The Fruits of Two Worldviews   02/29/2008    
Of all the arenas of state-sponsored genocides of the 20th century, the Killing Fields of Cambodia were among the most disturbing.  There, in a massive social engineering project, a radical communist government systematically starved, tortured and murdered nearly two million people with the brutal efficiency of an assembly line operation.  The regime outlawed all religions.  It sought to establish a communist utopia by force, driving everyone into an instant agrarian economy, and eliminating the brightest and most skilled simply because they did not fit the communist ideal.  Simply wearing glasses was enough to be processed – i.e., photographed, catalogued, tortured if necessary, and shot or hacked in the back of the head with a hoe.  Hundreds of thousands were killed by their own countrymen in a cold, calculated operation so dispassionately merciless, Cambodians to this day are almost in denial of what happened.
    The Independent reported that Kang Kek lew, otherwise known as Comrade Duch, was taken to the killing fields as part of his trial.  Duch had overseen Prison S-21 where 20,000 people were photographed, tortured and eliminated.  Now 66 years old, Duch broke down when shown trees where children's heads were smashed and saw a pile of 8,000 skulls of victims.  The article says he “fell to his knees, hands clasped in tearful prayer for the terrible crimes committed three decades ago.”
    Prayer?  Yes; you see, long after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, after some personal tragedies, he started attending a Christian church and became a born-again Christian in 1995.  He became a lay pastor.  When he went to assist the World Vision international relief organization in 1999, he was discovered by a journalist and surrendered to authorities.
    A visit to the killing fields was part of his trial which resumed last July after eight years in detention without being charged.  It was also part of an effort to document the horrors of the regime in order to bring closure to the horrific tragedy that killed nearly a third of the Cambodian population.  Duch is one of five remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge awaiting trial and sentencing by the UN-backed Cambodia Tribunal. 

Is this entry off-topic?  Perhaps somewhat.  But it is necessary to remember intently and frequently the stakes in the battle of worldviews.  Let’s recite the obligatory disclaimers first: not all atheists are genocidal maniacs, and not all Christians are merciful saints.  Understood.
      That being the case, who can deny that the worst genocidal regimes in history were atheistic, and that most atheists are evolutionists?  Communist philosophy was built on atheism, and evolution was the scientific justification for its views.  Evolution portrayed a world of death and struggle where killing was necessary for the advancement of the race.  The fitness of the State, not the individual, is what mattered to both communists and national socialists (both, despite their differences, subsets of Social Darwinist ideology; see 02/17/2008 and 11/30/2005; also see response to criticism of this linkage by Dr. Richard Weikart on Evolution News).
    Keeping unfit individuals around, in the minds of many Social Darwinists, was sin; advancing the fitness of the State was righteousness.  These were ideas first, then ideologies, then political parties, then dictatorships.  The perpetrators of communist genocides (Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and more) sincerely believed they were acting in accordance with the “laws of science” Darwin had delineated.
    Here we see one perpetrator who underwent a radical change of worldview.  Kang Kek lew was no peasant yanked into service.  He had been head of a local college.  He joined the communist party of Cambodia willingly.  As a communist, Comrade Duch dutifully carried out the will of the State.  He even went beyond the call of “duty.”  The Wikipedia entry on him says,

Assisted by his two deputies, Comrade Chan and Comrade Pon, Duch began perfecting his interrogation techniques and the purging of perceived enemies from the Khmer Rouge ranks.  Prisoners at these camps, mostly from the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, were routinely starved and tortured to extract real and made up confessions.  Few prisoners left the camps alive.

Now with a Christian worldview, Duch weeps over his sins.  He prays for the souls of his victims.  As a lay pastor, he tried to teach others the truth.  He joined a Christian relief organization that works around the world to feed the hungry and bring relief to the vulnerable.  Only God knows the depths of his sincerity, but one thing is certain: a Christian worldview of mercy and compassion is polar opposite to the communist worldview that turned intellectuals into cold-blooded mass murderers.
    Does Comrade Duch deserve the ultimate sentence for past crimes now that he has changed?  Whatever the tribunal decides, the blood of his victims is crying from the ground for justice.  The institutions of law enforcement, ordained by God according to the Apostle Paul (Romans 13), must act impartially by the rule of law and must weigh the magnitude of the crimes.  God will take care of justice for the soul.  These matters are not the point of this entry.  Comrade Duch’s story illustrates the stark contrast in the outcomes of worldviews that begin with intellectual questions – the existence of God, purpose in life, the nature of good and evil.
    What begins in the mind can move armies: armies of tanks and bombs, or armies of relief workers.  That’s why Creation-Evolution Headlines matters.  The killing fields in Cambodia, chilling as they were, were not unique.  Each Social-Darwinist utopian regime committed similar atrocities in ways just as cold and calculated.  The body count from 20th-century state-sponsored genocides, far outstripping the number of casualties from war, is exhausting to contemplate (11/30/2005).  A proverb of Jesus, applied to science by Sir Francis Bacon, sums up in seven words what we tried to say in seven paragraphs: “By their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:15-20).
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

