Explorer 1 Chief Discovers Design   01/31/2008    
On this day 50 years ago, America entered the space race.  On January 31, 1958, America gave its answer to Sputnik: a civilian satellite named Explorer 1.  Within a few hours of the time of day these words are being written, von Braun’s Jupiter-C rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, successfully launched a JPL satellite into the night sky.  An eager team of JPL ham radio operators picked up the signal in Pasadena, California, confirming that the satellite had reached orbit.  Many are familiar with the iconic photograph of William Pickering, James Van Allen and Wernher von Braun hoisting a replica of the satellite in a victory press conference in Washington DC in the middle of the night as soon as the signal was verified (see image at JPL ).
    Explorer 1 is a great American success story.  It produced the first scientific discovery in space (the Van Allen radiation belts), prompted the formation of NASA, and marked the beginning of JPL’s epic exploration of the solar system.  Details on Explorer 1 can be found at a special feature at JPL.  A documentary film produced by the lab is being premiered today on HD Discovery Theater and PBS: for show times, see: JPL.¹
    On the eve of the anniversary, Dr. Henry L. Richter, Jr. (PhD, Caltech), a design manager for Explorer 1, spoke to employees in the JPL Library about the mission.  Richter, the Group Supervisor of Explorer Design and Development, was responsible for the team that designed the satellite, its instruments and communications.  He also was among those who verified with ham radios that it had reached orbit.  Now 80 years old, his mind still sharp as a tack, he recounted details from the 1950s like it all happened yesterday.  With scientific acumen and engaging personal insights, he told the story of a fascinating time: how JPL had prepared a satellite before getting approval from President Eisenhower “just in case”, how he selected the instruments, how his team invented things that didn’t yet exist, how they tested delicate parts with shake tables and sun lamps for a space environment no one had yet experienced, how they tested the radio microlink relays in the desert, how they eavesdropped on the transmissions from Sputnik and Explorer with ham radio equipment, how he learned Russian in three weeks so that he could deliver a lecture in Russian about the mission to the International Geophysical Year convention in Moscow, and much more that made for a great story.
    As his talk was winding down, Dr. Richter turned to a bigger subject.  “So in conclusion,” he continued without breaking stride, “I’d just like to make one comment, that having been involved in all this, and somewhat of a scientific background, I’ve come to the conclusion that the earth and the universe are no accident of nature.  The way they’re put together is very specific to allow human life to exist on this earth – whether it’s the distance of the sun to the earth, it’s all the way it is to allow human life to exist.  And it’s according to a design, as far as I’m concerned.  And a design demands a Design-er.  And so someplace there’s a cosmic Designer that put it all together and made it work—call it God if you want.  And I decided I needed a relationship with that Designer.  I developed one late in life and my life has been drastically changed since then, and it’s been glorious.”
    The Van Allen radiation belts discovered by Explorer 1 were found to be essential for life on earth.  They capture deadly radiation from space and provide shielding for the inhabitants below.  Subsequent missions revealed that Mars lacks this protection (see 09/23/2006).
    Today at JPL, the 50th anniversary was celebrated outdoors, with the entire lab mingling over lunch with septegenarian and octogenarian veterans of the Explorer 1 days.  Dr. Richter was present sharing the limelight with a remarkable group of American heroes who laid the foundation for the peaceful exploration of space.

Word has it that a number of listeners congratulated Dr. Richter on the ending of his speech – and no one criticized it.  This suggests the presence of a silent majority eager to hear credible leaders speak out for creation.  The Darwinists might slink into the shadows if more distinguished scientists stood up and proclaimed the obvious: that our universe is not a cosmic accident, but was designed for life. 
Next headline on:  Solar System • Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology • Media

A Step Closer to Gecko Adhesive   01/30/2008    
Scientists are getting closer to imitating the amazing wall-climbing ability of geckos.  Science Daily reports that a team from UC Berkeley manufactured tape with hard polymer fibers just 600 nanometers across that mimic the spatulae on gecko feet.
    This latest attempt at imitating the gecko works only on smooth, clean surfaces, but requires no pressure and resists sliding.  It lifts off easily and leaves no residue.  Both gecko feet and the new tape work by employing intermolecular forces called van der Waals forces that only become significant at close range.  The tiny fibers create a large surface area for these forces to act on.
    Next, the team wants to improve it so that it can work on rough or dirty surfaces and clean itself.  Geckos are still way out in front in this technology (01/04/2005).  Their spatulae, being much smaller (200 nanometers in diameter), resist contamination because large dirt particles are more likely to stick to the surface than to the foot.

It was only after 2000 that scientists began to understand the physics of gecko feet (08/27/2002).  Immediately, they set out to imitate them.  Products inspired by this technology will soon find wide application.  Science inspired by nature’s designs – biomimetics – is on the forefront of research that, unlike evolutionary theory, is poised to improve our daily lives.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics

Hidden Messages Found in DNA   01/29/2008    
DNA contains the language of life, but what would happen if someone found hidden messages in the genetic code?  Such a thing actually happened, reported the New York Times.  When Craig Venter’s lab produced an artificial organism, they inserted hidden “watermarks” into the genome: his name, the names of co-workers, and the name of the Venter Institute.
    Wired Science took up the puzzle and found the hidden messages.  The sequences of DNA translated into the letters for amino acids, which in turn spelled out English words.
    This was not the first genetic puzzle to be coded and deciphered.  The New York Times article said that in 2003, a German biotech company inserted a line from Virgil into the DNA for a laboratory plant.

No doubt Venter would be quite upset if children were taught in school that these messages evolved by random mutation and natural selection over millions of years. 
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design

Good science seeks understanding of things with at least one tentacle on how it can help improve our lives.  Why reinvent solutions from scratch when many of them are literally right under our feet?  Think of something yucky around you – mold, maggots, cobwebs, slime – and there is probably a miracle product waiting to be discovered.  Forward-looking, productive science owes nothing to evolutionary theory.  The only “evolutionary marvels” are the professors who cling to a dead, useless ideology.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Plants • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

“We wouldn’t necessarily have expected horseshoe crabs to look very much like the modern ones, but that’s exactly what they look like,” [David] Rudkin [Royal Ontario Museum] said.

