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Creationism News – May 2013 创造论新闻– 2013 年 5月Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career

as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to make his excellent websites.

The contents of this presentation were taken from David Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. Pray for his fast recovery from cancer surgery.

Pastor Chuihttp://ChristCenterGospel.orgckchui1@yahoo.com

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 How does a growing flower bud or feather follicle know

where to put the intricate colors and patterns on a mature flower or feather?  Scientists are beginning to get partial answers.

Flower art:  Imagine you’re a flower bud.  You are blind, deaf, and dumb, but somehow you know how to create beautiful artwork.  Through your efforts, a lovely rose, petunia or orchid will result.  How would you do it?  An article on Live Science suggests an amazing, though partial, answer: the bud has a map of the finished product.  “The shape of a flower’s petals and leaves are dictated by a biological map hidden inside the flower’s growing bud,” according to a new study from the John Innes Centre and the University of East Anglia, both in the UK.

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 “They discovered that concealed maps within

the flower buds are made up of patterns of arrows that act as instructions for how each cell in the bud should grow. As such, the maps essentially influence a flower bud’s cell polarity, or the functions of the cells.

The study’s findings not only shed light on why geranium petals are unlike rose petals, they also explain why an individual flower’s petals and leaves are different shapes.”

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 The “arrows” are made up of proteins

called PIN proteins that migrate to the tips of cells.  When they concentrate, a pointed leaf results.  When they fan out, a rounded shape, like a flower petal results.  Other proteins follow the “arrows” to cause growth in those areas.  PLoS Biology discussed the paper in a little more detail.  The original paper in PLoS Biology described how the growth proteins follow the “polarity field” set up by the PIN proteins.

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 Feather art:  Bird feathers are vastly different

from flower petals, but another amazing “mapping” mechanism controls their development.  Feathers can contain stripes, spots, and nano-patterns that play tricks with light; see examples in PhysOrg’s coverage of a paper in Science Magazine.  What turns on the dark and light patterns?  The new research paper by Lin et al., “Topology of Feather Melanocyte Progenitor Niche Allows Complex Pigment Patterns to Emerge,” offers the beginnings of an answer:

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 “Melanocyte progenitors are distributed as

a horizontal ring in the proximal follicle, sending melanocytes vertically up into the epithelial cylinder which gradually emerges as feathers grow. Different pigment patterns form by modulating the presence, arrangement, or differentiation of melanocytes. A layer of peripheral pulp further regulates pigmentation via patterned agouti expression. Lifetime feather cyclic regeneration resets pigment patterns for physiological needs. Thus, the evolution of stem cell niche topology allows complex pigment patterning via combinatorial co-option of simple regulatory mechanisms.”

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 By “evolution,” the authors cannot assume that

blind, undirected processes create the patterns any more than they create intricate feathers themselves.  They merely mean that stem cells are regulated to generate the patterns.  But what tells the stem cells to differentiate according to a predetermined pattern?  What created the pattern in the first place that these mechanisms execute?  The explanation begs even deeper questions.

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 Speaking of feathers, how would you like to dive into a

feather on the wing of a red-tailed hawk and see its microscopic structure?  You can live this adventure, along with many others, in a new film just released in May from Illustra Media entitled, Flight: The Genius of Birds. (Click the link for trailer and ordering information.)  With cutting-edge science, stunning photography, an original music score and a thoughtful narration aided by the insight of biologists, the film makes a convincing case for intelligent design.  Along with the previous release Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies, this new entry forms the foundation to Illustra’s new series of high-quality nature documentaries, The Design of Life.  Both were produced in High-Definition Blu-ray with 5.1 surround sound.

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 We are very happy to co-sponsor 

Flight: The Genius of Birds and will be drawing attention to it all month.  CEH Editor David Coppedge worked closely with the producer on scientific research and proofing, but it was the genius of the production team led by Lad Allen, with his editor Jerry Harned, working with the biologists, the animators, the composer Mark Lewis and the sound technicians, and others, who made this film a masterpiece. 

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 The DVD is great, but if you have a good home

theater, this is a film to enjoy in an immersive environment, with a Blu-ray player, a large screen and a surround sound system.  Flight is the equal of secular nature documentaries—but without the Darwinism that is merely assumed by the others.  It includes several incredible true stories about particular bird species.  After being amazed by what you learn, and how beautifully it is presented, we are sure you will want to order extra copies of Flight to pass around.  Order today!  DVD ships May 14, Blu-ray on June 11.

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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 And by all means, if you haven’t yet watched 

Metamorphosis, order them both!  Readers delighted with the exceptional work of Illustra Media should support them financially.  They have plans to augment The Design of Life series with more superb documentaries on the wonders of the living world.  Nobody does it better than Illustra!  Their films are reaching around the world.  Be part of a team that is dismantling Darwinist materialism with clear, powerful, convincing evidence for design.

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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found找到完好的恐龙皮肤 Some material that flaked off a fossil in Alberta was

not stone; it was dinosaur skin.  Discoverers were excited and puzzled: how could it last so long?

Here’s how Mauricio Barbi of the University of Regina described their discovery, according to PhysOrg:

“As we excavated the fossil, I thought that we were looking at a skin impression. Then I noticed a piece came off and I realized this is not ordinary – this is real skin. Everyone involved with the excavation was incredibly excited and we started discussing research projects right away.”

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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found找到完好的恐龙皮肤 The reports on PhysOrg and on Nature World News

 focused on figuring what color the skin was.  Readers who go all the way to the end of the article, though, find out the really big question:

“But perhaps the greatest question Barbi is trying to answer at the CLS is how the fossil remained intact for around 70-million years.

“What’s not clear is what happened to this dinosaur and how it died,” he said. “There is something special about this fossil and the area where it was found, and I am going to find out what it is.”

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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found找到完好的恐龙皮肤 The fossil was found in an area described as a

“robust bone bed.”  Barbi claimed it’s the only 3-dimensional dinosaur skin fossil in the world.  According to the articles, the skin was preserved “almost intact,” with tissues that can be analyzed:

“For the experiment, the sample is placed in the path of the infrared beam and light reflects off of it. During the experiment, chemical bonds of certain compounds will create different vibrations. For example, proteins, sugars and fats still found in the skin will create unique vibrational frequencies that scientists can measure.

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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found找到完好的恐龙皮肤 “It is astonishing that we can get

information like this from such an old sample,” said Tim May, CLS Mid-IR staff scientist. “Skin has fat and lots of dead cells along with many inorganic compounds. We can reflect the infrared beam off the sample and we can analyze the samples to give us very clear characteristics.”

They will be studying melanosomes (pigment cells) in the skin to try to determine what color the hadrosaur was.

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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found找到完好的恐龙皮肤 Barbi promised he is going to find out what is so

special about his fossil and the area in which it was found.  His only hope is to abandon the millions-of-years Darwinian story.  The reason the skin is intact, and its tissues can still be studied, is that it is recent—not 70 million years old.  If he were to propose that explanation, though, his career would be over.  So strong is the bias against Darwin skeptics (even stronger against old-earth skeptics), truth no longer matters.  The primary goal of evolutionary geologists and paleontologists is to defend Charlie’s quaint Victorian myth against all the evidence the world throws at it.

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 The evolutionary story of extinction and the rise of

dinosaurs faces challenges, but survives when the glue of imagination holds fragmentary evidence together.

A frequent kind of upset in many evolutionary scenarios is evidence that creatures and their ancestors appeared earlier than thought.  That’s what happened to dinosaur ancestors, according to Live Science: “Dinosaurs – or at least their ancestors – may have gotten an earlier start than once believed.”

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 Fossils of archosaurs, thought to be dinosaur

ancestors by evolutionists, appear in Africa and Antarctica doing just fine after the so-called Permian extinction that should have wiped them out along with 90% of other life forms, it is alleged. One paleontologist has to insert a long hiatus into the evolutionary story: “We get the hint that the dinosaur radiation, which we don’t really see in the fossil record until about 20 million years later, is really starting to take off in this region.”

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 Yet the Permian extinction lacks any known cause: “No one

knows why the mass extinction happened,” the article says.  Could it be an artifact of the evolutionary approach to the data, dependent upon a consensus? After all, “The fossil record around the Permian extinction is spotty,” the article says, “with most paleontological research coming from a few fossil sites in Russia and in South Africa.”  On that note, Science Daily cast some doubt on the venerable event itself.  Did 9 out of 10 species perish?  “It turns out, however, that scientists may have been looking in the wrong places.”

By piecing together two “snapshots” before and after the alleged Permian extinction using disconnected bits of fossil evidence from different parts of the world, Christian Sidor, a biologist at the University of Washington salvaged Darwinism.  He made up a story about different kinds of animals evolving to fill various niches in different ways after the presumed extinction.

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 That’s another evolutionary storytelling plot: if

you loosen up the competition, evolution will take advantage of it.  From Science Daily:

“These scientists have identified an outcome of mass extinctions–that species ecologically marginalized before the extinction may be ‘freed up’ to experience evolutionary bursts then dominate after the extinction,” says H. Richard Lane, program director in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences.

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 According to the plot described by PhysOrg,

Dicynodon, a pig-sized animal with a small tail, ever-growing tusks like an elephant and a beak like a turtle, was the dominant herbivore. “After the mass extinction at the end of the Permian, Dicynodon disappeared and other related species were so greatly decreased that newly emerging herbivores could suddenly compete with them.”  But how did these herbivores emerge?  Where did they come from?

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 Sidor even got political.  “He likened the change

to politics: It’s hard to dislodge an incumbent politician, but once you do, anyone could step in to fill the gap,” Live Science said.  He made up a term for that, PhysOrg reported: “What we call evolutionary incumbency was fundamentally reset.”  Then Sidor alleged that humans are causing another mass extinction in our time.  So what?  Why couldn’t humans claim it’s just another reset of evolutionary incumbency?

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 These articles are based on a 

press release from the National Science Foundation that Astrobiology Magazine and others republished without comment. Sidor published his ideas in PNAS, where he introduced the concept of “evolutionary incumbency” as a kind of “biotic control” on evolution.  “The recognition of heterogeneous tetrapod communities in the Triassic implies that the end-Permian mass extinction afforded ecologically marginalized lineages the ecospace to diversify, and that biotic controls (i.e., evolutionary incumbency) were fundamentally reset,” the abstract states.  “Archosaurs, which began diversifying in the Early Triassic, were likely beneficiaries of this ecological release and remained dominant for much of the later Mesozoic.”  His thesis appears to rely on the proverb, “If you build it, they will come.”  Open up the ecospace and new creatures will emerge by blind, unguided processes of evolution.

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 Bird Evolution News In other dinosaur news, PhysOrg claimed that Microraptor gui, a

hawk-sized bird that was a good flyer with feathers and all, ate fish.  The article still calls it a “small flying dinosaur.”  Live Science pulled out a Darwinian icon for its headline, claiming that small feathered dinosaurs were “diverse like Darwin’s finches.”  Reporter Megan Gannon said this, replicating fallacies and misinformation:

“Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was famously inspired by the diversity of beak shapes among finches on the Galapagos Islands, which he took as a sign that the birds had somehow adapted to the specific environments where they lived. More recent research has shown that Darwin’s finches can evolve quite quickly. For instance, one species shrunk its beak size to better compete with another bird for small seeds in a mere two decades.”

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 What Gannon failed to acknowledge was that beak size merely

oscillated depending on the weather.  There was no net evolution.  Also, Darwin was not inspired by the finches.  The finch story came later after his ideas on evolution were already formed.  So what does this do for the idea that “feathered dinosaurs” were like Darwin’s finches?  Simply that they “may have similarly adjusted their beak size” in a similar way.  But did they do that on purpose?  A Yale postdoc made this statement: “So, in a way, the evolution of modern dinosaurs — birds — provides insight into ancient, extinct dinosaurs.”

But the fossils she was talking about are caenagnathids.  No fossils of these small dinosaurs found in North America have been reported with feathers.  Wikipedia thinks they “would have been covered in feathers.”  Gannon posted an artist’s rendition of a recently-discovered Texas caenagnathid adorned with imaginary feathers – a trick evolutionists have been using for six years (2/08/06, 6/13/07, 9/29/08 commentary, 12/11/09 #2, 1/29/10 #1, 2/18/11 #4).

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 Speaking of birds, another story on Science Daily and 

Live Science claims that a bird that “lived after the time of dinosaurs” is the ancestor of hummingbirds and swifts: the analyses“ suggest that the bird was an evolutionary precursor to the group that includes today’s swifts and hummingbirds.”  The small fossil, 12 centimeters from head to tail and estimated to weigh just an ounce, was found in the Green River formation of Wyoming.  The discoverers do not believe it could hover like hummingbirds or had any of the distinctive traits of the assumed progeny. Here’s the evolutionary spin: “The size of the fossil would indicate that the ancestors of swifts and hummingbirds evolved to be small before they gained their unique flying characteristics,” one of the researchers said.

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 The fossil contains soft tissue, too –

remarkable for a specimen claimed to be 50 million years old: “carbon residues in the fossils — once thought to be traces of bacteria that fed on feathers — are fossilized melanosomes, tiny cell structures containing melanin pigments that give birds and other animals their color.”

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 For 12 years we have been showing that the Darwinian

conception of earth history is a huge fabrication, built on imagination and ideology.  Fossils are mere props for a fictional story of millions of years that drives the search for credibility.  Since fossils are fragmentary and ambiguous, it is easy to fudge this or that caenagnathid or this or that dicynodon from Zambia or Tanzania into the Grand Myth.  Learn how it’s done.  Learn their catch-phrases (such and such “sheds light on evolution” etc.) and their propaganda techniques so that you won’t be snookered.  “Evolutionary incumbency”—good grief.  Clear the ecospace and watch the magic: new animals will just “emerge.”  If you build it, they will come.  The perpetrators of the myth are so inebriated with Darwine they can’t see what they are doing.  They think it’s science!  Well, what do you expect for research funded in part by the “Evolving Earth Foundation”?

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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence 恐龙进化的故事继续生存 A new book by Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, is coming

out in June.  It will show convincingly how the Cambrian explosion (all animal phyla appearing abruptly in the fossil record) undermines Darwinism and argues for intelligent design.  If you order now (click the link), you can get it at 43% off, plus receive four e-books as a bonus.  The Illustra film Darwin’s Dilemma is also excellent on that point, and Illustra’s new film Flight: The Genius of Birds gives strong evidence for intelligent design of birds as opposed to Darwinian stories about dino-to-bird evolution.  A two-volume work by PhD geologist Andrew Snelling, Earth’s Catastrophic Past (read a review), shows with examples from around the world that the evolutionary millions-of-years story cannot stand up to the overwhelming geological evidence for a worldwide flood.

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Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Incredible advancements in technology are coming from

the imitation of nature, but engineers cannot yet attain animal performance.

Look like a bug:  “New Camera Inspired by Insect Eyes,” announced Science Now.  If you thought insects with their compound eyes had inferior vision to ours, think that no more:

“An insect’s compound eye is an engineering marvel: high resolution, wide field of view, and incredible sensitivity to motion, all in a compact package. Now, a new digital camera provides the best-ever imitation of a bug’s vision, using new optical materials and techniques. This technology could someday give patrolling surveillance drones the same exquisite vision as a dragonfly on the hunt.”

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 In the Illustra film Metamorphosis, Dr. Thomas Emmel

notes that butterflies have better color vision than humans.  They can see from infrared to ultraviolet.  And in the Illustra film Darwin’s Dilemma, we see that compound eyes existed in the Cambrian multicellular animals, including trilobites and anomalocaridids.

According to PhysOrg, the new camera has an “unmatched field of view.”  Part of the challenge for engineers at the University of Illinois was to develop flexible electronics and optics that could accommodate curved surfaces.  Even so, their “low-end insect eye” mimic does not reach the performance of the design that inspired it:

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 “Eyes in arthropods use compound

designs, in which arrays of smaller eyes act together to provide image perception. Each small eye, known as an ommatidium, consists of a corneal lens, a crystalline cone and a light-sensitive organ at the base. The entire system is configured to provide exceptional properties in imaging, many of which lie beyond the reach of existing man-made cameras.”

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 It would appear difficult to rephrase that paragraph

in Darwinian terms, since it depends on the use of concepts like design, configuration, and exceptional properties.  The project caught the attention of Nature, and Science Daily twice.  The engineer’s paper was published in Nature, which noted that arthropods differ in the number of facets or ommatidia.  Some ants have about 100 facets; praying mantises have about 15,000, while some dragonflies have up to 28,000.  They ended by saying, “Biologically inspired schemes for adapting to different light levels are also of interest.”

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Fly like a fly:  A biomimetic robot that flies like a fly was

reported in Science this week.  It caught the attention of Nature and Science Daily.  “RoboBee” doesn’t look anywhere near as sophisticated as an actual fly (and lacks digestive, neural, and reproductive systems), but Nature called it a “manufacturing marvel.”  One of its designers said, “This is a major engineering breakthrough, 15 years in the making.”  The little robot, weighing only 80 milligrams, has thin membranes for wings that it can flap 120 times a second, similar to a fly’s flapping rate (the engineers admitted it is only “modeled loosely on the morphology of flies”). Building a lightweight battery was one of the biggest challenges, so they had to tether it to a power source and computer with thin wire.  Still, it’s “pretty fantastically cool,” an observer said for Science Now.

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 The engineering team faced many challenges. 

For instance, if the wings weren’t exactly symmetrical, it failed to fly.  It “took many rounds of tweaking the design before it finally worked,” but when the team had their “Kitty Hawk moment,” they were really proud.  RoboBee can only fly for 20 seconds, and wears out after 15 minutes of use.  But it’s “the smallest flapping wing aircraft that has ever been built and made fully functional,” they said.  The goal is to get the power supply, flight control computer and everything else on board. 

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 They envision making swarms of these robots for

search and rescue.  “When you scale things down, smaller is better,” they said.  That speaks volumes about the actual living fly, which not only has everything on board, but also contains digestive, neural, and reproductive systems.  A fly or bee is comparatively large for insects, too (consider gnats and mosquitoes, for instance).  Recently, a microscopic fairyfly dubbed Tinkerbella nana was discovered with a body length of 155 micrometers (see Science Daily for picture).  That’s packing a lot of systems into a very tiny space.

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Sea horse armor:  In other biomimetics

news, scientists at UC San Diego have their eyes on seahorses for ideas.  According to Science Daily, “Sea horses get their exceptional flexibility from the structure of their bony plates, which form its armor.”  The plates slide past each other.  The plates can be compressed to half their size without damage.   The principle behind the UCSD project is broader than one particular animal:

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 “The study of natural materials can lead to the

creation of new and unique materials and structures inspired by nature that are stronger, tougher, lighter and more flexible,” said [Joanna] McKittrick, a professor of materials science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

McKittrick and Meyers had sought bioinsipiration [sic] by examining the armor of many other animals, including armadillo, alligators and the scales of various fish. This time, they were specifically looking for an animal that was flexible enough to develop a design for a robotic arm.

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Mr. Clean cicada:  The 17-year locusts are

emerging from hibernation in some parts of the south this year.  Live Science reported on work to understand how the bugs can stay so clean.  They don’t need to stand in the rain; the structure of their exoskeleton allows the bugs to be self-cleaning, researchers at Duke University have found.  “Apparently, grime can simply leap right off them, given dew.”  When dewdrops merge together, they literally leap off the bugs, carrying grime with them.  This also happens on lotus leaves and other “super-hydrophobic” surfaces.

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 “These findings not only can

help explain the mystery of how cicada wings keep clean, but could also lead to improved artificial self-cleaning materials. Jumping droplets could also help remove heat from power plants, Chen said.”

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Protein origami:  Science Magazine published a

paper about the use of proteins for self-assembling materials.  A “Perspective” piece in the same issue about the project said that synthetic biology “aims to push natural biological systems in novel directions or to generate biomimetic systems with new properties.”  The team from University of Bristol learned how to control the self-assembly of proteins to generate simple “cages” and patterns out of coiled-coil elements of proteins.  “The assembly properties of the peptides are governed by how their folding results in the projection of chemical functional groups into space.”

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Short bows:  Nature mentioned the “worm-

inspired adhesive” that came from following how a spiny-headed worm embeds itself in the tissues of its host.  A bandage built on the principle is “more than three times as adhesive as surgical staples for affixing skin grafts.”  Live Science posted “Seven Clever Technologies Inspired by Animals.”  Entrants include butterflies, sharks, worms, cockleburs, beetles, geckos, and spiders.

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 As usual, evolution was useless in all these stories.  It

was only mentioned occasionally as an ideologically-driven afterthought, such as “Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution” (PhysOrg).  Nature is not a developer!  Nature is not a refiner.  Nature knows nothing of concepts.  Those are terms from intelligent design.  The Nature paper on the compound eye begins, “In arthropods, evolution has created a remarkably sophisticated class of imaging systems, with a wide-angle field of view, low aberrations, high acuity to motion and an infinite depth of field,” but then says nothing further about evolution. 

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Evolution is not a creator!  Evolution does

not design sophisticated imaging systems with desirable properties!  Tanya Lewis at Live Science dreamed, “Over time, evolution has led to some incredible developments, from the photosynthetic machinery in plants to the human eye.”  She needs to awake from her dogmatic Darwinian slumbers.

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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 The lingo that predominates in

biomimetics is design, inspiration, exceptional performance.  Darwinians, pack up your snake oil wagons and get out of the way of this new, popular I.D. parade.

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 Some claims by evolutionists sound cool, calm and

collected until you see them in context. An example appeared in Science Daily and 

Astrobiology Magazine – a claim that life may have originated in salty, icy stalactites under the sea ice.  Need “clues to the origin of life”?  The article says, “Life on Earth may have originated not in warm tropical seas, but with weird tubes of ice — sometimes called ‘sea stalactites’ — that grow downward into cold seawater near Earth’s poles, scientists are reporting.”

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 That’s a major shift toward further

implausibility.  From Darwin’s own speculations about a “warm little pond,” origin-of-life researchers have long claimed that heat is necessary to drive the reactions for life.  That’s why some have imagined life’s origin at a hydrothermal vent, or lakes near a volcano, or at least in the open ocean exposed to sunlight.  But “sea stalactites” of ice in the coldest oceans on earth?

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 Even more desperate is the analogy the

researchers of the American Chemical Society posed: these “brinicles,” as they have been dubbed, look like “chemical gardens” kids play with.  They look like “children’s chemistry sets, in which tubes grow upward from metal salts dropped into silicate solution.”  Being made of the wrong stuff, those structures have absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life.

From there, the article descended into rank speculation:

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 “The analysis concluded that brinicles provide an

environment that could well have fostered the emergence of life on Earth billions of years ago, and could have done so on other planets. “Beyond Earth, the brinicle formation mechanism may be important in the context of planets and moons with ice-covered oceans,” the report states, citing in particular two moons of Jupiter named Ganymede and Callisto.”

It’s safe to assume that if origin-of-life researchers had something better than this to propose, they would have proposed it long ago.

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 NASA’s Astrobiology Institute is a worthless

boondoggle that accomplishes nothing.  Where is their evidence?  They study planets, rocks, and possibly oceans, but there is still no evidence for life beyond Earth’s biosphere.  It’s an enterprise built entirely on faith in a Darwinian ideology.  Astrobiology Magazine publishes almost nothing original.  Day after day they re-post press releases from other sources that say, “maybe this” and “maybe that.”  Did you see the government seal of approval on the webpage?

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 When “astrobiology” was born as a “new science”

back around 1990 because of a rush to celebrate possible fossils in a Martian meteorite (since debunked), then-NASA-chief Dan Goldin convinced Congress to fund research into life on other worlds.   Since then, nothing has been accomplished to find life elsewhere, and now they are so desperate they propose cold icicles “could” be environments for the “emergence” of life on other planets.  Good grief.  One of our readers should research how many millions of tax dollars the government has spent on this Darwinian fantasy trip.

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Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 This is not to imply that many astrobiologists are not

intelligent, highly-educated scientists.  It’s just that their astronomy has nothing to do with biology.  Detecting extrasolar planets, studying planetary atmospheres, and characterizing the nature of living creatures at deep-sea vents is all fine and good, but to imply that life “emerged” from non-living environments is supported by no evidence whatsoever.  The legitimate studies of planets could have been funded without inventing a new word.    Astro-biology is a fabrication, spliced out of two legitimate sciences, astronomy and biology.  It is no more legit than geo-psychology or planetary sociology.  Without evidence to justify its existence, it should be called astro-bio-mythology.

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 Forest fire ash is not all useless.  It

contains signaling molecules that can switch on the next generation of plants.

How is it that in the spring following a forest fire, the ground comes alive with a profusion of new seedlings?  How do the seeds, which may have lain dormant in the soil for years, know that the ground has been cleared, providing opportunities for a new generation of growth?

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 An open-access paper in PNAS describes how a molecule

in the ash of plants after a forest fire turns on growth in dormant seeds.  According to the paper, “Germination-stimulating compounds, generated in the smoke of burning plants, include a seed dormancy–breaking compound” called karrikin-1.  The scientists studied what this molecule does to a seed.  Inside the seed is a protein, KAI2, that has a receptor for karrikin-1.  When the key fits the lock, the protein changes shape, switching on a message cascade that tells the side to prepare for sprouting.

A Salk Institute press release,“ Smoke signals: How burning plants tell seeds to rise from the ashes,” summarizes the findings:

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 “This is a very important and fundamental process of

ecosystem renewal around the planet that we really didn’t understand,” says co-senior investigator Joseph P. Noel, professor and director of Salk’s Jack H. Skirball Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics. “Now we know the molecular triggers for how it occurs.”

Noel’s co-senior investigator on the project, Joanne Chory, professor and director of Salk’s Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, says the team found the molecular “wake-up call” for burned forests. “What we discovered,” she says, “is how a dying plant generates a chemical message for the next generation, telling dormant seeds it’s time to sprout.”

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 The original paper didn’t say anything about how evolution

produced this signaling system, but the press release took a stab at it:

“In plants, one member of this family of enzymes has been recruited somehow through natural selection to bind to this molecule in smoke and ash and generate this signal,” says Noel, holder of Salk’s Arthur and Julie Woodrow Chair and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “KAI2 likely evolved when plant ecosystems started to flourish on the terrestrial earth and fire became a very important part of ecosystems to free up nutrients locked up in dying and dead plants.”

The researchers never explained how this recruitment “likely evolved.”  It was just “somehow.”

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 Another article on Live Science about

plant ecology states that aerosols produced by plants can modulate global climate.  “Plants release gases such as water vapor and oxygen; these combine with the aerosols released from plants to form larger airborne particles that reflect sunlight and form cloud droplets.”  The pleasing scent of a forest comes from these aerosols.

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 The Salk press release provides a good example of

how evolution pretends to be scientific while only gesticulating (hand-waving) in fantasyland.  The science about karrikins and KAI2 has nothing to do with evolution; it’s just good old observational, reproducible experimentation.  The evolution stuff was just tacked on at the end.  But look at it!  An enzyme has been “recruited somehow through natural selection,” we are told.  OK, how?  “Somehow.”  It just evolved.  How do you know it evolved?  It “likely evolved.”  Is this somehow likely?  No; it’s not even likely somehow. Proteins and enzymes are highly complicated living machines that defy origin by chance (see online book).

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 But even if in someone’s wildest

imagination KAI2 “emerged” somehow, unlikely as it is, getting it to do anything requires a whole system of other proteins, enzymes and genes to interact with it for a functional purpose.  When these scientists asserted it is “somehow…likely” that natural selection (an aimless, purposeless process) accomplished this without meaning to, they did BAD (Bald Assertion of Darwinism).  They abandoned all pretense of science.  They are just gesticulating, speculating, confabulating, somnabulating, absquatulating out of their own imaginations, where miracles of emergence happen when they wish upon a star.

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Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽 Everyone, therefore—even

Darwinians—believes in miracles and the supernatural.  Some can defend their beliefs with reason and evidence.  Others, like these Darwin addicts, just blow smoke and hot air.

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 In a mathematical tour de farce, two Oxford

evolutionists have applied Darwinian natural selection to the multiverse to try to explain why it looks designed.

A press release from the University of Oxford tells how evolutionary theorist Andy Gardner and theoretical physicist Joseph Conlon figured that universes give birth to other universes through black holes.  The ones with the “fittest” parameters of physics get better at it and survive:

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “Cosmological natural selection proposes that, if

new universes are born inside black holes, a ‘multiverse’ of many possible universes could be shaped by a process similar to natural selection so that successive generations of universes evolve to become better at making black holes.…

‘This idea of cosmological natural selection is controversial, and physicists have pointed out all sorts of problems with it. But we were interested in seeing if its basic evolutionary logic actually works,’ said Dr Andy Gardner of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, lead author of the paper.

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 ‘We found that a general equation from

evolutionary genetics, Price’s theorem, can help us to model how selection can work not only at the scale of genes and organisms but also at that of something as unimaginably vast as multiple universes,’ said Dr Gardner. ‘Our model uses maths similar to the mathematical theory underlying Darwinian adaptation in biology, which explains how the dynamics of natural selection leads to organisms appearing designed to maximize their fitness.’

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 The Price equation, however, is not universally accepted

as a valid description of evolution, dependent as it is on controversial ideas of kin selection and group selection.  Van Veelen and others criticized its use in the Journal of Theoretical Biology last year.  Tutorials at Evolution and Games illustrate how Price’s theorem can produce misleading results.

The Oxford team of two admitted that “the evolution of universes is very different from the evolution of animals,” but decided that “models of evolving universes are quite similar to models of bacterial evolution,” so they felt the similar logic made the exercise worthwhile.  Their original paper, published in Complexity, is available online in PDF format.

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 So if models of evolving universes resemble

models of biological evolution, what does that say about the latter?

Let’s use this paper with all its whiz-bang equations to show how to respond to pseudo-erudite atheists, without being intimidated by their jargon and flawed mathematics.  The idea to master is that if your thesis is illogical, no amount of jargon or math will make it logical.  You don’t have to be able to follow the math of these Oxford scholars to conclude that their ideas are laughably absurd.

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 Suppose, for instance that you want to prove that

gnomes are capable of painting birds’ eggs in the middle of the night.  In your paper, you let G stand for the available gnome population, E stand for the egg density per acre, r the effective egg coloration rate and F the gnomic fitness increase derived from the Price equation, assuming the egg-painting activity allows gnomes to produce more offspring.  It doesn’t matter if you can derive F = cov(G1 — G2) + cov(E1 — E2) r -ewT or anything else, even more impressive-looking.  If the assumptions are wrong, the conclusions must also be wrong.

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 Gardner and Conlon’s reasoning (and math) is

a house of cards on sand in a whirlwind.  They assumed Darwinism accounts for finely-tuned adaptations in biology, like avian flight, blinding their eyes, as did Francis Crick, who said that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”  They leapt from that error to assume that evolution can account for fine-tuning in the fundamental constants of physics. 

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 They borrowed Lee Smolin’s controversial notion of

“cosmic natural selection,” which they admitted “is only weakly analogous to Darwinian natural selection.”  They further assumed that finely-tuned, life-giving universes can emerge from black holes rather than dissipate in a sea of random particles by Hawking radiation.  They trusted the shaky math of Price’s theorem, which embeds evolutionary assumptions into the terms of its equation just like our example embedded gnomes into its terms.

They know exactly what they are doing.  Look at the intellectual hurdles they simply walked around instead of facing:

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “This idea relies on several important

assumptions, all of which are controversial. First, it is key to the ideas of Smolin that the endpoint of black-hole formation is actually a new universe, rather than simply a quantum mechanical state that will decay over time and ultimately disappear through Hawking radiation.…

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “Second, Smolin suggests that the fundamental constants can

change during the formation of new universes, but no physical mechanism is known to account for this. Third, Smolin assumes that the new universe inherits the constants of the previous universe, up to small variations. However, in the context of the multiverse, one should expect not just the constants of the Standard Model to be ambient, but also the gauge group (set of forces) and particle content of the Standard Model to be ambient properties as well. In this case, one would expect far more dramatic changes to the physical laws (e.g., the absence of electromagnetism as a long-range force) than simply a change in numerical constants. These are all substantial caveats (see [16] for an in-depth review). Here, we proceed on the assumption that they are surmountable.

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 With a leap of faith like that, you can

simply discount everything they say as foolishness.  Isn’t that exactly what Paul said the wise of this world do when facing clear evidence for design?  Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.  These two fallible men know fully well how designed the universe is:

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “The precise numerical values of these

constants determine much of the physics of our universe and pose a double conundrum for physicists and philosophers. First, the values have a high degree of arbitrariness: they are dimensionless parameters that range over eight orders of magnitude, for no known reason. Second, it is generally acknowledged that even rather small modifications to some of these values would lead to universes that are vastly less complex than our own.…”

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 No known reason?  Here you witnessed a

willful escape from reason.  Because they stubbornly refuse to consider actual design by a designing intelligence, they would rather leap into absurdity, using their God-given talents for abstract reasoning to manipulate numbers that exclude the obvious out of existence in a fantasy multiverse of their own imagination. It’s just what Paul said: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 

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Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and

divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:19–21).  Futile thinking implies the self-refuting fallacy.  By thinking their own reason emerged from a mindless cosmos, Gardner and Conlon just undermined its validity.  Such thinking deserves pity, not funding from the Royal Society, whose founders believed design came from the Designer about whom Paul wrote.  Today’s members honor fools by publishing their folly.

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Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Evidence disputes Mars water, let alone life.  It’s looking

like a toxic place.  Besides, where would the water come from?

The big mound in Gale Crater, site of the Mars Curiosity Rover, looked like a tantalizing place to look for habitability.  Mt. Sharp, as it is called, appeared to be a mountain laid down by water.  Now, however, it looks more likely it was built by wind.  Astrobiology Magazine shared the bad news from Princeton: “If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars’ past habitability.”

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Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Where would the water have come from, anyway?  

Live Science proclaimed that Mars and the core of Jupiter formed from “large space crashes.”  The energy of impacts would seem to obliterate volatile compounds (including water).  That’s why cosmogonists try to find other sources for Earth’s oceans, assuming it crashed into existence similarly.  The highly speculative theory proposed by U of Chicago scientists, given credence in the article, relies on numerous improbabilities, among them: (1) dust particles sticking together to make  planetestimals, (2) sufficient numbers of planetesimals colliding and accreting together instead of breaking up into fine particles, and (3) sufficient time before all the planet-forming ingredients are expelled from the system.

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Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Michigan State scientists are divining the

meaning of Martian meteorites again, but they admit the conclusions are unclear: “most meteorites that originated on Mars arrived on Earth so long ago that now they have characteristics that tell of their life on Earth, obscuring any clues it might offer about their time on Mars,” a researcher confessed.  Given the confusion, they are only “laying the groundwork for future researchers to answer this age-old question.”  In other words, they have nothing to say.

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Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Mars must certainly not be a lively place now, given

what landers have found.  There are “pesky perchlorates all over Mars, ” Science Magazine said.  The chlorine compounds not only erase carbon compounds by converting them to gas, they make living on Mars dangerous.  The perchlorates and other chemicals like gympsum get into fine dust that blows all over the planet, making it a dangerous place to send humans.  New Scientist described how “Toxic Mars could hamper planned human missions.”  The fine dust could harm the lungs and thyroid glands of future astronauts.  Even in the safety of spacesuits, the electrified dust would stick to everything, making its way unavoidably into astronaut living quarters.

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Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 The bad news is not stopping children

of the Star Trek generation, though.  Some 78,000 have applied to go on a proposed one-way trip to Mars, New Scientist reported elsewhere.  Hopefully they won’t find out too late that it’s a suicide mission.

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Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Mercury is a sterile hell, Venus is a sterile hell, Mars is

a toxic wasteland, and so on out.  In between Venus and Mars lies this blue jewel we call Earth, blessed with abundant water, greenery, and life in almost every nook and cranny.  It has the right magnetic shield, the right solar energy, the right continental minerals, the right atmosphere, the right carbon/oxygen/water/nitrogen cycles — the right everything.  Doesn’t that send a message we should heed?  Maybe the Creator gave us all these other worlds to examine, so that we would appreciate all the more how well designed our Earth is.  For those not drunk on Darwine, that has been the primary benefit of the planetary exploration program.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 There are professors and leaders of special

interest groups whose sole purpose is to draw students away from belief in a Designer and tempt them to embrace the aimless, purposeless, materialist processes of Darwinism.  How can students prepare for the challenge?

If evolution were true, well, then— who wouldn’t want to embrace the truth, even if it means a radical change to one’s beliefs?  Ay, there’s the rub.  Any aimless material process has no necessary connection to truth.  As Charles Darwin himself wrote to a friend the year before he died,

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 “But then with me the horrid doubt

always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? (Letter to William Graham, 3 July 1881, posted at the Darwin Correspondence Project.)”

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 What this implies is that the evolutionist, to

be consistent, must abandon all reason.  Yet paradoxically, they specifically employ reason in their attempts to dislodge “faith” (which they mean as anything that questions the science of evolution).  Whether ignorant of or willfully ignoring this major self-contradiction, some of them charge forward anyway on their campaign to take students hostage for Darwin.  Two of them show how they do it.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Eugenie Scott and the NCSE Retiring this year from her 26-year headship of the

National Center for Science Education (NCSE), an organization whose sole purpose is to prevent “anti-evolution” from gaining any headway in public schools, Eugenie Scott was honored by Science Magazine this week.  Jeffrey Mervis described the NCSE as a “U.S. Center That Fights Antievolution Forces.”  Whether that means creationism, intelligent design, or simply honest teaching of Darwinism with its pros and cons, Eugenie Scott has been a tireless advocate of Darwin-only in the schools, and a formidable opponent of even the academic freedom laws that attempt to prevent school boards from punishing teachers who teach evolution honestly.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Mervis’s article is filled with accolades for Dr. Scott from

like-minded Darwin-only people.  She herself long ago decided not to pose as anti-religious (after all, there are liberal theologians who embrace evolution, and lately she has tried to make overtures even to evangelical Christian groups to agree on some of NCSE’s goals).  Aware of the political and cultural issues at hand, she relies on “powers of persuasion” to defend what Mervis calls “integrity in science education.”  Uh— what was that Darwin quote again?  It would seem hard to define “integrity” in Darwinian terms.  To a Darwinian game theorist, cooperation evolves by the same aimless processes of natural selection that changes a finch beak, and non-cooperation is just part of the game.  None of that appears dependent on truth.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Melvin Konner and Daniel Dennett Melvin Konner is a self-proclaimed admirer of Daniel

Dennett, a Darwinian philosopher (if that oxymoron can be resolved).  Konner loved Dennett’s earlier books, but in a review in Nature, had a few problems with his latest, titled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.  Konner usually appreciates Dennett’s dedication to “facts” and “clarification of discourse.”  Strangely, he never seems to insist Dennett define those terms from materialistic processes of aimless selection.  Maybe that’s because Konner disclaims any expertise in philosophy, which is obsessed with clarity.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 In the course of his review, Konner described

how he likes to disabuse his students of their doubts about Darwin.  He had just puzzled about the usefulness of Dennett’s categories of “skyhooks” (“thinking-tools that hang an explanation on nothing”) and “cranes” (“concepts built on a solid factual foundation”).  Predictably, Konner pigeonholed intelligent design as a “skyhook” for its “explaining too-intricate bits of biological machinery.”  Anyway, here’s what he said he does to his students in class:

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 “But are skyhooks and cranes comparable kinds of ideas?

Symbiosis and sex are evolved processes like respiration or photosynthesis; each began with random mutation and, by gradual natural selection, produced a ‘design’ that changed the history of life. But what do skyhooks and cranes add to the basic principles of how we think about evolution? The next time I comfort a student struggling between faith and Darwin, it will not help me to say, “What you learned in Sunday school about evolution needing a ‘big boost’? That’s just a skyhook.” Rather, I will do what I do now: help the student to zero in on variation, inheritance, selection and, crucially, how very many generations there have been since evolution began. As Dennett states elsewhere in this book, the word for this is not ‘crane’ but ‘algorithm’ — both more and better than a metaphor.”

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 It’s nice that Konner wants to “comfort” his

students instead of beat them over the head, but it appears he just helped himself to several immaterial, purposeful concepts that depend for their usefulness on truth and integrity: design, principles, thinking, comfort, learning, algorithm, and metaphor.  Can he derive those from natural selection?  He doesn’t feel he has to.  Dennett has done it for him:

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 I share many of Dennett’s views: a ‘designed’

nature without a designer; the mechanistic, emergent character of consciousness; the rejection of the homunculus argument, or the idea that an entity (often characterized in discussion as a little person) watches a theatre consisting of the rest of the brain; and the compatibility of free will with determinism.

It would be interesting to ask Konner if he really agrees Dennett’s views are true, or if he considers himself a “cooperator” in some kind of evolutionary game.  Incidentally, who is watching the watcher in the theater that doesn’t exist?