Movies Worth a Leap Year...:   02/29/2008    
• Expelled:  Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for release April 18.  See the trailer and other information, both amusing and disturbing, at the film website ExpelledTheMovie.com.  The film documents the persecution by the scientific establishment of anyone who dares question the ruling evolutionary paradigm, especially those who embrace Intelligent Design.  ID news sites like Evolution News have already posted several articles and interviews about Ben Stein’s latest crusade for academic freedom.  See Stein’s recent editorial on News Blaze.
• The Case for Faith:  The third installment in a trilogy of Lee Strobel films based on his best-selling books is in the works and may be released by fall.  The Case for Faith tackles some of the most difficult questions skeptics ask about Christianity: Is Christ the only way to God? and, How can a loving God allow evil and suffering?  To prepare for this third film, be sure you have already watched The Case for a Creator (10/10/2006) and The Case for Christ (09/16/2007).  The exceptional production quality of La Mirada’s films are only exceeded by the depth of their content.  The Case for Faith will likely raise the bar again.
Next headline on:  Media • Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology

Is Cosmology Getting Wimp-y?   02/28/2008    
Physics and astronomy are usually thought of as the “hard” sciences, where empiricism is king.  Read the following excerpts from a story on the BBC News science page with that in mind (suggestion: replace “dark matter” with “mysterious unknown stuff”).

The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to US scientists....
   when the Universe was still young, there would have been abundant dark matter, made of particles called Wimps: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
    These would have fused together and obliterated each other long before nuclear fusion had the chance to start.
    As a result, the first stars would have looked quite different from the ones we see today, and they may have changed the course of the Universe’s evolution – or at least held it up.
    The theory, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, depends on particles that astronomers can’t see, but are certain exist, and physicists have never detected.  But the indirect evidence for their existence is overwhelming.

“Dark matter particles make up more than three-quarters of the mass of the Universe,” says theoretical physicist Katherine Freese from the University of Michigan.
    “In fact, billions of them are passing through each of us every second.”
    In the early Universe, there would have been even more.

The nature of the first stars has long puzzled astronomers.  Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded and cooled, so that for millions of years it was filled with dark, featureless hydrogen and helium – and perhaps Wimps.
    Astronomers can see that there were normal stars 700 million years after the Big Bang – the Hubble Telescope looking to the edges of the Universe, which is like looking back billions of years in time, can see whole galaxies of them.

It had been thought the hydrogen brought together by these dark matter haloes would collapse to make the first small stars, and would start to make inside themselves the first new elements – carbon, oxygen, silicon and other materials needed by planets and life.
    But the new paper says reactions between the Wimps, colliding and annihilating each other, would have generated enough heat to keep the protostars inflated – like hot air balloons.  And as more Wimps rained down on them the heating would have kept going.

One would almost think we are back in the dark ages, listening to wizards peep and mutter about mysterious vapors and essences and emanations that control our fate.  They haven’t found Wimps yet but are already talking about Super-Wimps (07/02/2003).  If the intellectually-wimpy believers in Wimpy dark matter don’t find it soon, or if new theories gain ground that don’t need it, these searchers are going to look very silly for having said 80% of reality consisted of superfluous nonexistent stuff.
    One would think they would look silly; actually, they will probably relish the Progress Of SciencE (POSE).  Ever since Charlie welcomed fantasy into science, all branches of modern investigation have loosened the restrictions on empiricism.  Now, it is quite fashionable to postulate mysterious unknown stuff if it MUST keep your materialistic story going.  Geology set the stage before Darwin by envisioning vast ages of unobservable prehistory.  Psychology imported mysterious unknown stuff like the Unconscious, the Id, the Ego and Superego, and Archetypes.  Political Science imported it in the form of Utopian visions that would be realized by the Class Struggle and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat over the Bourgeoisie and the mysterious Kulaks (you could be one yourself).  Physical Chemistry imported Charmed Quarks and other exotic things that are almost indistinguishable from the theories that require them.  And evolutionary biology is loaded with mysterious unknown stuff: mystical “selection forces” that cause wondrous organs and complex structures to “emerge” and “arise” and “appear” shedding light on modern man’s dark understanding.  In fact, much of the heritage of Charles Darwin is a vision of getting Known Stuff from Mysterious Unknown Stuff by a long, gradual, unobservable process called Emergence.
    If this all sounds like some ancient mystery religion, you got it.  Mysterious Unknown STuff, also known as snake oil, is rampant in science these days.  We’re long past the modern science era.  Now we are living in the era of what Francis Schaeffer called “modern modern science” – a fantasy cosmos of self-actualizing miracles.  Anything goes – except a miracle Worker.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Physics • Dumb Ideas

