Access
Research
Network

Welcome to ARN-Announce
Dennis Wagner, editor

Number Fifty-Seven, August 2, 2006

ARN-Announce is the on-line announcement and information service of Access Research Network. ARN generates announcements to the current ARN Announce list as information becomes available. You have received this message because your email address was submitted to this list. Subscription and Unsubscription information is at the end of this message.

Items discussed in this issue:

  • My vacation to the UK, Part 1
  • Darwin’s Deli
  • The London Natural History Museum
  • New book on the Origin of Life by Stuart Pullen
  • New DVD Lecture on Abiogenesis by Edward Peltzer
  • Human Evolution: One Small Speck to Man?
  • Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
  • David Berlinski Interview

Darwinism in the UK

I recently returned from a two week vacation to the British Isles, and while this was a family vacation and not an ARN related trip, I did keep my eyes open for signs of how Darwin’s theories were playing out in his homeland.  I will break my report in to two parts, this first one focusing on my time in London, and part two in my next email with some observations from Scotland (Edinburgh, Inverness,  and Glasgow) and Ireland (Belfast and Dublin). I thought I had really stumbled on to something significant my first day when I walked by Darwin’s Deli with a cute sign showing the famous ape to man progression with a man on a sandwich delivery bicycle as the final product of the Dawinian process.  But alas, this turned out to be an isolated cultural encounter until my final day in London when I strolled through The Natural History Museum in London (although the graffiti on the wall may have been important evidence of the evolution of man’s artistic capability, which I have also observed in Rome, L.A. and Colorado Springs).

The Natural History Museum

The museum is housed in this beautiful German Romanesque building designed by Alfred Waterhouse in the late 1800’s and is now referred to as the Waterhouse Building.  The museum guide refers to it as a ‘cathedral to nature’ which is one of the more revealing statements about Darwin’s impact on British culture (along with the mammoth religious cathedrals in Scotland and Ireland that have been converted into shopping malls, which I will discuss further in part 2).

The Dinosaur Exhibit

I started with a tour of the Dinosaur Exhibit on the ground floor.  No doubt they have a fine and varied exhibit of dinosaur fossils and a few animated dinos to amaze the kids.  They also did a great job of explaining the various theories for the mysterious disappearance of these magnificent beasts.  But, I did not leave the exhibit overwhelmed with evidence of our Darwinian heritage.  In fact the amazing diversity of dinosaur creatures had the opposite effect on me.  The creative power of random mutations and natural selection seemed even more suspect when you have spent an hour staring at all the fossils in one room.  The Darwinian story made a lot more sense to me when my wife, Priscilla and I toured the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta a few days earlier and were able to study the evolution of the Coke bottle over the past 100 years (Priscilla is shown below next to a modern version of the Coca-Cola bottle outside the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, Georgia where we stopped for a few hours on our way to London).  

We all know that the Coke bottle is the product of intelligent design—even though there are wide variations of shapes dating back to the late 1800’s.  I understand minor variations and adaptations to the environment in biological systems (such as Darwin’s finch beaks). But Darwin’s theory remains a mystery when it comes to explaining the wide morphological differences I observed in the dinosaur exhibit that day (no mater how many millions of years you allow). For a reality check I highly recommend the video interview with mathematician David Berlinski where he discusses the 50,000+ independent morphological changes required to evolve a cow into a whale. When you move from diagrams connected with hypothetical dotted lines to doing the math required to change major body plans, the explanatory power of random mutations and natural selection becomes suspect.  Perhaps I’d find more convincing evidence of Darwin’s amoeba-to-man theory in the Darwin Centre. 

The Darwin Centre

The Museum opened the Darwin Centre in 2002, which houses 22 million biological specimens stored in jars, including creatures collected by Charles Darwin on his HMS Beagle expedition.  It also provides state-of-the-art laboratory facilities for nearly 100 Museum zoologists.  But my hopes were dashed when I found out the Darwin Centre was accessible by tour only and all tours had been filled for the day.  Perhaps one of our UK friends can arrange a tour of the Darwin Centre and send us a first-hand report.  Video lectures and other information are available online, but like the dinosaur exhibit, it probably is more impressive to walk through the collections yourself.

From the Beginning

Next I jumped upstairs to stroll through the “From the Beginning” exhibit which is a monument to Darwin’s modern-day creation story.  The exhibit draws a comparison between the life of the universe and a 12-hour clock.  Using the idea that it is now midnight, the exhibit communicates that multi-cellular organisms emerged after 10 p.m, and human beings evolved just 20 seconds ago.  The whole Darwinian story of life’s development is laid out along a timeline in the long hall.  I found it interesting that the whole exhibit is based on the simple statement at the entrance “we don’t know exactly when or how life first started…”   I found it very refreshing that such an honest statement was made at the beginning of the exhibit, but also very frustrating that the average museum visitor probably missed the significance of the assumption for the rest of the exhibit.

This month ARN is releasing two new products that explore the origin of life problem in great detail. The first is a book by Stuart Pullen titled: Intelligent Design or Evolution: Why the Origin of Life and the Evolution of Molecular Knowledge Imply Design. Pullen does a fantastic job summarizing the results of origin of life research to date, and explaining why the research results, along with our modern understanding of molecular information and knowledge, eliminates all naturalistic explanations for the origin of life.

The second product is a DVD lecture by researcher Edward Peltzer titled Abiogenesis: The Faith and the Facts. As a graduate student in the 1970s, Peltzer developed ground-breaking chemical techniques for analyzing hydroxycarboxylic acids in the Murchison Meteorite, which yielded important information in origin of life research. In this lecture held at the University of California Santa Barbara, Peltzer explains that we have four options to consider and test for the origin of life:

  1. Life is the result of unguided chemical reactions and random processes
  2. Life is the result of purposeful physical laws and initial conditions
  3. The laws of nature and fine-tuning of the initial conditions are sufficient to account for the origin of life
  4. natural processes alone prohibit the origin of life
After reviewing the evidence for each option Peltzer comes to the conclusion that chemical cross-reactions, including the Maillard reaction, would have prevented a purely naturalistic origin of life.

I would love to see the National History Museum in London, or any museum for that matter, build a true “From the Beginning” hall based on the information contained in Pullman’s book and Peltzer’s lecture.  Such an exhibit would make it clear that after 50 years of intensive scientific research we have no natural explanation for the origin of life, and in fact the evidence clearly indicates that naturalistic processes alone prohibit the origin of life.

Our Place in Evolution?

After leaving the timeline, I wandered over to the “Our Place in Evolution” exhibit above the main entrance hall where you are afforded the opportunity to compare modern human skulls with those of living and fossils “relatives”.  Before visiting this exhibit, I would recommend a thorough review of chapter 10 of Vij Sodera’s excellent book One Small Speck to Man: the Evolution Myth.   In this chapter, which contains some of the best photos of fossil evidence I’ve seen, Sodera examines chimpanzee, ape, australopithecines, Homo habilis, archaic Homo sapiens and modern man evidence and concludes there is no evidence for australopithecines having evolved from a common ancestor of chimpanzees, or for modern humans having evolved from australopithecines.  So the human-like fossil evidence actually paints a completely different picture from that which is commonly portrayed in museums like this.  Instead of man evolving from apes via crude-looking ancestors, the evidence points to populations of ancient human beings having passed through some morphological changes (whether from inbreeding and/or disease) before these groups gained the modern human form.

To put it another way, the fossil evidence contains only human and non-human bones, with no convincing evidence for any intermediaries.  Apes have always been apes and Man has always been Man.  Ah, but what about the similarities in DNA between humans and apes that can also be found in the museum?  For that I would refer you to chapter 12 of Sodera’s book where he examines the chromosome and DNA evidence in detail and here is his conclusion:

“In summary, there is no demonstrable trend in chromosome number, size and shape from simple to complex animals; and rearrangements in chromosomes are not responsible for the observable differences either between different animals or between apes and human beings.  Furthermore, the evolution of ape ancestors into humans requires there to have been a large number of lineages of isolated inbreeding populations, resulting in a number of distinct genetic intermediaries between humans, living apes, Homo habilis and australopithecines.  There is no evidence to support such a notion.  Finally, the evidence of mitochondrial DNA is ambiguous and unreliable, and lends no support to the notion that apes evolved into humans.”

Since Vij Sodera is a British surgeon residing in West Sussex, author of three acclaimed surgical textbooks, and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh I would like to nominate him to the Board of Directors for the Natural History Museum in London to see if he can guide them from the land of Darwinian Fairytales back to genuine Museum of Natural History.

Conclusion

A day at the Natural History Museum in London is a wonderful experience.  The building is magnificent.  The collection of fossils is brilliant (sorry, a little British-speak rubbed off on me).  But, as you walk through, see if you can sharpen your critical thinking skills by separating out the data from the theories.  Before you go, read Darwinian Fairytales by Austrialian philosopher David Stove (or if you don’t have time at least read Denyse O’Leary’s excellent summary notes of Stove’s book).  Spend a couple weeks digesting the data presented in Vij Sodera magnificent book One Small Speck to Man. Now with your baloney detector fully operational, tour the museum and decide if Darwin’s theory of evolution which claims all of life can be explained by processes of random mutations and natural selection is a scientific fact--or a cultural fairytale of the western world.  The fossils in the museum are real, and very interesting to look at, but the dotted lines in Darwin’s tree of life that try to connect the fossils all together in a seemless naturalistic story are still dotted, and that is what makes Darwin’s theory the Modern Day Creation Story and not a fact of science.

ON-LINE ORDERING AVAILABLE FOR ARN PRODUCTS

All of the ARN products can be ordered through our web catalog store with secure credit card ordering. There you will find a description of each product and you may add as many products as you would like to the electronic shopping cart. The suggested donation for each item includes USPS Media Mail for North American orders, which typically arrive in 5-7 days. Overseas prices include Foreign Surface shipping which may take 4-8 weeks. For faster shipping please include an additional donation and request either USPS Priority or Foreign Air. If you provide your email address, you will receive an email receipt of your order. Place your order today online at www.arn.org (click the products links on the top menu bar). If you have any problems or questions, or would rather place your order by phone, call our toll free number at 1-888-259-7102 and our staff will be happy to assist you (or leave your order on our voice mail system if we are out of the office).

A FEW NOTES ABOUT ARN ANNOUNCE

ARN-Announce describes many of the upcoming events and new articles, books, videos and other resources on Intelligent Design. Please forward this message to several of your friends and colleagues to let them know about the resources available at Access Research Network (www.arn.org). Back issues of ARN-Announce can be found at www.arn.org/announce.htm

ARN-ANNOUNCE IS PRODUCED BY ACCESS RESEARCH NETWORK

ARN-Announce is produced by Dennis Wagner (dwagner@arn.org)

Access Research Network is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing accessible information on science, technology and society issues from an Intelligent Design perspective.

Mailing Address:
Access Research Network
PO Box 38069
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80937-8069

Contact:
(719) 633-1772 voice
(719) 520-1241 fax
(888) 259-7102 toll-free order line

On the web:
www.arn.org

TO ADD YOURSELF TO ARN-ANNOUNCE:
Send an email to "ARN-Announce-request@arn.org". The body of the message should consist of the word "SUBSCRIBE" and nothing else. Or visit the web page at www.arn.org/announce.htm and select Subscribe and enter your email address. You will receive a confirmation email indicating your name has been submitted to the list. Follow the directions and reply to the email and your email address will be added to the ARN-ANNOUNCE list.

TO REMOVE YOURSELF FROM ARN-ANNOUNCE:
Send an email to "ARN-Announce-request@arn.org". The body of the message should consist of the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" and nothing else. Or visit the web page at www.arn.org/announce.htm and select Unsubscribe and enter your email address. Your email address will be automatically removed from this list.

Copyright 2006 Access Research Network. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

08.02.06

replica breitling breitling replica watches