“Darwin claimed that a unique inclusively hierarchical pattern of relationships between all organisms based on their similarities and differences was a fact of nature, for which evolution, and in particular a branching process of descent with modification, was the explanation.  However, there is no independent evidence that the natural order is an inclusive hierarchy....  Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal TOL [tree of life] rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true.”
—Doolittle and Bapteste, from the 02/01/2007 entry.

Darwinian Assumptions Questioned   03/31/2007    
Sometimes common knowledge is not knowledge at all.  We sometimes are surprised to find out that things we had always heard turn out not to be true: for instance, the claim that Humphrey Bogart said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca, that humans only use 10% of their brains, that carbon-14 dates things millions of years old, that the 9/10 on gasoline prices is a tax for road repair, or that saying “Bless you” when somebody sneezes helps the sneezer in some mysterious way.  Recently, it has come to light that some ideas about Darwin and his evolutionary theory, long assumed as matters of fact, are not:

1. Did Darwin fear publication?  As the typical retellings on TV and in biographies go, Charles Darwin delayed publishing his book for fear of the reaction, especially from Christians and religious people.  The BBC News reported on a researcher who has debunked this notion.  Darwin’s letters show he was committed to publish all along.  “The idea that Charles Darwin delayed publishing On the Origin of Species for 20 years for fear of ridicule is a myth,” it says.  The delay was more due partly to bouts of ill health, and partly to his wanting to amass more evidence first.
2. Did dinosaurs have to die off before mammals flourished?  No, reported Live Science and Science Daily.  Mammals were doing well in the age of dinosaurs, and the rapid rate of diversification began a long time after dinosaurs went extinct.  This contradicts the usual picture on TV documentaries like the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs that mammals were all little shrew-like midgets dodging the big feet of monsters till a meteor blasted them to oblivion.  Incidentally, the BBC News also reported this finding, and called the old idea a “straw man” argument.
3. Is antibiotic resistance Darwinian evolution in action?  Michael Egnor, a medical doctor, argues that this evidence for evolution is a tautology.  See his reason on Evolution News.
4. Do animals evolve faster in warmer climates?  Again, the answer is no.  A new study reported by Science Daily showed that the reverse is true: animals evolve faster in temperate zones and at the poles than in the tropics.  The researchers debunked what they called a common assumption, the article explains.

Maybe Darwinism is analogous to Lenz’s Law.  Physicists learn that magnetically induced currents produce magnetic fields that oppose the inducing field.  Could it be that evolutionary ideas induce countermeasures in nature that oppose evolutionary ideas?  (This idea suggested in jest only; sug-gest in jest, if you digested that.)
    For any oft-repeated truism, it is good practice to ask, “How do you know that?”  We would probably be shocked at the number of things we take for granted that have little or no evidential support.  Darwin’s myth seems especially prone to revision.  Sometimes both the urban legend and the revision are both wrong, because both are prone to the same flawed assumptions.  This is the case in #2 and #4 above.  The revisors in both cases were still assuming evolution and millions of years.  They merely rearranged the pieces without changing the overall evolutionary picture.  This compounds the error, and poses myth against myth.  Beware of myth-placed confidence.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution

1. Global warming is man’s fault, right?:  A documentary by Martin Durkin called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (see Channel 4.com) interviewed half a dozen notable climate scientists who dispute the human-caused global warming scare.  The entire documentary can be viewed on You Tube.
2. Colleges educate students, right?  A new documentary called Indoctrinate U exposes the situation on many modern university campuses, where students are systematically indoctrinated by leftist ideologues.  Free speech is shouted down and political correctness reigns supreme, producer Evan Coyne Maloney attempts to document with interviews and examples.

The medium is not the problem.  Film can be good; film can be bad.  The ideas expressed via the sensation-enriched medium of film still need to be evaluated on the validity of the claims made.  Watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth side-by-side with The Great Global Warming Swindle and decide who makes the better case – not who has the better background music, camera angles or other enhancements.  At least now there are alternative viewpoints for astute baloney detectors to compare.
Next headline on:  Media

The next time you are struggling to carry your bags home from the supermarket just remember that this could, in fact, be the reason you are able to walk upright on two legs at all!  How we have evolved to walk on two legs remains a fundamental but, as yet, unresolved question for scientists.  A popular explanation is that it is our ability to carry objects, particularly children, which forced early hominins onto two legs.  Dr Johanna Watson (University of Manchester) will present work supporting this theory on Saturday 31st March 2007 at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow....
    Results indicated that when carrying an evenly spread load humans are actually more efficient at carrying than most mammals but carrying awkward loads, such as an infant on one side of the body, uses much more energy.  However this sort of carrying would have been inevitable once early hominins lost the ability to cling on with their feet.  “The high energetic cost of carrying an asymmetric load, suggests that infant carrying would need to generate significant benefits elsewhere in order to be selected for,’ says Dr Watson.

Follow this line of reasoning far enough, and supermarkets arose by natural selection.  It would be religious to claim intelligent design had anything to do with the origin of paper and shopping carts.  How about a Society for Real Biology for a change.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

The Hot Moon Epidemic Spreads to the Suburbs   03/31/2007    
A planetary symptom we might call “Enceladus fever” is apparently an epidemic.  Now, we’ve found that it infects some of the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) beyond the orbit of Neptune.  More and more small bodies are being found with internal heat that has broken out onto the surface.  This is a big surprise.  Small bodies should have frozen solid in billions of years.
    Richard Kerr reported for Science today about discussions at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences conference held March 12-16 in Texas.¹  Here’s the surprise in a nutshell:

What would erupting volcanoes, even icy ones, be doing on the coldest bodies in the solar system?  Temperatures hover around 50 kelvin [-370° F] on Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), which circle on the frigid dark fringes of the solar system for eons on end.  But astronomers recently have seen signs that fresh ice has formed on KBOs in the geologically recent past.  Now, researchers have calculated how a KBO, at least a larger one, might husband its primordial allotment of heat until the present day....
    Somehow, relatively warm crystalline ice has formed of late on the largest KBOs, but scientists have had trouble explaining where the necessary heat came from.  KBOs have been cooling inside for billions of years, and unlike satellites such as Io or Enceladus, they do not orbit a huge planet that can spare a trickle of tidal energy to heat the smaller body’s interior.