Tots learn from their mommies that their scratches will heal, so they don’t need to worry about being scarred for life.  We grew up accepting that as a given.  Imagine, though, having every scratch or cut from our youth a permanent disfigurement or point of blood leakage.  We would be covered head to toe in bandages as adults.  The life of hemophiliacs illustrates the point: when the blood clotting process breaks down, even a small cut is life-threatening.
    Imagine, furthermore, that clots were as hard as bone.  You would have to sit quietly for weeks till the wound was entirely healed, or else risk having changes in blood pressure rip it away from the surrounding tissue.  Instead, fibrinogen is constructed with coiled coils of amino acids to give it both strength and flexibility.  The network of fibers and proteins that form at a wound site involves multiple rounds of signaling, aggregating ingredients in the right order, and applying patches that won’t break off and cause a heart attack or stroke.
    Michael Behe argued in his classic book Darwin’s Black Box that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex.  His argument didn’t take much convincing.  All he had to do was show a flowchart of the 25 or so components that interoperate with feedback and feed-forward procedures to ensure that the flow of blood is stopped quickly and safely.  If any one of these ingredients is missing, the system breaks.  Any question why this article here did not mention evolution?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Today, the Burgess Shale represents a frozen sliver of life from a time when Earth and its life were completely different.
    “It dates from very early in the history of complex multi-cellular life,” [Jan] Zalasiewicz [U of Leicester] told LiveScience.  “For quite a while, it was the main window we had on the diversity of life at this time.  It’s very significant because one of the great enigmas about Cambrian life is that it seems to have started very suddenly.”
    Life existed for 3 billion years before the Cambrian Period, but almost all of it was simple life composed of single cells.
    “Then very suddenly at the beginning of the Cambrian, a whole host of life, all the major groups of animals, appeared,” Zalasiewicz said.  “That is called the Cambrian explosion.  It’s still a mystery as to how and why this great flowering of multi-cellular life took place.”

Zalasiewicz said that there were no trees or higher animals when the Burgess Shale was buried by an undersea landslide.  How would he know that?  One would not expect there to be such creatures in that environment.  Separate the interpretation based on worldview from the actual observations.  The observations show that Darwinism could not be true.  The 3-billion-year dates are part of the evolutionary tale.  Just look at the fossils: all the major animal phyla appear suddenly at the beginning of the Cambrian.  “Appear” is the operative word: they were not evolving.  There were not primitive forms of these creatures in the rocks below.  Boom!  There they are, complete with eyes, complex appendages and a functioning ecology.  That is not evolution.  It’s also true of the pliosaurs, plesiosaurs, and ichthyosaurs found at Spitsbergen.  They appear in the record suddenly and fully operational.  Extinct animals were usually larger and more diverse than their counterparts today.  If this is evolution, it is going in reverse.
    Kids, consider marine biology or paleontology as a career.  There are still remarkable discoveries to be made under the sea.  You don’t have to follow the Darwin script or swallow the evolutionary tales to discover amazing things and have an adventurous life.  Imagine making a living finding fossils of sea monsters.  Imagine finding new kinds of life in the depths of the sea.  Wouldn’t that be totally cool?
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Fossils • Dinosaurs • Amazing Facts

Prevent Drought: Hire a Beaver   02/25/2008    
“Beavers can help ease drought,” say scientists from University of Alberta.  EurekAlert published a press release about a 54-year study that showed beaver kept open water wetlands available.  They seem to even mitigate the effects of global warming.  “Climate models predict the incidence of drought in parts of North America will increase in frequency and length over the next 100 years, and beaver will likely play an important role in maintaining open water and mitigating the impact, [Glynnis] Hood said.”  In fact, maybe it isn’t climate that is driving everything.  “Beaver are helping to keep water in areas that would otherwise be dry.”  Their presence has a dramatic effect on how much open water is available in an area.  See also Science Daily.

Beaver are pests to some, and a cash cow to others.  In the early 1800s, they were coveted as a source of felt for gentlemen’s hats.  That’s what opened the West to exploration and expansion by Americans, Europeans, other nations and individual pioneers, explorers, entrepreneurs and adventurers.  We need to look at beaver in a better light.  They’re lovable, and they’re good for us.  Time to watch the wonderful IMAX file “Beavers” again. 
Next headline on:  Mammals • Amazing Facts

His campaign against pan-selectionism was in evidence.  “Evolution is not the evolution of traits but the evolution of organisms,” he said.
    But he had an even more sobering message, summed up in the title of his talk – “Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition”.  He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

1. Fossils:  “Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can’t be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us.  Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.
2. Interpretations:  “Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret.  ‘I don’t have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means,’ Lewontin confessed.”
3. Posture:  Lewontin expressed doubt that we can be sure which hominids walked upright.
4. Selective forces:  “He is also not convinced that we can use current selective forces to infer what natural selection was doing to our ancestors.”

You just saw a series of suicide bombs go off in the Darwin Party headquarters, carried in by Darwinites themselves.  Can evolution recover from the admissions these guys made?  This is not Duane Gish saying these things: they come from Mr. Can’t-Allow-a-Divine-Foot-in-the-Door himself, Richard Lewontin of Harvard, a knowledgeable, committed Darwiniac if there ever was one.  The upshot is that they are a bunch of know-nothings.  Now we have a new label for the Darwin Party: the Know Nothing Party.  Their motto is, “I know nothing but my Darwinism Storybook, my whole Darwinism Storybook, and nothing but my Darwinism Storybook.”  Their favorite amusement park is Paleofantasyland.
    Remember this entry the next time you get a National Geographic cover story of a hominid with a philosopher’s gaze.  Remember it when you are told stories about hominids walking upright, their hands now freed to scratch their chins and think.  Remember it when you are shown a chimpanzee on NOVA performing memory tricks for a banana or smashing bugs with a rock.  Remember it when a stack of erudite scientific papers on human evolution is placed on the witness table at a trial over whether students should be allowed to think critically about evolution in science class.
    You have just heard all you need to know about human evolution – from the Darwiniacs themselves.  The Darwin Party Know-Nothings, daydreaming in Paleofantasyland, have admitted they are just making up stories about the evolution of human cognition.  Their breathtaking ignorance is not limited to their answers.  They don’t even know what they mean by the question.  This is what they want to teach our students: ignorance!  Now, not only will public school students learn nothing; after indoctrination by the Know Nothings, they will know even less.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinian Evolution • Human Body

