sermons from science -- march 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 3 月

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Sermons From Science -- March 2013科学布道 -- 2013 年 3月Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube

under the name “Pastor Chui” and also in PowerPoint slides in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org.

The contents of this presentation were taken from Dave Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. May God have all the glory.

Let us pray for Dave Coppedge’s fast recovery from cancer surgery.

Pastor Chui

http://ChristCenterGospel.org

[email protected]

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 Why are we seeing young phenomena in the planets if

they are billions of years old? Some scientists are abandoning uniformitarian assumptions and admitting we are lucky to be witnessing them in “rare moments of glory.”

In Nature this week, Maggie McKee interviewed scientists who are struggling with short-lived phenomena in the solar system. The subtitle of her article, “Caught in the Act,” states, “We may be seeing some of the Solar System’s most striking objects during rare moments of glory.” Her first two paragraphs elaborate why this is unsettling for some:

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 “Ever since Copernicus evicted Earth

from its privileged spot at the centre of the Solar System, researchers have embraced the idea that there is nothing special about our time and place in the Universe. What observers see now, they presume, has been going on for billions of years — and will continue for eons to come.

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 “But observations of the distant reaches of the Solar

System made in the past few years are challenging that concept. The most active bodies out there — Jupiter’s moon Io and Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan — may be putting on limited-run shows that humans are lucky to witness. Saturn’s brilliant rings, too, might have appeared relatively recently, and could grow dingy over time. Some such proposals make planetary researchers uncomfortable, because it is statistically unlikely that humans would catch any one object engaged in unusual activity — let alone several.”

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 It seems a bitter pill for some planetary scientists to “go

against the grain of one of geology’s founding principles: uniformitarianism, which states that planets are shaped by gradual, ongoing processes,” she wrote. Then she quoted Jeff More (NASA-Ames) who explained that “Geologists like things to be the same as they ever were” because it’s “philosophically comforting because you don’t have to assume you’re living in special times.” Why that should be “comforting” was not explained.

McKee zoomed into each of these phenomena for more detail about what makes them look young:

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 Saturn’s rings: The rings are 90% water ice but should be

dirtier if they were old; “some planetary scientists say that the rings’ resplendence is hard to reconcile with a lifetime lasting billions of years.” That’s why hypotheses of a recent encounter with an icy interloper that broke apart and became the rings within the last few million years (just 10% of Saturn’s assumed age) have been put forth. An ad hoc solution like that, though raises other problems: all such candidate objects should have vanished 700 million years after the birth of the solar system, according to current theory. Close flybys by Cassini in years to come may confirm whether billions of years of dirt is hiding in the B ring, McKee said, but one responded, “if the Cassini results point to a low mass for the rings, it will be a real mystery.” This explanation, however, fails to explain why the thinner D, C, A, F, G, and E rings are so bright.

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 Enceladus: The geysers of Enceladus are another thing that can’t be

old; “researchers have struggled to explain how it can sustain such activity” on the order of 16 gigawatts – 10 times the amount they can account for by internal radioactive heating. “Several explanations have been put forward to account for this furious release of heat, but all rely on arguments that researchers are viewing the moon at a special time,” McKee said. It’s difficult to keep the geysers going for 10 million years (1/450th the assumed age of the moon), let alone 4.5 billion. One researcher who proposed a recent cracking from growing stresses in the crust has apparently been getting hard questions: “‘It seems like special pleading — we just happened to catch it in the act,’ says [Craig] O’Neill [Macquarie University, Sydney], echoing criticisms that he has heard when presenting the model at conferences.” Nearby Mimas “should be producing more heat than Enceladus and it doesn’t, and we don’t really understand why,” O’Neill said.

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 Io: If Enceladus is a firefly, Io is a furnace, McKee wrote. It

gives off 90,000 gigawatts through its incessant volcanoes, “several times more than would be expected from the simplest models of tidal interactions between the moon and Jupiter.” Again, it’s not that planetary scientists are unable to imagine scenarios in which we might be seeing Io at a special time; perhaps the moon’s orbital dance with the other moons makes it undergo periodic exaggerations of its eccentricity. Even though this “would satisfy the data,” one planetologist said, when thinking about the peculiarities of Io and Enceladus, “it’s possible we simply don’t understand them.”

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 Titan: The largest moon of Saturn presents problems

with both its atmosphere and surface. Atmospheric theories are up in the air, because “the atmospheric methane — and its effects on the landscape — ought to be short-lived” in the range of a few tens of millions of years. If sources of replenishment cannot be found (there are some disputed candidates thought to be ice volcanoes), it should have been long gone. Jeff Moore “thinks that researchers are seeing Titan at a unique and geologically fleeting time.” The question then becomes, why now, and what happened?

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 In Moore’s hypothesis, the sun warmed up to a tipping

point a few tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, levitating the frozen nitrogen and methane into an atmosphere that “rained like hell” onto the surface, creating the erosional features seen today. Ralph Lorenz [Johns Hopkins U] criticizes Moore’s view as “too simplistic” and pointed to “some evidence” (not mentioned in the article) that it would have taken billions of years to form Titan’s hydrocarbon-rich sand dunes.

McKee ended with a quote from Lorenz: “I think we have to have a much more nuanced view of Titan through time. Titan is bloody complicated.”