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Students: understand what you are up against.  People like

Eugenie Scott (and her squadron of attack forces) and Melvin Konner are on a mission: a mission to destroy “faith” and replace it with “Darwin.”  To them, “faith” means anything that doubts their own faith in Darwinism, which they consider to be “science” (in their thinking, synonymous with truth).  What are you going to do when the Professor Konner in your college comes alongside you to “comfort” you in (what he perceives as) your “struggle between faith and Darwin”?  Why, he just wants to ameliorate your worry about the conflict between what your Sunday School teacher said about evolution and the alleged “scientific” story of “variation, inheritance, selection” and long ages (“how very many generations there have been since evolution began”).  He just wants to help you.  What are you going to say to him?

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 The answer is so important that we want you to think about it

for a day.  Come back tomorrow for the continuation of our commentary.  Write down some problems you see with the situation as described, and what some of your possible responses might be.  The article contains some clues.  If you don’t learn to think these issues through for yourself with clarity and conviction, reading our advice will not help that much.  We are here to help you think in more cogent, clear, convincing ways than many Sunday School teachers do (speaking of the ones who say, “just have faith” or “maybe you can have your faith and Darwin, too”).  Your convictions cannot survive Eugenie Scott or Professor Konner with that kind of pablum.  Think about your responses and check back with us tomorrow.  This is a good exercise for all readers, not just students.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 How did you do?  Our suggested responses are

part pragmatic and part logical.  First, the pragmatic part.  Recognize that in class, it’s an unequal contest.  The professor is in the power position, and has the power to make or break your grade, and possibly your career.  In such cases, discretion is usually the better part of valor.  You don’t have to agree with his views.  Be respectful, try to fulfill the class requirements and get a good grade.  Just make sure you know what you would say if it were an equal contest.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Logically, we hope you noticed that the Darwinian position

is self-refuting.  Self-refuting positions are not just misguided, they are necessarily false.  They can never be true, now or ever.  This realization doesn’t dawn on most Darwinians, but it did on Darwin himself (read that quote from his letter to Graham again).  Darwin said that this “horrid doubt” always arises in his mind.  He worried about this right up to his death, long after he had become famous for his theory of natural selection.  How can the convictions of a man’s mind be reliable?  In the letter, he had no answer!  He never answered that doubt.  As far as we know, he died with that doubt in his mind, that everything he had propounded was no more reliable than whatever “convictions” exist in the mind of a monkey or one of the lower animals.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 To be consistent, Darwin would have had to admit that his views

are glorified monkey screeches.  They have no necessary connection to truth.  What is truth?  Ask the Konner-types if truth evolves.  Everything else in Darwin’s world changes.  If truth evolves, what is considered true today could be false tomorrow.  Evolutionary game theorists continually publish articles in leading journals that claim all that we consider good, true and beautiful is the result of behaviors that arise by natural selection, not by purpose or intent.  The aimless, mindless processes of selection produce “emergent properties” that only appear to be altruistic, truthful, and good.  They really aren’t!  They’re just arbitrary states of matter.  Even yeast colonies exhibit these behaviors, they claim, trying to assert that human behavior is no different.  So why should we view the NCSE as anything but an emergent property among human populations, that gains power for awhile, till the “religious” population grabs the ball?  Who is calling what religious, anyway?  In Darwin’s world, nothing has meaning.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 This logical response is so crucial it is worth learning well.  C. S.

Lewis used it.  G. K. Chesteron used it.  Now Alvin Plantinga and other modern philosophers are using it.  Understood and wielded well, this sword stops the Darwinist in his tracks.  We cannot allow a Darwinian to “help himself” to concepts of truth or beauty, because it’s a form of theft.  If we told them “get your own dirt” (see joke) they would be empty-handed.  If they try to argue that Darwinism is true, we must rap their knuckles and tell them to stop and define truth.  Does it evolve?  If so, game over.  A believer in God, by contrast, has the resources to justify belief in truth, because God, the eternal, unchanging One, is the source of Truth with a capital T.  As finite humans we may not always get our views right, but we have the one and only pole star to hitch our arguments to.  We can justify our belief in truth.  (Note: this is why belief in an impersonal designing “force” is inadequate.  A force like gravity does not deal in concepts, and concepts require personal communication.)

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Some Darwinians try to wriggle out of the

straitjacket by appeals to “evolutionary epistemology.”  This is the notion that natural selection, to work, required that animals “get the world right” to survive and reproduce.  That notion is easily dismissed by repeating the same point: survival has no necessary connection to truth.  Survival is pragmatic.  What helps an animal survive today might not tomorrow, so what a caveman thinks is true might be false in a million years.  At no time would an animal or human know what truth is.  Truth must be unchanging.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 Once again we recommend the Discovery Institute’s recent book, 

The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism and Society for an in-depth look at the “argument from reason” that defeats materialism.  But what about theistic evolution?  The argument works against that, too.  Almost all theistic evolutionists capitulate to the Darwinian notion that natural selection is aimless and unguided.  They refuse to think that God intervenes at any stage in the process, because they want to be accepted within the scientific community.  But any unguided, aimless, purposeless process has no necessary connection to truth, whether or not they believe in a God behind it.  What about those who think God set up natural selection as a “law of nature” that would fulfill His purposes?  Sorry, no dice there, either.  A law of nature that led inexorably to Adam and Eve would be a contradiction of natural selection’s aimlessness.  It would be tantamount to a miracle—indeed, a whole sequence of miracles—so nothing would be gained by theistic evolutionists who want to depend on “secondary causes” (natural laws), not miracles.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 The logical argument explained above is crucial to your surviving

evolutionary evangelists in college, the media, or elsewhere, but there’s also an abundance of empirical arguments against evolution.  In June, Stephen Meyer’s new book Darwin’s Doubt will discuss the problem of the Cambrian Explosion in detail.  Illustra’s excellent documentary Darwin’s Dilemma provides a one-hour presentation of this problem Darwin himself recognized as a valid argument against his theory.  Meyer’s earlier book Signature in the Cell, and our online book here, provide powerful, convincing arguments that work not only to refute evolution, but to provide positive evidence for intelligent design.  There are so many empirical arguments against evolution at creation sites and intelligent design sites that our problem is knowing where to stop.  Many good resources are available at a collection called True Origin, where you can find discussions about most issues in the creation vs. evolution debate.  Naturally we also recommend you avail yourself of our Search bar and categories here at Creation-Evolution Headlines.

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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists 学生应该处理以进化传道者 A final (but important) piece of advice concerning debate strategy. 

Don’t let the Darwinians define the issue or the terms.  They want to corner you into a supposed conflict between “faith” and “science,” but that is a false dichotomy.  If you accept their terms, the deck is stacked against you.  The truth is, everyone has faith!  The question is not faith vs. science, but their faith vs. your faith; their religion vs. your religion; their science vs. your science.  You could even demonstrate to the Darwinian, using the argument from reason, that they believe in miracles and the supernatural.  The key is to ask the right questions, as Phillip Johnson so ably argued in his book of that name.  The debate should be stated, Can you arrive at human reason, and all the beauty and complexity of the living world, by a material process that is fundamentally aimless, purposeless, and unguided?  Asked that way, the Darwinian is at the disadvantage.  His arguments collapse into monkey screeches.   Don’t let him say another word until he can justify the existence of truth, integrity, and morality.  As soon as he opens his mouth to argue a point, you have won.

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 Complaints about a new diagnostic manual show that

psychiatry has a long way to go before being considered a legitimate science.  That hope might never be fulfilled.

The occasion for scientific scrutiny on psychiatry is the publication this month of DSM-5, the latest upgrade to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  This 60-year old “bible” to psychiatrists has had a long history of problems.  In New Scientist, Peter Aldhous, Andy Coghlan and Sara Reardon hope that a “scientific DSM will transform psychiatry.”  That implies that it is not scientific now.

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 An article on Evolution News & Views recounts the

many ways that psychiatry fails as a science.  In the future, New Scientist predicts, things will be different.  “It will be based on science, and will look nothing like today’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”  As we reported earlier (5/18/12, 4/24/13), the DSM-5 has come under fire for removing some categories of mental illness and added many new controversial ones, such as “Hypersexual Disorder” and “Binge Eating.”  Many practitioners dispute the method of clustering symptoms and giving them names by consensus.  Others have accused the APA for being influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 Leading the charge to dump the DSM and work

toward evidence-based psychiatry is Thomas Insel, head of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.  His blunt comments to the APA have been cheered by many psychiatrists.  But how soon can psychiatry earn scientific credentials?

“Still, don’t expect the landscape of mental illness to change any time soon. Insel accepts that it will take at least a decade to conduct the research necessary to devise a new approach to diagnosis. In the meantime, patients’ illnesses will continue to be diagnosed using the DSM’s symptom-based categories.”

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 Evidence-based psychiatric diagnosis would require

mapping genes, neural abnormalities and other “biomarkers” to mental illnesses, providing biological underpinning for conditions like depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.  David Kupfer, who led the DSM-5 revisions, had this to say: “We’ve been telling patients for several decades that we are waiting for biomarkers. We’re still waiting.”  About those biomarkers, Kupfer said they “may someday culminate in the genetic and neuroscience breakthroughs that will revolutionise our field. In the meantime, should we merely hand patients another promissory note that something may happen sometime?”

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 Other psychiatrists contacted by New Scientist agreed

that the idea of biologically-based diagnosis is ideal, but had their doubts it will come anytime soon—or is even possible.  “These are incredibly complicated disorders,” said one.  Some worry that a focus on physical causes (neurons, genes) might overlook psychological causes.  Brain damage, we know, can cause behavioral problems.  So can impacted wisdom teeth.  But those are not mental illnesses.  If psychiatry needs to anchor its science in the psyche (Gr., soul), though, is that a proper realm for science?  How do you scan a soul with an MRI?

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 It appears that psychiatry (long thought to be

superior to psychology because it required a medical degree), is poised for collapse.  It cannot float on promissory notes forever.  Kupfer said that they’ve been waiting for biomarkers to undergird their diagnoses for decades.  DSM-5 is a highly controversial placeholder, but many practitioners with “physics envy,” who desire scientific empiricism to validate their claims, are tired of waiting for the legitimacy that never comes.

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science 精神病学（然而）不是科学 The ENV article pointed out that many of the

causes of psychiatry’s crisis have parallels to the situation with Darwinism.  If something as long-respected as psychiatry can collapse, it may be a matter of time for the Darwin Party, guilty of many of the same sins, falls.  We’d like to see the Darwin Party accuse the APA of being pseudoscientific.  Then the APA should respond by calling the Darwinists mentally ill.  They should fight over this and fall down together, but perhaps this is just a delusion.

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The most information-rich medium known

to man has been found in abundance under the sea, but man didn’t put it there.

In “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea Floor,” Traci Watson described for Science Now what deep-sea explorers have found in the abyssal plains of the Atlantic, 3 miles below the ocean surface:

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 “In the middle of the South Atlantic,

there’s a patch of sea almost devoid of life. There are no birds, few fish, not even much plankton. But researchers report that they’ve found buried treasure under the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in the muck of the sea floor, which lies 5000 meters below the waves.”

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The DNA is contained in fossils of foraminifera,

radiolarians and other planktonic creatures that have settled to the sea floor.  Pedro Martinez Arbizu, a deep-sea biologist of the German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research, said, “We have been able to show that the deep sea is the largest long-time archive of DNA, and a major window to study past biodiversity.”  It’s like finding a new fossil record.

Some of the 169 forams and 21 radiolarian species were unknown.  Even species without hard shelly parts yielded DNA.  A British scientist said, “These records are telling you new information that wasn’t found in the fossil record.”

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 Another team found traces of DNA from 2700

species in the shallower bottom of the Black Sea, including DNA from algae, fungi, and dinoflagellates.  Scientists expected that DNA could not survive exposure to oxygen, but apparently newer material cut off the oxygen from deeper sediments, preserving the genetic material.  Watson said, “more recent Black Sea sediments weren’t exposed to oxygen at all.”

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The Black Sea team claims the

sediments are 9,600 years old; the Atlantic team claims the DNA they collected is 32,500 years old.  The article did not explain the dates, but suggested that they were estimated from “first appearance” of certain species according to evolutionary assumptions.

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 Two observations should jump out at this

announcement.  One is that even with evolutionary assumptions, they are only claiming a 32,500-year maximum date for what they found.  That’s a tiny fraction of the millions and billions of years they assume plankton should have been settling onto the sea floor.  If the DNA is protected from oxygen by what lies above it, why didn’t they find DNA hundreds of thousands or millions of years old?  After all, evolutionists explain away dinosaur soft tissue by claiming it can last over 70 million years.  More likely, the DNA is even younger than they think.  It could not survive degradation, under ideal conditions, for more than a few thousand years.

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The other observation is the remarkable difference

between minerals and information.  Non-living rocks and mud are composed of relatively simple mineral compounds that carry no message.  DNA, by contrast, bears information — the wherewithal to build a complex organism like a radiolarian or foramina, with all its molecular motors, digestive, respiratory, and excretion systems.  Some of the shells of these creatures look like cathedrals or spaceships.  What a thought that information is still present in this dark, cold, otherwise sterile realm.  It’s like finding books inside a cave, or hard drives on the moon.  The best explanation (from our common experience) for information-rich systems is intelligent design.

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Two mysteries from the moon are forcing revisions to

textbooks.  One concerns water in moon minerals.  The other concerns the moon’s magnetic field.

Mare Basalts Surprisingly Magnetic “New research sets back date of moon’s dynamo 160

million years,” reported PhysOrg based on a paper in PNAS.  A team of geophysicists was surprised to find evidence from magnetic signals in moon rocks that the moon must have had a magnetosphere-generating dynamo that lasted much longer than they thought possible.   Current theory must be inadequate, because “The lifetime of the ancient lunar core dynamo has implications for its power source and the mechanism of field generation,” the scientists wrote.  They were driven to postulate unlikely mechanisms to keep the hypothetical dynamo going:

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “These data extend the known lifetime of the

lunar dynamo by 160 My and ∼ indicate that the field was likely continuously active until well after the final large basin-forming impact. This likely excludes impact-driven changes in rotation rate as the source of the dynamo at this time in lunar history. Rather, our results require a persistent power source like precession of the lunar mantle or a compositional convection dynamo.”

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Space.com’s headline reads, “Mystery of Moon’s Magnetic

Field Deepens.” Improbabilities that Are All Wet When a Mars-sized object hit the Earth to form the moon

(according to a popular theory), it should have obliterated all volatile compounds, like water, requiring Earth’s oceans to form later from impacts from wet comets or asteroids.  That theory has been impacted itself by studies of water-bearing minerals in moon rocks, prompting Science Daily to report, “Moon and Earth Have Common Water Source.”  Another Science Daily article suggests the new theory, “Water on Moon, Earth Came from Same Primitive Meteorites.”  A new analysis of Apollo moon rocks dispels ideas that comets brought the water.  It must have come from carbonaceous chondrites, the study concludes.

Lisa Grossman at New Scientist believes “Moon water came from young wet Earth.”

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “The notion that all Earth’s water was delivered by

comets or asteroids has just taken a hit. Chemical analysis of lunar rocks suggests that Earth was born wet, and it held on to its water long enough to donate some to the moon.”

This is a flagrant reversal of the idea that a moon-forming impact left the moon bone dry.  Measurements of water-bearing minerals on the moon show it’s not just a little water they’re talking about.  “The minerals hold as much as those in Earth’s upper mantle,” Grossman says.  Nature News portrays the head-scratching this finding causes for modelers:

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “That still leaves a potential gap in the Moon-

forming model. Some planetary scientists had reasoned that the heat generated by the collision would have boiled away any water that Earth might have transferred to the coalescing Moon. The findings “are screaming that there’s something about the Moon’s formation that we’re not quite grasping”, says study co-author Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.”

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 The findings beg for a new explanation.  Meteorites

could not have brought the water unless the moon were still molten, but the moon would have solidified too rapidly.  All one of the researchers could figure out was that the water came from the only place they know had water: the Earth.  So how did the Earth “donate” some water to the moon?  This calls for a delicate scenario: the hypothetical impactor that hit Earth had to loft just enough material off our primordial planet to form a large moon without destroying all Earth’s primordial water.  Then, some of that water lofted into orbit had to migrate to the moon:

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “It no longer looks likely that all the water

in the material that formed the moon evaporated instantly in the giant initial impact. Instead, it now seems more probable that water migrated over a period of centuries out of the cloud of debris that coalesced into the moon.”

Apparently, “likeliness” has evolved in the modeler’s minds.  The new findings forced a reassessment of what scientists thought was “probable.”

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 But the explanation begs a new question: where did the Earth

get its water to donate?  Current theory does not allow a body at Earth’s location to garner water from a spinning debris disk.  Adding a little more ad hoc can get the job done:

“[Alberto] Saal [of Brown University] thinks that Earth may have formed near where the asteroid belt is now, which is far enough from the sun for water to condense. The planet would then have migrated inward. It’ll be a tough theory to prove, because Earth’s geologic activity has been recycling rocks, and thus erasing the evidence, for billions of years.”

The new model would claim that the early Earth was not habitable, but through a series of lucky breaks, migrated into the habitable zone, where everything worked out just right for microbes to emerge and become planetary scientists who figured it all out.

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 These reports should anger anyone who watches

science shows and reads textbooks that make the formation of the Earth and its large Moon look so easy.  No theory can account for the observations.  Instead, secular moyboys (believers in “millions of years, billions of years”) concoct fantastical models to preserve their fantasies from the evidence.  Did you catch the howler in the quote above?  Earth has been “erasing the evidence, for billions of years.”  Quick!  What does that imply?  This is a fact-free story  – even the part about erasing the evidence for billions of years.

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Before, the priests of the planetary evolution cult needed

just a delicate impact from a Mars-size object (itself a highly improbable event) to form the moon, followed by some hand-waving and chants, to bring in a series of unknown wet impactors to form Earth’s oceans.  That was unlikely enough.  Now, they need Earth to form out in the asteroid belt, where water can conceivably condense, followed by a lucky pitch from Jupiter or Saturn to careen our dead planet right into the batter’s box of the habitable zone.  That all had to happen before the Mars-size impactor came in, this time even more delicately, to loft water into Earth orbit without losing it, so that it could transfer the water to a new moon (which happens to be just right to support life on Earth).

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Nobody would believe this series of ad hoc events

unless it were absolutely necessary to preserve secular materialism and long ages for Darwin.  We won’t even go into the much more highly fantastical tales needed to get life, multicellularity, consciousness and intelligence to “emerge” from hot wet muck.

Scientists speak of new data as “constraints” for their models.  That’s why raw data from planetary missions is so valuable.  The more constraints on storytellers, the better.  As of now, they appear to have just one hand free to wave from the straitjacket the data have put them in.  Maybe the next data will constrain the remaining hand-waving arm, and gag the mouth, too.

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Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 There was a time when talking plants was mythology. 

Now, it’s science. Hidden Messages in Plain Sight Plants don’t speak English, obviously.  Somehow,

though, they communicate through channels scientists are only beginning to understand.  No less than Science Magazine, the most respected journal in America, said this: “Shhh, the Plants are Talking.”  In the “Science Shot” article, reporter Andrew Porterfield described controlled experiments in Australia that showed chilis grow better when basil is nearby.  Somehow, the basil coaxes the chili plants through a hidden mechanism:

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Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 Because light, touch, and chemical

“smell” were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging “words” to the growing seeds. Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.

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Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 Live Science put it this way: “Even in the plant world, babies

fail to thrive without a friendly community chattering nearby, according to a new study.”  We weren’t kidding about talking plants.  Reporter Becky Olson headlined her article, “Plants Talk: Seedlings Thrive with Encouraging ‘Words’.”

The Underground Fungal Railroad More evidence is arising that plants communicate throughout

ecological communities through a network of fungal threads in the soil.  The fungi reward the plants for sharing nutrients by passing messages along, in a symbiotic relationship.  The BBC News featured more discoveries about the underground network, as did PhysOrg.  The BBC article claims that work in the UK is the first to show plant communication via the fungal railroad.

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Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 The research appears to show that a bean plant under

attack by aphids can send out a warning through the underground communication channels.  Plants getting the message set up defenses, but plants without the fungal network do not.  One of the researchers was delighted at this “abject surprise that it was just so powerful — just such a fantastic signalling system.”

The BBC called this an “evolutionary role” for the fungus without explaining how a blind, purposeless process could discover any role in complex communications systems.

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Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 Some day soon we may decipher the

language of plants.  Here are some predictions.  Favorite joke: that some humans think the underground railroad evolved.  Favorite saint: Basil.  Weather report: Chili today and hot tamale.  Favorite pastime: sending intelligently designed signals.  Favorite cowboy line: Where never is heard a discouraging word.  Favorite hymn: Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 Today’s entry features a mammal, a bird and an insect that have

good reasons to show off. The insect:  A little moth has hearing unsurpassed in the animal

kingdom (but we already know, from the film Metamorphosis, that any lepidopteran undergoing transformation from caterpillar to flying insect has much to boast about already).  Humans with optimum hearing can hear about 20 kHz.  That’s nothing for the greater wax moth.  Science Daily reported research at the University of Strathclyde that measured sensibility up to 300 kHz in this little, inconspicuous, gray insect.  The lead researcher remarked, “We are extremely surprised to find that the moth is capable of hearing sound frequencies at this level and we hope to use the findings to better understand air-coupled ultrasound.”  The moth’s hearing system appears overdesigned for detecting bat echolocation calls, so why would this extreme hearing evolve?  Ultrasound tends to drop in intensity through air faster than lower frequencies do.

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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 The mammal:  Speaking of bats, one flower-feeding bat

species has a dynamic tongue that works like a nectar trap.  Live Science and National Geographic have electron micrographs of the tongue tip from Pallas’s long-tongued bat.  Researchers at Brown University showed that blood in the tongue instantly fills dozens of papillae, or protrosions, in the tongue, allowing the bat to lap up much more nectar than a flat tongue could.  This all happens in less than the blink of an eye – 0.04 second.  A slow-motion video on National Geographic reveals action too fast for the eye: the papillae straighten and the tongue tip grows by 50% when the tongue hits the nectar.  The bat benefits from this mechanism because it has to expend a lot of energy hovering near the flower, so the more nectar retrieved from each sip, the better.  The full paper can be found on PNAS.

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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 The bird:  Those emperor penguins that starred in

the documentary March of the Penguins looked mighty cold out there in the Antarctic wind.  Surprisingly, their outside feathers are even colder!  New Scientist told how their freezing exteriors prevent heat from leaking out of their bodies.  Now for a bird bonus about the flying variety: PhysOrg told about how scientists are using tiny geolocators on migrating birds like the Manx shearwater to understand how they adapt their behaviors to changing environmental conditions.

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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 The movie:  Illustra Media’s new documentary 

Flight: The Genius of Birds is being released on DVD today.  It has another fascinating tongue story to tell, and a great migration story, too — just two glimpses into a film packed wonderful scientific discoveries about avian flight, told beautifully in this new documentary with great cinematography and outstanding animation.  You can order a copy right now by clicking the link.  Watch the trailer full-screen here.  Join the Illustra Facebook page for news and updates.

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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 Learning details of wonders in the animal world

provides immunity against Darwinian indoctrination.  That’s why we love sharing the latest discoveries here.

We highly recommend the new Illustra film Flight: The Genius of Birds.  You can order the DVD today, but if you have a good home theater, you might want to wait till June 11 to get the Blu-ray version with its outstanding detail and sound.  Or, you can get the DVD now to watch and give away, ordering the Blu-ray version for your library to go with your HD copy of Metamorphosis: the Beauty and Design of Butterflies —a terrific pair you’ll want to watch again and again.

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 Researchers at Vanderbilt University are tied up in knots

trying to locate Darwin’s branching tree in contradictory data.

A press release from Vanderbilt University summarizes a paper in Nature this week:

“These days, phylogeneticists – experts who painstakingly map the complex branches of the tree of life – suffer from an embarrassment of riches. The genomics revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary history that connects all living beings. But the unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious problem: The trees produced by a number of well-supported studies have come to contradictory conclusions.”

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 Salichos and Rokas, in their Nature paper, had to

resort to postulating rapid periods of diversification and long periods of stasis to keep Darwin’s vision intact against the onslaught of data.  The press release continues,

“In a study published online May 8 by the journal Nature, Rokas and graduate student Leonidas Salichos analyze the reasons for these differences and propose a suite of novel techniques that can resolve the contradictions and provide greater accuracy in deciphering the deep branches of life’s tree.…

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 “The study by Salichos and Rokas comes at a critical

time when scientists are grappling with how best to detect the signature of evolutionary history from a deluge of genetic data. These authors provide intriguing insights into our standard analytical toolbox, and suggest it may be time to abandon some of our most trusted tools when it comes to the analysis of big data sets. This significant work will certainly challenge the community of evolutionary biologists to rethink how best to reconstruct phylogeny,” said Michael F. Whiting, program director of systematics and biodiversity science at the National Science Foundation, which funded the study.”

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 Problem is, the data looks more like a bush than a

tree.  The record is punctuated by rapid, sudden appearances of organisms.  The authors acknowledged the problem of the Cambrian explosion:

“In broad terms, Rokas and Salichos found that genetic data is less reliable during periods of rapid radiation, when new species were formed rapidly. A case in point is the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance about 540 million years ago of a remarkable diversity of animal species, without apparent predecessors. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were very simple, consisting of single cells occasionally organized into colonies.

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 “A lot of the debate on the differences in the trees has

been between studies concerning the ‘bushy’ branches that took place in these ‘radiations’,” Rokas said.”

Calling this a “paradox,” the researchers found that even within yeast species a thousand genes did not match up to phylogenetic trees generated by standard software methods.  The same conflicts were found in larger data sets involving vertebrates and metazoans.  In response, they claimed that genetic dating becomes as unreliable as radiometric dating the farther back in time one searches, creating “considerable challenges to existing algorithms to resolve radiations” congruent with Darwin’s presumed ancestral tree.

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 One whole subsection in the paper is titled, “All gene

trees differ from species phylogeny.”  Another is titled, “Standard practices do not reduce incongruence.”  A third, “Standard practices can mislead.”  One of their major findings was “extensive conflict in certain internodes.”

The authors not only advised throwing out some standard practices of tree-building, but (amazingly) proposed evolutionists throw out the “uninformative” conflicting data and only use data that seems to support the Darwinian tree:  “the subset of genes with strong phylogenetic signal is more informative than the full set of genes, suggesting that phylogenomic analyses using conditional combination approaches, rather than approaches based on total evidence, may be more powerful.”

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 In conclusion, they had no solid

answers for the conflicts.  They called on other evolutionists to “to develop novel phylogenomic approaches and markers to more accurately decipher the most challenging ancient branches of life’s genealogy from the DNA record.”

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 This is scandalous!  It’s also old news.  Evolutionists have

been concocting Darwin trees in spite of the evidence ever since Darwin acknowledged the Cambrian explosion as a real problem that lodged a valid objection to his theory (get the new book Darwin’s Doubt for details, and the film Darwin’s Dilemma).

Darwinism is a classic case of Finagle’s Rule #3, “Draw your curves, then plot your data.”  Guru Charlie drew his little tree sketch by faith, then sent his disciples out on a hopeless quest to find evidence to support it.  Now, here it is May 15, 2013, and these guys are still telling us the tree vision is in conflict with the data!  They have to finagle their methods (“novel approaches”) to try to force a match with the uncooperative genes.

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush 达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木 And here, we saw they are even willing to

lie, tossing out “uninformative” data sets and only using data that appear to support their foreordained conclusion.  Were you told this in biology class?  Did your textbook mention this?  No; but you hear it here on CEH all the time, because we bring out into the open the dirty deals evolutionists whisper to themselves in the journals.

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 When a fossil violates Darwinist expectations, it

never falsifies the theory.  It just creates a new round of imaginative gesticulations.

Bad, monster, bad:  National Geographic wrote a headline, “New Sea Monster Found, Rewrites Evolution?”  The question mark implies, “Of course not,” even though the partial ichthyosaur fossil found in Kurdistan is “Out of time,” according to Live Science.  Actually, it wasn’t lacking time.  It had plenty of time to create problems for Darwinists:

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 “Researchers had previously believed that

ichthyosaurs declined throughout the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 199 million to 145 million years ago, with the only survivors rapidly evolving to keep ahead of repeated extinction events. The new fossil, however, dates from the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. It looks remarkably like its Jurassic brethren, revealing a surprising evolutionary statis [sic, stasis].

The fossil “represents an animal that seems ‘out of time’ for its age,” study researcher Valentin Fischer of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a statement.”

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Now, the gesticulation: one evolutionist called it

a “ghost lineage” (i.e., “changing very little over millions of years”).  Another called it a “living fossil of its time.” One “never even imagined” it could survive so long.  One said “it shouldn’t be there, but it is.”  The new story will apparently read: “The resulting ichthyosaur family tree suggests these marine reptiles stayed diverse into the Cretaceous, only to go mysteriously extinct 95 million years ago.”  National Geographic is holding out hope that a single specimen won’t “rewrite evolution”.

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Go, ginkgo:  Speaking of stasis, the unusual tree Ginkgo

biloba is a classic “living fossil.”  Because it is the now the “most abundant cityscape tree in the world,” one might be growing in a park near you.  Evolutionists, though, consider it an exception to their rule, “evolve or perish.”  J. C. McElwain wrote in Science Magazine about a new book about the ginkgo tree by Peter Crane:

“Ginkgo is among Earth’s oldest-living organisms, reaching ages of around 1500 years. It is a “living fossil,” belonging to a family line extending back over 200 million years. It is a symbol of morphological stasis yet incredible persistence, having survived two of the five great mass extinction events in Earth history.”

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Now, the gesticulation: maybe it’s because it

invented lignotubers, “among ginkgo’s adaptations that have ensured its persistence and resilience through hundreds of millions of years of global change.”  Funny no other plant borrowed that idea.  McElwain relishes in some tidbits of “subtle” evolutionary change, even though the tree is a “poster child for morphological stasis”.  He puts a positive spin on how ginkgo fossils can “inform us about the tempo and nature of plant macroevolution.”  Then he relishes how Crane makes the most of reverse evolution:

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 “He holds that Darwinian microevolutionary

processes and contingency can account for most of the patterns observed in the plant fossil record, and he downplays (but does not entirely discount) the roles of evolutionary innovations and environmentally driven macroevolutionary processes. Crane also draws a nice parallel between the trajectories of horse and ginkgo evolution—both belonged to once highly diverse families and both were “winnowed” to a single extant species.”

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 The human network:  Categories of early

humans are falling like dominoes, now that Svante Pääbo’s team has found more evidence of interbreeding between Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans (see 9/01/12).  Elizabeth Pennisi’s report in Science Magazine about a well-attended talk he gave in Germany last week seems devastating to evolutionary attempts to parse out human ancestors to various species and make a tree out of them:

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 “With all the interbreeding, “it’s more a network than a tree,”

points out Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. Pääbo hesitates to call Denisovans a distinct species, and the picture is getting more complicated with each new genome.

Pääbo’s team also deciphered additional Denisovan DNA, both nuclear and mitochondrial, from two teeth found in different layers in Denisova Cave. The nuclear DNA confirmed that both teeth are Denisovan. But, surprisingly, one tooth showed more than 80 mitochondrial DNA differences from both the other tooth and the pinkie bone. These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals from throughout their range, says Susanna Sawyer from Pääbo’s lab. Such diversity implies that the Denisovans were a relatively large population “that at some point may have outnumbered Neandertals,” Pääbo said.”

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Now, the gesticulating: Pennisi reported

that the evolutionists feel the new data will help clarify “genetic changes that underlie our own evolution.”  They might be able to line up genes from these “archaic people” and find out which are unique to our species, compared to genes of apes and monkeys.  See also the 9/05/11 and 8/12/11 entries.

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 The observations show solid horizontal lines

between interbreeding kinds, but dashed vertical lines where the evolution is supposed to have happened.  Where is the tree?  It’s all a tangled bramble bush.  When the fossils don’t tell the Darwin tale, they have to invent terms like “morphological stasis” and wave their hands to keep you from seeing what the evidence implies.  Ignore the waving hands.  If they can’t get the tree right, what makes you think they got the dates right?

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Pääbo has basically undermined the Neanderthal myth. 

Evolutionists give arbitrary names to populations of Homo sapiens, giving them new species designations like Homo neanderthalensis.  Since it fits Darwin’s expectations, it quickly becomes textbook orthodoxy.  Artists go to work to make the new species look as different as possible from us.  But what have we just heard?  “These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals from throughout their range.”  It’s all phony baloney categorizing among true humans, whose ability to interbreed proves they are one species.

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 At first, Pääbo and other evolutionists tried that

with the bones from Denisova cave, but now is reluctant to call those cave dwellers a distinct species.  How could he?  The DNA is all scrambled, showing they were all members of a single species: human beings.  The people in that cave were smart.  They were networking way back when they lived, just like we do today.  None of them were stupid enough to try mating with apes, or to think that’s where they came from.  If you respect evidence, help toss the Darwin Party out of power.

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 If you thought work on human cloning and

embryonic stem cell research went out of style with the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, watch out.  The pro-cloning people, who never lost their lust for toying with human embryos, are back.

Writing for Science Magazine, Gretchen Vogel titled an article, “Human Stem Cells From Cloning, Finally.”  She seems delighted that researchers may be able to treat humans like farm animals:

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 “This time it looks like it’s for real: Researchers have made

personalized human embryonic stem (ES) cells with a method similar to how Dolly the sheep was cloned—though with an added jolt of caffeine.

“The success, which produced stem cells carrying DNA belonging to a baby with an inherited disorder, comes 9 years after South Korean researchers claimed in a famously faked paper that they had achieved a similar feat. After their story unraveled, a handful of researchers continued trying, but human eggs, or oocytes, responded poorly to the techniques that have worked in sheep, mice, cows, pigs, and other animals.

“Now, thanks to years of work in monkey cells, a group led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton reports a recipe that works for human cells.”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Of course, there are those people troubled by

the ethics of such research: “While welcomed by many researchers, who

envision creating personalized stem cells for therapies or research, the achievement is also likely to stir up old ethical debates about human SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer], including whether it should be regulated to prevent attempts at reproductive human cloning. In the short term, that shouldn’t be a worry, Mitalipov says.”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Who’s worried?  After all, the scientists don’t

really want to clone human beings for a Star Wars army — at least not in the short term.  They just want to get their hands on those precious embryonic stem cells (ES), and this “success” opens the door for them.  Even so, “the team had surprisingly good success generating embryos,” Vogel said.

But this begs the question: who needs ES cells, when induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are just as good without the ethical problems?

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 “This high efficiency could mean that SCNT is not as

impractical for creating personalized human stem cells as many observers had expected. But it faces stiff competition from the current method of making genetically matched pluripotent cells, called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. By adding extra copies of several genes to skin or other cells, scientists can reprogram them to behave like ES cells. That technique is much easier than SCNT, and it doesn’t require a supply of human oocytes. (The oocytes used in Mitalipov’s experiments were donated by healthy volunteers for research purposes; donors were paid $5000 for their time and trouble, the local rate paid to egg donors for fertility treatments.)

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 “Some researchers have found evidence,

however, that there may be subtle but potentially significant differences between the genes expressed in iPS cells and ES cells derived from embryos. The chance to compare SCNT-derived human ES cells with iPS counterparts is one of the most important aspects of the new advance, Daley says. “There may be advantages to SCNT-ES cells, but this must be rigorously proven,” he says. In practice, he says, making iPS cells “remains considerably easier.”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 So just on the supposition that there might

be a difference, some researchers are willing to destroy human embryos to find out.  Does that sound ethical?  She quoted a researcher who thinks both methods are “useful” — the language of pragmatism, not ethics.  Vogel had no further ethical qualms.

To the editors at New Scientist, it’s “back to the future” all over again.

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 “A few years ago, therapeutic cloning

looked like the future of medicine. It promised to realise the dream of repairing damaged tissues and organs using a patient’s own cells. But it also had a dark side: producing its supply of stem cells required the creation of human embryos which were later destroyed.”

What did Nature say about this?  David Cyranoski wrote in Nature this week wearing ethics on his sleeve from the first paragraph:

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 “It was hailed some 15 years ago as the great

hope for a biomedical revolution: the use of cloning techniques to create perfectly matched tissues that would someday cure ailments ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. Since then, the approach has been enveloped in ethical debate, tainted by fraud and, in recent years, overshadowed by a competing technology. Most groups gave up long ago on the finicky core method — production of patient-specific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from cloning. A quieter debate followed: do we still need ‘therapeutic’ cloning?”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Mitalipov’s experiment “is sure to rekindle that

debate,” Cyranoski continued.   He described how Mitalipov used a “university advertising campaign” to attract women to donate eggs for his lab at the Health and Science University in Beaverton, Oregon.  (He first practiced on skin cells obtained from fetuses.)  His method sounds a little Frankensteinish, using electric jolts and caffeine to coax the stubborn skin cells to form stable stem cell lines.  It took longer to get human cells to work than monkey cells, he said, because much of the time was spent “navigating US regulations on embryo research.”

Mitalipov is apparently most concerned about making his process more efficient, why? to attract funding:

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Such improvements might be necessary to

convince people that SCNT research is still worthwhile. Egg donors for the experiment received US$3,000–7,000 in compensation. This is expensive and, according to some bioethicists, risks creating an organ trade that preys on the poor. Because the technique requires the destruction of embryos, funds from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) cannot be used to make or study SCNT-derived cell lines, hampering further clinical research. (Mitalipov maintains a separate laboratory for NIH-funded research.)

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Another “sticking point” is public fear of human

cloning.  Stem-cell opponents might “capitalize on” such fears, the article says.  Mitalipov is trying to convince opponents that creation of a human clone, like Dolly the sheep, is not possible (at least, at this time).

But other stem-cell researchers are wondering why Mitalipov is wasting his time.  “Honestly, the most surprising thing [about this paper] is that somebody is still doing human [SCNT] in the era of iPS cells,” said a specialist in regenerative medicine.  Watchers will be waiting to see whether iPS and ES cells really differ in significant ways.

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 New Scientist thinks the ethical battles will be

muted during the Obama era: “Will we now see a revival of the stem cell

culture wars in the US? Probably, but they should be less polarised this time round. The Bush-era laws were relaxed by President Obama in 2009 to no great hullabaloo. The fact that the breakthrough work was done in Oregon may also help: home-grown success has a way of changing hearts and minds. What is clear is that we have entered a new phase in the long-running stem cell soap opera. Expect drama aplenty.”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 But if this is a “soap opera,” it’s one where

innocent human lives are at stake — and not only the lives of fertilized human embryos, but potential adult clones.  Live Science asked if this might lead to human cloning someday.  What worried reporter Rachael Rattner more, the pragmatics, or the principle of the thing?

“Although it would be unethical, experts say it is likely biologically possible to clone a human being. But even putting ethics aside, the sheer amount of resources needed to do it is a significant barrier.”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Rattner concentrated on practical problems

with human cloning.  “It’s like sending your baby up in a rocket knowing there’s a 50–50 chance it’s going to blow up,” she quoted one researcher quipping.  “It’s grossly unethical.”  Practical problems, though, can be remedied with enough research.  If Rattner is willing to put ethics aside rhetorically, the day could come when unscrupulous, pragmatic researchers with government funding will put it aside for real.

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 This story is very disturbing on the heels of the Kermit

Gosnell trial.  Remember that abortion was sold in the 1970s in terms of concern for poor women who needed access to “reproductive health” needs.  The callous disregard for human life that resulted from that slippery slope has shocked the nation with revelations about Gosnell’s and other abortion mills described as “houses of horror” by investigators, who found abortion doctors twisting the heads off babies born alive, leaving them struggling for 20 minutes before severing their spinal cords with scissors, and telling mothers that the dead baby in the womb after chemical abortion is just “meat in a crockpot.”  Horrified nurses would find babies swimming in toilets and packed in bloody bags in refrigerators.  Do you think for a minute that “sanctity of human life” will fare any better among those who want free rein with human embryos?

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Speaking of abortion, Tanya Lewis wrote

an interesting article for Live Science about ultrasound and how it has changed attitudes about abortion.  While ultrasound can backfire in cultures that want to use it for sex selection (aborting many female babies), for the most part it has given expectant mothers a view the abortionists never told them about: their baby is a living human being.

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 “Ultrasound has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception by

pregnant women. In addition to revealing the baby’s health, the images themselves provide a keepsake. “Overwhelmingly, pregnant women expect to be scanned, and are moved and excited by seeing the fetus,” Nicolson said — especially if the baby moves. In fact, Nicolson said, some women report not feeling pregnant until they’ve seen the ultrasound image.

