The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Neanderthal home made of mammoth bones discovered in Ukraine" (PhysOrg.com December 19, 2011), Bob Yirka reports,

Up till recently, most researchers studying Neanderthals had assumed they were simple wanderers, hiding out in caves when the weather got bad. Now however, the discovery of the underpinnings of a house built by a group of Neanderthals, some 44,000 years ago, turns that thinking on its head. Discovered by a team of French archeologists from the Muséum National d'Histories Naturelle, in an area that had been under study since 1984, the home, as it were, was apparently based on mammoth bones. The team's findings are to be published in the science journal Quaternary International.

Why must this stuff always be a surprise?

Over the past decade, new information regarding Neanderthals, a human ancestor that died out approximately 30,000 years ago, has come to light that tends to reverse decades of thinking. Instead of a clumsy, dim-witted people, it appears Neanderthals were more advanced than most had thought. Evidence of cooking, burying their dead, making jewelry and perhaps even speaking to one another has come to light indicating that first assumptions were a little harsh. Now, with the discovery of a home built by Neanderthals, it's clear they were far more sophisticated than anyone had imagined.

Actually, Darwinists desperately needed an ape man, to demonstrate the fabled ascent of man, and they co-opted the Neanderthals. Who appear to have quit the job.

Perhaps even more interesting was the fact that some of the bones used to build the house had decorative carvings and added pigments clearly showing that those that built the house, were in fact, building a home.

We told you. They quit. And their house might be worth more than yours nowadays ... well, it would get top marks for creative use of natural materials ...

One solution for the Darwinist would be to establish "ghost lineages" of ape men. They must have existed, and the speculations about them will be immune to correction by evidence.

Images Here. And Here.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a remarkable departure from the usual "idiot child of evolutionary biology" fare provided by evolutionary psychology, from Was Darwin Wrong About Emotions?(ScienceDaily Dec. 13, 2011), we learn,

Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically "basic" emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. This means a recent move to train security workers to recognize "basic" emotions from expressions might be misguided.

Anyone who has managed a large number of people from diverse backgrounds will soon discover this fact. One smells lawsuits to come from security interventions based on crackpot evolution theory.

"What I decided to do in this paper is remind readers of the evidence that runs contrary to the view that certain emotions are biologically basic, so that people scowl only when they're angry or pout only when they're sad," says Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, the author of the new paper.

(Heretic!)

But Barrett (along with a minority of other scientists) thinks that expressions are not inborn emotional signals that are automatically expressed on the face. "When do you ever see somebody pout in sadness? When it's a symbol," she says. "Like in cartoons or very bad movies." People pout when they want to look sad, not necessarily when they actually feel sad, she says.

A very good point. Actors are expected to "show" emotions that the audience can interpret. But that's an elaborate repertoire. One reason most people "can't act" is that their real display repertoire doesn't travel well enough, and they can't master the repertoire.

Some scientists have proposed that emotions regulate your physical response to a situation, but there's no evidence, for example, that a certain emotion usually produces the same physical changes each time it is experienced, Barrett says. "There's tremendous variety in what people do and what their bodies and faces do in anger or sadness or in fear," she says. People do a lot of things when they're angry. Sometimes they yell; sometimes they smile.

And occasionally they show no apparent reaction but later go postal ...

"Textbooks in introductory psychology says that there are about seven, plus or minus two, biologically basic emotions that have a designated expression that can be recognized by everybody in the world, and the evidence I review in this paper just doesn't support that view," she says. Instead of stating that all emotions fall into a few categories, and everyone expresses them the same way, Barrett says, psychologists should work on understanding how people vary in expressing their emotions.

Hope she's got tenure.

But she may escape the Inquisition because, we are told, Darwin's sacred text "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" does not actually contain the claim attributed to him. Barrett tells us, "Darwin thought that emotional expressions -- smiles, frowns, and so on -were akin to the vestigial tailbone -- and occurred even though they are of no use." Which is equally nonsense, but not the same nonsense.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Are there Higgs bosons in space?" (Science on MSNBC.com, 12/14/2011), Natalie Wolchover asks,

"Rather than using a 17-mile-long collider, can't we just find them out there?", explaining, Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, report that they're hot on the trail of an elusive elementary particle known as the Higgs boson. It's only a matter of time before they'll have the infamous "God particle" in handcuffs, they say. But after years of particle- and head-bashing at the LHC, one burning question is whether there's an easier way to do this. Instead of constructing an 17-mile-long, high-energy collider to generate a Higgs particle from scratch, couldn't we just go look for one in nature?

John Gunion, first author of "The Higgs Hunter's Guide" (Basic Books, 1990) and a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, said Higgs bosons regularly pop into existence all over space.

Yet the little devils are explicitly avoiding the Large Hadron Collider ... hmmm ...

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "From whales to earthworms, the mechanism that gives shape to life" (News Mediacom, 14.10.11), we learn,

During the development of an embryo, everything happens at a specific moment. In about 48 hours, it will grow from the top to the bottom, one slice at a time – scientists call this the embryo's segmentation. "We're made up of thirty-odd horizontal slices," explains Denis Duboule, a professor at EPFL and Unige. "These slices correspond more or less to the number of vertebrae we have."

Every hour and a half, a new segment is built. The genes corresponding to the cervical vertebrae, the thoracic vertebrae, the lumbar vertebrae and the tailbone become activated at exactly the right moment one after another."

The process is astonishingly simple. In the embryo's first moments, the Hox genes are dormant, packaged like a spool of wound yarn on the DNA. When the time is right, the strand begins to unwind. When the embryo begins to form the upper levels, the genes encoding the formation of cervical vertebrae come off the spool and become activated. Then it is the thoracic vertebrae's turn, and so on down to the tailbone. The DNA strand acts a bit like an old-fashioned computer punchcard, delivering specific instructions as it progressively goes through the machine.

"A new gene comes out of the spool every ninety minutes, which corresponds to the time needed for a new layer of the embryo to be built," explains Duboule. "It takes two days for the strand to completely unwind; this is the same time that's needed for all the layers of the embryo to be completed." This system is the first "mechanical" clock ever discovered in genetics. And it explains why the system is so remarkably precise.

The punch line:

The Hox clock is a demonstration of the extraordinary complexity of evolution.

Or of something.

Happily, these guys don't offer a hoked-up "evolutionary" explanation.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "U.S. Will Not Finance New Research on Chimps" (New York Times, December 15, 2011), James Gorman reports,

The National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research. Those guidelines require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.

The announcement was not controversial. Not much chimp research is going on in medicine; it's expensive and usually unnecessary. And the ban exempts the usual "chimps r' us" stap of the pop science media:

For behavioral and genomic experiments, the report recommended that the research should be done on chimps only if the animals are cooperative, and in a way that minimizes pain and distress. It also said that the studies should "provide otherwise unattainable insight into comparative genomics, normal and abnormal behavior, mental health, emotion or cognition."

Notably,

In making the announcement, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H., said that chimps, as the closest human relatives, deserve "special consideration and respect" and that the agency was accepting the recommendations released earlier in the day by an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine, which concluded that most research on chimpanzees was unnecessary.

Of course, the key question is, what's to become of the (probably) thousands of chimps who are no longer grant attractors?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here, it was one of 2010's top ten new species picks. Turned up in South Africa; Can leap as well as a grasshopper.

File under: We warned you about cockroaches already, but you ...

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's some useful work by new Zealand scientists: By themselves, the New Caledonian crows didn't know what the thirsty crow knew in the famous Aesop's fable: He dropped pebbles into a nearly empty pitcher until the much-sought water ended up at the top. But given hints, ...

Crows saw a tube partially filled with water. Inside the tube was a bite of meat, stuck onto a piece of wood that floated below their reach. Small stones were sitting nearby. If you're thinking that you might not have been able to solve this puzzle, rest assured--the birds didn't get it either.

After making sure the crows didn't naturally know how to solve the puzzle, the researchers gave the birds a hint. This time, the crows saw the same tube, floating meat, and stones. But there was a platform next to the top of the tube with a couple stones sitting on it, too. As the crows attempted to jam their beaks far enough into the tube to reach the meat, they tended to accidentally knock the stones into the tube. After doing this several times and noticing how the water level rose, all the crows eventually figured out the trick. They began dropping stones into the tube on purpose to get the meat.

This suggests that smarter animals do not so much abstract a solution to a proble4m but take available hints from their environment. Makes sense.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, isn't that the key epigenetics question - what we really want to know.

From "Why Does the Same Mutation Kill One Person but Not Another?" (ScienceDaily, Dec. 7, 2011), we learn:

The vast majority of genetic disorders (schizophrenia or breast cancer, for example) have different effects in different people. Moreover, an individual carrying certain mutations can develop a disease, whereas another one with the same mutations may not. This holds true even when comparing two identical twins who have identical genomes. But why does the same mutation have different effects in different individuals?

Some researchers propose,

"In the last decade we have learned by studying very simple organisms such as bacteria that gene expression -- the extent to which a gene is turned on or off -- varies greatly among individuals, even in the absence of genetic and environmental variation. Two cells are not completely identical and sometimes these differences have their origin in random or stochastic processes. The results of our study show that this type of variation can be an important influence the phenotype of animals, and that its measurement can help to reliably predict the chance of developing an abnormal phenotype such as a disease ."

This team's own research looked at the worm C. Elegans, the space shuttle blowup survivor. C. Elegans is too simple to feature many complicating factors.

They note,

The work suggests that, even if we completely understand all of the genes important for a particular human disease, we may never be able to predict what will happen to each person from their genome sequence alone. Rather, to develop personalised and predictive medicine it will also be necessary to consider the varying extent to which genes are turned on or off in each person.

Goodbye, "genetics is destiny."

There is a sense in which no one can tell you why your brother died and you didn't. Perhaps some day they can point to a gene abnormality that affected him fatally and you minimally - and offer a credible explanation of the cascade of outcomes. But that's it. Some of what we need to know can only be addressed by philosophy, not science.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In the recent social sciences scandals, there was an obvious "freakonomics" factor: Really weird findings that do not directly upset elite pieties get massive attention and little analysis. Now, in "Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?" (American Scientist, statistics teachers Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung explain, "Examination of a very popular popular-statistics series reveals avoidable errors":

In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt's friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative.

The risks of driving a car: In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the contrarian claim that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk, an oversimplified argument that was picked apart by bloggers. The problem with this argument, and others like it, lies in the assumption that the driver and the walker are the same type of person, making the same kinds of choices, except for their choice of transportation. Such all-else-equal thinking is a common statistical fallacy. In fact, driver and walker are likely to differ in many ways other than their mode of travel. What seem like natural calculations are stymied by the impracticality, in real life, of changing one variable while leaving all other variables constant.

Some good suggestions for avoiding stats scams.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Disappearance of the Elephant Caused Rise of Modern Humans: Dietary Change Led to Modern Humans in Middle East 400,000 Years Ago," (ScienceDaily, Dec. 12, 2011), we learn:

The elephant, a huge package of food that is easy to hunt, disappeared from the Middle East 400,000 years ago -- an event that must have imposed considerable nutritional stress on Homo erectus.

There are so many holes in this story, it should be a fish net. There is considerable evidence of varied human diet from great antiquity - which we should expect, given that people can starve waiting for big game - and the longer they starve, the less capable they are.

Unlike other primates, humans' ability to extract energy from plant fiber and convert protein to energy is limited. So in the absence of fire for cooking, the Homo erectus diet could only consist of a finite amount of plant and protein and would have needed to be supplemented by animal fat. For this reason, elephants were the ultimate prize in hunting -- slower than other sources of prey and large enough to feed groups, the giant animals had an ideal fat-to-protein ratio that remained constant regardless of the season. In short, says Ben-Dor, they were the ideal food package for Homo erectus.

Except for one thing: The carcass goes bad after a few days. Maybe the theory is that homo erectus didn't notice. Even the flies and worms didn't bother him. Or, even though he couldn't cook, he knew how to salt and dry pemmican?

When elephants began to die out, Homo erectus "needed to hunt many smaller, more evasive animals. Energy requirements increased, but with plant and protein intake limited, the source had to come from fat. He had to become calculated about hunting," Ben-Dor says, noting that this change is evident in the physical appearance of modern humans, lighter than Homo erectus and with larger brains.

One thing their implausible thesis doesn't lack is confidence:

Not only do their findings on elephants and the Homo erectus diet give a long-awaited explanation for the evolution of modern humans, but they also call what scientists know about the "birth-place" of modern man into question.

Incidentally, if these people think elephants are dead easy to kill, they need to read George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "A Small Step for Lungfish, a Big Step for the Evolution of Walking" (ScienceDaily, Dec. 12, 2011), we learn,

Extensive video analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that the African lungfish can use its thin pelvic limbs to not only lift its body off the bottom surface but also propel itself forward. Both abilities were previously thought to originate in early tetrapods, the limbed original land-dwellers that appeared later than the lungfish's ancestors.

The observation reshuffles the order of evolutionary events leading up to terrestriality, the adaptation to living on land. It also suggests that fossil tracks long believed to be the work of early tetrapods could have been produced instead by lobe-finned ancestors of the lungfish.

Maybe.

Walking fish are nothing new, but there's more to terrestrial life than that.

See also: Land-based fish helps researchers assess how animals moved to land – and stayed there

Darwinists censor writer re: Fish that jump onto land unaided complicate the water-to-land transition story

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "You don't really exist, do you?" (December 10, 2011), at his blog Rationally Speaking, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci,
offers reasons to reject the materialist claim that our consciousness is an illusion:

For some time I have been noticing the emergence of a strange trinity of beliefs among my fellow skeptics and freethinkers: an increasing number of them, it seems, don't believe that they can make decisions (the free will debate), don't believe that they have moral responsibility (because they don't have free will, or because morality is relative — take your pick), and they don't even believe that they exist as conscious beings because, you know, consciousness is an illusion.

As co-author with Jerry Fodor of What Darwin Got Wrong, he might be expected to have thought of this:

... a closer look at the evidence does not bear out the increasingly persistent myth that "it's all unconscious anyway." Here very interesting work has been done by Alfred Mele at Florida State University. In his Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will, Mele critically examines claims to the effect that, for instance, our brains make decisions before we become conscious of them, or that intentions don't play a role in producing actions. He finds the evidence for such extraordinary claims extraordinarily deficient and — to the contrary — lines up evidence from neurobiology for the conclusion that consciousness plays a major role in (some, most certainly not all) of our decisions, particularly when it comes to the sort of decisions we normally do attribute to conscious deliberation (like whether to change career, say, not just when to push a button on a computer screen, a la Libet experiments).

As a matter of fact, the older one gets, the more likely one is to take some time to make a decision - because all aspects of one's mind are not reporting at once. Not all decisions are equally easy, or fact-rich.

That is why David Brooks' "The young and the neuro" have got it all wrong.

It's interesting how many atheists are pulling back from the materialist conclusions.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Natural Science is now in grave disrepute. It survives in its present from only because of a media- and academia-generated program of propaganda which needs the constant distractions of novelties, spurious discoveries, outright fraud, and smokescreens of personal invective, all of which are designed to keep the punters guessing, and ordinary people from asking the most fundamental of philosophical questions about cause and effect, reason and purpose, and loss and gain. ... This is not science. This is unmitigated wickedness.

- Metamorphosis, p. 52 (a companion book to the film, Metamorphosis

Strong stuff. But spend a while on the "The Aliens are really OUT There!" desk and you'll find it harder to disagree.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A long time ago Here.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Speaking of Dawkins, "I watch from the sidelines with engaged curiosity, and I shall not be surprised if within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory." - The God Delusion, 2006, p. 165. Anyone remember which year it was that the great breakthrough occurred?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Life on Earth: Is our planet special?" (BBC News , 9 December 2011), Howard Falcon-Lang tells us,

Far from being unique, many now regard Earth as an ordinary lump of space rock and believe that life "out there" is almost inevitable. But could the truth be somewhat more complex?

On Friday, top scientists are meeting at the Geological Society in London to debate this very issue, posing the question: "Is the Earth special?". What emerges is that aspects of our planet and its evolution are remarkably strange.

Prof Monica Grady is a meteorite expert at the Open University. She explained in what sense the Earth could be considered special.

"Well, there are several unusual aspects of our planet," she said. "First is our strong magnetic field. No one is exactly sure how it works, but it's something to do with the turbulent motion that occurs in the Earth's liquid outer core. Without it, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation from the Sun."

It gets better.

A key barrier to determining the odds of the habitability of other planets has been the need to minimize the ways in which Earth is special. "Special" doesn't mean that no other planets could be like Earth, but that we need to assess our chances rationally.

As opposed to pointless speculation like "Could exoplanets support life that has a different chemical composition?" Absent the proposed composition, who knows?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's Physorg on those recently found tintinnids from 635-715 million years ago. In "New fossils reveal oldest known ciliates" (November 16, 2011), Jennifer Chu reports,

Anyone who has taken high school biology has likely come into contact with a ciliate. The much-studied paramecium is one of 7,000 species of ciliates, a vast group of microorganisms that share a common morphology: single-celled blobs covered in tiny hairs, or cilia. These cilia — Greek for "eyelash" — are used to propel a microbe through water and catch prey.

Now, geologists at MIT and Harvard University have unearthed rare, flask-shaped microfossils dating back 635 to 715 million years, representing the oldest known ciliates in the fossil record. The remains are more than 100 million years older than any previously identified ciliate fossils, and the researchers say the discovery suggests early life on Earth may have been more complex than previously thought. What's more, they say such prehistoric microbes may have helped trigger multicellular life, and the evolution of the first animals.

"These massive changes in biology and chemistry during this time led to the evolution of animals," says Tanja Bosak, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. "We don't know how fast these changes occurred, and now we are finding evidence of an increase in complexity."

Nicholas Butterfield, a lecturer in paleobiology at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., says the group's findings provide convincing evidence for ancient organisms that are "significantly similar" to modern ciliates. However, in his view, the fossils mark a minimum date for the evolutionary appearance of tintinnids — the hairy organisms could have been floating about hundreds of millions of years earlier.

This is not the Darwin forced on us in school. It's not Darwin at all.

See also: Why do some life forms never really die?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Can physicists crack the big puzzle?" ( MSNBC Cosmic Log, November 30, 2011), Alan Boyleinterviews Oxford physicist Frank Close on his new book, The Infinity Puzzle , wherein we learn that "an even bigger puzzle remains: Why is the cosmos built the way it is?" Meanwhile,

Q: When it comes to the Higgs boson, the question has arisen as to whether it actually exists. One of my colleagues has joked that if it's found, that's worth a Nobel. And if it's ruled out, that's worth a Nobel as well. Is that the way it works?

A: The idea that has led to the Higgs boson is a piece of beautiful mathematics. Whether nature actually does it is a question that only experiments can answer. Although the theorists are the ones that get all the press ... the Einsteins and the other names that trip off the tongue ... it's ultimately the experiments that decide. That's where we are at the moment.

The idea that there should be a Higgs boson, or something else that masquerades as that particle, has been around for a long time. It's only now that are finally able to do the experiments that will tell us one way or the other if that is the case. And if it is the case, we might find out exactly how nature plays this particular trick. When Peter Higgs and a group of other people first put the idea forward, they were trying to solve a particular conundrum, and they came up with the simplest way of doing it — that is, that there was a single particle known as the Higgs boson. That was 50 years ago. Since then, people have refined those original ideas, based on the discoveries we have made.

There are several possible ideas as to how nature might actually do this conjuring trick. It might be there's a whole family of particles called Higgsinos and other weird names. It might not be a simple particle. It might be a compound — just as an atom has a nucleus that's made of protons and neutrons, which are made of smaller things called quarks, there might be new sorts of particles waiting to be found, called techniquarks, which collectively act as if they were a single boson.

It might be those, it might be something else. We simply don't know. And that's the exciting thing. Nature knows the answer at the moment, and we're trying to find out at last what it is.

We didn't know that nature was a personality who could know anything, but we didn't know about Higgsinos and such ...

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "The Driver of Human Evolution Isn't the Climate Around You, It's the Worms Inside You" (Discover Crux blog, December 2, 2011), we learn what one team of researchers concluded:

the authors found that adaptation to pathogens exhibited particularly strong signals of local adaptation—in particular, adaptations to varieties of worms. This aligns with the deduction of some evolutionary biologists that host-parasite interactions drive much of adaptive evolution in complex organisms. Why the local adaptation with worms? The authors posit that worms evolve slower than bacteria, and are also more localized in distribution. Climate and diet? Not so much effect. At least for humans the public perception is close to 100% wrong. Humans adapt to local biological forces, not to the local natural environment.

Finally, this should perhaps allow us to reconceptualize adaptation. It's not due to something out there, but something in there. Biological organisms by and large aren't reacting to geological forces, but to other biological entities. This is what makes biology such a frustrating science when you're faced with the beauty and linearity of physics. The planets may move, but they move regularly. In contrast, as organisms trace evolutionary paths they exhibit chaotic creativity, responding to each other's dodges and jabs. Evolution is not a smooth gradual geological process, but a noisy and scattered perpetual re-oganization of living organisms again and again in kaleidoscopic patterns.

Well, that might be the reason so much of Darwinist evolutionary biology is a mess. On the other hand, it could be growing incoherence in the face of mounting disconfirmation. By 2011, they weren't even doing reigns of terror well any more.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Astronomers Find 18 New Planets: Discovery Is the Largest Collection of Confirmed Planets Around Stars More Massive Than the Sun" (ScienceDaily, Dec. 2, 2011) , we learn:

Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

"It's the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission," says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and the first author on the team's paper, which was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Kepler mission is a space telescope that has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though the majority of those have not yet been confirmed.

So many of them might not exist?

By searching the wobbly stars' spectra for Doppler shifts -- the lengthening and contracting of wavelengths due to motion away from and toward the observer -- the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter's.

Question: These planets are unlikely to support life, and no one has suggested they do. But what if we find 18,000 planets that don't support life and none that do? Would it be time for a revisit of the basic "They're Out There" hypothesis?

"They" may very well be out there. Or not. But at what point would we be justified in using cold analysis - as opposed to brave, faint hopes - to make a decision?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The title, The Moral Landscape, refers to a hypothetical space between the "heights of potential well-being" and "the deepest possible suffering." Harris advocates a form of utilitarianism (well-being as the goal), but his thinking seems confused. For example, at p. 62 he calls himself a "consequentialist," yet by p. 66, his sympathies lie with "moral realism." The two are incompatible in many circumstances: A consequentialist may say that one is justified in stealing from an unjust employer; a realist would say it was not justified to steal, period. In any event, well-being is, Harris says, "perpetually open to revision" due to new circumstances and findings. So Harris is a relativist after all.

Many atheists write good philosophy; Raymond Tallis and Thomas Nagel come to mind. But Harris, unfortunately, has not thought long, deeply, or broadly enough to be numbered among them.

For more, go here.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Life began with a planetary mega-organism" (New Scientist, 25 November 2011) Michael Marshall reports,

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was, of course, an RNA world, in which error control for proteins was poor. Nevertheless, it all worked because "It was more important to keep the living system in place than to compete with other systems." So the last universal common ancestor knew what ws important and had goals?

Behold the increasing velocity of the tailspin of current attempts to find/describe the last universal common ancestor

And tell us again: Why is James [Margulis collaborator] Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis off the wall if this isn't?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "The Roots of Violence: Scientists discover the earliest evidence of human-on-human aggression etched in an ancient skull." (The Scientist , November 23, 2011)'
Bob Grant reports,

A millennia-old human cranium from China bears the oldest documented marks of violence between humans, according to a team of researchers who studied the find. The skull, which is likely 150,000-200,000 years old, was discovered in a cave near Maba in southern China more than 40 years ago.

A projectile is suspected as the cause, and evident healing suggests that the victim lived for "weeks or months" after the attack. The researchers suggest that this

... may indicate the existence of care and support networks among ancient humans. "They hit each other, they squabbled, they had weaponry," Trinkaus said. "But at the same time, they were helping each other out."

Of course, it could have been an accident. That would, of course, explain the care provided to the victim.

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And it's not just the skull. In "Neanderthal Neuroscience" (Discover, November 14, 2011), Carl Zimmer reports,

ome of our genes have mutations also found in Neanderthals and Denisovans, but not in chimpanzees. They must have evolved into their current form between 5 million and 800,000 years ago. Other genes have mutations that are found only in the human genome, but not in those of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Paabo doesn't have a complete list yet, since he's only mapped half the Neanderthal genome, but the research so far suggests that the list of new features in the human genome will be short. There are only 78 unique human mutations that changed the structure of a protein. Paabo can't yet say what these mutations did to our ancestors. Some of the mutations alter the address labels of proteins, for example, which let cells know where to deliver a protein once they're created. Paabo and his colleagues have found that the Neanderthal and human versions of address labels don't change the delivery.

Other experiments Paabo and his colleagues have been running have offered more promising results. At the talk, Paabo described some of his latest work on a gene called FoxP2. Ten years ago, psychologists discovered that mutations to this gene can make it difficult for people to speak and understand language. (Here's a ten-year retrospective on FoxP2 I wrote last month in Discover.) Paabo and his colleagues have found that FoxP2 underwent a dramatic evolutionary change in our lineage. Most mammals have a practically identical version of the protein, but ours has two different amino acids (the building blocks of proteins).

The fact that humans are the only living animals capable of full-blown language, and the fact that this powerful language-linked gene evolved in the human lineage naturally fuels the imagination.

Doesn't it just? Coming right up, another episode for the world's longest-running soap opera, Us n' Them!

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In "Deep sea fishing for tuna began 42,000 years ago" (New Scientist 24 November 2011), Wendy Zukermanreports that the recent find blows evidence for fishing with hooks or spears arund 12,000 years ago "out of the water":

Sue O'Connor at the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues dug through deposits at the Jerimalai shelter in East Timor. They discovered 38,000 fish bones from 23 different taxa, including tuna and parrotfish that are found only in deep water. Radiocarbon dating revealed the earliest bones were 42,000 years old.

Also hooks.

By way of explanation, investigator Sue O'Connor observes that they really had to learn such skills:

"Apart from bats and rats, there's nothing to eat here."

Besides, sea levels were 60-70 m lower than today. But were they fishing from shore or watercraft? With luck, the group practiced ship burial, as at Sutton Hoo, and O'Connor's team will find the craft.

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In conversation with CNN's John Zarrella (November 22, 2011),

Every time we learn something new about the universe, what we learn is that our situation doesn't seem all that special. And that suggests that life is not all that special either.

Curious words coming from a man whose project of finding intelligent life outside of Earth has been rewarded with 100 per cent failure so far.

Some have wondered what the effect on ID would be of finding such life. Nothing in particular because the reasons for thinking that life - as we know it - is designed would apply wherever it is found.

Some of us do question current science media's handling of ET questions, an abysmal low point.
For example, how many hosts think of challenging Shostak's claim that "our situation doesn't seem all that special," in the light of known facts about Earth, his own zilch track record, and the failure of any research group so far to find exoplanets likely to host life?

The only reasonable conclusion one can draw from the evidence is that, for whatever reason, Earth is special. But if pop science media figures started drawing reasonable conclusions, they would probably collapse, leaving a void to be filled later by reality-based thinking. Won't be any time soon.

See also: Tom Bethell reflects on ET's no-show, and what it means for popular culture

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Best known for her theory of endosymbiosis. Here's one of her books on it.

A Discover interview with her earlier this year, and Suzan Mazur's interview.

Here's Michael Ruse in Chronicle of Higher Education.

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In "Nudge thyself" (Financial Times, November 18, 2011), a review of Robert Trivers' Deceit and Self-Deception, Steven Cave allows us to know that "Economists have more to learn from the natural sciences if they are to claim a realistic model of human behaviour." We make irrational choices, it seems. But do we?

The book is vast in scope, covering every aspect of our lives from sex to religion, family to war. But Trivers reserves particular ire for the failings of economic theory: it "acts like a science and quacks like one" he writes, but it is not one. Its key ideas are naive and circular: it assumes we make our choices as rational utility maximisers, for example. And what is utility? It is whatever we, in fact, choose. There is no room in such a theory for me to plan to buy a salad, then persuade myself when faced with the cheeseburger that it is the superior option ("just this once") only to regret it later. "Yet," he rages, "such is the detachment of this 'science' from reality that these contradictions arouse notice only when the entire world is hurtling into an economic depression based on corporate greed wedded to false economic theory."

Steady on. How did we decide that choosing fast food rather than health food is irrational? Forget the evolutionary psychology mumbo-jumbo about our alleged carnivore ancestors, who supposedly rule our desires today. Forget even the considerable evidence that the ancient human diet was varied, as we might reasonably expect. Let's just focus on the proposition itself for a moment:

If Double Fries With That honestly believes that this life is all there is and that - before he ceases to exist - he would rather be happy in the present moment than down the road, is that irrational? Why?

Of course, he might become a problem to others down the road if he gets sick, but that doesn't make his choice irrational - rather, selfish. Others might refuse to look after him, in the end - and he might just accept that, for the right to live as he pleases.

Back of Trivers' "rage" is a moral preference for self-discipline and prudence over self-indulgence and living for now. But Trivers has no basis for that morality; it is merely a preference he wishes to impose on a heedless world. Absent a transcendent frame of reference, his rage is mere prejudice against people who don't choose to live the way he wants.

One need hardly point out that a transcendent frame of reference is not equivalent to God. It could be the ancient Greek or Chinese philosophers' "good life" or "way of the gentleman." It is a value beyond this life, one to which Double Fries With That is urged to aspire because it is intrinsically better for a man than burying his face in grease and starch. To this conception of life, evolutionary psychology can add nothing but petulant demands for conformity without vision.

While Cave's review is generally laudatory, he acknowledges evolutionary psychology's defects:

Trivers would like to see economics rebuilt on new foundations: those of evolutionary biology. But many of his specific claims are far from solid. They suffer from the broader weakness of his discipline: that claims about the evolutionary usefulness of this or that trait are notoriously difficult to test and relatively little is known with certainty about our prehistoric past. Some of Trivers' theories, therefore, go far beyond the evidence – such as his claim that the rate at which new religions emerge is a function of the number of diseases in a given area. Perhaps Trivers, a grand old man of his field, can indulge himself in such speculations, safe in the knowledge that a generation of graduate students will earn their spurs trying to fill in the gaps.

Alternatively, they will learn why he rages so.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's an oldie (2007), but worth considering anyway: In "What happens when 50,000 spiders hunt together?" (Globe and Mail, Oct. 27, 2007), Elie Dolgin reports,

spider teamwork depends on the size of their dinner: They join together when faced with the larger prey of lowland rain forests, but go it alone at higher elevations, where insects are smaller.

"Being social and co-operating allows spiders to enter an ecological niche that's not available to solitary individuals," she says.

Social spiders live in self-contained nests that house up to 50,000 insects. Group living can enhance foraging success and provide better protection against strong rains and predators such as wasps, ants and praying mantises. But all this togetherness also leads to high rates of inbreeding, leaving colonies vulnerable to disease.

And there are exceptions to the rules that Prof. Avilés has observed. She has discovered one new social species living 1,800 metres above sea level - about 1,000 metres above where loners were thought to take over. Prey insects are smaller at this elevation, however, so the species lives in smaller groups than its lowland cousins.

Either spiders and insects are smarter than we think or (more likely) something in them is smarter than we think.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

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ARN correspondent

Nature thinks this paper could "rock quantum theory to its core": Excerpt:

"On a related, but more abstract note, the quantum state has the striking property of being an exponentially complicated object. Specifically, the number of real parameters needed to specify a quantum state is exponential in the number of systems n. This has a consequence for classical simulation of quantum systems. If a simulation is constrained by our assumptions – that is, if it must store in memory a state for a quantum system, with independent preparations assigned uncorrelated states – then it will need an amount of memory which is exponential in the number of quantum systems." - Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph, "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically"

Recalling the New Scientist editor who, acknowledging that the riddle of free will is unsolved, is convinced that there is no free will, due to the compete derminism of the universe: One asks, How could he know that, if it would be exponentially difficult to even specify a quantum system (which is not determinist anyway)?

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In "Eugenics as philanthropic 'best practice'" (Philanthropy Daily , November 14, 2011), William Schambera reflects

As I was pulling together the research for my recent Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed on philanthropic involvement in North Carolina's eugenic sterilization program — a program highlighted recently on Brian Williams' new TV program "Rock Center" — I was struck by this thought:

Were it not for the niggling little fact that it is now understood to be an utter moral abomination, eugenics would be touted today as one of American philanthropy's most significant and successful undertakings.

It had grand vision, minute organization, and backing from every enlightened sector of society. Eugenicists spoke the language of science and appealed very successfully to progressives.

Founded in 1910 as part of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, the ERO would be readily recognizable today as a full-service progressive think tank, with purposes ranging from scientific and policy research to public education and political advocacy. As the primary independently funded eugenics institution in America, it helped organize and train the vast cadre of professional experts whose job it was to "bring technical concepts and knowledge to bear" on the problem of defective protoplasm, and to make efficient, rational plans for its elimination.

The philanthropies that created the [Eugenics Record Office] were not only true to the progressive, root-causes philosophy, they also employed techniques that could be lifted directly from the pages of the most recent popular guide to "strategic grantmaking."

It certainly was, to judge from how thoroughly they penetrated society with the message that there are too many rabble and they are ruining everything.

But - in fairness - elites have always believed that from time immemorial. Which means that any time it is true is probably accidental, and we should not assume either that ours is the exceptional time or that any fact base has been created by their agreement in the matter.

We did a series of interviews with an author of a book on the culture that grew up around eugenics, here.

The sobering fact is that eugenics was not discredited as science until the aftermath of World War II, when its staggering cost was revealed. That's what it took to wake people up.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that the textbook showcased at the Scopes trial, featured in the new film Alleged, explicitly taught eugenics. Incidentally, one public sock puppet for eugenics was "Ada Jukes, mother of criminals," a regular feature of textbooks. The pseudonymous Mrs. Jukes appealed to the educated consensus because she appeared to demonstrate that criminality can be inherited, leading to "calls for compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and even euthanasia against the "unfit." One presumes that Ma Barker and Ma James - who promoted enough havoc in the early West - didn't count, because they were actually encouraging their sons' criminality. Materialist science - actual or pseudo - can't address that, so the hunt was on for the "criminal gene" instead.

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A Brazilian contact tells us that

Olavo de Carvalho, a very controversial and polemical Brazilian philosopher, living in auto-exile in the States now. He is not a fan of Charles Darwin, but thinks that he invented Intelligent Design.

=Contact adds, "I don't believe he has really understood ID." Probably not.

Hat tip: Pos-DarwinistaHat tip: Pos-Darwinista

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In "'Sweet spot' for life's chemistry found, scientists say," Irene Klotz reports, "Methanol discovery has implications for understanding where to look for life."

Methanol (wood alcohol), we are told, can trigger complex organic chemistry, so given that it didn't likely exist on early Earth, some researchers have sought it in space.

In other words, find the methanol and scientists believe you find the chemical pathways to life.

"Searching for methanol in various regions in space will tell researchers where to look for other complex organic molecules, which will eventually lead to the formation of life," astronomer Sachindev Shenoy, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News.

And some young stars do produce methanol.

Now that we have learned that complex, organic molecules lead eventually to the formation of life, we learn

"The clouds we're observing appear to harbor more favorable conditions for life than the pre-solar cloud from which our solar system formed. And there is life in our solar system," Amanda Cook, a post-doctoral research fellow at NASA Ames, told Discovery News. "The implication is that life may have an even easier time taking root, so to speak, in other parts of the galaxy."

So Earth has life even though our solar system doesn't meet these people's criterion, which proves that solar systems that do meet their criterion foster life more easily. Not that we have evidence or anything.

It's come to this.

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Here's the Abstract:

Problematic megafossils in Cambrian palaeosols of South Australia

Gregory J. Retallack

Article first published online: 15 NOV 2011

Palaeontology

Volume 54, Issue 6, pages 1223–1242, November 2011

Abstract: Red calcareous Middle Cambrian palaeosols from the upper Moodlatana Formation in the eastern Flinders Ranges of South Australia formed in well-drained subhumid floodplains and include a variety of problematic fossils. The fossils are preserved like trace fossil endichnia but do not appear to be traces of burrows or other animal movement. They are here regarded as remains of sessile organisms, comparable with fungi or plants living in place, and are formally named as palaeobotanical form genera under provisions of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Most common are slender (0.5–2 mm) branching filaments flanked by green-grey reduction haloes within the red matrix of palaeosol surface horizons (Prasinema gracile gen. et sp. nov.). Other axial structures (Prasinema nodosum and P. adunatum gen. et spp. nov.) are larger and show distinctive surface irregularities (short protuberances and irregular striations, respectively). The size and form of these filaments are most like rhizines of soil-crust lichens. Other evidence of life on land includes quilted spheroids (Erytholus globosus gen. et sp. nov.) and thallose impressions (Farghera sp. indet.), which may have been slime moulds and lichens, respectively. These distinctive fossils in Cambrian palaeosols represent communities comparable with modern biological soil crusts.

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

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It's the twentieth anniversary of Phillip Johnson's seminal Darwin on Trial and people are starting to remember the difference Johnson made. Even by 1991, many were getting restless. It wasn't just the solemn nonsense propounded in science journals in the name of the Beard. "Evolutionary psychology" was catching on, promising to explain everything, including stuff like why black people are less moral than white people. Not to worry, a different evolutionary psychologist, given a budget and a guarantee of publication in a respected journal - and scads of attention from the pop science press - can come up, we are sure, with reverse nonsense. (One psychologist actually made a good stab at that, but was fingered for fraud; we don't know if that paper was directly implicated.)

Anyway, in the midst of it all, a Berkeley law prof published a book examining the Darwinists' claims from a legal - not religious - perspective, and suddenly millions found the courage to say, yes, that's sort of what we were thinking too. But could never have so clearly explained it.

Here's the statement that may well have had the most effect:

"I do not think that the mind can serve two masters, and I am confident that whenever the attempt is made, naturalism in the end will be the true master and theism will have to abide by its dictates. If the blind watchmaker thesis is true, then naturalism deserves to rule, but I am addressing those who think the thesis is false, or at least are willing to consider the possibility that it may be false.

Such persons need to be willing to challenge false doctrines, not on the basis of prejudice or blind adherence to a tradition, but with clear-minded, reasoned arguments. They also need to be working on a positive understanding of a theistic view of reality, one that allows natural science to find its proper place as an important but not all-important part of the life of the mind." - Johnson P.E., Darwin on Trial, Second Edition, 1993, Inter Varsity Press, Illinois, p. 169

In the age of ASA and BioLogos, Johnson's words are good to keep in mind. Christians, for one thing, can feel free to leave the Word of the Beard and other religious matters to the Christian Darwinists. And just plain doubt.

When in doubt, doubt.

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An art exhibit at Princeton is called "Intelligent Design." Here's New Scientiston it:

This year contest organisers chose the theme "intelligent design" - a rubric they confess was intentionally picked to be provocative. The term, they decided, suggests a theme that can be interpreted broadly enough to encourage submissions from any number of fields. But given its wide use in attacks on the theory of evolution, contest organisers hope to push scientists to reclaim the term, and remind one another of all its other possible connotations: the intelligently designed product of a thoughtful engineer, or the clever new simulation from a creative computer scientist.

They can reclaim the term any time they want, except for one thing: Darwinism explicitly teaches that there is no design, intelligent or otherwise, that there is no mind, only a brain, and that what we think it beautiful is merely what helps spread our selfish genes. That view - strenuously promoted by New Scientist, is what actually stops them from reclaiming the term - not that one would expect arterati looking for a media buzz to think about it or care.

Here's PhysOrg.

Hat tip Creation-Evolution Headlines.

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From "Mid-Ocean Creatures Control Light to Avoid Becoming Snacks" (em>ScienceDaily, Nov. 10, 2011), we learn:

Transparency is the default state of both Japetella heathi, a bulbous, short-armed, 3-inch octopus, and Onychoteuthis banksii, a 5-inch squid found at these depths. Viewed from below against the light background, these animals are as invisible as they can be. Their eyes and guts, which are impossible to make clear, are instead reflective. But when hit with a flash of bluish light like that produced by headlight fish, they turn on skin pigments, called chromatophores, to become red in the blink of an eye.

Okay, headlight fish: A deep-sea fish with a luminescent patch on its head. It's a "bring your own light" environment.

During ship-board experiments over the Peru-Chile trench in 2010, Zylinski shined blue-filtered LED light on specimens of both creatures to watch them rapidly go from clear to opaque. When the light was removed, they immediately reverted to transparent. On a second research cruise in 2011 in the Sea of Cortez, Zylinski measured the reflectivity of the octopuses and found they reflected twice as much light in their transparent state as in the opaque state.

Amazing the way this stuff just happens to evolve in response to selective pressure.

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In "Happy Carl Sagan Day" (The Best Schools, November 12, 2011) James Barham offers to help us celebrate the late, great Carl Sagan (1934-1996), along with thousands of atheists and "skeptics":

Wait a minute. The great who?

If you are under the age of 40, it is unlikely you've ever heard of Carl Sagan (1934–1996). He was an astronomer at Cornell University, who enjoyed a brief hour of celebrity in the early 1980s with some pretty good popular science books and an interesting TV series called Cosmos. Maybe you can still catch the reruns on the Discovery Channel or someplace.

Today, though, he is mostly remembered for being lampooned as the guy who repeated the phrase "billions and billions of stars" at every opportunity with a special smarmy emphasis. I think it was supposed to be about putting all those late-20th-century folks who still thought the earth was at the center of the universe in their place.

They still cite the "billions and billions"TM schtick today, for the same purpose, usually without acknowledgement. Some persist in seeing the fact that Sagan was never elected to the national Academy of Sciences as due to envy. In his case, it's more likely that they realized that there just wasn't much science, as such, in what he was saying.

Sagan's greatest legacy is this: He cemented in popular media and culture the following assumptions about the relationship between "science" and "religion":

"Science" is about the presumed accidental nature of our universe. "Religion" is about the evidence for fine-tuning.

"Science" argues that if Earth is fine-tuned for life, there "must be" billions and billions of Earths out there, plus aliens galore. "Religion" points out that we have no single bit of evidence for any of them.

"Science" says most DNA is junk. "Religion" says, wait and see. We did, and guess what?

"Science" claims that apes will one day write autobiographies. "Religion" claims that there is no evidence of any such thing, and points to the low quality of the evidence that apes are just like people.

Sagan was hardly the pioneer in this area, but he played a key role in establishing that the "science" of popular media is mostly bunk directed at supporting atheism and that any evidence-based assessment of life in our cosmos is the province of "religion" where people tend to classify us.

Nice goin', dude. The UD News desk salutes ya!

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In "Behavioral Economics Foils an Obama Tax Cut?" (Bloomberg Businessweek November 10, 2011), Drake Bennett reports, "New research finds that a trendy economic theory backfired on the Obama Administration. Or did it?

In the past decade, this new set of ideas about economic behavior has gone from the margins of academia to the intellectual mainstream. In 2002 one of its godfathers, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the years since have seen a growing list of best-sellers (Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational) describing and drawing on its findings. Unlike neoclassical economists, behavioral economists don't see people as rational actors coolly weighing costs and benefits. Behaviorists argue instead that people rely on a set of instincts, biases, and cognitive shortcuts to make decisions, which often lead them to choices they come to regret. We save too little and spend too much, we stick with the status quo even when it costs us money, we avoid smart risks and take dumb ones.

You don't shop; your inner ape does.

In 2009 this theory held obvious appeal to the incoming Administration. If the country's ills were in part the result of poor financial decisions people made unconsciously, perhaps those problems could be fixed through behaviorally informed public policy. The Administration's first big legislative push, its stimulus bill, presented an opportunity to test some exciting new ideas on a national scale.

One of them was to give people tax rebates in dribs and drabs, instead of in lump sums, based on the behavioural economics theory:

A series of slightly bigger paychecks feels like an increase in income and is more likely to be spent.

(The government wished to encourage spending.)

That's not what happened in practice, according to Sahm, Slemrod, and Shapiro. In a study of the 2009 stimulus, based on 500 telephone interviews, the authors found that only 13 percent of Making Work Pay recipients reported that the tax credit would lead them to increase spending. This was just half of the 25 percent spend rate the researchers found for the traditional lump-sum tax rebate in President Bush's 2008 stimulus.

The reason the Making Work Pay program flopped is obvious: If a family gets a $750 cheque - and there is an outstanding need, like new laundry machines - they'll probably spend it on the new machines.

If, however, the money comes in dribs and drabs, they may not even notice it because it is not solving any obvious problem. They neither spent it nor saved it; they just lost track of it. No wonder they reported that they wouldn't increase spending on its account. This is not an instinct, a bias, or a cognitive shortcut; it's a reflection of the fact that only the very poor have the time to deal in small change.

The fact that no one even considered this possibility illustrates the problem with applying these new EP-driven theories to anything approaching reality.

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From our moral and intellectual superiors, no less.

From Granville Sewell's In the Beginning:

A recent (November 10, 2008) article in News at Princeton entitled "Evolution's New Wrinkle: Proteins with Cruise Control Provide New Perspective," reports on research by four Princeton scientists, published in a Physical Review Letters article:"

The experiments, conducted in Princeton's Frick Laboratory, focused on a complex of proteins located in the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. ... Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins' behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. ...

he authors sought to identify the underlying cause for this self-correcting behavior in the observed protein chains. Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues. ...

Chakrabarti said. "Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows."

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design,...

Oh, why not?

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From Metamorphosis, the companion book to the film ...

Monarchs that emerge in the spring or early summer live for about two to four weeks. But the generation that emerges in late August is genetically equipped to live up to nine months. It's called the "Methuselah Generation." This enables these tropical butterflies (that would die if exposed to the freezing winter temperatures of the Midwest and Canada) to migrate as far as 3,000 miles, to a small area of forest in the transvolcanic Mountains of central Mexico. There, the conditions are right to ensure the survival of the Monarchs until the spring.

In March, the Monarchs become sexually active for the first time. They mate and then begin their return migration north. When they reach southern Texas, the females lay their eggs (only on milkweed plants - the only food source their caterpillars will eat) and soon die. Throughout the summer months, new generations of Monarchs emerge and move north - living, again, between two and four weeks.

Then, in early September, a new Methuselah Generation - three or four generations removed from the Monarchs that migrated the previous year - travel from as far north as Canada to the same trees that provided sanctuary for their grandparents and great grandparents, the year before. (P. 22)

The navigational systems they use to reach a forest in Mexico that they have never seen weigh less than a quarter of an ounce.

Note: The issue here is not whether the Monarch's generational cycles require a miracle, but whether this whole pattern is at all likely to have arisen as a result of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism), as opposed to inbuilt design. Or something else altogether?

Darwinists are stuck at the level of "explaining" metamorphosis, the creature's total-destruction-recreation life cycle, never mind its community life, strictly as an outcome of their theory - natural selection acting on random mutations - and there they will remain.

See also: Granville Sewell on Metamorphosis

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In "The Smallest "Astronauts" Set for Launch November 8" (Scientific American, November 4, 2011), David Warmflash reports on a useful Russian experiment:

Did space rocks seed Earth with life? To test that idea, a Russian probe is about to see whether microbes can survive a round-trip to Mars

Could life on Earth have originated on Mars? over the past two decades that question has left the pages of science fiction and entered the mainstream of empirical science. Planetary scientists have found that rocks from Mars do make their way to Earth; in fact, we estimate that a ton of Martian material strikes our planet every year. Microorganisms might have come along for the ride.

Only a few meteors get here in a year or so, and the question is, could a microorganism survive the trip?

One creature to be tested is the animal, tardigrade (water bear), which can survive temperatures approaching absolute zero and above boiling point, as well as massive doses of radiation.

