“Darwin’s idea was a good idea while it lasted.  But with advances in technology as well as the information and life sciences (especially molecular biology), the Darwinian magic gig is now up.  It’s time to lay aside the tricks—the smokescreens and the hand-waving, the just-so stories and the stonewalling, the bluster and the bluffing—and to explain scientifically what people have known all along, namely why you can’t get design without a designer.”  —Dr. William Dembski, The Design Revolution (IVP, 2004), p. 263.

Starting work on a Europa mission now, as suggested by the Solar System Exploration Roadmap, is the right thing to do.  Europa’s interior ocean may be the best environment for life in the solar system beyond planet Earth.  There is a substantial scientific basis to believe that Europa has the fundamental ingredients necessary for life: water, organic molecules, a chemical energy source, and a stable environment.  Understanding Europa’s potential for life brings us closer to addressing one of the most fundamental scientific questions that humans can ask: Are we alone in the cosmos?  It is only by committing the time and resources to a capable Europa mission that we will be able to begin to answer this essential question.

Notice the assumptions implicit in her answer.  Cynthia Phillips, like most astrobiologists, believes that environment produces life.  Provide water, heat, stability and organic molecules, and these are not only necessary conditions for life, but sufficient ones as well.  A second assumption is that life not only emerges from suitable environments, but evolves into complex life, and then to sentient beings who can communicate with us.  These are assumptions, not scientific demonstrations; in fact, they are contrary to good lab science.  The only thing about these assumptions demonstrated in the lab is their falsification.
    SETI and OOL people should never assume that finding life on another world will disprove religion.  Many theologians for millennia have anticipated finding life beyond the Earth.  Indeed, in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was uncommon not to believe in it.  The same debates over whether natural forces alone are sufficient to produce specified complexity will go on if life is found.  Only the location will change.  Most likely, Europa, Titan, and Mars will all prove a disappointment.  The debate is too important to delay for 30 years to look at Europa.  Evolutionists need to engage this debate on Earth and not displace it to a distant world.
Next headline on:  SETI • Origin of Life

Our organs tell stories.  A pathologist, for example, can look at a lung and recognize a lifetime of toiling in a mine.  Our genes tell stories, too.  By comparing the genomic sequences of an ever-increasing number of organisms, we are now uncovering how our bodies came to be the way they are.  Evolution, it seems, is a tale of détente: The need to adapt to changing environments is in a tug of war with the demand for precisely functioning biological machinery.  The stories presented in the special section (and the graphic, p. 1912) emphasize different facets of this complex saga.  They are not just historical lessons; they have implications for understanding disease mechanisms as well as basic physiology.

Why Are Kids Hyper?  Blame Evolution    09/28/2006  
Jon Hamilton on National Public Radio was curious why his 7-year-old kid always had more energy than he did and didn’t need coffee to get him going.  So he asked an evolutionary biologist at UC Irvine and got the following explanation:

“It’s fairly clear that human evolution has been strongly shaped by very powerful selection pressures over the last two million years to build a bigger brain,” Rose told me.
    That bigger brain doesn’t have much in it when we’re born, Rose says.  So children need all that energy to explore the world and devour information.
    “Play and activity and doing all kinds of things – including things your parents and teachers don’t like – is a big part of developing a functional human brain,” Rose says.
    Brain development pays off in the long run.  Kids eventually get smart enough to survive on their own.
    But while they’re going full speed through childhood, they put themselves at risk.  So evolution has equipped children with parents – who are slower but perhaps wiser.

“They spend a lot of time rough-housing, running around screaming and all this sort of thing,” he says.  “This is one of the most ridiculous things you can do.  It’s a giant ‘Eat at Joe’s’ sign, you know.  ‘Just come kill me.  I’m running around and not paying attention and making a lot of noise.’”
    Parents are much more alert to danger, even if we’re not very perky.  So we keep an eye out for things like tigers and traffic.
    And eventually, Lima says, children grow up and start acting more like parents.
    “Playing around like that becomes ridiculous,” he says.  “You don’t get anything out of it anymore.  It just becomes dangerous.”
    What slips away, of course, is youthful energy.

“Fifty- and 60-year-old humans can be very relevant to the future of their offspring and grand-offspring,” Rose says.  “And for that reason, natural selection may indeed still have some force in keeping us alive in middle age.”

And with that line, we award Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week to Rose, Hamilton and Lima, for their flexibility to explain everything, even your morning coffee and grandparents, by evolutionary theory.  Funny that this didn’t seem to work the same way with deer children, who will sit quietly in the thicket while their energetic parents are up and about.  Isn’t it amazing that evolution produces organisms that scream for predators to come and eat them, and others that silently blend in with the background.  Evolution is so powerful, it even produces reason, and wisdom! (but not the ability to stay energetic when you have the wisdom to use it).
    Does anyone doubt that if the observations were reversed (parents more energetic than children), these evolutionists would have another obvious, intuitive and confident evolutionary explanation ready to serve up?  It would never occur to these people that other explanations might exist, like design.  It doesn’t matter to them that opposite observations can be accommodated with their Silly Putty law of natural selection, the dream gadget that does everything.*
    What an elegant, beautiful system emerged in 1859, all from the fertile brain of a man whose brain emerged by nature to pronounce truths about nature.  You gotta admire Charlie – the new Aristotle.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

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*...but nothing very well.

We induced A. seemanni to walk on vertical glass surfaces in order to observe the contact mechanics of this challenging locomotion.  When walking up vertical planes, the spider attached only the distal parts of its tarsi to the substrate.  As it started to slip down the glass, silk produced by the tarsal spigots on all four pairs of legs arrested the spider’s descent and allowed it to remain attached to the vertical surface.  The spider’s feet were positioned such that the silk-producing spigots were in contact with the glass, while the dense setae in adjacent regions were held off the surface.

Regardless of whether tarsal silk production is ancestral or secondarily derived, the silk-producing apparatus of spiders seems to be controlled by developmental modules that can be expressed in a variety of body parts.
    Investigation of the genes involved in tarsal silk production should resolve whether the original function of spider silk was to increase traction or whether it was later co-opted for that purpose.  Spinneret silk proteins are encoded by a gene family that has evolved through a series of gene duplications and subsequent modifications for particular tasks.  If tarsal silks belong to the same gene family, then comparison of tarsal and spinneret silks should help our understanding of the ancestral function and composition of spider silk.

Do we really need to spin an evolutionary tale about this?  The authors do not know how the intricate machinery for spinning one of the world’s ideal materials evolved at all, let alone whether it evolved first on the legs or abdomen.  Here’s another example of forcing observations into a reigning paradigm.  The facts merely show that these spiders are exquisitely endowed for coping with a variety of situations they might encounter.  Remember that a gland is an organ, and an organ is a collection of tissues with a function, and that tissues are made of specialized cells.  It is naive to envision a whole collection of specialized parts coming into existence simultaneously by some blind process of evolution.  Realize, too, that it not only takes the equipment, but the know-how and reactions to use it.  The spider brain also must have software to quickly turn on the silk production in the feet and simultaneously retract the setae.  How many millions of years did that take to get all this right?
    Instead of getting distracted by some evolutionary tall tale, focus at the design in these amazing spiders.  Look at the handsome markings, the complex eyes, the coordinated walking movements, and all the other structures and functions that come together in a single complex animal that can carry on life in its niche – and reproduce all the parts for the next generation.  Did you know a female tarantula can live 20 years?  These critters have defensive mechanisms that rightly cause us a little trepidation (often exaggerated), but are really quite attractive creations in their own right.  Imagine designing a robot this capable.  Science should discover, describe and seek to understand the workings of nature.  Fitting the observations into speculations about origins is a job for philosophy and theology, not Nature.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Evolutionary Theory • Amazing Facts

The book, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is an unusual offering for a scientific society in its focus on religious issues.  Targeted especially at Christian adult-education classes, The Evolution Dialogues contributes a thoughtful discussion to the highly charged debate about evolution and its implications.  Written by Catherine Baker and edited by James B. Miller, the work was developed with input from scientists and theologians.

