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Could 90% of what doctors tell you be wrong?  David H. Freedman explores the work of Dr. John Ioannidis, whose survey of the medical literature shows most of it being poorly tested, unduly influenced, and falsified in short order (The Atlantic).  If science can provide so little confidence about things we can see and feel and test in the present, how can scientists’ confident pronouncements about the unobservable past, with all its untestable unknowns, be trusted?

Cambrian Explosion Solved     10/31/2010    
Oct 31, 2010 — Geologists have come out swinging against the idea the Cambrian Explosion damages Darwinism.  In a lengthy new paper in the Geological Society of America Bulletin,¹ they believe they pitch three strikes against creationists and intelligent-design supporters who claim that the sudden appearance of all the animal body plans at the base of the Cambrian falsifies Darwinian claims about gradual evolution.  Their last paragraph sums up their victory announcement that Darwin was right after all:

In his chapter on the imperfection of the geological record, Darwin alludes in passing to a different explanation for the supposed sudden appearance of animals in the lowest fossiliferous strata.  He writes “[w]e should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy” (Darwin, 1859, p. 307).  It is this explanation—the incompleteness of our knowledge—that has turned out to be closer to the truth.  The problem of missing fossil ancestors was solved by the discovery of the Precambrian fossil record, the problem that nearly all the animal phyla appear in the Lower Cambrian with no evidence of intermediate taxa was solved by the recognition that most Lower Cambrian fossils represent stem-groups of living phyla, and the problem of the explosive diversification of animals at the start of the Tommotian was solved by improved correlation and radiometric dating of Lower Cambrian sequences—to which we contribute here—showing that this diversification was drawn out over more than 20 m.y.

OK, guys, nice try, but no cigar; valiant effort, but no valium.  This “explanation” (or “contribution” toward an explanation) assumes much and explains little.  Fully half the bulk of this paper is taken up with 500 references from Darwin-Party sources and tedious nitty grit about isotopes of strontium, calcium carbonate and other distractions.  The elephant standing in the room is standing on Darwin.  The poor man needs help!  Don’t pore through your chemistry notebooks while he can’t breathe.
    Does his mechanism of mindless, undirected processes create body plans and genetic codes and complex organs or not?  Saying that miracles happen better if they happen slowly is not an answer!  Look at a trilobite.  It has compound eyes of sophisticated design and optical quality (09/13/2003), a gut, antennae, jointed appendages, and a central nervous system to operate them.  Do eyes just pop into existence?  Who made that happen – Popeye?  The first trilobites are not becoming trilobites; they are trilobites.  Same is true for all the phyla.  They are not microbes becoming cnidarians, or Ediacarans becoming worms; they are what they are when they appear in the record.  Their genetic programs know how to develop into complex body plans out of a single-celled zygote.  Moreover, the trilobite record is opposite evolutionary expectations – there’s more diversity in the lower layers (07/28/2007).
    Another huge, glaring omission in this paper is evidence for intermediate forms, the transitional forms that must have existed between all the phyla.  To talk over and over about the “appearance” of this complex animal, and the “appearance” of that complex animal is only multiplying miracles.  Where are the gradual transitional chains from simple to complex that Charlie is crying out for?
    There was a big lie in the conclusion that their own previous words exposed.  They announced in triumph at the goal line, “The problem of missing fossil ancestors was solved by the discovery of the Precambrian fossil record.”  In the Introduction, however, here is what they admitted, without ever coming back to it and solving the problem:

Despite abundant evidence for a variety of life extending back to at least 3.5 Ga, Precambrian fossils mostly record the evolution of bacteria and microbial eukaryotes.  The earliest evidence for animals predates the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary by only ~100 m.y.  (Xiao et al., 1998; Yin et al., 2007; Love et al., 2009, Maloof et al., 2010b), and the few unquestioned examples of Precambrian Bilateria are <15 m.y. older than the beginning of the Cambrian (Fedonkin and Waggoner, 1997; Martin et al., 2000; Jensen, 2003; Droser et al., 2005).  Significant increases in trace fossil diversity and complexity across the boundary and the absence of soft-bodied animals in upper Precambrian Burgess Shale–type biotas (Xiao et al., 2002) suggest that the general absence of bilaterian animal fossils from upper Precambrian rocks is not a preservational artifact.  Rather, it appears that animals originated and began to diversify relatively close to the base of the Cambrian.  Although early studies using a “molecular clock” suggested that the divergences between major animal groups long predated the Cambrian (Wray et al., 1996; Bromham et al., 1998), some of the more recent work has produced dates that are closer to (if still older than) those supported by the fossil record (Aris-Brosou and Yang, 2003; Peterson et al., 2004, 2008).  Furthermore, Konservat-Lagerstätten such as the Chengjiang biota and the Burgess Shale record a breathtaking array of soft-bodied animals by the late Early and Middle Cambrian (Briggs et al., 1994; Hou et al., 2004), respectively, and, together with more conventional skeletal assemblages, suggest a great radiation of animal life during the Early Cambrian.

You can give these Darwin-worshippers the most generous rope, stretching out the minimum claims of 5 m.y. for the explosion to 20 m.y., and the noose still won’t let their feet come near the ground.  The Cambrian explosion is real.  Appeals to calcium carbonate, carbon dioxide, oxygen, moving continents – none of that has the capacity to code for a complex body plan, developmental programs, and hierarchical designs as explained thoroughly in the documentary film Darwin’s Dilemma.  Watch the film!  It covers so much more than just the timeline – the least of Darwin’s problems, though even 20 million years is the blink of an eye in their evolution-incestuous dating scheme.
    Once again, the evolutionary explanation makes no sense unless you already believe in evolution.  To a creationist, it is question-begging nonsense.  Evolution is the question!  You cannot assume what your critics will not grant.  Did you catch the bad breath in their statement about microbes, ungulates and all?  “Although of significant interest, this high disparity soon after a group’s appearance is not unique to the Cambrian,” they said.  Good grief.  So they expect creationists to be converted to Charlie worship on the argument that “since miracles happened throughout the fossil record, it’s not hard to accept another one in the Cambrian.”  This is science class, remember?
    This long, tedious paper is no improvement on Charles Marshall’s circular paper that says, in a nutty shell, “evolution did the evolution.”  He promised his readers a long trip and dumped them off at the starting line.  The new paper does the same.  It also offers more of the “if you build it, they will come” theory of evolution: somehow, by unknown processes, if you give the ocean calcite, trilobites will pop into existence.  This foolishness appears over and over for those willing to wade through the endless details about chemistry: evolution is assumed when that is the very issue at stake –

• Precambrian fossils mostly record the evolution of bacteria and microbial eukaryotes....
• ... many of the basic features that distinguish the major groups of animals had evolved by this time...
• Lowest Cambrian trace fossils offer a record of the evolution of macroscopic, primarily soft-bodied, animals.
• an age model ... that we use to elucidate the evolution of small shelly fossils...
• carbonate skeletal mineralogy is determined by the chemistry of seawater at the time carbonate skeletons first evolve in a clade...
• ...how many small shelly fossil genera must have evolved by a certain time...
• ...the skeletal mineralogy of animals that evolved during the Early Cambrian.
• animals that evolve carbonate biomineralization associated with the youngest pulse of first appearances...
• ...calcareous plankton had not yet evolved in the Early Cambrian...

This is so old.  Why won’t the Darwinians listen?  Stop talking in an echo chamber.  Stop assuming evolution, and stop assuming that appeals to evolution are going to be taken seriously by your critics.  No amount of scholarly jargon can cover for circular reasoning.  The fossil record is a record of design, not evolution.  To borrow a quip from Ronald Reagan, it’s not that our opponents are ignorant; it’s that they know a lot of things that aren’t so.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Biology • Darwin and Evolution • Dating Methods

Purpose-Driven Science Ignores Darwin     10/30/2010    
Oct 30, 2010 — While some Darwinists feel that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement is a major threat to science, many scientists unconnected to ID are acting as if it provides for them a more fruitful approach to research.  Several recent examples illustrated what might be called a silent “de facto” intelligent design movement.

1. Purposeful proteins:  PhysOrg reported work at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Japan with the eye-catching title, “Searching for purpose in proteins.”  It’s not that the team is invoking a deity or searching for ultimate meaning in their work; they just want to understand what some enigmatic proteins do.  Going on a kind of “fishing expedition” with fishing tackle known as bioprobes, they have demonstrated the ability to watch how proteins bind, and deduce their role in biological processes.  The case reported in the article concerns tumor progression in cancer, but the methodology assumes that enigmatic proteins have a purpose and are not just cellular junk.
2. Imitating insects:  Meanwhile, inventors at Penn State, Harvard and the Naval Research Laboratory have their eyes on water striders and butterflies.  They have developed “an engineered thin film that mimics the natural abilities of water striding insects to walk on the surface of water, and for butterflies to shed water from their wings.”  The natural material has what is known as “superhydrophic properties” and is an “active area of research” because producing artificial materials with those properties would have many applications – “The nanofilm produced by this technique, called oblique angle deposition, provides a microscale smooth surface for the transport of small water droplets without pumps or optical waves and with minimal deformation for self-powered microfluidic devices for medicine and for microassembly.”  Inherent in biomimicry is the belief that the thing being imitated is well designed.
3. Biophysics on birds:  Researchers in Australia were curious why ostriches are such good runners compared to humans, so they compared their leg physics with a computer analysis.  PhysOrg summarized the resulting paper by saying it’s spring in their step.  Ostriches store so much elastic energy in their tendons, they can run as if on pogo sticks.  The BBC News includes a video showing the difference in gait efficiency.

Notice how many previous entries with the “Intelligent Design” chain link were not about scientists actively promoting ID, but were about subjects that assumed design and had no use for Darwinism (e.g., 10/27/2010, 10/25/2010).  Most of the Biomimetics articles fall in this category (09/24/2010, 09/12/2010, 09/11/2010).  Join the silent ID revolution.  You don’t have to use the maligned phrase, or declare your allegiance to the Discovery Institute.  Just stay focused on the design in your subject, and gradually say less and less about Charlie D.  After enough good design science, fewer people (except for the diehard blowhards) will even miss him.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Birds • Physics • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design

OOL fools are like politicians.  They wave the colors and deceive the gullible with the building blocks of lie (03/19/2008).
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Solar System • Dumb Ideas

Early Man in Trouble     10/28/2010    
Oct 28, 2010 — New findings (or claims) are throwing long-held beliefs about human ancestors into disarray.  Early people were smarter, and traveled farther, than paleoanthropologists thought.
    One report summarized by PhysOrg says, “A highly skillful and delicate method of sharpening and retouching stone artifacts by prehistoric people appears to have been developed at least 75,000 years ago, more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.”  The technique is called pressure flaking.  It allows finer control over the sharpness of stone tools.  “Pressure flaking adds to the repertoire of technological advances during the Still Bay (period) and helps define it as a time when novel ideas were rapidly introduced,” wrote researchers studying the stones in a South Africa cave.  “This flexible approach to technology may have conferred an advantage to the groups of Homo sapiens who migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.”
    That story about migrating out of Africa, though, took a falsifying hit.  Science Daily reported, “An international team of researchers, including a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered well-dated human fossils in southern China that markedly change anthropologists perceptions of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern Old World.”  Maybe it was out of Asia instead of Africa.  The BBC News has a photo of the cave in China where the bones were found.  National Geographic News said that these bones, 60,000 years older than previous finds, “presents a strong challenge” to the out-of-Africa theory and the “traditional early-human time line”.
    Speaking of changing directions in migration, another story in Science Daily claims that fossil evidence is showing anthropoid apes colonized Africa 39 million years ago rather than evolving there.

