“If ID triumphs, science will go on—but some scientists will be interested in different questions.  Chemical evolution will probably be abandoned for the same reasons that alchemy was abandoned, and Darwinism will join its cousins Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of intellectual history.  But deciphering the genetic code will be more interesting than ever.”
—Phillip E. Johnson, “The Rhetorical Challenge of Intelligent Design,” Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (Mich. State, 2003), p. 353.

Rockfish Prefer Oil-Rig Real Estate   06/30/2006    
Environmentalists may complain about offshore oil platforms, but the rockfish in the Santa Barbara channel aren’t paying attention.  According to a study announced by UC Santa Barbara, rockfish are finding better living through human chemistry.  The platforms provide security and prime nursing habitat, such that their numbers, once dangerously low, are now resurging.  The artificial reefs are apparently doing more for the fish than their natural ones.

Of course man did not have this in mind when drilling for oil, but it shows that human activity is not always an environmental curse.  We’re part of the ecology, too, and sometimes our animal friends learn to adapt – even profit – from our ventures.
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Politics

Hereby, we would like to propose a novel solution, based on the astrophysical properties of our Galactic environment on large scales, as well as some economic and informational aspects of the presumed advanced technological civilizations (henceforth ATCs).  In doing so, we will suggest a radically new perspective on the entire SETI endeavor.

In sorting priorities, I adopt what I term the central principle of cultural evolution, which I refer to as the Intelligence Principle: the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and that to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved.

A natural extension of the Intelligence Principle is what can be called the digital perspective on astrobiology: After a particular threshold complexity is reached, the relevant relations between existent entities are characterized by requirements of computation and information processing.  It is related to the emergent computational concepts not only in biology, but in other fields such as fundamental physics, cosmology, neuroscience, and social sciences.

We conclude that the conventional radio SETI assuming beamed broadcasts from targets – selected exclusively on the basis of the old-fashioned biological paradigm – within the vicinity of our Solar System ... is ill-founded and has minuscule chances of success on the present hypothesis.  It is a clear and testable prediction of the present hypothesis that the undergoing SETI experiments using this conservative approach will yield only negative results.

There is no meaningful scientific hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s Paradox – or, indeed, any problem of importance in science – without a set of assumptions.  In building of the migrational solution to Fermi’s puzzle, we have relied on the following set of assumptions:

1. The Copernican principle continues to hold in astrobiology, i.e. there is nothing special about the Earth and the Solar System when considerations of life, intelligent observers or ATCs are made.²
2. Laws of physics (as applied to the classical computation theory and astrophysics) are universally valid.
3. Naturalistic explanations for the origin of life, intelligence and ATCs are valid.
4. The Milky Way galaxy exhibits well-established gradients of both baryonic matter density and equilibrium radiation field temperature.
5. Habitable planets occur naturally only within the GHZ (which evolves in a manner roughly understood), but ATCs are not in any way limited to this region.
6. We assume local influences both of and on ATCs.  Thus, we disregard overly speculative ideas about such concepts as cosmic wormholes or “basement universes”.  Interstellar travel is feasible, but it is bound to be slow and expensive (for anything larger than nanomachines) at all epochs.
7. Astroengineering on the scales significantly larger than the scale of a typical planetary system (on the pc-scale and above) will remain difficult and expensive at all epochs and for all ATCs.
8. ATCs will tend to maximize the efficiency of information-processing, no matter how heterogeneous their biological and cultural structures and evolutionary pathways are.

These assumptions are naturally of varying validity and importance.  Items 1 through 3 are essential methodological guidelines of the entire scientific endeavor.  Although item 1 has recently become controversial with “rare Earth” theorists, there is still no compelling reasons for relinquishing it.  Assumption 4 is an empirical fact, and 5 is quite close to it.  Assumptions 6 and 7 are conservative extrapolations of our limited scientific and technological perspective, but in our view should be retained until the contrary positions can be verified.  In particular, absence of the Galaxy-size astroengineering effects in external galaxies ... strongly supports the assumption 7.

Interesting paper.  Heavily sci-fi, profoundly speculative, politically incorrect, and somewhat amusing, perhaps, but thought-provoking.  Is it scientific?  Does its presence in a scientific journal indicate it is worthy of more serious consideration by rational truth-seekers than if it appeared in a theological journal or in Mad Magazine?  After all, they made predictions and provided a falsification criterion.  They talked about baryons and physical laws and thermodynamics.  And look – they even had equations!  Surely no one could accuse this kind of sober, rigorous analysis as being equivalent to religion.  What do you think?
    Religion is a misleading word in this context.  It conjures up images of candles, robes, icons and prayer wheels.  World view is a more appropriate term: a way of looking at the world, of answering the big questions: who are we?  Where did we come from?  Why are we here?  Where are we going?  Science cannot answer these questions, yet world-view issues loom big in this article.  They have attempted to give their opinion about the origin and ultimate fate of the universe, dress it in a lab coat and pass it off as science.  Yet by any measure of scientific criteria, they always left a way out.
    Their prediction is hollow, because it would require proving a universal negative.  Their falsification test is hollow, because we could all be dead before anyone finds a way to detect an unknown kind of technology at intergalactic distances, and even if someone did, another would find a natural explanation for it.  Predictions and falsifiability are not necessary components of science anyway, according to some philosophers of science.  And equations – well, nice, but the ones in the paper describe observable physical properties of temperature distribution in galaxies and have nothing to do with the social habits of intelligent beings.  Sentient beings are notoriously resistant to obeying equations about what they should do or will do.  In short, the scientific props of this article are distractions from the fact this is nothing more than a world view paper.
    Their entire thesis breaks down on one of their assumptions.  It was nice of them to list their assumptions, but not so nice to glibly claim that the least plausible is one of “essential methodological guidelines of the entire scientific endeavor,” namely, “Naturalistic explanations for the origin of life, intelligence and ATCs are valid.”  Did you catch it?  They just attempted to baptize naturalism in the waters of science as if we wouldn’t notice.  (Only Cirkovic has a PhD, but they both attempted to doctor a philosophy.)
    Why should this tactic be allowed for sci-fi speculation, but not for other kinds of scholarly investigation?  After all, theologians can make testable predictions.  A conservative Bible scholar, for instance, could predict that evidence for King David will be found, even point to the Tel Dan inscription as confirming evidence.  Some preachers argue that the equation “nothing times nobody equals everything.” has been falsified.  Should sufficiently scholarly sermons be allowed in scientific journals, then?  Not a few theologians are well trained in mathematical physics, and not a few scientists doubt the assumptions listed by these two speculators.  They should have no privilege in this game.  The quality of the reasoning and the support of evidence, not the scientific trappings and venue, need to carry weight in evaluating world view claims.  Cirkovic and Bradbury may wish to believe that life and intelligence are emergent properties of matter in motion, but they cannot support this world view with scientific evidence.  In fact, the tide of evidence is overwhelmingly against it (06/12/2006, 04/17/2006, online book).
    These sci-fi speculators pulled off a shifty sidestep.  They merely assumed that “naturalistic explanations” for these things are “valid,” and then hid behind an arbitrary rule that naturalism is an essential methodological guideline for the entire scientific endeavor.  Oh yeah?  It wasn’t for many of the greatest scientists in history (see online book).  This claim is only made now by the Eugenie Scotts and Ken Millers of the world who want to shield their philosophical speculations from critical scrutiny.  It’s a tactic not unlike the childhood ploy “King’s X” that allows them to evade rules of the game to which the others are bound.
    Cirkovic and Bradbury are as free as anyone to speculate, but need to take their speculations out of New Astronomy and argue them before philosophers and theologians, not claim special privilege for things that cannot be observed or known – indeed, things that run contrary to what we do know about the propensities of matter in motion.  What they wrote, though, is bound to make the SETI Institute angry.  A lot of investment capital is bound up in traditional SETI strategies.  These two warring parties may make any further comments superfluous; they may end up falsifying each other.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • SETI • Origin of Life • Physics • Evolution • Intelligent Design • Theology

Foraging Saharan desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, use a mode of dead reckoning known as path integration to monitor their current position relative to the nest and to find their way home.  This enables them to return on a direct route, rather than retracing the tortuous outbound journey performed when searching for food items in their flat desert habitat, which is often completely devoid of landmarks.  The path integrator requires two kinds of input information: about directions steered, as obtained via the ant’s celestial compass, and about distance traveled, as gauged by the ant’s odometer.

There was no mention of evolution in this paper.  Only in evolutionary theory would someone attempt to say, with a straight face, that celestial compasses, path integrators and odometers are the result of a blind process lacking a navigation target.
    This discovery is all the more reason to get the kids an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm (03/16/2006).  It might stimulate a good science project, too.  If stilts, why not pogo sticks?  or how about a treadmill or moving sidewalk?  or a rotating table?  Don’t let students be cruel to the little puzzle-solvers, but use it as an opportunity to reverse-engineer the amazing GPS software embedded in their tiny heads (not referring to the students’ heads, of course, but to those of the ants).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Stories • Intelligent Design

• Go to H*** / H*** No, We Won’t Go:  One would think the editor of the prestigious journal Nature would get a little respect by virtue of his position, but when he tried blogging as an overture to the public, he got an earful for his mouthful.  Nature decided to join the blogosphere in April as part of its initiative for openness, in the aftermath of recent scientific scandals over peer review (06/13/2006).  One of the first experiments was a Nature Blog in April about the fish-o-pod Tiktaalik (04/06/2006).  After getting worked up over some creationist responses to the find, Gee jumped into the fray.  He argued that creationists cannot embrace the science that gave us modern health care and cheap travel and abjure other parts like evolution.  He likened creationists to those wanting to return to the Dark Ages and live like Bedouins.  Though he claimed to believe in God (as a Jew), Gee ended his tirade against Biblical creationism with:

  I object to the cheap, wilful [sic], nasty traduction of my religious faith by a group of people who would pervert it to further their questionable political ideals.  I call on all scientists of faith to join me in its damnation, and to educate certain in the evolutionary biology community of the rank and damning illogicality of their position.

  Some of the “Evolution is a FACT!” folk said Hear, hear, but not everyone.  Gee may have felt smug in consigning “fundamentalists” to the flames, but for some of his targets, the feeling was mutual.  One signing himself a biochemist called the Tiktaalik missing link claims “Pure rubbish” and said “The fact that this article is being heralded in media rags is one sign of payola and not necessarily substance.”  Another retorted, “macroevolution is a fairy-tale for those grown-ups who personally feel the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible to be unacceptable.”  Another commented, “Dr. Gee repeats an error so egregious that I cannot resist commenting; The Scientific advances he mentions from which we all benefit are all the result of impirical [sic] science.  They have absolutely nothing to do with evolution.”  Another pointed out, “The irony of this find is lost on the authors – that a single find of a fossil of a supposed transitional life form is a major news item.”  Another advised, “If you actually want to do something about the rise of 6-day creationism, arrogance isn’t going to help,” indicating what he thought of Gee’s decorum.  One wonders how often the editor of Nature has had to leave the comfort zone of academia and face live hecklers.
• Medical Malpractice:  A similar blog counterattack came when Stanford Medicine Magazine made anticreationism its summer cover story, “Darwin Lives.”  After a series of attack pieces like “Scientists mobilize to fight the forces of intelligent design,” the magazine invited readers, “Visit our evolution blog and tell us what you think.”  Despite the magazine’s portrayal of creationists as nothing more than politically-motivated religious zealots, many of the uncensored responses were not shy about refusing to be pushed into that corner.  “Saying over and over that it is a religion vs. science debate doesn’t make it so,” said one.  “Sure, you can find politicians and creationists to bash, but to be taken seriously, you must address the critics of Darwin who hold prestigious scientific positions within our universities and science organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences.”  Another called the magazine’s tactics “propaganda.”  Those supportive of the magazine’s assessment were outnumbered nine to five.  Many of the anti-evolution responses appeared reasoned and informed, not the work of religious dogmatists; they argued that the dogmatic Darwinist position is the real fundamentalism.
• The Great Unconvinced:  Curtis Dahlgren had some fun in an op-ed piece for Renew America, commenting on the apparent chagrin with which an alumni paper from the University of Wisconsin wrote,

  ”Putting Faith in Science,” the subhead of which is, “Intelligent design – an alternative theory of life supported by many Christians – argues that science alone can’t explain the mysteries of our existence.  And most Americans agree.  Why has science been so unconvincing?

  Dahlgren accused the accusers of blind faith, retorting, “So who is calling whom ‘stupid’?”
• Poll Homeostasis:  Lest one think blog entries do not represent a scientifically-valid sample, Evolution News listed polls from 1982 to 2005 that show “skepticism of evolution continues to remain at a very high level in the United States” despite the fact that “For years Darwinists have been doing their best to remind the world of the good news that evolution and religion can be compatible.”  In another piece, Evolution News argued that students reject evolution because of the science, not religion.  In a third piece, Evolution News noted that the pace of scientists willing to sign their Dissent from Darwin list is accelerating (see also a separate list for doctors).

To me, the struggle in the late 20th Century between creationists and evolutionists does not represent another battle between science and religion because rarely do creationists display hostility towards science.  If you read their literature, you’ll rarely come across an anti-scientific notion.  They love science.  They love what science can do.  They hate the fact that science has been hijacked by agnostics and atheists to offer such speculative theories as organic evolution.  So, they don’t see themselves as being antagonistic to science any more than many of the advocates of evolution – those who see evolution as God’s method of creation – view themselves as hostile to Christianity.

We hope you see that CEH also loves science.  When you compare who wants rational discussion about these important issues and who wants to browbeat their listeners into submission, the choice is clear.
    We also like to keep our sense of humor.  Apparently the irony was lost on poor Ms. Amy Adams who, in her submission to the Stanford Medicine Magazine anticreationist barrage, summarized her thoughts on evolution as, “Evolution in a nutshell.”
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Education • Media

Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth.  As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry.  Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny.