Sad.  If Dennett, Dawkins and Harris really believed and understood what they are arguing, they would realize that they are shooting themselves in the feet.  If belief in God evolved as an adaptive strategy, and therefore has no validity in its claims, the same can be said for belief in evolution – indeed, for belief in anything.  It would make just as much sense for other Darwinists to explain Dennett’s behavior in evolutionary terms, and for him to fight back and explain theirs in evolutionary terms, till everyone sings, “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
    Speaking of cognitive neuroscience, Dennett has a bad case of what we will term the Yoda Complex.  He makes himself out to be some kind of exalted master, the Enlightened One, like some disembodied green god with pointy ears (and a pointy head), able to talk down to the rest of humanity.  In reality, he wears flesh and bones and puts on pants like the rest of men.  Most of us wouldn’t promote a guy like him to Exalted Master if we could.  But Dennett rambles on like some Yoda, sipping a soda in his pagoda, as if we owed assent (or a cent) to his ode.  (A girl named Rhoda showed a more rational response to the evidence than some believers: Acts 12).  While Dawkins recklessly swings his light saber like the dark lord of the Mith, Dennett talks smooth and deliberately in hushed tones, unaware that the universal acid that flowed away from his own Darwinian principles was strong enough to corrode a Darwinist container, too.
    In case any Ewoks out there are entranced by Yoda Dennett, as if he showed a thing or two from some enlightened abode, a perceptive mind will know what’s up.  That’s because Yoda wrote a coda to his ode, a line in the review to his book on Amazon.com where he spilled the beans (or his guts, if there’s a difference): “I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here,” he said.  “They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that—that’s what I am, and that’s exactly what I am trying to do.”  So, students, now that he has shown his true colors, what side of The Farce is he on? (answer: 06/20/2003).
    One doesn’t have to be “dead right.”  Being alive and right is much preferable.  Keep reading Creation-Evolution Headlines, where you learn how to explode a load of phony openness before you’re snowed.  A pretentious Yoda in his own mind, Daniel Dennett showed a code of bluster, not a display of wisdom bestowed upon him from on high.  A man he is, pretender he is; deceitful times, these.  You asked for it, you got it: Toy Yoda.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Theology • Dumb Ideas

It must be remembered that things like starbirth rates and galaxy formation timelines are inferred from theory.  The observations show only colors, luminosities and chemical compositions of objects, along with other properties of spectra.  The shift of certain absorption lines from their normal wavelength positions is interpreted as universal expansion, except by the maverick astronomers (12/06/2004).  Even assuming the standard big bang scenario, though, it is a huge lumpiness problem for cosmologists to find galaxies already formed and producing stars at prodigious rates so near the beginning.  The sample sizes have been very limited so far.  Already, though, it is very surprising to think that whole galaxies could appear so soon out of a sea of particles by natural causes (05/11/2006).  Watch for new records to be set in future surveys.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Astronomy

Among the gravest risks of a manned flight to Mars ranks the possibility that massive amounts of solar and cosmic radiation will decimate the brains of astronauts, leaving them in a vegetative state, if they survive at all.
    Dubbed “Risk 29” by NASA's Mars scientists, the cosmic radiation risk remains a show-stopper because shielding a spacecraft from all radiation could make it too heavy to reach Mars, which, at its closest, is 38 million miles from earth.

Movie scriptwriters never bring up these problems on Star Trek and all the other space thrillers.  Fact is, it’s a shooting gallery out there.  High-energy particles would rip into our flesh constantly were it not for our protective bubble here on God’s green earth. 
Next headline on:  Human Body • Physics • Solar System

“The idea of a multi-winged Archaeopteryx has been around for more than a century, but it hasn’t received much attention,” Longrich said.  “I believe one reason for this is that people tend to see what they want or expect to see.  Everybody knows that birds don’t have four wings, so we overlooked them even when they were right under our noses.

Maybe Longrich should dial Ken Dial down in Montana for his opinion.  Dial has staked his reputation on wing-assisted incline running (WAIR) for the origin of flight (see 05/01/2006, 11/16/2005, 12/22/2003, 01/16/2003), so this is likely to spoil his spoilers.  But we’re all for peace.  “Working toward consensus” is a buzzphrase these days.  Maybe by working together they can come up with an even better story.  The wingless female was diving off the tree, you see, and the wingless male, arms outstretched, came running to catch her.
    If Archaeopteryx had four functional flight surfaces instead of two, that’s not evolution.  For structures to persist, they have to help an animal survive.  Incipient structures do not help survival; they only get in the way.  If some extinct birds had more aerodynamic equipment than birds today, it indicates something has been lost, not gained.
Next headline on:  Birds • Evolution

Maybe lowly bacteria, not decaying dinosaurs, will keep our automobiles (or barbecues) running for the foreseeable future.  This announcement could have ripple effects on astrobiology as well as geopolitics.  It also illustrates how little we still know about some of the most basic processes on our own planet occurring today.  Remain doubtful, therefore, about what some scientists claim was going on billions of years ago.
Next headline on:  Geology • Physics

Late night talk show hosts and their so-called experts will probably not be convinced even now.  They will either continue to see intelligent design that isn’t there, or accuse the European Space Agency of conspiracy to fudge the data.  This is the power of belief in spite of evidence.  To show our good will, though, we will offer them a new Mars Odyssey picture loaded with putative faces to dream about, and we’ll even donate some extra pyramids.  The rest of us need not worry about the Martians, though.  They’re our friends.  They even sent us a Happy Face and a Valentine.
    Teachers, however, can use this episode as an example of design detection principles.  We all tend to see faces in natural phenomena, but most of the time, we can usually tell when something was designed or not.  Compare Vermont’s erstwhile Old Man of the Mountain with Mount Rushmore.  This can be a fun project.    Finding images on the internet is easy with search engines.  Assemble as many lookalike images as you can and give children a test to see if they can tell which were designed, and which were due to natural causes or chance.  For each picture ask, “Designed or not designed?”  Explain, “That covers all the possibilities, doesn’t it?”  Either something was put together on purpose [by a mind] to say something or to do something, or else natural causes were sufficient to explain it.  Throw in some tricky ones to trip them up and make them think.  Here are some possibilities:

• Natural bush shapes vs bushes trimmed into animal shapes (topiary)
• Concretions vs cannonballs
• Cave pearls (or natural pearls) vs ball bearings
• Arrowhead Springs geological feature vs a carved arrowhead
• Natural snowflakes vs jewelry shaped like a snowflake
• Burrow tracks in rock vs hieroglyphics
• Beetle tracks in wood vs graffiti carved on a tree
• Representational art vs abstract art (shows that design detection can produce false negatives, but usually not false positives if the specification is high)
• Mars “blueberries” vs rover scratch marks (e.g., MER).
• An archery target vs a uranium radiohalo
• A spirograph drawing vs the Spirograph Nebula
• The “face on Mars” vs desert intaglios or Nazca lines
• The “Martian canals” vs Valles Marineris
• Cave formations vs cave paintings
• Cave flowstone resembling organ pipes, vs real organ pipes (throw in this complication)
• Geological columnar basalt vs a stack of steel girders
• A cave opening vs a rock-hewn tomb
• A natural rock pile vs an archaeological rock wall
• Random binary digits vs the Arecibo Message
• Rocks in random arrangements vs rocks piled up as a trail marker
• Alphabet soup at random vs the letters arranged to spell “chance”
• Lenticular cloud formations vs skywriting
• Crepuscular rays vs converging railroad tracks
• Mushroom fairy ring vs Indian medicine wheel
• Saturn’s rings vs an Aerobee
• A blinking pulsar vs Morse Code
• A cyclone, a spiral galaxy and a computer-generated spiral
• A geological ridge vs the Great Wall of China
• Pyramid-shaped mountains vs the Egyptian pyramids
• Sand ripples vs sand castles
• Stratified rock vs stair steps or a block wall
• A scrambled Rubik’s cube vs a solved one (one chance out of 43 quadrillion)
• Random Scrabble letters vs a pattern forming crosswords
• A face-like rock formation vs Mt Rushmore
• An outboard motor and a flagellum
• A solar eclipse [no correct answer; discuss reason for thinking design/coincidence]

Juniors at a recent teaching session found this a lot of fun, and it conveys several important lessons about thinking without jumping to conclusions.  Then show them a bush carved into the shape of an animal, and the real animal.  Why should we infer intelligent design in the former, but not the latter?  This exercise can lead to further discussions about information and functional design (what it says or what it does), and whether Darwin’s mechanism can account for the origin of information.  Pictures like this can be worth thousands of words.
Teaching tip: Kids might pay better attention if you make it a game.  Call up volunteers, for instance, to take turns answering “designed or not designed?” for various pictures.  Let the class vote on whether they answered correctly or not, and have them explain why.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Intelligent Design • Education

Now that the scapula of this species can be examined in full for the first time, it is unexpected to find the strongest similarities with Gorilla, an animal in which weight-bearing and terrestrial knuckle-walking predominately characterize locomotor use of the forelimbs.  Problematic in the interpretation of these findings is that the diversity of scapula architecture among hominoid species is poorly understood from a functional perspective.

This depositional setting, combined with the remarkable preservation of many articulated faunal remains lacking evidence of preburial weathering, most likely indicates that the juvenile hominin was buried as an intact corpse shortly after death during a major flood event.

This depositional setting, combined with the remarkable preservation of many articulated faunal remains lacking evidence of preburial weathering, most probably indicates rapid deposition during major flood events, burying many fossils as intact corpses (including the juvenile hominin).

There remains a great deal of controversy regarding the posture and locomotion of A. afarensis.  Most researchers accept that it could stand upright and walk on two feet, but whether it could climb up and move through trees is still disputed.  Some suggest that its adaptations to walking on two feet preclude any significant arboreal locomotion, and interpret any limb features that support such locomotion as evolutionary baggage without any useful function.  Others suggest that a primitive limb morphology would not have persisted unless it served a purpose.

When you scrape away the hype and artistic license, most of the details of the actual bones seem to back up criticisms by creationists that this is nothing more than an extinct ape.  The only portions of the skeleton that evolutionists use to claim this creature had something to do with human evolution are the least preserved: the leg and foot bones.  They interpret these to mean it walked upright, as if walking upright is the main human distinctive.  The best-preserved parts of the skeleton, by contrast, are clearly ape-like and argue against this extinct ape being a walker.  Read the articles skeptically, without assuming what the evolutionists assume, and the evidence is profoundly unconvincing for the claims made about it.  Everything from the backbone up is well within the charts for an ape, not a human wannabee.  The paleontologists admitted, also, that the skeleton has been deformed; how does that affect the interpretation, when assessing function from structure is “poorly understood” under the best of conditions?
    This fossil also creates other problems for the evolutionists.  Consider, for instance, how the evidence for arboreal (tree-climbing) behavior, based on the fingers and shoulder blades, scrambles the Lucy story: “The foot and other evidence from the lower limb provide clear evidence for bipedal locomotion [sic], but the gorilla-like scapula and long and curved manual phalanges raise new questions about the importance of arboreal behaviour in the A. afarensis locomotor repertoire.”  This means that evolutionists must now either consider the tree-climbing equipment as “evolutionary baggage” or believe that this creature climbed trees half the time and walked upright the other half.  (Only human boys exhibit this behavior today, but they quickly grow out of it.)  If Darwin’s mechanism could produce instant phyla at the Cambrian, why couldn’t it get rid of its baggage just as quickly?  On the other hand, if Baby Lucy was happy in the treetops, why was there evolutionary pressure to make her strut on the ground, when other primates found buried with her did not feel the same pressure?  And how can minorities endure the racism implicit in the artwork (see Yahoo) that always shows these alleged primitives with dark skin?
    The Darwin Party baby shower for Salem is, therefore, highly overblown, as is usual for human-evolution celebrations.  They don’t seem to be focusing quite as much on the remarkable collection of animals buried with the little she-ape.  If a sudden flood of this magnitude occurred today, burying this many animals in the same graveyard all at once, wouldn’t it be international news?  This was not a volcanic landslide; it was a watery catastrophe.  Notice how much the media are going out of their way to characterize this ape as a child and a baby when they won’t even afford that dignity to a human embryo.  It is time to get rid of the evolutionary baggage and discover the real Peace Child.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils

Yes, ideas need testing.  Sad to say, nobody appears to have tested this initial interpretation for 60 years.  That’s two generations of dino-loving children being told a story without evidence to support it.  That’s also two generations of scientists focusing more on the diet of Coelophysis than on the amazing fact that whole populations of these creatures died together in “some catastrophe.”  Some catastrophe, indeed.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Media

It’s a common excuse to be too busy for exercise.  Try this article’s advice: make better use of less time.  No more long, slow walks on the treadmill; crank up the incline and the speed, and work up a good, short sweat.  Do your own scientific experiment to see if it helps; better than nothing at all.  Of course, follow common sense and doctor’s advice for your age and condition.  If you can, work up to getting that heart pumping and the breathing heavy.  Find a way to work it into your schedule somewhere, even if just 20 minutes of intense activity and a quick shower.  It’s a small investment that will pay dividends by making the rest of your day more effective.  Think how much better the day will go with a sharper mind, more energy and a better outlook on life.
Next headline on:  Health

1. New ring:  PIA08322 shows a new faint ring between the G and F rings, never before seen.  It is aligned with the orbits of the moons Janus and Epimetheus.  Scientists found it surprising to see such a well-defined structure here.  The G ring also is shown to have a sharp inner edge, while the E ring is broad and diffuse.
2. Enceladus in action:  The geysers of Enceladus can be seen erupting from 1.3 million miles away in image PIA08321.  The ejected material, extending a remarkable distance from the small moon, is seen to perturb the E ring.
3. Our blue dot of home:  In what is sure to be a historic centerpiece of the growing Cassini catalog, image PIA08324 shows our Earth, 930 million miles away, as a faint dot between the G and E rings of Saturn.  A magnified image (inset) shows the pale moon behind the left limb of the Earth.  A closer look at the left side of the image also shows Enceladus, spouting away, inside the E ring.

These are the kind of pictures that can leave you speechless, and even bring tears to your eyes..  Cherish these special moments of discovery; we can talk more about the Enceladus geysers later and what they indicate.  Look at that “pale blue dot” again, and think of all that is going on down there.  Time to watch The Privileged Planet again tonight.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Amazing Stories

Around the home, regularly used tools are generally kept close at hand: a can opener in a kitchen drawer, a broom in the hall closet.  Less frequently used tools are more likely to be stored in less accessible locations, out of immediate reach, perhaps in the basement or garage.  And hazardous tools might even be kept under lock and key.
    Similarly, the human genome has developed a set of sophisticated mechanisms for keeping selected genes readily available for use while other genes are kept securely stored away for long periods of time, sometimes forever.  Candidate genes for such long-term storage include those required only for early development and proliferation, potentially dangerous genes that could well trigger cancers and other disorders should they be reactivated later in life.

An unanticipated observation from the study centers on the region of association between the two molecules in the complex.  The researchers knew that one of the two molecules in the complex, called ASF1, associated with a particular molecular partner, HIRA, when directing assembly of the more condensed form of chromatin.  But it could also associate with a different partner, called CAF1, to shepherd assembly of the less condensed form of chromatin.
    On closer study, the scientists discovered that HIRA and CAF1 have nearly identical structural motifs in the regions of interaction with ASF1.  This means that ASF1 can bind to one or the other molecular partner, but not to both.  In other words, the interaction is mutually exclusive: A kind of decision is made by ASF1 as to whether to guide the assembly process towards the more or less condensed forms of chromatin.  What determines the choice?  The relevant factors are unknown for now.

Good work, by scientists operating on design principles (whether they realize it or not).  There was no mention of evolution in the press release.  It would would seem, also, that evolutionary theory would be useless in tracking down the factors that determine which binding takes place.
    You might not have realized that your genetic toolkit has power tools that are dangerous.  Just like you would lock up hunting rifles in a secure cabinet, so that they won’t be used for the wrong purpose, your genetic system has controlled procedures for locking up its dangerous equipment.  Most of the trillions of cells in your body get it right for decades, and even when there’s an accident, the body has other procedures for containing the damage.  It is mind-boggling that all this goes on without our conscious knowledge, so that we can be conscious, and gain knowledge.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Amazing Facts

Think of the wonderful new possibilities this opens up for evolutionary storytelling.  The shark is obviously practicing for its eventual debut on land.  And shiver me timbers, shrimp must have retained developmental genes shared by praying mantises, leading to a most remarkable case of convergent evolution.
    The focus of the article was on the sad state of conservation of this area, and how local fisherman are using methods that threaten these unique species.  This time the liberals can’t blame the Christian right.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology

1. Hideouts and Holdouts:  Some Neanderthals may have lived thousands of years longer than earlier believed, said Live Science, Science Now and National Geographic.  This controversial claim emerged from radiocarbon-dates of charcoal from a Gibraltar cave as recent as 24,000 years–some 6,000 years earlier than the standard 30,000-year mark when modern humans were said to become dominant.  BBC News has a picture of the cave and the locale.  A possible multi-thousand-year overlap resurrects the question of whether Neanderthals and modern humans interbred.  Skeptics dispute the dates, claiming the samples must have been contaminated.
2. I’m OK, You’re Strange:  Erik Trinkaus of Washington State got publicity with this assertion: Neanderthals were normal; it’s we modern humans that are strange (see Live Science).  He compared other members of genus Homo and “discovered” that modern humans have twice as many “uniquely distinct traits” as Neanderthals.  Whether that qualifies as making us weird might be debated, but Trinkaus argued, “In the broader sweep of human evolution, the more unusual group is not Neanderthals, whom we tend to look at as strange, weird and unusual, but it’s us, modern humans.”

Did we hear a scientist doubting the accuracy of radiocarbon dates?  Is it possible somebody is picking and choosing the dates they want?  Evolutionists want us to believe that Neanderthals did little more than hunt game and paint on cave walls for 70,000 years, even though their average skull capacities were larger than ours.  Does that make any sense?
    Though Neanderthals (whatever we call them) are classified according to a set of distinctive anatomical traits, there is more variability among living people than between average Neanderthals and average modern humans.  Could Neanderthalism be nothing more than an artifact of human classification bias?  Is this a form of racism projected onto dead humans unable to hire a lawyer to defend themselves?^a  You decide; in the meantime, you’ll want to make a good impression among the Neanderthal glitterati at the next cave cookout, so order your prosthetic brow ridges today.^b
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

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^aThe BBC article included an artist’s conception that accentuates the “primitive” look.  This harks back to Haeckel’s ranking of humans to make certain races look less evolved.
^bNote: prominent brow ridges are not marks of brutishness or stupidity.  They are actually a benefit; they allow larger muscle attachments for chewing.  It could be argued that we modern humans are at a disadvantage without them.  Any trait can be accentuated in a limited gene pool; look at dachshunds vs. huskies.  You could organize dogs into groups based on traits, and set arbitrary boundaries between the groups, yet this would imply nothing about their intelligence, survivability, or (especially) their emergence from hypothetical pre-canine ancestors.

1. Evapo-Motors:  Scientists at U of Michigan were intrigued by how ferns turn the power of evaporation into launching pads.  The sporangia (spore ejectors) use a “microactuator” to eject the spores into the environment as they dry out.  The team was so impressed, they said “Oh, we have to build that,” and imitated the mechanism to build microchips that open and close when wetted or dried.  They think they might be able to generate electricity without batteries with this technique.
2. Info Compactor:  Despite their minute size, spores must carry the entire genome of the species.  A Wistar Institute press release talked about that.  It’s incredible: a histone tag on the chromatin somehow signals a compaction process that reduces the already-tight fit to 5% of the original volume.  All this must be done very delicately, because spores are haploid (one strand of DNA) and much more subject to disastrous breaks.

Can we just ignore that stupid little evolutionary piddle for a moment, and enjoy the fascination of these observational facts?  The ejection method of spores in ferns is just one of many highly clever and diverse seed-spreading techniques in the plant kingdom, some of which also use desiccation to advantage, like the Scotchbroom, whose pods explode to send seeds as far as 50 feet.  A beautiful film Journey of Life illustrates some of these tricks of the plant trade and is well worth watching.
    In the second story, think of how delicate and accurate this process has to be.  In the quintillions of sperm and spore cells that are produced throughout the world, most of the time the process works flawlessly.  The article did not even mention that a reverse process must also take place.  Packing is one thing, but what if you can’t unpack the information just as delicately and accurately?  Undoubtedly pollen grains have this nanotechnology, too.  A human cell can contain six feet of DNA, contained in the microscopic dot of a cell.  Many plants have even larger genomes.  A seed, sperm or spore must contain not only the entire genetic code, but the nutrients and machinery to unpack it, deliver it and protect it so that the next generation of the species can continue.  Could Darwin have known such things, one wonders how different the history of science (and politics) might have been.  Now, there’s no excuse.
Next headline on:  Plants • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

• Chromosome numbers range from 17 to 64 between species.
• X chromosomes in some species carry 20% of the genome.
• Some females carry significant parts of the male Y chromosome.
• In some species, the males and females have different chromosome numbers.
• Despite widely variant genotypes, all voles come out looking basically the same (phenotype).  Some species look so identical it takes a DNA analysis to tell the difference.

It doesn’t mean any such thing.  It means, rather, that evolutionists are more incorrigible than ever when faced with conflicting data, to the point they will believe in miracles.
    These findings also mean that geneticists don’t understand nearly as much as they thought.  How can you have vastly different genomes that yield identical-looking animals?  What do genetic differences really imply about the fitness of individuals and populations?  Why would a little furball evolve 100 times faster than an elephant, monkey, or whale, or rat or mouse?
    Evolutionary theory was so much easier before we had facts.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolution • Mammals

Imagine a peaceful herd of dinosaurs grazing by the lake bed, then deciding to die en masse and cover themselves with sediments.  If that does not happen today, it probably didn’t back then, either.
    Evolutionary stories and timelines are not essential to the scientific process of discovering, describing, identifying, cataloging and gaining insight into the growth and development of dinosaurs.  Did psittocosaurs gradually evolve into ceratopsids over millions of years?  The bones cannot confirm such notions.  What they can do, though, is constrain the imaginations of scientists who weren’t there and don’t know everything.  Go get ’em, hunters.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

The derived characteristics indicate that this cloud is composed of ethane and forms as a result of stratospheric subsidence and the particularly cool conditions near the moon’s north pole.  Preferential condensation of ethane, perhaps as ice, at Titan’s poles during the winters may partially explain the lack of liquid ethane oceans on Titan’s surface at middle and lower latitudes.

Methane (the second most abundant atmospheric constituent after nitrogen) is dissociated irreversibly by solar ultraviolet light, producing primarily ethane and, at one-sixth and one-10th of the ethane production rate, respectively, acetylene and haze, as well as other less abundant organic molecules.  These photochemical by-products precipitate to Titan’s surface.  Titan’s atmospheric composition and photochemical models indicate that ethane accumulates as a liquid (at the equatorial surface temperature of 93.5 K) at a rate of ~300 m (if global) over Titan’s lifetime of 4.5 billion years, whereas solid sediments, including acetylene and haze particles, accumulate at roughly one-third of this rate.  Thus, unless methane is a recent addition to Titan’s atmosphere or ethane incorporates itself into surface solids, it has been reasoned that a considerable fraction of the surface should be covered with liquid ethane.  Titan’s surface reveals dunes of solid sediments, probably including haze particles and acetylene ice.  In addition, the surface is riddled with alluvial features, suggesting the occurrence of methane rain in the past.  Craters are rare, indicating geological relaxation as well as their burial by photochemical sediments.  Yet Titan appears depleted of its most abundant photochemical by-product.  Except for the ethane-damp surface measured by Huygens, no condensed form of ethane has been detected, despite its rapid production in Titan’s stratosphere and the expectation of finding ethane-rich oceans before the Cassini encounter.

Presently, there is no direct evidence of polar caps composed of ethane.  The northern pole has not been imaged.  Cassini images of the southern pole do not indicate the morphology of 2 km of ethane ice, assuming current rates of ethane production over the past 4.5 billion years, accumulated within 35° of the poles.  Yet south polar images suggest flow features, possibly associated with a smaller quantity of ethane ice accumulated on the young surface.  The detection of surficial ethane ice is hindered by the correlation of ethane features and methane signatures, which obscure the visibility of Titan’s surface.  In addition, the polar surface is probably distinct and varied.  Similarly, other hydrocarbons would precipitate preferentially at the poles and pollute the ethane ice, and any lowland methane lakes would dissolve and melt ethane, because the mixture’s eutectic temperature is 72.5 K.  Such lakes might condense out of Titan’s humid lower troposphere during winter.  The surface distribution of liquid or solid ethane, whether corralled into the polar regions by circulation or transported by surface flows to lower latitudes, will be determined with radar and near-infrared images of the geomorphology, radio determinations of the polar temperatures, and infrared measurements of the polar composition, which are scheduled for future Cassini encounters with Titan.

Until now, clouds of the most abundant product of methane dissociation, ethane, have eluded detection.  The Griffith et al.  identification of polar ethane clouds is reassuring, in that it validates the basic ideas we have about Titan’s meteorology and chemistry: first, that condensation does occur, as expected, in the lower stratosphere, and second, that the inferred altitudes of the ethane cloud (30 to 50 km) are consistent with subsidence in the winter polar region.  This and other clues that we will obtain will help us to sort out the things we still puzzle over.

The problem vanishes when you liberate your mind from the requirement of billions of years.  This is really uncanny.  Everything about Titan screams young, but nowhere do you find anyone questioning the linchpin assumption that Titan is 4.5 billion years old.  It’s almost like they want to downplay this “puzzle” and sweep it under the rug.  Don’t let them.  Most creationists could live with a young or old Titan, though some would prefer the former.  The only people who would be completely scandalized by a young Titan are the evolutionists who absolutely depend on billions of years in which to hide their skeletons.
    The ethane cloud is too little, too late.  After all, vast quantities of ethane must be there.  Dr. Flasar admitted it: he was reassured that the ethane “condensation does occur” and that the basic ideas about Titan’s chemistry have been validated.  It follows logically that this process, going on interrupted for billions of years, would leave the evidence in abundance.  OK, so where is it?  They can’t hide the answer in the future much longer.  Imagine the entire globe covered with an ethane ocean half a mile deep or more.  What happened to it?  Did the interior suck it up like a sponge?  Did aliens take it?  Did creationists steal in a vast conspiracy to support their young-earth views?  Come on; let the facts speak to the unbiased mind.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Physics

It’s important for us to keep reporting what biophysicists and biochemists are finding, so that the Darwinists know what they are up against.  The cheap calls of “convergent evolution” and “remnants of the evolutionary process” and other such calls to accept evolution as an assumption are ringing hollow, and need to be ejected with the rest of today’s intellectual garbage and toxins.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

We tricked you by posing this as a contest between good and evil, between peace-loving leaf cells and dastardly bacteria up to no good.  Metaphors bewitch you, remember? (see 07/04/2003).  Plants and bacteria are not sentient beings.  We should liberate our minds from the tendency to view these ecological interactions in anthropomorphic terms.  The converse is not true; human beings are sentient moral agents; no one should take this commentary as support for viewing terrorism as a natural regulatory response to civilization, for instance.  But it is possible that bacteria act as a counterbalance in the overall ecology.  Nature is filled with counterbalances, with accelerator pedals and brakes, with promoters and terminators.  Bacteria invading a leaf may look to us like selfish invaders, but what if they have a role to play, preventing a plant community from growing beyond its resources?  Many bacterial invasions occur after periods of high humidity or drenching rainstorms.  It’s possible to look at the ecological community as a well-regulated system of checks and balances, responding to perturbations in a way that ensures the long-term survival of the whole.  Most of the time, it works.  Plant communities endure despite major geological and climatic changes.  Clearly, things get out of balance sometimes, but maybe that was not the original intent of these well-regulated systems in the original creation.  We don’t need to resort to the evolutionary selfishness metaphors.  We should not personify bacteria, speculating that they “have evolved strategies” to get their own way.  Maybe they’re just doing the best job they can in a messed-up world.
    The important point of these articles is not in some moral anthropomorphism, but in the realization that here is another example of an interrelated, regulated system that could never have evolved by some unguided processes.  Stomata may have looked like simple pores to earlier scientists; now we know that there is a whole network of regulators and detectors, composed of at least 40 parts, that work together to ensure the proper functioning and security of the photosynthetic factories on which all multicellular life depends.  This has been the pattern of scientific discovery ever since the discovery of DNA.  No matter where you look, life is much more sophisticated than one could have imagined.
    An evolutionary astrobiologist was heard today commenting on the arrangement of cells in leaves.  He pointed out that not only are individual leaf cells optimized to filter in the solar wavelengths most useful for photosynthesis, but that they are stacked in formations that act as waveguides, funneling in the vital green wavelengths while reflecting and passing through the infrared wavelengths that would otherwise overheat the power generators.  In other words, here are two separate and independent designs that contribute to the optimization of photosynthesis.  In a declaration of folly astonishing in its dimensions, he exclaimed, without even batting an eye, isn’t it amazing that plants figured this out by themselves!.
Next headline on:  Plants • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Further, Palmarini said, “The enJSRVs arose from ancient infections of small ruminants during their evolution,” said Dr. Massimo Palmarini, a virologist at The University of Glasgow Veterinary School.  “This infection was beneficial to the host and was then positively selected for during evolution.  In other words, animals with enJSRVs were better equipped than those without.  Therefore, enJSRVs became a permanent part of the sheep genome and, in these days, sheep can’t do without them.”