The moyboys* of the Lyell Theater seem to be on the defensive these days.  The planets and moons are not following the script.  It’s supposed to be Act MMMMD^VI of King Liar but they’re playing as if it’s Act CCM of a different play.  Is this a super condensed version of the show, or are we in the wrong playhouse?  The audience of the little hamlet stirs.  This is not just much ado about nothing; it’s becoming a tempest, or, as you like it, Lyell’s labors lost.  Measure for measure, all’s well that ends well, but this is looking more like a comedy of errors.  If the moyboys in desperation start singing For he’s a jolly othello,” the audience may just get up and walk out.  The timing of the crew couldn’t be worse.  Across the street, there’s a blockbuster oratorio drawing in huge crowds: The Creation.
*Believers in “millions of years, billions of years.”
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Solar System

Some fossils are rare, but this one recently unearthed in eastern Oregon may be positively mythic.  In life, the 2-meter-long Jurassic seagoing crocodile (above), discovered by members of the North American Research Group, sported scales, needlelike teeth, and a fishtail.  Some paleontologists, including Stanford University researcher Adrienne Mayor, think similar fossils may have inspired Native American representations of water monsters.  Mayor notes the croc’s “remarkable” resemblance, for example, to a 19th century Kiowa artist’s drawing (inset) of a legendary water serpent.

Unless such fossils were articulated and completely exposed, it’s hard to imagine early hunter-gatherers reconstructing entire animals from fossils as well as this story claims.  Why is the more straightforward explanation, that some of them actually saw this beast and imitated it, not even considered?  The obvious reason is that there is no way in the evolutionary timetable humans and Jurassic crocs could have co-existed.
    Not enough information is supplied in this short article to explain if the Kiowa drawing was an imitation of earlier legendary monsters that his ancestors might have seen.  It’s also not clear whether a 19th century Indian might have seen scientific reconstructions of prehistoric monsters that influenced his work.  Not too much should be inferred, therefore, from this brief article.  The biased interpretation of the scientist is the interesting thing to note: he immediately jumps to a conclusion based on his assumption that the two were millions of years apart.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Dating Methods

“If you build it, they will come.”  This marketing cliché works with designed organisms, like humans, who operate with purpose and intent, but when was the last time you saw an inanimate object to engage in goal-seeking behavior, simply because the opportunity presented itself?  Will an abundance of mud, straw and a hot sun spontaneously give rise to a building?  If the environment is subject to torrential rains, will it then construct for itself a sturdy roof?
    Many in the space program presume that suitable environments generate life.  Many in the SETI program assume that biomarkers will imply life arose spontaneously on its own.  These logical fallacies permeate much of the space program.  They are never questioned or criticized because of dogmatic Darwinism and a science that cannot think outside the materialistic box.
Next headline on:  SETI • Origin of Life

1. A Hex on the Pole:  As if the south pole of Saturn, with its earth-sized hurricane (picture) were not dramatic enough, the north pole seems determined to steal the thunder.  A bizarre hexagon-shaped feature was observed surrounding the pole that has scientists scratching their heads.  The press release at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) states that the structure, unique in the solar system, is a long-lived feature.  It’s not just a shallow cloud formation, either; the hexagonal shape extends 60 miles deep into the atmosphere.  How such a shape could form and endure in a fluid is a new and unexpected puzzle to solve.  Watch this short video of the hexagon in motion.
2. The whole Enceladus:  Little Enceladus, the second sizeable moon beyond the rings, is like a planetary David tugging on Goliath’s beard.  This little moon, no bigger than the British Isles, amazed scientists when its south polar geysers were caught in action in 2005 (see 02/10/2007, 11/28/2005).  Now, scientists have found that this tiny erupting moon is influencing Saturn’s gigantic magnetic field.  It spurts out so many charged particles, it drags the plasma with it, causing slippage of the plasma disk.  The JPL press release explains, “In a David and Goliath story of Saturnian proportions, the little moon Enceladus is weighing down giant Saturn’s magnetic field so much that the field is rotating slower than the planet.”  As a result, this throws off measurements of the rotation rate of the magnetic field, a key parameter used to infer the planet’s inner rotation rate.  See also the Science Daily report.
       Little Enceladus made yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.  The output of the moon’s geysers are clearly seen feeding the E-ring around Saturn.  One wonders whether this is an unusual burst of activity, or a long-lived feature – and how long such a feature could live.  See our previous story from 03/13/2007.
3. Tug of Warp:  Little moons around the F-ring of Saturn tug at the material in noticeable ways.  JPL issued this picture of Prometheus dragging material out of the ring, and breakaway clumps of material from previous passages of nearby moons.  The material may pass hands back and forth between the moons and the rings, but scientists are not sure; some of the embedded moonlets appear to have eccentric orbits and pass right through the F-ring at times.
4. Missing pockmarks:  Space.com wondered where all the craters went on Titan.  Cassini’s radar mapper has only examined about 10% of Titan’s surface, but only four clear craters have turned up – a “surprisingly small number” for a moon nearly the size of Mercury.  Either the craters are quickly erased or the surface is young.  “If Titan’s surface had the same density of craters that other Saturnian moons have, there should be thousands of craters,” remarked one member of the science team.
5. Charming physics:  For those liking to delve deeper into the physics of Saturn, a new CHARM PDF file (Cassini-Huygens Analysis and Results of the Mission) was posted 3/27.  Dr. Claudia Alexander delivered a colorful Powerpoint presentation about science results from the magnetic field observations.  Click here for a list of previous CHARM presentations on other aspects of the Saturn system.  To see Dr. Alexander in action, click here for her latest videocast on mission status, and here for the archives.

An amazing story.  Enjoy it while you can: a ringside seat on the most successful interplanetary tour ever.  It won’t feel the same when Cassini is in the history books; it’s much more fun to learn while it is happening.  Go Cassini!  Keep those bits coming, and fill our dishes with wonder.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Physics • Geology

Desperately Seeking Macroevolution   03/28/2007    
With Intelligent Design critics hot on their heels, Darwinian evolutionists are hot to find transitional forms that they can exhibit as evidence for large-scale evolution (macroevolution).  A symposium on that very subject was held last October by the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), but a report on the conference did not come out till this month’s issue of BioScience.¹  It appears only pro-Darwinists were allowed a hearing.
    The abstract says, “Speakers at the ‘Macroevolution: Evolution above the Species Level’ symposium, held at the National Association of Biology Teachers annual meeting last October, focused on macroevolutionary processes, the evolution of key innovations and major lineages of organisms, and the evidence for these processes.”  The Cambrian Explosion and other difficulties were specifically addressed – including this admission in the opening remarks: “Some in the antievolution community assert that microevolution happens but not macroevolution, because they believe there is no evidence for it.”  Here, then, was a prime opportunity for pro-Darwin advocates to showcase the very best examples of macroevolution.  Assuming reporter Oksana Hlodan did a fair job of capturing the highlights, what examples did the panel of five come up with?
    Combing through the report, here is the short list of evidence for macroevolution:

1. Choanoflagellates, a class of protozoa found in almost any body of water, seem to have the proteins higher animals use for cell signalling and adhesion.  So, “Genes shared by choanoflagellates and animals were most likely present in their common ancestor and may shed light on the transition to multicellularity.”  Nicole King (UC Berkeley) suggested that unicellular organisms like these might have been preadapted for multicellularity.  That almost sounds like a mindless process was able to plan ahead.
2. Developmental programs were exhibited as evidence by Nipam Patel (UC Berkeley) for how different body plans might have emerged, such as bilateral symmetry and numbers of segments.  He gave examples of fruit flies with four wings and with legs where the antennae should be.
3. Radiation (the biological kind, not the atomic kind) was discussed by Jeffrey S. Levinton (State U of NY at Stony Brook).  He tried to explain the Cambrian Explosion by referring to the fact that the “molecular clock” suggests an earlier time for diversification than the fossil record shows.  “The Cambrian explosion marks the appearance of most bilaterian multicellular animal designs,” he agreed, “but the actual divergence of these groups may have occurred many millions of years before the Cambrian.”
4. Extinction was presented as evidence by David Jablonski (U of Chicago).  But how can the loss of 95% of living things (his estimate) over five major extinction events count as evidence for macroevolution?  The explanation: “Mass extinctions are important in macroevolution because they change the rules of survival, eliminating the dominant groups of the time and allowing adaptations to hitchhike on traits, such as geographic range size, that determine survivorship during extinction episodes.  Mass extinctions homogenize the biota, and they encourage postextinction evolutionary bursts.”
5. Whales: Phillip Gingerich (U of Michigan) presented a series of fossils showing the putative evolution of whales.  He considered this “a transition from land to sea once thought inexplicable in terms of evolution.”
6. Flowers: Scott Hodges (UC Santa Barbara) argued that flowering plants with nectar spurs are more diverse than groups without them.  His explanation: “Finding this association, suggests that nectar spurs affect the process of speciation or extinction.”

The genetic toolkit is important in the study of macroevolution.  The same sets of genes are used again and again, so that major evolutionary change does not necessarily require major genetic changes.
    There is complexity in the tempo and mode of evolution.  There are many different patterns in macroevolutionary events.
    Many macroevolutionary changes depend on significant changes in the environment, some of which have led to large extinction events.
    The processes of microevolution and macroevolution are continuous.

So that’s it?  This is laughable.  The closest two cases for macroevolution that had any bones or photographs to back them up were the whale tale and the nectar spur myth.  For the latter, they are still species within the same kind, for crying out loud—not examples of macroevolution.  No creationist would deny the ability of some flowering plants to diversify to a limited extent.  As to whale evolution, that claim has been roundly debunked by many ID and creationist groups: the Discovery Institute response to the PBS Evolution series, by TrueOrigin #1 and True Origin #2, by Answers in Genesis, by Creation Ministries International, by the Creation Research Society, by ICR and many others.  The AIBS and other Darwin Propagandists pretend like these critiques don’t even exist.  The honest thing for a scientist would be to first do a literature search and come well-armed, but they never do.  They present their very biased one side of the story as if nobody else ever had a problem with it.
    The rest of the so-called “evidence” for macroevolution all consisted of “suggestions” that “might” explain away the falsifying evidence with a little more work (and funding), with nothing but hope that future discoveries might “shed light” on the vexing problem of how all the major body plans of all the animals appeared in the blink of an eye in the fossil record.  Such excuses don’t shed any light; they cover up the clear light of design.
    As for the LiveScience pitiful article on Darwin’s finches, here is another case of pretending the criticisms against Darwin don’t exist.  Jonathan Wells wrote a whole chapter about this in Icons of Evolution (note how LieScience used the synonym “symbol” instead of “icon” in their description).  Incidentally, Wells also had a chapter on four-winged fruit flies; Dr. Patel should have known that there is no way these rare mutants would survive in the wild, so they are irrelevant to evolutionary theory.  Haven’t these people heard that the Peter & Rosemary Grant team only found fluctuations around a mean in finch beaks over 30 years of study?  They only found slight enlargements of the average beak size of one species (on the order of fractions of a millimeter).  Big deal.  Moreover, the changes were reversed when the climate changed.  And this is still being promoted as something “special” worth knowing because it is a symbol of macroevolution?  Come on.  Any honest reporter should acknowledge the criticisms and try to address them.  Ignoring the question is tantamount to propaganda.
    In short, critics of Darwinian evolution should take heart at this, another in a long series of embarrassing admissions that Darwin’s modern-day disciples have no evidence for Charlie’s myth.  How much longer Darwinism will endure before collapsing is anyone’s guess.  If you’d like to hasten the inevitable, then you’d better stop their attempts to keep indoctrinating the young in their side and silencing the opposition.  Notice that they hastened at the end of the symposium to talk about how best to inculcate the youth into their mystery religion.  Unless we get public schools to teach the facts, to permit fair and balanced presentation of all the evidence, the Darwinistas could succeed in raising another generation of zombies.  This means the collapse of Darwinism could be delayed long enough for it to work even more mischief in society.  As Disraeli once said, “Error is often more earnest than truth.”  This means that error can win by default.  If you care about the truth, you had better exercise your earnestness above the opposition’s intensity level and apply it wisely.
Next headline on:  Darwinian Evolution

OK, let’s see if Leakey will recant.  Let’s see if the textbook publishers will fix the mistake.  His Skull 1470 raised quite a stir at the time and gained Leakey international fame.  Now, it comes out that Leakey’s personal bias dictated how he put the puzzle pieces of bone together.  How much does this go on in the dubious practice of paleoanthropology?  What other instances are out there right now with built-in bias?  Here it is 25 years after the discovery before the truth comes out.  Remember this next time this crowd trumpets some new missing link.  Today’s kids may not know it’s phony baloney till 2032.
    Bromage, for all his efforts in exposing Leakey’s bias, is still biased himself.  He still thinks man evolved from apes – just 300,000 years later than the current consensus timeline.  He still tosses around the millions of years and pictures Homo ergaster and Homo erectus belonging to some mythical pathway to man.  He still calls the apes Australopithecus and Paranthropus “hominids” and accepts the Darwin Party premise that we are evolved apes.  Let’s encourage him to keep exposing the bias in Leakey’s skulls.  This should get Leakey mad enough to counterattack by finding the bias in Bromage’s work.  The public will get the message: the tale of human evolution is all bias, all the time.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils

1. Mongolia: It’s a Bird!  It’s Plain!  Ker Than reported on two “raptor”species unearthed in Mongolia in Live Science.  He quickly associated these with alleged “feathered dinosaurs” like Microraptor gui.  But wasn’t that a bird?  He claimed that dromeosaurs were bipedal dinosaurs that “were closely related to birds and many of them are even known to have had feathers.”  (For more on Microraptor gui, see the 05/19/2003 entry and analysis by Jonathan Sarfati at Answers in Genesis.)
2. Fallout Shelter:  Charles Q. Choi at Live Science reported on the find of an underground den of dinosaurs found in Montana.  The setting and the shape of the snout and legs suggested that Oryctodromeus cubicularis, “digging runner of the lair,” dug burrows – the first dinosaur found with that ability.  Choi connected that with the K-T extinction and suggested that these dinosaurs “dug deep, possibly to avoid catastrophe.”  See also the BBC News.
3. Lizard slithered:  Jeanna Brynner wrote in Live Science about a lizard having nubs for front legs.  This was provided as support for evolution: the fossil, she said, is “clarifying how some lizards shed their limbs as they crept through evolutionary time and morphed into slinky snakes.”  Another paleontologist said this provided a window into what was happening 100 million years ago.  “We now know that losing limbs isn’t a new thing and that lizards were doing it much earlier than we originally thought.”
       Another surprise was noted.  Losing the front limbs first seems odd, “when you would think it would be the opposite.”  Wouldn’t a handicapped lizard shove its face into the dirt?  “The front limbs would be useful for holding onto dinner or digging a hole, but it must be developmentally easier to get rid of the forelimbs,” confessed Michael Caldwell (U of Alberta).  The end of the article contains a key disclaimer about the evolutionary value of this fossil: “Though the lizard find does not make for a ‘missing link,’ Caldwell suggests it suffices as a critical data point for helping scientists understand the aquatic process of limb loss.”  National Geographic and EurekAlert also reported on this story.  Question: has anyone proved this individual was not an unfortunate mutant?
4. Leapin’ lizards:  Another fossil lizard shows extended vertebra the discoverers believe allowed it to glide like a flying squirrel.  For a picture, see Live Science.  This had nothing to do with other flying reptiles, the pterosaurs, which were capable of true powered flight.  There are “dragon lizards” in Asia capable of gliding today.  Another gliding lizard fossil is known in Triassic strata.  The discoverer made this tie-in to evolution: “It is really amazing to see evolution making nearly identical structures in animals of different origins spanning such a long history.”

Evolutionary paleontology is 30% digging and 70% storytelling.  Maybe they think details about dry bones will bore the public.  Everybody wants to hear a good campfire story, whether or not it is true.  The more fanciful the better.  The next theory will be that dinosaurs could sing, dance and play chess (cartoon).
    Ezekiel told of a valley of dry bones that came to life (Ezekiel 37) but that was only a parable, and the resurrection occurred by intelligent design.  The evolutionists tell their stories as if they believe them to be literally true.  But can a consistent materialist conjure up behavior, motivation and intention from dry bones?  Bones are designed; tell the Darwinist who engages in such flights of fancy, “Get your own dirt.” (See joke).
    For those needing alternatives to the evolutionary interpretations of dinosaur bones, see the recent article in Answers magazine about sauropods, and in Journal of Creation about alleged “feathered dinosaurs.”
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Evolution

1. Snowball Earth Melts:  The idea that prior to the emergence of complex life the Earth was frozen over has been given the colorful title, “Snowball Earth.”  Scientists at Imperial College, London, are questioning whether this ever happened, according to EurekAlert.  They claim to have found evidence of repeated hot and cold cycles that would not have allowed Earth to undergo a prolonged period of freezing.  They also questioned it on thermodynamic grounds: “In fact, once fully frozen, it is difficult to create the right conditions to cause a thaw, since much of the incoming solar radiation would be reflected back by the snow and ice.” 
2. Antarctic rivers drain Antarctic lakes:  Many scientists had speculated that lakes under Antarctic ice might hold pristine clues to the early Earth, and exotic forms of life.  Now they may have to take into account a paper in Science¹ that found evidence these lakes are connected and drain from one to another as the ice cover shifts.  Images from space show that these lakes act like lubricants and rapidly shift the highly-pressurized subglacial ice around.  They cited instances: “Large outbursts of subglacial water have been observed in coastal regions,” and “Antarctic subglacial water can move in large volumes between lakes, on short time scales and over long distances.”
       In conclusion, they remark that the water movements they detected are “large, extensive, and temporally variable.”  Big changes were seen within just 2-3 years.  “These observations provide clues to understanding the stability of ice streams through their sensitivity to basal lubrication,” they said.  “The time scale for subglacial water transport (months to years) is short compared with that of other known drivers of glacial flow variability, suggesting a mechanism for more rapid changes in ice stream behavior than have previously been assumed.”

Didn’t they ever hear of global warming?  Indeed, the science wars are heating up all over the world.
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Geology

This leads to the tantalizing question of whether darwinian evolution can dismiss intentionality.  Obviously, creative brains can cope better with an unpredictable world and may have a selective advantage, so creativity and intentionality can evolve and in turn influence evolution.  But does it really need a brain like ours to bring intentionality into play?  Turner views this question through a physiological lens and develops a picture of a modular brain that could be understood as a kind of ‘climax’ ecosystem with competing and coevolving cells, and with homeostasis as the organizing principle of cognition.  He argues that we intentionally design the world when our neural ecosystems generate ideas that then guide our bodies to reshape it.  The point is that the brain may be just one example of what Turner calls ‘persistors’ – persistent environments that are created by systems of Bernard machines and that have a process-based form of heritable memory.  ‘Darwin machines’ – replicators that have to prove themselves under natural selection – shape evolution in the absence of intentionality.  But the author argues that life and evolution happen when Darwin machines act in concert with Bernard machines, which are the agents of homeostasis and can be seen, in their own particular way, as goal-seeking and purposeful.  These are the ‘tinkerer’s accomplices’ of the title.

Sharing a broadly accepted idea or philosophical concept comes with a danger: after a period of indulgence in mutual affirmation, it is easy to forget how to effectively defend the concept against a smart and captious critic.... evolutionary biologists can struggle to find their best arguments when challenged by a well-prepared enthusiast of ‘intelligent design’.