“...While the human mind responds to new information over the course of any individual’s lifetime, Charlton argues that past physical environments were more stable and allowed for a state of psychological maturity.  In hunter-gatherer societies, that maturity was probably achieved during a person’s late teens or early twenties”, he said.
    Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality.  In the
mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends.

“By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people,” he said.  “People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”  Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, “immature” people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift.  The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he believes.  These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness.

Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, “immature” people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift.

The obvious next question one should ask is if this immaturity has not already become apparent in the departments of Evolutionary Psychology.
    Assuming that all our psychological traits evolved due to environmental pressures, Charlton feels that if our environment encourages immaturity for long enough, we will become genetically disposed to immaturity.  This sounds Lamarckian.  History shows, contrariwise, that societies have only been successful at fostering maturity for a limited period of time.  How does he know our society is not simply paralleling the example of Rome, where maturity rose and fell with its civilization?
    Charlton seems to offer conflicting sources for our immaturity problem.  First, he attributes it to the pressure of the educational system, and uses as an example the immaturity of “academics, teachers, scientists, and many other professionals”.  If this is true (and this academic’s thinking provides anecdotal evidence for it) then we will be fine, since most people do not pursue advanced educations.  Most people, however, would agree that the problem goes well beyond academia.  It is a symptom of society in general.  Charlton’s second explanation, that the problem began in the mid 20th century with the pressure to “change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends,” seems to contradict his first explanation. 
    Either way, since society has had these same pressures for thousands of years, why is there any vestige of maturity remaining now?  We should have evolved into children long ago, as soon as we got past the hunter-gatherer stage.  There is no reason evolution should wait until the middle of the 20th century.  We are becoming immature because evolutionary thinking like this rejected the absolute authority of our Creator over us, leaving us adrift to pursue our baser instincts and desires, like spoiled children.
—DK
This story illustrates how the universal acid of Darwinian thinking is more pervasive and insidious than a set of armchair speculations by academics.  Charlton’s type rationalize immature behavior as evolutionary adaptations rather than moral wrongs.  If immaturity leads to reproductive success, it must be OK; why fight it?  But under their own assumptions, it is impossible to determine who is calling whom immature.  For example, David Brooks of the New York Times is cited at the end of the Discovery Channel article lamenting the loss of wisdom and maturity of our predecessors in today’s society that blurs the “bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture.”  Yet what is wisdom in Darwinland if not reproductive success?  Brooks needs to let his hair down and get dirty with the new inhabitants of the fitness peak.  Then history will have to judge the outcome of the war between the Bohemians and the Visigoths (05/09/2006).
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Health • Early Man

this is an exciting finding, as it seems to defy one of the basic rules of cell biology and genetics: that genetic material is distributed randomly.  It appears that the cellular machinery distinguishes old from new when it comes to DNA, and it may use this distinction to protect the body from mutations and cancer.  It is also possible that this mechanism is used to silence gene expression in the stem cell.

Oh no, this is bad news for us Darwinians.  We need those mutations to advance the tree of life.  If the ID people get hold of this, it will give them another hammer to beat us with.  Let’s pre-empt it with a good just-so story.  Can somebody come up with one?  Anyone?
Next headline on:  Genetics

What a great subplot to add to endless tale.  There must have been some truth to the old Greek myths after all.  Centaurs cannot be far behind.
    More funny than the mythical fantasyland conjured up by the evolutionary molecular Chaldeans is the seriousness with which they admit that their evolutionary trees remain controversial despite large-scale efforts to resolve them.  “We need to look at fossils from a new point of view, because there must have been a common ancestor of bats, horses and dogs,” one of them said.  There must have been, you see; this is the deductive premise of evolutionary research, which cannot be questioned.  (We agree about the advice to look at fossils from a new point of view.)
    So we must keep trying to find the magic spells in the DNA code that bring back the tree of life and of knowledge of good and evil.  We can’t keep the horses and cows together any longer, even though they both eat hay and work weekend gigs as extras in Westerns.  Maybe if we put bat wings on this horse, the idea will fly.  But then each new proposal yields similar interjections of surprise: “I think this will be a surprise for many scientists,” one of the researchers remarked; “No one expected this.”
    Oh, really?*
Next headline on:  Evolution • Genetics • Mammals • Dumb Ideas
*See 09/29/2005, 08/27/2004, 12/12/2003, 12/03/2003, 03/03/2002, 12/17/2001, etc.

Do a word search in this article for anything about evolution.  We got “word not found.”  The research was not motivated by or benefited by evolutionary speculation.  The scientists just wanted “to more fully understand how photosynthesis works.”  Students use similar motivation in auto shop without assuming car engines evolved from rocks.
    Notice where this research came from: the Biodesign Research Institute at U of A, whose starting point is “exploring the remarkable structure and function of living systems.... Inspired by nature and powered by collaboration, our bold new approach ensures that discoveries are rapidly translated into real-world benefits.”  (We left out the sentence in the middle that made no sense: “From microbes to man, these systems have been honed by thousands of years of natural selection.”  At least thousands is down from millions, and the sentence could be interpreted to mean that the systems were already present.)  Anyway, good research is flowing from another of the popular new interdisciplinary academic centers seeking to understand and apply biological design (05/13/2006, 06/25/2005).  The Darwin Party has nothing to offer this new trend in biodesign research and should get out of the way.  This is intelligent design science at work: stimulating and productive.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing

• Washington Post led off with “Amber-preserved web shows early spider evolution” and mentioned evolution eight times in its short report.
• LiveScience mentioned three times that the evolution of web-spinning spiders must have influenced the evolution of flying insects. 
• National Geographic mentioned the surprise that orb-spinners appeared earlier than thought, back in the time of the dinosaurs, but also brought evolution prominently into the story.  One expert was quoted as saying, “amber such as this latest discovery does preserve vital information on spider evolution.”  (He also mentioned that 500 extinct spiders have been found in amber.)  Another expert explained that the discovery “helps researchers understand the evolution of both spiders and their prey,”  such as spiders “influencing the evolution of flying insects for millions of years.” 
• Associated Press (see Fox News) focused on the claim that web-spinning evolved only once.  It did, however, describe the exquisite detail in the amber: “The amber, found in Spain, preserved 26 strands of silk, many of them connected to one another.  Glue droplets are visible on the web and prey includes a fly, a mite, a beetle and a wasp.”
• BBC News spun their web story as all evolution, all the time: “Ancient web spins evolution story,” wrote Helen Briggs; “....The find, described in Science, sheds light on the early evolution of spiders and the insects they fed on.”  Her article included this twist on the word design:  “The fossil web appears to have been designed along the same lines as the round nets woven by modern spiders.”

We know our readers are more perceptive than the average dupe of mainstream science reporters.  We’re wondering if anyone saw any evolution sneak by through all this advanced, elegant, geometric structure evidenced by these modern-looking spiders and their modern-looking prey.  What?  You haven’t installed the software patch yet?  No wonder.  Just skip the EULA^* and go for it.
^*Caution: installing this free patch rearranges your memory stacks and forces compliance between conflicting inputs.  Click on the executable name to download: FrontalLobotomy.exe.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Genetics • Evolution

It is curious that Rubisco should fix CO₂ at all, as there is 25 times more O₂ than CO₂ in solution at 25°C, and a 500-fold difference between them in gaseous form.  Yet only 25% of reactions are oxygenase events at this temperature, and carbon intermediates ‘lost’ to the carbon fixation reactions by oxygenase action are metabolized and partly recovered by the so-called photorespiratory pathway.  Catalysis begins with activation of Rubisco by the enzyme Rubisco activase, when first CO₂ and then a magnesium ion bind to the active site.  The substrate, ribulose bisphosphate, then reacts with these to form an enediol intermediate, which engages with either another CO₂ or an O₂ molecule, either of which must diffuse down a solvent channel to reach the active site.

Such observations provided the key to the idea that in the active site the enediol must be contorted to allow CO₂ to attack more readily despite the availability of O₂ molecules.  The more the enediol mimics the carboxylate end-product, Tcherkez et al. conclude, the more difficult it is for the enzyme to free the intermediate from the active site when the reaction is completed.  When the specificity factor and selectivity for CO₂ are high, the impact on associated kinetic properties is greatest: k_cat [i.e., the rate of enzyme catalytic events per second] becomes slower.
    So, rather than being inefficient, Rubisco has become highly tuned to match substrate availability.

Several other correlates are also explained by this relationship.  For instance, Rubisco discriminates more against ¹³C than against ¹²C, the two naturally occurring stable isotopes in CO₂.  But when the specificity factor is high, the ¹³C reaction intermediate binds more tightly, and so carbon isotope discrimination is higher (that is, less ¹³C is incorporated); in consequence, the carbon-isotope signals used to reconstruct past climates should perhaps now be re-examined.  In contrast, higher ambient temperatures (30-40 °C) reduce the stability of the enediol, and Rubisco oxygenase activity and photorespiration rate increase.

Other research avenues include manipulating the various components of Rubisco and cell-specific targeting of chimaeric Rubiscos.  Potential pitfalls here are that the modified Rubisco would not only have to be incorporated and assembled by crop plants, but any improved performance would have to be retained by the plants.  Finally, one suggestion is that we should engineer plants that can express two types of Rubisco – each with kinetic properties to take advantage of the degree of shading within a crop canopy.  Such rational design would not only offer practical opportunities for the future, but also finally give the lie to the idea that Rubisco is intransigent and inefficient.

Folks, here you have it again.  What Griffiths meant as a paper praising evolution is really a paper demonstrating intelligent design.  We dare any evolutionist to explain how this “highly-tuned” enzyme, with the optimized contortions of its intermediates and its “highly conserved” (i.e., unevolved) active site, arose by an unguided process, especially how a lowly bacterium – the simplest of organisms – evolved three forms of it and can switch between them depending on environmental conditions!  And don’t say it evolved because evolution is a fact.
    Here again, also, we see how further research is giving “the lie to the idea” that something in nature “is intransigent and inefficient.”  Evolutionists love to showcase examples of inefficiency in nature, to give the impression that any God or designer would not do such a bungled job.  The only bungling is in the theories of evolutionists who look at optimized, rational design in the face and can’t see a rational designer.  Human rational design applied to improving on nature’s engineering marvels does not support evolution, it supports intelligent design.  If human intelligence is required to copy or modify a design, one cannot say that the original design “emerged” by an unguided, purposeless, material process.  Why is that such a hard concept for the Darwinists to grasp?  Why can’t they see the illogic of their position?  As usual, they merely assume evolution can perform any engineering job necessary, even designing nanomachinery that exceeds our human capabilities.
    Notice the snippet about climate models in this story, also.  It goes to show that assumptions about the unobservable past, like foundations under a house of cards, can shift under new research.  Though Griffiths was not specific about the degree of alteration climate models might suffer, this is a point to remember whenever popular science reports glibly claim things like “218.24267 gazillion years ago, the atmosphere went through a period of global warming followed by a snowball earth.”
    You may never have heard about this indispensable enzyme that helps keep you breathing and gives you salad to eat (and, indirectly, meat from plant-eating animals).  Astrobiologists had better pay attention.  Mars and Venus have lots of carbon dioxide, but no Rubisco.  Earth has just enough CO₂ to help moderate the atmospheric temperature, but not too much to cause a catastrophic greenhouse effect; that balance is maintained in part by this highly-tuned enzyme.  Our ability to read and write and think these thoughts owes to the convergence of numerous improbable factors, including our planet’s optimal distance from the sun, a global magnetic field, a planetary mass that retains the right ingredients but lets others escape, a transparent atmosphere, a star that produces radiation with just the right energy range for molecular reactions, and optimally engineered molecular machines in plants that can harvest that energy.  As a result, our lungs have air, our bodies have food, and our eyes have beauty and variety to enjoy.  If this looks like intelligent design, and if that has philosophical or religious implications, so be it.  Thank God for Rubisco. 
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

4. Since its first appearance on Earth, life has taken many forms, all of which continue to evolve, in ways which palaeontology and the modern biological and biochemical sciences are describing and independently confirming with increasing precision.  Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin.