“This kind of straightforward connection is just not the way organisms are put together,” he says.  When it comes to something as complex as language, “one would be hard-pressed to come up with an example less amenable to evolutionary study.” And the specific Foxp2 connection is based on a whole chain of events, each of which is speculative, so there’s little chance of the whole story being right.
    “It’s so chaotic, it’s like weather forecasting,” he says.  “The noise overwhelms the signal.”
    Rather, language is almost certainly the result of a far more complex and subtle interplay among a variety of factors, Berwick says, and it may never be possible to connect it to specific genetic changes.  “There are some things in science that are very interesting, but that we’re never going to be able to find out about,” he says.  “It’s a sort of romantic view some people have, that anything interesting can be understood.”

Ultimately, the important thing is to understand that language is, at bottom, something that takes place inside the human mind and is independent of any particular sound, sight or motion.  The same internal mental construction could be expressed through verbal speech, through writing or through sign language without changing its basic nature, Berwick says.  “It’s not about this external thing you hear,” he says.  “It’s about the representation inside your head.”

Intelligent design theorists and cognitive neuroscientists can have a field day with this!  If language at its core is not a physical representation but a concept in the mind, then it has no basis in evolution.
    ID scientists have been demonstrating for years the common-sense idea that information, a product of intelligence, can be represented in a variety of ways independent of the substrate that conveys it.  The sentence “John loves Mary” can be represented by sand writing, sky writing, electrons (email, TV), sound waves, paper and ink, sign language, knots in rope, and a host of other ways – yet the message is unchanged.
    The “evolution of language,” therefore, would have to be a theory about the evolution of meaningful information.  You cannot get meaning out of meaninglessness, or purpose out of purposelessness.  Did you see Berwick make an irrational leap?  He just said it is unlikely that an evolutionary approach will ever figure out language, but then he went back to studying bird song and poetry for insight.  He isn’t going to figure it out till he adds in the fundamental term missing from all materialistic world views: information.
    Notice how evolutionists deceived the public (again).  They sent the Foxp2 gene up the flagpole for people to salute and sing “Darwin wins again” (example).  Now, five years later, comes the admission that their explanation cannot possibly be right.  Typical.  John may love Mary, but Charlie despises tRuth.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

Florida Wises Up and Teaches Evolution Uncritically   02/20/2008    
The Florida State Board of Education adopted, by a vote of 4 to 3, science standards that require the teaching of evolution as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology” without critical analysis or alternatives.  Evolution News said that calling evolution a “scientific theory” instead of a scientific fact represented a meaningless compromise with the minority who had argued for insertion of the statement, “Students should learn why some scientists give scientific critiques of standard models of neo-Darwinian evolution or models of the chemical origin of life.”  No proposal for teaching alternatives, such as intelligent design, were even considered.
    Decisions on these highly-charged issues typically produce a torrent of lively commentaries in the news media.  Carl Hiaasen in the Miami Herald had a particularly fun time pointing out that the vote means that Florida’s reputation for flakiness is at stake:

In a move that could endanger Florida’s flaky backwater reputation, the state Board of Education is poised to endorse the teaching of evolution as a science.
This is a dangerous idea -- not the presentation of Darwinism in schools, but the presentation of Florida as a place of progressive scientific thought.
Over the years the Legislature has worked tirelessly to keep our kids academically stuck in the mid-1950s....
By accepting evolution as a proven science, our top educators would be sending a loud message to the rest of the nation: Stop making fun of us....
Certainly that’s [i.e., evolution is] the position of every reputable academic group on the planet, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Teachers Association.
But forget the fossil record, OK?  Forget DNA tracing.  Forget the exhaustively documented diversification of species. This battle is about pride and independence; about boldly going against the flow, in defiance of reason and all known facts.

Entertaining op-ed piece.  Kind of like watching Groucho Marx or the Three Stooges calling smart people stupid.  Hiaasen’s skill at sarcasm is only exceeded by his ignorance of the issues.  His intellectual dysentery is the product of feeding on arguments from authority, bandwagon arguments, glittering generalities, non-sequiturs and the rest of the junk Darwin propaganda diet.  By equating Darwin’s mythology with practical science, assuming that teaching evolution will bring in high-paying jobs, and confusing observational science with fability (01/16/2007 commentary), is it any wonder he wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week?  The Discovery Institute should hire him for a sideshow, to illustrate the quality of ranting by the DODO heads (Darwin-Only 2x).  Hiaasen is doing more to ensure Florida’s ongoing flakiness than anyone siding with the Minority Report could have done.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

1. Mighty mouth:  An African theropod with massive, shark-like teeth was found in the African Sahara, reported National Geographic News and PhysOrg.  It was named Eocarcharia dinops, or “fierce-eyed dawn shark.”  Another similar individual, presumed to be a scavenger, was named Kryptops palaios, “old hidden face” had a bony horn that covered much of its face.  National Geographic posted a gallery of artist’s reconstructions.
2. Mighty duck:  In Mexico, giant duck-billed hadrosaur remains were found, reported National Geographic and Science Daily.  These specimens were said to be 35 feet in length.  Till now, dinosaur bones in Mexico have been rare.  Terry Gates (Utah Museum of Natural History) said, “The crested duck-billed dinosaurs are an extraordinary example of vertebrate evolution.”
3. Sparrowsaur:  In China, the smallest pterosaurs ever found have come to light (see National Geographic and Live Science).  These toothless flying reptiles were only about the size of a sparrow – 10 inches or so (see artist reconstruction).  Like birds, they had curved digits that probably helped them grasp the branches of trees.  Found in the rich fossil beds of China’s Liaoning province, the species was named Nemicolopterus crypticus. by the discoverers who published their findings in PNAS.¹
       Alexander Kellner (Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) pieced pterosaurs into a vision of evolutionary progress: “The general idea was at some point we had these very primitive pterosaurs – very low down on the evolutionary tree – that were living on insects.  At some point pterosaurs learned to feed on fish.”  He said the find “opens a new chapter on the evolutionary history of this group of volant [flying] reptiles.”

Some paleontologists estimate we have only found 27% of the dinosaurs that actually lived (11/22/2004).  This means that new, exotic discoveries can be expected for many years to come.  Exciting as each new unusual form is, one cannot assume that the diversity in the dinosauria exceeds that in other groups, such as insects.  Dinosaurs stand out in our minds because of their size and the fact they are all extinct.  In many groups of plants and animals, the fossil record is richer than the living inventory.
    One should remember also that classification is a very human enterprise.  Paleontologists win honors for naming a species.  This can lead to species bloat – too much splitting of similar specimens into separate species.  With fossils, one cannot know the natural amount of variation that was present due to diet, climate, development, genetic isolation or other factors.  One cannot know which ones were capable of interbreeding.  One also cannot compare the DNA of different dinosaurs (yet).  The count of dinosaur species and genera is a function of the classification scheme used.  Jones may want to name his find Magnificentosaurus jonesii but that doesn’t make it different from Majesticosaurus smithii.  Another factor leading to the impression that new dinosaurs are popping up all over is selective reporting.  “More of the same” doesn’t make news as much as something new and different.
    These finds, nevertheless, should inspire the young to realize there is still much to discover.  Join the treasure hunt.  Replace the old guard paleontologists who can’t kick the smoking habit (i.e., the addicts who exude smokescreens of fogma about millions of years, primitive forms, and new chapters in evolution).  Let the bones do the talking.  They know how to remain silent.  Evolutionists have not yet learned that anything they say can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion (09/30/2007 commentary).
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology

The measurements are indirect and highly theory-laden.  The light astronomers measure exists in the present: here at our retinas on earth.  Where it came from, and how long it took to get here, depends on theories and models that cannot be tested directly.  How are you going to recreate a big bang and watch stars form?  Are you going to wait 400,000 years to see if it happens according to your theory?
    As with fossils in evolution, spectra from space are data points that mean nothing till inserted into a paradigm.  Despite the confidence with which the theory was explained in the article, this discovery produces as many problems as it answers.  Astronomers need to explain how diffuse fog became clumpy, and condensed into a hierarchy of unlikely objects: galaxies and stars.  Astronomers appear to have the same problem as the biologists: a kind of cosmic Cambrian explosion.
    The ability to tell stories (fability, 01/16/2007 commentary) about how this all worked out somehow is not the same as knowledge.  The theory might be correct, but how would they know?  A survey of the history of scientific pronouncements that were later overturned is not encouraging.  The most significant data point in the article may, in fact, be the surprised look on their faces.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods

For Healthy Society, Father Knows Best   02/18/2008    
Science Proves Common Sense Dept.  Swedish scientists have found that “Children Who Have An Active Father Figure Have Fewer Psychological And Behavioral Problems,” according to a report on Science Daily.  In addition, “Children who lived with both a mother and father figure also had less behavioural problems than those who just lived with their mother.”  Dr Anna Sarkadi from the Department of Women’s and Children's Health at Uppsala University, Sweden, explained:

“For example, we found various studies that showed that children who had positively involved father figures were less likely to smoke and get into trouble with the police, achieved better levels of education and developed good friendships with children of both sexes.
    “Long-term benefits included women who had better relationships with partners and a greater sense of mental and physical well-being at the age of 33 if they had a good relationship with their father at 16.”

Ask: who are the people who typically want to break down traditional marriage, confuse gender roles, and contribute to governmental policies (e.g., the welfare state, taxes that penalize marriage, promotion of alternate lifestyles) that make it harder for kids to have a father and mother at home?  Sorry to insult your intelligence with such a giveaway question.  You guessed it: liberals.  Evolutionists, who are predominantly liberal in their politics, often portray Dad as nothing but a gene donor, a biological entity selfishly seeking to pass on his own genes at any cost, married or not.  Is it any wonder a society immersed in evolutionary thinking is going to have little use for the traditional family?  As a result of sick liberal, progressive policies (see book review), we have inherited a host of societal ills: crime, drugs, antisocial behavior, a sense of hopelessness, suicide.  The kids most in need of a father – economically disadvantaged blacks, for instance – grow up predominantly in fatherless homes.
    Don’t count on this announcement making liberals slap their foreheads like in the V8 commercials and say, “Oh!  I could have had a nuclear family.”  How ironic that this study came out from that ultra-liberal society, Sweden.  Most politicians realize that fatherless homes are a ticking time bomb for societal catastrophe.  Fewer of them connect the effect to the cause: anti-family legislation and social experimentation, rooted in a materialistic, evolutionary philosophy.
    There are bad dads – abusive, alcoholic, selfish – but the exceptions prove the rule.  God designed a family to have one father and one mother.  The kids not only need the different roles of the man and the woman, the parents need the sense of responsibility that having children brings.  It’s all a system to engender health and harmony from the family unit upwards to society.  It almost looks like it was planned that way.  Should anyone be surprised at the horrendous consequences of abandoning the Master plan?
    Support the ministries that are trying to bring governmental, educational and corporate policies back from the abyss of social experimentation, and promulgate environments that encourage two-parent families: Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, and others.  Most of all, do all you can to set a good example.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

This is old news; they should have given up long ago.  Reports from the first year of the rovers on Mars (12/03/2004) worried about the high acidity and salinity of the water.  Mars is dead; face it.  So we can rule out one body on the list.  Since evolutionists expect creationists to prove a universal negative, they will have job security for a long time. 
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life

But we learnt how exquisitely closely ‘normal’ professors – not just the mad Nazi types – aligned their goals with the policies of the Nazi regime.  Grant applications showed, for example, how many professors took part in developing plans for expansion to the east after Germany won the war (as they assumed).  Plans that would have killed or enslaved more than 30 million people.

Does anyone think for a moment that today’s professors and academics in Big Science would not fall in line with another genocidal totalitarian regime, if the inducements were strong enough?  The herd mentality makes it more comfortable to go along to get along.  We already see the shameless ease with which they support experimentation on human embryos, the selfishness with which they demand public money for everything they want to do, and their willingness to lie openly about the evidence for Darwinism.  Many individual scientists are the most honest and noble people you would ever meet, but the record of Big Science is not encouraging.  How many of even the honest ones would risk everything to stand against incipient evil policies?
    Hitler’s regime has become such a byword for evil, we tend to overuse it and get numb to it.  Don’t let that happen.  Watch the documentaries, read the histories, remind yourself regularly just how destructive it was.  Then read up on communism and the other Social Darwinist regimes of the 20th century: ideas that generated unspeakable evil on the world, resulting in 148 million deaths and untold misery for survivors, many of whom would have welcomed death.  This story demonstrates that “normal” intelligent professors, and citizens, went right along with policies that not only killed millions, but would have killed tens of millions more had they not been defeated.
    To prevent a recurrence, it is not sufficient to know the dark side of your nation’s history.  You must know the dark side of your own heart (Romans 3).  Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).  We may not know it exhaustively, but we can know it sufficiently to demand our governments set up safeguards to prevent the success of evil ideas.  Beware especially of ideologies that build their morals on a Darwinian foundation.  The solution to the problem of evil begins one heart at a time (Romans 5).
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Oldest Bat Fossil: Was It Evolving?   02/16/2008    
A bat fossil surpassing the previous record holder for the oldest by 2 million years made the cover of Nature this week.¹  The news media immediately began saying that it provided insight into evolution.  The BBC News announced “Bat fossil solves evolution poser.”  National Geographic called it the icing on the cake, and said that “the fossils represent a breakthrough in the understanding of bat evolution.”  PhysOrg called it a missing link that “demonstrates that the animals evolved the ability to fly before they could echolocate.”
    That last statement gets to the crux of the evolution angle.  It’s not that this specimen was part bat and part something else.  It was fully capable of flight and was easily identified as a bat.  What it appeared to lack (though this point is somewhat questionable) is the ability for echolocation – the bat’s famous sonar navigation system.  Some living bats have echolocation; others do not.  The ones without it typically have a smaller cochlea (the inner ear organ that converts sound waves into nerve impulses).  Since the fossil appeared to have a small cochlea, the researchers inferred that it lacked echolocation; however, size may not be the only valid diagnostic.  We know that miniaturization can be a measure of advanced technology (e.g., iPod over cassette player).  Without the ability to observe this species in action, it would be impossible to prove that it could not echolocate with its compact cochleae.
    The evolutionary question before these scientists and reporters was not whether bats evolved – their minds were already made up on that point.  “There has been a longstanding debate,” though, “about how bats evolved, centering around the development of flight and the development of the sonar system they use to navigate and hunt for prey,” PhysOrg explained.  The majority opinion among evolutionists seems to have been that echolocation came first, then flight.  This fossil seemed to suggest the reverse.
    Echolocation or not, there was never any doubt this was a bat.  It was classified in the bat order Chiroptera, and given the name Onychonycteris.  Even though this bat is similar to modern bats that lack echolocation, it “may have been otherwise equipped for flying at night,” wrote John Speakman (U of Aberdeen) in the same issue of Nature.²  Why, then, did the discoverers call it “primitive”?  Nothing in the paper provided definitive evidence the bat was lacking in “derived” (i.e., advanced, or “highly evolved”) features.  There were only suggestions couched in tentative wording:

The shape of the wings suggests that an undulating gliding-fluttering flight style may be primitive for bats, and the presence of a long calcar indicates that a broad tail membrane evolved early in Chiroptera, probably functioning as an additional airfoil rather than as a prey-capture device.  Limb proportions and retention of claws on all digits indicate that the new bat may have been an agile climber that employed quadrupedal locomotion and under-branch hanging behaviour.

However, around the end of the 1980s, evidence accumulated, including work from my own group, that favoured the ‘flight-first’ hypothesis.  One paper showed that, for a bat hanging at rest, echolocation is extremely energetically costly.  This high cost probably explains why no terrestrial mammals have evolved full-blown echolocation systems such as those used by bats.  However, a second paper showed that when a bat takes flight these costs disappear.  This is because of a remarkable coupling of the beating of the wings with the ventilation of the lungs and production of the echolocation pulses.  When a bat hangs stationary and echolocates, it must contract its muscles specifically to generate a forceful expiratory burst, and this is where the large costs come from.  When a bat is flying, it is already contracting these muscles, so in effect echolocation when flying is free (or at least substantially cheaper).
    But what about the problem of bats flying in darkness before they could orient themselves?  A hypothesis I favour is that the earliest ancestors of bats may have been diurnal, and had visual means of orientation – but were perhaps forced to become nocturnal by the appearance of avian predators, shortly after the dinosaurs became extinct around 65 million years ago.  Some then evolved echolocation, whereas others became nocturnal vision specialists.

You see what the evolutionists do, don’t you?  You understand the modus operandi of their crimes.  Their M.O. is, simply: “assume evolution”  Evolution is their miracle worker, that appears on cue, like Tinker Bell with her miracle-mutation wand, to produce anything they need.  Since the Darwinian storytellers have usurped the institutions of science, they have no need for proof, demonstration and evidence.  Fossils and other observable things are mere props for their stories.  The basic plot is fixed in stone.  Like a counterfeit tree of life, the Darwinian story of common ancestry via unguided processes over millions of years is guarded against critical analysis by angles with flaming words (puns intended).
    You also just saw (again) the Darwin-drunk news media not only parroting the evolution angle verbatim, but even embellishing it.  The original paper worded its claims with a modicum of doubt, but the BBC News trumpeted, “Bat fossil solves evolution poser.”  But look at the fossil evidence!  The Darwinists should be ashamed.  The oldest known bat in the fossil record is 100% bat and no less advanced than living bats!  How on earth can any sensible scientist claim that this supports Darwinism?  Did any of them tell us how complex capabilities like echolocation or flight could have arisen by chance?  Did they elaborate the dozens, if not thousands, of lucky mutations that would have had to come together blindly to produce a flying mammal from a mouse?  No!  If anything, they uncovered a more astonishing thing – that the flight capabilities of bats are dynamically integrated with their sonar systems.  Did they watch 52 million years go by?  Did they watch the so-called primitive bat change into a more advanced creature?  Did they seriously entertain any of the many, many scientific criticisms that could be leveled against their tale?  No, no, no.
    If this non-stop parade of dogmatism masquerading as science makes you mad, join the campaign to expose the Darwinists.  Don’t let them get away with using this discovery as a prop for their fable.  Don’t let some evolution advocate stack papers like this on the witness stand to claim evolution is scientific.  Understand what is really going on in biology these days.  Keith Wanser stated it succinctly: “There is not one theory of evolution, but a body of opinions, speculations and methods for interpretation of observational facts so that they fit into the philosophy of naturalism.”  That, friends, is not science, and does not deserve the honor of being taught in our schools.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Fossils • Evolution

To my mind, metabolism is chemistry’s answer to the physics of convection.  It’s a way of distributing energy back into and lowering the energy levels, generating waste products – generating a little chaos if you like – because the universe is running down, and life just obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics and is just helping the planet to run down chemically.

Something like 100 years.  I’m being a bit glib, but think about what 35,000 postdocs could do, 365, 24x7, for 35,000 years.  It’s not going to take long.  It’s got to be quick, because otherwise you’re going to run out of steam, so to speak; you’re going to run out of fuel.

The earliest metabolic vehicle is a hybrid.  And now comes the vehicle’s regulator or computer.  Eventually we need the RNA to help guide these reactions so that they don’t just happen chaotically.  So we get to the RNA World.

The philosopher never asks that question... the philosopher asks of a puzzle, what does it do?  What does life do?  Life takes carbon dioxide and hydrogen, sinks the oxygen into it (it found a way of using the oxygen in photosynthesis) and makes organic molecules.  That’s what life does.  It’s a process.... It’s understanding what it does that matters.

It was sad to see an audience of fairly well-educated engineers and scientists take this all in with smiling faces and expressions of rapture.  They laughed at his jokes and gave him hearty applause.  Most of them didn’t seem to notice they were being had by a fast-talking charlatan.  Read our earlier commentary on his previous JPL talk (12/03/2004).
    This lecture was followed a couple of days later by a presentation on a more technical level by a colleague of Russell, Dr. Dieter Braun.  Braun’s goal was to explain how the concentration problem in origin-of-life studies could be solved in geothermal vents.  The concentration problem is how to get enough prebiotic molecules close enough together to interact.  Both Russell and Braun recognized this as a serious problem.  In fact, Russell was emphatic in his talk that the old Miller spark-chamber scenario was unworkable.  The early earth would have had no land, and the ocean surface would have been too turbulent for a thin film of molecules to aggregate, whether delivered by comets or by lightning.  This again illustrates how the genetics-first and metabolism-first parties falsify each other.
    Braun focused only on how thin tubes in hydrothermal vents convect and concentrate molecules – any molecules (in his experiments, he used polystyrene beads).  Like Russell, he glossed over numerous problems along the way.  When faced one-on-one with questions afterward about chirality, harmful cross-reactions, the difficulty of getting essential molecules and keeping unwanted ones out, the origin of ribose for RNA and DNA, the nature of information and information transfer, functional information, probability and other serious matters, all he could do was say he was only trying to show how molecules can be concentrated in a realistic prebiotic environment.  He was lectured that shoving off the miracles for someone else to solve (playing intellectual hot potato) does not necessarily constitute scientific progress.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Geology • Dumb Ideas

Here we have another puzzle: Titan’s methane and hydrogen are constantly being broken apart, with some fragments escaping into space while others form new constituents that condense in the cold atmosphere and precipitate to the surface.  At the present rate of destruction, all of the methane now in the atmosphere will be gone in just a few million years.  This is a tiny period of time compared to the 4.5-billion-year lifetime of the solar system, so there must be a source of methane that replenishes the atmosphere.  Could it be comets?  Volcanoes?  Underground springs?  We simply don’t know.

One can calculate how much ethane has been produced on Titan over the entire history of the solar system (it is the most abundant byproduct in the photochemical destruction of methane).  The result is that this remarkable moon could be covered by a global ocean of ethane with an average depth of up to several kilometers!

The total inventory we measure is substantially smaller than the reservoir estimated to be produced throughout the age of the solar system if methane photoloysis were to have occurred continuously at its present rate.  The apparent dearth of material (compared to these model predictions – a summary is given by Lorenz and Lunine [1996], of several hundred meters thickness, or ~10⁷–10⁸ km³) may indicate one or more of four things.  First, other undetected organic materials are present, but not morphologically distinct.  It is commonly assumed on the basis of bulk cosmological abundance that Titan’s bedrock is dominated by water ice, but the near-surface may in fact be dominated by organic material.  Furthermore, even at the low latitudes dominated by arid landforms like dunes, the Huygens probe indicated that at least some surface materials are moistened by liquid methane [Lorenz et al., 2006b; Niemann et al., 2005] so some amount of liquid is present (perhaps in very large amounts) beyond the obvious lakeforms.  Second, the photochemical models may not correctly predict the ultimate yields of surface deposits (c.f.  the relative yields of solids and liquids – see next paragraph).  Thirdly, photochemical production may have been interrupted for long periods in Titan’s past if the delivery of methane to the surface was episodic and led to occasional methane depletion.  The identification of cryovolcanic features on the surface [Sotin et al., 2005; Lopes et al., 2007] supports such a picture.  A final more speculative possibility is that some process has destroyed or subducted the deposits, such that they no longer exist at the surface.

Finally, the liquid inventory, while extending over a large enough area to permit evaporative fluxes to match photochemical depletion on short timescales [Mitri et al., 2007], is not enough in volume terms to sustain the concentration of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere on geological timescales.  Put another way, there is an order of magnitude less liquid in the lakes than there is methane in the atmosphere, and photochemical models predict that inventory to be depleted in ~10 Myr [million years].  This makes the present climatic situation somewhat precarious – the observed surface reservoir, even if mostly methane, is unable to buffer the atmospheric methane for long, and unless volcanic resupply matches methane loss at just the right rate, significant climate change is likely in the future and by implication in the past....

Why do the science reporters ignore the bad news for evolution and long ages?  Here was a falsification of a clear prediction, calculated from the laws of chemistry and physics.  The only rational solution is that Titan is not as old as claimed.  The ethane budget is monstrously short of predictions.  Only trace amounts were found in the atmosphere or on the surface.  The leading planetary scientists who wrote this paper, some of whom have been studying Titan for more than 20 years, are completely baffled and can only offer weird-science explanations that cannot be observed to salvage their long age belief.
    Is this what you hear from the popular science press?  Of course not.  They only mention the fun stuff: “Look at all the gas on Titan – hundreds of times more than earth!” as if we should go fill up our cars there.  And the angle they love most is the L-word Life combined with the E-word Evolution.  Lorenz said, “We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe.”  Happy, happy, happy.  Isn’t Fantasyland fun.  Where are you going to get the straight scoop unless you read Creation-Evolution Headlines?  Spread the word: our shortcut address is http://crev.info .
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods

Several potential criticisms need to be addressed.  First, Hunt et al. start their analysis at exactly the point in time when each armour trait begins to decrease, which favours a model of initially strong directional selection.  But this choice does not undermine their general conclusion, because the standard methods could not reject randomness even when started at these same times.  Second, the analysis of the stickleback data formally examined only one model of selection – the hybrid directional-stabilizing model they expected beforehand.  The authors are here again stacking the deck for success in confirming selection.  But then this is the point.  Their analysis is akin to a positive control in showing that a new statistical method can infer the correct evolutionary process when that process is almost certain to be acting.