“This body plan that they’ve invented, they’ve stayed with it for almost a half a billion years.  It’s a good plan,” Rudkin told LiveScience.  “They’ve survived almost unchanged up until the present day, whereas lots of other animals haven’t.”

And whereas major extinction events have wiped even the mightiest, non-avian [sic] dinosaurs from our planet, this primitive-looking organism has come out unscathed.

“The horseshoe crab, the lowly little animal that crawls out of the sea every once in a while to mate, it’s survived for at least 445 million years in more or less the same form,” Rudkin said.

Friends, you have just witnessed ideology driving belief to the point of absurdity.  This is why evolution gets falsified over and over and over again, and its adherents still refuse to admit defeat.  And this is not the worst example.  Remember the fossil ctenophores that look identical to modern ones, but were found fossilized in Cambrian strata 540 million years old? (04/03/2007).  The whole fossil record is replete with similar stories of extreme stasis (e.g., 12/26/2006, 11/15/2007 bullet 6, 04/23/2006).
    Notice that these specimens were already fully-equipped horseshoe crabs.  They were not primitive, transitional forms.  An evolutionist would have to infer that their ancestors existed far earlier, probably back in the Cambrian or before.  It’s probably only a matter of time that a Cambrian horseshoe crab will be discovered.  Trilobites, similar complex arthropods with jointed appendages and compound eyes, are well known Cambrian animals.  In any case, these fully-formed horseshoe crabs appear abruptly in the Ordovician strata without ancestors, with soft parts fossilized and undisturbed.  If they are juveniles, they could well be identical to modern species.
    The only explanation is that the millions of years in the evolutionary timetable are complete fiction.  These specimens are not hundreds of millions of years old.  That would be obvious to any impartial jury hearing all the evidence.  To admit that, though, would be tantamount to reclassifying Darwin’s little book from the science section to the storybook section – a fate too horrible for the Darwinists to imagine, so the faith goes on.
    But faith it is.  What shameless credulity allows these people to believe that delicate fossils like these sat in rocks half a billion years only to show up now, unchanged from living counterparts?  Think about how many generations that is (in their timeline).  There was ample opportunity for the inexorable forces of evolutionary change we are forced to learn about in school to have modified these spider-like animals – to have given them harder armor, lungs, snorkels, water wings or something to show for all that time.
    The claim that they invented a good body plan and stayed with it half a billion years is so ludicrous, all sensible people should rise up and laugh the Darwinists to shame.  If this were the only case it would be sufficient, but critics have been pointing out these anomalies since Darwin’s day, and nothing ever changes.
    So strong is the grip of the Darwin Party on institutional science, theirs is the only belief system too sacred to criticize.  By force of decree it has been labeled the “scientific” view of the world.  It and it alone is permitted to be taught as “science.”  All other explanations must be relegated to the religion class, where the pseudoscientists and clowns hang out.  Something is really rotten in this regime.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Biology

Molecular Phylogeny Is a Mess of Uncertainty   01/26/2008    
Genomes galore – a great opportunity to study evolution, right?  Think again.  A paper in Science by Wong et al¹ revealed systematic uncertainty in the way genomes are compared, leading to bias that makes genetic comparisons essentially useless.  Antonis Rokas, in the same issue,² began his commentary on this problem thus:

Darwin relied on fossils, morphology, and geographical distribution to glean important clues about the history of life.  Today, natural historians can study organisms’ history of change and adaptation by probing the DNA record.  Whether to elucidate evolutionary relationships of genes and species or spot the amino acid changes driven by selection, we need to be able to generate accurate alignments of DNA sequences.  On page 473 of this issue, Wong et al.¹ provide some important caveats on how this can go awry and how to avoid alignment bias.

For years, the standard protocol has been to pick a favorite algorithm to optimize the alignment it generates.  This approach is fast and easy, but it is like being forced to always settle on vanilla ice cream for dessert; doing so can taint one’s opinion about ice cream.  Similarly, sticking to the use of a single alignment from a single algorithm can bias the estimation of phylogenies or of other evolutionary parameters pivotal to our understanding of the DNA record.  Until now, the extent and potential significance of this bias introduced by alignment was unknown.  Wong and colleagues quantify the contribution of alignment uncertainty to genome-wide evolutionary analyses and report that we sweep this uncertainty under the proverbial rug at our peril.

They report that a staggering 46.2% of the genes examined exhibit variation in the phylogeny produced dependent on the choice of alignment method, whereas the prediction of the amino acid changes driven by selection was likewise method dependent for another 28.4% of the genes.

A common theme in comparative genomics studies is a flow diagram, or chart, tracing the various steps and algorithms used during the analysis of a large number of genes.  Flow charts can be quite sophisticated, with steps such as identifying orthologous gene sets, aligning the genes, and performing different statistical analyses on the resulting alignments.  The key point, and a great practical difficulty in comparative genomics studies, is that the analyses must be repeated many times.  The procedure, then, is largely automated, with scripting languages such as Perl or Python cobbling together individual programs that perform each step.  In addition, many of the individual steps involve procedures originally developed in the evolutionary biology literature, to perform phylogeny estimation or to identify individual amino acid residues under the influence of positive selection.  Statistical methods that until recently would have been applied to a single alignment, carefully constructed, are now applied to a large number of alignments, many of which may be of uncertain quality and cause the underlying assumptions of the methods to fail.

Many comparative genomics studies are carefully performed and reasonable in design.  However, even carefully designed and carried out analyses can suffer from these types of problems because the methods used in the analysis of the genomic data do not properly accommodate alignment uncertainty in the first place.  Moreover, the genes that are of greatest interest to the evolutionary biologist probably suffer disproportionately.  For example, in several studies, the genes of greatest interest were the ones that had diverged most in their nonsynonymous rate of substitution.  But, these are the very genes that should be the most difficult to align in the first place.  We also do not believe that the alignment uncertainty problem is one that can be resolved by simply throwing away genes, or portions of genes, for which alignment differs.

As in any scientific field, molecular evolution has a long tradition of dramatic transformation.  The development of a powerful computational and statistical arsenal to account for the uncertainty stemming from sequence alignments is heralding the first paradigm shift in the era of genome-scale analysis.

This shouldn’t be news.  A team of scientists reported six years ago that building phylogenetic trees with any realistic measure of reliability was mathematically impossible (07/25/2002).  Evolutionary biologists have to make assumptions and take shortcuts to get results.  Because the algorithms are built on evolutionary assumptions (e.g., what constitutes positive selection, or what constitutes maximum likelihood or a parsimonious solution), the whole exercise is circular.  Don’t think for a minute that a computer program built by evolutionists for evolutionists is going to generate bias-free, objective, neutral “facts of science.”  They is a-huntin' for Darwin’s trees, and Darwin’s trees is what they gonna get.
    This paper is not likely to make much of a dent.  Life will go on, because “tree-thinking” is inscribed with an iron stylus on the evolutionary biologist’s brain (11/14/2005).  It influences everything he thinks and does.  Besides, the importance of bashing down the creationists with mountains and mountains of scientific evidence for evolution is too important for a little bit of error, say 75% or more, to hinder the mission.  With Darwin Day coming, the show must go on!
Next headline on:  Genetics • Darwinian Evolution

1. Could is not good enough:  “It must be recognized that assessment of the feasibility of any particular proposed prebiotic cycle must depend on arguments about chemical plausibility, rather than on a decision about logical possibility.”  To claim a chemical reaction is possible does not mean it will ever happen.  What are the specific reactants?  How efficient are they?  Researchers must present ideas that are chemically plausible, not just possible.
2. Paper is not good enough:  “It is a catalytic cycle in which a complicated sequence of enzymatic reactions is used to bring about indirectly a reaction that looks simple on paper, but is not easily achieved in practice.”  A researcher needs to think about chemical cofactors required, and the possibility of damaging cross-reactions, for instance, or whether reactions in a cycle are likely to proceed in a realistic time frame.
3. Time is not enough:  A metabolic cycle on the primitive earth may have had eons longer to work than a chemist in a lab.  “However, the identification of a cycle of plausible prebiotic reactions is a necessary but not a sufficient step toward the formulation of a plausible self-organizing prebiotic cycle.”
4. Where are the exits?  Every step in a metabolic cycle needs to be efficient enough to keep the whole cycle going.  “The cycle could not survive if side reactions funneled off more than half of the cycle components irreversibly, because then the concentration of the cycle components would decline exponentially to zero.”
5. Weakest link breaks the chain:  A researcher might be able to propose that each step in a metabolic cycle, say the 11 steps in the reverse citric acid cycle, is plausible in a prebiotic environment.  “However, the reactions are not independent because each reaction is pulled toward completion by the use of its product as the input for the subsequent reaction of the cycle.” 
6. Don’t forget thermodynamics:  Because reactions are reversible, it is likely the input of a step will be depleted.  “Whatever the original input, one would finish with an equilibrium mixture, the composition of which is determined by thermodynamics.”  Equilibrium means you are at a standstill and nothing more will happen.
7. Not all reactions are created equal:  Orgel lists seven reactions in the reverse citric acid cycle (one popular scenario for a self-organizing metabolic scenario) that are completely different.  “The reverse citric acid cycle involves a number of fundamentally different kinds of chemical transformations,” he said; “At the very least, six different catalytic activities would have been needed to complete the reverse citric acid cycle.”  What would this require: six different environments on the early earth?  This “could be argued, but with questionable plausibility,” he remarked.
8. Beware of thieves:  Damaging side reactions are often more likely to occur than the desired ones.  Orgel gives examples, such as difficult carboxylation reactions.  “This reaction would move material irreversibly out of the cycle, so one must postulate a specific catalyst that discriminates between succinic and malic acid.”
9. Inspectors required:   Biological enzymes in living cells are experts at discriminating between similar substrates.  The same cannot be assumed in a prebiotic environment: “One needs, therefore, to postulate highly specific catalysts for these reactions.  It is likely that such catalysts could be constructed by a skilled synthetic chemist, but questionable that they could be found among naturally occurring minerals or prebiotic organic molecules.”
10. Minerals are not enough:  Clay surfaces and other substrates have been popular ingredients in metabolic cycle scenarios.  The necessary reactions might occur on these natural lab tables, they say.  Orgel discusses two leading scenarios.  “While the details of the two proposals are different, the difficulty of achieving all of the required reactions while avoiding all of the likely side reactions seems at least as formidable” in both of them.
11. Hand-waving is not enough:  Orgel criticizes a recent proposal by Wachtershauser that describes self-organization by “metabolic reproduction, evolution, and inheritance by ligand feedback.”  Suggestive words.  “Unfortunately he never explains, even in outline, how this mechanism could lead to the synthesis of the aminoacyl-nucleotide conjugates that seem to be an essential feature of the proposal.”
12. One example is not enough:  “The only autocatalytic cycle that has been demonstrated experimentally is that involved in the formose reaction—the polymerization of formaldehyde to give a notoriously complex mixture of products, including ribose, the organic component of the backbone of RNA.”  Well, this must be the path to explore!  Indeed, researchers have explored this path since it was discovered in the 19th century.  Is it the holy grail?  Not exactly; the mix must be seeded with certain impurities to get started, and “Despite some successes, it is still not possible to channel the formose reaction in such a way as to produce ribose in substantial yield.”
        Ribose, of course, is one of the most difficult essential parts of RNA to imagine forming on the prebiotic earth – especially in the presence of water (see Benner, 11/05/2004).  The proposed hopeful cycles, unfortunately, produce a host of other unhelpful reaction products.
13. Simple is not enough:  Orgel begins a section on “Cycles and the Evolution of Complexity.”  Assume a cycle begins.  That does not mean that complexity will evolve.  “A cycle ... does not seem capable of evolving in any interesting way without becoming more complex.”  The scenarios that suggest a substantial amount of “information content” will emerge from a simple cycle, with genetic macromolecules coming in late to add stability, are little more than “intuitions” – not schemes that can be examined critically.
14. Variation is not enough:  Suggesting that a change in temperature or concentration is a form of evolution is a play on words.  For instance, “one could not usefully claim that the dependence of the rate of a reaction such as ester hydrolysis on reaction conditions is a form of evolution.”  At some point you have to add complexity to the picture.  “The evolution of any substantial additional complexity of a cycle, therefore, must depend on the appending of further reaction sequences to those present in the core cycle.”
15. The law of diminishing returns:  “Given the difficulty of finding an ensemble of catalysts that are sufficiently specific to enable the original cycle, it is hard to see how one could hope to find an ensemble capable of enabling two or more.”  The further the scenario gets from the original simple cycle, the more the problems arise.  Orgel has heard many proposals in his career.  None of them “explains how a complex interconnected family of cycles capable of evolution could arise or why it should be stable.”

