“The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science.... This is becoming increasingly obvious to the American people, who are not the ignorant backwoods religious dogmatists that Darwinists make them out to be.  Darwinists insult the intelligence of American taxpayers and at the same time depend on them for support.  This is an inherently unstable situation, and it cannot last.” 
—Dr. Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), in “Why Darwinism is Doomed,” WND Sept. 27, 2006.

Today’s news is often forgotten a few days later.  But when one opens ancient texts that have appealed to a broad audience over a longer period of time, such as the Bible, what does one often find in the opening chapter?  A discussion of how the constituents of the universe--light, stars, life--were created.  Although humans are often caught up with mundane problems, they are curious about the big picture.  As citizens of the universe we cannot help but wonder how the first sources of light formed, how life came into existence and whether we are alone as intelligent beings in this vast space.  Astronomers in the 21st century are uniquely positioned to answer these big questions.

This combined observational and theoretical effort should shed light on various mysteries that now plague the theory of galaxy formation.  One set of questions concerns the massive black holes in the centers of galaxies.  Over the past decade astronomers have realized that almost every galaxy in the present-day universe, including our own Milky Way, hosts a massive black hole.  These holes are believed to be fed with gas in episodic events, triggered by mergers of galaxies.  During these growth spurts, the accreting gas shines much more brightly than the entire rest of the galaxy, producing a quasar.  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has revealed that quasars with black holes of more than a billion solar masses already existed at a cosmic age of one billion years.  How did such massive black holes come to exist so early?  Why did they stop growing?
    Another set concerns the size distribution of galaxies.  Theorists believe that the ultraviolet radiation produced by dwarf galaxies during the epoch of reionization heated the cosmic gas and suppressed the formation of new low-mass galaxies.  How did this suppression unfold over time?  Which of the dwarf galaxies we find today were already in existence at the beginning?  These are only a few of the many questions whose answers lie in the Dark Ages.

Proud man exalts himself above the word of the Lord and places his own perception, aided albeit by his instruments, as the discoverer of Truth about ultimate things.  One only needs to see the history of human speculation about cosmology, with its many upsets, to get a reality check on the likelihood today’s theories have arrived.  And one only needs to consider the magnitude of the remaining questions to doubt the propriety of confidence.
    Loeb’s tidy picture would require that the universe went from an almost completely homogeneous soup of particles to highly structured arrangement of stars and galaxies and clusters of galaxies in a relatively brief period of time.  Not only that, these stars would have had to age, collapse, and form supermassive black holes at the centers of quasars within 7% of the presumed age of the universe, because that is what we now observe at the farthest extent of our current observational capabilities (09/24/2006).  Hoping that the next generation of space telescopes will fill in the blanks is only hope.  If history is any guide, any answers lurking in the Dark Ages will be outshone by new questions.
    Loeb does well to have us ponder the big picture, something often lost in the nightly news.  And it is certainly honorable to extend our vision as far as we can, and to seek for understanding.  That is a far cry, however, from claiming we already have it.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Bible and Theology

1. Garden of Eden?  A place called Gobekli Tepe in Kurdish Turkey is contending for the title of the Garden of Eden, reported The First Post.  Archaeologists found carvings of animals and a temple they claim are much older than Stonehenge; they estimate the date as 10,000 years old.  Carvings include images of scorpions, water birds and river life.  The researchers feel these are images depicting an Edenic life of the hunter-gatherers before they took up the toils of agriculture.
2. Gems in the Temple Mount rubble:  Haaretz published an update on what Gabriel Barkay and crew are finding in the Temple Mount debris tossed over the wall by Muslims building a mosque (04/17/2005).  The artifacts cover a wide range of dates, from neolithic to Byzantine.  Finds include potsherds, jewelry, statuettes, game pieces, remains of mosaics and much more, some of it from the First Temple period (the time of Solomon to the Babylonian captivity).  Students, soldiers and tourists are getting into the project.  The team seems conflicted between the thrill of seeing artifacts come to life from areas inaccessible till now, countered by anger at the “archaeological crime” committed by the Muslims for their illegal excavations on this holiest of sites and their cavalier dumping of the soil over the wall.  For a taste of the responses, see the Talkback at the end of the article.
       The Jews have another reason for concern.  Muslims are planning to build a fifth minaret on the Temple Mount, the first construction in 639 years, and the tallest at 134 feet high.  Todd Bolen commented on the double standard in his Bible Places Blog for 10/13:

   Such a construction is a violation of the principle of status quo of disputed holy sites in Israel, and almost certainly will be built without any archaeological supervision.  It is ironic that if one wants to build a cottage in a remote part of Israel and antiquities are present, then an excavation must take place.  But if one wants to construct on one of the most important sites in the Holy Land, there are no such requirements.

   Update 11/10/2006: Todd Bolen has more pictures and commentary about Barkay’s rubble-sifting project at Bible Places Blog for 11/10.  He mentioned a website, har-habayt.org, that documents the situation on the Temple Mount, and said that a newer website is coming with up-to-date information.

The difference is incredibly stark between the way the Muslims and the Jews treat their history.  It’s plainly obvious to any tourist in the Holy Land.  Israeli national archaeological parks are clean, attractive, educational, and welcoming.  Go anywhere near a Muslim site without their approval only at the risk of death.  Jewish buses must avoid the West Bank for fear of being pelted with rocks or blown up.  Jews who would love to remember their sacred history on the Temple Mount are forbidden, but Muslim kids are free to play soccer, fly frisbees and drop their ice cream wrappers and other trash all over the place.  Many Palestinians make their living selling Biblical trinkets at places like Bethlehem, it is true, and not all Muslims approve of violence, but the Israeli Antiquities Authority has to walk on eggs to avoid riots even for protesting the violation of their most sacred sites.  Where is the United Nations?  Oh—most of them are Muslim or Muslim supporters.
    As to the Garden of Eden claim, get real.  This dig, though interesting, is post-Flood, and post-Babel, made perhaps by tribes without written language settling here to form the beginnings of settlements.  Every country wants some fame, but calling this Eden is illogical, if not a ploy for Turkey’s tourism industry.  It also treats the Biblical account of Eden like a myth, a mere fable portraying the evolution of primitive man to civilization.  It is apparent that whatever people made these structures were already civilized and talented.  Enjoy the pictures, but don’t buy the line.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Politics and Ethics

Highly reactive peroxide would scour organic chemicals from Martian soil, says [Gregory T.] Delory [UC Berkeley].  That process would make the surface of the Red Planet hostile to life.  Furthermore, because the planet lacks an ozone layer, large quantities of ultraviolet radiation reach Mars’ surface.  Deep in the soil, where neither ultraviolet radiation nor peroxide infiltrates, however, life might survive.

Delory left intact a tiny bit of hope by saying, “The jury’s still out as to whether there is life on Mars.”  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Physics

• Toad in the hole:  A blog named Toad in the Hole expresses some of the fervor of certain Darwinists who cannot tolerate the thought of intelligent design in a scientific context.  They are on a campaign to pressure libraries to move copies of Darwin’s Nemesis (an anthology by ID leaders about Phillip Johnson) from the life science section to the religion section. 
• Canadian intolerance:  For some Darwinists, it’s not enough to force creation and ID out of the public school science classrooms.  The Quebec National Post reported, “The Quebec Ministry of Education has told unlicensed Christian evangelical schools that they must teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and sex education or close their doors....”  Read what Evolution News said about this “winter chill” in Quebec.
• Dawkins Talkin’:  Richard Dawkins, on a book tour with The God Delusion, is making the rounds to combat religion.  The science journals are mostly praising the book, if not the intensity of his rhetoric.  The famous atheist and scientific rationalist has been also facing some stiff opposition, however; see Resurgence link to a YouTube clip (funny), and listen to this MP3 excerpt of debater David Quinn giving him a run for his money.  Terry Eagleton, English professor at U of Manchester (and no fundamentalist) was quite incensed at Dawkins and said so on the London Review of Books.  In addition, eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel (NYU School of Law) gave him bad press on National Review recently (see ID the Future).
      At an appearance at a local bookstore in Washington D.C., a visitor asked Dawkins whether it was consistent for him to believe in determinism and then take credit for writing his book.  Access Research Network tells how Dawkins hemmed and hawed, and then conceded he had to live as if determinism is false, and society must treat people as if they are responsible for their actions.  He admitted “it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable.”  Evolution News has links to more stories about how “everyone’s talkin’ about Dawkins’ crusade against religion.”  There’s more Dawkins Talk on William Dembski’s blog Uncommon Descent (Oct 25-26) and on Post-Darwinist.
• This means war:  When a British ID-friendly group named Truth in Science decided to give out free copies of the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to secondary schools throughout the UK, some in the media went ballistic.  Evolution News described the “unsupported assertions, editorializing in a manner that even some of the most agenda-driven reporting in the US has yet to do.”
• Detective mystery:  Who is the “British Centre for Science Education”?  David Anderson of Derbyshire decided to investigate.  He found some surprising clues about this organization which emerged to condemn the Truth in Science campaign, and reported his findings on his blog BCSE Revealed; it reads like a detective mystery.
• The Polish front:  The deputy education minister of Poland, a member of the conservative League of Polish Families (LPR) that entered the ruling coalition in May, got vocal with anti-Darwin statements recently: “The theory of evolution is a lie” and “It is an error we have legalized as a common truth.”  Immediately, the scientific establishment mobilized to fight this “catastrophe.”  Nature 10/26 reported that “Members of the Polish Academy of Sciences protested against the LPR campaign in an open letter that was published in several Polish newspapers,” hoping that “the quick response will avert damage to Polish science and education.”  Some were worried that “People could easily get the impression that there is a controversy about evolution among scientists.”
      Included in the report are charges that the LPR is “ultra-right-wing” (see loaded words) and that the deputy education minister has “openly homophobic, anti-Semitic and nationalistic opinions” and “is also known to favour creationist views” (see association).  It quoted one signer of the letter that said, “However, the point that really requires further discussion is not evolution, but how a minister can say such stupid things” (see ridicule).  Another researcher was “shocked” by the anti-Darwinist statements, saying, “We really did not expect a creationist movement to emerge in Poland.”  (Nature 443, 890-891(26 October 2006) | doi:10.1038/443890c).
• Keep on schmucking:  The same issue of Nature contains three favorable book reviews of anti-creationist books: (1) a mostly-favorable review by Lawrence M. Krauss of Dawkins” book The God Delusion, (2) a friendly review by Brian Charlesworth of Sean B. Carroll’s new book The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, and (3) a positive review by Paul Bloom and Izzat Jarudi of Marc D. Hauser’s book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong which presents “A view of morality as the product of an innate mental faculty – rather like language.”
      When creationism or intelligent design is mentioned at all in these reviews, it is only to dismiss it briefly; Charlesworth, for instance, says “A favourite ploy of creationists is to accept the possibility of small-scale evolutionary change by darwinian means, but to deny that this has any relevance to the evolution of complex structures or new species.”  A large cartoon in Krauss’s review shows a man with a sandwich board proclaiming, “Renounce God and be saved.”
• Remote slander takes no guts:  Columnist Mike Adams in his Oct 30 entry on TownHall.com describes how he had to give a speech to a hostile audience at the University of Minnesota.  Before he even arrived, he had been lambasted by P.Z. Myers, associate professor of biology at UMM and author of the anti-creationist blog Pharyngula (07/06/2006, 11/21/2005).  How had Myers described Adams?  For starters, “Horowitzian shill, anti-feminist, creationist clown, homophobic bigot, warrior for free speech, professional racist, gun kook, academic-by-accident, beauty contest judge, and just generally contemptible far, far right-wing nutcase.”¹  Adams told how Myers, though vicious in his attacks online, did not have the courage to ask any questions in person.  After the talk, which went smoothly without incident, Myers continued his web attacks afterwards, including telling lies that were refuted by the videotape.