The Darwin Party heads keep sending out their novice debaters as if they think this puts the intelligent design Visigoths on edge.  The Visigoths in the camp outside are wondering, meantime, how such shallow logic could make it into Nature, the DP’s warfare manual.  Any undergrad logic student could show how self-refuting this thesis is.  The argument makes no sense even if one assumes evolution at the outset.  Each example from the living world Turner provides has intelligent design already built into the genetic code, not self-generated out of thin air.  And count the number of times mindless entities are personified in the quote above and the entire “interior designer” concept unravels.  It’s like we have to keep slapping the hands of the bumbling Darwin Party emissaries and reminding them, “You can’t say that.  That word is not in your vocabulary.  You can’t plagiarize our ID manual; we won’t let you get away with it.”  They never learn.  Maybe it’s a strategy; perhaps they believe a million novices can compensate for one philosopher.
    So with a smile and a snicker under our breath, we send back a greeting card into the Darwin Castle, wishing the best to the newlyweds, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Tinkerer’s Accomplice.  Father Charlie and Tinker Bell, surrounded by indulgent guests enjoying mutual affirmation, must be proud parents.  They probably hope Little Miss Tinker Bell Jr. will be able to zap the brooms the Apprentice unleashed and bring back order.  But we know what’s going to happen.  The brooms will douse the wand and carry on, submerging the Castle in a flood of entropy.  This makes our work so easy.  All we will have to do is mop up when the walls fall down.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

• Oregon Trial:  A rapid ouster from the classroom was what biology teacher Kris Helphinstine faced when he dared question Darwinism before students in an Oregon high school.  According to Fox News, Helphinstine went out of his way to not to teach creationism.  His unforgivable sin, though, was to link Darwinism to Planned Parenthood and Nazi Germany in a Powerpoint presentation.  He explained, “Critical thinking is vital to scientific inquiry.  My whole purpose was to give accurate information and to get them thinking.”  Comparing President Bush to Nazis would probably not have gotten him in so much trouble.
      Helphinstine said he was trying to teach a point about bias in sources, but apparently he pushed his point too far.  When his optional supplemental material included some Biblical references, that was “not just a little bit over the line,” a school board member in the Bend, Oregon town said.  One parent complained that his presentation prevented his daughter from learning what she needed to learn.  Another asked, “How many minds did he pollute?”  It didn’t matter that Helphinstine has a master’s in science from Oregon State.  He was summarily fired after only 8 days on the job.
• Don’t Bring that Stuff Here:  One would think an ostensibly Christian university would like to hear a good discussion about intelligent design (ID) vs evolution.  A “Darwin vs. Design” event is scheduled for next month (April 13-14) at Southern Methodist University (see DarwinVsDesign.com).  These are simple lecture events where PhD scientists share scientific evidence for design in nature.
      In a pre-emptive strike, though, “angry” professors “fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down,” reported Jeffrey Weiss for the Dallas News.  A taste of the anger from the Anthropology Dept.: “They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask,” begging the question of who is engaging in polemics.  “Similar letters were sent by the biology and geology departments,” Weiss said.
      What about free speech?  A college campus has its limits, apparently.  The scientists are calling for prior restraint, complaining that the event will give the “impression that Intelligent Design has support from scientists at the school.”  This “propaganda” event is causing “enormous discomfort” to the science professors, who feel that hosting ID proponents on campus is tantamount to “giving them legitimacy.”
      The administration defended the event on free speech grounds while holding ID at arm’s length: “Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support of the free marketplace of ideas, providing facilities for those programs does not imply SMU’s endorsement of the presenters’ views.”
  

If you are wagging your head right now at the intolerance of the Darwinists to debate the scientific evidence, and the degree of hostility to the idea of critical thinking about Darwin’s views, thank God.  You’re normal.  Not even Darwin would condone this irrational behavior.  Campuses routinely host the most outrageous, radical views in public, sponsored by the campus: lectures by homosexual activists or radical Islamists, without a peep.  You can denounce Bush as Hitler, spit on the Bible, make students act out Ramadan, wear cross-dressing clothes and use the other sex’s bathroom, and advocate euthanasia or bestiality, and reporters will yawn.  But mention the letters “ID” and you will not believe the hostility.  How can the open marketplace of ideas, especially at a nominally “Christian” university, condone prior restraint of the very core concepts (design in nature) that you would think Christians believe?  How can a public school, where kids’ lunch money still says “In God We Trust,” fire a teacher with a master’s degree in science for telling the truth that Darwinian evolution has clear historical linkages with Planned Parenthood and Nazi Germany? 
    These two stories show why the majority of people in this country, who still deny that life is the product of blind natural processes, had better wake up and get involved.  Has America gone down the tubes this far, that Biblical references in supplemental material from a teacher daring to question Darwin’s Supreme Authority is fired on the spot?  A century ago the McGuffey Readers in public schools openly included Bible references, Bible stories, and Biblical morals.  Now, this is called “polluting” the minds of students, while abortion, homosexuality, and radical Islam and communism are openly praised.  How did it come to this?  What were you doing to let this happen?  Not even Darwin or Voltaire or Hume would consider this a healthy situation.  Calm down, Darwinistas!  Get a life.  Cool your jets.  Take a breath.  Chill out.  Get a reality check.  Let’s put the best scientific evidence on the table and talk about it, OK?  You’ve had your turn at the rostrum for 148 years.  Let’s be nice, now, and take turns.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism • Intelligent Design

New evidence of “human” culture among primates
23 March 2007
Research suggests that stone-banging by South American monkeys could be a socially-learned skill

Fresh evidence that suggests monkeys can learn skills from each other, in the same manner as humans, has been uncovered by a University of Cambridge researcher.
    Dr Antonio Moura, a Brazilian researcher from the Department of Biological Anthropology, has discovered signs that Capuchin monkeys in Brazil bang stones as a signalling device to ward off potential predators.
    While not conclusive, his research adds to a mounting body of evidence that suggests other species have something approaching human culture.

The depths of inanity to which Darwinian dogmatists will sink borders on insanity.  Monkey bangs rock.  Shakespeare can’t be far behind.  Will this line of argument fly at Oxford?  (On second thought... Dawkins territory...)
    There are two reasons why Darwinists get away with shameless nonsense in the press.  The first is because they have not learned shame.  Normal people, not infected with Delusia academia, should teach them the normal human blushing response.  A good bout of laughter can help.  Saturday Night Live should take this theory and run with it.  Calling all comedians: there’s a gold mine of joke material at Darwin Party Headquarters.
    The second reason they get away with nonsense is that the gutless press isn’t doing its job.  Science reporters, like fawning toadies, just gulp down the toad and regurgitate it onto the plate to dish out to the public.  We need a new generation of reporters who understand their role is not to parrot but to ferret.  Fire the current batch and send in some seasoned political reporters to face up to the academics, shove microphones in their faces, and ask questions like:

“How do you know that?  Mr. Moura, doesn’t it seem a little silly that rock-banging by monkeys could have anything to do with human culture?  What do you have to say to the majority of people who would disagree with your idea?  Don’t you feel it is a little bit reckless to take such a trivial behavior and extrapolate it onto human beings?  What about crows and parrots and dogs? (03/08/2007, bullets #2, #3).  Don’t they show much more elaborate signaling behavior than Capuchin monkeys?  Didn’t we learn that even ants can teach one another? (01/11/2006, bullet #3).  You wouldn’t suggest that human culture evolved from crows and ants now, would you?  Couldn’t the same reasoning be used to speculate that architecture evolved from beaver dams?  What makes rock-banging stand out as anything unusual in the animal kingdom?  How could your hypothesis be tested?  How could it be falsified?  Have you been fair to other explanations, or debated with scientists who disagree with your “suggestion”?  Isn’t science supposed to be about verification and justification of ideas?  If it is not conclusive, and only a suggestion, why not get to work in the lab until you can state something with more confidence?  Where is this mounting body of evidence you speak of?  Can you produce it so that our research team can see if any of it really does more than just speculate?  Have you, sir, seen the mounting body of evidence that Darwinism is on the decline?  And why, sir, are you spending your time speculating on such things instead of doing science that can make the world a better place?”