• By faith:  The discovery of a feasible, evolvable cycle would be a real breakthrough, but...

  What is essential, therefore, is a reasonably detailed description, hopefully supported by experimental evidence, of how an evolvable family of cycles might operate.  The scheme should not make unreasonable demands on the efficiency and specificity of the various external and internally generated catalysts that are supposed to be involved.  Without such a description, acceptance of the possibility of complex nonenzymatic cyclic organizations that are capable of evolution can only be based on faith, a notoriously dangerous route to scientific progress.

• By intelligent design:  You can get fantastic experimental results if you add design to the equation:

  Ghadiri and his coworkers have demonstrated experimentally that peptide cycles of the type envisaged in Kauffman’s theory are possible.  They first showed that peptides of length 32 that have been carefully designed to self-associate to form stable coiled-coils will facilitate the ligation of their N-terminal and C-terminal subsequences.  This shows that the self-replication of peptides is possible.  In later work they demonstrated the self-organization of networks of ligation reactions when more than two carefully designed input peptides are used.  These findings, however, cannot support Kauffman’s theory unless the prebiotic synthesis of the specific 15mer and 17mer input peptides from monomeric amino acids can be explained.  Otherwise, Ghadiri’s experiments illustrate “intelligent design” of input peptides, not spontaneous self-organization of polymerizing amino acids.

  Those words must surely sting in the ears of researchers trying to avoid the D word design.  He presses the point: can these long chains necessary for autocatalytic cycles form spontaneously?  In several paragraphs, he explains why not.  The short answer invokes words that sound like Dembski’s criterion of specified complexity for design: “Clearly, self-organization requires catalysis that is not only sufficiently efficient but also sufficiently sequence-specific.”

• Let us bow our heads;  No worship leader, Orgel pauses to marvel at how life does what it does:

  The catalytic properties of enzymes are remarkable.  They not only accelerate reaction rates by many orders of magnitude, but they also discriminate between potential substrates that differ very slightly in structure.  Would one expect similar discrimination in the catalytic potential of peptides of length ten or less?  The answer is clearly “no,” and it is this conclusion that ultimately undermines the peptide cycle theory.”

  For a few more paragraphs, Orgel entertained various attempts to rescue Kauffman’s theory.  Alas; “Even if such systems exist, their relevance to the origin of life is unclear,” he said mercifully.  “It is unlikely, therefore, that Kauffman’s theory describes any system relevant to the origin of life.”

Almost all proposals of hypothetical metabolic cycles have recognized that each of the steps involved must occur rapidly enough for the cycle to be useful in the time available for its operation.  It is always assumed that this condition is met, but in no case have persuasive supporting arguments been presented.  Why should one believe that an ensemble of minerals that are capable of catalyzing each of the many steps of the reverse citric acid cycle was present anywhere on the primitive Earth, or that the cycle mysteriously organized itself topographically on a metal sulfide surface?  The lack of a supporting background in chemistry is even more evident in proposals that metabolic cycles can evolve to “life-like” complexity.  The most serious challenge to proponents of metabolic cycle theories—the problems presented by the lack of specificity of most nonenzymatic catalysts—has, in general, not been appreciated.  If it has, it has been ignored.  Theories of the origin of life based on metabolic cycles cannot be justified by the inadequacy of competing theories: they must stand on their own.

Simplification of product mixtures through the self-organization of organic reaction sequences, whether cyclic or not, would help enormously, as would the discovery of very simple replicating polymers.  However, solutions offered by supporters of geneticist or metabolist scenarios that are dependent on “if pigs could fly” hypothetical chemistry are unlikely to help.

Ouch!  Or should we shout, Amen!  What a way to go.  No more spark-discharging simple gases for him.  Orgel has just tased everyone in the OOL community with shocks of realism.  Does it get any better than this?
    We spent a lot of time on this entry because of its significance.  Evolution’s theory of the origin of life is the fulcrum on which the entire evolutionary worldview rests, like an inverted pyramid at the tipping point.  The news media, and children’s textbooks, make it all look so easy.  NASA repeatedly insinuates that the mere presence of water on some planet or moon means that life can’t be far behind.  For over 50 years now, textbooks have been decorated with Miller’s spark-discharge experiment, that useful lie, that icon of the Darwin Party propaganda machine (05/02/2003).  The propaganda has deceived the public into thinking scientists have essentially solved the puzzle of the origin of life, and God is out of business.
    Orgel has been in the thick of actual OOL research and, thank God, did not lose his scientific realism completely like so many of the others have.  Practically on his deathbed he has preached a final hellfire sermon against researchers who substitute imagination for reality, faith for experimentation.  He reprimated those who unscrupulously insert that foreign, despised, prohibited ingredient into their equations: intelligent design!  You may go speculate about flying pigs, Orgel says, but don’t claim that by doing so you are doing science, or helping the evolution movement.
    Read this article, then read Shapiro’s critique of the genetics-first approach (02/15/2007).  Here you have two champions both collapsing in the ring with fatal wounds.  Creationists and Intelligent Design debaters need do nothing but show the tape.  The evolution advocates have falsified each other, the flying pig circus tent has collapsed, and the pyramid has tipped toward intelligent design, never to point toward evolution again.
    Thanks for hanging in there with this long entry.  We just thought our readers would like to know what the silly TV shows and kiddie books aren’t telling you.  As Porky (the flying) Pig always ended his Looney Tunes, “Th-Th-Th-That’s all, folks!”  Cartoons are over.  Get off the couch, go outside, and have a great day in the real world – the world of Creation.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