Palmarini ought to read what Jerry Coyne wrote about evolutionary theory (08/30/2006).  Evolution neither predicted nor expected this surprising discovery.  The explanation resembles the habit of Kruschev-era communists to spin every political and economic observation, no matter how contradictory, into terms of class conflict and dialectical materialism.
    If you think back to the commercials of the Leave-it-to-Beaver era, all germs were considered evil.  Wondrous kitchen products like Lysol helped the modern homemaker destroy the wretched bugs and keep the kitchen shining spic-and-span and germ-free.  It is becoming apparent now, by contrast, that most bacteria are beneficial to humans (see 08/02/2006 entry), and that the world is teeming with more viruses than previously conceived, most of which are harmless.  This does not mean we should give up cleanliness and hygiene, but it means that we need to rethink our view of natural evil.  A new view seems to be emerging that life not only tolerates, but may ultimately depend on, bacteria and viruses.
    The relatively small number that cause disease and harm, like brats in the playground, steal most of our attention.  What if the bratty germs are really beneficial players gone awry?  That would fit a Biblical creation model.  A design-based research program could investigate the beneficial interactions of animals with their micropartners and retroviruses, instead of giving up and spraying the “junk” with evolutionary LiesAll.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolutionary Theory • Mammals

The attacks were meant to bring us to our knees, and they did, but not in the way the terrorists intended.  Americans united in prayer, came to the aid of neighbors in need, and resolved that our enemies would not have the last word.  The spirit of our people is the source of America’s strength. And we go forward with trust in that spirit, confidence in our purpose, and faith in a loving God who made us to be free.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate preserved conscious awareness in a patient fulfilling the criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state.  When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving around her home, the patient activated predicted cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of healthy volunteers.

These results confirm that, despite fulfilling the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state, this patient retained the ability to understand spoken commands and to respond to them through her brain activity, rather than through speech or movement.  Moreover, her decision to cooperate with the authors by imagining particular tasks when asked to do so represents a clear act of intention, which confirmed beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings..  Of course, negative findings in such patients cannot be used as evidence for lack of awareness, because false negative findings in functional neuroimaging studies are common, even in healthy volunteers.  However, in the case described here, the presence of reproducible and robust task-dependent responses to command without the need for any practice or training suggests a method by which some noncommunicative patients, including those diagnosed as vegetative, minimally conscious, or locked in, may be able to use their residual cognitive capabilities to communicate their thoughts to those around them by modulating their own neural activity.

Recall the anger and outrage against the people who protested the death of Terry Schiavo.  Remember the claims that they were the ones being unreasonable and insensitive, and that the compassionate thing to do was to let Terry die, because she was not really living.  Now picture the possibility of her hearing all these things said about her but trapped inside, unable to communicate.  Imagine the fear and helplessness and pain of knowing you were being intentionally allowed to starve and dehydrate to death.  How many other times has a similar decision been made to a patient assumed to be “vegetative” and unaware?  Remember, these scientists said that negative responses in the brain scans are not definitive in diagnosing the awareness of a person.
    What kind of nonsense applies a word like vegetative to a human being, anyway?  What are they insinuating, that this patient is nothing more than a carrot or rutabaga?  Notice how these researchers called the diagnosis of “vegetative state” as one of the “least understood and ethically troublesome conditions in modern medicine.”  Haven’t we learned that dehumanizing an individual is often the first step toward rationalizing the unthinkable?
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Newton had his own unorthodox views of prophecy, the trinity and eschatology, but no one can claim that his intense interest in the Bible disqualified him as a great scientist.  See our short bio of Newton from our online book in progress.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

Only the scrutiny of the public is going to prevent abuse in the stem-cell gold rush.  Nature was originally praised for coming up with an “ethical” way to harvest embryonic stem cells, but look how ethical it turned out to be.  There is big money and ambition shoving ES research on this country, in spite of the fact that it has no track record (while adult stem cell research is already saving lives).  Don’t expect the researchers or science journals to act in morally responsible ways when eyes are glazed over with dreams of fame and prize money.
    There is a detailed analysis of stem cell hype and politics in Ann Coulter’s recent best-selling book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

For example, [James] Collins [NSF] says, if scientists want to find an organism that has properties useful in the cleanup of oil spills, they would first turn to microbes that have known beneficial properties and then examine the microbes’ nearest relatives for good matches.
    To help engineer new crops, agricultural researchers might study genetic traits that make crops drought resistant.
    [Michael] Donoghue, the Yale biologist, says scientists can use the tree to understand where emerging infectious diseases originate and to search for organisms that have evolved resistance to the diseases in question.  Such clues can lead to the development of new drugs, he says.
    “Applications are everywhere,” he said.

  The article also begs another question: whether Darwin’s tree is the only paradigm fitting the data and providing the benefits.  Artificial selection has a long history preceding Darwin himself, let alone his tree analogy or this new AToL project.  Also, since creationists acknowledge a nested hierarchy picture of classification without the necessity for common ancestry, why wouldn’t that structure provide the same heuristic for scientific research, and the same benefits, without the Darwinian baggage?  Don’t count your fruit before it ripens.  Darwin’s tree has already dropped so many bad apples (08/23/2006),* some of us would rather look in a different orchard.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Genetics

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*The History Channel showed a special on Stalin Sept. 8 that should be required viewing, just so people can begin to fathom the lengths of evil that can result from one man sold out to the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest.  Did you know Stalin killed more Jews than Hitler?  That his oppressive regime was by far more deadly, and lasted far longer, than Nazi Germany?  Some of the details of his dictatorship have only recently come to light.  The evil done by this one man is withering in its scope, and horrifying beyond expression, yet Stalinism was not alone in the poison fruit of Darwin’s Century.  In fact, it was surpassed by another Darwinist: Mao.

Overall, one can speculate that some episodes of speciation might be mediated by pathogens that bind to specific forms of cell-surface glycans.

A lethal pathogen that binds to glycans of a certain species to initiate infection might markedly reduce the primary population, leaving geographically isolated subpopulations that have the opportunity to evolve into new species.

Some of the survivors are likely to have been selected because of random glycan variations that allowed them to escape from infection with the pathogen.

Such survivors may have secondary alterations in glycan biology that are permissive for pleiotropic changes in embryogenesis and/or morphogenesis.

Glycan changes also might alter fertilization barriers, causing either reproductive isolation or anomalous fertilization by closely related species.

Any or all of these mechanisms could support the formation of new species.  Many of these speculative ideas are testable by observational studies and possibly by long-term experiments.  [No examples cited.]

Thus, glycans may be trapped in neverending cycles of evolutionary “Red Queen” effects in which long-lived hosts must evade the more rapidly evolving pathogens that infect them by changing their glycan expression patterns, without compromising their own survival (Van Valen, 1974 and Hamilton et al., 1990).  The colorful term, “Red Queen” effect, recalls the comment to Alice by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”  This may explain the remarkable structural variations of glycans in nature, which contribute to biological diversity and perhaps even to speciation.

Thus, the glycans of complex multicellular organisms with long life cycles may be subject to evolutionary “Red Queen” effects....

For example, cell-type-specific expression of certain glycans can mediate specific biological roles within an organism (Lowe and Marth, 2003), which thus may be under positive selection.

Additional Red Queen effects may arise from the fact that many pathogens use a successful form of molecular mimicry,...

Such diversification and redundancy may be driven by sexual selection and sexual conflict....

If, as Dobzhansky stated, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”..., why is it rarely, if ever, mentioned in most natural science books?  We usually use the leading college texts in each area (for example, the A&P text we use is the 10th edition of Hole, a standard text).  And why is it a minor topic even in most introductory biology books that cover the subject in more depth than most all other courses except formal classes on evolution?

Varki inserted so many doubt-words into his text, it makes you wonder which side of the looking-glass he is on.  Despite his valiant effort, he only showed that evolution doesn’t buy you anything in theory.  Last week, Jerry Coyne showed (08/30/2006) that evolution doesn’t buy you anything in practice.  Conclusion: evolution is a bad investment.
    While scientific freeloaders amuse themselves with “tantalizing speculations” in the Darwin Party lizard lounges (12/22/2003 commentary), the real work in science is being done by design (e.g., 07/21/2006, 06/29/2006, 06/22/2006).
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This is another controversy that must be shielded from students.  We must teach the consensus view.  Even if its truth is in dispute, dark matter is a fact – like the big bang (see 09/05/2006).
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology

Man-made outboard motors are stubby-shaped, loud, polluting, inefficient monstrosities that generate huge wakes.  Since the bacteria have already mastered propulsive efficiency, maybe this will inspire some boat builder to do a little biomimetics.  We should see if flagellar construction scales up to human proportions and maintains the efficiency rating.  If so, lakefront property owners would love them for it.
    Too bad we can’t ask the little critters how they came up with this technology.  It wouldn’t help anyway, probably.  All they would say is, “Dunno; we’re just the customer.”
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Still waiting in the dark for payment on this promissory note (03/27/2003 commentary).
Next headline on:  Dumb Ideas

Nature provides numerous examples of nanometer-scale molecular machines.  In particular, motor proteins, which efficiently convert chemical energy into mechanical work, are fascinating examples of functional nanodevices derived from living systems.  The molecular mechanism underlying the function of these motors has long been a major focus of biophysical research, and the information emerging from those studies should greatly aid in the design and fabrication of novel synthetic micro/nanomotors....
    Turning an eye to higher-order biological structures reveals many examples of excellent mechanical devices, including bacterial and eukaryotic flagella and muscle sarcomeres.  These motile units are tens of nanometers to several micrometers in size and consist of multiprotein complexes built up with atomic accuracy through the self-assembly and self-organization of protein molecules within cells.  In general, these devices work far more efficiently and intelligently than the isolated proteins but, because the principles and mechanisms of self-assembly are only vaguely understood, we are currently unable to assemble higher order motile units from the isolated component proteins outside the cells.  Consequently, research aimed at developing hybrid devices using biological motile units is rare at present.