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 It’s not complicated at all, if you subtract out the

needless billions of years. This article is important, in that in the 8 years of the ongoing Cassini mission to Cassini, and the 9 years since the end of the Galileo mission to Jupiter, scientists still have no answers to these age conundrums. Their uniformitarian philosophy makes them uncomfortable with the facts their own eyes are beholding. We should not be living in special times, but we appear to. (Understand that the Copernican principle does not mean that we are not special; see The Privileged Planet for corrective information.)

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 Here’s a classic case of ad hoc explanation to

force observations into a web of belief. (This is called ‘special pleading’ in logic.) If science were about honestly following the evidence where it leads, these scientists would have to conclude that the solar system is much younger than thought. But they won’t do it, because they know Charlie D. (their idol) needs billions of years for life to evolve on Earth. Failing to provide those annual sacrifices to the idol would get them excommunicated from the Church of Darwin.

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Rare Moments of Glory: Planetary Scientists Admit Seeing “Lucky” Circumstances 罕见的荣耀时刻：行星科学家承认看到“幸运”的情况 If Saturn’s rings, Enceladus, Io and Titan were the only

problem worlds, they might have hope to rescue their beliefs someday. Unfortunately, the problems mount for uniformitarianism when one considers Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and its moons, Uranus and its moons and rings, Neptune and its moons and rings, Pluto and the trans-Neptunian objects, comets, asteroids, dust – the whole system. There is hardly any planet or moon that met their uniformitarian expectations. We call on them: please, dump the assumption of billions of years, and all these things will start making sense. We do this out of sympathy for their discomfort, wishing them to sleep well for once.

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Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Desert Varnish Growth Can Be Rapid 沙漠上光油的增长可以快速 New research shows that the black coating on sandstone

known as rock varnish or desert varnish can form much more rapidly than previously thought.

The abstract of a paper in Geology1 states: Rock varnish is a thin dark coating best known from deserts,

and is believed to grow extremely slowly. Varnish samples from near Socorro, New Mexico (United States), contain as much as 3.7% PbO, derived from nearby smelters operating from A.D. 1870 to 1931. Additional varnish, measuring as much as 4 μm beyond the Pb-rich layer, indicates continued growth from 1931 to 2003. Comparison with other varnish confirms that the Pb is not an artifact. Based on Pb layer thickness, and the period of smelter operation, these very young rock varnishes yield growth rates of 28–639 μm/k.y., substantially higher than previously documented fastest rates of 40 μm/k.y.

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Desert Varnish Growth Can Be Rapid 沙漠上光油的增长可以快速 These rates imply that the average 1–2 μm/k.y. rate for

older varnish is not the active growth rate. Rather, it is a long-term value including periods of nondeposition, erosion, and active growth. Therefore, models of rock varnish formation should be reevaluated with consideration of much faster maximum growth rates.

The new maximum growth rate is nearly 16 times the old estimate.

1. Spilde, Melim, Northup and Boston, “Anthropogenic lead as a tracer of rock varnish growth: Implications for rates of formation,” Geology, published online January 4, 2013, doi: 10.1130/G33514.1 v. 41 no. 2 p. 263–266.

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Desert Varnish Growth Can Be Rapid 沙漠上光油的增长可以快速 Interpretive signs about desert varnish appear in

national parks throughout desert parks in the United States and probably elsewhere. How many of them are going to be updated as a result of this revelation? Probably few. They will continue to tell unwary visitors that it’s a slow, slow, slow process. As this paper shows, not necessarily. Significant buildup could occur in just a few thousand years. Even so, does any scientist possess the wherewithal and know-how to understand all the variables? That this paper shows up in 2013 after decades of research on desert varnish should cause perceptive readers to see, once again, that human “scientific knowledge” is limited and subject to change without warning.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 Finding an article on a secular science site that criticizes

the left and defends the right is so rare, it’s news. On New Scientist today, Alex Berezow and Hank

Campbell blasted political leftists for their “war on reason” with “lefty nonsense” that pretends to be scientifically-based but is not. The caption reads, “Conservatives rightly get a bad rap for anti-science policies. But progressives can be just as bad, say Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell.”

As an example, the two describe a Congressional “green” initiative to keep plastic and styrofoam utensils out of the Capitol and replace them with biodegradable ones. It sounded good; it felt good; but it ended up more wasteful and harmful to the environment than before. This led to their key paragraph:

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 “Conservatives’ sins against science —

objections to stem cell research, denial of climate science, opposition to evolution and the rest — are widely reported and well known. But conservatives don’t have a monopoly on unscientific policies. Progressives are just as bad, if not worse. Their ideology is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds. Just like biodegradeable spoons, their policies often crumble in the face of reality and leave behind a big mess. Worse, anyone who questions them is condemned as anti-science.”

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 This paragraph makes it clear that they

are not embracing or defending conservatism – just calling out anti-science (as they conceive it) on both sides. “We have all heard about the Republican war on science; we want to draw attention to the progressive war on reason.” This statement, though, begs the question whether science and reason are separable.

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 Berezow, editor of RealClearScience.com, is

clearly anti-creationist but also anti-nonsense from any political stripe. Campbell is his co-author of a book whose title is self-explanatory: Science Left Behind: Feel-good fallacies and the rise of the anti-scientific left. While not letting conservatives off the hook for their “sins against science” (as perceived by Berezow and Campbell), they feel the charges need to be fairly distributed on both sides of the political spectrum. While claiming only a “lunatic fringe” among progressives is guilty, the guilt is pressing:

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 “We contend that there is a disturbing and

largely unreported trend among influential progressive activists who misinterpret, misrepresent and abuse science to advance their ideological and political agendas.

Of all of today’s political philosophies, progressivism stands as the most pressing problem for science. Progressives, not conservatives, are the ones most likely to replace scientific research with unscientific ideology.”

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 Strong words coming from a news site that typically

takes the progressive position as a given. “Conservatives who endorse unscientific ideas are blasted by the scientific community, yet progressives who do the same get a free pass,” they ended. “It is important the problem be recognised, and that free pass revoked.”

Update 2/05/13: New Scientist admitted to a leftist bias. Commenting on Berezow and Campbell’s rebuke, they agreed it is right to “Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source.” They considered whether the left gets a free pass by scientists and reporters. Their conclusion was a call to freedom:

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 “Is there any substance to that suspicion? We should go

to every possible length to ensure there isn’t. Unreason of any hue is dangerous; any suggestion of bias only makes it harder to overcome. Science and liberalism are natural allies, but only in the literal sense of liberalism as the pursuit of freedom. That means freedom of thought, freedom of speech and, above all, freedom from ideology— wherever on the political spectrum it comes from.”

Trying to explain the bias, they said, “The suspicion must be that this is because scientists themselves lean towards the left, as does the media that covers them.” Then in parentheses, they added, “(Both friends and critics of New Scientist tell us we lean in that direction.)”

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 Freedom from ideology? Good

luck. Everyone has a world view, whether carefully thought out or not. We’d like the editors of New Scientist to explain “unreason” in Darwinian terms.

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 Refreshing as the main article is, it doesn’t even come close to

levelling the playing field. First of all, Berezow and Campbell adopt, without question, the leftist talking points that anti-evolutionism is unscientific, that global warming theory is scientific, and that no one has a scientific right to question “stem cell science” (presumably the destruction of human embryos, an ethical question, not an issue of science). They already condemned conservatives before examining irrational ideas from progressives. They essentially tarred and feathered all conservatives before pointing out that just a few leftists on the “lunatic fringe” are just as bad or worse. Is this the best New Scientist can say? It’s too little too late. (Understand that it’s not because Republicans or conservatives actually are anti-science that gives them the bad rap; the leftists who control the media, education, labor and scientific societies hate conservatives for everything they stand for, scientific or not.)

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 Berezow and Campbell did well to distinguish liberalism

from progressivism: Liberalism, as defined by John Locke, means the pursuit

of liberty. By that definition progressives are not liberal. Though they claim common cause with liberals (and most of them are Democrats because very few progressives are Republican), today’s progressive movement is actually socially authoritarian.

Unlike conservative authoritarians, however, they are not concerned with banning “immoral” things like sex, drugs and rock and roll. They instead seek dominion over issues such as food, the environment and education. And they claim that their policies are based on science, even when they are not.

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Rare Anti-Leftist Editorial Posted on Science Site 罕见科学网站发布反左派编辑 This distinction is correct and rarely recognized. If

Berezow and Campbell wish to promote liberalism of the Locke version, though, then let them promote academic freedom and freedom of inquiry – including freedom to criticize evolution, global warming and stem cell research, without pre-judging it as anti-science in a socially authoritarian way.

Nevertheless, thanks to New Scientist and these men for the partial recognition of a huge problem. We wish them well on their journey toward a non–self-refuting rational foundation.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Science Supports Proverb of Jesus 科学支持耶稣的谚语 It is more blessed to give than to receive, said

Jesus and a team of psychologists. The psychologists in New York were not setting

out to confirm Jesus’ words, but the headline on Medical Xpress stated, almost with surprise, “Study finds it actually is better (and healthier) to give than to receive.” Two decades of prior research had not found that recipients of help got the same benefits as the givers. Now, a five-year study involving 846 individuals linked decreased mortality with the stress-releasing pleasure of giving.

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Science Supports Proverb of Jesus 科学支持耶稣的谚语 “These findings go beyond past analyses

to indicate that the health benefits of helping behavior derive specifically from stress-buffering processes,” Poulin says, “and provide important guidance for understanding why helping behavior specifically may promote health and, potentially, for how social processes in general may influence health.”

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Science Supports Proverb of Jesus 科学支持耶稣的谚语 The words of Jesus, “It is more blessed to give than

to receive,” do not appear in the four gospels of the New Testament, but instead were quoted by Paul to the Ephesian elders in the book of Acts of the Apostles, chapter 20, verse 35. This indicates that many of Jesus’ teachings were remembered decades later by other eyewitnesses besides Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This should not be surprising, because many thousands heard Jesus teach. As John ended his gospel (21:25), “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

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Science Supports Proverb of Jesus 科学支持耶稣的谚语 It’s nice when science finally catches up to the Master

Planner’s truths two millennia later, but once again, the thinking of scientists (if that’s what you can call psychologists) is orthogonal to the intent of Jesus’ words. Jesus was not saying, “Behave this way for your own health and happiness.” He was encouraging the disciples to forget themselves and focus on others. Not every selfless deed results in personal reward; look at soldiers who fell on grenades to protect their comrades. When health and happiness do accrue from acts of helping others, fine; but anyone who engages in helping others for his own health misses the point. Psychology can only look at the “what,” not the “why,” the “is” not the “ought.”

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Science Supports Proverb of Jesus 科学支持耶稣的谚语 Wouldn’t it be something if the

Creator built our brains so that righteous behavior would usually result in health and happiness as a by-product? That would be like intelligent design. (It doesn’t work with impure motives, though—that’s part of the design, too.)

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 A new paper warns that commonly-used simulation

methods in science can misrepresent the real world. In the European Physical Journal Plus, Daan Frinkel

warned about the “dark side” of simulations – those applied out of context or extrapolated beyond their capabilities (by “dark” Frenkel means under-exposed, not evil). Simulations are very common in science; for instance, Monte Carlo simulations are frequently used to study everything from thermodynamic processes to population behavior.

The paper was summarized on Science Daily as “Simulations’ Achille’s [sic] Heel,” and on PhysOrg with the headline, “What can go wrong when computer simulations applied outside their original context.” The summary says,

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 “Frenkel also focuses on methods that, at first blush,

appear reasonable, but are flawed and are akin to attempting to compare apples and oranges. For example, computing a mechanical property of a system—say the potential energy—using a Monte Carlo simulation, which can be based on thermal averages, does not allow us to compute the thermal properties of such a system—such as entropy—in terms of thermal averages. Finally, the article also takes great care to debunk common myths and misconceptions pertaining to simulations, for instance, newer simulation methods are not necessarily better than older ones.”

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 Looking inside the paper, Frenkel

explained that Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics methods, though simple, are not risk-free. They require great care, and sometimes are unreasonable even if they seem appropriate. When used carelessly, they can pretend to provide answers – sometimes when the original question has been forgotten.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 In Kuhn’s view of science, “guilds” of scientists amuse

themselves with busy work on paradigms that may or may not reflect reality. Guild members can seem mutually self-satisfied that progress is being made on the paradigm, when in fact, the work may not correspond to reality. Hopefully many scientists really do care about correspondence with reality, but even though they produce papers with whiz-bang simulations that seem to work, their readers should keep a healthy caution in mind that internal self-consistency does not presuppose getting “the world” right. This is especially true of evolutionary scenarios (see 5/08/2008 commentary, “How Not To Work a Puzzle”). We reproduce that commentary here for convenience.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 HOW NOT TO WORK A PUZZLE Visualize your favorite picture. Invite your friends. Check their credentials. If anyone

from a “different picture club” tries to sneak in, expel them. Make everyone feel good about the picture.

Reinforcement can be achieved with a few choice sermonettes from respected individuals.

Draw a big outline of the picture on the floor. A gymnasium is good for this step.

Open the box and spill out the pieces. Throw away the box top and the instructions. After all, this is

science. We do it our way.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 Form teams and pass out the puzzle pieces. These can be

distributed by color, shape, or any other useful scheme. Allow each team to work on their part of the picture.

Rearrangement of small parts is permitted, but not changes to the outline.

The rules allow for complaints about how hard the work is. If anyone complains about the big picture, though, they must be expelled.

Every two years, throw a party with booze and croissants and let each team share their experiences. Throw in a few more choice sermonettes to keep spirits high.

Report to the media on the progress being made. Draw up a curriculum and teach the next generation how to

work the puzzle.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 INTERPRETATION

Note: Mature, well-trained, experienced readers can skip this section.

Philosophy of discovery: Theories do not emerge from raw data. More often, scientists begin with a picture in mind. Even deciding what to call “the data” requires a human choice, because not all inputs are relevant to the picture. Like Benner said, “science is often what we choose to believe.”

Sociology of science: Scientists tend to hang out with people they know and like.

Sociology, cont.: Science is a human activity, not something that could be done by robots. It is not purely rational but involves emotions, rhetoric, herd mentality and other non-rational considerations.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 Kuhnian normal science: The paradigm determines the

research project. The participants were not assembling to question the picture. They were assembling to affirm it.

Underdetermination of theories by data: There are inevitably many possible explanations for one set of data. The same puzzle pieces could be fit to a different picture.

Naturalism: Modern science has chosen to restrict itself to “natural causes” (whatever that means; see 05/11/2006). Today’s scientists have been trained to deplore revelation (natural and/or special), no matter how well validated by empirical evidence, reason or history.

Pragmatism: Nature does not determine the choice of classification scheme; people do.

Limits of science: No one person can master the whole picture, especially one as broad as evolution.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 Sociology/psychology of science: Each researcher works

under the assumption that his or her little piece will reinforce the paradigm. Cooperation is ensured by the fear of being expelled as a maverick, or worse, a pseudoscientist. Since no philosopher of science has successfully defended demarcation criteria for science vs pseudoscience, and since no universal scientific method has been defined, emotional and sociological judgments again come into play to determine who is “in” and who is “out.”

Sociology, cont.: Social activities, though they have nothing to do with the validity of the proposition under study, serve to reinforce the paradigm and draw in more party members.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 Positivism: The party celebration attracts reporters and gives

them some fun work to do at a nice hotel. The atmosphere promotes a spirit of progress. All this activity, all these smart people, and all the erudite PowerPoint slides must mean that productive science was being done, right? It must be the case since the government is funding the work.The system feeds on itself. Reporters get a share of the booze and croissants, paid for by their bosses, who get better advertising ratings for maintaining a lively science page. The reporters make friends with some of the scientists and learn from the herd who is hot and who is not. It is unlikely any reporter will go back to the office and write up a scathing rebuke of the entire philosophical premise underlying the event. Party organizers will be sure to send the cheerful press releases to Senator Earmark.

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Simulations Can Misrepresent Reality 模拟可以误传现实 Education: The paradigm might lose popularity

without new blood. Captive students must be trained and inculcated into the craft before other paradigms capture their attention. This can be accomplished by making all other paradigms illegal. Skilled facilitators can create visuals and curricula from the Policies and Procedures Manual of the Paradigm, to inculcate the novitiates into the craft and inoculate the young herd against critical thinkers (12/21/2005). Successful novitiates are graded on their ability to regurgitate the talking points, meditate on the non-negotiable assumptions and doctrines, sense how to tell the good guys from the bad guys (the creationists), and honor the idol of Our Leader.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Targeted SETI Search Hears Nothing 针对性的 SETI搜索没有听到什么 For this search, a team targeted 104 stars with

planets discovered by the Kepler Telescope. Still nothing.

Space.com told how veteran SETI queen Jill Tarter was among the team using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia to look for radio signals between 1.1 and 1.9 GHz – a range SETI enthusiasts believe would be the most likely for alien broadcasts, because it includes the range used by humans for cell phones and television.

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Targeted SETI Search Hears Nothing 针对性的 SETI搜索没有听到什么 MIT Technology Review’s ArXiv Blog discussed

an upcoming paper for the Astrophysical Journal available as a preprint on ArXiv. “No signals of extraterrestrial origin were found,” the paper states tersely. The blog comments:

The results allow the team to put important limits on the likelihood of Kardashian [sic] Type II civilisations. Tarter and co say that the negative result implies that the number of these civilisations that are loud in the 1-2GHz range must [sic] less than one in a million per sun-like star.

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Targeted SETI Search Hears Nothing 针对性的 SETI搜索没有听到什么 PhysOrg defined the term: “a Kardashev

type II civilization ([is] named after Nikolai Kardashev, who came up with a 3 tiered scale of intelligent existence: those that use the resources from a planet, their sun, or a galaxy, respectively).…” Apparently the blogger had a certain celebrity socialite in mind; that alien has been found, but her intelligence is questioned by some.

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Targeted SETI Search Hears Nothing 针对性的 SETI搜索没有听到什么 Imagine a planet filled with Kim

Kardashian types! Yikes! That’s a really funny Freudian slip. Maybe the Type II Kardashian civilization is when a Kim babe marries a Carl Sagan type, and they search happily ever after.

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Targeted SETI Search Hears Nothing 针对性的 SETI搜索没有听到什么 We can’t be too hard on the SETI believers, if

they are using private funding, because they really are looking for a needle in a million haystacks, having to make lots of assumptions. Remember that “less than one in a million” includes “less than one in a gazillion” given zero results. They can argue that silence is to be expected given the nature of the search. It’s still silent, though, even when looking at the best candidate stars. Let them look; it keeps them out of trouble, and their methods give backhanded support to intelligent design theory.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 In origin-of-life (OOL) research, any partial solution seems good

enough, even if the big questions go unanswered. Stack of Plates Sans Code Science Now got real excited about a new kind of RNA that,

with a sufficient kind of design, can organize into a stack that reporter Robert Service (not the Alaskan storyteller) believes mimics DNA. In “Self-Assembling Molecules Offer New Clues on Life’s Possible Origin,” he spoke of problems with certain RNAs called CA and TAP that stubbornly refuse to self-assemble in water. A little tweaking got them to cooperate the way scientists wanted:

Unfortunately, in water CA and TAP clump together in large ribbons and sheets and quickly fall out of solution, making it hard to conceive of how these proto-RNAs could have stored genetic information in the earliest stages of life.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Now, however, Hud and his colleagues at Georgia

Tech and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain, have solved this solvent problem. The researchers gave TAP a short chemical tail, transforming it into a chemical they call TAPAS, as they reported on Friday in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. And that one change encourages it to assemble with CA to form rosettes in water. What is more, the rosettes stack atop one another, forming long genelike chains made up of as many as 18,000 individual TAPAS and CA components—quite a stack of small plates.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Unfortunately for Service, this serves no

purpose without a code to organize the sequence of the plates (which don’t even resemble DNA’s double helix and paired bases – the foundation of the genetic code). He was content to call this “a step in the right direction.”

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Assault on Battery Tia Ghose in a story on NBC News said, “Theorists are

pumped up about their new origin of life proposal.” This one has nothing to do with RNAs, but rather theoretical natural “batteries” in hydrothermal vents where “life may have gotten started.” The gaps in one quote are astonishing:

Somehow, the precursors of life harnessed carbon dioxide and hydrogen available in those primitive conditions to create the building blocks of life, such as amino acids and nucleotides (building blocks of DNA). But those chemical reactions require a power source, said study co-author Nick Lane, a researcher at the University College London.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Ghose seemed close to a solution merely by having the battery,

without the need to explain the computer and software. Live Science asked, “Origin of Life: Did a Simple Pump Drive Process?” but did not offer a critique of Lane’s suggestion. In its coverage, Nature News didn’t address DNA or codes at all, but exposed Nick Lane to SEQOTW by stating a conundrum:

It is assumed that the rocky proto-cells would initially be lined with leaky organic membranes. If the cells were to escape the vents and become free-living in the ocean, these membranes would have to be sealed. But sealing the membrane would cut off natural proton gradients, because although an ATP synthase would let protons into the cell, there would be nothing to pump them out, and the concentration of protons on each side of the membrane would rapidly equalize. Without an ion gradient “they would lose power,” says Lane.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 “Proteins that pump protons out of the cell

would solve the problem, but there would have been no pressure for such proteins to evolve until after the membranes were closed. In which case, “They would have had to evolve a proton pumping system in no time, which is impossible,” says Lane.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Lane implies that given some time, the

impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain, as George Wald claimed decades ago in a widely-criticized article on the origin of life. On PhysOrg, Nick Lane swept aside the problem of the genetic code with a hand wave: “Life is, in effect, a side-reaction of an energy-harnessing reaction.”

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 It Rocketed from Space Intoxicated by the phrase “building blocks of life,” Tia Ghose

looked to the wisdom of NASA scientists who think they found hydroxylamine. What? Well, given access to acetic acid, this “white, unstable crystalline, hygroscopic compound” (Wikipedia) whose nitrate form can be used for rocket fuel, can form amino acids, Ghose claimed in Live Science. And once you have amino acids, can’t you envision proteins? Again, nothing was said about the genetic code, or even how those amino acids could be filtered into a one-handed population. Instead, Ghose imagined worlds in collision: “In turn, hydroxylamine could react with other compounds, such as acetic acid, to form amino acids that could be dumped onto other worlds during space-rock collisions.”

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Get your local OOL researcher to take the following

pledge: “I will not publish anything that contains the words may, might, could, perhaps, or possibly.” They won’t do it because they would be out of a job. For the rest of us, their storytelling under the banner of “science” is unbearable.

For an explanation of why partial steps in their story are of no value, we turn to a quotation from the 5/22/2002 commentary:

They took a giant leap of faith. “But at least they were in the lab experimenting; isn’t that better than just giving up and claiming ‘God did it’?” (This is a favorite criticism of Eugenie Scott and the NCSE.) It depends.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 To illustrate this, picture a large canyon, representing the

origin of life, that the evolutionists must cross by building a bridge over it. They think they are making progress when they hire a helicopter to hold a steel girder out in mid-air and say, “We have demonstrated that this girder would work as part of our bridge, if all the other parts were in place.” But what happens the moment they let go of the girder, and the pilot flies away? It crashes to the bottom of the canyon, accomplishing nothing. In their write-up of their results, they might refer to other helicopters that have held up other girders and cables at other points, none of which could have ever hung out there in mid-air waiting for the next piece to join up, yet they boast about the progress they’re making.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 An evolutionist may retort that they are not holding their

girders in mid-air, but building from the sides to meet in the middle. No they are not; every one of their experiments independently cheats by invoking intelligent design (the helicopter or the prefabricated girders), which is unlike what nature would do. To imitate nature, they would have to take their intelligently guiding hands off the apparatus, and wait for millions of years in despair while nothing happens. Besides, nature would only be able to build from one side of the canyon, and would have no directionality or will to aim for the other side, or to build on any previous “successes”. (How do you define success, by the way, without a mind?) Invoking natural selection prior to replication is also cheating; but without it, there is no building on prior successes.

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OOL Follies: Evolutionists Ignore the Obvious Questions生命起源的愚蠢：进化论者忽略显而易见的问题 Our bridge analogy is actually generous toward

evolution; we gave them helicopters and steel girders, which are all designed objects built or manipulated by intelligent minds. The evolutionists’ task is to tell us how mindless nature, using raw materials like iron ore, built the bridge itself, without help, and tell us why nature would even want to do such a marvelous thing. And why even grant them the iron ore? Go back far enough, and they have to explain the origin of all the raw materials from nothing.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 If an evolutionist can’t blame God for an alleged

poor design, all he can blame is Darwin. PhysOrg and Live Science both broadcast the

anti-ID rants of Bruce Latimer (anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University) and Alan Mann (Princeton) at a recent AAAS conference on human evolution. They claim the human body is poorly designed, despite being the dominant primate form in the world today, successful at conquering everything from the deep sea to outer space.

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 Bad backs, dangerous childbirths, sore feet and

wisdom teeth pains are among the many ailments humans face from evolution, researchers say.

In an evolutionary sense, humans are by far the most successful primates on the planet, with a world population close to 7 billion. Humanity owes this success to a number of well-known adaptations, such as large, complex brains and walking upright on two feet. However, there are downsides to these advances as well.

“We’re dealing with the scars of human evolution,” anthropologist Alan Mann at Princeton University told LiveScience.

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 One would think that such success would

generate awe for human design, but no: PhysOrg led off with Latimer’s anti-design sentiments:

“If an engineer were given the task to design the human body, he or she would never have done it the way humans have evolved,” Latimer said. “Unfortunately, we can’t go back to walking on four feet. We’ve undergone too much evolutionary change for that—and it is not the answer to our problems.”

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 If Latimer wants to start a new evolutionary

path to four-footedness, he could certainly lead the way. Live Science tossed in an anti-ID comment from another ungrateful anthropologist:

“If you want to look for examples of how we’re not the result of intelligent design, you don’t have to go far — just look at the complicated, uncomfortable way we have babies,“ anthropologist Karen Rosenberg at the University of Delaware told LiveScience.

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 Both articles pointed to human walking and running

motions as examples of poor design, contradicting all the good things Daniel Lieberman had said about those adaptations (see11/18/2004 entry). “Evolution doesn’t produce perfection,” Mann said, thus employing a false dichotomy, because intelligent design theory never claims perfection as evidence of design (or non-perfection as refutation of design). The literature on dysteleology as it relates to ID is extensive, but apparently unknown to these anthropologists. Besides, evolution cannot even approach the sophistication of the human body—let alone perfection—if survival is the only value in life.

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 How Latimer could claim, therefore, that

“The original design specs for the human body were designed to last about 40 years” is quizzical (besides his redundancy). “Darwinian evolutionary theory” certainly knows nothing of design specs.

Live Science reporter Charles Choi employed the long-debunked evolutionary “march of progress” icon with the caption, “Turns out, we have human evolution to thank for our bad backs, dangerous childbirths, sore feet and wisdom teeth pains.”

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Ungrateful Evolutionist Grouches About the Human Body负心的进化论者对人体整日愁眉不展 Do you see what ingrates the evolutionists are? If

they don’t like their bodies, let them go on a fitness program or walk on all fours. Watch Olympic athletes and try to say the human body is poorly designed. Without even referring to theological arguments about the Fall and the curse (including pain in childbirth), we can debunk the evolutionists’ own positions. They spoke of evolutionary theory in an effort to determine the truth about human history. Well, if evolutionary theory is a product of evolution, they have no grounds on which to say it is true. Give these ingrates the gong and move along.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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What Do a Toucan, an Oyster and a Spider Have in Common? Bio-Engineers’ Drool大嘴鸟，牡蛎和蜘蛛有什么共同点？生物工程师流口水 If we want to build more robust, lightweight materials, two

researchers say, look to nature. In Science, Meyers and McKittrick, who have been in the

biomimetics field for a decade (seePhysOrg), laid out the design specs for new artificial materials inspired by animals.

Spider silk is extraordinarily strong, mollusk shells and bone are tough, and porcupine quills and feathers resist buckling. How are these notable properties achieved? The building blocks of the materials listed above are primarily minerals and biopolymers, mostly in combination; the first weak in tension and the second weak in compression. The intricate and ingenious hierarchical structures are responsible for the outstanding performance of each material.

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What Do a Toucan, an Oyster and a Spider Have in Common? Bio-Engineers’ Drool大嘴鸟，牡蛎和蜘蛛有什么共同点？生物工程师流口水 Toughness is conferred by the presence of

controlled interfacial features (friction, hydrogen bonds, chain straightening and stretching); buckling resistance can be achieved by filling a slender column with a lightweight foam. Here, we present and interpret selected examples of these and other biological materials. Structural bio-inspired materials design makes use of the biological structures by inserting synthetic materials and processes that augment the structures’ capability while retaining their essential features. In this Review, we explain this idea through some unusual concepts.

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What Do a Toucan, an Oyster and a Spider Have in Common? Bio-Engineers’ Drool大嘴鸟，牡蛎和蜘蛛有什么共同点？生物工程师流口水 Meyers & McKittrick delineated the following challenges

for materials engineers: self assembly, multi-functionality, hierarchy, hydration, mild synthesis conditions (e.g., room temperature), optimization, and self-healing. For inspiration, they looked to the beak of the toucan, the feathers of birds, oyster shells, spider silk, porcupine quills, and the skulls of longhorn cowfish. Strong, lightweight, durable – life has mastered all seven design specifications. Engineers don’t have to use proteins as long as they follow the methods used in nature. “Mother Nature gives us templates,” said McKittrick. “We are trying to understand them better so we can implement them in new materials.”

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What Do a Toucan, an Oyster and a Spider Have in Common? Bio-Engineers’ Drool大嘴鸟，牡蛎和蜘蛛有什么共同点？生物工程师流口水 Meyers pointed out that biomimetics has a long

history. “Bio-inspired designs have been a part of science and engineering for a long time—from the legend of Icarus, to Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machines, inspired by birds, to modern-day materials such as Velcro, Meyers pointed out” in PhysOrg. Only in the last decade or so has the field really taken off, with new research labs, journals and dramatic successes with more on the way all the time.

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What Do a Toucan, an Oyster and a Spider Have in Common? Bio-Engineers’ Drool大嘴鸟，牡蛎和蜘蛛有什么共同点？生物工程师流口水 In other Biomimetics news, (1) Science discussed efforts to

copy what microbes do so easily—splitting hydrogen molecules. Hydrogenase enzymes are the envy of fuel cell designers but molecular biologists still don’t know quite how they work so effectively at room temperature. (2)PNAS featured “Biomimetic Buildings” in a review that is part engineering, part art, and part Thoreau. Architect Charles Lee’s exhibit of a biomimetic house is currently on tour as part of exhibition entitled Nature’s Toolbox: Biodiversity, Art, and Invention. (3) Finally, Science Daily talked about “Cell Circuits Remember Their History: Engineers Design New Synthetic Biology Circuits That Combine Memory and Logic.” By building logic circuits in the genes of bacteria, MIT researchers hope to create “long-term environmental sensors, efficient controls for biomanufacturing, or to program stem cells to differentiate into other cell types.”

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What Do a Toucan, an Oyster and a Spider Have in Common? Bio-Engineers’ Drool大嘴鸟，牡蛎和蜘蛛有什么共同点？生物工程师流口水 The future is in biomimetics, not

Darwinism. The quaint Victorian myth has no place in this exploding field. Get with the program, Charlie worshippers; it’s all about design now.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Soil, Sustainability, and the Blue Revolution土壤，可持续性和蓝色革命 Life-sustaining resources are right beneath our

feet, says a Penn State hydrologist. Henry Lin, professor of hydropedology and soil

hydrology at Penn State, has some good news for environmentalists worried about the availability of water for a thirsty world. In a Penn State press release, he said:

“We look at nature and we see all the beauty and all the prosperity around us,” said Lin, “But most people don’t know or tend to forget that the key to sustainability is right underground.”

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Soil, Sustainability, and the Blue Revolution土壤，可持续性和蓝色革命 He shared some amazing facts about soil ecology: Soil “helps soak up and purify water by extracting

excess nutrients, heavy metals and other impurities.”

“The ground can also act as a storage container for freshwater.”

“About 60 percent of the world’s annual precipitation ends up in this zone, Lin said.”

Lin added, “In fact, there is more water under the ground than there is in the so-called ‘blue waters,’ such as lakes and rivers.”

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Soil, Sustainability, and the Blue Revolution土壤，可持续性和蓝色革命 We tend to forget about soil. It’s out of sight,

out of mind. That needs to change: “Without water there is no life,” Lin said.

“Without groundwater, there is no clean water.”

Lin looks forward to a “Blue Revolution” where farmers will prevent flooding, building designers will minimize runoff and keep groundwaters replenished, and city planners will minimize groundwater contamination. Such a revolution “may lead to efforts to water security with clean, safe water supply around the globe.”

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Soil, Sustainability, and the Blue Revolution土壤，可持续性和蓝色革命 Speaking of soil, PhysOrg discussed how natural

soil antibiotics can offer an alternative to farm chemicals. “All you have to do is make your microbial community happy,” one researcher said, and they can help feed the world. And speaking of clean water, for the rainfall-poor areas, researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology, “inspired by nature,” have devised a coating for cotton that can hold 340% its weight in pure, fresh water by absorbing it from desert air. They got the idea from desert beetles and spiders that collect their water from fog.

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Soil, Sustainability, and the Blue Revolution土壤，可持续性和蓝色革命 Did you know that soil is a giant sponge

that holds 60% of the worlds rainfall and cleanses it? What a wonder simple soil is – a complex ecosystem involving decaying plant material, numerous animals and countless microbes. It’s a marvelously designed system that human beings can protect and preserve or erode away. The choice is ours.

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Soil, Sustainability, and the Blue Revolution土壤，可持续性和蓝色革命 Many third-world countries are desperate

for clean water. Some common-sense planning can enhance the gift of soil, a gift that will give back an overflowing abundance of life. New biomimetic technologies can pull clean, pure drinking water right out of the air. This is the kind of thing science should focus on, not speculative tales about the unobservable past. Let’s help real people in the here and now.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Intact Biomolecules Claimed to Be 350 Million Years Old 完整生物分子被称是 3.5亿年老 The oldest recovered biomolecules have

been found in crinoid fossils – but are they really that old?

A trio of Ohio State researchers, publishing in Geology, described intact biological molecules in crinoids they found in Carboniferous strata in Ohio. Rather than question the ability of fossils to maintain biological molecules for 350 million years, they used the evidence as support for evolution:

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Intact Biomolecules Claimed to Be 350 Million Years Old 完整生物分子被称是 3.5亿年老 Results suggest that the preservation of

diagnostic organic molecules is much more common that previously realized, and that preserved organic molecules may provide an independent method to unravel phylogenetic relationships among echinoderms and, perhaps, other fossilized organisms.

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Intact Biomolecules Claimed to Be 350 Million Years Old 完整生物分子被称是 3.5亿年老 The press release from Ohio State shows

the crinoids (sea lilies) in situ in the rock, clearly distinguishable by color. Analysis of the material in the colored specimens suggests that the molecules are quinones, used by the animals for coloration or as toxins to deter predators.

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Intact Biomolecules Claimed to Be 350 Million Years Old 完整生物分子被称是 3.5亿年老 “When a crinoid dies, the tissue will start to

decay, but calcite will precipitate into the pores, and calcite is stable over geologic time,” the article claimed. “Thus, organic matter may become sealed whole within the rock.” The researchers did not watch the organic matter for that long, though, to see if it is empirically true, nor did they explain how the pores would remain sealed through hundreds of millions of years of asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and other catastrophes.

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Intact Biomolecules Claimed to Be 350 Million Years Old 完整生物分子被称是 3.5亿年老 It’s uncanny how these people never ever question the

time scale. They can’t. It would be their undoing. “Geologic time” must remain a Law of the Misdeeds and Perversions that cannot be altered. An earth even one third or one fourth as old as claimed would lead to the collapse of the quaint Victorian myth they hold so dear. But when miracles of time and chance multiply in the evolutionary scenario, it becomes indistinguishable from any other human-concocted creation myth. Creation accounts with an Eyewitness are vastly superior. Do you know of more than one?

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sermons from science -- march 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 3 月

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