The intensity of anti-creationist rhetoric exceeds all bounds of reason.  One cannot imagine these same people being as angry at the Taliban or child molesters as they are against a lot of innocent people who simply feel that whenever Darwinism is taught, students should have the right to know the problems also, and that evidence for design deserves to be discussed.  Remember: first they ignore you, then they fight you, then they become hysterical, then they collapse from brain short-circuits, then you win.  With reaction #3 right on cue, the ID Movement has a bright future.
Next headline on:  Darwin • Intelligent Design • Education

1. Bee Genes:  Nature published the honeybee genome this week.  This is important not only to entomologists, but to social scientists interested in the unique social structure of these insects, and to ecologists and agriculturalists interested in the economic importance of honeybees as pollinators.  Summaries of the genome report can be found on EurekAlert, Science Daily, CSIRO, National Geographic.  Another EurekAlert story contains links to other research papers.  Surprisingly, bees seem to have fewer protein-coding genes than other insects.
2. Bee Gems:  A fossil bee in amber claimed to be 100 million years old, 35-45 million years older than the previous record holder, was announced in Science.  Though it was predominantly bee-like in morphology, researchers claim it had some wasp-like characteristics that hinted of a common ancestry.  They’re claiming that the emergence of honeybees corresponded to the explosion of flowering plants.  Reports about this can be found on EurekAlert, Live Science, Science Daily, National Geographic and the BBC News.  The amber-imprisoned insect was in “remarkable condition, showing individual hairs on undamaged portions of its thorax, legs, abdomen and head. The legs and wings are clearly visible,” according to an Oregon State press release.
3. Beehavior:  EurekAlert reported on work at Arizona State attempting to explain the complex foraging behavior of bees from data in the genome.
4. Bee on time:  EurekAlert has a story about researchers at Hebrew University that found a surprise: “Biological clock of honey bee more similar to humans than to insects.”  Dr. Guy Bloch said, “Discovering that molecular characteristics of the biological clock in bees is closer to the biological clock of mammals than that of flies was a big surprise, since previously it had been thought that there is one type of clock that is typical of insects and another typical of mammals.  These results change our understanding of the evolution of circadian clocks.”
5. Out of Africa:  A press release from UC Irvine and a EurekAlert echo of work from University of Illinois claim that the bee genome shows that bees first emerged in Africa.  This is based on a paper in Nature Oct. 26.
6. Bee brain chemistry:  U of Illinois scientists are also figuring out the peptides in bee brains, reported EurekAlert.  A second EurekAlert story discussed findings about the chemoreceptors bees use to detect tastes and smells.  Apparently bees beat out fruit flies and mosquitos in smell receptors, but don’t have as much tasting equipment – surprising, considering their life around nectar.  Interesting fact: “There are a million neurons in the brain of a honey bee (Apis mellifera), a brain not much larger than the size of the period at the end of this sentence.”
7. Pollen nation:  The importance of pollination (principally by honeybees) was discussed in Science Daily and a press release from UC Berkeley.  The second article contains images of how much better fruits develop when pollinated by insects instead of wind or self-pollination.

There’s way too much material here to digest; links are provided for those who wish to follow up.  As usual, evolutionary storytelling occurs side-by-side with amazing observational facts about these marvelous insects.
    We may get afraid of the occasional bee that hovers over our picnic plate, but the wealth in our supermarkets depends on them.  Most won’t sting you if you don’t startle them.  Take the time to get to know honeybees.  They really are spectacular creations.  Imagine a million neurons, coded with biological clocks and social instincts and flight software, all packed into a brain as tiny as a period on a sentence.  Evolutionists claim they have changed little in 100 million years, even after coming out of Africa once upon a time and taking over the world and causing an explosion in flowering plant diversity.  Let’s help science once again focus on facts, not fables.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Genetics • Amazing Stories

You can’t call it a terror bird without being there to watch it.  Inferences from living ostriches and rheas are probably warranted, but maybe these were big, beautiful, stupid and sweet.  Maybe they would have made good pets.  Don’t put it together with the cat, though.  (Imagine it having a chirp like Here, kitty kitty kitty.)  Best put the bird in the yard and the cat in the cage.
Next headline on:  Birds • Fossils

The discovery of Priscomyzon within a Late Devonian marginal marine estuarine environment pushes the minimum date of lamprey-like fishes back by some 35 million years, and provides a new minimum date for molecular-clock-based estimates of the cyclostome crown node.  The well developed oral disc, annular cartilages and circumoral teeth of Priscomyzon suggests the evolutionary long-term stability of a highly specialized parasitic feeding habit.  Lampreys have long been recognized as highly apomorphic but only now is it possible to appreciate just how ancient these specializations are.  In this particular sense, lampreys might be described as ‘living fossils’, and Priscomyzon adds new phylogenetic perspective to studies using modern agnathans as model systems for deriving insight into primitive vertebrate conditions.

The relationships between living hagfishes, lampreys and jawed vertebrates are hotly debated, because of conflicting distributions of morphological and physiological traits on the one hand, and of DNA and RNA sequence data on the other.  The morphological and physiological aspects suggest that lampreys (but not hagfishes) are the sister group of jawed vertebrates, whereas gene sequences generally suggest that lampreys and hagfishes are sister groups.  Fossils sometimes help to resolve such conflicts, by revealing combinations of traits in an extinct species that better support a particular relationship.  Frustratingly, Priscomyzon does not help in resolving the problem of lamprey relationships, because it provides no new informative combinations of characteristics compared with post-Devonian and extant lampreys.
    Morphology-based evolutionary trees of living and fossil vertebrates have long been prone to change.

The researchers performed some tree-building magic with their new lamprey to give it the illusion of fitting into an evolutionary ancestry somehow, but clearly finding one so early, so little evolved, was a surprise.  Their unwieldy chart now has to place lampreys 35 million years farther back, where its unique morphology was already well-developed.  Then they have to claim that very little changed for 360 million years.  During that same amount of time, all the varieties of reptiles, birds, mammals, and land plants supposedly emerged: an embarrassment of riches for the fecund process of evolution.  Why did lampreys miss the party?  May as well add to the story; in the absence of fossils, National Geographic speculates, “When the fossilized lamprey lived, there were probably many types of jawless vertebrates.  Except for the lamprey and hagfish, all of them seem to have died out.”
    Interestingly, Janvier pointed out that we cannot assume a parasitic lifestyle just from the morphology.  It may look like this fossil lamprey used its mouth to suck blood, “Yet only 19 living lamprey species (out of 38) feed this way,” he said.  “Other lampreys mainly use their sucker to either secure themselves while at rest or carry stones for nest building.”  This opens the possibility that parasitism was a degenerate behavior for structures that had another purpose.
    The overarching theme, though, was the surprise of finding a nearly modern lamprey so far back in time; it means that any alleged common ancestor had to be pushed even farther back: “lamprey morphology has been astonishingly stable for 360 Myr,” Janvier said.  Thinking inside the Darwinian box, he said this “proves that lampreys and hagfishes had already diverged by late Devonian times, earlier than previously thought.”
    So there you have Darwinists experiencing the surprise effect of anomalies again, yet with no prospect of thinking outside the box.  (In fact, the same issue of Nature had several tirades against those close-minded, evil creationists.)  Finding organic molecules in fossils 350 million years old does little to jar the evolutionists, nor does finding living fossils virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.  The gumby Darwinists are masters at turning every falsification into confirmation.  The evolution talk is all in future tense, as usual: this “may give us insight” into evolution (yawn).  We’ve been waiting a long time for said insight, and all we keep getting is outdark.  It makes us downright ready to upchuck.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Life

Rock formations there are used as a frame of reference to judge the ages of rocks throughout North America.  So these new results mean that many scientists will have to revise their work.  Estimates of when certain animals went extinct may change.
    “Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people are going to have to re-examine work that they thought was done,” Cramer said.

“We have this great geological record of climate changes in the past,” Cramer said.  “The problem is, the rate of change that we’re worried about in the modern day is on a very short time scale.  And when we look into the deep past, our ability to know where we are in time isn’t that precise.  If we can get our time constraints down more precisely, we can begin to ask the same sort of questions of the past that we’re asking of the modern era.”

The Niagara Gorge was the site of another episode where the word “unfortunately” is apt.  Creation on the Web retells how Charles Lyell, the father of uniformitarian geology (who had a huge influence on Darwin) fudged the data about the rate of erosion of Niagara Falls.  His estimate of the age of the falls—35,000 years—undermined the faith of many Christians about the Biblical record of the age of the earth.  Only after the damage was done did the facts come out: his estimate was also at least four to five times too slow!  The corrected date puts the age at an upper limit of 7000-9000 years, much more credible in a Biblical timescale, considering that the erosion would have been much more rapid right after the Flood.
    Now, another measurement in the same gorge has been found to be off by a factor of five.  Sure, everything is still stated in terms of millions of years, but bigger questions need to be faced.  Think of the confidence that many other geologists placed in the earlier estimate.  Think of the timelines, tables, and charts published in geology textbooks and scientific papers that counted on the Ireviken Excursion dating to a particular age and rate of formation.  Now, “a lot of people are going to have to re-examine work that they thought was done.”  They need to re-examine at a much deeper level and question another formation: the geological column itself.
    Uniformitarian geologists might respond that this error represents one correction out of a vast body of data and will not have that big an impact on the geological column.  But Cramer’s comments bear deeper reflection: “when we look into the deep past, our ability to know where we are in time isn’t that precise.”  Then he said that “if we can get our time constraints down more precisely, we can begin to ask” the pertinent questions (italics added).  That is a big if.  Geologists apparently counted on this marker from 1800 to 2006, only to find that the formation was laid down at least five times faster than they had estimated.  What confidence can we have in other measurements?  How much can one infer about millions of years when all he has to go on is some carbon isotope ratios?
    The problem is, their methods are married to their assumptions, and those assumptions were raised in Darwinland.  Cramer was only questioning the rate of formation of this particular gorge, not the framework of geological history that assumes it occurred hundreds of millions of years ago when fish were presumably evolving.  A new generation of geologists needs to arise with bigger questions, and fewer assumptions.  For too long, the marriage of geology with evolutionary theory has been a bondage instead of a blessed union.  Calling a rock stratum “Silurian” for convenience based on a type section is harmless taxonomy, but why must Silurian correspond to evolutionary beliefs?  The evolutionary beliefs usually dictate the interpretations.
    For example, as we have seen, no one in secular geology questioned the disconnect between the geo-evolutionary assumption that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and the finding of flexible soft tissues in a dinosaur bone (06/03/2005, 03/24/2005).  It’s like a wife exclaiming, “Wow, look at how fresh this bone looks!” only to have the husband put his hand over her mouth and tell the reporters, “What she means is, we have just realized that soft tissue can survive 65 million years, because we all know that dinosaurs went extinct long before humans evolved.  Isn’t that right, honey?” and she nods submissively in agreement.
    Evolution is an abusive spouse.  It beats research into conformity with its own needs and desires.  If geology can get a divorce from evolution, and if geologists can once again start dating outside the Darwin Party concentration camp, a union of new questions and answers might emerge from the minds of liberated researchers, and the offspring could be precocious.  For a good discussion on thinking anew, read The Right Questions by Dr. Phillip E. Johnson.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

This upset is just the next episode in a long line of speculations about what happened to the dinosaurs.  They thought they finally had it nailed with the big crater in Mexico.  Now that the impact theory is coming under fire, it’s going to be a hard sell with these new scenarios.  Why didn’t the worms afflict the mammals and birds that came through the extinction unscathed?  Why didn’t global warming and volcanism have the same effect on all animal groups?  Dinosaurs, remember, inhabited almost every longitude and latitude on the globe, and were successfully adaptive in a wide variety of climes.
    If they perished in a world-wide flood, however, and the remaining stock were hunted to extinction as pests by humans, this would fit the evidence.  The flood was accompanied by volcanism and, maybe, triggered by meteor impacts.  If this sounds too radical, it’s no more radical than finding soft tissue inside the bones of a T. rex (02/22/2006).  Evolutionists haven’t been able to hold onto an explanation that fits the evidence any better.  The Science Daily article ended, What the microfossils are saying is that Chicxulub probably aided the demise of the dinosaurs, but so did Deccan trap volcanism’s greenhouse warming effect and finally a second huge impact that finished them off.  So where’s the crater?
    “I wish I knew,” said Keller.  “There is some evidence that it may have hit in India, where a crater of about 500 kilometers in diameter is estimated and named Shiva by paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee from the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock.  The evidence for it, however, is not very compelling at this time.”

It’s funny.  It’s cute.  But here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real.  It is not the way we got here.  In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live.  We are not creations of random chance.  We are not accidents.  There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me.  We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures.