Mycoplasma mobile, a species of gliding bacteria, is another example of a higher-order unit (cells in this case) with superb motility.  M.  mobile has a pear-shaped cell body ~ 1 micrometer in length and moves continuously over solid surfaces at speeds up to 2-5 micrometers per second.  The mechanism by which it glides remains unknown, although a mechanical walking model that makes use of the rod-like structures protruding from the cell surface has been proposed.  Although three proteins have been identified as essential for gliding, we speculate that this motile system may need a dozen additional proteins, including various cytoskeletal proteins.

As a result, it is currently impractical, if not impossible, to reconstitute fully functional motile units from the isolated proteins of M. mobile in vitro.  For that reason, we have been attempting to construct micromechanical devices using intact M. mobile cells instead of the isolated proteins.  A key benefit of this approach is that hybrid devices into which living cells are integrated enable us to take advantage of preassembled excellent motor units that have the potential for self-repair or self-reproduction when damaged.

This is nothing less than intelligent-design research in action: intelligent humans seeking to understand and incorporate the built-in technology of intelligently-designed biological machines.  The overlap between artificial and biological design is almost seamless.  What dividing line could separate the two domains?  Who could claim that man’s part represents intelligent design, but the biological part is the result of a long series of mistakes?  The researchers even spoke of manipulating the bacteria through genetic engineering to conform the protein moving parts to their design goals.  That will blur the distinction even further.
    If Martians found our rovers and put them on a track to drive a grinding mill, could they claim with any sense of justice that the rovers must have emerged out of the dust and sand by some unguided process of self-organization?  The engineers at JPL would justly be offended.  The future belongs to those who think intelligently, and know design when they see it.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Amazing Stories

Theories that are widely accepted are rarely overthrown by one measurement.  Even the great Laplace did not abandon caloric theory after Count Rumford demonstrated by cannon-boring experiments that it was absurd to think a finite piece of metal could store an infinite amount of the imponderable substance (see UCI lecture notes and Wikipedia).
    Most cosmologists will undoubtedly feel this paper is “interesting” rather than threatening.  They will respond that the big bang theory has so much going for it, one anomaly will not demand an overhaul.  Some will seek alternative explanations for the Lieu et al data.  What shouldn’t be allowed is for the cosmological community to ignore this paper.  Science does not advance by ignor-ance.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics

One doesn’t really know what may come in the future, but cloning an organism from a genome fragmented into small pieces of DNA will probably always be impossible,” [Paabo] says, “and from what we know about the chemical stability of DNA, sequence retrieval will always be on this side of a million years ago, so dinosaur DNA is beyond our reach.”  The problem, he says, is that DNA is extremely hydrophilic, and exposure to water molecules as well as atmospheric oxygen and background radiation breaks it down.  Even under highly favorable preservation conditions, such as mummies in a dry and cold desert, DNA disappears from a specimen within a few hundred thousand years.  However, even given such limitations, many interesting discoveries still lie in ancient DNA.

National Geographic reported on this paper after we did.  As usual, their write-up provides a good chance to practice separating data from interpretation.
    Now that we know soft tissue and possibly blood cells can be preserved in dinosaur bones, there should be plenty of material to look in.  The second article made a prediction: DNA is too fragile to be found at all after a few hundred thousand years.  What if some day dinosaur DNA is found that can be sequenced?  Here is a great contest for scientists with an open mind.  Children who like dinosaurs should be encouraged to grow up and join the hunt.  We should never think that all the exciting scientific discoveries are behind us.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Dating Methods

These differences have important implications for current models of the functional and architectural relationships of the components.  Whereas the Salmonella motor spins just the flagellum, because Treponema flagella are periplasmic, it is thought that they cause the whole cell to gyrate.  Thus, each rotation may be much slower and require greater torque.  The unusually large stud ring, C ring and rotor in Treponema may serve to increase torque by increasing the length of the effective lever arm through which each stator stud acts.  These larger rings may also accommodate more stator studs and FliG molecules around the ring, in effect ‘gearing down’ the Treponema motor so that the passage of each proton across the membrane produces a smaller angular rotation.

Who would have ever thought that some tiny little bug living inside another bug would possess some of the most elaborate nanotechnology in the world.  Early microscopists like Leeuwenhoek were astonished at the motions of microscopic animalcules, but the true wonder at what makes them move is still just now coming to light.
    We hate to keep beating the Darwiniacs over the head with this high-tech motorized wet noodle, but it’s kind of fun in a perverse way.  Besides, incorrigibility deserves flagellation.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

People who have large noses, a stocky build and a beetle brow may indeed be a little Neanderthal, according to a genetic study.  But the good news is that other research concludes that Neanderthals were much more like us than previously thought.

Don’t let the news media grant Pearl Jam fans license to club women and drag them into a cave (08/31/2006).  The inferences made by the researchers are way too speculative to provide confidence in any interpretation.  There is far more that we don’t know than we do know about human ancestral genetics.  (More proof of that can be found on News@Nature about a “newly discovered mystery gene may have helped build the modern human brain” about which a high-ranking scientist commented, “People are going to argue about it and be fascinated by this, because it takes us in a couple of directions we haven’t really been in before.”)  What’s more instructive is to watch reporters swallow anything a scientist says and regurgitate the bubbly vomit as building material for the growing Temple to Evolution.
    The potential for variability within the modern human population is probably far greater than realized.  The Old Testament talks about races of giant humans (the Rephaim and others) in isolated populations.  Racial and physical differences could quickly arise between populations segregated by language and then by locale after Babel, for instance.  If the “hobbits” of Indonesia become accepted as kinfolk, there’s tremendous physical variety between them and Goliath.  Even today, the range in human traits is quite remarkable, yet we are all interfertile, intelligent, communicative, and fully aware of a sense of right and wrong.
    None of genetic variability past or present implies that people have ever been anything less than fully human, with language and moral responsibility.  What anthropologists call “Neanderthal” could well have been a group of capable, smart, strong human beings, accustomed to life in harsh climates.  Perhaps they shunned cities and tended to remain strongly tribal, but left some genetic overlap with the rest of us.  The brutishness in the human lineage is not due to ape in our ancestry, but rather to sin (see Jude 10), as has been evident in all tribes, kingdoms, nations and peoples around the globe, regardless of average height, skin color, face shape and cultural preferences.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

Need we point out to Dr. Krauss that the funding for these “attacks” (note the fear-mongering in the militaristic terminology) is from private sources?  And that these “attacks” are only concerned with allowing fair and honest investigation of the truth claims of Darwinism, which, under the DODO monopoly (i.e., Darwin-Only-Darwin-Only), are immune from scrutiny?  This is quite unlike the plunder of taxpayers’ pockets to support something they do not agree with.  And the private funding for “teaching the controversy” is not well.  It is a shoestring compared to the river of dollars flowing down the drain into Darwinian pork barrels (see quote on top right of this page).
    This paranoia by the Darwinists begs the question of whether evolutionary theory actually produces anything useful to the taxpayers who have to pay for it (see the important quote in the 08/30/2006 entry, and the 08/04/2006 revelation), or whether its fruits are beneficial to society (see yesterday’s entry).  This is a good occasion to remember David Berlinski’s comment a year ago (see Evolution News):

For scientists forever banging their crutches against the trough of public funding, any form of criticism represents an alarming turn of events, the more so when it affects their traditional claims to speak with authority on matters of culture, faith and morals.  They are right to be alarmed.  A great many people have come to regard Darwinism as tedious, illiterate, uninformed and tendentious.  Darwin’s theories seem destined to disappear by negative selection, an interesting but rare example of a Darwinian process reaching a sound conclusion.

If Darwinian pseudoscientific research is so essential, according to all those “wiser heads,” let it be self-supporting, the way all science had to operate before World War II.  Surely there are enough reliable supporters in the country to keep the Darwin Party in bright lights.  Look at all the glazed-eyed zombies at the slot machines in Las Vegas, for instance.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Education

1. Brain:  Elisabeth Pennisi tackled the biggest problem first: the evolution of the human brain, in “Mining the Molecules that Made Our Mind.”²  Surprisingly, she began by criticizing news reporters who got carried away with the announcement Aug. 17 (08/22/2006) that a particular gene named HAR1F, possibly related to the cerebral cortex, contained many more differences between apes and humans than most other genes.  Headlines like “A single gene led to humans” and “Revealed: the gene that gave us bigger brains” she considered way overblown.  HAR1F is only one of several candidate genes evolutionists have speculated might have been involved in brain evolution.  Pennisi pointed out the bandwagon effect of working on stories of human origins, and warned that caution is in order:

   Many scientists find the potential to understand ourselves irresistible.  A rush of comparative genomics results about human evolution are being presented at meetings, and publications are starting to stream out.  “Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon,” says Bruce Lahn, a human geneticist at the University of Chicago, Illinois.  Progress at identifying the DNA tweaks that distinguish people from other species should be swift.  “Within a year or two, we will have a comprehensive list of genome changes to start looking at,” says Christopher A. Walsh, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
       Emphasize “start.”  Despite what the headlines imply, genomic data so far offer provocative clues rather than direct answers to what caused humans to branch out from the primate tree to become walking, talking, creative beings.  Tying genomic events such as a gene duplication to human evolution is a challenge, because often researchers know little about what their candidate genes do.  To make a concrete connection between a genetic change and the evolution of the human brain “is a much slower process,” says Walsh.

