Findings vs Surmisings in Astronomy   04/21/2008    
April 21, 2008 — The Galex satellite (Galaxy Evolution Explorer) found “bright features” with an ultraviolet glow in the outskirts of a spiral galaxy, reported the BBC News.  What are they?  Scientists “think” they are large clusters of stars.  How much is known, and how much is interpreted?
    The region imaged is the dark area around spiral galaxy M83 in the constellation Hydra.  Symmetrical arms of glowing hydrogen appear in the periphery of the more familiar central spiral.  If these are starry regions, the discovery is surprising: “The finding has surprised astronomers because the galactic periphery was assumed to lack high concentrations of ingredients needed to form stars.”  Each pixel in the Galex image would have to contain hundreds of thousands of stars.  It is impossible, therefore, for Galex to actually resolve them.  The Galex researchers compared their image with radio telescope data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.  Did the VLA find the elusive stars?

Light emitted in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum can be used to locate gaseous hydrogen atoms.  These are seen as a good sign that the molecular form of the gas is also present.  And it is from this molecular gas that stars are born.
    When the astronomers combined the radio and the Galex data, they found that they matched up.
    “Clearly, the basic ingredients for star formation are out in those regions,” said Dr [Mark] Seibert [Carnegie Observatories].

The astronomers speculate that the young stars seen in far-flung regions of M83 could have formed under conditions resembling those of the early Universe, a time when space was not yet enriched with dust and heavier elements.
    But this process is not well understood.

Maybe there are stars there.  These astronomers did little to ground their interpretations in empirical data.  Not a single star was observed in this gas, yet we are supposed to believe there are hundreds of thousands of them in each pixel?  Are we supposed to respect a pure speculation about the early universe resting on the admission that “this process is not well understood”?  Try that with gnome theory.  “We did not find any gnomes, but we think we found some gas they emit.  We didn’t expect to find that gas in the desert.  It might shed light, however, on how gnomes arose on the early earth, before the land was enriched with toadstools.”
    If a scientist is not sure of something, let him say so or keep his speculations to himself.  Today’s scientists often do a very poor job of discriminating between observation and interpretation.  News reporters shift between them seamlessly and shamelessly.  It is up to the reader, and to sites like this, to sift the shift and lift the fogma.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology

They found that the placenta develops in two distinct stages.  In the first stage, which runs from the beginning of pregnancy through mid-gestation, the placental cells primarily activate genes that mammals have in common with birds and reptiles.  This suggests that the placenta initially evolved through repurposing genes the early mammals inherited from their immediate ancestors when they arose more than 120 million years ago.
    In the second stage, cells of the mammalian placenta switch to a new wave of species-specific genes.  Mice activate newly evolved mouse genes and humans activate human genes.
    It makes sense that each animal would need a different set of genes, Baker said.  “A pregnant orca has different needs than a mouse and so they had to come up with different hormonal solutions to solve their problems,” she said.  For example, an elephant’s placenta nourishes a single animal for 660 days.  A pregnant mouse gestates an average of 12 offspring for 20 days.  Clearly, those two pregnancies would require very different placentas.

Baker found living, functional, designed placentas that meet the needs of each animal perfectly.  She did not find evolution.  She did not find anything about evolution.  Instead, she lost something: common sense.
    Evolutionists get away with murder.  They murder rationality in their mythoids but no science reporter takes them to court.  Except here.  Repurposing genes – did you catch that little infraction?
Next headline on:  Evolution • Mammals

Nature Topples ID Straw Man   04/19/2008    
April 19, 2008 — It’s easier to knock down a straw man than a strong man.  Maybe that explains the human tendency to fantasize about victory over one’s enemies.  In scientific journals, however, one would expect to deal in facts and to realistically portray adversarial positions.  Even better would be to let the adversary respond.  Nature, however, in its latest issue, did neither.  Matthew Bennett and Jeff Hasty mentioned intelligent design just enough to discredit it.¹
    The two scientists from the Department of Bioengineering and Institute for Nonlinear Science at the University of California in San Diego were reviewing an experiment in the same issue where a team of European geneticists “rewired” a genetic network to see what would happen.²  In other words, they made certain proteins interact that normally did not.  Fortunately for the E. coli subjects, they survived, and some even did better under artificial selection pressures.  It suggested “the possibility that organisms can evolve by changing the architecture of their genetic network,” though no new structures, functions or organelles emerged from the experiment.  What does this mean for the idea that cells are intelligently designed?  Bennett and Hasty said,

This conclusion also flies in the face of the popular misconception among opponents of the evolutionary theory, who believe that the genetic code is irreducibly complex.  For instance, advocates of ‘intelligent design’ compare the genome to modern engineered machines such as integrated circuits and clocks, which will cease to function if their internal design is altered.  Although sometimes it is instructive to point to similarities between the design principles behind modern technology and those behind genetics, the analogy can only go so far.  Engineered devices are generally designed to work just above the point of failure, so that any tampering with their construction will result in catastrophe.  In the event of failure, new clocks can be purchased or central processing units replaced.  But nature does not have that option.  To survive – and so evolve – organisms must be able to tolerate random mutations, deletions and recombination events.  And Isalan and colleagues’ work provides an important step forward in quantifying just how robust the genetic code can be.

Why doesn’t Nature ever let ID scientists speak for themselves?  Why do they rarely let an ID scientist respond to a claim made against them? (and when they do, only in highly edited fashion).  These scientists did not see anything evolve.  No new genetic information arose without their interference.  They did some artificial selection experiments under artificial conditions and watched the robust organisms survive.  Did any functional genetic information arise naturally?  No.  Did they show that the mutated organisms would survive better in the wild?  No.  This is not evolution; it is semi-intelligent tinkering with nature.
    Bennett and Hasty hastened to another fallacy: the phrase “to survive – and so evolve” commits a non-sequitur.  You might survive a world war by the skin or your teeth, but you would be exactly the same individual as before, broken bones, scars and all.  Survival is not evolution.  Evolution requires generating novel genetic information that produces new structures, functions, organs and senses – like eyes, wings, sonar, and all the things that mammals have that E. coli did not.
    Next time, Nature, let your adversaries define their own positions.  It’s interesting that critics of ID complain that it is not science because it is not testable – then they go and claim it has been tested and found false.  They can’t have it both ways.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Genetics

Could the Big Bang have come not at the beginning of the universe, but after a long, slow period of shrinkage?
    That’s one theory bolstered by a new analysis of the Big Bang’s afterglow, which shows that the early universe did not inflate with the smoothness that many theorists expected.
    “The standard, canonical models will be ruled out if this holds,” says Amit Yadav, an astronomer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  “The simplicity is gone.”

Inflation theory arose in the 1980s as a means to explain some features of the universe that had previously baffled astronomers such as why the universe is so close to being flat and why it is so uniform.  Today, inflation remains the best way to theoretically understand many aspects of the early universe, but most of its predictions are sufficiently malleable that consistency with observation cannot be considered unambiguous confirmation.

If the universe is older and more complex than a recent inflationary Big Bang, other questions arise.  According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the universe cannot be infinitely old.  It would have gone to its heat death infinitely long ago.
    The only solution appears to be a controlled expansion done by intelligent design.  Enter the Bible, that claims a dozen times that God stretched out the heavens.  That fits not only the expansion evidence, but the fine-tuning as well.  Materialists are left totally baffled trying to account for these observations without design.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Intelligent Design

Applying the limited lifespan to a stepwise model, Watson finds that approximately four major evolutionary steps were required before an intelligent civilization could develop on Earth.  These steps included the emergence of single celled life about half a billion years after the Earth was formed, multicellular life about a billion and a half years later, specialized cells allowing complex life forms with functional organs a billion years after that, and human language a billion years later still.
    Several of these steps agree with major transitions that have been observed in the archeological [sic] record.

The mathematical methods Watson used assume that each evolutionary step is independent of the others, though they must occur in sequence.  Watson considers this “a reasonable first approximation for what is, after all, a very idealized sort of model, deliberately simplified enough that the math can be solved analytically.”

But even if we never make contact with another world, the process of preparing for contact may help us become better, more integrated humans.  By reflecting on how we would portray ourselves to other worlds, we also have an opportunity to grow in our own self-understanding.  And part of that increased self-understanding can come about through a recognition of those aspects of ourselves that we would rather not be true, but that are a part of ourselves.

In a sense, the composition of messages to other worlds becomes a process not merely of being in touch with alien worlds beyond, but of unknown worlds within.  And such an exploration into our souls requires as much fortitude as does building and sustaining telescopes that will search the stars for decades and centuries, seeking evidence of life beyond Earth.  As we look within, let’s not forget to look at those parts of ourselves that we would rather look away from.  As Jung reminded us, “no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.  To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.  This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

We hope it was apparent that there is no justification for the SETI and Astrobiology folk to call what they do science.  They deserve no more respect than a Raelian.  Their use of mathematics and scientific instruments is an irrelevant distraction: “no evidence” equates to “no science.”
    Progress will be made only when science reporters get the courage to nail the mythmakers with the hard questions they typically ask politicians.  Here are some suggestions: “How can you say that?  How do you know that?  Dr. Vakoch, a lot of critics would argue that your views have no scientific merit, and that you are making up stories out of your own imagination.  How would you respond to them?”  If he gives the typical smug elitist answer that he is doing “science,” not “religion,” keep pounding away.  “Dr. Vakoch, which definition of science are you using?  Do you follow Bacon, Buffon, Herschel, Whewell, Mill, Popper, Quine, von Fraasen, Laudan, Feyerabend, Foucault, Kuhn, Cartwright, etc. whose views contradict one another?  Are you a rationalist or an empiricist?  Does the use of scientific instruments and mathematics make something scientific?  Where is your evidence?  How do you define what is good or moral?  Why did you pick Carl Jung over other experts?  Wasn’t he a spiritualist who claimed to have a demonic spirit guide?” (source)  Shove the microphone to his face after this barrage, and make sure the camera gets a good shot of the flushed expression.  It will look lovely on the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “Charlatan Exposed.”
Next headline on:  SETI • Evolution

Darwin and Hitler: A Trumped-Up Connection?   04/16/2008    
April 16, 2008 — If there is anything critics of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled are griping about, it is the association of Hitler with Darwin.  What is the movie claiming and not claiming, and how solid is the historical connection?
    Scientific American, in particular, loathed the implication that Darwinism has anything to do with the Holocaust (but see rebuttal on Evolution News).  The American Thinker was a little sympathetic, but still asked whether the imagery of Dachau and Hademar “begs [the] question of the ontological connection between Darwinism and Nazism”
    In response, historian Richard Weikart, PhD at UC Stanislaus, wrote an article for the The American Spectator to clarify the relationship between “Darwin and the Nazis.”  He acknowledges that today’s Darwinists are not Nazis—far from it.  Nevertheless, he listed six principles embedded in Darwin’s world view that cheapen the value of human life:

1. Humans are animals.
2. There is no soul.
3. Morality is relative.
4. Humans are unequal.
5. Nature is a struggle for existence.
6. Death is an engine of progress.

The Darwin Party attack force is in full battle array to destroy this film.  Reviews by science journals and pro-Darwin rags have unleashed a torrent of invective.  The NCSE has launched a campaign to pre-empt the damage this movie could do to the DODO (Darwin-Only 2x) policy (see rebuttal by John West).  The mainstream media are strangely silent.  It’s as if the culture is poised to see what is going to happen on opening night.
    You can make a difference.  Go see this movie.  Take your friends, your family, your church, your co-workers.  Tear down this wall that protects atheistic materialism from scrutiny.  Open the gates.  Start the debate.  Nothing is gained by inaction, and the status quo is intolerable.  If you want to start to loosen Darwin’s grip on the culture, the schools, the courts, the media, science and religion, then here is a chance to do something.  Vote at the box office.
    Some movie reviews worth checking: MovieGuide.org, AIG, ICR, CMI, Rush Limbaugh and World Magazine.
    Bloggers and debaters sometimes joke about “Godwin’s Law” or reduction at Hitlerum – the tendency for an argument to degenerate into a discussion about Hitler.  It is true that references to Hitler against an opponent are tasteless if overdone.  But it is worse to forget!  When the shoe fits, and there is a real case to be made, it is cowardly to avoid making the association out of fear of Godwin’s Law.  Cowardice in the face of a battle for truth is the Devilwin’s Law.
Next headline on:  Media • Darwinism

1. Israel is picking a national bird.  So what feathered friend will represent the Holy Land?  “The nine finalists include the hoopoe, the owl, the spur-winged plover, and the griffin vulture, but no doves.”  Source: Science, Random Samples, 4/10/2008.  WWJD?
2. Do I hear $700,000?  Step right and buy your own triceratops at the dinosaur auction.  Video at National Geographic.  Wouldn’t that be a conversation piece. (Science Random Samples, 30:5873 04/11/2008).
3. An evolutionary biologist is coming to revitalize research at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.  What are David Mindell’s goals?  “He wants to expand research in comparative genomics, strengthen ties with local university researchers, and do more public outreach--especially about evolution.”  (Science Newsmakers, 320:5873, 04/11/2008.)  Do they have a theater?  They could show Expelled nonstop.
4. David Berlinski has answered the Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion with one of his own, The Devil’s Delusion (the identity of the devil is left as an exercise).  His book tour began on C-SPAN’s Book TV, and sounds to his critics like the raking of fingernails across Slate.
5. Don’t tell the creationists: a biophysical complexity researcher has called into question the whole notion of fitness and natural selection, according to a Wired Blog.  “You always get into trouble if you say these things out loud with creationists around,” Maya Paczuski groaned.
6. Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute has responded to the NCSE’s Expelled Exposed website with “Expelled Exposed” Exposed.  Could this be the start of an infinite regress?
7. Richard A. Kerr gets the pun award for mixed metaphors: “An Early Big Hit to Mars May Have Scarred the Planet for Life” he said in Science (320:5873, 04/11/2008, pp. 165-166), calling the big show a “striptease.”  But if Mars put on a show and nobody was there to see it, would it be risque?
8. Cassini got two years; NASA granted a two-year extended mission to the Saturn orbiter, reported JPL.
9. The Israeli Antiquities Authority is in its third year of a trial accusing an Egyptian antiquities merchant of forgery for the famed James Ossuary and Jehoash Inscription, said Todd Bolen.  A speedy trial means something else in a land that boasts a 7,000 year history.
10. Inconvenient facts?  Science Daily reported on a panel that praised Al Gore’s movie An Inconvient Truth for its visual excellence and persuasiveness – but not necessarily for its facts.
11. All fired up: “Some scientists are urging Florida’s Legislature to reject a bill that would protect teachers from being fired if they present information challenging evolution,” reported ABC News SunCoast.com.
12. Oh, the irony: critics of the documentary Expelled, which opens in theaters this Friday, have accused the producers of plagiarizing animations of the cell from a Harvard production (a charge Premise Media denies).  Of course to make this claim, the critics had to make an inference of intelligent design.  What message would it send to get Expelled expelled?

Exercise:  Is the IRS tax code a product of intelligent design?  (Hint: not all complexity is “complex specified information”.)  Caution: there are no simple answers.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education • Birds • Media

1. Nature editors:  The editorial in Nature April 10 asked,¹ what is “natural”?  The occasion for the question was a transgendered woman-who-became-a-man announcing on Oprah that he/she/it had become pregnant.  The editors seemed to waffle on the answer to the question.  Uneasy to accept this person’s sexual identity crisis as natural, they had more questions than answers: e.g., “if drugs enhance performance on a standardized test, what is so ‘natural’ about prep courses designed to improve scores?”
       The question of what we mean by “natural” is a profoud issue (see 05/11/2006 for a deep discussion about it).  Nature, however, started the editorial with a statement that begged much bigger questions: whether logic and intelligence is natural, and how they could have evolved:

   From an evolutionary perspective, we humans have good reason to be wary of things that seem to be ‘unnatural’.  Anything out of the ordinary can be dangerous.  But the evolutionary origin of that response also guarantees that it will be guided more by emotion than by reason.

2. Michael Ruse:  Philosophy of science is a field where logic and reason should be on full display.  It was most interesting, therefore, to see what Michael Ruse, a self-proclaimed “hard-line Darwinian” philosopher, thought of a new book, Why Think?  Evolution and the Rational Mind by Ronald DeSouza (Oxford, 2008).  He reviewed the book in the March Literary Review of Canada.
       Ruse liked the book very much, and shared its usual speculations about what intelligence is good for in evolutionary biology: e.g., having fewer offspring means greater care must be invested in their care – which requires judgment.  That, in turn, “means brains and all of the rest– getting on with others, finding protein and so forth,” he said, adding in his off-the-cuff way, “I am not sure if this is really an evolutionary justification for eating Big Macs, but one can say that this is all very much a feedback situation.”
       Where Ruse seemed to get tied up in knots was considering the comeback argument to all this from philosopher Alvin Plantinga.  Ruse said Plantinga “loathes and detests” evolutionary biology.  But he seemed disappointed that DeSousa in his book did not provide a satisfying answer to Plantinga’s challenge: “the unreliability of reason in the Darwinian scenario is reason enough to reject evolution and embrace God.”  He elaborated:

   As Plantinga points out, what counts in evolution is success and not the truth.  So how can we ever be sure of the truth?  Perhaps none of our thoughts can tell.  Perhaps none of our thoughts can tell us about reality.  Perhaps we are like beings in a dream world....
   Everything we believe about evolution could be false.

   Ruse acknowledged that this question even troubled Darwin himself:

   With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy.  Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

   Surprisingly, Ruse conceded that Plantinga could have employed this quote of Darwin to make his point.  How did DeSousa respond to “Darwin’s Doubt”?  In short, he argued that our mathematical knowledge could not have evolved by natural selection.  Our brains evolved for other things.  Since our brains discovered mathematics along the way, and found it useful for all kinds of other things (including predictions that came true), this implies our brains are able to comprehend external reality as it is, not just as we experience it.
       Ruse felt that DeSousa did not adequately answer Plantinga’s challenge.  Ruse himself did not have a good answer, but shrugged it off: “you are probably right, but that is a level of skepticism about knowledge that excites philosophers and not mature human beings.”  Then he changed the subject.  He hoped DeSousa would write a sequel on the evolution of morality.
3. Eugenie Scott:  Speaking of morality, the director of the National Center for Science Education should be a good person to ask about evolutionary ethics.  Eugenie Scott reviewed a book in Nature about “brave new bioethics,”² Life As It Is, Biology for the Public Sphere by William F. Loomis (University of California Press, 2008).  First, her review of philosophy:

   Science’s task is to explain the natural world: what it is, how it works and why it is the way it is.  Ethics is about the oughts and the shoulds.  Most ethicists – religious and secular – agree that knowledge of the natural world helps us make better, or at least better-informed, ethical decisions.  But, as David Hume, Thomas Henry Huxley and G. E. Moore have noted, a particular understanding of nature does not dictate a unique moral stance.

   Thus one of the preeminent evolutionary spokespersons in America jumped right into the quagmire of evolutionary ethics.  One would think that Scott, whose life work is to keep evolution in schools and creationism out, would bring evolutionary theory to bear on the question and show its superiority in grounding ethics in something sustainable.  But she said almost nothing about evolution.  Instead, she de-emphasized the ability of science to inform ethical decision-making.  “The idea that a realistic understanding of biology will usher in a paradise of ethical correctness,” she said, “is naive: the panoply of extra-scientific considerations that influence ethical decision-makings cannot be ignored or minimized.”
       At one point she described Loomis making advice about sustainability: “Loomis recommends a programme of voluntary population reduction,” she said, apparently uncomfortable with this idea: “requiring both political leadership and a radical change of public opinion.”  Hopefully Loomis was not recommending mass suicide.  What she failed to provide, though, was an answer to the question she raised at the beginning: if science cannot dictate a unique moral stance, how can it provide “better, or at least better-informed, ethical decisions”?
4. Self-refuting sci-fi:  Science journals don’t have to be all dry.  Nature ends each issue with a science fiction short story featurette called “Futures.”³  The April 10 entry was a story by Neal Morison set in the far distant future.  A group of scientists were reliving a century-old discovery that a lively blogger turned out to be a robot.  The moral of the story seemed to suggest this had solved the mind-body problem, one of philosophy’s biggest questions, once and for all.  What the story actually did, though was beg the question: who built the computer?  And who programmed the robot?

There you have it: the world’s biggest Darwin defenders can’t answer the question: how can evolutionary theory produce any knowledge that is trustworthy – including the supposition that evolution is true?  They either shrug their shoulders or retreat into fiction.
    Since Michael Ruse took delight in a jab at the Bible, let’s see how logical it was.  He said of DeSouza’s introduction, “I knew I was going to love this book” when the author compared Abraham to Andrea Yates (the delusional housewife who said God told her to kill her five children).  DeSouza quipped, “When enough people share a delusion, it loses its status as a psychosis and gets a religious tax exemption instead.”  Oh; you mean, like Darwinism?.
    DeSouza may have scored on ridicule, but not on logic.  If Yates had truly received a message from God, she would not have killed her children.  How many times did God angrily speak through his prophets about the idolaters who burned their children in the fire?  Over and over, God said of such horrendous practices, “I did not command them, nor did it come into My mind” (e.g., Jeremiah 32:35).  Human sacrifice was such a completely alien concept to the mind of God, He pronounced severe judgments on the nations that practiced it.  But self-sacrifice for others is one of the highest measures of love: “Greater love hath no man,” said Jesus, “than that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
    So put the pieces together.  What of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son?  This was not a temptation, or even a test of Abraham’s faith (God, being omniscient, already knew what Abraham would do).  This was one of many types or pictures in the Old Testament of Christ.  Just as God provided the ram as a substitute for Isaac, God provided a Lamb as a substitute for our sins.  God’s righteousness demands penalty for sin, and the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).  Either we will die for our sins, or a substitute will take our place.
    The only person able to give a life in payment for the sins of the world was Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  He alone in the universe was fully God and fully man.  Since the persons of the Trinity never act apart from one another, and share fully in each other’s joys and sorrows, God was providing Abraham (and all of us) an illustration of the torment of being ordered, “Take thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and offer him as a sacrifice.”  The pain of God’s sacrifice of His Son having as satisfaction for His justice was portrayed in a heart-wrenching way to the world.  Yes, God provided the Lamb: Himself!
    What Abraham did is polar opposite from Andrea Yates did.  What good came from her delusional revelation?  Yet look how the world has been blessed by those who are children of Abraham by faith.  And what kind of character was Abraham?  Up to that point, and throughout his life, he showed by his actions to be a man of sound mind and self-sacrificing character, bold for the cause of right, but gentle and loving toward his family and neighbors.  He was not delusional.  By all accounts of his friends and his enemies, he was a great man.  He was great spiritually because he believed God, and God counted it to him as righteousness (see Hebrews 11:8-19).
    Faith is only as good as its object.  It is not Abraham’s faith per se that made him great: it was that the object of his faith was the true and living God.  As for Abraham founding three world religions, well, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac makes no sense apart from its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and Mohammed was a latecomer who co-opted the fame of Abraham for anti-Abrahamic ends (e.g., killing Jews and Christians).  Abraham did not set out to found any religion.  He just obeyed God, and God brought about the answers to the promises He gave Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you.”
    Whether any religion deserves tax breaks is a side issue.  The delusional religion of Darwinism gets a free ride in all our public schools, national parks, museums, courts, media and science labs.  Who are they to complain about religious tax exemptions?  Watch out when the Darwinists gain absolute power and act consistent with their presuppositions.  They might just give tax breaks to the Andrea Yates types who follow delusions and exhibit relativistic morality.  Neither DeSouza nor Ruse can claim any action is more rational or moral than any other.
    So how logical was Michael Ruse to laugh at DeSouza’s distortion of Scripture?  Pray for him.  Despite his bluffing, he seems troubled by Plantinga’s challenge.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Bible and Theology • Politics and Ethics

Dinosaur Expert Criticizes Uber-Darwinists More than Biblical Creationists   04/13/2008    
April 13, 2008 — One of the field researchers most identifiable with dinosaurs is Dr. Robert Bakker, a colorful individual who’s had a long friendly rivalry with an equally iconic figure of the modern dinosaur hunter, Jack Horner (e.g., 11/24/2007).  Brian Switek interviewed Bakker on the Laelops Science Blog.  He introduced him as “one of the most famous paleontologists working today, an iconoclastic figure who has played a leading role of rehabilitating our understanding of dinosaurs from the inception of the ‘Dinosaur Renaissance’ through the present.”  Wait till you see whom Bakker considers the “greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.”
    Many recognize Bakker’s cowboy visage from TV documentaries about our changing views of dinosaurs.  His grizzled beard, now graying, bespeaks the passage of time that may have nuanced his views about science and theology a bit.  He is no creationist but has learned to understand and sympathize with them.  In fact, he turned the disgust many evolutionists feel toward creationists and aimed it at the likes of Richard Dawkins.

We dino-scientists have a great responsibility: our subject matter attracts kids better than any other, except rocket-science.  What’s the greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.?

Militant Creationism?

No way.  It’s the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists.  The likes of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

These shrill uber-Darwinists come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions.  If you’re not an atheist, then you must be illiterate or stupid and, possibly, a danger to yourself and others.

Bakker’s attitude is refreshing compared to the line-up of rabid Darwinists dominating the news, whose invective for creation knows no bounds.  We can only hope that further contemplation on the paradox of design and suffering, combined with the wonder of a comprehensible and extraordinarily beautiful world, will lead him to pick up a Bible and read it anew.  The historical sciences are limited in what they can teach.  If we have a mind, would not the Maker of minds know more about history than our feeble attempts to divine meaning from dead things?
    We also hope Bakker doesn’t get into trouble with the uber-Darwinists for his comments.  His reputation seems secure, but never underestimate the wrath of the Darwin Party.  If you get Expelled, Dr. Bakker, ask yourself what it is about the uber-Darwinists that makes them so vicious.  Why are the Bible believers usually more pleasant to be around?  Randy Olson made this point in Flock of Dodos, but he hasn’t succeeded, so far, in convincing his fellow Darwiniacs to be nice.  You can’t change the leopard’s spots.  The spots are in their genes.  Scrubbing them is not only futile, it irritates the leopard.  Darwinists will only snarl louder and bite harder at attempts to say they shouldn’t be so elitist and nasty.  Is it time for a new social group?  Hopefully creationists you meet will be agreeable folk, and any questions or disagreements notwithstanding, will welcome you, respect your accomplishments, and be willing to engage in stimulating conversation in a calm and rational manner.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Bible • Education • Darwin • Intelligent Design

At the end of the press release, they tagged on a line about global warming.  The scientists should have focused, instead, on the remarkable evidence for design.  Can you imagine a featherweight machine that knows how to sail in the air?  We won’t even bother thinking about how similar wonders could have evolved separately in birds and insects, which are nowhere near each other on Darwin’s tree of lie (04/11/2008).
Exercise:  Make a list of the items of hardware and software you would have to add to a 2-inch scrap of paper blowing in the wind to make it be able to arrive at a precise point 300 km away.  Extra credit: Add to your list how many more items of hardware and software you would have to build onto the paper for it to reproduce itself with copies that could fly back home, having never been there before.  Notice that this implies a requirement: the hardware needs to be lightweight enough to make your scrap of paper not plummet to the ground.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts

If the first animal was a predator, what did it eat?  If Darwin’s tree fell in the falsification forest, and nobody cared, would it even make a sound?
    Darwinists act so shocked.  This is old news.  Why they continue to be tree-huggers when Darwin’s tree icon has been shown to be a myth? (02/01/2007).  Creationists already knew it was a tree of lie, composed of the building blocks of lie (03/19/2008).  Old myths die hard.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Darwinian Evolution • Marine Biology

Grand Canyon Age Estimates Fluctuate Wildly   04/10/2008    
April 10, 2008 — Just when the park rangers were getting familiar telling the public the Grand Canyon was carved about 5 million years ago, some geologists announced the shocking news that it might be less than a million (05/31/2002, 07/22/2002).  The age was plummeting as recently as November (11/30/2007).  But then last month, another revision came: it’s 17 million years old.  Now, another team claims it is 55 million years old, or older.  National Geographic News announced that the majestic gorge is 9 times older than thought, and PhysOrg claimed it may be as old as the dinosaurs.  Are these estimates or just guesstimates?
    The new date, to be published in the May GSA Bulletin, is based on an inference about the time when minerals of apatite, containing uranium and thorium, began to cool when first exposed to the surface.  This inference, however, depends on models of where the minerals formed and became exposed.  The National Geographic article called this only “a clock of sorts” for dating the canyon.
    The geologists from Caltech and Colorado University at Boulder noted that the rocks at the bottom of the canyon dated the same as those at the top.  From this they inferred that an ancient canyon existed 55 million years ago that later became integrated with other sections that had evolved separately.  Why?  Because the only way the bottom and the top could have cooled at the same time, they surmised, was that “the gorge formed from previously existing canyons that eventually connected, rather than a plateau.” Brian Wernicke, a geology professor at Caltech, explained, “If there had not been a canyon, the gorge and rim samples would have been different.’
    Some amazing claims emerge from the complexities of this model.  In the PhysOrg article, Rebecca Flowers of Colorado University was quoted saying, “If you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon today, the bottom of the ancestral canyon would have sat over your head, incised into rocks that have since been eroded away.”  Visitors at the rim would be astonished to look up a mile into the sky and try to visualize an imaginary canyon above them that somehow turned into the canyon below them.  Not only that, the river was running in the opposite direction!  During all these millions of years, the plateaus around the canyon were eroding as fast as the canyon itself, they said.  “Small streams on the plateaus appear to have been just as effective at stripping away rock as the ancient Colorado River was at carving the massive canyon.
    If these inferences appear to go far beyond all empirical support, resting on some ratios of minerals, so be it.  “It’s a complicated picture because different segments of the canyon appear to have evolved at different times and subsequently were integrated.”

Do you get the idea that modern secular geologists are absolutely clueless about the origin of one of the most stark exhibits of geology in the world?  They can be perfectly happy with 70 million years, 100,000 years, 6 million years, 17 million years or 55 million years.  All that matters is keeping the naturalistic belief system intact.  They will even give us an imaginary canyon in the sky (that used to be ancient sediments) with a river eroding it down as fast as small streams did.  Side canyons all join up together and make the river turn around and flow the other way.  Isn’t science wonderful.
    One little observation the secular team mentioned should have jumped up and shouted for attention.  If the inferred dates of cooling were the same at the bottom and the top, then guess what!  Maybe, just maybe, the canyon formed catastrophically.  We know that happened at Washington’s channeled scablands and at Mt. St. Helens.  Why, that would explain the whole Grand Canyon in a matter of days or weeks.  Is that any less scientific than wavering between dates that differ by two orders of magnitude?.  If it were the only inference to be drawn, that would be one thing – but the Grand Canyon is filled with other evidences of rapid deposition and rapid canyon formation.  Take time to review some of them from our 09/16/2005 commentary.
    In any other science, huge swings of speculation and reckless deployment of ad hoc circumstances and reliance on unobservables would be scorned.  Creation scientists have been studying the Grand Canyon for decades now.  They can point to real-world analogues to explain what happened.  Their confidence in creation and Flood models has made some of them call this vast area “Exhibit A” for a worldwide flood and catastrophism.  The elite secular geologists pretend these scientists, some with PhDs and years of field experience, don’t even exist.  Take your pick whom you think has more credibility.  One thing was clear to a New York Times reporter – the Christians have a richer time in the Canyon than the evolutionists (10/06/2005).
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

1. Chimeras:  Even though ethicists have called it “a monstrous attack on human rights,” to blend human embryos with animals, UK scientists created the first chimera of cow and human genetic material, reported PhysOrg.
2. Stem cells:  Induced pluripotent stem cells apparently have all the benefits of embryonic stem cells and none of the ethical problems.  Why, then, does Nature continue to argue that embryonic stem cell research must continue?
3. Presidential pressure:  At the same time Nature and Science have been stifling debate on intelligent design and stem cell research, they have been calling for a “science debate” among the US presidential candidates.  While science policy is certainly a major topic for any presidential campaign, it’s apparent from the Science Debate line-up of supporters (mostly liberals) that the pressure is not so much to give the public and its candidates a chance to freely express their views on the role of science in society, but to find out which candidates align with the goals of the science establishment, and to use their statements as campaign fodder.
4. Expelled:  If anyone thought for a moment that the scientific establishment would be taken aback by the popularity of Ben Stein’s upcoming documentary Expelled (see 03/29/2008, 04/07/2008), and perhaps feel a little fear or remorse at this public backlash against scientific intolerance, they need only look at today’s post on the Nature blog.  A spirit of contempt exudes from every line of the entry.  “Meanwhile, for those not utterly tired of Expelled, the National Center for Science Education has launched an Expelled Exposed website.”  The motives of those wanting to open the debate about evolution were suspect: “religiously motivated politicking” and “subterfuge for injecting the religious beliefs held by some into the science classroom” – but no such motive-questioning in the other direction could be found.  Presumably, Nature and the NCSE always act from pure motives.¹
   

Big Science has lost its innocence.  Scientific institutions were once clubs of citizens who did scientific experiments out of their love for knowledge and desire for truth.  In the 20th century, especially after World War II, science became a necessity for national prestige, military success and economic innovation.  Through the advocacy of scientists like Vannevar Bush, the government began to pour millions of dollars into pure and applied science.
    Power corrupts.  The momentum gained by scientific institutions invariably turned their interests inward.  What used to consist of small, privately-funded associations is now Big Science: huge institutions, feeding at the public trough, with a political stake in their ability to maintain a monolithic consensus as they lobby the government.  Almost vanished is the heroic individual of yesteryear, the Faraday or Kepler revealing new knowledge to the world.  A practicing scientist today needs to know how to work the system.  He or she must belong to the right associations, attend the right conferences, and say the right things.  Individuals get swept up into the funding rush and herd mentality in order to survive.  The managers at the top of the food chain are far removed from the worker bees at the bottom.  Science institutions these days are like small cities with their own official press core, employment agencies, affirmative action boards, diversity and inclusion departments and P&P (policies and procedures) dictums.
    Intelligent design represents one of the biggest threats to Big Science (not science itself) in recent decades.  The leading advocates of ID, all with impeccable academic credentials, know how to make an inference to the best explanation based on the collective evidence available from astronomy, paleontology and cell biology.  They also know that all pretence of epistemic superiority by modern science has been undermined, not by religious claims, but by the best thinkers in philosophy of science for over a century.  They see through the phony, outdated “scientism” that persists in public perception.  And so they defy the consensus.  They demand a return to academic freedom and debate.
    Reason, empiricism, argumentation about the evidence – one would think scientists would welcome this.  Instead, Big Science flexes its muscle and says that anyone outside The Wall is ignorant, stupid, wicked, or (worse) religiously motivated.  Their behavior is reminiscent of the self-serving communist party bosses who did whatever they needed to do to hang onto their cushy jobs.  Knowledge, ethics, integrity – those are lost in the system.  Maintaining power is what matters.
    Reader, please see what is going on.  Sad as it seems, you must jettison your beloved old preconceptions that today’s Big Science institutions represent neutral, unbiased, honest, sincere seekers after Truth.  Look at them now like the other large political pressure groups – Big Labor, Big Education, the Military-Industrial Complex, Big Entertainment, and Big Wall Street.  Each of these bodies has upright individuals who do the best job they can.  But the scientific institutions are about consensus and politics and money.  They are incorrigible.  All dissent will be crushed.
    What is to be done?  For one, vote your conscience.  Write letters.  Support academic freedom, like the Academic Freedom Petition.  Get involved with your school board at the grass roots level.  Support a good turnout at the Expelled movie, to raise awareness of the problem.  Encourage politicians to stand up to the Big Science lobbyists.  Become a Citizen Scientist.  And wherever you can, hold Big Science to the fire of its conscience.  Science was born in a culture of openness, individuality, integrity, and above all, a love for knowledge and a desire to help people.  It sought for the truth about the world.  It was willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, recognizing its own limitations.  Sad to say, Big Science needs to be shamed back to those core values.  They are supposed to be accountable to the people.  Stand up to them.  Don’t be intimidated by the NCSE and other dogmatists; point them to the battle going on in their own conscience.  When they contradict their own core values, call them on the carpet for it.  Half the battle will be over when you get the Big Science bureaucrats, KGB and propagandists to shut their loud mouths and blush a little.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Evolution • Intelligent Design

This beautifully illustrates what about evolution is random and what is not.  While the end point is predicted by the selection pressure—i.e., the decreasing concentration of ingredients determines that enzymes will evolve to cope with decreased concentration—the actual mutations that allow this are completely random and cannot be predicted at the outset—i.e., if you bought an “evolution machine” and ran the same experiment, your end product would be an enzyme that could cope with low concentrations too, but the mutations that it acquired to do this might be different.

The principles of Darwinian evolution are fundamental to understanding biological organization at the level of populations of organisms and for explaining the development of biological genomes and macromolecular function.  Darwinian evolution also has become a chemical tool for discovering and optimizing functional macromolecules in the test tube (for recent reviews, see [2–5]).  Laboratory evolution is greatly accelerated compared with natural evolution but requires substantial manipulation by the experimenter, which is imprecise, time consuming, and usually performed in an ad hoc manner.

The runtime parameters for evolution are established at the outset and are enforced precisely throughout the course of an experiment.  The continuous stream of real-time data provides a high-resolution record of an evolutionary trajectory, which can be obtained as a function of population size, population heterogeneity, growth conditions, and the availability of limiting resources.  Each microchip contains multiple microfluidic circuits that can be addressed independently, and the chip as a whole can be produced at nominal cost.  Thus, Darwinian evolution becomes commoditized, allowing one to perform many evolution experiments with little more difficulty than the execution of a computer program.

Darwin isn’t on this chip.  The chip is on Darwin.  His disciples just put one on his shoulder.  How convenient for Gerald Joyce to start with a complex RNA enzyme.  He has said that the spontaneous appearance of chains of RNA on the early earth would have been a near miracle (02/15/2007).
    Something is very wrong with this picture.  Darwinian evolution experiments are like the way one would execute a computer program?  OK, Baloney Detectors, get busy.  Your assignment is to identify all the ways the scientists snuck information into the system, making this a case of intelligent design, and therefore worthless as an illustration of Darwinian evolution.  How should they have designed the system to really mimic Darwinism?  If you need help, you can re-read the following entries: 07/31/2002, 12/18/2002, 05/08/2003, 10/04/2005, 07/05/2006, 11/14/2006, 08/07/2007.
  Grad students can scrutinize the original open-source paper in detail.
    Before teaching the kiddies about Darwinian evolution on the tabletop, teach them the word TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  That will help inoculate them against the scam artists known as evolutionary science reporters.
Next headline on:  Darwinian Evolution • Education

Watch for Falling Amino Acids   04/08/2008    
April 8, 2008 — A long-standing problem of origin-of-life theories is how proteins became left-handed.  Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, come in right-handed and left-handed forms, yet life uses only the left-handed form.
    The two isoforms are otherwise identical—yet one amino acid of the wrong hand in a protein spells doom for its function.  Wherever amino acids form naturally (as in Stanley Miller’s spark-discharge experiment), they form in roughly equal amounts of both hands (racemic mixture).  How could a natural system isolate and purify the mixture without the DNA code and ribosomes that ensure quality control in life?  One new suggestion printed in Science Daily was adorned with a picture of a ribosome and the suggestive title, “Meteorites Delivered The ‘Seeds’ Of Earth’s Left-hand Life.”  The first paragraph almost sounds like the beginning of a children’s story:

Flash back three or four billion years -- Earth is a hot, dry and lifeless place.  All is still.  Without warning, a meteor slams into the desert plains at over ten thousand miles per hour.  With it, this violent collision may have planted the chemical seeds of life on Earth.

Scientists have presented evidence that desert heat, a little water, and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up one of the first prerequisites for life: The dominance of “left-handed” amino acids, the building blocks of life on this planet.

“These meteorites were bringing in what I call the ‘seeds of chirality,’” stated Breslow.  “If you have a universe that was just the mirror image of the one we know about, then in fact, presumably it would have right-handed amino acids.  That’s why I’m only half kidding when I say there is a guy on the other side of the universe with his heart on the right hand side.”

Breslow found that the left and right-handed amino acids would bind together as they crystallized from water.  The left-right bound amino acids left the solution as water evaporated, leaving behind increasing amounts of the left-amino acid in solution.  Eventually, the amino acid in excess became ubiquitous as it was used selectively by living organisms.

This story is far-fetched to the extreme.  Anyone familiar with the problem must stand aghast at the leaps of faith required to believe in their fairy tale.  For a refresher on the severity of this problem, read our online book, chapter 3 and chapter 4.
    They get away with it because their worldview requires it, and they have nothing else.  Dressing it up with humor and metaphor doesn’t distract the wise.
    Shame on science reporters for portraying fairy tales as science.  Dave Mosher, who trashed the ID movie Expelled yesterday (see 04/07/2008), had no problem with the pseudoscience in this paper.  In fact, he even embellished it more in his LiveScience article that was syndicated to Yahoo.com and other news outlets: “Neutron starlight might have zapped amino acids riding on comets and asteroids into a bias, and a little water might have concentrated them after they crashed into Earth, a team of scientists now say.”  So Mr. Mosher thinks he knows science well enough to demonize all the PhDs in the movie Expelled, but cannot see the demons of irrationality and imagination channeling through evolution-worshiping scientists.
    That’s why one of our readers, a retired engineer, called the guilty website “Sèance Daily” (also works for Live Sèance).  He wrote up a spoof that has more believable science in it than the article above:

Meteorites Delivered The ‘Seeds’ Of Earth’s Chain Link Fences, Experts Argue

Sèance Daily (Apr. 6, 2008): Flash back three or four billion years -- Earth is a hot, dry and fence-less place.  All is still.  Without warning, a meteor slams into the desert plains at over ten thousand miles per hour.  With it, this violent collision may have planted the chemical seeds of chain-link fences on Earth.
    Scientists have presented evidence that desert heat, a little hand waving, and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up one of the first prerequisites for aluminum fences: The dominance of “left-handed” aluminum atoms, the building blocks of chain-linked fences on this planet.
    In a report at the 235th national meeting of the Atheist Apologist Society, Donald Slowbres, B.S., University Professor, Darwin University, and former AAS Official Watchmaker Debunker, described how aluminum fences came from outer space.
    Chains of aluminum atoms make up the strands found in fences, various rods, and all cheap sets of pots and pans.  There are two orientations of aluminum atoms, left and right, which mirror each other in the same way your hands do.  This is known as “chirality.”  In order for chain-linked fences to arise, fences must contain only one chiral form of aluminum atoms, left or right, Slowbres noted.
    “If you mix up chirality, a fence’s properties change enormously.  Chain-linked fences couldn’t operate with just random mixtures of stuff,” he said....
    ... Evidence of this left-handed excess was found on the surfaces of these meteorites, which have crashed into Earth even within the last hundred years, landing in Disney’s Fantasy Land Theme Park.
    Slowbres simulated what occurred after the dust settled following a meteor bombardment, when the aluminum atoms on the meteor mixed with the primadona soup.  Under “credible pre-fencetic conditions”-- desert-like temperatures and a little bit of random mutation -- he exposed aluminum atom chemical precursors to those aluminum atoms found on meteorites.
    Slowbres and Darwin chemistry grad student Quickdraw McDuck found that these cosmic aluminum atoms could directly transfer their chirality to simple aluminum atoms found in aluminum fences.  Thus far, Slowbres’s team is the first to demonstrate that this kind of handedness transfer is possible under these conditions.
    On pre-fence Earth, this transfer left a slight excess of left-handed aluminum atoms, Slowbres said.  His next experiments with beer cans replicated the chemistry that led to the amplification and eventual dominance of left-handed aluminum atoms.
    The steps afterward that led towards the genesis of chain-linked fences are shrouded in mystery.  Slowbres hopes to shine more light on pre-fence Earth as he turns his attention to iron atoms, the chemical units of the Eiffel Tower and its more primitive cousin, the Eiffel Fence.
    “This work is related to the probability that there is chain-linked fences somewhere else,” said Slowbres.  “Everything that is going on on Earth occurred because the meteorites happened to land here.  But they are obviously landing in other places.  If there is another planet that has the cow pastures and all of the things that cows excrete, you should be able to get the same process rolling.”

Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Baloney Detectors are going to have a field day with the reviews of this film.  They are so polarized for and against, it should be easy to find out who is engaging in emotional tactics instead of reasoned debate.  See the film if you can before being influenced by the press.  You can expect the secular mainstream press to be uniformly negative.  Keep in mind a couple of things.  A movie can only say so much in 90 minutes.  This is a highly complex topic with many side issues.  The basic question is clear; is intelligent design sufficiently supported, and Darwinism sufficiently challenged, to allow academic freedom for both sides to be heard?  Why should careers of qualified scientists be ruined over this?  Why the systematic effort to prevent a hearing of challenges to the views of a small minority, its advocates profoundly atheistic, instead of letting the evidence, reason and common sense carry the debate forward?
    Another thing to keep in mind is that this is a movie, not a legal brief.  To attract audiences to theaters there has to be enough appeal with visuals, action and controversy or else the subject could easily bore them.  We didn’t see Live Science complaining when Randy Olson used humor and satire with Flock of Dodos (compare that review with this one).  Stein feels strongly enough about this issue he went out on a limb to make the case in a convincing yet “seriously funny” way.  It’s intended to get the ball rolling toward public debate on an issue that is crying for open and fair investigation.
    For those who need the scholarly backup, there are plenty of densely-worded thick tomes available.  One mid-level book (with enough facts and references to support every claim), that is comprehensive yet approachable, is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design by Jonathan Wells (Regnery, 2006), available at Access Research Network.  This book would be a good companion piece to the film.  The ARN catalog has many more books on the subject suitable for anyone from the high school student to the science reporter to the PhD academic researcher.
    As interesting a phenomenon as Expelled is in the culture war, no movie should be a crutch.  Get informed so that your opinion has legs.
Next headline on:  Media • Darwinism • Intelligent Design

1. Ant farm:  Science Daily reported on Smithsonian scientists who constructed an evolutionary tree after observing ants’ abilities to “farm” fungus for food.  “By studying certain fungus-growing ants, which our study indicates are almost like ‘living fossils,’ we might be able to better understand steps involved in the evolution of ant agriculture,” one researcher said.
       Living fossils might have been seen as evidence against evolution (10/13/2004).  According to the evolutionary timetable, they represent organisms that have shown no evolution for tens or hundreds of millions of years.  Somehow, despite that admission, the evidence was being used as support for evolution.  The quotation indicates that if evolution has explanatory power in this case, it is in future tense.
2. Mystery religion:  The phrase “abominable mystery” seems synonymous with Darwin’s frustration at explaining the origin of flowering plants (01/30/2002, 12/21/2007).  National Geographic admitted as much, saying, “The apparently sudden appearance of angiosperms in the fossil record confounded Darwin, who worried that it might pose a problem for his theory of evolution by natural selection.”
       That admission, however, was the only expression of doubt about evolution in a story about “the world’s oldest plant-eating lizard.”  Even though this “spectacular” fossil “challenges long-held views about lizard evolution,” the fact of lizard evolution was never in doubt.  Ker Than explained that it was a choice between two evolutionary possibilities: “either the ancestral condition for lizard diet was not as restricted as once thought or that diet has been highly labile [easily changed] throughout lizard evolution.”
       How this fossil solved the abominable mystery of flowering plants was not explained.  “Thus the new fossil species, dubbed Kuwajimalla kagaensis, could indicate that angiosperms were already in existence and perhaps widespread millions of years earlier than had been thought, the researchers say.”  Might that not count as evidence that flowering plants were created fully formed?  Such an option was never in the cards: “Scientists have since uncovered fossils tracing the evolution of angiosperms from nonflowering plants, called gymnosperms.”
3. Ancient mother:  “They are separated by a vast ocean and by millions of years, but tiny prehistoric bones found on an Australian farm have been directly linked to a strange and secretive little animal that lives today in the southern rainforests of South America.”  The observation is: a living animal that resembles a fossil animal.  Science Daily wove this into a story about how this “Primitive Mouse-Like Creature May Be Ancestral Mother Of Australia’s Unusual Pouched Mammals.”  PhysOrg echoed the tale, claiming, “The fossil ankle and ear bones of Djarthia make it clear that the Monito del Monte [the living animal] descends from a Djarthia-like ancestor, and so probably returned to South America from Australia before Gondwana broke up.”
4. Hanging around:  Spiders often hang upside down in their webs.  What does this mean?  Science Daily gave Darwin the microphone:

   The great majority of land animals evolved to use the ground as the main support for their motion.  Accordingly, they evolved legs capable of supporting the weight of their whole bodies, enabling them to move around with their heads above their feet.  However, many spider species found it more convenient to literally turn their world upside down.  They spend most of their lives hanging suspended by their legs, and ‘walk’ by swinging under the influence of gravity.

   The article tells how researchers were “intrigued by this evolutionary phenomenon,” even though they had not watched any spiders evolve.  “One of their focal questions was the evolutionary importance of ‘bridging’ -- the technique many spiders use to move between remote plants by building their own silk bridges,” it said.  Somehow they “discovered” evolution by watching live spiders: “We discovered that spiders that live upside-down have evolved disproportionately longer legs relative to ‘normal’ spiders, which enables them to move faster while bridging than while ‘normally walking’ on the ground.”
       Again, both kinds of spiders are alive today, but “Now,” somehow “we have a much better understanding of how an animal shape should evolve when animals spent most of their lifetime hanging upside-down.”  Yet people have observed living spiders for centuries without seeing evolution between them.  Is it even clear which one evolved from the other?  To the hanging spider, the walking spider looks upside-down.
       A physicist was brought in to study the energetics of upside-down locomotion.  Nowhere was there any mention, though, of an observable series of intermediates (perhaps spiders walking sideways) that would demonstrate evolution had occurred or was occurring.  Nor was there any mention of how a spider finding it more “convenient” to hang around in an inverted world found a way to gather the random mutations required to allow natural selection to adapt its body for efficient upside-down mobility.
5. Fuzzy logic:  Observation: fuzzy fibers of cellulose (a protein) can sometimes be found in salt deposits.  Conclusion: “Microscopic Fuzz May Be Best Evidence of Martians.”  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, “If Martian life existed a few billion years ago, scientists think any plant-like microbes would have left behind a stringy fuzz of fibers.”  Read all about it on Space.com.
       Even though no life has ever been found on Mars, we already know that evolution will be the explanation.  We can already envision Martian life cooking up cellulose like popcorn:

   If a future Mars-bound robotic explorer seeks out signs of ancient life, [Jack] Griffith [U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] said looking for cellulose in salt deposits peppered south of the planet’s equator would be the best places to start.
       “Cellulose was one of the earliest polymers organisms made during their evolution, so it pops out as the most likely thing you’d find on Mars, if you found anything at all,” Griffith said.  “Looking for it in salt deposits is probably a very good way to go.”
       [Phil] Christensen [Arizona State U] said Martian salt deposits likely formed after briny pools of water on the planet’s surface — a sun-bathed environment for photo-synthesizing organisms that may have made cellulose.
       “The sun is an awfully nice source of energy to turn down in your evolution as a microbe,” Christensen said.  “If we do find signs of life on Mars, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it is plant-like in nature.”

   In living organisms on earth, cellulose is manufactured by a group of complex molecular machines.  They transcribe the recipe from the genetic code written in DNA, translate it into enzymes, and then weave the sugars into intricate chains (try the Wikipedia description for a taste of the complexity of the process).  These scientists did not explain, nor did they even think to ask, how hopeful microbes wanting to green up a red planet could have figured this out.
6. Demon drink:  How did Asians become protected from alcoholism?  Call Darwin: “That these populations turn out to be less prone to the ravages of demon rum,” explained Kenneth Kidd [Yale School of Medicine], ‘is just a serendipitous event’ of evolution.”  So reported Science Daily.  Since Asians are interfertile with American alcoholics, inter-species “evolution” does not demonstrate a Darwin-style Origin of Species.
7. Your inner fish:  Observation: selenium is toxic to humans but is necessary in trace amounts, or else serious diseases result.  Explanation, according to PhysOrg: “Although this trace element is essential in the diet of humans, it seems that we have lost some of the need for selenium, which occurs in proteins and is transported in blood plasma, when our evolutionary ancestors left the oceans and evolved into mammals.”
       The article continued without blinking an explanatory eye: “Selenium-containing proteins evolved in prehistoric times,” it said, and “We’ve found that the evolutionary change from fish to mammals was accompanied by a reduced use of proteins containing selenium.”  The reporter seemed intent on inserting Darwinese (03/06/2008 into every sentence.  “Some insects have also lost the need for selenium during the course of evolution.”  The scientists linked humans’ minimum daily requirement to the “the evolved reduced utilization of selenium” that occurred since we ostensibly crawled out of the sea millions of years ago.

The findings suggest that selection on a greater number of niche dimensions promotes evolutionary divergence.  Of course, replication of the data reported here is required before the robustness and generality of our findings can be known.  This is especially the case because only a single species pair was examined.

These articles, like building blocks of lie (03/19/2008), are typical of the daily Darwin fare fed to the public by the media.  We’re collecting enough of them to build a monument to dupidity (03/13/2008 commentary).
    Each article invoked evolutionary explanations for observations that were already “in the bag,” so to speak.  In philosophy of science, explanatory inference can work for post-dicted observations as well as pre-dicted observations; the logic is the same.  However, there is a built-in logical fallacy in prediction called “affirming the consequent.”  It goes: p predicts q, q happens, therefore p explains q.  The problem of underdetermination of theories by evidence shows that there are always other theories that could explain the evidence just as well.  That is why Karl Popper repudiated prediction as having any value in scientific explanations.  Instead, he proposed falsification as a test of a good theory.  Historical studies of science show, however, that few scientists ever give up on a theory that has been falsified.  W. V. Quine argued in 1951 that scientists are more likely to adjust strands at the periphery of their web of belief than abandon it because of anomalies.
    These considerations are among many in 20th century philosophy of science that have undermined the simple faith that science is on a progressive path to the truth.  Thomas Kuhn caused a furor in 1962 when he argued that scientists are blinded by the ruling paradigm in which they work.  The paradigm, or explanatory viewpoint most widely accepted at the time, determines the questions worth asking, the scientific approach to answer them, and what counts as evidence.  It even determines the concepts and language used to do science.  Scientists, he said, do not work to falsify paradigms; they work to confirm them and thus receive affirmation from their peer group.  Pursued to the extreme, his line of thinking decouples scientific practice from truth-seeking altogether, and reduces it to an absurdity: science is what scientists do.  Though Kuhn didn’t go that far, some did.  They doubted that science has any case for epistemic privilege over other avenues of investigation. 

Some offer the rebuttal that science must be true because it works.  This, however, is a pragmatic argument, not a logical argument.  Even if a theory provides success (or satisfaction) at explanation, prediction, and control, that is no guarantee it is true.  A look at history shows this.  Civilizations throughout history, and modern science in recent Western history, have trusted in ideas that are now considered wrong, even though they provided their adherents at the time with remarkable degrees of success at explanation, prediction and control.  Ptolemaic astronomy satisfied its believers for 1500 years, then Copernican, then Keplerian astronomy – but now we know that the planets do not move in ellipses (because a whole set of additional motions at higher levels precludes a closed loop).  Newtonian mechanics for centuries represented the pinnacle of scientific truth – only to be doubted in the 20th century with the rise of relativity and quantum mechanics.  String theory and dark energy continue to show that a comprehensive understanding of the basic structure of matter is lacking; how much more so for biology, where natural laws are hard to come by?

Exercise: Read this astronomy article on Space.com and ask how strong is the connection between the observations and the explanations offered.

The dust from Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions has yet to settle, even if he overstated the case.  His little book launched whole new university departments and fields of study.  Researchers started putting science itself under the microscope.  Some portrayed science as a cultural phenomenon, complete with its own sociology, rhetoric and history.  Though the pendulum has swung back a bit toward “scientific realism” (the assumption that science does deal in fairly reliable accounts of external reality), it’s more from weariness of the science wars than any logical or epistemological victory.
    Most philosophers and knowledgeable scientists today realize that scientists can no longer blithely assume that what they are doing is objective or has a necessary connection to truth or reality.  Sociological, rhetorical, historical and political factors are non-trivial influences in what passes for science in a given era or culture.  How strong are these influences?  There is a broad spectrum of opinion, with no agreement.
    If anything in science today fits the Kuhnian vision of “normal science” being an effort to force-fit observations to a consensus paradigm, it is Darwinism.  Evolutionary biologists deceive themselves into thinking what they do is understand and explain reality by objective standards and methods (a position known as logical positivism or scientism).  Their critics, looking in from the outside, are convinced the evolutionists have blinders on.  From their vantage point outside the paradigm, evolutionists are simply putting a Darwinian shine on the observations, no matter what observations come along (12/17/2007 commentary).  They are asking meaningless questions and giving self-reinforcing answers.  Is this not obvious from the examples above?  If so, any resolution to this impasse will require logical and rhetorical arguments as well as evidential arguments.
    At the present, the Darwinians are controlling the rhetorical front from sheer clout over scientific institutions, schools, the courts and the media.  That could change.  A majority of the public is upset that only their side gets told.  Darwinism has become a kind of world religion that, having gained ascendancy, no longer questions its assumptions.  Worse, it imposes its paradigm on the world: both on the world of nature (demanding explanation in terms of the paradigm) and on the world of people (demanding compliance).
    We have seen that the only requirement to explain anything these days is to say, “Darwin told us so.”  Moreover, anyone who doubts the paradigm is labeled dangerous – not to the consensus, but to “science” itself!  One has to go along to get along.  Acceptance into the cult requires abandonment of all other explanatory systems, and allegiance to the Darwin Party statement of faith, encapsulated succinctly in their children’s song,

Darwin shoves me, this I know,
For the Origin tells me so.
Little use for right and wrong;
Weak ones die, but fit are strong.
Yes, fitness shoves me,
Yes, fitness shoves me,
Yes, fitness shoves me,
Survival tells me so.

Time for a scientific revolution?  Join the rebellion.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Human Body • Health

Mars Lacks Safety Shield for Humans   04/03/2008    
April 3, 2008 — Forget all those optimistic, futuristic sci-fi tales of humans landing on Mars.  It isn’t safe, said Space.com.  NASA’s space radiation program doubts that a human body could survive prolonged exposure to space.  This is a problem for long stays on the moon, too.
    “The magnetic field of Earth protects humanity from radiation in space that can damage or kill cells,” Charles K. Choi wrote.  “Once beyond this shield, people become far more vulnerable.”  Another article on Space.com showed that “solar tsunamis” on the sun cause coronal mass ejections that “can launch damaging material at Earth and the other the planets.”  Earthlings are protected by the home planet’s magnetic field, but astronauts would be exposed to the full brunt of the explosions.
    Current ideas for shielding from high-energy cosmic rays and solar eruptions are impractical.  Would astronauts want to stay imprisoned in a lava tube?

No worries, mate.  Seth Shostak just told us our planet ain’t privileged (04/01/2008).  We’ll throw another prawn on the Mars barbie and let Ol' Sol cook it up fine and dandy.  Still worried?  We got lots of lava tubes.  We’re all mates down unda.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Health • Physics • Solar System

The constant-total-effect model, however, has the consequence that the average effect per character decreases and thus the rate of response to directional selection also decreases, leading to another cost of complexity prediction.  However, our data show that the total effects of mutation actually increase with pleiotropy.  It therefore seems that in real organisms the combination of restricted rather than universal pleiotropy, and increasing total effects, could be seen as evolution’s answer to the challenges of evolving complex organisms with random variation and selection.

It’s tempting to want to be gentle with these Darwinists.  After all, didn’t they do all the right scientific things?  They published their work in a peer-reviewed journal.  They used scientific jargon (to the hilt).  They used mathematics, the language of science.  Look; they even did experiments on lab mice.  What could be more scientific?  What does a Darwinist have to do these days to get a little respect from the Visigoths and get them to stop the siege?
    How about telling the truth.  We were told this paper was going to be about Darwin’s grand story that eyes (03/31/2008), wings and other complex structures could emerge by blind processes of random mutation and natural selection.  Instead, what we got was a thick fogma (05/14/2007) of bluffing about everything but the main point.  The question of evolution of complex structures kept standing there, like a trumpeting, stomping elephant in the room, with these guys quibbling, as if down on their knees examining carpet dust under a magnifying glass, about correlation coefficients of specific genes and their relationships to other genes and microscopic skeletal changes within one species of animal, who already have eyes, and were apparently not embarking on an origin of species project via a random walk.  Irrelevant details that miss the main point are not worthy of a respectful response.
    Why irrelevant?  Because they started with lab mice, and the ended with lab mice, and no evolution whatsoever occurred!  The mice were one species, interfertile, the whole time.  Did they watch an eye or a wing evolve?  No!  Did they observe the emergence of new complexity and order?  No!  Did their lab mice sprout wings and take off?  No!  Did any mutation lead to any measurable improvement in fitness?  No!  Did they observe anything that a young-earth creationist would have any trouble with?  No!  Did they accomplish anything to vindicate Darwin?  No!  None of their “findings” contributed a micro-meme to Darwin’s myth unless one was already committed to it from the beginning.  It’s the girder over the Grand Canyon again, suspended in mid-air from a helicopter (re-read the 05/22/2002 commentary).
    They cannot assume that the critics are going to trust the Darwinian web of belief, because the critics already know it is insufficient to support the weight of empirical evidence required (Cambrian explosion, molecular machines, irreducible complexity, etc.).  Darwinism can no longer be regarded as a default position.  A few irrelevant details about how genetic mutations might be able to navigate between the extremes of universal pleiotropy and dilution, within one species of mice, according to a rigged mathematical model, is not enough to pay the cost of complexity.  The Darwinists have been in default on this tax for 149 years.  Such details do not provide either progressive or cumulative currency for Darwin’s account, when so much other observational evidence is draining it.  Responding that, “according to our own records, we don’t owe any Complexity Tax,” is a bald lie.  Making small payments in counterfeit currency from your own presses won’t work, either.  The Visigoth tax collectors (05/09/2006) demand, stop lobbing pennies over the wall and lower the drawbridge.  We have you surrounded.
    You can bet these scientists are not as thick as their jargon about what is going on in the Darwin wars.  Critics have been hammering them on this with increasing intensity ever since Origin of Species hit London shelves.  They are sick and tired of 149 years of bluffing, speculation and storytelling about how eyes and wings came into existence by chance.  This is now 2008.  Everybody knows how much more complex biology turned out to be than Darwin ever imagined.  His Victorian-progressive myth, like a tottering wall, cannot survive another coat of whitewash and fancy frescoes.  The Darwin Party usurpers need to stop slapping one another’s backs about how clever they are, and go out to face the revolt.  They need to answer the ultimatum signed by 700 scientists surrounding Darwin’s Castle, who shout in unison, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.  Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
    It’s another safe bet this is the best the Darwinists could come up with.  The authors hail from Yale and two other distinguished pro-Darwin universities.  It was published in the most prestigious pro-Darwin scientific journal, Nature, where publishing real estate is scarce and each entry goes through multiple rounds of editorial screening.  In light of the outcry and controversy these days, if the Darwinists had a better defense for the most controversial claim in the theory, they surely would have published it.  Instead, we got a bunch of hand-waving, some water-balloon arguments that are wobbly and all wet, and a fallacious anthropomorphic statement that somehow pleoiotropic mutation is “evolution’s answer to the challenge.”
    What this amounts to is an admission of futility.  A sufficiently weak defense is indistinguishable from capitulation.  Deduction: Darwinism is de facto defunct.  It is in default on its Complexity Tax because it is bankrupt.  Watch Expelled, join the rebellion, break down this wall, kick the rascals out, clear out the fogma, restore academic freedom, and bring back honesty to the venerable halls of science.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

Other suggestions about why they might visit include forestalling competition in the Milky Way marketplace, proselytizing, or just learning more about us.  It’s not clear that any of these goals requires “killing us,” of course, but the logic is wobbly anyway.  Any beings that actually could come here will be far beyond us in technological accomplishment.  Imagine if you could visit the Neanderthals.  Would you worry about commercial competition?  Would you give them bibles?  Remember: these are (nearly) the same species as you are.  The aliens won’t be.  I dare say you wouldn’t try convincing porpoises to join your church.
    Then again, there’s that last point: they just want to learn more about us.  Well, perhaps so.  Maybe that’s really what’s interesting about Homo sapiens.  Not grabbing our habitat, saving our souls (or our environment), or subverting our industrial output – but assaying our culture.  I’m willing to consider that even very advanced beings might find our culture mildly worthy of study.

Alien sociology; good grief.  Here’s another case of a so-called scientist waxing eloquent about nothing (03/12/2004).  You thought science was about things we could observe.
    Shostak is amusing to read, but should his speculations be considered any more academically rich (despite his science backdrop) than those of theologians who speculate about the nature of angels and devils?  At least they have some texts to refer to.  The Bible (capital B here) that Shostak would not think a Neanderthal would understand (but cf. 03/18/2008) actually says quite a lot about angels.  One could argue there is more support for the science of angel sociology than for alien sociology, for which there is zero evidence.  SETI has no data.  To date, it is a body of mere speculation based on assumption-driven probabilities.  Should it be viewed as somehow more scientific than theology, just because its practitioners use computers and radio telescopes?  So do theologians (computers and TV satellite dishes, at least).
    That Bible also teaches that the earth, though small, is privileged – not only because it’s the handiwork of God, but because it’s a place He visited in human form.  It also tells us that humans are special, not so much for their biology as for the sacrifice their Creator made out of His love for them.  That’s why the original Neanderthal man, an intelligent and wise theologian named Joachim Neander (see 10/26/2001), wrote a hymn proclaiming Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation.  Shostak appeared briefly in the film The Privileged Planet, arguing that unless our planet is extremely special, miraculous almost, there should be hundreds of thousands of others like it.  That’s pure speculation driven by his evolutionary assumptions.
    Shostak pulled a fast switch in his article.  Don’t be April-fooled by it.  His career is Searching for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI, not SOS, Searching for Other Souls.  The reason we don’t invite porpoises to church is because they are not souls.  A soul has more than intelligence.  Animals can be very intelligent, and even express what look like real emotions.  A soul has that and much more: it is a rational, free moral agent, endowed with the breath of life as a living soul by its Creator.  It makes moral choices on purpose, not on porpoise instinct.  A soul can also reason abstractly, understand and choose between right and wrong, comprehend God, exercise true altruistic love, and live forever.
    Evolutionists have a hard enough task explaining how intelligence could evolve without having to explain what a soul is.  If they want to argue a soul is a phantom artifact of blind selection processes, guess what?  They just April-fooled themselves! – because now they must deny their own rational choices.  That’s why Psalm 53 says only a fool is an atheist.  It’s not saying atheists are unintelligent.  Shostak is obviously highly intelligent.  So is Dawkins and Hitchens and Sam Harris.  Intelligent people can still do foolish things, though, like pulling the intellectual rug out from under their own feet, and sawing off the philosophical branch they are sitting on.  It’s the intellectual malady we named sophoxymoronia (02/02/2008 commentary) that makes April Fool’s Day last 366 x 24 x 7.  (It is Leap Year, you know.  Don’t use that as an excuse to make intellectual leaps.)
Next headline on:  SETI • Dumb Ideas