1. Dirty Comet:  The Stardust spacecraft that collected comet samples in 2006 was so named because it was believed comets contained pristine material from the birth of the sun.  That has all changed.  National Geographic News summarized a paper in Science¹ that expressed a real surprise: Comet Wild 2 was as dirty as an asteroid, and had earth-like composition.  “The first surprise was that we found inner solar system materials, and the second surprise was that we didn’t find outer solar system materials,” remarked one researcher.  Richard Kerr, writing in Science,² said they didn’t even find one speck of unaltered, presolar material.
       But then, how could this comet retain volatile gases at all if it spent much time close to the sun?  “It’s coming apart like crazy at its present distance,” said principle investigator Donald Brownlee.  And where are the pristine remnants of the early solar nebula – if they exist at all?  The entire field of comet studies is up in the air.  “For those of us who study presolar materials, it’s turned out to be a bit of a bust,” said a team member.  “It’s changing the way we think about comets.”  See also PhysOrg, which quoted a researcher saying, “I think this is science in action.  It’s really exciting because it’s just not what we expected.”  If science is constantly being surprised by the unexpected, to what degree can scientists claim they are making progress?
2. Farewell to Mantle Plumes:  The textbook case of a mantle plume is the Hawaiian Island chain.  According to theory, it floats over a “hot spot” in the crust where deep mantle material is rising.  The evidence on which this has been based, isotopic signatures of osmium and other elements, is now found to be flawed.  According to a paper in Science,³ the signatures are too heterogeneous to constrain the theory.  All the isotopic signatures could be accounted for by processes occurring in the upper mantle, not deep mantle plumes.
       Anders Meiborn, in the same issue of Science,⁴ called it the “rise and fall of a great idea.”  He listed four major observational inconsistencies with the long-held belief.
       The finding also affects theories about undersea lava.  “The concept of isotopic ‘anomalies’ in oceanic basalts thus has to be applied with extreme care,”he warned.  “Indeed, with an upper mantle as heterogeneous as the data by Luguet et al. suggest, it is difficult to imagine that isotopic signatures in oceanic basalts can be uniquely tied to the outer core.”

Some geologists are incensed.  “All of a sudden they want to move [the Pleistocene] down 800,000 years,” says marine geologist Lucy E. Edwards of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia.  “Why?  ‘Because we want it.’  It upsets the stability of the nomenclature without a good scientific reason.  Many more marine geologists working in the Pleistocene would be completely discombobulated.”

We must constantly be reminded of the difference between brute facts and the fallible names and explanations humans impose on them.  What if the whole schemes about the earth’s core, the evolution of the solar system, and the geologic time scale were wrong?  Would it be determined by the brute facts?  How would fallible humans know?  The earth is the same, and the comet is the same, but human concepts have undergone multiple revolutions in the last few centuries.
    Sometimes the very names we impose on things drive our conceptions of what they are.  Truths of reality are not obligated by human nomenclature, group consensus or majority vote.  Paradigm shifts may be more indications of erratic movement, not progress toward The Truth.
Next headline on:  Geology • Solar System • Dating Methods

Do Chicks Tell Dinosaur Tales?   01/25/2008    
For years, evolutionary biologists have battled over the origin of flight.  Did dinosaurs run along the ground and take off, or did they jump from trees?  The first idea is called the cursorial hypothesis; the latter, the arboreal hypothesis.  In 2003, Ken Dial [U Montana] had an idea: maybe watching partridge chicks could inform the debate.  This month his approach made the journal Nature.¹
    Dial’s team videotaped chukar partridges from hatching to adulthood, and noticed their flapping behavior.  As chicks, they hold out their undeveloped forelimbs and appear to use them as stabilizers when running up slopes and over obstacles.  By the time they have grown up, this behavior has “evolved” into full flapping flight.  The evolutionary history of flight unfolded before his eyes:

Based on our results, we put forth an ontogenetic-transitional wing (OTW) hypothesis for the origin of flight.  The hypothesis posits that the transitional stages leading to the evolution of avian flight correspond both behaviourally and morphologically to the transitional stages observed in ontogenetic forms.  Specifically, from flightless hatchlings to flight-capable juveniles, many ground birds express a ‘transitional wing’ during development that is representative of evolutionary transitional forms.  Our experimental observations reveal that birds move their ‘proto-wings’, and their fully developed wings, through a stereotypic or fundamental kinematic pathway so that they may flap-run over obstacles, control descending flight and ultimately perform level flapping flight (Fig. 1).  The OTW hypothesis provides a simple adaptive argument for the evolution of flight and can be tested and observed in extant fledglings.  This hypothesis differs from other published accounts in that it is flap-based (in contrast to requiring a gliding precursor), involves an aerodynamically functional proto-wing, incorporates both the simultaneous and independent use of legs and wings and assumes that a fundamental wing-stroke (described herein) was established for aerodynamic function early in the bipedal ancestry leading to birds.

Ken Dial has been pushing this fictional plot for five years now.  Our comments about his highly-speculative and unsupportable hypothesis, which rated the “dumb” award, bear re-reading (01/16/2003, 12/22/2003, 05/01/2006).  He claims it is testable – but only on living birds that already have the genetics for flying.  This is absurd.  It amounts to nothing more than job security for storytellers (12/22/2003 commentary).  Instead of repenting in shame, now he has added the Haeckel fallacy to it (to be explained shortly).
    Dr. Dial is apparently fond of chukars.  That’s fine.  If he wants to go hunting for them, or even videotape them to understand their wing function, great.  No problem.  But when he tries to weave an evolutionary tale about the ancestry of flight, he is way, way off scientific course.  He is flapping Icarus wings in Fantasyland.  Nothing like a little sunlight of scrutiny to melt them, sending his ideas crashing down.
    Over a century ago, Darwin-worshiper Ernst Haeckel promoted a similar idea.  He thought the evolutionary history of animals was preserved in their embryonic development: a human embryo replayed its evolutionary history by going through a worm stage, a fish stage, and finally a mammal stage.  This was dubbed the “Recapitulation Theory” and later was exalted into a law of nature, the so-called Biogenetic Law, by Haeckel.  Darwin himself considered it the most powerful evidence of his theory.  So strong was Haeckel’s belief and commitment to Pope Charlie, he notoriously doctored embryo drawings to support his pet hoax.
    Haeckel may have seemed the mild-mannered Jekyll, but his ideas led to a Hyde of terror.  The Recapitulation Theory led to all kinds of social mischief, as described in articles by ICR and AIG.  Scientific racism, Freudian psychology, and abortion trace their ancestry to Haeckel’s myth.  Today, it is almost completely discredited by scientists, even evolutionary biologists.  Why should an animal retain any genetic memory of presumed ancestors and play them out on an embryonic stage?  Stephen Jay Gould was appalled by the idea.  He dismantled the “biogenetic law” mercilessly in his books, announcing that it is, and should be defunct.  Dr. Keith Thompson (Yale) said it went extinct in the 1920s and, as a scientific theory, is dead as a doornail.
    Someone needs to inform Dr. Dial that his revival of recapitulation theory is embarrassing.  How can a living bird weave tales about dinosaurs evolving flight?  The whole notion is crazy.  Does Dr. Dial not realize that chukar partridge chicks have DNA for flight in every cell of their bodies?  Regardless of how they get about before they grow strong enough to fly, how on earth can he presume to think that their behavior as chicks tells anything about some mythical evolutionary past?  Where are the fossils?  Where are the modern reptiles holding out their forelimbs in a series of transitions leading to powered flight?
    This is not science; it’s divination.  When he looks into the crystal ball (the video screen) of chicks running up a ramp with forelimbs outstretched, the trance comes.  Visions appear in his mind.  He is transported mentally into a swamp 150 million years in the mythical past.  Behold!  A theropod stretches out its forelimbs and escapes the predator bearing down on him.  OK; cut, time out.  Turn off the video playback and turn the lights back on.  Unless a random genetic mutation in the dino’s gonads helped its offspring run faster with outstretched forelimbs, significantly faster enough to make the slower guys die off, he has concocted a Lamarckian tale.  This phony idea, which Dial has been preaching for five years at least, is Lamarckian, progressivist, and Haeckelian.  It’s against the neo-Darwinist official party line.
    Why, then, is Nature giving this crackpot idea the time of day?  Here’s why: all’s fair in love and war, and policy notwithstanding, any weapons that can be used against creationists, even old duds and lies, are fair game.  This dud is dressed up in new jargon and fancy acronyms, but it won’t fly.  If you want a shekel for your Haeckel, Dr. Dial, no sale.  To sound convincing, rather than experiment with living birds that already have flight software, chase down some lizards until they take off into the air.  Go experiment on the Geico gecko and see if holding out his forelimbs will help him fly some car insurance policies.  Better yet, give up on evolutionary biology altogether.  Do something useful with your life, like hunting some chukar meat for dinner, or marketing your videotapes to showcase the beautiful design of wings in these handsome birds.  Then we will stop laughing.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

“If, indeed, the nervous system faced evolutionary pressures to be able to anticipate and precisely control routine tasks like rapid precision pinch, the cortical structures for sensorimotor integration for finger function would probably need to be pretty well developed in the brain,” Valero-Cuevas said.
    “That would give us the neural circuits needed for careful timing of motor actions and fine control of finger muscles,” he said.  “Thus, our work begins to propose some functional justifications for the evolution of specialized brain areas controlling dexterous manipulation of the fingertips in humans.”
    The article was also posted by Science Daily on Jan. 28.

For three sins of USC, and for four, the reprimand due these scientists will not be turned back.  (1) Disjunction: There is no connection between the observed facts and their evolutionary story.  They made it up out of thin air with hand-waving and magic.  (2) Misrepresentation: It misrepresents evolutionary theory.  Needs to do not produce complex structures.  “Evolutionary pressures” do not “give” the “neural circuits needed” to provide precision switching and control of 30 muscles to perform fine manipulations of objects.  The only evolutionary pressure is the one to go extinct.  Unless random mutations appear, the pressure is toward death, not emergence of complex, interacting systems.  (Good luck waiting ten to the quintillion years for that to happen.)  (3) Deception: By presenting an evolutionary explanation as incontrovertible fact, they are lying to the public and their students.  What they saw was engineering design, not evolution.  OK, strike three; but since creationists are longsuffering and merciful, one more chance.  Whoops: (4) Ingratitude: Can any sin be more egregious than to be handed a gift, like two hands and ten fingers, and then to use them against the Giver?
    The observational facts of science do not support evolutionary storytelling.  You saw it just now.  These researchers looked at raw, empirical evidence for fine-tuned complexity, and even admitted they don’t understand it, but then immediately leaped into Fantasyland to claim with brashness and confidence that it evolved.  They get away with it because that is all they have ever been trained to believe, and critics are systematically expelled from the discussion.  Philosophers who should be blowing the whistle on these unwarranted assertions are too often cowed into timidity by the temerity of the Darwin Party.
    Until scientists realize that such philosophical inferences are unfounded – that they are contrary to the purpose and reasoning of science – the debate over creation and evolution will be muddled in noise.  It is not the job of the scientist to invent a tale about a mythical past he cannot observe even in principle.  Stick to the facts.  Get a grip.  Press here.  Then, and only then, can people with sense discuss what the facts mean.