   Pennisi next emphasized the differences between the human brain and the chimp brain.  She offered only hints of genes that might have undergone positive selection in the alleged pathway from a common ancestor, HAR1F being the latest headlined candidate.
       Also, geneticists are finding that the differences may not be so much in the genes and proteins themselves, but in their rates of expression.  That leads to a new plot line: “These extra copies are material with which evolution can play, perhaps dedicating the activity of one copy of a gene to a subset of cells, for example,” leading to evolutionary “innovation.”  Nowhere, however, was an explicit example of innovation by duplication provided.  Only the suggestion was proffered: e.g., a particular gene with more copies in humans than mice “may have evolved crucial new functions in the process.”  In another example of a gene where humans have a different number than apes, “No one knows exactly what the gene does,” so it is certainly premature to expect anyone could understand how it could help produce a human brain.  Even noting that the gene is active in the brain is not conclusive, she said.  “The work highlights the potential importance of duplications in the emergence of novel genes within the hominoid lineage” said one researcher – thus assuming evolution rather than demonstrating it.  The same flaw exists in plot lines that parts of an ape gene were replaced on the path to humans.  Wishful thinking and imagination become substitutes for scientific demonstration.  Notice:

   However, at some point in hominid evolution, part of SIGLEC-16 must have replaced the front part of the DNA of SIGLEC-11, creating a “brand-new, ‘human specific’ protein,” says [Ajit] Varki [UC San Diego].  The gene for this protein now turns on in the human brain, specifically in microglia, cells known to be important to the growth of nerve cells (Science, 9 September 2005, p. 1693).  The finding is “tantalizing, but of uncertain significance,” Varki points out.

   A question could be asked whether a “tantalizing” observation might just as well be applied to an alternative view, or whether “tantalizing” findings of “uncertain significance” deserve publication in a scientific journal.  At this point, shockingly, Pennisi seemed to pull several rugs out from under all such claims and “headline-grabbing genes” –
   • “there’s a tendency for people to think this [gene] is it”--the explanation for why people are unique....
   • For his part, Varki warns that the quest to understand human evolution is too brain-centric.  “We are also defined by differences in our reproductive, musculoskeletal, and immune systems, as well as by our skin,” he points out.
   • Moreover, almost every gene linked to human brain evolution comes with questions about the strategies used to establish the connection.  For example, some scientists are not convinced that the methods used to detect positive selection in a gene are reliable or that the results will hold up as more genome sequences are added to these analyses.  Genes that appear to change rapidly may still fall within the range of normal variation, for example.  Moreover, rapid change in a gene or extra copies “does not mean that these genes are [all] important during the evolution of the human brain,” says [Xun] Gu [Iowa State].
   • Some scientists also question the relevance of certain findings, such as a protein-coding gene’s mRNA being produced in a brain region.  After all, not all mRNAs are translated into proteins.
   • [Evan] Eichler [U of Seattle] illustrates the challenges the field faces when he complains about spending the past 5 years trying in vain to figure out the role of a promising family of genes that emerged from his survey of segmental duplications.
   For these and other reasons, Pennisi said the glorious headlines about brain evolution being found in the genes should be doused heavily with the salt of realism.  “Pääbo shares Eichler’s frustration at the field being unable to move more swiftly beyond highlighting candidate brain-evolution genes.  “It’s getting a little stale,” he admits, “to say, ‘I have another case of positive selection.’  The challenge is to link the evidence of positive selection to brain function.”
       All Pennisi could do at this point was highlight some of the latest studies trying to establish the link.  Each of them, however, suffers from the same weaknesses, as in the case of a nerve protein named prodynorphin:

   The prodynorphin example is one of the most advanced, but even this evolutionary story is unfinished, because no one knows exactly what effect the extra prodynorphin has in the human brain, says [Greg] Wray [Duke U].  And most other examples are in even earlier stages.  “In virtually all cases, the link of genes or genomic patterns with human brain evolution is only tentative and based on suggestive evidence,” says Lahn.  “The situation may not change anytime soon due to the complexity of the questions and because we can’t redo the experiment that evolution did in many millions of years.”

   And that’s it: that is where the story of human brain evolution stands.  Pennisi ended with a short sentence pregnant with implications for science and society: “Headline writers, pay heed.”
       That was just for starters in this series on genomics and evolution.  Is the situation any better in the story of eye evolution?  Next....
2. Eyes:  Russell D. Fernald tried to cast “Genetic Light on the Evolution of Eyes.”³  His plot line is somewhat different, but certainly not a straight line from eyelessness to the best eyes.  The story invokes some common Darwinist words – such as exploitation, convergence, and co-option – that seem to assume Darwinism rather than demonstrate it. 

   Light has been exploited for information by organisms through the evolution of photoreceptors and, ultimately, eyes in animals.  Only a handful of eye types exist because the physics of light constrains photodetection.  In the past few years, genetic tools have revealed several parallel pathways through which light guides behavior and have provided insights into the convergent evolution of eyes.  The gene encoding opsin (the primary phototransduction protein) and some developmental genes had very early origins and were recruited repeatedly during eye evolution.  Eye lens proteins arose separately and make up a diverse group, many of which were co-opted from other functions.  A major challenge now is understanding how newly discovered pathways for processing light evolved and how they collaborate with eyes to harvest information from light.

   Challenges to understanding are certainly not lacking in this field, either:

   Understanding how eyes evolved into what Darwin called an “organ of extreme perfection” requires analysis of evolutionary constraints, key selective forces, and possible origins.  The evolution of photodetection, giving rise to eyes, offers a kaleidoscopic view of selection acting at both the organ and molecular levels.  The repeated exploitation of some regulatory gene sequences in eye development and lens formation raises questions about why certain transcription factors have been regularly recruited to build eyes.  The ease with which we can now analyze the evolution of structural gene sequences across species belies the difficulties in tracing the selective forces that shaped regulation of gene expression.

   His basic idea is that the physics of light “constrains” the evolution of eyes to what is possible.  This, however, begs the question of how an organism oblivious to the “information” in light could care whether it exists, and whether a Darwinian mechanism could ever converge on a constrained engineering solution to “exploit” that information – and that not once, but multiple times.  Fernald’s explanation seems to confuse cause and effect:

   In using vision to extract information about the environment, all animals exploit the same properties of light: intensity differences to produce contrast and wavelength differences to produce hue.  However, no unique solutions exist, and specializations that evolved to process intensity and wavelength differ among species; these differences reflect how similar problems are solved via diverse mechanisms through natural selection.  For example, mammals and bees use long wavelength photoreceptors for intensity and color vision, whereas flies and birds have evolved separate sets of photoreceptors for these two purposes.  The genetic substrates that supported such different evolutionary paths are unknown.  Even though blowfly and monkey photoreceptors evolved independently and use different molecular mechanisms, signal processing, and other physiological steps, the information about the world delivered to the nervous system is nearly identical.  These few examples reveal the different routes natural selection has taken during the evolution of eyes in response to the information available in light.

   As to actual studies linking genetic changes to evolution, it’s more of the same plot line as that of brain evolution (above), but with a more convergent-evolution twist: for example, “Functionally, the exquisite gradient of refractive index necessary to allow spherical lenses to focus light is a convergent solution that has evolved in water-dwelling vertebrates and invertebrates alike.”  I.e., it evolved because it evolved.  Fernald’s story is replete with the theme that if a source of information is available, evolution will find a way to exploit it, even if we have no idea how it happened.  He ended, “Light has been such an important source of information that evolution has exploited it in many ways that remain to be discovered and understood.”  Undoubtedly, a critic of evolution like Michael Behe, who wrote about the irreducible complexity of photoreception in his book Darwin’s Black Box, would remain unconvinced by such a statement.
3. Heart:  Is the story any different with heart evolution?  Eric N. Olsen wrote about this in the same issue of Science.⁴  He started out with a flat assertion: “The heart, an ancient organ and the first to form and function during embryogenesis, evolved by the addition of new structures and functions to a primitive pump.”  Embryogenesis, though, is not evolution, and is not controversial.  Can the heart really be explained by natural selection?  The explanation sounds familiar:

   Heart development is controlled by an evolutionarily conserved network of transcription factors that connect signaling pathways with genes for muscle growth, patterning, and contractility.  During evolution, this ancestral gene network was expanded through gene duplication and co-option of additional networks.  Mutations in components of the cardiac gene network cause congenital heart disease, the most common human birth defect.  The consequences of such mutations reveal the logic of organogenesis and the evolutionary origins of morphological complexity.