Corrected version: There is no theory of evolution.  Just a list of Darwin Party creatures Chuck Norris has not shared Christ with yet.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Theology

But nearly 150 years after Darwin first brought this elegant idea to the world’s attention when he published The Origin of Species, the evolution of complex structures can still be hard to accept.  Most of us can envision natural selection tweaking a simple trait—making an animal furrier, for example, or its neck longer.  Yet it’s harder to picture evolution producing a new complex organ, complete with all its precisely interlocking parts.  Creationists claim that life is so complex that it could not have evolved.  They often cite the virtuoso engineering of the bacterial tail, which resembles a tiny electric motor spinning a shaft, to argue that such complexity must be the direct product of “intelligent design” by a superior being.
    The vast majority of biologists do not share this belief.  Studying how complex structures came to be is one of the most exciting frontiers in evolutionary biology, with clues coming at remarkable speed.

In case you didn’t notice, National Geographic’s understanding of Darwinism and the many philosophical and evidential arguments against it is not much above a high school freshman level.  There are so many problems in their presentation, and so much pure propaganda the way it is presented, the editors ought to be ashamed of themselves.  For instance, they still appeal to Haeckel’s embryo argument—not with Haeckel’s original forged drawings, but with newer ones that do not look at all alike.  But the caption says, “The early embryos of three different vertebrates—a fish, a chicken, and a human—look much the same.”  Any reader is going to look at the drawings and say, “Huh?”
    Where have the editors been?  Don’t they read the literature against Darwinism?  Don’t they know how to deal at a more scholarly level with problems that even biologists inside the Darwin Party acknowledge?  In their simplistic minds, Hox genes under natural selection can create anything and everything, even “Masterworks” of engineering.  They chide creationists for finding it “hard to accept” the evolution of complex structures.  This is classic question begging.  Who says it’s right to accept a flawed theory, full of holes and wishful thinking with the whitewash of artwork substituting for the brick and mortar of evidence?
    You may have noticed the similarity of Carl Zimmer’s title “A fin is a limb is a wing” with the statement by Ingrid Newkirk of PETA (see source), “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”  No they aren’t, and no he isn’t.  Notice how word choice is operative in the propaganda both PETA and NG employ: a human boy is a rat when they want to dispose of a fetus, but an extinct ape’s juvenile offspring is a “baby” when they want to promulgate evolutionary philosophy.  Connect the dots between the philosophies of both of these dehumanizing, desensitizing philosophies.  If you get a picture you don’t like, it’s time to write more letters to the editor.
    Dr. Brad Harrub has investigated the “Lucy’s Baby” evidence on Apologetics Press.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man

The fossil skeleton shows the fish’s skull had large holes for breathing through the top of the head but importantly also had muscular front fins with a well-formed humerus, ulna and radius – the same bones are found in the human arm.

Whereas the braincase and dermal cranial skeleton exhibit generalized morphologies with respect to Eusthenopteron or Panderichthys, taxa that are traditionally considered to be phyletically close to tetrapods, the presence of a deeply invaginated, wide spiracle, advanced internal spiracular architecture and near-horizontal hyomandibula are specialized features that are absent from Eusthenopteron.  Furthermore, the pectoral fin skeleton of Gogonasus shares several features with that of Tiktaalik, the most tetrapod-like fish.  A new phylogenetic analysis places Gogonasus crownward of Eusthenopteron as the sister taxon to the Elpistostegalia.  Aspects of the basic tetrapod limb skeleton and middle ear architecture can now be traced further back within the tetrapodomorph radiation.

The conspicuously large spiracular opening (Fig. 1a-c) is proportionally similar to those recently reconstructed for Panderichthys and Tiktaalik.  The pectoral fin endoskeleton of Gogonasus is described here for the first time (Fig.  2), the new specimen being the only known Devonian fish that shows a complete acid-prepared pectoral limb.  There are some surprising similarities to the recently described pectoral fin in the advanced elpistostegalian Tiktaalik.  As such features could indicate homoplasy between Gogonasus and early tetrapods, we present a revised character analysis to determine whether the new anatomical information supports a more crownward position for Gogonasus in the stem-tetrapod phylogeny.

When you read scientific papers, with all their unknowns, all their qualifiers and disclaimers and uncertainties and admissions of doubt and lack of evidence, then read the popular news reports gleaming with confidence and glittering generalities glibly stating how some new fossil proves evolution, it gets really disgusting.  Any Darwin Party advocate holding up a stack of science journals at a school board meeting and claiming they represent mounds of evidence backing up Charlie’s wacko story about humans coming from bacteria is either a charlatan or a dupe of the popular press.
    When you hear a wild, reckless claim like “This is the mother of all tetrapods!” don’t be a sucker.  Read the original source paper like we do.  It has the fine print.  It suggests a revised claim that, unfortunately, makes for a very poor sound bite for reporters: something like:

If we could figure out how these shallow-water inhabitants got from Australia to the arctic, and if we had the soft parts, and if we understood how morphological features could appear and disappear and re-appear within a Darwinian mechanism, and if we could unscramble these mosaics and redistribute them into lineages, and if we had the vaguest idea of what kind of environments the creatures actually lived in, and if we could rule out the possibility (as in Coelacanth) that the observed bones were used for other purposes other than what we expect, and if we could wiggle out of the Lamarckian charge of orthogenesis, and if we could somehow connect these morphological differences to beneficial mutations that natural selection could act on (with no purpose or goal in mind that they might prove advantageous on land, if both the breathing apparatus and the fin bones were to get lucky at the same time), then we might be able to make the claim that our particular fossil fits somewhere in an ancestral relationship to tetrapods, however controversial, that could be a contender in scientific conferences, and could get us some powerpoint slides that won’t be criticized, and might get us some brief popularity at the closing dinner, and maybe even a question from a reporter, or at least avoidance of ridicule, until our rivals find something else the following spring that blows our entire scheme out of the water.

That, discerning students, is how real Darwinism is done.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Life • Darwinism

The creationist faithful would do well to take a look, says van Wyhe.  “If people feel so strongly about Darwin, they should actually take the time to read his own words rather than relying only on the interpretations of others.”  Even if this doesn’t convert them to evolution by natural selection, it should expose the popular misconception that Darwin had an anti-Christian agenda, he says.  “This was not what he was about,” says van Wyhe.  “He was simply a scientist trying to explain how the world works.”

It’s a fair request that creationists consult the actual words of Darwin instead of relying on the interpretations of others, as long as that same request cuts both ways.  Darwinists routinely misquote and misunderstand the points of creationists and those in the intelligent design movement.  Many Darwinists don’t understand Charlie, either—including Mr. van Wyhe who thinks Darwin had no anti-Christian agenda and “was simply a scientist trying to explain how the world works.”  Read Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin for some disturbing details that provide more finesse than a quick either-or judgment on Darwin’s motivation.
    Critics of Darwin should welcome this site.  Now it will be possible to trace the evolution of Darwin’s own ideas, including his loss of faith in the Bible.  For instance, early editions of Voyage of the Beagle are said to indicate he still believed the Bible and creation, and supported Christian missionaries for some time after his voyage, till gradually his faith wore away under the influence of ideas from Lyell and others who cast doubt on the historicity of Scripture.  His mind began to interpret what he had seen in terms of slow, gradual change over long periods of time.  Now that the uniformitarian foundation that caused this slide into apostasy has been undermined, it is well to consider the lesson of building a world view on fallible ideas.
    A digital archive is not the same as a book.  With the advantages come some disadvantages.  One can only hope the administrators of both websites will have high standards of integrity, and will not surreptitiously expunge politically incorrect words or passages from the documents.  Van Wyhe need not fear creationist faithful will avoid taking a look.  When some uncomfortable details come out, the question will become, will the Darwinist faithful take a look?
Next headline on:  Darwin • Bible and Theology

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.  At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated.  The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Stringer, a positivist and progressivist, thinks science is self-correcting, and will no longer fall for such a low deed.  We leave it to the reader to judge if the Darwin Party has learnt their lessons, or earnt any credibility or respect among civilized human beings.  Maybe we should let them inhabit their own island and evolve this way if they want to.  The rest of us will read good books and hone our social skills for the common good, choose our soul-mates wisely, and develop the moral character needed to be good citizens and fulfill our Creator-endowed rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of eudaimonia.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

These experiments suggest that the diptera [flies] may have ‘opened their eyes’ (invented neural superposition) by a single change: reprogramming the expression of Spacemaker [a gene] for novel expression in the ommatidia [the eye segments].  It is not often that we get such a clear glimpse of the blind watchmaker at work.

The Role of God in Science and Life    10/18/2006  
Big science today may seem to be controlled by atheists, but that’s clearly not the case for many involved in science.  Here are two unrelated stories from unexpected quarters expressing support for belief in God:

• No God, No Scientific Laws:  Noted philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has a new paper coming out that argues that one cannot have the concept of scientific laws without God.  The full paper, that begins as follows, is available on her personal website.

  My thesis is summarized in my title, ‘No God, No Laws’: the concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God.  It is not as dramatic a thesis as it might look, however.  I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God.  Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God.

  Cartwright, a philosophy professor at LSE and UCSD, won the McArthur prize in 1993.  She has previously argued that science gives us a dappled picture of the world, not a progressive, exact, certain image of reality.
      Speaking of God and philosophy, another philosopher of science, Del Ratzsch, was interviewed by Galilean Library.  He talked about God-of-the-gaps, front-loading, intelligent design, scientific motivations and other issues related to science and theology.  He said he has been influenced by a third philosopher of science, Alvin Plantinga – another who has made a case for God in scientific endeavor.

• No God, No Career:  Shuttle astronaut Jack Lousma said his faith led him to his career in space and gave the program success, reported Petoskey News.  Speaking at a church in Michigan, the 70-year-old veteran of 17 years as an astronaut spoke of his faith that began at age 9.

  It was that belief in God that led him to his career with NASA and helped him through his 17 years as an astronaut.
      “I believe my relationship with Jesus Christ and my decision to do so was the best decision I ever made,” Lousma said during the “Dinner with an Astronaut” evening hosted by the Liberty Baptist Church of Alanson.  “At every juncture ... we noted that whenever there was a change it was God directed.  God helped us prosper.”

Lousma’s testimony recalls Solomon’s wisdom in Proverbs 3:5-6 – “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.”  Maybe that’s why the Darwinists are in such a hopeless muddle of dogmatism on the one hand, and despair on the other: they do not acknowledge God.
    Great Christians scientists have been known to stop and pray for wisdom and guidance in the lab during their work.  They were not asking for miracles, but for Divine guidance and providence, knowing their own limitations, and acknowledging the wisdom of the Maker of Nature.  That’s perfectly natural.
    Are you reading this and missing out on the vast, spiritual dimension of reality?  Are you adrift with a world view lacking purpose and direction?  Faith in God is not antithetical to science: look at Newton, Faraday, Pasteur, von Braun and so many other scientific heroes outlined in our online book.  They believed, like astronaut Lousma, that God directed them into science and gave them success; Newton said, “All my discoveries have been made in answer to prayer.”  Read the wise words of Boyle, Joule and von Braun about science and God.
    If you are not ready for this, do a controlled experiment.  Live like a consistent Darwinist.  Don’t use the phrase scientific law.  Purge your mind of all thoughts of purpose, beauty, direction, goals and morality (if you can do this for more than a few seconds without pain), and imagine a world where everyone felt the same.  Ask yourself: can I live with this belief?
    That’s one half the experiment.  Now try out Proverbs 3:5-6 on yourself.  It must be sincere, though; no scientific fraud gets past the Ultimate Reviewer.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

• Weird Tooth:  An “ancient mammal that defies classification” has been given a name, at least.  EurekAlert reported that Horolodectes sunae, found 30 years ago in Alberta, remains a mystery: “the creature mystified the researchers, who could not positively identify it, and exactly where it fits into the evolutionary ladder is still unknown.  Horolodectes remains an enigma to this day.”
• Dwarf Hoof:  A previously unknown dwarf water buffalo was found by chance in the Philippines, reported EurekAlert.  The Field Museum points to this as a classic case of “island dwarfing,” in which natural selection produces smaller species due to limitations on resources in isolated environments.  See also the New York Times and Science Daily reports.
• Super Camel:  A fossilized camel, twice as big as today’s models and as big as a giraffe or elephant, was found in Syria, according to the BBC News.  They think this previously-unknown species may have been living 100,000 years ago – maybe even a million.  “It was not known that the dromedary was present in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago,” said one paleontologist.  This biggie had competition: “It may even have been killed by humans, who were living at the once water-rich site during the same period.”
• Mighty Mouse:  For a story about a mammal still wearing its fur, BBC News reported a “living fossil” rodent on Cyprus.  Mus cypriacus was thought to have gone extinct an estimated 9-10,000 years ago when humans arrived on the Mediterranean island.  It was thought that every species of mammal in Europe had been identified.  Apparently giant camels couldn’t stand up to human hunters, but humans never did build the ultimate mousetrap.