“Seeing a developing fetus has a humanizing effect, too. Donald, the physician who helped develop the technology, was a devout High Anglican, and knew the images carried moral significance for women contemplating having an abortion.”

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Human Cloning Is Back 克隆人回来了 Lewis cited anecdotal evidence that

expectant mothers who see their baby with ultrasound are less likely to terminate their pregnancy.  Each moving baby that the mother rejoices to see on the ultrasound scanner was a single cell just a few months earlier.  The DNA for a full human is there in both cases; the difference between a moving baby in the womb and a fertilized cell is only a matter of time.

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 If lying evolved as a fitness strategy, can we

believe anything an evolutionist says? In his blog entry “The Evolution of Lying” on 

The Conversation, Rob Brooks, a professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at University of New South Wales, gave half-hearted credit to a new theory on deception as a by-product of the evolution of cooperation.  The open-access paper by two Irish evolutionists, Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson, was published by the Royal Society this week.  It posits lying as an evolutionary strategy:

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 “Our results suggest that the evolution

of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities. Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.”

04/22/23 195

Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Brooks agrees that lying evolved, but feels the model of

McNally and Jackson is too simplistic.  “I would like to see if it can help us understand the fine-scale tensions between cooperation and dishonesty in human affairs,” he said.  “There is a lot more to lying than simply misrepresenting the world.”  The liar can deceive himself as well, for instance, in order to make the lie more believable.

From there, Brooks considered Sam Harris’s short e-book Lying, in which Harris advocates we all try to do better at overcoming our evolutionary tendencies, “arguing we can both simplify our own lives and build better societies by telling the truth in situations when we might be tempted to lie.”  Here’s how Brooks concludes all this discussion about lies and truth (bold added, italics in original):

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 “Harris gets bottom-up processes and the conflict between

individual benefits and group functioning. His book is worth a read for his impassioned argument that each of us, as individuals, would benefit from resisting the urge to lie.

“I’m not convinced. What would help right now is some theoretic and empirical evidence that showed the conditions under which Harris’ prescriptions might work. And that’s the beauty of papers like today’s one from McNally and Jackson.

“Irrespective, a better understanding of how lying evolves, no matter how simple, might do enormous social good.

“For one thing it might help constrain the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda.”

The question none of them are considering is, if lying evolved, and if self-deception is possible, and if deception can be very convincing, how are the readers to know who is telling the truth?

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Imagine a liar so skilled, he convinces his

listeners that he is 100% against the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda.  He tells you he wants to achieve enormous social good to provide a better understanding of how lying evolves.  Now, add to it that he is self-deceived.  Doesn’t his credibility implode?  How could one possibly believe a word he says?

04/22/23 198

Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Brooks has the Yoda complex.  So do

McNally and Jackson.  They believe they can look down on the rest of humanity from some exalted plane free of the evolutionary forces that afflict the rest of humanity.  No; they need to climb down and join the world their imaginations have created.  In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception.  It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment.

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 To see this, consider a majority of humans

in a population that are self-deceived and believe that by giving magic Kool-Aid to the defectors, laced with cyanide, they will help them become cooperators.  The few defectors in that situation who try to stop them would be perceived by the majority as the real liars and non-cooperators.  By what standard would anyone in this Darwinian world know the difference between truth and lies?

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary

world collapses into power struggles.  The appeals by Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations to lie” are meaningless.  How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?  How can either of them know what is true?

Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves.  Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 An even stupider notion came out of the 

Association for Psychological Science.  This is the evolutionary story that “political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength”  (see also Science Daily with its photo of a guy flexing his bicep).  A group of Darwine-drunk psychologists are trying to convince the world that “Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution.”  According to them, “an evolutionary perspective may help to illuminate political motivations, at least those of men.” Strong men oppose redistribution of wealth, namby-pamby men and women support it, they claim.  It’s not clear if they intended to impugn Obama’s masculinity this way, and those of all his staff, but it doesn’t really matter how many biceps they measured in their survey of political opinions. (Exercise: list exceptions to their “rule” from world history.)  

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Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 You know their whole premise is false from their comment,

“This is among the first studies to show that political views may be rational in another sense, in that they’re designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.”  OK, their point is?  If physical strength is a measure of fitness “designed” by natural selection, then anti-redistributionism is a measure of fitness, too.  Get the wimps out of the way!  They’re impeding evolutionary progress.  Isn’t “self-interest” the highest good in Darwinism?  We won’t belabor the misconception of conservatism they presented, because they already defeated their credibility by calling natural selection “rational.”  Readers are justified in dismissing everything these quacks say, too, if they had any inclination left to trust the word of “evolutionary psychologists” about anything.

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 Cooperation exists in nature.  Does that

mean it evolved?  Only if evolution is the sole mechanism in your toolkit.

According to a Florida State press release, a professor found that couples show more “prosocial” (i.e., constructive) behavior when one commits to pray for the other.  Frank D. Fincham, director of the Florida State University Family Institute, had this to say:

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 “My previous research had shown that

those who prayed for their partner reported more prosocial behavior toward their partner, but self-reports are subject to potential biased reporting,” Fincham said. “This set of studies is the very first to use objective indicators to show that prayer changed actual behavior, and that this behavior was apparent to the other partner, the subject of the prayer.””

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 All kinds of good things turned up for those who

prayed: forgiveness, cooperation, and positive feelings.  While the benefits appeared substantial, some warning flags should turn up for applying some “scientific method” to a study like this.  For one, participants were asked if they were comfortable with praying before the study began.  For another, there was no designation of the object of the prayers.  And finally, Dr. Fincham only measured the behavior of the praying partner, not whether there was any real answer to the prayer.  Can science study such things?

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 “Until recently, social scientists have stayed away

from studying religion, spirituality and especially prayer, Fincham said, despite the fact that some 5 billion people, or about 75 percent of the world’s population, profess some religious faith.”

But those faiths include everything from Christianity to Buddhism to Islam, whose objects of prayer and patterns of prayer are very different and often contradictory.  While a Jew or Christian might “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” for instance, some Muslims might pray for its destruction.  Some pray earnestly with their minds; others empty their minds and repeat mechanical prayers.  Can the scientific method study sincerity?

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 Prisoner’s Dilemma – or Darwin’s Some evolutionists rush in where angels fear to tread. 

It’s become common these days to study the “evolution of cooperation” in everything from bacteria to humans.  The thinking is that humans are mere animals that, like yeast or bacteria, exhibit certain behaviors by natural selection. For example, one team found “survival of the fastest” among microbes.  Publishing in Current Biology, they used a favorite situation in evolutionary game theory called “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (see video demonstration on The Conversation) to discern how microbes either cooperate or defect as a population grows. 

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 “We conclude that colony growth alone can promote

cooperation and prevent defection in microbes,” they said, extrapolating the behavior of microbes without minds to humans with them: “Our results extend to other species with spatially restricted dispersal undergoing range expansion, including pathogens, invasive species, and humans.”  It shouldn’t be surprising to find humans in a list with pathogens and invasive species.  After all, some advocates of climate control see humans as a kind of pathogen on the planet.  But it seems silly to link cooperative, prosocial behavior merely to colony growth.  Depending on how it’s defined, cooperation was arguably more common in the frontier than in New York City.

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 The Evolution of Capitalism by Natural Selection Another case of applied evolutionary game theory was

published in PNAS (open access), “Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene.”  Even though the authors, Bowles and Choi, deal with modern humans coming out of the hunting and gathering stage into agriculture, they speak of private property rights as a principle that “emerges” in the population under environmental pressures.  They could just as well be speaking of bird nesting sites or bacteria in a Petri dish.  Nowhere does their evolutionary model insert rational design into the equation as something human beings employed.  The paper is listed in the category of “evolutionary game theory.”

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 To see how seamlessly evolutionists move from

bacteria to humans, consider a paper in Nature about bacterial microfilms.  In the same issue of Nature, Ute Römling reviewed the paper as a demonstration of “Bacterial communities as capitalist economies.”  Did we really need an Adam Smith to define the rational principles of capitalism?  It would seem that capitalism or communism are simply emergent properties, given the right environment.  If so, what are rational people to think of the talking heads in the news, the historians, the professors, making such a big deal over politics?  In Darwin’s world, biological entities simply self-organize according to natural selection.

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 These papers are illustrations of the radical

scientism C. S. Lewis warned about, where the rampant application of evolutionary thinking to the human being would undermine all rationality and aesthetics (read The Magician’s Twin for documentation and elaboration).  You know the evolutionists are wrong, though, when you watch them exempt themselves from the power of evolution over them.  Tell your prof that he’s only teaching what he’s teaching because his evolutionary past makes him do it, and he will quickly get angry. 

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 Call his anger an emergent property of selection

pressure, and he will get angrier still.  No evolutionist can live with the implications of their own assumptions.  It is only by promoting themselves into the Yoda plane, where rationality matters, that they can speak their mind.  But the moment they do that, the moment they think of their pronouncements as anything beyond glorified monkey screeches or movements of bacteria in a dish, they are committing a technical foul.  That’s grounds for ousting them from their own evolutionary game, which vanishes in mist behind them.  Have they never considered that apparent cooperation in bacteria, yeast and animals are designed properties instilled into them for a purpose?  If not, why don’t they study the cooperation of rocks?

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷 Regarding prayer, it goes without saying that God

cannot be put in a test tube.  Any attempt to “scientifically” test the efficacy of prayer runs afoul of the sovereignty of God, who often delights in confounding the wisdom of the wise (1 Cor 1:18–29), and catching them in their own craftiness (Job 5:12–13, 2 Sam 22:26–27).  The God of Scripture, however, does invite testing by man on occasion.  In Malachi 3, after admonishing the Israelites for their sin of withholding prescribed Jewish tithes and offerings, the Lord offered them a test of His goodness: “put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.” 

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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer 亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷  Psalm 34:8 says, “O taste and see that the Lord is good! 

Blessed is the soul that takes refuge in Him.”  The Lord submitted to a test by fire, proposed by Elijah, against the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18).  And Isaiah pronounced to all the world that one can test the salvation of God: “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:6–7).  As for why God is not a proper subject of scientific inquiry, He continues: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 It doesn’t take much to stimulate an

evolutionist’s imagination.  A tiny middle ear bone will do.

The press all jumped on a report that some early fossil apes had “human-like” middle ear bones.   The paper, published in PNAS, alleges that the malleus (hammer) of Paranthropus and Australopithecus africanus have human-like proportions, whereas the incus (anvil) and stapes (stirrup) retain ape-like proportions.  Here’s how the press took this:

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 Nature News: “Hearing changes could be

ancient in the human line.” Science Now: “Earliest Ear Bones Sound Off on

Human Hearing.” New Scientist: “Early hominins couldn’t have

heard modern speech.” Science Daily: “Prehistoric Ear Bones Could

Lead to Evolutionary Answers.” Science Daily again: “Oldest Fossil Hominin

Ear Bones Ever Recovered: Discovery Could Yield Important Clues On Human Origins.”

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 Few reporters seem to be asking follow-up

questions of less dramatic import, such as: What is the natural range of variation in the malleus among apes, and what is the natural range of variation for humans?  Has there been any reworking of these tiny delicate bones since they were deposited?  Science Now did state, “The team is not entirely sure what this precocious appearance of a human-like malleus means.”  If so, it seems premature to think that this little bone can reveal anything significant about hearing in extinct apes, much less about human origins.

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 The little bone actually creates a problem for evolutionary

theory.  Science Daily put it, “Since both the early hominin species share this human-like malleus, the anatomical changes in this bone must have occurred very early in our evolutionary history.”  Nature News quoted one evolutionary morphologist, Callum Ross (U of Chicago), who was “underwhelmed” by the announcement, stating that the outer ear has more influence on hearing than the ossicle bones.  He also discounts the importance of minute hearing changes in alleged human ancestors compared to bipedalism, feeding, and brain size.  (Speaking of brain size, another paper in PNAS asserts the surprising claim that “Human frontal lobes are not relatively large” – contradicting over a century of assumptions about human uniqueness in that regard.)

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 The authors of the original paper are not

even sure if their work has any significance to human evolution.  Nature News ended, “But Quam is confident that his team will soon demonstrate the importance of changes in the ossicles.”  Thus, another promissory note was issued in lieu of conclusory evidence.

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 The operative word in most of these articles is

“could.”  The discovery “could” yield important clues on human evolution; the bones “could” lead to evolutionary answers; hearing changes “could” be ancient in the human line.  Whenever you see that word in evolutionary claims, or its siblings “may” or “might,” you have every right to respond, “But then again, it might not lead to evolutionary answers; it may having nothing to do with human evolution; it could be irrelevant to the human line.”  After all, they have demonstrated nothing scientifically.  They are only dealing in possibilities.

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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions 从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论 That’s a theme we will have to explore in future

posts: the prevalence of “possibility thinking” in evolutionary circles.  Think of the possibilities!  This little malleus bone could have opened up hearing for mid-range frequencies!  That could have spurred the development of language!  That could have brought the apes down out of the trees and motivated our ancestors to walk upright!  For shame.  That’s the very kind of faith they disparage in their critics.  When an evolutionist pulls his faith on you like that, tell him to go back into the lab and keep his mouth shut until he has something observable, testable, and repeatable to talk about.

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 New impacts observed on the moon and Mars allow space

scientists to learn about crater formation in near real time.  What conclusions can be drawn?

Moon Flash shot:  On March 17, a flash was reported on the

moon by NASA cameras (see video clip on Space.com).  The object was the size of a small boulder going 56,000 miles per hour.  The crater is estimated to be 65 feet wide.  It was the brightest of 300 such impacts seen, by a factor of ten, since NASA monitoring lunar impacts in 2005.  The video clip states, “Lunar meteor showers have turned out to be more common than anyone expected.”  About 55% come from known meteor swarms; the others are random stragglers.

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 The Earth’s atmosphere protects us

from many such objects, but the fireball over Russia last Feb. 15 (Space.com), made by an object estimated to be 50 feet across (50 times larger than the lunar impactor), made big news as the biggest meteoroid to hit Earth in more than a century.

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 Mars Orbiting spacecraft like the Mars

Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) are allowing planetary scientists to gather “ground truth” data about meteoroid impact rates on another planet.  A press release from the University of Arizona discussed the 250 fresh craters detected by the high-resolution camera on MRO, based on before-and-after images.  Even though this implies hundreds of hits per year, the rate is lower than expected:

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 “Taking before and after pictures of

Martian terrain, researchers of the UA-led HiRISE imaging experiment have identified almost 250 fresh impact craters on the Red Planet. The results suggest Mars gets pummeled by space rocks less frequently than previously thought, as scientists relied on cratering rates of the moon for their estimates.”

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 Can the new data provide any information on the

age of Mars?  “Estimates of the rate at which new craters appear serve as scientists’ best yardstick for estimating the ages of exposed landscape surfaces on Mars and other worlds,” the article says.  There are, however, many variables to consider.  Meteoroids span a whole range of sizes, from dust particles to asteroid-size, each with its own probability of impact.  Objects above a certain threshold can spawn secondary impacts (9/25/07), making date calculations essentially unreliable (see 5/22/12)

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 Today’s rates, furthermore, cannot be

extrapolated into the distant past without making unverifiable assumptions.  So when Alfred McEwen says, “Mars now has the best-known current rate of cratering in the solar system,” he can only speak authoritatively of knowledge in the observational period of the space program.

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 In addition to the major problem of secondaries,

consider other complications when making calculations of crater rates and dates: speed of the impactor, angle of impact, gravity of the target, composition of the impactor and the target surface (e.g., porosity), atmospheric drag, magnetic field, sunlight pressure, focusing effects of other orbiting bodies.  Above all else it is impossible to know whether impact rates have been episodic.  One major swarm can throw all the dates off.  Planetary scientists try to infer a “Late Heavy Bombardment” from lunar data, but as we have seen, that inference is not without critics (4/26/12, 1/09/12, 9/17/10, 2/16/10).

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 By analogy, there are rivers in large canyons

(including the Grand Canyon and, at Mt. St. Helens, Loowit Canyon) that did not carve the canyons—the rivers are relicts of catastrophic events.  Modern viewers might look at these canyons and conclude that the canyons formed by slow, gradual erosion over long periods of time, but we know from Mt. St. Helens that is not true.  The Yellowstone fossil forests were similarly thought to have taken eons of slow processes, but now are thought to represent catastrophic deposits.

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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon 观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞 So when you look at a crater-filled moon

or Mars, or any of the other bodies in the solar system, you cannot know just from the number of craters how old the surface is, no matter what the textbooks and TV documentaries say.  If you won’t take our word for it, look at what Xiao and Strom said in Icarus a year ago (5/22/12).

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 There are more wonders in your body than you

can possibly imagine.  Here are half a dozen new findings for conversation starters.

Your inner bat:  You have another sense you may not be aware of: you can learn the art of echolocation.   It’s been known that blind people develop an ability to detect objects by their echoes, but Science Daily reported that even sighted people can train themselves to do it.  Some people are better at it than others, for unknown reasons.  Echolocation depends on very precise detection of timing differences between the two ears.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 Self-healing holes:  Our blood vessels are made of a

wonderful tissue, called epithelium.  It’s stretchy, stable, and watertight.  Science Daily says, “Measuring just a few hundred nanometers in thickness, this super-tenuous structure routinely withstands blood flow, hydrostatic pressure, stretch and tissue compression to create a unique and highly dynamic barrier that maintains the organization necessary to partition tissues from the body’s circulatory system.”

But there are immune cells, called leukocytes, that need to enter these passageways.  How do they do it?  The article presented findings by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where scientists studied how epithelial cells cooperate with leukocytes, creating holes for them to enter, then healing the holes behind them.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 “By and large, these ensuing “micro –wounds” are short-lived;

as soon as the cells have crossed the endothelium, these pores and gaps quickly heal, restoring the system’s efficient barrier function. In cases when these gaps fail to close — and leakage occurs — the results can be devastating, leading to dramatic pathologies including sepsis and acute lung injury.…

“Described in The Journal of Cell Biology, the new findings suggest that rather than structural robustness per se, the barrier function of the endothelium relies on an enormous self-restorative capacity.…

“The cell’s restorative capacity was just so striking,” says [Christopher V.] Carman. “But these early investigations were still inadequate to tell us how the breaches were being closed. We had to dig down to the sub-cellular level to understand the underlying activities and the molecular signaling mechanisms that were orchestrating these activities.””

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 Viruses, your friends:  You have another immune system

scientists did not realize till recently, and it involves partnership with viruses.  Nature News reported that “Viruses in the gut protect from infection.”  Bacteriophages, tiny viruses that can invade and kill bacteria, find a home among the linings in your airways, by forming bonds with sugars in the mucus.  When bacteria invade, these killing machines, like a robotic army, take them out.  Medical Xpress called this a “new immune system” that has been discovered.  In more general terms, Science Magazine reviewed “our viral inheritance,” giving examples of good and bad ways that viruses interact with our bodies.  Even some endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) that seemed at first to be parasitic on our genomes now appear to be useful or beneficial.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 Nose knowledge:  The sense of smell continues

to be one of the most difficult to understand in humans and in fruit flies.  The molecules that land on olfactory receptors encode messages that are in some ways similar to those in the retina, but there appear to be timing dependences, too, Medical Xpress reported.  Science Magazine reviewed the growing science of “flavor,” trying to understand how we learn to associate smells and tastes with pleasure or displeasure.  “It’s a vastly more complex topic than they once thought,” the article said.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 Your inner clock: We share a sense with

the little flies we swat on our arms: a biological clock.  Because the human circadian clock is much more complex, scientists try to understand the clock in fruit flies.  Medical Xpress reported that a new component of the fruit fly circadian clock has been identified.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 Six degrees of separation:  Because the brain is so heavily

interconnected, any synapse is only about six steps away from any other.  This allows for an enormous amount of plasticity for “rewiring” circuits when one part is damaged.  Science Daily discussed work at UCLA that shows the brain “rewires itself after damage or injury.”  Understanding these processes could lead to therapies for stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients.  Last week, Science Magazine discussed “Why adults need new brain cells.”  Contrary to beliefs decades ago, neuroscientists now know that brain cell regeneration takes place.  Not only that, “a key function of adult neurogenesis is to shape neuronal connectivity in the brain according to individual needs,” the article said.  Because of the brain’s plasticity and massively parallel architecture, Sandia Labs is looking to the human brain as “a model for supercomputers,” PhysOrg reported.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 To make a point without attempting to be

morbid, these findings underscore why the death of a human being, whether in a tornado or an abortion lab, is such a traumatic thing.  It’s like smashing a supercomputer, destroying a working factory, obliterating a work of art.  A dead body returns to undifferentiated dust that fulfills none of these fantastically complex processes.

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Amazing Body Facts惊人的身体事实 The Bible describes death as an enemy, the

result of sin that infected the planet with a curse and judgment.  The only hope of a new body that can live forever is faith in Jesus Christ, who paved the way for salvation through His death and resurrection (I Corinthians 15).  If you marvel at the body you have now, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (I Corinthians 2:9).

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 Science reporters are dancing with happy feet about a news

story supposedly explaining how penguins evolved. The new documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds states, “More

than 9,000 species of birds have been identified in the world, and nearly all of them can fly.”  The “nearly all” reserves room for flightless birds, such as ostriches, kiwis and penguins.  The flightless cormorant on the Galapagos, with its pathetically stunted wings, appears to have descended from mainland birds capable of flight, later becoming adapted to flightlessness on the islands where swimming was sufficient for survival.  This is a similar kind of “evolution” to that of blind cave fish, descended from normal fish, losing their eyes as they became adapted to total darkness.  In addition, some fossils alleged to be “feathered dinosaurs” are thought by some paleontologists to have been secondarily flightless birds (4/27/12).  But what about penguins?

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 Penguins are superb swimmers, well adapted to their

Antarctic climate.  They use their wings to “fly” in a different fluid—water, not air.  The sight of a swarm of penguins darting through the water under the ice with speed and grace makes for dramatic film footage.  Most of the major science news sites (e.g., BBC News, National Geographic, Science Now, Nature News, New Scientist) are claiming that the “puzzle” of penguin flightlessness has been “solved” in a new study published in PNAS.  Earlier theories suggested that the lack of predators led to flightlessness, or that evolution had a hard time producing a wing that was good at both flying and swimming.

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 An international team took a different

approach.  They measured the energy demands of flight.  There’s no question that maintaining flight in the air is costly.  Some birds, like cormorants and penguins, are good at both.  But if aerial flight is not required for successful feeding, a bird could focus its wings, feet, and other body parts on just the swimming.

04/22/23 248

The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 The authors measured the energy cost of flying for the

guillemot, a bird that looks remarkably like a penguin but can fly (see photo on PhysOrg’s article; see also 7/23/12 entry).  They found that its wings allow it to barely stay aloft; it is exhausting for the bird, that swims effectively to catch fish.  They feel the guillemot is near a “tipping point” where it might some day reach an “evolutionary trade-off” to give up aerial flying. They also compared the energy expenditures for murres (10/27/11) and cormorants (5/24/04), two other kinds of fishing seabirds.  One co-author put it, “Basically the hypothesis is that as the wings became more and more efficient for them to dive, they became less and less efficient for them to fly.”  The abstract says,

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 “These results strongly support

the hypothesis that function constrains form in diving birds, and that optimizing wing shape and form for wing-propelled diving leads to such high flight costs that flying ceases to be an option in larger wing-propelled diving seabirds, including penguins.”

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 But how is the change explained in evolutionary theory? 

Surprisingly, none of the articles mentioned natural selection, even though National Geographic’s headline quipped, “Why Did Penguins Stop Flying? The Answer Is Evolutionary.” There was no mention of a mechanism for evolving a penguin out of a flying seabird.  Presumably, the loss of aerial flight occurred by some kind of negative selection, or “de-evolution.”  This doesn’t explain, though, why some seabirds maintained both swimming and flight.  Guillemots do not seem to be evolving into something else.  In the 7/23/12 entry, researchers found that the birds maintain their energy fitness into old age, even though flight is costly.  Certainly, none of the flightless birds thought about exercising an “option” to go swimming only.  Somehow, the adaptation had to make it into the genes, otherwise it sounds like Lamarckism (use and disuse, inheritance of acquired characteristics).

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 None of the articles, in addition, exhibited a chain of fossil

birds leading to the penguin.  On the contrary, National Geographic offered only speculation:

“Scientists don’t have fossils of flighted penguin ancestors, and the earliest known penguin dates to just after the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (58 to 60 million years ago).

“It is tempting to speculate that the evolution of penguins happened in that explosive radiation [of mammal species] that happened just after the K-T event,” when many species went extinct, Speakman said. “However, there is no direct evidence to support this, and it could have happened any time during the late Cretaceous.”

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 So the first fossil penguin was already a

penguin.  The phrase “explosive radiation,” further, offers no mechanism for evolution to produce complex creatures like elephants and giraffes with new organs requiring large increases in genetic information.  Penguins, by contrast, contain all the same basic features as other birds.  With their modified wings, they continue to fly—underwater.

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 Speaking of fossil birds, PhysOrg reported that

the classification of Archaeopteryx has been disputed again.  One disputant offered this advice: “methodological choices should be based on the adequacy of the assumptions for particular kinds of data rather than on the recovery of preferred or generally accepted topologies, and that certain probability methods should be interpreted with caution as they can grossly overestimate character support.”

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 National Geographic, we know it’s

tempting to speculate.  You must learn to resist temptation.  Speculation is the besetting sin of Darwinists.  Readers, did you catch the reference in that quote to Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law?  “It is tempting to speculate that the evolution of penguins happened in that explosive radiation… that happened.…”  Review the 9/15/2008 commentary.

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 It’s reasonable to assume that many creationists,

even strict recent-creation advocates, would allow for penguins to have ancestors that flew like the guillemot.  The similarities are very striking.  If creationists can believe blind cave fish “evolved” from seeing fish in a short time, it’s not a stretch for them to suppose that penguin ancestors flew in the Antarctic originally, then lost their wings as life under the sea ice proved sufficient for their needs.  This is not Darwinian evolution, because it does not require increases in information, but only modifications to existing genes and gene regulation.

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 There are reasons, though, to believe that penguins

have always been penguins.  One is the fossil record.  Where is the ancestral evidence for flying penguins?  Perhaps one will turn up some day, but in the meantime, we should accept the evidence at face value, that penguins have always been flightless in air.  The Creator outfitted each kind of bird with the traits it needed to fill the Earth with a profusion of amazing creatures reproducing after their kind.  As usual, the fossil record shows a profusion of larger and stronger representatives in the past (read about “super-penguin” in our 10/01/10 entry).  Our world is impoverished after the Deluge.

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The Evolution of Penguins企鹅的进化 To appreciate in more detail the

mechanisms inside birds that make them such watchable flying machines, be sure to get the new Illustra Media documentary, Flight: The Genius of Birds.  You can watch the episode about development in the egg from the film right now on Illustra’s Facebook page.  Become a subscriber and join the discussion.

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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来 NASA’s Astrobiology Program is charting a new roadmap for future

projects, and the public is allowed to voice its opinions. Astrobiology Magazine announced “A Roadmap for the Future of

Astrobiology.”  Born in 1996, the new “science” of astrobiology was an interdisciplinary effort with the following 7 goals:

Understanding the nature and distribution of habitable environments in the universe

Exploring for habitable environments and life in our own Solar System

Understanding the emergence of life Determining how early life on Earth interacted and evolved with its

changing environment Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms and environmental

limits of life Determining the principles that will shape life in the future Recognizing signatures of life on other worlds and on early Earth.

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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来 Yet after 17 years, no solid evidence for “astro”biology

exists.  Since NASA’s projects in astrobiology are funded with tax dollars, the public has a right to express its views on the value of these questions, and whether a new consortium of scientists is needed to address them.  Many of these subjects have long been studied without the formation of a new “science” garnering additional funds.

Members of the public interested in voicing their opinions about the future of astrobiology can log in at astrobiologyfuture.org and express themselves.  In addition, there is always the avenue of writing one’s representatives.

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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来 Astrobiology is one of the biggest boondoggles in NASA. 

In 1996, an overly hyped NASA press conference about possible fossils in a Martian meteorite (since debunked) launched the new science of astrobiology; now we’re stuck with it (coincidence?).  Any new science is not just a name; it’s an institution.  It costs money to print materials, hold conferences, run websites and do all the other things that come along with a new label.  How would you like it if NASA invented a new “science” called “astropsychology” and asked the government for millions of dollars for establishing new journals, building research centers, and holding conferences for scientists to speculate about what they know nothing about?  (Oh, wait a minute—wasn’t that called SETI?)

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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来 There’s astronomy, and there’s biology, but never the

twin shall meet until and unless life is actually found beyond Earth.  Fifty years of searching has turned up nothing.  It’s a mythical science.  Studies of extrasolar planets and their habitability could be performed, and have been performed, without calling it astrobiology.  All the rest is predicated on belief in materialistic Darwinian evolution.  Darwinists have been studying all that stuff for decades, long before 1996, and they probably would on their own dime anyway.  (Don’t you love #3, “Understanding the emergence of life” — the old Stuff Happens Law.  Without the magic word “emergence,” Darwinism wouldn’t have a concept to talk about.)

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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来 “Astrobiology” is a euphemism for materialistic philosophy

masquerading as science.  Here’s a roadmap for them, all right: a big U-turn and refund.  Can we still afford this boondoggle in a struggling economy, with foreign enemies trying to kill us and our allies?  Why not fight cancer with the money?  You have a brief opportunity to tell NASA what you think about the way they are spending your tax dollars to speculate in front of the nation about “emergence” by materialistic means of the most complex systems in the universe.  Even the simplest functional protein can be calculated as so astronomically improbable, it will never “emerge” under the most hopeful conditions (source).  Yet faith in the impossible drives these shamans to convince gullible people that they, too, emerged on a lucky planet once upon a time.  If this riles you, speak up.*

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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来 *Please be discreet if you state your views

on their website.  Ranting only backfires.  Also, appeals to religion or creationism will be rejected without consideration.  There are plenty of scientific and philosophical questions that they cannot dismiss at the outset.  Learn the art of asking the right questions and stating opinions in a way that commands respect.

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Evolution is one of the most carelessly-used words in

science, as several recent articles show.  Not all change is evolution the way Darwin meant it.

Roaches check in, and they also check out:  Those omnivorous pests have outsmarted engineers again.  Even though they like sugar in the wild, they have learned to avoid sugary-tasting poison in roach traps.  Sure enough, you can watch the smarter bugs in a video clip on Live Science.  Stephanie Pappas headlined the story, “Yikes!  Cockroaches Evolved to Avoid Sugary Baits.”  The authors of the paper in Science claimed that the German cockroaches “rapidly evolved an adaptive behavioral aversion to glucose.”  They spoke of glucose aversion as a “gain of function adaptation” that “emerged” in their study population.

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” The scientists did not state, though, if the glucose-

averse roaches represent a new species.  Darwinian evolution is not just about changes of adaptive behavior within a species, but the arrival of new species.  If the glucose-averse roaches are interfertile with the wild type, no evolution has occurred.  In the Live Science article, furthermore, one of the paper’s authors admitted that glucose avoidance could have been an ancient trait that surfaced under the new environmental condition of encountering man-made bait traps.  “Some plants produce toxic bittersweet compounds that roaches would have needed to avoid before humans came around.”

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Even worse, the glucose-avoiding roaches may

be less healthy.  In Science Daily, that same co-author admitted they grow more slowly in the lab without the environmental stress.  “Cockroaches have to adapt to a varied and unreliable food supply, and glucose-aversion places an additional restriction on obtaining adequate nutrition.”  In any case, this is certainly not a case supporting Darwinian evolution—universal common ancestry via natural selection.

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Name it and claim it:  Just claiming something evolved

does not make it so.  Asking why some flowers close at night, Elizabeth Palermo on Live Science credited evolution.  Those plants are “highly evolved,” she said.  That’s no better than ridiculing another human as being less evolved than you are.  Then she admitted, “scientists are not quite sure why some plants, particularly flowers, evolved this way.”  You can’t just say that the trait might be a “highly evolved defense mechanism against a plant’s nocturnal predators.”  Without an explanation based on mutation and natural selection, this is mere speculation.  For all Palermo knows, plants were designed that way.

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Negative selection:  Some developmental processes

involve killing of cells that are not needed in the finished adult form.  It happens in the developing thymus, for instance; in PLoS Biology, Caitlin Sedgwick wrote, “To prevent autoimmunity, developing T cells undergo a process called negative selection, wherein strongly ‘self-reactive’ T cells are provoked to undergo apoptosis (cellular suicide) before they leave the thymus.”  This is not evolution, either, even though she boasted of “Bringing You Negative Selection, Alive and In Color.”  The word “selection” might cause one to think this is about Darwinian evolution.  It’s not; the only evolution here is the “evolution [i.e., unfolding] of apoptotic events.”

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Not everything Darwin said is evolution:  Charles Darwin

wrote about a lot of things, not all of which support his idea of universal common ancestry via unguided natural processes.  A story on PhysOrg is a case in point; “research proves Darwin prediction,” the headline reads, but the principle at issue is whether “productivity increases with species diversity.”  Creationists would accept a substantial amount of variation within created kinds.  Although the researcher mentioned “evolutionary distance,” the distance doesn’t have to be evolutionary.  Creationists acknowledge a lot of morphological distance between a zebra and a zebrafish.  Even critics of Darwin recognized he was right about some things.  Nothing in the data of this story necessarily supports Darwin’s most famous notion, that zebras are descendants of microbes.

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Guided variation is not evolution:  It’s like a pesky

urban legend that won’t die: artificial selection is not evolution.  It’s intelligent design, even if the engineers use random variation in the process.  Another example appeared on Live Science, where Wynn Parry wrote, “Evolution May Help Build Better Robots.”  Then he transferred the design from the engineers to the robots themselves, claiming, “In the real world, animals have evolved the ability to get from point A to B by galloping, crawling and jumping. Now, robots in the virtual world have accomplished something similar.”

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Turtle embryonic development is not evolution: 

On Science Daily, the word “evolution” was used in connection with observations of turtle development from the embryo.  First, the article said that turtles are “not primitive reptiles as previously thought, but are related to the group comprising birds and crocodilians, which also includes extinct dinosaurs.”  Whether that relationship illustrates common ancestry or not, the statement argues against a simple-to-complex process.  Then the article confused embryonic development with evolution.  Here again, though, was a conundrum: “The study also reveals that despite their unique anatomy, turtles follow the basic embryonic pattern during development.” 

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Even if the shell arrives late in the process, when limb

development normally occurs, the highly complex process of development can hardly be used to support the notion that “turtle shell evolved by recruiting part of the genetic program used for the limbs.”  Evolution is not a recruiter.  That’s the personification fallacy.  Yet based on this, one of the researchers stated, “The work not only provides insight into how turtles evolved, but also gives hints as to how the vertebrate developmental programs can be changed to produce major evolutionary novelties”—all that after admitting that these “evolutionary monsters” are unique in the animal kingdom.

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” Data points within natural variation of a species are not

evolution:  The Chinese found another “new hominin” in a cave based on its teeth.  But then, the article on PhysOrg admits, “the size of these teeth all falls [sic] into the tooth size variation of Chinese modern humans.”  How, then, are these teeth assumed to be from a different ancestral species?  As usual, when the data are unconvincing, more research is needed: “Our excavation shows the cave has great potential perspectives,” the researcher said.  “Further excavation and laboratory study of cave development, filling sequence, hominin teeth morphology, dating, and environmental change from the Fuyan Cave as well as some adjacent caves will help better understand the human evolution and adaptive behavior in Southwest Hunan, east Guangxi, and north Guangdong.”

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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化” This is how scientists get away with claims that

evolution is essential to biology, and is supported by mountains of evidence.  Why, look at all the scientific papers and articles about it!  How can Darwin skeptics claim it is unscientific?  Well, we can, and we just showed you why.  Ask them for evidence supporting universal common ancestry of all life by unguided natural processes, and this is the kind of fluff you get.  They accuse their critics of being people of faith, but Darwinians are people of fluff.  Point that out to them, and they become people of froth.  There’s nothing as pitiable as people of froth supporting their fluff by faith.

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 Here are some new ways scientists are

imitating plants and animals to understand their designs and make new products.

Polymer Breakthrough Inspired by Trees and Ancient Celtic Knots (Science Daily).  “A new slow-motion method of controlling the synthesis of polymers, which takes inspiration from both trees and Celtic Knots, opens up new possibilities in areas including medical devices, drug delivery, elastics and adhesives.”

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 Ant studies to aid design of search and rescue

robots (BBC News).  Stick your finger in sand and the hole fills back in.  Somehow, fire ants can make narrow tunnels in sand—any kind of sand or soil, even sand composed of artificial glass beads.  A video clip in the article shows fire ants constructing narrow tunnels not much wider than their own bodies, allowing them to catch themselves to prevent falling in vertical orientations.  Nick Gavish at Georgia Tech wants to learn how they do it.  He envisions search-and-rescue operations taking advantage of loose rubble to build passageways for victims.  So he is going to the ant to distil “the principles by which ants and other animals manipulate complex environments.”

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 Moth-Inspired Nanostructures Take the Color

out of Thin Films (Science Daily).  We’ve learned in previous biomimetics entries about enhancing colors with “photonic crystals,” structural designs found on butterfly wings.  The reverse effect—diminishing reflections—can also be achieved structurally, by cancelling out wavelengths through destructive interference.  That’s how a moth’s eye works – and scientists at North Carolina State are “mimicking that concept” to improve the performance of solar cells.

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 Snake’s ultra-black spots may aid high-tech quest (PhysOrg)

– and that quest is “to create the ultimate light-absorbing material.”  How does the snake illustrate the ultimate?  “The West African Gaboon viper, one of the largest in Africa and a master of camouflage, has dark spots in the geometrical pattern of its skin that are deep, velvety black and reflect very little light.” the article says. That’s because “Interwoven with white– and brown-coloured scales that are very reflective, this creates a high contrast that renders the snake difficult to spot on the richly-patterned rainforest floor.”  Following the “snake’s nanotechnology” could prove beneficial to man: “The micro-ornamentation on the snake’s velvet black scales is a further example that the same physical law applies to both nature and technology and leads consequently to similar constructions.”

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 DNA-Guided Assembly Yields Novel Ribbon-

Like Nanostructures (Science Daily).  DNA continues to be an ideal molecule to work with.  It acts in unique ways due to its small size.  “Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that DNA ‘linker’ strands coax nano-sized rods to line up in way [sic] unlike any other spontaneous arrangement of rod-shaped objects.”  What cannot be done at the macro scale can work for nano-fabrication.

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 Advanced Biological Computer Developed (Science Daily).  We’ve reported on DNA computing before, but now, “Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations.”  Biological computing is attractive because it can interact directly with living things.  Maybe that will someday be a cause for alarm, but for now, they have benefits to human health in mind.  One statement in the article that emphasizes the close ties between natural and artificial computing could have been written by an advocate of intelligent design:

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 “All biological systems, and even entire living

organisms, are natural molecular computers. Every one of us is a biomolecular computer, that is, a machine in which all components are molecules “talking” to one another in a logical manner. The hardware and software are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical tasks. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, programmed changes, following a specific set of rules (software) and the output of this chemical computation process is another well defined molecule.”

04/22/23 285

New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 A look back at the first biomimetics:  Velcro is

one of the classic cases of the imitation of nature.  At Live Science, Ryan Goodrich told the story of Swiss engineer and amateur mountaineer George de Mestral, who conceived the natural “zipperless zipper” by observing cockleburs on a hike in 1948.  The article reveals where the name came from, and brings the story up to the present by mentioning a few of the many applications of this highly useful product that was “Inspired by Nature.”

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 Most of these instances of biomimetic

technology have not been mentioned in previous entries.  That suggests that much, much more awaits to be discovered.  Why not join the fun, and look around your yard for ideas?  What solutions to real-life problems have been solved by plants or animals around you?  Maybe you could become the next millionnaire, plagiarizing what the Creator already invented.  Give Him the glory and He will not mind the imitation.

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New Biomimetics Stories新仿生学的故事 The quote above is a keeper.  Show

that to someone who thinks intelligent design is a science stopper or a religious concept.  On the contrary, I.D. is the only way to understand biology in the 21st century.  ID ID -> IDEA (meaning, IDentify Intelligent Design as a forward-looking idea).

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Whenever you hear “all scientists agree” or “we now know,” it’s

no guarantee a finding won’t be disputed years later.  In the following examples, CEH focuses not so much on the content of the disputed subjects as the implications for philosophy of science.

The big warm up:  One very strong consensus among establishment scientists right now is that humans are causing global warming.  Science Daily reported a survey of 4,000 abstracts of scientific papers that indicated an “overwhelming consensus among scientists,” as high as 97%, “that recent warming is human-caused” (cf. fallacy of statistics).  Yet contrary data still arise from time to time.  For instance, New Scientist reported that re-analysis of global temperatures over the last decade shows that “Earth will warm more slowly over this century than we thought it would” – diminishing some of the frantic appeals for immediate action of past years. 