One can imagine that in the time of the Reformation, every Catholic academy across the Latin world would have unanimously risen up to condemn Luther.  The list of signatories would have been impressive.  It must have been a fearful moment for Luther to stand alone against the tidal wave of illustrious scholars and officials arrayed against him, and say, “Here I stand.  I can do no other.  God help me.”
    Don’t be impressed by the number of signatories to this dogmatic document (that, ironically, claims science is not dogmatic; if they really believed that, they would recognize the possibility that evolution is wrong and listen seriously to the claims it has been falsified).  A position statement issued by the upper echelons of management of a scientific society no more reflects the views of all scientists than a labor union’s political endorsement reflects the rank-and-file workers.  How many of them even knew this document was being published?  Most of the scientists in those societies don’t even study evolutionary biology in their day-to-day work, and probably many who accept evolution don’t feel that strongly about it.  Probably one or a few activist leaders at a meeting of these academies wrote the statement and pushed it through for a vote; perhaps it included “Yves Quere, co-chair of the Inter Academy Panel on International Issues,” whom the BBC article quoted: “So in this statement we say you cannot teach this to children, it is wrong.”  Here’s a guy with an agenda.
    Even if I.D. is a minority view at this time (but not among the public, only among Big Science organizations), science does not advance by majority vote.  As we saw from the case of Grote Reber (02/06/2003), the Lone Ranger is sometimes the good guy.  There have been many instances in the history of science where a maverick had to fight long and hard against entrenched ideas – sometimes for decades, facing official opposition that was sometimes strident and personal.  What’s important in science is not to be popular, but to be right.  There are notable nonconformists within the scientific societies.  Though pro-ID letters from scientists are routinely censored by most mainstream journals, Evolution News found a well-written letter to the Journal of Clinical Investigation that should be held up alongside the IAP document and any other saber-rattling position papers attacking intelligent design.  Read it and see who is taking the reasonable scientific position on this issue.
    The IAP statement, despite its self-righteous condemnation of anything that questions evolution, is noteworthy for what it does not say.  The BBC article ended with a statement by Steve Fuller, who promotes teaching the controversy.  Fuller thought it was “pretty mild” and “really doesn’t hit on the kinds of issues that would separate either contesting schools within evolutionary theory or evolution versus intelligent design.”  It lacks, for instance, any reference to a naturalistic mechanism – including Darwin’s – that could lead from hydrogen to humans.  Once you scrape away the rust of evolutionary assumptions masquerading as evidence, there’s really not much left to argue with: the universe appeared, life appeared, photosynthesis appeared, geology changes and science should be falsifiable.  Remove the E-word here and there, and nothing is offered to demonstrate all living things arose from a common ancestor by an undirected natural process.  (For a refutation of the argument from similarity, see Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells.)
    The statement also attacks a straw man.  No ID-friendly school board or organization is advocating removing the subject of evolution in the public schools, or replacing it with young-earth creationism.  Where has Quere been?  The whole controversy is about teaching the controversy and removing the artificial moat that protects Charlie’s castle from monitoring by independent inspectors.  One would think that scientific societies, committed to an open-ended process of inquiry and the formulation of falsifiable theories, would welcome the scrutiny.  So what if Darwin’s ideas are found to be false?  Great; science marches on.  So what if intelligent design wins?  Great; now we have another paradigm for trying to make sense of the natural world.  What’s the problem?  The only people working to conceal, deny and confuse the issue are the Darwiniacs.
    Official denunciations like this suggest an underlying insecurity.  There would not be a need if evolution were so obvious.  Instead of engaging their opponents calmly with rational discussion, they entrench themselves behind their castle walls and talk tough.  Wouldn’t it be cool to lob boxes of Ann Coulter’s Godless over the wall, just for the fun of watching their pointy heads turn red and explode.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education

• Chimp off the old block?  Richard F. Harris in Current Biology¹ surveyed media coverage of a Nature story that human and chimp ancestors might have crossbred.  At first, Harris expected the anti-evolutionists to suffer the most over this seemingly bitter pill:

  A recent survey found that half of all Americans believe our species was not a product of evolution, but instead a direct creation of God (and Brits aren’t much different).  So imagine how hard that half of the population swallowed after reading the latest reported twist in human evolution.  Our relatives, it seems, were more than just kissin’ cousins, when it came to the early chimp line.

  Harris sampled some of the bawdy lines this story generated in news stories.  Later, however, he admitted the evidence is not all that clear:

  Whether it’s the truth or not remains to be seen.  In a paper in Nature, David Reich and colleagues are careful to say they just “suggest a provocative explanation” for their surprising genetic results.  Science journalists didn’t dig too deeply for other possible explanations.  They did, however, seek out some words of caution....
  In fact, nobody has a good picture of what these early hominids and chimp ancestors looked like.

  How an uncertain claim could prove distressing to anti-evolutionists, therefore, was not explained.  Time, however, won Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for spinning confusion into certainty and clubbing the anti-evolutionists with it.  Quoted by Harris, the magazine announced confidently,

  It’s sure to be seized on right away, though, by anti-evolutionists, who will undoubtedly claim that evolutionary theorists will once again be forced to rewrite the theory in the face of inconvenient facts – and that this proves it’s not a valid theory.  But that’s bogus.... A mystery like this poses no threat to evolution – it just makes it more interesting.

• Hands Off Policy:  CEH got mentioned on MSNBC on Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log.  He took a look at media coverage of the duck “missing link” story, including ours (see 06/16/2006) and the load of email he got, and decided to go on a diet of sorts: “This tongue-lashing over ‘missing links’ is enough to make me swear off the term from now on – even if the researchers themselves use it, or even if other news outlets apply the term to Gansus or past finds such as the Tiktaalik ‘fish out of water’” (see 04/06/2006 story).

• Fear of Godless:  Ann Coulter told Fox News she was surprised at the reaction to her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism.  The surprise was not that there was a reaction, but the target of the reaction.  Most critics focused on her description of four widows of 9/11 victims, whom she claimed were profiting from their anti-Bush celebrity.  She expected the biggest negative response would come from the Darwinists.  “Liberal’s creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor,” she had opened chapter 8; “It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record—and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking.”  On that point, the reaction from the scientific community and the mainstream media was an unexpected silence.

Readers can propose their own explanations for the lack of outrage against Coulter’s irreverence for Father Charlie (which only intensifies after her opening paragraph).  Either this book is completely off their radar screen (though a New York Times best-seller and the talk of the talk shows the week of June 12); or, they don’t want to dignify the views of an articulate woman they probably wish to characterize as a dumb blonde; or, they have no answers to her hard-hitting accusations.  It does seem strange to see no response at all from the Darwin Party against a high-profile columnist whose books are flying off the shelves.  It wasn’t long ago that any criticism of Darwin met swift and strident censure.  (Buy the real book, by the way, not the awful things liberals are saying about it.)
    If the Darwinists had such a strong case, they could trot it out every time some upstart calls their bluff.  They could produce the Emperor’s elegant robes, and the argument would be over, just like displaying the dead body of Jesus on the streets of Jerusalem would have snuffed out the Christian church on Pentecost afternoon.  That the Darwinists do not produce the goods is a strong indication that they know they cannot.  They used to keep the peasants in line with bluffing, authority and evasion.  Now that more writers, speakers and websites like CEH are challenging their authority and exposing their Emperor’s nakedness, their only recourse is diving into their holes and waiting it out, or by “finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter,” as Coulter puts it (p. 200).
    Indications that some news sources are toning down their rhetoric (except for incorrigibles like Time) is an encouraging sign.  It probably means that the relentless public challenges to the Darwinist elitist rule are having an effect.  If so, it’s only a start.  Darwinist dictatorship will assert itself again at the slightest sign of weakness.  (Their only ethic is survival of the fittest, after all.)  There were strident attacks against Darwin’s book as soon as it was written and for a decade after, but they were effectively silenced by the shenanigans of Darwin’s four musketeers (see 01/06/2004 commentary).  This is a long-term conflict.  The noble-minded Visigoths (05/09/2006) who want to defeat the Darwin Party’s stranglehold on science must be willing to stay in the battle for the long term.  If you do write letters to the editor, please do so effectively.  Poorly-written missives with faulty reasoning do more harm than good.  Alan Boyle printed some particularly shoddy examples on his MSNBC column; hopefully these were exceptions.  Before saying anything, master the Baloney Detector, spelling, and grammar.  Know the issues, keep it succinct, stay on point, keep away from questionable arguments and claims, and your arrows will not miss the mark.
    So Time thinks the new claim about human-chimp ancestry poses no threat to Charlie’s tale, but just makes it more “interesting.”  That’s about the best spin that could be put on it.  It illustrates our running argument that what Darwinists care about is not truth but an entertaining plot line.  The more twists and turns, the better; they add suspense.  The show must go on, regardless.  Nothing can possibly falsify their open-ended tale, because the preface and conclusion were agreed on in advance.  The story may turn out to be more “interesting” than they can stomach.  (Perhaps hidden in some chapter in the middle, within some hopelessly convoluted situation appearing impossible to resolve, a sentence will jump out and say, “Do not finish this book.  To continue for the surprise ending, jump to this other book.”)  As the Chinese fortune cookie equivocally wishes, “May you live in interesting times.”
Next headline on:  Early Man • Genetics • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

With polls continuing to show a majority doubt evolution, and with more school boards showing boldness enough to stand up against ACLU and Americans United threats, and with the inherent and obvious reasonableness of allowing controversial subjects to get a critical analysis, the AP and other mainstream media may be slowly catching onto the fact that they cannot continue to lie and sell papers.  Keep those well-written and soundly-argued letters to the editor flowing.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism • Intelligent Design

• Darwin’s Dilemma Solved?  Dr. J. William Schopf (UCLA), renowned discoverer of Precambrian microfossils, triumphantly announced the solution to “Darwin’s Dilemma” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a slide presentation to scientists 06/14/2006.  He showed examples of cyanobacteria, stromatolites (see 03/22/2006) and carbon isotope anomalies.  All these, however, showed evidence for microbes, not the complex body plans that burst on the scene in the Cambrian.  Moreover, he showed fossil cyanobacteria dated as 3.5 billion and 1.5 billion years old alongside modern species that looked identical; he even speculated that their biochemistry was probably the same.
• Bilateral Split:  Fossil embryos with “polar lobes” characteristic of bilaterians (animals with two-sided symmetry) were reported in Science this week from Precambrian deposits in China.¹  Though simple microscopic bundles of 3-5 cells, the authors claim, “these fossils imply that lobe formation is an ancient evolutionary device, and that the general strategy of precocious blastomere specification still used in most bilaterian groups was extant at least 40 million years before the Cambrian.”  Katherine Unger wrote in the same issue² that “Some scientists are reluctant to give the fossils their unequivocal endorsement.”  No adult forms were found; some speculate they could represent an extinct lineage of early bilaterians.

The Schopf talk was egregious for claiming Darwin has been vindicated.  For one thing, he gave no clue how microbes exploded into a plethora of complex body plans in the Cambrian.  For another, he guaranteed he cannot see evidence against evolution!  One of his criteria was, “Does it fit with evolution?”  This means that no matter what is found, if it doesn’t fit with evolution, it must be mistaken.  Darwin in, Darwin out.
    Bilaterian embryos are too little, too late.  These are just drops in the bucket, in a bucket too large for Darwin to fill.  Read the Paper View article from 04/23/2006 for a detailed account of the problem.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Evolution

This is scandalous.  The news media should be ashamed of themselves.  What should have been interpreted as the falsification of common notions about bird evolution has been twisted into support for evolution.  In an act of contortion astounding in scope, the media expect us to believe three more impossible things before breakfast: (1) that the anatomical features of modern birds including webbed feet, oil glands and all the other traits necessary for aquatic life, evolved quickly; (2) that soft tissues like webbed feet, downy feathers and “pelvic limbs with soft-tissue preservation” survived for 110 million years, and (3) that the cataclysm that spelled doom for dozens of kinds of survival-hardened dinosaurs, from the powerful carnivores to the pet-sized mini-sauropods (see 06/10/2006) – animals that presumably conquered the world from the arctic to the tropics, outlasting all kinds of environmental changes – somehow left our cute feathered friends unscathed.
    This is loony.  Aren’t you glad for the internet, and sites like Creation-Evolution Headlines, that can bring a dose of realism to out-of-control Darwin-infested science reporting?  Before, the mainstream media and networks fed this sleight-of-mind to the public unchallenged; well, now the public is calling out the propagandists and demanding honesty.  And welcome, all you at Panda’s Thumb; we know you’re paying attention.

Follow-up: Sidestepping at Panda’s Thumb:  Let’s examine how a PT critic answered the above entry:

.... Creation-Evolution headlines’ article on this find is particular execrable.  They call Gansus a ‘duck’; they claim the find is a ‘known species appearing much earlier than already thought’ (Gansus has always been assigned to the Early Cretaceous), and they mock the idea that birds survived the KT extinction (most of them did not; the enanthornithines did not, and there was a major genetic bottleneck in the ornithurines).  A shorebird, able to travel to find food, living largely off shoreline detritus and small shoreline scavengers, likely in the tropics, would be exactly the kind of species one would expect to survive a major catastrophe.

First of all, brush off the cussword execrable as mere emotional fluff, and examine the facts.  It wasn’t just CEH that called this a duck.  Every popular article linked above said it resembled a duck, was duck-like or was “just ducky.”  LiveScience began, “If it looks like a duck and paddles like a duck, it must be a duck, right?  That’s the conclusion of researchers....”  So let this critic castigate the other science reporters, then; the bird had webbed feet and swam, so why quibble about categories?  The original paper said that Gansus used to be thought of as a sandpiper, but “Its anatomy, however, demonstrates that it was more similar to, but not as adept as, foot-propelled diving birds such as grebes, loons, and diving ducks.”  The fossil didn’t come with a Linnaean sticker on it.  The criticism that we called it a duck when it isn’t is like complaining we called a vehicle a minivan when it was really a Caravan.  It’s a Dodge.
    As to Gansus always being assigned Early Cretaceous, the original paper stated, “Previously reported, alleged Early Cretaceous ornithurans are either fragmentary, of debatable age, or have received only limited examination.”  For instance, the first known specimen consisted of an “isolated partial left pelvic limb.”  The whole surprise of this discovery was to find a much more complete and well-preserved fossil of an Early Cretaceous bird with Late Cretaceous features.  The paper states, “this taxon possesses advanced anatomical features previously known only in Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic ornithuran birds.”  So the point is not where evolutionists had classified this species in their own incestuous dating scheme, but that it turned out to have “late” or modern features much “earlier” than expected.  The critic strains at a gnat and swallows a camel.
    Finally, about the extinctions, well, it’s nice that this critic was able to invent a just-so story to patch up an older just-so story.  There were shore-scavenging dinosaurs in the tropics, too, along with swimming dinosaurs.  This major catastrophe was shore selective in what shore creatures it wiped out.
    So how well did this critic do in attacking our report?  Now consider what he didn’t address – namely, the main points.  Evolutionists ask us to believe that a modern-looking aquatic bird, fully capable of swimming and diving, evolved all its advanced features quickly.  After being buried in pristine condition, its soft tissues, feathers and webbed feet survived intact for 110 million years.  That’s what all the science reporters are parroting without asking the obvious questions, and without considering any alternatives outside the Darwinian orthodoxy.  It’s time such nonsense was not foisted on the public as science without a challenge.
    Answering blogger blather such as that on Panda’s Thumb is not our style, lest we dignify what David Berlinski described as low-market, semi-literate posts with a “characteristic combination of pustules and gonorrhea that one would otherwise associate with high-school toughs” (ARN).  This was an experiment to see if they could deal with it honestly.  If you want creation-evolution news based on the original scientific sources along with critical analysis of reports issuing from the mainstream media, you know you can find it here.  We still invite the Thumb-suckers over there at PT to graduate to a higher education.
Next headline on:  Birds • Fossils • Evolution

The time has come for this claim, and its evidence, to be scrutinized critically yet fairly.  Though the pictures are intriguing, the burden of proof will be on the team to associate this object with the Ark of Noah.  Years ago Ferdinand Navarra wrote a book about his discovery of hand-hewn timbers found under a glacier on Mt. Ararat; he even had film to prove it.  Unfortunately, the artifacts were later discredited as too recent to be associated with Noah’s Ark.  Another film made great claims about a boat-shaped structure below Mt. Ararat, yet few became convinced it is anything more than a strange geological feature.  This reminder is not to put the new claim in the same boat, so to speak, but to show how initially spectacular photographic evidence does not always match the hoped-for results of scientific tests.
    A number of hard questions should be asked.  There are many places on the planet where dark rock outcroppings contrast with the surroundings.  There are also many mountains with seashell fossils.  Petrified wood is also widespread.  In many places, columnar basaltic lava looks very geometrical and can give the appearance of hand-hewn wood.  How do we know this is not just another spectacular example of an artificial-looking geological formation?  Does this object have the expected dimensions and shape of the vessel described in Genesis 6?  How conclusive is the evidence this petrified wood was tooled?  Are there nails or other marks of artificial construction?  Are the sizes and arrangements of the alleged beams consistent with shipbuilding?  Is there evidence the structure, now filled in, had internal rooms and compartments?  Is there any residual organic matter that can be carbon dated?  What is the history of this region, both geologically and archaeologically?  Are there other marks of ancient habitation here?  Even if this structure proves artificial, could it be something other than a ship, like some later structure that became petrified?  What about all the sightings on the traditional Mt. Ararat—were all of them in error?  What petrified the wood, if this was a boat—did it get re-buried?  If smothered by a landslide or other catastrophe, how could it remain recognizable?  Why would the timbers not be dismantled by the descendants of Noah or subsequent generations?  How did it get preserved, only to be discovered now?  Perhaps you can think of more questions.
    Most claims of this sort turn out to contain a mosaic of pieces of evidence, some more convincing than others, some even contradictory.  Confidence in the conclusion will rest on the inference to the best explanation from the preponderance of evidence.  It may never be convincing to all honest scholars under the best of conditions.  We cannot be influenced solely by the pictures or the enthusiasm of the team members—nor by the complaints of skeptics and rivals.  Detailed scientific tests will be required.  Other investigators should visit the site and consider all possible explanations.  The team should be open to sharing information, should be their own best critics, and should not give the appearance of capitalizing on this finding for personal gain or fame.  Now that the initial announcement is out, it’s up to the discoverers to prove this is not just an interesting geological formation.
Update 07/05/2006: Tas Walker at Creation on the Web urges caution.  He thinks it is a geological formation, similar to others found around the world.  National Geographic News also gave prominent press to the claims, but then debunked them with the opinions of geologists.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Geology

Wade’s explanations commit various well-known errors, such as equating correlation with causation and extrapolating from individual traits to group characteristics.  Often his arguments and trait choices are laden with Western-oriented value judgements....
    Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.  In The New York Times on 15 January 2006, Wade warned against journalists being too ready to accept “overstated or wrong” claims from the science literature, but in too many places where it makes a difference he has ignored his own advice.  A journalist doesn’t create facts, but he does select what to repeat and how to colour it, and Wade is long on speculating about what “is reasonable to assume”, and short on circumspection of his own, or anthropologists’, yarn-spinning.  Most of the scenarios he reports have not been rigorously tested, nor is it clear how they could be.  The book has many internal inconsistencies, and one can easily find contrary evidence or readily construct alternative ‘just so’ stories that invoke the same genetic scenario and the same kind of reasoning.

How could this subject be better treated, without denying the importance of genes in human traits?  For a start, evolutionary arguments should be based on sufficiently credible, consistent and compelling scientific evidence.  It is easy to claim that a trait is due to natural selection, but responsible selection-based arguments should have substantial experimental mechanistic support, at least for the fact of selection.  That’s not the state of most current evidence.  Indeed, after 50 years of investigation, we can’t convincingly demonstrate selection for most of the red-blood-cell diseases, other than sickle-cell anaemia, that are probably coevolving with the strong selective force of malaria.  Other best-case scenarios for human genetic adaptation, such as adult lactase persistence and skin colour, are also incomplete.  Explaining selection is particularly problematic for behavioural traits because of the powerful role of culture and facultative ability, which is probably what human evolution really favoured.  Human phenotypic changes can far outpace genetic ones, making it challenging to know whether such traits are even genetic, much less what they ‘evolved for’ millennia ago.

But why not just enjoy the sport of fanciful speculation, even if the arguments leak like sieves?  Because it’s not just sport.  Positions on genetic determinism often correlate with social politics, and few of us are neutral or even changeable on the issues.  Wade recognizes that his ideas may not be acceptable to everyone but warns that “to falter in scientific inquiry would be a retreat into darkness”.  He seems to be warning, appropriately enough, against benighted political correctness.  But we should never become casual about how comparable ‘slopular’ science and very similar speculative evolutionary reasoning by leading scientists fed a venomous kind of darkness not too many decades ago.  Wade’s post-hoc tales often put him in step with a long march of social darwinists who, with comfortable detachment from the (currently) dominant culture, insist that we look starkly at life in the raw and not blink at what we see.  But given today’s limited understanding of complex traits, too often what one sees is oneself.

Thank you, Kenneth and Anne, for a common-sense, well-reasoned, historically astute, level-headed, fair-minded, disinterested, impartial, responsible, thoughtful, straight-shooting, devastating critique of evolutionary theory.  The cheers you are hearing are from your real scientific allies, the creationists.  If enough of your academic comrades read and heed your sermon, the House of Darwin will collapse from within.  Fanciful speculation?  Exaggeration?  Unwarranted claims of causation?  Arguments that leak like sieves?  Projections of oneself on the world?  Post-hoc tales?  Slopular science?  You’re right, it’s not just sport; it is a deadly game, and Charlie started it.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics • Early Man

Birds Can’t Tell Molecular Time:  Evolutionists used to think the molecular clock was steady.  That assumption has taken another blow in Molecular Genetics and Evolution.²  The authors began, “Current understanding of the diversification of birds is hindered by their incomplete fossil record, and uncertainty in phylogenetic relationships and phylogenetic rates of molecular evolution.”  So they decided to study the phylogenetic rates of molecular evolution.  Did it help?  “We found no support for the hypothesis that the molecular clock in birds ‘ticks’ according to a constant rate of substitution per unit of mass-specific metabolic energy rather than per unit of time, as recently suggested.”  Did they offer a solution?  Not exactly; but this realization “will therefore aid comparative biology studies that seek to infer the origin and timing of major adaptive shifts in vertebrates.”  In other words, the bad news is not just for the birds.

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¹Wilson et al., “Environmental Coupling of Selection and Heritability Limits Evolution,” Public Library of Science Biology, Volume 4 | Issue 7 | July 2006.
²Pereira and Baker, “A Mitogenomics Timescale for Birds Detects Variable Phylogenetic Rates of Molecular Evolution and Refutes the Standard Molecular Clock,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, Advance Access published online on June 14, 2006 Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl038.

We thank some readers for bringing these two papers to our attention.  The closer you examine each evolutionary claim, the weaker it looks.  How many other assumptions underlying the “fact” of evolution are rotting away?
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Genetics • Birds

Foot Facts: Frogs and Flies Fulfill Feet Feats    06/13/2006  
How do frogs walk on wet leaves without slipping?  Eric Jaffe in Science News¹ describes how they have dual-purpose footwear: a mucous film that holds on by wet adhesion, plus microscopic bumps that protrude above the wet layer to make dry contact.  Though a frog foot doesn’t appear as fancy as that of a gecko, “Now, researchers have evidence that the tree frog’s foot may be surprisingly sophisticated.”
    The frog’s prey has fancy feet, too.  Corey Binns explained on LiveScience how flies can walk on ceilings.  It’s not a simple feat: “Walking upside-down requires a careful balance of adhesion and weight, and specialized trekking tools to combat the constant tug of gravity.”  The fly does it with broad footpads loaded with microscopic hairs that increase the surface area of contact, much like the setae on gecko feet.  (The article includes a stunning electron micrograph of a fly’s foot).  Not only that, the hairs secrete “a glue-like substance made of sugars and oils.”  To get unstuck, the fly simply peels the pad away like a sticky note.  “The combination of the feet hairs’ rounded tips, the oily fluid, and a four-feet-on-the-floor rule help the inverted insect take steps in the right direction,” Binns summarized.

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¹Eric Jaffe, “Walking on Water: Tree frog’s foot uses dual method to stick,” Science News, Week of June 10, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 23 , p. 356.

We could rhapsodize about the design in a frog leg or fly foot, but you already know the sermon.  Instead, we offer, for your afternoon amusement, a fly joke (there’s already a frog joke on the humor page).  OK.  Three hungry flies buzzed around the kitchen at midnight, discovering to their delight a skillet of bologna.  After gorging themselves on this unexpected feast, they stopped short with alarm, hearing footsteps.  “The human is going to come after us with a swatter if he finds us here,” one shouted.  Stuffed to the gills, they all waddled out to the handle and tried to use it like a runway.  Their flimsy wings could no longer support the added weight, though.  One by one, they launched out, only to collapse in a heap on the floor.  The moral of this story is, “Don’t fly off the handle when you’re full of baloney.”
Next headline on:  Terrestrial zoology • Amazing Facts

Nature of Peer Review Undergoing Review at Nature    06/13/2006  
The science cops are on trial.  Peer review, the process that many are led to believe enforces objectivity and validity in scientific papers, has come under fire lately (see 03/17/2006, 02/05/2006, 01/31/2006, 01/09/2006).  In response to scandals and criticisms that the peer review as practiced is no guarantee against fraud, Nature is stepping out into uncharted waters.
    In an Editorial entitled “Peer review on trial,”¹ Nature announced two initiatives that seem revolutionary if they become the new standard.  One is to attach blogs to every item posted on News @ Nature, such as this one on the fish-o-pod, Tiktaalik.  On a blog, readers can vociferate for or against a claim, rather than take the author’s word for it in a published paper that is assumed factual since it passed peer review.
    Another change opens the door to the hitherto secretive process of reviewing papers.  The trial run of the new process is accompanied by an online debate on peer review at Nature.

During the trial, which will last several months, Nature’s traditional approach to peer review will continue: typically, we send selected submissions to two or three experts whose identities are kept confidential.  We believe that this approach works well.  Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, the web debate will explore other approaches, as well as the potential for online techniques to unpack the various functions of conventional journals, the ethics of peer review, and more
    Our online trial opens up a parallel track of peer review for submitted papers for authors willing to go down that route.  The traditional process will still be applied to all submissions selected for peer review.  But we will also offer to post the submitted manuscript onto an open website.  Anyone can then respond to it by posting online comments, provided they are willing to sign them.

After a period of time, the website will close, and the author(s) will have the opportunity to modify the paper; Nature will also consider the comments posted before publishing it in the journal.
    The editors realize this opens research up to critique by journalists and the public as well.  Nature is calling this a trial, not an experiment; they only want explore, expand, and test these ideas to see if they take hold.  But, they end, “our core goal remains as always: to bring our readers the most stimulating content that our editorial skills can deliver.”

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¹Editorial, “Peer review on trial,” Nature 441, 668 (8 June 2006) | doi:10.1038/441668a; Published online 7 June 2006.

Notice they said stimulating content, not reliable content.  Science fiction is stimulating, too, and so is alcohol.
    It’s about time peer review got some review itself, and lost some of its mystique.  It’s a relatively recent tradition that many great scientific discoveries got by without just fine (e.g., Newton’s Principia).  While scrutiny by others is wise for any claim (even in theology, the Apostle Paul said that “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets”), peer review as practiced in science has created new problems while trying to solve others.
    In the information age, there are newer and better ways to screen out fraud and guarantee validity than to publish papers in high-profile journals that people are expected to trust simply because they have been peer reviewed.  (Science reporters, among the worst of the believers, have tended to treat each issue as a message from the gods.)  We want to see the day when Darwinian storytelling is no longer immune from scrutiny in the public arena, when scientists will be praised for the quality of their observations rather than their imaginations, and when claims outside the bounds of evidence are shamed out of science.
    Public review will not solve everything.  Scientists risk their life work being stolen by rivals.  But an author knowing his or her ideas will be exposed to knowledgeable critics willing to tie their names to their criticisms may be forced to act more reserved in their conclusions.  That can be a good thing.  No initiative or process is a substitute, however, for old fashioned honesty, an absolute requirement for credibility in any line of research.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Reach Out and Touch Some Robot    06/13/2006  
The news media were excited to report an advance in materials science last week that could pave the way for touchy-feely robots (see BBC News, News @ Nature, LiveScience and National Geographic News, for instance).  Two scientists produced a thin film with touch resolution comparable to that of a human finger, an order of magnitude better than previous attempts.  The work was published in Science.¹
    While this is indisputably a remarkable achievement, few of the popular articles drew detailed comparisons and contrasts with the capabilities of human skin.  Richard Crowder, in the same issue of Science,² started his analysis of the paper with a touch of realism:

Today’s state-of-the-art dexterous robotic hands cannot achieve tasks that most 6-year-old children can do without thinking, such as tie a shoelace or build a house of cards.  The improvement of the manipulative capabilities of robotic hands requires advances in a wide range of technologies, including mechanics, actuators, sensors, and artificial intelligence.  Many robots—such as NASA’s Robonaunt—have the dexterity required to perform some of the tasks that we take for granted, but replication of the full manipulative capabilities of the human hand is still years away.