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Encore:  To reinforce the conviction that brain/hand coordination could never have evolved, listen to a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.  Horowitz performed nearly 30 minutes entirely from memory, over a huge dynamic range with such rapid-fire precision it is incredible to conceive of the brain signaling involved.  Can you imagine a chimpanzee doing this?  Or composing such a thing?  For a sample, here is part of the second movement on YouTube.  You absolutely must hear the third and final movement.  Here is a taste on YouTube, which, unfortunately, stops before the grand finale.  A poorer-quality video that includes the ending can be found at truveo.com.  If you liked these, here’s another fast finger frolic.  How about one more?  Go ahead, Charlie; tell me about evolution.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Facts • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Somebody else needs a kick-start.  At least intelligent design wasn’t excluded from the list of possibilities this time.  It’s the only contender that isn’t deaf, dumb, blind and lazy from the starting gate.  (Clarification: speaking of the hypotheses, not their proponents).
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Life Influences Dating Method   01/22/2008    
The rate of calcium carbonate precipitation can double if microbes are present, says an article in PhysOrg.  Scientists studying hot spring deposits in Yellowstone made this “surprising discovery about the geological record of life and the environment.”  The article adds, “Their discovery could affect how certain sequences of sedimentary rock are dated, and how scientists might search for evidence of life on other planets.”
    The travertine terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone can grow millimeters per day.  The precipitation can actually “more than double” when microbes are present, the article said.  Calcium carbonate is the most abundant mineral in the rock record.
    The scientists believe that inferences about the presence of life can be drawn from studying the rate of deposition.  “Separating biologically precipitated calcium carbonate from non-biologically precipitated calcium carbonate is difficult,” however.  Inferences about life would also require independent knowledge about the rate of deposition.  They believe they can tease this information out from the chemistry, based on “the environmental and ecological context of the rock being studied.”

The important observation here is that previous trusted assumptions about most common sedimentary rock were off by more than a factor of two.  What other assumptions are still unquestioned that will be overturned in the future?  Other questions: What will this do to cave formation dating methods?  Will they change the textbooks within the next decade?  How can they rightfully infer the presence of life from a precipitation rate on a planet where no life has been found, when other unknown factors could influence the rate?  How come geologists never apologize for the misinformation they spread?
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Geology

Giraldo also discovered that the wings of [Cabbage] Whites are constructed in a surprisingly effective way.  Both sides of the wings have two layers of overlapping scales that reflect light.  The more scales there are, the more light is reflected.  This light reflection is very important as butterflies want to be seen. Giraldo discovered that these two layers form an optimal construction: with more than two layers the reflection may be improved, but the wing would become disproportionately heavy.

Much great scientific work is being done without any reference to Darwin and his Tinker Bell tale.  The Darwiniacs are wrong to think the US will fall behind in science unless his bacteria-to-man story is taught as fact.  On the contrary; unlatching the old ball and chain will be liberating to the real scientists.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

1. The pig is falling.  “Darwinian evolutionary theory proposes that the phenotype of a creature is an adaptation to the particular demands of the ecological situation in which it evolved,” wrote Geraint Rees [University College, London] in Current Biology.¹  That’s what he intended to show in a report on a study suggesting humans are attracted more to animal motion than inanimate motion.²  He had to acknowledge, however, that a completely different, non-Darwinian interpretation is possible.  This led to him joking about why pigs don’t have wings:

   This suggests that the ability to detect change in animate objects represents a heritable trait that reflects implicit information about the external structure of the environment in which humans evolved, an intriguing possibility.  But while intuitively appealing, caution is required before accepting such an argument.  Jerry Fodor has recently argued that phenotypes do not always represent implicit information about the environment in which they evolved.  Instead, sometimes phenotypes simply reflect internal constraints on the functional organisation of that animal.  For example, Fodor suggests that the reason pigs do not have wings is less to do with the intrinsic structure of the environment that pigs inhabit, and more to do with the fundamentals of how the pig is constructed.  The lack of wings does not by itself carry any intrinsic information about the pig’s natural environment, and has not been selected against in the course of porcine history!

   In that case, there is no information about pig or human evolution to be gained from the study at all.  The findings about human propensity to pay attention to animal motion, instead, “provide important insights into the organisation of the human visual system,” he said, though he still held out hope that adding natural selection to the equation might inform the “discovery of the psychological architecture of human cognition.”
2. Platypus granddaddy:  News@Nature examined the case of the ancient platypus (see 11/27/2007).  The bones of an apparent platypus 20 to 80 million years older than thought is causing confusion among evolutionary paleontologists.  Timothy Rowe, the discoverer, concluded “It looks like the monotremes may have had a really slow evolutionary history.”  Why the vast array of mammals underwent dramatic transformations in far less time, according to the Darwinian timeline, leaves a mystery why the platypus remained virtually unchanged.  “Rowe thinks the creatures probably didn’t need to evolve because their hunting abilities were so fine-tuned,” the report said.  This begs the question of why other predators with similarly fine-tuned hunting skills lack the evolutionary stasis, or why the platypus’s prey did not evolve so as not to be hunted so effectively.
       The contrary explanation, that this was not a platypus fossil at all, but rather a remnant of a common ancestor of platypus and echidna, requires invoking convergent evolution.  A platypus-specific canal found in the skull would have had to evolve twice, once before the split, and once again after the split.  The illustration caption simply reads, “Older than we thought.”
       The paper by Timothy Rowe et al in PNAS³ states the conundrum in scientific jargon:

   Morphology suggests that Teinolophos is a platypus in both phylogenetic and ecological aspects, and tends to contradict the popular view of rapid Cenozoic monotreme diversification.  Whereas the monotreme fossil record is still sparse and open to interpretation, the new data are consistent with much slower ecological, morphological, and taxonomic diversification rates for monotremes than in their sister taxon, the therian mammals.  This alternative view of a deep geological history for monotremes suggests that rate heterogeneities may have affected mammalian evolution in such a way as to defeat strict molecular clock models and to challenge even relaxed molecular clock models when applied to mammalian history at a deep temporal scale.

