The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, diamonds go with everything. And what would summer be without another brand new theory of the origin of life? So far, I have heard at least fifty (soup, stew, pizza) - now diamonds.

Yes, the latest is that diamonds are a swirl's best friend, as Robert Roy Britt notes in "Diamonds May Have Jump-Started Life on Earth" (Fox News, July 28, 2008):

When primitive molecules landed on the surface of these hydrogenated diamonds in the atmosphere of early Earth, a few billion years ago, the resulting reaction may have been sufficient enough to generate more complex organic molecules that eventually gave rise to life, the researchers say.

[ ... ]

The new research does not conclusively determine how life began, but it lends support to one possible way.

Well, here are a few of the others, as per recent stories:

Could life on Earth be much older than supposed? (700 million years older?)

"Sci-fi writer reminds us that life from outer space is not life from Roswell" (= an extraterrestrial origin of life is a respectable hypothesis)

"Origin of life a perfect circularity" (Even the concept can be difficult to define.)

"Why the origin of life is such a difficult problem" (because the many theories are in fundamental conflict with each other)

"Origin of life: Tangled skein continues to tangle"

It's nobody's fault. Origin of life probably isn't a solvable problem. Remember, even if someone creates life in a lab, that does not prove life started that way - only that that way is possible. It is somewhat like the prosecutor (district attorney) showing that the defendant "might have" committed the murder. That won't get the defendant convicted; it only means that the trial continues. If the prosecutor cannot demonstrate that the defendant's guilt is even possible, the trial must end.

Other stories just up at Colliding Universes:

Extraterrestrials: Younger astronomers less likely to believe than older ones?

Universe: Dinesh d'Souza finally debates Richard Dawkins - at Al-Jazeera!

Some scientists hope that the aliens are NOT out there!

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).

Did the eyespots of butterflies and moths really evolve to deter predators?

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For two hundred years, scientists have believed that the eyespots of butterflies and moths evolved to look like large eyes in order to frighten off predators. A bird might think that the bright eyespots are the eyes of a concealed cat, for example.

It sounds logical, but there is a hidden assumption: We are assuming that a predator such as a bird pays attention to the same features that we would. But does it?

Cambridge behavioral ecologist Martin Stevens and his team decided to test the longstanding assumption:

For the rest go here.

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).

By Robert Deyes

For those who have followed the long history of the famous Galapagos tortoise Lonesome George, the news on the 24th of July, 2008 that he may have at long last achieved fatherhood came as a much-welcomed surprise (Ref 1). It has been almost twenty years since scientists began trying to mate Lonesome George, originally from the isle of Pinta, with female tortoises from the neighboring island Isabella (Ref 1). On the 20th of July, 2008, staff at the Darwin Station in Santa Cruz, where Lonesome George is now located, discovered that one of these females had made a nest and filled it with nine eggs (Ref 1). Scientists will now have to wait until November to find out whether these eggs are truly fertile. But hopes are up. Indeed three of the eggs have already been placed in special incubators at the Darwin station in anticipation of a long-awaited rescue from extinction for the lonely Baltra tortoise (Ref 1).

1997 will forever remain in my memory as the year that I had the opportunity to fly out to Galapagos and see the fauna of these magnificent islands for myself. My parents had been living in Ecuador for some years prior and I had made it my duty to go out to visit them on a regular basis. This year however was different. Working as the British cultural representative in Ecuador, my father had been called to the Galapagos on business and had several meetings arranged at the Darwin Station. I was intensely excited about what lay ahead not only because I had read so much about the wonders of the Galapagos wildlife but also because I was eager to visit one of the 'pinnacles' of Darwin's evolutionary thesis. I had frequently been told about the impressive Frigate birds with their puffed out red chests, the almost motionless marine iguanas that bask in the sun, the curious boobies with their characteristic blue feet, and the giant tortoises that are now housed at the Darwin station itself.

We flew out on a crisp morning in early June and, six hours later, began our descent to the Island of Baltra in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago. As we neared Baltra on that sunny summer afternoon I recall how, from a distance at least, the islands appeared rather uninteresting and uninviting, very much as Darwin had described in 'The Voyage of the Beagle' (Ref 2, pp.28-35). We touched down in Baltra in the early afternoon breeze and began our journey towards the station, located about an hour away on Santa Cruz. We eventually arrived at the town of Puerto Ayora on the south coast of Santa Cruz where my father was scheduled to attend several meetings. This gave us a unique opportunity to visit the giant tortoise breeding center and talk to the researchers whose conservation work is so fundamental to the survival of the extraordinary wildlife that lives on the Galapagos. Our hopes became reality as we arrived at the station and got a unique view of the tortoises. Weighing in at 200 Kg, these animals were truly giants only matched in size by the giant tortoises of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. Their life expectancy is not known for certain but estimates range from 100-150 years. As we learnt from our visit, there were originally 14 different races of tortoise across the islands a number of which have become extinct. The Floreana and Santa Fe races, for example, disappeared some time in the 18th century while the Fernandina race lost its foothold sometime in the last 100 years. We heard a lot about how attempts to breed Lonesome George had until then been unsuccessful.

The following morning we took a boat trip out of the Ithaca channel and into the glistening white sand bays around Santa Cruz and Baltra. We were welcomed on several occasions by several intrepid seals eager to find out more about us. Their curiosity over us seemed at times to match our fascination for them as we climbed out of the boat. We met up with red crabs and the infamous sea iguanas. Basking in the late morning sun, these creatures' only movement came from their curiously-rotating eyes that followed our every move. Further along on the rocks, brown pelicans were taking a well earned rest after plunge-diving into the water for food. As we looked out into the distant waters we could see schools of dolphins making their way to local feeding grounds- not an unexpected sighting given that the Galapagos islands has feeding zones for over 24 species of cetacean including blue whales and humpbacks. Amidst the heavy vegetation just beyond the sands, male frigate bird 'puffed out' their red pouches as if in anticipation of our arrival. As we would later learn, this display forms part of a courtship ritual. It had even been reported that competing males sometimes 'pop' each others inflated pouches in their frenzy to win the acceptance of female Frigates. In such cases the injured male needs to wait until the pouch is healed sometimes until the next breeding season before getting another chance to breed. I reflected on how these splendid birds had attracted Darwin's own curiosity almost two centuries earlier (Ref 3, p.226).

That afternoon we got a very close sighting of an albatross with its long, partially curved beak and its characteristic dark plumage. As we were to learn later, the Darwin station has focused a lot of its work on these enormous birds. Satellite studies had shown that they regularly flew to the Peruvian coast almost 600 miles to the east to feed. Any conservation program for the albatross would thus require a concerted effort from a number of different countries including Ecuador and Peru. After being followed by another school of dolphins later on that afternoon, we arrived back at the docks in Itabaca with the feeling of awe and wonderment with the adventure we had had that day. I thought once more of Darwin's first impressions of the Galapagos islands over 150 years earlier. According to Darwin, every animal on these islands bore the 'unmistakable stamp' of mainland wildlife- an observation that lead him to the conclusion that these island species had not, as many would have inferred at the time, been independently created but had through time descended from a mainland progenitor (Ref 3, pp.537-538).

Our trip to the Galapagos had not only presented us with a unique opportunity to savour the wildlife of this unique archipelago but had also given us the perfect environment in which to reflect on the foundations upon which the Darwinian 'intellectual drama' had been built. And yet I still remained troubled by the extension of Darwin's special theory beyond the confines of speciation to include the evolution of all life on earth. Today Neo-Darwinists suppose that small microevolutionary mutations translate to large changes that, over time, have generated the tremendous diversity of life that we see on earth today (Ref 4). From the Frigate birds to Lonesome George, from the blue footed boobies to the Iguana, Darwin suggested that all extant fauna are connected through a branching tree of ancestral life forms albeit one that has left little trace of its existence (Ref 3, pp. 148-160). Indeed there is little corroborative evidence in support of Darwin's macroevolutionary extension to his theory (Ref 5, pp.14-15). As biochemist Michael Behe noted,

"it is at the level of macroevolution- of large jumps- that the theory evokes skepticism....the canyons separating everyday life forms have their counterparts in the canyons that separate biological systems on a microscopic scale. Like a fractal pattern in mathematics, where a motif is repeated even as you look at smaller and smaller scales, unbridgeable chasms occur even at the tiniest level of life" (Ref 5, p. 15).

We arrived back in the Ecuadorian capital Quito slightly disappointed that we could not have stayed for longer on these magnificent islands.

References

1. Henry Nicholls (2008), Does fatherhood loom for Lonesome George?, Nature News, 24th July, 2008,
see http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080724/full/news.2008.981.html

2. Michael Denton (1986) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler and Adler Publishers, Bethesda Maryland, First Edition

3. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York

4. Neil de Grasse Tyson presented a discussion on the origins of life in a NOVA documentary that aired on PBS on the 28th of September 2004, entitled "Origins:How Life Began"

5. Michael J Behe (1996), Darwin's Black Box- The Biochemical Challenges to Evolution, 1st Edition, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, I have been reading the books of physicist Gerald Schroeder, who appeared in the Expelled documentary. Here's the opening paragraph of his The Hidden Face of God: Science reveals the ultimate truth:

A single consciousness, an all-encompassing wisdom, pervades the universe. The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of subatomic matter, those that explore the molecular complexity of biology, and those that probe the brain/mind interface, have moved us to the brink of a startling realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom. In the laboratories we experience it as information first physically articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter. Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to have within it a level of information, of conscious wisdom. The puzzle I confront in this book is this: where does this arise? There is no hint of it in the laws of nature that govern the interactions among the basic particles that compose all matter. The information just appears as a given, with no causal agent evident, as if it were an intrinsic facet of nature.

The concept that there might be an attribute as nonphysical as information or wisdom at the heart of existence in no way denigrates the physical aspects of our lives. Denial of the pleasures and wonder of our bodies would be a sad misreading of the nature of existence. The accomplishments of a science based on materialism have given us physical comforts, invented lifesaving medicines, sent people to the moon. The oft-quoted statement, "not by bread alone does a human live" (Deut. 8:3), lets us know that there are two crucial aspects to our lives, one of which is bread, physical satisfaction. The other parameter is an underlying universal wisdom. There's no competition here between the spiritual and the material. The two are complementary, as in the root "to complete."

I think he is on to something. We will make no further progress until we incorporate information/wisdom.

Here is my review of Schroeder's earlier book, The Science of God:.

Also, just up at Colliding Universes:

Increase in UFO sitings in Canada - what's behind that?

So what if fossil bacteria are found on Mars? Polls show many Americans expect Star Trek!

Talking to origin of life scientists: Like giving a bobcat a prostate exam?

Agnostic mathematician: God is in the discoveries, not in the gaps (assuming he exists)

Carl Sagan and celebrity cosmology: Was he the best cosmology could do? Or the best celebrity could do?

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).

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. -- Plato

Modern science's saddest side show is the hypocritical heavy-handed thugdom of scientific materialists, who, insisting origins science must be practiced as if only matter exists, behave as if only their existence matters. Thugs and thugettes with day jobs (mainly tax- or tuition-funded) keep busy and fulfilled expelling teachers, suing school boards, denying tenure, derailing dissertations, intimidating administrators and shutting down websites wherever they find those who dare question Darwin. But without even realizing it, scientific materialists' insistence on doing science only their way proves their philosophy false and their science suspect. Because if the philosophy of materialism (also known as naturalism) is assumed to be true, and the universe assumed to be nothing more than Godless, mindless matter and energy, it necessarily follows that all ideas, including ideas of intelligent design, must be assumed as necessary and natural as earth, wind and fire. How on earth can the wind condemn fire?

But condemn they do, those piddling public protectors. Darwinists dogmatically defend materialistic Darwinism by denouncing any idea of intelligent design as "not science" because it is "not materialistic". But think about it: if science must be practiced as if the universe exists only in the form of matter and energy in various Big-Banged agglomerations, as if there is no God, no guidance and no purpose, then shouldn't that practice include toleration and acceptance for every natural outcome of the Big Bang, including thoughts of intelligent design? How could it not? How can one set of unintelligently designed and purposeless Big-Banged matter-blobs fault differently minded matter-blobs for opposite, but no less natural, thoughts?

Materialists may naturally dislike natural thoughts of others, but they have no basis to deem them wrong. After all, if materialism is true there can be no absolute "ought not to be" of anything in nature; materialism dictates that every thing that is by definition not only ought to be, but must be. So if (as scientific materialists mandate we all learn) naturalistic evolution produced every human thought through a process of random error and unintelligent selection (that's what "natural" means), are not the materialists' haughty (but meaningless) thoughts against intelligent design an affront to nature itself which creates all thoughts naturally (and meaninglessly)?

Of course, the next question logically follows: if materialism is not assumed true, why act as if it is and insist scientists pretend with great indignation that the fiction is necessary? Materialists in the United States fly into animated Darwinisteria at the slightest hint of intelligent design being mentioned in public schools. Together with their duped allies in academedia (who, like ventriloquist dummies all speak with one voice), materialists fret that any consideration of the logical inference of design would irreparably compromise the purity of science, demolish the "wall of separation" between church and state, cause the United States to fall (further) behind other countries in science literacy, and may even cause students to flip out in religious convulsions. To listen to the rhetoric of today's "science" defenders one would think that a full-orbed teaching of the evidence in origins science would lead directly and inexorably to schools with steeples and backpacks with bibles.

But consider one powerful fact: Lord of the Thugdom and Chief Atheist of the World Richard Dawkins grew up in a country encumbered with an official state religion. As a child he attended a Church of England school, was confirmed, and embraced Christianity until his mid-teens. No doubt during his tender years he was taught some form of creationism (the real thing?) in school. But nevertheless, Dawkins made up his own mind over time and decided that "Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design." Clearly, contrary to the fears of materialists, teaching creationism under a state religion guarantees little in the way of garnering support for either. So what are they afraid of? At least Dawkins' education provided the ability to make up one's own mind; and if Richard Dawkins can be given the benefit of an informed choice, why not all students?

And Richard Dawkins is not an English anomaly. Many American Darwinists, materialists and atheists in the late 20th-century were taught creationism in schools where the teaching of evolution was banned by law. So the constant monotone emanating from the elite Darwingentsia that if students are introduced to evolution-challenging evidence of non-material creation, then science (and quite possibly modern culture) will be ruined is quickly becoming a bore. (And based on the evidence of what teaching one view produces, Darwinists should stop teaching Darwinism and go back to creationism).

It's time to call the dogmatic Darwinists to task for their hypocritical stance on materialism. If they want to practice science as if materialism is true, then they must be held to that standard themselves. For if materialism is true, then every behavior, every thought, every belief of everyone is purely natural, so that people not believing in Darwinism is natural. Thoughts of intelligent design must be natural. In fact, if Darwinists really believe their materialistic theory they should glory in evolution's bounty in naturally selecting more and more intelligent design proponents every day.

So why won't Darwinists, who rely on the philosophy of materialism to shelter their materialistic belief from criticism, trust materialistic evolution with the task of selecting advantageous ideas, accept all things as natural and leave natural thoughts of true design in nature well enough alone?

The answer is itself ironic: very simply, materialism is unnatural. Darwinists prove it is impossible for human beings to coherently live out a materialistic world view because the world view itself does not match reality. And naturally, reality is unforgiving to those who wish it different.

Roddy Bullock is 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) 2008 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:

Richard Dawkins quote and info: Hattenstone, Simon, 2/10/2003, "Darwin's Child", The Guardian. Retrieved on July 18, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/10/religion.scienceandnature

By Robert Deyes

Hope, desire and prejudice are the three words that Stephen Jay Gould used to explain why one of the greatest embarrassments of evolutionary biology and anthropology was so widely accepted by some of the most renowned paleontologists of our time- the 1912 hoax of the Piltdown man (Ref 1, pp.108-124). The story of the Piltdown man centers around cranial fragments- human in appearance- that were found in the ground alongside a mandible bone that showed every indication of being that of an ape (Ref 1, pp.108-109). For several years after the finding, the Piltdown man became a household name as a result of the claim that here at last was evidence of a man-ape intermediate (Ref 1, p.110). Unfortunately for those who chose to see its relevance to evolutionary theory, later scientific evidence revealed unequivocally that the bones had been planted in the ground as part of a well-planned hoax (Ref 1, pp.110-115) The erroneous view that Piltdown man was just what one would expect and hope for an ancestor of the modern white man, that had risen to supremacy primarily because of his intelligence and had crossed the cultural threshold before other races, meant that observable anomalies were twisted into the mould of expectation (Ref 1, pp.115-120). Indeed, Roger Lewin noted just how much preconceived notions of what the fossil record should show had influenced the judgment of the experts:

"How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones- the cranial fragments- and "see" a clear simian signature in them and "see" in an ape's jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists' expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data. At the time the Piltdown finds were announced, anthropology had been going through a set of theoretical changes into which the Piltdown fossils fitted as snugly as if they had been tailored that way- which, of course, they had." (Ref 2, p.61).

Like Christian Anderson's suited emperor who walked through the streets of his town naked after having been convinced by swindling weavers that he was wearing the most marvelous new suit, we see here that, given a strong enough expectation, science can find what it needs to find and reduce the significance of anomalies that do not fit in with underlying preconceptions. The Piltdown man presents us with a historical case study of a fraud that had a tremendous influence on evolutionary science before its true identity was finally discovered. Indeed it became crucial evidence in a legal challenge that was to mark a turning point in science education in the United States (Ref 3, p.31). The event in question carried the illustrious title of 'The Trial of The Century' and involved an intense feud between two of the most formidable public speakers in the United States at that time- William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow- over a rather controversial legal ruling that the State of Tennessee had adopted concerning the teaching of evolution in public schools (Ref 3). During the 1920s Jennings Bryan became heavily involved in a national crusade to rally against the teaching of evolution. Indeed in 1924 he took his case to two of the southern states- Tennessee and North Carolina- providing speeches in support of anti-evolution legislation (Ref 3, p.48). A bill was voted in by the Tennessee House of Representatives that, "proposed making it a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $500, for a public school teacher to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal" (Ref 3, p.50).

So it was that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) entered the scene setting up the platform for a test case that would challenge the Tennessee legislature. In a trial designed in part to publicize and bring world focus to the small town of Dayton TN, the ACLU put forward a teacher by the name of John Scopes as the defendant who had broken state law by supposedly teaching evolution (Ref 3, pp.89-91). When Bryan adopted the position of aiding the state in the Scopes' prosecution, it was only a matter of time before Clarence Darrow, one of the most influential trial lawyers in America, stepped in for Scopes' defense (Ref 3, p.100). Darrow and his defense team were denied use of expert (scientific) witnesses in their defense of Scopes but were nevertheless allowed time to prepare statements on evolution from such witnesses for submission to the court (Ref 3, p.174). While the final verdict favored Bryan and found Scopes guilty for violation of the Tennessee statute, triumph lay in the seemingly unshakable scientific evidence presented by Darrow's camp. Nevertheless, behind the apparent solidity of scientific empiricism the Piltdown Man lay as a 'dark horse' waiting to make its appearance for the fraud that it was (Ref 4, p.5). Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was the director of the American Museum of Natural History at the time of the trial, considered the Piltdown discovery as primary evidence for the inclusion of man in the evolutionary picture. In countering the anti-evolution crusade he stated:

"the very recent discovery of Tertiary man...constitutes the most convincing answer to Mr. Bryan's call for more evidence..Near to us is the Piltdown man, found [in] England; still nearer in geologic time is the Heidelberg man found on the Neckar River; still nearer is the Neanderthal man, whom we know all about....This chain of human ancestors was totally unknown to Darwin. He could not have even dreamed of such a flood of proof and truth." (Ref 3, p.7).

While Osborn never appeared in the Scopes trial, his assertions were known to the Defense and would almost certainly have shaped Darrow's confidence in the solidity of the science that he himself was defending. Needless to say Jerome Lawrence's and Robert Lee's play 'Inherit the Wind' rather inaccurately portrayed the whole affair as a witch-hunt that at times resembled the, "glorious sixteenth century when bigots condemned Galileo for daring to bring intelligence and enlightenment to the human mind" (Ref 5). As Professor of Political Science John West noted,

"The film "Inherit the Wind" presents the controversy over the teaching of evolution as a battle between stick-figure fundamentalists who defend a literal reading of Genesis and saintly scientists who simply want to teach the facts of biology" (Ref 6).

Such artistic license only hardened the erroneous impression that the anti-Darwinian movement had convicted teachers on religious grounds at the expense of scientific truth. The Scope's case was after all just a test trial. Admittedly the radical actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s had a great deal to do with Lawrence's and Lee's version of events (Ref 7). As for the Piltdown man, the discovery of more recent, high profile cases of misconduct and troublesome patterns of behavior across different fields of science should prompt us to reconsider our most treasured notions about the water-tight objectivity of the scientific enterprise (Refs 8-13).

References

1. Stephen Jay Gould (1992) The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, Published by W.W Norton and Company Inc, New York

2. Roger Lewin (1987), Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York

3. Edward Larson (1997) Summer For The Gods-The Scopes Trial And America's Continuing Debate Over Science And Religion, Basic Books Harper Collins Publishers, New York

4. Phillip Johnson (1991), Darwin on Trial, InterVarsity Press Publishers, Madison, Wisconsin First Edition

5. The film 'Inherit the Wind' was produced in 1999 and distributed by MGM Home Entertainment starring George Scott, Jack Lemmon, Lane Smith and Tom Everett Scott

6. John G. West Jr. (2002), Evolution coverage missed real story, FOXNews.com, Sept 30, 2002

7. For the MSN review of the screen adaptation of Lawrence and Lee's play 'Inherit the Wind' turn to http://entertainment.msn.com/Movies/Movie.aspx?m=61361

8. Rick Weiss (2005), Many Scientists Admit to Misconduct, Washington Post, Thursday, June 9, 2005; Page A03

9. Kurt Kleiner (2005), Most scientific papers are probably wrong, NewScientist, 30th August, 2005, Access article on http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915

10. Jennifer Couzin (2006), Science Committee Issues Hwang Report, ScienceNOW Daily News, 28th November, 2006, http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/1128/1

11. Eli Kintisch (2006), Poehlman Sentenced to 1 Year of Prison, ScienceNOW Daily News, 28 June 2006, http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/628/1

12. See 'Secrets of the drug trials', http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6291773.stm

13. Robert Service (2008), The Bubble Bursts, Science, 18th July, 2008, See http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/718/1

A fascinating article by Judith Thurman, "First Impressions: What does the world's oldest art say about us?" (June 23, 2008) in The New Yorker explores the attempts we make to understand the artworks left by humans drawing on the walls of caves thousands of years ago.

She reflects on the Chauvet paintings found in south central France. These oldest known paintings predate the Lascaux and Altamira friezes by fifteen to eighteen thousand years. The history of interpretation of older artworks has suffered from too-ready assumptions about "primitive" people, in particular that, as mud slowly morphed into mind, art would gradually become more sophisticated. For example,

He had also made the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive, and [i]n that respect, Chauvet was a bombshell. It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a "classical civilization." For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been "deeply satisfying"—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

Go here, to the ID Arts site.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend writes to quote me a passage from Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, noting, "Levitin does a great job of presenting the complexity of the human mind, as relates to thought and music processing, in a way that even the non-specialist can understand":

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge they go well beyond our everyday experience (unless you are a cosmologist). The average brain consists of one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. Suppose each neuron was one dollar, and you stood on a street corner trying to give dollars away to people as they passed by, as fast as you could hand them out- let's say one dollar per second. If you did this twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, without stopping, and if you had started on the day that Jesus was born, you would by the present day only have gone through about two thirds of your money. Even if you gave away hundred-dollar bills once a second, it would take you thirty-two years to pass them all out. This is a lot of neurons, but the real power and complexity of the brain (and of thought) comes through their connections.

Each neuron is connected to other neurons- usually one thousand to ten thousand others. Just four neurons can be connected in sixty-three ways, or not at all, for a total of sixty-four possibilities. As the number of neurons increases, the number of possible connections grows exponentially...The number of combinations becomes so large that it is unlikely we will ever understand all the possible connections in the brain, or what they mean. The number of combinations possible- and hence the number of possible different thoughts or brain states each of us can have- exceeds the number of known particles in the entire known universe." (Levitin, pp.85-86)

Most of us, far from overestimating our brains, probably underestimate them. It's not magic, but it is reality. It will not do everything we want, but it will do far more than we sometimes expect.

Just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: How complex is your brain? More than you can easily imagine!

Hunting, herding, hiding, and hustling - that explains our social relationships?

Psychiatrist Jeff Schwartz speaks on what drugs can do for you - and what you and your mind must do for yourself

How not to study science ...

Computers: Most engineers have probably guessed that they themselves are not robots

God is not dead yet - but some haven't gotten the memo

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).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

After reading American journalist Pam Winnick's A Jealous God (Nelson, 2005), I informed her that I wish I had written it. Authors, a contentious lot, don't usually suffer from a lack of ego, so that's high praise, even if it does not quite aspire to the heights of pardonable jealousy.

Winnick and I both started writing a book on the intelligent design controversy at about the same time. My By Design or by Chance? is a closeup look; Winnick used the ID controversy as a jumping off point for a number of interrelated science controversies - and produced a highly informative, easy-to-read book as a result.

She may also have damaged her career, as the Expelled film suggests, because she did not stick to a party line on many topics, but looked at what the evidence actually showed.

Party line vs. evidence? In science? Yes indeed. A profoundly illiberal trend is growing up in science. Once a party line becomes widely accepted, not only are dissenters ostracized and punished but truth, fair comment, and good intent are not permitted as defenses. If that sounds like a Canadian "human rights" commission, the resemblance is not accidental. The trend in science is part of a larger trend in society, though it is expressed in different ways.

Winnick begins with the 1970s debate on the use of live human fetuses in research. She focuses in particular on the sudden importance of "bioethicists" - whose main job, it appears, was to construct justifications for what researchers wanted to do. (pp. 28-29) For example,

"Research on the Fetus" was filled with the moral doublespeak of bioethics, the intellectual shifting, the illogic and the numerous loopholes that soon would typify nearly all writings in the emerging field of bioethics. (p. 80)

These are the things that mainstream journalists like Winnick, who wrote for the Pittsburgh Gazette, are just not supposed to say.

One must rather speak of "anguished choices" and "no easy answers" - as if, in the entire history of the world, the word NO! had never been invented and there had never been a reason to use it. She adds:

Virtually unnoticed at the time was the sub-rosa dismantling of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, the "bias for life" that at least in theory, holds each life dear. (p. 29)

In my experience, that dismantling wasn't so much unnoticed as impolite to mention. To notice such a thing implied the moral judgement that the loss of Judaeo-Christian ethics was a genuine loss. But our North American society has grown suspicious of moral judgments of any kind, especially judgements in favour of that kind of thing.

Significantly, foreshadowing later developments, advocates of live fetal research called their opponents "scientific know-nothings" who were "anti-research," thus subtly positioning science itself as on the side of dehumanizing trends.

Next: Part One: Science as popular religion

All the parts:

Introduction A journalist tries to understand a jealous god - materialist science
Part One: Science as popular religion
Part Two: The social justice costs of glorifying "science"
Part Three: Celebrity cosmology and assorted flimflam
Part Four: The simple, basic information needed to blow it all up the river

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Winnick observed the same pattern - during roughly the same time period - in the public panic about overpopulation. (Pp. 40-44) Discussing a widely read population zealot, insect specialist Paul Ehrlich, she notes,

Few in the scientific-intellectual community or in the media challenged Ehrlich's preposterous claims or the coercive methods he suggested. Those who did were treated like heretics. (p. 40)

Actually, the dissenters were in fact heretics because "science", in the Sputnik and "space race" era, had rapidly morphed into a popular religion, one that would deliver us from evil, real or imagined.

In the case of Ehrlich's "population bomb," the evil was imagined. People might as well have worried that the devil would run off with them. Actual population trends during the period clearly showed that the peak had already passed. Birth rates were falling on most continents.

The world's population increase (chiefly due to reduced childhood deaths) was the outcome of previous higher growth rates. That is, people who were born into large families grew up to have children themselves instead of dying young. That created the impression of continued rapid growth. But those people were not in fact having nearly as many children.

As I noted at the time, if there had ever been a crisis, it was over before it was announced.

However, the outcome of the panic has been that birth rates across Europe and in many parts of North America have fallen to such low levels that planned social programs for the elderly may not be sustainable. So much for the benefits of pop science panic.

Now here is the remarkable part of the story, which Winnick points out: The correct information was both easily available and easy to understand. But,

... the very scientists who preached the scientific method, who glorified the study of science for its objectivity, these were the very men and women who chose to ignore the data there in front of them. These were the folks who pushed their political agenda at the expense of fact. (pp. 41-42)

Deeply concerned with the social justice issues that often result from the popular glorification of science, Winnick then tells the story of Baby Fae, the heart-damaged child who received the heart of Goobers, a baby baboon, in 1984. Her doctor enthused that she might live to see her twentieth birthday.

Next: Part Two: The social justice costs of glorifying "science"

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Perhaps, given the chronic shortage of organs for transplant, Baby Fae's heart transplant from a baby baboon should have caused stock in baboon breeding facilities to briefly skyrocket. But then again maybe not.

Many were outraged that the baboon was sacrificed, Winnick recalls,

Animal rights activists were not all from the fringe; many ethicists in academia likewise argued that animal life was equally valuable as human life. In part, this was an offshoot of increased knowledge of animals, and their modes of expression. But more fundamentally, this shift of values was made possible by modern science, whose findings were directly opposed to the Judaeo-Christian belief that man was created in God's image." (P. 71)

Few knew that Baby Fae could have had a less invasive procedure with a much higher success rate. Winnick points out the obvious:

How different it would have been had Theresa [the mother] been wealthy or middle class, had she possessed a Ph.D. or been a high-powered executive or at least had health insurance, which would have encouraged the l3ss-invasive procedure. Had she not been poor, Theresa might have had her child transferred to a hospital in a major metropolitan area, which would have offered an array of treatments and more skilled physicians (72-73).

Instead, Fae became a token in faculty common room jawdowns between animal rights advocates and push-the-limits technocrats.

As it happens, whoever won the war, Fae lost it, dying on her twentieth day, not her twentieth birthday. Winnick reports that one agency director told her,

I think that they did not make any effort to get a human infant heart because they were set on doing a baboon. (P. 73)

Winnick, a self-described Jewish Democrat, is not a preacher calling for a return to the good old days; if she were, she would merely have been ignored and would not be one of the subjects of the Expelled movie. Rather, she is one of those dangerous people who have an inconvenient habit of discovering what is going on and explaining it simply - at a time when a vast science and technocracy industry has a huge investment in maintaining a myth.

Next: Part Three: Celebrity cosmology and assorted flimflam

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Winnick also goes after Carl Sagan's celebrity cosmology, the flim-flam around the origin of life, school board elections in Kansas, where some brave citizens tried to defy the materialist agenda (and learned how powerful it was), the use of the "rubber stamp" commission to justify the unjustifiable, the trumped up claims that science education in the United States is in serious decline*, gene therapies, and even the holiest of holies, the human embryonic stem cell research scam. (Currently, the leading company is at risk of going under.)

It's not surprising that the Darwin lobby, if not others, had to try to diminish Winnick, and I wouldn't doubt there are others.

Actually, all these issues are interlinked in a subtle way.

The fact that all these issues are interlinked can be inferred as follows: It is usually easy to predict where a person will stand on one of them if you know where they stand on the others. For example, the scientists I have met who think that design underlies the universe rarely support coercive population control or embryonic stem cell research. The underlying reason for this is a belief that there is an underlying order in nature that is not merely a mechanistic law.

(*Note: If science education is indeed in decline, the likely cause is the same as the likely cause of other education declines - feeling good has replaced doing well. Fix that and you can stop the decline.)

Next: Part Four: The simple, basic information needed to blow it all up the river

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Winnick's approach to the intelligent design controversy has been marked by the same tendency to get quickly to the underlying issues. She focused on the key meeting at MIT in 1966 where mathematician Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger challenged Darwinists (and they did not have any good answers):

Schützenberger went on to question neo-Darwinism until his death in 1996, but his dissent was ignored by the American media. Perhaps because of science's post-Sputnik prominence, perhaps for political and philosophical reasons, and mostly likely, because of the stigma that attaches to any view that reinforces religion, the other objectors faded into oblivion and neo-Darwinism went on to thrive, unquestioned, as the only acceptable scientific explanation for the origin and evolution of life. (P. 122)

She also talks about the Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) and quickly identifies the political agenda:

Although the BSCS included some local science educators, most of its leaders, those who produced the textbooks and other materials, were overtly hostile to the Judeo-Christian religion. Some of the BSCS leaders were outright eugenicists who, in other contexts, had openly promoted the "betterment" of man through selective breeding. This alone should have disqualified these individuals from educating America's youth, but their associations were never exposed by the media, which to this day fails to prove the political and economic agendas of the scientific community.

Heading the BSCS was Bentley Glass, a renowned geneticist and member of the American Eugenics Society, who disparaged procreation, promoted population control, and advocated the establishment of genetic "clinics" to weed out the "defective." (P. 123)

In my view, anyone associated with eugenics should not venture into education, and especially not in a multiracial society. If they think that they should have a better group of students than the one in front of them, they are not going to do a very good job. In any event, as Winnick shows, they did not do a very good job:

Ten years after the BSCS developed its curriculum and textbooks, American students began their precipitous decline in academic standing. The BSCS textbooks were not the reason for this decline - but they certainly didn't help. In fact, they weren't very good. (p. 129)

Their serious ideologically motivated shortcomings could easily have contributed to a continuing decline in science education (if such a decline was really occurring - finding out genuine information about things like that is actually quite difficult).

My sense is that Winnick, who understands so much, did not understand one critical thing: She was not supposed to write a book that set all this out for the vulgar public who pay taxes to support celebrity science projects. They are supposed to sit, dumbfounded, at churches on Evolution Sunday or listen to Carl Sagan preach the gospel of atheist materialism in Cosmos. And never under any circumstances should they have the simple, basic information they need to blow it all up the river.

I think Winnick's career setback, if it occurred, will not be long, and I strongly recommend A Jealous God.

Return to Introduction A journalist tries to understand a jealous god - materialist science

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Over the years, the Post-Darwinist blog has received many attacks from people who insist that the Nazis owed nothing to Darwin's theory of evolution (which, to Darwin believers is, of course, the fount of all good things).

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the Nazis owed the very definition of who and what they were to Darwin's theory of evolution. They saw themselves as the more highly evolved master race, after all.

That does NOT mean that the Nazis couldn't have murdered without Darwin. Of course they could have. They could have taken their inspiration for mass murder from anyone who offered it. Charlie Manson, for example. But, as it happens, they found Darwin's "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection" instead.

Anyway, a friend wrote to alert me to the Nazis' Wannsee Protocol for the "Final Solution" (= murdering 6 million Jewish people), and I am assured by historian of the period Richard Weikart (California State University) that it is genuine:

My friend writes

The debt that the Nazis owed to the Theory of Evolution is clearly stated in the protocol of the Final Solution (Endloesung) of the Jewish question formulated on January 20, 1942. This document was produced as a result of a conference among leading Nazis which considered how the Jewish problem could be solved in its entirety.

and draws my attention particularly to this section:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

In other words, the Nazis even used the terminology of Darwinian evolutionists (= explaining the worry that those Jews who survived forced labour would be naturally selected as the more "fit" population).

Now, museum curators and Darwin hagiographers, airbrush that!

See also:

Darwin Day in America - a Review, especially the systematic attempts to deceive the public about Darwin's racism and support for eugenics.

Darwin and the Nazis: Nazism as a "biological" political program

Further stories here (scroll down below the one immediately above).

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).

By Robert Deyes

Today cladistics is used as an analytical approach for grouping organisms through evolutionary relationships (Ref 1). The resulting picture or cladogram is thus, "an evolutionary tree [that] shows the relationship of a group of species based on the fewest number of shared changes that have occurred from generation to generation" (Ref 1). While this definition raises important questions, given that it is the very existence of such an evolutionary tree that we must seek to demonstrate, it is the definition used by evolutionary biologists today. By measuring the total 'fit' between 1000 morphological cladograms and the fossil data, for example, Mathew Wills and colleagues from the University of Bristol concluded that the fossil evidence correctly documented the appearance of species through history in a way that was consistent with the 'evolutionary tree' concept of modern cladistics (Ref 2). As they later stated, "there is evidence that published morphological and molecular phylogenetic trees are probably generally close to the truth" (Ref 2). What they did not state was that cladistics, as an analytical tool, is fraught with problems that make such assertions difficult to justify. Firstly, the current debacle over what truly are homologous (evolutionary-related) anatomical structures is likely to make the interpretation of supposed cladistic relationships confusing (Ref 3, pp.178-179). Erroneous interpretations on what are and what are not true phylogenetic relationships are likely to occur simply because much of evolutionary biology is subjective. As paleontologist Simon Conway Morris noted:

"at the moment it is still very difficult to decide between characters that are of genuine use in determining evolutionary relationships as against those that have arisen by convergence from unrelated ancestors" (Ref 3, p.179).

As he subsequently commented, "any cladogram is merely a hypothesis, although too often cladograms are presented as being the last word in the debate" (Ref 3, p.180). A given cladogram is only one out of a number of possible evolutionary solutions. Biologist Rebecca Cann expounded on how cladistics involves selecting the evolutionary solution that requires the least number of transformations of a given set of characters (Ref 4, p.1008). Camilo J. Cela-Conde and Francisco J. Ayala similarly wrote of cladistics as a technique that selects those evolutionary solutions that require the fewest transitional intermediates (Ref 5). In other words, the shortest route of evolution is chosen as the most likely route. It was the 14th Century Franciscan Monk William of Ockham who proposed that, "when confronted with two seemingly equal explanatory hypotheses, the simplest or most economical explanation should be granted logical deference" (Ref 6). Philosopher Kenneth Richard Samples rightly questioned whether Ockham's principle could stand alone as the final answer to an evolutionary problem. As Samples pointed out, the simplest solution or pathway might be, "simplistically inadequate", for explaining the phenomenon in question (Ref 6). It becomes unreasonable to seek the simplest explanation on how life has come to be as we see it today because we fail to recognize the complexity involved in transitioning between the life forms we find in our favorite evolutionary models (Ref 6).

As a case in point, cladists concluded that the elusive ancestor of three of the 'ancient birds', Sinosauropteryx, Protopteryx and Archaeopteryx, would most likely have been a two-legged dinosaur (Ref 7). Small dinosaurs such as velociraptor and oviraptor had previously been considered as strong candidates for a dinosaur-origin of birds on the basis that they were not only two legged but had a clavicle or 'wishbone' just like birds (Ref 7). And yet paleontologists such as Alan Feduccia and Larry Martin who do not consider dinosaurs to be ancestral to birds, were deeply troubled by the fact that velociraptor and oviraptor had lived deep in the Cretaceous period- almost 85 million years after the earliest birds (Ref 7). Storrs Olson, head of ornithology at the National Museum of Natural History, likewise accused others of engaging in "ideological mumbo-jumbo" amidst claims that feathers had the same evolutionary origin as hair-like integuments found on dinosaur fossils (Ref 7).

Evolutionists may be right in their claim that fossilization is a rare event (Ref 8, p.8). Yet once again we place our convictions on blind faith when through cladistics we claim that some time ago intermediate forms linking the dinosaur scale with the avian feather must have existed. Many still live in hope. As vertebrate paleontologist Dale Alan Russell asserted, "when the common feathered ancestors [of birds] are found, probably in lake deposits of the middle Jurassic, [they] may well resemble a large, flightless archaeopteryx" (Ref 9).

It was Mark Norell, Peter Makovicky and Julia Clark from the American Natural History Museum who wrote that, "science is about discovery" and that, "by assuming less, we discover more"(Ref 7). We learn an important lesson here- maybe if we were to assume less when making cladistic interpretations and keep a more open mind about what discoveries really show us, we would unearth the foundations upon which all of life came into existence.

References
1. Definition of Cladistics provided in the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002 , 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved

2. M.J. Benton, M.A. Wills and R. Hitchin (2000), Quality of the fossil record through time, Nature, Volume 403 pp.534-537

3. Simon Conway Morris (1998), The Crucible of Creation; The Burgess Shale And the Rise of Animals, 1st Ed, Oxford University Press

4. Rebecca L Cann (2000), Talking trees tell tales, Nature, Volume 405 pp.1008-1009

5. Camilo J. Cela-Conde and Francisco J. Ayala (2003), Genera of the human lineage, Proc Nat Acad Sciences USA, Volume 100, pp.7684-7689

6. Kenneth Richard Samples (2004), Does Ockham's Razor Support Naturalism? Connections, Volume 6 (2) pp.6-7

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

8. Caroline Arnold (2001) Dinosaurs With Feathers: The Ancestors of Modern Birds, Clarion Books, New York

9. Dale Alan Russell (2002), Archaeopteryx, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002. 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved

Friend Gil Dodgen, an accidental software genius, writes,

I have an interesting story to tell concerning computational error detection.

