http://www.crev.infoNews from science relating to origins, creation vs. evolution, and intelligent design.Sat, 11 Mar 2006 02:33:32 -0800FeedSpring - http://feedspring.com/Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:57:45 GMThttp://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100315aMars is under assault by an armada of orbiters gathering intel from the planet with photons and radar beams. What kind of information has been seized recently? (4 reports)Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:52:15 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100314aWhat a thought – a repair crew of molecular machines roaming the strands of your DNA, fixing errors 24 x 7. It happens. New techniques are showing the machines jumping from strand to strand like fleas, stopping at suspicious points, and fixing errors, reported Science Daily. Dr. Bennett Van Houten (U of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute) had an earthy way of illustrating what goes on. “How this system works is an important unanswered question in this field,” he said. “It has to be able to identify very small mistakes in a 3-dimensional morass of gene strands. It’s akin to spotting potholes on every street all over the country and getting them fixed before the next rush hour.” A bacterium has about 40 team members on its pothole crew. That allows its entire genome to be scanned for errors in 20 minutes, the typical doubling time. The machines were observed jumping and sliding at random, but engaged sometimes in paused motion that “seemed slower and purposeful,” the scientists said, as if they were scrutinizing a pothole (i.e., a structural abnormality or defect) needing repair. These smart machines can apparently also interact with other damage control teams if they cannot fix the problem on the spot. Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:57:18 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100313bThe fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an icon of evolution. Since the 1930s these poor little bugs have been mutated endlessly and watched for signs of Darwinian change. So far, though, only useless mutants, unable to survive in the wild, have been produced. Recently, scientists seem more enamored with their design. Two recent articles had nothing to say about evolution but a lot to say about the amazing ways they are put together. They are so well put together, in fact, that they put humans to shame in some ways – not only because they can fly and we can’t. (3 reports)Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:20:33 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100313aIt’s risky to say “never” in science. The Man Will Never Fly Society had a short life. However, an article on Space.com makes it seem a safe bet that, Star Trek notwithstanding, warp-speed flights to the stars are out of the question for humans. “Warp speed will kill you,” the article announced; why? Because interstellar hydrogen atoms would become lethal weapons, delivering a deadly radiation blast to ship and crew. The ship’s electronics would fry and the crew would be killed instantly. The last thing Kirk might have told Scotty was, “Jump to warp speed.” Don’t think that “Shields up” would have helped. If the Enterprise didn’t have shields a kilometer thick (making warp speed all the more impractical), they would not have done any good. William Edelstein (Johns Hopkins U) explained these problems to a meeting of the American Physical Society last month. The demise of the Trekkie dream is not the only ramification, he said. The physical barriers to near-light speed also suggest that aliens would have been physically unable to drop in for a visit – if they are made of atoms. “Getting between stars is a huge problem unless we think of something really, really different,” Edelstein said. “I’m not saying that we know everything and that it’s impossible. I’m saying it’s kind of impossible based on what we know right now.” Trekkies might still take hope in lessons from history where yesterday’s impossibilities, like flying, became today’s everyday experience. Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:12:32 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100312aDo you have a self that controls your brain, or is thought a secretion of the brain, as Darwin claimed? Do you use your brain, or does your brain operate you? Who is in charge? These are deep philosophical questions with a long history, that some people prefer to avoid, as in the common joke: What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter. The answer is probably not an either-or proposition, because we know that physical changes in the brain, whether by drugs and injury, can have profound affects on the self – if there is one. But there is also ample evidence that people can affect their physical brains through choice and will – just as a person can order her arm to rise against the pull of gravity. Some recent findings suggest that opinions of neuroscientists (for a long time those most tending to physicalism) seem to be shifting back to belief in the existence of a determinative self. (8 reports)Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:49:06 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100311aWhen scientists find that virtue brings reward and vice bring trouble, are they doing a better job than preachers? Hold that thought while reading some of the things scientists have been telling us lately about ourselves. (7 examples of moral "findings" and judgments made by scientists.)Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:03:10 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100310aAncient stargazers imagined the violent actions of gods in the heavens giving rise to the stars, earth and man. Today’s secular astronomers engage in a similar kind of lore. While not naming their gods after mythical heroes, they describe them as forces of nature whose violent clashes give rise to order and design. Sometimes they even personify these forces. Maybe the only thing that has changed since Greek times is the sophistication of the observations. Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:29:31 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100309aImagine a tree that can provide both nutritious food and clean water. Moringa oleifera is such a tree. It grows in Africa and Asia and is being looked at as a life-giving plant that can reduce bacterial contamination of water by 90 to 99.99% by filtering water with its seeds. Science Daily has a picture of the tree’s leaves. “A billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are estimated to rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily water needs,” the article said, based on information from John Wiley & Sons Corporate Citizenship Initiative. “Of these, some two million are thought to die from diseases caught from contaminated water every year, with the majority of these deaths occurring among children under five years of age.” Michael Lea, a researcher at Clearinghouse, a Canadian organisation dedicated to investigating and implementing low-cost water purification technologies, just published a low-cost water purification technique using seeds from the Moringa tree at Current Protocols. By low cost he means no cost. The trees already live where they are needed. “Moringa tree seeds, when crushed into powder, can be used as a water-soluble extract in suspension, resulting in an effective natural clarification agent for highly turbid and untreated pathogenic surface water,” the article explained. “As well as improving drinkability, this technique reduces water turbidity (cloudiness) making the result aesthetically as well as microbiologically more acceptable for human consumption.” But that’s not all. Lea said, “Not only is [the tree] drought resistant, it also yields cooking and lighting oil, soil fertilizer, as well as highly nutritious food in the form of its pods, leaves, seeds and flowers.” He calls it “one of the world’s most useful trees.” Lea is trying to publish the procedure and make it widely available, because children have been dying in third world countries when a solution has been growing right around them. Lea counted other benefits, like income from cultivating the trees. He envisions the “possibility that thousands of 21st century families could find themselves liberated from what should now be universally seen as 19th century causes of death and disease. This is an amazing prospect, and one in which a huge amount of human potential could be released,” he said. “This is particularly mind-boggling when you think it might all come down to one incredibly useful tree.” Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:22:16 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100308aTwo papers recently claim to have seen natural selection. Neither paper, however, identified a functional advantage that would have tied the differences to benefits that could improve a species.Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:40:36 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100307aThis quote from UC Berkeley wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: In the long evolutionary road from bacteria to humans, a major milestone occurred some 1.5 billion years ago when microbes started building closets for all their stuff, storing DNA inside a nucleus, for example, or cramming all the energy machinery inside mitochondria. Any questions? Science Daily repeated it without laughing. The occasion for the comment is research on a microbe that can switch between an amoeba-like form and a flagellated form. Naegleria gruberi, when stressed, can switch on genes that grow two flagella. A Berkeley bioinformaticist commented that “It is a very rare process to go from amoeba to flagellate like this.” It has two completely different modes of motility. Nevertheless, somehow, this germ is “shedding light on the set of perhaps 4,000 genes that may have been part of the first, most primitive eukaryotes” and will “shed light on how cells move, how they signal one another and how they metabolize nutrients.” Presumably, discoveries about this living microbe “will help in understanding the evolution of more complicated organisms” hundreds of millions of years ago. It “can help scientists understand the origins of these parallel systems during the evolution of eukaryotes.” There’s light and understanding everywhere. According to one team member, “By comparing diverse organisms like Naegleria from all over the family tree of eukaryotes we can begin to understand where we come from.” Apparently we are to understand that we are amoebas a few million years farther down the evolutionary highway. Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:01:50 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100306aTo find great ideas, look to nature. Many plants and animals are useful, not just ornamental. They can show the way to solve problems of great interest to humans. (6 amazing stories)Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:43:28 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100305aThe science news media are all reporting that the “oldest known dinosaur relative” has been found. The artist reconstructions of Asilisaurus kongwe, found in middle Triassic layers in Tanzania, make the creature look quite dinosaurian; at least it was dog-sized and walked on thick legs under its body like its famous brethren did. Its early date (230 million years, by evolutionary reckoning) creates a conundrum for evolution. It pushes the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs (if there was one) farther back in time, to 245 million years ago. The fossil presents another problem for evolution. “Until now, paleontologists have generally believed that the closest relatives of dinosaurs possibly looked a little smaller in size, walked on two legs and were carnivorous,” PhysOrg said. “However, a research team including Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Utah Museum of Natural History and assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah has made a recent discovery to dispel this hypothesis.” That discovery was a herbivorous, four-legged silesaur – a sister group of contemporaries to the dinosaurs – that looked very different from what was expected. One of the authors of a paper in Nature said, “The crazy thing about this new dinosaur discovery is that it is so very different from what we all were expecting, especially the fact that it is herbivorous and walked on four legs.” Science Daily also echoed the press release from the University of Utah. National Geographic announced, “ Dinosaurs Ten Million Years Older Than Thought.” The evolutionary story that was expected was that herbivory evolved late in the silesaur lineage. Finding a herbivorous silesaur 10-15 million years earlier means that its carnivorous ancestor had to be earlier, too. But even that story is murky. Are vegetarians better adapted? “Although difficult to prove, it’s possible that this shift conferred an evolutionary advantage.” But then, herbivory arose in three groups: silesaurs, and both major groups of dinosaurs. “The researchers conclude that the ability to shift diets may have lead to the evolutionary success of these groups.” Why do paleontologists think so? “These shifts all occurred in less than 10 million years, a relatively short time by geological standards, so we think that the lineage leading to silesaurs and dinosaurs might have had a greater flexibility in diet, and that this could be a reason for their success.” It sounds like he just said that fast evolution is evidence for evolution. Live Science put it this way: “The analysis provides a window into dinosaur evolution, particularly how the animals acquired plant-eating abilities.” Somehow, evidence that the animal ate plants told them how they got the ability to eat plants, even though National Geographic admitted, “What emerged looked nothing like what paleontologists had imagined.” Evolution was not very evident in the fossil bed where Asilisaurus kongwe was found, however. Also found were crocodiles. So much for dinosaur-like body plans evolving from crocs. “The presence of these animals together at the same time and place suggests that the diversification of the relatives of crocodilians and dinosaurs was rapid, and happened earlier than previously suggested.” Somehow, we are told, this “sheds light on a group of animals that later came to dominate terrestrial ecosystems” for 185 million years. Randall Irmis (Utah Museum of Natural History) was apparently not shamed by this blow to expectations. Quite the contrary: he said, “It’s very exciting because the more we learn about the Triassic Period, the more we learn about the origin of the dinosaurs and other groups.” Christian Sidor, a co-author of the paper, was less sanguine: “It’s making the picture a little bit murkier, because we have a possible herbivore and quadruped very close to the dinosaur lineage.” Christopher Brochou made hay out of both sides of the truck: “It’s part of a larger, growing realization that the earliest archosaurs were far more diverse than we ever thought,” he said, but hey: it’s also “an elegant fulfillment of a prediction” that dinosaur ancestors would include members that were both crocodile-like and bird-like. Picturing the common ancestor of those is left as an exercise. Live Science noted that the research was funded by the National Geographic Society, Evolving Earth Foundation, Grainger Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:22:07 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100304bConflicting views on atheism by scientists show that deducing the intellectual status of atheism is not an exact science. Are such questions even approachable by the scientific method? What conclusions could be drawn? National Geographic reported Kanazawa’s theory that liberals and atheists are smarter (02/27/2010) without much criticism. Reporter Maggie Koerth-Baker only said that a new study “suggests” that “liberals, atheists [are] more highly evolved” and “more inclined to nontraditional values,” but the blaring headline and opening bold summary made its point: “Your apelike ancestors probably aren’t top of mind when you enter the polling booth,” she began. “But a new study suggests that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you’re liberal or conservative—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe in God, or whether you’ve got a cheatin’ heart” (see 02/27/2010 for critique of Kanazawa’s thesis). The article did critique Kanazawa’s measure of IQ, but did not question the science underlying the idea that intelligence evolved by a Darwinian process: “For instance, other researchers have advanced the theory that intelligence arose as a way of competing for sex,” she said. “If that's the case, Kanazawa’s conclusions only make sense if, say, being liberal or atheist also makes you more sexually attractive.” Then the article invited readers to “Take a Darwin quiz” on the National Geographic website. It doesn’t measure your sexual prowess, intelligence, or fitness, though; just your knowledge of Darwin trivia. New Scientist had a less complimentary view of atheism. “Where do atheists come from?”, asked Lois Lee and Stephen Bullivant. They started by echoing what seems to be a truism in academia: “where Reason reigns, God retires.” It seems intuitive. Isn’t that why atheists predominate at Oxford? “Of course, things are never quite that simple,” they quickly countered. In fact, surveys show that postgraduates tend to be less atheistic. Evidence from elsewhere, they said, shows “there is no straightforward relationship between atheism and education.” They produced statistics to show this. One surprise is that more degree-holders are religious than atheist. “It appears that Enlightenment assumptions about the decline of religion as the population becomes more educated will no longer do – at least, not without considerable qualification.” So where do atheists come from? They discussed a “collective blind spot in research: atheism itself.” Atheists have put religious people in a test tube without jumping in themselves. What we need now is a scientific study not of the theistic, but the atheistic mind. We need to discover why some people do not “get” the supernatural agency many cognitive scientists argue comes automatically to our brains. Is this capacity non-existent in the non-religious, or is it rerouted, undermined or overwritten – and under what conditions? Psychologically, we need to know how the self functions without theistic belief, and how our emotional resources might be altered by its absence. Anthropologically, we need to understand how people without religion make sense of their lives, how they find meaning, and how non-theistic systems of thought are embedded in, and shape, the different cultures in which they are present. Sociologically, we need to know how these alternative meaning-making systems are shared between societies, how they unite or divide us, and whether non-religious groups contain pro-social elements commonly associated with religion itself. Since nobody has asked such questions, Lee and Bullivant announced that they have set up a “Non-religion and Secularity Research Network” in 2008. The first problem was getting the vocabulary right: the words atheistic, non-theistic, non-religious, unbelieving and godless do not mean the same things. What has turned up in the test tube? Interesting findings have, however, begun to emerge; some providing insight into the relationship between education and atheism. Voas, also a keynote speaker at the Wolfson conference, says one reason why a greater number of religious people are degree-holders may be that “better educated people have typically reflected on religion and have the self-confidence to come down decisively, on one side or the other’. The issue is not which idea – atheism or theism – is more stupid than the other, but that education helps us either to work out or simply to communicate our beliefs, no matter what they are. Their article, surprisingly, said nothing about evolution. It did not try to describe atheism or theism in terms of selection pressures on primitive ancestors. And their conclusions had something nice to say to both sides: “The believers may take heart from the fact that the most comprehensive studies no longer suggest the unreligious are cleverer or more lettered than them,” they said. “But the non-believers might also comfort themselves that they are no longer outside the mainstream.” Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:15:20 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100304aTo some people, the world would be a better place if ruled by scientists. They could be like a benevolent oligarchy, employing the knowledge gained by the scientific method for the good of the people. A recent editorial might shake that belief. In Nature News this week,1 Daniel Sarewitz had some sobering thoughts for scientists who think their views should direct national policy. The context was the Climategate scandal. He used the incident to call attention to inherent weaknesses in the ability of science to rule the people. Science has been called on to do something beyond its purview: not just improve people’s understanding of the world, but compel people to act in a particular way. For nearly twenty years, researchers, policy-makers and activists have claimed that climate science requires a global policy agenda of top-down, United-Nations-sponsored international agreements; targets and timetables for emissions reductions; and the creation of carbon markets.... The idea that a mounting weight of scientific evidence would gradually overwhelm ideological opposition to the climate policy regime is not just false but backwards. Science is much more pliable and permissive than deeply held beliefs about how the world should work. Scientific understanding of the complex, coupled ocean–atmosphere–society system is always incomplete, and gives the competing sides plenty of support for their pre-existing political preferences – as well as plenty to hide behind in claiming that those preferences are supported by science. Science can decisively support policy only after fundamental political differences have been resolved. The crucial point here is that no amount of reform of the IPCC, or rooting out of bad science – or of scientists behaving badly – will begin to correct the flaws in the dominant approach to climate policy. Rehabilitation of climate policy is a matter not of getting the science right, but of getting the politics right. Science is the handmaiden of politics, not its queen. That appears to be what Sarewitz is saying. Because scientific understanding of complex issues is always incomplete, it will never be able to overwhelm the opposition by the sheer weight of evidence. Whatever party wins can use “science” to support their policies. The picture of science Sarewitz just painted is hugely deflating to the presumptive authority and epistemic privilege normally granted to scientists by the public, but the scientists did it to themselves: “the public legitimacy of climate science [is] under assault” from recent revelations. Along with it, distrust of “political” science is growing: “To those who already distrust climate science because it is used to justify action that they deem ideologically repugnant, such revelations make it look as though the science is systematically, if not congenitally, biased in one direction.” The Climategate scandal created a “poisoned political climate,” Sarewitz said, that deepened the divide between conservatives, who “typically distrust international governance regimes and the United Nations in particular” and “hate government programmes that demand major wealth transfers,” and liberals, who have an “equally naive and idealized version of how the vaunted scientific consensus on anthropogenic warming demanded action consistent with their ideological preferences.” Liberals “counted on science to deliver progressively greater certainty about the reality and consequences of climate change, an approach embodied in former US vice-president Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.” The unraveling of that certainty in recent months has made “climate rhetoric” take on an increasingly insistent and hysterical tone” like comparing future catastrophes to the Holocaust. That must change. Science is incapable of offering such certainty, Sarewitz argued. He noted how quickly the IPCC incorporated outlandish claims about Himalayan glacier retreat into their report, but then said, “One can hardly imagine that equally bad data tending in the other direction – for example, saying that the glaciers were not retreating – would have made it into the report.” Thus, he undercut the assumed objectivity of science. Sarewitz appears to favor the liberal position on climate science; he ended by saying that “the imperfect science we already have will turn out to be plenty good enough to support action.” Even so, he had some advice for conservatives and liberals. “With the public legitimacy of climate science under assault, political progress in the United States may now depend on the willingness of thoughtful conservatives to chart a better way forward,” he said. “But liberals and moderates must meanwhile abandon the claim that the science supports only their way of doing things.” Sarewitz spoke half the time about climate science and half about science in general, suggesting he felt the lessons from Climategate can be generalized: “Science carried out in the context of divisive politics cannot but be influenced by that politics, as the CRU e-mails so starkly showed.” It appears, therefore, that his themes in the editorial can be generalized to four lessons for science and politics: (1) Science does not belong to one political persuasion. (2) Science is pliable to deeply-held world views and can be used to support either position. (3) Because the conclusions of science on complex issues are always uncertain, science cannot convince an opposition on the weight of evidence. (4) Politics should lead science, not the other way around.Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:49:37 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100303bIf Ida known then what I know now: the media-frenzied presentation of Ida (Darwinius masillae) as a distant relative of human beings last year has been debunked. “Many lines of evidence indicate that Darwinius has nothing at all to do with human evolution,” said Chris Kirk (U of Texas) in an article on Science Daily. Researchers publishing their analysis in the Journal of Human Evolution accused the presentation of ignoring decades of research and an enormous body of literature on the evolution of strepsirrhines, a primate group that includes lemurs and lorises. Ida’s discoverer claimed it had characteristics suggesting a linkage to haplorhines “However, Kirk, Williams and their colleagues point out that short snouts and deep jaws are known to have evolved multiple times among primates, including several times within the lemur/loris lineage,” the article claimed. “They further argue that Darwinius lacks most of the key anatomical features that could demonstrate a close evolutionary relationship with living haplorhines (apes, monkeys, humans, and tarsiers).” The announcement about Ida included a book, a History Channel documentary, and an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled the specimen at a news conference in New York city. The lead author of the new paper remarked, “Just because it’s a complete and well-preserved fossil doesn’t mean it’s going to overthrow all our ideas.” Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:32:13 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100303aParse the following sentence for logical consistency: “Just as the Wright brothers implemented controls to achieve stable airplane flight, flying insects have evolved behavioral strategies that ensure recovery from flight disturbances.” That is the first sentence from a paper in PNAS yesterday about the stabilizers in fly wings.1 Ristroph et al just compared design principles employed purposefully by inventors to the trial-and-error process of evolution. The authors studied how fruit flies recover from disturbances. They made them stumble while flying, and watched how they responded. Their abstract continued the invention motif all the way up to modern times: “Thus, like early man-made aircraft and modern fighter jets, the fruit fly employs an automatic stabilization scheme that reacts to short time-scale disturbances.” It only takes them 60 milliseconds to recover to within 2 degrees of their original heading. They do this because they are equipped with “a pair of small vibrating organs called halteres that act as gyroscopic sensors.” More aerodynamic engineering lingo ensues forthwith: “These findings suggest that these insects drive their corrective response using an autostabilizing feedback loop in which the sensed angular velocity serves as the input to the flight controller.” The word “control” was one of the most prominent in the paper, used 27 times. Later, their transition from biology to human engineering was seamless: Flight control principles uncovered in this model organism may also apply more broadly, and this work provides a template for future studies aimed at determining if other animals employ flight autostabilization. The control strategies across different animals are likely to share common features, because the physics of body rotation is similar across many animals during flapping-wing flight. Additionally, animals that lack halteres may use functionally equivalent mechanosensory structures such as antennae. Finally, the control architecture of the fruit fly offers a blueprint for stabilization of highly maneuverable flapping-wing flying machines. For fixed-wing machines, the need to overcome instabilities spurred the invention of autostabilizing systems by 1912, only 9 years after the Wright brothers first manually controlled airplane flight. The development of such automatic steering systems also led to the first formal description of proportional– integral–derivative control schemes and advanced gyroscopic sensor technology. The fruit fly’s autostabilization response is well-modeled by a simple PD scheme that receives input from gyroscopic halteres, and, like airplanes, uses fine adjustment of wing orientation to generate corrective torques. Roughly 350 million years after insects took flight, man converged to this solution for the problem of flight control and joined animals in the skies. Want to see what animal flight technology has achieved? Look no further than the aptly-named swift. The common swift (Apus apus) is the speed champ in the category of sustained level flight. The BBC News reported that swifts have been measured faster than peregrine falcons in level flight, though the falcon, employing gravity, sets the record in freefall dives. A swift was recently measured going 69.3 mph, “the highest confirmed speed achieved by a bird in level flight,” said Swedish researchers publishing in the Journal of Avian Biology. This is nearly triple their normal fast flying rate of 22-26 mph. Apparently males do it to show off in “screaming parties” when flocks of swifts come together in jubilant displays of prowess. Dr. Per Henningsson said, “It is remarkable that a bird that otherwise appears to be ‘finely tuned’ to perform at a narrow range of flight speeds at the same time is able to fly more than twice as fast when it needs to.” The reporter added, “That means the birds need to be able to radically alter their aerodynamic performance, by altering their wing profile and physiology, depending on whether they are flying normally or in a screaming party.” The article includes a short video of swifts in flight. They go by in a blink of an eye, so a slow-motion sequence follows the real-time blip. Reporter Jody Bourton called them “supercharged swifts”. Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:20:22 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100302aGetting life to emerge from nonliving chemicals is either a cinch or the most impossible thing in the universe, depending on who you ask. Let’s look at a couple of recent papers that suggest the origin of life was no big deal. A press release from the University of Colorado advertised a paper by Michael Yarus and team in PNAS.1 The team, funded by a $415,610 grant from the National Institutes of Health, concocted a “Tiny RNA Molecule With Big Implications for the Origin of Life.” It’s the smallest ribozyme yet, with only five nucleotides, and it is able to “catalyze a key reaction that would be needed to synthesize proteins.” Tom Blumenthal, a colleague working with Yarus, said, “Nobody expected an RNA molecule this small and simple to be able to do such a complicated thing as that.” By implication, this ribozyme could have been a stepping stone on the way to larger and more complex molecules of life. Yarus has been a strong proponent of the “RNA World” hypothesis. The team’s findings argue that RNA enzymes (ribozymes) did not have to be as complex at first to have a function. Yarus said, “If there exists that kind of mini-catalyst, a ‘sister’ to the one we describe, the world of the replicators would also jump a long step closer and we could really feel we were closing in on the first things on Earth that could undergo Darwinian evolution.” He refers to the fact that Darwinian evolution by natural selection cannot be invoked till there is a replicator – a system able to duplicate its parts accurately. Yarus admitted, “the tiny replicator has not been found, and that its existence will be decided by experiments not yet done, perhaps not yet imagined.”Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:02:13 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100301aCassini will be swooping by Saturn’s moon Rhea tomorrow (March 2) at just 100 km. Dr. Paul Schenk, one of the planetary scientists, said on his blog Stereo Moons, “it should be axiomatic by now that the closer you look at a planetary object the more surprises you see.” Keep your eye on the ball. One surprise from 2007 Cassini scientists want to check more closely is evidence for a ring around Rhea. Schenk, whose talents include generating 3-D flyovers of surfaces from image data, posted a “ringside seat” flyover of Rhea Feb. 25 on YouTube from the 2008 flyby. It has a striking characteristic that may provide more smoking-gun evidence for a ring: bluish patches along the equator. Schenk believes these are impacts of low-orbiting ring particles on the surface. The discussion going on at Unmanned Spaceflight, a blog frequented by planetary scientists and knowledgeable amateurs, doubted that the streaks could be ancient, because they would have been erased by now. Gushin’ geysers; Enceladus is bustin’ out all over its tiger stripes. Space.com, Science Daily and National Geographic were among the news feeds highlighting amazing views of the plumes emanating from the small moon of Saturn (see Imaging Team gallery). The images, taken last Nov. 21, were released Feb. 23 with enhanced measurements of heat taken by the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS). The photos show that the plumes vary with time. The jets can erupt along the whole lengths of the stripes. A new detailed map of one of the stripes “illustrates the link between the geologically youthful surface fractures and the anomalously warm temperatures that have been recorded in the south polar region.” Eleven more flybys of this moon are scheduled for the seven-year second extended mission. Titan continues to astonish planetary scientists.... Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:41:17 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100228a“Belief in a Caring God Improves Response to Medical Treatment for Depression, Study Finds.” That’s what Science Daily said. The statement assumes, of course, that psychiatry knows what depression is. Another story on Science Daily worried that “Psychiatry’s Main Method to Prevent Mistaken Diagnoses of Depression Doesn’t Work.” It makes sense that diagnosis must precede treatment. The psychiatry industry’s manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM (see 02/17/2010) contains the criteria for diagnosing depression. A patient needs 5 of 9 listed symptoms to be diagnosed. “However, these symptoms can also occur in normal responses to loss and stress.” Because of false positives resulting from the old DSM criteria, the new DSM-IV tried to correct them with a Clinical Significance Criterion (CSC), in order to reduce over-diagnosis (some studies suggested that 33% of the population suffer from depression). A new study, though shows that the CSC does not reduce false positives. Even if the dividing line between clinical depression and normal distress or sadness is fuzzy, there is no question that many people are afflicted with grief, sadness, and feelings of despair that can be debilitating. A study of 136 adults at Rush University Medical Center tried to quantify the effect of belief in a caring God on medical treatment for depression. Science Daily said the doctors used “the Beck Depression Inventory, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, and the Religious Well-Being Scale” to assess the depth and intensity of depression, and “feelings of hopelessness and spiritual satisfaction.” According to the article, “the study found that those with strong beliefs in a personal and concerned God were more likely to experience an improvement.” Therefore, “clinicians need to be aware of the role of religion in their patients’ lives.” Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:58:02 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100227aIt may be that Professor Kanazawa was intending to be compassionate by couching his assessment in the language of evolutionary theory, but he essentially made a categorical judgment that conservatives and Christians are stupid, and atheists and the sexually promiscuous are smart. How could he say such a thing? He could dodge the charge of hate speech by claiming that this is just the way evolution designed things. It’s hard to know which portion of a bizarre article in Science Daily to select for winner of Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week; it’s even harder to know why Science Daily titled Kanazawa’s thesis uncritically, “Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds.” Here’s how Science Daily summarized the press release from the American Sociological Association: “More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.” (Notice that this proposition states that sexual exclusivity is not morally preferable – just novel. Novelty is presumably the seedplot of evolutionary progress.) It would be difficult to find a pastor or theologian willing to grant these things as scientific “findings.” Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, put forward his thesis this way: “General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions. As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.” But how can that be? Have conservatives and religions people never come up with novel ideas? Have liberals and atheists never reverted to old doctrines and habits? Could it not be considered novel to be a conservative Christian in a liberal communist dictatorship? These two paragraphs will probably suffice as the winning entry: In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.... Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.” In this, Kanazawa has just labeled PhDs who support intelligent design as stupid and paranoid. He also opened a door for the sexually licentious to consider themselves smarter than the average dog. But it is not clear that using an oxymoronic phrase like “evolutionarily designed” is a mark of intelligence. “One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.” This appears to be an attempt to justify gay marriage or any other arrangement, using evolutionary theory. Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:50:42 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100226aHere’s a factoid for the party: a cell is 10,000 times more energy-efficient than a transistor. PhysOrg tells us that “ In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power.” This and other amazing facts lead to an obvious conclusion: inventors ought to look to life for ideas. (Examples in living cells, sea turtles, and even human social networks).Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:10:28 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100225aGetting the vast diversity of highly complex creatures seems an impossible task for evolutionary theory, but some recent stories claim it’s not so hard. (3 examples of oversimplifying evolution, and one that re-complexifies it.)Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:47:24 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100224bTo keep dry, make like a spider. “Engineering researchers have crafted a flat surface that refuses to get wet,” began a press release from University of Florida. “Water droplets skitter across it like ball bearings tossed on ice. The inspiration? Not wax. Not glass. Not even Teflon.” The audience waits breathlessly for the answer. “Instead, University of Florida engineers have achieved what they label in a new paper a ‘nearly perfect hydrophobic interface’ by reproducing, on small bits of flat plastic, the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on the bodies of spiders.” How does the spider do it? The researchers expected to find a regular pattern on a small scale, but instead, “learned that spider hairs are both long and short and variously curved and straight, forming a surface that is anything but uniform.” This apparently chaotic surface is key to its effectiveness. When Wolfgang Sigmund at U of Florida imitated that, the results were perfect. Unlike other hydrophobic materials, this one repelled the microscopic spheres of water without distorting them. “The results came as a great surprise.” It’s something that had to be discovered in the lab instead of by theory, he said. “Most people that publish in this field always go for these perfect structures, and we are the first to show that the bad ones are the better ones,” Sigmund said. Another benefit of this finding is that it can be made from any material. Because the trick is done with physics instead of chemistry, the hydrophobic surface manufactured to spider spec does not have to slough off any dangerous chemicals. Sigmund is now working on similar surface tricks that can repel oil. If engineers can figure out economical ways to manufacture these surfaces with enough durability for a range of temperatures, industry will beat a path to the spider’s web. The spider, of course, already knows how to manufacture the material durably and flexibly, and even repair it. Ever seen a wet spider? See also the 02/04/2010 for another wonder of spider water management technology. Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:57:41 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100224aTwo recent articles show that Darwin is not invincible. On one side he is being attacked by hopeful monsters. On the other, he is being attacked by an atheist truth-seeker. Neither of these attacks are coming from creationists. Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:57:12 GMThttp://creationsafaris.com/crev201002.htm#20100223aNo matter what is found in plants or animals, it finds its way into an evolutionary explanation eventually. Are these explanations driven by the data, or forced into a belief system? Are other explanations possible? Four recent reports might inform these questions. (4 recent stories about plant genetics, dinosaurs, and early man explored.)Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:47:15 GMT