3. Predators and unintended consequences:  The simple view is that predators kill prey, leading to prey that try to reproduce faster in greater numbers – a direct effect of evolutionary ecology.  A study with small fish called killifish that inhabit streams in Trinidad showed scientists a more complex view.  In addition to direct effects of predation, there are indirect effects that may be just as important: for instance, the availability of food after prey are reduced by the predators.  The whole community is restructured by reintroduction of predators.  “Since predator-induced indirect increases in resource availability are common in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, the evolutionary consequences of these interactions are potentially a very important component of evolutionary change in nature,” said David Reznick, coauthor of the study.  “Moreover, biologists have observed evolutionary change occurring on short ecological timescales in nature, on the order of a few years to decades, suggesting that such interactions are contributing to overall ecosystem functioning and health.”  The changes he described, however, are microevolutionary changes to existing structures, not innovations.  If microevolutionary restructuring of ecological communities can be witnessed in mere decades, it adds to the conundrum of why the platypus remained unevolved for 100 million years.
4. Black sheep in Darwin’s family:  Fitness is supposed to help you gain the upper hand in the race to survive, but the fitter black sheep of Scotland are dying out.  Why?  A study in Science⁴ found that fitness can work against you.  Dark coat color is correlated to larger body size, “which is heritable and positively correlated with fitness,” the research team said.  “This unexpected microevolutionary trend is explained by genetic linkage between the causal mutation underlying the color polymorphism and quantitative trait loci with antagonistic effects on size and fitness.”  The finding makes evolutionary inference more difficult.  “This result demonstrates the importance of understanding the genetic basis of fitness variation when making predictions about the microevolutionary consequences of selection.”  The article began, “The evolutionary changes that occur over a small number of generations in natural populations often run counter to what is expected on the basis of the heritability of traits and the selective forces acting upon them.”  When a scientist can’t expect what evolution will do, can Darwin really claim to have discovered a law of nature?
5. Papa Neanderthal:  It seems the story of our relationship to Neanderthal Man is back and forth.  An article in the Australian News explains the problem: “For more than 150 years, a debate has raged over the origins of modern humans.  The main body of scientific thought says modern humans migrated from Africa and then overwhelmed their more primitive European counterparts, the heavy-browed Neanderthals, or inter-bred with them.  But growing credence is being given to the theory that homo sapiens [sic] evolved from the Neanderthals, who mysteriously died out some 28,000 years ago.”  So no one seems to know what the relationship was.  That did not stop the author from titling the report, “Bad weather helped evolution.”
6. Tree trimming:  Darwin’s tree of life just lost a branch.  “The Tree of Life must be re-drawn, textbooks need to be changed, and the discovery may also have significant impact on the development of medicines,“ began an article in Science Daily.  New research by European biologists who compared 5000 genes in “the largest ever genetic comparison of higher life forms on the planet” now lumps brown algae and silica algae together.  “Previously, these species were thought to be completely unrelated,” the article states.  The article ended on a triumphal note that researchers are making progress toward understanding evolution.  Puzzles remain, however: “To make the picture a little less clear, one branch of chromalveolates is still in no man’s land,” claimed one researcher.
7. Mammal disconnect:  The molecular and fossil stories about mammals don’t agree; see Geotimes for discussion.  Watch this space.  (That’s all there is to watch for now.)
8. More than a chimp:  Be thankful for your DNA repair genes; they are unique.  An article in EurekAlert said, “researchers were surprised to find the acquisition of functional response for certain genes involved in DNA metabolism or repair to be mostly unique in humans.”  Some of the genes were shared with chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys; none were shared with mice.  The researchers wove their findings into an evolutionary story, but admitted, “the full implications of these evolutionary points remain far from clear....”
9. The new buzz:  Remember the old story?  The one about the meteorites that killed the dinosaurs?  Scratch that.  It was bugs.  The new story can be found at The Guardian, which says, “Forget the meteorites – it was insects that did in the dinosaurs.”  This can be considered true till the next revision.  Hold the presses!  Maybe it was acid rain, reported EurekAlert.  But then again, that old Chicxulub meteor did make a mighty big splash, say the Longhorns.

Translating Timothy Rowe’s jargon into colloquial English (blue quote in bullet #2 above), he said, “We’ll, I’ll be.  Shore looks like a platypus.  How come all its brethren evolved all over the place while he just sat there?  Musta been stuck in a Darwinian rut somehow.  Better tell my geneticist buddies their clocks are runnin’ super-fast and super-slow all at once.  The clocks musta e’en forced this little guy to evolve in slo-mo!  Whatever.  We KNOW dem bones is 120 million years old – that’s a fact, even if the clock is outta whack.”
    Darwinism is the perfect playground for science fiction writers (that is, evolutionary biologists).  You never have to be right; you just have to look busy.  You can tell creative stories, then celebrate when they are overturned later.  The more complex the plot, the better.  You have no threat of criticism because your critics have been expelled and put behind a sound-proof barrier.  You get free checking for making reckless drafts on the bank of time (07/02/2007).  The peasants don’t revolt, because they have been hypnotized into thinking what you are working on is science.  Ah, the life of a Chaldean soothsayer.  It was bliss before Daniel showed up.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Mammals • Genetics • Dinosaurs

The Evolution of Morality   01/20/2008    
Can morality evolve in Darwin’s universe?  Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, is just the man to ask.  He wrote an 8-page article for the New York Times about it, facing the issues with frankness and forthrightness.
    To Pinker, as with other evolutionary psychologists, the “moral” behind morality is an evolutionary artifact of psychological choices and behaviors that have evolved over millions of years.  Populations choose what is right or wrong based on shared and habitual patterns that aid survival.  Pinker justified his scientific amorality on the grounds that scientists are just trying to be objective observers:

Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them.  Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition.  It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.
    And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense.  The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them.  Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested – to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.  The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.”  And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

Here is the worry.  The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world.  The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way.  Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green?  And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

One is th