Exoplanet Hunters Fail Predictions     08/31/2010    
August 31, 2010 — Before the first extrasolar planets were discovered, astronomers had high confidence that other solar systems would resemble ours.  We have rocky planets close to the sun, and gas giants farther out.  Planetary scientists were pretty sure the pattern would hold up around other stars.  Now that we have hundreds of examples to compare, the reality has been far different from expectations.  The number of surprises in real exoplanet systems underscores the potential flaws in building models based on a sample size of one.
    In Caltech’s latest Engineering and Science magazine,¹ John Johnson was interviewed about the state of extrasolar planet hunting.  Johnson has been involved with leading planet-hunting pioneers.  A recurring theme in the interview is the surprise that planetary systems were found to be radically different from predictions.

What are some of the current big questions that you guys are trying to tackle?

We’re interested in how the solar system formed.  We’re interested in our immediate environment and describing its origins.  And beyond that, we’re interested in general in how planetary systems formed.  There are some very specific questions that arise at every turn.  There are so many surprises in this field—almost nothing is turning out as we expected.  There are Jupiter-mass planets in three-day orbits.  There are planets with masses that are between those of the terrestrial planets in our solar system and the gas giants in the outer part of our solar system.  There are Jupiter-mass planets with hugely inflated radii—at densities far lower than what we thought were possible for a gas-giant planet.  There are giant planets with gigantic solid cores that defy models of planet formation, which say there shouldn’t be enough solids available in a protoplanetary disk to form a planet that dense.  There are planets with tilted orbits.  There are planets that orbit the poles of their stars, in so-called circumpolar orbits.  There are planets that orbit retrograde—that is, they orbit in the opposite direction of their star’s rotation.  There are systems of planets that are in configurations that are hard to describe given our understanding of planet formation.  For instance, some planets are much too close to one another.

But a lot of those surprises have to do with the fact that we have only one example of a planetary system—our solar system—to base everything on, right?

What’s interesting is that we’ve found very little that resembles our example.

He didn’t really find a blue lion.  He found a natural lion, but the funny glasses he was wearing made it look blue.
    Johnson went on to describe how Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time had made a profound influence on him.  He also affirmed at the end that he thought humans would figure out that their place in the universe is insignificant, following the theme of the positivists and Carl Sagan: “We are coming out of the darkness from a couple hundred years ago and we’re rubbing our eyes today, realizing that we are on a really small planet around a really average star in an unspectacular part of the galaxy, and we’re learning our place in this whole universe,” he said.  “Once we find more planets like our own, it’ll further define our place and give us a better universal context for what it means to be human.”
    This kind of bluffing means Johnson has been a good apprentice.  His mentor Hawking was similarly prone to wild speculation without evidence, pontificating as he did in his book about how close humans were to finding a “theory of everything” when in fact he could point to little more hard evidence than mathematical speculations whirring about in his nimble imagination.  If anyone in economics or sportscasting had this bad a track record of predictions, though, they would be out of a job.  Cosmology is one of the many evolutionary sciences where you can brag about how wrong you have been, and people will still think you are wonderful because you are busy stamp collecting.
Next headline on:  Stars • Solar System

The findings appear to be subject to interpretation, because not all religions are created equal.  The article said, for instance, “Specialists in the care of the elderly were somewhat more likely to be Hindu or Muslim, while palliative care doctors were somewhat more likely than other doctors to be Christian, white, and agree that they were ‘religious.’”
    Interpretation aside, consider the logic: a religious person is likely to care very much about the afterlife and the consequences of dying.  Religious doctors are also likely to have moral principles about the sanctity of life.  Why would an atheist care about such things?  When you die, you die; it’s only natural (everything dies, after all), and better that a patient be put out of misery.  Let the dying sleep so we can focus the resources on the living, he or she might say.
    Ideas have consequences.  You had better consider your doctor’s beliefs, and the beliefs of health care policy makers, when considering your final will about prolonging your own life.  The new leftist/progressive push toward universal health care (mostly promoted by the non-religious) also contains the seeds of rationing – decisions about what lives are worth preserving without any thought of human dignity.  Despite the promises and repudiations about rationing, the American president snuck in a recess appointment for head of the healthcare program who has overtly promoted rationing as a preferred policy (see TownHall.com).  Watch what politicians do, not what they say.  That principle applies more than ever in the current political environment..
    One tragic statistic in the press release illustrates the erosion of belief in God among the majority American population: “But, overall, white doctors, who comprised the largest ethnic group among the respondents, were the least likely to report strong religious beliefs.”
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

Teachers may want to use this video, lame as it is, to illuminate some aspects of intelligent design.  (Hint: the forgettable music with its shallow lyrics can be dispensed with to focus attention on the action.  Another good choice is the famous Honda Accord Cog Commercial.)
    Some evolutionists complain that the cell acts like a clumsy Rube Goldberg device.  Notice what the engineers said, though: the smaller the parts, the more design and care was required.  And the whole set was irreducibly complex, in that a failure of one part would bring the rest of the production to a halt.
    Another lesson is that it’s not necessarily the parts, but the way they are arranged, that showcases design.  The video was made almost entirely with used household items.  Similarly, a cell achieves phenomenal intricacy with just a few simple atoms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, calcium, and a few metals.
    The design of a phenomenon should be judged by its effectiveness, not by some subjective human measure of clumsiness.  The workings of cells are far more elegant and effective, and, as orders of magnitude smaller, require far more fine tuning to remain robust to fluctuations.  Compare what magnificent music can be made from a few black and white keys.  There’s a lot more going on under the surface.

Exercise:  Ask young physics students this question: How is it that a tiny domino falling can lead to a human being flying through the air?  The domino does not have much energy; where does the energy come from to produce such large effects from a small source?
Answer:  The energy is stored in the potential energy of each contraption.  The flags, for instance, are held down by springs storing potential energy that can be released by a small trigger.  No energy is created or destroyed, but according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it becomes more unusable over time.  Once released, the Rube Goldberg Machine would never reset itself.  It takes intelligently-directed outside energy to reset it each time.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design

Who Invited the Scientist in Here?     08/25/2010    
August 25, 2010 — If you envision science in terms of white-coated lab chemists holding flasks, field biologists gathering bird eggs, astronomers peering through a telescope or geologists chipping rocks with hand picks, think again.  Today’s science sweeps everything into its domain, including the human mind, intellect, emotions, will, creativity, and our most sincere beliefs and actions.  When not explained in terms of evolutionary impulses from some animal past, they are often described in sterile, dispassionate terms, reducing our sincerely held beliefs, choices and partnerships into matters of neurotransmitters in the brain or impulses little different than the behavior of ants.  Humanities departments should beware letting scientists in the door.  They come in and take over.

1. Moral calorimeter:  A Harvard press release posted on PhysOrg analyzed moral decision making in terms of brain wiring.  “It seems that our capacity for complex, life-and-death decisions depends on brain structures that originally evolved for making more basic, self-interested decisions about things like obtaining calories.”  The scientists assumed that since the same brain circuits for moral decisions lit up in brain images as those for obtaining money or food, that therefore morality was an artifact of the evolutionary selection for self-preservation.
2. Evangelical species:  A Rice University press release posted on PhysOrg classified evangelical leaders into four categories with the coldness and aloofness of a museum worker pinning insects to a cladogram.
3. Shame on poverty:  An Oxford press release announced an international study to measure the relationship of poverty to feelings of low self-esteem, PhysOrg announced.  This study did desire, however, to “tackle poverty effectively while simultaneously recognising the importance of promoting dignity and a sense of self-respect.”  It is not clear, however, whether science can establish which is the cause, and which is the effect, if either.
4. Evolution of crying:  Several articles such as this one on SmartPlanet analyzed the evolutionary purpose of tears.  Assuming anything that exists evolved, the article said, “according to scientists who study evolution, crying has likely evolved to be a tool – a leg up in natural selection – to help the species persist.”  The reporter called NPR’s coverage of this idea a “great report” because it supposedly explains a human behavior as “an evolved mechanism to save relationships in distress.”
5. Evolution of marriage:  A press release from University of Chicago posted by PhysOrg analyzed the stress levels and hormones of married couples compared to singles, and classified human marriages right along with the animals: “in species of primates and birds where males assist females with rearing offspring ... testosterone levels in males drop as they engage in more fatherly behavior.”  The human subjects were subjected to saliva sampling before and after playing computer games.
6. Religious patriotism:  A press release from the American Sociological Association claimed, according to PhysOrg, that “People with no religious affiliation have less favorable views of the US.”  It’s not clear whether the sociologists intended to state a cause-and-effect relationship between patriotism and three demographic factors (ethnicity, religious affiliation and nationality), or just wanted to state a pattern in the statistics.  The press release was too brief to describe the instrument used.  What does a national-pride-o-meter look like?
7. TV Sex:  A press release from Temple University published by PhysOrg claims that TV sex is not linked to early teen sexual activity.  “There are many reasons to find the portrayal of sex in mass media objectionable,” the researcher remarked, “But let’s not confuse matters of taste with matters of science.”  Apparently science is tasteless.
8. Goys and birls:  In a claim sure to cause furrowed brows among some parents, Michigan State University claims, “Boys and Girls Not as Different as Previously Thought.”  The article on Science Daily admitted that “further research is needed to confirm the results by examining a single group of children over time.”
9. Don’t tell dad:  My, what would Mom and Dad think of a press release from the American Sociological Association that exonerates college unmarried sex on the grounds that it is “often harmless to their academics”?  Read Science Daily if you dare.  Apparently the opinions of parents, religious leaders, ethicists and counselors were irrelevant to this kind of “scientific” study.
10. Mr. Wilson against Dennis the Menace:  E. O. Wilson was at it again this week, explaining the evolution of eusociality (self-sacrificing group behavior, as seen in beehives and human charitable organizations).  Science Daily summarize his latest Nature paper.  The apostate Christian and his colleagues figured out a way to explain unselfish behavior entirely in terms of Darwinian natural selection.  Part of the collateral damage of this view, if it becomes the new paradigm (not a new game; see 05/07/2002 and 08/26/2004), is that decades of Hamilton’s kin selection (inclusive fitness) theory, regarded as “one of the most (or even the most) important evolutionary insights of the recently finished century” gets tossed into the dustbin of history.  For more on the “disturbing” legacy of W. D. Hamilton, see 03/07/2002 and 09/02/2004.

It’s time to turn the tables on these Yoda wannabes again.  According to their own belief systems, they are evolved animals, too.  No fair excluding oneself from the population.  If they want to treat the rest of us as lab rats, we can ask for reciprocation, so here goes.  These evolutionary researchers go through these scientific motions because they use the same brain circuits for getting food and money.  We can divide them into four categories: the dogmatic, hilarious, circumlocutious and brazen.  Their affluence causes a lack of shame.  Their atheism causes their unfavorable attitude toward their country.  They are stressed out because their marriages are either unstable or non-existent.  Justifying TV sex is an evolutionary defense mechanism they employ to cover up their own dalliances.  Their scientific conclusions are artifacts of their hormones and gender identities.
    Why not let the humanities teachers, philosophers, theologians and preachers turn their measuring instruments on the denizens of the science department?  It would not be hard to envision G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis or Billy Sunday having some rather colorful rhetoric to explain the propensity of evolutionary psychologists to be predominantly atheist, leftist, intolerable, arrogant reprobates.  Undoubtedly, the sin meters of some of these poor scientific scoundrels would be so active, they could be used on hot days as a fan.
    What happens when scientists leave the lab and presume upon the domains of other modes of inquiry is that they become caricatures of themselves.  Like the proverbial carpenters with a hammer seeing every problem as a nail, they start hammering the water, the air, the language, and the music.  It looks pretty silly to hammer a Mozart concerto.  One thing they never do, though, is hammer their own heads.  Maybe they should.  Somehow they need their sense knocked back into them, so that they can “experience” the psychology of self-refutation.
    Notice how the evolutionary psychos leapt onto the Maslow pyramid to evolve it better.  What is this “hierarchy of needs”?  Who was Abraham Maslow to presume to prescribe what his fellow creatures need most?  Even if he had not been a new-age mystic, he got it wrong – his hierarchy was the complete opposite of what the Manufacturer commanded.  We don’t need self-actualization; we need self-sacrifice!  Jesus said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33) and all your other needs would be added to you.  Paul admonished believers to present themselves to God as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2) and have our minds renewed by the word of God.  Jesus told his followers to deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow him, not to seek self-actualization.  Without question the nobility of Jesus Christ, and the life He lived, is incomparably more to be desired than the whims and myths of this joker Maslow who put his puny little self at the center of the universe.  Like all the other leading-light psychologists, he appeared on stage briefly to give his short soliloquy, garner some applause, and then disappear into the wings, out of a job, along with Freud, Jung, Rogers, and all the other pretenders.
    It’s time to unmask the charlatans who misuse the good name of science to hawk their deceptive wares.  The know-nothing Yodas described above are only fallible people.  Their hammer works good on physical nails, but not on the mind and the things of God.  Call their bluff, pastors; be bold!  We need some modern-day Elijahs, unaffected by labels and histrionics and costumery, to challenge these priests of Darwin-Baal and show who can draw down the true fire.  One good Elijah is all it takes.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Politics and Ethics • Mind and Brain • Bible and Theology • Philosophy of Science

1. Wight wash:  The Isle of Wight is “one of the most important dinosaur sites in the world,” reported PhysOrg.  On this British isle, a great variety of dinosaur bones and other species are found in a “chaotic jumble” showing signs of fire and drowning.  Something dramatic happened here, and two UK paleontologists are quick to tell their tale:

   “Rainfall occurred all year round but during the summer months, when temperatures soared to between 36-40°C, evaporation exceeded rainfall causing drought conditions.  At these times vegetation became parched leaving it vulnerable to fires caused by lightning strike.
       “Occasionally very heavy rain would follow electrical storms and wild fires causing flash floods.  These swept up all loose objects in their path, swallowed complete dinosaur skeletons and eroded floodplain sediments.  The more debris and sediment the water collected the thicker and thicker it became until eventually it was like mixed concrete.”

   Can this tale be untangled from the data?  According to one of the paleontologists, “On the Isle of Wight you get a complete muddle of the smallest fossils blended with the biggest, nothing quite like it has been seen anywhere else in the world.”  The article claims that the Isle of Wight once lay farther south at the latitude of Gibraltar.  The new study, it claims, “revealed” that “the island’s once violent weather explains why thousands of tiny dinosaur teeth and bones lie buried alongside the huge bones of their gigantic relatives.”  Why the violent weather, lightning fires, floods and concrete muddle did not happen on the mainland simultaneously was not explained.
2. Arctic reptiles:  One does not normally envision alligators and tortoises roaming on Arctic ice, but according to Science Daily, these cold-blooded animals “thrived” there on Ellesmere Island 50 million years ago, despite being relegated to very little sunlight six months of the year.  University of Colorado scientists are certain they have figured it out.  Back in the Eocene, they surmise, it never got below freezing on Ellesmere.  It was a balmy forested swamp back then, like Louisiana.  It’s still a bit north, Dr. Jaelyn Eberle admitted: “the existence of large land tortoises in the Eocene High Arctic is still somewhat puzzling, said Eberle, since today’s large tortoises inhabit places like the Galapagos....”  Interesting that bowfin fish were also found mixed in with the fossils, which including a surprising assortment of animals like “giant tortoises, aquatic turtles, large snakes, alligators, flying lemurs, tapirs, and hippo-like and rhino-like mammals” in a “lush landscape.”  Interesting, also, that the paleontologists are concerned about coal miners disrupting the fossil beds.  Coal – in the Arctic?  Eberle managed to make her research politically relevant by describing the Eocene as a “a deep time analogue” to modern concerns about global warming.
3. The early sponge:  In an attempt to show that animals started their emergence long before the Cambrian Explosion, some Princeton scientists have described traces in Australian rocks said to be 650 million years old as the first sponges – among the simplest of multicellular animals.  The BBC News shows the squiggly lines in rock from the Flinders Ranges as a kind of Rorschach test for visualizing animal life.  After all, based on Darwin’s tree, the Geologic Column and molecular phylogeny, sponges should have appeared about that time.  Problem is, we have no idea what they would have looked like.  Are they really animals?  A skeptical Aussie scientist described the traces as “coco-pop breakfast-cereal-like forms” that anyone could use to claim were the “oldest sponge-grade fossils.”

Try our interpretation: a global flood.  Why not?  If storytelling is the thing, that one has a lot going for it, including adequate mechanisms, eyewitnesses and a lot less special pleading.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Dinosaurs • Marine Biology • Terrestrial Zoology

Scientists try hard to make it look like they know what they are talking about.  Describing how things look today is one thing.  That’s observation.  Telling us how they got that way is interrupted frequently by the refrain, “Scientists had long thought... but....”  Heard often enough, it’s not cause for confidence in what they are telling us now, even when they crow about nailing the age of the solar system to 5 significant figures (see New Scientist) which, by the way, they just decided is some 2 million years older than the previous value they crowed about (see Space.com).  Let’s stack their confidence in that number by the pile of mistakes in all their predictions (07/29/2010).  They don’t know, and they weren’t there, so is this science, or is it educated storytelling with unlimited withdrawals from the Ad Hoc Bank?
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Geology

Universe Is Doomed     08/22/2010    
August 22, 2010 — Astronomers have decided the universe will expand forever, growing colder and darker, till it ends in a heat death.  According to the BBC News, a study of gravitational lensing by a huge galactic cluster named Abell 1689 determined that dark energy will push galaxies apart till they burn out.  One researcher remarked that the study proves “exactly what the fate of the Universe will be” – which the article described, “Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term ‘absolute zero’.”

This is not news, but a reaffirmation of what 19th century physicists inferred from the second law of thermodynamics.  It doesn’t matter whether the universe is expanding or not (a factor 19th century astronomers did not consider).  No process can prevent the increase of entropy and the unavailability of usable energy in the universe.  When everything becomes a uniform temperature, approaching the asymptotic limit of absolute zero, that is the end.
    This is a blow to all positivistic conceptions of human progress.  Even in the movie Contact, there was meager comfort for the intelligences of the universe to have nothing more to offer than biding time till the inevitable fate awaited everything.  In our day, cosmic acceleration speeds up the gloom.  Sure it is far off (far beyond our individual lifetimes), but what hope is there for any activity that ends in a cold, black nothingness?  There is no point in ultimate pointlessness, no purpose in ultimate purposelessness, no initiative to energize mental activity in dread of the ultimate disappearance of mind, reason and communication.  The same despair holds, for anyone who ponders it, in the cyclic worldviews that teach a universe vanishing into a cosmic sea only to emerge again with no memory of what it had been.
    Lord Kelvin, one of the most eminent in the field of 19th century thermodynamics, understood that there is no hope in a world view that omits God.  Kelvin noticed the second law clearly stated in Scripture thousands of years before his generation had discovered it (Psalm 102:26-27).  Not leaving his Creator’s universe decaying away in vain, he affirmed the revealed promises of God, the only eternal hope that can energize our yearnings: “We have the sober scientific certainty that the heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment,’” he said.  “....Dark indeed would be the prospects for the human race if unilluminated by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and a new earth’” (Revelation 21-22).
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Bible and Theology

1. Do the RNA:  Scientists at Yale University found an RNA complex that helps proteins to infect cells.  That’s interesting as far as it goes, but Science Daily embellished the observation with a story about the distant past: “Yale University researchers have discovered an ancient but functioning genetic remnant from a time before DNA existed,” it said.  Ron Breaker of Yale elaborated the reasoning behind the claim:

   This is the sort of RNA structure would have been needed for life exist [sic] before the evolution of double-stranded DNA, with its instruction book for proteins that carry out almost all of life’s functions today.  If proteins are necessary to carry out life’s functions, scientists need to explain how life arise [sic] without DNA’s recipe.  The answer to the chicken or egg question is RNA machines such as the one identified in the new study, Breaker said.
       A lot of sophisticated RNA gadgetry has gone extinct but this study shows that RNA has more of the power needed to carry out complex biochemistry,” Breaker said.  “It makes the spontaneous emergence of life on earth much more palatable.”

   Incidentally, even though the observation showed this RNA helping a bacterium infect a cell, the RNA probably had a more beneficial function: “They were though [sic] to be molecular parasites, but it is clear they are being harnessed by cells to do some good for the organism.”  The article did not attempt to explain how machinery evolves.
2. Moses oar:  One of the most complete skeletons of the mosasaur Platecarpus, an extinct marine reptile that was a dynamite swimmer as well as a fierce predator, was announced by Science Daily.  The article said that earlier beliefs about it swimming like an eel have had to be revised, as analysis shows it probably swam more like a shark.  That’s interesting as far as it goes, but it has evolutionary implications, as Luis B. Chiappe of the Los Angeles National History Museum explained:

   The findings underscore how these adaptations for fully aquatic existence evolved rapidly and convergently in several groups of Mesozoic marine reptiles, as well as in extant whales.  “This fossil shows evolution in action, how a successful design was developed time after time by different groups of organisms adapting to life in similar environments,” said Chiappe.  “It highlights once again the potential for new discoveries to challenge well-established interpretations about dinosaurs and other animals that lived with them.”
       “From this beautifully preserved specimen it seems that advanced, shark like swimming began in mosasaurs millions of years earlier than we previously thought,” said Dr. Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, not involved in the paper.

   The article praised the curators and workers on the fossil, and remarked that new discoveries can challenge well-established interpretations about dinosaurs and other animals, but was strangely silent about how evolution produced complex adaptations time and time again in different groups of animals.  Incidentally, the fossil was exceptionally well preserved: “It retains traces of a partial body outline, putative skin color markings, external scales, a downturned tail, branching bronchial tubes, and stomach contents (fish).”  Most sea creatures decay in the ocean.  The article did not explain how this specimen was preserved so delicately.
3. Reasoning about irrationality:  People say and do dumb things.  That’s interesting as far as it goes, but Sharon Begley at Newsweek used her powers of reason to argue “why evolution may favor irrationality.”  Putting herself in the mindset of a hunter-gatherer in prehistoric times, Begley explained, “Forms of reasoning that are good for solving logic puzzles but bad for winning arguments lost out, over the course of evolution, to those that help us be persuasive but cause us to struggle with abstract syllogisms.”  She said this very persuasively, if not logically; for if evolution favored irrationality, how would she know the difference?

When you read evolutionary science articles with your Baloney Detector on, it all becomes very clear.  It’s like seeing with those new scanners at airports.  Evolutionary storytelling is an ideology searching for evidential threads to cover Emperor Charlie.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Origin of Life • Fossils • Marine Biology • Dinosaurs • Human Body • Mind • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Would it be science if you published many articles on scientific constraints for the survival of gnomes and leprechauns?  Shostak knows a lot of astronomy, but his reason for being in his current post is SETI, for which there is no scientific evidence.  He loves to mingle with the sci-if crowd (05/31/2005), but when the legitimacy of SETI is at stake, he can easily point to Filippenko and Brown and the other legit astronomers, and say, “I’m with them.”  Note: they haven’t found ET, either.
Next headline on:  SETI

Conjuring Up Evolutionary Implications from Current Data     08/11/2010    
August 11, 2010 — What does observable reality imply about unobservable reality?  Some scientists say, a lot.  But is unobservable reality really real?  Or is it an oxymoron?  A couple of recent articles in the science media show scientists observing things in the present, then saying they have “huge implications” for things no scientist ever observed.
    In one article, some Yale geologists measured the angle of magnetization in rocks in Australia in the present.  That’s the data.  The implication they drew was that a supercontinent in the unobserved past called Gondwana underwent a 60-degree rotation 525 million years ago.  According to Science Daily, one of the scientists exclaimed, “this could have had huge implications for the Cambrian explosion of animal life at that time.”
    A picture of a professor and his post-doc working in a Frankensteinish lab accompanies another article in Science Daily.  They are looking at space dust.  That’s the data.  They are trying to tally up the chemicals in meteorites and dust samples brought back from space missions, and detected in spectra from the Herschel space telescope, and make their tally available to researchers around the world.  What is the significance of dust?  The article announced the implications: “Because space dust contains the basic ingredients that form planets, the University of Central Florida physicists’ analysis could provide important clues about how the solar system formed and how life emerged.”  The postdoc is learning her lessons well.  “A complete understanding of the mineralogy of cosmic dust is essential to understanding the formation and mineralogy of planets and, ultimately, to unraveling how life emerged in the universe,” she said.
    An evolutionist at the University of Dusseldorf found organisms deep in the Mediterranean that can live without oxygen.  That’s the data.  It led Bill Martin to propose a radical idea about the origin of life and its subsequent evolution that shows all the other evolutionary biologists are wrong: the origin of complex life did not revolve around oxygen.  The tale told as a “hydrogen bombshell” in New Scientist conjures up the union of a bacterium and an archaeal microbe to form mitochondria.  It conjures up the Cambrian explosion.  It conjures up images of the rise and fall of oxygen, the interactions of that gas with microbes directing the course of evolution.  For example,

One is that the initial rise in oxygen did not cleanse the oceans, but converted them into a stinking mess, full of hydrogen sulphide.  Far from having few refuges, anaerobes had whole oceans to themselves.  What’s more, these conditions lasted for more than a billion years, right through the period when the eukaryotes are thought to have evolved.

They should be weeping over the Cambrian explosion and the inability of evolution to account for the “emergence” of complex life and body plans, and they should be blushing over reducing science to “freak accidents,” but instead they are rejoicing in their own freak imaginations.
    What are the implications of following their example?  If they can do it, so can we.  We can take observable reality and make up stories about unobservable realities that exist only in the imagination.  Here’s your assignment: assume a stupid thing, observe a fact, and make up a story about what it means about unobservable reality.    Here are a couple to get you started.

Assumption: Everything happens according to the will of Elvis.  Data: I got a junk phone call from an airline company.  Implication: Elvis wants me to fly to Memphis.

Assumption: Aliens planted gnomes on Earth to direct the course of evolution.  Data: Flies come into the house when the windows are open.  Implication: 128.523 million years ago, flies were change agents the gnomes used to pressure mammals to grow long tails as fly swatters.
    See?  It’s fun.  You, too, can be a scientist.  Send in your suggestions.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Fossils • Geology • Origin of Life • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

Complicating the question is the “Great Unconformity”, an event that wiped about a billion years of history out of the geologic record of this region.  The disappearance of these tons of rocks was due to erosion – seas receded, and the newly exposed rocks wore away through wind, rain and other weathering processes.  Then the seas flooded in again and sediments began forming new layers.  The result is that a 330-million-year-old rock layer now lies directly on top of rocks that vary between 1.2 and 1.6 billion years old, depending on the location.

If a “story” is required to explain the data anyway, who has a better one?  One thing is for sure: the present was not the key to the past, as Lyell believed.  This is also true for Venus and Mars.  So any hope of resting secular planetary science on natural laws – on observable, repeatable processes – is problematic, when they have to invoke very special ad hoc conditions to make their story fit the facts.  Creationists admit that the conditions for the Flood were special, but they are not ad hoc, because one chooses whether or not to believe the eyewitness that tells us what happened, and why.
    Another thing that seems clear is that glaciers are a poor explanation for the Great Unconformity.  Glaciers slide down mountains.  If the whole world were a mountain covered with ice, the glaciers would have no place to slide and plane off the surface.  Where are the valleys, like Yosemite?  Where are the moraines?  Why did it happen when they say it did, and not earlier or later?  Where are the millions of meteors that must have fallen in a billion years, and why were none of them large enough to end the ice age?
    The Great Unconformity is flat as a pancake in most exposures; this is clearly evident in the Grand Canyon for hundreds of miles.  The secular story also has to invoke about a billion years of missing history between the underlying rocks and the overlying sedimentary layers, which are also mostly flat as a pancake (all the way up to the rim of Grand Canyon).  If those million years took place, why are there not numerous gullies, channels and faults running through the Great Unconformity?  It appears that the surface of the earth was scoured flat in a single event, after which sediments quickly became deposited.  It looks like a global Flood.
    The meteor that Mullins talked about, if that’s what caused the Santa Fe rocks to look like they do, occurred after the Flood – not hundreds of millions of years ago.  The secular date is decided based on the rocks in their presumed evolutionary context – in other words, the rocks in their head.  It is not based on some true history that is out there in the world.  It’s part of their scheme, their story, of how the world came to be.
    If you want to believe the evolutionary story, full as it is of ad hoc special pleading, fine.  If you can live the several lifetimes for the army of secular geologists to try to figure out their story, fine.  But don’t fall for the notion that it is somehow superior or “scientific” because secular experts believe it.  Both camps need a story, but there is a difference between historical narrative and fiction.  Historical narrative has eyewitness testimony and usually tends to fit the observations better.  Look at the Great Unconformity and think about it.  You might want to also think about the 07/15/2010, 07/01/2010, and 06/27/2010 entries.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

1. Walker with muscle:  A paper by Kaya and Higuchi from the University of Tokyo discussed how myosin motors, the active force-generating machines in muscle, adjust their walking steps with non-linear elasticity.¹  Myosins work together in muscle.  Their ability to reduce stiffness and adjust their walk is essential: “the load-dependent changes in the step size are an essential property of skeletal myosin,” the authors said.  Their last sentence explained why this contributes to their effectiveness: “Such molecular properties may be inherent in the assembly of molecular motors and may reduce molecular interference, leading to the high mechanical efficiency of muscle contraction.”  You have your elastic myosins to thank for every simple or complex move you make.  For more stories about myosin this year, see 04/19/2010, 02/19/2010, and 01/19/2010.
2. Junk with control:  It wasn’t long ago when any non-coding region of the genome was considered junk.  No longer; lincRNAs are emerging as stars of regulation and control (see 08/02/2010).  Another finding to that effect was published in Science by an international team from Stanford, Harvard and the Weizmann Institute in Israel.²  They studied one lincRNA called HOTAIR that has two specific binding domains for making histone modifications.  Histone is the protein on which DNA winds.  It contains molecular tags that affect translation – the “histone code” (see 12/22/2009, bullet 5, with its embedded links).
       The team found that HOTAIR, an RNA generated from non-coding DNA, is intimately involved with the regulation of histone by forming a scaffold for PRC2 and LSD1 proteins: “The functional consequence of coordinate targeting of PRC2 and LSD1 by HOTAIR is gene repression,” they said.  What they found may apply to other cases: “Some lincRNAs may be ‘tethers’ that recruit several chromatin modifications to their sites of synthesis while other lincRNAs can act on distantly located genes as ‘guides’ to affect their chromatin states,” the concluded.  “On the basis of their dynamic patterns of expression, specific lincRNAs can potentially direct complex patterns of chromatin states at specific genes in a spatially and temporally organized manner during development and disease states.”
3. Repairmen with teamwork:  A team at Zheijiang University in China studied the partners in DNA interstrand cross-link repair, one of many repair pathways active in the genome.  Fanconi anemia is a disease caused by mutations in 13 Fanc genes.³    “Here, we characterize a previously unrecognized nuclease, Fanconi anemia–associated nuclease 1 (FAN1), that promotes ICL repair in a manner strictly dependent on its ability to accumulate at or near sites of DNA damage and that relies on mono-ubiquitylation of the ID complex,” they said, referring to the tagging of a repair site with ubiquitin, a “ubiquitous” cellular tag signaling a site for repair or demolition.  “Thus, the mono-ubiquitylated ID complex recruits the downstream repair protein FAN1 and facilitates the repair of DNA interstrand cross-links.”
       For more on DNA repair teams in the cell, see the 07/18/2001, 07/26/2002, 01/30/2003, 02/13/2004, 03/31/2005, 08/14/2007, and 03/14/2010 entries.

Who needs evolution?  Not these authors.  Not medical science, genetics, or cell biology, either.  Let’s move along, and leave Darwinism to rust in pieces.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Down with Human Evolution Just-So Stories     08/08/2010    
August 08, 2010 — Stories of human ancestors around campfires evolving larger brains by eating meat or caring for animals often sound themselves life campfire stories.  For example, Jeremy Hsu in Live Science speculated that “Caring for Animals May Have Shaped Human Evolution.”  A cute girl with a puppy adorns the article.  “Our love of all things furry has deep roots in human evolution and may have even shaped how our ancestors developed language and other tools of civilization.”  For another example, see the 06/10/2010 entry on why humans became hairless.
    Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has had enough of this tale-telling.  “‘Just-so stories [are] driving me crazy,” he exclaimed in a rare outburst against reporters and those in his own field on his John Hawks Weblog.  Responding to one such story, the idea that eating meat gave humans bigger brains (12/20/2009), he showed how to ask skeptical questions: “How did meat make us smarter?  Is it a magical meat property?  If I fed enough meat to the local deer, would they get smarter?”  He did not reject the evolutionary tales outright: “These are serious hypotheses with literature and evidence supporting them,” he claimed, but then he blushed on his colleagues’ behalf: “I just wish that they could be reported in a way that made it sound like paleoanthropologists are skeptical scientists!”

Thank you, John.  Join our campaign to clean up science by ridding it of storytelling.  Just watch the ground under your feet.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

You can try this at home.  Put some watch parts in an accordion and pump till a watch comes out.  If you want NSF funding, find a way to make your experiment sound sexy.  (Warning: experimenting on the origin of life between your own sheets does not qualify.  Maybe the Kinsey Institute will finance that.)
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Darwinism has no explanation of how the atoms and all the laws of nature should just come to “be there”, no adequate theory of how life with its highly complex DNA suddenly appeared, and no evidence to show that single-celled life forms evolved into the much more complex forms of the later fossil record.  It also cannot explain how consciousness, instinct, free will, and sexual reproduction came into being.

It’s fun to watch bigots go ape.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Mammals • Terrestrial Zoology • Education

Stem Cell News: Adults Still Lead     08/06/2010    
August 06, 2010 — Stem cells are still hot.  Most of the significant findings are coming from adult stem cells (AS) or induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) rather than embryonic stem cells (ES).  For example, a PhysOrg article described progress at the University of Michigan in predicting what cell types stem cells will become.  Nothing was said in the article about embryonic stem cells.  Here are more news reports since the 07/20/2010 entry on the lead of adult stem cell discoveries over ES findings.
    RNA is a rising star in stem cell research.  For instance, according to Science Daily, Caltech found that micro-RNAs, once of unknown function or considered cellular junk, are intimately involved with stem cells.  It appears they control the function of mammalian stem cells in the blood, determining what types of blood cell they will become.  Similarly, PhysOrg reported on work at Massachusetts General Hospital that found micro RNAs are involved in controlling the number of blood cells in the body.  Science Daily reported on work at MIT that finds RNA provides a safer way to reprogram stem cells (iPS cells). 
    Research at Stanford found that purifying the stem cells from bone marrow increase the chances for successful bone marrow transplants, according to PhysOrg.  Adult stem cells continue to show promise for healing broken hearts.  According to PhysOrg mesenchymal stem cells injected into pigs with heart disease made their hearts “good as new.”  Want a renewed, all-natural joint?  PhysOrg reported that adult stem cells are coming along well in experiments.  It appears from tests on rabbits that “failing joints can be replaced with a joint grown naturally using the host’s own stem cells.”  Researchers foresee a future with “naturally grown joints that would last longer than currently used artificial joints.”  Another study announced by PhysOrg found that, for patients with deadly brain tumors called glioblastomas, survival time was doubled if radiation therapy was directed at parts of the brain known to harbor stem cells that perhaps had become cancerous.  The radiation apparently targets the source of proliferating cancer cells.
    Overall, PhysOrg reported, adult stem cell therapies are “far ahead” of embryonic experiments.  “For all the emotional debate that began about a decade ago on allowing the use of embryonic stem cells,” the article said, “it’s adult stem cells that are in human testing today.  An extensive review of stem cell projects and interviews with two dozen experts reveal a wide range of potential treatments.”  The score for ES cells is still zero.  While according to New Scientist the first embryonic stem cell test on humans has gotten a green light, PhysOrg said that “in the near term, embryonic stem cells are more likely to pay off as lab tools, for learning about the roots of disease and screening potential drugs,”  An ethicist quoted in the article, however, dubbed all the efforts for a decade to use ES cells for therapy as “fruitless.”
    But perhaps the most significant news was announced by Science Daily.  The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has added strong evidence that ES and iPS stem cells are “virtually identical,” apparently removing any need for embryonic stem cells with their “ethical hurdles.”  Garrett Frampton, co-author of a paper in Cell Stem Cell about this comparison, commented, “Billions of dollars have been invested in the idea that we will use ES cells at some point in the future as therapeutic or regenerative agents, but for ethical and practical issues, this may not be possible.  But if they work out therapies with ES cells, and iPS cells are equivalent to ES cells, then the idea is that those therapies could be used with iPS cells as well.”
    In light of this scorecard, why was the dominant theme in the past decade focused on the promise of embryonic stem cells?  PhysOrg reported on a study at the University of Arizona that found who drove the issue.  It wasn’t public demand.  It wasn’t even the media.  According to the study, President Bush had little influence holding back the tide of ES research because of the demands of scientific elites.  The scientific community held the ball on the issue, and the media followed them – not the President.  “They also found that while two-thirds of the sources included in the stories were ‘elites,’ such as experts and politicians, not one story used the president as a dominant source.”  When President Obama voiced support for ES research, that all changed.  The media, the scientific community and the President were then all on the same team.  One of the study authors remarked, “I think it is time for us to see whether the same pattern occurred during the debate for health care reform under the new Obama administration.”

Defend science.  But when a scientist (or reporter, or President, or any other human being) does something deplorable, loses integrity, promotes a selfish agenda, wastes money, runs roughshod over ethics, or abandons common sense, “science” makes a pitiful shield.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics • Media

The analyses of Srivastava and her colleagues suggest that there was a crucial window, some 150 to 200 million years in duration, when the basics of multicellular life emerged.  Nearly one-third of the genetic alterations that distinguish humans from their last common ancestor with single-celled organisms took place during this period.  These changes would have occurred within our sponge-like forebears.
    The researchers also identified parts of the genome devoted to suppressing individual cells that multiply at the expense of the collective.  The presence of such genes indicates that the battle to stop rogue cells — in other words, cancer — is as old as multicellularity itself.  Such a link was recently hinted at by work showing that certain ‘founder genes’ that are associated with human cancers first arose at about the same time as metazoans appeared.  The demosponge genome shows that genes for cell suicide – those activated within an individual cell when something goes wrong – evolved before pathways that are activated by adjacent cells to dispatch a cancerous neighbour.

• Comparative analysis enabled by the sequencing of the sponge genome reveals genomic events linked to the origin and early evolution of animals, including the appearance, expansion and diversification of pan-metazoan transcription factor, signalling pathway and structural genes.  This diverse ‘toolkit’ of genes correlates with critical aspects of all metazoan body plans, and comprises cell cycle control and growth, development, somatic- and germ-cell specification, cell adhesion, innate immunity and allorecognition.
• The emergence of multicellular animals from single-celled ancestors over 600 million years ago required the evolution of mechanisms for coordinating cell division, growth, specialization, adhesion and death.
• Sponges are diverse and their phylogeny is poorly resolved, allowing for the possibility that sponges are paraphyletic, which implies that other animals evolved from sponge-like ancestors.
• Although the diversity of sponges and their uncertain phylogeny make it doubtful that any single species can reveal the intricacies of early animal evolution, comparison of the A. queenslandica draft genome with sequences from other species can provide a conservative estimate of the genome of the common ancestor of all animals and the timing and nature of the genomic events that led to the origin and early evolution of animal lineages.
• We find 235 animal-specific protein domains and 769 animal-specific domain combinations that evolved along the metazoan stem (Supplementary Note 9).  Additionally, lineage-specific changes to these animal domain architectures occurred in early metazoan evolution.
• The Myc oncogene illustrates how intramolecular regulation has also evolved.
• This lack of phylogenetic resolution may reflect a period of rapid evolution and diversification of ligand/receptor molecules in sponge and eumetazoan lineages.
• ...the expression of orthologues of post-synaptic structural and proneural regulatory proteins in Amphimedon larval globular cells suggests an evolutionary connection with an ancestral protoneuron.

Whereas the eumetazoan lineage produced a wide diversity of body forms [i.e., the Cambrian Explosion], the sponge body plan has been stable for over 600 million years.  What can explain this disparity in evolved morphological complexity?  Although we have seen that sponges and eumetazoans share many common pathways related to morphogenesis and cell-type specification, there are notable genomic differences, including different microRNA assemblages, lineage-specific domains and domain architectures, and the differential expansions of gene families.  Although there has been minimal characterization of cis-regulatory architectures in non-bilaterians, we note that as most classes of bilaterian transcription factors are also present in sponges, cnidarians and placozoans, it may be that quantitative rather than qualitative differences in cis-regulatory mechanisms were needed to produce more diverse body plans.
    The sexually-reproducing, heterotrophic metazoan ancestor had the capacity to sense, respond to, and exploit the surrounding environment while maintaining multicellular homeostasis.  Although sponges lack some of the cell types found in eumetazoans, including neurons and muscles, they share with all other animals genes that are essential for the form and function of integrated multicellular organisms.  With these genomic innovations enabling the regulation of cellular proliferation, death, differentiation and cohesion, metazoans transcended their microbial ancestry.

Are you angry after reading this?  You should be.  Ever since Charlie’s coup, the world has been told that evolution is the one-and-only scientific explanation for the living world.  It’s all smoke and mirrors!  Look at what they said – complexity just emerged in the genes of some hypothetical, unseen, mythical “common ancestor.”  (Note the imbedded evolutionary assumption there and the euphemism for miracle, emergence).  This ancestor was endowed with such incredible foresight, it somehow came up with “innovations” that would prove useful to the scientists 636 million years later who might want to use their neurons to write nonsense.  What?  Getting even one useful gene is astronomically improbable (online book), to say nothing of 18,000 genes matching in a functional “genetic toolkit.”  This is absolutely shameful.  It’s indescribably absurd.  Science is supposed to be about evidence, observations, data, testability, repeatability, proof, not just hollow thinking of ideologues, writing about magic visions reflecting in the vitreous humor of their darkened eyeballs.
    All the tricks of the racketeer are here.  Readers are shielded from contrary evidence and critical analysis (card stacking).  The nonsense is wrapped in the prestige of science (association).  Everywhere questions are begged (circular reasoning) in broad-brush statements (glittering generalities), while key issues, like how complexity “emerged,” are dodged in passive verbs and miracle words (sidestepping).  The lingo is loaded with bluffing and subjectivity and equivocation.  non-sequiturs abound, such as the inference that complexity in sponge cells implies that thousands of genes exist in some putative microbe ancestor, based on circumstantial evidence interpreted according to an a priori commitment to naturalism (post hoc fallacy, it exists, therefore it evolved).  This has nothing to do with science; this is dogma in an echo chamber (repetition).  And when the lack of evidence is too overpowering to ignore, there’s always hope that the evidence “may shed light” on evolution (suggestion).
    Folks, we are not talking about some little, backwater issue with Charlie’s grand scheme, but the main argument even Darwin admitted could be deadly to his theory – the lack of evidence for transitional forms at the base of the fossil record (Origin, chapter 10).  It was unsolved in his day; it remains unsolved today.  In fact, it is far worse for evolutionists now than it was in 1859, because there are no more excuses that the fossil record is incompletely sampled, or that Precambrian rocks could not preserve soft tissues (see the film Darwin’s Dilemma).  Look at the flim-flam offered up a few years ago by Charles Marshall, the Master of Disaster, when tasked with explaining the Cambrian explosion (04/23/2006): basically, “it evolved because it evolved”.  This is smoke, not science.
    The fossil record, a spear-pointed battering ram aimed at the flimsy gate of evolutionary theory, should have toppled King Charlie’s castle long ago.  It’s not for lack of trying.  Critics have used the battering ram to good effect from the beginning, but Charlie’s demons maintain an impenetrable moat of smoke to hide the sacred image of the Bearded Buddha in the castle temple.  Long ago, they co-opted all the institutions – the journals, the media, schools and even some churches – keeping them occupied perpetuating the smoke moat with their fogma machines, sending the sensible soldiers with the battering ram coughing and the Darwincense-addicted Charlie worshippers inhaling deeply, euphoric in their hallucinations of “emergence.”  (For definition of fogma, see the 05/14/2007 commentary.)  The defenders of the castle are also well-trained in hate speech, knowing to close their eyes, cover their ears, and shout on cue “Creationism!  Pseudoscience!” at any sign of the battering ram.
    The Bearded Buddha is a false god.  It’s long past time to clear the air and demand scientific integrity.  Don’t get angry; get the power fans.  Once the truth can be seen, a battering ram will not even be necessary.  The Darwin Castle will vanish in its own fogma.  Expect a hard fight getting the power fans in place, though; there’s too much riding on this ideology.  Expect Screwtape to use his whole arsenal in its defense.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Marine Biology • Darwin and Evolution • Fossils • Dumb Ideas

Fine-Tuning Found in Life’s Rotary Engine     08/04/2010    
August 04, 2010 — The universal energy currency in living things is ATP.  To produce the vast quantities of this molecule required by life 24 x 7, cells employ banks of rotary engines called ATP Synthase, which we have reported on previously in these pages many times.  ATP synthase has become somewhat of a mascot of intelligent design, because there are no known precursors to this multi-faceted, exquisitely efficient motor that is so tiny, 120,000 of them could fit on the head of a pin (07/16/2002).  Scientists continue to glimpse finer details of these engines using X-ray crystallography and other techniques.  A new finding, published in PLoS Biology,¹ found that water molecules play a crucial role in the rotor.  The findings were summarized on PhysOrg, “Cells use water in nano-rotors to power energy conversion.”
    The international team (primarily at Max Planck Institute for Biophysics, Frankfurt, Germany) investigated the ATP synthase motors in an unusual bacterium that lives in highly-alkaline water.  “This bacterium prefers alkaline environments where the concentration of protons (H⁺) is lower outside than inside the cell – the inverse of the situation usually found in organisms that prefer neutral or acidic environments,” the authors said.  These cells have a special challenge.  Many cells live in neutral or acidic waters, providing no obstacles for the free flow of protons (hydrogen ions, H⁺) through the membranes and into the rotors they help turn.  In alkaline conditions, the protons would tend to leak out to neutralize the environment.  These special ATP synthase motors, therefore, need to maintain a gradient that is not as alkaline as the outside.  “The extreme alkaliphile [alkali-loving] Bacillus pseudofirmus Of4 grows by oxidative phosphorylation with cytoplasmic pH values maintained 1.5-2.3 pH units below the high external pH (up to 11) of the medium,” they explained (a pH of 11 is very strongly alkalinic).  “The existence of this reversed [delta]-pH poses a major thermodynamic problem, with which these cells must cope.”
    This species has some modifications to its engine design to help it cope with its special conditions.  It has a modified a-subunit, latent activity, and, most significantly, a modified c-ring with more subunits and a different shape.  The c-ring is the primary rotor.  In most organisms, it has 10 subunits; in B. pseudofirmus, there are 13 subunits (some other organisms have 11 or 15, and some run on sodium ions, Na⁺, instead of protons).  Though identical in many respects to the c-rings in other species, this one has an altered shape, somewhat like a “tulip beer glass,” they said soberly.  Although the ways in which these modifications serve to function in the alkaline environment of this bacterium are not yet clear, the authors are convinced that the cooperation of the water ion in the center of each subunit is a key:

This work shows a new type of proton coordination in an F₁F₀ synthase rotor ring....  It is evident that the coordination network of the water itself... is a stabilizing and therefore a structural part of this c-ring.  The presence of the water has been shown to enhance the Na⁺-binding affinity in the Na⁺-binding c₁₁ ring [in organisms with 11 c-subunits].  Given this observation we propose that the water in the c₁₃ ring binding pocket also enhances the proton affinity.  High affinity rotor binding sites are of central importance for all ATP synthases but are especially important for ATP synthases of bacteria that grow in alkaline environments.... Perhaps the novel manner in which a water participates in proton binding is also a consequence of adaptation of the ATP synthase to alkaliphily [adaptation to alkaline environments].

ATP synthases are among the most abundant and important proteins in living cells.  These rotating nano-machines produce the central chemical form of cellular energy currency, ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is used to meet the energy needs of cells.  For example, human adults synthesize up to 75 kg of ATP each day under resting conditions and need a lot more to keep pace with energy needs during strenuous exercise or work.  The turbine of the ATP synthase is the rotor element, called the c-ring.  This ring is 63 A [Angstroms] in diameter (6.3 nm, or 6.3 millionths of a millimeter) and completes over 500 rotations per second during ATP production.

As usual, the references to evolution were mere incense offerings to Charlie at the start of festivities, having nothing to do with the substance of the show.  Those formalities could have been excised without any loss of information; yea, indeed, but with a net gain in clarity.  Did the authors propose any primitive ancestors of functioning machines?  Any half-way ATP synthase?  Of course not; they wouldn’t work unless completely functional from the beginning.  They admitted, “The amino acid sequence of the protein subunits in this rotor ... has features common to an important group of ATP synthases in organisms from bacteria to man.”  The modifications they found for the bacterium under study were not accidents or mistakes, but purposeful modifications allowing this species to survive in its harsh environment.  To say that it evolved from a more common form begs the question of evolution.  One would have to already subscribe to evolution to believe that.
    This machine is too wonderful for laypeople to be uninformed about it.  It keeps us alive!  It’s a real, mechanical, rotary engine spinning up to 30,000 RPM by the thousands in every cell on the planet!  The thought of rotary engines keeping us alive, even in our sleep, should be shouted from the housetops!  This was only discovered in the 1990s.  Aristotle, Descartes, Voltaire, Darwin and Freud could never have dreamed life was this exquisite at its core.  Could any finding in the history of science be as awe-inspiring?  People should know this.  Amaze someone at the water cooler today.  Instead of the useless phatic utterance, “How’s it going?” try opening with, “How’s your rotary engine doing today?”  Your surprised co-worker might respond, “I don’t have a Mazda,” to which you reply: “No, I mean your rotary engines – the ones inside of you.”  Now you have the springboard for an enlivening discussion that will put the engines spinning in your brains to good use.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Best Face-on-Mars Photo Looks Dead     08/03/2010    
August 03, 2010 — Conspiracy theorists will probably have little to say now that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken the clearest photo yet of the alleged “Face on Mars” in Cydonia.  For the before and after photos, see PhysOrg.  The new photo is clearly an eroded, rocky mesa – that’s all, folks.

Use this as a teachable moment.  See our 09/21/2006 entry on design detection and the use of evidence to support a theory.  Most serious human observers of Mars never bought into the late-night-talk-show fantasies (05/24/2001), but there is a serious question in such cases that needs reflection: how do we humans differentiate between design and chance or natural law?  Look at our long list of paired objects, some designed, some not.  A pictorial presentation of these pairs for kids can be a great way to help them think logically about design.  Some of them are trickier than at first glance; they raise additional questions about deeper levels of design, and what we mean by design and natural law, that can trip up adults, too.  And some of the most ardent scientific opponents of the Face-on-Mars idea have a puzzle of their own: how did they use intelligent design theory to show the believers were wrong?  Moreover, how do they justify the inference of alleged microbes on Mars from methane, color, or other indirect biomarkers?  Dumb as the Face-on-Mars theory was, it can be turned into a lively discussion on important questions, and can refine everyone’s baloney detecting skills.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Intelligent Design • Education

This brief entry today is a teaser to go and read the articles, look for mentions of evolution or design, and think about which point of view found these discoveries surprising or not.  Of course, don’t expect to see the words “intelligent design” anywhere, since that phrase is effectively banned from secular science journalism.  Look instead for indirect inferences that design is the best explanation.  Or, look for the lack of attempts to explain the regulation by evolution.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Health

1. Pack it green:  Got parcels?  Don’t use styrofoam peanuts and bubble wraps; that’s so 2009.  Why manufacture plastic and oil-based stuffing when you can grow something soft and biodegradable?  Two grads from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute started a company that is making packing foam out of mushroom fibers and agricultural waste, reported Science Daily.  Gavin McIntyre said, “We don’t manufacture materials, we grow them.  We’re converting agricultural byproducts into a higher-value product.”  The products use mushroom fibrous roots called mycelia mixed in with waste from cotton gins.  It’s all natural, all green, all biodegradable.
       With fellow grad Even Bayer, McIntyre started up a company in Green Island, New York, called Ecovative Design to bring their idea to fruition.  They can produce custom-fitted foam packing material with very little energy.  The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency are supporting their project.  By 2013, do-it-yourself homeowners may be able to use the technology in another way: for home insulation.  The award-winning company also invented Greensulate(tm): an insulating material based on mushroom fibers that has the added advantage of being flame retardant.
2. It’s a plane, like a bird:  “Why can’t an airplane be more like a bird?” asked researchers at MIT.  Birds don’t have to slam into a runway and roll for a mile to land.  They “can switch from barreling forward at full speed to lightly touching down on a target as narrow as a telephone wire,” said Science Daily.  They do it by mastering the “stall” – a complicated maneuver that involves vortices and wakes.  The article explains how this “complicated phenomenon” works; “Even the best descriptions of it are time-consuming to compute.”
       Can humans make like a bird?  Hopefully, yes.  “MIT researchers have demonstrated a new control system that allows a foam glider with only a single motor on its tail to land on a perch, just like a pet parakeet,” the article said.  “The work could have important implications for the design of robotic planes, greatly improving their maneuverability and potentially allowing them to recharge their batteries simply by alighting on power lines.”  Picture that on your next long-distance flight.  The control system won its inventor the Engineering Student of the Year Award, but the article did not say if the parakeet got an extra treat for providing the inspiration.
3. Eye of the fly:  Who would have ever thought that fly’s eyes would inspire a scientist?  What’s next, the bee’s knees?  Sure enough, PhysOrg reported that fly eyes are inspiring the next biomimetic surfaces that could revolutionize solar cells and materials for a “variety of applications.”  Scientists at Penn State are not only mimicking the fly eye; they are duplicating it.  They used a high-tech electroplating technique to reproduce the shape of they compound eye exactly, forming a “master template can be used either as a die to stamp the pattern or as a mold.”  The fly they chose is the blowfly – those disgusting flies that hang around dead things.  The researcher said, “These eyes are perfect for making solar cells because they would collect more sunlight from a larger area rather than just light that falls directly on a flat surface.”
       The same team is “currently looking at butterfly wings to understand how the surfaces create colors without pigment.”  Who knows; for more great ideas, maybe they should also take a closer look at the bee’s knees.
4. Light farming:  Algae and plants achieve a feat that is the envy of engineers: harvesting the energy of sunlight with high efficiency.  Jeff Tollefson at Nature News reported about the new “Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis” that is using federal grant money “with the ambitious goal of developing, scaling up and ultimately commercializing technologies that directly convert sunlight into hydrogen and other fuels.”  Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley labs are teaming up to get the technology out of the lab and into commercially viable products.  Plants produce sugars and other complex molecules with their light harvest.  The human engineers would be happy to get cheap hydrogen for fuel cells.  They appear to be making progress; the article is accompanied by a photo of a test car that has a bumper message, “This plug-in hybrid gets 100+ MPG.”
5. Snakes alive:  The thought of snake bite is enough to cause shudders, but there might be a bright side to learning more about it.  Science Daily told about a Japanese team that is studying snake venom for clues to how blood platelets respond to it.  This is not a true biomimetics story, in that the researchers are not trying to imitate snake toxin, but they think by controlling substances that have similar responses they can gain understanding for good ends.  The article began, “Researchers seeking to learn more about stroke by studying how the body responds to toxins in snake venom are releasing new findings that they hope will aid in the development of therapies for heart disease and, surprisingly, cancer.”
6. Spider prize:  Many of our previous biomimetics entries have mentioned spider silk as the holy grail for materials science.  A spider is able to take a watery fluid with special proteins and spin it out into some of the strongest flexible material known.  “It’s also flexible, durable and biodegradable, and can withstand extremely high temperatures,” Live Science added.  Simple as the spider makes it look, it is astonishingly difficult to duplicate the feat.  After years of work, several teams are making progress understanding and imitating the process of silk production.
       A paper in Science¹ recently pointed out that “the development of silk hydrogels, films, fibers and sponges is making possible advances in photonics and optics, nanotechnology, electronics, adhesives and microfluidics, as well as engineering of bone and ligaments” that will be non-invasive and environmentally friendly, according to PhysOrg.  The authors of the paper, from Tufts University, said (pun probably intended), “Silk-based materials have been transformed in just the past decade from the commodity textile world to a growing web of applications in more high technology directions.”  One exciting new method for mass production of the coveted material would be through genetically-engineered plants that could be harvested like cotton.  Developing countries might find a new source of wealth by growing the stuff made famous by silkworms and spiders.
       On another front, Live Science and PhysOrg reported on work published in PNAS² about the successful engineering of a bacterium, E. coli, to produce spider silk protein that mimics the properties of the real thing.  PhysOrg mentioned some of the uses that could come from mass production of spider silk: parachute cords, protective clothing (bullet-proof vests), and composite materials for aircraft are just the beginning: “Researchers have long envied spiders’ ability to manufacture silk that is light-weighted while as strong and tough as steel or Kevlar,” the article began.  “Indeed, finer than human hair, five times stronger by weight than steel, and three times tougher than the top quality man-made fiber Kevlar, spider dragline silk is an ideal material for numerous applications.”

Spiders and silkworms generate silk protein fibers that embody strength and beauty.  Orb webs are fascinating feats of bioengineering in nature, displaying magnificent architectures while providing essential survival utility for spiders.  The unusual combination of high strength and extensibility is a characteristic unavailable to date in synthetic materials yet is attained in nature with a relatively simple protein processed from water.  This biological template suggests new directions to emulate in the pursuit of new high-performance, multifunctional materials generated with a green chemistry and processing approach.  These bio-inspired and high-technology materials can lead to multifunctional material platforms that integrate with living systems for medical materials and a host of other applications.

Biomimetics is a favorite topic in our pages for many reasons: the promise of wonderful products, the wonder of learning about amazing feats of plants and animals, the fact that biomimetics is intelligent-design friendly, and the reality that scientists do not need to pay homage to Charlie D. to participate, get funding, and be heroes.  For the years we have reported biomimetics news, we have rarely seen the researchers even mention evolution.  When they do, it’s usually just in passing, like “spiders evolved this fantastic ability 300 million years ago” or some other stupid dragline that wouldn’t hold up an ounce of scrutiny.  Whole university research departments have been set up to work on biomimetics, and the future is bright.  It’s time to ditch Darwin like a ball and chain and run into the future of design-based science.
    If you have precocious kids, take them into the yard and get them thinking along these lines.  Some of the most amazing technologies are right under our feet.  If your kid can help understand them, copy them, and make products out of them, he or she could become rich and help support you in your retirement, because if you can build a better fuel cell, Obama will beat a path to your door with stimulus money.  (Whatever works; the greed angle should be secondary, whenever possible, to the inspirational angle.)
    Spiders didn’t invent silk; birds didn’t invent landing on a wire; plants didn’t decide to harvest light and then find the perfect way to do it.  Such things do not arise from unplanned, unguided processes of chance and necessity.  This is engineering – and art.  Strength and beauty, magnificent architectures, efficient high performance – nature’s wonders should stimulate any clear-thinking person to ponder the master Mind that put these technologies into living things.  That’s a good first step toward wanting to know that Mind.
Next headline on:  Botany • Terrestrial Zoology • Birds • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts