The ID Update

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Issue 9 of Salvo (Summer 2009) has come out, with many fine articles. The feature article is on the explosion of kids watching Internet porn.*

A number of interesting features on topics related to the intelligent design controversy:

Gimme that Spacetime Religion: Seeking Salvation in Science by Regis Nicoll, about the effort to transform Darwinism into a religion with all the trappings - except actual guilt for sin.

Wesley J. Smith, describing himself as a "Human Exceptionalist" talks about the effect that the growing practice of equating humans with animals and plants has on bioethics, pointing out, "If they really wanted to be reductionist, they could also say that because carrots are made out of carbon molecules, there is no distinction between carrots and humans either. You can't get far enough ahead of these guys in terms of satire."

Twin Features: The Big Problem That Design Convergence Posses to Darwinian Evolution by Hugh Ross: Remember the Tree of Life we were taught in high school, that proved Darwin was right? "The problem for the Darwinian perspective is this: Life forms that are only distantly rrelated, if at all, nevertheless show amazing similarities in their morphological features (some are identical). This is not what Darwinists expect." He recounts a good deal of examples, including Lenski's famous simulation, showing that repeated design is a better explanation. We are now down to the club moss of life, I guess. Turns up everywhere.

The Flop: Betting Against Darwin's Tree of Life by Casey Luskin: A great companion to the above. Luskin explains how a famous Darwinist, self-cited as one of the "world's leading experts on the tree of life" tried to bluff the Texas State Board of Education that Darwin's Tree of Life was in great shape - when current science lit shows it is collapsing. Or, as Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said, "... today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence." One of the world's leading experts should spend less time bluff and more time reading the evidence. Even the Texas Board can find this stuff out now. (If they don't, it won't be Luskin's fault.)

Old Bones: The Story of a Girl with a Birth Defect by Michael Cook: About a severely retarded child who lived over 500 000 years ago. "Now here's the remarkable thing. The hunter-gatherer Middle Pleistocene family of Cranium 14 must have cared for the child, or she would not have survived for at least five years, and perhaps as many as twelve. In the dry-as-dust words of the article, 'It is obvious that the [Sima de Huesos]' hominin species did not act against the abnormal/ill individuals during infancy, as has happened along our own history in many cultures.'"

My regular Deprogram column is about Phineas Gage - the Lecture Room Psychopath. It seems he wasn't a psychopath in his lifetime, but became one after his death, when he was needed to demonstrate to Psychology 101 students that brain injury radically changes personality. "Sadly, Intro to Psych 101 professors didn't need a workingman who had independently adapted to his disability - without government funding - and found work on his own. They needed an aimless, sociopathic drifter."

Only the first of these ID-relevant articles seems to be online. If you thought this was a hint that you should subscribe or buy just this one issue, or support Salvo - well yes, it is!

Americans, Happy July 4!

(*As a mother and grandmother, I would say key controllable factors are more chores, more sports, more homework, and more supervision. A busy, supervised kid is not watching porn whether it is available or not, for the same reason that a busy, supervised kid isn't smoking (or not often) even if he can buy cigs from a complicit shopkeeper.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

As reported by Beb Leach in the London Telegraph, Prof. Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, has helped set up an atheist summer camp where children will be taught rational scepticism and sing John Lennon's Imagine...

The author of "The God Delusion", who stepped down from his post at Oxford University last year, has subsidised the five-day camp in Somerset.

Camp-goers will be given lessons in rational scepticism, as well as sessions in moral philosophy and evolutionary biology.

More...

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Now, let me get this straight...according to the atheist, when Christians "propagandize" children regarding God, it's a form of child "abuse", but when Richard Dawkins propagandizes children regarding atheism, it is just wonderful "truth-telling".

The world of human phylogeny has been hit by a bombshell. Although scholars and textbooks are presenting chimpanzees as man's closest relatives, Grehan and Schwartz have revived the case for orangutans. They consider hominoids to be comprised of two sister clades: the human-orangutan clade (dental hominoids) and the chimpanzee-gorilla clade (African apes). They claim that humans and orangutans "share a common ancestor that excludes the extant African apes". Since it is received wisdom that chimps are the nearest relative to humans because we share over 98% of their genes and since humans are referred to as the "third chimpanzee", the ramifications of the new paper are immense!

Mr. Jiggs, a six-year-old orangutan at London Zoo, is capable of mopping his own quarters (credit B. A. Stewart and D. S. Boyer, source here)

Conceptual upheavals of this magnitude are unlikely to happen without major methodological modifications. This is the main concern of this blog. The authors do not start with DNA similarities but with morphological data. They note that, originally, the DNA comparisons were interpreted in the light of morphological analyses, but:

"Neither of two oft-cited morphological studies claiming to corroborate the interpretation of molecular data as supporting a close relationship between chimpanzees and humans took into consideration or provided justification for excluding most of the morphological features that have been documented as being shared uniquely by humans and orangutans."

The authors proceed to critique previous studies for the way they selected characters for cladistic analysis. They point out that these approaches incorporated characters considered to be derived within the ingroup "in spite of the fact that the feature is also common in the outgroup".

"Although a range of morphological studies have claimed to support a closer relationship between humans and chimpanzees or African apes, these studies have relied on many of the characters that we found to be problematic, and thus demonstrate how entrenched error becomes as it is unquestioningly passed on from and incorporated into one study after another."

Those familiar with the Kuhnian analysis of the practice of science will discern features here of 'working within the paradigm', with presuppositions unintentionally closing off avenues of enquiry. Conscious of the limitations of other work, Grehan and Schwartz explain and justify their selection of characters. One of their additional objectives was to include numerous fossil apes within their study.

"Our analysis of relationships between living and fossil taxa is based on a character matrix limited to hard-tissue characters that have been sufficiently well described in the literature to permit verification, and whose claimed character states as well as unique occurrence within a large-bodied hominoid clade we could corroborate via a broad outgroup comparison."

It is worth noting that their conclusion has deep roots. Schwartz was making points like this in 1984. His book The Red Ape appeared in 1987 and in a revised form in 2005. The paper has not come from authors who have suddenly hit on a quirky idea but it represents the mature judgment of two respected scholars.

What then shall be said of the DNA similarity data? The analysis of the authors is scathing. The key points are, in their own words:

"But the widely accepted notion that the 'greatest overall molecular similarity' is synonymous with 'most closely related' derives not from any empirical evidence but merely from the acceptance without question of the 'molecular assumption': namely, most recently divergent taxa will be most similar in their proteins and DNA because they will have shared a longer lineage of molecular change prior to their divergence and that the pace of molecular change was clocklike in nature. Nevertheless, despite claims to the contrary, the demonstration of molecular similarity does not a priori equate with a demonstration of homology, which must precede any hypothesis of phylogenetic relationship because a demonstration of similarity alone is only phenetic and must be subject to rigorous phylogenetic enquiry."

They cite previous work by Schwartz & Maresca that was the subject of a blog here. They argue that the published studies lack objectivity and have embedded tautologies. The New Scientist report summarises the argument against chimp/human genetic similarities by quoting one of the authors:

"Grehan, however, argues that this is not scientifically justified. He points out that traditional taxonomy makes a distinction between two types of similarity - "derived novelties" and "primitive retentions". Derived novelties are traits shared by two closely related species and are taken to have evolved in a recent common ancestor. Primitive retentions are older traits with a deeper evolutionary past shared by a larger group of species.
The problem with molecular systematics, says Grehan, is it fails to distinguish between the two. "It does not matter that more DNA similarities may be found between humans and chimpanzees if these similarities are really primitive retentions," he says."

A third element of the new paper is to set the argument for the human/orangutan relationship in a biogeographical context. Whereas the consensus view understands an emergence of humanity "out of Africa", there is a need for these issues to be addressed for the dental hominoid clade. The authors do this utilising data relating to the fossil species included in their analysis.

The significance of the paper is that the arguments relate to cladism (which is very widely used for assigning probabilities to evolutionary relationships) and phylogenomics (which is a standard tool for establishing evolutionary relationships). The authors have challenged the scientific consensus with some cogent and penetrating arguments. It is not just a dispute about the meaning of data, but how that data is selected and what presuppositions the researchers bring to their work. As such, the new paper provides us with a very important case study and sets the agenda for potentially very interesting discussions about methodology. If this is properly done, it will be to the health of the science community. Scientists with an openness to ID will welcome this debate, because many of critiques made by Grehan and Schwartz link directly to issues that concern us.

Evolution of the second orangutan: phylogeny and biogeography of hominid origins
Grehan, J.R. and Schwartz, J. H.
Journal of Biogeography, advance online 22 June 2009 | doi 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02141.x (abstract)

Main conclusions: Humans and orangutans share a common ancestor that excludes the extant African apes. Molecular analyses are compromised by phenetic procedures such as alignment and are probably based on primitive retentions. We infer that the human-orangutan common ancestor had established a widespread distribution by at least 13 Ma. Vicariant differentiation resulted in the ancestors of hominids in East Africa and various primarily Miocene apes distributed between Spain and Southeast Asia (and possibly also parts of East Africa). The geographical disjunction between early hominids and Asian Pongo is attributed to local extinctions between Europe and Central Asia. [. . .]

See also:

Lawton, G. Could the orang-utan be our closest relative? New Scientist, 17 June 2009

Humans and Orangutan, Buffalo Museum of Science web resource.

As reported by ENV...the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed "through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection," a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that "the development of life was guided by intelligent design."

More...

Archeologist with simple piece of pottery: Look what I discovered; I wonder who created it.
Scientist: Wow! What a cool pot; who do you think made it?

Biologist with complex piece of DNA code: Look what I discovered; I wonder who created it.
Scientist: Wow! What a crackpot; why does he think someone made it?

It's a good thing the Bible doesn't say God made clay pots. If it did, design-minded archeologists would be out of a job. With little to say about each new find that cannot be turned into a "religious" question, design-inferring archeologists would be relegated to the fate of their like-minded brethren in biology--the realm of "science cannot infer design because design might mean God and science and religion cannot mix." Archeologists be glad; you get to freely infer intelligent design for objects of obvious design but unknown origin without facing the "might mean God" barrier to truth-seeking. In other words, you get to be scientists and logically infer intelligent design--a luxury not to be taken for granted.

Actually, archeologists are not the exception; they are the rule. Scientists of many stripes infer design to explain phenomena of unknown (and unknowable) origin all the time. Forensic scientists, faced with a dead body and no witnesses look for evidence to piece together a historical narrative to explain a past event: was the death accidental (unintelligent causes) or murder (intelligent causation)? Simple. And what about the good folks over at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)? Their name says it all. Although embarrassed at being rightly compared to their like-minded biologist counterparts, these scientists regularly collect evidence in the form of radio signals to determine if the signals are the result of background radiation in space (unintelligent causes), or extraterrestrial intelligence (intelligent causes). Easy. A child can do it.

And biologists? Well, there's the exception to one rule and the imposition of another. Biologists must suppress entertaining any lingering thoughts spurred by logical inferences of design because such thoughts automatically and necessarily lead to "religion" and, unless it's a God-denying religion, that's a bad thing. After all, a respectable scientist having "religious" thoughts hasn't happened since the days of Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Bacon, Pascal, Herschel, Faraday, Joule and, well, you get the idea. It's been a long time since the natural wonder of the beauty of intelligent design in nature could be scientifically expressed without professional and personal recriminations.

The savvy Darwinist will quickly jump in here with a smug smile and reply that the analogy to archeology does not hold. It happens, he says with the certainty of one-sided thinking, that in our human experience we know that humans can, and have, made pottery for generations. And because we can explain the kind of potter with some certainty, archeology never approaches the "might mean God" line. Living systems, on the other hand, are not known to be made by human intelligence, so we have no basis to infer human design, and any suitable intelligence must mean God, and science and religion cannot mix. You see? The inherent "who" problem in origins science is not to be found in archeology, so there is no inconsistency in letting archeology be respectable science and letting intelligent design be respectable religion (if there is such a thing).

But this response misses the point. This response jumps the inquiry directly to the "who" question, bypassing the "what" question without a thought. Yet in archeology, as in all disciplines, the "what" of design alone can be an end in itself, informing a fruitful line of scientific inquiry that otherwise would be missed were the fact of design not granted or the identity of the designer demanded. Even if the potter remains forever unknown, the fact of design-discovery alone gives the archeologist the subject matter of her science. How else is an archeologist to know if she has found a piece of clay or a pot? Without design detection alone (i.e., absent design-er detection) having scientific value, the field of archeology would be dead.

But more importantly, the "because we know there's a human potter" response powerfully confirms exactly the intelligent design theorist's point: design can be recognized because in our human experience we can recognize things for which we know only intelligent agency can accomplish. Our experience of the world shows that what we recognize as design invariably reflects the prior activity of conscious and intelligent persons who may now be hopelessly unknowable. In the case of a clay pot, yes, it was most certainly made by a kind of potter we are familiar with: men or women, who may forever remain unknown. But why must we all pretend ignorance when we consider clay people? Does not the fact of design carry great value independently of knowledge of the designer?

Clay people, like clay pots, carry the unmistakable hallmarks of intelligent design. Conflating the "what" of design with the "who" in biological systems is the illogical and scientifically inconsistent tactic of those philosophically opposed to a divine creative intelligence, i.e., Darwinians who fear a "divine foot in the door" of science. But denying a pot for fear of a potter is not science, and is ultimately no more effective than denying a symptom for fear of a disease. Truth is not changed by the evidence-denying belief in a lie.

Presumably, our Darwinian tutors must think, were it not for "religion" no one would think to infer design in biology. And solely because of a supposed "mighty mean God" mainstream science desperately demands that a biologist must obey a rule that prohibits design detection, while his archeologist colleague freely infers intelligent design. The disparate rules of desperate scientists create an illogical two-tiered system where a biologist is required to attempt a rigorous proof of design, while an archeologist is merely required to say, "Hey, look what I found!" Why is this?

No, really. Why?

Roddy Bullock, a skeptic of Darwinism, is a freelance writer, engineer, lawyer, the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by and available from Access Research Network.

Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

If you like this essay, go here for many more.

Copyright (c) 2009 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:

Information on God-believing scientists: http://creationsafaris.com/wgcs.htm

The sentence that starts: "Our experience of the world shows that what we recognize as design invariably reflects the prior activity of conscious and intelligent persons . . ." was adapted from Stephen C. Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell, DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, (Harper Collins, 2009), p. 16. In Meyer's sentence, the term "information" is used instead of "design".

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

"It is a remarkable thing", said Sir Hart,
"that we find ourselves thinking of a cosmical start,
in which all that we know and we love came to be,
from a specified moment of time."
"In fact time itself is said to begin",
said Sir Hart as he pensively scratched at his chin.
"And as space expanded, we see from within,
that it started as small as a dime."

"The expansion of space was controlled to a T,
as fine-tuned an expansion, we never did see,
like an archer who shoots an arrow will be,
so precise in his aim and his shot.
It is from the heat radiating from space,
that Wilson and Penzias came face to face,
with a finding that changed how we looked at our race,
for our cosmos was small as a dot."

"It began at a point so incredibly small",
said Sir Hart as he stood almost two meters tall,
indicating the tinniest dust on the wall,
"This is how we are told it began:
There was a brief period of hyperinflation
from which space arose from a point in creation,
not too fast or slow to ensure the formation,
of galaxies visible to man."

For those who don't like what the finding implies,
that there must be a maker who stretched out the skies,
so controlled an expansion we see with our eyes,
there is one riposte they propound.
"Our cosmos is one out of many" we're told,
"so statistical chance will ensure that the mold,
of a cosmos conducive to life will unfold,
in one of the many around."

"But where" we may ask "are the many around?"
"All those cosmic abodes that we're told must abound,
having spawned from a sponge before time had been wound,
and from which ours arose as we see?"
There is no firm evidence that we observe,
that our universe here, so shaped like a curve,
is one of a 'Multiverse'. Oh what a nerve!
Conjecture is all it could be!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Before I announce the winner, I should note that Harper One San Francisco has announced that 5 hardback copies of both Steve Meyer's Signature of the Cell, ( 2009) and Beauregard and O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain (2007 ) are available free to contest winners. Like, win and add them to your library for free.

Okay, now to Question 5:

Winner VJ Torley writes,

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Research into the skeletal remains of Stone Age Man has been undertaken in parallel with work to clarify the cultural and cognitive skills of these people. The dominant paradigm has been gradualism linked to the slow transformation of ape-like creatures into Modern Man. Darwinism has influenced the way people have approached the data and the interpretations they have placed on findings.

Papers are regularly published which point out the earliest example of a cultural trait: use of fire, hunting using spears, artefacts (like jewellery) indicating the presence of aesthetic values, Venus figurines, and so on. Two recent examples are noted in this blog.

Musical instruments like these allow inferences to be made about the cognitive skills of the users (Source here)

The first example concerns hafted spears, which are said to date back to 200,000 years ago. These are compound tools, where a sharp, hard point is hafted to a shaft. Archaeologists recognise that this invention has implications for our understanding of the minds of the spear-makers. The newly reported discovery is of spears where the hafting was found to be associated with a number of naturally occurring materials. Why were these materials located at the join? By an extensive programme of experimentation, the researchers came to the view that the artisans were using the materials as adhesives, and that the manufacturing process demonstrated a high level of abstract thinking.

"Wadley et al. identified naturally available materials (acacia gums and beeswax) that could be combined with ochre (found as residue on the tools), after which they experimented with various combinations to find the most effective mixture. They also tried different techniques for producing the actual haft, including the use of fire for rapid drying of the adhesives. With the most effective procedure in hand they could then ask themselves what an artisan needed to understand in order to conceive of and execute this task. "We propose that these artisans were exceedingly skilled; they understood the properties of their adhesive ingredients and they were able to manipulate them knowingly". In particular the artisans needed to understand the properties of their ingredients (e.g., cohesiveness), to be able to judge the effects of temperature, to be able to switch attention back and forth between separate rapidly changing variables, and to be flexible enough to adjust to the variability inherent in naturally occurring ingredients."

In a Commentary on the paper, Wynn points out that the reasoning that leads to such a conclusion must be "based on a sequence of inferences, each of which must be explicit and persuasive if the argument as a whole is to be credible." He spells out the details of that reasoning process, "borrowed loosely from Botha's detailed critique of an archaeological argument for the use of syntactical language by people at Blombos Cave 77,000 years ago." The merit of this approach is that observations and inferences can be clearly identified and each step can be scrutinised carefully. Archaeologists have new avenues to explore, which is very exciting.

"Most of the focus in this debate has been on the role language and symbolism but, as Wadley et al. make clear, there is more to modern cognition than language and the use of symbols. Indeed, language has proven to be a particularly intractable topic for archaeologists, a point made cogently by Botha. By focusing on activities that tax reasoning ability and are also visible archaeologically, such as hafting, archaeologists are in a better position to contribute to an understanding of the evolution of the modern mind."

The second paper concerns the finding of musical instruments. "Researchers universally accept the existence of complex musical instruments as an indication of fully modern behaviour and advanced symbolic communication." Previously, the oldest instriument was about 30,000 years ago, but the new finds come from a site dated at about 35,000 years. Some of the reported comments are as follows:

"It's becoming increasingly clear that music was part of day-to-day life," he said.
"Music was used in many kinds of social contexts: possibly religious, possibly recreational - much like we use music today in many kinds of settings."
The researchers also suggest that not only was music widespread much earlier than previously thought, but so was humanity's creative spirit.
"The modern humans that came into our area already had a whole range of symbolic artifacts, figurative art, depictions of mythological creatures, many kinds of personal ornaments and also a well-developed musical tradition," Professor Conard explained.

The first general point I want to make is that the procedures described (for making inferences from archaeological data) are not dissimilar from the procedures used by Intelligent Design scholars for making inferences about design in nature. These procedures are not arbitrary or poorly conceived, but rigorous and evidence-based (and exciting!). This is why the objections most often heard are based on demarcation arguments: 'Design is not part of Science'. Clearly, in archaeology, design is part of science!

The second general point concerns the creeping awareness that Stone Age men were far more "modern" than we have given them credit for. The problem is that most scholars understand consciousness, capacity for abstract thought and aesthetics as emergent properties of evolving animals. They do not allow the thought that these capabilities might be present by design. So, the data is moulded to fit a slow evolutionary transformation and other ways of interpreting the data are neglected. To show that design perspectives can propose hypotheses that can be tested, here is possible scenario. All these Stone Age men are human and have essentially modern cognitive skills. However, they lived in environments where they needed to adopt survival strategies and this prevented the flowering of sedentary communities and limited evidences of creativity. The prediction is that evidences of modernity will continue to be found, pushing the appearance of cultural artefacts earlier and earlier in time.

Implications for complex cognition from the hafting of tools with compound adhesives in the Middle Stone Age, South Africa
Lyn Wadley, Tamaryn Hodgskiss and Michael Grant
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, Published online May 11, 2009 | doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900957106

Abstract: Compound adhesives made from red ochre mixed with plant gum were used in the Middle Stone Age (MSA), South Africa. Replications reported here suggest that early artisans did not merely color their glues red; they deliberately effected physical transformations involving chemical changes from acidic to less acidic pH, dehydration of the adhesive near wood fires, and changes to mechanical workability and electrostatic forces. Some of the steps required for making compound adhesive seem impossible without multitasking and abstract thought. This ability suggests overlap between the cognitive abilities of modern people and people in the MSA. Our multidisciplinary analysis provides a new way to recognize complex cognition in the MSA without necessarily invoking the concept of symbolism.

New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany
Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina, Susanne C. Munzel
Nature (online 24 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08169 (Abstract)

Considerable debate surrounds claims for early evidence of music in the archaeological record. Researchers universally accept the existence of complex musical instruments as an indication of fully modern behaviour and advanced symbolic communication but, owing to the scarcity of finds, the archaeological record of the evolution and spread of music remains incomplete. Although arguments have been made for Neanderthal musical traditions and the presence of musical instruments in Middle Palaeolithic assemblages, concrete evidence to support these claims is lacking. Here we report the discovery of bone and ivory flutes from the early Aurignacian period of southwestern Germany. These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe, more than 35,000 calendar years ago. Other than the caves of the Swabian Jura, the earliest secure archaeological evidence for music comes from sites in France and Austria and post-date 30,000 years ago.

See also:

Ghosh, P. 'Oldest musical instrument' found, BBC News, 25 June 2009.

Wynn, T. Hafted spears and the archaeology of mind, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 2009 | doi: 106:9544-9545 (Extract)

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The summer of 2000 promised to be very exciting for ornithologists and paleontologists alike as they flew into Beijing for the fifth quadrennial meeting of the Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution (Ref 1). The setting was most appropriate given the richness of fossils that have been unearthed in Chinese soil. The central theme of the meeting lay in trying to resolve the question of whether birds had really evolved from dinosaurs (Ref 1). However, rather than a harmonious discussion with the constructive disagreement that one might expect from any scientific 'get-together' aimed at resolving discrepancies in data, the meeting did nothing but expose an underlying discord (Ref 1).

While some scientists such as Berkeley's John Hutchinson and Yale ornithologist Richard Prum were frustrated over issues that they considered long resolved, others were much more skeptical about the certainty of the facts. Storrs Olson, head of ornithology at the National Museum of Natural History, weighed in by accusing Prum of engaging in "ideological mumbo-jumbo" when Prum claimed that feathers had the same evolutionary origin as "hair like integuments found on dinosaur fossils" (Ref 1). So strong was Olson's feeling against the evolutionary link drawn between birds and dinosaurs that throughout the meeting he and others wore badges stating their case: "BIRDS ARE NOT DINOSAURS" (or B.A.N.D for short; Ref 1). University Of North Carolina paleontologist Alan Feduccia, well known for his discussions on temporal discrepancies between bird and dinosaur fossils, was similarly uncertain about the dinosaur-bird link. Feduccia made his uncertainty public to the sound of accusations claiming a creationist undertone (Ref 1).

With the latest evidence Olson and his 'BAND of merry men' appear to have been vindicated. New data on how birds breathe makes the dinosaur-bird link untenable. According to a recent study, the unique thigh bone and muscle structure in birds' legs play a key role in preventing lung collapse (Ref 2). For birds, that need about twenty times more oxygen than say reptiles, such structural support is crucial to survival (Ref 2). Theropod dinosaurs from which birds are thought to have descended, did not sport such a fixed thigh bone structure and are therefore not viable candidates for a hypothetical bird ancestor (Ref 2).

Of course the impasse over how birds evolved extends well beyond thigh bones and muscles. In fact, the origin of feathers continues to be a formidable stumbling block for 'evo-philes'. To further understand the difficulty that the feather poses to the assumed evolutionary transition from dinosaurs to birds, consider the feather's structural foundations. What we know is that the central rachis (or shaft) of the feather branches off into smaller barbs and barbules. The barbules are equipped with tiny hooklets at their ends that interlock with ridges in the posterior barbules to form an impervious, tightly-held vane (Ref 3).

From an aerodynamic standpoint, the arrangement of the feathers in the overall shape of the wing makes for an aerofoil that displays minimal levels of turbulence (Ref 3). The ability to change the geometry and shape of such an aerofoil makes it ideally suited for the various tasks that the bird has to perform such as landing, soaring and flapping. From a molecular and cellular perspective, the story is no less fascinating. The feather follicle, from which the central rachis projects, contains specific zones of epithelial cells specialized in the formation of each of the components of the feather (Ref 4). The molecular mechanisms by which such cell specialization is achieved have also been elucidated in recent years (Ref 4). Through concentration gradients and a highly-regulated activation of specific genes, the morphogenesis and development of a feather is a very tightly-controlled affair (Ref 4).

With such a realization, we begin to get a sense of why it was that twenty three years ago biologist Michael Denton so emphatically decried the step-by-step, unguided evolutionary origin of wings (Ref 3). As Oregon State University Professor John Ruben humorously quipped, "a velociraptor did not just sprout feathers and fly off into the sunset" (Ref 2). The wing- the perfect aerofoil- must meet rigorous criteria before it can provide the necessary lift (Ref 4). No slight fraying of dinosaur scales would have done the job.

Seemingly oblivious of these intractable challenges, some scientists have gone all out to prop up their evolutionary meanderings by focusing on the three-fingered limbs of theropod dinosaurs and modern day birds (Refs 5,6). Paleontologists Xing Xu and James Clark for example recently published on two specimens of a 156 million-old, toothless-beaked, herbivorous theropod called Limusaurus inextricabilis that, they maintain, is a Darwinian-style 'missing link' (Refs 5,6).

One factor that has long been a source of consternation is that the finger digits of theropods and birds do not appear to match. While theropods seemingly carried digits 1,2 and 3 of the pentadactyl arrangement, birds display what scientists believe to be digits 2,3 and 4 (Refs 5,6). Xu and Clark have ruffled feathers by claiming that theropod digits have historically been misidentified. Based on their study of L. inextricabilis, they contend that just like in birds early theropods would have had digits 2,3 and 4 (Refs 5,6).

Such a conclusion is not without its critics. In fact prominent Yale evolutionary geneticist Gunter Wagner has questioned the numbering assignments of bird digits adding that bird wings might be based on digits 1,2 and 3 after all (Ref 5). Wagner cites fundamental aspects of embryonic development in support of his case. University of California paleontologist Kevin Padian has similarly suggested that the digit morphology of L. inextricabilis might represent nothing more than an "oddly reduced hand", commensurate with its herbivorous lifestyle (Ref 5).

Today, nine years after the Beijing meeting, Olson would seemingly be justified in wearing his famous badge. For him and others, the 'B.A.N.D' does indeed play on. To be sure, contemporary evidence shows birds to be a distinct phyletic group not easily integrated into a man made evolutionary scheme. While evolutionists point proudly to the apparent anatomical similarities between birds and dinosaurs, they themselves admit to the pressing need to resolve crucial questions about the origin of flight, the evolution of feathers and the conversion to endothermy (Ref 7).

These are not side questions designed to obfuscate discussions, but rather questions that are central to the matter at hand. In light of such facts, perhaps a more radical message needs to be conveyed that echoes the beat of a different mantra: BIRDS ARE REALLY BIRDS (or B.A.R.B for short). It is perhaps time to re-examine our most treasured notions of bird evolution.

Literature Cited
1. Rex Dalton (2000), Feathers fly in Beijing, Nature, Volume 405, p.992

2. See 'Discovery raises new doubts about dinosaur-bird-links', http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/osu-drn060809.php

3. Michael Denton (1986), Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler and Adler Publishers, Bethesda Maryland, 1st Edition, pp. 202-208

4. Mingke Yu, Ping Wu, Randall B. Widelitz, Cheng-Ming Chuong (2002), The morphogenesis of feathers, Nature, Volume 420, pp.308-312

5. Matt Kaplan (2009), Dinosaur's digits show how birds got wings, 17 June 2009, Nature, doi:10.1038/news.2009.577

6. Xing Xu, James M. Clark, Jinyou Mo , Jonah Choiniere, Catherine A. Forster, Gregory M. Erickson, David W. E. Hone, Corwin Sullivan, David A. Eberth, Sterling Nesbitt, Qi Zhao, Rene Hernandez, Cheng-kai Jia, Feng-lu Han, Yu Guo (2009), A Jurassic ceratosaur from China helps clarify avian digital homologies, Nature 459, pp.940-944

7. See 'Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?', http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/avians.html

On June 2, 2009 as Congress debated global warming legislation that would raise energy costs to consumers by hundreds of billions of dollars, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released an 880-page book challenging the scientific basis of concerns that global warming is either man-made or would have harmful effects. In "Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)," coauthors Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso and 35 contributors and reviewers present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scholarship in this book demonstrates overwhelming scientific support for the position that the warming of the twentieth century was moderate and not unprecedented, that its impact on human health and wildlife was positive, and that carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change. The full 880 page report, Climate Change Reconsidered, can be downloaded for free, along with a 48 page downloadable summary, Nature, Not Human Acivity, Rules the Climate, which is the recommended place to start for those who want a quick overview or the evidence and arguments.

Links to these reports have been added to the ARN resource page on global warming, which provides viewpoints from both the Alarmists and the Skeptics, a great place to start for those trying to sort out the facts.