“Living fossil” is the opposite of “Fossilized liver.”  Are you pretending to be alive, when your soul is dead?  Better to be a living fossil than a fossilized liver.  Live to the fullest while you can, before you become a dead fossil.  Solomon said, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).  You might want to check out this entry next.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Fossils

Titan, has a dense atmosphere of nitrogen with a few per cent of methane.  At visible wavelengths its surface is hidden by dense orange-brown smog, which is produced in the stratosphere by photochemical reactions following the dissociation of methane by solar ultraviolet light.  The most abundant of the products of these reactions is ethane, and enough of it should have been generated over the life of the Solar System to form a satellite-wide ocean one kilometre deep.... Here I explain the mysterious absence or rarity of liquid ethane: it condenses onto the smog particles, instead of into liquid drops, at the cold temperatures in Titan’s atmosphere.  This dusty combination of smog and ethane, forming deposits several kilometres thick on the surface, including the observed dunes and dark areas, could be named ‘smust’.  This satellite-wide deposit replaces the ocean long thought to be an important feature of Titan.

It is entirely reasonable that these few molecules would not reside on the smust particles.  A possible difficulty is that this small amount of ethane vapour would be unable to condense.  On the other hand, if more ethane were available one would expect the cloud particles to grow larger; probably the attachment of most of the ethane to the smust particles is necessary to prevent this.

It’s fair to propose an explanation for something, but a little unfair to propose one when it cannot be tested for a long time.  It may be well into the 2030s before another probe returns to Titan, and even then, it may be a blimp-like device incapable of digging several kilometers into the surface to measure the deposits.  What if Hunten’s mechanism works somewhat, and a lander detects these smust particles on the surface, but cannot determine if the layer is only inches deep?  One could not know that there is enough of it to explain the missing billions of years without extremely difficult and costly efforts.  Additionally, it is very difficult to simulate Titan conditions on Earth.  The only lab evidence Hunten mentioned did not support his theory:

It would be desirable to verify in the laboratory the attachment of ethane molecules to smog particles, here deduced from their behaviour on Jupiter.  Such particles, with their fluffy structure, have, however, not been produced in experiments, which instead generate a dense deposit on the walls of the vessel.  It will be a challenge to reproduce this structure along with a realistic composition, and then to expose the particles to ethane molecules.

In other words, this is just an airy, fluffy suggestion on his part.  Even if the particles formed and fell as he suggested, what would keep them from liquefying on the surface after they compacted?  The fact is, Titan was not the oceanic planet that the best scientists predicted.  Speculating after the fact what happened to the missing ethane is not science till verified.  While no one would deny Dr. Hunten his right to speculate based on his own assumptions about the age of Titan, his little story should not be put forth as “the answer” to this huge problem.  Speculation is no substitute for openmindedness that one’s assumptions could be vastly in error.
    As for the relentless suggestions that liquid water or ethane mean the possibility of life, this is so silly it is tiring.  Here’s a better form of entertainment that’s realistic.  For a wild ride down to the surface of Titan aboard Huygens, based on actual photos and measurements, download the animations from the Huygens CD-Rom available from the European Space Agency.  For the download page, click here.
Next headline on:  Geology • Physics • Solar System • Origin of Life

The ancient rise of atmospheric oxygen is of great interest because of its close relationship with evolution, but the geological evidence for this is indirect and subject to interpretation.  The consensus for more than 30 years has been that atmospheric oxygen first reached appreciable levels around 2 billion to 2.4 billion years ago, an occasion known as the great oxidation event (GOE).  But doubters of this event have remained.

But this would still leave some unexplained observations.  For example, the Witwatersrand gold deposits in South Africa contain detrital minerals that were washed down streams between 2.8 billion and 3.0 billion years ago.  In the presence of oxygen, these minerals should have become oxidized and dissolved.  So, either the oxygen levels were never high enough for that, or they repeatedly went up and came back down very quickly.  Or perhaps oxygen concentrations did not increase at all, and the low-MIF anomaly seen in post-GOE rocks was produced by some entirely anoxic mechanism, such as the shielding of solar ultraviolet rays by an organic haze.

What needs a Great Oxidation Event is the air in the Darwin Party Castle.  It is so stuffy in there it’s stifling.  Maybe science would take on giant new wings in a less suffocating environment.
    It is an observational fact, though, that giant insects did once inhabit the earth.  It’s interesting to study what environmental conditions allowed for giantism, not only in insects, but in other organisms, including mammals, and what the hazards might have been: e.g., more wildfire?  Or was the oxygen increase also moderated by higher humidity?  Some of these factors can be tested by observational lab science.  The interpretation of past events, though, and when they occurred, as shown in the first article, is a yo-yo pastime.  “The ancient atmosphere may have had a more complex evolution than we imagined,” Kasting said, using evolution in the equivocal sense of “change over time.”  But when your clock is broken, and your data are contradictory, and your assumptions are circular, maintaining dogmatic allegiance to Darwinism could be called ear-aversable complicity.
Next headline on:  Geology • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils

Articles like this typically fail to mention anything about evolution.  This was no exception.  One could argue that research like this is owned and operated, from conception to application, by intelligent design, inc.
Next headline on:  Plants • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Despite hypotheses that Doushantuo embryos are unusual in comparison to most known metazoans, the patterns of cleavage and cell topology are compatible with a range of animal groups.  For instance, in embryos composed of eight or more cells, the offset arrangement of successive tiers of cells, strong cell cohesion, and a stereoblastic cell topology are comparable to early cleavage embryos of many arthropod groups.  Stereoblastulae are also particularly common among sponges and scyphozoan cnidarians.  Doushantuo embryos composed of many hundreds of cells resemble the purported gastrulae of demosponges, before the development of parenchymella larvae, although at this stage demosponges exhibit evidence of gastrulation, with a differentiated superficial layer of micromeres surrounding a core of macromeres.

If all the Darwinian assumptions (biological, paleontological and geological) were purged out of this story, you would only have some advanced-looking embryos in a certain layer of Chinese rocks.  They are incapable of interpreting themselves.  The simplest explanation is that complexity exists from the very beginning of the fossil record, whenever that was.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Fossils

1. Contingency:  In Current Biology,¹ Doug Erwin (Smithsonian Institute) wrote a quick guide to “Evolutionary Contingency.”  Right off the bat, Erwin answered the first question, “What is contingency?” with the response, “Chance, in a word.” 

   For instance, all living sea urchins, sand dollars, heart urchins and other echinoids are descended from one (possibly two) species that survived the great End-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago.... One can argue that the group with two plates was somehow better adapted, or that they simply survived by chance.  In truth, either possibility is equally likely.  Because we only have a single case, we have no way to choose between the two.

   The answer to the next question had an equally short first sentence.  “How do we know?”  His response: “We don’t!”  He claims that convergence is very common, but it’s hard to test for contingency.  He mentions Stephen Jay Gould as the best-known champion of a contingent view of the history of life on earth.
       Erwin answered the final question, “Are contingency and convergence opposing views of how evolution operates?”

   One hopes not, as both have clearly been important in the history of life.  As is so often the case in evolutionary biology, this is an issue of relative frequency, not absolute possibility.  Chance can limit which groups are around to evolve, where they live, and even the range of future morphological possibilities.  Convergence often reflects limited engineering solutions to particular problems, but does not predict that particular groups are likely to survive over the long-term.  And convergence has little to do with many aspects of evolution where selection, genetic drift and chance are free to come up with the remarkable diversity of butterfly wing patterns, arthropod legs or the colors on seashells.

2. Convergence:  In a companion piece in the same issue of Current Biology,² Simon Conway Morris discussed the flip side of evolutionary theory, convergence.  He didn’t explain how different organisms could evolve to similar forms.  He just asserted that they did.

   Consider your eye and that of an octopus.  Both are built based on the camera principle, yet you are closely related to a starfish while the octopus is a near cousin of the oyster.  The common ancestor of you and the octopus lived about 550 million years ago and at most possessed a simple eye-spot.  Regarding the eyes, vertebrates and molluscs have arrived at the same solution, and in doing so have solved equally successfully problems such as how to correct spherical aberration.  Camera-eyes are a brilliant evolutionary invention, and so it is less surprising that they convergently emerged in at least five other groups, including cubozoan jellyfish.

   [See 05/13/2005 on cubozoan jellyfish.]  Morris gives other putative examples of convergent evolution in nature.  He says that while instances are remarkable, convergence as an evolutionary principle is not obvious.  Oddly, he says that evolution should not produce convergence at the molecular level, but “is probably far more common than realized.”  For example, he says carbonic anhydrase evolved five times – but “that is modest when compared to C4 photosynthesis, which has arisen at least 30 times.”
       Simon Conway Morris is such a strong believer in environmental forcing of convergent adaptation, he thinks extraterrestrials will think like us.  But they certainly will not think like creationists.  In answering the last question, “Why does convergence matter?” he said,

   It shows adaptation is real, and not some Darwinian conspiracy.  It insists that organisms are functionally integrated and not a heap of character states.  Paradoxically, the very similarities seen in convergence are some of the best proofs of evolution.  Next time you are cornered by a pair of creationists order them a stiff gin and tonic and then ask him why the position of the retina is opposite in our eye to that of octopus (clue: embryology), and ask her why the bacterial flagellar motor has evolved at least twice.  Then when they are sobering up remind them that the way in which Drosophila reacts to ethanol is remarkably similar in terms of behaviour to the manner in which we get drunk.  Please raise a glass to convergence.

   So rather than seeing common design, Morris sees in the remarkable convergence of parts in different lineages an even stronger proof of evolution.  And it matters because it can give you something to argue over with a drunk creationist.

3. Evolvability:  The evolution of the ability to evolve (see 08/04/2004) is the topic of another article in Current Biology by Sniegowski and Murphy.³  This concept is recent and controversial, they begin:

   Increasing numbers of biologists are invoking ‘evolvability’ to explain the general significance of genomic and developmental phenomena affecting genetic variation.  What exactly is evolvability, and how important is it likely to be for our understanding of evolution?  Definitions of evolvability are almost as numerous as the papers and books that have been written on the subject.  All definitions agree that evolvability has to do with the capacity of populations to evolve – no surprise there.  In actual use, however, evolvability can be a rather slippery concept with a variety of meanings and implications.  The goals of this primer are to try to pin down some of the meanings of evolvability and to explain why evolvability is a controversial subject.

   Whatever it means, though, it does not mean purpose or goal.  That is made clear in a paragraph entitled, “The problem of teleology” –

   The idea that variability has been fine-tuned in order to maximize the evolutionary potential of populations is certainly controversial, although it is not new.  The obvious reason to be suspicious of this idea is that it suggests a teleological view of evolution.  Natural selection cannot adapt a population for future contingencies any more than an effect can precede its cause, so any future utility of the capacity to generate variation can have no influence on the maintenance of that capacity in the present.  As Sydney Brenner supposedly remarked many years ago, it would make no sense for a population in an early geological period to retain a feature that was useless merely because it might “come in handy in the Cretaceous!”

   Clearly, then, evolvability must be an unguided (i.e., chance) process.  The authors explain their ideas on how this capacity might have come about in a contingent world.  Evolvability is a by-product of the random walk of evolution, they say.  Seeming to realize they have wandered into the bypass meadow of speculation, they repent and ask how the evolvability-as-byproduct hypothesis might be testable.  Surprise: it isn’t—

   In fact, it is rather easy to pile up examples of genomic and developmental features that may affect evolvability, and this is a bit troubling: How do we know when it is necessary – rather than just appealing – to invoke evolvability differences in order to explain evolutionary histories?  The problem here is that the evolvability-as-byproduct hypothesis is probably correct in a very broad sense that tells us little we did not already know: because newly arising variation modifies existing organismal blueprints, large differences between taxa imply differences in the kinds and amounts of new variation that can arise....
       Invoking variability as a retrospective explanation for why one clade has diversified or changed more than another does not rule out the possibility that the clades evolved differently for reasons unrelated to variability.  And finding related to distinctive variability mechanisms — for example, mutations of major phenotypic effect caused by transposable elements — provides only anecdotal evidence for the importance of such variability mechanisms in evolution.  As other commentators on evolvability have noted, there is a need for quantitative, testable predictions concerning evolvability rather than retrospective and anecdotal arguments.  Approaches such as computer simulation and long-term experimental evolution may yield some progress in this direction because they allow direct manipulation and assessment of the effects of variability differences on evolution, but even these kinds of approaches may not provide dependable insights into whether and how variability differences have actually affected the evolution of natural populations.

   In fact, their last sentence says that it’s only an interesting – but largely untested – hypothesis.”  This may be a disconcerting conclusion to readers looking for something a little more substantive in modern evolutionary thought.  But that’s not all: they said earlier that in spite of major advances in molecular biology in the last few decades, “our fundamental genetic understanding of natural selection developed before 1950 and has not changed in major ways since then.”  Is evolutionary explanatory power stuck in a rut?  Maybe so, but when working with hypotheses based on chance, don’t expect nice and neat answers.  This, however, is no excuse for storytelling:

   To some, this historical disjunction suggests that evolutionary theory cannot account for the origin and maintenance of mechanisms affecting variability and is overdue for major revision.  It is indeed attractive to suppose that the most important evolutionary feature of organisms – their very capacity to evolve and adapt – is itself an adaptation, but this is probably only true in highly restricted circumstances.  Instead, variability is probably most often a byproduct of the messy and intricate ways in which genomes have evolved.  And the possibility that incidental differences in variability between populations have caused differences in evolvability with profound consequences for evolutionary history remains an interesting — but largely untested — hypothesis.

4. Creatures of Accident:  In Nature,⁴ Matthew Wills [U of Bath] reviewed a book by Wallace Arthur whose title clearly indicates that chance is king in Darwin’s theory: Creatures of Accident: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom (Hill & Wang, 2006).  Wills began with a rather dogmatic statement of evolution-as-fact:

   All life on Earth, no matter how complex, shares a common, very simple, ancestor.  You and the bacteria in your gut have been evolving away from this starting point for precisely the same length of time.  So how is it that you are capable of perusing a magazine, whereas your gut bacteria look little different from the most ancient prokaryote fossils we know?  The answer, in a nutshell, is development.

   With answers that firm, students may not want to ask further questions, unless they want to think outside the nut shell.  Wills proceeded to speculate about the controversy of whether evolution is progressive, egalitarian, or deterministic.  He leans toward Simon Conway Morris:

   The human brain enables behaviours vastly more elaborate than those of even our closest relatives.  But is this an inevitable corollary of evolution?  Arthur –like Simon Conway Morris in his excellent book Life’s Solution (Cambridge University Press, 2003) – thinks it probably is.

   Presumably, the “development” spoken of in Wills’ nutshell answer is a random process.  The question whether complexity is inevitable from unguided developmental evolution led to an aside about theology.  Wills made a timid appeal for less excoriation of theism by Arthur, (as long as it is humanistic and liberal, like that of prominent evolutionary thinkers like “George Gaylord Simpson, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Stephen Jay Gould and even Charles Darwin from time to time”) but the appeasement was more than drowned out by his vitriol aimed at any and all Darwin doubters: “The subtext and closing chapters [of Arthur’s book] are an attack on fundamentalism of every stripe.  Pleasingly, there is little explicit tilting at the straw men of creationism and intelligent design: atheism and theism are equally irrational in Arthur’s view,” he said, lumping together a wide range of views into the narrowest pigeonhole for easy snuffing.

These Darwinists, who by their own admission are wandering aimlessly in speculation space, nevertheless get free rein in the science rags to trash creationists without consequence.  But what proof do they have for their beloved dogma?  Only 30 proof – the stiff gin and tonic that Morris offered.  No thanks, we don’t drink (10/07/2006 commentary).  When scientific standards return, and the lazy goofballs in the Darwin Party lounges are kicked out (12/22/2003 commentary), there will be a second scientific revolution.  Led by intelligent design instead of chance, it will make the first revolution seem elementary.
Next headline on:  Darwinism

• The Ladolam hydrothermal system, on Lihir Island, Papua New Guinea, hosts one of the youngest and largest gold deposits in the world.  Several deep (more than 1 kilometer) geothermal wells were drilled beneath the ore bodies to extract water at >275°C and to facilitate open-pit mining.  Using a titanium down-hole sampler, we determined that the deep geothermal brine of magmatic origin contains 15 parts per billion gold.  At the current gold flux of 24 kilograms per year, this deposit could have formed within 55,000 years.  The combination of sustained metal flux and efficient metal precipitation led to the formation of a giant hydrothermal gold deposit in a short period.
• The origins of giant hydrothermal gold deposits are enigmatic.  This is because the concentrations of precious metals and flow rates of ore-forming fluids are poorly quantified, and the origins of the metals are unclear.
• The deep geothermal brine contains high gold concentrations [13 to 16 parts per billion (ppb) Au], and these values greatly exceed those measured (0.05 to 0.2 ppb Au) in high-temperature submarine hydrothermal fluids.  Except for Sb and Pb, the proportions of Au, Ag, Cu, Mo, Zn, and As in the deep geothermal brine match those in the ore (Fig. 3), suggesting that these elements were not fractionated during deposition.
• The Ladolam heat flow (50 to 70 MW) is modest compared with that of well-known geothermal systems such as Wairakei (420 MW) and Waiotapu (540 MW) in New Zealand.  The overall Ladolam gold flux is 24 kg/year, and only 55,000 years would be required to account for all the known gold in the Ladolam ores if we assume constant aqueous gold concentration and fluid flow (50 kg/s), and 100% deposition.
• Although the Ladolam gold concentrations are lower than a theoretical upper limit of 10,000 ppb, as determined by inclusion fluid analyses and calculations of magmatic hydrothermal solutions, the deep Ladolam brine is capable of forming a giant gold deposit within tens of thousands of years.
• That gold transport and deposition operated effectively and in concert on a time scale of several tens to possibly several hundreds of thousands of years emphasizes the importance of synchronizing these processes to generate a giant deposit.

• Direct analyses of the gold concentration in these recent fluids demonstrate an intimate link of ore formation to magmatic processes and indicate that metal enrichment occurred in a geologically short period of time.  The authors imply that gold mineralization may even go on today, while ore is mined from steaming hot ground in a giant open cut...
• How much fluid is required to form a major ore deposit, and how long does the process take--centuries or millions of years?
• Simmons and Brown calculate that it took 55,000 years to accumulate the 1600 metric tons of gold now contained in the Ladolam deposit.
      These results open up new questions and will stimulate the ongoing debate about the connection between magmatism, geothermal activity, and ore formation.
• In light of the geological history of Lihir, these observations are consistent with a story for the formation of the giant Ladolam deposit that is even more spectacular than the one envisaged by Simmons and Brown.  Most of its gold ore is contained in minerals cementing a highly fragmented rock, which was produced by a dramatic event about half-a-million years ago, when the peak of a former volcano built high above the present area of the deposit collapsed and formed the present semicircle of mountains around the deposit (see the first figure).  This sector collapse would have led to sudden decompression of magmatic-hydrothermal fluids beneath the volcano, which originally could have been orders of magnitudes more gold- and sulfur-rich.
• Could a rush of rapidly expanding fluids have formed the deposit in an even shorter period of time than calculated by Simmons and Brown, just after this dramatic event and maybe even on the time scale of a human life?  And could the extraordinary geothermal waters sampled today be a mere trickle representing the “spent” ore fluid...?
• Precise radiometric dating of mineral deposition may help to answer these questions, but the interpretation of such data could be challenging.  The rocks have been kept at high temperature to the present day, potentially allowing all isotopic clocks to reset themselves continually.

Centuries—or within the span of one human lifetime—not millions of years could have been all the time needed to form massive gold deposits.  This is rapid geology with a vengeance.  All that’s necessary are the right conditions, and it’s gold, gold, GOLD!  Imagine James Marshall watching an event like that near Sutter’s Mill.
    Remember, Simmons and Brown measured 15 ppb of gold in the brine, but there is a theoretical upper limit of 10,000 ppb, and Heinrich thinks that what we are seeing today could be the tail-end trickle of a “spectacular” event.  He claims this volcanic dome collapse was half a million years ago, but what does he know?  Just a little while ago, these guys thought gold deposits required millions of years.  No human observer was there, but one thing is clear from this report: big things can happen much faster than uniformitarian scientists thought possible.
    Don’t miss that last bullet by Heinrich.  Some conditions can also cause “all isotopic clocks to reset themselves continually.”  Remember that when you hear scientists proclaim confident-sounding dates in the millions and billions of years.  They don’t know, and the rocks aren’t telling.
    Conditions before, during and after a worldwide flood would have been extremely non-uniform.  With the fountains of the great deep bursting from many parts of the world, and volcanic activity occurring on unprecedented scales, it’s possible to envision huge upwellings of hot metal-saturated brine rising up at rates never seen before or since.  If that’s how some of these deposits formed, then perhaps God brought some extra blessing out of the devastation of the flood.  For the weary descendents of Noah trying to eke out an existence on a cursed planet, he provided a novel form of recreation: the treasure hunt.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

The secularists never hesitate to ridicule, mercilessly, any Christian or creationist who shows the slightest hint of beliefs they consider foolish.  No comment.
Except, begging your pardon, that there was once a certain Emperor in similar attire (01/31/2003).
Next headline on:  SETI • Dumb Ideas

Last week, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) unveiled a draft of its “strategic plan” for the next 10 years.  The 149-page blueprint offers timelines for initiatives from basic research to public outreach and warns that no therapies using human embryonic stem (ES) cells are likely for at least a decade.

Californians, already burdened by bonded indebtedness to the gills of their grandchildren, nevertheless voted in Nov. 2004 to fund $3 billion in bonds for stem cell research.  They were probably thinking on shorter time scales.  The ads in favor of Proposition 71 promised miracle cures and played on the heartstrings of voters, using stories of the afflicted as if stem cells were just within the reach of a chain of dollar bills.  What did you expect?  Scientists whose evolutionary ethics that see no problem with killing a human embryo shouldn’t have any qualms about lying to voters, too.  Whatever works: that’s natural election.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Health

• Deep Impact:  The team of the Deep Impact mission to a comet published spectral results in the July 13 issue.  “Emission signatures due to amorphous and crystalline silicates, amorphous carbon, carbonates, phyllosilicates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, water gas and ice, and sulfides were found” in the plume of dust flung out by the probe.
• Keep on rovin’:  Steve Squyres and the Mars Exploration Rover team celebrated two years at Meridiani Planum by Opportunity in a paper on scientific results in the Sept 8 issue.  They argued that “ancient Meridiani once had abundant acidic groundwater, arid and oxidizing surface conditions, and occasional liquid flow on the surface.”  In the Sept 29 issue, Squyres and two colleagues discussed “Merging views on Mars,” about how data from orbiters and rovers is coming together to provide comprehensive models of Mars history.  They speculated, “Both the roughly neutral pH suggested by phyllosilicates and the lower pH suggested by sulfates could have produced habitable surface environments; the former may have been more suitable for the origin of life.”  Yet evidence for surface water appears local, not global.
• Plume gloom:  A major paradigm shift has been occurring in geology over the theory of mantle plumes and hotspots, and Science has had several stories on the controversy: On Sept 1, a Perspectives article discussed discrepancies with plume theory in its classic case, the Hawaiian seamount bend.  Also in the Sept 1 issue, another Perspectives piece asked if a chain of offshore Japanese volcanoes is “Another nail in the plume coffin?”  Three weeks later in the Sept 22 issue, Richard Kerr asked if plumes are phantom or real: “Seismologists probing the planet’s depths are generating tantalizing images, but whereas some researchers see signs of plumes feeding volcanic hot spots, others see noise.”
• Radiocarbonization:  Those interested in the assumptions behind radiocarbon dating should check Michael Balter’s article in the Sept 15 issue, “Radiocarbon dating’s final frontier.”  He talks about the “heroic and contentious effort” to calibrate the method to 50,000 years, but unveils how coming up with a “calibration curve” is a controversial matter.  Here’s a sample about Paul Mellars (U of Cambridge) that may raise eyebrows on how the sausage is made:

  Mellars insists that archaeologists can’t wait for a final calibration curve.  “Are we all really expected to keep studies of modern human origins on hold for the next 5 years, until they decide they’ve finally got the calibration act together?” he asks.  The working group, he argues, “has hijacked the term ‘calibration’ to mean an absolutely agreed, rubber stamped, legalistic, signed, sealed, and delivered curve.”  And even when the experts agree on a curve, Mellars says, it will not be “final and absolute” but “simply the best estimate from the data at the time.”

• Ocean motion:  Richard Kerr discussed a surprising discovery Sept 22 that plankton are a major factor in stirring the ocean.  This “preposterous” conclusion is supported by measurements of how krill descend into the depths during the day and ascent at night to feed.  The sheer numbers of these swimmers are a major factor in agitating ocean waters, and could be affecting global climate as well.  On Oct. 13, a press release about this was published from Florida State University.
• Asteroid puzzles:  Robert Clayton gave a summary of asteroid science in the Sept 22 issue.  One puzzle is interpreting oxygen isotope differences in terms of accretion history.  “An additional unsolved problem in planet formation is the possibility of large oxygen isotope differences between the Sun and the inner planets.”  Greenwood et al. discussed this in more detail, also in the Sept 22 issue.  They had to postulate that “intense asteroidal deformation accompanied planetary accretion in the early Solar System” was responsible for the stony-iron meteorites.
      In the Oct 6 issue, Richard Kerr asked, “Has lazy mixing spoiled the primordial stew?”  Drawing on the studies of isotopic composition in meteorites, he warned that new findings “indicate that the notion of permanent layering in Earth’s depths may rest on shaky assumptions about the chemistry of the early solar system.”
• Lab goof?  Elisabeth Pennisi explored whether a previous claim that plants can recover their grandparent’s genomes was due to contamination in the lab, in the Sept 29 issue.  One lab can’t reproduce the other’s and vice versa.  The jury is still out, she concludes.
• Ribosome in focus:  Scientists continue to resolve more detail in the DNA-translating factory, the ribosome.  The Sept 7 issue had a paper on the structure of the 70S ribosome complexed with mRNA and tRNA, including details of the roles of metal ions and proteins in the intersubunit bridges.  The authors didn’t explain how these could have evolved, other than to say, twice, that they “had evolved” to do this or that function.
• Brainy ideas:  The Oct. 6 issue featured computational neuroscience, with no less than a dozen articles and book reviews on the subject.  Evolutionary neurologists strive to reduce everything, even human altruism and the moral sense, to the connections of neurons and the actions of neurotransmitters in the synapses.  Peter Stern and John Travis gave an overview of the field in Of Bytes and Brains.
      When these articles mentioned evolution at all, most of them merely assumed it, such as this selection from Greg Miller’s An enterprising approach to brain science, which can be considered representative: “This memory-prediction framework has evolved to take advantage of the spatial and temporal structure in our surroundings, Hawkins says, which helps explain why brains easily do certain tasks that give computers fits.”  If you need more examples, here are the only three mentions of evolution in Ingrid Wickelgren’s piece, Vision’s grand theorist:

  1. [Eero] Simoncelli’s analyses have already solved several longstanding mysteries in visual science: for example, how the brain assembles a moving picture of the world and why humans drive too quickly in the fog.  He’s also helped explain how evolution may have sculpted the brain to respond ideally to the visual environment on Earth.
  2. Next, Simoncelli wanted to link his image analysis to the human visual system.  He hypothesized that evolution may have forced the brain to encode the visual world in the most efficient, mathematically optimal way.  Using that concept, Simoncelli and his colleagues reported in 2001 that the nonlinear responses of neurons, such as those in the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, are well-matched to the statistical properties of the visual environment on Earth, that is, the mathematical patterns of lightness and darkness that recur in visual scenes.
  3. The result may help explain how evolution nudged certain visual neurons to be acutely sensitive to object edges and contours, for example.

  Readers will note some candidates for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week that got overlooked.
• Moral evolution:  In the Oct 6 issue, Michael Waldmann reviewed Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Marc D. Hauser (Prentice-Hall, 2006) – an odd title mixing metaphors of naturalism and design.  As could be expected, morality is discussed in purely naturalistic terms of natural selection and neuroscience, ignoring centuries of theological and philosophical input on such a sensitive subject so close to the human heart.  This is true even though Waldmann praises Hauser at one point, “Although Hauser is not shy about his theoretical preferences, he presents alternative theories in a fair manner.”  The only alternatives mentioned by the author or reviewer, however, are those based on evolutionary assumptions.

Keep the Baloney Detector handy, though.  As the quotes from “Brainy ideas” bullet indicate, evolutionists perennially assume that blind processes of chance can produce exquisitely engineered products.  Once the Darwin Party is forced to back up these claims instead of asserting them unchallenged, the gig will be up, and design science will be back in vogue.
    When Darwinism finally falls into the dustbin of history, a fresh new way of looking at the world will open up in art, science, literature, history and every other field of study.  Some of these ideas were investigated in a new book by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World: How the Arts & Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature.  This book is getting rave reviews by leaders in the intelligent design community.  For instance, Michael Behe said, “A Meaningful World is simply the best book I’ve seen on the purposeful design of nature... the authors portray the depth, elegance, clarity and pure cleverness of a universe designed to nurture the intelligent life that one day would discover that design.  A Meaningful World recovers lost purpose not only for science, but for all scholarly disciplines.”  Chuck Colson in his BreakPoint commentary spoke highly of it and included links for further information.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods • Marine Life • Evolution • Cell Biology • Human Body • Theology

“We expected to see things we haven’t seen before, but we are really, really puzzled by these new images of Saturn’s main ring system,” said Dr.  Phil Nicholson, of Cornell, Cassini visual and infrared spectrometer team member.  “The rings appear very different, with none of their usual calling card of water-ice features.  There are hints that other material besides ice might finally be detected within the rings.”
    “The main rings show a neutral color, while the C ring is reddish, and the D and E rings are quite blue,” added Nicholson.  “We don’t quite understand if these variations are due to differences in particle size or composition, but it’s nice to be surprised every once in a while.”

Saturn’s smallest moons have weak gravity and cannot retain any loose material on their surfaces.  When these moons are struck by rapidly moving interplanetary meteoroids, this loose material is blasted off their surfaces and into Saturn orbit, creating diffuse rings along the moons’ orbital paths.  Collisions among several moonlets, or clumps of boulder-sized rubble, might also lead to debris trails.  For instance, Saturn’s G ring seems not to have any single moon large enough to see; it might have formed from a recent breakup of a moon.

Cassini’s findings confirm predictions made over several decades now that Saturn’s rings are being rapidly eroded by collisions.  We now have even more evidence that impactors, from comet-size to molecule-size, are wearing away Saturn’s rings.  The E-ring would be gone in mere decades or centuries if Enceladus were not constantly replenishing with new micron-size material.  The color differences between the rings also show that whatever non-ice material has been added has not had time to become thoroughly mixed.  And it would be surprising to think that this new D-ring impact was a one-time phenomenon we just happened to be lucky to witness.
    It may be impossible to say from data alone that the rings are mere thousands of years old or less, but they certainly cannot be billions of years old.  That should raise some eyebrows by several inches among scientists who accept the standard A.S.S. (age of the solar system) as being 4.5 billion years old.  Upper limits at ring ages are often put at 10 or 100 million years.  That may sound like a lot (it’s an upper limit, remember), but even 100 million years is 1/45 the standard age.  What was Saturn doing the other 44 parts?  No materialist wants to believe that humans were somehow lucky to emerge right at the time when Saturn’s rings were at the height of their glory.  Yet no secular scientist dares question the A.S.S., because concluding a recent formation of Saturn and the rings would collapse the time available for evolution.  There is nothing about the Saturn system that needs billions of years.  A scientist should follow the evidence where it leads, whether or not it agrees with prevailing orthodoxy.
    Those of us living in 2006 should take time to value the privileges we have in this age of discovery.  Pictures like this are hard to come by.  It took over 3 billion dollars, and hundreds of scientists and technicians, to build the Cassini spacecraft.  This complex machine had to fly for seven years before even getting to Saturn, and has orbited over two more years before getting into position last month to look back toward home and take this unprecedented shot.  In 1609, when Galileo Galilei first turned a crude telescope to the sky and beheld new and wonderful things – including the rings of Saturn for the first time – his response was to worship the Creator.  He said, “I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries.”  What is your response as you look at this rare vantage point on creation?
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Amazing Facts

• Carbon 14:  In the Sept 14 issue, there was a give & take between critics of a carbon-14-dated study and the author.  The critics pointed out, “We appreciate that Mellars’ review was restricted to radiocarbon dating, principally of bone, but it is recommended practice that multiple methods and materials should be investigated to avoid any possible pitfalls that might be associated with a single technique or sample type.”  They decried the need for “much-needed rigour to radiocarbon chronologies.”
• Bossa Supernova:  Also in the Sept 14 issue, David Branch reported a “champagne supernova” in a star not known to go boom.  “Thermonuclear supernovae were thought to occur only when white-dwarf stars of a certain mass explode,” he said.  “The discovery of a supernova that is way over the mass limit might require a reworking of the model.”  See also the press release from Berkeley Lab.
• Twinkle, huge star:  Showing that the best proof of a theory in science is existence, an international team said in the Sept 28 issue (pp 427-429), “Theory predicts and observations confirm that low-mass stars (like the Sun) in their early life grow by accreting gas from the surrounding material.  But for stars approx ~10 times more massive than the Sun (approx > 10 solar masses), the powerful stellar radiation is expected to inhibit accretion and thus limit the growth of their mass.  Clearly, stars with masses >10 solar masses exist, so there must be a way for them to form.”  They presented a theory based on non-spherical accretion.
• Political science:  Environmental activists are another thorn in Big Science’s side.  In the Oct 5 issue, an Editorial began, “Not everyone’s opinion is equally valuable.”  Eco-terrorists who blow up science labs are just the most outspoken of a larger base of support.  Nature advocated dialog with these folks: “signs of paternalism or scepticism about emotional arguments will quickly alienate a section of public opinion whose views, although logically fuzzy, are very firmly held.”  They didn’t say what to do about critics of Big Science whose views are logically sound and very firmly held.
• Hanging by a string:  The Oct 5 issue had several articles for and against string theory.  The Editors were for it, George Ellis was against it, and Geoff Brumfiel reported the war of words in several new books like Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.  Ellis reviewed the latter and began, “String theorists are setting a worrying trend by downplaying the need for experimental evidence.”
• History of science and art:  The Oct 5 issue mentioned an exhibition of the science and art of Leonardo da Vinci touring Europe.
• Geo-lithium:  How sure are we of the science under our feet?  The Oct 5 issue had a news item beginning, “Lithium isotopes provide a fingerprint of recycled material in Earth’s upper mantle.  But this fingerprint is different from what had been expected.  So do we need to reassess our ideas about how the upper mantle evolves?”
• Kryptonite-proof superbacteria:  The Oct 5 issue investigated how the tiny germ Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand radiation hundreds of times greater than that required to kill ‘normal’ bacteria.  The secret is in its super-fast and efficient DNA repair mechanisms.  See the Scientific American write-up on this germ.
• Useful junk:  Two French scientists in the Oct 5 issue (pp 521-524) think junk DNA is an “evolutionary force.”  They said, “Transposable elements were long dismissed as useless, but they are emerging as major players in evolution.  Their interactions with the genome and the environment affect how genes are translated into physical traits.”  It seems odd that a major player in evolution would elude discovery this late in the game.  “But it is an open question whether the variation in genome size is indirectly associated with host population size, or whether it is directly promoted by environmental stress or by the novel environmental conditions that populations encounter when they invade a new habitat,” they said.  “The answer will bear on our understanding of, for example, how ancestral humans adapted after they migrated out of Africa.”  Seems a tall order for junk DNA to explain.
• Give and take:  Co-evolution was the theme of two articles in the Oct. 5 issue, one by Gavin Sherlock commenting on another paper by Jensen et al.  They considered cell division, discussing the odd observation that while the genes are highly conserved (unevolved) throughout the living world, the expression of these genes is not.  This adds greatly to the complexity of theorizing how the cell cycle evolved, because now the genes and their regulators had to co-evolve; in fact, Jensen et al say, “Our current results raise the intriguing possibility that all three levels of regulation have co-evolved.”  In addition, they discuss the remarkable phenomenon called “just-in-time assembly” in which certain protein complexes only go into action when key proteins are expressed only at the point in the cycle when they are needed.
      “It is tempting to speculate on the driving force that leads to the co-evolution,” they said in this paper that, while admiring the complexity observable today, was heavy on speculation about how it got that way.  “Together, our results provide a first global view of the evolutionary dynamics of the transcriptional and post-translational regulation of a large and complex biological system,” they said in conclusion.  But how much can be inferred about evolution?  Not much: “They clearly indicate that although the same general underlying principles, namely just-in-time assembly and multi-layer regulation of functional modules, are widely conserved in eukaryotes, the detailed regulation of individual genes and proteins varies greatly and thus generally cannot be inferred from distantly related organisms.”
  