Some of you might have heard that Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta recently solved the game of checkers. It made big news in the computer science world.

I first met Jon at the First Computer Olympiad in London (organized by the famous David Levy of chess and computer-chess fame) at which Jon's program won the gold medal and mine won the silver.

Jon and his team eventually computed the eight-piece endgame database for checkers, and later my colleague Ed Trice and I computed it as well. Jon and I compared results, and it turned out that his database had errors that had evaded his error-detection scheme. This scheme produced internally consistent results, despite the errors. Later, Jon detected errors in my database, which were traced back to a scratch on a CD that evaded my error-detection scheme.

All the errors were eventually traced to data transfer anomalies and not the generative computational algorithms, so CRC (cyclic redundancy check) methods were used to solve the problem.

Check it out.

Jon thanks three of us (Ed Gilbert, Gilbert Dodgen, and Ed Trice -- how's that for a strange combination of names?) for database verification.

The bottom line is this: Errors creep in easily, are difficult to detect, and are even more difficult to correct.

Biology apparently does much more than detect and correct errors. It is not only anti-entropic, it is neg-entropic; that is, it mysteriously produces new information despite all the forces of nature that attempt to drive it in the opposite direction.

This is something that materialistic evolutionary theory is completely impotent to explain. How one cannot arrive at a design inference from this obvious evidence is a complete mystery to me.

Score one for intelligent design - the ultimate negentropy!

(Note: (A bizarre classical music aside: Levy had heard through the grapevine that I was a classical concert pianist. He asked if I would be willing to play for the closing ceremonies, since the competition hall had a wonderful concert piano on the stage. I was reluctant to perform, because I didn't feel that an international group of computer nerds would be interested. Levy insisted. Boy was I wrong. I played the Chopin A-Flat Polonaise to a thunderous standing ovation and was called back for an encore. I was stunned. These were people who theoretically should have had no appreciation of, or interest in, classical music. Apparently the lack of appreciation of classical music is a U.S. phenomenon.)

[From Denyse: Hey, Gil. Not every nerd is a philistine. And you are a marvellous pianist. Download free music here.]

Also, just up at The Design of Life blog:

Cells: Scientists learning to tap cells' regenerative power, to regrow organs, fingertips

First detailed map of the Grand Central Station of the brain

Animation of life inside the cell as high art?

Cladograms: Reconstructing evolution's history depends on the assumptions you start with.

Learning biology is more fun with free virtual cell animations

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "The Life of Trees: Their "most simple and beautiful oneness" in Books & Culture, Alan Jacobs writes about trees, reminding us of how little we really know about the life forms that surround us:

But perhaps the most interesting fact to be gleaned from these books—and from Richard Preston's The Wild Trees—is this: much of our knowledge about trees is of recent vintage, and there is still a great deal about these creatures that we do not know. Rackham points out that two great storms that swept across Britain in 1987 and 1990 and uprooted thousands of old trees created surprise and consternation in many botanists: all along they had been describing the long taproots that anchored such trees deep in the ground, but the storms revealed that the taproots didn't exist. Even the largest trees can have roots just a couple of feet deep: they extend horizontally vast distances, but the taproots that saplings (especially oaks) send down are soon supplanted. Preston describes the work of Steve Sillett, of Humboldt State University in California, and a small group of other scientists who in the past fifteen years have discovered what really goes on in the canopies of our tallest trees—something which earlier botanists had tried, with limited success, to explore by floating above the forests in balloons. Sillett and company simply climb the trees, risking life and limb every time they do it, and in the process are discovering the phenomenally complex ecosystem flourishing in those heights. Preston, who became a climber himself and joined Sillett on some of his expeditions, found in the crowns of some Eastern trees flying squirrels so unfamiliar with human beings that they allowed him to scratch their heads, and life two hundred feet farther up, in those California redwoods, is even stranger. As one scientist vividly remarked, atop some of the tallest redwoods, with their dense and interlocking multiple crowns, you could put showshoes on and throw a Frisbee around. O brave new world indeed.

And so much of what we know is wrong:

Conservationists," says Rackham, "have a record of trying to play God and rectifying God's mistakes as well as humanity's. Often they make woods fit a predetermined theory (which theory depends on how long ago they were at college) rather than listening to the woods and discovering what each wood has to contribute to conservation as a whole." It's now well-understood that the most catastrophic of these attempt at God-playing was the practice—very common throughout the 20th century, especially in North America and in Brazil, and not yet everywhere rejected—of trying to eradicate forest fires. This overzealousness deprives woodland ecosystems of the vital benefits of occasional burning, and, worse, insures that when fires do start they find so much combustible material that they become superfires, with dire consequences for forests and people alike.

Essentially, if all mature trees are protected from destruction, there will be no habitat for the many life forms that depend on new growth and mid-life forests, to say nothing of clearings. A sound ecology incorporates all stages of life, including rotting logs. Jacobs also notes,

It's interesting to see that people who love trees and know them intimately, as opposed to those who have merely general instincts for conservation, tend not to erect ideological barriers between the human world and "Nature." Rackham's deeply committed but pragmatic and nonideological approach credits woodlands with a remarkable ability to manage themselves, and sees a great deal of wisdom in many of our ancient practices of woodcraft—practices formulated when we couldn't dominate our environment and so had to learn to be stewards of it.

It's a lovely essay; it communicates a love for trees while acknowledging the short-sightedness of the sort of urban environmentalism, where the busybody has, alas, picked "nature" as his target.

I had a run-in with just such folk a decade ago when the maple tree in my front yard was struck by lightning. A huge branch blocked the street for hours. Because it was an old tree, planted too close to the sidewalk and now quite disfigured, the city condemned and removed it.

Well! To hear some people, you would think we had murdered the legendary Spirit of the Trees! In fact, a fine young tree now stands in its place, and life goes on, somewhat closer to the ground, at least for now.

Also, just up at the Post-Darwinist

Darwin: Science mags pipe the hype, and no, you are NOT just imagining that uproar behind the curtains ...

Burying Darwin while he is still hot? The Altenberg 16

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).

By Robert Deyes

Much has been said about how in The Origin of Species, the problem of suffering in nature tinted Darwin's view and convinced him of a world that bore none of the expected hallmarks of a loving God (Ref 1). Indeed in a letter to a friend Darwin reflected on the "misery in the world" and expressed his aversion towards the female digger wasp that, ghastly as its feeding habits were, could not have been the product of a,"beneficent and omnipotent God" (Ref 1, p.12). So it is that we begin to understand biophysicist Cornelius Hunter's assertion that much of Darwin's own theory was based not on scientific premises but instead on a personal expectation of what God's creation should look like (Ref 1, p.13). Darwin was disenchanted with Christianity and he wrote as much in the autobiographical account of his younger years (Ref 2, p.57). But he was also deeply affected by the ugliness of nature and what this meant for the existence of a benevolent God. As he wrote:

"A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas....the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection." (Ref 2, p.90)

Theologian John Haught commented on how much the existence of such suffering and pain has become a barrier to faith in the biblical God for many a skeptic today. As Haught noted:

"For many scientific thinkers...the science of evolution has clearly aggravated objections that have always been leveled against the idea of God, including those we find in the Book of Job. Why does God allow all the suffering and waste in the millions of years of evolution? Scientists speculate, for example, that over ninety-nine percent of the species evolution has produced are now extinct. What sense can we make of the epochs of suffering and loss that lie beneath the surface of nature's present order?" (Ref 3, p.123)

Darwin saw the apparent suffering throughout nature as the product not of an all-loving God but rather as a consequence of a God who had lost his omnipotence, his control and his sovereignty over his own creation. God, according to Darwin, would not have wanted so much suffering and toil in his own creation. One of Darwin's favorite volumes- John Milton's 'Paradise Lost'- revealed Satan's revenge against earth itself and the death of all of God's creation (Ref 2, p.84; Ref 4, p.579). In other words, natural selection became the best answer to the problem that our world did not present evidence for Darwin's benevolent God. Such metaphysical reasoning has been handed down to contemporary evolutionary biology (Ref 1, p.14). Darwin's theory was in part a solution to the problem of suffering in so far as the blind unguided search it proposed, appeared much more in tune with the blundering and toiling natural realm that he had observed (Ref 1, p.16). For zoologist Richard Dawkins the apparent indifference of nature has haunted him just as much. Indeed much of Dawkins' view on evolution is founded more on strong metaphysical assumptions than on any scientifically objective argument (Ref 5, p.17-18). In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins gave a detailed account of the macabre sexual habits of the praying mantis revealing a natural world that appears more blindly indifferent than purposefully designed (Ref 6, p.5). Similarly Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker lashed out at the idea of a God-created universe and the implicit moral conduct that came with it:

"It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it is also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. Our bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial and error tinkering a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree, goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long gone fur. The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design. What twisted sadist would have intended a parasite that blinds millions of people or a gene that covers babies with excruciating blisters? To adapt a Yiddish expression about God: if an intelligent designer lived on Earth, people would break his windows. The theory of natural selection explains life as we find it, with all its quirks and tragedies. We can prove mathematically that it is capable of producing adaptive life forms and track it in computer simulations, lab experiments and real ecosystems. It doesn't pretend to solve one mystery (the origin of complex life) by slipping in another (the origin of a complex designer). Many people who accept evolution still feel that a belief in God is necessary to give life meaning and to justify morality. But that is exactly backward. In practice, religion has given us stonings, inquisitions and 9/11. Morality comes from a commitment to treat others as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. Like physical evolution, it does not require a white coated technician in the sky." (Ref 7)

In the same way, philosopher of science David Hull gave his own rendition of the cruelties of nature, and in the process revealed just how metaphysics had tainted his own views:

"What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a zygote. Of the millions of zygotes that are produced, only a few ever reach maturity. On current estimates 95 per cent of the DNA that an organism contains has no function. Certain organic systems are marvels of engineering, others are little more than contraptions. When the eggs that cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch, the cuckoo proceeds to push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest. The queens of a particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a serrated appendage which they use to saw off the head of the host queen. To quote Darwin, "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars". Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray." (Ref 8)

This 'requiem of nature' was published in Nature- a leading scientific journal that prides itself in objective commentary and bias-free journalism. Yet clearly here an offensive has been made against the God of Judaism and Christianity. Rather than 'one long argument' fully objective and free of personal bias, Dawkins, Pinker and Hull emphatically illustrate how naturalistic evolution presents an account heavily riddled with metaphysical speculation.

References

1. Cornelius Hunter (2001) Darwin's God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Brazos Press, A division of Baker Book House Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan

2. Charles Darwin, The autobiography of Charles Darwin, Copyright held by Nora Barlow in 1958, W.W. Norton and Company Inc, New York

3. John Haught (2001), Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution, Paulist Press, NY

4. John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost, Edited by Alastair Fowler, 2nd Edition 1998, Longman Inc, New York

5. Richard Dawkins (1996), God's Utility Function, Phoenix, a division of Orion Books Ltd, London

6. Richard Dawkins (2003) A Devil's Chaplain, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson London, UK

7. Claudia Wallis (2005), The Evolution Wars, Time Magazine, August 15, pp. 27-35

8. David Hull (1991), The God of the Galapagos, Nature, Volume 352, pp. 485-486

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "First Detailed Map of the Human Cortex" in MIT's Technology Review, Emily Singer notes,
"A new imaging technique reveals previously hidden brain structures, including the central hub" and explains,

The first high-resolution map of the human cortical network reveals that the brain has its own version of Grand Central Station, a central hub that is structurally connected to many other parts of the brain. Scientists generated the map using a new type of brain imaging known as diffusion imaging. The technique maps the largely inaccessible tangle of the brain's white matter--the long, thin fibers that ferry nerve signals between cells.

and we also learn,

Conventional imaging techniques, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), reveal major anatomical features of the brain. But in humans, the brain's finer architecture--the neural projections that connect its different parts--has, until recently, remained hidden. "The brain we've been looking at with conventional MRI or CT scans all these years is not the real brain," says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, who was also involved in the study. "We're just seeing a shadow of its surfaces."

The notion of the "real" brain vs. "a shadow of its surfaces" is an intriguing one. My guess is, we will never find the "real" brain for the same reasons as we never find the "real" Grand Central Station or the real Canada. There is a physical reality that corresponds to Grand Central Station and one that corresponds to Canada. But usually, what we find is a series of overlapping material and immaterial things whose "reality" can only be understood as a series of generalities - the reality is not any one of the generalities nor even all of them together, nor only in specific things we can point to.

I suspect that it will always be much easier to find the answers to specific questions about the brain than to find - and take in - the "real" brain.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: Meditation really can change the brain

My experiences point to truth but yours are classic examples of brain rot? (Yes, Charlie Brown's sister Lucy's theory of psychiatry, but not a cartoon)

Jeff Schwartz lectures in Ireland on changing the troubled brain by changing the mind

Can languages be treated as if words were genes?

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).

PART II

Robert Deyes

As new early primate specimens are unearthed, we continue to hear of possible 'missing links' between man and ape. In November of 1994, scientists from Spain uncovered well preserved remains of an ape that they now believe would have lived as far back as 13 million years ago (Ref 1). Named after a nearby community, this specimen has been classified under the genus Pierolapithecus and is thought to have moved around on all fours (Ref 2). While not explicitly calling Pierolapithecus a missing link, Salvador Moya-Sola and colleagues from the Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona clearly hinted at its evolutionary significance claiming it to be, "close to the last common ancestor of great apes and humans" (Ref 1). Of course depending on who one talks to amongst the experts, there are conflicting views on what Pierolapithecus is and is not related to (Ref 2). Another 6-million year old hominid called Sahelanthropus was likewise touted as a specimen that would have been close to the chimpanzee/human ancestor (Ref 3). Indeed Sahelanthropus received an almost iconic status from the president of Chad who called it Toumai, literally meaning 'Hope of Life' (Ref 4). Others such as Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris questioned whether Sahelanthropus could really be placed into a human lineage claiming instead that it would have been a forerunner to modern apes (Refs 4, 5).

Regardless of where one stands in the debate of hominid evolution and irrespective of which features one chooses to look at as the most important indicators of evolutionary relationships, the fact remains that a transition from a quadrupedal ancestor to a bipedal form of walking would have required numerous coordinated anatomical changes to occur. As Nobel Laureate John Eccles has pointed out, several key adaptations such as elongation of the hind limbs, broadening of the pelvis, adjustment of the hip musculature, a considerable reshaping of the foot to support the additional weight and extensive rewiring of the neural system and the brain would have been essential before walking on two legs could have been achieved (Ref 6, pp. 51-60). Those eager to cite the occasional episodes of two-legged movement in modern apes as a precursory state of the human bipedal gait ignore the chasm between these two modes of locomotion (Ref 6, p. 51). Equally important is the discovery by biomechanical engineer Dennis Bramble and physical anthropologist Daniel Lieberman that humans are unique amongst all mammals in his ability to run for vast lengths of time- sometimes for hours- with very low energy consumption (Ref 7). One review of Bramble's and Lieberman's work noted how numerous adaptations are necessary for sustaining long distance running- adaptations that must have all appeared together for running to be as efficient as we see it in modern humans (Ref 7).

Our species is of course much more than a two-legged ape. Humans are after all able to rationalize and think about the world in ways that any of today's primates cannot, while exhibiting a self awareness that sets them apart from the rest of the natural world. While much has been made of the findings of gorillas that are able to use sticks as tools for measuring the depth of water (Ref 8), nothing approaches the complexity of tool making that species of Homo are known to have displayed (Ref 9). As theologian G.K Chesterton noted man derives great importance from, "the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it" (Ref 10, p. 138). We can therefore understand why Russell Wallace, who published his theory of natural selection together with Darwin, would lay claim to the uniqueness of our species. UCL biologist James Mallet captured Wallace's sentiments:

"[because] the capacities for art, music and philosophy...resulted ultimately in the flowering of human culture, Wallace felt that some sort of benevolent law, in addition to natural selection, must be directing human evolution" (Ref 11).

Science writer Roger Lewin similarly wrote of the inevitable spiritual implications of Wallace's conclusions:

"What of wit and humor, and mathematical skill, in advanced societies? How could these be the product of natural selection when our forebears could have no use of them? [Wallace] listed our peculiarly naked skin as inexplicable by natural selection, our singing voice, our "unnecessarily perfect" hands and feet and of course our moral sense. "The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose"" (Ref 12, p. 310).

Attempts to explain the origins of human consciousness in terms of some vaguely-defined process of emergence (Ref 13) have so far lacked substance. As one review noted,

"not only has advanced neuroscientific research revealed an obdurate mystery at the core of consciousness, but theoretical advances in the natural and physical sciences have greatly complicated the effort to reduce all human phenomena- the mind notably included- to the effects of material causes" (Ref 14).

Philosopher Alvin Platinga likewise asserted that Darwinism will never be able to explain the origin of consciousness and the mind (Ref 15, p. 530).

So we see humans today as beings distinct from the other animals, whose mode of locomotion, intellectual attributes and desires for artistic exposition and cultural expression are not to be found at the base of any evolutionary tree linking humans with the apes. Strikingly, we do not even see lesser degrees of these characteristics (Ref 12, p.309). Paleoanthropologists such as the late Sir Arthur Keith noted the paradox of this human-ape divide and rightly asked why it was that humans had supposedly gone through so much evolution while the ape had, as he put it, "been left in the obscurity of its native jungle" (Ref 12, p.34)? It is in recognizing the facts of human uniqueness that we see how those that question our evolutionary relatedness to the apes have a case to make. In the end opinions on what are and what are not hominid species depend very much on what features one chooses to look at. We may rightly ask how much of what we now state as fact about our own evolution is dependent upon which data we may subjectively choose to include in support of our assertions. We may also ask how much of what we claim to 'see' in human evolution is based on expectation and preconceptions of what the fossil record should show.

References

1. Salvador Moya-Sola, Meike Koehler, David M. Alba, Isaac Casanovas-Vilar,Jordi Galindo (2004), Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, a New Middle Miocene Great Ape from Spain, Science, Vol 306, pp.1339-1344

2. The BBC Review on the finding of Pierolapithecus entitled 'Original Great Ape Discovered', can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4014351.stm

3.Michel Brunet et al (2002), A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa, Nature, Vol 418, pp.145-151

4. Rex Dalton (2002), Face to Face With our Past, Nature, Vol 420 p.735

5. Milford H. Wolpoff, Brigitte Senut, Martin Pickford and John Hawks (2002), Palaeoanthropology (communication arising): Sahelanthropus or 'Sahelpithecus'? Nature, Vol 419, pp.581-582

6. John C. Eccles (1991) Evolution of the Brain, Creation of Self, Published by Routledge, New York

7. Carl Zimmer (2004), Faster Than a Hyena? Running May Make Humans Special, Science, Vol 306, p.1283

8. The CNN report on the use of tools by wild gorillas, entitled 'Wild gorillas recorded using tools for first time' can be found at
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/30/gorilla.tools.ap/index.html

9. James Steele (1999), Palaeoanthropology: Stone legacy of skilled hands, Nature, Vol 399, pp.24-25

10. G.K Chesterton (1923), The Everlasting Man, Ignatius Press, San Francisco

11. James Mallet (2002), Review of 'In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace' by Michael Shermer, Nature, Vol 419 pp.561-562

12. Roger Lewin (1987), Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York

13. Olaf Sporns (2003), Network Analysis, Complexity, and Brain Function, Complexity, Vol 8, Issue 1 pp.56-60

14. Jay Tolson (2006), Is There Room for the Soul? New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit, US News & World Report, October 15th, 2006

15. Lee Strobel (2004), The Case For A Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Towards God, Zondervan Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Was there always water on the moon?

In a paper published in the July 10 issue of the journal Nature, the team, led by Alberto Saal, assistant professor of geological sciences at Brown, believes that the water was contained in magmas erupted from fire fountains onto the surface of the Moon more than 3 billion years ago. About 95 percent of the water vapor from the magma was lost to space during this eruptive “degassing,” the team estimates. But traces of water vapor may have drifted toward the cold poles of the Moon, where they may remain as ice in permanently shadowed craters.

NASA plans to send its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later this year to search for evidence of water ice at the Moon’s south pole. If water is found, the researchers may have figured out the origin.

And if there was water on the moon, who knows what else we might find?

Also, today at Colliding Universes:

Political correctness stumbles on science: "Black hole" to be a banned word now?

Earth to Mercury: We love you, don't quit. Read the note, smell the flowers .... please forgive us

Outlaw journalist David Warren disparages Extraterrestrials- and WHERE, I ask you, is the Canadian Human Rights Commission?

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).

PART I

Robert Deyes

The classic text book picture of human evolution extends over millions of years to a time when supposedly the first seeds of humanity were just beginning to take a foothold in north east Africa (Ref 1). Within this classical picture the discovery of superbly preserved adult skeletons in the Hadar region of Ethiopia has set the chain for human evolution back beyond 4 million years ago (Ref 1). The general appearance of these skeletons- described as being half ape half human- has lead scientists to refer to them not as humans but as hominids (Ref 1). With an overall height of approximately three and a half feet and a brain size that apparently more closely resembled that of chimpanzees, these early hominids are on the surface exactly what evolutionists would have wanted for an ape-human intermediate (Ref 1). And yet what is stunningly clear about these skeletons, today classified under the name of Australopithecus (meaning "Southern Ape"), is that they reveal an anatomy entirely consistent with a bipedal gait (Ref 1). In other words, they would have walked on two legs.

Hundreds of Australopithecine specimens have now been found around Hadar. Amongst the findings unearthed are a number of stone tools that indicate that Australopithecus would have been capable of technological innovation, using local resources and materials for his tool-making needs (Ref 2). Nevertheless, as paleontologist David Begun noted there is now evidence showing that a taxonomic group of hominids older than the Australopithecines existed (Ref 3). Known as Ardipithecus, this new group is thought to have lived approximately 6 million years ago (Ref 3). Some of the evidence for the existence of Ardipithecus is extremely sketchy. Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues from Berkeley and the University of Tokyo, for example, have used specific features from only a handful of molar teeth found in Awash in Ethiopia to draw an evolutionary sequence of hominids that extends from early apes (Ref 4). Perhaps not surprisingly Begun has cautioned against drawing any conclusions because of what he called, "the level of uncertainty in the available direct evidence" (Ref 3). In fact Begun appears much happier with a so-called 'messier view' of evolution in which several taxonomic groups co-existed (Ref 3).

Messy or not, today samples of skulls dating back as far as 6 million years ago are causing much consternation amongst paleo-anthropologists worldwide (Ref 5). While recognizably fragmentary, the picture that is emerging is not one of a continuously evolving lineage but rather of a coexistence of different types of hominid (Ref 6). More spectacularly these early samples seem to demonstrate unequivocally that bipedalism already existed as far back as 6 million years ago even in an environment that would have been dominated by woodland and dense forest (Ref 5). This, notes science writer Ann Gibbons, sounds a crashing death-blow to the orthodox view that bipedalism arose as a result of climate change that forced apes out of trees into grasslands (Ref 5). Many skeptics believe that Ardipithecus, rather than representing the genesis of human evolution, might have been an ancestor of the chimpanzee (Ref 5).

What we also see from these hominid findings is the seemingly unshakable compulsion to place fossil specimens into a sequence that links homo to the apes even when the specimens do not fit into a 'clean' sequence. One case, Orrorin tugenesis ('Original Man', otherwise known as 'Millenium man') that dates to approximately 5.8 million years, appears to have been more man-like in several key points than the later Australopithecines (Ref 5). In order to get around this apparent temporal misfit some scientists have employed words like 'yo-yo evolution' to explain how such features may have been partially lost in australopithecus before returning later on in the evolutionary sequence (Ref 5). Others have hidden behind the smoke screen of 'extensive hominid diversity' implicit in the messier model to try and explain why anatomical features that would have been expected to appear later on in a theoretical evolutionary sequence in fact appeared earlier (Ref 6). They explain away such discrepancies on the basis that they are exactly what one would expect from a rapid diversification of hominids (Ref 6). All of this of course brings us to the question of why we should think that any of these specimens were ancestral to humans- precisely the question that Peter Andrews of the Natural History Museum in London has asked and for which we still need an answer (Ref 5). Indeed in the 1960's the late paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his son Richard Leakey challenged the basic assumption that Australopithecus was ancestral to the genus Homo. They regarded Australopithecus as a mere offshoot from an evolutionary tree with Homo extending much further back in time than the above reports suggested (Ref 7).

Perhaps the best kept specimen of a possible upright, walking hominid was uncovered in early 2005 by Haile-Selassie and Bruce Latimer of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio (Ref 8). The specimen included many bones from the legs, pelvis and back all of which seemed to support the hypothesis that this early Australopithecine would have walked on two legs (Ref 8). If indeed bipedal walking represented the origins of the human lineage that evolved from an ancestral ape, what transitional intermediates would have lead to this new form of locomotion? Brian Richmond and David Strait of the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University attempted to answer this question on the basis of certain bone features in Australopithecus that they claim were associated with knuckle walking (Ref 9). Knuckle walking is how chimpanzees and gorillas get around and in simple terms describes how the backs of the fingers are used to support much of the body's weight. From their own studies, Richmond and Strait concluded that some early hominid species, "[retained] the derived wrist morphology of knuckle-walkers", and that therefore these early hominids must have evolved from a knuckle walking ancestor (Ref 9). Others such as biologist Mike Dainton from the Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology at Liverpool disagreed that the evidence necessarily indicated a knuckle walking ancestry adding that, "it is debatable whether form, function and adaptive significance should be so linked within a modern evolutionary framework" (Ref 10). While paleoanthropologist Jim Fleagle concurred with Richmond's and Strait's conclusion, Henry Potts of the Smithsonian Institute rightly questioned why an ancestor already adapted for other forms of locomotion would have needed to evolve an alternative method, such as walking on two legs, to be able to get around (Ref 11). Anthropologist Carol Ward from the University of Missouri in Columbia speculates that a bipedal mode of walking would have freed up the hands for carrying food across large distances (Ref 11). Yet in the absence of any common ancestor with which to work on, such ideas are of course pure speculation (Ref 11).

In 1984, the American Museum of Natural History in New York held an exhibition that showed several of what are considered to be key fossils relating to human evolution. This 'Ancestors' exhibition caught the public eye for several reasons not least of which was the fact that many of the displays on show were brought to the museum in a convoy of limousines under police escort after having been flown from around the world on first class plane seats (Ref 7, p.21). The reverence shown to these specimens revealed their iconic, almost godly-like status in a scientific field that is filled with emotions and deep-rooted sentiments about the 'facts' of human evolution. As the late Harvard anthropologist Ernest Hooton noted, this so-called 'ancestor worship' has become the greatest source of danger for an objective study of human origins (Ref 7, p.26). With discoverers of hominid fossils eager to identify primitive features that place their finds closer to a theoretical common ancestor with the apes while equally eager to identify features that establish an evolutionary relationship with modern man, what we end up with is undoubtedly a half-baked story of our past (Ref 7, p.26). According to science writer Roger Lewin, our own judgment of the evolution of man is tainted by our desire to portray progress as, "the epitome of evolution", with modern man becoming an example of progress from its ancestral ape, just as industrialization became an example of progress from darker times of our history. In all, the history of modern anthropology has been characterized by subjectivity with the experts seeing what they wanted to see in the evidence that they found. Even answers to the question of where the enigmatic ape-man would have lived- be it present day Africa or Asia- have depended very much on individual preconceptions of what this ape-man would have looked like (Ref 7, p.70-90).

REFERENCES

1. See http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vwsu/gened/learn-modules/top_longfor/timeline/afarensis/afarensis-a.html

2. Brooks Hanson (2005), Paleontology, Early Tool Makers, Science Vol 307 p. 18

3. David R. Begun (2004), The Earliest Hominins-Is Less More? Science Vol 303 pp. 1478-1480

4. Yohannes Haile-Selassie,Gen Suwa, Tim D. White (2004), Late Miocene Teeth from Middle Awash, Ethiopia, and Early Hominid Dental Evolution, Science, Vol 303, Issue 5663, 1503-1505

5. Ann Gibbons (2002), In Search Of The First Hominids, Science Volume 295 pp. 1214-1219

6. Bernard Wood (2002), Hominid Revelations from Chad, Nature Vol 418 p.133-135

7. Roger Lewin (1987), Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York

8. Ann Gibbons (2005), Skeleton of Upright Human Ancestor Discovered in Ethiopia, Science Science, Vol 307, p.1545

9. Brian G. Richmond and David S. Strait (2000), Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor, Nature 404, 382-385

10. Mike Dainton (2001), Palaeoanthropology: Did our ancestors knuckle-walk?, Nature 410, 324-325

11. Erik Stokstad (2000), Hominid Ancestors May Have Knuckle Walked, Science Volume 287 pp. 2131-2132

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Over at Brains on Purpose, Stephanie West Allen has been discussing the way some people use neuroscience principles in none-too-credible ways:

Lots of pseudoscience being tossed around these days, sometimes by people you might likely assign credibility. Last month, I attended a talk by George Lakoff about his new book The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain and was appalled at how he used the science. After reading an article "Mind Games" (The National), I knew I was not alone. Jeremy Freeman writes:

"In a typical argument, Lakoff starts by describing a fairly well-established neuro-scientific theory and then generalises it to apply to a highly abstract and unstudied context. That simply does not work in neuroscience. One of the central challenges of studying the brain is that an understanding at a particular level of analysis does not always translate to others. A theory about learning at the level of individual neurons may or may not apply to the learning of complex metaphorical relationships. A theory about how the brain binds simple visual features into complex objects may or may not apply to the way it binds simple emotional experiences into complex narratives. In making these leaps, Lakoff reveals himself as someone distinctly out of touch with neuroscience."

Unfortunately I see all too much of that leaping from neuroscience to the abstract. The leapers say something like this: "Well, we know this about the brain so we must know that about how businesses run or what employees need." Some of the leaps are astounding.

For my money, nothing beats the "God Helmet" that Mario Beauregard and I discuss in Chapter 4 of The Spiritual Brain. Brain, but people who pretend to know how your brain is organized - that is, if you would vote for Schmeazle versus Schmoe - are giving the hilarious Helmet some serious competition.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Monkids? As if there aren't real kids out there?

Fake pills for kids: Is it illegal to kiss a bruise now?

Charles Darwin and Kemal Ataturk have been spotted by devotees, And you are surprised? Why?

Sociologist: Modernization and secularization are not the same thing - and the difference makes a big difference

The Spiritual Brain: See the Probe article and hear the radio program! Materialism is only a theory but non-materialism is a fact.

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).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Louisiana Confounds the Science Thought Police" at National Review Online, John West of the Discovery Institute* comments on the new Louisiana "it's okay to question what they tell you" law:

Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren’t well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the “scientific” view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

Real science, however, is a lot more messy — and interesting — than a set of ideological talking points.

Ah yes, brings back memories ...

One of the ways I first became interested in the intelligent design controversy years ago was encountering a long-departed science teachers' Web site. A teacher opined that the Monarch and Viceroy butterflies' similarity may not really be due to Darwinian evolution, but it nonetheless made a good illustration of Darwinian evolution.

Huh? Yes, but only if Darwinian evolution isn't true. On the other hand, that's not what the teacher was trying to say ... He was trying to say that Darwinian evolution is so true that the material that illustrates it need not be factual.

In which case ... I sensed a story developing.

I went on to study the Monarch and Viceroy similarity myself and discovered that they probably do not resemble each other due to Darwinian evolution.

A couple of years later, I completed a book about the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?.

Also, at the Post-Darwinist:

Killer insects and intelligent design

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Friends fear the comics won't dare be funny in ways that matter

Louisiana Academic Freedom Bill: White lab coats to take refuge behind black law robes?

Was the bison’s peculiar chest a design feature ... to help Native North Americans survive?

Intellectual freedom in Canada: ... Look out, PC bigots! The True North strong and free is shaking off your chains ...

Darwin's co-founder Wallace accepted intelligent design?

Canadian comics rally for freedom: Let's
LAUGH Canada's "human rights" commissions out of existence!

What I think about common descent - answer to a reader's question

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).

Robert Deyes

For those eager to claim that the human species is just an evolutionary extension of the primeval monkey our own quest for knowledge and the understanding of the world around us is made a mockery (Ref 1). After all, with such a claim science can be said to have its origins in, "the first monkey searching for the first flea" (Ref 2, p.169). Ironically it is science itself that contravenes such a blunt dismissal. Our species is after all so suitably adapted to probe and understand the universe in all its vastness. No other comes close to being able to explore its own existence within the context of our cosmos (Ref 3, p.238). This unique ability has only been possible through our species' own superbly-developed nervous system (Ref 4, p.217). Nobel Laureate John Eccles eluded to man's almost incessant quest for knowledge when he wrote of our present age as, "pre-eminent in the conservation of cultural products" with museums and libraries being developed as never before as, "centers of excellence and critical evaluation" (Ref 4, p.225). Not only does our species stand out in its mastery of language and descriptive and argumentative capacities (Ref 4, p.72) but also in its competence in the use of tools that has positioned it in a superb vantage point from which to excel in exploration (Ref 4, pp. 133-138).

English poet John Milton once described our species as, "a master-work...not prone and brute as other creatures, but endued with sanctity of reason...and upright with front serene" (Ref 5, p.421). Indeed we can identify some key characteristics that have brought about the pinnacle of human reasoning. The bipedal gait- the ability to stand on two legs instead of four- frees up our hands for creative expression (Ref 4, p.48). Likewise two regions in the brain intimately involved in speech- the Broca and the Wernicke speech centers- give us the ability to handle the semantic requirements of speech and efficient communication, an ability that is not reproduced anywhere else in the animal kingdom (Ref 4, p.86). Indeed Eccles concludes that our uniqueness can only be attributed to, "a supernatural spiritual creation" (Ref 4, p.237). Such a view has likewise been championed by naturalist and primate specialist Jane Goodall who wrote of her disbelief in chance as the much headed-to explanation for our species' intellect while she contemplated the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris:

"How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that had led up to that moment in time-the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built....Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so I must believe in a guiding power in the universe" (Ref 6, p. xii)

As philosopher Joe Boot writes, it is our intellectual capacity that sets us apart from the rest of nature and makes us all that much more unique (Ref 7). Indeed no other organism had demonstrated the enormous complexity of our species' ability of teaching and expression through both vocal and written language (Ref 6, p.93-94).

So where did our species originate? One model holds that early humans left Africa approximately 50,000 years ago to conquer the world, as the Earth was in the grip of the last ice age (Ref 8). Traveling as far as current-day India, Australia and Europe and enduring freezing temperatures as they moved into the Arctic circle and on into the Americas almost 20,000 years ago, the earliest true humans defied belief in their resilience and speed of movement as they migrated across vast geographical distances in search of new land (Ref 8). As geneticist Spencer Wells noted, the technological advances both for hunting and survival in general that would have made such an Out-Of-Africa epic possible, would have needed a 'quantum leap' in the use of the brain from anything that had existed previously (Ref 8). If this model turns out to be correct, this global conquest will only serve to confirm the uniqueness of man's mental capacity and his distinction from the hominids that preceded his existence.

REFERENCES

1. Richard Dawkins (2005), Darwin and Evolution, The Illusion Of Design, Natural History Magazine, November 2005. Article can be found at http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/

2. George A Buttrick (1966), God, Pain and Evil, Abingdon Press, Nashville Tennessee

3. Michael Denton (1998), Nature's Destiny: How The Laws of Biology, Reveal Purpose in the Universe, 1st Edition Published by the Free Press, New York

4. John C. Eccles (1991), Evolution of the Brain, Creation of Self, Published by Routledge, New York

5. John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost, Edited by Alastair Fowler, 2nd Edition 1998, Longman Inc, New York

6. Jane Goodall (1999), Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey Warner Books Inc, New York, NY

7. Joe Boot (2005), Dinosaurs and Digital Phones, Slice of Infinity, 07/28/05,
http://www.rzim.org/USA/Resources/Read/ASliceofInfinity/TodaysSlice.aspx

8. Journey Of Man- The Story Of The Human Species; Hosted by Spencer Wells, 2003; Tigris Productions for PBS Home Video

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Matthew Chalmers has a story in New Scientist (07 July 2008), "Lithium: The hole in the big bang theory", which addresses the problem the early forged light element lithium may present for the Big Bang theory (paywall). In this 2007 PhysicsWorld article, "Testing the elements of the Big Bang", Kenneth Nollett explains that most of the elements with which we are familiar (oxygen, calcium, carbon) were forged inside stars long after the Big Bang. However,

One big exception is hydrogen: almost all hydrogen nuclei are protons that emerged from the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago. Another is light nuclei such as deuterium and lithium, which were produced in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis that occurred when the universe was only a few minutes old.

The nucleosynthesis, in which the other light elements, including lithium and helium, originated, is thought to have lasted only a few minutes. So why a problem?

Recent measurements of the cosmic background radiation, which reveals the universe as it was when atoms formed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and of the large-scale distribution of galaxies have greatly increased the precision of cosmological data. So far it seems that the observed primordial abundances – particularly those of lithium – do not quite tally with BBN theory. The goal now is to bring BBN into line with the new precision of cosmology, and to improve our understanding of the astrophysical environments where the primordial abundances are observed.

Basically,

BBN predicts that there are 4.7 × 10^–10 lithium-7 atoms for every hydrogen atom, while the Spite-plateau stars contain only about 1.4 × 10^–10. Several explanations for this discrepancy have been proposed, but no-one knows the right answer. Either some important physical process is missing from BBN theory, some astrophysical mechanism destroys large amounts of lithium-7 after BBN, or there is something is wrong with our interpretation of stellar spectra.

Lithium, of course, is much better known to the public than its rarity would suggest because of its fabled role in the treatment of mental illness.

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Spacetime more like simple stir fry than elaborate wedding cake?

Could life on Earth be much older than supposed?

Does Mercury really need to exist?

David Warren - further on Frank Tipler ...

Call for Papers: "First International Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe."

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).

Robert Deyes

Bio-inspiration is a relatively new field of science that is trying to replicate the phenomena and designs of nature in ways that are of benefit to man. The manner in which a gecko's foot allows it to climb glass, the way in which the wings of a butterfly sparkle in the sunlight and the complex methods of flight used by insects have all inspired technologists to emulate nature. More recently the cellular world with its molecular machines has provided a source of ideas for nano-technological design. This 'nanorealm' that is the cell has become the last frontier of natural exploration. Bioinspiration has likewise brought together disparate disciplines of science to tackle some of the major challenges of engineering and medicine - proteins that stick onto silica chips, for example, that may one day help in finding a cure for cancer.

Peter Forbes describes his book as, "the Aladdin's cave of bio-inspired materials and devices" - a 'must have' account for those interested in all things bioinspired. As he remarks, "bioinspiration has opened up a new realm of nature as surely as did the coming of the microscope or the unraveling of the structure of DNA". Yet it is the potential commercialization of a product that makes the field of bioinspiration so captivating. One of Forbes' foremost examples is the leaf of the lotus plant. With its bumpy surface and its water repellency, the lotus leaf can be easily washed free of any dirt- an effect that is now being used in the manufacture of different types of glass and metal coatings. The same effect may soon be applied to clothes as a means of preventing stains.

With its extreme elasticity and strength spider silk is another natural substance that could soon bring about the design of commercially-viable man made products. Spider silk is after all strong enough to trap flying insects without snapping or tearing- a property that has been exploited by fishermen from Papua New Guinea who use spider silk in their fishing nets. The mimicking of natural silks culminated in the invention of Nylon in 1937. But neither Nylon nor any other man made fiber to-date has come close to paralleling the strength of the natural alternatives. Spiders spin their filamentous fibers from an initially watery solution making a composite structure that is extremely strong. The commercial potential of a synthetic spider silk-like fiber, once it is found, is all too evident. Indeed one entrepreneur has already patented a machine that mimics the mechanics of the spider's spinneret. Perhaps the first applications of any synthetic spider silk will be biomedical. But eventually they might even find use in the manufacture of satellites and space telescopes.

A synthetic material that replicates spider silk is likely to bring lucrative returns to its eventual inventor. Just as attractive for 'bioinspirationalists' are the one billion tiny bristly hairs on the sole of a gecko's foot that help it to stick very efficiently onto surfaces. The underlying secret behind the gecko's remarkable sticking capabilities is an electrostatic force called 'Van der Waals'. So strong is this force that if all the one billion hairs were to be in contact with a surface at any one time, the gecko could hold the weight of a 120 Kg man. Many novel applications for a synthetic equivalent of the gecko's bristly foot are already being thought of including first aid plasters and insect traps. The ability of the gecko to walk upside down has even inspired one researcher to look at how a similar feat might be achieved by a robot. Other natural methods of attachment such as the strong 'DOPA Glue' used by mussels to stick to rocks and piers may likewise serve as the seeds for man made medical adhesives.

The beauty of nature often stares us in the face luring us to look deeper into the secrets of its designs. Iridescence, the eye-catching display of color that is found on the feathers of peacocks or the wings of butterflies, is caused by the reflection of light at particular wavelengths. For the butterfly wing there is an intricate cavernous labyrinth on the surface of the wing that generates this effect. This effect bears similarities to the way in which light is transmitted through fiber optic cables. The color changing abilities of animals such as the octopus or brittle stars and the reflective and anti reflective surfaces found in nature are likewise now raising the interest of the military where camouflage is a critical consideration in defense. We find a similar beauty in the design of natural structures such as shells. The red abalone shell fish, for example, uses fifteen different proteins at different times of the shell biomineralization process to produce a structure of exquisite design.

How may we exploit the designs of nature in our own construction? The cantilever bridge that resembles the structure of animal anatomy, the 'badgir' ventilation channels used in houses in Iraq which mirror similar channels in termite mounds, glasshouses that employ the same building principles as those used in the ribbing of water-lilies, geodesic domes that have at their roots the icosehedronal structures of viruses perhaps all reveal the shape of things to come. The self assembly of a bacterial virus called lambda has likewise inspired some researchers such as Harvard's George Whitside to develop self assembling nanostructures. Others have taken to generating molecular hybrids by attaching already existing molecular machines, such as the rotating motor of an enzyme called ATP Synthetase, onto solid surfaces.

Forbes' historical musings on the use of some of these materials are an embellishment to his account. But the underlying message of his story is more profound for it tells of a world that is accessible to learning and creativity by humans. Ours is an earthly 'classroom' seemingly designed for our own learning enjoyment, and displaying an "intrinsic value" which we recognize in our ability to make detailed and accurate scientific observations. It is not only a world that has highly improbable properties but also the kind of world that, as astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards observe, "an intelligent agent would have some interest in designing" (see Footnote).

Footnote: This quote taken from Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards (2004), The Privileged Planet, How Our Place In The Cosmos is designed for Discovery, Regnery Publishing Inc, Washington D.C, New York, pp. 306-307

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

As a friend explains, they are seeking cosmologists, physicists, astrobiologists, theoretical and evo-devo biologists, complexity, systems and hierarchy theorists, philosophers, and other scholars who wish to explore and critique hypotheses of evolution and development at universal and subsystem scales:

Evo Devo Universe is a global scholarly research community interested in quasi-organic models of the universe. We are seeking cosmologists, physicists, astrobiologists, theoretical and evo-devo biologists, complexity, systems and hierarchy theorists, philosophers, and other scholars who wish to explore and critique hypotheses of evolution and development at universal and subsystem scales.

Their first international conference on these topics will be occurring in Paris, France on 8-9 October, 2008. Their first deadline for abstract and paper proposal submission is July 30th, 2008. Go here for more.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist

Could life on Earth be much older than supposed?

Evolve already, huffingtons ... the alligators are laughing at you

What happens when we assume there is no design in nature ...

More on Louisiana's "assault on Darwin" ...

Darwin's co-discoverer thought design can be detected in nature

History moment: Quick, relabel that exhibit!

"Accepting evolution" does not make you an atheist... oh, puh-LEASE! Not this rubbish again!

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).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Did you decide to adopt him when you first saw him? When he licked your hand? When you decided to speak to the Humane Society cage attendant? You might be surprised ...

Recent research on making decisions shows that people may actually make a decision ten seconds before they become aware of it.

In "Get Out of Your Own Way" in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Lee Hotz reports,

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.

Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

This is very interesting, though not surprising. It provides research support for something that storytellers sense and try to portray - we become aware of a choice after we have already made it.

Shakespeare's villains are especially good at sensing when their victims have already begun to commit to a disastrous course of action - even when they aren't yet conscious of it themselves.

In other research,

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

That makes a lot of sense too, because consumer choices are essentially a question of what we think we'd be happy with. The more we think about it, the more complex the problem becomes. I suspect that if the problem involved abstract calculation rather than consumer choice, distraction would not be a benefit.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack

Neuroscience: News flash, sort of ... people would rather give to charity than pay taxes. Who'd ever have guessed?

Fun! G. K. Chesterton on the difference between humans and apes

Mathematician David Berlinski on why we should not pay any attention to "evolutionary psychology"

Evolutionary psychology: Women prefer men with stubble? Oh, no wait - beards - but we can explain that too ...

Brain: If a pill did not cause all your problems, chances are a pill won't fix them all either

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).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

He who sups with the devil must bring a long spoon. - proverb

Mathematician David Berlinski is an exception, and often noted as such. He does not fit the stereotype of the earnest, learned theist we expect a Discovery Institute fellow to be. An American living in Paris, a secular agnostic Jew, and both a mathematician and a novelist - so why isn't he caterwauling about the Visigoths at the gates, who think there is evidence for design in the universe?

Well, for one thing, he is way too smart. He is also a relentless foe of fashionable mediocrities. Thought enforcers mutter darkly against him.

No doubt there will be a law against him some day, but the bureaucrats will need to make good time. He was born in 1942. Meanwhile, ...

Well now, what of Berlinski's Devils?, that is The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions?

The book is not so much a defense of the God of the philosophers as a meditation on the vast, dim stupidities put up, in popular science works, to replace him. Although Devil's would stand on its own as an excellent piece of writing and reasoning, in fairness it owes much to the sheer ridiculousness of the current conventions of thought it sends up, as we shall soon see.

Next: Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science

All parts:
Introduction: David Berlinski's exceptionalism
Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science
Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does
Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism
Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

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).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Berlinski was a student of the great French mathematician M.-P. Schutzenberger - a man who challenged Darwinism on mathematical grounds, provoking the Darwinists present to professions of faith.

He does not claim to have big and easy answers, nor even a cause to promote (except the ongoing life of the mind). He is willing to live with uncertainty. There, of course, he differs from the thousands of tenured mediocrities who proclaim junk ideas like meme theory or cosmic Darwinism - and assure us that our sense that these theories are implausible is fully accounted for by the fact that our brains have not evolved in such a way as to find the theory plausible.

Surveying the big picture in science ( what we now know and what we don't), he offers,

We have been vouchsafed four powerful and profound scientific theories since the great scientific revolution of the West was set in motion in the seventeenth century - Newtonian mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. These are isolated miracles, great mountain peaks surrounded by a range of low, furry foothills. The theories that we possess are "magnificent, profound, difficult, sometimes phenomenally accurate," as the distinguished mathematician Roger Penrose has observed, but as he at once adds, they also comprise a "tantalizingly inconsistent scheme of things.

These splendid artifacts of the human imagination have made the world more mysterious than it ever was. We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a "warm little pond." The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found." (xii-xiii)

and he adds

Occupied by their own concerns, a great many men and women have a dll, hurt, angry sense of being oppressed by the sciences. They are frustrated by endless scientific boasting. They suspect that as an institution, the scientific community holds them in contempt. They feel no little distaste for those speaking in its name.

They are right to feel this way. I have written this book for them. (xiv-xv)

I remember precisely such an incident a couple of years ago. I was studying the face of a woman in an audience, when it became apparent that the head of the National Academy of Sciences had been, shall we say, economical of the truth. He had insisted, counterfactually, that many members of NAS were religious. She was informed, with utmost condescension, that he had said so for political reasons. In other words, because she would be stupid enough to believe it. Or maybe not? But there it was, briefly out in the open - the contempt that the tax-supported science establishment feels for the people who work to support it.

When an establishment can treat those who support it with contempt, untruth without consequences is only the beginning. And there have been many untruths, as Pamela Winnick's A Jealous God points out.

Another risk is establishing a religion. Indeed, that is the distinguishing characteristic of the new "scientistic" atheism. Some forms of atheism may be genuinely non-religious, but this is not one of them. Berlinski comments,

If nothing else, the attack on traditional religious thought marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion. From cosmology to biology, its narratives have become the narratives. They are, these narratives, immensely seductive, so much so that looking at them with innocent eyes requires a very deliberate act.. And like any militant church, this one places a familiar demand before all others: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

It is this that is new; it is this that is important.

Yes, and one might add, this new religious profession helps us understand many peculiar current obsessions of the pop science media - like trying to prove that great apes think like humans, for example.

One must ask, why would it matter so much if great apes don't think like humans? That would not be a blow to common descent of humans and apes because no one maintains that common descent requires detailed similarity or even, for that matter, that similarity is strong evidence of descent. After all, ravens may also think like humans in certain respects, and no one proposes reorganizing our current ideas about common descent on their account.

It would be closer to the mark to say that seeking such similarities is a religious exercise among those for whom common descent is not so much a convenient explanation of origins as an article of religious faith.

Berlinski also adverts to the privileged lives so many of the new atheists have enjoyed. Responding to Dawkins's observation that religion's power to console doesn't make it true, he observes,

Perhaps this is so, but only a man who has spent a good deal of time snoring on the down of plenty could be quite so indifferent to the consolations of religion, wherever and however they may be found. (P. 11)

To be sure, it is not a consolation that Berlinski himself has sought. But it is a consolation, and he wants to know why it is, and has been, for millennia.

Next: Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does

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 new The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Berlinski makes clear that, like Ben Stein, he knows how great a role Darwin played in Nazi theories:

A sinister current of influence ran from Darwin's theory of evolution to Hitler's policy of extermination. A generation of German biologists had read Darwin and concluded that competition between species was reflected in human affairs by competition between races." (p. 27)

That the Nazis may have misunderstood or misused Darwin is hardly the point. They could not have been what they were without him. Indeed, no understanding of the Nazis is even possible apart from their conviction that their ethnic group had evolved Darwin-wise into a master race that would - with the inevitability of the outworking of a law of nature - cause the extinction of less evolved races.

The fact that other ethnic groups have had different sham reasons for pretended superiority and mass murder is irrelevant: As the tableau of the three Jewish thinkers at the Wall in Expelled mutely testifies, the Holocaust was driven in part by the Nazis' partiality to Darwin's theory, not to some other theory.

Indeed, at this point it is safe to say that one way of professing allegiance to the new religion of scientism is to act offended by any assertion of this simple and obvious fact. Hardly the best beginning to a faith journey - but perhaps a beginning well suited to the faith of scientism.

But more generally, what can Berlinski affirm to be true? At the heart of his agnosticism is a conviction that the level of certainty required for belief - in God, atheism, Darwinism, et cetera, is simply lacking.

To the question what makes the laws of moral life true, there are three answers: God, logic, and nothing. Each is inadequate. (P. 37)

We know that there is an intellectual and moral life but, in his view, we do not know why.

Nonetheless, materialism is even less convincing. "Every scientist since Newton has placed his allegiance in the world beyond the world."

In his remarkable treatise, The Road to Reality, Roger Penrose quotes a letter from the mathematician Richard Thomas of the Imperial College in London. What is one to make, Penrose asks, of the remarkable strange, and baffling mathematical results that have appeared in theoretical physics over the past twenty years or so? Thomas's reply is instructive and it is quite moving. "To a mathematician," he writes, these things cannot be coincidence, they must come from a higher reason. And that reason is the assumption that this big mathematical theory describes nature" (italics added). (P. 46)

And, while materialism makes the argument for atheism easy, it is not workable in the world we know:

... the world of matter revealed by the physical sciences does not serve to endow materialism with a familiar face. The universe in its largest aspect is the expression of curved space and time. Four fundamental forces hold sway. There are black holes and various infernal singularities. Popping out of quantum fields, the elementary[54] particles appear as bosons or fermions. The fermions are divided into quarks and leptons. Quarks come in six varieties, but they are never seen, confined as they are within hadrons by a force that perversely grows weaker at short distances and stronger at distances that are long. There are six leptons in four varieties. Depending on just how things are counted, matter has as its fundamental constituents twenty-four elementary particles, together with a great many fields, symmetries, strange geometrical spaces, and forces that are disconnected at one level of energy and fused at another, together with at least a dozen different forms of energy, all of them active.

This is not an ontology that puts one in mind of a longshoreman's view of the material world. It is remarkably baroque. And it is promiscuously catholic. ... If tomorrow, physicists determine that particle physics requires access to the ubiquity of the body of Christ, that doctrine would at once be declared a physical principle and treated accordingly. (pp 53-54)

Well, I don't know about that. They might be just as inclined to build a three-billion dollar device on the French-Swiss border to prove it wasn't true after all. Oh heck, why not a thirty-billion dollar device? Can't be too careful these days.

Next: Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

If materialism is not true, its "evolutionary psychology" branch is doomed. But it might have been doomed anyway. Berlinski, while he has some fun with it, does not write like a man with an urgent message. Nor need he.

He usefully reminds us that what we now call "evolutionary psychology" was at the heart of the true conflict between Darwin and his co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace:

... there is no evident distinction, Wallace observed, between the mental powers of the most primitive human being and the most advanced. Raised in England instead of the Ecuadorian Amazon, a native child of the headhunting Jivaro, destined otherwise for a life spent loping through the jungle, would learn to speak perfect English, and would upon graduation from Oxford or Cambridge have the double advantage of a modern intellectual worldview and a commercially valuable ethnic heritage. He might become a mathematician, he would understand the prevailing moral and social codes perfectly, and for all anyone knows (or could tell), he might find himself a BBC commentator, explaining lucidly the cultural significance of head-hunting and arguing for its protection.

From this it follows, Wallace argued, that characteristic human abilities must be latent in primitive man, existing somehow as an unopened gift, the entryway to a world that primitive man does not possess and would not recognize.

But the idea that a biological species might possess latent powers makes nonsense in Darwinian terms. It suggests the forbidden doctrine that evolutionary advantages were front-loaded far away and long ago; it is in conflict with the Darwinian principle that useless genes are subject to negative selection pressure and must therefore find themselves draining away into the sands of time.

Wallace identified a frank conflict between his own theory and what seemed to him obvious facts about the solidity and unchangeability of human nature.

The conflict persists; it has not been resolved. (P. 158-59 )

Far from the conflict being resolved, contemporary scientism has opted for legends instead. As noted earlier, an alleged similarity between humans and apes, based on very little evidence, is widely advanced today. Berlinski observes:

It is for this reason - no science, little evidence - that the kinship between human beings and the apes has been promoted in contemporary culture as a moral virtue as well as a zoological fact. It functions as a hedge against religious belief, and so it is eagerly advanced. The affirmation that human beings are fundamentally unlike the apes is widely considered a defect of prejudice or a celebration of trivialities. (p. 160 )

Similarly, he takes on the "hardwired" metaphor for human characteristics, originally from computer science but now a beloved truism of pop evolutionary psychology (P. 166):

Commenting on the negative advertising in political campaigns, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, remarked that "there appears to be something hardwired into humans that gives special attention to negative information." There followed what is by now a characteristic note: "I think it's evolutionary biology." The fact that there is nothing hardwired about human beings, because they are not wired at all is passed over as incidental. The metaphor has taken on a life all its own and now that it is living, it has grown great.

Indeed,

[H]aving provided an explanation of negative campaign advertisements, evolutionary biology also explains war and male aggression, the human sensitivity to beauty, gossip a preference for suburban landscapes, love, altruism, marriage jealousy, adultery, road rage, religious belief, fear of snakes, disgust, night sweats, infanticide, and the fact that parents are often fond of their children.

These are, of course, the pious legends of scientism.

As for the "blonde bombshell" theory of evolution (Why gentlemen prefer blondes), Berlinski observes,

If sexual preferences are rooted in the late Paleolithic era, men worldwide should now be looking for stout muscular women with broad backs, sturdy legs, a high threshold to pain, and a welcome eagerness to resume foraging directly after parturition. It has not been widely documented that they do.

Our ancestors are in any case unavailable. Claims made on their behalf are unverifiable. (pp.167-68)

But, of course, evolutionary psychology never needed to make historical or scientific sense in order to be believed. It only needed to confirm the average newspaper reader's view that materialism "explains" things. And of course, it does. Indeed, any perspective, whether space alien conspiracy theory or Freudian psychodrama, can explain things. If an "explanation" is all you want, evolutionary psychology has the advantage of being widely disseminated and readily understood, as well as competely ridiculous. At last, pop psychology grows up and becomes science.

Next: Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

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 new The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Of course, Berlinski became notorious primarily for his direct assault on scientism's sacred cow, Darwinian evolution - the miraculous process whereby mud becomes mind and faith becomes science:

"The effort by Darwinian biologists to promote Darwin is simply explained. Within the English-speaking world, Darwin's theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You've got to be kidding, right? There is wide appreciation of the fact that if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they ar wrong about everything." (p. 186)

In Devil's, he doesn't say nearly as much about Darwinism as he has elsewhere - scientistic atheism, after all, generates a great many opportunities for a debunker. He does however point out the ongoing "computer simulation of evolution" as one case where reality bytes deeply and hard:

Computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not. Thomas Ray has for years been conducting computer experiments in an artificial environment that he has designated Tierra. Within this world, a shifting population of computer organisms, met, mate, mutate, and reproduce. (P. 190)

As duly reported by Sandra Blakeslee in the New York Times, it became "Computer 'Life Form' Mutates in an Evolution Experiment: Natural Selection Is Found at Work in a Digital World", but

... as Blakeslee observes with solemn incomprehension, "the creatures mutated but showed only modest increases in complexity." Which is to say, they showed nothing of interest at all. That is natural selection at work, but it is hardly work that has worked to intended effect.

In Berlinski's view, the key science theorem demonstrated by these computer models is, "There is a sucker born every minute."

Essentially, Berlinski comes off as a premodern sort of thinker who has never accepted a duty to come to the aid of the Party by believing the big science scams of our times. Agree, disagree ... he's still fun and original - and I suspect he is usually right.

Some further resources:

Videocasts of David Berlinski discussing his ideas. Note especially the first, a five-minute summary.

Podcasts

The Council of Europe's attack on design

Berlinski on his Devil's Delusion

Berlinski gets Expelled: His appearance in the Expelled movie

A collection of his essays and other writings is here.

Back to Introduction: David Berlinski's exceptionalism

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 new The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues, Mike Gene discusses a 2005 paper by Luc Arnold of the Observatory of Haute-Provence in France, in The Astrophysical Journal.

Arnold explains his idea thus:

... considering that artificial planet-size bodies may exist around other stars, and that such objects always transit in front of their parent star for a given remote observer, we may thus have an opportunity to detect and even characterize them by the transit method, assuming these transits are distinguishable from a simple planetary transit. These objects could be planet-size structures built by advanced civilizations, like very lightweight solar sails or giant very low density structures may be specially built for the purpose of interstellar communication by transit. (P. 194)

Arnold argues that non-spherical artificial objects such as triangles and other exotic shapes each have a specific transit lightcurve, so alien design would be detectible in principle.

Gene is a bit dubious about how soon to expect this revelation, pointing out that "we are still looking for evidence that microbes exist on other planets," never mind aliens capable of designing, say, a planetary bundt pan.*

Mike Gene's basic point, of course, is that one need not know "who" a designer is in order to detect design, and he cites Arnold because Arnold apparently doesn't think so either.

Gene also observes in the Chapter Notes (Note 3) that France is the home of the Raelians. Mi-i-ike! Do keep in mind, if you are an American, that the United States is the home of Roswell. Fair's fair when you're making fun of people.

Here is Arnold's citation and abstract:

"Transit Lightcurve Signatures of Artificial Objects."." Astrophysical Journal, 627:534-539.)

The forthcoming space missions, able to detect Earth-like planets by the transit method, will a fortiori also be able to detect the transit of artificial planet-size objects. Multiple artificial objects would produce lightcurves easily distinguishable from natural transits. If only one artificial object transits, detecting its artificial nature becomes more difficult. We discuss the case of three different objects (triangle, 2-screen, louver-like 6-screen) and show that they have a transit lightcurve distinguishable from the transit of natural planets, either spherical or oblate, although an ambiguity with the transit of a ringed planet exists in some cases. We show that transits, especially in the case of multiple artificial objects, could be used for the emission of attention-getting signals, with a sky coverage comparable to the laser pulse method. The large number of expected planets (several hundreds) to be discovered by the transit method by next space missions will allow to test these ideas.

*Yes, the bundt-pan design would so be handy, when you need your planet to section easily into structures with flat sides and curved tops ....

Also, today at Colliding Universes:

Large Hadron Collider: And what if, $3 billion later, they don't find the God particle?

Can reincarnation save Schrodinger's cat?

Origin of life: Does the uncertainty principle rule out nanotechnology?

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).

By Robert Deyes

As far as discussions and debates on evolutionary thought go, 1981 was to be a memorable year. Not only was it the centennial celebration of the British Natural History museum in London but it was also the beginning of a new exhibition on Charles Darwin that opened at the museum to commemorate the anniversary (Ref 1). Colin Patterson, who died in 1998 and who was the scientific officer in the museum's paleontology department at the time, was critical of the way that evolutionists had used cladistics (Ref 1). Patterson thought it 'strange' that phylogenetic groups could be generated on the assumption that as-of-yet unidentified organisms that had already gone extinct had at one time existed (Ref 1). Indeed Patterson called such phylogenetic groups, "the inventions of evolutionists"- a charge that only fueled the fury of many a Darwinian protagonist at the time (Ref 1).

In 1997, sixteen years after the inauguration of the Darwin exhibition, a scientific meeting was held in Paris to discuss the most up to date findings of evolutionary biology (Ref 2). The meeting drew some of the heavyweights in the evolutionary debate such as Gaylord Simpson and Patterson himself. Under the illustrious title of 'Molecules and Morphology in Systematics', the meeting promised much to those aware of the discordance of the 1980s (Ref 2). Yet ironically the meeting only served to illustrate the severity of conflict that still prevailed amongst taxonomists and systematists over the precise forms of their hypothetical evolutionary trees. In his Science review of the meeting, Michael Balter did not underestimate the magnitude of the discordance when he pointed out that, "few groups of plants or animals have had their evolutionary or phylogenetic trees worked out with complete confidence" (Ref 2). This time the focus was not on how morphological data compared to the fossil evidence so much as on how it compared to the most recent molecular studies. Rather than resolving many of the incongruencies, the meeting served to underpin the ongoing struggle to get any sort of agreement between these two sets of measurements (Ref 2).

Those who visit the Natural History Museum in London today will not find any remnants of the controversy that centered around the Charles Darwin exhibition in the early 1980s. Nor will they see any mention of the conflicts in data that were so evident a decade ago. Yet controversy there was and a perusal through the letters to Nature during that time period reveals just how heated opinions and views became. The 'Museum of Errors', as the late neo-Darwinist Beverly Halstead called the Natural History Museum, led him to "raise the alarm" as he sought to "ensure the survival of the museum's reputation for scholarship in its public galleries" (Ref 3). What really seemed to anger Halstead was the museum's assumption that, as far as human evolution was concerned, no species in the fossil record could be considered to be in any way ancestral to any other. As he saw it, this particular aspect of the exhibition directly contravened the mounting fossil evidence. After all Homo erectus appeared to be the clear ancestral predecessor of Homo Sapiens (Ref 3). However, the museum clearly had a very different opinion on the matter:

"The Homo erectus people were not quite like us.....the Homo erectus skull has several characteristics that the modern skull does not share. Because of these special characteristics, we think that the Homo erectus people were not our direct ancestors" (Ref 3)

Halstead seemingly irritated by this grave insult to neo-Darwinists, turned towards the political arena as he equated the museum's position to the "tenets of the Marxist-Leninist party" in which change occurs not gradually but rather quickly and abruptly in a revolutionary style (Ref 3). In Halstead's view, the Marxists were quietly approving of any evidence for a saltationary progression of evolution as this would finally provide a scientific basis for their socio-political position (Ref 3). Halstead's letter read like a cigarette packet- that 'Marxism can seriously damage your Health' was the underlying message of his letter as he warned of the grave consequences to the British educational system if this alternative cladistic approach became the accepted view (Ref 3).

So what relevance did the socio-political argument have in discussions concerning the objectivity of science? This was precisely the point raised by the geologist Michael Benton in response to Halstead's letter when he wrote that, "the political argument is....really, a diversion from the main issue" (Ref 4). As Benton went on to add, politics should not affect the progress of scientific research. The Nature journal's own editorial in February of 1981 pointed out that Halstead's belief of a capture by Marxist Ideologies could not be sustained (Ref 5). Curiously the social impact of Darwinism, also known as the doctrine of Socio-Darwinism, has become increasingly popular as a way of justifying a "dog-eat-dog world" in which "we should celebrate the 'survival of the fittest', as it provides a means of constantly improving the human stock" (Ref 6, p.79).

That crucial evidence had been omitted in support of the Homo erectus/Homo sapiens transition was the sticking point in Halstead's argument as he accused the museum of leaving out "ugly facts" lest they should "slay beautiful hypotheses" (Ref 3). Despite Halstead's intense criticism, the museum was initially silent to accusations that the its managers had perhaps lost their nerve. Nature's editorial on the controversy invoked a feeling of disbelief at the museum's assertions that evolution was still a matter in doubt (Ref 5). Amidst such a climate, one in which a major pillar of evolutionary theory was being so severely challenged, it is no wonder that neo-Darwinists such as Halstead were eager to thwart any impression that the public might gain that the gradual progression of Darwinism was in doubt. After all, if the public got wind of the idea that a saltationist-type alternative had been proposed by evolutionary biologists to overcome the insufficiencies of gradual progression, Darwinism would be irreparably marred. Indeed today other aspects of evolutionary theory seem to be built on suppositions that are unproven. On the subject of macroevolutionary extrapolation, for example, Cornelius Hunter had this to say

"No one has yet proven that small-scale change does not extrapolate to large-scale evolution, but this does not mean that small change does add up to large change. But because no hard limit to modification can be found, evolutionists feel free to use small-scale change as evidence for evolution. The use of small-scale change as evidence for large-scale change is based on speculation....Obviously it is questionable to use such minor variation....to justify mammals arising from reptiles." (Ref 7, pp. 58-59).

As William Dembski has noted "the Darwinian just-so stories that attempt to account for complex, information-rich biological structures [have become] incantations that give the illusion of solving a problem" (Ref 8, p. 368). David Quammen would do well not to dismiss the challenges to natural selection as an "honest confusion and ignorance" from people who have only a haphazard understanding of Darwinism (Ref 9, p.6). After all, the inconsistencies in the data revealed in the 1980's and 1990's still continue to plague contemporary evolutionary biology(Ref 10). Indeed today there are a growing number of professional scientists who have trouble accepting the dogmatic precepts of Darwinian theory (Ref 11).

References
1. Gareth Nelson (1998), Colin Patterson (1933-98): Paleontologist-reformer of the fossil record Volume 394 p.626

2. Michael Balter (1997), Morphologist Learn To Live With Molecular Upstarts, Science Volume 276 p.1032

3. L.B. Halstead (1980), 'Museum of Errors', Letter to Nature, Nature Volume 288 p.208

4. Michael J. Benton (1981), Letter to Nature, Nature Volume 289 p.106

5. The Nature Editorial dealing specifically with the discussion on the saltationist interpretation of the Natural History Museum's Public Services Department can be found in Nature, Volume 289 (1981). Title of the Editorial is "Darwin's Death in South Kensington"

6. Niles Eldredge (1987), Life Pulse: Episodes From The Story of The Fossil Record, Facts On File Publications, New York

7. Cornelius Hunter (2001) Darwin's God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Brazos Press, A division of Baker Book House Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan

8. William Dembski (2002), No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD

9. David Quammen (2004), Was Darwin Wrong? National Geographic Magazine, November 2004 pp.4-31

10. David Bottjer (2005), The Early Evolution of Animals, Scientific American, August 10th, 2005

11. See http://www.rae.org/darwinskeptics.html

Please note that a discussion in Spanish on the controversy surrounding the Darwin Exhibition at the British Natural History Museum can be found at http://www.sedin.org/propesp/X0086_07.htm