The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Team finds Earth's 'oldest rocks'" (BBC News, September 26, 2008) James Morgan reports:

Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known.

It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms.

Geologist Don Francis and graduate student Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University in Montreal have found an ancient greenstone ("faux amphibolite") which may be the oldest rock known.

The rock was dated to between 3.8 and 4.28 billion years ago. "4.28 billion is the figure I favour," says Francis. It is not surprising that he favours the latter date, since it would make his find about 250 million years older than the second oldest one, the Acasta Gneiss in Canada's Northwest Territories, dated at 4.03 billion years old.

But now what's this about life? Well, honestly, right now, it's mostly imagination. The greenstone shows a banded iron formation of magnetite and quartz also found in rock around deep sea hydrothermal vents. Many think that these vents hosted early life on earth.

"These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation," said Francis.

"Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria.

"If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life.

"But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence."

O'Neil adds,

We know that probably the right environment was there for life to be on the Earth -- so liquid water and all it takes to have life. Now was there life? This is a big question mark"

Actually, the geologists are probably safe. People are pretty open to speculation around the origin of life. But let us say that their wildest dreams come true an they do find hard evidence of life in these rocks. In that case, life started on Earth almost immediately after the planet cooled (in geological terms, that is). If so, then life clearly did not originate via a long slow random swish of chemicals, as we have been encouraged to believe.

Francis and O'Neil hade been looking for clues on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec about the Earth's mantle from 3.8 billion years ago when they found the outcrop of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. It was dated at the Carnegie Institution of Washington by measuring the isotopes of neodymium and samarium, rare elements that decay at a known rate.

Here are some other "oldest rocks" stories, and some photos put up by Professor Francis.

See also

Origin of life: Positive evidence of intelligent design?

Origin of life: But is being greedy enough?

Origin of life: Ah, that "just so happens" intermediate series of chemical steps

Why should the search for Darwin's "warm little puddle" be publicly funded?

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing theories of our universe:

Galactic habitable zone not unique, computer sim suggests

Hail, ceaseless complexity! Or maybe
FAIL, ceaseless complexity. How much can complexity really do for us without design or purpose?

Time is the only true mystery?

Like clouds in our coffee ... all these other universes ...

Mathematics: 46th Mersenne prime number found

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).

"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth."
-- Archimedes

Never in history have atheists enjoyed such roaring intellectual fulfillment. Triumphantly parading a ragtag procession of kowtowed cultural Darwinists, browbeaten boards of education, a few fawning federal judges and (on a special float) a collection of tamed and harmless theists, today's atheists strut brashly down Main Street Everywhere shouting "up yours!" to every measured glance from the sidelines. Give them credit--atheists have won the day, if not the era, by ushering in a world of practical public atheism where God is not even dead, he simply is not. Someone help us.

Atheists have always been a temerarious lot. But in the lost age of reason thoughtful atheism was more a philosopher's leisure, something of a private intellectual indulgence, like pondering perpetual motion or musing Zeno's paradoxes, suitable for thought-play among friends but little else of practical value. By all accounts being against logic and human nature (the two being inextricably bound), atheism remained for most of history a young man's comfort and an old man's folly, but in public the evidence of those thought fools.

That was then, this is now; a few short years of remarkable activity successfully transformed Western culture into a God-free zone marked by public institutions which, formerly God-filled in thought and speech, now permit their foundational lingua franca only as an anti-intellectual private indulgence. As the torch was passed the past was torched, with the last public vestiges of any Godly heritage reluctantly endured only as cultural artifacts--offensive but harmless reminders of a very different time. Not permitted to inform law, policy, or education at any level, God-thoughts are now a young man's folly and an old man's comfort, but in public the evidence of those thought fools.

Fools thought wise and wise thought fools, what in the world happened? Future generations will look back and marvel at the unfortunate complexity of fortuitous events, but simply speaking, Darwinism happened. In perhaps no other age has an elixir met a mood the way Darwin's notions met a cultural temper. Decades before Darwin various lines of evolutionary thought developed, not only in biology but in geology and cosmology as well. In a sense, the world was primed for a catalyst to set off an irresistible movement toward a materialistic world view. For this reason scientists are correct when they maintain that Darwinism is "more than a theory." It is much more. As stated by leading 20th-century Darwinist Ernst Mayr, "The Darwinian revolution was not merely the replacement of one scientific theory by another, as had been the scientific revolutions in the physical sciences, but rather the replacement of a world view, in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant explanatory principle, by a new world view in which there was no room for supernatural forces."

That is, as every leading Darwinist maintains proudly, Darwin invented the missing link necessary to consummate Western civilization's growing love affair with materialism, handmaiden to atheism herself. Previously limited only to longing glances and burning infatuation, materialism's frequent flirtatious forays on atheism's behalf seemed destined for perpetual frustration for one simple reason: life and its evident purpose and design. Without a plausible creation story offering an explanation for nature's living designs by purely unintelligent causes, materialism seemed doomed as serving naught but a bitter spinster. But Darwin miraculously made materialism seem coherent, giving atheism herself a reason to be seen preening in public.

Armchair Darwinists may take offense, but they, like all cultural Darwinists must own up to what arch-atheist and outspoken Darwinist professor William Provine insists: "Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented." Likewise, Niles Eldredge, co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould of punctuated equilibrium stated, "Darwin did more to secularize the Western world than any other single thinker in history." And of course, everyone's favorite contemporary atheist, Richard Dawkins, spewing bilious hatred of God like a burst sewage pipe, thanks Darwin for making "it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

The miracle of Darwinism is that, despite the fact that the author of Origin of Species assumed origin of life in the first place and presented absolutely no data or examples (except an admitted indulgence of the imagination) for the origin of any species by natural selection (a practice followed by his disciples to this day), Darwin's theory swiftly became sacrosanct among institutions of science. Now thrust to the vaulted and singular status in science of incontrovertible fact, Darwinism, like a big stick, is used both to prod the reluctant materialist and to beat the unwilling theist into devoted public homage to the new author of life and life more abundantly, Lord Darwin, King of the Zoos.

And to atheists' delight the miracle story of Darwinism's origin unfolded with scripted perfection as 19th-century scientific materialists found the wise men of liberal theology bearing gifts of guilt, appurtenance and error, as they welcomed the humble birth of a new world order. As noted by Owen Chadwick, Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, "At first much of the opposition to Darwin's theory came from the scientists on grounds of evidence, not from theologians on grounds of scripture." It seems the good churchmen of the day either ignored the bad news to preach the good news or compromised the old word adherence to fit the new world appearance.

Bowing to what was perceived as one more of nature's immutable truths, 19th-century theologians already sensitized to a growing onslaught of scientific hegemony yielded authority, their weak spines bent to form a perfectly stable fulcrum that alone transformed Darwin's stick into a lever. Yes, the irony of atheism's remarkable rise in the last century is that it came not by the unwavering work of atheists, but the wavering word of theists. Believing another of nature's gaps closing so tightly even a paper God would be displaced, leading theologians embraced Darwin's theory as the better part of valor and accommodated a theory with no need of God to protect a God in no need of theory.

And the world moved.

Thus began a long tradition of adapters, reconcilers, mollifiers and appeasers, quick to find a way to salvage a respectable private belief in light of what appeared to destroy its very foundation. But attempting to reconcile the work of God with the word of God is always tricky business, and it's rationally impossible when one assumes materialistic evolution is true, in which case there is no work of God. And because materialism requires a science of unintelligent and purposeless causes, if Darwinism is assumed true it is the word of God's guided purpose that must yield to some ultimately meaningless indeterminate status, such as metaphor or allegory. That's why the question, "is Darwinism (or any other materialistic evolution of life) true?" remains the seminal question of our age. And on exactly this point atheists have clinched their greatest victory: in spite of a growing mountain of evidence to challenge Darwinism the very question is not permitted.

Atheists owe much to their handmaiden. And their handmaiden owes much to timid theists, who, believing Darwinism to be true before tested jumped to clever "both are true" irrational schemes like "theistic evolution" to accommodate what they saw as nature's public truth to their private belief. Too bad. If only they had held fast they would have found themselves vindicated by evidence. Were materialistic Darwinism not already deified in science as eternally omnipotent, it could not survive 21st-century scientific evidence. As journalist Denyse O'Leary writes of theistic evolutionists, "The problem to which they are a solution--evolution can explain everything (but we can still know God through faith alone)--doesn't exist." But the accommodators remain, no doubt believing themselves useful to both God and Godless man with odd ideas that neither find rational.

Fortunately, the objective truth of our origins is not changed by anyone's theory. Either the evidence weighs in favor of life created by intelligent design or it supports a theory of life occurring by unintelligent, purposeless causes. There is no other choice; only one can be true. To date atheists lean hard on the lever of Darwinism, intent on forcing compliant theists in place as they continue to move the world. Will they remain in control?

Maybe. But not on my back.

Roddy Bullock is a freelance writer and 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.

Publisher and agent inquiries welcome.

Reference:
For the quotes of scientists about evolution and theism: http://bevets.com/evolution.htm#atheism

For an excellent detailed account of the history of Darwinism in the context of Christian theologians of the 19th-century, see, Dr. Henry Morris, The Long War Against God, (Green Forest, AR, Master Books, 2000).

Denyse O'Leary quote from private email. For more from Denyse O'Leary, see her blogs here, here, and here.

Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Writing in The Origin Of Species, Charles Darwin expressed his believe that many anatomical structures seen in nature were simply modifications of progenitor structures that had existed in common ancestors some time in the past. He referred to such structures as homologous and considered them to be powerful indicators of common ancestry. Indeed he saw homology as representing the "very soul" of natural history (Ref 1). He was especially intrigued by the "extraordinary type" of the mammalian forelimbs that, in several species, had the same overall structure even though they served quite dissimilar needs:

"What can be more curious than that the hand of man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions? How curious it is, to give a subordinate though striking instance, that the hind-feet of the kangaroo, which are so well fitted for bounding over the open plains- those of the climbing, leaf koala, equally fitted for grasping the branches of trees, those of the ground dwelling, insect or root-eating bandicoots and those of some other Australian marsupials should all be constructed on the same extraordinary type, namely with the bones of the second and third digits extremely slender and enveloped within the same skin....is this not powerfully suggestive of true relationship, of inheritance from a common ancestor" (Ref 1, pp.579-580)

Modern genetics has made major strides in recent years and contributed hugely in our search for relationships between genes and their phenotypes. The most astonishing revelation has been that not only are different genes involved in the formation of apparently homologous structures but supposedly related genes also code for structures that would not be categorized as homologous under the Darwinian definition. One article that appeared in Nature described a stunning example of how genes- once thought to be predictable 'operators' of structural homology- are proving to be just the opposite. Molecular biologists Ying Litingtung and Randall Dahn described the involvement of two genes- sonic hedgehog (shh) and Gli3- in the development of the digit pattern of the vertebrate pentadactyl limb (Ref 2). It turns out that Shh is part of a much larger group of highly conserved genes called the hedgehog family that not only exist in vertebrates but also in a number of invertebrate species including leeches, sea urchins, amphioxus and fruit flies (Ref 2). As biologists Philip Ingham and Andrew McMahon wrote, the extreme conservation of the hedgehog family across such a diverse set of species is, from a homology standpoint, a highly unexpected find:

"parallel studies in invertebrate and vertebrate systems have shown that although the final outcome might look quite different (eg: a fly vs a mouse), there is a striking conservation in the deployment of members of the same signaling families to regulate development of these seemingly quite different organisms" (Ref 3)

In evolutionary terms, Shh and Gli are described as orthologous genes on the basis that they have, "evolved by vertical descent from a common ancestor and are presumed to have the same function" (Ref 4). It is therefore paradoxical to find that these genes should be responsible for such a wide variety of different phenotypic outcomes. Of course this is not the only example of such an incongruency. Another set of genes called the Hox family also play a role in development in several distinct animal phyla (Ref 5). University of Wisconsin biologist Sean Carroll has written on this rather troubling state of affairs:

"The first and perhaps most important lesson from [the study of evolutionary development] is that looks can be quite deceiving. Virtually no biologist expected to find what turned out to be the case: most of the genes first identified as body-building and organ-forming genes in the fruit fly have exact counterparts, performing similar jobs, in most mammals, including humans. The very first shots fired in the [evolutionary development] revolution revealed that despite their great differences in appearance, almost all animals share a common "tool kit" of body-building genes. That discovery - actually a series of discoveries - vaporized many previous ideas about how animals differ from one another...The architects of the modern synthesis expected the genomes of vastly different species to differ vastly. They had no idea that such different forms could be built with similar sets of genes" (Ref 6).

And of course the list goes on. A group headed by Walter Gehring from the University of Basel in Switzerland wrote of the involvement of a gene called Pax-6 in eye development in a number of distinct animal taxa including mammals, amphibians, fish and insects (Ref 7). Possibly the most important finding about Pax-6 is that not only are the mouse and human forms of the Pax-6 protein identical in their amino acid sequence but they also share between 90 and 94% sequence similarity with the fruit fly sequence (Ref 7) The challenge that such a finding poses to the traditional Darwinian view of homology is clear. As Gehring and his colleagues wrote

"This was [an unexpected result] because of the long-standing dogma.. that the insect compound eye was non-homologous to the vertebrate camera eye, and that the two types of eye had evolved independently" (Ref 7)

As paleontologist Simon Conway Morris has pointed out, such findings are puzzling when one considers how different the vertebrate and insect eyes really are (Ref 8, p.8). More generally, Darwin was well aware of the enormous difficulties that an organ as apparently near-perfect as the eye presented to his theory of natural selection. He wrote:

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."(Ref 1, p.227)

However, he was certain that if a gradual sequence of light perceiving organs could be drawn up spanning the unimaginable distance between the simplest 'imperfect eye' and its more complex derivative, the threat to his theory would not be so great (Ref 1, p.228). Such a sequence is precisely what Darwin failed to find and what Gehring and his colleagues subsequently used in defense of a common origin to the diversity of eye-like organs in nature (Ref 7). Gehring and Ikeo postulated that the evolution of the eye was "intimately connected to the evolution of the visual pigment rhodopsin". Thus the seemingly ubiquitous presence of both the rhodopsin and the Pax-6 proteins could only be considered as evidence that all eyes in higher organisms had evolved from a single prototype and were therefore, according to Gehring and Ikeo, evolutionarily related (Ref 7). This was a massive shift in thinking given the commonly held view of non-homology between eye-like organs of organisms as disparate as insects and vertebrates.

In their own depiction of a, "hypothetical scheme of evolution of various eye-types from a common ancestral prototype" Gehring and Ikeo were unable to fill in the tremendous jumps that would have to have been made to obtain the diversity of eye-like organs from their hypothetical prototype. Such omissions are of utmost importance if we are to have a serious discussion on the step-by step evolution of the eye. It can always be argued, and Sean Carroll does, that the fact that there are common genes involved in the development of most organisms is evidence itself for evolutionary relatedness and that structural differences arise because significant differences in the patterns of expression of these genes have evolved through time.

Nevertheless, when we begin to investigate gene expression patterns in different organisms we find that they are very tightly regulated with little scope for change. In fact ever-so-slight changes in these expression patterns can have extremely deleterious consequences for the organisms involved. Indeed fruit fly biologist Peter Lawrence has shed light on how the patterning of body plans during embryonic development is dependent on what he calls 'positional information'- the program through which cells recognize their position relative to other cells and develop into specialized tissues accordingly (Ref 9, pp. 146-148). As Lawrence so eloquently describes, individual cells recognize their relative positions or coordinates through the activities of proteins called morphogens that form highly specified concentration gradients across the embryo (Ref 9, p. 27; pp. 57-59). In all there are four systems of concentration gradients that define amongst other things the overall patterning of the developing embryo (Ref 9, p.50). These gradients determine the fate of cells by generating molecular 'triggers' that will lead to further specialization into tissues and organs (Ref 9, p.51). Strikingly, these gradients also exhibit a high degree of specification with particular genes being turned on at determined concentrations within the gradients. Too high or too low a concentration and the genes so necessary for the correct specialization of cells into tissues in a given region of the embryo will not be turned on. Indeed dramatic experiments on flies lacking one morphogen called 'bicoid' have shown just how disastrous variations in its concentration can be on subsequent development (Ref 9, pp. 28-30).

How does one explain the origin of structural differences between organisms from some limited number of ancestral forms if the gene expression patterns that define structural differences are so tightly regulated? As we can glean from Lawrence's review, there is very little room for these expression patterns to evolve through slight successive changes because of the critical roles that they play in defining overall body plans in different organisms (Ref 9). As we have seen, orthologous genes which seemingly bear the hallmarks of common ancestral relationships, generate outward phenotypes that show everything besides the conserved structural forms that a Darwinian and neo-Darwinian assessment of homology would predict. In conclusion, Darwin's 'Soul of Natural History' is today being put to the test by the very unit of hereditary that should have solidified the case for natural selection. This unit is none other than the gene itself.

References
1. 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

2. Ying Litingtung, Randall Dahn, Yina Li, John F. Fallon and Chin Chiang (2002) Shh and Gli3 are dispensable for limb skeleton formation but regulate digit number and identity, Nature Volume 418 pp 979-983

3. Philip W. Ingham and Andrew P. McMahon (2001), Hedgehog signaling in animal development: paradigms and principles, Genes and Development Volume 15 pp3059-3087

4. Arcady R. Mushergian, James Garey, Jason Martin, Leo X. Liu (1998), Large-Scale Taxonomic Profiling of Eukaryotic Model Organisms: A Comparison of Orthologous Proteins Encoded by the Human Fly, Nematode And Yeast Genomes, Genome Research Volume 8 pp590-598

5. Patrick Callaerts, Patricia N. Lee, Britta Hartmann, Claudia Farfan, Darrett W.Y. Choy, Kazuho Ikeo, Karl-Friederich Fischbach, Walter J. Gehring and H Gert de Couet (2001), HOX genes in the sepiolid squid Euprymna scolopes: Implications for the evolution of complex body plans
PNAS Vol 99 pp 2088-2093

6. Sean Carroll (2005), The Origins of Form, Natural History Magazine, November 2005. Article can be found at http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/

7. Walter J. Gehring and Kazuho Ikeo (1999), Pax 6: mastering eye morphogenesis and eye evolution, Trends in Genetics, Volume 15 pp.371-377

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

9. Peter Lawrence (1992), The Making Of A Fly- The Genetics Of Animal Design, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, UK

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Actually, there isn't a mind-body problem. There is a materialism problem. If scientists cannot talk about non-material entities like the mind, they cannot help us understand basic facts like why so many people in the control group get better just because they know they are taking part in a study. Or why so many people die within a few years of losing a life partner (statistically beyond normal). What we think and how we think matters.

A recent symposium "Beyond the Mind-Body Problem" held at the United Nations featured many non-materialist neuroscientists, including Mario Beauregard, lead author of The Spiritual Brain.

I am told that Jeffrey Schwartz, lead author of The Mind and the Brain, vastly livened up the proceedings ... as I very well believe.

Here's the webcast. Note in particular Mind-Body Connections: How Does Consciousness Shape the Brain?

Here's the conference overview:

Over the past decade, an increasing number of physicians and neuroscientists have sought to uncover the complex relationship between mind, brain, and consciousness as they continue to search for a more comprehensive perspective on the "self" and the workings of the human mind. Though much remains to be done, their findings to date have shed a more holistic light on our understanding of the elusive mind-body problem. Join our panel of renowned experts as they explain how new paradigms fueled by the latest scientific research are beginning to fundamentally alter how we perceive and relate to the physical world.

The symposium will also serve as the occasion for the formal launch of The Human Consciousness Project—a multidisciplinary collaboration of international scientists and physicians who have joined forces to research the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain. Led by Dr. Sam Parnia, The Human Consciousness Project will conduct the world's first large-scale multicenter studies at major U.S. and European medical centers on the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death. The results of these studies may not only revolutionize the medical care of critically ill patients and the scientific study of the mind and brain, but may also bear profound universal implications for our understanding of death and what happens when we die.

Also just up at Mindful Hack:

Near death experiences: Respectful interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine

The Spiritual Brain: A "great primer" on the mind-body debate, says reviewer (= how does the mind control the body when the mind is immaterial and the body is material)

Does religion protect us againstpseudoscience?

Neuroscience: Where materialism misleads us

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

New Scientist has announced that we now know the origin of superstition. Ewen Callaway tells us (10 September 2008):

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but "if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around," Foster says.

Foster and a University of Helsinki colleague Hanna Kokko sought to model superstition in mathematical language, using a definition that could apply to animals and bacteria as well as humans, and found that "As long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favoured."

The problem is that the quality described in the New Scientist article as "superstition" is more commonly called "prudence" (avoiding foreseeable risks).

It would help if we begin by understanding what superstition actually is.

Superstition is not a "false" link between cause and effect. If it were, many health fads would be superstitions. But they are not; they are merely unsubstantiated or poorly substantiated claims.

Superstition is the belief that the connections between events are occult (hidden) and that bad events can be caused or prevented by understanding and working with these hidden causes. For example, here's a superstition: It's seven years' bad luck to break a mirror. Why? Well, I've heard people theorize that at one time mirrors were very expensive, and therefore it might take seven years to save enough to replace on. And later on, people just somehow continued to believe the idea even though mirrors had become cheap.

There is a name for that kind of thinking - euhemerism, in honour of Euhemerus, a 3rd-century BC Greek philosopher. Euhemerus argued that the Greek gods were originally just mortal heroes whose exploits were embellished. In other words, he sought a pragmatic explanation for belief in the gods, in the same way that Foster and Kokko seek a pragmatic explanation for superstition.

But Euhemerus missed the transcendent and numinous qualities that people sought in the Greek gods, the qualities that caused the 19th century poet Wordsworth - trapped in industrial England - to exclaim,

Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

In the same way, Foster and Kokko missed the point about superstition - what makes a belief a superstition is not that the supposed connections between events may be false but that they are occult. They are not normal connections in any event.

Now back to the mirror: The true reason that breaking a mirror was anciently considered bad luck is that one's reflection was thought to be an image of one's soul, one's life. So the shattered image was an omen of death:

The mirror crack'd from side to side;
The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

- Tennyson

Is the belief false? That's difficult to say because, while it is false for the person who disregards it, it might be true for the person who believes it. That is, you break a mirror and nothing happens, of course, but the person who honest believes she will become very ill could trigger the flareup of a chronic illness. That's called a nocebo effect.

The difficulty then is that the person who believes in superstitions and occult causes may see genuine confirmation of her belief. So one will not get very far in discussing the matter with her by simply informing her that her belief about the broken mirror is false. It might be wiser to help her see that the power that she attributes to the image in the mirror actually resides in her own mind. It is quite real, but it is not what she thinks and she has power over it.

But, back to Foster and Kokko for a moment, we can now see why their "simple definition for superstition that includes animals and even bacteria" is not going to be very helpful for humans.

Note: Mario Beauregard and I discussed the nocebo effect in The Spiritual Brain.

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 an article at the BBC News online (September 15, 2008), "Who are the British creationists?", Julian Joyce beautifully demonstrates why legacy media, online or not, are media sources that are best taken with a big bag of sidewalk salt.

He starts with a creation museum in England:

At first glance the Genesis Expo museum, in the naval town of Portsmouth, looks like any other repository of natural history exhibits: fossils of dinosaurs and unusual rock formations.

But focus on the narrative of the information panels alongside them, and you start to realise this is a museum with a difference - one dedicated to the theory of creationism.

As I said when the much glitzier American creation museum opened in Kentucky, it is legal to have a private museum about anything one wishes to. That only shows that one lives in a liberal democracy or constitutional monarchy.

He then informs us,

The revelation that US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin says creationism should be taught in schools, alongside that of evolutionary theory, has raised few eyebrows in the US. ...

Actually, that is a canard put out by the anti-Palin crowd. But Joyce can count on his British readers not to know that.

We are also told that, "And while the Church of England this week issues a formal apology to Charles Darwin, ... " - in fact, there was no formal apology. A church bureaucrat had literally thunk the idea up on his own initiative.

And in a classic display of believing whatever confirms one's prejudices, we read that there is "growing support" for "literal six-day" creationism. The evidence? Get a load of this:

Growing support

Justin Thacker, head of theology for the Evangelical Alliance, says research in 1998 found one third of the Alliance church members were "literal six-day creationists." The other two thirds embraced evolutionary theory to a "greater or lesser degree" he says.

"Since that survey was done, I'd say fewer of our members are out-and-out creationists - it has become more acceptable to embrace some form of Darwinism," he says.

But Keith Porteous Wood of the Secular Society is unconvinced.

"There is no question that creationism is growing," he says. "It is increasingly well funded, and well organised."

In short, creationism is not growing in Britain but both Wood and Joyce need to believe it is - Wood for his fundraising letters and Joyce for his scare story.

Unless ... Joyce really means that Muslim creationism is growing. That is a safe bet because, given that the Muslim population of Britain is growing, any point of view accepted by Muslims might well be growing in consequence. But Joyce does not say that.

He handles this topic by implying that Christian and Muslim creationists are somehow "uniting":

This shared belief in the origins of man - and the universe - is uniting unlikely bedfellows in the anti-evolution cause.

The Rev Greg Haslam, who preaches the creationist Christian creed to his 400-strong congregation at Westminster Chapel in London, welcomes the determination of Muslims to impart a religious-based view of the world.

But that is hardly an example of "uniting", and does not imply that the two groups work together. So far as I have been able to determine, they generally do not.

Anyway, file this one under "Why the legacy mainstream media are losing ground." Basically, it's reached the point that, on some topics, they just can't put out a story any more without a big fat thumb print sticking in it.

See also: "Will Brit "faith and science" heavyweights speak up after education director's firing?"

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Intelligent design and popular culture: Science fiction "must" be anti-ID. Mustn't it?

Want "nice"? Move to Canada. And give UP on human dignity, okay?

Canadian Earth Scientists "extremely concerned" about creationism/ID

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
ARN Correspondent

Hopes of finding a true transitional intermediate between fish and tetrapods were raised in March of 2006 when scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences, the University of Chicago and the University of Harvard announced the finding of a so-called 'fish-like Tetrapod' in Northern Canada (Ref 1). The new specimen was found in strata dating from 375 million years ago which is close to when the water-to-land transition is believed to have occurred (Ref 1). Tiktaalik rosea, as the specimen is now called, has been hailed as a true 'missing link' that, "helps to fill in a gap in our understanding of how fish developed legs for mobility" (Ref 1). According to its discoverers Edward Daeschler, Neil Shubin and Farish Jenkins, what is most remarkable about these finds is the apparent transitional nature of the skeletal structure in Tiktaalik's front fins (Refs 2-3). As one review in Nature indicated, "the front fins are on their way to becoming limbs [with] the internal skeletal structure of an arm, including elbows and wrists, but with fins instead of clear fingers" (Ref 1). Daeschler and his colleagues postulated that the pectoral fins of Tiktaalik could literally function as fins or limbs (Ref 3). Even the sedimentary deposits in which Tiktaalik was found suggested an aquatic existence (Refs 2-3).

There has also been much excitement raised over the possibility that Tiktaalik had wrist bones, these being critical for a land-based lifestyle although this finding remains highly controversial (Ref 4). Other discoveries since Tiktaalik have lead to the rather contentious conclusion that we now have at our disposal some of the key 'staging posts' in the sea-to-land transition (Ref 5). More recent studies of fossils of another specimen called Panderichthys have led Uppsala University scientist Per Ahlberg and colleagues to claim that primitive finger and toe bones were already present in some fish prior to the sea-to-land transition (Ref 6). Problematic for the evolutionary picture is the finding that Tiktaalik, considered to be further along the transition than Panderichthys, lacked any such bones (Ref 7).

While Tiktaalik appeared superficially to be a triumph for evolutionary biologists, the specimen still did not provide a clear picture of how a soft anatomy suitable for life on land could have evolved. The coelacanth- the fish that Daeschler and colleagues called, "the closest living relatives of tetrapods" (Ref 3), for example, has been found to have a soft anatomy far removed from what would be expected for a terrestrial ancestor (Ref 8). Biologist Paul Ciesieleski from the University of Florida, has reviewed some of the enormous barriers to survival that a fish-like tetrapod would have faced in its initial stages of life on land (Ref 9). Such an animal would have had to have found new ways of obtaining food and water, as well as novel mechanisms for preventing body water evaporation, and specialized structures for breathing oxygen (Ref 9). In short, many of the changes in the way that animals supposedly adapted to a terrestrial form of living would have had to have occurred concurrently if survival in the new habitat were to have been possible.

From their own studies Daeschler and his colleagues admit that Tiktaalik represents a 'major departure' from any of the fish fossils that have previously been found (Ref 2). In fact the cladograms that Daeschler and his colleagues drew up revealed tremendous differences in not only the bones of fins in specimens that are purported to be evolutionarily antecedent but also the tetrapods that are supposed to have evolved from Tiktaalik (Ref 3). We see how arguments for the transitional status of Tiktaalik resemble much of the saltationary incantations of evolutionary biologist Richard Goldschmidt who suggested that organisms, through nothing more than sheer good fortune, could undergo sudden, large changes in their anatomy and physiology that would allow them to lead new ways of life in habitats that would have otherwise been inaccessible to them (Ref 10, p.188). Whether such dramatic changes are viable is questionable and they are certainly not what Darwin would have wished for in his demand for a gradual turning of evolution.

We are still left with the question of what selective pressures would have been operational to drive creatures from water to land. Paleontologist John Maisey has chosen the 'Escape-from-Predator' scenario to explain why fish would have ever evolved into tetrapods. By hauling itself temporarily onto land, Maisey says, an early tetrapod would have been able to escape from potential hunters (Ref 1). Indeed based on some of its externally visible features, Daeschler and his colleagues have suggested that Tiktaalik might have had both gills and lungs for breathing and a head shape that would have been ideal for feeding on land and making a quick get away (Ref 2). Yet details on the soft anatomy of Tiktaalik remain speculative and raise more questions than they answer on how the water-to-land transition supposedly took place. Darwin explained such transitions by assuming that natural selection could adopt already existing structures and organs for novel functions (Ref 11, p.234). In the case of lungs, for example, Darwin conjectured that they may have originated from swim bladders that, he hypothesized, had served the function of flotation in fish (Ref 11, p.234).

By the same token Martin Brazeau and Per Ahlberg wrote how bones within the ear of terrestrial vertebrates might have evolved from structures that had previously been used for breathing in fish (Ref 12). Curiously, these structures were also found in Tiktaalik (Ref 12). A review of Brazeau's and Ahlberg's work notes how in fish a channel called a spiracle links up the roof of the skull with the mouth in a way that, Brazeau and Ahlberg contend, resembles the tube connecting the outer and inner sections of mammalian ears (Ref 12). Others such as biology professor Michael LaBarbera disagree (Ref 12). But even if there were such a connection, we still lack any of the important details of how hearing itself might have evolved. Evolutionary biologists such as Jennifer Clack have made hand-waving attempts at answering this particular enigma by supposing that ears formed when bones shrunk in size and got lodged into holes (Ref 12). Such explanations clearly skirt over the most important details of the biology of hearing- details that are so necessary if we are to take the idea of evolutionary transitions seriously.

The most recent versions of Darwin's 'swim bladder' model suggest that rather than giving rise to lungs, the swim bladder might in fact have appeared as a later adaptation, having evolved from lungs in fish that already had developed gills as an alternative breathing mechanism (Ref 13, pp.107-108). Such a reversal of ideas proposes that, with the arrival of gills, many of the specialized breathing structures of the lung became redundant and therefore disappeared as its new function of flotation evolved (Ref 13, pp.107-108). Clearly in the absence of soft anatomy data in support of structural transitions, evolutionary biologists are free to let their imaginations wonder where they wish and to assert what they like about what evolved from what and how natural selection played its role. But still we have no model for how the lung might have originated through gradual steps.

By ignoring the complexity of a soft anatomy we can continue our 'a priori' commitment to a naturalistic origin of animals like Tiktaalik on the basis that superficially they may look attractive as intermediates and temporally they fall exactly where they should. Although on this latter point, even if Tiktaalik had been found in strata dating millions of years later, new cladistic interpretations would have been possible that would still place it close to the base of the terrestrial evolutionary tree. At least one other example of such cladistic 'jiggering' exists elsewhere in the vertebrate sequence (Ref 14). Without the detail, anything goes.

References
1. Rex Dalton (2006), The fish that crawled out of the water, Nature News, 3rd April, 2006

2. Edward B. Daeschler, Neil H. Shubin and Farish A. Jenkins, (2006), A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan, Nature 440, pp. 757-763

3. Neil H. Shubin, Edward B. Daeschler, Farish A. Jenkins (2006), The pectoral fin of Tiktaalik roseae and the origin of the tetrapod limb, Nature 440, pp. 764-771

4. Casey Luskin (2008) An "Ulnare" and an "Intermedium" a Wrist Do Not Make: A Response to Carl Zimmer, see http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/08/an_ulnare_and_an_intermedium_a.html

5. Matt McGrath (2008) Fossil fills out water-land leap, See http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7473470.stm

6. Catherine A. Boisvert, Elga Mark-Kurik, Per E. Ahlberg (2008), The pectoral fin of Panderichthys and the origin of digits, Nature (21 Sep 2008), Letters to Editor

7. Jeanna Bryner (2008), Fish Fingers: Your Digits Used to Be Fins http://www.livescience.com/animals/080921-fish-fingers.html

8. The discovery of the coelacanth was outlined in the PBS' NOVA documentary 'Ancient Creature Of The Deep' which aired on Wisconsin Public Television on the 21st of January, 2003

9. The lecture notes on tetrapods by Paul F. Ciesielski can be found at
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pciesiel/gly3150/fish_to_amphibians.html

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

11. 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

12. John Rennie (2006), Ears that Breath and Eight Toed Feet, Scientific American, 21st January, 2006

13. Stephen Jay Gould (2002), The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

14. See the following excerpt from Alan Feduccia's discussion on the use of cladograms to claim a dinosaur/bird lineage, in http://www.pnas.org/content/96/9/4740.full?ck=nck:"Aside from criticism concerning the cursorial origin of avian flight, there are problems related to the geologic, temporal occurrence of putative dinosaurian ancestors, which occur some 30 to 80 million years after the appearance of the earliest known bird Archaeopteryx"

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Okay with some qualifications, that is.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel of New York University is probably best known for his 1974 essay, "What is it like to be a bat?" (He was writing against reductionism in thinking about animal minds.)

Now, in "Public Education and Intelligent Design" in Philosophy & Public Affairs (pp. 187-2005), Nagel, an atheist, stirs the pot again:

The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it is, has resulted in a counterorthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory.

You'd think Nagel was referring to the Michael Reiss affair, but he can't be because the essay came out before Brit Reiss was forced to resign.

It would be unfortunate if the Establishment Clause made it unconstitutional to allude to these questions in a public school biology class, for that would mean that evolutionary theory cannot be taught in an intellectually responsible way.

Actually, if the Reiss affair in Britain or similar incidents in North America are any guide, teaching evolutionary theory" in an intellectually responsible way" is not in fact an education establishment goal. He reflects on the odd situation that arguments against design are considered quite legitimate but not arguments for it. Why is that?:

The contention seems to be that, although science can demonstrate the falsehood of the design hypothesis, no evidence against that demonstration can be regarded as scientific support for the hypothesis. Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.

This, he says, creates a dilemma:

The denier that ID is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.

and

Critics take issue with the claims made by defenders of ID about what standard evolutionary mechanisms can accomplish, and argue that they depend on faulty assumptions. Whatever the merits, however, that is clearly a scientific disagreement, not a disagreement between science and something else. ... It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the two sides are in symmetrical positions. If one scientist is a theist and another an atheist, this is either a scientific or a nonscientific disagreement between them. If it is scientific (supposing this is possible), then their disagreement is scientific all the way down. If it is not a scientific disagreement, and if this difference in their nonscientific beliefs about the antecedent possibilities affects their rational interpretation of the same empirical evidence, I do not see how we can say that one is engaged in science and the other is not. Either both conclusions are rendered nonscientific by the influence of their nonscientific assumptions, or both are scientific in spite of those assumptions.

In the latter case, they have a scientific disagreement that cannot be settled by scientific reasoning alone. ...

So then with respect to discussing intelligent design in a classroom, he asks,

What would a biology course teach if it wanted to remain neutral on the question whether divine intervention in the process of life’s development was a possibility, while acknowledging that people disagree about whether it should be regarded as a possibility at all, or what probability should be assigned to it, and that there is at present no way to settle that disagreement scientifically? So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect
for the Establishment Clause.

This sounds a lot like "teach the controversy" to me.

Nagel makes clear at various points* that he thinks that the Darwin fans have oversold their theory. Which they have. All around me, "icons of evolution" are tumbling (another one just came down the other day) ....

Basically, in order to keep serious discussion of evidence for design from surfacing, the fans must imply to the public that vastly more evidence exists for the standard Darwinian view of the history of life than actually does exist - and all discussion of the quality of evidence must be suppressed. And for the very good reason that once we get rid of the bad or questionable evidence, there is only a little good evidence. Not enough to justify Expelling scientists who doubt.

*For example, he writes,

My own situation is that of an atheist who, in spite of being an avid consumer of popular science, has for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life. ... Sophisticated members of the contemporary culture have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they easily lose sight of the fact that evolutionary reductionism defies common sense. A theory that defies common sense can be true, but doubts about its truth should be suppressed only in the face of exceptionally strong evidence.

Here is the article behind a paywall, but you may be able to read it through a library subscription. Here is lawyer Ed Sisson's view.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Failed Brit Darwinist Michael Reiss: "A Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God": Synopsis of a Play in Three Acts

Intelligent design and popular culture: Spore game site dupes fervid atheists

Darwinism and popular culture: The Anglican Church's non-apology to Darwin

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

We learn from ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2008) that female spiders do not necessarily eat their mates. Now, before we move on, let us pause to think of all the just-so Darwinian sexual selection stories we have heard that explain why they do. (They add to their energy stores, they prevent the male from mating again, they ... )

Researchers Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio found that, in general,

Males are more likely to be eaten if they are much smaller than females, which likely affects how easy they are to catch. In one species of spider, Hogna helluo, large males were never consumed while small males were consumed 80% of the time. This result was also confirmed when Wilder and Rypstra examined published data from a wide range of spider species. Males are more likely to be eaten in species where males are small relative to females.

Much research on sexual cannibalism has focused on a few extreme cases involving sexual selection and sperm competition. However, by looking at data on a wide range of spiders, Wilder and Rypstra discovered that the size of the male relative to the female (often referred to as sexual size dimorphism) determines how often sexual cannibalism occurs in a species.

This sounds like a polite way of saying that previous researchers have focused on the few cases that would confirm Darwin's theory of sexual selection and its theoretical heirs, without looking at fundamental facts like, how does a usually unintelligent creature like a spider know when to attack and consume another life form and when not to. This calculation may well be made irrespective of mating, as Wilder and Rypstra's research suggests.

Does a spider even know that it is having sex? Or that that matters?

They go on to say,

"We were surprised to find that such a simple characteristic such as how small males are relative to females has such a large effect on the frequency of sexual cannibalism," states Shawn Wilder. In many cases, sexual cannibalism may not be a complex balancing act of costs and benefits for males and females but rather a case of a hungry female eating a male when he is small enough to catch.

In an interesting twist, evolution does not appear to be driving this relationship. ...

No surprise there. "Evolution" need not drive the relationship. Once spiders have neural circuits (however, exactly, they acquired them) which determine whether a given life form is too big to attack, they probably don't need "evolution" to drive the subsequent relationship, whether or not it involves reproduction.

Our local spiders pounce on insects that get trapped in their webs but flee humans that accidentally break them. So, in the absence of neuroscience studies on spiders, I will assume that the spider has a system for judging size. In that case, we might predict that neural circuits urging spiders to flee will override those urging them to attack - when the size of the possible object of attack exceeds certain boundaries.

In that case, it would be more useful for researchers to study the spider's nervous system and find the relevant circuit than to speculate on how Darwinian sexual selection might explain why spiders attack or do not attack.

See also:

O'Leary meets an intelligent spider

Peacocks and sexual selection (another situation in which famed Darwinian sexual selection does not work)

Also at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: The Anglican Church's non-apology to Darwin

Intelligent design and popular culture: The ghost of Darwin rises - in a play

Journal reference: Wilder et al. Sexual Size Dimorphism Predicts the Frequency of Sexual Cannibalism Within and Among Species of Spiders.. The American Naturalist, 2008; 172 (3): 431 DOI: 10.1086/589518

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

A physicist friend writes to say, regarding the current Large Hadron Collider experiments, aimed at finding the "God particle",

Perhaps it should be pointed out that many high energy physicists are quite worried about their future as a discipline. The physics of today's particle experiments test theory of the 1960s - which has led to an exodus of theorists from this research discipline.

It will be a big accomplishment if they find the Higgs boson, but this has been part of the standard model of particle physics for some time. The really interesting thing they are hoping for is sometime new - there hasn't been anything unexpected in experimental particle physics for a long time. If something unexpected in this new energy range isn't found, it is quite possible that many physics departments across the globe will ramp down the experimental particle physics programs.

As it is, all of the possibly-interesting physics has been exported to Switzerland - there has been much talk here about a post-accelerator era.

Well, maybe it's not so bad as that. Science has lasted a long time. It still has a long run. This sounds like jitters to me.

See also:

Will it be a disaster for physics if the Higgs boson is the ONLY thing the Large Hadron Collider finds?

Mass: Is the Higgs boson the "stuff" of all that stuff we call matter?

Also at Colliding Universes:

Will it be a disaster for physics if the Higgs boson is the ONLY thing the Large Hadron Collider finds?

Origin of life: Is it Positive evidence of intelligent design?

Mass: Is the Higgs boson the "stuff" of all that stuff we call matter?

Origin of life: The "billion billion" planets solution?

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
ARN Correspondent

In April of 2008, physicist David Tyler reported on a study that had seemingly diminished the role of the peacock train during courtship (Ref 1). Amongst other things, the study claimed that there was "no evidence that peahens expressed any preference for peacocks with more elaborate trains" after researchers examined the size of the train, the number of eye spots on the train and the duration of the famous 'shivering display' that peacocks perform in front of females (Ref 2). As one review of the study noted:

"The feather train on male peacocks is among the most striking and beautiful physical attributes in nature, but it fails to excite, much less interest, females" (Ref 3)

This finding went against one aspect of sexual selection, expressed under the umbrella of Zahavi's Handicap Theory. Named after Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi, the Handicap Theory tells us that for adaptations that seem to be burdensome and dangerous, such as the elaborate feathers of a male peacock, the very demonstration that the male of a species can carry them is in itself a display of physical prowess (Ref 4, p.140-141). Such a display is after all energetically draining as well as outright dangerous (imagine the ease by which a predator could home in on the exuberant peacock). British zoologist Richard Dawkins who has championed Zahavi's position had this to say on the matter:

"The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favour skepticism among females (or among recipients of advertising messages generally). The only way for a male to authenticate his boast of strength....is to prove that it is true by shouldering a truly costly handicap- a handicap that only a genuinely strong male could bear. It may be called the principle of authentication" (Ref 4, p.141)

Dawkins employed the same logic to explain the stotting jump of the Thomson's gazelle:

"stotting, rather than being a signal to the other gazelles, is really aimed at the predators. It is noticed by the other gazelles and it affects their behaviour, but this is incidental, for it is primarily selected as a signal to the predator. Translated roughly into English it means: 'Look how high I can jump, I am obviously such a fit and healthy gazelle, you can't catch me, you would be much wiser to try and catch my neighbour who is not jumping so high!'...An individual who jumps high is advertising, in an exaggerated way, the fact that he is neither old nor unhealthy" (Ref 5, p. 171)

And yet as Tyler was quick to comment, the peacock's train is, "a clear example of how a Darwinian hypothesis has become accepted as scientific fact, yet now has been disproved by some rigorous empirical research" (Ref 1). Of course in light of this research, Darwinists will no doubt be looking for other natural selection-based explanations for the encumbering peacock train since they remain convinced that something has to always be selected for and something selected against in order for key adaptations to arise in nature. And so it is that in at least one key aspect Darwinism remains protected from falsification. If the outcome were any different- say, if only male peacocks with short discrete feathers survived- we could just as easily conclude that selection had favored discrete-feathered varieties. After all, what a handicap it is for a peacock to carry its wondrous feathered display of beauty. Likewise for the stotting gazelle that may survive because it is showing itself to be fit or may not survive because, by stotting, it is revealing its exact location for the predator to maul it down.

We can see how traditional Darwinism is truly burdened with a heavy yoke. It is difficult to demonstrate that anything is true if you cannot also show that alternatives are false. That 'anything goes' as evidence for natural selection was clearly demonstrated in a recent review of man's exploitation of farm animals. Cited as an example of how cows and pigs had succeeded in the evolutionary 'rat race' by becoming man's primary resource of meat, the claim brought the apparent explanatory power of Darwinism to new heights:

"The more mankind uses a particular species of animal, the more that species flourishes. There are no rights and wrongs in nature, even when man is involved, but only "blindly immoral evolution," all of those unconscious, pre-programmed survival strategies with the single aim of species perpetuation. The animals we use thus gain our "protection" under a kind of evolutionary "covenant", escaping the inevitable extinction now befalling other species as human mastery expands across the earth. These chosen ones become our "evolutionary co-partners", so that today, for example, no animals are flourishing more than the livestock crowded by the billions into our factory farms, or the research subjects abounding in our labs, or the inhabitants of our game parks. Far from being exploited, the theory runs, these animals are in a sense exploiting us, like so many parasites, their collective survival assured by their utility to the "dominant evolutionary partner". Indeed, factory farming becomes a kind of ultimate good in this scheme, a supreme act of fidelity to our evolutionary "covenant"" (Ref 6, pp.230-231).

Biophysicist Cornelius Hunter wrote that "theories that make general predictions that can accommodate just about any result not only are less useful but are protected from falsification" (Ref 7. p.27). Of course critics would argue that simply because we do not have the ability to predict or pre-state where evolution is going to go next does not mean that evolution is not getting on with evolving new forms and new ways of making a living. This is precisely biologist Stuart Kauffman's counter argument. According to Kauffman, a biosphere- a collective entity of interacting organisms- is, by its very nature, continuously evolving and changing such that it generates new "causal axioms" (Ref 8, p.137) from which new, yet unseen solutions to survival arise. Kauffman tells us that evolution continuously changes the biosphere and thus renders the previously held axioms incomplete. Nevertheless as philosopher William Dembski is quick to note, evolutionary-interesting solutions are so rare that a purely naturalistic search is not going to find them, regardless of whether or not one considers Kaufman's continuously changing biosphere (Ref 9, pp.224-228).

The peacock's train has clearly challenged us to rethink about what we thought we knew about sexual selection. Besides the Sherlock Holmes-like abilities of deduction that Dawkins attributes to peahens, the underlying non-falsifiable aspects of the Darwinian paradigm have been demonstrated to be as relevant today as they were in the time of the renowned philosopher Karl Popper. We are left with the startling conclusion that much of Darwinism is built around a theory that tells us nothing of value and is therefore of little importance to real science.

References
1. David Tyler (2008) Sexual selection falsified in the case of peacock feathers, Access Research Network, April, 2008, See
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2008/04/01/sexual_selection_falsified_in_the_case_o

2. Mariko Takahashi, Hiroyuki Arita, Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa and Toshikazu Hasegawa (2008), Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains, Animal Behaviour, 75(4), pp.1209-1219

3. Jennifer Viegas, (2008), Female Peacocks Not Impressed by Male Feathers, Discovery News, March 2008, http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/26/peacock-feathers-females.html

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

5. Richard Dawkins (1989), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK

6. Matthew Scully (2002), Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, St Martin's Press, 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. Stuart Kauffman (2000), Investigations, Published by Oxford University Press, New York

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This editorial in Nature Neuroscience raises a very important children's health issue issue:

Our understanding of the neurobiology and treatment of psychiatric illness in children remains poor. Prominent psychiatrists have now been accused of concealing the extent of their financial ties to the drug industry. We urgently need to encourage more science in this area and we need vigorous regulation to restore some neutrality to the field.

Here's a brief excerpt:

Diagnosing mental disorders can be tricky even under the best of circumstances. God biomarkers for psychiatric disorders (pediatric or adult) are nonexistent. Our knowledge of the neurobiology of these complex disorders also has glaring holes;

And if you are the parent of a child with a mental disorder, you can at least have the peace of mind of knowing that, if you think this :

... there is an urgent need to put more science behind child psychiatry. We need an independent, objective assessment of the efficacy and safety of these medications, comparing existing generics and new products, and comparing non-drug or combination interventions to drug-only approaches. One option is to pool money from both industry and the government or other funding bodies, bringing together public and private money to fund such studies (similar to the ‘Innovative Medicines Initiative’ proposed by the European Commission). The raw data generated by clinical trials should be available for independent scrutiny. We also need to consider ways to increase recruitment in clinical trials, such as an alternate trial design where all patients initially get access to active treatment (Klein, D.F. JAMA 299, 1063–1065 (2008)) . Urgent action is needed to restore some objectivity and neutrality to this field; the stakes are simply too high to remain complacent.

, you have expert company.

For some reason, Nature Neuroscience is not making this editorial "Credibility crisis in pediatric psychiatry" (Nat Neurosci. 2008 Sep;11(9):983.) available free online yet, but the rest may be available through a library with journal subscriptions.

Applied non-materialist neuroscience: Do not fire your boss before you listen to this ...

Psychology: What did you really see? You'd be surprised!

Animal minds: How well can we understand a cat ... or a bat?

The God gene ... Warning! Restricted to people with a sense of humour!

Sending your brain back to school

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

A recent article in Nature by Katharine Sanderson suggests that "Greedy molecules could be behind the emergence of life" because an "Artificial system shows how a molecular soup could be exploited by a single self-replicating complex."

Douglas Philp, a chemist at the University of St Andrews, UK, has previously shown that a molecule made of two halves that recognise and bind to one another can then act as a template for its own replication1. Along with his colleague Jan Sadownik, he has now discovered that this template molecule can drive its own formation in a bigger pool of many more reactants, quickly taking over the processes in that pool and dominating the system so that almost no other products have a chance to form.

This kind of self-replicating system has been proposed as an explanation to how complex molecules such as DNA could have formed, ultimately triggering the emergence of life. Artificial versions of these systems, however, have remained elusive.

This, Philp says, "... shows that you can bring order from chaos."

Yes you can - but only over a limited range. And the fundamental problem we tend to run into is that further instances of order become astronomically less probable.

For example, if I dump the Scrabble letters, the ones face up can probably form some words. But if I must form a specific sentence - for example, "You better all move your cars because I can see the parking hornet from my window," my chances are very much lower. Origin of life is far more like that than it is like finding some letters that will form words.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing theories of our universe:

Large Hadron Collider: Experiments underway

Podcast: The argument from design in cosmology

The truth hurts ... and it can leave you seeing stars, too ...

The nothingness of nothing ... as seen by scientists, philosophers, and others

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).

Friend Alan Yoshioka, otherwise The Sheepcat, sends me this item which he titles, “Sherlock Holmes on design”. In the words of The Spirit’s Sword, Here, in the first forty seconds of the clip, Holmes deduces the existence of God from the existence of flowers, the speech delivered in beautiful tones by Brett.

According to Sword,

The speech in the original story is rather longer. In the original Holmes explains that there are many aspects of the flowers which are necessary in the first case for their survival, however their beauty is an "extra" not necessary for the immediate survival of the flowers, and is therefore a gift from a divine and loving providence, which not only gives us enough, but an abundance and more.

It is an argument for design that, I confess, I have never clearly understood. Perhaps I have spent too much time in survivable ugliness. Maybe if I were to retire ...

Also, just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Intelligent design and popular culture: Secular humanists lead the way in offering open debate

Intelligent design and elite culture: Why evidence would not convince many top people that there is design in the universe

Intelligent design and popular culture: Why respect people?

Message to Canadian readers: Make intellectual freedom an election issue

Plants: The assured results of modern evolutionary science ...

Darwinian evolution produces new species, right?

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Evolution through natural selection as an all-encompassing theory of how life evolved is considered by school boards across the United States as a strictly non-negotiable part of the teaching of biology (Ref 1). This was biochemist Michael Behe's assessment when he wrote in 1999 of the 'hysteria and intolerance' against those who dared question evolution. Perhaps the most notable challenge to the Darwinian camp's exclusionary stance has come from the latest discoveries in biochemistry and cell biology which, as theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman remarked, have revealed a cellular world replete with interacting, molecular machines. Stuart Kauffman's brief review of the cell is telling

"A cell is...a rich tapestry of molecular happenings...There is, after all, all of metabolism, the busy building of cell membranes and organelles. There is the business of DNA to RNA to protein, where the code itself is mediated by the very aminoacyl transferase charging enzymes that load the proper transfer RNA molecules with the right amino acids to translate the code that creates, among other things, the aminoacyl transferase enzymes themselves. There is the swishing of energy flowing in and through the multiplexed highways and byways, labyrinthine in their details...The simplest free-living systems, pleuromonia (PPLO), a simplified bacterial species that haunts the lungs of sheep, still has a membrane, DNA, a code, perhaps 300 assorted genes, the machinery of transcription and translation" (Ref 2, pp.29-30).

Labyrinthine indeed. Peering across the fence that was the limited knowledge of biochemistry at the time, Darwin must have hoped that the black box that so characterized the cell would not upset his grand theory of evolution. He was able fill in the gaps of knowledge with the apparent power of natural selection. As he wrote in his autobiography

"The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered....There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows" (Ref 3, p.87).

Unfortunately for Darwin, we now know that such generalities regarding his grand theory were not only premature but wrong. Indeed, famous amongst the molecular machines that defy Darwin's assertion of a design-less world is the enzyme H+ ATP Synthase that, as Princeton molecular biologist Steven Block brought to the world's attention, is responsible for manufacturing ATP in our cells (Ref 4). The remarkable feature of this enzyme is that it has the ability to rotate much like a man-made rotary motor (Ref 4). The catalytic subunits of the H+ ATP Synthase enzyme are tiny nine-protein complexes, having a characteristic 'flattened sphere' shape with a dimensional area of only 10nm across and 8nm high (Ref 4). The synthase enzyme is a veritable achievement of molecular engineering, coupling protons with subsequent rotational movement in the same way that a combustion engine couples the flow of gas and oxygen with the ensuing movement of the car. As the protons are pumped across a membrane, an electro-chemical gradient is generated that provides the energy to drive the H+ ATP Synthase motor (Ref 4). The catalytic subunits of the H+ ATP Synthase enzyme rotate around a channel, rather like a rotary motor turns around a central shaft (Ref 5). The ATP Synthase, with its precision design, thus provides an elegant illustration of a highly-efficient motor.

One can but wonder what Darwin would have made of minuscule engines with rotating propellers that generate ATP- the energy source of the cell. But the story does not end there. In fact the mechanisms used for eliminating waste proteins from the cell are likewise revealing of a world that contravenes Darwin's premature dismissal. The proteasome, a protein complex that functions as a cellular 'garbage disposal unit', for example degrades redundant proteins by shredding them into smaller parts. In their studies using X-ray crystallography, Michael Groll and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute in Germany brought the functioning of the proteasome complex to life by elucidating much of its molecular structure (Ref 6). Their analysis of the yeast version of the proteasome provided some valuable insights into its function demonstrating a structure that is ideally suited for breaking up redundant or toxic proteins (Ref 6). According to Sherwin Wilk from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, there is now strong evidence for the proteasome's involvement in the mammalian immune response (Ref 7). Indeed what really distinguishes the proteasome from any other protein complex is the multitude of catalytic activities that it exhibits.

One recent review, described the proteasome in the broader context of the cell's own "sophisticated inventory control program" that ultimately tells cells when to divide and when to die (Ref 8). While proteasomes break proteins down other molecular machines fold proteins up into their functional conformations. These machines are called chaperonins for, just like the chaperones of old that escorted young unmarried women to protect them from harm, they attach themselves to newly synthesized proteins (Ref 9). Like a master of origami that folds paper into exquisite shapes, chaperonins ensure that proteins are folded into their correct conformations for specific functions within the cell (Ref 9). With as many as 24 subunits in a chaperonin complex, we see an elegant co-operativity between the different parts of this protein folding machine (Ref 9).

ATP generation, protein folding and waste disposal are all critical processes for the healthy maintenance of a living cell. Perhaps paradoxically we find that much of how the body eliminates and destroys a cell at the end of its life is also heavily bound up in machines that parallel those discussed above. Until recently, the molecular mechanism of cell death was not well characterized and certainly somewhat of an enigma for most biologists. One type of cell death called apoptosis is a natural process that serves for removing cells that are either threatening or simply unnecessary for an organism (Ref 10). It is a form of controlled cellular suicide that ensures the well being of the organism as a whole. Merck scientists Donald Nicholson and Nancy Thornberry reviewed one aspect of this rather complex process in a landmark paper (Ref 10). Notably, the apoptosis pathway involves inactive precursor molecules that are activated by other proteins.

The core steps of the apoptotic pathway are governed by a family of enzymes called Caspases (Ref 10). What is most fascinating about these enzymes is that their activation carries all the hallmarks of a carefully planned military campaign (Ref 10). Caspases exist as inactive precursors that are cut at specific points by other caspases in a carefully orchestrated cascade of molecular events (Refs 10, 11). Indeed a 1999 study headed by Gerald Cohen at the UK MRC and Douglas Green at the La Jolla Institute in San Diego provided much of the detail of the apoptotic cascade (Ref 12). The overall picture seemingly epitomized much of Behe's irreducible complexity hypothesis, revealing how all the caspases involved required conversion from their precursor (inactive) to their active forms through the activity of other caspases further up the cascade before they could function. A highly controlled activation of caspases is necessary if animals are to ensure that cell death occurs only when it is required.

Writing over a century ago, Darwin could have stood confidently behind his assertion that there was no more design in the make up of life than in the direction of the wind. Little did he know of the molecular biology revolution that would reveal amongst other things the cell's capacity to not only fold proteins but also dispose of them when no longer needed. Drawing much needed energy from the ATP that it generates and commiting suicide whenever its internal processes threaten the well-being of the greater organism, the cell is the masterful 'disarmer' that has taken the wind out of the sails of Darwinism. With such discoveries as those outlined in this paper the involvement of intelligent design is quite simply the best causally specific inference that can be made.

References
1. Michael Behe (1999), Darwin's Hostages: A decision in Kansas to question evolution dogma has given rise to hysteria and intolerance American Spectator December 1, 1999. Article can be accessed at http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_darwinshostages.htm

2. Stuart Kauffman (2000), Investigations, Published by Oxford University Press, New York

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

4. Steven Block (1997), Real engines of Creation, Nature, Vol 386, pp. 217-219

5. T. M Duncan, V V Bulygin, Y Zhou, M L Hutcheon, and R L Cross, Rotation of subunits during catalysis by Escherichia coli F1-ATPase, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1995 November 21; 92(24), pp.10964–10968

6. Michael Groll, Lara Ditzel, Jan Lowe, Daniel Stock, Matthias Bochtler, Hans D. Bartunik, Robert Huber (1997), Structure of 20S proteosome from yeast at 2.4A resolution, Nature Vol 386 pp463-471

7. Sherwin Wilk (2003), "The Search For Neuropeptidases And The Discovery Of The Proteasome". Seminar held at Promega Corporation, Madison WI on the 19th of November, 2003

8. Kenneth Chang (2004), Study of Cell Breakdown Captures Nobel, New York Times, October 7, 2004

9. Tatsuro Shimamura, Ayumi Koike-Takeshita, Ken Yokoyama, Ryoji Masui, Noriyuki Murai, Masasuke Yoshida, Hideke Taguchi, So Iwata (2004), Structure Vol 12 pp. 1471-1480

10. Donald W Nicholson and Nancy Thorneberry (1997), Caspases: killer proteases, Trends In Biological Sciences Vol 22 pp 299-306

11. Pascale Villa, Scott H. Kauffmann, William C. Earnshaw (1997), Caspase and caspase inhibitors Trends in Biological Sciences Volume 22 pp 388-393

12. Xiao-Ming Sun, Marion MacFarlane, Jianguo Zhuang, Beni B. Wolf, Douglas R. Green, and Gerald M. Cohen (1999), Distinct Caspase Cascades Are Initiated in Receptor-mediated and Chemical-induced Apoptosis, J Biol Chem, Volume. 274, 5053-5060

Copyright(c), 2008, Robert Deyes

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Why the Universe Is the Way It Is, astronomer Hugh Ross explains,

The solar system holds a special position in the Milky Way, close to (but not exactly at) the co-rotation distance - the one distance from the core where stars orbit the galaxy at the same rate as its spiral arm structure does. A star or planetary system located at the co-rotation distance and between two spiral arms would seemingly remain at that safe place. However, stars and planetary systems exactly at the co-rotation distance would experience a "mean motion resonance," repeated gravitational "kicks" exerted by the galactic arm structure. Such kicks would send the star and its possible planetary system flying out of the habitable zone.

Earth's solar system is located just inside the co-rotation distance. So it is safe from the mean motion resonance. Because the solar system revolves around the galactic center only slightly faster than the galactic arm structure, it crosses the spiral arms only one about every billion years. The last spiral arm crossing occurred 560 to 600 million years ago (just before the Cambrian explosion, when complex animals first came on the scene), so Earth currently resides in the safest possible position).

This protected location is truly exceptional. Not all spiral galaxies are like the Milky Way. In the vast majority, the co-rotation distance and the habitable zone fail to overlap. Not only is there a match for the Milky Way Galaxy, but also the best possible place for a newly forming planetary system to accumulate all the heavy elements and long-lived radioactive isotopes requires for advanced life happens to lie just inside the co-rotation distance." (pp. 68-70)

See also: "Astronomer argues that we can test whether Earth is fine tuned as a science lab"

Also, just up at Colliding Universes a blog about competing theories of our universe:

Physics: No escape from philosophy through equations?

Extraterrestrials: Several million UFO reports later ... the state of the question

More demolition teams trying to blow up the Big Bang

Do you have time to hear about some new theories ... of time?

Now, if the butterflies would just appear out of nowhere ...

Chaos theorists stumped by butterfly effect?

Solar system: Ours is special, researchers say

Aussie PM: Cosmic order proves God exists

Origin of life: Ah, that "just so happens" series of intermediate chemical steps ..

Physicist realizes that there is more to nature than materialist atheism can explain

Rehabilitating the idea of creation - Big Bang cosmology

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

Recently, Ben Stein, star of Expelled, the film about the intelligent design theorists, annoyed some ID folk by his comments about Republican veep choice Sarah Palin, believed friendly to ID,

"Ben Stein Repulsed By Sarah Palin, Thinks Henry Kissinger Should ‘Babysit’ Her" - Wonkette who adds, "He is not impressed with Sarah Palin. No matter what weird causes Ben Stein supports, he has never been very forgiving of total idiots."

Critically, he says "This most peculiar vice-presidential choice there has ever been." and "What we have now is back to, what you might call, this fundamentalist, born-again, backwoods values of the United States of America."

Stein professes to love those backwoods (or backwards?) values, but then some people love pickled 'possum innards, or anyway they profess to.

He also noted that he was probably the only person on CNN who believes in intelligent design - which, if true, says something not very complimentary about CNN's claims to be mainstream.

The many comments I've heard from ID folk, break out along these lines:

- Stein's tone and words were "dismissive and demeaning." "It is just like Obama -- in Scranton where the votes are, talking up the small-town folks, and then in San Francisco at the wine and cheese reception, sneering at the rubes."

- More people will see this free than pay to see Expelled.

- ID folk should stop promoting Expelled until Stein apologizes for the damage he is doing, implying that Palin supporters are yay-hoos and rubes.

- A guy could be pro ID but anti-Christian, especially if, for example, he were Jewish and held Christianity accountable for persecuting Jews. Whether ID is true and whether Christianity is basically true are different issues.

- Chill out: ID is not about being conservative, Republican or Christian, and it's okay if two people who agree with the perspective it offers on current science disagree about a lot of other things.

In my view:

1. This flap blew up before this - and Ben, like many, may well be quietly revising his view:

2. This really has nothing to do with Expelled and will soon blow over. Stein thought Palin couldn't handle foreign affairs or the economy. Hmmm. Palin's state sits between Canada and Russia - I wonder how many American states have two foreign neighbours? As for the economy, it's not clear that the US Republicans spend less tax money than the Democrats anyway.

A note on Palin and creationism:

There is much squalling over Palin's presumed creationism, but Edward Sisson reminds me that "Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, Dems all, as well as McCain, back in 2001, all voted for the Santorum Amendment, which is a stronger "teach the controversy" position than Palin's comment at a debate" which is the basis for the anguished squalls. He discusses that here. (Obama was not then a senator, so he did not vote.)

Here's a pretty comprehensive look at Palin's views from Parablemania, as well as a clear and well-worded explanation of why Wikipedia is usually a worthless source on these issues and should not be consulted by anyone looking for information, as opposed to propaganda.

British columnist Melanie Phillips gets it right:

Palin is a Christian, which means she believes that the world had a Creator She shares that belief with other Christians along with Jews and Muslims the world over. Unless one takes the view that all religious belief is certifiable, there is nothing remotely odd about a person of faith believing in God. Indeed, one might say this is a prerequisite (unless one happens to belong to the Church of England).

Also at the Post-Darwinist

Darwin's defenders: Moving stuff around and claiming it just happened by chance ...

Whale evolution: Now there's a story without legs ...

Science writer wonders whether telling people about the "end of science" is bad for business

More on "Evolutionary Creation" ... and yes I will read the book ...

Evolutionary Creation? I am supposed to promote THAT?

Intellectual Freedom in Canada: Oops ... a political party has actually noticed the problem? Not just collecting fat pay cheques?

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
ARN Correspondent

The name 'Tie Club' derives from the saga behind the discovery of the genetic code in which Francis Crick, George Gammow and others played essential roles. "20 scientists, 20 amino acids, 20 matching ties and 1 collaboration to break the genetic code" was how one account described the club (Ref 1). The idea to form a club to decipher the genetic code came right on the heels of Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953. Ecstatic by what he read of Watson and Crick's work, Gammow wrote a letter asking for their thoughts on the mystery of how DNA might code for the amino acids found in proteins (Ref 1). Gammow was curious to know how, with just the four bases Adenosine, Cytosine, Thymidine and Guanine that are found in DNA, the twenty amino acids that make up proteins could be coded for. So it was that the Tie Club was born, which had as its goal the "fostering [of] consistent but informal communication on the coding problem" (Ref 1).

From its inception, the Tie Club was exclusive establishing a 'brotherly atmosphere' between its twenty members (each representing the 20 amino acids) and its four honorary members (for each of the four bases in DNA). Working together, these men eventually concluded that the four bases of DNA had to be organized into groups of at least three bases long since this was the minimum length needed to cover all twenty amino acids. Reading about the Tie Club we are perhaps reminded of Albert Einstein's own 'Akademie Olympia'- a group made up of Einstein's closest friends whose aim it was to foster scientific discussions around the subject of classical physics (Ref 2, p.47). And yet contrary to the images of popular culture, scientific discoveries such of those of Albert Einstein and the Tie Club, are not in some way restricted to the intellectually elite.

It turns out that our universe is fantastically accessible to scientific study and investigation by humanity as a whole, inspiring us to probe both the large and the small in our quest to understand its inner workings. Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards, perhaps the main stalwarts of the modern biocentricity movement, have told of how features such as the clear atmosphere of our earth, the stabilizing effect of the moon over the earth's rotation, our precise location in our galaxy and also the particular mass and size of our sun the sun are, "crucial to the discovery and measurement of the universe" (Ref 3, page X). Our earth is effectively a giant classroom for probing our universe on a grand scale and learning about its history. Moreover, we seem to be positioned in an optimal location to do so, as if at the very top corner of the cosmic 'school building' where our vista of our surroundings is superb. Indeed, Julia Lee Thorpe, a paleoclimatologist from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, explained in one television documentary how ice cores in the polar regions of our planet can provide valuable information about mean changes in the earth's climate over millions of years (Ref 4). We are likewise able to glean accurate data on the changing temperatures and sea levels of our oceans by studying the oxygen isotope content of small planktonic creatures called forams (Ref 4). We are also able to discern critical facts about the moon's orbital patterns over the millennia by examining growth layers on coral reefs (Ref 3, p.28). And we are able to build up accurate pictures of climate change by examining the growth rings of trees.

Our earth is teeming with biological 'data recorders' that have made possible close observation and detailed analysis of our earth (Ref 5, p.355). Moreover, there is no reason why this should necessarily be so. As theologian and physicist Arthur Peacocke expounded, there is no requirement for nature to be so open to discovery:

"Biology at all levels (molecular, macromolecular, organismic, phenotypic, ecological) is delving more and more deeply into the structures of life. The intricacies of the interlocking mechanisms of the utilisation of food, of reproduction, of protection, of behaviour...prove to be amenable to intelligent explication and to exhibit an inherent rationality different from but just as impressive in their own way as the elegant equations of fundamental physics. In this context, too, we can echo Einstein's aphorism, 'The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility'" (Ref 6, p.41).

Even pollen, which Darwin apparently dismissed as "extravagant and even wasteful" (Ref 3, p.30) provides Carbon-14 measurements that have allowed scientists to date sedimentary deposits. Of course, the list goes on. Beyond biological data recorders, geological phenomena have been of vital importance for gaining an understanding of plate tectonics and ground subduction (Ref 3, p.48). The earth's core generates magnetic fields that become 'frozen' over time providing scientists with an accurate 'barcode' for measuring the spreading of the ocean floor from deep oceanic ridges (Ref 3, p.51). Our own solar system is equally open for study and measurement. Total solar eclipses have allowed physicists to determine the chemical composition of our own sun while crucially confirming Einstein's general theory of relativity (Ref 3, pp.12-17).

Ever since Gustav Holst composed his symphony of the planets, it has become all to clear that no other planet or moon in our solar system has close to the right conditions for sustaining life and allowing scientific discovery. Writing for the Washington Times, Phillip Gold commented,

"For the cosmos is more than a spectacle- the same in all directions- that we view through an atmosphere that is, most fortunately for us, transparent. The universe is also a laboratory. Studying what it does, from our vantage point, unlocks its secrets far more effectively than it might, were we to study elsewhere" (Ref 7).

Likewise Eduardo Llull wrote of the earth as "an extraordinary blue dot in the vast universe" with its special and unique position in our solar system giving us an optimal ability to "explore the far reaches of the universe as well as the intricate detail in our own backyard" (Ref 8). As biologist Michael Denton has so emphatically demonstrated, man is ideally suited in all his characteristics to make the probe the world around him and to decipher the inner most workings of the universe. The importance of these capabilities is all too evident when one considers how the controlled use of fire has played such a critical role in man's use of the earth's resources:

"because the smallest sustainable fire is about 50 centimeters across, only an organism of approximately our dimensions and design- about 1.5 to 2 meters in height with mobile arms about 1 meter long ending in manipulative tools- can handle fire....So we must be at least the size we are to use fire, to utilize tools, to have a sophisticated technology, to have a knowledge of chemistry and electricity and explore the world" (Ref 9, p.243).

Writing in 'Heaven And Earth', science photographer David Malin drew attention to how humans lie almost halfway in scale between the smallest and the largest things we know- halfway between the atoms that make up DNA and the galaxies that lie as remnants of the cosmic expansion (Ref 10, p.10). What evolutionary importance can we attribute to man's immense suitability for acquiring knowledge from his cosmic abode? According to theologian and physicist John Polkinghorne, none:

"Our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life" (Ref 11, pp. 2-3).

Malin likewise made note of such evolutionary irrelevancy:

"For thousands of generations we have prospered knowing nothing of the stars or the galaxies beyond. Even the Sun and the Moon were mysterious until the invention of the telescope. Now we know of the existence of billions of galaxies, each containing myriads of Sun-like stars. None of this knowledge directly affects our daily lives, but we would be immeasurably poorer without it" (Ref 10, p.10)

For the twenty scientists who elucidated the mathematical requirements of the genetic code over 50 years ago, one can only ascribe their achievement to the openness of our world for discovery and minds whose probing capabilities do not derive from an evolutionary need. In the words of Polkinghorne, ours is a world filled with, "insights of rational beauty [and] finely-tuned fruitfulness" (Ref 11, p.24).

References
1. A full account of the Tie Club and the story of how the genetic code was deciphered can be found at http://www.ambion.com/tieclub

2. Abraham Pais (1982), Subtle is the Lord, The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, New York

3. 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

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

5. David Raup and Steven Stanley (1971), Principles of Paleontology, W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco

6. Arthur Peacocke (2002), Paths From Science Towards God, One World Publications, 2nd Ed, Oxford, UK

7. Phillip Gold (2004), The Universe- A Laboratory Designed With Us In Mind?, Washington Times, 18th April, 2004

8. Eduardo Llull (2004) Our Privileged Planet, Human Events, Published on 8th March 2004. See full article on http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=3222

9. 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

10. See David Malin's discussion in Heaven and Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye, Phaidon Press, UK, 2004

11. John Polkinghorne (2003), Belief in God in an Age of Science, Published by Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, New Haven

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Benedict Carey reports in "For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving" (Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2008) that

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

Of course, th3y are not saying that the memories are in a single neuron:

Dr. Fried said in a phone interview that the single neurons recorded firing most furiously during the film clips were not acting on their own; they were, like all such cells, part of a circuit responding to the videos, including thousands, perhaps millions, of other cells.

[ ... ]

Single-cell recordings cannot capture the entire array of circuitry involved in memory, which may be widely distributed beyond the hippocampus area, experts said. And as time passes, memories are consolidated, submerged, perhaps retooled and often entirely reshaped when retrieved later.

Yes indeed. Memory, especially when we are old and have a lot of it, is always being edited.

These results support the approach that Mario Beauregard and Vincent Paquette were working with when they asked Carmelite nuns to recall mystical experiences, as reported in The Spiritual Brain. The nuns' recollections would activate the same circuits that were active when the experience occurred.

Also at The Mindful Hack:

Religion and health: Some teens more, not less, depressed due to religion?

Religion and violence: Do materialist intellectuals have answers?

Reviewer thinks The Spiritual Brain should have been longer?

If you need a book that tries to explain religion and doesn't succeed ...

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
ARN Correspondent

Writing in the 1970s, American astronomer Robert Jastrow so poignantly summed up much of what we now know about the origins of our cosmos:

"We have been aware for fifty years that we live in an expanding Universe, in which all the galaxies around us are moving apart from us and one another at enormous speeds. The Universe is blowing up before our eyes, as if we are witnessing the aftermath of a gigantic explosion. If we retrace the motions of the outward-moving galaxies backward in time, we find that they all come together, so to speak, fifteen or twenty billions years ago. At that time all the matter in the Universe was packed into a dense mass, at temperatures of many trillions of degrees. The dazzling brilliance of the radiation in this dense, hot Universe must have been beyond description. The picture suggests the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb. The instant in which the cosmic bomb exploded marked the birth of the Universe" (Ref 1, p.13).

Incredibly our universe displays several aspects of orchestrated design and fine-tuning- aspects to which we owe our very existence. In fact so finely tuned is our universe that, were it just the slightest bit different, stars would not burn for as long as they do and life would never have arisen. TIME Magazine senior science writer Michael Lemonick noted as much

"Many of the most fundamental characteristics of our cosmos- the relative strengths of gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that operate inside atomic nuclei as well as masses and relative abundances of different particles- are so finely tuned that if just one of these were even slightly different, life as we know it couldn't exist. If the so-called weak nuclear interaction were a tiny bit stronger or weaker than it is, for example, stars wouldn't blow up in the mammoth supernovas that spread elements like carbon and oxygen out into space and without those elements, there would be no water and no organic molecules. If the strong nuclear force were just one-half of 1% stronger or weaker, stars could not make carbon or oxygen....Because there is no known law that requires those forces to have the values they do, scientists figure that there must be another explanation for how we got so lucky" (Ref 2).

In order to avoid the metaphysical repercussions that accompany a singular universe with its seeming fitness for the advent of life, some have postulated that ours is but one of a multitude of universes- a Multiverse (Ref 3, pp.157-181). With a large number of universes, we could simply attribute the apparent 'fine tuning' of our cosmic world to an issue of probabilities- after all, the more universes that exist, the greater the probability of finding one that is conducive to the appearance of life. And yet as British Astronomer Royal and Multiverse proponent Martin Rees is quick to point out multiple universe theories are "tentative and should be prefaced by something akin to a health warning" (Ref 3, p.158).

Cosmologist Lee Smolin has developed his own Multiverse theory conjecturing that within the confines of black holes, there might be other universes forming and expanding just like our own that would never be visible to us because of the limited horizon of black holes (their gravitational pull is so strong that even visible light cannot escape) (Ref 4). Smolin's ideas would certainly make good science fiction. Universes that originate from explosions that are hidden from sight in black holes make a backdrop for a great story in which intelligent beings such as us are oblivious to the origin of their cosmos, believing it to be in some way unique (Ref 4, p.89). With so many universes spawning from black holes, Smolin argues, it becomes more probable that at least one of them will have laws of physics that are fine-tuned for the formation of stars, planetary systems and eventually life. Or does it?

Smolin's idea of universe progeny spawning from black holes within parent universes bears striking similarities to the evolutionary tree of common descent that Darwin provided as the sole picture in 'The Origin Of Species'. According to Smolin, as universes 'improve' their ability to generate more stars and thereby produce more black holes, 'fitter' universes will swamp out those that are less finely tuned, have fewer stars and therefore produce less progeny (Ref 4, p.90-100). Given time, enough universes will have produced enough stars to generate enough black holes to produce more progeny universes with life-supporting, physical parameters such as our own.

But what is to say that fine-tuning will necessarily improve to the phenomenal level that we find in the laws of physics that under gird our own cosmos? Smolin's theory relies on the early parent universe going through expansion-collapse cycles before it becomes 'fit' enough to produce stars and consequently black holes for its progeny to form (Ref 4, p.97). For such a cosmos, the mechanical energy needed for expansion-collapse would eventually decay just as a ball bouncing on a living room floor would eventually stop bouncing. Such observations are consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. So for Smolin's parent universes to generate progeny, they would have to get fit before the bouncing energy ran out.

Oddly enough Smolin's theory also suffers from a lack of testability and falsifiability. We have no way of testing whether or not a host of universes and other worlds actually exist behind black holes. Historian and theologian Ben Witherington III emphasized that we should "stick to the story" when looking at historical accounts, using what we know to be true or falsifiable to back up our assertions (Ref 5). To do otherwise is to open ourselves to the possibility of almost anything happening. The very fact that we are here to look back on the history of the universe is being used as testimony that the very small probability of obtaining the precise fine-tuning of our cosmos must have been achieved without recourse to a designer's 'hand'. Without the evidence and without testability, such a position becomes a philosophical and not a scientific one.

CERN cosmologist Gabriele Veneziano has been emphatic in his view about possible alternatives to the singularity of the universe implicit in the cosmic Big Bang (Ref 6). 'Going further north than the North Pole' is the phrase that Veneziano has coined for this idea that time extends back beyond the origin of our universe (Ref 6). Astronomer Ed Hubble's discovery that galaxies were moving away from each other in a celestial expansion and Roger Penrose's and Stephen Hawking's proof that time does not extend indefinitely into the past certainly support the view point that the big bang beginning is, "the ultimate cataclysm, beyond which our cosmic ancestry cannot extend" (Ref 6). What has proven difficult for cosmologists to understand is just how it might be that, from a singular origin, the universe became so homogeneous, with the properties of one galaxy being the same as those of another many billions of light years away (Ref 6). Today cosmology has answered this apparent paradox by suggesting that a period of hyper inflation was responsible for the massive distances between different regions of the universe that initially were much closer together. What is most appealing of this latter view is that it has predicted several crucial observations of the cosmos with a very high degree of precision (Ref 6).

Nevertheless Veneziano has questioned certain aspects of the hyper inflationary model. For example, no one knows the exact nature of the so-called 'Inflaton' that caused the hyper inflation to counteract the forces of gravitational collapse (Ref 6). One theory that has challenged the singularity of the Big Bang suggests that the universe contains structures called 'branes' that, through forces of attraction, periodically collide just as a ship coming into a port might collide with the side of a dock (Ref 6). Physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok are the major protagonists of this brane collision theory (otherwise known as the Ekpyrotic or Conflagration theory) in which branes hit and bounce off each other (Ref 6). They propose that each time branes collide, a 'big bang' event occurs spawning off a new universe in the process. In short, Steinhardt and Turok tell us that our universe may have arisen as a result of two branes banging together.

The difficulty with the brane collision theory, as Veneziano points out, is that in order to get the homogeneous bang required by inflationary cosmology, the colliding branes that supposedly set off our universe must have been exactly parallel (Ref 6). Steinhardt and Turok are ever hopeful that, had they not been parallel, successive collisions would have allowed them more time to straighten out without any external guidance (Ref 6). It is just as if a ship, coming into a port has multiple opportunities to line up with the side of the dock but with the added feature that the captain could leave the bridge and go and sleep in his cabin with absolute confidence that, sooner or later, the boat would line up and dock correctly. A rather uncomfortable affair for all the passengers concerned!! Just like Smolin, Steinhardt and Turok rely on buying time to achieve highly improbable events (in this case, the almost perfect coming-together and subsequent rebounding of parallel branes). More importantly however, neither their colliding branes nor Smolin's budding universes remove the requirement for a creation event of some kind- after all, something must still come into existence if we are going to have branes to collide or universes to budd. There must be some singular event that brings the initial universe into existence.

It is ironic that Smolin should choose Darwin's tree of life to illustrate his model. After all, Darwin himself called for a singularity in so far as all existing life could be brought together through the ages to one or at least a few common ancestors at some defined point in time (Ref 7, pp. 480, 615, 630). With the different Multiverse theories we have still not answered the fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing.

REFERENCES

1. Robert Jastrow (1978), God And The Astronomers, W.W. Norton and Company Inc, New York

2. Michael Lemonick (2004), Cosmic Conundrum, TIME Magazine, November 29th, Vol 164, Number 22, pp. 58-61

3. Martin Rees (2001), Our Cosmic Habitat, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Publishers, UK

4. Lee Smolin (1997), The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, New York

5. Ben Witherington III (2004) 'In Search of the Real Jesus', Seminar presented at Blackhawk Free Evangelical Church, Madison WI on 8th of May, 2004

6. Gabriele Veneziano (2004), The Myth of the Beginning of Time, Scientific American Volume 290 (5) pp. 54-65

7. 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

Copyright(c), 2008, Robert Deyes

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

American high school student RGR has been, he tells me, following the debates on the validity of Darwinism since the release of Ben Stein's Expelled

Until then, I had never questioned the validity of Darwinian natural selection. A little independent research has convinced me of Darwinism's improbability. I'm still a firm proponent of common descent, but I see now that Darwinism can't account for much of the development of life.

A while ago, I read an article of yours referencing the upcoming videogame "Spore". I agree that this game is a sign of Darwinism's weakening hold on pop culture, and I think the game will be an excellent demonstration of how common descent is compatible with non-Darwinian evolution. I was pleased all the more when I saw a trailer for the game on Youtube, and noted the language with which it was described.

I think RGR is on to something there. The Darwinian narrative is treated ironically, not reverently. The assumption is that it is okay to doubt, to think that design is more plausible. No wonder militant atheists, whose creation story is Darwinism, are outraged, as Reuters reports:

As a simulation of evolution from single-cell organism to space-faring civilisation, Will Wright feared his latest creation, Spore, would draw criticism from religious groups. But so far, the game's creator has revealed, the portrayal of religion in the game has only drawn the ire of angry non-believers.

[ ... ]

Life in Spore is created according to the theory of panspermia - which hypothesises that it has been seeded on Earth from elsewhere in the universe. But it's the mere presence of religion in the game's civilisation stage that has raised hackles amongst some in the gaming community.

"I didn't expect to hit hot buttons on the atheist side as much; I expected it on the religious side," Wright revealed. "But so far I've had no critical feedback at all from anybody who is religious feeling that we were misrepresenting religion or it was bad to represent religion in the game. It was really the atheists."

[ ... ]

Wright, however, who described himself as an "atheist", insisted that with Spore he was not trying to pronounce on the issue one way or the other: ...

Wright doesn't seem to understand that materialist atheists permit no doubt, whereas traditional theists and non-materialists do. He had carefully vetted his game with the traditionals (who like it), not understanding that it is the New Atheist fascists he has something to fear from. Well, a few years of their 24/7 hostility will soon teach him, I fear. Here's Johnny Minkley's Eurogamer interview with him.

Meanwhile, one prof friend confesses that he "spent too much time learning how to make Spore creatures last night" but he nonetheless recommends the free trial version.

Significantly, a teacher grouses:

It's not great as an aid to teaching evolution, since the premise is actually intelligent design. Or, more often than not, unintelligent design. An accurate evolution game would not be a game at all, because everything would get on without any input from the player.

I wonder if the makers will be forced to issue a disclaimer to the effect that the premise of the game is natural selection acting on random mutations? I remember when the creators of the stunning March of the Penguins had to issue a disclaimer that the film didn't really support intelligent design (of course it does). The best they could come up with in response is that the penguins, after all, change their mates every year ... (Now, if the blubbery birds could just do colour as well as black and white, maybe Hollywood would call ... )

Oh, and here's a fun spoof on March. Spoof's premise: In French, the film was "Marche des Empereurs". Recall who France's "Empereur" was ...

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

I have no objection to origin of life research, but then I have no objection to the search for the Lost Atlantis either. To the extent, however, that a quest seems primarily religious in character, the case for public funding must be constructed on public grounds. And that must begin with an examination of the faith under discussion.

1. Origin of life - the Genesis of a new religion?

2. Was origin of life ever mainly a science quest in the first place?

3. The sacred mysteries of the prebiotic soup

4. So should the established religion seeking the origin of life be disestablished? There is an alternative ...

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).