Wet Cave with Fossils Found in Dry Desert   07/31/2008    
July 31, 2008 — The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest places on earth – it gets about 1mm of rainfall per year, if that – but scientists just discovered a wet cave there.  Robert Roy Britt reported for Live Science that these desert caves can contain water, and at least one is loaded with fossils – indicating a moist climate for the region in the past.
    The discovery was totally unexpected, the article says.  There is even evidence of prehistoric human activity.  Hundreds of thousands of bones in one of the Atacama caves, mixed with tree branches, were found eroding out of cave walls.  The article contains a link to a photograph of ungulate bones seemingly jammed together in the wall in a haphazard manner.  Ungulates (grazing animals that chew the cud) must have enjoyed a wealth of grass here at one time.
    The team led by J. Judson Wynne of the SETI Institute was exploring the desert for caves that might resemble those on Mars, in hopes of finding likely places to look for life.  Mars is still a question, but there was apparently plenty of life at this location in the past.  The team is seeking to determine whether the bones were “dumped into the cave by prehistoric people or if perhaps they were trapped by a flood.”  One of the team members was “marveling over the extent of this deposition as well as discussing what could have possibly led to the deposition of these bones.”  Readers may want to follow the adventures of the expedition on Wynne’s blog.
    Speaking of caves, another amazing underground feature has been exciting cavers since its discovery in New Mexico in 2001.  A large passageway in old Fort Stanton Cave sports a river of crystal running for over four miles – the longest known cave formation in the world.  See Live Science for the story.  Named the Snowy River by its discoverers, it is unique and beautiful.  They still have not determined how far it goes.  The Bureau of Land Management tells about its discovery and has a photo gallery of the river and the cave.  In a return trip last year, cavers were surprised to find water flowing over the crystal.  It had been dry on previous surveys.  Apparently new layers of calcite are deposited each time the underground river periodically flows.

What a planet we live on.  There are still phenomenal discoveries to be made.  Imagine hundreds of thousands of fossils and tree branches buried in one of the driest places on earth.  What does that suggest?
Next headline on:  Geology • Amazing Facts

What’s SETI Got to Do With It?   07/31/2008    
July 31, 2008 — The science news outlets are all posting a story from Space.com about how you can adopt a scientist.  Mark Showalter is an interesting guy – astronomer, scuba diver, amateur naturalist, award-winning photographer, and specialist in planetary rings.  But why was this story posted in the SETI column?
    There doesn’t seem to be anything Mark has done to find intelligent life in space.  It appears that the SETI Institute, with its “Adopt a Scientist” program, hopes that getting people to follow a scientist around will end up transferring his passion for science onto the search for life in space.  “When you adopt a scientist, you help lead the way towards answering profound questions regarding our place in the universe,” the article says.
    Another story from Live Science talks about a cave explorer adventuring in Chile who is also a member of the SETI Institute (see previous entry).  His work is aimed at comparing habitats on Earth that might compare to those on Mars where life might be found.  Again, though, the search for microbes has nothing to do with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This is an example of the propaganda tactic of transfer or association.  The positive vibes you receive by getting to know an interesting person are supposed to transfer over into making you think that SETI is science, not religion.  Anybody can play the association game.  Mark is a nice guy with a lot of abilities and interests, but his personality does not put SETI in the Science column.  Science needs data.  SETI will become a science when Mark finds an alien in his viewfinder, on his next dive, or in the rings of Saturn.  Good luck.
Next headline on:  SETI • Solar System

Here is a science project crying out for some mathematically-minded person to work on.  It can be done right at the desk without special equipment – just a literature search and a calculator.  Figure out how long it would take to get the observed lakes on Titan.  Inputs are conservative rates of ethane production in the atmosphere and the most optimistic estimates of lake volume.  The result should place a severe upper limit on the age of Titan.
    Scientists have downplayed the severity of this problem.  They usually mention it in passing only to change the subject.  Usually, they jump to the possibility that Titan’s organic chemistry might have something to say about the origin of life (07/26/2005) – a foolish distraction.  Where is the ethane?  There should be a huge ocean of it by now, according to their belief in billions of years.
    Their only escapes now are less credible.  They have to claim the chemical process started recently, or that the ethane remains in the atmosphere (how long could that last?), or that the ethane went underground.  They never, ever question the billions-of-years age!  Their problem would be solved by reducing the age of Titan (and Saturn, and the solar system) by a few orders of magnitude.  That would fit this observation and many others (e.g., 04/08/2005, 06/29/2008, 05/05/2008, 03/10/2008, 12/03/2007, 08/04/2007, 07/18/2007, 05/04/2007, 03/31/2007).
    So here is a challenge.  The long-age believers made a prediction that appears to have been falsified.  We want to know what they are going to do about it.  Don’t let them sweep this problem under the crust.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Bridged trails observed in biofilms indicate that a previously viscous film was populated with swimming bacteria.  Carbon dating of the film points to its relatively modern origin.  A comparison of infrared spectra of modern biofilms with modern collagen and fossil bone coatings suggests that modern biofilms share a closer molecular make-up than modern collagen to the coatings from fossil bones.  Blood cell size iron-oxygen spheres found in the vessels were identified as an oxidized form of formerly pyritic framboids.  Our observations appeal to a more conservative explanation for the structures found preserved in fossil bone.

A turtle carapace from the Hell Creek formation was selected for spectroscopy because of its proportionally large chambers in the trabecular bone that allowed scraping the coatings loose.  Two milligrams of material was ground with 450 milligrams of potassium bromide (KBr) and pressed into a pellet using 8 tons pressure.  Modern biofilms grown on microscope slides in pond water were allowed to desiccate for 7 days and 2.5 milligrams were pressed into a KBr pellet as above.  A 2.5 milligram sample of desiccated tendon from a chicken was ground with KBr and pelletized.  Spectrums were taken on a Nicolet 510P bench at 1 cm^-1 resolution with a minimum of 15 scans.  Infrared flux was matched within 5% for all specimens and a clean KBr pellet used for background subtraction between specimens.  Excel cross correlation routines were used to determine percentage of similarity for spectrums.

A biofilm would coat the voids of vascular canals and lacunae, producing an endocast of the structure.  Once the bone is dissolved, these biofilm endocasts would closely mimic pliable vascular structures.  The results presented here suggest that the tubular structures and osteocytes are formed by this process.  The lack of observed cell structure in the transparent tubes is inconsistent with preserved tissues.

We agree with Kaye that “You have to go where the science leads,” and if Schweitzer ever retracts the claim (based on the best evidence and further study) that these represent (at least in part) original soft tissues from the dinosaur, then so be it.  We’ll have to concede the point.  However, a number of questions arise from the new interpretation.  For one thing, as some observers noted in the New Scientist write-up, the structures could still be a composite of original tissue and biofilm.  And why did Schweitzer get a match of collagen in the dinosaur bone with that of chickens, while using the same techniques, got the collagen in mastodon bone to resemble that of elephants?  What about Schweitzer’s discovery of fragile medullary bone in the same dinosaur fossil? (see 11/11/2006).
    We asked a dozen follow-up questions in the 11/11/2006 entry when the slime interpretation was first raised.  More questions come to mind now.  Why was biofilm inside fossilized bone discovered now, after centuries of collecting fossils?  Is there something in common with the environments displaying this phenomenon?  What did all the scraping, grinding and pressing do to the original material?  Maybe less destructive techniques need to be used for corroboration.  Even if biofilms can conform to original tissues and persist after they decay away or fossilize, is it reasonable to believe they would remain unaltered for 68 million years?  If the biofilms date modern by radiocarbon methods, and bacteria are still seen swimming around, it would have to imply the bacteria have been sitting there all this time, incorporating carbon-14 as they grow and divide millions of times.  What did they live on after the original tissue was all gone?  Wouldn’t there be evidence of millions of generations of biological growth in the bacterial colony?  How reasonable is it to assume that for 68 million years, a biofilm would maintain such a good mimic of original dinosaur tissue (now long gone) that it would fool careful researchers in the lab?
    So even granting victory to the Kaye team’s interpretation would seem to still argue these bones aren’t that old.  Evolutionists tell us the world underwent drastic changes since this fossil was deposited.  A meteor nearly destroyed all life on earth.  Mountains rose, valleys sank, floods came, tectonic plates mashed against one another while others drifted apart, climates warmed and cooled, ice sheets blanketed continents and animal life was evolving like crazy.  Cows evolved into whales and shrews evolved into giraffes.  All that time, we are asked to believe, the bacteria in that bone held hands to maintain the shape of long-gone soft tissue for millions of generations, till in 2005 a team of scientists found it so perfectly matching collagen and blood vessels they announced to the world the discovery of original soft tissue.  How credible is that?  The fact that Kaye et al found similar biofilms in ammonite and turtle might just suggest those fossils aren’t millions of years old, either.
    This is a scientific controversy in progress.  It illustrates the tentative nature of scientific announcements.  The biofilm advocates might argue that Schweitzer’s soft-tissue interpretation is the extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary evidence.  One should take a conservative, guarded attitude about it till more observations can test it.  Fine; creationists were going strong without dinosaur soft tissue.  Their views do not require it.  It would be very interesting to them if the soft-tissue interpretation wins out, and they could employ it as additional evidence falsifying millions of years.  Even so, their claims were no less robust before the surprise announcement in 2005.  Creationists don’t need the soft tissue, but evolutionists need their millions of years.  As we have argued, the biofilm interpretation, even if it wins out, does not get rid of their difficulty.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Dinosaurs • Dating Methods

Leaf Assumption Challenged: Affects Climate Modeling   07/29/2008    
July 29, 2008 — A reasonable-sounding assumption has been overturned, leaving climate models in upheaval.  The assumption was that leaf temperature stays in equilibrium with air temperature.  It doesn’t.  Leaves are hotter than assumed during active periods of growth, such as at midday in the growing season.  They maintain a relatively constant temperature through their own biological air conditioning, regardless of what the weather is doing.  This affects the interpretation of oxygen isotopes in wood extracted from tree rings, which in turn affects inferences about past climate.  The story came unraveled in Nature last week.¹
    Scientists have used the ratio of oxygen-16 to its heavier sibling oxygen-18 as a proxy for climate variations.  The interpretation, however, assumed that leaves are in equilibrium with ambient temperature.  Helliker and Richter (U of Pennsylvania) found that leaves can be 10° C hotter than air temperature, and were almost uniformly warm across a wide range of habitats.  This also affects calculations of relative humidity – a function of temperature.  “Our results explain this observation over a broad climatic range and further suggest that the overarching trend is to maintain leaves at an optimal temperature irrespective of mean climate,” they said.  F. I. Woodward (U of Sheffield, UK), commenting on this paper in the same issue of Nature, ² explained, “During the growing season, with photosynthesis at its peak, leaf temperatures remain constant over a wide latitudinal range.  This is a finding that overturns a common assumption and has various ramifications.”
    One key ramification relates to climate models.  Scientists have built models of past climate on the assumption that the oxygen ratios they measured in wood reflected the air temperature during the growing season.  Now, it appears that assumption is misguided.  Pine needles, for example, cannot be modeled in isolation, because they usually are in tight clusters.  It seemed reasonable that a pine needle, exposed on all sides to the air, would be the same temperature as the air.  But in the dense forest canopy, clusters of densely-packed needles create their own microclimate as the needles actively expend energy manufacturing sucrose in response to photosynthesis.  Leaf temperatures, therefore, can be much higher than air temperature – and relative humidity correspondingly lower.  This affects the rates at which oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 diffuse and become incorporated into the cellulose in tree rings.
    Woodward summarized the potential impact of this finding on climate models: “The fact that vegetation canopy rather than leaf morphology dominates temperature control in the forests sampled by Helliker and Richter suggests the need for greater emphasis on understanding how the canopy responds to climate change, and to global warming in particular.”  The authors also suggested that the finding will force researchers to modify estimates of water loss in the forest canopy.  In addition, theories about how climate affects leaf evolution have been called into question.

Do you see how unquestioned assumptions become weak links in chains of reasoning on which politicians and societies put their trust?  Maybe the modifications to theory required will not be dramatic in this case, but they could be.  Scientists had treated oxygen ratios in tree rings as bona fide scientific evidence of past climate conditions.  Scenes of scientists measuring isotope ratios to high precision in labs make for impressive visuals in documentaries.  The lay public becomes persuaded that scientists have a virtual crystal ball into the past.  All the while they were not measuring climate – they were measuring local microclimates right at the leaf surfaces, which can be significantly warmer than the air just a meter away.  Plants have a thermostat of their own that maintains near-constant temperatures during the growing season.  These temperatures are the ones recorded in the wood – not the climate conditions.  This little “whoops” discovery should teach us a healthy caution and skepticism about proxy measurements employed matter-of-factly by scientists.  We can all learn, furthermore, to question our own assumptions, as reasonable as they may seem to us.
Next headline on:  Plants

They are one of evolution’s most useful and prevalent inventions.  Ninety five percent of living species are equipped with eyes and they exist in many different forms.  Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells.  Discover how dinosaur’s evolved eyes that helped them become successful hunters.  Finally, learn how primates evolved unique adaptations to their eyes that allowed them to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.

Evolution thrives on visual propaganda and the power of suggestion.  Animation fills in the holes in their story.  Don’t be fooled.  Carl Sagan weaved animation tricks decades ago in the Cosmos TV series.  In one of the most egregious cases of visual propaganda for evolution ever shown, his animators depicted a single cell morphing into one animal after the other, till the final output was upright-walking man.  The number of conceptual, evidential and philosophical obstacles he leaped over in a single bound makes Evel Knievel look like a pogo-stick rider.  OK, Carl, if you want to play the Imagination game, even Homer Simpson can do a better job evolving than that.  And Guinness Beer at least got the direction of evolution right.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Media • Intelligent Design • Bible

How do wild ideas get such good press?  If you need a refresher course on why crystals are not templates for information, read the 02/19/2004, 02/15/2004, and 06/08/2007 entries.  Progress will be measured in some future day by the decibel level of laughter such conjectures evoke among thinking people.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Can Worms Outsmart Humans?   07/27/2008    
July 27, 2008 — Worms may seem creepy to some people, but they possess some amazing abilities.  How many of you had to struggle through calculus class, for instance?  Worms know it by heart, reported Greg Soltis at Live Science.  Their brains instinctively apply the logic of calculus to input signals from sensory inputs.  A University of Oregon biologist found that when a roundworm is sensing the presence of food, it essentially takes a derivative to arrive via the shortest possible path.
    In other worm news, engineers may have found a source for “super-strong, lightweight materials for use as construction and repair materials for spacecraft, airplanes, and other applications.”  It’s in the fang-like jaws of a common marine worm, reported Science Daily.  A unique histidine-rich protein identified in the jaw and pincers of this worm “rivals that of human teeth and exceed the hardness of many synthetic plastics,” yet is as lightweight as it is strong.  Nereis virens (sandworm or ragworm; see description), a marine worm prized as bait by Maine fishermen, uses the jaws to capture and cut up its food.

Maybe dogs learned calculus from worms (05/20/2003).  If an evolutionist tries to call this a case of convergent evolution, debate him.  It’s funny to watch them squirm and bark when challenged.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Marine Biology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

If you have been grossed out by the sight of an animal licking an open sore, maybe you should respect the animal for having tacit knowledge that scientists are just discovering.  How would evolution explain this?  How many animals had to die of infection before the right compounds emerged by chance?  How did the animal learn to lick the wound once the antiseptic did emerge?
    The creation perspective makes sense.  We are equipped with the substances needed to flourish in the environment that was created for our enjoyment.  This includes tools for handling routine exigencies that might arise from our curiosity.  You have an effective healing ointment right there in your mouth.*
     The shame is that modern science took so long to think about this cue from nature.  Sometimes civilization seems to train us away from the tacit knowledge we need as part of our design.  Will the Red Cross start teaching licking one’s wounds in First Aid class?
Next headline on:  Health • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts
*As the “Eden Principle” advises,** things are not necessarily the same now as in the original creation.  This finding about histatin should be modulated by the possibility of risks in human saliva offsetting some of the benefits; it does not, therefore, render unnecessary the proper application of modern antiseptics.
**Eden Principle: examination of the original interoperations of natural phenomena should provide our default understanding of their current optimal interoperations, unless historical changes indicate otherwise.  Corollary: the burden of proof is on the proposer of a health treatment if it was unnecessary in Eden.  Examples: (1) Vegetarianism was the prescribed diet in the Garden of Eden, but subsequent events permitted the eating of meat.  (2) If coffee enemas were not prescribed as routine health treatments in Eden, they are probably not needed today.

In order to obtain a well-resolved tree, we undertook some post hoc taxon pruning where poorly constrained species, producing unacceptably high numbers (more than 5000) of equally probable supertrees, were removed.  Choosing a tree for diversity analyses was based on overall supertree support.

Phylogenetic shifts in diversification were detected using SYMMETREE v.  1.0 (Chan & Moore 2005).  Analyses of tree shape are biased when a group is paraphyletic [composed of some but not all members descending from a common ancestor], as a particularly speciose clade (in this case, birds) is represented by a single terminal (Archaeopteryx).  A modification was thus required in order to account for the absence of birds.  Although it was not feasible in the present contribution to include all birds, a hand-drawn phylogeny of the better-known Mesozoic taxa (72 species in total) was inserted at the node subtending Archaeopteryx +Jinfengopteryx, effectively making the tree a Mesozoic time slice.  (This placement of Jinfengopteryx is based on the original description (Ji et al.  2005), but more recent analyses, e.g. Turner et al. (2007), have placed it within Troodontidae.)  Polytomies [divisions into three or more parts] were treated as soft, with the size-sensitive ERM [equal-rates Markov] algorithm set to perform 10000 random resolutions per individual node and 1000000 random resolutions for the entire tree.  Internal branches within the phylogeny on which diversification shifts are inferred to have occurred were identified using the Delta-2 shift statistic.  This process was repeated for time slices of the whole tree as described in Ruta et al. (2007) to avoid violating the ERM model.

Ghost ranges, minimal basal stratigraphic range extensions implied by the geometry of the phylogenetic tree, indicate missing fossil data, and allow us to correct diversity profiles for the group through the Mesozoic and to compare diversification rates, the proportional change in observed species richness as a function of time, at different points (figure 2b, solid line): note how the addition of ghost ranges smoothes the curve.  In particular, peaks in observed diversification rate in the Norian and Campanian-Maastrichtian (bins 3 and 12) are greatly reduced when ghost ranges are introduced.  This is a minimal correction that does not take account of unknown taxon ranges before the first appearance of the older of a pair of sister groups.  In addition, this correction does not address possible upward range extensions.  However, peaks in the earliest, Middle and Late Jurassic are still observed after introduction of ghost ranges (figure 2b, dashed line).

You have just watched professional divination in action.  What these scientists did has no more relation to the true history of the world than the tea leaves in a fortune-teller’s bowl reveal about the origin of tea plants.  This is pure hocus, foisted on a gullible public under the guise of science (i.e., knowledge).  We provided detailed quotes from the paper to reveal how the trickery is done.  You don’t have to understand the jargon.  Just look at how subjective it is.  Why do the popular media publish the bottom-line claims of these wizards as if knowledge has just been gleaned from the world?  This is nothing but Darwinist imagination masquerading as scientific research.
    Notice how the project was saturated with evolutionary religion from start to finish.  The fossils (admittedly scanty) were first placed into the millions-of-years evolutionary story.  This step has already been falsified by the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bone, bringing the millions-of-years assumption crashing down (see 04/26/2008).  Unabashed by that inconvenient fact, the authors continued their vision quest by borrowing other published evolutionary-diviner chants and spells.  It’s only polite, after all, to reference one’s sources.  Then they used Darwin-divination software.  They selected only the tea leaves and lighting guaranteed to support their story.  They published their resultant horoscope in a Darwin-divination journal, then handed it to the Darwin-inebriated press to herald to the unwashed masses.  A colorful image of the Magic Supertree Diagram was displayed to lend an air of mystical authority to the announcement.
    All these shenanigans are designed to create a sense of numinous awe in the public consciousness.  Readers are supposed to bow down and confess that the diviners possess The Wisdom of The World, and that they are to be heeded instead of those wicked, nasty, evil, insane Creationists who proclaim a different message: that the complex bodies of birds, mammals, dinosaurs and insects reveal design, not chance, and that mythical “Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolutions” are incapable of forcing undirected matter to invent complex organs and functions.
    Get wise to the tricks of the wizards.  This is not science.  It’s not even magic.  It’s deception.  The deceivers who believe their own lies are the most to be distrusted.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Evolutionary Theory

Did Lyell Lie a Little?   07/25/2008    
July 25, 2008 — Science is supposed to be a collective process involving presentation of arguments by many people making reference to observational data.  Ideally, no one person’s world view should dominate what other scientists think.  Yet in the history of geology, the figure of Charles Lyell has loomed large as a guiding influence.  With rare exceptions, his principle that geological phenomena should be explained with reference to current processes at current rates (uniformitarianism) dominated geological practice for over 150 years.  Did Lyell “discover” this principle in the data, or impose it on the data?  Indications are coming to light that he not only pre-selected uniformitarian thinking as his own guiding principle, but through force of his writings and personal prestige succeeded in marginalizing opposing views.  His influence channeled generations of geologists to look at evidence through the lens of “slow and gradual” processes.
    Geologist Victor R. Baker had little good to say about Lyell in a book review in Nature.¹  “Geological history turned upside down” is how he titled his review of a second book on the history of geology by Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2008).  Baker began by stating that “geology also has its own set of attitudes that have accrued during the discipline’s long history.”  Attitudes can be taken as synonymous with presuppositions – those ways of looking at the world that precede actual investigation of the facts.
    Lyell was, of course, preceded by notable figures like Cuvier (a catastrophist who invoked multiple earth-changing events), and gradualists like Comte du Buffon, Werner, Hutton and others who had laid the groundwork for viewing earth history in terms of vast ages of gradual change.  Rudwick had discussed these in his prior work, Bursting the Limits of Time (U of Chicago Press, 2005).²   

Worlds Before Adam looks at how the ideas generated by Cuvier and others came together with more theoretical concepts between 1820 and 1845.
    Rudwick’s books are myth-busters, of which writers of introductory geology texts and popularizations should take note.  In both volumes he counters the Anglocentric view that James Hutton, William Smith and Charles Lyell were the founders of modern geology who shone their British intellectual light onto the darkness of continental musings.  To a large degree, he argues, the reverse was the case.
    Controversially, Rudwick challenges the view that geology’s development is a story of secular progress.

If contemporary lists of the greatest scientists feature a geologist at all, it is usually Lyell, a central figure in Worlds Before Adam.  Lyell intended the title of his great multi-volume opus Principles of Geology (first published in 1830–1833) to recall Isaac Newton’s Principia.  He sought to recast geology on firm foundations, just as Newton had done for physics.  Following his geologist contemporaries and predecessors, Lyell used the understanding of present-day causes to interpret the deep past – a principle termed actualism.  Rudwick explains that Lyell’s excellent descriptions of current geological processes, embellished with observations from his own geological excursions, derived from an original listing by the eighteenth-century German scholar Karl Ernst Adolf von Hoff.  Lyell greatly extended the actualistic method by making pronouncements about how the complex geological processes of the past occurred through the progressive action of small-scale procedures that were still in operation, and by prescribing how geologists should reason about these past processes.

Rudwick shows that Lyell’s ideas met with almost universal criticism.  This was not caused by his advocacy of actualism, which was widely used, nor was any serious denunciation forthcoming from the biblical literalists, who were considered anti-scientific by Lyell and by his critics.  Instead, the geological facts themselves seemed contrary to Lyell’s vision of uniform action by small-scale processes operating over a long time.  Examples include evidence for sudden mass extinctions from records in various ‘bone caves’, the existence of huge blocks sitting erratically out of geological place in the Alps and northern Europe, and deep U-shaped valleys containing streams too small to account for their excavation.  Lyell’s critics held that one should inquire into nature through evidence, rather than through privileged reasoning.

It is an irony of subsequent developments in geology, and a testimony to the success of Lyell’s advocacy, that catastrophism came to be regarded as unconventional.  This perverted Whewell’s original intention, which was to show that the uniformitarians and Lyell were extreme in thinking that geologists should say in advance how nature works, through slow and uniform processes, before interpreting the evidence.

As Terry Mortenson documents in his detailed treatise on the Scriptural geologists, The Great Turning Point, the uniformitarian view was an agenda-driven worldview choice, not a requirement of the evidence.  Many of the Scriptural geologists were at least as qualified (if not more so) than the long-age advocates who wanted to compromise Christianity with the ancient-earth ideas of Hutton.  Lyell himself stated clearly in his letters that his agenda was to divorce geological inquiry from any and all consideration of the Mosaic record in Genesis.  He succeeded uniformly with catastrophic results for free inquiry.  A perusal of the abstracts from Geology any given month reveals Lyell’s paradigm nearly unchallenged.  Article after article is consumed with fitting this or that formation into its presumed place in the billions-of-years geological timescale.  The categories, names and dates are never questioned.  Out-of-the-box thinking plays second fiddle to keeping the story going.
    The Scriptural geologists argued that this approach was as doomed as trying to understand the Roman Empire by choosing to study only the monuments of Rome without reading any contemporaneous eyewitness testimony.  They had strong scientific justifications for evaluating the evidence within a creation and Flood framework.  They argued with scholarship and finesse, showing how the data fit with a global catastrophe as described in the Genesis Flood but did not fit with long ages and gradualism.  Flood geology died out around 1840 for reasons Mortenson gives in the conclusion of his book.  Among them was the fact that the Scriptural geologists acted alone and did not raise up a school of thought or society that could carry on their work.  The uniformitarians won by default and continued through sheer dominance of academia, till Flood geology emerged again (essentially independently from its 1830 predecessor) with the publication of The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris in 1961.  The secular geological societies continue to pay them no attention.  True to the Lyell playbook, they label them “anti-science” only to dismiss them.
    It is apparent from Rudwick’s book that the marginalization of the “biblical literalist” view was an example of a category error in science.  Lyell, Sedgwick, Buckland, Phillips and the other uniformitarians who captured 19th-century academic geology departments did not have to listen to the Scriptural geologists, review their books, answer their arguments or evaluate their evidences.  Why?  Because they had decided, in advance, that the Scriptural geology position was “anti-science.”  Sound familiar?  That is exactly what the Darwinians do to the creationists today.  How convenient it is to rule your opponent out of a debate by definition.  “I don’t have to listen to you; you are a fool.”  The real fool is often the one calling the other one a fool.
    Today’s entry fits well with the yesterday’s on philosophy of science.  What can science know?  Surely it is hard enough interpreting the causal thicket for things that we can observe and repeat in a lab.  Geology is a science necessarily historical in nature.  Is there any good reason for rejecting historical accounts a priori that speak of processes germane to one’s subject matter?  Much less so when the written records show a good fit to the evidence.  What the Bible described as a real event fits what we see: billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth, to borrow Ken Ham’s pithy phrase.
    So did Lyell lie a little?  In view of his negative influence on geology for 150 years, he lied a lot.  He pretended to be promoting objective science but really was imposing his own theological views on geological practice.  The Charlie & Charlie Company (Darwin and Lyell) are partners in crime – defining science so as to downplay the priority of evidence.  Now that we have seen that Lyell had an agenda, and that his “epistemological project” outran his respect for the evidence, it’s time we toss his ideas overboard and let them experience a little catastrophism up close.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Theology and Philosophy

It is common ground between Wimsatt and his targets that these ideas about science are idealizations, perhaps even extreme ones.  But Wimsatt argues that they are unhelpful idealizations.  For they idealize away from what we most need to explain: the cognitive success of limited beings.  Treating science as ideally rational is like a developmental biologist using preformationism to model development: the subject matter of the discipline has been idealized away.

The world is messy.  We are fallible and bounded.  Yet science progresses with great reliability.  Wimsatt’s conception of science is organized around these three facts.  Like science itself, his account is partial and incomplete, an approximation organized around the idea of a heuristic.  Many questions are left open, and much could be challenged.

As these book reviews show, it’s overdue to dispense with the triumphalist, progressivist view of science.  None of these factors guarantee science has a grip on truth: (1) it gets a lot of money, (2) a lot of smart people practice it, (3), it appears to be successful, (4) the textbooks portray it as victorious over superstition, (5) it wins Nobel Prizes, (6) it has a “scientific method” (whatever that is), (7) geeks major in it at school, (8) it’s hard and uses a lot of math, (9) it explains things, (10) it uses a peer review system, (11) it has big organizations and publishes impressive journals, or (12) it owns lots of big buildings and museums.
    Clearly science seems “on to something” because of its practical successes in medicine, electronics and the space program, but even then, how much of the success is due to trial and error?  How much is due to practical engineering?  How much do we assume is true simply because it works according to the best theories of the day?  One only need look at history to see many examples of practical success using theories we now believe are wrong.
    The “hard sciences” like physics and chemistry arguably have the best case to make.  They give us practical benefits like lasers, computers and robotic spacecraft that arrive at distant planets on schedule.  But arriving at Saturn and taking pictures of its rings is different from explaining how Saturn got there in the first place.  Even physics gets pretty far out when it comes to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the many-worlds interpretation, or cosmology.  How much more the storytelling that goes on in psychology and evolutionary biology and uniformitarian geology?  It’s not beyond belief to foresee today’s leading theories being tomorrow’s pseudosciences.
Look at how many of science’s claims to epistemic priority have been undermined by philosophers of science:

1. There is no one scientific method.
2. Even if there were a scientific method, exercising a method cannot be done without making assumptions and judgments.
3. There are no demarcation criteria between science and pseudoscience that can reliably keep the good stuff in (physics) and the bad stuff out (e.g., astrology).
4. Scientific discovery follows no rules: it can come from hard work, tacit knowledge, accident, or even dreams.
5. Scientific hypothesis-making follows no rules.  Few scientists arrive at a hypothesis out of raw data without some hunch or intuition of what to look for.  Many scientists have their hypothesis before looking at any evidence at all.
6. Scientific explanations are fraught with logical pitfalls.  Reducing a complex phenomenon into simple principles runs the risk, for instance, of “explaining away” the very thing to be explained. 
7. Induction is subject to serious criticism.  It begs the question that patterns in past experience will continue in the future.
8. Prediction is no reliable guide to good science.  Astrologers and other pseudoscientists often succeed at predictions.  Predictive success runs the risk of affirming the consequent: a logical fallacy.  That’s why Karl Popper denied predictive success has any role in scientific justification.
9. Falsification rarely succeeds in overcoming a paradigm’s web of belief.
10. Scientific reasoning may differ in diligence but not in substance from other kinds of reasoning.
11. The requirement for natural laws is fraught with pitfalls.  Are laws descriptive or normative?  Statements that sound like laws may be nothing more than accidental generalizations.  Laws also make claims that far outrun experience; on what basis can they be justified?  Should natural laws be permitted that have zero instances?  Newton’s did – e.g., “A body in motion acted on by no external forces will continue in a straight line forever.”  Some legitimate sciences, like biology, employ few natural laws, and the ones they do employ are often plagued by exceptions.
12. Science is a vague term with wannabees trying to latch onto the prestige of the word.  Where does one draw the line?  At social science?  political science?  economics?  Christian Science?  Scientology?  The speculations even within a “hard science” like physics are arguably just as unproveable as those of a “soft science” like psychology.

What are you left with?  “What works for our needs right now.”  We call something scientific if it gives us some nice feelings with its explanations, allows us to make useful predictions, or gives us some practical control over the world.  Its grip on reality or truth is tenuous at best.
    Once we get past triumphalist science, we should take a more informed look at other avenues of human knowledge.  History and the humanities might want to re-assert some of their claims in the marketplace of ideas.  Likewise, philosophy and theology have been footstools of imperial science for too long.  Provided that scholars in other fields apply sound principles of reason, use thorough research methods, interact where theories are analyzed and different points of view are considered, and build on prior knowledge, are their methods really so different from those of science?  Aren’t these good practices for any kind of research?
    At the end of the 19th century, science was king.  Two world wars later, and a century of revolutions in philosophy of science later (with no clear winners), it’s time to re-evaluate science’s claims to special epistemic status and cultural priority.  Take another look at that quote by Dr. Daniel Robinson at the top right of this page.
Next headline on:  Education • Theology, Philosophy, or History • Politics and Ethics

Among individual OTUs [operational taxonomic units], Homo sapiens had the maximum support value of 293.9, but the distribution of scores had a long tail leading to 6402 OTUs with no support at all (most of which, 6079, simply were not found in any phylogenetically informative clusters).  The top 10 were all mammals; the top 25 were mammals, angiosperms (tomato, potato, tobacco, rice, and wheat), Drosophila melanogaster, and Drosophila simulans, all with support scores above 60 units.  Of the 171,703 OTUs for which scores were calculated, only 12% achieved minimal phylogenetic support.  The mean support was 0.84, less than the equivalent of each taxon being found in at least one well-resolved and -supported phylogenetic tree.

Charlie’s hanging from his own tree.  Why give him more rope?  It will only make the carcass horizontal instead of vertical.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Genetics

Mangrove as Metaphor   07/22/2008    
July 22, 2008 — The mangrove – that shoreline tree with the salt-tolerant roots that grows into dense thickets – is the fulcrum of two unrelated news stories.  It never met a force it couldn’t handle.  It also provides metaphors for evolution and creation.
    PhysOrg reported that the mangrove is a key to saving lives.  “The replanting of mangroves on the coasts of the Philippines could help save many of the lives lost in the 20-30 typhoons that hit the islands annually,” the article said.  Mangrove forests help people in two ways: they create rich ecosystems that benefit local fisheries and the economy, and they absorb the energy of typhoons and tsunamis (02/18/2005).  Tragically, many of the native mangrove forests have been depleted.  In Mexico, National Geographic reported, mangrove forests are being destroyed by resort development.  This is dooming fisheries and ravaging the local economy.  “The government has overvalued such development and grossly undervalued the vital role mangroves play” in the ecology that benefits humans, a report found.  Asian governments are beginning to understand the value of mangroves.  The PhysOrg article showed that expensive rehabilitation projects are not required.  Often, locally-led, low-budget attempts work best.
    On a completely different topic, science writer Carl Zimmer considered the mangrove as one possible metaphor for what has happened to Darwin’s tree of life.  Its appearance of a tangled thicket represents a little closer the kind of relationships among microorganisms that recent research has discerned, contrary to the sketch of a branching tree Darwin produced in his early notebooks.  Writing for Discovery Magazine, in “Festooning the Tree of Life,” Zimmer illustrated concepts from a paper by Tal Dagan (U of Dusseldorf) in PNAS.¹  Dagan and colleagues analyzed 181 microbe genomes and determined that lateral gene transfer has been a major contributor to the diversity of microbes.  This means that “much of the history of life may not fit the tree metaphor very well any more,” Zimmer said.
    Zimmer produced a series of illustrations of the original Darwinian branching tree getting all tangled up.  He showed that lateral gene transfer produces cross-connections that scramble the data so thoroughly, the tree pattern is no longer discernible.  After crossing out tree, bush and mangrove thicket, Zimmer selected “Gordian Knot” as the best metaphor for the result.  “This new picture is a far cry from Darwin’s sketch, and thank goodness for that,” he ended.  “A science that doesn’t move forward for 150 years isn’t much of a science at all.  But we may need some new metaphors to help us catch up with it.”

Science has moved forward, all right.  It has moved so far forward since Darwin’s time, his speculative worldview of design without a designer has been thoroughly scrambled.  A Gordian knot is not the illustration Darwin projected about how life changes.  Look at Zimmer’s last diagram.  It requires faith to see any tree at all.  Why even maintain the metaphor?  Zimmer’s own reasoning has falsified the original tree diagram and made it superfluous.
    A mangrove thicket, by contrast, is a tightly-knit community of trees, birds, fish, insects and animals all living together simultaneously and harmoniously as a system.  Who really needs to believe they evolved from one another’s microbe ancestors over mythical millions of years?  If you want a worldview that has withstood wave after wave of scientific discoveries, think creation.
Next headline on:  Plants • Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

Watch the two videos in order.  They communicate to the heart.  Where else in the universe could conditions exist for such behavior?  What impassionate physical laws brought about the happy dance?  Think – and then thank (Acts 14:17).  The Creator has not left himself without witness, Paul said.  Turn away from worthless things.  The Creator has given us blessings that fill our hearts with joy in order that we would seek Him, though He is not far from each one of us (Acts 17).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Stars

Praise God for progress on all debilitating diseases regardless of how scientists find them, but this one has special significance for those who have been watching the debate over embryonic stem cells.  It illustrates the disconnect between the researchers actually finding cures and the scientific establishments who keep pushing embryonic stem cells (ELS cells), which require the killing of fertilized human embryos.  Adult stem cells cause no ethical concerns.
    Here is another tremendously hopeful example of a potential cure from the use of adult stem cells.  The list of near-miraculous cures has been growing for years now.  Big Science keeps pushing ELS cells, tricking voters into spending billions of taxpayer dollars on stem cell research centers, yet still have nothing to show for it.  They even admit that any treatments usable by doctors may be over a decade away – or more.  As a citizen and voter, don’t expect scientific institutions, with eyes on Nobel Prizes and international prestige, to do the right thing.  Doing the right thing has to start with you and me.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

Cellular Trucks Use Moving Highways   07/18/2008    
July 18, 2008 — Imagine how cool it would be to get in your car and have the road do the driving.  The highway would stretch or shrink, moving this way or that, till you saw your destination and hopped off.  That appears to be what the cargo-bearing motors do in the cells in your body.  A new paper by a team of American biophysicists published the hypothesis in PNAS this week.¹
    Cell biologists have known for a long time that molecular motors move cargo around on long strands of protein, called microtubules, that form an intracellular highway network (12/04/2003) called the cytoskeleton.  One observation that has been confusing, though, is why the motors seem to just move back and forth (bidirectional transport) instead of making progress toward a destination.  It doesn’t seem to make any sense.  Would a car that has to get somewhere just keep shifting between forward and reverse gears?  It starts to make better sense when you consider that the road is also doing the moving.
    The situation in a cell is much more complex than suggested above.  The cell is a crowded environment, with enzymes and parts moving about rapidly.  In addition, there is thermal motion adding to the hustle and bustle.  Microtubules grow and shrink as their molecular components are added and removed constantly.  Cargo-carrying motors, like dynein and kinesin, attach and detach from their freeways all the time.  It seems chaotic, but the cell works.  Somehow it is a powerhouse of organization and function.
    The authors of this new idea proposed that any given cargo vesicle has multiple motors attached to multiple tracks at a time.  These motors can work in concert, tugging on the microtubules, making them bend and buckle at times.  Think of what could happen if cars could do this on a 3-D freeway system, in which they had attachments to multiple tracks at once.  They could compress the road, let go of the overhead track, and then shoot out quickly for miles as the road beneath them stretched back to its extended position.  Some vehicles along for the ride could get a free ride – like on a moving sidewalk that advances by un-stretching itself.
    Is this a novel concept, or what?  Here’s how the authors explained it, after first dismissing other possibilities:

Given these observations, a more parsimonious explanation is that nonthermal (motor-induced) forces and quenched disorder constraining the microtubule backbones within the cell body generate large backbone undulations.  Numerous constraints are imposed by the crowded intracellular environment, forcing the microtubule backbone into an effective highly curved confining tube, in particular through entanglement with other microtubules.  The large stored length of microtubules (within the cell body) is transmitted over long distances by the virtually incompressible microtubules and projected in the longitudinal direction inside the processes.... ... The fluctuating tensions are induced by multiple molecular motors decorating intracellular cargos and cross-bridging between several microtubules at a time.
    The microtubule network actively “animated” in this fashion induces an additional velocity component that adds to the motor-driven cargo transport velocities in the microtubule fixed reference frame.

As suggested by our data, within the “fluctuating cytoskeleton” picture we can indeed understand the observed back-and-forth motion as a consequence of a peculiar form of tug of war of many motors competing with each other and with microtubule elastic forces.  As opposed to the “local” tug of war of opposite polarity motors on the same vesicle, the “global” tug of war described here allows large numbers of motors distributed along the whole microtubule to exert forces at a time and compete for the direction of microtubule movement.  When bent on large scales, the microtubules offer a rather large compliance to the exerted longitudinal and lateral forces, which in turn allows all of the motors along their length to act at a time and generate the observed microtubule fluctuations.  Switching of motor pulling and microtubule relaxation phases can induce a back-and-forth motion of the microtubule backbone.

Frequent readers of CEH will know immediately the answer to this pop quiz question.  “True or false: evolution was mentioned in this paper.” (Answer: false).
    As amazing as this explanation was, other questions come to mind.  How does the motor know where to get on and off?  How do the motors conspire to control the microtubules for best effect?  Remember, these are blind molecules in a busy, seemingly chaotic environment.  The results, however, are anything but chaotic.  There are wonders in this black box we are only beginning to appreciate.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

This is disturbing.  What else are they ignoring that could have important effects on their cosmological models? 
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics

Forget everything you were taught about early man in Europe, because the evolutionists keep changing their story and what they say now is absurd.  Is it really plausible that two groups of Homo sapiens lived side by side for nearly 30,000 years and never intermarried?  Has that ever happened in modern times?  Where is all the genetic evolution that should have occurred between the time this Italian Cro-Magnon individual lived and today?  He’s virtually identical to modern Europeans.  Why even classify him as “other” than us?
    And why think that he lived so long ago?  28,000 years is three to four times the length of all recorded human history.  These people were our equals physically and probably mentally.  Maybe they were even superior.  Who could possibly believe that Cro-Magnon, or even Neanderthals for that matter (with bigger average cranial capacity than us), would not have reached the moon in 28,000 years, to say nothing of 300,000?  Evolutionists want us to believe they were smart enough to hunt mammoths and produce cave paintings that attract the awe of modern artists, but never learned how to ride a horse in all that time.  That is absurd.  Wouldn’t you expect that they would have built cities in a fraction of the evolutionary time scale, and invented writing?  They have no answer for what “switched on” in the human brain to create instant civilization about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago.
    The ages they give are not scientific.  They are part of a vast evolutionary myth that is propagated by a powerful class of shamans who run our schools and scientific institutions.  There is nothing in the data that is inconsistent with the Biblical view that these were people after the Flood (which itself is remembered in hundreds of tribal legends around the world), scattered after Babel into distinct family clans.  Those remaining in the Fertile Crescent built the first cities and started writing in clay tablets about their banking transactions and laws.  Others with different spoken languages migrated east and west, north and south.
    The harsh conditions in Europe during the Ice Age delayed the development of writing and civilization.  (Think of how few records modern tribes near the Arctic leave today.)   Neanderthals were particularly hardy individuals who got to Europe first.  Cro-Magnon people (just as much offspring of Noah as their brethren but genetically distinct) arrived later after conditions were becoming more hospitable.  If this started a big war, with the Cro-Magnon ending up victorious over the Neanderthals, would there be any fossil remains?  Not likely; nor would there necessarily be any written records, any more than detailed accounts of wars between Germanic tribes in later Roman times or Anasazi in North America much later, who vanished without a trace (unless the Hopi are living descendants).
    No long periods spanning tens or hundreds of thousands of years is required in this scenario.  It matches what we know about people, and it matches the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.  Think how much migration could happen among intelligent people in just decades or centuries.  We know how curious people are.  Within a few millennia, Germanic tribes were exploring the New World.  South Pacific Islanders were hopping from island to island.  Columbus, a latecomer, was sailing west for the Indies.
    We are familiar with human wanderlust.  It is inconceivable that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons would have sat still for 28,000 years or 300,000 years and not populated the globe.  There’s only one logical conclusion.  The evolutionary story, with its vast periods of time, portraying brutish people living like cave potatoes, is a myth.  If they can be so flagrantly wrong about dates and activities close to us in time, do the math and tell us if you trust them when they weave tales about what happened millions and billions of years ago.  The reckless drafts on the bank of time must stop.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Genetics • Dating Methods

Another Evolutionary Statistic Is Wrong   07/15/2008    
July 15, 2008 — Marine invertebrate diversity has not increased dramatically over time, contrary to conventional wisdom.  That’s the conclusion of a team of 35 researchers who spent a decade analyzing seashell fossils from around the world.
    Science Daily reported the story July 7.  A week later, on July 14, Science Daily reported a follow-up story, entitled, “Disproving Conventional Wisdom On Diversity Of Marine Fossils And Extinction Rates.”  The later article featured John Alroy (UC Santa Barbara), the principal author of the paper published in Science.¹  “There’s been 36 years of people arguing about this,” he said.  “And I feel we finally resolved this debate, which is certainly one of the most high profile debates in the study of diversity of the fossil record.”  95% of the fossil record consists of marine invertebrates (see ICR claim).  The abstract says,

It has previously been thought that there was a steep Cretaceous and Cenozoic radiation of marine invertebrates.  This pattern can be replicated with a new data set of fossil occurrences representing 3.5 million specimens, but only when older analytical protocols are used.  Moreover, analyses that employ sampling standardization and more robust counting methods show a modest rise in diversity with no clear trend after the mid-Cretaceous.  Globally, locally, and at both high and low latitudes, diversity was less than twice as high in the Neogene as in the mid-Paleozoic.  The ratio of global to local richness has changed little, and a latitudinal diversity gradient was present in the early Paleozoic.

It’s good to know where you have been.  Where you have been, though, does not necessarily predict where you will go.  Do these researchers know the answer to such questions?
    Statistics can be misleading.  Good for them that they went at it in much more detail than in previous studies.  They have falsified claims going back four decades.  That does not ipso facto “truthify” their own claims.  Because their work has an incestuous relationship with evolutionary geology and biology, any conclusions borne out have a statistically high likelihood of dementia.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Fossils • Dating Methods

An evolutionist should extend his or her reasoning to ask if these new molecules are products of natural selection.  If the DNA in the scientist’s body is a product of natural selection, why not the products of his body?  If the mind is an excretion of the brain, why are not products directed by the natural brain through natural hands also products of natural selection?  At what point did something “new” like purpose or design ”emerge” from undirected natural ingredients?  Is not artificiality merely an artifact of the same natural process that produced DNA?
    If the evolutionist answers yes to the above, we continue the line of questioning.  How do we know that your answer was not a product of natural selection, a mindless, undirected process of chance and necessity?
    Information is the key ingredient that makes understanding possible.  The prerequisite for information is a mind.  If these scientists truly invented a new molecule on purpose that is capable of storing information, then explain why the DNA in their cells was not purposefully created.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics

These results raise many questions.  Are the volatile contents of the melts that formed the green and orange glasses typical for the Moon?  Can the general scarcity of most volatile elements on the Moon be reconciled with the apparent abundance of sulphur, chlorine, fluorine and especially water in the lunar glasses?  What happened to all the water during the Moon’s formation?  And if the Moon is not bone dry, where did the water come from?

Lead author of the study, Alberto Saal of Brown University remarked: “Beyond the evidence for the presence of water in the interior of the Moon, which I found extremely exciting, I learned that the contributions from scientists from other disciplines has the potential to produce unexpected results.  Such a scientist is able not only to ask questions that no one has asked before, but also can challenge hypotheses that are embedded in the thinking of the scientists working in the field for many years.  Our case is a typical example.  When I suggested we measure volatiles in lunar material, everyone I talked to thought that such proposal was a futile endeavor.  We ‘knew’ the Moon was dry.”

How can science progress if scientists don’t ask the right questions?  Looking for water on the moon was futile.  They “knew” the moon was dry.  If you think science is always an unbiased collection of evidence, think about this case.  Scientists always approach a problem with a bias.  No one collects data in a strict Baconian fashion.  There is always an element of human selection, deciding what questions are interesting, and what data are most likely to yield fruitful hypotheses.  Thank goodness for a few individuals who bravely ask the questions others don’t consider worthwhile.  If the finding holds up, a lot of artwork and computer animations may get tossed out the window.  Another problem will resurface: where did our moon come from?  The Mars impact hypothesis was the leading theory for a long time, not because the data demanded it, but because the other contenders were each losers (see best-in-field fallacy).  But consider what was said in the previous entry about our privileged planet: the moon has a function.  It’s very probable that without our specific moon, its mass and distance, life could not exist.  Then there is the amazing coincidence about solar eclipses: the moon’s apparent diameter in the sky is the same as the sun’s.  Too many coincidences and the chance hypothesis sounds uncannily lucky.  Maybe the moon was created.
Next headline on:  Solar System

Love Your Planet   07/13/2008    
July 13, 2008 — Modern astronomy and space travel have given humans the ability to view the earth from a distance and ponder its significance.  Some astronomers expected the earth to be ordinary-looking.  In many respects, however, astronomy is teaching us otherwise.  Clara Moskowitz, staff writer for Space.com began an article by saying, “Earth is one special planet.”
    What makes the earth special?  Let her count the ways:

1. Liquid water in abundance – but not too much water to submerge the continents.
2. Plate tectonics and active geology.
3. A magnetic field that shelters it from harmful solar radiation.
4. The only planet known to have life.
5. The only planet known to have intelligent life.
6. The only known planet hosting intelligent beings who have achieved space travel.
7. An environment that has kept water liquid for a long time.
8. A safe distance from its star.
9. A carbon-silicate cycle that has operated for a long time.
10. The right size to hold onto an atmosphere, yet have a habitable surface.
11. A moon the right size and distance to stabilize earth’s tilt and rotation.
12. A moon that circulates the ocean tides.

Brownlee appeared briefly in the DVD The Privileged Planet explaining his view about the uniqueness of earth.  The unique properties listed above and more are discussed in the film – along with a thought-provoking hypothesis about why these features point to intelligent design.  The production includes startling admissions by a variety of astronomers, some hostile to intelligent design but struck by the facts of nature.  If you haven’t yet seen this powerful and beautiful film, order a copy today.  It makes a nice loaner and conversation starter.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Amazing Facts

1. Cluster generation conundrum:  The members of globular star clusters were long thought to be old stars of the same age, like seniors at a care facility.  Then the discovery of “blue stragglers” caused consternation; they were too massive to be billions of years old.  In the first episode of a new DVD series produced by Astronomy magazine, “The Life and Death of Stars,” an astronomer proposed that the blue stragglers are stars born from collisions among the older stars.  Now, a third population is further upsetting cluster age models, according to a press release from the Space Telescope Science Institute.  Science Daily stated that the dilemma of three out-of-sync stellar populations in globular cluster NGC 6791 “may fundamentally challenge the way astronomers estimate cluster ages.”
       The article says that astronomers have found three populations of stars with different estimated ages: 4 billion, 6 billion and 8 billion years.  Two of the populations consist of white dwarf stars.  “The age discrepancy is a problem because stars in an open cluster should be the same age,” said one astronomer.  “They form at the same time within a large cloud of interstellar dust and gas.  So we were really puzzled about what was going on.”  Another added, “This finding means that there is something about white dwarf evolution that we don’t understand.”
       The article proposed a simple and “elegant” reconciliation of the two discrepant ages of white dwarf populations.  They might be binary systems.  The brightness of the binaries makes them look younger, the team of astronomers suggested.  They did not explain why this was never discovered before, or what it means to other estimates of cluster ages and distances.  White dwarfs are commonly-used age indicators, because according to leading models of stellar evolution, they are the end products of main sequence stars of a certain range of masses after the red giant phase.  For more on problems with globular cluster dating, see 01/05/2003, 01/01/2004, 08/28/2006 and 05/03/2007.  National Geographic News published the stunning Hubble image that shows the interior of the cluster.  A couple of distant spiral galaxies can be seen in the background.
2. Cosmic baby boom:  Another conundrum “baffles astronomers,” according to Space.com.  The article subtitle explains the problem: “Our galaxy cranks out about 10 new stars per year.  Now astronomers have found one near the beginning of time that’s generating a whopping 4,000 a year.  At that rate, the galaxy needs only 50 million years to grow into one equivalent to the most massive ever observed.  Such rapid-fire starbirth and growth confounds theory.”  Sure enough, the leading “Hierarchical Model” of galaxy evolution expects that galaxies should grow slowly, not explosively “in one big burst” of star formation.  Peter Cepak of Caltech used a human analogy to explain the problem: “If our human population was produced in a similar boom, then almost all of the people alive today would be the same age.”  He continued, “If the universe was a human reaching retirement age, it would have been about 6 years old at the time we are seeing this galaxy.”
       The new finding further exacerbates the problem of instant maturity in the early universe (see 06/04/2001, 01/03/2004, 09/21/2005, 03/31/2006).  Why would stellar evolution occur at a much more rapid pace in the early universe?  What was exceptional about that epoch?  The idea contradicts uniformitarianism.  Astronomers announced the results based in images of a galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii.  Now, the team is trying to see if this “Baby Boom galaxy” is an exceptional case.  If not, and most early galaxies were bursting into growth in their cosmic infancy, the Hierarchical Model of galaxy formation may be falsified.

We’ll let our readers chew on these stories and ponder their implications.  Some will feel comfortable with the explanations offered by the pros.  Others will wonder if a scientific revolution is in the offing.  For a diversion, try this riddle on someone today:
Q: I am the end of time and the beginning of eternity.  I am the last of space, and the beginning of every end.  What am I?
A: The letter ”e.”
Have a stellar day.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Dating Methods • Cosmology

Inferring interrelationships between higher groups in this explosive radiation has proved difficult, and an unresolved bush persists.  Documenting the origin of these clades is vital to understanding the roots of modern biodiversity, because acanthomorph fishes comprise nearly one-third of living vertebrate species.  Stem representatives—such as Amphistium and Heteronectes [the two fossils discussed in the paper] in the case of pleuronectiforms [flatfish]—have yet to be identified for many acanthomorph clades, but their recognition might prove invaluable in delivering a stable hypothesis of interrelationships for this exceptional vertebrate radiation.

We peer over the shoulders of biologists all the time and find them exaggerating.  They talk about evolution in action, but what is observed is evolution inaction (01/01/2007).  They need to get busy and find the vast majority of missing links they claim must exist if they expect reasonable people to accept their myth.  Finding explosive radiations and unresolved bushes is only helping their sworn enemies, the creationists.  No wonder this discovery is “unlikely to change the minds of many creationists.”  They have too much respect for evidence and logic.  To watch Darwin’s process in action – you mean his propensity for just-so storytelling?  Why yes, we see that very clearly.
    One of our readers asked a good question.  How do we know that these fossils were not mutants, or were not de-evolving from flatfish back to the upright position?  After all, blind cave fish can re-evolve eyes under the right circumstances (see 01/08/2008).  Maybe in these rare cases the developmental process got stopped in the middle.  If the proposed intermediate and the full flatfish lived side by side, it seems these possibilities are just as warranted by the evidence.
    Even if an independent panel of philosophers and logicians were to judge that the evidence in this paper is sufficient to justify the claims that the fossils were (1) ancestral and (2) intermediate and (3) adaptive (conclusions one should not assume based on the exaggerated claims of its supporters), creationists can handle a few rearrangements of existing parts without being whelmed over the ankles.  Sherwin is right about the real issue: “Show me how a fish came from a nonfish ancestor.”  That goes for the entire panoply of life.  Show us how a human came from a bacterial ancestor.  Systematic gaps, explosive radiations and unresolved bushes put the burden on the evolutionists, not the creationists.  Stop the BAD science (bluffing assertions of dogmatism).  Get back to the intellectual restraint that scientists are supposed to exhibit.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Evolution • Intelligent Design

Why Academic Freedom Is Dangerous   07/10/2008    
July 10, 2008 — Barbara Forrest has a tough case on her hands.  The veteran creationist-fighter has to convince the people of Louisiana that they did a bad thing by passing the Academic Freedom Bill, because academic freedom when it comes to discussing intelligent design and evolution is dangerous (cf. 05/12/2008, bullet 3).  The bill passed by 94-3 in the state House and unanimously in the Senate.
    Amanda Gefter, reporting on New Scientist admitted Forrest has the deck stacked against her.  Those supporting the measure outnumbered her group and had more spirit.  Nevertheless, she empathized with Forrest’s anti-ID position, titling her article “New legal threat to teaching evolution in the US” and speaking of “hidden dangers” in the bill recently signed by Governor Bobby Jindal that protects the rights of teachers who wish to supplement their lessons with alternative material on controversial science topics such as evolution, human cloning and global warming, after first teaching the assigned textbook material.  It is the prospect of offering alternatives to evolution that has generated the most heated discussion.
    What is it about the evolution issue that is so threatening to the time-honored tradition of giving voice to opposing views on controversial topics, and letting people think critically about the evidence?  In sum, here are the arguments as gleaned from the article for forbidding academic freedom on the evolution question:

1. [Forrest] had spent weeks trying to muster opposition to the bill on the grounds that it would allow teachers and school boards across the state to present non-scientific alternatives to evolution, including ideas related to intelligent design (ID) – the proposition that life is too complicated to have arisen without the help of a supernatural agent.
2. The act is designed to slip ID in “through the back door”, says Forrest, who is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and an expert in the history of creationism.
3. She adds that the bill’s language, which names evolution along with global warming, the origins of life and human cloning as worthy of “open and objective discussion”, is an attempt to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial.
4. Jindal .... enjoys a close relationship with the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a lobbying group for the religious right whose mission statement includes “presenting biblical principles” in “centers of influence”.  It was the LFF which set the bill in motion earlier this year.
5. The development has national implications, not least because Jindal is rumoured to be on Senator John McCain’s shortlist as a potential running mate in his bid for the presidency.
6. The new legislation is the latest manoeuvre in a long-running war to challenge the validity of Darwinian evolution as an accepted scientific fact in American classrooms.
7. ...Forrest presented evidence that ID was old-fashioned creationism by another name....
8. “Academic freedom is a great thing," says Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California.  “But if you look at the American Association of University Professors’ definition of academic freedom, it refers to the ability to do research and publish.”
9. This, he points out, is different to the job high-school teachers are supposed to do.  “In high school, you’re teaching mainstream science so students can go on to college or medical school, where you need that freedom to explore cutting-edge ideas.  To apply ‘academic freedom’ to high school is a misuse of the term.”
10. “It’s very slick,” says Forrest.  “The religious right has co-opted the terminology of the progressive left... They know that phrase appeals to people.”
11. ....those who wish to challenge Darwinian evolution have “plausible deniability” that this is intended to teach something unconstitutional.... “They are better camouflaged now.”
12. In a landmark 1987 case known as Edwards vs Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled the [balanced treatment] law unconstitutional, effectively closing the door on teaching “creation science” in public schools.

Hallelujah!  The dogmatists are on the run.  Were you impressed by the scare tactics and loaded words used to support the idea that high school students are so dumb and pliable, they must be indoctrinated into lily-white evolutionary truths lest their pure minds get corrupted by evil religious ideas?  Were you attracted by the tender vitriol of their hate speech?
    This is how you make freedom look dangerous.  You characterize the ones calling for freedom as evil.  Those sneaky, creepy (05/22/2008), creationists are just angry they lost at Dover.  So in retaliation, they look for new ways to set brush fires and wreak havoc on civilization (cf. 11/30/2005).  Thus black is white and white is black.  (Be sure to throw in a few big lies wherever needed, like defining ID incorrectly, mischaracterizing the Supreme Court ruling [it does not prevent teaching creation science but only laws that require teaching creation equally alongside evolution], and claiming there is no controversy among evolutionists; see 03/07/2008.  Also, keep holding up the Dover decision – an ACLU-plagiarized ruling by one unelected judge in one Pennsylvania school district – as the standard of jurisprudence for the entire world.)
    Evolution, of course, is so “scientific” that it is the only contender for a science class (06/03/2008).  And of course, evolutionists have no bias or agenda (06/21/2008, 04/13/2008).  Why, those evolutionists, they are so smart, and so logical (04/14/2008, 03/12/2008) they know for a fact that people have bacteria ancestors (03/20/2008, 02/22/2008).  They only tell the honest truth (03/06/2008).  Their math is so good they get the whole universe out of nothing (01/15/2008).  Yes, we must protect students from challenges to those natural truths.  Nothing supernatural about their miracles.  And they just lo-o-o-o-o-ve the people of Louisiana (04/09/2008).  They would never do legal maneuvering and play politics to sneak around the will of the people (02/20/2008).
    The dogmatists can’t win through the democratic process and town hall or through open debate on the evidence, so they use the courtroom and special-interest PACs.  To enforce their will on the people, they get unelected judges to tell us what science is, and get the ACLU and Americans United for “Separation of Church and State” (a misleading slogan, more properly United Against Academic Freedom) to slap parents, teachers and students with budget-busting lawsuits (intimidation, e.g., 01/06/2007).  Who has been setting those brush fires?  No wonder the people at the Louisiana hearing were wearing stickers, clapping, cheering and standing in the aisles.  No longer will they have to stay after class with Ben Stein, covering the chalkboard with “I will not question Darwinism.”
    Let’s keep the pressure on Barb till she emigrates to a country she would really enjoy – Cuba.  There, she can stand and clap for little Elian Gonzalez – you remember the little boy denied freedom in America and captured at gunpoint and shipped to Castro’s evolutionary heaven?  Now, eight years older (high school age) and sufficiently indoctrinated with the consensus view, Elian is a proud young member of the Communist Youth Brigade (see New York Times).  He promised he will never let down the murderous Castro dictators.  Enough to make Forrest clap, cheer and stand in the aisle!  Sufficiently programmed, Gonzalez will have all the academic freedom he wants to be a good, loyal communist on an island where alternative views are systematically excluded.  Maybe he can debate (with his professional academic freedom) controversial topics like whether an annual pro-communist rally should be held on Fidel’s birthday or on Raul’s.  See?  We’re only trying to alleviate the anxiety that is wearing Barbara Forrest down.  Why not take your services to a place where they would be appreciated?
    After reading the anti-ID smear piece on New Scientist, take a refreshing intellectual shower.  Read John West’s piece on National Review celebrating the fact that neo-Darwinism is no longer a protected orthodoxy in Bayou country.  He explains what academic freedom is really all about.  If you agree, get to work against the Darwin-only-Darwin-only DODOs in your state.
Next headline on:  Education • Evolution • Origin of Life • Intelligent Design • Politics and Ethics

1. Volcanoes:  The volcanoes are officially real.  Mariner had left doubt whether the smooth plains and craters with flattened floors were produced volcanically.  Now, MESSENGER scientists have confirmed numerous cases of intrusive and extrusive volcanism.²  Many impact craters and areas between craters have been flooded with lava.  In addition, small “ghost” craters can be seen in some lava flows.  The volume of lava in some craters is impressive.  Some flooded craters are hundreds of miles wide and 5 km deep.  Grabens and wrinkle ridges subsequent to the eruptions suggest that Mercury’s surface shrank subsequent to the planet’s formation.  Overall, the volcanic evidence on Mercury resembles that of earth’s moon.
2. Craters:  The interpretation of surface age by crater counts has continued to be controversial, reported Strom et al in another paper.³  Crater-counters will need to take into consideration what they said: “Clusters of secondaries, seen in some higher-resolution Mariner 10 images, were presumed to constitute a minor fraction of Mercury’s smaller craters.  MESSENGER images suggest that secondary cratering is much more important than had been thought, as exemplified by the many distinct chains and clusters of craters radiating away from prominent, large, fresh impact craters and basins.”
       Additional findings cast more doubt on the assumption that craters signify how old things are.  Some heavily-cratered plains appear much younger than others which presumably formed during a hypothetical Late Heavy Bombardment 3.5 billion years ago.  “In any event, the use of small craters for dating of geological units on Mercury must be done with even greater caution than is needed for other bodies.”  Why?  “Whereas an older unit will tend to have more secondaries on it than a younger unit, there cannot be the one-to-one correspondence of crater density with relative or absolute age (as there is for primary craters) because of the temporally and spatially nonuniform production of secondaries.”  If crater counts are to have any age interpretation, it seems that each planet or moon will have to have its own rules.
3. Magnetic field:  The fact that two rocky planets (Mercury and Earth) have global magnetic fields, and the other two (Venus and Mars) do not remains puzzling.  Mariner 10 “yielded the surprising result that Mercury has a coherent, intrinsic magnetic field,” Anderson et al stated in another paper.⁴  For a small, ancient, slow-spinning body to maintain a global field, when larger planets do not, is a mystery.  There has not been a statistically significant change in Mercury’s magnetic field strength since 1974.
       The field seems predominately dipolar.  How is it produced?  The leading theory suggests a stagnant layer at the top of the outermost molten core, where convection currents might generate a dynamo.  MESSENGER measurements are “consistent” with this view.  The field produces a sizeable magnetosphere, which was analyzed by Slavin et al.⁵  Mercury is unique in having a double magnetopause and multiple current sheets: “This double MP signature had not been observed previously at Mercury or any other planetary magnetosphere,” they said.  Perhaps the reason is Mercury’s unusual proximity to the sun and the solar wind.  The magnetosphere is immersed in a cloud of comet-like planetary ions that influence the field’s shape and behavior.
       The MESSENGER press release said, “Researchers have been puzzled by Mercury’s field since its iron core should have cooled long ago and stopped generating magnetism.  Some researchers have thought that the field may have been a relic of the past, frozen in the outer crust.”  The fact that the field remains dipolar rules that out, and “supports the view that we’re seeing a modern dynamo.”  If so, the core is not solid as it should be for a small planet after billions of years.

Interpretations are a dime a dozen, but raw data from distant places are worth their weight in gold.  We’ve seen a remarkable paradigm shift about crater count dating (09/25/2007, 10/20/2005).  Space.com delivered the usual assumption: “Scientists will also be able to use variations in crater density across the surface to date the sequence of geological events,” it piped; “‘The longer a surface sits out there, the more cratered’ it becomes, Solomon explained, so more cratered surfaces should be older formations.”  Should be and Are are different words.  If scientists cannot infer absolute or relative dates, they cannot infer ages much at all.  You just saw them admit that secondary cratering went from minor to major concern, and greater caution must be used in interpreting crater ages.  This implies that they were not cautious before when they made bold pronouncements about how old Mercury was.  Their readers should therefore exercise even greater caution.
    Don’t expect observations of remnant volcanism to provide any stronger evidence for hidden epochs of time.  A lot can happen in a short time if the conditions are right.  The presence of ghost craters hints that very little time elapsed from the point eruptions began and craters were emplaced.  The only ones who need an old, old Mercury are the evolutionists.  The solar system is exempt from the requirements of their world view.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods

Feather Fossil Fallacy?   07/09/2008    
July 9, 2008 — Imprints of melanocytes have been found in fossil feathers.  What does this mean?  The popular science news reports, like Science Daily, Live Science, PhysOrg and the BBC News seem convinced it can tell us something about how birds evolved from dinosaurs.  Understanding what was discovered requires sifting through claims that go far beyond the evidence.

The Claims:  “The complex coloured plumage of extinct birds which once soared over the heads of dinosaurs could soon be revealed” (BBC).  “Artists may now be able to paint dinosaurs and ancient birds and mammals in their true colors, thanks to the discovery of pigment residues in fossilized feathers.” (Live Science).  “The traces of organic material found in fossil feathers are remnants of pigments that once gave birds their color, according to Yale scientists whose paper in Biology Letters opens up the potential to depict the original coloration of fossilized birds and their ancestors, the dinosaurs” (Science Daily).  Another Yale scientist remarked, “Now that we have demonstrated that melanin can be preserved in fossils, scientists have a way to reliably predict, for example, the original colors of feathered dinosaurs” (Live Science).
What Was Found:  The Yale scientists determined that some imprints of carbon in the rock were not bacterial residues but traces of melanocytes – the cells that contain the pigment melanin.  The protein melanin was thought to degrade quickly, but carbon imprints of melanin were still identifiable in color bands within the specimens.  These were detected in a fossil of a striped feather from Brazil (which evolutionists claim is 100 million years old), and in a fossil of an Eocene bird from Denmark (claimed to be 55 million years old).  Both specimens were from birds.  No dinosaur feathers were found.

The observation-to-assumption ratio in this story was so low, that if it were a signal-to-noise ratio, you would hear mostly static.  Ask yourself a simple question.  Up till now scientists respected the “well-known fact” that organic molecules decay in mere thousands of years.  Doesn’t the presence of organic molecules in fossils suggest the slight possibility that the scientists are flat wrong about their dating, and that the fossils are indeed mere thousands of years old?
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils • Dating Methods

It’s Networks All the Way Down   07/08/2008    
July 9, 2008 — New ways of seeing biology are finding life is full of networks.  At both ends of the complexity scale – from humans to bacteria – complex interactions are the rule.  Two teams studying different phenomena had the same reaction – astonishment.

1. Bottom-up complexity:  Who would have thought one of the simplest life forms has a more complex network of signaling molecules than man?  “We were absolutely stunned,” remarked Gerhard Manning, a bioinformatics researcher, at the level of complexity in a network of tyrosine kinases in a single-celled microbe.  Science Daily said of the organism studied, Monosiga brevicollis, “It commands a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism higher up on the evolutionary tree, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered.”
       Speaking of evolution, this organism was selected precisely because of its evolutionary position.  The choanoflagellates are thought to be basal members of microbes about to evolve into multicellular animals.  Imagine the shock seeing network complexity at that level:

   With all this new information, one obvious question remains unanswered: what is a single-celled organism doing with all this communications gear?  “We don’t have a clue!” says Manning, “but this discovery is the first step in finding out.”

   The article title was telling: “Can You Hear Me Now?  Primitive Single-Celled Microbe Expert In Cellular Communication Networks.”

2. Top down complexity:  This is your brain on diffusion imaging: see Technology Review.  A refined method of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that follows water molecules as they move through neurons is allowing scientists to see, for the first time, the network connections in the brain.  The crude new views of this non-invasive imaging technique have revealed a core region in the back of the brain, reported Emily Singer, that seems to act as a central hub.  The number of connections within the hub as well as outside suggest an important function.  “What goes on there?” asked one of the neuroscientists at Indiana University.
       This imaging technique promises new looks at the complexity of the human brain.  Before, MRI and CAT scan images showed only shadows of the surfaces of regions of the brain.  Now, diffusion imaging promises to reveal the network connections of the brain’s trillions of neurons.  (Note: in the illustration, multiple layers of complexity have been subtracted in order to focus on certain features.)  By comparing normal brains to victims of autism and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers hope to understand what went wrong in the network wiring in those debilitating conditions.
       Singer called the newly-discovered hub a kind of Grand Central Station.  Even in a resting state, your hub is a hubbub of traveling signals.

It was way too funny to see the Salk guys admit they don’t have a clue figuring out where a microbe got all that complex communications gear.  If they don’t have a clue about what is right in front of their eyes, what can we trust of their claims about the unobservable past?
    Creation scientists might also have been stunned by this discovery, but in a different way.  They would be delighted with yet another display of the Creator’s wisdom.  Evolutionists, on the other hand, are stunned with a tinge of dismay.  Their delight in discovery is tempered by an unexpected level of complexity in an organism that was supposed to primitive and simple.  Dumbstruck, they flounder about for an explanation of how it could have evolved.  That calls for a new word: they’re dumbfloundering.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Human Body • Amazing Facts

In this theory of the origins of life, each cell-like assembly had a different composition from the next.  Most were inert, but a few might have contained a particular mixture of components that could be driven towards further complexity by capturing energy and small ‘nutrient’ molecules from the environment – the beginnings of a heterotrophic system.  As the nutrient molecules were transported into the internal compartment, they became linked together into long chains in an energy-consuming process.  Life began when one or more of the assemblies found a way not only to grow, but also to reproduce by incorporating a cycle involving catalytic functions and genetic information.

More powerful than a loco motive, leaping tall conceptual hurdles with a single bound, faster than a speeding roulette, it’s Supermad!
    For more cartoons, stay tuned to the Nature channel.  Now, for a word from our sponsors.  Do you sometimes feel like a fat blob?  Are you lacking energy and feeling lifeless?  Here’s a tip; jump into a volcano.  That’s right.  The far-from-equilibrium conditions at the Volcano Mountain Health Spa are sure to drive you toward higher degrees of complexity and fitness.  It will also improve your sex life.  You’ll find yourself growing and reproducing in no time.  Spend a few million years on our metabolic cycles and read our magazines, filled with genetic information.  Join today and get a free cart load of our sugary snacks made of 100% pure ribose, just in from Death Valley! (11/05/2004).
    If you’re tired of cartoon re-runs (09/03/2004), get some realistic intellectual nourishment at Creation-Evolution Headlines.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Speak for yourself, Robin.  This reporter for one of the most egregious of the dogmatic-Darwin news sites has illustrated profoundly illogical and unscientific behavior.  She has just besmirched the character of all gentle grandmothers praying for wayward children, all men of God in the pulpit, all self-sacrificing parents, all missionaries, all doctors serving poor people in third-world countries, and all honorable people everywhere by calling them moral hypocrites.  Is a guilty conscience here finding comfort in numbers?
    Worse, she speaks nonsense by speaking of morality as a product of evolution.  If “morality” is only about self-survival, and if it bears no reference to absolute standards of right and wrong, it is a meaningless word.  Not even survival can be called morally beneficial; death and extinction are equally as meaningless as survival in Darwin’s universe.  Who is to judge that survival is a good thing?  Who is there to pat the chimps on the back when they act like team players and survive better?
    “Evolutionary morality” is an oxymoron.  The fact that this reporter innately knows right from wrong and makes moral judgments herself refutes her claim that morals evolved.  At least she admitted that the researchers had nothing to back up that claim other than speculation.
    Only the Biblical world view can defend the assertion that we are moral beings, because it teaches moral absolutes rooted in the character of God who created all things.  And only the Biblical worldview can judge humans as hypocritical.  This hypocrisy, the result of sin, is curable through Jesus Christ.
    Even thoughtful non-Christians should look at this article as profoundly irrational.  Can a contrived lab test on 85 individuals be generalized to all of humanity, of all cultures and all times?  What kind of scientific reasoning is that?  Robin should have been laughing at this study, not praising it.  In our culture, any stupid thing that a so-called scientist publishes in some journal somewhere garners more presumptive authority than something that a righteous man in the pulpit has to say from the word of God.  Hypocrisy is not limited to the occasional preacher who strays from the moral standard.  It applies also to those who speak vain words of morality while denying its foundation.  By indicting all humanity, this reporter indicts herself.  Her readers are therefore justifiably entitled to ignore anything she says, including the assertion that morality evolved.  How can we trust her word?  She’s a hypocrite, too – unless she claims Yoda privileges, which make her an exalted master looking in on the predicament of mankind from the outside.  But then, how could we know such a claim is not hypocritical?
    Evolutionary theory offers no hope for hypocrisy, because whatever moral instincts we have could only be part of a pointless, meaningless, inborn nature; why fight it?  The Bible offers forgiveness for hypocrisy (Romans 10) and a moral standard to which we can and should aspire, enabled by God’s Holy Spirit (Romans 12).
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Bible and Theology

Amazing Cell Tricks: Contour Map Navigation   07/05/2008    
July 5, 2008 — Watch a cell divide, and if things go well, it always divides in the middle.  How does a cell figure out where its middle is?  It follows its contour map.  PhysOrg titled its entry, “Dividing cells find their middle by following a protein ‘contour map’.”
    Cell division, or cytokinesis, is a precisely-controlled operation that is vital to all of life (see 12/28/2007).  Each molecule in the cell has to know its proper position during each stage, and how to get there.  For some molecules, crossing a cell is like navigating a countryside over a long distance.  Human navigators, we know, need a topo map printed out or software or GPS.  They also have to know where they are trying to go, and have sensory equipment (eyes, kinesthetic sense) to gauge contour lines on a hill or valley.  How can a cell pull off this feat?  They use periodically-placed signaling molecules that act like beacons.
    The team measured all over the cell the positions of important sensory molecules involved in cell division.  They detected a gradient – like the slope of a hill – that was greatest at the center, where the site of cleavage must be located.  The proteins and enzymes that create the cleavage furrow are thus able to sense the contours and arrive at the right spot to begin cleaving the cell in two.

Wonderful stuff, that molecules are so precisely choreographed that they can arrive in formation like band players on a football field.  The explanation was duly marvelous, but... it seems to beg the question.  What tells the signalling molecules where to go and where the center is?  If Dan found the mountaintop because Bob hollered to him from the summit, how did Bob find it?  Clearly more is going on than scientists have thus far been able to figure out.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

• The findings, reported online in Nature Genetics, have provided new insights into the evolution of genomic or parental imprinting and epigenetic regulation in mammals.
• Imprinting is thought to have evolved because of genetic conflict that influences the allocation of resources from parents to offspring.
• The apparent absence of genomic imprinting in monotremes and presence in eutherians and marsupials suggests that imprinting has evolved at the boundary of monotremes and therians’ divergence.
• Interestingly, imprinting evolution paralleled the apparition of the placenta and implantation.
• Hence, it is possible that imprinting and placentation co-evolved in the therian ancestor.
• The next stage is to look for the IGF2-H19 locus in another branch of mammals’ evolution...
• Recent evidence suggests that therians diverged from the egg-laying monotremes like the platypus approximately 180 million years ago, and then split into the eutherian and marsupials infra-classes around 150 million years ago.
• Hence the ... consortium will concentrate its efforts in obtaining the sequence of the monotreme IGF2 locus to provide further insights into the imprinting evolution and the mysteries of gene regulation in these curious creatures which carry mammalian, bird-like and reptilian characteristics.

Evolution is such a wonderful story.  It explains everything.  It conjures up such marvelous apparitions of mythical worlds in the far distant past.  Evolution is so versatile.  It mixes things up rapidly but then saves other things for 150 million years.  Who would have ever thought up such things.  Aren’t you glad we have the shamans to comfort us with their hidden wisdom?  Think how hard life would be if we actually had to think for ourselves.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Genetics • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Don’t you creationists try to latch onto this story now.  They said, “The long evolution of vascular plants has resulted in a tremendous variety of natural networks responsible for the evaporatively driven transport of water.”  So clearly they believe in evolution.  This is merely an adaptation.  Natural selection is up to the task.  That’s what natural selection does: adapts things to their environment.  It searches through all possibilities and finds the optimum solutions to nature’s engineering problems.  It tinkers with things until it gets them right.  Evolution has millions of years to work its magic.  Given enough time, anything is possible, even things that look like miracles.  Evolution is smart.  Evolution is like... well, a god.  Believe!
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts • Biomimetics

Saturn Rings: F is for Flamboyant   07/02/2008    
July 2, 2008 — The Cassini spacecraft just started its extended mission on July 1.  Among its many achievements during the four-year prime mission (2004-2008) was the elucidation of complex processes occurring in Saturn’s rings.  One ring in particular, the thin outlying F-ring, attracted particular interest.  Voyager scientists from the early 1980s could hardly believe their eyes when separate strands of this narrow ring appeared to braid around each other.  Thanks to Cassini, a little more is known now, but the discoveries are no less surprising.
    A press release from JPL last month announced the discovery of collisions within the F-ring.  These collisions, on the order of 30 meters per second, create some of the flamboyant features seen by the cameras: rapid perturbations, spurs, grooves, gouges and fan-like structures that vary rapidly.  “Large scale collisions happen in Saturn’s F ring almost daily,” said one of the authors of the paper in Nature,¹ “making it a unique place to study.  We can now say that these collisions are responsible for the changing features we observe there.”  Interactions with the two shepherd moons, particularly Prometheus (the larger and nearer one) also perturb the ringlets.  Prometheus both incites violence in the embedded moonlets, causing them to collide more frequently, and it gets struck itself during its periodic close passages of the ring.
    One detail strangely omitted from the reports is an estimation of how long these processes could continue.  Carl Murray said that “Saturn’s F ring is perhaps the most unusual and dynamic ring in the solar system; it has multiple structures with features changing on a variety of timescales from hours to years.”  But for a ring undergoing almost daily collisions of its constituent moonlets, could this ephemeral ring last for billions of years?  No one in the popular reports was asking the question.
    The original paper, however, noted that these processes could not last for long.  “It is difficult to understand how the observed ~1 km-wide ring component seen in some of the highest resolution images can survive in such a chaotic environment,” they said.  “Nonetheless, the evidence suggests not only that it does, but also that it even maintains enough integrity to precess uniformly; the only obvious mechanisms to prevent its destruction are self-gravity and collisions.”  They left to future researchers the need to make progress in understanding how self-gravity might work.
    The authors placed an upper limit for the origin of the ring at a million years – a tiny fraction of the assumed 4.5-billion-year age of the solar system (and of Saturn itself).  To save the age of the system, they either had to presume a moon broke up in the vicinity of the F-ring a million years ago, or that the F-ring is balanced between forces of accretion and disruption.  The latter suggestion, however, does not take into account the brightness of the ephemeral ring (which would have been darkened by dust pollution), nor other disruptive processes, such as external bombardment and sunlight pressure, that would also erode the ring over time.
    Space.com printed a review of the surprises Cassini found at Saturn over the last four years.

Great.  Now we can add another evidence that the consensus age of the solar system is vastly overdrawn (see also last month’s admission about Enceladus, 06/19/2008).  You will notice that the scientists have to keep adding ad-hoc “rescuing devices” to their paradigm in order to maintain the 4.5-billion-year figure.  Multiplying rescuing devices makes a theory look bad.  The straightforward interpretation is that the rings are not so old.  Thank you, Cassini, for adding impetus toward another scientific revolution.  Keeps gurus honest.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Physics

The usefulness of psychology as a science is very limited.  Some findings about memorization and learning methods have value, but any time they try to generalize about human nature, psychologists are right about as often as the proverbial broken clock.  The field is replete with discredited theories, contradictory speculations, and outright scandals (Freud, Jung).  Some of its teachings are indistinguishable from those of cults.  Who needs these guys?
    The rational animal is far too complex for a science of the soul.  If lab rats under controlled conditions do what they darn well please (the Harvard Law), how much more people who can choose to deceive and mislead a researcher?  There are no scientific laws in this field anything as rigorous as the law of gravity.  You are likely to have far better luck figuring out how to interact with your fellow humans with good old folk psychology: the kind we learn growing up.  We learn by experience how to judge one another’s inner mental states, to anticipate what they will say or do, to empathize with what they are feeling.  We assume, without proof, that our fellow humans are rational entities, not just Pavlovian responders to neural states (see 06/21/2008, bullet 3), despite what the cognitive neuroscientists tell us.  In terms of explanatory power and practical utility, folk psychology has a pretty impressive track record over professional psychology.  It is arguably just as scientific.
    Best of all is to get your anthropology from the operator’s manual.  Only the Maker understands how humans are put together.  First, we need to get reconnected to the power source.  The Bible says we are like walking dead needing life, rebels needing to lay down our arms, fools in need of wisdom, sinners in need of redemption (Romans 3).  Christ’s sacrificial work, accepted by faith, pays our debt, resurrects us back to spiritual life and imputes His righteousness to us.  Then, the Bible’s instruction manual, such as the Proverbs of Solomon and teachings of Jesus Christ (e.g., Sermon on the Mount – but don’t stop there) and the writings of Paul, James, John and the other apostles are the textbook for living.  The Bible is loaded with real, practical principles on all aspects of life.  It comes with numerous case studies.  No other source of soul-ology (psychology) has the Creator’s imprint on it.  Why would you go anywhere else?  The sweet spot for confidence is right there: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6).
Next headline on:  Health • Theology