   This line of explanation (duplication and co-option) is apparently a skeleton key to Olsen: “The modular addition of innovations to primitive structures, although speculative, has also been proposed as a mechanism for the genesis of other vertebrate organs and body structures.”  A proposal is not a proof.
       Since the article is basically just elaboration on this theme, the interested reader can refer to it for details.  Suffice it to say he referred to evolutionary “conserved” elements seven times, co-option five times, and duplication seven times (assuming gene duplication provided the raw material for modular innovation).  He used the word “primitive” eight times, six of which refer to assumed ancestral hearts: e.g., in vertebrate embryos, “Cardiac progenitors from the primary heart field converge at the ventral midline to form a linear heart tube that resembles, both structurally and functionally, the primitive heart thought to exist in ancestral chordates.”  This could be a reference to Haeckel’s controversial recapitulation theory, largely discredited by many of today’s leading Darwinists.
       As with the other articles, the complete evolutionary story will have to be told in the future, he said, (though research continues to help advance medicine, whether or not evolution is true).  Here’s his last word: “Further analysis of the genetic networks that govern heart development through the combined use of genomics, genetics, and model organisms promises to yield insights, not only into general principles of organogenesis, but also to facilitate therapies for congenital and acquired heart disease.”
4. Developmental genes:  Hox genes, implicated in body plan patterning during embryonic development, have been suggested as sources of evolutionary innovation.  Derek Lemons and William McGinnis discussed this aspect of evolutionary genomics in their article.⁵  This, also, is no simple story:

   Beginning with Lewis, there has been much speculation that changes in Hox gene number may have contributed to morphological evolution.  Such ideas are a variation on the old theory that duplicating genes, particularly developmental control genes, may be an initial step in a process that increases regulatory circuit complexity, leading to increased morphological complexity, whereas elimination of control genes may be an initial step leading to less morphological complexity.  In one case, gene-replacement experiments showed that two mammalian Hox paralogs have nearly identical functions in a variety of tissues, which may be an example of a Hox duplication and functional divergence at an initial stage.
       There is currently no rigorous evidence that connects the loss or gain of specific Hox genes or gene complexes with specific morphological changes in different lineages, but there are a number of intriguing correlations.

   So all they could offer were speculative examples of these possible correlations.  “On the other hand,” they wrote (hinting of trouble ahead), “adult sea urchins and urochordate tunicates, which exhibit innovative and complex body architectures, have one set of Hox genes, either scrambled or dispersed.”  Clearly it would be simplistic to reduce all evolution to Hox gene duplication and divergence.  “Perhaps the novelty of these adult morphologies is dependent on other, equally complex sets of regulatory genes that resemble the Hox genes in their power to diversify morphology but are as yet not well understood.”  This not only points to the complexity of the Hox gene regulatory networks, but complicates the problem for evolutionists: there may be additional networks, just as complex, that we don’t even know about.  The closing paragraph is notable for its speculative words and lack of certainty:

   Genomic analyses have revealed surprising diversity in Hox gene number, organization, and expression patterns in different animals.  There are still many animal groups about which little genomic sequence is known, and it remains to be seen how much more variation in Hox gene organization and function will emerge, including the numbers and functions of non-protein-coding RNAs.  The property of HOX proteins working as a loosely coordinated system, often with overlapping patterns of expression and function, has apparently fostered their abilities to contribute to morphological change during the evolution of animals.  Their colinear [sic] arrangement and coordinated regulation in many animals may assist in the maintenance of their overlapping expression patterns.  This may have allowed some members of the clusters to subtly and slowly alter their expression patterns and functions to drive groups of cells toward novel structures.  But Hox genes still can work as an axial patterning system even when partially dispersed in the genome, and dispersal may foster their rate of functional evolution.

5. Tree of Life:  The final article in the special series is “Genomics and the Tree of Life” by Antonis Rokas.⁶  The lone photo in the article is Charles Darwin’s sketch of a branching tree, “a lovely tree” as Rokas calls it, depicting the path of evolutionary diversification through millions of years.  Has genomics confirmed Darwin’s picture?  “The dramatic increase in data set sizes has led, in many cases, to increased confidence in the inference of evolutionary relationships,” he said.  But then a few sentences later, the yardage on that first down was lost:

   But further increases in data set sizes present challenges as well.  Analyzing many thousands of nucleotides for hundreds or thousands of species requires substantial computational power to efficiently search among all possible trees.  More sophisticated statistical algorithms are also needed for discovering the trees best supported by the data.  Several clades of the Tree of Life, including the one of Metazoa, are proving difficult to resolve too.  Most parameters of sequence evolution vary across lineages.  Slight biases—amplified by the sheer volume of data—can potentially mislead phylogenetic algorithms and provide high support for the wrong trees.

   (Note: metazoa includes all multicelled organisms, from flatworms to humans; i.e., the entire tree of plants and animals is “proving difficult to resolve.”)  It seems apparent that such a situation could lend itself to creative storytelling.  Rokas spoke of “phylogenetic riddles” and “alternative markers” in the genes, one of which produced “the discovery of several new clades such as the Pegasoferae, which unexpectedly combines bats with horses, cats, dogs, and pangolins” (see 06/26/2006 entry).  But even the approach of looking at alternative markers is still in its infancy, he admitted.
       Then there is the problem of lateral gene transfer.  This writes off any hope of tracing a phylogenetic tree for non-eukaryote one-celled organisms: “the extensive occurrence of lateral gene transfer in prokaryotes has raised concerns as to the validity of any gene-based phylogenies for these organisms.”  These he called “evolutionary networks and not trees,” although it is not clear how any kind of evolutionary lineage could be inferred from this kind of scrambled egg.  The only approach he offered (identification of core orthologs) doesn’t really solve the problem: “However, given the prevalence of lateral gene transfer—mostly in prokaryotes, to a much lesser extent in eukaryotes—as well as the high frequency of gene gain and loss, questions as to whether these core gene sets are meaningful or how we can reliably identify orthology among genes remain wide open.”  Indeed, “The integration of genomics data into the phylogenetics mold is just beginning.”  Interesting choice of word: mold.  What is a phylogenetics mold, if not an evolutionary stricture into which the data must be fit?  That this is the case he made clear in the next paragraph:

   As the choice of genomes to be sequenced is increasingly guided by evolutionary considerations, and as emerging sequencing technologies promise to drop costs even lower, the reach and impact of genomics to non-model organisms is rapidly extending.... Given the breadth of organismal diversity, the gene-scale era of phylogenetics is still an invaluable asset to the pursuit of the Tree if Life.  Comparative genomics, with its ability and potential to vastly increase both the amount and type of molecular data available for a small but critical fraction of biodiversity, is bound to play an increasingly important role in efforts to assemble a robust picture of the Tree of Life.

   A bystander could well wonder which is the cart, and which is the horse.

If you have never gotten angry about the snow job that professional evolutionists have pulled in science, you should be hopping mad now.  We provided plenty of quotations and links so that you can savor the baloney in all its rottenness.  A cursory glance at the cover, “Building the Body from Genes,” would give an unsuspecting reader the impression that scientists are well on their way explaining all the most complex features of our body – the heart, eye, and brain – by Darwin’s tall tale.  The caption boasts,

Through comparative genomics, scientists are learning about the forces that have promoted diversity or imposed constraints on our biological machinery.  As described in a special section beginning on page 1907, comparative genomics not only gives us a view of our evolutionary history but also illuminates human physiology and suggests new approaches to attacking diseases.

Don’t be fooled.  The references to physiology and medicine are tossed in as distractions to give an aura of undeserved legitimacy to the bankrupt yarns of the Darwin Party, like perfume to mask B.O. (baloney odor).  You just read the real situation for yourself.  Strip away the paragraphs of impertinent details about what scientists in a laboratory have observed about real genes, i.e., all the observational details irrelevant to evolution, and what is left?  Only a house of cards built out of hope, hype, assumption and wishful thinking.  Not a single observational fact supported their tale, and most of the facts were contrary to it.  But since the stretch and squish theory of evolution (12/14/2004) molds itself to the most uncooperative facts, like The Blob to a bicycle, honest investigation has come to a halt.  Evolutionary theory is like a castle in the air, burdened down by facts that would otherwise bring it crashing down to the ground, were it not for the continual stream of hot air blown by Darwin Party windbags.  Yet this is the only theory allowed in our public schools, museums, national parks, mainstream media, government-funded research institutions and (incredibly) many liberal churches.
    How many classrooms will use the simplified charts, and come away with a completely false picture, where all the facts fit neatly into a story with a happy ending?  If you are still reading this, you are one of the few to know the true situation.  You thought this was Science, but now it is clear that the Darwinists have been just making this stuff up as they go along and force-fitting it into a plot that was determined by faith in their materialistic worldview.  Facts be damned; they are just props to The Endless Story, a fictional tale where machinery emerges by itself and begins to think.
    If you are sick and tired of the shenanigans the Darwin Party has pulled these 147 years, making it seem like their story had triumphed over every other possible explanation, such that everybody had to acquiesce to Charlie worship whether they liked it or not, it’s time to call their bluff and demand accountability.  Darwin did not lead us to the Tree of Life, but to a Tree of Death – millions of years of death and destruction, out of which endless forms most beautiful emerged, they told us.  Well, we’ve gotten nothing for trusting these charlatans but endless promises of vaporware on back order.  Bedtime storytime is over; wispy dreams of convergent evolution have evaporated into the morning light; Creation-Evolution Headlines has sounded the alarm, and we’re all wide awake now.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics