How the Evolution Story Became Like Jellyfish   09/30/2008    
Sept 30, 2008 — “How the [blank] got its [blank]” is the template for story titles imitating Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories: i.e., How the Camel Got His Hump and How the Leopard Got His Spots.  Kipling wrote these as silly stories to entertain children, not to be taken seriously by scientists.  Knowing that creationists often criticize Darwinian explanations as Just-So Stories, was Amber Dance being sarcastic or whimsical when she titled her article on Nature News “How the jellyfish got its sting”?  Apparently the latter (or neither) because she dove into the genre forthwith: “From a bacterium, surprisingly.”
    The article discussed apparent evidence for widespread lateral gene transfer among multicellular animals.  In particular, a French team supposed jellyfish got the toxin in their stinging cells from bacterial genes.  Comparing genomes, they deduced that the same gene jumped between cnidarians (jellyfish, corals, and anemones), sponges, worms and fungi.  The team lead said, “horizontal gene transfer is often neglected, and could sometimes be more important than we thought.”
    If true, this scrambles attempts to understand common descent.  It’s understandable that other evolutionists didn’t want to take that plunge.

“There are other explanations for the incongruencies they see in the tree,” agrees Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist who studies phylogenetic problems at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
    For instance, the gene could be vertically transferred from a distant progenitor, before being lost from some organisms.  Or, it may be possible that more than one animal independently evolved the gene; such sequence conversion is not unheard of, Dunn says.  “At the end of the day, it will probably take far more data to paint a conclusive picture of what’s happening.”
    Rabet responds that since the PGA synthase gene is approximately 1000 bases long, it is statistically unlikely to be the product of multiple distinct genes converging on the same sequence.
    And if the gene was lost from all but the cnidarians and a few other animals, it must have disappeared from all related organisms.  “It’s possible, but we need to imagine a lot of lost genes,” he says.

Using phylogenetic analysis, Rabet and his colleagues found that the cnidarian gene fits well into the bacterial family tree.  They also showed that the gene turns on in at least one jellyfish, Clytia hemisphaerica.  The same gene pops up in certain sponges, worms and fungi, suggesting it jumped between species more than once, the scientists say.  It is not yet clear how the transfer might have occurred, or why this particular gene would be so well-travelled....
Scientists are finding that horizontal gene transfer, once thought to be the domain of single-celled critters, is not uncommon in the animal world, says Syvanen.  “Horizontal gene transfer with the animals is going to turn out to be more widespread than anybody believes now.  When that realization comes down, it will definitely change the way people think about evolution.”

With the new Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week cartoon, we welcome Brett Miller to our website talent pool.  His drawing of Emperor Charlie’s New Clothes removes all need for comment (click image for larger version).  Watch for his occasional eye-catching graphics in days to come.  Thanks, Brett!  Your cartoon made our day.
See more of Brett’s work at EvidentCreation.com.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Genetics • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

• Evidence from the fossil record for the origin and evolution of this system is extremely limited, because lungs do not fossilize and because the bellow-like air sacs in living birds only rarely penetrate (pneumatize) skeletal bone and thus leave a record of their presence.
• Principal findings: We describe a new predatory dinosaur from Upper Cretaceous rocks in Argentina, Aerosteon riocoloradensis gen. et sp. nov., that exhibits extreme pneumatization of skeletal bone, including pneumatic hollowing of the furcula and ilium.  In living birds, these two bones are pneumatized by diverticulae of air sacs (clavicular, abdominal) that are involved in pulmonary ventilation.  We also describe several pneumatized gastralia (“stomach ribs”), which suggest that diverticulae of the air sac system were present in surface tissues of the thorax.
• The advent of avian unidirectional lung ventilation is not possible to pinpoint, as osteological correlates have yet to be identified for uni- or bidirectional lung ventilation.
• The origin and evolution of avian air sacs may have been driven by one or more of the following three factors: flow-through lung ventilation, locomotory balance, and/or thermal regulation.
• As a result of an extraordinary level of pneumatization, as well as the excellent state of preservation of much of the axial column and girdles, Aerosteon helps to constrain hypotheses for the evolution of avian-style respiration.
• The capacity of the cervical air sacs to invade centra to form invaginated pleurocoels may have evolved independently in sauropodomorphs (sauropods) and basal theropods and appears to have been lost several times within theropods.
• The osteological or logical correlates needed to support some of these inferences have been poorly articulated, which may explain the wide range of opinions on when intrathoracic air sacs like those in birds first evolved and how these relate to ventilatory patterns.
• Based on the osteological correlates we have assembled (Table 4), we would argue, first, that until we can show evidence of the presence of at least one avian ventilatory air sac (besides the non-ventilatory cervical air sac), it is problematic to infer the presence of flow-through ventilation or a rigid, dorsally-attached lung.  Second, we know of no osteological correlates in the gastral cuirass that would justify the inference of abdominal air sacs.  Potential kinesis of the gastral cuirass and an accessory role in aspiration breathing potentially characterizes many amniotes besides nonavian dinosaurs.  The absence of gastralia in crown birds or in any extant bipeds also hinders functional inferences.  And third, it is not well established that abdominal air sacs were either first to evolve or are functionally critical to unidirectional ventilation.
• Avian lung ventilation is driven by muscles that expand and contract thoracic volume by deforming the ribcage and rocking a large bony sternum.  Basal maniraptorans have many of the features associated with this ventilatory mechanism including a large ossified sternum, ossified sternal ribs, uncinate processes a deepened coracoid that contacts the sternum along a synovial hinge joint.  By contrast Aerosteon and the abelisaurid Majungasaurus lack these features.  Does that mean that maniraptorans had evolved unidirectional lung ventilation?  Or does it indicate only that the maniraptoran ribcage functioned in aspiration breathing more like that in avians?  We do not know of any osteological correlates that are specifically tied to uni- or bidirectional lung ventilation (Table 4), which may explain the range of opinion as to how and when avian unidirectional lung ventilation first evolved.
• The factors driving the origin and evolution of the functional capacity of avian air sacs and lung ventilation remain poorly known and tested.

The bluffing about evolution in many science news reports is shameful.  Search on Aerosteon and you will find examples, like this one on InTheNews.co.uk: “Dinosaurs: Breathed like birds.  A carnivorous dinosaur with a bird-like breathing system has provided more evidence of the connection between the two groups of animals separated by millions of years.”  The whole article is fluff.  “Palaeontologists are now satisfied Aerosteon provides the evidence needed to seal the connection with birds,” it ends.  One cannot bluff about fluff.
    National Geographic must have panicked at our expose, so they cranked out a propaganda piece immediately announcing, “New Birdlike Dinosaur Found in Argentina.”  They even put imaginary feathers on it: “The new dinosaur probably had feathers, but did not actually fly,” they said (cf. 06/13/2007).  OK, so we went hunting for feathers in the original paper.  “The fossil evidence for intrathoracic air sacs now closely overlaps that for feathers, which had evolved in coelurosaurian theropods most likely for heat retention.”  That was the only mention of feathers.  This appeal to imaginary feathers was followed by more storytelling in lieu of empirical evidence:

Air sacs may have initially been employed as an antagonist to feathers in theropod thermoregulation.  Although this hypothesis has been criticized for lack of empirical evidence in living birds, air sacs have been implicated in avian heat transfer and/or evaporative heat loss, and Aerosteon and many other theropods had a body weight more than an order of magnitude greater than that for any living bird.  A thermoregulatory role for the early evolution of air sacs in nonavian dinosaurs should not be ruled out without further evidence from nonvolant ratites.

Can you believe that?  They invented imaginary feathers out of thin air for this big heavy meat-eater to compensate for imaginary air sacs that they presume existed near its hollow bones.  So now their evolutionary magic produced two imaginary thermoregulatory systems competing with each other – what, for survival of the coolest?
    For the fun of it, let’s grant them air sacs and even imagine with them a respiratory system that had some birdlike features; after all, any two vertebrates, like mice and camels, or frogs and penguins, are bound to have similarities as well as differences, depending on what you decide to focus on for the moment.  Paul Sereno told National Geographic that the beast didn’t fly (obviously, unless you can imagine wings on a T. rex), so NG concluded, “even though this species was birdlike [sic], feathers and air sacs didn’t necessarily evolve for flight.”  So their point is... ?  All the hype about feathers was supposed to reinforce the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  They were practically ready to name this thing Tweety Rex, and now they seem to be telling us this beast evolved air sacs for a completely different function, about which no one is sure, and it was an evolutionary dead end anyway.  Even NG’s accompanying slide show didn’t show feathers.  The only suggestion of a birdlike respiratory system was in slide 2, where colored regions represent the imaginary air sacs in the thorax. 

But excuse me, Mr. Scientist sir, did any of that soft air-sac material fossilize?  “Evidence from the fossil record for the origin and evolution of this system is extremely limited, because lungs do not fossilize and because the bellow-like air sacs in living birds only rarely penetrate (pneumatize) skeletal bone and thus leave a record of their presence.”  Are you telling me there was no direct evidence for the air sacs in this dinosaur?  “Some of its postcranial bones show pneumatic hollowing that can be linked to intrathoracic air sacs that are directly involved in lung ventilation.”  They can be, you say, but how strong is the inference?  “We do not know of any osteological correlates [fossil evidence] that are specifically tied to uni- or bidirectional lung ventilation (Table 4), which may explain the range of opinion as to how and when avian unidirectional lung ventilation first evolved.”  But isn’t a unidirectional lung ventilation system the primary distinguishing feature in birds?  Are you telling the court that this is all inference, not evidence?

The tale gets more speculative and implausible with each lawyer’s question.  Darwin’s defense attorneys are sweating in their seats.  NG quoted a colleague admitting, “It shows that evolution is not a chalk line—there are many dead ends.”  Being interpreted, this means evolutionists can always concoct a story for any possible combination of data.  (Chalk is erasable, you know.)  We think a scientist who wants to feather his monster should produce the feathers in the fossil, not draw feathery dragons on the chalkboard and tell the press that it “probably had feathers.”  Chalk lines are supposed to be snapped to a level that has been carefully measured.  So he’s right; evolution is not a chalk line; it’s a crooked crack in the wall of a theory that is about to collapse.  Don’t build to it.
    We brought you extended quotes to illustrate the difference between original sources and the news media hype.  The lesson: always check out the original data.  The authors with the bones in their hand usually know better than to make any outlandish claims to their colleagues.  In front of reporters, though, they lose restraint.  Reporters go ape to praise Darwin.  For example, Live Science, that perennial Darwin billboard, shouted Extra! Extra! “Bus-sized Dinosaur Breathed Like Birds.  A huge carnivorous dinosaur that lived about 85 million years ago had a breathing system much like that of today’s birds, a new analysis of fossils reveals, reinforcing the evolutionary link between dinos and modern birds.”  That, in turn, got passed around to all the major news outlets as gospel truth.  This is bad breath, not bird breath.  The sound of flapping dino-feathers is only the pompons made of synthetic material manufactured for the Darwin Party cheerleaders.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils • Evolution

Darwinists Root for Obama   09/28/2008    
Sept 28, 2008 — Ministers in churches are not allowed to promote political candidates, even though they do not take government money.¹  Scientists, who often do take federal money in the form of grants, openly take positions on the presidential candidates they feel will further their interests.  Is this proper?
    Both Nature and Science this week did extensive reporting on the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.  While the magazines and the organizations behind them do not receive tax money directly, they act as the leading voices of scientists who are largely supported by grants, and thus they stand to profit directly from the level of funding a President supports.  Nature’s editorial bluntly stated, “The most worrying thing about a McCain presidency is not so much a President McCain as a Vice-President Palin.”  Their concern was over her opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, and the claim that “She is a creationist” (but see Evolution News).  In fact, Nature went out of its way to point out the differences between Obama and McCain on the issue of intelligent design, quoting Obama’s answer with apparent satisfaction:

I believe in evolution, and I support the strong consensus of the scientific community that evolution is scientifically validated.  I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny.

McCain has courageously bucked his party’s more parochial viewpoints in the past, as when he fought for a cap-and-trade system long before it was politically popular.  But his selection of Palin as a running mate suggests a new-found willingness to pander to his party’s far-right wing.

There is a crisis in scientific literacy in the United States: only 25% of Americans accept our evolution from ape-like ancestors, yet 74% believe in angels.  Republicans make it worse by proposing that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public-school science classes.  Anyone aspiring to be president should have a basic acquaintance with evolution and with the masses of evidence that it’s not just a theory, but a fact.  Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species comes to mind, but it is outdated and written in turgid Victorian prose that is uncongenial to modern readers.  Future US leaders should read a short, popular work that lays out the evidence for evolution and dispels the spectres of creationism and intelligent design without dwelling on religion.  Sadly, no book fills this niche.  My attempt, Why Evolution is True (Viking, 2009), will be published only after the election.  Until then, I suggest Richard Dawkins’s brilliant exposition of natural selection.  If a presidential candidate doesn’t accept evolution after reading this book, there is no hope.

Interesting that Coyne ridicules the majority of Americans who believe in angels, while he believes in spectres.*  Too bad he didn’t get his little sermon book published in time for the election.  Anything he writes has a high probability of backfiring.  Who wants to bet that Why Evolution is True will showcase examples of microevolution, which is not controversial even among young-earth creationists, but will then extrapolate microevolution recklessly into molecules-to-man macroevolution?  Don’t hold your breath that Coyne will deal honestly with Darwin’s enigmas, like molecular machines, the origin of life, the fine-tuning of the universe, complex specified information in DNA, and the Cambrian Explosion.
    We hope several things are evident from this story: the lack of objectivity among scientific institutions; their far-leftist leanings (they adore Obama, who is the most liberal member of the Senate); their obstinate refusal to distinguish between intelligent design and creationism despite years of clarification by ID advocates; their illogical conflation of scientific literacy with acceptance of Darwinism; their identification of Darwinism and atheism with their political persuasion; their ability to lie with impunity in print about what ID leaders advocate in education; and the level of vitriol they can display toward religion.  They might barely tolerate a theistic evolutionist who prostrates himself before the Shrine of Darwin, but will explode in wrath against any member of the meaningless class labeled “People of Faith” who dares to suggest that a Designer (no matter how vaguely characterized) might interact with the world in any way.
    This is the way of the People of Froth (09/26/2005 commentary).  Add to that their pattern of refusing to publish opinions from the conservative or pro-ID side, and one has grounds to question their objectivity.  Isn’t objectivity a core value of science?  Where is it?  Is this how scientists and their institutions ought to behave?  Observe.  They exercise their political advocacy with the help of your tax money, but would forbid that freedom to ministers.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Religion and Theology • Education • Intelligent Design • Darwinism

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*Coyne can’t get out of logic jail by accusing us of reifying his figure of speech.  He may not be calling creationism and intelligent design actual spectres (demonic spirits), but what are they if not concepts?  Concepts and angels are not made of particles.  He can’t assume matter in motion created everything, then turn around and judge concepts that require reference to matters of truth, knowledge, morality and logic.  These realms are not reduceable to particles.  Our Spectre Inspector, therefore, still finds Coyne guilty as charged: a hypocrite floudering in mid-air without a leg to stand on.

Fastest Squirt Gun in the Fungi   09/26/2008    
Sept 26, 2008 — A paper on PLoS One described the highest-speed flights in all nature: the spore discharge mechanisms in certain fungi.  A dozen scientists in Ohio worked to capture the action on ultra-high-speed cameras.  It took 250,000 frames per second to reveal how fast the projectiles accelerate.  The answer: from 20,000 to 180,000 g (where g = the acceleration of gravity).  One species launches its projectiles at almost 2 million meters per second squared – winning the title of “fastest recorded flights in nature.”
    In their introduction, they discussed the variety of ways that fungi disperse their spores.  Their language sounds downright military: “Mechanisms include a catapult energized by surface tension that launches mushroom spores, the explosive eversion of a pressurized membrane in the artillery fungus, and the discharge of squirt guns pressurized by osmosis.”  Well, maybe squirt guns are for kid’s playground battles, but army engineers might learn a few things from these lowly fungi.  That’s why the authors said the study of spore-discharge mechanisms has implications for biomimetics (the imitation of nature).  Who else would want to imitate this?
    The four species of fungi studied live on cow manure.  They need to launch their spores out far enough onto the grass so that cows will eat them and spread them around.  Each species has variations on the mechanism, but basically, the spores are ejected in a mass (either in a fluid or solid), within a sporangium, or capsule.  The sporangium usually separates during flight..  This trick, reminiscent of a spacecraft ejecting its cover after achieving orbit, allows the spores to minimize viscous drag on the ascent, then disperse on descent and landing.
    How are such superlative accelerations achieved?  The answer lies not only in the structure of the catapults, but in the viscosity of the specific sugars and ions in the spore capsules.  The liquids allow the build-up of 4.4 atmospheres of turgor pressure.  As the “pressurized squirt gun” undergoes a “controlled and rapid rupture,” almost none of the energy is lost to friction.  The “supremely fast movements” represent a “a series of remarkable feats of natural engineering,” they said.
    Engineers might be curious how these feats were designed.  Their answer was, simply, they “have evolved.”  The authors stated this twice: “A variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi,” and, “Squirt gun mechanisms are responsible for launching spores at the highest speeds and are most common in the Ascomycota, including lichenized species, but have also evolved among the Zygomycota.”

It evolved because it evolved – this is the theory of evolution in a nutshell (see 05/25/2005).  This is sufficient to explain the origin of any feat of natural engineering.  It evolved.  Darwin sure simplified biology, didn’t he?  Scientists used to have to produce explanations the hard way, with logic and evidence.  Now, a simple two-word answer suffices for everything in the world that used to inspire awe, wonder, curiosity and motivation.
Next headline on:  Plants • Biomimetics • Evolution • Amazing Facts

The article did not mention evolution.  Here is another amazing fact, right under biologists’ noses, that was unknown till now.  If an observable, measurable phenomenon in the present can escape detection for so long, how can biologists speak so glibly about factors in mythical worlds millions of years ago?  How could a communication network among brainless plants evolve?  This was discovered by good old-fashioned field work.  Taxpayers donated funds for the research.  Darwin donated nothing.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts

1. Light shields:  EurekAlert reported earlier this month problems with oxygen.  Ratios of oxygen isotopes in a meteorite are very different from those in all other solar system bodies, including the Earth, moon and Mars.  A leading theory that UV photoshielding would yield the anomalous ratios was tested and found to be wrong.  Did a nearby supernova seed the early nebula with the isotopes?  That’s too unlikely and ad hoc an explanation for most scientists.  One other theory is being tested, but the article was titled, “Theory of the sun’s role in formation of the solar system questioned.”
       Science Daily provided more detail.  One researcher for the Genesis mission, that collected samples of the solar wind, commented, “You can see the ratios of the isotopes brought back by Genesis, but that doesn’t tell you how they came about.  The isotope ratios themselves don’t tell you why they were different in the early universe than they are today, so there’s lots more science to do in the laboratory.”
2. Comet upsets:  Astrobiology Magazine reported on the surprise discovery that comets are not the pristine objects from the fringes of the solar system as was long thought (12/27/2007, 01/25/2008).  “Observations from this sample are changing our previous thinking and expectations about how the solar system formed,” a Stardust mission researcher said.  Models now have to worry about how material can migrate radially across the disk.  “This really complicates our simple view of the early solar system,” said another.  The apparent mixing of material near and far from the sun is “causing a revision of theories of the history of the solar system.”
       Science Daily agreed.  “Chemical clues from a comet’s halo are challenging common views about the history and evolution of the solar system and showing it may be more mixed-up than previously thought,” the subtitle read.  A Stardust team member explained, “They were originally hoping to find the raw material that pre-dated the solar system.  However, we found many crystalline objects that resemble flash-heated particles found in meteorites from asteroids.”  Such heating was supposed to be impossible beyond the “frost line.” a theoretical radius beyond which volatiles in the early solar system would have frozen into comets, never to heat up again till tugged toward the sun long after their formation.
3. Demolition derby:  Watching planets form would take a long time, but watching them get destroyed is quick and easy.  Space.com and Science Daily reported the collision of two Earth-like planets around a sunlike binary star 300 light-years away (an apocalyptic ending for any life there).  Benjamin Zuckerman of UCLA said, “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before.  Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system.”  Astronomy Picture of the Day posted the artwork of the proposed collision.  (Actually, the collision was inferred from dust, not witnessed.)
       OK, so planets destroy each other, but does this observation provide any evidence for how they form?  Not exactly; the article mentioned theories that our moon formed from a collision, and that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a collision.  They surmised that the planets that they think collided were in the final stages of its dust disk’s evolution.  But there seemed to be more surprise than confirmation of theory.  For one, they were surprised planets could form at all around a binary star.  For another, they were surprised to see a collision in such a mature system: “How do planetary orbits become destabilized in such an old, mature system, and could such a collision happen in our own solar system?” asked one.  The observations here seem to relate more directly to planetary destruction models, not planetary formation models.
4. Shooting gallery:  Last month, Science Daily reported on computer simulations at Northwestern University.  Results showed that our solar system is “pretty special” to have ended up with nice, stable rocky planets in nearly circular orbits inside the habitable zone.  Even assuming that planets can coalesce from a dust disk, most of the time wild things happen: the star eats up the planets, the large bodies fling the small bodies out of the system, and the remaining ones end up with elongated orbits that would prohibit life.  Out of a hundred runs on “very powerful computers,” none of the systems ended up like ours except under Goldilocks conditions – ones that were “just right.”  The senior author of the report commented on what they learned: “We ... know that the solar system is special and understand at some level what makes it special.”

What we see in the above examples are destructive processes, not creative ones.  The creative ones exist only in the minds of the scientists and in their contrived models.  It may make someone feel good to imagine worlds forming naturally.  It may conform with their world view: an evolving universe, full of evolving stars, with evolving planets, on which life emerges and evolves.  Everything happens naturally (whatever that ambiguous word means).  If it feels good, call it a belief.  Science, however, demands we stick with observations that are measurable and repeatable.  Thomas Kuhn would look at the number of anomalies in current models and predict a paradigm shift.  Sidney Harris would look at the number of miracles inserted into the models and draw a cartoon.
    There are numerous problems with solar system formation theories we have addressed before (e.g., 03/21/2006, 08/06/2004, 02/03/2004, 09/22/2003, 11/20/2002).  This time, notice primarily that there is no way to distinguish between whether we are seeing planets forming out of dust disks, or pre-existing planets grinding down into dust disks.  The latter would seem to comport better with well-known processes of thermodynamics and probability.  Dust particles lack the gravitational mass to accrete and grow.  It is much more plausible that disks erode into dust rather than self-assemble into planets.
    Simplistic models need not apply.  Chondrules, comets, and coincidences that make life possible must be explained with observation, measurement and repeatable experiments.  A model is not evidence.  One cannot assume what needs to be proved.  Let the scientific empiricist show his evidence; until then, we must classify planet formation theory what it is thus far: a belief, not a science.
Next headline on:  Solar System

Designed for Health   09/24/2008    
Sept 24, 2008 — Recent science reports on physiology and health contain suggestions of intelligent design as well as challenges to evolutionary theory.

1. “Amazingly elegant, amazingly precise and very complicated” kidneys:  Scientists studying the effects of hypertension on kidneys have found that ATP acts not only as an energy source but an extracellular messenger.  It’s involved in helping arterioles constrict to the right size in the glomeruli where the filtering of blood plasma takes place.  According to Science Daily, one team member who is “trying to figure out how this all fits together” was struck by the “amazingly elegant, amazingly precise and very complicated” processes involved.
2. Bee nice:  The thought of a bee sting makes us shiver, but honeybee venom contains a molecule scientists can use to study hypertension.  Science Daily reported that a molecule called terpianin can restrict the flow of potassium ions out of a particular membrane channel.  This may allow medicines to adjust the level of salt reabsorption by kidney cells, and thus treat high blood pressure.
3. Got stem cells?  Scientists have found a source of multipotent stem cells right on the cell walls of blood vessels.  Science Daily reported that these adult stem cells apparently have the “unlimited potential to differentiate into human tissues such as bone, cartilage and muscle.”  Advances in regenerative medicine are within sight with this discovery.  One researcher described what may be soon be possible: “These cells can be extracted easily and painlessly from convenient sources such as fat tissue, dental pulp, umbilical cord and placental tissue, then grown in culture to large numbers and, possibly, re-injected into the patient to heal a broken bone, a failing joint or an injured muscle.”  The ingredients have been right inside you all along.
4. Clear eyes:  “Every tissue has evolved unique adaptations that allow it to perform specialized functions.” began a paper in PNAS.¹  “Such adaptations are especially evident in the lens of the mammalian eye, where many of the usual cellular metabolic pathways have been sacrificed to achieve one overriding goal: transparency.”  The paper explained that one of the aquaporins (membrane water channels, 12/20/2001, 04/18/2002) in lens cells acts slower than others in its family.  That slow flow in aquaporin AQP0, though, has a function: “We hypothesize that the structural features leading to low permeability may have evolved in part to allow AQP0 to form junctions that both conduct water and contribute to the organizational structure of the fiber cell tissue and microcirculation within it, as required to maintain transparency of the lens.”

The references to evolution in the PNAS paper are useless.  As is so typical, the Darwinspeak provides only an aftermarket narrative gloss on the scientific content so as to preserve the philosophy of naturalism.  Evolution doesn’t perform any function in the body of scientific knowledge.  It’s like a tumor.  Human brains and science will be much healthier after undergoing a radical Darwinectomy.*
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body • Intelligent Design

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*CEH radiation therapy, with its gentle non-invasive beams of truth, is known to be a relatively painless and effective alternative treatment for shrinking Darwin tumors, provided the patient continues exposure on a regular basis.

A reader wrote in: “I’d already had my radical Darwinectomy years ago.  But I can personally vouch for the ongoing medicinal benefits of regular doses of CEH radiation therapy to help purge any residual evolutionary cancer.  And it’s great for the heart, too (Proverbs 17:22).” – a PhD biologist in Australia who was a former atheist.

Neanderthals have always been treated like the poor relation in the human family.  From the recognition of the first partial skeleton from Feldhofer, Germany, in 1856, Neanderthals made scientists uneasy.  Initially they were viewed as too physically apelike to fit into Homo sapiens and too brutishly primitive to have been capable of modern human behavior.  Now, new information on Neanderthal adaptations has come from Gibraltar, an island where an adult Neanderthal cranium and pieces of a Neanderthal child’s skull were found previously.  As reported in this issue of PNAS, evidence from Vanguard and Gorham’s caves indicates that Neanderthals used unexpectedly modern and complex subsistence strategies.

Paleoanthropologists currently debate whether any set of attributes of material culture can distinguish between modern and archaic human behavior.  In particular, McBrearty and Brooks challenge the paradigm that there was an abrupt “human revolution” ~40,000 years ago in Europe that marked the invasion of modern humans and the onset of modern behavior (but see ref. 16 for another view).  In Gibraltar, Neanderthals and modern humans apparently shared similar or identical “modern” subsistence practices at ~28,000, yet Neanderthals were clearly outside of the range of morphological and genetic variability of modern humans.²  If behavior did not separate “us” (modern humans) from “them” (Neanderthals), what did?

The answers aren’t elusive at all.  It’s only evolutionary blinders that obscure the obvious to those who refuse to see.  Creationists aren’t surprised.  They feel vindicated
    The whole human evolution story is a farce.  Think about this, for starters: now that we know Neanderthals were the mental equivalents of modern humans, evolutionists would have us believe that these people lived among and hunted all the big mammals for over 100,000 years – ten times all recorded human history – and in all that time never learned to ride a horse (11/09/2007, 08/16/2008) or plant a farm or build a city.  Is that even remotely credible?  Even when “modern humans” showed up 30,000 years ago it supposedly took them 22,000 years to figure it out.  Does that match anything you know about our curious, inventive species?  In the Darwin paleofantasyland scenario (02/22/2008), some lucky mutation must have just switched on abstract language (02/21/2008), architecture and agriculture out of nowhere (02/22/2008), because archaeology shows these abilities full blown from the start.  Who can believe the evolutionary tales any longer?  Look how goofy they can get (see 05/29/2008, 05/02/2008, 10/28/2007).
    The next day after Shipman’s commentary, National Geographic News tried to do damage control.  Their article repeated the same fictional plot line, this time with feeling: “Neanderthals and modern humans are distinct species that split from a common ancestor several hundred thousand years ago.”  This was followed by “Test your Neanderthal knowledge with our online quiz,” which being interpreted, means, “Let’s make sure your indoctrination level is safe before we reveal the next admission.”  This was followed by an astonishing backtrack:

Why modern humans thrived and Neanderthals ultimately failed has long been a topic of scientific intrigue, and previous research had suggested that the ability to exploit marine resources was one of the defining characteristics for the success of modern humans.
    But the new research may eliminate sophisticated foraging skills from the list of potential advantages unique to humans.
    “I don’t think that the success of one or the other had to do with subsistence, with the way they hunted or fed,” Finlayson said.
    “There may be other factors coming into this, or it may just have been a question of luck.”

Emphasize that word intrigue (def: “to accomplish or force by crafty plotting or underhand machinations”).  Pay attention: this quote is a complete admission of ignorance.  “It could be this factor, it could be that factor, it could be Lady Luck”  (cf. 03/18/2008).  What kind of scientific explanation is that?  Attributing events to chance is no better than appealing to the Stuff Happens Law (see 09/15/2008 commentary).  A cartoon on EvidentCreation (2nd cartoon) illustrates the principle.  Ignorance is not science, even if you use the methods of science to explore the extent of your ignorance.  What does the word science mean?  Knowledge.  The know-nothings (02/22/2008) have no claim on science, white lab coats notwithstanding (cf. 05/06/2008).  The Darwin diviners (07/26/2008 commentary) only surpass the Babylonians in the sophistication of their ignorance.
    The BBC News tried to rescue a bad situation in their report with a quote from Chris Stringer [Natural History Museum, London]: “So there still is an element of superiority,” [Where!?]  “but it is a much more finely balanced one now” [What!?]  “This is yet another difference that had been proposed between Neanderthals and moderns which now disappears.”  That’s falsification, folks!  Where is that finely-balanced superiority they just talked about?  It just disappeared, along with their credibility.  Again, no remorse, and no repentance for their entrenched fossil racism.
    Live Science quoted Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum as a spoiler: “Deep down there is this idea that modern humans are cognitively superior and therefore able to outcompete Neanderthals.  I suppose we’ve thrown a bit of a spanner in the works by showing that Neanderthals were doing exactly the same thing.”  Of course, he wasn’t surprised, he said.  He’s been arguing for many years that Neanderthals “were as intelligent as modern humans with similar behaviors.”  OK, so how exactly are the Darwinians supposed to run that flag up the pole?  Big help he is.  This is the same guy who told NG the modern humans won out by chance – not by natural selection.  This abandons any grounds for making human evolution a theory based on laws of nature; it reduces to the Stuff Happens Law.
    The rest of National Geographic’s too-little-too-late article resorts to the usual evolutionist misdirection tactic of handing out promissory notes for evolutionary futureware:

To resolve the issue, Marean recommends a systematic comparison of Neanderthal and human seafood collection at sites with similar availability.
    “Were Neanderthals [exploiting seafood] like we expect they would if they were modern?  And if they weren’t, then the question is: Why?” he said.
    “We could be getting into something interesting there, for sure.”

Veddyyy inteddesting, yah, foor shoor.  Do you get angry at admissions like this?  You should.  Think how much damage has been done by the Neanderthal myth.  For over a century, school children have been indoctrinated into a vision that Neanderthals were some kind of pre-modern, human-but-not-quite product of evolution that the superior moderns (like us and the Europeans) knocked out of the race.  Countless posters, artist reconstructions, museum dummies and TV specials have told and re-told this myth for decades.  National Geographic Magazine has been one of the worst repeat offenders.  Where is their shame?  Any sign of remorse?  None whatsoever.  They still portray their organization as a beacon of scientific knowledge, leading us into a glorious future of understanding our origins.
    Neanderthal Man was one of the last in the famous parade of hominids leading to the ultimate product, us.  The iconic evolutionary march of progress to Thoroughly Modern Man (and Millie) has been the subject of countless cartoons.  But it’s not funny.  This has been bad science.  It has been perpetrated with an agenda to make evolutionary philosophy appear scientific.  Now, after all that propaganda, they ask, if behavior did not separate “us” from “them,” what did?  The answer is obvious.  Nothing!
    Imagine the myths that could have been spun with the bones of living humans from differing parts of the world.  Put a Watusi skeleton next to an Eskimo in the Museum of Man, and just imagine the yarns you could spin.  That is basically what has happened here.  Extreme members of the same species have been put side by side, and a fictional fable has been foisted on the unsuspecting for over a century.  Long ago it was noted that you could give a shave and a suit to a Neanderthal Man, have him walk down a New York sidewalk, and nobody would notice, even without the shave.
    It’s not science that led culture down this primrose path.  It was the Darwinians – those usurping materialists who have a psychological need to force every bit of evidence into a moyboy (09/16/2005) scheme of progress from particles to people via mindless, undirected, purposeless natural processes of evolution.  They are a blight on science.  Real scientists, who find cures for disease and peer into the workings of the cell, and explore space and seek to understand the laws of physics and chemistry that bring us technological advances – God bless them all – owe nothing to these pretenders.  Like parasites, the Darwinians sap the resources of their host and use it for their own advantage.  And did you notice?  These are the same people who most vehemently breathe fire against the scientists who actually have the resources to explain the origin of life and human history (the creationists).
    Let this fact melt into the folds of your cerebrum: the Darwinians were wrong again for 150 years! – just like they have been wrong about the origin of life, the fossil record, and the genetic code.  What major discovery did not hit them like a complete surprise? (the DNA code, the complexity of the cell, Mendel’s laws, the Cambrian explosion, living fossils, “convergent evolution” everywhere, to name a few examples).  What prediction did they make that has not been falsified? (e.g., molecular phylogeny, ease of self-assembly of molecules into a cell, unlimited genetic variation, evolution of the horse, life on Mars, and much more – read the back issues).  Their scientific theory is all vaporware and futureware.  Their scientific method is just-so storytelling (02/22/2008).  Their list of scientific accomplishments is a list of failures and deflated hype – a growing midden of discarded ideas, piling up and stinking to high heaven.  Their scientific legacy is a ghastly record of intolerance, arrogance, destructive doctrines and crimes against humanity.  How can real scientists stand being associated with these incorrigible miscreants?  (miscreant, n., adj.: depraved, behaving badly, scoundrel, reprobate.)  What have they done for you lately, you true scientists out there?  They are destroying your good reputation.
    Take Darwin and evolution and the Victorian myth of progress out of the 19th century, and what might have happened?  Creationists would have looked at the robust skeletons dug up from the field of Christian hymnwriter Joachim Neander (see 10/26/2001), and interpreted them as fully human without a blink.  Creationist historians would have fit them into Biblical history after Babel, looking into the Table of Nations for clues.  Creationist geneticists would have recognized the propensity for exaggeration of features with inbreeding of family groups.  Creationist anatomists (like Jack Cuozzo) would theorize that the skeletons represented long-lived humans, just like the Bible said existed around the time of the Flood.  Creationist geologists would have not been misled by myths about humans evolving from apes over millions of years, and so would have felt no pressure to fit these humans into a long, stretched-out timeline.  Creationist anthropologists would not have called it “startling” to find them using the same hunting and subsistence strategies as other tribes at Gibraltar.  Who would have been more correct?  Who would have felt more comfortable with the evidence?  The fate of the evolutionist is to be constantly startled by facts that don’t fit their plot line.
    Stop calling our ancient dead forebears Neanderthals – they were people.  Stop the “us” vs “them” racist rhetoric; they were our brothers.  This final collapse of the evolutionary Neanderthal Myth should arouse a call for accountability.  Americans are all up in arms right now about high-profile managers of money funds who mismanaged affairs terribly, causing major economic catastrophes, yet profited by their misdeeds to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in salaries and pensions.  The evolutionists should pay for what they have done.  It’s time to defrock them of their white lab coats, charge them with impersonating a scientist (09/30/2007) and send them packing.  Don’t let them say that science is marching on and correcting itself.  This was a painful, totally unnecessary, 150-year detour.  Don’t let them say more research will figure it out.  They cannot be trusted any more.  Don’t let them say this is just how science works.  Science is supposed to be a search for the truth.  Don’t let them say this was just an academic correction.  It seduced the minds of millions of school children.  It destroyed people’s faith.  It was all lies, lies, lies!  Citizens who love science should get really angry right about now.
    Channel that righteous anger into constructive action – like cleaning house at the Science Academy.  One effective method is to cut off the flow of money for evolutionary research and other oxymorons.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils • Dating Methods • Evolutionary Theory

Abscission is a physiological process that involves the programmed separation of entire organs, such as leaves, petals, flowers, and fruit.  Abscission allows plants to discard nonfunctional or infected organs, and promotes dispersion of progeny.  At the cellular level, abscission is the hydrolysis of the middle lamella of an anatomically specialized cell layer, the abscission zone (AZ), by cell wall-modifying and hydrolyzing enzymes.  Thus, abscission requires both the formation of the AZ early in the development of a plant organ and the subsequent activation of the cell separation response.

Multiple gene products, including potential signaling ligands, membrane receptors, protein kinase cascades, regulators of hormone responses, and transcription factors have been implicated in the regulation of abscission in plants.  We have demonstrated, by several different lines of evidence, that there is a signaling cascade (Fig. 5B), from putative ligand (IDA) to receptors (HAE HSL2) to cytoplasmic effectors (MKK4, MKK5, MPK3, and MPK6), which function together to control cell separation during abscission.  Additional gene products are also likely to play important roles in abscission and the relationships between them and the signaling pathway outlined here remain to be determined.  However, based on the genetic interactions between IDA, HAE, HSL2, MKK4, and MKK5, it seems that this core signaling cascade is an important regulator of floral abscission.

The autumn leaves drift by my window,
The autumn leaves of red and gold;
I dream of genes and MAPK modules,
Of signal pathways yet scarcely told.

When evolutionists continue to proclaim glib generalities about how plants evolved this and animals evolved that, it’s essential to look in detail at some of the structures and processes they’re talking about.  Even something as common as leaf fall is not simple.  The plant has to sense the time of year.  It has to signal the nucleus to translate genes and produce the right proteins in the right quantities.  These form a cascade of signals, with feedback loops, that instigate changes in cell adhesion.  The right cells have to start separating in the right order.  Simultaneously, the photosynthetic organs have to shut down.  The changes in pigments have to be expressed to provide plant protection (10/27/2007).  The stems have to weaken so the leaves will drop only when the plant has enough resources for the coming winter.  These are just a few considerations behind the programmed, coordinated, environmentally-responsive genetic program devoted just to this one operation.
    The PhysOrg article tried to explain why leaves fall.  “Aged leaves, for example, may be shed to facilitate the recycling of nutrients, ripening fruits dropped to promote seed dispersal and infected or diseased floral organs discarded to prevent the spread of disease.”  Whoa... that’s teleology-talk.  Stop right there on that first suggestion.  How could a tree plan its own recycling program?  After the leaves have dropped, the nutrients are gone.  They’re lying on the ground.  it doesn’t make any sense to say that the plant facilitated a recycling program, nor that it was trying to promote its own seed dispersal, or trying to prevent the spread of disease.  The plant is a brainless machine programmed with these functions.  If you don’t believe computers can emerge and program themselves, then plants cannot do such things, either.  Such subtle personification fallacies are ubiquitous in evolutionary literature.  Plants do these things because they were programmed to do them.
    Many questions remain.  How does the whole plant know to change color all at once?  Since abscission also relates to fruit and seed dispersal, how does the abscission program know when the seed ripening program has completed?  How do the stems on maple seeds loosen at precisely the time when the seeds, that work like marvelous propellers in the wind, are ready to fly?  Let’s teach our kids to see beyond the surface properties of nature into its marvelous secrets.  This is good inoculation against dogmas that would have them believe complex programmed operations just happen.
    Suggested visual resources: Journey of Life and Wonders of God’s Creation from Moody Video, and Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution from Exploration Films.  Or, take a walk in the woods for a 360-degree, surround-sound demonstration.
Next headline on:  Plants • Genetics • Amazing Facts

Questioning Earth’s Privileges   09/20/2008    
Sept 20, 2008 — Two articles this week downplayed considerations that would make the Earth seem like a special place in the universe.  Both have ties to NASA.
    Are life-friendly stars limited to a narrow band in the galaxy called the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ)?  NASA-supported Astrobiology Magazine cast doubt on the idea.  Citing a study by a doctoral student at the University of Washington, the article claims stars can migrate in the galactic disk and end up at radial distances very far from where they formed.  If that is true, it must not be a requirement for a star to be in the GHZ to obtain the heavy elements necessary for rocky planets and life.
    The article does not mention the work of Guillermo Gonzalez (a former U of Washington assistant professor) who proposed the GHZ, but references at the end of the article point to a 2001 entry on Astrobiology Magazine that entertained his GHZ hypothesis as a “very, very interesting idea.”  Since then, many remember, Gonzalez was “expelled” from Iowa State (05/22/2007, bullet 5), for his involvement with the intelligent design movement – in particular, his co-authorship of an ID book The Privileged Planet (06/24/2004) and appearance in a documentary of the same name.
    Gonzalez never suggested that the radial extent of the GHZ was well constrained.  In Privileged Planet, he used it as just one of many cosmic “coincidences” that suggest the universe is designed to permit scientific discovery.
    On a related subject, Edna DeVore asked on Space.com “How rare is the Earth?”  She didn’t answer the question.  Instead, as co-investigator for the upcoming Kepler mission that will search for earth-like planets, she encouraged citizens to write NASA an email that will be placed on the spacecraft.  Anyone can submit a 500-word statement about the search for planets like Earth”  DeVore (who is also Director of Education and Outreach for the SETI Institute) did not mention anything about Johannes Kepler, for whom the mission is named.  Though interested in the possibility of other inhabited worlds, Kepler was a strong Protestant Christian who would most likely have stood with Gonzalez arguing that our world was intelligently designed.

This new NASA propaganda article is a weak response to the GHZ hypothesis.  For one thing, it is a half-truth as a counter-argument.  The abundance of heavy elements only applied to the outer edge of the GHZ.  The inner edge may have plenty of heavy elements, but it has other problems – radiation, collisions and no clear view of the cosmos.  In addition, the article did nothing to constrain the locales where a star could get its heavy elements.  Presumably there is still a GHZ outside of which stars could not gather enough heavy elements for rocky planets.
    Even if one were to grant that stars can migrate radially, it does not eliminate or reduce the argument for intelligent design of the Earth.  Assume for the moment the evolutionist’s timeline and origin stories.  One has to ask why our planet’s location just “happens” to be at a prime location between the spiral arms for an unobstructed view of the distant universe just in time for the rise of modern science to take advantage of the situation.
    The GHZ argument is not a clincher by itself.  It is one of a number of independent evidences that collectively point to the reasonableness of the design explanation.  Watch the film to see how the combined evidence makes a compelling case that even materialists like Paul Davies and Robert Jastrow could not ignore.
    DeVore needs to watch it, too.  She parroted the typical Copernican myth: “It’s been about four centuries since Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo began to displace the Earth from the center of the universe,” she claimed.  “Less than one hundred years ago, we discovered that the sun was not near the center either, and that the Milky Way galaxy was just one of billions of galaxies and that the universe has no center.”  Not only is this a misrepresentation of the views of three great Christian theists, it is a distortion of the Copernican revolution.  Watch the film and you will learn why.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Stars and Galaxies • Cosmology • SETI • Intelligent Design

Makes perfect sense.  Conservatives are more likely to be alert, sober, clothed and in their right minds.  That’s why the liberal participants were cool and loose with scientists wasting their tax money on dumb projects.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Dumb Ideas

Ant What it Used to Be   09/18/2008    
Sept 18, 2008 — A new species of subterranean ant discovered in Brazil is so weird, biologists have classified it as the sole representative of a new subfamily.  The alien creature has been whimsically named Martialis heureka: “the ant from Mars.”  An article about it in Nature News said, “It adds a new branch to the ant family tree which split off from the others extremely early in the family’s evolution.”  Trouble is, it doesn’t look anything like a wasp, from which ants supposedly evolved (see picture on National Geographic).
    This has thrown ideas of ant evolution into a bit of a quandary.  Christian Rabeling, the discoverer, found that this ant did not fit into the existing taxonomy.  Scientists are calling this a relict species of a sister family they have named Martialis.  The original paper in PNAS says, “On the basis of morphological and phylogenetic evidence we suggest that these specialized subterranean predators are the sole surviving representatives of a highly divergent lineage that arose near the dawn of ant diversification and have persisted in ecologically stable environments like tropical soils over great spans of time.”  That makes it essentially a living fossil.  “Like the duck-billed platypus is to mammals,” explained Nature News, “it’s clearly a cousin to other ants, yet a weird and ancestral version that took its own evolutionary direction early on.”  This must be what the title of the paper means when it says the discovery “sheds light on early ant evolution.”
    A look inside the paper, though, reveals a few problems with the confident assertions about evolution:

A robust phylogeny is indispensable for elucidating the evolutionary origin of ants and for exploring the selective forces that have produced their extraordinary specializations.  Previously published studies, however, led to contradicting views of early ant evolution, in part because of high levels of morphological convergence, the secondary loss of characters, and a lack of informative paleontological data.  As a result, numerous taxa have been proposed as the most basal lineage.

Our phylogenetic analyses, combined with the inferred biology of M.  heureka, suggest that the most basal extant ant lineages are cryptic, hypogaeic foragers, rather than wasp-like, epigaeic foragers (Fig. 3).  This finding is congruent with recent molecular studies, which previously suggested the Leptanillinae, another subfamily of subterranean predators, to be sister lineage to all extant ants.  This result has puzzled ant systematists for two reasons.  First, Wilson et al.’s classic study of the Mesozoic amber ant Sphecomyrma postulated that the ancestral ant was a large-eyed, wasp-like, ground forager, creating a strong expectation that the most basal extant ant lineages would also be epigaeic foragers, presumably similar to Sphecomyrma.  Second, the Leptanillinae [blind foragers in Africa] share common morphological and behavioral characteristics with the Amblyoponinae, implying the monophyly of this group.  In contrast, our results and recent molecular systematic studies suggest that blind, subterranean, specialized predators, like Martialis, the Leptanillinae, and some poneroids, evolved early during ant diversification.  We hypothesize, that once these hypogaeic predators adapted to their specialized subterranean environment, their morphology and biology changed little over evolutionary time because their hypogaeic habitat has likely been ecologically stable and provided a refuge from competition with other, more recently evolved, ants.  It is important to note that no definitive statement about the morphology and life history of the ancestral, Mesozoic ant can be derived from our current knowledge about the surviving basalmost ant lineages, because the relative probabilities of evolutionary transitions between epigaeic and hypogaeic habits are uncertain.

We can suggest some other studies of other groups where evolutionists could import this lesson: how about the Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae and Animalia? (the five kingdoms of taxonomy).
    The discoverers put their weird little ant in a jar, but maybe the scientists need to be put in one, because Martialis “jars us out of going with our familiar conceptions,” Cover said.  While they’re safely in a jar out of harm’s way (unable to harm us, that is), let’s hunt for more rainforest species with great evolutionary importance.  Jarring evolutionists is fun.  Every new discovery jars them into realizing their neat little schemes are wrong.  They’re like blind hypogaeic foragers, digging around in their own dirt, thinking every new surprise is shedding light on evolution.
    That phrase – “Shed[ding] light on evolution” – yields thousands of hits on Google.  We’ve examined dozens of those claims right here.  Can you remember one that has turned up a single photon?  The truth is they are walking in a darkness of their own making.  The light they need to see is the flashing red stop light next to the “Wrong Way” sign they missed back in 1859.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Evolutionary Theory

Is Dinosaur Diversity an Artifact of Headline-Hunting?   09/17/2008    
Sept 17, 2008 — Many dinosaurs classed as different species are actually the same animal with different names, a publication of the Royal Society announced.  Read two news reports on this, however, and you will get two different opinions about how serious the problem is.
    Rex Dalton in Nature News sounded the alarm: “One hundred and thirty-five years of questionable judgments, some driven by a lust for headlines, have left dinosaur nomenclature in disarray, according to two new studies.”  His article, “In search of Thingummyjigosaurus,” claims that nearly half the names given to dinosaurs have errors.  “The high error rate is not just a problem for fossil hunters; it is a warning that scientists should take extra precautions when identifying new species as they assess modern biodiversity, too, says [Michael] Benton.”  Benton [U of Bristol], author of one of the studies, said “It is a bit scary” to think that there are so many misnamed species.  16% of dinosaur names are duplicates, the study found, and another 32% have other classification problems.
    The BBC News downplayed the seriousness of the problems.  It says most of the errors were made by self-promoting headline seekers in the early years of dinosaur hunting; “My research suggests we’re getting better at naming things; we’re being more critical; we’re using better material,” Benton told the BBC.  Another source of error has been the fragmentary nature of the evidence.  Paleontologists often have to classify a fossil based on just a hip or leg bone or vertebra.  In spite of these difficulties, “modern practice is now very good,” the BBC claimed.
    Still, the BBC acknowledged that the ramifications of bad classification can be serious.  “There’s no point somebody such as myself doing big statistical analyses of numbers of dinosaur species through time – or indeed any other fossil group – if you can’t be confident that they really are genuinely different,” Benton told the BBC.  Accuracy is important for all biodiversity studies.  “People have also been looking at our current knowledge of mammals and insects and other animal groups and asking the simple question: are the species totals and lists we use for important conclusions – including to give political advice about endangered species – are they correct?” Benton asked.  “There’s been a big debate about vast extinctions among amphibians.  We have to know what the species are first, before we can talk about that.”

This is the inverse of a long-lost cartoon.  A museum curator in Mexico shows a patron the skull of Montezuma.  Another smaller skull nearby prompts a question about whose it was.  “That,” the curator announces confidently, “is the skull of Montezuma as a little boy.”  There was a case of classifying two individuals as one man.  This is a case of classifying like objects as different species.  Think of the fun they could have with dogs and cats.
    Classification is a human game.  Classification can have impact on human psyches and politics.  Remember that when you see a Thingummyjigosaurus in the museum, it might just be a Artifactofnomenclaturasaurus by another name.  But make no mistake.  That Bullfrogus headlineus in the path of construction is an endangered species.  Quick, pass a law!
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Politics and Ethics

Life is that which replicates and evolves.  The origin of life is also the origin of evolution.  A fundamental question is when do chemical kinetics become evolutionary dynamics?  Here, we formulate a general mathematical theory for the origin of evolution.  All known life on earth is based on biological polymers, which act as information carriers and catalysts.  Therefore, any theory for the origin of life must address the emergence of such a system.  We describe prelife as an alphabet of active monomers that form random polymers.  Prelife is a generative system that can produce information.  Prevolutionary dynamics have selection and mutation, but no replication.  Life marches in with the ability of replication: Polymers act as templates for their own reproduction.  Prelife is a scaffold that builds life.  Yet, there is competition between life and prelife.  There is a phase transition: If the effective replication rate exceeds a critical value, then life outcompetes prelife.  Replication is not a prerequisite for selection, but instead, there can be selection for replication.  Mutation leads to an error threshold between life and prelife.

• We assume, for simplicity, that all sequences grow in one direction.
• At first, we assume that the active monomers are in a steady state.
• For “supersymmetric” prelife, we assume that a₀ = a₁ = alpha/2, and a_i = a for all other i.
• Let us now assume that some sequences can act as a templates for replication.
• Fig. 3 shows the competition between life (replication) and prelife.  We assume a random prelife landscape where the a_i values are taken from a uniform distribution between 0 and 1.  All sequences of length n = 6 have the ability to replicate.
• All fundamental equations of evolutionary and ecological dynamics assume replication, but here, we have explored the dynamical properties of a system before replication and the emergence of replication.

We have proposed a mathematical theory for studying the origin of evolution.  Our aim was to formulate the simplest possible population dynamics that can produce information and complexity.  We began with a “binary soup” where activated monomers form random polymers (binary strings) of any length (Fig. 1).  Selection emerges in prelife, if some sequences grow faster than others (Fig. 2).  Replication marks the transition from prelife to life, from prevolution to evolution.  Prelife allows a continuous origin of life.  There is also competition between life and prelife.  Life is selected over prelife only if the replication rate is greater than a certain threshold (Fig. 3).  Mutation during replication leads to an error threshold between life and prelife. Life can emerge only if the mutation rate is less than a critical value that is proportional to the inverse of the sequence length (Fig. 4).  All fundamental equations of evolutionary and ecological dynamics assume replication, but here, we have explored the dynamical properties of a system before replication and the emergence of replication.

Have you ever in your life come across a more bold, bald collection of highfalutin nonsense than this?  You can’t just make up words and assume what needs to be proved in an argument.  You can’t just help yourself to concepts foreign to your worldview and manipulate them mathematically to guarantee the outcome you want.  If we were to follow their example, we could prove anything.  Let’s demonstrate the evolution of gnomes, for example.

PreGnome Dynamics and the Origin of Garden Gnomes

Gnomes are beings that inhabit gardens and hide under toadstools.  Here, we formulate a general mathematical theory for the origin of gnome.  All known gnomes are made of terracotta and are found in gardens.  Therefore, any theory for the origin of gnomes must address the emergence of such a system.  We describe pregnome as an alphabet of terracotta ostracons that form random shapes.  Pregnome is a generative system that can produce gnome parts.  Pregnome dynamics have selection and mutation, but no replication.  Gnomeness marches in with the ability of replication; Ostracons act as templates for their own replication.  Pregnomeness is a scaffold that builds gnomes.

You get the idea.  When you weren’t looking, they snuck in design concepts like information, competition, error, scaffolds, templates and information carriers.  Well, of course!  With a hole that big in the intransigent walls of chemistry, no wonder life just marches in (09/04/2008).
    The flaws in this exercise are legion.  They envisioned polymers as simple as binary digits (1's and 0's) that somehow can be “activated” and join up into chains.  They claimed that any random string of binary digits carries information.  They claimed that life is merely something that replicates and evolves.  Well, fire does that.  It replicates rapidly.  It evolves, too.  Feed it some different elements and it will turn all kinds of colors.  It adapts to the environment.  According to their definition, it must be alive.  In this land of made-up words, we can call an oil spill prefire.  They considered anything that outnumbers something else as having been “selected” without any consideration of whether it can do anything, like breathe or eat or move or write sonnets.  According to their definition, natural selection selects bubbles in soapy water, and favors ice over dew on your windshield when the temperature drops.
    Here is your tax money at work.  This paper was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.  Japanese people will be honored to know that funding also came from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.  Those interested in the interaction between science and religion will also get a warm feeling in their hearts to learn that this bit of secularist, materialist, mechanistic propaganda was supported by the John Templeton Foundation.  We hope the atheists at Nature will give the Foundation a pass this time (08/28/2008).
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Notice how rarely the scientists ever address the age question.  It seems hard to believe that interactions this delicate and dynamic could persist for billions of years.  Before spacecraft got there, scientists expected things to be simple and stable and old.  Things like ring arcs, thousands of ringlets, ring spokes and ring collisions caught them by complete surprise.  Why are they silent on the question about whether such phenomena could last that long?  As with biological evolution, the answers are worded as vague promissory notes: “Understanding these interactions and learning about their origins can help us to make sense of what we are seeing in the Cassini images.”  They need help, all right, especially with sense.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Looking for Laws to Make Darwinism Scientific   09/15/2008    
Sept 15, 2008 — Science needs natural laws.  Darwinian laws that have been put forward by evolutionists contain so many exceptions and complexities, they seem to have a bad case of physics envy.

1. Coping with Cope’s Rule:  Evolution tends to make animals larger over time – except when it makes them smaller.  In Science,¹ Kaustuv Roy lamented the perils of this principle that animals evolve toward largeness, known as Cope’s rule.  It has some examples but plenty of exceptions.  If Cope’s rule were a law of nature, wouldn’t we find lots of giants?  “Instead, most species tend to be small to intermediate in size, with few in the smallest and largest size classes.”
2. Bergmann’s suggestion:  Maybe Cope’s rule is offset by a competing principle.  This happens sometimes in physics when two forces compete with each other.  Bergmann’s rule says that animals grow larger in colder climates.  Polar bears grow larger than black bears, for instance.  Again, this is too simplistic, Roy argues:

   Translating these “rules” into predictions about trajectories of size evolution is not straightforward.  If bigger really is better, then we should have a world full of giants, yet most species are small.  Clearly there are costs to getting bigger, which prevent a runaway Cope’s rule.  Such costs involve complex interactions among a multitude of factors including development time, population size, and patterns of resource use.  In addition, the temperature-size rule [Bergmann’s rule] suggests that the external environment, which changes in a complex and nonlinear manner over geologic time, is also important in driving size evolution.  So, not surprisingly, simple process-based models of size evolution (such as one based on energetics) have not been widely accepted.

   As if that weren’t complex enough, “There is also the problem of scaling up from observations at the population level to macroevolutionary trends in size,” he said.  It is unclear whether models built on samples from a few generations (living or extinct) will hold up “across geographically separated populations and macroevolutionary time.”  The uncertainty about these “rules” of body size evolution make it difficult to quantify the apparent influence humans are having on large animals today.
3. Extinction rules or rules going extinct?  Three Turkish scientists brought up problems with measuring extinctions.  There are no agreed-on measures of how “great” an extinction event was.  Writing in PNAS,² they said that even since Cuvier proposed multiple catastrophes, and on through the time of Lyell to the present, “it has remained controversial as to how completely and how fast those disappearances occurred,” they said.  “Interpretations about the nature and origin of these fluctuations in the progression of life have long been bedeviled by uncertainties as to what constitutes a mass extinction and which mass extinction is ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ than any other.”  The fact that these authors proposed a quantitative scale highlights the fact that no one had done it successfully before.  Here’s how they ended their discussion:

   Great extinctions are generally less catastrophic than widely thought: they are generally Lyellian, only exceptionally Cuvierian.  When they are Cuvierian, as the end-Cretaceous extinction so obviously was, and as the present one so alarmingly is, they stand out among the other, more mundane, Lyellian ones.  It is not profitable to study extinctions in isolation, among few taxa, in few sections and in limited time frames.  They are simply parts of one continuous evolution of the entire earth system and must be studied as such.

   And yet, aside from the admitted uncertainties and complexities of defining an extinction event and measuring its magnitude, can there really be natural laws governing events as random and unpredictable as catastrophes? 
4. Know your limits:  Evolutionists from UK and UC (University of California at Santa Cruz) pulled some reins on how much can be generalized from in vitro evolution models.  Some scientists, for instance, study populations of E. coli in a Petri dish and watch what happens when bacteriophages invade.  Can the results be generalized into laws of co-evolution?
       Writing in Nature,³ the team began by asking, “Given the difficulty of testing evolutionary and ecological theory in situ, in vitro model systems are attractive alternatives; however, can we appraise whether an experimental result is particular to the in vitro model, and, if so, characterize the systems likely to behave differently and understand why?”
       They optimistically proposed a mathematical model that was concordant with one experimental result.  So far, so good, but can that be extended to other experiments?  They provided several cases where outcomes could be very different depending on the host, the parasite, the resources, and the genetics of the system.  Their explanation for different results in different conditions seemed convincing, but their ending paragraph seemed to suggest that a model for one experiment cannot easily be extrapolated to others without auxiliary hypotheses.  These seems to make it difficult to establish any laws of co-evolution:

   Given the above explanation, it is perhaps not surprising in retrospect that what is found for T7–E. coli interactions need not be true for other biologically viable modes of host-parasite co-evolution.  These results show how appropriately framed mathematical models aligned with experimental analysis can obviate the need to presume typicality of one model within a class.

5. Contingency vs Law:  It would seem that contingency is the opposite of natural law.  Attributing events to chance is about as explanatorily useful as saying “Stuff happens.”  That’s about all that a team from the American Museum of Natural History was able to say, though, about the evolution of dinosaurs.  Writing in Science, they found that the famous “evolutionary radiation” of the dinosaurs did not follow any rule of size trends, superiority, character evolution or morphological disparity.  “The results strongly suggest that historical contingency, rather than prolonged competition or general ‘superiority,’ was the primary factor in the rise of dinosaurs.”  Stuff just happened.  Such a premise flies in the face of many a textbook and TV documentary.
       The paper was summarized by PhysOrg, which titled its article, “Luck gave dinosaurs their edge.”  Team member Steve Brusatte was quoted saying, “For a long time it was thought that there was something special about dinosaurs that helped them become more successful during the Triassic, the first 30 million years of their history, but this isn’t true.”  In the AMNH press release, team member Michael Benton said, “Many people like to think that evolution is progressive: mammals are better than dinosaurs because they came later.... So it may be hard for us to accept that dinosaurs achieved their dominant position on earth largely by chance, just as mammals did when the dinosaurs were later wiped out by a meteorite strike.”  Maybe the new phrase for Darwin should be “Survival of the luckiest.”  But, then, if fitness cannot be correlated with evolutionary success, what becomes of any Darwinian claim to having established a new law of nature?  What is natural selection selecting?  What is survival of the fittest judging as fit? 
6. Lucky information:  This list concludes with a reminder that David Deamer said this about the origin of the DNA code: “I think genetic information more or less came out of nowhere by chance assemblages of short polymers.” (See the 09/10/2008 entry.)

Soils constitute the topmost layer of the regolith, the blanket of loose rock material that covers Earth’s surface.  An open system such as soil or regolith is sustainable, or in steady state, only when components such as rock particles are removed at the same rate they are replenished.  However, soils are defined not only by rock particles but also by minerals, nutrients, organic matter, biota, and water.  These entities--each characterized by lifetimes in regolith that vary from hundreds of millions of years to minutes--are often studied by scientists from different disciplines.  If soils are to be maintained in a sustainable manner, scientists must develop models that cross these time scales to predict the effects of human impact.

In science it is fairly rare to reduce a phenomenon to simple, neat laws.  Physics has arguably been the best example – you can write the physical laws of the universe in equations on a sheet of paper – but even there, complications and difficulties arise (see 06/30/2008, for instance).  Maybe you’ve seen one of those science toys that pits gravity against magnetism: a pendulum wobbles chaotically as it tries to fall but hits magnetic repulsive forces.  The laws of gravity and electromagnetism are easily expressed mathematically, but it would be a huge challenge to predict the path of the pendulum.  How much more so when dealing with all the complex factors involved in ecology and evolution?  Don’t use the comeback, Darwinists, of the “Law of Natural Selection.”  Go re-read the entry on “Fitness for Dummies” from 10/29/2002.
    One feels a bit of pity for the evolutionary biologist doing his or her best to capture nature’s exigencies in models, equations and natural laws.  It seems a hopeless task.  Valiantly they continue on, but the above examples highlight the quandary.  One may never know all the factors that come to bear on a problem, or their relative influences, or their rates of action, or their interactions and feedbacks.  Yet the NCSE and other pro-Darwin groups constantly parade the supposed priority of evolutionary theory over design or creation on the basis of its explanatory power with reference to natural laws.  OK: show us the laws.  Can they name any one evolutionary law or rule that is not plagued by exceptions, controversy and counter-claims?  And when they have to admit that most evolution occurs without any apparent reason – the Stuff Happens Law – does that qualify as science?  Honk if you find this defense convincing:

Why the Stuff Happens Law is Scientific

• It is reductive: all events can be reduced to this law.
• It makes predictions: Stuff will happen.
• It is universal: Stuff always happens.
• It is normative, not just descriptive: Given matter in motion, stuff must happen.
• It is falsifiable: If nothing happens, the law has been disproved.
• It is practical: If something happens, you know you will find stuff around.
• Corollaries can be derived from it: e.g., Stuff happens at the worst possible time, Bad stuff happens to good people, Murphy’s Law, etc.

Impressed?  Darwin’s laws of nature are about as helpful to the understanding of nature as the Stuff Happens Law.  Your science might be healthier with a bit of Cole’s Law (i.e., thinly sliced cabbage).
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Dating Methods • Dinosaurs • Geology

Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still.  We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends.

Oh, puke.  Such obsequious prostrations to the Bearded Buddha like Brown’s apology only encourage the proliferation of dogmatism like that of the Rotten Society wigheads.  If you have connections to the UK Anglican church this is reason enough to get out.  We must point out that the apology is the opinion of one church official, not necessarily all of them, and does not necessarily represent the views of the rank and file in the dying, diminishing UK churches.  Many Anglican churches around the world operate independently of the British hierarchy.  Still, where is the outcry from other leaders and from the membership?  The silence is deafening.  It’s a default acquiescence to Brown’s views.
    The Royal Society, founded largely by Puritans, has devolved into an arm of the modern Darwinist totalitarianism, in which even mentioning the C word creationist is grounds for expulsion.  Reiss is no creationist but had the audacity to suggest it might be good policy to sentence teachers to less than the usual punishment for crimethink.  He apparently failed to remember the policy: creationists are not even worth the expenditure of their contempt (05/12/2008, bullet 5).  Aren’t you proud of the leaders of science these days.  If their intolerance can even make Dawkins squeamish (hinting that he still feels a debt somewhere to Christian virtues like fairness), you know things are rotten.  It’s time to clean house and send in the reformers.  How about Sarah Palin?
    How did it come to this?  Answer: amnesia and ingrown reinforcement of lies.  They’ve got their history all wrong.  Galileo was not a victim of faith vs science (see biography) – and especially not Darwin.  In Victorian England, the Anglicans jumped onto the Darwin bandwagon wholeheartedly.  In fact, they had jumped onto the evolutionary bandwagon when Robert Chambers published his evolutionary myth Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1845.  Darwin biographer Janet Browne noted the “remarkable flexibility of the Anglican church when faced with evolutionary issues” by pointing to Anglican theologian Charles Kingsley, who endorsed Darwin’s theory within the pages of The Origin itself (Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, p. 96; see more on Kingsley at CMI).  In addition, the Archbishop of Canterbury was defending writers like Darwin who were attacking the foundations of church doctrine.  After Darwin’s death, the Church of England welcomed his body into Westminster Abbey.  Except for a few conservative theologians like Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the main Anglican critics of Darwin’s theory were the scientists, like Sedgwick and Owen, who understood the danger of attributing God’s hand to blind, undirected process of chance (see article at CMI).
    And they’ve got their science all wrong.  Darwin subverted science by dismantling the requirements of evidence and opening the door to storytellers (12/22/2003 commentary) and empowering his fellow secularists to usurp the Academy and expel any opportunity for scientific criticism of his views (05/12/2008).
    And they’ve got their theology all wrong.  Darwin could not have employed reason, nor argued for the truth of propositions and the values of honest investigation, without plagiarizing Christian theological presuppositions that give meaning to these concepts.  Had he been consistent with his own presuppositions, he would have grunted nonsense to get meaningless sex at the mercy of his animal past.
    If the Anglicans really had faith seeking understanding, they would rewrite the statement as follows: “Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you and the world an apology for accepting your views uncritically and failing to foresee the damage that accrued to our church, culture, society, politics, law, education, philosophy, theology and general well-being of the millions of individuals your damnable doctrines relegated to the category of the unfit.  Though too late to help the 148 million people killed by state-sponsored democide under regimes inspired by your false and pretentious claims (11/30/2005), we try to practice the old virtues of ‘speaking the truth in love’ and so hope that by raising awareness of the deadly power of lies we can make some amends.”
    Leaders of other churches without hobbles and blinders on might do well to make this their official proclamation before the scientific societies parade their Emperor Charles in new clothes next year (02/11/2008).
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Bible and Theology • Education

The difference between brains and computers arises not so much in the size of the elementary computer elements as in their numbers: where a modern microprocessor chip has 10⁹ transistors, the human brain contains about 10¹⁴ [100 trillion] synapses (and a brain uses about as much power as a microprocessor).  A state of-the-art microprocessor could have close to 30 km of total wire connecting its transistors, where the brain has 3 to 4 x 10⁵ km of wire (most of which is axons).  The brain’s total wire, then, is about the same as the mean distance from the earth to the moon (a little less than 4 × 10⁵ km).  Clearly, although the sizes of the basic computer elements are not so different between brains and computers, what is vastly (a million fold) different is the number of elements.

Neural circuits have no need for a central clock to keep actions exactly synchronized because any neural circuit in the brain has its own instructions embedded in the circuit itself: whenever it is presented with information, the circuit knows just what to do with it.  Because the brain is not bound by the Von Neumann architecture, exactly what a particular neural circuit computes can be modified on the fly without reference to other circuits (as when we shift our focus of attention from one thing to another) and can also remember things for a lifetime (how to ride a bicycle).

The four times out of five that information about a nerve impulse arriving at a synapse is not relayed on to the target cell by a synapse could be viewed as errors, but in fact synapses are designed this way.  Neural circuits are highly redundant, with the same information arriving simultaneously at many synapses on different neurons so that, on average, neural components are predictable, in the same sense that a fair coin is predictable: you never know on a given flip whether heads or tails will turn up, but you can be sure that there will be very close to 500 heads out of a thousand flips.

There is a final big difference between the designs of computers and brains considered here.  Every time the performance of a computer circuit is improved, major design changes are necessary.  Even modest alterations, like modifying the thickness of the wires on the computer chip, mean the computing components on the chip must be rearranged (a very difficult process).  For evolution to work, however, neural circuits must have what is called a scalable architecture.  This means that the computing performance can be improved by simply increasing the number of components and enlarging the circuit in accordance with the original design.  Brain circuits generally have scalable architectures so that, for example, we are not even aware of the usual two to three fold differences in the size of brain areas from one brain to the next.

Now wasn’t that an absolutely satisfying, fascinating, thrilling journey into your head, and a classic look at intelligent design science at work?  Don’t show this to Eugenie Scott or she’s likely to have a cerebral hemorrhage.  How many mutations did that take?
    Wow!  Scientists admit it: the brain is built on design principles.  It is a massively parallel, robust, fault-tolerant machine that has kept the Turing Test challenge intact throughout decades of rapid, phenomenal computer design.  Its design can be compared with computers that we design – and it is far superior.  How on earth can anyone believe for a millisecond that this wonder just happened?  And consider: they didn’t tell the half of it.  The scientists vastly oversimplified things.  Your brain is handling millions of subconscious operations at the same time you are thinking about this article, or identifying a face or a CAPTCHA word.  Give a supercomputer all that simultaneous work and it would melt down.  A computer has to be plugged in or recharged, but you can wander the globe.  Your computer takes several minutes to boot up, but you can be awake and aware instantly.  It has to be protected from liquids, but you can dive into a pool with your CPU not shorting out.  And it runs on potatoes! (a favorite quip of A. E. Wilder-Smith, our Scientist of the Month).
    Think!  If “design principles” are required to understand the brain’s operation, of what purpose or value (or credibility) is evolutionary theory?  While you’re at it, think about the conundrum of a brain thinking about itself—or a brain thinking about the conundrum of a brain thinking about itself.  If some day a computer can fool a judge into thinking it is human, will that computer really be self-aware?  Will it experience love, worship, beauty, or truth?  Robots in Star Trek probe these questions, but the fact is, we design computers, and computers don’t design us (except in science fiction).
    Get real.  Think.  If design principles were active in our creation, then there was a Designer who employed those principles.  This includes the hardware and the software.  You would not be able to consciously think about anything without an embedded BiOS (Bible Input-Output System) that the Designer built in, which gives you the preconditions for intelligibility of the world.  Everyone has it.  You couldn’t run the thinking application without it.  But just as a good computer can be tricked into running malware (malicious software), a created being can be tricked into thinking its brain is a product of evolution.  That is necessarily false.  The brain could not even run that malware without the BiOS.
    When you’re infected with this deep-seated, entrenched virus, or any of the other malware that information terrorists inserted into the global shipment, the only solution is to recognize that fact, then wipe, reinstall, and patch.  Fortunately, outstanding technical support is just a call away (Isaiah 55:6-9) – and it’s free, straight from the Designer himself.  Operations Manuals are also freely available by request (see BlueLetterBible and Bible Gateway, or that book in your hotel room drawer).
    Got cycles?  Think, then thank.  Worship.  CAPTCHA the thrill of the Psalmist who exclaimed, “I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well” (Psalm 139:14, italics added).
Next headline on:  Human Body • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Data on scientific objects is always incomplete.  The explanations about them, therefore, are also necessarily incomplete.  If star death, which can be observed in a flash, is poorly understood, how about star birth which, because theory says it takes millions of years, cannot be observed from start to finish?
    Astronomers piece together stages of star birth from actual stars presumed to be at different stages.  The charts and explanations sound convincing.  One must ask, though, whether this approach assumes what needs to be proved.  Deciding that stars evolve, and then putting them into an evolutionary sequence, is circular reasoning.  We can see stars age.  We can see them die.  But we can only theorize from laws of gravity, diffusion, viscosity, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and other principles what a gas cloud would do, given millions of years.
    Stars are not irreducibly complex structures like those in biology.  They do not contain information.  It seems reasonable to trust models of star birth from well-known laws that have been amply confirmed in the lab.  There are many examples in the history of science, though, when plausible models turned out to be wrong.  Usually, the real world proves more complex than the models.  If we struggle with modeling processes that can be observed in a flash, we should at least retain a certain level of humility about scientific models of unobservable processes, and hold them in a tentative way.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Amazing Facts

Sea: the Light   09/13/2008    
Sept 13, 2008 — Some of the most abundant unicellular organisms in the ocean are diatoms.  Physicists are eagerly studying the optics of their pill-box-like shells, because they can manipulate light in surprising ways.  Imitation of diatom light tricks may lead to biosynthetic devices like improved drug delivery systems and solar cells, an article on the BBC News said.
    The “intricate designs of their silica shell walls” are not just geometrically pleasing (03/19/2002) and strong (02/19/2003) and artistically awesome (07/21/2004).  Scientists have found that they strongly diffract light.  Their optical qualities may work to spread the light evenly throughout the cell bodies of these organisms whose light-harvesting chloroplasts depend on light.  Maybe this accounts for the particular patterns on species of diatoms that come in “all shapes and sizes” and inhabit almost every body of water on the planet.
    The article speculated about the evolution of diatoms.  “Why have diatoms evolved these nanostructures?” reporter Elisabeth Mitchell asked.  The even diffusion of light seemed to offer a satisfactory explanation for her.  She added one line, though, that wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: “Nature started to evolve complex colour and light manipulating systems during the Cambrian explosion – about 500 million years ago.”
    Moving right along, Current Biology¹ mentioned another creature with a remarkable ability to respond to light – in this case, moonlight.  The creature is the Palolo worm of the South Pacific.  Foster and Roenneberg were talking about lunar effects on biological behavior when they said,

One well known example will suffice to illustrate lunar related rhythms in the animal world.  The Palolo worm (Eunice viridis) is found on several coral islands near to Samoa and the Fiji Islands.  The palolos reproduce by swarming during the last quarter of the moon in October and November.  The terminal parts of their bodies drop off and float over the surface of the water, releasing sperm and eggs.  The natives of the Samoan Islands have known this for centuries and predict the date and time of day when the emergence occurs so that they can be ready to catch the worms for food.  Studies have attempted to determine whether it is the direct effect of lunar illuminance which stimulates swarming.  This seems unlikely because cloudy or clear whether [sic] conditions have no effect on the spawning date.  Furthermore, the Palolo worm lives at depths of 3-5 metres within coral rocks, where moonlight would not easily penetrate.  Studies in an allied species of polychaete worm have demonstrated that moon-related rhythms in behaviour continue in isolation from any environmental influence.  Collectively the data suggest that the Palolo worm and other polychaete worms have an endogenous circa-lunar timer.

Human biology can be affected by the moon by intelligent design.  Didn’t Foster and Roenneberg realize that the Jews were commanded to the blow the ram’s horn each new moon?  Doesn’t the sight of a full moon generate design and purpose to sit by the lake on a date?  Isn’t the phenomenon of a lunar or solar eclipse a cause for intelligent humans to purposefully go outside and view the awesome sight?  Only when thinking of humans as biological robots can a scientist say there is no influence.  A mind with choice can do what genes alone cannot.
    Human minds can also investigate nature and appreciate the design in creatures that exhibit optical perfection and accurate timekeeping.  One might notice that diatoms and worms are among the simplest of organisms (but see 10/01/2004), lacking the brain power to plan, design and execute the systems embedded within them.  It is sad that some observers believe in implausible miracles.  There are plausible miracles, you see.  One that is implausible is that optical perfection sprung into existence in a Cambrian explosion.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Physics • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Human Body • Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

(A) A diagrammatic representation of the proposed novel pathway for photoperiodic timing in birds.  (1) The light signal enters the brain via the skull and is detected by extra-retinal, deep brain photoreceptors (2), the exact identity and location of which are not yet known.  Long day lengths induce TSH and Dio2 expression (3) in the pars tuberalis (red) and mediobasal hypothalamus, respectively, thereby causing a local increase in T₃.  This increase in T₃ is conveyed via an unknown pathway to promote the release of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) from neurons (4) in the pre-optic area.  GnRH then induces the release of gonadotropins luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) from the pituitary gland into the bloodstream to cause gonadal activation (5).  Note the lack of involvement of melatonin in this proposed pathway, even though the pineal gland in birds is light-sensitive in its own right. 

Models help unraveling the dynamics of cellular rhythms and show that sustained oscillatory behavior often corresponds, in the concentration space, to the evolution toward a closed curve known as a limit cycle.  Cycling once around this trajectory takes exactly one period.  The closed trajectory is generally unique in a given set of conditions, and is particularly stable as it can be reached regardless of initial conditions.

The ubiquity and physiological significance of biological rhythms can be illustrated by one last example, which shows how rhythms are often nested in a manner reminiscent of Russian dolls.  In the process of reproduction, several rhythms play key roles at different stages and with markedly distinct periods.  Fertilization of an egg triggers a train of Ca²⁺ [doubly ionized calcium] spikes that are essential for successful initiation of development.  Prior to these Ca²⁺ oscillations of a period of the order of minutes, ovulation requires appropriate levels of LH and FSH established through pulsatile signaling by GnRH with a period close to one hour (the response of pituitary cells to GnRH also involves high-frequency Ca²⁺ oscillations).  The ovulation cycle is itself periodic, and takes the form of the menstrual cycle in the human female.  Capping these various periodicities, in many animal species reproductive activity varies according to an annual rhythm controlled by the photoperiod, through modulation of the circadian secretion of melatonin.  In a final manifestation of the ticking of the biological clock, ovulation stops at menopause.  At the very core of life, the reproductive process highlights the deeply rooted links between rhythms and time in biological systems.

Clocks within clocks within clocks – wouldn’t William Paley be astonished.  Pay no mind to those Darwinian storytellers in the footnotes; they are assuming 99% of what they need to prove, and still scrambling to come up with plots that thinking people would not laugh at.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Birds • Amazing Facts • Evolutionary Theory

1. What’s the point?  Hanna Kokko (U of Helsinki) was interviewed in Current Biology.¹  After using an example of “how short-sighted evolution can be” to ridicule intelligent design and the “intelligence of the designer,” she was asked, “aren’t there bigger problems in the world?”  So, turning to profundity, she quoted Bertrand Russell on the value of pure research.  She then preached on the value of thinking long-term (which is ironic, considering she had just described how short-sighted evolution can be).  We ought to consider our long-term impact on the environment, she said.  That prompted a follow-up question that seemed out of place in an exclusively pro-Darwin magazine:

   But scientists surely aren’t saints themselves are they?
   No, we fly too much but at least there is a certain honesty about it: we tend to admit that.  We’re a bit as selfish as the others, but at least we get some wicked pleasure out of saying it aloud.  We ought to complain when society hasn’t established sensible rules that serve the long-term interests of people.

   Kokko did not explain how the long-term interests of people can be reconciled with the needs of the environment, or how the morality-tinged words saint, honesty, wicked and selfish entered into the Darwinian vocabulary – except with this short anecdote, hinting that she is aware of the conundrum:

   My cousins recently looked at the proofs of a popular Finnish book on evolution that I’ve coauthored.  I was perhaps expecting them to comment on my claims that evolution has something to do with our troubled relationship with the environment, or challenge my views on how we can live humanely ‘despite’ being products of natural selection.  But what they asked me was far simpler.  They were simply baffled about where I got all this information; who told me all these cool stories?

   Safely off the hook, Kokko went on to praise the value of science education, and to admire the younger generation of Finnish students, who “show a far greater acceptance of evolution than older ones” and “are also more environmentally aware.”  So we never got to hear how she reconciles moral and theological values with the short-sighted blindness of natural selection.  Would she have grounds for calling the terrorist attacks evil?

2. Superstition for better fitness:  New Scientist published an interesting twist on evolution: Darwin’s theory of natural selection helps explain why people believe nonsense.  Avoiding black cats and ladders and rubbing a rabbit’s foot are no longer moral failings, but rather adaptive strategies sustained by evolutionary forces.  Interestingly, the article refers to the work of the aforementioned Hanna Kokko, who, with colleague Kevin Foster of Harvard, “sought to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off.”  Superstition can be good for you, in other words.
       As if to pre-empt creationist ridicule for this idea, the article continued, “Rather than author just-so stories for every possible superstition – from lucky rabbit’s feet to Mayan numerology – Foster and Kokko worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition that includes animals and even bacteria.”  The definition was not given by New Scientist, but the mathematical rule boils down to this: “As long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favoured.”  (They admitted, later in the article, that this rule does not always hold.)
       Their rule seems to rely on a philosophical assumption, however.  “Real associations” can only be alleged if one presupposes the correspondence theory of truth – the confidence that our sensory perceptions correspond to external reality.  Some theologians have argued that this presupposition cannot be derived from naturalism.  It requires reference to eternal truth, which in turn requires an eternal Truth-giver, or God.
       Surprisingly, New Scientist gave the last word to a critic of the Foster-Kokko hypothesis.  One can almost hear philosophers and theologians smirking in the background:

   However, Wolfgang Forstmeier, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, argues that by linking cause and effect – often falsely – science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition.
       “You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,” he says.  By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, “quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often,” he says.

   But then,our background philosophers and theologians ask, isn’t Forstmeier begging the question?  How does he define ignorance without presupposing the correspondence theory of truth?  And how is contradicting oneself viewed as bad, if natural selection can produce superstitious beliefs and call it fitness?  In the end, this article did not address the origin of evil, either – let alone grounds for labeling something like 9/11 as evil.  Could not superstition be judged a means of attaining fitness from the terrorists’ point of view?

3. Those evil creationists:  Scientific American seems to be able to smell evil even if they can’t define it.  It’s those creationists trying to get their views in the science classrooms.  Suspects included VP nominee Sarah Palin (cf. Evolution News #1 and #2), Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and the Discovery Institute.  Their crime: using buzzwords, rhetorical shifts, faulty reasoning (“They have this idea that it’s a zero-sum game, so anything you can do to knock evolution down actually promotes creationism without having to say the word”), and retooled approaches to sneak creationism into the classroom (but see Evolution News).
       The article failed to explain, though, why any of this is bad in Darwin’s universe.  After all, “evolution is the linchpin of modern biology, explaining everything from antibiotic resistance in bacteria to the progression of species found in the fossil record,” the article said.  If evolution explains everything, surely it could explain the fitness of the majority of the human population that wants creationism to get a fair hearing.  On what moral grounds, then, or by what force of natural selection, could the NCSE resist these efforts?  Robert Crowther responded to this article for Evolution News.

4. Teaching points:  As stated in the update to yesterday’s entry (09/10/2008), a consortium of scientific societies is planning a big public forum to promote evolution.  A key goal of the meeting is to explain why intelligent design is not science.  Needless to say, no advocates of ID were invited on the panel.  This seems a continuation of the pro-Darwin strategy immediately after 9/11.  PBS aired a series on Evolution with no explanation for moral evil, and no opportunity for opposing views to get a hearing (see 09/18/2001).

Once you unmask the naturalist’s quandary that nothing he or she says can make any judgments about truth or morality, it’s over.  If we hit the buzzer every time they borrowed Judeo-Christian concepts and words, they would not be able to get an edge in wordwise, or vice versa.
Next headline on:  Education • Evolution • Intelligent Design • Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

Are You Too Dumb to Understand Evolution?   09/10/2008    
Sept 10, 2008 — Astrobiologist David Deamer believes that life can spontaneously emerge without design, but he thinks lay people are too uneducated to understand how this is possible, so he gives them the watered-down version of Darwin’s natural selection instead, which he knows is inadequate to explain the complexity of life.  That’s what he seemed to be telling reporter Susan Mazur in an interview for the Scoop (New Zealand).  Is the lay public really too dense for the deeper knowledge of how evolution works?

Suzan Mazur: Change of subject.  Why does NASA promote natural selection as the only mechanism of evolution in its literature – for example, in Astrobiology Primer, whose editor is a priest, and on television in the program Origins of Life?

David Deamer: NASA is speaking to the general public.  They’re just trying to keep it simple and explain evolution to people who may not know much about it.

Suzan Mazur: But there are other mechanisms contributing to evolution.  The public is not being told about this.  Not informing the public is not really serving the public.

David Deamer: The Astrobiology Primer and the Origins of Life program are intended for a lay audience.  Biologists agree that life started simple and became more complex through a natural process, and at the most general level we call that process evolution.
    If I were teaching an advanced class in evolutionary biology to a college level audience, they would have enough preparation to deal with the other aspects that go into the evolutionary process beyond Darwin’s initial explanation.  It takes a lot of background to understand the details that contribute to the evolutionary process.
    For instance, the Altenberg 16 you have written about are professional biologists who are trying to go beyond the simplistic explanations that involve nothing more than natural selection.  They are bringing to the table ideas that require considerable knowledge to understand their argument.
    I certainly wouldn’t want to state that natural selection is the only process driving evolution, but if I am going to explain what that means my audience needs to have enough information to understand the questions that are being raised.

David Deamer: I get the point.  Unfortunately, creationists have politicized the science so much that the very fact of evolution is being questioned.
    Perhaps this is why scientists tend to fall back on the bedrock of Darwin’s basic concepts when they speak in a public forum.  No one denies the factual basis of evolution, but we are still learning how evolution takes place, particularly in animal and plant populations in ecosystems.
    I have debated creationists and intelligent design people in public forums, and my impression is that they are not looking for scientific truth.  Instead they are working to advance their political aim, which is to get Christian fundamentalism taught in public schools as an alternative to evolution.

Yes, absolutely.  Astrobiology has put life on the Earth into a larger context of our solar system and our galaxy.  The origin of life on Earth is likely to be a universal process, and that’s why we are so excited by the discovery that Mars once had shallow seas.  Perhaps in the next decade we will have clear evidence that life began there as well, by the same process of self-assembly that we discussed earlier.
    It also has given us a vast amount of information about the history of life on the Earth.  We now know that oceans were present well over four billion years ago, and there is evidence for life in the isotopic record that goes back about 3.8 billion years ago.

Come on, David, we can handle it.  Give us your best shot.  Many readers of Creation-Evolution Headlines are highly educated and can take the advanced-wizard version of evolutionary theory instead of the watered-down Astrobiology Primer and other NASA propaganda.  While you’re at it, show us some experiments of self-organization better than soap bubbles.  We stopped playing with those as kids.  We can’t remember any of them generating information out of nowhere by chance, either.
    Do creationists really just harp on what evolutionists don’t know, and ignore what they do know?  You be the judge.  Read eight years of articles with the leading evolutionary biologists speaking their own words in their own journals, and ask them, like Colin Patterson, did (see ARN) “Can you tell me anything about evolution, any one thing that is true?”  In 2008 you will still get the same answer he got: silence.  Oh, you may get some bluffing, generalities, analogies (09/04/2008) and bandwagon arguments that all scientists believe it.  You may get appeals to what we might find out in the far distant future if they keep getting their funding.  But for things they can point to that they know are true about evolution, they know less than nothing, because things they thought they knew turned out to be wrong.  Need some proof?  Revisit these entries: 09/05/2008, 08/23/2008, 08/11/2008 – and those are just from the past month.
    Some day when the Darwin house of cards collapses, and the books are opened, interviews like this are going to sound shameful and despicable.  The wizards who peep and mutter behind closed doors and deceive the public with half-truths and big lies are not going to have any recourse, because it will require integrity to be a scientist.  For those who excuse their misdeeds on the grounds that their opponents have a political agenda, well, guess what: that criticism cuts both ways.  Who butters your bread, D.D.?  Who you gonna vote for?  Why are so many of your colleagues liberal Democrats?  Why are they so adamant about keeping DODO in the schools? (Darwin-Only, Darwin-Only).  Is that not an agenda?
    The myth of the bias-free, politically-neutral scientist in the white lab coat went out with World War I.  Let’s focus, shall we, on who makes the better case based on logic and the evidence.  That person doesn’t need to misrepresent his case for the lay public.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Education

Flightlessness is a loss of function – a downward trend – that is easier to explain than flight, a gain of function.  Even so, notice how evolutionary theory and geological speculation about millions of years led scientists down a primrose path to folly.  It was not the data that led to the textbook evolutionary view: it was the absence of data.
    One needs to ask of what value evolutionary theory was in the first place.  Why does one need to even continue thinking Darwinly after so many upsets?  The remarkable similarity of emus and ostriches (despite their genes) might lead an independent thinker (not drunk on Dar-wine) to propose that they were independently created.  If science is supposed to follow the evidence, why not at least consider the possibility?
Next headline on:  Birds • Genetics • Evolutionary Theory

Comet Conundrums Resist Bluffing   09/09/2008    
Sept 9, 2008 — Scientists may claim they are learning about the origin of the solar system, but the fine print shows them scratching their heads.  This is apparent in a couple of discoveries about comets this week.
    One Science Daily article is entitled, “Comets Throw Light On Solar System’s Beginnings.”  Scientists at the UK’s national synchrotron lab in Oxfordshire had a chance to examine particles from Comet Wild-2 returned from the Stardust spacecraft.  The unsuspecting reader would expect to see confirmation of a theory revealed in the body of the article, but the opposite is found:

Dr John Bridges, from the Space Research Centre, explains the results, ‘Comets are starting to look a lot more complicated than the old dusty iceball idea.  For one thing Wild-2 contains material, like chromium oxides, from the hot inner Solar System – so how did that material get mixed in with a comet which has spent most of its life beyond Neptune?  It suggests that there has been major mixing of material from inner and outer parts of the Solar System in its earliest stages.

Good grief, you can’t do archaeology on orbits.  What are they looking for, a clay tablet?  Pottery?  Archaeology is a science of intelligent design.  These people want to steal ID concepts for secular, materialistic theories impossible to confirm by observation.  It seems that evolutionary bravado has infected all branches of science these days.  The people of fluff like to swagger and bluff, but connecting lab stuff to historical huff is tough – and as science, we rebuff, is not good enough.  The observations without the stuffing will suffice.
Next headline on:  Solar System

Modeling Just-So Stories for Earth History   09/08/2008    
Sept 8, 2008 — Models are only simulations of reality.  In science, they have a long history of simplifying complex physical phenomena in an attempt to understand them.  Many times, empirical evidence can correct a model.  The model then becomes a more accurate simulation, and can even provide additional insights and make predictions.  Can modeling work for the unobservable, unrepeatable past?
    A story posted on Space.com has a title like a Kipling fictional story: “Why Early Earth Did Not Freeze.”  Reporter Aaron L. Gronstal for Astrobiology Magazine addressed a well-known puzzle in climate history: how the early earth prevented a deep freeze.  According to stellar evolution theory, stars like our sun begin with much lower luminosity.  Four billion years ago, the sun would not have had enough energy to keep Earth’s oceans from freezing.  Yet evolutionists and geologists believe that the earth had liquid oceans at least as early as 3.7 billion years ago.  This is the “faint young sun paradox.”  Geophysicists and climate historians have proposed more “greenhouse effect” or meteor bombardments to warm the earth, but without convincing success.  Most doubt that there could have been enough carbon dioxide, methane or ammonia to provide a space blanket.
    Gronstal reported models by German scientists that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide required to heat the earth.  “The model showed that a partial pressure of only 2.9 millibars of CO₂ would have been needed during the late Archaean and early Proterozoic periods in order to bring the surface temperature of the Earth above freezing,” the article said.  “This result, although contrary to previous studies, agrees with current geological data.”  The paradox thus disappears.
    Whether this claim will have ripple effects on assumptions about the impact of carbon dioxide remains to be seen.  Will it renew fears about global warming?  What does it mean to other geological periods when life was present?  And a question for philosophers of science: what was driving the model – the physics, or the assumptions of stellar and geological theories?
    Another geology news story is shaking up the world – so to speak.  National Geographic News claimed that continents get pushed, not sucked, into place.  This new idea, “contrary to accepted theory,” rearranges ideas about a theoretical supercontinent named Pangaea that split up 200 million years ago on the evolutionary timeline.  This “provocative” new theory pictures the continents moving back-and-forth like an accordion, instead of by the suction of deep ocean basins.  Maybe a superplume of magma in the mantle is the driving force.
    Yet the article includes doubts that geologists know any of this, because like the climate story above, it is based on models:

This accordionlike action, dubbed the Wilson Cycle, has been recognized for more than 40 years, but the forces responsible for it are unknown.
    Moreover, if current models thought to be responsible for these movements were applied to a 500-million-year-old Earth, they would not produce Pangaea in the right configuration.
    Why this reversal happened is unclear, and that’s disconcerting, [J. Brendan] Murphy said, because even though Pangaea is the best studied of the supercontinents, “something happened that we don’t understand.”

With the faint-young-sun story, we have another case of a contradiction that should have falsified a belief being circumvented by tweaking a simulation.  And with the Pangaea story, we have geologists playing games on the job.
    This is like what the evolutionary biologists do with their in silico organisms (imaginary life-forms that can evolve in ways real organisms never could).  Climate is very complex and difficult to model, even for today’s weather.  Can these scientists really know what carbon dioxide did to the earth 3.9 billion years ago, without going back there in a time machine?  How many other factors (clouds, outgassing, feedback mechanisms) could have swamped the effects of carbon dioxide? (for instance, see this article on EurekAlert that explores possible effects of giant ocean eddies that might have a “profound influence on marine life and on the earth’s climate”).  How justifiable is it to run present observed continental motions back recklessly for billions of years into the past?  The observation-to-assumption ratio is so small it is like homeopathic medicine – one molecule of data in a swimming pool of speculation.
    Models that cannot be checked with empirical data become playgrounds for storytellers.  Never are these astro-geo-biologists content to follow the evidence and say, “Well, I guess the earth couldn’t be as old as that.”  No way; they have their timeline, with its mythical Late Heavy Bombardment, First Oxygenation Event (after the mythical Origin of Life), mythical supercontinents Pangaea, Rodinia and Gondwana (which sound like characters in an earth religion), and all the subsequent Darwinian fables that ride on top.  When a contradiction threatens the Grand Myth, they can always invent simulations that can be tweaked and forced sufficiently to match their hard-core, unalterable beliefs about billions of years and evolution.  Models become their carts before the observational horse.  Who needs a horse?  They have horseless carriages, driven by the gas of imagination, polluting the atmosphere of knowledge.
    Whether this is Model A or Model T, we don’t know.  Even a broken flivver can be pushed if it won’t go on its own and the horse is going in the other direction.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Physics

To call Stalin’s agricultural collectivization policy a “consolidation of land and labour” is an awful understatement: an estimated 10 million productive peasants and their families were exiled or imprisoned from 1929–1933.  Stalin was hardly “desperate to feed thousands of citizens dying of starvation” when these were the same people he starved and murdered while sending Russian grain abroad.

Stalin’s regime was so unspeakably horrible, we must never let generations forget.  It makes no sense to focus entirely on Hitler’s six million victims when Stalin murdered at least 20 million, machine-gunned whole towns, forced people into miserable lives of hard labor, starved millions in the Ukraine to death, incarcerated millions more in the Gulag, destroyed churches and murdered tens of thousands of clergymen, and purged rivals almost at random with a coolness and disdain that is fearful to contemplate. 
    While inflicting this unspeakable harm, Stalin lavished wealth on himself and basked in the worship of masses of peasants duped by his propaganda into thinking he was saving their mother country.  Throughout his career he was actively involved, through the Comintern and propaganda, in spreading communism in the West and East.  Had not a stroke cut him down in 1953, he could have toppled many other governments and instigated a nuclear war against Europe and America.
    We remind readers that Stalin was a diehard Darwinist.  Upon finding and reading Darwin’s Origin of Species in seminary, Stalin became an atheist, reversed his career plans for the Russian Orthodox Church, and entered politics, where, through intrigue and crafted relationships, he took the legacy of the intensely radical, murderous Vladimir Lenin (another atheist Darwinist) into his own hands.
    Every dictator accomplishes some good things and has some nice moments.  But in light of these atrocities, is that useful or necessary to review?  Saddam Hussein could look pretty handsome and polite in meetings with foreign dignitaries.  So what?  His overall reputation for evil swamped any good traits.  Stalin achieved some impressive modernization and industrialization of the Soviet Union.  He repulsed Hitler’s advances (though late and poorly planned, with horrendous human cost).  He collected art and left some impressive buildings.  When such things were done on the backs and graves of millions of his countrymen, it hardly deserves listing them, especially when a free government under beneficent leaders might have achieved the same or better without such horrible human cost.  There’s no rationalization for evil.
    The only one exceeding Stalin in pure evil was Chairman Mao in China, Stalin’s ally, who murdered up to 77 million through state-sponsored terror (11/30/2005).  But after awhile the body count begins to sound academic.  The ideas that resulted in the worst genocides in modern history – in all of human history – came from the poisoned well of Darwin, who led people to think of mankind adrift in a chance universe without God.  In Darwin’s meaningless universe, the individual as a creation of God faded away like a dream.  In its place came The State.  Is anyone surprised that Marx, Lenin and Stalin, all Darwin-lovers, began a genre of cold-blooded despots the likes of which history had never seen?  The despots of Cambodia, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam, and North Korea (which remains one of the scariest and most brutal governments in the world) all admired Hitler and Stalin as role models.
    With American universities still infiltrated with Marxist-Darwinists, with prominent Darwinists pushing atheism in the name of science (08/28/2008), and with Nature insinuating that there is moral equivalence between Stalinist Russia and President Bush’s policies on science funding, maybe you get a sense of why services like Creation-Evolution Headlines play a vital role in our times to remind us that bad ideas have consequences – real consequences, where it hurts.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

True science seeks to understand a natural phenomenon with observation, equations and experiments, with an eye toward improving human life.  It’s not necessary to tell a story about how the butterfly invented a technology that human intelligence can photocopy but not yet engineer.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

How Not to Prove Positive Selection   09/05/2008    
Sept 5, 2008 — Erase all that evidence for positive natural selection in the genes you’ve read about.  It’s all misleading confusion based on “certain poorly conceived statistical methods,” argues Austin L. Hughes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina.  Writing a commentary in PNAS,¹ he accused, “Thousands of papers are published every year claiming evidence of adaptive evolution on the basis of computational analyses alone, with no evidence whatsoever regarding the phenotypic effects of allegedly adaptive mutations.”
    Why would Hughes make such a damning statement among colleagues of the National Academy of Sciences, who are overwhelmingly pro-evolution?  The reason: he wanted to praise a new study that does it right.  In the same issue of PNAS,² a study by Yokoyama is “solidly grounded in biology,” Hughes said.  Instead of presenting “more of the same” evidence of positive selection without tying it to adaptation at the phenotypical level, this paper related changes in visual pigment genes to actual benefits for the organism.
    More on that later.  What’s interesting about evolutionary claims in perspective is that Hughes presented this paper as if it were a rarity, a first step in the right direction after decades of error.  “Sequences of DNA provide documentary evidence of the evolutionary past undreamed of by pioneers such as Darwin and Wallace, but their potential as sources of evolutionary information is still far from being realized,” he began.  “A major hindrance to progress has been confusion regarding the role of positive (Darwinian) selection, i.e., natural selection favoring adaptive mutations.”  That’s when he criticized the methods in “thousands of papers” that rely on “certain poorly conceived statistical methods” that fail to show how the genetic changes relate to adaptive benefits to the organism in its ecological niche.
    Hughes described how the typical paper uses an “unwarranted generalization” from one classic case in which relative frequencies of synonymous and nonsynonymous mutations³ seemed to be related to selectional pressure.  Since then, evolutionists have recklessly applied instances of d_N > d_S as evidence of positive selection.  This assumption is “demonstrably false,” Hughes argued, because due to the stochastic nature of mutations, such inequalities are just as likely to occur by chance, without any adaptive value.  “Yet, despite their shaky foundations, numerous publications have used these methods as the basis for claims of positive selection at the molecular level.”  In fact, using the Yokoyama et al paper to test the codon-based methods and Bayesian methods so often used in the literature, Hughes found them to be “100% off-target.”  The mutations putatively showing positive selection, in other words, bore no relation to the ones Yokoyama et al found to be adaptive.  “These results support the theoretical prediction that, because of the faulty logic in their underlying assumptions, codon-based focus mainly on statistical artifacts rather than true cases of positive selection.”  Has he just falsified “thousands of papers ... published each year”?
    Hughes is not done with his bombshell barrage yet.  Next, he criticized Neo-Darwinism itself – at least some widely-held assumptions about its record in the genes:

Contrary to a widespread impression, natural selection does not leave any unambiguous “signature” on the genome, certainly not one that is still detectable after tens or hundreds of millions of years.  To biologists schooled in Neo-Darwinian thought processes, it is virtually axiomatic that any adaptive change must have been fixed as a result of natural selection.  But it is important to remember that reality can be more complicated than simplistic textbook scenarios.

In recent years the literature of evolutionary biology has been glutted with extravagant claims of positive selection on the basis of computational analyses alone, including both codon-based methods and other questionable methods such as the McDonald-Kreitman test.  This vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science.  It is to be hoped that the work of Yokoyama et al. will help put an end to these distressing tendencies.  By incorporating experimental evidence regarding the phenotypic effects of reconstructed evolutionary changes, this study sets a new standard for studies of adaptive evolution at the molecular level.  In addition, by providing evidence that non-Darwinian and Darwinian processes are likely to be involved in the evolution of adaptive phenotypes, it points the way toward a new, more realistic appreciation of the evolutionary process.

Vertebrate ancestors appeared in a uniform, shallow water environment, but modern species flourish in highly variable niches.  A striking array of phenotypes exhibited by contemporary animals is assumed to have evolved by accumulating a series of selectively advantageous mutations.  However, the experimental test of such adaptive events at the molecular level is remarkably difficult.

Wow.  The damage to evolutionist credibility from these two papers can hardly be overstated.  Hughes just wiped away stacks and stacks of papers that Ken Miller and Eugenie Scott might have piled up in a courtroom to demonstrate the overwhelming evidence for evolution, then he held up a very weak paper as the best example yet.  We looked into that paper and found nothing but evolutionary assumptions buttressing evolutionary assumptions.
    Consider how weak their best evidence is.  They were talking about animals that already had eyes, retinas, optic nerves, brains and all the other organs and functions that support vision.  The only parameter that they studied was the wavelengths of light to which particular rhodopsin molecules are maximally sensitive, between 482 and 505 billionths of a meter.  But as we know from many phenomena in biology, compensating mechanisms are often at work.  It would be impossible to prove that a fish with a rhodopsin most sensitive to 489 nm would be any better evolved than one with a rhodopsin most sensitive to 502 nm, because the ganglion cells or optic nerve might compensate for the slight shift in sensitivity.  All we observe is that living fishes today are marvelously adapted to their particular ecological niches.
    We’re only talking about virtually indistinguishable shades of green light, folks!  Are you impressed with the creative power of natural selection?  Are you impressed with scientists’ ability to demonstrate evolution at the molecular level?  During the hundreds of millions of years in which animals supposedly evolved from trilobites to philosophers, the best evolutionists can show are slight changes to sensitivity to green light in just 12 positions in one protein molecule out of the thousands of exquisitely-adapted enzymes essential for vision.  Even then, the “evolution” demonstrated is predominantly from mutational drift, with no particular functional trend, and the changes (we are told) appeared, disappeared, and reappeared 18 times.  At the most optimistic, the changes they’re talking about are microevolutionary.  Even staunch young-earth creationists would have no difficulty believing that changes this small might occur in a few thousand years.
    Nothing the evolutionists have produced as evidence for natural selection (after the purge of papers by Hughes) is sufficient to distinguish between creation vs evolution models.  Should evolution be the only view sanctified in the schools?  Hughes was right on when he said that the “vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science.”  He did nothing to repair the damage, and by pointing to an insipid paper as the best example yet after decades of hype, he actually made it worse.
    This effectively undermines everything the evolutionists have told us about divining evolutionary history in the genes (e.g., 06/13/2003, 04/30/2005).  Where else could we see it?  In the fossil record?  Ha! (07/21/2003), 05/21/2004, 05/10/2008).
    Undoubtedly the Darwin Party will spin this situation in their favor, by making it an illustration of the progress of triumphalist materialist secularist science.  For 8 years now, CEH has been exposing the charades behind the curtain where Charles the Extravagant, the Wizard of Flaws, and his loyal munchkins dupe people into thinking that evidence for evolution is overwhelming.  This is a prime example.  Now you know.  Get the word out!  Expose the charlatan!  We need to get out of this mythical fantasyland (09/04/2008) and back to the real world!  The Kansas School Board is counting on you!

You’re off to shame the Wizard, the Blunderful Wizard of Flaws
You’ll find he is a Wimp of a Wiz if ever a Wiz there was
If ever, oh ever, a Wimp there was the Wizard of Flaws is one because
Because, because, because, because, because
Because of the blunderful spins he does
You’re off to shame the wizard, the Blunderful Wizard of Flaws.

Use your brain.  Take courage.  Have a heart.  And bark, Toto, bark!
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

Spore Game: Evolution or ID?   09/04/2008    
Sept 4, 2008 — Spore is a highly-anticipated computer game that just came out.  Evolutionists are claiming it as a model of how life evolves – but intelligent-design advocates are calling it an ID game, pure and simple.  Who’s right?
    Carl Zimmer, a science writer, is among those counting Spore points for Darwin.  His blog entry from Discover Magazine leads to an article on the New York Times sporting a large depiction of Tiktaalik, the alleged fish evolving legs (04/06/2006).  In “Gaming Evolves,” Zimmer gets evolutionary biologists to comment on the game.  The reviews are positive but mixed.  They enjoy the game, but Dr. Richard Prum commented, “The mechanism is severely messed up.”  Presumably it does not accurately depict the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations.  The game only touches on some of the big questions of evolutionary biology, Prum continued: What is the origin of complexity?  And how contingent is evolution on happenstance?  Nevertheless, he feels that if it helps players ask these questions, “that would be great.”
    Spore was written by Will Wright, author of the popular game SimCity and its spin-offs.  Wright was motivated by the work of evolutionary biologists and prior simulations like Avida (05/08/2003) and Evarium.  In Spore, he wanted to “give players an experience of life and the universe across billions of years, from microscopic creatures to interstellar civilizations.”  So he invented a virtual landscape that allows players to create organisms that mate and evolve and deal with the unexpected.  The question remains: is this evolution or intelligent design?
    The game avoids the problem of the origin of life by starting with spores from outer space.  Then, players exercise choice and direction over what happens:

The game begins with a meteorite crashing into a planet, sowing its oceans with life and organic matter.  Players control a simple creature that gobbles up bits of debris.  They can choose to eat other creatures or eat vegetation or both.  As the creature eats and grows, it gains DNA points, which the player can use to add parts like tails for swimming or spikes for defense.  Once the creature has gotten big and complex enough, it is ready for the transition to land.
    On land, the creatures can grow legs, wings and other new parts.  And it is at this point that some of Spore’s features really shine.  Mr. Wright’s team has written software that can rapidly transform creatures in an infinite number of ways, as players add parts and alter their size, shape and position.

Even as scientists praise Spore, they voice concerns about how the game does not match evolution.  In the real world, new traits evolve as mutations arise and spread gradually through entire populations.  Winning Spore’s DNA points does not work even as a remote metaphor.
    “I do hope that it doesn’t confuse people as to what evolution is all about,” said Charles Ofria, a computer scientist at Michigan State University and a creator of Avida.
    Spore may also mislead players with the way it is set up as a one-dimensional march of progress from single-cell life to intelligence.  Evolution is more like a tree than a line, with species branching in millions of directions.  Sometimes species become more complex, and sometimes they become less so.  And sometimes they do not change at all.  “There’s no progressive arrow that dominates nature,” Dr. Prum said.
    These caveats notwithstanding, Dr. [Thomas] Near [Yale] hopes that Spore prompts people to think about the evolutionary process.  “This may be totally off about how evolution works, but I’d much rather be dealing with a student who says, ‘O.K., I have no problem with evolution; I think about it the same way I think about gravity.’”  If it does that, it’ll be great.”

Since future scientists are presumably human beings and not plants, it is disgusting to spread manure on them.  Will Wright may be a clever inventor like Wilbur Wright, but in the unforgiving air of critical analysis of evolution, his invention won’t fly.  Adding a lot of hot air underneath violates the rules.
    It’s no wonder evolutionists love this game.  They live in Fantasyland, where Tinker Bell helps them wish upon a star, and all their Darwinian dreams come true.  They love digital organisms, not real ones.  They flourish in a playground where imagination is king.  They don’t want students to learn about evolution; they want them to have an experience of it.  They want their minds to soar off into millions of mythical years where miracles happen, given enough time.  If they really wanted a real-world simulation of evolution, they would turn the computer off and shake it for a million years.
    The perceptive onlooker sees intelligent design all over the place (cf. 11/14/2006).  It took ID to build the hardware.  It took ID to write the software.  It takes ID for the players to guide the outcomes according to their own purposes and plans.  And all the complex organs – wings, lungs and legs that Spore conjures up on demand – are conveniently pre-designed in software modules.  To really simulate Darwin’s scenario, how about we take the players’ hands off the controls and throw in a few random mutations in the code from time to time.
    The awarding of “DNA points” to fake organisms unmasks the hype that somehow Spore represents evolution.  In nature, who rewards anyone?  Survival is not a reward.  The last man standing is not necessarily going to be rewarded with wings.  It’s the origin of innovative function that is the problem.  Wright designed an evolutionary algorithm to solve the problem, but it presupposes a purpose and direction that nature cannot provide.  As William Dembski proved in No Free Lunch, no evolutionary algorithm, when stripped of auxiliary information, is superior to blind search.  The giving of awards to help evolution represents the insertion of auxiliary information into the system – a form of cheating.  With deft analogies and rigorous mathematical reasoning, Dembski reduces all evolutionary algorithms to blind search, and then shows mathematically that getting complex specified information at the complexity level of life by blind search is less probable than the universal probability bound of one chance in 10^-150 – i.e., it will never happen.
    Evolutionists deceive themselves into thinking this game has anything to do with evolutionary theory.  Then they deceive players and students quite literally by enticing them to “think about the evolutionary process” with a game that is literally saturated with intelligent-design requirements.  Chalk this up as another example of the “useful lie” tactic with which evolutionary manure is spread on the unsuspecting (e.g., 06/29/2007).
    If you’re a vegetable (e.g., a couch potato), you might enjoy the fertilizer.  Future sentient scientists, however, need nutritious food, exercise, sound reasoning, ethics and a valid education about the real world – not manure.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Intelligent Design • Media • Education • SETI • Dumb Ideas

Fully Gecko 40 Million Years Earlier?   09/03/2008    
Sept 3, 2008 — Amber, or fossilized tree sap, usually contains remnants of insect parts.  One piece, mined in the jungles of Myanmar, contained the foot of a gecko – alleged to be 100 million years old.  That’s 40 million years older than the previously claimed oldest gecko fossil.  This critter may have skittered under the feet of dinosaurs.  Maybe it even hitched a ride by walking on the underside of a Diplodocus.
    Examination of the foot pads shows the same lamellae that give modern geckos their ability to walk across ceilings.  To Science Daily, this could only mean one thing: “that geckos were definitely in Asia by 100 million years ago, and had already evolved their bizarre foot structure at that time.”
    The discoverers from Oregon State and the London Natural History Museum estimate the juvenile specimen could have grown to about a foot long as an adult, comparable to living species.
    Speaking of the Spiderman abilities of the gecko, the article stated that “Research programs around the world have tried to mimic this bizarre adhesive capability, with limited success.”  How did this inimitable ability arise?  “It’s not known exactly how old this group of animals is, and when they evolved their adhesive toe pads.”
    But does this fossil really provide evidence that evolution produced a gecko, with its innovative adhesive feet?  Certainly not directly.  The specimen was 100% gecko – and it appeared 40 million years earlier than evolutionists thought, according to their own timeline.  It’s not clear, therefore, how or why this fossil is “shedding additional light on the evolution and history of these ancient lizards that scampered among the feet of giant dinosaurs then and still are common in tropical or sub-tropical regions all over the world.”

If you are tired of the evolutionists’ tiptoe dance around falsification with the falsetto jingle that the latest discovery is “shedding more light on evolution,” then let’s all shout in basso profundo, “Let there be light!”  The light is shining, but it is shining everywhere except on evolution.
    Fossil after fossil has proven older and less evolved than any honest evolutionist would have predicted.  Nowhere do we find them evolving into something else.  All their equipment is there from the start.  At first appearance, this gecko was all gecko, just like the first bat was all bat (02/16/2008), the first frog was all frog (05/28/2008), the first bombardier beetle was already armed and dangerous (09/23/2007), the first horseshoe crab was all horseshoe crab (01/28/2008), the first platypus was all platypus (11/27/2007), the first penguin was all penguin (06/26/2007), the first jellyfish was all jellyfish (11/02/2007, the first crustacean was all crustacean (10/04/2007), and the first comb jelly was all comb jelly (04/03/2007), and on and on anon etc. and so forth.  In each case, the evolutionary paleontologist declares that the fossil is “shedding light on evolution.”
    Let’s follow the light, then.  If trends keep up, every kind of animal will trace its ancestry to the Cambrian or before.  They will all be seen to burst onto the scene, fully formed, without ancestors.  The light shed on evolution will show it to have been essentially instantaneous.  In the asymptotic limit, evolution under the lights will be seen clearly.  It will come into sharp focus.  It will read: CREATION.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Evolution

1. Camera Iris:  One of the many gate motors in the cell membrane acts like a camera iris.  Biochemists in Scotland studied a mechanically sensitive channel named MscS in the E. coli bacterium.  At 3.45 angstrom resolution (a third of a billionth of a meter), they found that the protein coils in this channel, which opens in response to mechanical energy, twist in a way that opens and closes like the iris of your eye.  The motion breaks a vapor lock, they said; “This motion is akin to the opening of camera iris.”  The side chains move apart “in a manner reminiscent of the plates of a mechanical camera iris.”  In conclusion of their paper in Science,¹ they said:

   The opening and closing of channels is central to biology, yet is still poorly understood at a molecular level.  The use of mutants with modified gating kinetics may prove a widely applicable approach to crystallize different channel conformations.  By combining functional data with an open structure of the MscS channel, we have described the transitions between closed and open forms that involve tilting and separation of the transmembrane helices reminiscent of a camera iris.

2. Winch:  Like men pulling together, cell motors can team up to pull cargo along.  The two primary transport motor types, dynein and kinesin, actually “walk” step-by-step on filaments.  Like African women with baskets on their heads, these machines attach to vesicles and other cargo and carry them to their destinations.  Scientists are finding that more often than not they work in teams.
       This is an active area of research with many questions.  William Hancock (Penn State) reviewed what is known in a Dispatch in Current Biology.²  He asked some of the questions: “how many motors need to be turned on or off to trigger directional switching?  And what sorts of regulation and cooperative interactions underlie the complex oscillations of chromosomes seen during metaphase?”  As if individual motors were not complex enough, he said, “While understanding the characteristics of the individual motors involved in these processes is important, there is clearly another level of complexity that needs to be considered when developing realistic physical models of these processes.”
3. Flagellum motorboat:  Observers of the evolution controversy will immediately recognize the bacterial flagellum as the mascot of the intelligent design movement (02/10/2003, 07/11/2003, 10/27/2004).  Evolutionists are just as astonished with this outboard motor, present in one of the “simplest” forms of life, but continue to believe it evolved somehow.  An example is Dr. Flagellum himself, Howard Berg of Harvard (07/11/2003, 08/19/2005, 06/24/2008).  This man who knows the most about the physics of the flagellum published a handy-dandy Q&A article about the flagellum in the Aug. 26 issue of Current Biology.³
       Some quick facts from his Quick Guide: It is “remarkably small rotary electric motor” with a drive shaft, rotor, stator, bushings, universal joint, mounting plate and switch complex.  It runs on proton motive force or sodium ions that come through the cell membrane through specialized channels.  It responds to chemical gradients with higher rotation.  “At high loads, eight or more force-generating elements are active, each generating the same torque.”  Some 20 protein parts make up the motor base, but many additional parts are involved during its construction.  The motor is built from the inside out with parts added in a strict sequence:

   There are a number of checks and balances in this process, the most dramatic of which involves an antibody-like factor that blocks expression of late genes, which encode the filament protein FliC, the Mot proteins A and B, and the various components of the chemotaxis pathway.  When motor assembly reaches the level of the hook, this factor is pumped out of the cell by the flagellar transport apparatus, relieving suppression of late-gene transcription.  At about the same time, the export apparatus switches from transport of components of the rod and hook to the hook-associated proteins and filament.  Ingenious mechanisms are involved in supplying raw material at the base of the motor, in rod and hook-length control, and in pumping hook and filament subunits through a 2 nm pore along the motor axis.  In Escherichia coli and Salmonella, the energy required for this export is supplied by an electrochemical proton gradient (protonmotive force).  Remarkably, the filament grows at its distal end.

   (Links to animations of this process can be found in the 11/02/2005 entry).  Berg continues: the motor can turn both directions, and stop in a millionth of a rotation.  It usually reverses direction once per second.  This allows the organism to alter direction quickly.  The viscosity the bacterium feels in water is similar to what you would feel swimming in molasses.  The propeller has variable pitch.  Rotation is likely driven by conformational changes of protein parts between the 26 units comprising the ring.  The flagellum usually spins at 100Hz (6,000 RPM), but can go 300Hz (18,000).  Flagella with sodium-ion drive can go five times faster (~100,000 RPM).
       Berg did a little calculation of how much force the motor generates.  If ramped up to our scale, he said, it would be about 5 horsepower per pound – “That’s roughly the power per pound generated by a turboprop airplane engine.”  Unlike the airplane engine, though, the flagellum doesn’t get hot: “the motor is water-cooled and thermal diffusion is very efficient over small distances, so its temperature remains very close to ambient.”
       Asked if the flagellar motor is good for anything, Berg remarked, “If you are a bacterium, a great deal: a lot of energy is expended in building such a machine so that a cell can find essential nutrients.  For humans, very little so far, except to illustrate how extraordinary nanotechnology can be.”

Food for thought, indeed.  OK, so chew on it.  Howard Berg wants us to think that the complete rotary engine existed for some other function before it was co-opted by the bacterium as an outboard motor.  That’s like believing a water-cooled, precision-assembled, variable-pitch, reversible, switch-controlled, highly efficient 5HP/lb airplane turboprop engine composed of 40 essential parts just “emerged” from nowhere until an airplane chassis “emerged” that used it to fly.  We thought about it.  We chewed on it.  We ruminated on it.  We masticated it.  We munched, crunched, chomped, chawed and gnawed it to pulp.  Bleagh.  So we spit it out and had some SOLID* food for thought instead.
*Smart Ones Like Intelligent Design.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Amazonia Supported a Cosmopolitan Civilization   09/02/2008    
Sept 2, 2008 — Today’s naked, spear-hunting tribes in the jungles of the Amazon live in the shadow of a complex society that once thrived there.  By increasing their scope from the single site to the wider region, archaeologists from Florida and Brazil have discovered a cosmopolitan culture that left large earthworks and evidence of complex urban societies.  Their work was published in Science.¹
    Charles C. Mann, commenting on the paper in the same issue of Science,² describes some of the dozens of earthworks or “geoglyphs” that have come to light:

Shaped like circles, diamonds, hexagons, and interlocking rectangles, the geoglyphs are 100 to 350 meters in diameter and outlined by trenches 1 to 7 meters deep.  Many are approached by broad earthen avenues, some of them 50 meters wide and up to a kilometer long.  The geoglyphs “are as important as the Nazca lines,” Ranzi says, referring to the famed, mysterious figures outlined in stone on the Peruvian coast.  But even though the Acre geoglyphs had been observed 20 years before, “nobody still knew anything about them.”

The new findings show that the region was “a cosmopolitan crossroads” between the societies of the eastern Amazon and the Andes, of whom the most famous were the Inka, says Susanna Hecht, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles: “You have every language group in lowland South America represented there.”  She adds, “It was a major cultural center--and it’s incredible that this is just coming out.”

“The immediate response is that they were symbolic places,” says [Peter] Stahl [Binghamton University], “But that’s the old archaeological canard: If you can’t figure out the function of something, you say it was for ritual.”
    The late arrival and ubiquity of the geoglyphs may indicate that some type of cultural movement swept over earlier social arrangements.  “But whatever was there, these societies have been completely forgotten,” says anthropologist Guillermo Rioja, director of sustainable development and indigenous peoples for the Pando.  “It’s only been 400 years since they vanished.  Why does nobody here know anything about them?  They were living here for such a long time, and nobody knows who they were.”

In essence, “prehistory” refers to the thousands of years before civilization, when history supposedly did not move.  Historians came to such an idea through a mixture of ignorance and practicality.  Into the 19th century, European historians turned to the Book of Genesis; later scholars, forced to reckon with deep geological time and evolution by natural selection, were more creative.  The spirit of their arguments for ignoring deep history is reflected in a sentence Smail quotes from the historian Mott Green: “At some point a leap took place, a mutation, an explosion of creative power--the ‘discovery of mind,’ or the ‘birth of self-consciousness’--interposing a barrier between us and our previous brute, merely biological existence.”

These have deep phylogenetic roots.  Although the neural responses may not have changed much across time, the means by, and contexts in, which dominance and submission are felt and exploited by people in a society are culturally specific.  More generally (and without our being aware of it), emotional and physiological ups and downs are exploited in different ways in different cultures--for pleasure, for inflicting harm, etc.--through different associations.  Smail dubs the varying forms of culturally specific instruments that drive brain-body responses “psychotropic mechanisms.”  These include mood-altering practices, behaviors and institutions generated by human culture, foods like coffee and chocolate, our interactions with others through social hierarchies or religions, and self-stimulation through novels or roller coasters.  Importantly, the exploitation of brain-body states by cultures is not intentional nor does it have a goal.
    On Deep History and the Brain is a small book with big ideas: that human history is linked in deep time by the physiological mechanisms that we share with our vertebrate ancestors and that the historical “progress” and “acceleration” we detect are in fact directionless series of ongoing culturally specific experiments with psychotropic mechanisms.

Ask yourself if these findings fit a creation view of history better than an evolutionary view.  Evolutionists would have us believe that modern humans, indistinguishable from us in brain capacity, stature and probably language, have been inhabiting our small globe for 100,000 years – maybe even 300,000 years.  Yet in that vast stretch of time, multiple times the length of all recorded history, not one of them learned to ride a horse, build a city or use symbolic communication till some unknown mutation(s), without purpose or goal, switched on these capabilities full-blown, only a few thousand years ago.  Furthermore, evolutionists would expect primitive, stone-age cultures to be on the way up toward European measures of intellectual fitness.  At least, that’s how Darwin’s followers understood things in Victorian England and on the Continent (ideas now considered very incontinent).
    Creationists, on the other hand, believe humans were created from the beginning with intelligence, abstract reasoning, aesthetics and language.  Adam’s kids were already skilled at herding and farming, had a conscience, and an innate sense of their obligation to God.  The next generation was already working metals making musical instruments.  After the Flood, it wasn’t long before the rising population was building a tower to reach heaven.
    Wherever humans have gone, they have managed to work the environment to their advantage.  Some environments only permitted a subsistence economy, but no real empirical evidence suggests humans were stuck on hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years.
    Here in the New World, long before Columbus lay claim to it in the name of a European king and queen, urban civilization on an advanced scale had existed.  Before the ancient Greeks had learned to stop fighting themselves long enough to invent the polis, people were taming Amazonia with large earthworks, building canals and causeways and farms that could sustain tens of thousands of people.  They were communicating long distances with other cultures.
    In the post-Babel account, the confusion of languages forced people to segregate and disperse.  People began exploring the globe.  They took their knowledge of technology and culture with them, adapting it to their particular tastes and environments.  They took with them their innate mental abilities.  This all happened not so very long ago.  Consider that when European mountain men encountered Native Americans, many took squaws as wives – and had children.  Why had not there been some Darwinian adaptive radiation and origin of species among populations over the epochs since they became geographically isolated?  Why were they able to communicate with symbolic sign language quickly, and learn one another’s languages and ways?  Why indeed.  It’s because there is only one race – the human race – whose history is short, and has been recorded by ancestors skilled at abstract reasoning and language from the beginning.  Eons of grunting “prehistory” between different mythical species of humans exist only in the imaginations of Darwinists.
    The emigrants who arrived in today’s Brazil before 1000 BC rose to the challenge of their new home and figured out what to do.  We see evidence of their solutions.  Before long they were building urban centers, cooperating on building projects, inventing techniques to tame the land for their use, and communicating across many miles.  It all fits human nature as we know it.
    The head-hunting cannibals encountered by 19th- and 20th-century Darwinists were not slower-evolvers outdistanced by proud Europeans.  It appears more likely they are degenerate relics of once advanced societies.  The knowledge of the true God had become corrupted over the generations.  Power-hungry kings and shamans learned how to exploit myth and superstition to keep people under control, such as the grotesque human sacrifice and ethnic cleansing extolled among the Inca (07/10/2007).  Even so, a deep inner sense of the Almighty One, above all the invented gods, remained.  Missionaries have encountered this on many occasions (read Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson).  Intelligent, capable humans with a fallen spiritual nature: this is what the Bible predicts, and this is what we find.
    The sense of surprise among the archaeologists at this new evidence is instructive (see also last month’s surprise discovery about a Sahara society).  Evolutionists maintain their mythology in spite of the evidence.  Every objective measure shows that mankind has always been Homo sapiens sapiens throughout its short tenure on this planet.  “They don’t believe it, but it’s true.”
Next headline on:  Early Man • Bible and Theology

If Biden wants to attract votes, it doesn’t seem politic to alienate the majority of people.  Diplomacy does not seem to be his strong point.
    A hot-headed vituperant responded to Sammon’s article with this gem of reasoning: “I also use strong language to ridicule the creationist idiots who still believe in intelligent design MAGIC in the 21st century.  Nobody is more uneducated, gullible, and just plain stupid than the creationists.”
    Here’s a suggestion on how to respond to this kind of pronouncement when you encounter a self-made philosopher.  Use the J. P. Moreland approach.  Listen patiently while the vituperant blows his credibility, then look him or her in the eye, and calmly but firmly ask, “Excuse me sir/madam, do you have an argument?” After a short pause for the quizzical look, continue, “because I’m waiting for one.  If you have a point to make, make it.”
    Get the vituperant on the defensive to make a rational argument based on evidence.  (This assumes you have been setting a good example.)  If the combatant takes the challenge and states a proposition, good.  That can be debated, using evidence and logic.  Don’t put up, though, with ridicule.  Stand up to it.  Demand respectful, rational dialogue, and maybe you will win mutual respect.  If he or she storms off muttering, then – well, you’ve won something else: the whole shootin’ match.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Intelligent Design • Education