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Apparently the rate of heating hit a plateau even with more

greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere.  It doesn’t change the consensus; the new data are just “buying us a little more time to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change,” the article continued.  Likewise, PhysOrg spun the new data to mean that we still face a “Dire outlook despite global warming ‘pause’,” according to the study published in Nature Geoscience.  Skeptics of global warming like to point out that a few decades ago, the consensus warned that Earth was approaching a period of global cooling that would have drastic effects on human life.

What will the consensus believe about climate change in a few years or decades?  Nobody knows.  It’s instructive, though, to look at other examples of shifting consensus in science.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Salt is good:  Jesus once said “Salt it good” (intending

a spiritual application, Luke 14:34), but dietary salt has been a bogeyman for many years according to the scientific community.  That’s why it was shocking to find a report in Science Magazine that “smashes the paradigm that lower [salt intake] is better.”  It’s a serious overturn, too: “an expert panel … says that there is little evidence that dropping below 2300 mg of salt lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease—and some hints it might actually do harm.”  Some scientists, to be sure, are complaining that the report is flawed, but the problem is that science may never be able to figure out what advice is sound:

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 “Radically reducing your salt intake is good

for your health. Or is it? That question is at the center of a passionate debate once again after an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report last week called into question official recommendations advising people to consume less sodium. The high-profile study is the latest in a controversy that has raged for decades—and some researchers say the science of salt is so complex that they may never find solid answers.”

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Those already at risk of cardiovascular

problems might benefit from lower sodium intake, but what about the majority of healthy people?  Scientists still agree that American consumption is too high; it’s mainly the advice for radical reduction that is being questioned.  But who knows?  Evidence linking high salt intake to disease for healthy people is spotty.  Philosophically, there’s also a risk of confusing cause and effect:

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 “The evidence is far from clear-cut. It mainly comes

from studies on patients treated for serious diseases, which means there is a danger of confusing cause and effect, Antman warns. For instance, patients with heart failure or metastatic cancer might have a low sodium intake simply because they eat less. “This is not solid evidence,” he says.”

The article goes on to give physiological reasons why reduced sodium might cause harm in some people.  There may be political and rhetorical reasons behind the low-salt craze, too: “Sodium is just easier to measure and make public policy around,” one remarked.  Another said, “If you are going to ask people to change something, you need to have at least a clue that there will be a benefit.”

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Fat is not all bad:  Here’s another surprise.  Obesity has

been a large topic for discussion in the news.  Fat certainly doesn’t improve one’s looks, but does it shorten life?  Possibly not, reported Nature. In “The big fat truth,” Virginia Hughes revealed a kind of scientific conspiracy: “More and more studies show that being overweight does not always shorten life — but some public-health researchers would rather not talk about them.”  And it’s not just that being a little overweight is less harmful than thought.  Look at this: a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association provided evidence that “people deemed ‘overweight’ by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of ‘normal’ weight over the same time period.” 

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 This caused an outrage at Harvard, where

organizers of a packed-out event wanted to explain “why [the] new study about weight and death was absolutely wrong.”  It’s a “pile of rubbish,” one scientist said, worried about how the fast-food industry might spin the story.  Nevertheless, Nature sided with the need to remain objective about the “obesity paradox” a string of findings showing that, while obesity is clearly bad, having a few extra pounds is not necessarily unhealthy—and might actually be beneficial.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 The story illustrates how the political and sociological

influences on scientific consensus cannot be ignored.  The article tied into our first discussion about climate change:

Willett says that he is also concerned that obesity-paradox studies could undermine people’s trust in science. “You hear it so often, people say: ‘I read something one month and then a couple of months later I hear the opposite. Scientists just can’t get it right’,” he says. “We see that time and time again being exploited, by the soda industry, in the case of obesity, or by the oil industry, in the case of global warming.”

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 But isn’t it science’s job to “get the world

right,” not to worry about policy?  Can they blame individuals and industries for taking advantage of findings that contradict the consensus?  That’s how the lead author of the JAMA paper feels.  “Our job is not to make policy, it’s to provide accurate information to guide policy-makers and other people who are interested in these topics,” Katherine Flegal said.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Ethicists act ethically, right?  Readers might be

disturbed to find out that experts whose business it is to judge ethics do not necessarily act any more ethically than the rest of us. Science Daily wonders who is watching the watchers:

“Do ethicists engage in better moral behavior than other professors? The answer is no. Nor are they more likely than nonethicists to act according to values they espouse, according to researchers from the University of California, Riverside and Stetson University in Florida.”

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Volcano winter, not:  It made for a good story.  A super-

eruption of Indonesian supervolcano Mt. Toba 70,000 years ago—the largest eruption of the past 2.5 million years—changed the course of human evolution, driving our ancestors nearly extinct in a kind of “nuclear winter” scenario as ash blocked the sun and made early man shiver to death.  Maybe not; Live Science reported, based on a paper in PNAS, that new evidence shows little if any effect on humans in Africa or India, even though ash has been found twice as far away as previously thought.  Even though Mt. Toba put out over 200 times as much ash as Krakatoa, there was no evidence of cooling in lake sediments in Africa, and artifacts from India show that people got along fairly well.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Who’s crazy?  As reported before (5/10/13, 5/18/12),

psychiatry is embroiled in controversy with the release of its new bible of psychiatric diseases, DSM-5, this month.  Are we to believe one article in New Scientist that 1 in 5 children develops a mental disorder each year?  Or is Live Science more correct to question the controversial diagnoses in the field’s bible?  Maybe the authors of the manual need a serious diagnosis themselves if they think 20% of the population is abnormal.  Evolution News & Views considered this an example of how a “science” can collapse, comparing 14 of psychiatry’s faults with those of Darwinian evolution.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Bye-bye, instinctual attachment theory:  It was all the rage in the post-World War II era: “instinctual attachment theory.”  Have you seen those black-and-white photos of Harry Harlow getting a monkey baby to cuddle up to a fake mother made of wire and cloth?  The conclusion drawn from such experiments by Konrad Lorentz and John Bowlby was that infant humans are like baby ducks, imprinting on their mother at a critical period of “instinctual attachment.”  Without it, they develop psychological problems.  The researchers apparently ignored other factors, like peer influence, on maturation.  Writing for Science Magazine, Ben Harris did not have much good to say about this flawed theory in hindsight as he reviewed a new book on it by historian of science Marga Vicedo, titled The Nature and Nurture of Love From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (U of Chicago Press).   The take-home message is larger than one story about how a few scientists fooled themselves and the public:

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 “As the reader learns, animal research was not

the only discipline misrepresented by the radical instinctivists. Anna Freud, for example, complained that Bowlby excised the subjective, psychological essence of psychoanalysis in his fervor to biologize the infant-mother bond. In her chronicles of such disagreements between Bowlby and his critics, Vicedo’s analysis of scientific evidence is thorough enough to be used in a course on research methodology.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 “As a historian of science, however, she is after

bigger game. Sheasks how a scientific theory can endure when its evidence and logic are persuasively refuted by experts. Her answer is that Bowlby’s attachment theory brought the authority of biology to the seemingly less rigorous field of developmental psychology. It also borrowed from enough scientific and social-scientific specialties to outflank critics who only knew one discipline. And compared to their opponents, Bowlby and Lorenz presented a united front that persisted for decades—while others moved to new research questions.”

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 Caveat emptor:  When evaluating “What science says”

or “What scientists believe,” we should remember H. L. Mencken’s proverb, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  Politicians and special-interest groups are all too hasty to cite the consensus in support of their agendas, charging their opponents with being “deniers” or worse if they dispute what “science says.”  Mario Livio, writing for Nature in the aftermath of some recent high-profile retractions and frauds, called on scientists to embrace their mistakes.  There’s a human tendency to want to cover up research mistakes, but in actuality, even the mistake can trigger scientific progress in other directions.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 In the “Science and Culture Update” on talk-show host

Michael Medved’s radio program this week (hear it on ID the Future), Discovery Institute fellows Stephen Meyer and Jay Richards chatted with Medved about the problems with scientific consensus.  When should an individual doubt a concensus?  Richards explains that “the consensus says” can be a catch-phrase that signals an appeal to authority – else the debater would simply cite the evidence to support his claim.  Meyer emphasized that good science thrives on open debate, not just about the evidence, but about the interpretation of the evidence.  “Saying there’s a consensus means we don’t have to argue.  That’s what’s unscientific,” he said.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 In 2003, the late novelist Michael Crichton gave

a devastating critique of consensus to an audience of scientists at Caltech, where he said, “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.  In science consensus is irrelevant.”  For more of his comments, see the 12/27/2003 entry or the entire speech here.

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 As we consider these lessons for their application to the

creation-evolution debate, we offer a quote by William Patten of Dartmouth from 1930: “Evolution itself has long since passed out of the field of scientific controversy.  There is no other subject on which scientific opinion is so completely unanimous.  It is the one great truth we most surely know.”  In 1943, Edwin Grant Conklin said, “The fact of evolution is no longer questioned by men of science.”  Yet evolution remains controversial to the present, a majority of the public disagreeing with the scientific consensus.  The Darwinians continue using their consensus as a bandwagon fallacy to try to keep their critics at bay.  We think scientific conclusions should be determined by the evidence, not the consensus.  If one Darwin skeptic were right, and a million scientists disagreed, who would you believe?

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So科学家们同意的事情不是如此 This entry is primarily about scientific consensus, but the

flip side is that non-scientists can also hang onto notions that aren’t true.  To that problem, we would like to show that gullibility is part of human nature, something we all need to address.  While scientists are “supposed to” have more rigorous standards of evidence, we wrongly assume that the category “scientist” is different in kind from that of “people” in general.  Here’s a quote by C. S. Lewis that ties us all together: “Experimental verification is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the deficiencies of mere logic.  We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought. The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Birds evolved from dinosaurs; that’s the evolutionary

consensus.  Let’s examine the evidence for that scenario.

In “Feathers Before Flight,” Julia Clarke [U of Texas] gathered together the evidence birds evolved from dinosaurs in a Review article for Science Magazine.  To the untrained eye, the confident assertions can seem convincing.  Buried within the text, though, are the bits and pieces of actual fossil evidence used to support the conclusion.  Do they support the evolutionary picture?  Her first paragraph seems to have more gap than link:

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ “Feathers are branched structures consisting of β-keratin—a

rigid protein material formed by pleated β sheets—with a hollow central shaft. They are strikingly different from other forms of vertebrate integument such as scales, skin, and hair. Until recently, evolutionary hypotheses envisioned their origin through elongation of broad, flat scales driven by selection for aerial locomotion such as gliding or flapping flight. Over the course of the past two decades, fossil discoveries, especially from northeast China, have revealed that the early precursors of feathers were filament-like rather than expanded scales and that branched pinnate feathers of modern aspect predate the origin of active flight. The revolution in our understanding of feather evolution continues, driven by rapid fossil discoveries and by new information from the study of extant birds.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ She implies that the scale-to-feather theory is out.  Somehow,

filaments emerged where scales once existed.  Two statements stand out in this quote: that feathers are “strikingly different from any other forms of vertebrate integument,” and that “branched pinnate feathers predate the origin of active flight.”  The first is confirmed by discussions in the new Illustra Media documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds, where an animation of a single feather shows a complex structure complete with a hook-and-groove microstructure that provides an ideal mechanism for flight: lightweight, flexible, and strong.  The second claim, that feathers predate flight, will have to be supported further down in Clarke’s review.

Clarke calls the new ideas of feather evolution “transformative,” suggesting that previous evolutionary scenarios taught in textbooks are no longer correct.  Most notable in transforming evolutionary beliefs have been the Chinese fossils:

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ “The Chinese deposits provide one such unique

snapshot, where over a thousand specimens with fine details of soft tissues such as feathers, hair, and skin are preserved in ash-rich lake deposits ranging from the Late Jurassic ( 150 million years ago) to the Early ∼Cretaceous ( 120 million years ago)∼ . Fossils from these deposits have revealed that dinosaurs that were inferred from bone characteristics to be closely related to living birds also share more features of feather structure.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Acceptance of the evolutionary story is going to

require acceptance of the dates, and with that, the belief that a lake was repeatedly buried in ash over a period of 30 million years – a very long time for an ecological community to survive with volcanoes going off.  Has anyone thought that through?  Would a dinosaur with filaments get buried in ash, then a lake form again, then more-evolved creatures with more-advanced feathers happen along, only to be buried in fine ash again, preserving soft tissues?  Would this cycle repeat for 30 million years?

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Between Clarke’s retellings of the consensus dinosaur-to-

bird scenario, curious statements appear.  “The latter forms do not fit the hypothesis of flat scales morphing directly into flat feathers,” she writes.  “But these hollow filaments or ‘protofeathers’ are similar to structures seen early in feather development; a simple hollow cylindrical sheath arises first in feather ontogeny from the collar of the feather follicle before the barb ridges, linked to the development of its branching shape, form.”  There are two problems for evolution here.  One is the gap between scales and filaments.  The other is that her statement sounds like Recapitulation Theory: a modern bird’s feathers remember their ancestral forms as they develop.  The idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is generally frowned upon in evolutionary circles.

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Another problem is her statement, “Fossil data

indicated dramatic shifts from scale to filament, to bunches of filaments, to branched feathers in theropod dinosaurs.”  Evolutionists typically like to avoid dramatic shifts, preferring gradual changes that mutation and selection can accommodate.  (Whether theropod dinosaurs had branched feathers will have to wait for the fossils she presents.)

But then, Clarke mentions another gigantic conundrum confronting the simple scenario:

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ “The more recent discoveries of a basal ornithischian

dinosaur with a filamentous body covering, and another ornithischian more closely related to Triceratops with a bristle-covered tail, force reconsideration of the timing of this transition. These fossils indicate that filamentous structures may be ancestral to dinosaurs. Filaments called pycnofibers also covered some pterosaurs. Ornithischian dinosaurs, sauropod dinosaurs, and pterosaurs are on evolutionary branches that split from that of theropod dinosaurs and birds about 230 million years ago in the Triassic. If these structures have the same evolutionary origin, a form of filamentous integumentary structure evolved from scales nearly 100 million years before the locomotor transition that we call the origin of birds (see the figure).”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ If 30 million years is a problem, how about 100

million?  The findings (accepting the evolutionary dates) now require filaments to evolve from scales way back, 230 million years ago, long before Triceratops, T. Rex and pterosaurs (let alone feathered theropods) – only to come and go in various species for 80 to 100 million years.  Is that plausible?  And why would feathers “evolve” out of scales long before any functional adaptation?

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ The figure Clarke referred to should be fodder for creationists. 

It shows true pinnate feathers and simple filaments emerging virtually simultaneously in different branches, long after the split from Archosauria.  Not only does this show abrupt appearance; it shows no ancestral relationship between the filaments and the true feathers.  What’s more, the feathers are used for flight in some of the creatures suddenly at the earliest appearance of any integumentary structures.  Instant birds!  If her diagram is authoritative for the evolutionary story, it has “evolution of filaments” a good 50 million years before the first fossil bearing those filaments or feathers – simply because the timing of presumed evolutionary splits between various groups requires the filaments to be in the common ancestor.  Apparently, it is too difficult a pill to swallow for “convergent evolution” of these structures.

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ The emerging evolutionary story is far from simple.  Clarke

points out important questions it raises: “The recent fossil data suggest that key integumentary shifts

might be related not to flight but to innovation in stance, terrestrial gaits, and life history in early archosaurs, which came to dominate terrestrial ecosystems by the end of the Triassic. However, there are unanswered questions. Were there at least three independent and convergent shifts from scales to filaments in Archosauria, with only one of these linked to the origin of feathers and flight? Or was there a single ancient origin of filaments, with subsequent losses in some species and, much later, a second period of novelty seen in the evolution of a branching feather form? Answering these questions is key to understanding the evolution of feathers and other integuments.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ That these key questions remain unanswered undermines

simplistic portrayals that “birds are dinosaurs.”  Generally, composite explanations are not useful in science.  Clarke says that “key integumentary shifts might be related not to flight but to innovation in stance, terrestrial gaits, and life history in early archosaurs.…”  Well, which is it?  Composite explanations won’t do for the student who excuses his missing homework with “either the dog ate it, or my sister threw it away, or I forgot it was due.”  Science needs definitive explanations.  Besides, abrupt appearance is the norm throughout this story.  What is a “key integumentary shift,” anyway?  Did it just “happen” somehow?  What is “innovation,” or a “single ancient origin,” or a “period of novelty” but a confession of ignorance of any mechanism to explain how it arose?  Where are the fossils?  The figure caption reads, “Filamentous feather precursors may have originated nearly 100 million years before the origin of flight, but very few fossil deposits sample this period.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ So despite the confidence shown on TV and museum

displays, the critical fossil evidence for the origin of flight is missing.

“These questions send paleontologists back into the field. Early fossils of most major archosaur lineages are known from records in the Late Triassic and Early to Middle Jurassic ( 225 to 165 million years ago).∼ However, no dinosaur older than the Late Jurassic has been recovered with preserved integuments (scales or feathers). Early pterosaurs are virtually unknown in the fossil record; their earliest fossils with integuments are also Late Jurassic in age (see the figure). A Late Triassic or Early Jurassic site with fine-scale soft tissue preservation would offer crucial insight into this question. However, very few candidate sites are known.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Clarke becomes more confident again, if the early evolution can

be ignored.  “The fossil snapshots that we do have offer much more insight into the evolution of pinnate feathers seen in living birds,” she says, launching into a discussion of what feathers might have been used for before flight emerged.  Maybe it was for sexual display.  “There is no known analog of archosaur filaments in adult living animals, but bird feathers are known to have diverse functions, for example, in flight, display, camouflage, and heat retention.”  Feathers on modern birds might be used for sexual selection, she notes.  But she’s talking about “living birds” there, not where they came from.  It’s only inference that dinosaurs used them for sexual selection before they thought of taking to the skies.  How did that happen?  It’s time to get specific about the origin of flight.  Remember as you read her statement that living birds are irrelevant.  Where are the fossils?

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ “Evidence is thus accruing for the function of early pinnate feathers in

sexual selection, but there is little consensus on shifts in feather function associated with the evolution of flight. Reconstruction of ancestral conditions for the bird lineage requires consensus on the evolutionary relationships of key species. These species differ in feather shape as well as in their organization and layering on the forelimb and hind limb. Whether observed differences can presently speak to a gliding or flapping origin for flight is debated. Species with elongate feathers or a “wing” on the hind limb show characters consistent with a form of aerial locomotion but not one seen in living birds. At the same time, continued research indicates a broader variety of locomotor functions for forelimb feathering in living birds other than powered flight; young living birds flap short pinnate feathers on the forelimb, increasing traction to climb highly inclined surfaces. Although historically, feathers were firmly linked to flapping flight, the evolution of their early locomotor function in climbing, taking off, turning, landing, gliding, or flapping is a key outstanding question.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ The reference to “young living birds” on

“inclined surfaces” is a hat tip to Ken Dial’s “WAIR” hypothesis (wing-assisted incline running), in which he watched living partridge chicks raising their forelimbs as they scuttled up ramps (see story and comments from 12/22/03, 12/03/12).  Her final paragraph is basically an admission that there are more questions than answers about the origin of flight:

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ “The evolution of feathers is now seen as one part

of a broader story concerning the origin of novel integumentary structures in archosaurs, although data on the early parts of this story are very limited. New data multiply the set of questions we must ask about the locomotor transition that we call the evolution of flight. Model-based approaches are needed to explore the varieties of aerial and nonaerial locomotor strategies that extinct dinosaurs may have employed. These must take into account not only the diverse locomotor strategies in living birds but also potential differences in feather properties, shape, and plumage organization.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Like Illustra’s film on Flight says about current speculations on the

evolution of flight, “Each of these theories is highly controversial.”  The film contends that the functional requirements for powered flight cannot be achieved piecemeal by gradual steps.  “It’s really an all-or-nothing proposition,” Paul Nelson explains; “You don’t partly fly, because flight requires not just having a pair of wings, but having your entire biology coordinated towards that function.”  Even if dinosaurs were capable of employing “nonaerial locomotor strategies” of some undefined nature, how did a “locomotor transition” occur, leading to all the biological “innovations” required for powered flight?

Clarke began with a promising title, “Feathers Before Flight.”  She ended on a series of unanswered questions – primarily, “New data multiply the set of questions we must ask about the locomotor transition that we call the evolution of flight.”

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ Oh, wow, this article is so classic of the evolutionary genre, it’s a

virtual gift to creationists.  Aside from the obvious evidential conclusion that dinosaur-to-bird evolution is a myth, Clarke used all the evolutionary tricks of the trade we’ve been pointing out in the Darwin lit for 12 years now: the Stuff Happens law, just-so stories, shielding complex changes in words like “novelty” and “innovation,” promissory notes, the coulda-woulda-shoulda habit, embedding evolution in terms like “protofeathers,” the convergence concoction, using passive verbs and subjunctive mood as covers for ignorance, composite explanations, punk eek, incredible stasis, ghost lineages, “more research is needed,” job security for storytellers, glossing over soft tissue in supposedly ancient material, tidbits of Lamarck and Haeckel as needed when gradualism doesn’t work, forcing uncooperative data into prefab scenarios, parading naked Emperor Charlie in public, sacrificing brains at his shrine – everything.  Hardly a sentence of this article is devoid of fallacies masquerading as science.

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What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight? 在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？ We hope you caught these things before the commentary

began.  If not, you need Creation-Evolution Headlines as a deprogramming course.  Bookmark this site and come for your daily therapy.  Since Ken Dial made an off-camera appearance, we like all beginners to get the shock treatment in our commentary from 12/22/03 – the first time (now a decade ago, still cited favorably by Darwinists) the Montana drunkard-on-Darwine presented living partridge family chicks as possible props to an evolutionary tale.  Read that color commentary now; know the tricks, and you won’t be fooled again.

Flight: The Genius of Birds is now on sale in DVD format!  The Blu-ray edition is coming June 11.  Get breaking news and join the discussion on Illustra’s Facebook Page.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Stem cells continue to show promise for dramatic

healings, but reporters don’t always clarify what lived or died to produce the cells.  Adult stem cells inhabit all living humans; embryonic or fetal stem cells require a human death.

Adult Stem Cell News Cord blood awakens boy:  Parents of a boy with

pediatric cerebral palsy are glad they froze samples of his cord blood when he was born. At age 2–1/2, he had a cardiac arrest with severe brain damage that left him in a persistent vegetative state. Now, Science Daily reported, after the first successful treatment with stem cells from his autologous cord blood, the boy has awakened. He can move and speak simple sentences.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Mesenchymal stem cells and ALS:  It’s an odd

reversal of ethics to put human stem cells in rats, but Medical Xpress reported progress against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by injecting engineered human mesenchymal stem cells into the furry rodents, causing them to produce growth factors that delay onset of the disease.  The article pointed to a benefit of adult stem cells: “By using adult mesenchymal stem cells, the technique avoided the danger of tumor that can arise with the transplant of embryonic stem cells and related ‘do-anything’ cells.”

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Blood stem cells and cancer:  Science

Daily reported on significant improvements in survival for cancer patients with lymphomas, leukemias and other blood cancers, thanks to adult blood stem cells from donors and the patients themselves.  “The significant improvements we saw across all patient and disease populations should offer patients hope and, among physicians, reinforce the role of blood stem cell transplants as a curative option for life-threatening blood cancers and other diseases.”

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Embryonic and Fetal Stem Cell News hESC and blindness:  New Scientist reported a rare

success with human embryonic stem cells.  Implanted into the retina, a man with a form of macular degeneration went from 20/400 (legally blind) to 20/40 (sighted) over time.  Results have not yet been published.

Fetal stem cells and stroke:  New Scientist reported modest improvement in stroke victims injected with stem cells in a new clinical trial.  The article only mentioned where the cells came from in passing.  The researcher “thinks that the fetal neural stem cells injected into the volunteers’ brains may stifle inflammation and catalyse the formation of new blood supplies to stroke-damaged tissue.”

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Cloner trouble:  The embryonic stem cell

success at University of Oregon (see 5/17/13) has come under fire for two things: a rush to publication, and sloppy errors.  New Scientist and Nature reported the controversy.  So far, it appears none of the errors affected the experimental results.  Mitalipov admitted the mistakes but defends his work.

How This Translates to Policy

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Protecting the right to kill:  In the wake of the Mitalipov

success, Nature’s editors urged the journal’s scientific members to take ownership of the stem cell debate, lest public fears stifle progress.  The editors acknowledged, “It is true that the research faces ethical controversy on three fronts: egg donation, embryo destruction and cloning.”  They also acknowledged that induced pluripotent stem cells appear so far to work just as well as hESC without the ethical problems: “crucially they do not require egg recruitment, embryo destruction or cloning.”  Yet the editors seemed more concerned about preventing a public outcry against the destruction of human embryos.  Without proof, they said, “Whatever the outcome of those investigations, there are some clinical applications for which cloned stem cells could be the best option.”  The prior week, though, Nature editors urged scientists to accept more social responsibility for risky new technologies.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Why stop at embryos?  In an article entitled “Alzheimer’s

disease, the soft target of the euthanasia debate,” Medical Xpress aired the views of Megan-Jane Johnstone (Deakin University) about euthanasia.  Johnstone sees a softening of public attitudes about euthanasia with so many elderly declining into dementia.  “The proposal to allow euthanasia as a morally warranted option in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is neither simple nor straightforward,” she said. “Anything less than an honest, transparent and accountable debate, which has been lacking to date, would be an assault on the integrity of all—both those for and against the euthanasia proposal—who are trying in their own ways to care for those who are confronting the hard-nosed reality of their inevitable mortality.”

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Why stop at euthanasia?  New

Scientist provoked controversy with this eye-catching headline: “Is extinction really such a bad thing?”  Consultant Shaoni Bhattacharya was not proposing it for humans or anything like that; she was just commenting on a new exhibit on extinction at London’s Natural History Museum.     “A thoughtful exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum explores the benefits of extinction, and the possibility of humanity eradicating itself.”  The world view is both Darwinian and Malthusian:

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 “Survival is tough, and in a masterful stroke, the exhibition

drives this home with a retro video game. In the species extinction game, the player must manoeuvre a Pac-Man-like creature around a world beset with creeping ice ages, fiery volcanoes and relentless winds, all the while competing with other animated species to snaffle sparse food supplies. A genius touch is the availability of “adaptation” tokens, which allow your creature to evolve traits to help it survive longer in its hostile world.”

The museum portrays extinction as a part of life.  “Extinction isn’t necessarily the end of the world, it could be just the beginning…,” one sign reads.  “In a thought-provoking section, the museum presents the concept of Homo extinctus — humans wiped out forever.”  Sweet dreams.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 The choice is clear.  Evolution is pro-death, creation is

pro-life.  Evolution sees death as a good thing; creation sees it as a curse.  Evolution says “what’s the big deal?”; creation says humans, made in the image of God, are more precious than animals. Evolution sees millions of years of senseless struggle against elements just for the reward of passing on one’s genes in an endless cycle of meaninglessness that ends in a charred, dead world.  Creation sees death as an intruder, an enemy, that will be conquered in the new heavens and new earth, and has been conquered for those who accept Christ’s death and resurrection on their behalf.  Choose you this day.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 The sanctity of human life is the dividing

issue for stem cell research, abortion and euthanasia.  It’s easy to see why evolutionists are so dismissive of the ethical qualms “religious people” worry about.  They only see cells and fetuses as clumps of matter, when in fact, a human embryo, even from the single-celled zygote, contains the entire genetic program for an adult human being.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Evolutionists tend to be pragmatists.  If people are

having abortions anyway, why not grab some of the stem cells?  (They fail to see how this legitimizes abortion and creates a market for it.)  If women are producing eggs anyway, why not harvest them?  (They fail to take seriously the potential abuses to women.)  If human blastocysts can’t produce adult clones (yet), why not harvest their stem cells?  If old people can’t communicate any more, why not help them die?  If everything competes for resources, why not let humans go extinct?  If humans are wrecking the planet, why not drastically cut their numbers? OK, evolutionist, set the example – you first.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 The New Scientist article on extinction

shows that some evolutionists still think Malthus had the right idea: competition for scarce resources guarantees lots of death.  That notion that spurred Darwin to use the “struggle for existence” as a driver for natural selection has been debunked (7/02/09, 12/09/09 #3, 9/18/10) but it keeps returning.  In actuality, freedom lets human society blossom, but tyranny destroys it.  Need proof?  The 20th century.

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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Evolutionists would not want to live in the world

their world view is leading toward.  Those who love Christ need to keep the leaven of his teachings spreading through a lost world.  Keep the salt in the decaying meat.  Keep the light shining in the darkness.  All that is required for a brave new world to embrace death is for godly people to do nothing.  “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 How can you tell where sounds come from? 

The brain is quicker than the speed of sound between your ears.

There’s only about 8 inches between your ears (more, perhaps, for fatheads).  The speed of sound is finite.  The tiny time lag between the arrival at one ear compared to the other is what enables us to sense the source direction of the sound, but there’s more to it than that.  If signals did not get processed in the brain faster than the time lag, the information would not be useful.

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 How can you tell where sounds come from? 

The brain is quicker than the speed of sound between your ears.

There’s only about 8 inches between your ears (more, perhaps, for fatheads).  The speed of sound is finite.  The tiny time lag between the arrival at one ear compared to the other is what enables us to sense the source direction of the sound, but there’s more to it than that.  If signals did not get processed in the brain faster than the time lag, the information would not be useful.

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 Science Daily asks, “How Do We Locate the Spatial Position

of Sounds? Mechanism Responsible for Creation of Giant Synapses Discovered.”  Sure enough, there are massive hubs or neural intersections in our brains that can process information faster than the speed of sound.  Here’s the upshot (notice the astonishment):

“Humans and most mammals can determine the spatial origin of sounds with remarkable acuity. We use this ability all the time — crossing the street; locating an invisible ringing cell phone in a cluttered bedroom. To accomplish this small daily miracle, the brain has developed a circuit that’s rapid enough to detect the tiny lag that occurs between the moment the auditory information reaches one of our ears, and the moment it reaches the other. The mastermind of this circuit is the “Calyx of Held,” the largest known synapse in the brain. EPFL scientists have revealed the role that a certain protein plays in initiating the growth of these giant synapses.”

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 Because it resembles the calyx of a flower, anatomist H.

Held described it as such in 1893.  Regarding it, Wikipedia says, “This structure is specially designed for fast, efficient transportation of information from one cell to the next.”  The part of the brain that processes auditory information has a number of these structures.

According to the Science Daily article, studies at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) show the Calyx of Held to act “almost like peer-to-peer communication between neurons.”  These synapses have hundreds of inputs.  “The result is that information is processed extremely quickly, in a few fractions of a millisecond, instead of the slower pace of more than 10 milliseconds that occurs in most other neuronal circuits.”

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 EPFL scientists identified a protein

named BMP that is implicated in developing the contact points for the Calyx of Held.  “The impact of this study will go well beyond increasing our understanding of the auditory system,” the article says.  “The results suggest that the BMP protein plays an important role in developing connectivity in the brain.”

Medical Xpress begins with an image of the giant synapse.

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 “The brain has developed” this

circuit.  Funny; did you ever ask your brain to do that?  There’s another example of pulling off evolutionary magic by misdirection.

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 In his excellent book, The Wonder of Man (1999), Dr.

Werner Gitt provided numerous amazing details about our senses.  The ear, “our highest precision sense organ,” is able to detect energy ratios of one million million to one, an “astonishing feat” that approaches auditory perfection.  Since each ear provides two sound paths, we actually get four inputs for localizing sound sources.  Considering the path lengths and the speed of sound, the brain must be able to process inputs arriving as close as 0.00003 seconds apart.  “In acoustic orientation terms this means that a sound source located only about 3° from the centre line of the head is recognized as being off-centre,” he said.  The slight difference in sound intensity between the two ears also gives us information on the distance to the sound.

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons 你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经 Dr. Gitt’s book, though 14 years old, is highly

recommended if you can find it.  It’s well illustrated and extremely interesting.  Not only does he provide a wealth of information about the senses and other body organs, he gives the glory not just to an unspecified designer, but to the Lord Jesus Christ.  [Note: None of the secular sources in this entry dared mention their idol, Charlie.]  The power of the Christian explanation for the wonders of creation is in the details that this book so beautifully presents.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Here are some recent fossil finds that, whether they fit or not,

are claimed to shed light on evolution. Goby a fish:  Otoliths are rocks in the head of many vertebrates

that aid with orientation and gravity sensing.  An article on PhysOrg claims that fish otoliths provide “unprecedented insight” into the evolution of gobioid fishes, one of the most numerous groups of bony fish.  But what can really be told from little rocks?  What is the “eloquence of the otoliths,” as the headline teases?  Does the body of the article live up to the hype?  Actually, even though a team claims to have produced a detailed phylogeny, and claims it can read otoliths like a genetic code, the major finding from “perfectly preserved” otoliths in Italy just moves one fish family to another clade.  Moreover, the lack of fossils that can be dated “has hampered understanding of the evolutionary history of this highly successful group of fishes.”

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Turtle on the half shell:  A fossil of a turtle-like animal with back

ribs that are not fused together, as in modern turtles, is attracting interest.  Both Science Now and Science Daily put their headlines just-so story form, like “How the Turtle Got Its Shell” (see 10/09/08).  The comparison of the fossil to a turtle looks convincing that the fossil is an evolutionary ancestor, but that inference requires believing that the “beginnings of the turtle shell started 40 million years earlier than previously thought” according to another Science Daily article.  It also requires believing that the turtle’s novel respiratory system evolved in concert with changes in the ribs.  “If you incorporate your ribs into a protective shell, then you have to find a new way to breathe!” one researcher exclaimed.  That being the case, they are only claiming that the South African fossil named Eunotosaurus may provide “clues” to turtle evolution.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Scrambled dino eggs:  Fossil dinosaur eggs are rare,

especially ones that contain fossil embryos.  National Geographic used the “missing link” meme in its announcement of theropod eggs found in Portugal.  Lucky for evolutionists, they fit in a gap that “has frustrated scientists because many of the bird-like aspects of reproduction seem to have appeared during the gap.”  Scientists inferred a few things about the eggs, such as that they must have been buried, but nothing definitive of increase in complexity or information except a single layer as opposed to two or three layers of assumed later dinosaurs and birds.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Triceratops cousin:  Live Science announced a new

ceratopsian dinosaur claimed to have lived “12 million years before the rise of its more famous younger relative.”  It’s being called “a new kind of three-horned dinosaur” that “may be the oldest cousin of Triceratops yet.”  Judging from the artist reconstruction, though, it’s hard to see much difference.  Judiceratops (from the Judith River formation, Montana) has the frill and three horns and most other features Triceratops, yet the article asks readers to believe that these dinosaurs evolved rapidly, with “a lot of turnover” as older species were replaced by newer ones.  Whatever differences might be apparent to paleontologists on the outside seem trivial compared to the complexity of the inside of both creatures.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Wood you believe:  PhysOrg posted a

story of a buried forest in Switzerland that is being studied for dendrochronology.  Claimed to be 13,000 years old in Zurich clay, the pine wood was discovered by accident.  The data have not been formally published, but the article includes a picture of some cross sections being analyzed.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 The early bird:  No sooner had our entry on “Feathers before

flight” gone to press (5/28/13) that a new “feathered dinosaur” announcement hit the wires (paper in Nature).  All the secular sites went nuts, as expected: “New candidate for world’s first bird” (National Geographic); “New feathered dino may be world’s first bird” (Live Science); “New contender for first bird” (Nature News).  The reconstruction makes this creature look something like a bantam chicken with teeth, but fully fledged with modern-looking feathers and wings.  A consequence of calling Aurornis xui the first bird is that it puts Archaeopteryx back on the bird line (BBC News, New Scientist), after the controversial shake-up by Xing Xu in 2011 (see 7/28/2011).  Science Now, though, is not sure this fossil, found by a Chinese farmer and sold to a museum, is authentic:

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 “But Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History

Museum of Los Angeles County in California, says that Aurornis must fly through at least one important hoop before it can claim to be the first bird: Its authenticity must be proved. That’s because the specimen was not found during excavations by Godefroit’s team, but—like most early birds and feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning province, including many studied by Xu—it was supposedly found by farmers and acquired from a Chinese fossil dealer, who sold it to the province’s Yizhou Fossil and Geology Park. China’s museums and research institutions have been plagued in recent years by the circulation of fake or altered fossils, including the infamous “Archaeoraptor” fake of the late 1990s, a claimed “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds published by National Geographic.”

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Many of the science news sites though,

including National Geographic, let their imaginations take wings, asserting that it is truly a feathered dinosaur ancestral to birds.  The original paper was more concerned about phylogenetic placement of this fossil than about explaining how powered flight could have evolved.  The supplementary information file claims there was no evidence of forgery but concurred that most of the spectacular feathered dinosaur fossils have come from dealers.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Mammoth blood:  A potentially gigantic, though

controversial, finding came from Siberia this week: mammoth blood preserved in ice (see Siberian Times, “Exclusive: The first pictures of blood from a 10,000 year old Siberian mammoth”;  Live Science, “Perfectly preserved mammoth blood unearthed in ice”).  The photos show clear pictures of blood vessels, red meat and liquid blood collected in a vial.  Nature urged caution in its announcement, “Can a mammoth carcass really preserve flowing blood and possibly live cells?” but could not rule out the authenticity of the claim:

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 “The Siberian Times obtained striking photos of the

specimen showing the reddish tissues and a vial of the dark brown liquid said to be blood that was found in ice cavities under the animal’s belly, as well as additional details of the discovery. The story quotes mammoth researcher Semyon Grigoriev of the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, who led the recovery of the mammoth, as speculating that the blood contains “a kind of natural anti-freeze” and declaring the specimen — a female that was between 50 and 60 years old when she died — to be “the best preserved mammoth in the history of paleontology.””

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Moreover, the report says this specimen gives

researchers “a really good chance of finding live cells” — no wonder the Nature reporter said, “Wow!” before mentioning a few caveats: “The upshot: it really does appear to be an incredible find, but some of the claims about it are incorrect as reported or have yet to be established as fact.”  A few experts weighed in on the possibility that the claims are true.  None of them claimed they were definitely false.  One asked, “Another question is, how were these samples preserved in this state for so long? 

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 The discoverers postulated that some kind of natural

antifreeze protected the blood and soft tissues.  They said they are working with South Korean researchers who want to clone a mammoth, using an elephant for gestation.  Speaking of mammoths, Science Daily presented a new theory for their extinction: a meteor impact changed the climate.  Considering that mammoths and mastodons lived throughout much of the world, and some are buried in mass graves like those in Hot Springs, South Dakota, impact theories require auxiliary hypotheses to explain why a meteor would be selective in its effects.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 The last two stories are the most

interesting (early bird and mammoth blood).  The prior ones show evolutionists doing what they usually do, forcing obscure pieces of evidence into their worldview picture (see 5/01/08 commentary, “How not to work a puzzle”).

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Regarding Aurornis, skeptical readers should watch

these “feathered dinosaur” fossils like a hawk.  Science made a very damaging admission by stating that most of the fossils come from dealers.  Just think—very few, if any, were found intact in the strata, including those found by master dinobird storyteller Xing Xu (5/01/10).  Forgers fooled the experts once with “Archaeoraptor” back in 1999.  Is it possible that many of the most controversial “feathered dinosaurs” are fakes?  Those that are not fakes (like Archaeopteryx, found across the world in Germany) are genuine, but it was a bird, capable of powered flight.  Consider: the motivation for forgery is strong. 

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Poor Chinese farmers can gain riches and fame for

finding what evolutionists want.  Maybe the forgers learned lessons from “Archaeoraptor” and have gotten better at their craft.  Why can’t the paleontologists pull authentic fossils out of the strata themselves?  Is it because the fossils are not there?  Why are the same species never found anywhere else in the world in comparable strata?  If forgery is proved for some or any of them, creationists will be all over it like white on paint.  It would seem in the best interests of the evolutionists, therefore, to err on the side of caution, stop the hype, and go dig up some in situ specimens, documenting their provenance.  Their reputations depend on it.

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Regarding the mammoth blood, this is an amazing

story worth watching.  More analysis is needed that can satisfy scientists, but the fact that many frozen mammoths are already known would seem to discount motivation to commit a forgery.  In July or August the discoverers are bringing other researchers to the cold site where the specimen is preserved.  Imagine if live cells and intact blood are actually proved.  That would be a “Wow!” indeed—a finding that would cast serious doubt on the dating methods used to claim this beast died 10,000 years ago.  Until we have more reliable information, though, creationists should include disclaimers in their coverage.

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