These claims and the dates are all incestuous with evolutionary assumptions.  Fossils are real, and stone tools are real, but the stories about them are convoluted and contradictory.  Since they have told us “everything you know is wrong” year after year, why do we pay them any attention?  Are they making progress toward understanding human history?  No, they are revealing their Know-Nothing Party affiliation (10/28/2009).  Vote no on Proposition D, the evolutionary storytelling initiative of the Darwin (Know-Nothing) Party.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Early Man • Dating Methods

Cells Know Their Physics     10/27/2010    
Oct 27, 2010 — At the microscopic level of cells, forces come into play that are unfamiliar to us at the macro level: quantum mechanics, Brownian motion, and subtle elastic forces that we might overlook.  Two recent papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explored physical mechanisms cells use to good advantage.  Good thing cells know their physics, or we could not exist.
    In a paper in PNAS by a team at the University of Oregon,¹  Harland, Bradley, and Parthasaranthy explored the forces at work in cell membranes, which they called “nature’s most important two-dimensional fluid” composed of lipid bilayers.  What keeps the membrane intact?  “It is generally assumed, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that homogeneous lipid bilayers are simple Newtonian fluids – that is, purely viscous two-dimensional liquids incapable of an in-plane elastic response.  To the contrary, “we find that membranes are not simply viscous but rather exhibit viscoelasticity, with an elastic modulus that dominates the response above a characteristic frequency that diverges at the fluid–gel ... phase-transition temperature,” they said.  This means that the membrane is stretchy and it requires force to pull it apart.  “These findings fundamentally alter our picture of the nature of lipid bilayers and the mechanics of membrane environments.”
    As for why this matters, “The fluidity of membranes is crucial to functions such as the assembly of proteins into signaling complexes and the controlled presentation of macromolecules at cell surfaces” – i.e., we could not live without membranes that know how to take advantage of viscoelastic properties.  “At the level of single proteins, rapid conformational changes on the part of transmembrane proteins such as ion channels and pumps must couple to the local lipid environment;” they said at the end of their paper; “whether this environment is viscous or elastic must therefore influence any molecular model of protein function.”  The authors did not mention evolution in their paper.
    Another team at UC Davis explored the quantum mechanics of an important molecular machine – the Complex I macromolecular complex.²  This machine employs a railroad-like piston and coupling-rod mechanism (07/07/2010, 09/22/2010) to create the proton gradient that drives ATP synthesis.  This process is vital to all life: in humans – and in respiring bacteria – it takes the energy from food and stores it as chemical energy in ATP molecules that are used like currency to pay for most of the energetic activities in the cell.  Complex I transfers two electrons from NADH and passes them like hot potatoes down a series of cofactors in the long arm of its L-shaped structure.  One of the electrons is apparently used for control, and the other gets passed 90 angstroms (a fair distance on the scale of proteins) to a ubiquinone molecule for the next stage of energy transfer.  This happens in the cell’s power plants, the mitochondria.  The electron pathway includes a flavin molecule, water molecules, and eight iron-sulfur (Fe/S) clusters in two conformations, each acting alternately as donors and acceptors of the electrons – creating an electrical current.
    Hayashi and Stuchebrukhov found that Complex I takes advantage of electron tunneling – a phenomenon in quantum mechanics – to pass the electrons down the chain.  Tunneling occurs when a particle faces an energy barrier that seems insurmountable, but makes it through somehow, because in the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics, a particle, being wavelike and having a wave function, has a probability distribution of where it might be located, due to the uncertainty principle.  There’s a certain probability the particle will be found on the other side of the barrier.  It’s as if a soldier at a castle could magically appear on the other side of the wall without climbing over it.  “In this paper we use state-of-the-art electronic structure calculations to show that the mechanism of electron transfer is quantum mechanical tunneling, as in the rest of electron transport chain;” they said.  Another surprise was that water molecules in path amplify the efficiency of transfer many-fold: “the water between subunits of complex I plays the critical role in mediating electron transport.”  Here’s how they summarized their findings:

The whole electronic wiring of complex I is obtained by combining tunneling pathways of individual processes, as shown in Fig. 3.  It is clear that specific peptide residues serve as electronic wires connecting neighboring Fe/S clusters; individual electron tunneling paths involve up to three protein residues, including two cysteine ligands and one additional key residue (Table 1).  Notably, the clusters in the protein are oriented in a specific way—corner to corner—with Cys [cysteine, an amino acid] ligands mostly pointing toward each other, which is clearly the most efficient way to transfer electrons from one cluster to another.

Notice the precision of these machines.  The efficiency of electron transfer in Complex I, for instance, depends on precisely-placed amino acids and water molecules down a fairly long chain.  The fact that these amino acids are “conserved” (i.e., unevolved), only means that they cannot be altered without severe consequences (like death).  It does not mean that they evolved into that configuration—that would be a logical fallacy.  Both creationists and evolutionists realize that mutations occur – a cosmic ray could hit the molecule or a gene, or an editing error could result in a different amino acid being inserted.  Many of these will cause death.  The ones that do not may allow the organism to survive and reproduce (genetic drift and stabilizing selection).  Over time, mutations can accumulate (mutational load) at rates that are not well understood (despite the evolutionary “molecular clock” that circularly depends on evolution as an assumption), but genetic drift and stabilizing selection are level or downhill processes.  They are only creative if you believe the Tinker Bell myth already (10/08/2010).  How did the first microbe even get off the starting line without Complex I and ATP Synthase already in place?  Evolutionists imagine stepping stones, but never provide them.  It’s like imagining stepping stones to Hawaii or across the Grand Canyon with no evidence – just the belief that they had to be there for evolution to get across the chasm.  Well, guess what.  Some people have no need of that hypothesis.
    The elegant, functional structures of these molecular marvels should make us stand in awe of their Creator.  Scientists dare not utter such thoughts.  Look again at that circumlocution in the second paper, “whether it was evolutionarily determined or not remains to be examined further.”  The position of the authors about evolution vs design is unknown to us, but that statement is about as close as a scientist can safely get these days to saying, “Darwin was a mush-head” and still get published in PNAS.  Thoughtful readers can look at the evidence and draw their own conclusions.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Darwinism is like the patient who has more bandages than skin, or the traveling salesman that lost money on every sale but thought he could make it up in volume.  In either case, the outcome will not be pretty.  Time for a body transplant and a new product.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Biomimetics • Darwin and Evolution • Amazing Facts

Cell biology needs evolution like a king needs a jester.  The jester may not win wars or feed the peasants, but provides some comic relief, standing there juggling balls and telling jokes about where the leopard got its spots (10/20/2010).  Bring it on, Chuck: tell us how an unguided, purposeless process arranged twelve precisely-arranged intermembrane helices of amino acids into a cup shape, provided a precise pocket for a sodium ion, figured out how to invert the cup to the inside just long enough to recognize and bind a toxic molecule, and then flip over and shuttle it out, and do this 25 times a second.  Did this all happen in a single chance miracle or a string of chance miracles?  Tell us also how all the other tens of thousands of molecular machines essential for life “emerged,” like the topoisomerases that fold DNA into compact shapes and separate the chromosomes, the winches that pull chromosomes apart, the molecular highways that transport the good cargo all throughout the cell, the DNA repair molecules, and much, much more.
    Neo-Darwinism is utterly incapable of standing up to these findings about precision molecular machines in the cell.  The Old Guard Darwinists are like the old guard communists in the former Soviet Union, who clung to their worn-out Marxist-Leninist talking points when it was clear to everyone that they didn’t work.  The Darwinist talking points, with their ridiculous notions of conservation and convergence, are a ball and chain to molecular biology.  This is the age of systems biology, reverse engineering, nanotechnology, biomimetics, information science, machine language.  Take off the ball and chain.  Run toward the future with intelligent-design gusto.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Plant Biology • Human Body • Health • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Biomimetics: Does It Flatter Darwin?     10/24/2010    
Oct 24, 2010 — The imitation of natural design (biomimetics) is a cutting-edge approach to engineering these days.  Many times, the reports on attempts to mimic the amazing properties of cells, plants, and animals have no time to discuss evolution (e.g., 09/24/2010).  Once in awhile, though, scientists or reporters go out of their way to tell their readers that the exquisite designs they want to imitate are the work of billions of years of evolutionary trial and error.  A press release from MIT News is a recent example – and an occasion to investigate the explanatory power of Darwin vs intelligent design.  It begins:

Nature has one very big advantage over any human research team: plenty of time.  Billions of years, in fact.  And over all that time, it has produced some truly amazing materials – using weak building blocks that human engineers have not yet figured out how to use for high-tech applications, and with many properties that humans have yet to find ways to duplicate.

It all comes down to assembling complex structures from small, simple building blocks, Buehler explains.  He likes to use a musical analogy: A symphony comprises many different instruments, each of which on its own could never produce something as grand and complex as the combined rich, full musical experience.  In a similar way, he hopes to construct complex materials with previously unavailable properties by using simple building blocks assembled in ways that borrow from those used by nature.

The answer to that last question, you evolutionists are itching to say, is “survival – adaptation.”  Caught you.  Re-read the first part of the 10/19/2010 entry.  Now, realize also, that you must purge your mind of all teleology, all purpose-driven-life concepts, all personification fallacies, to be a consistent evolutionist.  “Evolution” is not a person, nor is “Nature.”  Natural selection, furthermore, is a chance process: both the mutation part and the selection part.  Why?  Because mutations or “variations” (Darwin’s term) are clearly random, and the environment is random.  Earthquakes and landslides and meteors just happen; they have no goal to push life toward survival.  What do you get when you add chance to chance?  Chance!  Stuff happens!  If all you can say is Stuff Happens, even if you call it a law (SHL; see 12/07/2009, 09/22/2009 and 09/30/2008), it is equivalent to saying, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”  You may now exit the Science Lab and return to your cult.
    The rest of us sensible people are wondering how evolutionists get away with this shallow tripe year after year after year.  It is illogical, absurd, nonsensical, empty, and devious.  It is dumbness taught to the dumb, and if the dumb lead the dumb, both will fall into the dumpster.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Dumb Ideas

Weekend Grab Bag     10/23/2010    
Oct 23, 2010 — Here’s another unclassified assortment of news stories readers can follow and evaluate on their own (cf. 10/18/2010).  Take your Baloney Detector along and discern the Amazing from the Dumb.

1. Fast Lane: Nick Lane explains how life became complex: cells invented mitochondria (Science Daily).  Gem from his paper in Nature:¹ “If evolution works like a tinkerer, evolution with mitochondria works like a corps of engineers.”  For this he gets a royal prize (The Guardian, New Scientist).
2. The Code Delusion: Steve Talbott tries to wean biology away from the metaphor of codes (The New Atlantis).
3. Why, chromosome?  Nature News struggles with the apparent rapid evolution of the Y chromosome; or are they overlooking the possibility that humans did not evolve from chimps?
4. Pick your poison:  Nature News does some head-scratching about convergent evolution of toxins in animals, but recommends we pick a platypus to find useful ingredients for drug design because that animal is an evolutionary newcomer.  Heart patients might like scorpions better, says PhysOrg.
5. Dawkins talkin’:  Richard Dawkins is still worried about America becoming a theocracy, likes Obama, and is worried about Islam (Houston News Chronicle.
6. But is it science?  Why is PhysOrg worried about the perception America is a Christian nation?
7. Moon water:  Where did the moon get all that water?  Ask the BBC News and National Geographic, who reported on LCROSS crash test results.  Be amazed as Space.com tells us “Moon Crater Has More Water Than Parts of Earth.”
8. Times Are a-Changing:  Check out the equatorial clouds photographed by Cassini at Titan, reported by PhysOrg and JPL.
9. Oil remedy:  Forgotten about the Gulf oil spill already?  Maybe because microbes have cleaned up more than expected, reported Science Daily.
10. Cool imagery:  New microscopic techniques are allowing scientists to culture cells in 3-D (Science Daily).
11. Archaeolo-gee:  Soon you will be able to view the Dead Sea Scrolls online, reported National Geographic.
12. Edge of space:  The most distant galaxy ever seen has been announced (BBC News), already bright at just 600,000 years after the big bang, 13 billion light-years away (redshift 8.55).
13. Stuff Happens:  It’s official: evolutionary theory is equal to the Stuff Happens Law.  “100-million-year-old mistake provides snapshot of evolution,” PhysOrg claims.
14. The Kipling sloth:  Science Daily tells us “How sloths got their long neck.”
15. Jaws and Jawless:  “Jawless evolution explained,” announced The Scientist triumphantly.  But was it?
16. Evolve or perish:  New Scientist brings together two leftist favorites: global warming and human evolution.  “Past climate change influenced human evolution,” the article claimed, but then Steve Jones was not sure that’s encouraging.  Arguing like a male chauvinist, he said “We’re not going to evolve our way out of trouble.  The answer lies in our skulls, not our testicles.”
17. Left face:  David Horowitz described the beautiful world of academia and its open marketplace of ideas on TownHall.com.  And you thought we were serious.
18. ALH 84001 won’t die:  Mars meteorite supporters are at it again.  PhysOrg is keeping the controversy about life in the Martian rock alive.

More to report than time permits.  Are you a skilled and knowledgeable reporter who likes this site?  Want to report, or help in some other way?  Write our Feedback line.  Reward: ridicule and hate from the leftist radical bigoted foam-at-the-mouth Darwin dobermans.  It brings a kind of satisfaction.
Next headline on:  Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

1. Smarter than your average bear:  PhysOrg reported on work by psychologists and computer scientists at University of Georgia that concluded: “New research shows people are better at strategic reasoning than was thought.”  Experiments with video games of strategy apparently showed that recursive reasoning – the ability to foresee an opponent’s moves and plan accordingly – is well-established in the human mind.  “This so-called recursive reasoning ability in humans has been thought to be somewhat limited,” the article began, “But now, in just-published research led by a psychologist at the University of Georgia, it appears that people can engage in much higher levels of recursive reasoning than was previously thought.”  In fact “they do it fairly easily and automatically” according to the head of the Georgia Decision Lab at UGA.  No attempt was made to explain how evolution produced this ability.
2. Smart vegetarians:  Toss out the image of cavemen ripping meat with their teeth over the fire.  “Stone Age humans liked their burgers in a bun,” an article on New Scientist announced.  What this implies is that human ancestors alleged to have lived 30,000 years ago had the smarts to grind flour.  Researchers at the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Early History in Florence examined grindstones in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic, looking for signs of plant material – and found evidence of flour making, “a complex process involving harvesting roots, then drying, grinding and finally cooking them to make them digestible.”  That takes foresight, learning from experience, and well thought out procedures.  “The reason Palaeolithic humans were thought to have lived solely on wild meat, says [Anna] Revedin, is that previous plant evidence was washed away by overzealous archaeologists as they cleaned the tools at dig sites.”  She claimed hers was the “first time anybody has tried to find vegetable material on” the grindstones.
3. Smart jewelers:  A debate over the chic of Neanderthal jewelry is going on, according to New Scientist.  An Oxford team claims that Neanderthal ornaments were really made by modern humans.  Another researcher at University of Bordeaux, though, disagrees, still thinking that other sites show sophistication in Neanderthal taste.  Reporter Michael Marshall perpetuated a stereotype by concluding whimsically, “I would suggest settling the debate with the enthusiastic use of hefty stone clubs, but that would be positively Neanderthal.”
4. Smarter than paleoanthropologists:  500,000 years ago, human ancestors like Heidelberg Man were supposed to be emerging from the fog of animal instincts.  New Scientist reported that a fossil specimen found in Spain with a distorted pelvis indicates that the 45-year-old hunter-gatherer would have been too hunchbacked and in pain to support himself.  The researchers at the University of Madrid argue that this shows his compatriots cared for him, even though he had no way to help contribute to the survival of the fittest; “it implies a level of social support, and that he was valued by his contemporaries.”  Were values and charity already well-developed half a million years ago in the evolutionary timeline?
5. Smarter than the herd:  Are humans just lemmings who will follow the herd over a cliff?  There’s no doubt that crowd behavior has a certain attraction for many people, but that can apparently be switched off by the force of will, according to an article on PhysOrg.  An Oxford team performed a study of Facebook behavior (a good place to look for herd instinct).  How much did users react to social influence about whether online apps became flops or hits?  “Users only appear to be influenced by the choices of other users above a certain level of popularity, and at that point popularity drives future popularity,” the article said, supporting the herd mentality, but it’s not always so simple.  The data for the study contained no information on individuals, for one thing, and as a researcher cautioned, “we simply don’t know whether this marks an important difference between offline and online behavior, or whether more detailed and comprehensive data from offline contexts will identify similar collective behaviour in settings that do not involve online environments.”
6. Smarter than computers:  Another study on CAPTCHA (see 09/14/2008) has appeared.  The basis of this technology to discern human identity on computers (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is the human gift of pattern recognition.  We can read cursive handwriting, even when messy – a task that gives a computer headaches.  Researchers at the University of Buffalo are trying to extend CAPTCHA to biometric signals such as hand gestures that could be used to activate devices in smart rooms, elderly living facilities, airports and other transportation venues.
7. Smarter than philosophers:  Heavy-duty thinkers may want to analyze and critique a new theory of rationality by Philip N. Johnson-Laird published in PNAS, who said in his introduction, “The theory predicts systematic errors in our reasoning, and the evidence corroborates this prediction.  Yet, our ability to use counterexamples to refute invalid inferences provides a foundation for rationality.  On this account, reasoning is a simulation of the world fleshed out with our knowledge, not a formal rearrangement of the logical skeletons of sentences.”  That may leave a number of questions begging in the shadows.
8. Smart about mental health:  The mind-body problem is aggravated by the recognition of mental illness and mental decline with age.  An article on Live Science may encourage those growing older (who isn’t?) to get off the couch and take a hike.  A study at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease could be delayed, maybe for months or years, by walking about a mile a day.  In the end, though, we all know that gray matter that did so much thinking and reasoning during our lives is destined to turn to dust.  What then?
9. Thinking about smartness:  What makes humans so special?  Robert Sapolsky, neurobiologist and primatologist at Stanford, shared his thoughts on Live Science.  Is it just quantity of neurons over quality?  After all, “Animals may share characteristics with humans such as politically motivated aggression, empathy and culture, but humans take them to a level without parallel among animals,” reporter Jeremy Hsu said, describing Sapolsky’s views.  Do we just have more of the same?
       It can’t be, if an article at PhysOrg draws the right metaphor: “Neurons cast votes to guide decision-making.”  According to neurobiologists at Vanderbilt University, “our brain accumulates evidence when faced with a choice and triggers an action once that evidence reaches a tipping point.”  Yet the experiments were done with monkeys, which humans would like to believe do not have reasoning minds like our own.  This is one of many experiments trying to draw links between “psychological processes and what neurons are doing.”  But then, if a better analogy is a logic circuit, who programmed the circuitry?
       Sapolsky is not worried about neurobiology reducing our humanness to mechanistic stuff.  For one thing, even if it could, “explaining everything in purely mechanistic terms would not diminish our appreciation of classical music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach or the sight of a leaping gazelle.”  For another, “Every time neuroscience comes up with an answer, it’s attached to 10 new questions, and nine of them are better than the original,” Sapolsky said.  Maybe just thinking about thinking helps answer the question.

This food for thought is delivered fresh by Creation-Evolution Headlines, which encourages you to think critically about each claim, evaluate the evidence, use your power of choice, exhibit honesty, and thereby prove that materialism is hopelessly incapable of explaining what you just did.  For if truth and honesty are not illusions, but really exist, which must be true to carry on this discussion, they refer to things that are timeless and universal – things in the conceptual realm that, expressed in language with semantics or meaning (which, according to our uniform experience always have an intelligent cause), can be rationally inferred to have an intelligent cause that is likewise timeless and universal.  Or, more succinctly, in the beginning was the Word (John 1:1-14).
Next headline on:  Mind and Brain • Early Man • Human Body • Mammals • Philosophy of Science • Bible and Theology

Judge Jones at Dover thought he had his finger safely in the dike, but don’t be so sure.  A tremendous amount of pressure has been building behind it – scientific evidence that Darwinism cannot withstand (e.g., 10/07/2010), and evidence the dike is cracking (10/19/2010, 10/03/2010).  Rothschild said that without that one victory in Dover (which only applied locally), intelligent design would be everywhere now.  That gives hope that one finger in their dike cannot stop all the leaks threatening to burst everywhere.
    When the artificial moat protecting the Darwin Castle goes, and people are free to see the foundation of quicksand and termites everywhere, there will be revulsion and astonishment at how King Charles with his imperial robes was able to put on airs for so long.  Darwinism cannot survive in free and open debate.  That’s why the Darwiniacs and other leftists (10/14/2010) ratchet up the rhetoric as they scream in pain at fingers about to turn blue.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Politics and Ethics • Media

Ring Around the Moons     10/20/2010    
Oct 20, 2010 — Saturn is known for its rings, and some small moons have been found inside its rings.  But wouldn’t it be strange if some of its moons had rings of their own?  Such a thing had not been widely considered before 2007, when there was a tentative detection of a ring around Rhea (see 03/10/2008).  That ring has not been confirmed by subsequent observations.  The thinking now, however, is that it used to be there – and not only there, but there might have been one around Iapetus, too.

• Rhea ring tones:  Paul Schenk, planetologist at Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and stereo animation wizard, was glad to be able to share his secrets at his blog 3D House of Satellites now that his paper in Icarus was published.¹  The paper concerned color patterns on Saturn’s inner moons Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea.  All of them show evidence of plasma stains and electron discolorations from the magnetosphere and E-ring, some on the leading hemispheres and some on the trailing hemispheres, or both.  The last section of the paper is the intriguing one: “A ring at Rhea?”  The authors acknowledged that the cameras couldn’t see a ring the plasma and magnetospheric instruments thought they had detected earlier, but Schenk noticed a chain of blue splotches along the equator, only 20 km wide, going almost all the way around the moon.  Could these be the smoking gun of a ring that was there but partly collapsed onto the surface?  “Well,” he said on his blog, “we don’t need the ring to be present today to explain the ultraviolet splotches on the surface.  They could have formed a few thousand or million years ago and still exist on the surface today.  Probably not much longer than that but that's [sic] very young for the Solar System.”
      To see these blue features that might mark impact points of ring boulders driven into the surface, look at the JPL news feature or fly over them on Schenk’s YouTube page.  Schenk’s StereoMoons blog entry from 02/25/2010 has the best close-up photos of the blue streaks.  Strangely, the orientation of the features suggest that the ring rotated in the wrong direction – retrograde to the orbit of the moon and Saturn.  Where did the particles come from?  The authors doubted that it could have been debris from one of Rhea’s largest and youngest impact craters.  Whatever the impactors were, “the strong bluish color indicates that formation occurred recently and these may be among the most recently formed features on the surface,” the paper said.  “On the other hand, the surface features we observe might date from an earlier time, as no bright rays have been observed in association with the equatorial deposits.  This would imply that sufficient time has lapsed for ray erasure to have occurred but not sufficient time to erase the blue crater rims associated with relatively young impact craters elsewhere on Rhea.”  In short, this means they don’t know.  The latter suggestion (of old age) sounds ad hoc; Schenk’s true feelings are probably reflected by his blog statement that they are “very young for the Solar System.”  Interesting how he can thrown “thousand or million” years around without blinking an eye.
• Iapetus ring bumps:  The detection of possible ring impact debris on one moon opened up a search for others.  (On Saturn, of course, ring debris that falls into the planet disappears into the fluid clouds).  None of the other major moons have an equatorial signature like Rhea’s, but Iapetus, that walnut mimic way out in the suburbs (picture), has its mysterious equatorial mountain range (see 01/07/2005, 09/13/2007).  Schenk thinks that the evidence at Rhea supports the theory that the mountain range is debris from a collapsed ring (see Geophysical Research Letters paper by W.-H Ip).  The idea gains a little support from a couple of small moons, Atlas and Pan, that have a pronounced saucer shape that might indicate deposition of ring material during their histories (see Cassini image).  The alternative, the spin-up theory (see 03/01/2006, bullet 2), got more press from National Geographic this week.  Both the exogenic and endogenic theories require highly special conditions (e.g., 07/18/2007) that are running rings around planetary scientists.
  

Go, Cassini!  What a great collection of fantastic discoveries and surprises have come from this epic mission.  Schenk said, “Its [sic] times like these when I really enjoy my job.”  Keep those images and data flowing, Cassini.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Cataloguing and describing cat patterns is one part of science, but explaining a phenomenon is another, often harder, exercise.  Scientists don’t want to just do stamp collecting.  They want to offer insight.  (Note that finding correlations is not the same as explaining the relations).  Darwin came along and thought he could shed light on the living world.  Natural selection was a law-like mechanism that could account for all the diverse designs of life.  If he had found a law of nature, we would see consistency in results, but we don’t.  Neo-Darwinism hasn’t provided any more insight.  It just re-packaged the old darkness.  What lucky mutation occurred in what gene?  How did it correlate with the environment?  Was it really adaptive? (see 10/19/2010).  If natural selection can explain opposite results, it explains nothing at all.  What did he improve on, really, more than John Ray and Linnaeus, who saw God’s design in the adaptive patterns in living things?
    Evolutionists like to look busy: doing field work, whipping out their math tools, publishing papers.  Their answers of how and why become as elusive as a stealthy leopard in the jungle.  When all is said and done, evolutionary explanations amount to little more than just-so stories.  What Kipling’s story lacks in insight it makes up for in entertainment.  Given that insight is comparably lacking in Allen’s paper, full as it is of dry math without justification, which would you prefer reading?

Exercise:  Go to a zoo and admire the intricate patterns on animal fur – tigers, zebras, giraffes, pandas, leopards, chipmunks, ringtail cats, and more.  Consider the remarkable adaptation of each animal to its ecological niche.  Don’t ignore the ones with plain fur – the black panthers, prairie dogs, and bears.  Read the evolutionary explanations and ponder whether adaptation implies evolution (see next headline), or whether evolution is merely a narrative gloss applied in retrospect to a dazzling array of diverse phenomena.  In what cases is microevolution (sorting of pre-existing genetic information) adequate to explain adaptation as opposed to macroevolution (common ancestry with increase of genetic information)?  Does the former imply the latter? (see extrapolation).  How do genes without eyes on the environment get translated into precise geometric patterns in fur on the outside?  Look at your dog or cat while you think on these questions.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Darwin and Evolution • Philosophy of Science

1. Evolution is a theory in chaos...:  If you thought Charles Darwin brought biological evolution under natural laws, think again.  Keith Bennett on New Scientist argued, “Forget finding the laws of evolution.  The history of life is just one damn thing after another.”  His surprising article undermines the two pillars of evolution: common descent and natural selection.  Common descent, he says, was not discovered by Charles Darwin; it was stipulated by him.  It has been “accepted as a basic premise of biology since 1859.”  If it is a premise, it is an a priori assumption or axiom; it is not a finding.  Bennett left it at that.
       As for the second pillar, the claim that life “evolves by means of natural selection and adaptation,” a principle he equates with adaptationism, Bennett says it is “more controversial, but has come to be accepted over the past 150 years as the principal mechanism of evolution.”  But is it?  Microevolution is uncontroversial, he said, but “there is still huge debate about the role of natural selection and adaptation in ‘macroevolution’ – big evolutionary events such as changes in biodiversity over time, evolutionary radiations and, of course, the origin of species.”  The impact of that admission can hardly be overestimated.  Many of the bitter disputes at school board meetings across the country have occurred over the presumption that there is no controversy over evolution among scientists.  Darwinians have railed against citizens who have lobbied to “teach the controversy” about evolution.  But Bennett continued to say that a “long-running debate” about it included the famous Stephen Jay Gould, who in 1972 “challenged the assumption that evolutionary change was continuous and gradual.”  His notion of “punctuated equilibria” also challenged the expectations of adaptation to produce continuous change over long periods.
       Bennett argued instead for a “Chaos theory of evolution,” a theory that acknowledges that evolutionary changes are unpredictable, individualistic, highly sensitive to initial conditions, nonlinear, and fractal.  Even the dynamics of evolution are changing all the time, he said, meaning that even the principles of flux are in flux.  Using fossil data from the Quaternary period with its ice ages, he shows that many populations did not adapt to the changes, others adapted in unpredictable ways, and many went extinct.  Here’s how he summed up the implications of his view:

   This view of life leads to certain consequences.  Macroevolution is not the simple accumulation of microevolutionary changes but has its own processes and patterns.  There can be no “laws” of evolution.  We may be able to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the evolution of any given species or group after the fact, but we will not be able to generalise from these to other sequences of events.  From a practical point of view, this means we will be unable to predict how species will respond to projected climate changes over next century.

   Yet it has been the great goal of Darwin and his followers ever since to bring biology under natural laws.  His ending reinforces the fact that there are none.  “In the last analysis, evolution can be likened to the description of human history as ‘just one damn thing after another,’” he smirked.  If the only law of human history is that we do not learn from history, then his analogy is apt.  What can a biologist learn from a Chaos theory of evolution?  No predictions can be made; there is no way to falsify it, there is no way to understand it.
2. ....But it creates morality:  It’s doubtful that Franz der Waal read Bennett’s article, because he launched out in the New York Times Opinion Pages to explain how natural selection produced morality.  Taking on all creationists and moralists, he argued that moral motions emerged out of the pleasure response.  These “building blocks of morality” evolved into social instincts, he said, that increased the pleasure and survival of the group.  Drawing on observations of apes, he constructed a “bottom up morality” –

   Such findings have implications for human morality.  According to most philosophers, we reason ourselves towards a moral position.  Even if we do not invoke God, it is still a top-down process of us formulating the principles and then imposing those on human conduct.  But would it be realistic to ask people to be considerate of others if we had not already a natural inclination to be so?  Would it make sense to appeal to fairness and justice in the absence of powerful reactions to their absence?  Imagine the cognitive burden if every decision we took needed to be vetted against handed-down principles.  Instead, I am a firm believer in the Humean position that reason is the slave of the passions.  We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates.  Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals.

   Taking that cue from David Hume, he argued that religion came in as a latecomer and stole the credit for sanctioning these evolved behaviors.  He admitted, though, that no human culture has been studied that was never religious.  “That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.”
       Interestingly, however, though he believes science no longer needs God to explain how we got where we are today, he ended by supporting religion’s role in society.  “I doubt that science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good,” he concluded.  “Any framework we develop to advocate a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, its own prophets, and attract its own devoted followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.”

Bennett has reaffirmed something said often here: Darwinism is the Stuff Happens Law (SHL) in disguise.  If universal common ancestry is a premise, then it is a deduction from a chosen world view, not a science.  And if macroevolutionary changes are not adaptive, natural selection reduces to “stuff happens,” the absence of an explanation (see 10/03/2010).  Thank you, Dr. Bennett, for affirming the demise of evolution as a theory in chaos.
    As for Franz der Waal’s attempt at putting a narrative gloss on his a priori commitment to naturalism, it doesn’t work, and it can’t work.  There is no law inherent in producing moral motions in any population, because natural selection has no direction, no goal, no predetermined outcome.  An impersonal, unguided universe could not care less whether it produces Disneyland or a world of all against all.  What’s more, you can’t believe that morality is good or normative without begging the question.  An anonymous commenter said, “The basic problem with De Waal’s approach (as so many other sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists) is that if altruism is simply an evolved trait, then so is genocide.  If helping the old lady across the street is an evolved trait, then so is raping the young woman in the dorm.... both are simply acting according to the moral character given to them by evolution.”  Q.E.D.  He pointed out also that there is a distinction between viewing God as the source of morality (as stated, for instance, in the Declaration of Independence) and religion as a source of morality.  These separate issues must not be confused.
    Bennett and de Waal illustrate the bankruptcy of evolution as a scientific approach to biology, and the shallow thinking of Darwinians pretending to be philosophers.  You can’t get there from here, and evolution doesn’t even know where here or there is.  Stuff happens?  Science was supposed to do better.  If Hume and de Waal really believed that reason is the slave of the passions, then the rest of us should most passionately reject their views as unreasonable.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology • Philosophy of Science

A Dozen Leftovers     10/18/2010    
Oct 18, 2010 — Here’s a rapid-fire list of links to science stories that looked interesting, but were filling up our backlog.  Thinkers, bloggers and reporters might want to do what they want with them.

1. Baby born after 20 years as a frozen embryo: PhysOrg.
2. Where dinosaurs died reveals how they lived: Live Science.
3. Clues included in diamonds: PhysOrg; but did they look for carbon-14?
4. Neptune was incapable of sending asteroids out to the edge: Science Daily.
5. Crystal cave in Mexico: great photo gallery on National Geographic.
6. NASA has a busy “year of the solar system” on tap: PhysOrg.
7. Talk about global warming: the universe overheated, according to Science Daily.
8. Earliest land plant in Argentina? BBC News.
9. Fish were first to have sex: Discovery Channel.
10. The case of the cannibal T. rex: Live Science.
11. Giant pterosaurs might have flown 10,000 miles nonstop: National Geographic.
12. Monkeys try to make a movie: New Scientist.

The list provides a small taste of the dozens of headlines, stories, papers, and claims that have to be evaluated each day for a chance to be reported on Creation-Evolution Headlines.  Which one(s) would have won Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week?
Next headline on:  Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

1. Wet feet:  Geckos cling to walls and ceilings even when their feet are wet.  How do they do it?  It would be nice to know, because human adhesives typically get gooey and slippery when wet.  Kellar Autumn, the one who figured out how their feet cling to surfaces using atomic van der Waals forces, has been studying the effects of moisture on gecko feet.  According to Science Daily, he and his team at Lewis and Clark College figured out via experiments on discarded gecko setae that the cling isn’t due to capillary action.  Composed of keratin, the setae become softer when moist.  This makes them deformable and creates more adhesion, giving the animals an even better grip than their remarkable cling on dry surfaces.
2. Wet silk:  Another “completely counterintuitive” discovery was made about wet silk from silkworms.  Most man-made substances become more diffuse when wet, but silk becomes more concentrated.  Researchers at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Sweden, working with others from Oxford, first found that the silk proteins are hundreds of times more concentrated inside the silkworm than most proteins can be and remain stable.  “Even stranger, as the concentration drops the proteins begin to expand and flow, until they eventually clump together — this is the reverse of what we’d expected,” a team member said, according to Science Daily.
       Silkworms exceed the capabilities of the scientists to control this substance.  The scientists lose control when the proteins get diluted.  “In the lab, the effect is a like a neat ball of string becoming unravelled into a big mess that ties itself in knots,” the article said.  “However, the silkworms are able to control this process so that the proteins are spun into highly ordered silk filaments as they unfold and begin to flow.  This surprising observation is a vital step towards understanding the liquid precursor, which is essential to synthesise silk and develop new materials with silk’s desirable mechanical properties.”
3. Wet backs without sunburn:  Somehow little creatures called water fleas can live under UV radiation in their clear watery habitat without getting sunburn.  PhysOrg described how they manage without extra melanin – the dark protein that provides some UV protection in human skin.  The article did not explain how the water flea Daphnia does this trick in its Olympic Mountain pond environment.  Scientists at the University of Washington would like to know. 

Miner’s little transgression illustrates how Darwinists take irrefutable evidence for design and subvert it into Darwinian storytelling, not because the evidence demands it (quite the contrary), but because the culture of storytelling Darwin created with his “one long argument” tall tale makes it a kind of expected tradition.  For more examples of this besetting sin of the Darwin Party, listen to Casey Luskin on an ID the Future podcast describe how several more of Nature’s list of “Evolutionary Gems” (see 01/02/2009) turn out to say, when the original sources are examined, almost nothing about evolution, but only add a “narrative gloss” to the explanation in spite of the evidence.  Meanwhile, the de-facto I.D. science of biomimetics marches on.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

I do believe in aliens – as much as I can, being a scientist – believe in anything without actual evidence.  A universe teeming with life is consistent with what we have learned about the history of the Earth, the apparent requirements for life, and the materials and environments that exist elsewhere in the universe.  Given all this, to propose that life, and even intelligent life, is unique to Earth seems the scientifically less plausible condition.

Secularists and the religious know so little about what is out there, it is foolhardy to be dogmatic.  There is no basis for making rational estimates from either an evolutionary or a theistic position.  Consider the extremes: to an evolutionist, life could be common or unique.  To a theist, life could be common or unique.  The evolutionist would be more surprised if life is unique, and some theists might be surprised if life is common, but no firm prediction can be made either way.  No matter the result, both camps will doubtless find a way to incorporate it into their world view.
    So isn’t it better to do something and search?  Won’t this alleviate our ignorance?  The diagrams in Shostak’s article are not encouraging.  Even with the Allen Telescope Array’s expanded reach, the search space is a relatively small sphere in one spiral arm of the Milky Way.  It has taken years and millions of dollars to search that far.  Would people still be giving money in 2079 if nothing has been detected by then?  What are the criteria for failure?  The public cannot be led along the primrose path forever.  Undoubtedly some spin-off benefits will come in radio and optical technology and in software design, but those could be found through traditional science.  But you can’t have a science without evidence.  Shostak is doing a great job demonstrating the sophistication of his ignorance.
    The history of science can provide illuminating examples.  The classic case is alchemy.  This “science” was highly respected for centuries.  Even the great Isaac Newton dabbled in it with some passion.  Alchemists used the tools of chemistry to search for a hidden reality that existed only in their mind’s eye: the possibility of turning base metals into gold.  They had much of the same intense confidence in their quest seen in today’s SETI folk.  They felt they were getting warmer, and warmer, and their tools and techniques better and better.  It was only a matter of time.  And they knew gold existed!  SETI doesn’t even know that much.  They know humans exist, but humans are not aliens in the way they think of them evolving independently.  Alchemy finally had to be abandoned, as real chemistry began to supplant it.  It was eventually deemed a pseudoscience.  It had never been a science in the first place.
    What if SETI succeeds?  Will it then become a science?  Will the years leading up to detection count as scientific work?  Perhaps.  But what if it fails?  Like alchemy, will it be abandoned or replaced with a new science acknowledging human uniqueness?  Nobody knows.  All we can say for now is that, like alchemy, it is not a science merely for using the tools of science, because no evidence exists for life beyond the earth, let alone intelligent life (08/12/2010).  SETI could be a fool’s errand.  With no criteria for failure, with no end-point in sight, it will look more and more foolish as time goes on, while its proponents can always claim they are getting warmer.  It’s been 50 years so far.  How much time do they get?  A century?  A millennium?  Eventually watchers will complain that SETI has become a perpetual job-security gimmick.
    By assuming that detectable physical signals carrying a message with purposeful intent might exist, and by employing their intelligence to make contact with it, SETI researchers are accomplishing something many of them would resent hearing: they are validating the legitimacy of intelligent design science (12/03/2005), and they are recognizing their own uniqueness as rational, mindful creatures capable of acting with purpose and intent.  This is something that an unguided process like natural selection is incapable of generating.  Intelligence must be viewed as existing in the conceptual realm, not the physical realm.  The conceptual realm presupposes immutability and integrity.  For greatest likelihood of success, therefore, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should begin looking in places where the purpose that brought sentience into the physical realm has been revealed.
Next headline on:  SETI • Origin of Life • Intelligent Design • Mind and Brain

Babbage’s Computer May Be Built     10/15/2010    
Oct 15, 2010 — The “Analytical Engine,” a 19th-century computer conceived by Charles Babbage, may finally be built 140 years after his death.  The remarkable contraption was to be powered by steam and would fill a warehouse, but the eccentric old man could not get the Royal Society to back it.  His idea, 100 years ahead of its time, would be a true general-purpose computer, able to solve any problem expressible in numerical algorithms.  It would take instructions with punched cards, operate a CPU, use memory, and print output, just like early computers in the mid 20th century.  Given the technology and parts available in the mid 19th century, however, it was a dream far in advance of its time.  His son tried but was unable to get the plans off the ground.  Others also attempted the project but failed.
    The BBC News reported that interest is growing in bringing the “inspirational piece of equipment” to reality, for its historical interest if not for its ability to compete with modern computers.  “A hundred years ago, before computers were available, [Babbage] had envisaged this machine,” a leader of the effort said.  A real working model would answer “profound historical questions,” a historian of computer technology remarked; “Could there have been an information age in Victorian times?  That is a very interesting question.”  Now, with distributed planning and world-wide cooperation, Babbage’s historic computer might just become a reality.

Too bad this contemporary of Darwin did not get his project off the ground.  If the information age had begun in Darwin’s day, perhaps it would have taken the steam out of the idea of random variation producing complexity.  Read our online biography of Charles Babbage – a Christian scholar who would have been comfortable with Intelligent Design theory – for a really entertaining look at a fascinating visionary whose ideas would eventually triumph and change the world.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Philosophy of Science • Amazing Facts

The largest animals that have ever lived on this planet are useful as well as ornamental, valuable as well as voluminous, constructive as well as well constructed.  Thank God for whales.  How did the oceans ever survive before that first cow sprouted flippers and took to the sea?  Just kidding.  (They’re not.)
    If humans are mammals, maybe they should be included in the contest.  The Apostle Paul, for instance, is said to have walked and sailed some 13,500 miles on his missionary journeys.  If airplanes count, the average American business executive with Far East connections blows whales out of the water in his annual migrations.  Well, are we part of nature or not?  And why aren’t the whales keeping records on the humans?
Next headline on:  Mammals • Marine Biology • Amazing Facts

Readers are encouraged to find examples that contradict the claim that pro-Darwin, secular science writers in the mainstream media and scientific institutions are predominantly leftist.  There are sure to be some, but the leftist slant is, in our experience, so predictable that exceptions prove the rule (see 05/13/2010).
    So is the left really “pro-science” and the right “anti-science”?  Hopefully our graduates of Baloney Detecting University are more skilled than to accept such false dichotomies, and our graduates of the history of science know better.  Define science.  Separate science as a concept from scientific institutions (06/25/2010).  The latter often have soiled hands, being dependent either directly or indirectly on the public dole.  Any institution that must fight for its survival on keeping government money flowing will necessarily promote big government and higher taxes – hallmarks of the left.  Consequently they will try to portray science in terms of consensus, a monolithic entity composed of all those who stand to gain from public funding of their pet projects (cf. 09/15/2010).  We speak here of the leadership, publicity and lobbying arms of such institutions; at any given institution there is undoubtedly a mix of liberals and conservatives at work.
    The arrogance of some of these people is astounding.  They act like they own public money, that they are entitled to it.  How would they like it if other citizens of this country – say Tea Party members – walked into their houses and demanded tribute, claiming it was owed to them?  Public money is a limited commodity.  It needs to be collected and spent wisely by a representative government according to well thought out priorities.  The case needs to be made every year for why certain projects deserve funding, and these projects must have an understandable link to public interest.  Numerous commentators write about wasteful spending on science (example at Wall Street Journal).  Do we want $100,000 of taxpayer money going to UC Irvine scientists to study how US and Chinese students play World of Warcraft? (see Orange County Register).  Some will remember former Senator Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Awards” for wasteful spending.  SETI was a winner back in the 1980s.  Its proponents have had to survive on private funds ever since, though NASA pulled in millions for Astrobiology with the Martian Meteorite “useful lie” back in the 1990s (see 01/07/2005 commentary).
    Many worthwhile science projects, such as space exploration and cancer research, cannot be done by citizen scientists or private enterprise.  Large research labs and universities will of necessity need foundation grants or government funds (but look how entrepreneurs are making inroads into space flight).  Those paying the bill, whether the US government or foundations, have the right to decide what projects are in their interest.  Oversight and scrutiny over spending should be valued, because hubris leads to fraud and abuse, which ultimately damages the reputations of scientific institutions.  What if whistleblowers had not found the errors in Climategate?  Contrary to what Chris Mooney thinks, he should welcome the input of conservatives as a necessary check on power.  Scientists, after all, are only human (02/17/2010).
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Philosophy of Science • Media

Living Fossils Found in Space     10/13/2010    
Oct 13, 2010 — A type of galaxy that should have only existed long ago is alive and well nearby, astronomers from Swinburne University are claiming.  “The Swinburne researchers have likened the galaxies to the ‘living dinosaurs’ or Wollemi Pines of space – galaxies you just wouldn’t expect to find in today’s world,” said Science Daily.
    Very turbulent galaxies were thought to represent early stages in the evolution of our universe, the article claimed.  Something’s wrong, then.  “Their existence has changed our ideas about how star formation is fuelled and understanding star formation is important,“ Professor Karl Glazeburg said.  “Just look at the Big Bang, which is how we all got here.”

Maybe that is how he got here, but the rest of us think we got here by design.  Prof. Glazeburg and the biological Darwinists lose credibility when data that should have falsified their notions get recast in new rhetorical schemes, like “living fossils” – a contradiction in terms.  If they’re alive, maybe they were never dead as long as claimed.  Would you trust an antique dealer who guaranteed that a certain grandfather clock was only made in 1789, but then you find a Sony part number on the back, and he exclaims, “Well, I’ll be darned!  A living fossil!”?  Then why do we grant the time of day to these evolutionary salesmen?  A lot of things have gone terribly wrong with their scenarios, but they never repent, never come clean, never admit they have no idea what they are talking about.  So when you read that the universe “likes to form galaxies similar to the Milky Way” (Science Daily) or that rapid star formation was a teenybopper thing (PhysOrg), have a little skepticism, OK?  Data are one thing; interpretations are something else; cute stories are sales gimmicks.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Stars and Astronomy • Dumb Ideas

1. But can they dance?  Bacteria swim, but they also land on surfaces – and when they do, they put out little legs and walk.  This fascinating discovery, discussed on Science Daily, was made at UCLA.  The legs are called “type IV pili” in Pseudomonas, some of which cause diseases in humans.  “What enables this upright walking are appendages called type IV pili, which function as the analog of legs,” the article said.  “What’s more, walking allows P. aeruginosa to move with trajectories optimized for surface exploration, so that they can forage more effectively.”
2. Social network:  Some bacteria are “wired” with their own electrical intranet.  This was announced also by Science Daily in an article titled, “Bacteria Grow Electrical Hair: Specialized Bacterial Filaments Shown to Conduct Electricity.”  Tiny microfilaments extend out between bacteria to provide a means of communication and mutual support – a kind of cellular FaceBook system.  These create large “living biological circuits” (see Live Science) made of “biological nanowires” that function just like social networks.  “This is the first measurement of electron transport along biological nanowires produced by bacteria,” a researcher said.
       Science Daily explained, “A bacterial nanowire looks like a long hair sticking out of a microbe’s body.  Like human hair, it consists mostly of protein.”  Imagine if people communicated through their nanowires hair.  For bacteria, these networks are like a lifeline.  They exchange electrons, allowing bacteria to “breathe” and also communicate.
       Microbes were already known to communicate with chemical signals.  The nanowire networks apparently provide a faster channel.  Said one of the researchers of the wired net, in stressful situations or when survival is at stake, “You want the telegraph, you don’t want smoke signals.”  One can only guess at what they are saying.  Do they speak in Morse code?  “The current hypothesis is that bacterial nanowires are in fact widespread in the microbial world,” he added.

Darwin was obsessed with the appearance of natural evil in the world, because his acquaintance with natural theology did not take the Fall and the curse of sin seriously.  William Paley, for all his good reasoning, tried to use induction from the happy things in nature to a benevolent God.  Darwin saw design, but then looked at the suffering and disease everywhere.  Since he could not reconcile parasitism and disease with a benevolent God, he fell away from Paley’s view that originally was a strong influence in his thinking, and decided that design was just an illusion.  So he came up with an even more miracle-working god – chance!
    Without understanding sin and judgment, one cannot correlate the irrefutable evidence of design with the existence of evil.  The world is like a bombed city, with relics of its original goodness clearly evident, but with the marks of judgment just as clear.  The Creator does not plan to make this world a better place.  He is going to destroy it and build a new one (II Peter 3:3-13).  In the meantime, He has left enough marks of good design to put individuals on trial without excuse for denying His existence (Romans 1:16-22), and yet in His grace has provided enough happiness to motivate all people to seek Him (Acts 14:8-18, Acts 17:22-30).  The gospel is a means to escape this present evil world destined for judgment, for a new creation in which righteousness dwells (II Peter 3:11-13).
    Evolutionists mock at this, of course.  OK, take their answer: design is just an illusion.  Machinery emerges.  Weird stuff just happens sometimes (10/03/2010).  Evil doesn’t exist.  Everything came from nothing and is going nowhere.  Morality is a myth because it came from an undirected process of natural selection (10/10/2010).  Be consistent, now, and thank that E. coli when it lays you low, because it is merely showing it is more fit than you.  And no fair taking a stand on any moral issue, including the environment and climate change: the words ought and should are not in the Darwin Dictionary.  Take a random walk in Afghanistan; maybe the mutation-enhancing bullets will do you some good, whatever that word means.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Amazing Facts

The brain is very efficient, and doesn’t let unused space go to waste.
    The brain wants to compensate for the lost sense with enhancements that are beneficial.
    For example, if you’re deaf, you would benefit by seeing a car coming far off in your peripheral vision, because you can’t hear that car approaching from the side – the same with being to [sic] more accurately detect how fast something is moving.

Compensation algorithms?  Rewiring?  Explain that, Darwin – and we don’t mean “explain” by telling us a once-upon-a-time story.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mind and Brain • Amazing Facts

DNA Performs the Linking Rings Trick     10/11/2010    
Oct 11, 2010 — Those who love a good magic show should be aware of a world-famous trick going on inside their own bodies.  The “Chinese linking rings” trick is done by a team of protein magicians in the cell – but it’s not for entertainment, it’s to repair damage that could lead to cancer.
    PhysOrg echoed a press release from UC Davis about a team of proteins named Sgs1, Top3 and Rmi1.  This magic team makes DNA strands pass through one another when repairing double-stranded breaks (see 10/07/2010).  The team has to get the information from the matching chromosome, so “a sophisticated repair process is activated that uses the same DNA sequence on the matching chromosome,” the article explained.  “One of the strands is stripped back, leaving an exposed single strand.  The matching chromosome is brought alongside and partly unwound, and acts as a template to repair the broken piece.”
    Aside from the wonder at how protein machines can find a matching strand on another chromosome, when the chromosomes separate at points called Holliday junctions, the real magic happens.  “To finish the process, the chromosomes have to separate – like the magician’s interlocking rings, one has to pass through the other.”  Stephen Kowalczykowski, microbiology professor at UC Davis, remarked, “This protein complex does what magicians do.”

Natural selection was Darwin’s little magician that was advertised to create wonders on stage that seemed like natural theology.  The rest of us know that magicians really act with purpose and intent.  When they are really good, magicians make what they do seem miraculous.  But Darwin hyped his magic show without delivering the show.  He not only promised to pull a rabbit out of the hat; he promised to pull the magician out of the rabbit – and the hat out of nothing!  We came to watch this miracle, but the hat, the rabbit, and the magician were already on display.  Darwin came out and said, “The magician exists; therefore, he evolved from the rabbit.  It all happened long ago without anyone watching.  It must be so, because God wouldn’t have made things this way.”  All together, now: booooo.... give us our money back.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Rival camps have emerged, each endorsing a different approach to social evolution.  Heated exchanges have occurred at conferences, on blogs and in journals, and have even been reported in The New York Times.  Biologists have accused each other of misunderstanding, of failing to cite previous studies appropriately, of making unwarranted claims to novelty and of perpetuating confusions.  Yet I contend that there is little to argue about.
    Much of the current antagonism stems from the fact that different researchers are focusing on different aspects of the same phenomenon, and are using different methods.  In allowing a plurality of approaches – a healthy thing in science – to descend into tribalism, biologists risk causing serious damage to the field of social evolution, and potentially to evolutionary biology in general.

Researchers should take stock before another overblown dispute does serious damage to the field.  Up-and-coming researchers are unlikely to be attracted to a discipline plagued by controversy.  Moreover, if the experts cannot agree about what theoretical framework works best, the supply of research funding may eventually be threatened.  Also worrying is the possibility that onlookers perceive the central question of social evolution theory – how altruism can evolve – as unresolved, even though it was answered decades ago.  During the ‘sociobiology wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, creationists proved adept at seizing on and exaggerating the differences in opinion between biologists for their own ends.  It would be a disaster if the same were to happen again.

This is rich.  So creationists have their own ends, but these pure-minded Darwinists have none of their own.  So it would be a disaster if creationists pointed out this controversy and commented on it, but not if evolutionists gave them occasion for it.  Social evolution theory is plagued by controversy, he admits, but we’re not supposed to teach the controversy.  Why?  Because there is none.  It may look like a controversy – evolutionists behaving badly, making accusations, flouting “basic scientific practice,” misunderstanding one another, making unwarranted claims, unable to come to terms, but they all really agree deep down.  Controversy?  I don’t see any controversy, do you?  This was all solved decades ago.  “All this disagreement creates the impression of a field in massive disarray,” he said.  It’s just an impression, not a reality.  Can’t we see that both sides are just looking at the same solution from different angles?  Can’t we just get along?  Maybe the 30 at Amsterdam know more than Okasha does.
    The really funny thing about this article is that Okasha is treating his fellow evolutionists as rational beings capable of moral behavior.  By speaking of altruism as a moral capacity that can be strengthened by reason and appeals to unselfishness and integrity, he has just undermined all views of the evolution of altruism by natural selection, because natural selection by definition is mindless, purposeless, directionless and amoral.  He’s too busy to shoot the creationists, because he just shot his own views on social evolution in the foot.  They’re laughing hysterically, but are willing to come over and explain a thing or two about the origin of altruism, and even share some, if permitted.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Politics and Ethics • Education

1. Asteroid water bombs:  Water ice has been discovered on a second asteroid, reported Science Daily, echoing a press release from University of South Florida.  A professor said, “And it supports the theory that asteroids may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water and the building blocks for life to form and evolve here.”
   
2. Primordial haze:  Space.com and other sites are publishing speculations by Sarah Horst [U of Arizona] claiming that Titan may have the “ingredients for life” in its atmosphere.  “We don’t need liquid water, we don’t need a surface,” she said.  “We show that it is possible to make very complex molecules in the outer parts of an atmosphere.”  The toxic sludge pouring through Hungary contains complex molecules, too (BBC News).
       Horst omitted explaining how a genetic code or molecular machinery might arise from her ingredients for life.  She was focused on the ingredients themselves.  She simply assumed they will spontaneously spring into living things: “The results suggest that Titan’s upper atmosphere could be a reservoir of prebiotic molecules that could serve as the springboard to life, according to the scientists,” the press release continued, failing to state who the diver was.  “And the find may offer a new perspective on the emergence of life on Earth as well: Instead of a primordial soup, the first ingredients of life on our planet may have formed from a primordial haze high in Earth’s atmosphere.”  National Geographic interviewed Horst and published her speculations uncritically.  See also the 06/07/2010 entry.
   
3. Life signs:  The news reports about Gliese 581g, an exoplanet in its star’s habitable zone (09/29/2010), were spiced with liberal use of the L-word.  Most recently, David Shiga remarked in New Scientist that it might be “be awash with liquid water and perhaps life.”  Maybe we could tell by detecting “possible by-products of life, such as oxygen and methane,” he said, even though Saturn’s lifeless rings have oxygen and Titan has lots of methane without sentient beings peering through telescopes at earth.  Incidentally, the unfunded Terrestrial Planet Finder mission was renamed Darwin.
4. Hard questions and genetic divination:  How life got started is “one of the biggest questions in evolutionary biology,“ but that didn’t stop PhysOrg from publishing Oxford University’s press release about one of its scientists teasing insights from the genetic tea leaves of archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes about which one “emerged around 3.5 billion years ago.”
5. Complexity and computer divination:  Computers provide another way to peer into the mysterious origins of life.  PhysOrg reported on supercomputer simulations being done at Oak Ridge National Lab into the mechanics of a ribozyme, an RNA molecule of catalyzing some reactions while being composed of nucleotides that could be considered a rudimentary code.  The article claims these simulations are “helping scientists unravel how nucleic acids could have contributed to the origins of life.”  Admittedly these experiments, that are simply looking at how a magnesium atom keeps an active site open in one ribozyme, are a far cry from life, but the simulation is said to “probe an organic chemical reaction that may have been important in the evolution of ribonucleic acids, or RNA, into early life forms.”

The Cult of Tinker Bell pervades our scientific institutions and schools.  It’s a cult of magic, superstition, and imagination.  Don’t be tricked by the trappings of science; this cult has wizards, divination, and indoctrination.  In this cult, buildings not only “emerge” from the lumberyard in their Magic Kingdom; they evolve into castles and thrill rides every time Tinker Bell comes by with her mutation wand.  When they wish upon a star, like Gliese 581, all their dreams come true (12/05/2008 commentary).

“Evolution was a tinkerer,” he claims, thus personifying the favorite little Darwin Party goddess and proving that not even an evolutionist can be a consistent atheist.  Now we know who their ding-a-ling goddess is.  She gets the gong for her hopelessly inadequate impersonation of an intelligent designer.  It’s Tinker Bell.  (03/08/2005 commentary).

If this were just fun and games, it would be a temporary escapist fantasy.  But this is presented as science (05/27/2010 commentary).  It’s a bag of lies, with all the building blocks of lie (03/19/2008) and ingredients of deception built in (see Baloney Detector).  Deceiving the public by implying that life is a simple matter of stirring ingredients with water is a crime.  But can you blame a perpetrator of a crime when he or she believes the crime is a good thing?  That’s the problem: the deceivers are among the deceived.  This hopeless situation is the fulfillment of a scientifically-testable prediction by someone who came face to face with a lot of their kind: “evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (Paul, in II Timothy 3:13).

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Suggested reading: Meyer, Signature in the Cell ch. 3-5; Behe, Darwin’s Black Box ch 3-7; Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis ch. 13-14; and our online book, ch. 6-10.  These books describe the complexity of life (particularly the cell) and dispel the notion that life would ever “emerge” from building blocks.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Stars • Solar System • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Keeping Saturn Old     10/07/2010    
Oct 7, 2010 — Keeping a planet like Saturn going for billions of years has been a problem lately, especially when evidences show that what we see today of its rings and moons could not have lasted that long.

1. Ringside gambling:  The rings of Saturn are majestic, colorful, and young-looking.  Their ices are too clean, and the forces acting on them too pervasive, to have lasted 4.5 billion years.  The old idea that they formed along with Saturn has, therefore, fallen into disfavor.  Robin Canup came up with a “new alternative,” according to the BBC News: a body the size of giant moon Titan (larger than Mercury) floated within range of Saturn and dove in.
       “Just how these icy rings came about has always been a mystery,” the BBC said.  Earlier theories envisioned an icy comet, not a minor planet, forming the rings, leading to its 90 to 95% icy composition.  To keep the rock out, Canup proposed that the impacting body’s surface ices got stripped off on the way in and became the rings, then the rocky part smacked into the planet.  Canup’s story requires a body 10 times the size of previously-supposed comets.  She even thinks there was enough material left over to form icy moons like Enceladus, Dione and Tethys.  Whether or not such an explanation is likely, Carl Murray thought it was “a clever way to explain the peculiarly icy nature of the rings.”
2. Titan’s vanishing oceans:  An article on Science Daily was primarily devoted to allowing Akiva Bar-Nun of Tel Aviv University to say “I told you so” about Titan’s oily lakes and 6,000-foot mountains.  One of the things he had predicted in 1979, though, was that there would be enough hydrocarbons formed on the surface over its age to cover the large moon 43 meters deep.  Later estimates were around ten times that high.  Bodies of liquid the Cassini spacecraft actually found in 2005 are restricted to scattered lakes in the polar regions.
       Bar-Nun agreed that the liquids accumulate from precipitation of compounds formed in the atmosphere by solar radiation.  He disagreed with astrobiologists and researchers like Sarah Horst (see 10/08/2010) who find Titan a tempting target in the search for life.  “The chemical processes on Titan are different than those on Earth because there is no water vapor in Titan’s air, leading to hydrocarbon-based lakes unlike those seen on our planet.  Because of this, the frequent claims that Titan could be a laboratory for the investigation of life’s emergence on Earth are unfounded, he says.”
3. Enceladus: bubbly or wobbly?  The discovery in 2005 of active geysers at the south pole of little moon Enceladus “jolted many astronomers,” according to a story by Mike Wall on Space.com echoed on Live Science.  How could this “small, frozen and presumably dead moon” be “geologically active” after four and half billion years?  One “new way of thinking” that former Cassini Project Scientist Dennis Matson came up with to account for its “unique properties” is fizz.  A subsurface ocean picks up ions in the rock that bubble upward and explode out the south polar cracks.  According to his computer models, it doesn’t take much fizz to produce the effect.  Mike Wall got excited about this “Perrier ocean” model without asking too many questions, like how the ocean survived for billions of years in a moon just 500 miles across, why they erupt at the south pole, and why other moons don’t do this.  Matson admitted, “Until now, how you got so much heat out was a big, big problem.”
       Some of the details of that big, big problem were stated more overtly in an article on PhysOrg, echoing a news feature from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that took another “new way of thinking” to explain the puzzle.  No one expected little Enceladus to be “one of the most promising places in our solar system to look for extraterrestrial life” (because of its water); “Instead, it should have frozen solid billions of years ago.”  Whereas larger astrobiological targets like Mars (4,200 miles across) and Europa (2,000 miles across) “harbor hints” of subsurface water, Enceladus (500 miles across) “just doesn’t have the bulk needed for its interior to stay warm enough to maintain liquid water underground.”  Internal heating from radioactive decay is woefully inadequate: “in smaller moons like Enceladus, the cache of radioactive elements usually is not massive enough to produce significant heat for long, and the moon should have soon cooled and solidified.  So, unless another process within Enceladus somehow generated heat, any liquid formed by the melting of its interior would have frozen long ago.”
       The JPL story calls for friction between the sides of subsurface cracks to keep the interior warm.  As Enceladus wobbles in its orbit due to a tiny bit of libration (non-uniform rotation) from its slightly-out-of-round shape, it may gain the added increment of tidal stress to cause the friction – perhaps up to five times as much, according to computer models.  The hypothesis was made by trying to match the computer model with known hot spots at the south pole.  They didn’t line up without adding libration.  Libration has not been observed, but if it occurs, must be less than 2%.  Terry Hurford, author of the model, believes that’s enough: “the extra heat makes it likely that Enceladus’ ocean could be long-lived, according to Hurford.”  The L-word life was not far behind: “This is significant in the search for life, because life requires a stable environment to develop.”
       Similar questions arise, however, with the wobble model as with the bubble model.  Why does this happen only at Enceladus, and not nearby Mimas or Tethys?  What makes this unique to this one moon?  Don’t other moons librate?  Are all others perfect spheres?  Have they no tidal stresses?  Invoking ad hoc conditions after the fact is generally frowned upon in science.

A reader calculated that Enceladus could power 2.3 cities the size of Las Vegas with 13 billion watts.  After all, Las Vegas is at the “south pole” of Nevada, a state about as big across as Enceladus.  Isn’t it wonderful that this little tiny moon has been putting out this power, and this water-ice paint, for four and a half billion years?  Science says so.  You must believe.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Geology

How Darwinism can survive in today’s environment is a tale of the capacity for humans to cling to dogma far beyond whatever usefulness it may have had.  Darwinism may have made 19th-century Victorian racists in the British empire feel like they had latched onto something.  It may have allowed certain racist totalitarian tyrants to justify their atrocities with a veneer of scientific credibility.  That was all before 1951, when the basis of heredity was found to involve a coded language.  Shortly after, Crick discovered that one code gets translated by a family of interpreters into another code.  Now, in the 21st century, we have whole systems of molecular machines dedicated to preserving the code, and codes upon codes regulating the codes.
    Darwin didn’t write code.  Software was only beginning to be invented by Babbage in those days.  Darwin knew nothing about networks and codes and double-stranded breaks with BRCA2 machinery at the ready, and other complex mechanisms operating even in bacteria, the simplest little blobs of protoplasm he envisioned, that turned out to be more complex than any machinery in Britain.  Why must we cling to an outmoded view of life that spun from minds eager to rid science of intelligent causes?  We need a biology for the Information Age, where intelligent causes are well known.  Intelligence, and only intelligence, explains codes, messages, software, error-correction routines, networks, and hierarchical systems of all the above.  Step aside, Charlie.  You had your day.  You did your damage.  We have a lot of repair work to do.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Health • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Apparently no one ever tested the effects of trampling by animals before, even though some of them were aware of it.  The follow-up question we should be asking is, what other factors are they not considering about the unobservable past?  Don’t be so sure that archaeologists are able to separate trampled sites from non-trampled sites.  A herd of elephants walking over a site might not leave it the same as a herd of wildebeest.  Or a herd of supersaurus, either, but we say that just to irritate the Darwin dogmatists.
    The article said, “Scientists often date artifacts of the Stone Age, which began about two and a half million years ago, based on the depths at which the items are found: The deeper the object, the older it is, generally speaking.”  The 2.5 million number is based on evolutionary reasoning – i.e., how long did it take monkey-men to come out of their trees, develop a taste for meat, reorganize their anatomy for long-distance running (11/18/2004), figure out it was easier to carve the meat with a stone than by hand, and decide cooking was women’s work, and getting impaled and trampled by mammoths was men’s work?  How many times did a site get trampled before it dried up?  Say the site was wet for just a million years – less than half the assumed age.  Say that it got trampled once a month.  That’s 12 million tramplings.  OK, cut that in half, or a tenth – it’s still an outrageous amount of time for the artifacts to just sit there undisturbed by large animals, to say nothing of worms and burrowing creatures.  Does the possibility dawn on you that many of these claimed ages, which no scientist ever experienced, could be flawed?
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

Kinder, Gentler Dinosaurs Envisioned     10/06/2010    
Oct 6, 2010 — See if this statement by Tim Rowe [U of Texas at Austin] meets your mental picture of dinosaurs after a lifetime of movies: “We used to think of dinosaurs as fierce creatures that outcompeted everyone else,” he said.  “Now we’re starting to see that’s not really the case.  They were humbler, more opportunistic creatures.  They didn’t invade the neighborhood.  They waited for the residents to leave and when no one was watching, they moved in.”
    This quote from an article in PhysOrg may not make for a very dramatic sequel to Jurassic Park, but it’s based on his team’s analysis of migration patterns of a new species of dinosaur from Arizona gently named Sarahsaurus.  “And so it’s starting to look like some of our ideas about how size and evolution work are probably in need of revision,” Rowe said, “and that some of the features we thought were tied to gigantism and the physics and mechanics of the bones may not be right.”

Does Rowe know that dinosaurs were humbler, more opportunistic creatures?  No, because he wasn’t there.  Neither does Steven Spielberg know that they were terrors.  Who knows; maybe they were like large cows and sheep, and the predators were like large coyotes.  Maybe Alley Oop had to beat off Sue with a stick.  Make up your own scenario.  It’s as good as anyone else’s, because all such opinions about behavior are inferred from indirect evidence and are inherently subjective.  For best chance at fame, come up with a scenario that lends itself to a screenplay and keeps the animators employed.
    The one thing that you can be sure of is that the opinions of evolutionists will continue to change, so that any of their claims today “are probably in need of revision” tomorrow.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

Good grief; Moskowitz titled her display of nonsense, “After Big Bang Came Moment of Pure Chaos, Study Finds.”  It found nothing of the sort.  It found nothing, only sordid hubris pretending to be science.  Be sure to read the 10/03/2010 commentary as a preface to this one.  Since Battersby and Moskowitz, Motter and Gelfert have surrendered all credibility and lowered themselves to shaman status, their speculations can be safely disregarded as no better than anyone else’s, and decidedly worse.  For they present themselves as scientists – you know, those who know.
    If you’re thinking, “Well, the Bible states that things started without form and void, and that sounds like chaos,” consider that chaos can be molded by intelligent design.  The creation account is top-down, like a potter taking a formless mass of clay and designing art or dishware out of it.  Take the secularist, materialist, evolutionary bottom-up approach on clay without a potter, and try getting the palace of Louis XIV out of it, all orderly and furnished to the hilt.  That would be far more credible than getting our universe out of impersonal chaos.
    Not only that, the materialist has to account for the origin of the clay out of hydrogen, and the hydrogen out the chaos, and the chaos out of some undefined, unobservable, fantastically-low entropy nothingness that is “not well understood” and “in the realms of speculation.”  It’s all speculation.  None of it is well understood.  Genesis 1:1 sounds downright scientific by comparison.
Suggested Reading:  For a scholarly introduction to some of the problems with modern cosmological speculations, read “Was there a big bang?” by David Berlinski (1998), posted at the Discovery Institute.  Other apropos essays in his book The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (Discovery Institute, 2009) include “God, Man, and Physics” (2002) and “The State of the Matter” (2009).  These penetrating essays will not convince someone of God, since Berlinski is a non-practicing Jew, but his deftness at exposing the pretensions of the self-acclaimed wise will surely confront the reader with the deep and enduring problems of trying to bring a universe into existence without Him.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Bible and Theology • Intelligent Design

This is good science as it should be done: pure research that produces understanding, and looks ahead to the possibility of improving our lives.  “Do no harm” states the Hippocratic Oath.  A corollary of that is “Do no Darwin” (example).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics

Cosmic Accidents Are Not Scientific Explanations     10/03/2010    
Sunday Meditation Oct 3, 2010 — The classic understanding of science is that it explains things with reference to natural laws, makes predictions, is testable, quantifiable, and falsifiable.  Depending on the branch of science, many researchers still attempt to hold to those ideals.  Eugenie Scott put it this way: “modern science operates under a rule of methodological materialism that limits it to attempting to explain the natural world using natural causes.”  Natural causes include natural laws, predictable patterns, probability, or combinations of these.  Pure accidents, by contrast, contain no explanatory power.  How satisfying would it be to hear a scientist explain a phenomenon by saying, “Weird things just happen sometimes”?  That’s tantamount to saying, “We have no idea.”  See if the following two articles from New Scientist’s series “Cosmic Accidents” can do better than that.
    New Scientist has a headline: “Cosmic accidents: Inventing language, the easy way.”  What is this easy way of which reporter David Robson speaks?  Here’s how he explained it.  He picks up the tale as hominids migrate out of Africa to discover new habitats:

Released from many of the selective pressures that had shackled their evolution, they began to change subtly.  Their calls, for example, had once needed to be very specific – one to signal aggression, one to announce feeding time and so on – and were hard-wired in the brain.  Any variation from a small inherited “vocabulary” risked a potentially fatal misunderstanding, so mutations that promoted greater flexibility were quickly weeded out.
    In the new havens, however, mutations emerged that allowed more complex vocalisations, controlled by wider regions of the brain.  Ultimately, these morphed into huge learned vocabularies and flexible grammars that exploded the tight constraints on interpersonal communication.  A change of scene had accidentally created that most human of features: language.

The countless simple cells living in many different environments on Earth have had over 3 billion years to evolve complexity.  It could have happened repeatedly - and yet it appears to have happened just once, perhaps 2 billion years ago.  All complex life is descended from a single common ancestor.
    Why is that so?  Because, says Nick Lane of University College London, natural selection normally favours fast replication, keeping simple cells simple.  Then a freak event occurred: an archaeon engulfed a bacterium and the two cells formed a symbiotic relationship.  That transformed the dynamics of evolution, leading to a period of rapid change that produced innovations such as sex.  The incorporated bacterium eventually evolved into mitochondria, the energy generators of complex cells.

Science is stuck with chance explanations sometimes.  We have no theory at this time for why one radioactive nucleus decays when it does, or why a photon goes through one slit instead of the other.  Usually, though, scientists can assign probability values, given a large sample size.  Watch enough radionuclei, and you can predict to a high degree of accuracy how many will decay within the isotope’s characteristic half-life.  Watch enough photons, and you can predict the pattern that will emerge on the screen.  If there were only one nucleus or photon, though, all bets would be off for predicting what would happen.  Scientists would have to admit, “We have no idea.”  Even in chaos theory, which camps on unpredictability, large sample sizes allow predictable patterns called “strange attractors” to emerge.
    Given enough smokers, medical researchers can predict what percentage will get lung cancer; but all bets would be off for predicting the fate of a particular smoker.  If either outcome – the smoker lives, the smoker dies – could be “explained” by the probability value, then nothing has really been explained at all.  He dies: Just as we predicted, he was part of the 70% group that gets cancer.  He lives: He was lucky and beat the odds.  Opposite outcomes are encompassed by the theory.  The bottom line is, “We have no idea.”
    When a scientist is reduced to saying, “We have no idea,” his or her opinion is essentially no better than anyone else’s.  For all a neutral observer could tell, a New Guinea shaman or the Oracle at Delphi has just as good an explanation for a phenomenon.  A scientist reduced to saying “Weird stuff just happens sometimes” has no claims over a theologian, for sure.  “Sheer dumb luck” as David Berlinski calls it is no explanation at all.  It is the antithesis of explanation.  If science gets reduced to sheer dumb luck, the Stuff Happens Law (SHL), it surrenders all claims to epistemic priority.  Possession of a white lab coat, a PhD, and a university professorship amounts to nothing more than costumery the shaman could put on, by all rights.
    The GSA talking points say, “Science cannot be used, by definition, to study events or phenomena that cannot be perceived by natural or empirical senses and do not follow any natural rules or regularities.”  This statement, though intending to disparage creationism and intelligent design, rules out explanations that ultimately depend on “freak accidents.”  It therefore rules out so-called scientific explanations of the Big Bang, the origin of life, the origin of eukaryotes, the origin of sex, the origin of consciousness, and most of the subject matter evolutionists are interested in.
    Darwinism itself is outside the bounds.  Why?  The root of its explanation is contingency – sheer dumb luck.  Darwinism is the SHL in different words.  Early critics of Darwinism pointed this out.  They were appalled that Darwin was introducing contingency into scientific explanation in an era when natural law was king.  Darwin believed he had found a law – the law of natural selection – but closer examination shows it is chance masquerading as law.  Nothing could be selected without random mutation, obviously, but selection itself is directionless – therefore random.  The environment is random.  “Selection pressure” is unpredictable; it pushes this way, and that: up, down, sideways.  Everything at the fundamental level is explained by freak accidents.  Whatever happens happens.  Darwinists cannot appear after the fact and say, “natural selection” did it.  That’s equivalent to saying, “A freak accident produced this outcome by sheer dumb luck.  Weird things (like eukaryotes, like language) just happen sometimes.”  As we have shown repeatedly, Darwin’s “law” explains opposite outcomes – therefore it explains nothing (12/19/2007 commentary).  Might as well invite the Delphic oracle, the New Guinea shaman and a gambler to give presentations at the Darwin convention.  On what basis could they be denied admission?  Their clothes?  Their taste in cuisine?  That kind of diversity already exists at science conferences.
    Eugenie Scott, in her talking points on the NCSE website, used to say, “Science and religion are different.  Scientific explanations are based on human observations of natural processes,” where processes include laws, patterns, causes and logical deductions other than appeals to chance or so-called supernatural forces taken on faith.  The newer explanation, “What is science?” at NCSE web, emphasizes method and “ways of thinking” more than laws and cause.  “The process of science is creative and flexible.  There is no single scientific method used by all scientists.... All scientific conclusions are tentative.”    This looser description, more nuanced and postmodern, appears to have been adopted to insulate the NCSE from charges that evolution is unscientific.  But do the gains in defense offset the gains in offense?  Scott can keep evolution in science only by widening the tent.  If she looks carefully, though, she lets in the Delphic oracle and the New Guinea shaman.  After all, they have methods; they are creative; they are flexible.  They can even hold their conclusions tentatively.
    To maintain a distinction in the wider tent, Donald Prothero adds the only claim in the article to epistemic priority: the hope of converging on the truth, whatever that is, somehow: “Science is not about finding final truth, only about testing and refining better and better hypotheses so these hypotheses approach what we think is true about the world.”  But in attempting to kick the shamans and oracles out, Prothero has let in a more fearsome group: the logicians and philosophers.  They will ask what he means by truth, what constitutes testing and refining if there is no standard of truth by which one can measure progress, and whether what one thinks is true about the world corresponds to what is really true about the world.  Prothero will need more than sheer dumb luck to get out of that predicament.
    Have we gotten lost in a postmodern fog, where everyone’s opinion is equally valid and deserving of a hearing?  Fortunately, no.  Intelligent design (ID) identifies a measurable quantity, complex specified information (CSI), that can dispel the fog.  Intelligence is a known, testable cause of CSI – the only known cause.  And there is a threshold for separating chance from intelligence as a scientific explanation – the universal probability bound, based on the information content of the phenomenon under study.  Human language and eukaryotic cells are rich in CSI.  While ID cannot yield final truth, either, it provides an inference to the best explanation for measuring the confidence one can have in design as the cause versus chance as the cause.  This can be achieved by running the explanation through the Explanatory Filter (ARN).
    With this background, re-examine the articles above and their explanations.  The “scientists” (if deserving of that honor) attributed the causes to freak accidents – sheer dumb luck.  But the phenomena under question – human language and eukaryotic cells, are rich with CSI that exceed the universal probability bound.  Chance is therefore excluded; design is the best explanation. 
    ID leads to another advantage: a theory of truth.  While ID restricts itself to design detection, additional logical inferences can be made once an inference to design has been made – just like when an inference that a string of bits contains a message, rather than being natural noise, leads to additional inferences about the content of the message and the nature of the sender.  Given that many phenomena (DNA, the human brain, and the universe itself) pass through the Explanatory Filter into the design explanation, it follows that a designer capable of producing a universe must be greater than the universe, therefore transcendent, and outside of spacetime, therefore timeless.  That provides an anchor point for truth to allow it to be timeless, universal, necessary, and certain.  Reflexively, it provides the preconditions for intelligibility that a scientist assumed to draw that conclusion.  It is therefore logically coherent and explanatorily rich. 
    So let’s kick the Know-Nothings (10/28/2009, 02/22/2008) mumbling sheer dumb luck and freak accidents out of the lab and give them new jobs in the caves of Delphi and the jungles of New Guinea.  Let’s welcome back ID scientists (the heirs of Kepler and Newton, Boyle and Maxwell) to clean up the mess and put scientific explanation back on track: chance for single events of low information content, probability for quantifiable events, natural law for predictable patterns, design for high-CSI phenomena with high information content.  Help achieve this if logical coherence is something you value in science.

Suggested Reading:  David Berlinski, “The Deniable Darwin,” (1996) and “What Brings a World Into Being?” (2001), The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute, 2009).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Early Man • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas • Philosophy of Science • Intelligent Design

Galileo Affair: Plenty of Blame to Go Around     10/02/2010    
Oct 2, 2010 — What is the true account of Galileo Galilei’s troubles with the Catholic church?  We may never know.  Complex historical events are often difficult to interpret, and new details sometimes shed different light on commonly-accepted views.  One thing does seem certain, according to Thomas Mayer, historian at Augustana College, Illinois: “The notion that Galileo’s trial was a conflict between science and religion should be dead.”  He told this to Live Science in a report about new findings showing a new angle on the 17th-century trial of the eminent astronomer and physicist.
    There’s a difference between simple and simplistic.  Many adults grew up with the simple explanation that Galileo was a heroic victim in a classic clash with religion.  It was the theme of 19th-century books intent on exalting science by bashing the church – books now almost universally deplored as simplistic and wrong.  A clash existed, but its causes are multiple and intertwined.  Mayer has been poring over Inquisition documents and finding that many of them are just sloppy.
    While that’s a blot on the church, Galileo made his share of mistakes.  He could have avoided a lot of his troubles with a little research into the rules about negotiating a settlement, but he apparently didn’t.  Mayer says he “didn’t know the rules and deliberately kept himself ignorant of them.”  He contradicted himself, and “he made every imaginable mistake” in the second part of his trial, Mayer believes.
    Mayer is trying to understand the players as “human beings as opposed to cardboard cutouts” as they are often portrayed.  The Galileo Affair was not a simple, good-guy-vs-bad-guys story.  The nuances won’t diminish Galileo as a hero, nor exonerate the church for persecuting him, but it will surely make the story more interesting than a melodrama.

Could your entire life be reduced to a few episodes that would give a true picture of yourself?  That’s what we’ve done to Galileo.  Like the Scopes Trial, the Galileo Affair has been for too long a “cardboard cutout” story that has colored perceptions of the relation of science and religion.  Sometimes knowing more detail won’t change the conclusion, but it will significantly alter the route by which you arrive at it, and make the journey much more interesting.  It also softens hatred of villains into a kind of reluctant empathy when you understand their times and motivations.  Galileo remains a fascinating character, but if you want a better role model, check out Kepler.

Comment on historical interpretation
It’s common for history professors nowadays to emphasize that characters need to be evaluated in the context of their times and cultures.  It is not right, they say, for us to judge them by our cultural values; we need to put ourselves in their shoes and see the world as they saw it.  This is sensible as far as it goes, but taken too far, it can lead to a kind of relativism that is self-refuting.  To see why, picture a history professor, Dr. Smith, 400 years from now evaluating a history professor, Dr. Jones, from 2010.  He says, “To evaluate Dr. Jones, we need to judge him by his context, which was to judge historical characters by their context.”  800 years from now, another history professor, Dr. Bennett, says, “To evaluate Dr. Smith, we need to judge him by his context, which was to judge Dr. Jones by his context, which was to judge his predecessors by their context.”  Infinite regress: no context becomes solid enough to provide a basis for evaluating anything.  Instead, there needs to be a foundation for truth and values that is fixed and eternal, by which all things can be evaluated.  The Bible provides such a foundation for “building on the rock” instead of the shifting sands of human opinion (Matthew 7:24-27, Psalm 119).  Works for science, too.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology • Philosophy of Science

Tell us when you get there.  Tell us when you understand.  Tell us when you can span the boundary between living and fossil so as to tell how penguins got from there to here.  Tell us how melanocytes and feathers survived for 36 mythical million years.  Tell us why changes from bigger to smaller without morphological changes should be called evolution.  Tell us when you get the flashlight to shed some light on evolution.  All we hear so far is confusion and waffling.  We don’t see any evolution to shed light on in the first place.
    This super-bird was bigger, badder and fitter than today’s penguins – exceeding by a foot the four-foot emperor penguins made famous by March of the Penguins, with twice the body mass.  According to the artist’s reconstruction, it was fully equipped with tuxedo wetsuit and outfitted for powerful swimming just as much as today’s penguins.  The melanocyte differences are trivial.  They should have worried about how the delicate structures and the feathers could be preserved at all for so long.
    The Darwin bluffing charade continues: they promise but don’t deliver (cf. 09/22/2010).  Some of us are not convinced that Darwin should get a pass just because he wears a Science badge.  Science badges can be faked.  They don’t make reliable science badges like they used to.
Next headline on:  Birds • Fossils • Dating Methods • Darwin and Evolution