• Zygote to adult:  A book review of Eric Davidson’s The Regulatory Genome by Michael Karin in the Oct. 5 issue dealt with a related problem: “All living organisms deploy similar evolutionarily conserved mechanisms to generate energy, replicate their genomes, use genetic information and synthesize basic building-blocks for their cells,” he began.  “Yet the myriad shapes and forms of both plants and animals are overwhelming in their variety and extremes.  What is even more amazing is that most plants and animals start their life as a single diploid cell (a zygote) created by the union of a sperm and an egg.  How these simple cells give rise to such complex creatures with diverse body shapes is a major preoccupation of developmental biologists.”
• TRON revisited:  Can life live in a computer?  A German team in the Oct 5 issue investigated biological models in silico.  They recognized that this is not a field for initiatives, and that some traditional biologists are skeptical, they said, “Suspicion towards simulations should dissipate as the limitations and advantages of their application are better appreciated, opening the door to their permanent adoption in everyday research.”  Surprisingly, at the end, “By discovering design principles, identifying biological modules, and quantitatively understanding how they operate through experiments and simulations, we hope to elucidate biological function,” they said.

This illustrates how the reporting here has to be selective just due to constraints of time and space.  Every week, scores of sources and articles from the scientific journals and science news outlets are perused for consideration.  For every article that gets mentioned, dozens more have to be passed over.  We hope you appreciate getting at least a daily digest of interesting and important happenings in a wide variety of subjects related to origins.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Astronomy • Genetics • Geology • Dating Methods • Politics

Evolution is not a science, it’s a game for public amusement.  Anyone can play.  You don’t even have to be a scientist.  The rules are simple:

1. Assume evolution.
2. Observe a fact.
3. Make up a story to fit the fact into the assumption.

Once you master these rules, you will understand the vast majority of evolutionary research.  In the scientific journals there are lots of big words to make it look smarter, but really, this is the gist of the game.  Now you know why so many lazy scientists choose to go into this line of work (see 12/22/2003 commentary).  It’s just a grown-up version of our old childhood game of make-believe.
    Make-believe has two meanings.  The first means pretending things that don’t have to be true – just entertaining, for the sheer fun of imagining things.  The second meaning is more sinister.  It’s imposing a belief, by force, onto the imaginations of others, such as in public schools, where no alternatives to the evolutionary stories are ever allowed, in order to make students believe whether they want to or not, if they want to get a passing grade.
    Play the game in school if you have to to get by.  Nobody, though, can make you believe something ridiculous.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

OK, National Geographic; where’s that apology for the racist artwork?  It’s still on your website.  You’re losing your credibility.
Next headline on:  Early Man

Hence, the maximum adhesive forces an archerfish’s shot must overcome in order to actually dislodge prey increase linearly with prey’s size.... Archerfish force-scaling closely matches this prediction, ensuring a reasonable safety margin: for any given size of prey, the fish apply about ten times the forces the adhesive organs of prey of that size could maximally sustain.

We have a different math based on observation and intelligent design.  The vacuousness of the evolutionary explanation is proportional to the cube of the observed adaptation.  We also have a natural law to back this up (see Darwin’s Law with Bloch’s Extension, right sidebar).
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Physics • Evolution • Amazing Facts

This DVD makes a convenient witnessing tool.  The prior three films mentioned above are all still excellent and go into more detail in their respective subjects.  But for people not willing to watch three hours of video, The Case for a Creator brings most of the best arguments together into a single, attractively-produced hour-long package.
    Though some of the animations will look familiar, the film includes new animations of ATP synthase and other molecular machines, an enhanced look at the universe-generator from The Privileged Planet, a dramatic visualization of the precision of the gravitational constant, and more.  Viewers will get a kick out of the “monkey-typewriter” segment.  The story line revolving around a true testimony of a skeptic investigating the case for a Creator may make this film resonate with more viewers than one strictly about science.  Anything Illustra produces carries with it a reputation of production quality and content credibility unsurpassed in the field of creation/ID graphical media.  Get a quantity of these DVDs and start handing them out.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Media

Whoever wrote the APOD entry didn’t appear to realize that he or she was bringing science to a halt.  Eugenie Scott would have a fit.  Science cannot refer to entities that are “not natural.”  A scientific explanation would require finding a natural explanation for this “unusual spot,” instead of giving up and saying a designer did it.  Those are the rules, and when doing science, one must play by the rules.  Perhaps the object just oozed up out of the sand over millions of years.  The principle of emergence: now that’s science!  (see 02/25/2003 commentary).
    Teachers can use illustrations like this to explore the question of when design reasoning is appropriate and when it is not (see 09/21/2006 commentary).  What would aliens landing on Mars think of this object?  Would they be correct in assuming the object could not have formed out of the natural materials in the environment, but must have been the work of intelligent designers?  How about finding the NEAR spacecraft on the asteroid Eros?  For a trickier case, how about the crater on Comet Tempel 1 formed by the Deep Impact mission, or the crater in Utah formed by the Genesis solar wind collector?  Think and grow righteous.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Solar System

A long-standing debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether species diverge gradually through time or by punctuational episodes at the time of speciation.  We found that approximately 22% of substitutional changes at the DNA level can be attributed to punctuational evolution, and the remainder accumulates from background gradual divergence.  Punctuational effects occur at more than twice the rate in plants and fungi than in animals, but the proportion of total divergence attributable to punctuational change does not vary among these groups.  Punctuational changes cause departures from a clock-like tempo of evolution, suggesting that they should be accounted for in deriving dates from phylogenies.  Punctuational episodes of evolution may play a larger role in promoting evolutionary divergence than has previously been appreciated.

For some biologists, “punctuated equilibrium” is a radical idea.  The term was coined in the 1970s to describe an uneven pace of evolution in the fossil record.  But because it posits that evolution happens in bursts, punctuated equilibrium goes against the notion that evolution inches forward in tiny steps guided by natural selection.  Now evolutionary biologists have shown that evolution in the genome also has fast and slow speeds, and that natural selection isn’t always governing genetic change.

The analysis by Pagel’s team assumes evolution from start to finish, from initial conditions to conclusions, from variables to constants.  So despite the mathematical wizardry, no sound conclusions can be expected from such an incestuous reasoning process.  What’s interesting about the paper is that the war started by Gould and Eldredge in the 1970s about the pace of evolution is not over.  Both fossils and genes fail to show the gradual change Darwin expected.  Evolutionists are still having to scramble to force-fit the observations into their imaginary picture of the world.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Genetics

• Consider a world composed of nanometre-sized factories and self-repairing molecular machines where complex and responsive processes operate under exquisite control; where translational and rotational movement is directed with precision; a nano-world fuelled by chemical and light energy.  What images come to mind?  The fantastical universes described in the science fiction of Asimov and his contemporaries?  To a scientist, perhaps the ‘simple’ cell springs more easily to mind with its intricate arrangement of organelles and enzymatic systems fuelled by solar energy (as in photosynthetic systems) or by the chemical energy stored in the molecular bonds of nucleotide triphosphates (for example, ATP).
• Biological motors convert chemical energy to effect stepwise linear or rotary motion, and are essential in controlling and performing a wide variety of biological functions.  Linear motor proteins are central to many biological processes including muscle contraction, intracellular transport and signal transduction, and ATP synthase, a genuine molecular rotary motor, is involved in the synthesis and hydrolysis of ATP.  Other fascinating examples include membrane translocation proteins, the flagella motor that enables bacterial movement and proteins that can entrap and release guests through chemomechanical motion.
• Whereas nature is capable of maintaining and repairing damaged molecular systems, such complex repair mechanisms are beyond the capabilities of current nanotechnology.
• In designing motors at the molecular level, random thermal brownian motion must therefore be taken into consideration.  Indeed, nature uses the concept of the brownian ratchet to excellent effect in the action of linear and rotary protein motors.  In contrast to ordinary motors, in which energy input induces motion, biological motors use energy to restrain brownian motion selectively.  In a brownian ratchet system the random-molecular-level motion is harnessed to achieve net directional movement, and crucially the resulting biased change in the system is not reversed but progresses in a linear or rotary fashion.
• Biosystems frequently rely on ATP as their energy source, however very few examples of artificial motors that use exothermic chemical reactions to power unidirectional rotary motion have been reported to date.
• That biological motors perform work and are engaged in well-defined mechanical tasks such as muscle contraction or the transport of objects is apparent in all living systems.

The exquisite solutions nature has found to control molecular motion, evident in the fascinating biological linear and rotary motors, has served as a major source of inspiration for scientists to conceptualize, design and build – using a bottom-up approach – entirely synthetic molecular machines.  The desire, ultimately, to construct and control molecular machines, fuels one of the great endeavours of contemporary science....
....As complexity increases in these dynamic nanosystems, mastery of structure, function and communication across the traditional scientific boundaries will prove essential and indeed will serve to stimulate many areas of the synthetic, analytical and physical sciences.  In view of the wide range of functions that biological motors play in nature and the role that macroscopic motors and machines play in daily life, the current limitation to the development and application of synthetic molecular machines and motors is perhaps only the imagination of the nanomotorists themselves.

These superlatives call for an explanation: how did nature achieve this level of technology, a level our best scientists can only view with awe as they attempt to catch up, using their brightest intelligence applied to design?  Here is the simplistic, hand-waving explanation.  In what should have been a paper permeated with unadulterated intelligent design, both human and biological, they slipped into the old Darwinian bad habit.  Get ready with your baloney breathalyzer.

Understanding and harnessing such phenomenal biological systems provides a strong incentive to design active nanostructures that can operate as molecular machines, and although our current efforts to control motion at the molecular level may appear awkward compared with these natural systems, it should not be forgotten that nature has had a 4.5 billion year head start.

This is bad breath caused by Dar-wine.  No matter the object under consideration, from a nanoscopic rotary motor with near perfect efficiency to a narwhal’s antenna or a butterfly’s photonic crystals, Darwin-drunk researchers continue to ascribe these wonders to blind, aimless, materialistic processes.  If nature’s advantage were merely a head start, then Nature Nanotechnology would do better to tell its researchers to close their labs, put on blindfolds, and wander aimlessly about, bumping into each other, till something interesting happens.
    As we wag our heads at the inebriation of scientists believing such things, let’s not forget what they said about biological machines.  Those machines really do exist.  They’re keeping you functioning.  They’re enabling your brain to think.  So think.  Don’t try to drink and think, lest your breath stink and your common sense shrink.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts • Intelligent Design

The article speculates that these large creatures calmly died and sank to the bottom of the sea, where they were slowly buried.  Would not bacteria and predators have devoured any trace of them?  And even if the bones remained, would they not have disarticulated and spread apart?  They must have been buried suddenly at the same time.  Like so many other fossil graveyards, this area tells a silent tale of catastrophe.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Life • Dinosaurs

These researchers did worthwhile work helping us understand why DNA is so good, seemingly “the work of an accomplished sculptor” as well as programmer.  “The new insights provided by this structure lie at the heart of the most fundamental of scientific inquiries – the origin of life on Earth,” they said.  That’s a worthy question to think about, even if an “unsolveable” mystery from a materialist standpoint.  But the press release easily wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for these groaners:

• DNA’s simple and elegant structure – the “twisted ladder,” with sugar-phosphate chains making up the “rails” and oxygen- and nitrogen-containing chemical “rungs” tenuously uniting the two halves – seems to be the work of an accomplished sculptor.
      Yet the graceful, sinuous profile of the DNA double helix is the result of random chemical reactions in a simmering, primordial stew.
• “These molecules are the result of evolution,” said Egli, professor of Biochemistry.  “Somehow they have been shaped and optimized for a particular purpose.”
• “Homo-DNA is just one alternative system.  There are hundreds of sugars, as many as you can think of.  It will be almost impossible to look at all of them,” Egli said.
      “But the big red herring of this work could be that nature never went through these other sugars.  Maybe it just hit on gold (these five-carbon sugars) very early and took off from there.”

This shows that even misguided evolutionary scientists, though hopeless gamblers, are not completely out of touch with reality.  Like the blindfolded, they occasionally bump into it and bang their heads.  Nobody is forcing them to wear the blindfolds.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life and Chemical Evolution • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

• Overwhelming Evidence is an ID website aimed at high school students.  It has blogs, forums and opportunities to get involved.
• Salvo Magazine is a new magazine devoted to cultural and scientific issues related to origins and the meaning of life.  It’s snazzy interface and cutting-edge, no-holds-barred approach is aimed at the tastes of knowledgeable young adults.
• Darwinism and ID has a wacky website featuring the new book by Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.
• Blogs like GlobeLens and this example from Brazil are too numerous to mention in this day of personal publishing.
• Life’s Story volume II, from Exploration Films, is due for release in mid-October.
• Lee Strobel’s best seller The Case for a Creator is expected to come out in a film version soon.

The hardened Old Guard of the Darwin Party has shown itself incorrigible too long.  Welcome to a new generation of critical thinkers who don’t have to be force-fed the Darwin Brand Snake Oil, but know what’s good for them and can read the bottles for themselves.
Next headline on:  Media • Darwinism • Intelligent Design

Incredible feats like this hint at the innate capabilities of the human body and brain that only occasionally surface in world records.  Can someone explain what the Darwinian adaptive value is of being able to quote 100,000 decimal places of pi from memory?  Mr. Haraguchi is already past the normal reproductive and hunting years.  Will this help him inspire the tribe to get a bigger mammoth or something?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Facts

• Florida sunshine  Over 3600 Floridians attended an event on “Darwin or Design” at the Sun Dome Sept. 29, reported Evolution News and the St. Petersburg Times.  The event was sponsored by Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity and sponsored four leading ID speakers.  (See Doctors Doubting Darwin for the position of the sponsoring organization.)
• Baylor upset:  Dr. Francis Beckwith, who agrees there is nothing unconstitutional about teaching I.D. in public schools, gained tenure at Baylor after a long, drawn-out battle, reported Evolution news and World Magazine (10/07/2006 issue).
• Conn job:  Conn College in Connecticut is hosting skeptic Michael Shermer Oct. 10 to discuss evolution vs. intelligent design.
• Cato Plato:  Shermer takes on Jonathan Wells on Oct. 12 at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.  The title is “Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.”
• Museum dust:  Associated press writer Deepti Hajeli (see Yahoo News) showed that museum curators are becoming cynical at the incorrigible creationist beliefs of many visitors: “I haven’t been surprised by the public’s reaction since our first survey, when I saw that 35 percent of the adult population thought that humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs.”
• Old dinos, really?  The Dallas Morning News reported on ICR’s latest RATE conference, in which evidence for a young earth and problems with radiometric dating were shared before an audience of 700.
• Be fair:  In the Detroit News, Scott Bahr argued that evolutionary theory relies on faith, too.  Those who decry faith in the classroom, he said, fail to see the irony in their position.  Even evolution requires ID to be valid: “The scientific method assumes an ordered universe that obeys natural absolute laws.”  For this and other reasons, “an intellectually honest discussion of origins belongs in the classroom.”
• Kentucky freed education:  The outgoing education commissioner in Kentucky, Gene Wilhoit, warned the Board of Education that they should not choose a proponent of intelligent design, reported WHAS Channel 11 and the Courier-Journal of Louisville.
• Space perspective:  In an editorial for the Space Foundation, CEO Elliot Pulham, an evolutionist, said that space exploration to justify itself needs to understand the enduring value of humans.  Pulham included a line combining of The Privileged Planet with Gaia: “we have only understood the preciousness and rarity of Mother Earth since we have been able to view her from space and since we have been able to peer deeply into the universe and understand how very rare this home planet is.”
• Let there be light:  Strongly pro-evolution magazine Scientific American had an editorial asking for at least a little more respect for religion, even if certain religious tenets (e.g., the Bible’s) have been contradicted by science, it claims.  “Cosmology, geology and evolutionary biology flatly contradict the literal truths of creation myths from around the world,” The Editors wrote, “Yet the overthrow of religion is not a part of the scientific agenda.  Scientific research deals in what is measurable and definable; it cannot begin to study what might lie beyond the physical realm or to offer a comprehensive moral philosophy.”
• British revolution:  “Outrage and alarm” by the media and scientific societies was the response to the “Truth in Science” initiative last month, in which “Schools up and down the country were sent two DVDs with a study guide helping teachers to utilise these materials in biology lessons.”  The BBC News, TSL Education and Politics.co.UK described some of the angry responses.  A writer for Biblical Creation had fun with the irony of what he called “grotesque behavior” by the opposition to freedom of thought.  “If the Government has any sense, it will not do anything to reinforce the grip that materialistic dogma has over many minds within the science community,” David Tyler wrote.  “We do not want to see any moves towards instituting ‘thought police’ to protect Darwinism from critical scrutiny, because that is self-evidently anti-science.”
• Jesuit agenda:  Loyola University is offering forums for and against intelligent design Nov. 6-7.
• Darwin’s ghost:  Peter James Causton had a lot to say about the moral influence of Darwinism in Commonweal magazine.  He compared the Darwinian and Christian responses to the problem of suffering.
• Talk back:  The editors of Time Magazine may continue to present cover stories like, “What makes us human?  not much,” that assume evolution and attribute our humanness to mere natural causes, but more readers are not taking it without a response.  Catholic priest Jonathan Morris on Fox News accused Time of making a “wild, pseudo-scientific (and very common) conclusion about the nature of evolution and of man.”
• The man Darwinists love to hate, but cannot:  Phillip E. Johnson, the founder-figurehead of the intelligent design movement, was featured on today’s BreakPoint commentary by Chuck Colson.  A book of Johnson’s writings was compiled this year, called Darwin’s Nemesis.  Johnson is in good health these days and still active in speaking.

So many words out there.  Let your senses tell you what a thousand philosophers can’t ignore: the exquisite design in nature didn’t just happen. 
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinian Evolution • Education

Several species of terrestrial and marine mammals with whiskers (vibrissae) use them to sense and navigate in their environment – for example, rats use their whiskers to discern the features of objects, and seals rely on theirs to track the hydrodynamic trails of their prey.  Here we show that the bending moment – sometimes referred to as torque – at the whisker base can be used to generate three-dimensional spatial representations of the environment, and we use this principle to construct robotic whisker arrays that extract precise information about object shape and fluid flow.

It’s clear that the interpretation of whisker movements must come from the base, since the protein fiber that makes up a whisker contains no nerve endings.  This means an elaborate sensory apparatus must inhabit the tiny follicle of each whisker.
    Car drivers used to install curb whiskers to sense the car position during parallel parking, but the transduced information was useful not to the car, but to the driver, who through auditory input could respond accordingly.  Imagine what it would take to engineer a car to parallel park itself based on one curb whisker’s tactile response.  Sensors would have to be mounted orthogonally at the base, and computer software would have to be written, complete with feedback to the steering and brakes.
    In the mammal body, whether of a rat, cat, seal or otter, sensing the conical movements of a whisker must require multiple nerve endings in each hair follicle.  The timing and strength of each nerve response must be coordinated with brain software to draw the 3D image, and the reaction time must be nearly instantaneous to do the animal any good.  This is all complicated by the large number of individual whiskers (nearly 20 per side on the face of this Weddell seal).  All this technology can fit on the tiny head of a mouse or weasel, allowing the animal to gain a continuous image of its dark surroundings.
    Based on the observed performance, design-theoretic researchers could probably expect to find even more engineering behind this one tactile sense.  Undoubtedly similar responses occur in hair follicles since we are aware of temperature and touch with those smaller antennae also – another reason not to shave, men, especially if you like cave exploring or crawling under the house.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

This is a trend to watch.  We don’t know yet if the problems will outweigh the benefits.  It might become comparable to how cable and the web ended the dominance of the mainline news broadcast networks.  Did you know that peer review is a relatively recent phenomenon?  Though early modern scientists stressed the need for sharing and verifying experimental results, peer review as practiced today did not become common till after World War II.  Now, it has too often hindered the very quality it set out to establish.  Authors fear giving away their life work to rivals who might wind up on the review committees.  Journals tend to look for ground-breaking and sensational works, downplaying ordinary but important work.  And worst of all, ideas outside the mainstream are often silently dropped from view.
    Competition is good for ideas; Darwinism has for too long been a stifling orthodoxy.  There will be problems.  Mavericks might get carried away in this new wild west.  Readers might consider an online paper authoritative without sufficient warrant.  The potential benefits look strong, though.  This might stimulate more student interest in science, and the new freedom may lead to more bold exploration of new promising leads (like intelligent design).  Wikis and blogs will permit rapid validation and falsification, and lively debate among scholars.  With the new “multitude of counselors” there may be more safety than the few secret reviewers of the past provided.  Welcome to Web 2.0; hang on.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Should Elephants and Lions Be Reintroduced to North America?    10/02/2006  
Believe it or not, some scientists think large mammals that existed in North America in prehistoric times should be brought back.  This is called “rewilding,” in hopes of healing some of the ecological disruption caused when early humans “played a significant role in their demise 13,000 years ago.”  A dozen scientists provided a detailed proposal for the restoration of North American megafauna, reported EurekAlert. 

Starting with giant tortoises and wild horses, then moving toward lions and elephants, the authors provide a number of case studies for “Pleistocene Rewilding” and argue such introductions would contribute biological, economic, and cultural benefits to North America.  The authors acknowledge that there are substantial risks and challenges; the risks of inaction may be even greater, however, including the continued global loss of megafauna.

Let’s think this through in evolutionary terms.  After all, evolutionists must be consistent.  Since evolution is what evolution does, the early human inhabitants of North America merely showed their fitness after the emergence of evolutionary innovations such as spears and knives.  Since many species have gone extinct, why should we weep over the loss of a few more?  And what would be the impact on today’s native megafauna (mountain lions, bison, bears) with the introduction of new, larger competitors?
    If the insinuation in this story is that our forebears did something bad by killing them off, and therefore we need to perform penance to rectify past mistakes, then the argument switches to moral philosophy.  Since there are no morals in Darwinism, this is really a synonym for theology.  Let the evolutionists repent and be converted, then we could have an interesting discussion on stewardship of the environment – but not until.  After all, evolutionists must be consistent.
    But then, why must evolutionists be consistent?  Consistency is a virtue, and there are no virtues in Darwinism.  In their world view, they could play any intellectual game to get what they desire.  The only acceptable compromise in a pluralistic society would be to give them their own territory for their experiments.  Put the Darwinists in the same pen with the lions and elephants, and let them play survival of the fittest to their heart’s content.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Early Man

It’s kind of fun watching the Planet of the Apes actors fight each other (e.g., 12/21/2004, 09/23/2004).  You saw this latest dispute coming, of course.  After awhile, each new episode looks like a rerun (for the plot line, see 06/11/2003 commentary).  We know it’s all fiction anyway (see 12/30/2004, 11/19/2004, 02/19/2004).
Next headline on:  Early Man

That’s right; conversion is a miraculous transformation begun by repentance from sin and faith in the miraculous resurrection of Messiah.  These are inexplicable by an evolutionary process.  Did you notice that the anthropologist’s innate bias at looking for continuity and evolution will color his or her perception of the subject?  Explain Paul by evolution, Dr. Robbins.  Tell you what; we’ll let you analyze C.S. Lewis as an anthropological subject, if you will let him analyze you back as a theological subject (a kind of thing he did, at length, in his writings).  Beware, though; he could undermine your operational presuppositions by showing them to be theologically based.  It could be an interesting contest: the survival of the wittest.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Theology

The new age estimate matches the supernova spotted in 185 AD.  But this calculation means the remnant is 8,000 years younger than previously thought.  The astronomers said the difference can be attributed to the irregular shape of the remnant’s expanding bubble.  Stellar wind from the progenitor star pushed some of the remnant’s gases in a certain direction, forming a dense pile.  “The idea for RCW 86 is that in some regions the shock has hit this piled-up material.  In those regions the shock will start moving slower,” [Jacco] Vink [U of Utrecht] said.  And in other regions, the shock wave is much speedier.

One of the captions in the article was “Shell Shocked,” but it was not clear if this referred to the supernova remnant or to the astronomers finding out how wrong they had been.  In this case, we had an observation to calibrate a dating method, and the result was drastically lower than predicted from theory.  There are many other things in space and time that cannot be so calibrated.  The parameter to watch in dating methods is the observation-to-assumption ratio.
Next headline on:  Stellar Astronomy • Dating Methods