Calling the development of tactile sensors “one of the most difficult problems in robotics,” went on to describe how difficult it is to measure slippage while gripping an object.  Though he had praise for the touch-sensitive film invented by Maheshwari and Saraf, he continued to underscore the problems facing robot designers emulating a human hand.

To appreciate the advantages of having a single sensor for both slip and texture, it is worth considering how it can be integrated into robotic hands that need to restrain and manipulate a wide range of objects under a wide range of conditions.  To achieve a satisfactory grasp, optimal force control is required.  Any movement of a robotic hand may result in the grasped object slipping and possibly being dropped; hence, the sensors on the hand have to register any slippage and adjust the applied forces to bring the object back to rest....

In short, he wrote, “The problem of defining the required grasp force is crucial and can be posed as an optimization problem.”  The new tactile sensory material is thus only part of a multi-faceted problem that will require mastery of many disciplines.  “The next stage in the development of this sensor is to look at its robustness and performance characteristics over time,” Crowder ended.  “Once these issues are resolved, the sensor can be integrated into a dexterous hand, hopefully leading to an improvement in dexterity.”  Fortunately, robotics designers will have their human sense of touch to aid them in this endeavor.

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¹Maheshwari and Saraf, “High-Resolution Thin-Film Device to Sense Texture by Touch,” Science, 9 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5779, pp. 1501 - 1504, DOI: 10.1126/science.1126216.
²Richard Crowder, “Toward Robots That Can Sense Texture by Touch,” Science, 9 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5779, pp. 1478 - 1479, DOI: 10.1126/science.1129110.

Would you want a robotic hand encircling your neck, with the inventor’s assurance it will only apply the right force to give you a gentle massage?  What if the software, it turns out, needs a patch?
    The researchers can be rightly satisfied of their achievement, but use this story as an occasion to consider the wonder of human touch.  Articles like this one on Apologetics Press remind us of the exquisite engineering behind this sense that brings such pleasure and awareness to life.  More than a mere force-sensitive material, human skin is integrated with a powerful processing and feedback apparatus (the central nervous system) with force actuators (muscles) and automatic temperature controls.  In addition, skin is self-repairing, nourished by a circulating network of nutrients, armed with defenses, and able to breathe without leaking.
    Inventors can make telescopes stronger than eyes, and machines stronger than muscles, and sensors more precise than nerves.  But let no man boast till he can optimize all capabilities of a human being in a 150-lb package (more or less) and make it all reproduce itself through a cell the size of a pinhead.  Even then, the inventor will not have breathed into his creation the breath of life to make it a living soul.  He will only have underscored the degree of intelligent design it takes to design and optimize integrated, multifunctional systems.
    We hope robotics science will continue to advance – not only toward the improvement of our lives, but toward illustrating the principle that integrated, optimized systems do not arise from unguided processes.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Physics • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Can the Origin of Life Be Simplified?   06/12/2006    
Evolutionists looking for a materialistic explanation for the origin of life know that there is a huge gap between a sea of chemicals and a self-replicating cell.  Over the years since the Miller experiment (see 05/02/2003 entry), there have been several approaches trying to bridge this gap.  One has been the RNA World hypothesis, that RNA molecules fulfilled the functions of genetic storage and enzymatic activity (but see problems in 07/11/2002 entry).  A different approach rising in popularity these days is the “metabolism first” hypothesis.
    This approach, championed by Harold Morowitz, Robert Hazen and others, looks for self-sustaining chemical cycles that could grow in complexity till co-opted later by nucleic acids and proteins.  Most researchers in the field are diffident about progress they’re making, but Michael Schirber on LiveScience shucked aside all modesty in the title of his article broadcast throughout the news media (see Fox News, for example), by announcing: “How Life Began: New Research Suggests a Simple Approach.”  Schirber reduced an enormous problem to the simplicity of flipping a switch, making it seem as if metabolism-first was a known fact of history:

Somewhere on Earth, close to 4 billion years ago [sic], a set of molecular reactions flipped a switch and became life.  Scientists try to imagine this animating event [sic] by simplifying the processes that characterize living things.

Not only that, he said, “New research suggests the simplification needs to go further.”  But then, after the title had done its comforting work, Schirber spent a whole section debunking the RNA World and Miller Experiment scenarios.  He focused instead on the ideas of Robert Shapiro (New York U) who favors the metabolism-first approach, and quoted him explaining why other approaches fail:

Shapiro, however, thinks this so-called “RNA world” is still too complex to be the origin of life.  Information-carrying molecules like RNA are sequences of molecular “bits.”  The primordial soup [sic] would be full of things that would terminate these sequences before they grew long enough to be useful, Shapiro says.
    “In the very beginning, you couldn’t have genetic material that could copy itself unless you had chemists back then doing it for you,” Shapiro told LiveScience.

Shapiro is usually a good realist for spoiling the optimism of researchers envisioning RNA Worlds and primordial soups.  But he has his own hopeful world in an imaginary landscape, where garbage bags turn into powerhouses:

Instead of complex molecules, life started with small molecules interacting through a closed cycle of reactions, Shapiro argues in the June issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology.  These reactions would produce compounds that would feed back into the cycle, creating an ever-growing reaction network
    All the interrelated chemistry might be contained in simple membranes, or what physicist Freeman Dyson calls “garbage bags.”  These might divide just like cells do [sic], with each new bag carrying the chemicals to restart—or replicate—the original cycle.  In this way, “genetic” information could be passed down

The word “genetic” is in quotes because that’s a pretty loose application of a word so closely tied to information storage and retrieval.
    The article jumps to discussing work by other researchers who found a microbe that runs a simple reaction cycle via two proteins.  One of them leaped to the conclusion that “This cycle is where all evolution emanated from.”  James Ferry (Penn State) continued triumphantly, “It is the father of all life.”  Shapiro, wearing his realism hat again, countered skeptically that something had to create the two proteins.  Probability studies show this to be astronomically unlikely (see online book).  He ended with a proverb, “We have to let nature instruct us.”

Michael Schirber easily wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week with his dazzling, death-defying leap, “Somewhere on Earth, close to 4 billion years ago, a set of molecular reactions flipped a switch and became life.”  What could be more simple than flipping a switch?  He flipped a switch, all right, but in the OFF direction, turning the light of honest science into darkness.  Ferry wins a close second for his zinger about a reaction cycle (in a living microbe) being the “father of all life.”
    Robert Hazen (George Mason U) made a great pitch for Metabolism-First in his 2006 lecture series for The Teaching Company, “Origins of Life.”  It’s interesting to hear him waffle between grandiose optimism and the hard realities of the lab.  In the end he has nothing more than visions and hope to keep him going in the face of repeated honest admissions of serious and fundamental challenges no matter what approach is used.  (In addition, he describes in some detail the partisanship and bickering between competing groups.)  Never do any of the workers in origin-of-life research entertain the slightest possibility that materialism might be the wrong answer.  They cannot, because they have already convinced themselves philosophically that science and materialistic philosophy are one and the same.
    Unfortunately for them, Metabolism First is another dead end.  Why wait for the capitulation speech?  We already know that genetics is essential to life.  Metabolic reactions cannot code for function; they can only run in circles.  Planets run in circles, too, but they are not alive.  For a metabolic cycle to grow, adapt, “learn” (note Shapiro’s illegal anthropomorphism), and respond to stimuli, it must store information and reproduce itself accurately; and (because all life is built on DNA and proteins), it has to find a way to form these thermodynamically-unfavorable molecules de novo and get them to co-opt the cycle in some kind of genetic takeover.  But Shapiro already knows that proteins and nucleic acids capable of storing information and functioning as cellular machines are astronomically improbable.  Adding improbabilities to improbabilities does not produce probabilities, or even possibilities.  It produces impossibilities, unless one cheats by attributing wants, needs and purposes to the inanimate (see personification fallacy).
    Materialistic origin-of-life research has been stumbling backward into the darkness.  Researchers keep themselves entertained not with success in the lab, but with ego, bravado and hype, which is only whistling in the dark.  Claiming the problem is simple (a big lie) is like shutting one’s eyes in a dark cave.  The only way out of the cave is to flip the switch to the ON position.  The switches are everywhere, readily felt on the walls.  Yes, Robert, we must let nature teach us.  Only determination to walk in darkness obscures the clear, well-lit view of the vital necessity of information, and its source: intelligence.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Domestic Housecat Trees Wild Bear   06/11/2006    
Donna Dickey has quite a watchcat.  This declawed tabby chased a roaming black bear up a tree and held it at bay for 15 minutes.  When the bear slid down to try to get away, Jack chased it, hissing and snarling, till the bear escaped up a second tree.  That’s when Donna called her cuddly pet home.  The story is told on CBC News, Canada.

Amusing things can happen when domestic and wild animals find themselves overlapping on the borders of human civilization.  Mammals and birds adapting to their human owner’s lifestyles exhibit behaviors that seem a curious mix of playfulness and confusion as their survival-honed instincts discover new situations: thus, the popularity of TV shows like The Planet’s Funniest Animals.  We should not attribute human emotions and thoughts to our fellow mammals, into whom the Creator did not breathe the breath of life to make them become living souls.  But there’s something poignant in this little story of Jack that illustrates how God’s creatures are more than robotic, yet less than sentient – and why we humans find their behaviors so entrancing.
Next headline on:  Mammals

Mini-Dinos Found in Marine Sediments   06/10/2006    
Sauropods were not all the lumbering giants we think of; they could be the size of a pet dog (images of Deeno in the Flintstones come to mind).  This came to light from recent discoveries announced in Germany (see BBC News and LiveScience) of adult sauropods smaller than human height, ranging five to 20 feet long
    According to Nicholas Bakalar writing for National Geographic News, the unlikely place of their discovery was quite a surprise.  Co-author of the study Octavio Mateus (New University of Lisbon) described the puzzle of their location in a quarry loaded with marine sediments.  “This was not supposed to happen,” he said, “because all those layers were supposed to be marine layers containing only marine animals.  We didn’t expect to find dinosaurs, but we did.”

To their shame, most of the news reports focused more on the story line than on the facts of the discovery.  They went on about how this species used to be large like the heavyweight sauropods, but found themselves trapped on an island of diminished resources so downsized into dwarfs.  Only National Geographic (not particularly partial to hard facts) mentioned the surprise of finding them buried among marine organisms.  Even then, Bakalar did not elaborate.  Yet this is an important detail of the discovery that should not have been understated.  These 11 individuals did not just go to the beach and wait for high tide to come in.  They were apparently caught off guard and overwhelmed suddenly by a watery catastrophe along with the sea creatures entombed with them.  If this were an isolated case, we might suspect a local misfortune, but is there a pattern emerging? (see 05/13/2006, 04/25/2006, 04/15/2005).
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

Eukaryote Evolution Proceeded from Complex to Simple   06/09/2006    
As if reprimanding simpletons, three scientists writing in Science¹ preached that the old picture of evolution from simple to complex is simplistic.  This is particularly true, they claim, for the story that eukaryotes were born from a blessed union.  “Data from many sources,” they counter, “give no direct evidence that eukaryotes evolved by genome fusion between archaea and bacteria.”  Further down, they remark, “Unfortunately, such a model has been tacitly favored by molecular biologists who appeared to view evolution as an irreversible march from simple prokaryotes to complex eukaryotes, from unicellular to multicellular.”  The old picture harks back to obsolete views of straight-line evolution.

Comparative genomics and proteomics have strengthened the view that modern eukaryote and prokaryote cells have long followed separate evolutionary trajectories.  Because their cells appear simpler, prokaryotes have traditionally been considered ancestors of eukaryotes.  Nevertheless, comparative genomics has confirmed a lesson from paleontology: Evolution does not proceed monotonically from the simpler to the more complex.  Here, we review recent data from proteomics and genome sequences suggesting that eukaryotes are a unique primordial lineage....

Out with the old, in with the new.  What do they suggest to replace the old picture?  Believe it or not, “sequence loss and cellular simplification.”  Since these are “are common modes of evolution,” they argue that the first eukaryote was already a unique, complex creature.  Like a predator or raptor, it acquired mitochondria by phagocytosis, and diversified from there.
    Their view does not prohibit increases in complexity, yet they seem eager to distance evolutionary theory from visions of progress.  “Genome evolution is a two-way street,” they say; “This bidirectional sense of reversibility is important as an alternative to the view of evolution as a rigidly monotonic progression from simple to more complex states, a view with roots in the 18th-century theory of orthogenesis.”  They describe several life-forms that have reduced their genomes and slimmed down to the bare minimum: parasites, symbionts, organelle genomes, and anaerobes.
    OK so far; evolution can move either toward complex or simple – but how does this explain eukaryotes (cells with nuclei and compartmentalized organelles)?  Here, their explanation appears forced by the hard realities of the evidence.  From the earliest possible ancestor, eukaryotes were already complex.  They had introns (and complex spliceosomes, half of whose 78 proteins are unique to eukaryotes, to handle them), mitosomes, hydrogenosomes, mitochondria, nuclei, nucleoli, the Golgi apparatus, centrioles, and an endoplasmic reticulum, along with “hundreds of proteins with no orthologs evident in the genomes of prokaryotes.”  (Simple Giardia, for example, has 347 eukaryote signature proteins.)  Much of the article describes the unprecedented features of eukaryotes, which constitute a “unique cell type that cannot be deconstructed into features inherited directly from archaea and bacteria.”
    This calls for alternatives to “hypotheses that attribute eukaryote origins to genome fusion between archaea and bacteria” (endosymbiosis), which they claim “are surprisingly uninformative about the emergence of the cellular and genomic signatures of eukaryotes.”  Recognition of these realities must be “the critical starting point” for explaining where eukaryotes came from: i.e., a “larger and more complex cell” at the beginning when the three kingdoms – bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes – diverged.
    Their picture can be summarized as follows: (1) the common ancestor was a raptor or predator on prokaryote mitochondria.  (2) Cellular crowding and compartmentalization led to more efficient molecular interactions.  (3) Extensive genome reduction followed.  Darwin, of course, grins in the background; “This abbreviated account of genome reduction illustrates the Darwinian view of evolution as a reversible process in the sense that ‘eyes can be acquired and eyes can be lost’” (because of the two-way street of natural selection).  Even Darwin would have agreed that “selection gives, and selection takes.”  They concur with essential evolutionary doctrine without hesitation: “Genomes evolve continuously through the interplay of unceasing mutation, unremitting competition, and ever-changing environments.”  Darwinism is safe, therefore; so now, let’s picture the new emerging story for the 21st century:

For the reasons outlined above, we favor the idea that the host that acquired the mitochondrial endosymbiont [sic] was a unicellular eukaryote predator, a raptor.  The emergence [sic] of unicellular raptors would have had a major ecological impact on the evolution of the gentler descendants of the common ancestor.  These may have responded with several adaptive strategies: They might outproduce the raptors by rapid growth or hide from raptors by adapting to extreme environments.  Thus, the hypothetical eukaryote raptors may have driven the evolution of their autotrophic, heterotrophic, and saprotrophic cousins in a reductive mode that put a premium on the relatively fast-growing, streamlined cell types we call prokaryotes.

One problem.  How this complex, predatory cell with most of its unique parts “emerged” is anyone’s guess.  So get busy, everyone: “This scenario, which is not contradicted by new data derived from comparative genomics and proteomics, is a suitable starting point [sic] for future work.”

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¹Kurland, Collins and Penny, “Genomics and the Irreducible Nature of Eukaryote Cells,” Science, 19 May 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5776, pp. 1011 - 1014, DOI: 10.1126/science.1121674.

How many more times can Darwinism survive the onslaught of facts?  Here is another case where (1) everything you know is wrong, (2) the old ideas taught in the days of the Scopes Trial and as far back as Darwin were too simplistic, (3) the complexity appears to have been present from the start, and (4) nobody has a clue what happened, and (5) all we have is a “suitable starting point” (read: hunch, guess, scenario, plot, tall tale) for starting all over.  Once again, also, it will be harder this time because the “new data derived from comparative genomics and proteomics” complicates the picture enormously.
    In place of the old simple story (that was easy to illustrate in textbook cartoons), we have a new, more violent tale.  Predator cells pop into existence somehow, fully equipped; they alter the ecology and force the prokaryote prey to streamline their genomes and hide.  Established at the top of the food chain, these new eukaryotes begin their long trek toward Volvox, Tiktaalik and Homo sapiens.  Whenever needed, these storytellers can always invoke the Darwinist Miracle Word emergence to cover their tracks, and call in Tinker Bell to wave the mutation wand when a major innovation is needed.  Thus is worship in the Temple of Charlie kept going another day, while Big Science mans the fortifications.  But for how much longer?  The Visigoths are at the gates (05/09/2006), demanding, “Enough of this!  No more excuses.  Mr. Darwin, tear down this wall!”
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Plant Hula-Hoop Railroads Build Cell Walls   06/09/2006    
Solving a long-standing mystery about how plants build cell walls, Stanford scientists imaged molecular machines traveling along hoop-shaped rings around the inside of the cell.  Publishing in Science, Paradez, Somerville and Ehrhardt proved that cellulose synthase (CESA), a machine that manufactures cellulose composed of six subunits arranged in rosettes, rides like a rail car on microtubules that encircle the inside of the plasma membrane.  From there, the machine extrudes the complex molecule to the exterior, building the rigid cell wall.
    Clive Lloyd, commenting on this finding in the same issue of Science,² seemed happily astonished, not only at the scientific achievement, but at the plants themselves:

In a remarkable series of biological transformations, green plants convert carbon dioxide into cellulose fibers stronger than steel.  These thin threads of polymeric glucose are wrapped around growing cells, lending structural support to the plant as it extends further into the environment.  The fibers are not simply secreted into the plant cell wall in a haphazard fashion but are deposited in ordered layers that still allow the cell to expand.  For more than 40 years, it has been known that the alignment of these cellulose fibers (microfibrils) in the cell wall often coincides with cytoskeletal microtubules tethered to the cytoplasmic side of the plasma membrane... Despite this coincidence, there has never been direct proof that microtubules provide a guidance mechanism for the alignment of cellulose microfibrils.  Now, on page 1491 of this issue, Paredez et al. (1) provide that proof.

Lloyd described the cell-encircling hoops as a “microtubule railroad” providing tracks for the cellulose-synthesizing machines.  Apparently these tubules can reorient themselves, perhaps in hula-hoop fashion, allowing the machines to stitch cross-hatch patterns of cellulose for added strength (see 01/16/2003) for analogous process).

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¹Paradez, Somerville and Ehrhardt, “Visualization of Cellulose Synthase Demonstrates Functional Association with Microtubules,” Science, 9 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5779, pp. 1491 - 1495, DOI: 10.1126/science.1126551.
²Clive Lloyd, “Microtubules Make Tracks for Cellulose,” Science, 9 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5779, pp. 1482 - 1483, DOI: 10.1126/science.1128903.

Should we not gasp and applaud over how a blade of grass stands up?  Plants don’t just happen.  A plant could not grow upward against gravity without a complex, programmed arrangement of tools and parts that build the structure piece by piece in an ordered fashion.  Now, we see that this construction process involves railroad tracks and rail cars loaded with organic-chemistry wizards.
    The ways the components of the cell wall are manufactured and assembled are wonders in themselves (see 10/26/2001 for a glimpse).  Did you realize plants contain a substance stronger than steel?  And that they make it starting with just carbon dioxide (a gas) through a “remarkable series of biological transformations”?  What an amazing creation!  (We must add the obligatory observation that neither of these papers said anything about how these biological marvels might have evolved.)
Next headline on:  Plants • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Update:  Crater-Count Dating Squabble Unresolved    06/08/2006  
Remember the revelation last year that many craters on Mars used to infer ages may have been secondary impacts from fallback debris? (see 10/20/2005 entry).  Well, a microsymposium on this subject was held in Houston in March, and Richard Kerr in Science¹ said that “125 planetary scientists deadlocked over how to apply crater-dating techniques to recent Mars history.”
    Some are adamant that most craters are secondaries, and that they are difficult to distinguish from primaries, while others feel their methods produce consistent dating results.  If the former are right, however, then crater counts “have little to do with telling time,” Kerr wrote.  Inferences about ages of features in geological history built on these dating methods could be “off by orders of magnitude.”
    Support for the secondary-crater explanation comes from ground level.  It shows that the process occurs even at small scales:

Close-up images from the Mars rover Spirit also suggest that secondaries dominate small craters on Mars, too.  Geologist Matthew Golombek of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a Spirit team member, reported on a survey of impact craters measuring from 10 centimeters to a couple of hundred meters across.  Spirit found that they are all far shallower and less bowllike than primary craters tend to be.  The high speed of impactors falling in from the asteroid belt makes for relatively deeper craters than those made by slower ejecta blocks of the same size.  “Almost every crater you see looks like a secondary,” said Golombek.

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¹Richard A. Kerr, “Planetary Science: Who Can Read the Martian Clock?”, Science, 26 May 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5777, pp. 1132 - 1133, DOI: 10.1126/science.312.5777.1132.

Before this realization came to light, the assumption was that meteoroids produced a steady rain of impactors on a planet or moon, allowing scientists to estimate the age of the surface.  “The concept sounds simple enough,” Kerr said, nostalgically; “To decipher the geologic history of other bodies in the solar system, count craters formed by the slow rain of bombarding rocks.  The more craters on a lava flow, glacial debris, or a flood deposit, the farther back in time a volcano erupted, ice flowed, or water gushed.”  Now, we know that “In practice, however, telling geologic time beyond Earth has proved tricky.”  A sidebar shows that there is even debate on how the impacts took place, and whether there was a catastrophic period of bombardment, or a slow decrease in events in the first million years of the solar system.
    But wait; about that first million years – it is inferred from studies of the moon, which were dated by crater counts.  And the moon is also dated by extrapolation of dating methods from earth which were largely accepted due to their allowance of time for Darwinian evolution.  What if evolution is not true?  And what if the dating methods on Earth are flawed?  Can secular scientists really know anything about ages in the solar system?  Don’t count on it.  Assumption is the mother of confusion.
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Solar System

Evolutionary Trees “Positively Misleading”    06/08/2006  
According to an article in PLoS Genetics,¹ there is a fundamental flaw in the way species trees are inferred from gene trees using molecular genetics that is guaranteed to produce erroneous results:

Because of the stochastic way in which lineages sort during speciation, gene trees may differ in topology from each other and from species trees.  Surprisingly, assuming that genetic lineages follow a coalescent model of within-species evolution, we find that for any species tree topology with five or more species, there exist branch lengths for which gene tree discordance is so common that the most likely gene tree topology to evolve along the branches of a species tree differs from the species phylogeny.  This counterintuitive result implies that in combining data on multiple loci, the straightforward procedure of using the most frequently observed gene tree topology as an estimate of the species tree topology can be asymptotically guaranteed to produce an incorrect estimate.

Their paper proves that “the ‘democratic vote’ procedure of using the most common gene tree as the estimate of the species tree is statistically inconsistent for phylogenetic inference.”  In fact, it is “positively misleading,” they claim.  Common methods used in phylogenetic studies do not take into account the “anomalous gene trees” (AGTs) that result from a flawed assumption: “the implicit premise that makes it sensible to estimate a species tree using a single gene tree or the most common among several gene trees—has remained unquestioned.”  They show that “discordance can occur between the species tree and the most likely gene tree” and that the data can converge on a wrong answer as the number of genes increases.  This is not just a theoretical problem, they say, and provide an example:

It is noteworthy that our theoretical results apply to known—rather than estimated—gene trees, and do not consider the effect of mutations on inference of gene trees.  This issue is important, as mutational history is a key factor in determining when an empirical study might actually be misled by AGTs.  As an illustration, in one human-chimp-gorilla study, a substantial fraction of loci—six of 45 considered—had no informative substitutions that could provide support to any particular phylogenetic grouping..  That this many loci would not have any phylogenetic information in the human-chimp-gorilla clade suggests that for the smaller branch lengths typical of the anomaly zone, the fraction of uninformative loci could be much greater.

Adding more genes to a study does not improve the statistics, nor does including other types of data, such as genomic inversions or rearrangements.  Their best advice is to include samples with multiple individuals per species.  That, however, is unlikely due to the difficulty and expense of sequencing.  “Different algorithms for combining data on multiple loci will have different degrees of susceptibility to the occurrence of AGTs, and a challenge for phylogenetics is to identify those procedures that are best able to overcome this new obstacle to accurate inference of species trees.”

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¹Degnan and Rosenberg, “Discordance of Species Trees with Their Most Likely Gene Trees,” Public Library of Science: Genetics, Volume 2 | Issue 5 | MAY 2006.

So much for hundreds of papers for the last few decades, with all their confident claims about the evolutionary ancestry of this or that group.  Now what?  Can anything reliable come out of Darwinist attempts to find ancestry in DNA?
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolutionary Theory

Beavers Achieve Environmental Reprieve    06/08/2006  
In what might be considered an unexpected convergence between geology and zoology, it has been found that beaver dams influence large tracts of land both above and below ground.  “Impact of beaver dams wider than thought” announced a headline on LiveScience summarizing studies by scientists in Rocky Mountain National Park.
    The dams take water that would otherwise be channeled down narrow passages and spread it out, raising the water table and sustaining plant and animal life during the dry season.  The “construction projects also spread water downstream with the efficiency of a massive once-every-200-years flood,” the article states.  “....Additionally, beaver dams built away from natural river channels further redirect water across the valley, increasing the depth, extent, and duration of small floods.”  This suggests that “beavers can create and maintain environments suitable for the formation and persistence of wetlands.”
    Without the spreading effect of the dams, small and large floods would largely rush down to the lowlands, leaving mountain valleys dry.  The beaver dams help capture and spread the resources into the sides of the mountain valleys where it can be stored in the water table.  This moderates the peak- and low-water periods, resulting in enhanced vitality and biodiversity of mountain ecosystems.
    See also the 07/16/2005 entry on how beavers are inspiring human dam builders.

In the fur trade era, these river rats were valued only for hats, as their pelts produced felt for svelte European dudes.  Now we know that beavers’ influence is felt in bigger and better ways.  Watch the IMAX film Beavers on DVD at home and marvel at another of God’s adorable creatures that are useful as well as ornamental – as we also should be.
Next headline on:  Geology • Mammals • Amazing Facts

The Universe Is Made Out of... Fudge!   06/07/2006    
[Guest article]  According to the July issue of Astronomy magazine, the Universe is comprised mostly of fudge – or at least fudge factors, anyway.  The article by James Trefil from George Mason University describes the current thinking among astrophysicists as to the eventual fate of the universe.  Since the Big Bang, there has been an expansion:

On one hand, the expansion could reverse, in which case, all the matter in the universe would come together again – the Big Crunch... On the other hand, the expansion could go on forever, leading to a bleak, cold, and empty future – the Big Chill.

There is a happy medium called the “flat universe,” where we don’t Crunch or Chill, but coast happily outward forever.
    There is a quantity of matter in the universe necessary for the happy coasting.  It is called the critical density, and theorists believe that the universe must be at that value in order to observe what we see today. There is a problem, however: “If you count up all the stuff astronomers see – stars, dust clouds, and other kinds of ordinary, or baryonic, matter – it totals about 4 percent of the critical density.”  This is way too little to get to the critical density.
    In addition, astronomers note that galaxies rotate strangely.  The arms of the galaxies, being further away, should, over time, separate from the inner regions of the galaxy.  Enter fudge factor #1, “dark matter:”

The only way for this to happen is for the visible galaxy to be surrounded by a sphere, or halo, of something else – something not visible, something dark.  This stuff is called ‘dark matter’.

    Even though it is not visible, the author states, “We know that over 90 percent of material in galaxies like the Milky Way is dark matter....”  Even when you add this generous fudge to the universe, “the density of the universe comes to about a third of the critical density.”
    The Big Bang theory predicted that if we were able to measure the velocity of galaxies over time, it would follow a profile one would expect of an energetic explosion – high velocity early, then a slowing as the energy of the explosion dissipated.  The physicists devised a method by which they could observe more distant stars, where distance equates to farther looks into the past by their reckoning, and see what earlier velocities were.  Unfortunately, there was a bombshell:

Against all expectations, they found the most distant galaxies are receding from Earth more slowly than nearby ones... The expansion is accelerating!

Enter fudge factor #2: “dark energy.”  In order to make the expansion get faster later, physicists had to attribute to dark energy the ability to counteract the slowing force of gravity with an impulsive force that would boost the expansion enough to account for the faster current rates.  The matter equivalent of dark energy (remember E=mc² ?) fills up the rest of the matter required to bring the universe to critical density.  This dark energy, by the way, is also invisible and unobservable.
    Between dark matter and dark energy, these fudge factors fill in gaps of 96 percent of what is observed in order to get old-age math to work out.  This helps physicists feel optimistic that in a few tens of billions of years, we won’t Crunch or Chill.

Evolutionists accuse creationists of inventing a “God of the Gaps” to cover for their ignorance of true science.  It would appear that the high priests of astrophysics have their own Gods of the Gaps, namely dark matter and dark energy.  What will happen to the universe?  It won’t be the Big Crunch or the Big Chill, but the Big Furnace: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.  Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat!  But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:10-13).
—TC
Next headline on:  Cosmology

Protein Dressing Room Has Electronic Walls    06/07/2006  
Properly folded proteins are essential to all of life.  When a polypeptide, or chain of amino acids, emerges from the ribosome translation factory on its way to becoming a protein, it looks like a useless, shapeless piece of string.  It cannot perform its function till folded into a precise, compact shape particular for its job.  Some short polypeptides will spontaneously fold into their “native” state, ready for work, but many of the bigger ones need help.  Fortunately, the cell provides a private dressing room called the GroEL-GroES chaperonin that not only gives them privacy, away from the bustle of colliding molecules in the cytoplasm, but actually helps them get dressed (see also 05/05/2003 entry).  This chaperone or “helper” machine thus not only gets the actor ready for the stage faster, but prevents misfolding that could clutter the cell with useless or harmful aggregates of protein.
      A team from the Max Planck Institute, writing in Cell,¹ investigated how the internal structure of this barrel-shaped molecular machine overcomes energy barriers to proper folding and speeds up the process ten-fold.  They found that the inside walls of the GroEL barrel and the inside walls of the GroES lid contain protrusions that generate electrostatic and hydrophobic forces on the interior space.  When the unfolded protein enters, therefore, it is subjected to gentle pressures that coax it to fold.  These forces are nonspecific enough to work on hundreds of different substrates that use this general-purpose machine. 
    Furthermore, they found that the forces change during the entry of the nascent protein.  The interior is not barrel shaped when the actor approaches the door; the GroES lid, with the help of the energy molecule ATP, guides the protein in, and then the barrel pops into its shape, providing a safe haven for folding.  Moreover, the electronic walls turn on to provide that gentle nudge to get the polypeptide over its energy barriers and into the right folding pathway.  When the protein has properly completed its folding after about 10 seconds in the dressing room, the door opens and the protein pops out, ready for action.
    How finely tuned is this machine?  The authors did some experiments on mutating the chaperone to make the barrel looser and tighter.  They found that volume changes as small as 2-5% slowed down the folding considerably.  The barrel volume needs to be within certain narrow limits, yet general enough to handle a variety of small, medium and large proteins.

The GroEL/GroES nano-cage allows a single protein molecule to fold in isolation.  This reaction has been compared to spontaneous folding at infinite dilution.  However, recent experimental and theoretical studies indicated that the physical environment of the chaperonin cage can alter the folding energy landscape, resulting in accelerated folding for some proteins.  By performing an extensive mutational analysis of GroEL, we have identified three structural features of the chaperonin cage as major contributors to this capacity: (1) geometric confinement exerted on the folding protein inside the limited volume of the cage; (2) a mildly hydrophobic, interactive surface at the bottom of the cage; and (3) clusters of negatively charged amino acid residues exposed on the cavity wall.  We suggest that these features in combination provide a physical environment that has been optimized in evolution [sic] to catalyze the structural annealing of proteins with kinetically complex folding pathways.  Thus, the chaperonin system and its mutant versions may prove as useful tools in understanding how proteins navigate their energy landscape of folding.

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¹Tang et al., “Structural Features of the GroEL-GroES Nano-Cage Required for Rapid Folding of Encapsulated Protein,” Cell

We didn’t need that little senseless phrase “optimized in evolution” now, did we?  The authors talked nothing else about evolution, or how natural selection could produce three independent structural features of this one machine that assists proteins in vital ways.  This machine has irreducible complexity written all over it.  As usual, references to evolution provide nothing but a narrative gloss on the actual facts of the story.  The science involved continuing revelations inside the black box, where we see precision, efficiency, control – and design.
    In the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life with its forgivably simplified animations, a nascent protein is shown floating into a smooth, barrel-shaped chamber with a lid, where it folds on itself from one end to another.  This is helpful to show the general idea, but the actual process is much more complicated and interesting.  For one thing, this all happens much quicker than shown, in a very crowded environment.  For another, protein folding is a complex affair, wherein several domains of the polypeptide fold sequentially or simultaneously following an energy landscape (like a pinball negotiating obstacles) that leads to the completed protein.  Some domains fold into a helix or sheet, or several, which then combine into larger structures.  Even then, after the protein exits the chaperone, there can be subsequent modifications: multiple proteins, for instance, might be joined into complexes, with metal ions inserted (as in hemoglobin or chlorophyll), and these proteins usually become part of networks.  Add to that now the exciting discovery that the walls of the chaperone barrel are interactive, coaxing the proteins to fold properly.  At every stage there is coordinated, synchronized, elegant design.
    Think about how these molecules operate in the blind.  They do not have eyes and brains telling them where to go – yet they succeed.  There is no analog in human technology; the closest, perhaps, is computer programming, but in life, at scales smaller than most of us can imagine, nano-factories operate with physical entities moving through space and time.  How fortunate we are to see these marvels unfold.  Our ancestors might have wondered at the mysteries of biological life, but could they in their wildest dreams have imagined the city-like organization at work at the molecular level?
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Update:  Iraq Marshlands Recovering Quicker Than Expected   06/06/2006    
How is south-central Iraq doing?  Recall that Saddam Hussein nearly obliterated, intentionally, one of the world’s premier wetlands (05/01/2003, 02/18/2005).  His fall from power enabled scientists to measure the damage and estimate hopes for recovery.  The outlook was pretty bleak at first.  Now, after two seasons of above-average rainfall upstream, fresh water has again been flooding large areas of the marshes.
    A team monitoring the recovery provided an update in BioScience.¹  Their assessment is guarded optimism: about a third of the vast acreage is recovering better than expected, but there is a long way to go.  Many birds and indigenous species have been spotted, giving scientists hope of their return from near extinction.
    The main problems are lack of landscape connectivity between the reflooded areas, uncertainties about the sustainability of the freshwater sources, and doubts that the Marsh Arab culture will become re-established.  Many of those forced away may not return due to other opportunities, fear, uncertainty and other factors: the young, for instance, are being attracted to other ways of life.  It was not exactly the “Garden of Eden” lifestyle portrayed in the West, anyway: the paper states that warfare, rivalry and disease accompanied living in the region.

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¹Curtis J. Richardson and Najah H. Hussain, “ Restoring the Garden of Eden: An Ecological Assessment of the Marshes of Iraq,” BioScience, Volume 56, Number 6, June 2006, pp. 477-489(13).

Where are the activist environmentalists on this issue?  Have they forgotten that Saddam Hussein intentionally committed two of the worst acts of environmental terrorism in history, the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields in the first gulf war, and the destruction of the Iraqi marshlands in the second?  Had not the international coalition under American leadership intervened in both cases, Saddam would have succeeded without consequence, and the land might never have recovered.  The dictator who machine-gunned civilians by the tens of thousands and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves now is getting some due process he denied his victims, while the land he ravaged has at least some hope of recovery.  Environmentalists tend to be predominantly leftist in ideology.  Can they at least give the two President Bushes a little credit here for taking the initiative, boldly, to do something about it?
    While saving the ecology was not the primary mission of either military action, it has been a tangible by-product.  As in other lands ravaged by dictators, the return of freedom has provided incalculable environmental hope for this vital region.  Sin cursed the original Garden of Eden and continues to curse the land wherever evil triumphs.  Some day, according to the Bible, only the Creator’s intervention will avail to “destroy those who destroy the earth” (Rev. 11:18).  By then, a complete remake will be required by the Creator himself.  That does not mean, however, that we stewards should not work to conserve and fortify what we have now.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

Hobbit Man, Neanderthal Man Further Scrutinized    06/06/2006  
The positions of two alleged human ancestors in the family tree is becoming clearer, or murkier, depending on whom you ask.  This illustrates the uncertainty and disparity of opinions in this field.

• Hobbit workshop:  Regarding the diminutive skeletons dubbed Homo floresiensis found in Indonesia, opinions seems to be condensing around the idea they were true Homo sapiens, not missing links.  Bruce Bower reported in Science News (162:22:141, June 3), summarizing a paper by Adam Brumm et al. in Nature last week,¹ that stone tools found elsewhere on the island of Flores appear to match those in the Liang Bua cave where H. floresiensis was discovered.  But these artifacts are dated at up to 840,000 years old, whereas the bones of Hobbit Man are thought to be much more recent (estimated 74,000 to 12,000 years), within the time frame when true Homo sapiens are believed to have inhabited the island.  This raises several questions:
  • Can we trust the dates?  Bower quotes James L. Phillips (Field Museum, Chicago) calling the idea “beyond belief” that the tools at the other site are connected culturally with H. floresiensis.  He says, “Mata Menge artifacts lay in unstable river sediment that moved over time, making it impossible to obtain accurate age estimates, Phillips holds.”
  • Can we measure brain power from bones?  The stone toolwork, apparently unique to Flores, displays humanlike technology.  “The latest Flores finds show that the diminutive islanders, with their craniums the size of chimps’, possessed enough brainpower to parlay cultural traditions into effective toolmaking,” Bowers writes.
  • Can we know the toolmakers?  Though 3,626 artifacts have been excavated in the cave hideout of Hobbit man, “I don’t think we can rule out Homo sapiens as the [maker] of the Liang Bua tools,” John Shea (State U of New York) said.
  • Can we assume cross-cultural connections?  According to Bower, Dietrich Stout (University College, London) remarked that “It’s hard to know whether a single Stone Age culture connected residents of Mata Menge to Liang Bua’s inhabitants or whether separate hominid populations happened to exploit similar, basic toolmaking techniques.”
  Indeed, it appears hard to know anything at all about this population.  Since the dates of H. floresiensis are too recent to consider them missing links or derivatives of Homo erectus, a minority of scientists still contend the specimens are examples of modern humans with microcephalic disorder (see Science 19 May, 2006).  An article on BBC News mentions the puzzle of the hundreds of thousands of years alleged between Mata Menge and Liang Bua; “We can’t guarantee that this material really is related because of the large time gap,” Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, UK, commented.
• Neanderthal genes:  European scientists reporting in Current Biology² sequenced another strand of Neanderthal DNA in hopes of shedding light on whether Neanderthals and modern humans interbred (see 05/22/2006).  In short, they reported that there is still a distinction between the DNA of the two groups, but that Neanderthal genetic diversity has been underestimated, and is comparable to modern human genetic diversity.  They could not discern if the diversity was due to cohabitation, climactic changes, or subdivisions of populations; “Thus, more Neandertal sequences than the six presently available and longer than 100 bp [base-pairs] are needed to fully understand the extent of the past diversity of Neandertals.”

No firm conclusions here, either, but that has not stopped Steven Mithen (U. of Reading, UK) from writing a whole book speculating that Neanderthals were the first musicians (see Reuters story on MSNBC.com).  The storytelling goes on: “It was a dark and stormy night, and in a cave in what is now southern France, Neanderthals were singing, dancing and tapping on stalagmites with their fingernails to pass the time.”

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¹Adam Brumm et al., “Early stone technology on Flores and its implications for Homo floresiensis,” Nature 441, 624-628 (1 June 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04618.
²Orlando et al., “Revisiting Neandertal diversity with a 100,000 year old mtDNA sequence,” Current Biology, Volume 16, Issue 11, June 2006, pages R400-R402, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.019.

The MSNBC story about Neanderthal music continues by asking whether such a cave concert might have actually happened, or is a figment of Mithen’s imagination.  The answer is: the latter.
    In neither story are data definitive enough to draw conclusions.  In the case of Hobbit man, they cannot be sure which tools are associated with which population, who is related to whom, how old they are, how long they were there, and what their capabilities were.  It seems incredible to expect a simple stone-tool technology to persist on one island for over 800,000 years without change.  And making inferences about intelligence based on brain size is fraught with fallacies; consider how capable a hummingbird is with a brain the size of a grain of rice (see next story).
    None of these reports contradict the creationist position that humans have always been humans and had their intellectual and artistic abilities from day one, or shall we say, Day Six.  According to the Bible, Adam’s great grandchildren were already accomplished farmers, metallurgists and musicians (see Genesis 4), having invented these skills from scratch using their God-given abilities, without hundreds of thousands of years of mutations and natural selection.  Do you need a model that fits the evidence?  Put this score on your music stand and play it.  (More harmony, less cacophony.)
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods • Genetics

Hummingbirds: Small Wonders    06/05/2006  
Do you enjoy watching the world’s smallest birds, right from your backyard?  Susan Healy and T. Andrew Hurly provided interesting tidbits about them in a Quick Guide to Hummingbirds in Current Biology this week.¹
    There are 330 species of these small flyers noted for their aerobatics and iridescent colors.  Typically, they weigh a few grams.  The largest is the size of a starling; the smallest (from Cuba) weighs a mere two grams, and is nine centimeters long (mostly beak and tail).  Flight muscles comprise 25 to 30% of a hummingbird’s body weight; “a three gram hummingbird beats its wings an astonishing 50–70 times per second,” the authors exclaim.  Yet all this capability grows from an egg the size of a pea.
  Some species migrate to the Canadian Rockies while snow is still on the ground, yet manage to keep their eggs 25° C warmer than the ambient air.  How?  “They are able to deal with cold temperatures because their feathers provide some of the best avian insulation, with more feathers per inch of surface than other small- to medium-sized birds.”  Furthermore, they can lower their metabolism to a state of torpor to conserve energy.
    Before migrating, they store 72% of their weight in fat, more energy efficient than carbohydrate.  This requires some physiological fine-tuning on the inside:

They have the most metabolically active liver known, with the highest levels of enzymes for lipid synthesis along with extremely high rates of intestinal glucose transport, which results in very dilute excreta, invaluable for a nectarivorous animal ingesting large quantities of water in its food.  Quite how they are able to produce highly dilute urine is still not known, but it appears that their renal morphology and physiology is more like that of nectarivorous bats and freshwater amphibia than that of non-nectarivorous birds.

Their hovering ability is well known; they can even fly upside down and backwards.  This is made possible by “a wing structure unlike that of any other birds, which articulate their wings from shoulder, elbow and wrist: hummingbirds’ wings articulate only from the shoulder.”  In the ecology, they fulfill important roles as pollinators.
    Another hummingbird feat that has come to light recently is their skill at memory.  The article states that they “appear to remember where they have visited hummingbird feeders along the way: the reminder for garden owners to put the feeder containing sucrose solution out is often a bird hovering around the place the feeder was hung the previous year” (a reminder not to disappoint the little backyard friends).  “Secondly, they have been shown to remember information on a more local scale, avoiding flowers they have recently emptied and returning to flowers they have left still containing food” (see 04/05/2006, bullet 9).
    How is this all possible in such a tiny creature?  The authors remark, “Although the rufous hummingbird has a brain approximately the size of a grain of rice, it puts it to rather good use.”

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¹Susan Healy and T. Andrew Hurly, “Quick guide: Hummingbirds,” Current Biology, Volume 16, Issue 11, June 2006, pages R392-R393, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.015.

Buy a hummingbird feeder and use it as a teaching opportunity for your family.  Hold up a stuffed bird of similar size and weight and ask your kids how many systems would need to be added to make it fly like a real hummingbird.  Imagine NASA designing a remote sensing, guided hovercraft with a computer the size of a grain of rice, able to extract energy from sugar water and fly to snowy peaks in Canada.  Then imagine them making it able to reproduce itself through pellets the size of a rice grain.  Moments like these can help teach young people not to take the wonders of nature for granted.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

Researcher Denies SETI Is a Religion   06/03/2006    
Apparently irritated by charges that SETI research is like a religion (see, for instance, the article by novelist Michael Crichton mentioned in our 12/27/2003 entry), David Darling of the SETI Institute has issued a response.  On Space.com, his title was direct: “Of Faith and Facts: Is SETI a Religion?”  The answer was a forthright NO to people like George Basalla (U of Delaware, emeritus) who claimed in his new book Civilized Life in the Universe (Oxford, 2006) that in the absence of any positive evidence, SETI relies more on a kind of religious zeal than anything else.  Basalla attempts to draw stark distinctions:

Religions are characterized by two factors: worship—in other words, some system of devotion directed toward one or more omniscient and supranatural beings—and faith in the absence of material evidence.  SETI qualifies as a religion on neither of these counts.  Unless I’m very much mistaken no SETI researcher offers prayers to the subject of his or her quest (although it would be fascinating to know what spiritual traditions might have grown up among the civilizations of other stars).  And any faith that’s involved in SETI is only the kind of non-religious “faith” that any scientist adheres to—faith in the scientific method, the equipment she uses, the all-important peer review process, and so on.  As I’ve mentioned, we already have material evidence for intelligence in the universe: it consists of the brains you’re using right now to assimilate these thoughts.  Unlike a religion which relies on pure faith that a god exists, we don’t need faith that intelligence and technology exist.

Other intelligences that we already know about, Darling said, include dolphins and great apes.  Darling draws a parallel between the hunch that other scientists had 40 years ago that extrasolar planets exist, not confirmed till recently:

If we were to follow Basalla’s line of reasoning, the search for extrasolar planets also qualifies as a kind of religion.  Shouldn’t we simply have given up after four decades of looking?  Surely that’s enough time to have found something if it really existed?  Isn’t continuing beyond that a sign of misplaced faith and over-optimism?  Fortunately the quest did go on and we’re now reaping the rewards—new planets by the bucket-load.

He admits, though, that SETI has not detected anything, so the comparison is only in the spirit of the early researches, and its confidence in the physical theories that expected to find extrasolar planets.  “SETI researchers know their limitations,” he says, in the spirit of Murphy’s Ultimate Law: By definition, when investigating the unknown, you do not know what you will find.  “We are ... like Columbus sailing into uncharted waters,” Darling ends.  “We don’t know what we’ll find.  But,” he adds with positivist flair, “the quest is extraordinary, exciting, abundantly worthwhile, and true to the methodology and spirit of science.”

Give this to J. P. Moreland; he will have a field day with the faulty analogies, false dichotomies and straw-man arguments, to say nothing of Darling’s junior-high philosophy of science.
    Science in our culture is like the celebrity everyone wants his or her picture taken with, wants to name-drop and pretend is a close friend.  But does hanging around with scientists, using scientific equipment and engaging in peer review qualify as science?  Darling and the other SETI Institute darlings like to shmooze with the scientists in the green room, but they cannot publish a peer-reviewed paper about aliens because they don’t have any.  They might get peers to review an article about the detection limits of this or that instrument, but such documentation could not support the belief that extraterrestrials exist, any more than describing the physical characteristics of a fine-mesh net establishes its ability to capture ghosts.  The reference to peer review also begs the question whether peer review qualifies something as scientific, or grants credibility (see 02/05/2006).  Even theologians and historians engage in peer review of a sort but don’t call their work science or faith.
    Darling commits a blatant association fallacy by comparing apes and dolphins and human brains to alien intelligences.  We know about apes, dolphins and our fellow humans – whose brains are all DNA-and-protein based – but not anything demonstrable about alien intelligence, other than an endless chain of speculations tickling the imaginations of science fiction writers, cartoonists and Discovery Channel animators.  Darling’s bravado leans on the bruised reed of materialistic evolution.  He presumes Earth intelligence evolved, then transfers that assumption to outer space – ignoring the possibility that brains, dolphins and apes were created.  He unjustifiably extrapolates their presence here as evidence they could have evolved out there.
    There’s nothing wrong with looking, but the existence of alien intelligence cannot even begin to be discussed scientifically till there are data in hand.  Even then, however, detection of unknown intelligence will not prove it is natural or arose naturalistically (see 05/11/2006, “is the universe natural?”).  If he wants to shore up the scientific respectability of SETI, let’s see some boundary conditions, a null hypothesis, criteria for success and failure, and willingness to consider alternative hypotheses – including creation.
    Most egregious is Darling’s depiction of religion, a classic either-or fallacy.  He paints religion in the starkest of terms: mind-numbed devotees, going through worship rituals and prayers, exercising blind faith in things contrary to evidence.  Apparently he has not debated the likes of Gary Habermas or Josh McDowell, who accept Christianity precisely because of the facts, and certainly have more hard data in support of their “faith” (read: confidence) than has the SETI Institute.  What confidence, by contrast, can SETI researchers have in their compass, the Drake Equation?  It’s a series of unknown factors that can yield any number from a hundred million alien civilizations to zero.  Informed guesses don’t count, either, argued Michael Crichton: “If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess.  It’s simply prejudice.”
    Darling, Shostak, Tarter and the rest of the SETI gang are free to look and believe, pray their Drake Equation rosaries and worship the Spirit of Charlie, who brings forth intelligence from particles.  As long as there are people willing to put money in their offering baskets and build their dish-shaped cathedrals, hey – it’s a free country.  But like Crichton warned, even if SETI research has some heuristic value, “that does not relieve us of the obligation to see the Drake equation clearly for what it is—pure speculation in quasi-scientific trappings.”
Next headline on:  SETI • Theology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Handy Dandy Modus Operandi   06/02/2006    
Charles G. Gross and Asif A. Ghazanfar win the prize for this gem in Science¹ from a book review of The Sensory Hand by Vernon B. Mountcastle (Harvard, 2006):

In one of the first systematic attempts to describe the differences between primates and other mammals, Thomas Huxley argued that the former are distinguished by virtue of their adaptation to arboreal life.  Central to this arboreal life is the grasping hand.  Indeed, the primate hand is so fundamental to how we define ourselves that some, including Friedrich Engels, have claimed that hand use (particularly with tools) was the driving force that gave rise to our sophisticated cognitive abilities.  Though this idea is an overstatement, our hands do represent a masterpiece of Darwinian evolution; its elegant design is on a par with the eyes and ears.

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¹Charles G. Gross and Asif A. Ghazanfar, “Neuroscience: A Mostly Sure-Footed Account of the Hand,” Science, 2 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5778, p. 1314, DOI: 10.1126/science.1125179.

Well, since eyes and ears evolved, obviously, hands must have, too.  In fact, natural selection not only invented the hand, but used it as a driving force for more natural selection.  Now that just drives it out of the park, doesn’t it?  Darwinian evolution makes hands that make Darwinian evolution make brains.  Who needs artists and engineers any more?  Darwinian evolution, the masterpiece maker, the masterpiece-maker maker, renders all other makers obsolete.  It even makes masterpiece critics who know what “elegant design” means.
    The reviewers must be communist sympathizers, because they ended with another quote by Engels, a guy on the dustbin of history known more for his radical economics than knowledge of anatomy: “Man alone has succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature ... and he has accomplished this primarily and essentially by means of the hand ... step by step, with the development [i.e., evolution] of the hand went that of the brain.”  They add, “Mountcastle’s book shows us how we are beginning to understand this process.”
    You can’t know you’ve understood a process at the beginning, but only at the end.  Their “masterpiece of Darwinian evolution” statement shows that they understand little, if anything, about the origin of masterpieces.  Their choice of guru (Engels) shows that they understand even less about economics – and logic.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Human Body • Dumb Ideas

Asteroid Sticks Together While Theories Disintegrate   06/01/2006    
[Guest article]  In an story entitled “Rubbly Itokawa revealed as ‘impossible’ asteroid,” New Scientist Space reported on findings gathered from the recent visit of Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa to the asteroid Itokawa (see 11/28/2005 bullet).  There seems to be no end of problems for scientists trying to fit the solar system into billions of years.  Now they must deal with evidence that shows that asteroid Itokawa must be very young.  The article’s frankness about the severity of the problem is astonishing:

What they found was completely unexpected.  “Five years ago, we thought that we would see a big chunk of monolithic rock, [we thought] that something so small doesn’t have the ability to hold onto any pieces,” says Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, US, who is not involved with the mission.  “Everything we suspected about it turned out to be wrong.”

Astronomers assumed that small asteroids would have to be very solid, like a single giant boulder, or else their weak gravity would have caused them to be quickly disintegrated by collisions with other rocks in space.  It turns out that Itokawa is about as solid as a sponge.  And to make it worse, collisions with small rocks, not big enough to break the asteroid apart, should, after billions of years, have caused it to pack into a more solid mass.  That compaction apparently never occurred:

Measurements of the asteroid’s gravity field also suggest it coalesced from the debris of a previous collision.  Hayabusa scientists used the data – combined with measurements of the space rock’s size – to estimate its density.  It appears to be 40% porous, or filled with empty space.  “That is astonishing,” says Asphaug, adding that a handful of sand has a porosity of 20%.  “It’s very hard to get porosities greater than that.  You’ve got to start balancing things delicately, like you were building a house of cards,” he says.  “The only way to do it is to gently pack the stuff together.”  But that raises another mystery, he says, since repeated impacts with other space rocks over millions of years should have made Itokawa denser.  “Every time you have an impact, you’re going to tamp it down,” he says.

The article mentions no proposed solution to the mystery.

Some day it may begin to dawn on scientists that they are starting with wrong assumptions about time.  A loose collection of dust and rock just a few thousand years old would probably look just like what they found.  That explanation, however, is ruled out from the start because it conflicts with their preconceived ideas of the time required for evolution.  Is this objective science?
—DK
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Solar System