After this barrage (typical of the way political reporters treat the President), Mr. Moura needs to be put face-to-face on TV with a well-prepared and outspoken Darwin critic who can shoot down every suggestion he makes on scientific grounds, and with a philosopher of science who can express outrage at any attempt to draw such a grandiose extrapolation from such flimsy observations.
    Darwinism will slink away silently when the wise and sensible among us stand up to their bluff and demand scientific integrity or else.  Or else what?  Or else a room full of belly laughs.  Reporters, do your homework and come prepared to your next interview with a Darwinist.  Have a long list of hard-hitting questions and, as backup, a box of kazoos and party blowers.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

There’s dust on Earth, too, but....  In most cases (except in man-made habitats like mines and in smoke-filled rooms), our bodies are tuned to the geology and geography and atmosphere.  The atmosphere transports large amounts of dust, but clouds and rain cleanse it and allow dust to solidify into rocks or be transported to the oceans.  Meanwhile, our sinuses, mucous membranes and sneeze responses trap and expel much of the dust that enters our airways, allowing most of us to enjoy many decades of healthy breathing.  Pushing the human body outside the envelope is teaching us many things we might otherwise take for granted.  It’s revealing an amazing degree of tuning of the body to its habitat.
    The moon is the same distance from the sun as Earth, but look how different it is.  Nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there for long.  The lack of sufficient mass to retain an atmosphere and allow liquid water makes all the difference in the world.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Health

Perhaps nowhere is the truism ‘structure defines function’ more appropriate than for the brain.  The architecture of different brain regions determines the kinds of computations that can be carried out, and may dictate whether a particular region can support subjective awareness.  Also, the degree of architectural complexity may determine susceptibility to neurological and psychiatric diseases – complex architectural schemes being more prone to disruption than simpler ones.  Understanding how such structure-function relationships govern brain operations requires a systems-level approach that explores how local computation relates to global patterns of neural activity.

It is one thing to measure, describe and understand the physical action of neurons, but quite another to reason about them.  If reason can be subsumed under the structure of neurons, how can I know it is reason?  If consciousness is merely an artifact of firing patterns in a network, how do I know I am not just dreaming?
    Whenever evolutionary neurobiologists, who are obligate physicalists, attribute consciousness and reason to networks of physical parts with a presumed evolutionary history, we need to ask them some pointed questions.  Let’s take some of his statements and play with them.

• “I propose that the distinct network architectures translate into unique functional consequences.”
  Is a proposition an artifact of a hardware network, or does it have an external validity?
• “In cortical networks, a dynamic balance between excitation and inhibition gives rise to an array of network oscillations involving neuronal populations of varying sizes.”
  Was that thought an excitation or an inhibition?  Suppose the pattern is different next time.  Will the first thought evaporate?
• “This self-organized, or so called ‘spontaneous’ activity is the most striking and yet perhaps least appreciated feature of the cerebral cortex.”
  Where is the “appreciation module” in this structure?  How can it be appreciated if it is self-organized?  What is a self?  Whose self can demand that I appreciate something?
• “Without inhibition, excitatory activity caused by any one stimulus would ripple across the entire neuronal network and a confused jumble of overlapping signals would result.”
  How would an observer of similar signals in a computer chip be able to reverse-engineer the software that produced it?  Would the engineer attempting the feat be an artifact of his own circuits?
  
• “Inhibitory interneurons and the rhythms they generate can temporally and spatially structure the activity of excitatory cell assemblies to ensure that information flows to just the right place at just the right time.”
  Please define “right” in this view.  This seems to imply goal-directed software that is directing the patterns.  What is information?  What directs the inhibitory neurons to inhibit, and when?  How can we know that the right inhibitions occured to generate your thoughts on this subject?  Would different inhibitory rhythms generate a completely different opinion?  If so, on what basis would other humans subject to their own rhythms decide that your opinion has more – or less – validity than that of a schizophrenic?
• “The interaction and interference of multiple brain rhythms often gives rise to the appearance of ‘noise’ in an electroencephalogram.  This noise is the most complex type known to physics and reflects a metastable state between the predictable behaviour of oscillators and the unpredictability of chaos.”
  In a physicalist view, who determines what is noise and what is signal?
  
• “A special case is the hippocampus whose highly recursive connection matrix is thought to function as a large ‘autoassociator’, allowing the reconstruction of entire episodes from remembered fragments.”
  What does “is thought to” mean?  Who thinks?  Is thinking valid?  What is determining the end result of these associations to produce the “right” reconstruction?
• “I suggest that the local-global wiring of the cerebral cortex and the perpetual, self-organized complex dynamics it supports are necessary ingredients for subjective experiences.”
  If experiences are artifacts of network activity, who decides what is subjective?  Could this statement itself be considered subjective?  Does objectivity exist?
• “If they manage to perturb ongoing activity for a sufficiently long time in a big enough population of neurons, their effect will be noticed; that is, we will become conscious of them.”
  Whoa.  Define consciousness.  If my neurons focused on that sentence, and thought about it, how am I to know your proposition or my thoughts about it are verifiable? 
• “Complex neuronal networks are a useful product of brain evolution but come at a price.  Greater resources and volume are required to sustain long-distance wiring in complex networks, and the risks of malfunction increase with complexity.”
  Please define useful.  Please define malfunction.  Can you defend the proposition that a mindless, aimless process of evolution will inevitably converge on truth and integrity?
• “Timing errors present particularly difficult problems in complex networks, because of limits to how much information can be conveyed through restricted numbers of long-range conduits.  Not surprisingly, diseases of the cerebral cortex are manifold – including epilepsies, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.”
  What is information?  What is disease?  Is disease a continuum or an on-off state?  If the former, who decides at what point something is normal and something else is a timing error?  If the latter, and schizophrenics were in the majority, could they lock up the minority in the insane asylum?
• “One of the greatest challenges left for systems neuroscience is to understand the normal and dysfunctional operations of the cerebral cortex by relating local and global patterns of activity at timescales relevant for behaviour.”
  Is a pattern of activity equivalent to consciousness?  Could the patterns of impulses in a mechanical machine wired like the brain and connected to a power source be considered conscious?  Would those patterns be able to judge the validity of your propositions, and if so, who would judge the debate?  Suppose a group of robots reasoned that their circuits had been designed, therefore the humans’ circuits must also have been designed; would you accept their verdict?

Here is another case of a scientist with the Yoda Complex (09/25/2006 commentary).  He stands at a pulpit outside of his own brain and speaks wisdom to the rest of us stuck inside our brains.  This is a technical foul.  He cannot play the game of trying to answer the age-old mind-body problem* unless he first acknowledges the independent validity of reason and the laws of logic.  If his subjective thoughts can be completely described by the firing of neurons and the timing of rhythms of excitory/inhibitory signals, then his opinions are self-refuting and necessarily false.  His own system, i.e., just crashed.  We’ve seen the Darwin malware do this many times.  The only solution in these cases is to reformat the hard drive, load the ID disk and reboot.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Evolution

---

*For news and commentary on neurobiology from an intelligent design perspective, see Denyse O’Leary’s blog The Mindful Hack.

How, then, does it happen? The researchers noted that their findings are compatible with a recently proposed nonrotating model in which the ring of ATPases alternately compresses and extends, drawing the DNA in—a bit like what your mouth might do if you had to eat a plateful of spaghetti with your hands tied behind your back.

Another amazing machine shows up in the cell just for the purpose of packing DNA.  Rings of ATP alternately compress to push strands of DNA into a cellular storage container for safe keeping.  The author describes the machine as “a complex and powerful molecular motor,”  and truly it is.  Perhaps evolutionists could explain how the cell managed before this complex machine accidentally appeared on the scene to deal with the great wad of DNA that must have been getting in the way of the operation of the cell.  The author gives us no clue: evolution is not mentioned once in the article.
-DK
Next headline on:  Genetics • Amazing Facts

Missing Link, or Just Jawboning About Ear Evolution?   03/19/2007    
Tetrapod vertebrates (four-footed animals with backbones) comprise a dizzying array of species, both living and extinct.  When is it justifiable to arrange different forms into an ancestral evolutionary sequence, especially when some members are extinct and others are still alive today?  On what basis can scientists claim that a discovery demonstrates evolution?  Some Chinese scientists entered their latest attempt to exhibit a missing link.  They discovered a fossilized “primitive” mammal they claim fills a gap in the evolution of the mammalian middle ear.  Their paper was published last week in Nature.¹  A press release from the National Science Foundation reproduced on EurekAlert emphasized the evolutionary message: “This early mammalian ear from China is a rosetta-stone type of discovery which reinforces the idea that development of complex body parts can be explained by evolution, using exquisitely preserved fossils,” said Richard Lane of the NSF.  The lead author said, “This new fossil offers a rare insight in the evolutionary origin of the mammalian ear structure.”  He also said, “Yanoconodon clearly shows an intermediate condition in the evolutionary process of how modern mammals acquired their middle ear structure.”  Nothing in the press release indicated anything short of complete vindication for evolutionary theory with this find.
    Zhe-Xi Luo et al described a new eutriconodont mammal species, Yanoconodon, they found in the fossil-rich province of Liaoning, China.  After providing the customary description and classification sections, they attempted to explain two observations.  First and most notable was the structure of the middle ear.  They claimed it represents a clear transitional form between the attached bones of mammaliaformes (“mammal-like reptiles”) and detached middle ear bones of mammals.  Second, they noted the extra vertebra (26 instead of 19 for most mammals, and 22 for the nearest relative) and the presence of lumbar ribs, unusual for mammals but present in some widely-separated groups.  This they explained by convergent evolutionary manipulation of Hox genes that govern the divisions of the vertebral column (sacrum, ilium, lumbar) and the presence or absence of lumbar ribs.  Experiments on lab rats show that these traits can be manipulated by knockout or overexpression of these master-switch regulatory genes.
    There is no clear evolutionary transition in the vertebral characteristics.  The authors noted that Yanoconodon’s nearest alleged relative, Jeholodens, lacks lumbar ribs.  Moreover, they found another pair of relatives on a different branch, one that has lumbar ribs and one that doesn’t.  For an animal to have 26 vertebra is “exceptional,” they said; the only other one is Repenomamus, a dog-size Cretaceous mammal that preyed on dinosaurs.
    The focus of the paper, though, was on the middle ear bones.  The authors went into great detail to try to establish Yanoconodon as a transitional form.  In the evolutionary scenario, primitive mammals emerged from reptiles with the bones at the rear of the jaw still attached to the jaw.  Over evolutionary time, the rear bones began to gradually separate from the back of the jaw.  Presumably, this gave some advantage to hearing because the incipient middle ear bones (ossicles), the hammer, anvil and stirrup (or malleus, incus and stapes) were more free to vibrate.  Eventually, the ossicles became completely separated from the jaw as in modern mammals and were devoted solely to hearing.  The authors identified parts they called malleus and incus, but did not find a stapes.
    In support of the story, the authors found that in Yanoconodon the ossicles had partially detached, remaining connected to the jaw only by an ossified Meckel’s cartilage.  Further, the malleus and incus bore a resemblance to the completely-detached ossicles of the platypus (Ornithorhynchus paradoxus), a fur-bearing monotreme.  They also pointed out that platypus ossicles emerge during development with an attachment to the jaw via Meckel’s cartilage, then become detached later.  The arrangement in Yanoconodon, they said, may be pedomorphic – a case of “arrested development” in which the embryonic attachment was maintained into adulthood.
    So that’s the story.  How good a transition is it?  The well-known skeptic and pseudoscience fighter James Randi thought this was ”very cool” as a demonstration of evolution.  He gave it a big write-up at his James Randi Educational Foundation where he reproduced the figures from the original paper.  The figure he left out, however, is the cladogram (phylogenetic tree), which, surprisingly, shows “homoplasies [convergent evolution] of DMME [definite mammalian middle ear] in basal mammals” in six places on the tree.  One of them is Hadrocodium, a lower Jurassic mammal lacking some of the typical features of mammals but having a complex hearing system (see Reference.com).  Does this mean that an even less derived species had mammal-like middle ear bones, separated from the jaw?  If so, Yanoconodon is too late to be considered a transitional form.  Randi displayed some ignorance of modern evolutionary theory by using the pedomorphy hypothesis to conjure up the ghost of Haeckel: “It’s one module in development that flaunts a lovely example of embryonic recapitulation of evolutionary history,” his article boasts.  (Recapitulation is dismissed by most Darwinists these days.)
    The authors of the original paper did not even claim that Yanoconodon represents a straight-line evolution from attached middle ear to separate middle ear.  It represents, rather, a possible pedomorphic characteristic capable of two different evolutionary explanations.  The placement of Yanoconodon in an evolutionary sequence also required a tool that maximizes “parsimony” (simplicity) between competing possibilities of phylogenetic trees when all the characteristics are analyzed.  In the technical explanation below, keep in mind that homoplasy refers to convergent evolution – similar traits appearing in unrelated groups.

Yanoconodon and its eutriconodontan kin are nested within the crown Mammalia (Fig. 2) by the parsimony of all characters.  The absence of DMME [definite mammalian middle ear] in eutriconodonts, an in-group of crown Mammalia, is in sharp contrast to modern monotremes [like Platypus] and therians [more derived mammals, including marsupials and placentals] that have DMME.  This phylogeny requires one of the following two evolutionary scenarios: either (1) DMME was present in the common ancestor of monotremes, eutriconodonts and therians; but eutriconodonts re-evolved the middle ear attachment to mandible, or (2) DMME was absent in the common ancestor of monotremes, eutriconodonts and therians, and this is retained as a paedomorphosis in eutriconodonts; but DMME evolved in extant monotremes, and separately in therians.  Paedomorphosis, or retention of fetal or juvenile characteristics of ancestors and relatives through developmental heterochrony [differences in developmental rates], is a common phenomenon in vertebrate evolution.  The heterochronic (‘premature’) ossification of Meckel’s cartilage in eutriconodonts is the immediate cause for this paedomorphic connection of middle ear and mandible, and is why there is an overall homoplastic distribution among therians (with DMME), eutriconodonts (without DMME), monotremes (with DMME) and pre-mammalian relatives (without DMME) (triangles in Fig. 2).  The paedomorphic connection of the middle ear to mandible of eutriconodonts and mammaliaforms is consistent with their lack of the long-bone epiphyses for terminating skeletal growth, as seen in modern mammals.

The formation of the three tiny bones of the middle ear from components of the reptilian lower jaw was a key event in mammalian evolution.  Never before has this transition been seen so clearly as in a primitive fossil mammal found recently in a new locality of the Yixian Formation in China, 300 km west of the classic sites in Liaoning.  In this specimen the middle-ear bones remain connected to the lower jaw by Meckel’s cartilage – a transition associated with a corresponding remodelling of the lower back.  But the situation is not as clear-cut as it seems.  The evolutionary relationships of the fossil suggest that either the ‘modern’ middle ear evolved twice, independently or that it evolved and was then lost in at least one ancient lineage.

Evolutionary papers are like contracts: the bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.  Darwin just handed us a reverse mortgage without telling us the benefits are all coming from a reduction of equity [equity n.: fairness, impartiality, justice].  James Randi performed his glitzy commercial like James Garner, touting all the wonderful benefits of evolutionary reverse mortgages, but we just read the fine print and found the alleged benefits overpowered by serious problems.
    Anyone who thinks explanations just “jump right out of the data” should listen to the Philosophy of Science lecture series from the Teaching Company.  Jeffrey Kasser shows that it is devilishly hard to prove the simplest scientific statement, such as “all copper conducts electricity” by either deduction, induction, empiricism or anything else.  In a related course from the Teaching Co., Steven Goldman shows how philosophers have struggled for centuries with the question of whether the observations of our senses actually tell us anything about the real world.  If such basic and simple explanations about things right under our noses that we take for granted cannot be established with certainty, how much less inferences about the unseen past?  The issues of proof and explanation are far more difficult and complex than most people realize.

Did you know, for instance, that David Hume in the 18th century argued that induction provides no justification for explanation or prediction, that we do not “see” causes, and that philosophers of science have never answered his challenge successfully?  Did you know that Karl Popper essentially dismissed induction as having anything to do with scientific explanation?  Did you know that induction is not necessary to discover anything in science, and that deduction has about as many problems as induction?  How about the facts that philosophy of science since the heady days of logical positivism in the 1930s has become a welter of conflicting opinions between realists and anti-realists and every position in between, with no one being able to define with any justification what constitutes an observation, let alone a scientific explanation or theory? 

It would do you good to struggle with some of these issues for awhile before evaluating a paper claiming to have found a transitional form in Darwin’s storyland.
    Surprisingly, the usual Darwin propaganda outlets who usually go ape over every missing link story didn’t seem to pay this claim much attention.  Maybe they realized critics could easily shoot it down.  We’re going to display this as an example, though, to educate our readers on how to evaluate such claims in general.  OK, so a four-legged fossil animal was found.  There are lots of four-legged fossil animals.  What right does anyone have to arrange them into an ancestral sequence?  What justification is there for the implication that complex hearing bones were evolving by a naturalistic, aimless, pointless, purposeless process, with advanced mammalian hearing as the product?  If you take away the evolutionary assumption, no such inference jumps out of the observations.
    To see why, visualize a 3-dimensional plot with data points scattered throughout like dust particles in the air.  Here and there, some seem to cluster together, but no obvious trend reveals itself.  How can one justify drawing lines through the dots that show an ancestral tree pattern?  An almost infinite number of patterns could connect the dots.  What right does one scientist have to claim his pattern is the “true” pattern that tells what actually happened before there were observers?
    One needs to understand the Darwinist process of drawing phylogenetic trees, because the story really breaks down right there.  These scientists used a “maximum parsimony” computer program to produce their tree.  Why did they select that?  They could have chosen instead to use “maximum likelihood” or Bayesian analysis, or some yet-to-be-discovered new method that will enjoy fad status for awhile.  Even so, the method they used required choosing between 218 equally parsimonious trees.  For those who need proof how arbitrary this process is, read the following quote from the paper:

This is based on the strict consensus of 218 equally parsimonious trees of PAUP (Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony and Other Methods, version 4.0b) analysis of 436 characters (1,000 heuristic runs with unordered multi-state characters) that can be scored for 102 comparative taxa (97 mammaliaforms including 25 extant mammals, plus three cynodonts as outgroups).  For each equally parsimonious tree, tree length = 2,188, consistency index = 0.375, retention index = 0.803.

What would happen if they included different organisms as outgroups, or lightened the consistency requirements, or used some other criterion for establishing the consensus?  How much was the result dependent on the way the traits of the various organisms were described by others?  To what extent were evolutionary assumptions embedded in all the data to start with?  Anyone thinking that The One and Only True Tree came out of this exercise is a good customer for the next beachfront property sale on the Isle of DeBris.
    We have reported previously (07/25/2002, 10/01/2005) that all such trees are compromises between contradictory data points, and therefore represent human assumptions imposed on the data, not independently-verifiable patterns that exist “out there” in some value-free, assumption-free Logicland.  This is an important fulcrum of this discussion; all the team’s inferences about evolutionary transitions hinge on the validity of their phylogenetic tree.  But their tree is a product of human imagination, not a fact of history.  Understand that and the whole paper falls apart.  The only thing that is left is an unusual fossil that fits who-knows-where into some scheme by who-knows-who about who-knows-what that happened who-knows-when.  Insert your guess here.  It can be considered just as valid as anyone else’s, including the one in this paper.
    Suppose you sent four different teams into a grocery market on a mission to read the ingredients on every box of processed food and arrange them all into a phylogenetic