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At Telic Thoughts, Techne tells us that on "Fitness: A Battle is Raging" (November 5, 2011):

In an earlier post it was pointed out that John O. Reiss argues that the fitness landscape metaphor has teleological implications. If evolution is anything close to the metaphor then the process is fundamentally teleological.

The rigor of this approach, however, is lessened because there is as yet no universally agreed upon measure of fitness; fitness is either defined metaphorically, or defined only relative to the particular model or system used. It is fair to say that due to this lack, there is still no real agreement on what exactly the process of natural selection is. This is clearly a problem.

We're not sure whether any battle really is raging.

The obvious reason that there is "still no real agreement on what exactly the process of natural selection is" is that the case for Darwinism would then fall apart in the face of disconfirming evidence.

Here's what would go wrong: Let's say a Darwinist forthrightly declares that he sees no evidence for Dawkins's "selfish gene." Very well, he cannot then invoke selfish gene arguments in his own defense of Darwinism. It's better to avoid specifics, bellow that "evolution is fact, Fact, FACT," and refuse to debate the subject. That way his defenses can go in all directions at once, like a bee gathering nectar.

What possible fact base can dislodge such a strategy, given that it is accepted as legitimate?

But we'd love to be wrong.

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In "Surely by now we've outgrown the soul?" (The Independent , 16 October 2011), neuroscience PhD student Martha Robinson informs us,

Although no branch of scientific thought has all the answers, we have known for some time that there is no theoretical need to look outside of the human body for a explanation of the many and varied phenomena that we collectively refer to as 'consciousness'.

Apparently, she has not noticed the utter failure of materialist explanations to even get a handle on what the materialist would explain.

She writes as though the problem is that we are "afraid" that materialists would discover the secret of consciousness. Actually, most people are afraid of the cascade of nonsense we will be subjected to as they fail, decade after decade.

The nonsense, she concedes:

Neuroscience certainly hasn't done itself any favours in this argument. We've all read over-hyped and nonsensical reports in national newspapers about scientists discovering the neural location of love or the brain areas responsible for iPhone addiction. Even more accurate stories, exemplified by the recent fantastic work by Professor Mintz's lab in Tel Aviv, tend to be over-sold: while amazing, replacing one functional loop does not an 'artificial cerebellum' make. This kind of 'neurotrash' allows eminent fuzzy-dualists like Ray Tallis to bandy around accusations of 'Neuromania' with some credibility – which is then used to shore-up the rejection of any and all scientific approaches to the explanation of human consciousness. To do this is to wastefully throw the baby of good science out with the sensationalist bathwater.

Hey, just a minute!

Martha Robinson, we don't have any reason to believe that a "baby of good science" exists in this case. They faked up the pregnancy. That's how the situation came to be overwhelmed in the media by nonsense.

When good science is being done, there is a distant pop pop fizz fizz of nonsense in the background (NASA is hiding space aliens, cell phones cause cancer ... ) but it does not dominate. It dominates where science has lost its way.

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Caroline Crocker at AITSE is interviewed at BestSchools.org:

I began to entertain "politically incorrect views" while I was studying for my PhD. Basically, I did not see how evolution by random mutation and natural selection could lead to the kind of intricate nanotechnology that I was seeing inside a cell. Aspects of evolutionary theory conflicted with what I knew of science. I've heard people say that eventually we will figure out how mistakes in copying lead to increased information, but that belief takes more faith than I have. I think that it might make more sense to just evaluate the scientific evidence and follow where it leads rather than try to fit the new evidence about the copious amounts of information found in cells into a theory that was suggested over 150 years ago when cells were thought to be simple blobs of protoplasm.

When I began to teach, I noticed that the assigned textbooks were written in a way so as to encourage students to memorize, rather than critically assess, some of the information. I did not think this practice would lead to their success in future biology classes nor in their chosen careers in science. Therefore, in keeping with Yale recommendations on teaching controversial subjects, my habit was to teach students "not to argue from authority and to link their claims and assertions to appropriate evidence whenever possible."

For example, when teaching about the function of steroids in cellular communication, I had the students go beyond the text and encouraged them to speculate on the possible side effects of hydrocortisone. In the same way, in the single cell biology lecture where I presented the information the textbook provided on evolution and the origin of life, I suggested that the students critically assess the claims made. I asked questions like, "Is microevolution is a legitimate 'proof' of macroevolution?" or "How much does the synthesis of a racemic mixture of individual amino acids in a closed system add to a discussion of the origin of life?" I encouraged them to think about what they were being taught, making it clear that disagreeing with the professor was okay—provided they backed their opinions up with science. The students enjoyed this method of teaching and clamored to get into my classes. Their letters can be found in my book Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters.

My first inkling of trouble was the day that my supervisor called me into his office and told me that I was going to be disciplined for allegedly "teaching creationism."

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From "City Lights Could Reveal E.T. Civilization" (ScienceDaily, Nov. 3, 2011), we learn:

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner (Princeton University) suggest a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights. "Looking for alien cities would be a long shot, but wouldn't require extra resources. And if we succeed, it would change our perception of our place in the universe," said Loeb.

Yes! Just think! Someone else to blame for electricity waste, as in "THEY is worse than Us."

As with other SETI methods, they rely on the assumption that aliens would use Earth-like technologies. This is reasonable because any intelligent life that evolved in the light from its nearest star is likely to have artificial illumination that switches on during the hours of darkness.

Unless, of course, eyes never evolved on that planet ...

In that context, see this story by H. G.Wells, about a sighted man who thought he could rule over a society in which everyone else was blind. It didn't work out because the society was adapted to sightlessness and people assumed he was delusional when he claimed to "see" stuff - just like Madame Baloney claiming to "see" the future.

Hey look, it's Saturday morning, folks. Serious science news later.

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In "Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" (New York Review of Books,
November 24, 2011), Anthony Grafton reviews a number of "what's wrong with universities" books, one of which offers some genuinely interesting information:

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Take that, world of ideas.

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From "'Saber-Toothed Squirrel': First Known Mammalian Skull from Late Cretaceous in South America" (ScienceDaily, Nov. 2, 2011), we learn:

Paleontologist Guillermo Rougier, Ph.D., professor of anatomical sciences and neurobiology at the University of Louisville, and his team have reported their discovery of two skulls from the first known mammal of the early Late Cretaceous period of South America. The fossils break a roughly 60 million-year gap in the currently known mammalian record of the continent and provide new clues on the early evolution of mammals.

Cronopio was shrew-sized, about 4-6 inches in length, and was an insectivore with a diet of the insects, grubs and other bugs of the time. It lived when giant dinosaurs roamed Earth -- more than 100 million years ago -- and made its home in a vegetated river plain.

The skulls reveal that Cronopio had extremely long canine teeth, a narrow muzzle and a short, rounded skull. "These first fossil remains of dryolestoids … give us a complete picture of the skull for the group," John R. Wible, Ph.D., curator of mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said. "The new dryolestoid, Cronopio, is without a doubt one of the most unusual mammals that I have seen, extinct or living, with its elongate, compressed snout and oversized canine teeth. What it did with that unusual morphology perhaps may come to light with additional discoveries… ."

The squirrel moniker comes from Skrat, a "sabre-toothed" squirrel in Ice Age, in case you wondered. One somehow doubts Cronopio had many squirrelly habits.

A reader writes to say:

And interesting aspect that was omitted from ScienceDaily and mentioned in Nature was the unexpected fact that Cronopio is highly specialized. The ArsTechnica article put it this way:

Although Cronopio is older than other South American dryolestoids, it is far more specialized. Researchers are still working to put this new find in its proper ecological and historical context.

In other words, file this under "Evolutionary prediction falsified. More complex than thought. Stand by for postulation of ghost lineages."

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Here:

Abstract

Fossilized compound eyes from the Cambrian, isolated and three-dimensionally preserved, provide remarkable insights into the lifestyle and habitat of their owners.

The tiny stalked compound eyes described here probably possessed too few facets to form a proper image, but they represent a sophisticated system for detecting moving objects.

The eyes are preserved as almost solid, mace-shaped blocks of phosphate, in which the original positions of the rhabdoms in one specimen are retained as deep cavities. Analysis of the optical axes reveals four visual areas, each with different properties in acuity of vision. They are surveyed by lenses directed forwards, laterally, backwards and inwards, respectively. The most intriguing of these is the putatively inwardly orientated zone, where the optical axes, like those orientated to the front, interfere with axes of the other eye of the contralateral side.

The result is a three-dimensional visual net that covers not only the front, but extends also far laterally to either side. Thus, a moving object could be perceived by a two-dimensional coordinate (which is formed by two axes of those facets, one of the left and one of the right eye, which are orientated towards the moving object) in a wide three-dimensional space.

This compound eye system enables small arthropods equipped with an eye of low acuity to estimate velocity, size or distance of possible food items efficiently. The eyes are interpreted as having been derived from individuals of the early crustacean Henningsmoenicaris scutula pointing to the existence of highly efficiently developed eyes in the early evolutionary lineage leading towards the modern Crustacea.

So where are those really simple eyes that just sort of happened by accident back then?

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"Children, Not Chimps, Prefer Collaboration: Humans Like to Work Together in Solving Tasks -- Chimps Don't" (ScienceDaily, Oct. 13, 2011), we learn:
He said it: On origin of life, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem

In one sense the origin of life problem today remains what it was in the time of Darwin -- one of the great unsolved riddles of science. Yet we have made progress. Through theoretical scrutiny and experimental effort since the nineteen-twenties many of the early naive assumptions have fallen or are falling aside -- and there now exist alternative theories. In short, while we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.

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In "How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code" (New York Times, October 24, 2011), John Markoff reports on the world's toughest codes and the design inferences used to crack them, most notably the 18th-century German Copiale cipher:

Uncertain of the original language, the researchers went down several blind alleys before following their hunches. First, they assumed the Roman characters and not the abstract symbols contained all of the information.

Eventually they concluded that the Roman letters were so-called nulls, meant to mislead the code breaker, and that the letters represented spaces between words made up of elaborate symbols. Another crucial discovery was that a colon indicated the doubling of the previous consonant.

Some codes have never been cracked.

But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world's best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.

But maybe not. What makes code-breaking so difficult is that the guy who wrote it may be smarter than the cryptographers.

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In "From the Cave to the Kennel" (Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2011, Mark Derr offers a somewhat contrarian history of the dog:

But it was never clear, in this old account, just how we got from the scavenging wolf to the remarkable spectrum of dogs who have existed over time, from fell beasts trained to terrorize and kill people to creatures so timid that they flee their own shadows. The standard explanation was that once the dump-diver became a dog, humans took charge of its evolution through selective breeding, choosing those with desired traits and culling those who came up short.

The DNA evidence remained controversial for years, even as most major studies placed the genetic separation of wolf and dog at earlier dates than those favored by archaeologists. Hard proof was slow to appear

This account is now falling apart in the face of new genetic analyses and recently discovered fossils. The emerging story sees humans and proto-dogs evolving together: We chose them, to be sure, but they chose us too, and our shared characteristics may well account for our seemingly unshakable mutual intimacy./blockquote>

All of this suggests that it was common for highly socialized wolves and people to form alliances. It also leads logically to the conclusion that the first dogs were born on the move with bands of hunter-gatherers—not around semi-permanent pre-agricultural settlements. This may explain why it has proven so difficult to identify a time and place of domestication.

Born on the move? Some of us have seen old film footage from the 1930s of Canadian Eskimo dogs born while their moms were in harness, and picked by children, deposited on the sledge.

The new account has the real advantage that it doesn't try to explain why people started out by putting up with vicious curs. They didn't.

This guy's book might be a great Christmas present.

Hat tip Creation-Evolution Headlines.

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From "Culture in Humans and Apes Has the Same Evolutionary Roots, Researchers Show"
(ScienceDaily, Oct. 20, 2011), we learn: something that no one would have imagined, that orangs have culture just like people.

About ten years ago, biologists who had been observing great apes in the wild reported a geographic variation of behavior patterns that could only have come about through the cultural transmission of innovations, much like in humans. The observation triggered an intense debate among scientists that is still ongoing. To this day, it is still disputed whether the geographical variation in behavior is culturally driven or the result of genetic factors and environmental influences.

There is probably about as much difference between the behaviour of urban and rural squirrels, that offspring learn from their dams, but you wouldn't get away with calling it culture.

See also: Great apes think ahead: Conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities Then why doesn't it ever amount to much? And here we thought one Marc Hauser was enough.

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From "Land Animals, Ecosystems Walloped After Permian Dieoff" ( ScienceDaily, Oct. 25, 2011), we learn:

The researchers examined nearly 8,600 specimens, from near the end of the Permian to the middle Triassic, roughly 260 million to 242 million years ago. The fossils came from sites in the southern Ural Mountains of Russia and from the Karoo Basin in South Africa. The specimen count and analysis indicated that approximately 78 percent of land-based vertebrate genera perished in the end-Permian mass extinction. Out of the rubble emerged just a few species, the disaster taxa. One of these was Lystrosaurus, a dicynodont synapsid (related to mammals) about the size of a German shepherd. This creature barely registered during the Permian but dominated the ecosystem following the end-Permian extinction, the fossil record showed.

Why Lystrosaurus survived the cataclysm when most others did not is a mystery, perhaps a combination of luck and not being picky about what it ate or where it lived. Similarly, a reptilian taxon, procolophonids, were mostly absent leading to the end-Permian extinction, yet exploded onto the scene afterward.

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Here Klinghoffer muses,

I will never forget my personal experience with a journalist who often writes for The New Republic. In an email exchange he chastised me for thinking the universe was created a mere 6,000 years ago. He assumed that was the main issue for intelligent design advocates. I explained to him that wasn't the case and that I'm not a YEC, that intelligent design assumes a universe more than 13 billion years old and a history of life going back more than 3 billion.

Not long after, he criticized me again on the very same point, for believing in a 6,000-year-old world. I don't think he believed that I was lying in my previous email to him. He just could not surrender a plank in the platform of his own ignorance: The belief that this is all fight about whether in riding around on dinosaurs, cavemen went bareback or opted for more of a western saddle. He had that audio loop playing over and over in his head. He couldn't hear a thing I said.

No, David, and he won't, and his publication will go under before he does.

Here's what 40 years in the field have taught me: The journalist doesn't want to know things, he wants to know better than you. Let's say, for example, you can't understand why the school taxes are so high and rising, when standardized testing shows that math and science performance numbers (best indicators of later jobs) are in the toilet - internationally. Slovakia is better'n you.

The journalist doesn't care about that. What he cares about is that the head of admin is shacked up with the mayor, and enjoying a $300,000 salary for helping others rip off. His paper won't let him write about it because they are supporting the mayor for re-election, and generally support the head of admin's no-tests, no homework policy. They can always find scantily clad high school girls to pose in favour of no effort at school, and an earnest social worker to back them up.

You take the journalist out and buy him a few, and he will admit all this. But then nothing follows.

So the only useful information he could provide you is, generally, stuff you could have figured out for yourself - if it mattered. For example, if the mayor and the head of school board admin aren't shacked up, they may as well be for all the difference it makes that your district performs worse than Peru, spending twenty times as much and planning to spend more.

Okay, how does it relate to ID? David, what on earth would cause a fellow like that to actually think that facts mattered? (Other than who's sleeping with whom, the only fact he knows that you probably didn't.) A lightning bolt? A heart attack? Armageddon? I'm out of ideas here, and have to go back to my day job real soon.

We are the new media. He isn't.

Note:: Christian journalists are no better, but that is a horrible story for another day: The betrayal of civil rights in English-speaking democracies.

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Remember that dude from over 5000 years ago found encased in ice in the Austrian Alps? The Iceman melts here, an apparent murder victim:

The autopsy results have also rewritten the story of the Iceman's final moments. The neuroscientists determined that blood had indeed accumulated at the back of the Iceman's brain, suggesting some sort of trauma—either from falling on his face from the force of the arrow, Zink speculated, or perhaps from a coup de grâce administered by his assailant. DNA analysis of the final meal is ongoing, but one thing is already clear: It was greasy. Initial tests indicate the presence of fatty, baconlike meat of a kind of wild goat called an alpine ibex. "He really must have had a heavy meal at the end," Zink said—a fact that undermines the notion that he was fleeing in fear. Instead, it appears he was resting in a spot protected from the wind, tranquilly digesting his meal, unaware of the danger he was in.

And of course, unaware of the intense attention awaiting him far in the future. The Iceman might be the most exposed and invaded person who ever walked the planet. "There were moments yesterday," Zink said in a soft, almost surprised voice, "when you felt sorry for him. He was so … explored. All his secrets—inside him, outside him, all around him—were open to exploration." He paused and added, "Only the arrowhead remains inside him, as if he's saying, This is my last secret."

Maybe. They said that before they found the arrowhead.

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In "Evidence of earliest oxygen-breathing life on land found" (MSNBC, October 25, 2011), Wynne Parry reports on those bacteria who process stuff from mine wastewater , "Analysis indicates earliest estimate to date for Great Oxidation Event — 2.48 billion years ago" Of course, it's probably not the "earliest" evidence, just the earliest we've found. From Parrym we learn,

For this study, the researchers performed more than 2,000 analyses on samples from more than 100 rock formations, including those called banded iron formations, located around the world, from Canada to South Africa.

Life did exist at the point when chromium levels increased, but it was simple; single cells had yet to come together and begin cooperating as multicellular life forms.

There probably wasn't much to cooperate about: They were all doing the same thing. Today, we would describe it as eating mine tailings. Great photo of a banded iron formation.

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In "X-Men Ethics Class: Why Help the Weak If It Thwarts Evolution?" (Salvo 18 (Autumn 2011), Cameron Wybrow teases out the struggle over Darwinian morality that provides an underlying theme for the series, including this summer's "cream of the crop" instalment, X-Men First Class:

For our purposes here, it is more important to focus on what the X-Men stories get right about Darwinian evolution. While they grossly exaggerate its power and its speed, they portray its general character bang-on. And this is where they lead us to clarity in discussions of "evolutionary ethics."

According to Darwinian theory, new species emerge when mutations produce individuals who can outperform the stock they came from, with the result that, eventually, the mutant stock replaces the original. Thus, the intermediate creatures between the bat and the primitive insectivores are all extinct, because the modern bat is more fit for its flying environment than were any of them.

The bat has no pity for the failed creatures from the earlier stages of its evolution that were not good enough to survive. Nor, on Darwinian premises, should it. Nature decides, in its cold and pitiless way, who will live and who will die, and which species will thrive and which become extinct. It is pointless and ethically irrelevant to question nature's decisions.

Ironically, when we come to analyze the positions of Professor X, the hero, and of Magneto, the villain, we are led to the curious conclusion that Magneto is philosophically the more coherent of the two, because he is actually more in tune with the pure logic of Darwinism. This becomes clear if we consider the positions of two real-life writers on evolution and ethics, Richard Dawkins and Larry Arnhart. ...

More.

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In "Planet-forming disk could create thousands of oceans" (TG Daily October 21, 2011), Kate Taylor reports,

Astronomers have discovered an embryonic solar system surrounded by a cloud of water vapor that could eventually form comets and deliver oceans to dry worlds.

The star TW Hydrae, 176 light years away in the constellation Hydra, is surrounded by enough water to fill Earth's oceans thousands of times over.

Which means:

"This tells us that the key materials that life needs are present in a system before planets are born," says University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin, a HIFI co-investigator.

One wonders, if many phenomena like this turn up, but life is not detected, would that set of circumstances be taken to mean anything?

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "New Evidence for the Oldest Oxygen-Breathing Life On Land"
(ScienceDaily, Oct. 19, 2011), we learn:

New University of Alberta research shows the first evidence that the first oxygen-breathing bacteria occupied and thrived on land 100 million years earlier than previously thought. The researchers show that the most primitive form of aerobic-respiring life on land came into existence 2.48 billion years ago.

"We suggest that the jump in chromium levels was triggered by the oxidation of the mineral pyrite (fool's gold) on land," said Konhauser.

The researchers say the modern analogue for that first primitive oxygen-dependent life form on Earth is still with us.

"The same bacterial life forms are alive and well today, living off pyrite and settling in the highly acidic waste waters of mining sites the world over," said Konhauser.

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In "Chatbots fail to convince judges that they're human," (New Scientist, 20 October 2011), Paul Marks recounts his experiences as a judge in Turing tests:

A chatbot called Rosette won the $4000 annual Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter yesterday - but once again none of the four chatbots that were competing managed to convince any of the judges that they were human.

After computer pioneer Alan Turing in 1950 posited the notion that machines might one day be thought of as "thinking", the competition attempts to find a computer program whose chat responses are indistinguishable from a human's. They are nowhere near it.

Not what was confidently predicted by consensus science two decades ago.

Every year since 1991, the prize's founder, Hugh Loebner, has asked four judges to sit at computer terminals where they can talk to a both a human (who's hiding in another room) and a chatbot - but they are not told which is which. It's up to the judges to decide which is the person and which is the software and then rate the chatbots on how good they are at human mimicry. A chatbot has only seemed more human than a human once in the competition's history - but that, says Loebner, only occured when one human volunteer decided to behave like an early chatbot, skewing the results.

So not only can't machines stand in for humans, but - it gets worse - humans can mess up things trying to stand in for machines.

The trouble with machines is, they can't sound brainless enough to stand in for a certain type of seat-beside-you bus passenger who wants you to know all what's wrong with her hair, her clothes, her landlord, her dog, her job, and her boyfriend. And leaves you wondering, "Is the brain really an illusion?"

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In "Bridging the Gap" (Caltech, 10/10/11), we learn: "Caltech Neuroscientists Find Normal Brain Communication in People Who Lack Connections Between Right and Left Hemispheres." Not in itself a new find, by any means.

PASADENA, Calif.—Like a bridge that spans a river to connect two major metropolises, the corpus callosum is the main conduit for information flowing between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that people who are born without that link—a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, or AgCC—still show remarkably normal communication across the gap between the two halves of their brains.

Many have heard about Roger Sperry's work with people whose brains were split to control life-threatening epilepsy, whose left hand really didn't know that their right hand was doing. But the Caltech researchers studied people who had never had a functional corpus callosum, from the time of embryogenesis:

"This was a real surprise," says Tyszka. "We expected to see a lot less coupling between the left and right brain in this group—after all, they are missing about 200 million connections that would normally be there. How do they manage to have normal communication between the left and right sides of the brain without the corpus callosum?"

What may have happened is that, never having been able to connect via the CC, the two halves of the brain simply use existing communication channels more intensely, to stay connected. By contrast, Sperry's split-brain subjects brains had adapted to communicating through the CC, but then it was severed. Thre is a practical side to this research:

"We are now examining AgCC subjects who are also on the autism spectrum, in order to gain insights about the role of brain connectivity in autism, as well as in healthy social interactions," says Tyszka. "About a third of people with AgCC also have autism, and altered connectivity in the corpus callosum has been found in autism. The remarkable compensation in brain functional networks that we found here may thus have important implications also for understanding the function of the brains of people with autism."

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In "New Genes, New Brain" (The Scientist , October 19, 2011), Cristina Luiggi reports,

The evolution of the human brain may have been driven by a group of novel genes that arose fairly recently in primate evolution.

A bevy of genes known to be active during human fetal and infant development first appeared at the same time that the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain associated with human intelligence and personality—took shape in primates, a new study published yesterday (October 18) in PLoS Biology found. The timing suggests that the new genes may have been intimately tied to the evolution of the human brain.

Previous research focused on older genes conserved across the animal kingdom, looking at new genes is hoped to provide insight. Like:

"We were very shocked that there were that many new genes that were upregulated in this part of the brain," said Long, who added that he was also taken aback by synchronicity of the origin of the genes and the development of novel brain structures. It seems that around the same time that the neocortex and the prefrontal cortex arose, and then expanded in humans, a large collection of genes also popped up.

That's something the old genes were never going to tell researchers.

It feels like a rollout of some kind, no?

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Bridging the Gap" (Caltech, 10/10/11), we learn: "Caltech Neuroscientists Find Normal Brain Communication in People Who Lack Connections Between Right and Left Hemispheres." Not in itself a new find, by any means.

PASADENA, Calif.—Like a bridge that spans a river to connect two major metropolises, the corpus callosum is the main conduit for information flowing between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that people who are born without that link—a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, or AgCC—still show remarkably normal communication across the gap between the two halves of their brains.

Many have heard about Roger Sperry's work with people whose brains were split to control life-threatening epilepsy, whose left hand really didn't know that their right hand was doing. But the Caltech researchers studied people who had never had a functional corpus callosum, from the time of embryogenesis:

"This was a real surprise," says Tyszka. "We expected to see a lot less coupling between the left and right brain in this group—after all, they are missing about 200 million connections that would normally be there. How do they manage to have normal communication between the left and right sides of the brain without the corpus callosum?”

What may have happened is that, never having been able to connect via the CC, the two halves of the brain simply use existing communication channels more intensely, to stay connected. By contrast, Sperry's split-brain subjects brains had adapted to communicating through the CC, but then it was severed. There is a practical side to this research:

"We are now examining AgCC subjects who are also on the autism spectrum, in order to gain insights about the role of brain connectivity in autism, as well as in healthy social interactions," says Tyszka. "About a third of people with AgCC also have autism, and altered connectivity in the corpus callosum has been found in autism. The remarkable compensation in brain functional networks that we found here may thus have important implications also for understanding the function of the brains of people with autism."

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In "Neutrino watch: Speed claim baffles CERN theoryfest" ( New Scientist, October 2011), Lisa Grossman reports,

Even a meeting of elite minds at Europe's top particle physics lab couldn't do it: reconciling neutrinos that appear to break the cosmic speed limit with the laws of physics is still beyond us. However, a paper on the speeding neutrinos has been accepted for publication and the first preliminary results from a comparable experiment are out.

"For the moment, there is no explanation that works," says physicist Ignatios Antoniadis, who helped to organise the meeting at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, last Friday.

Papers are in progress, offering various perspectives.

Relax guys. It just means physics is a science. After all, Unlike Darwin, Einstein can be wrong. We have confidence in you because you are not trying to claim that the old egghead had foreseen and allowed for stuff he wouldn't have imagined.

Can we say that any discipline whose iconic figure can’t be wrong should be reclassified as a religion? Thoughts?

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And the implications for our view of life and its origins

You can watch Don Johnson's Programming of Life vid here free. Here's a synopsis.

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In "Perfect fossil could be most complete dinosaur ever"(New Scientist, 13 October 2011). Jeff Hecht tells us,

Although Chinese bird and dinosaur fossils are famed for delicate details such as their feathers, they don't match this 72-centimetre-long theropod in terms of clarity and completeness of preservation.

98% of the skeleton has been preserved.

A friend of Uncommon Descent offers a detail gleaned from the German report (fossil wasfound in Bavaria): "This one comes complete with skin. Actually discovered two years ago, but kept quiet to avoid thievery."* You’ll see why.

Here's the dino under UV light.

* The wily researchers may have been thinking of a curious incident in the afterlife of famous fossil Flores Man. (Search on "suitcase"), as in: the container in which the fossil left the site one day ....

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Yeah, one of those types. Alfalfa Sprouts Man. Still extant, unfortunately, in any caf infested by health nuts.

From "New Technologies Challenge Old Ideas About Early Hominid Diets" (ScienceDaily, Oct. 14, 2011), we learn:

By analyzing microscopic pits and scratches on hominid teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in teeth, researchers are getting a very different picture of the diet habitats of early hominids than that painted by the physical structure of the skull, jawbones and teeth. While some early hominids sported powerful jaws and large molars -- including Paranthropus boisei, dubbed "Nutcracker Man" -- they may have cracked nuts rarely if at all, said CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, study co-author.

Well, it's awful hard on the teeth, and there were no dentists back then.

The results for teeth from Paranthropus boisei, published earlier this year, indicated they were eating foods from the so-called C4 photosynthetic pathway, which points to consumption of grasses and sedges.

Like we said.

The analysis stands in contrast to our closest human relatives like chimpanzees and gorillas that eat foods from the so-called C3 synthetic pathway pointing to a diet that included trees, shrubs and bushes.

Crikey! Can we see the grass menu again?

"The bottom line is that our old answers about hominid diets are no longer sufficient, and we really need to start looking in directions that would have been considered crazy even a decade ago," Sponheimer said. "We also see much more evidence of dietary variability among our hominid kin than was previously appreciated. Consequently, the whole notion of hominid diet is really problematic, as different species may have consumed fundamentally different things."

Some of us have wondered why so little attention is given to eating fish. Fish can often be trapped quite simply, and shellfish can merely be gathered. And it's equal opportunity, as between men, women, and children.

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Dwarfs the Lascaux caves (30,000 mya) for antiquity.

In "Ancient 'paint factory' unearthed" (BBC News, October 13, 2011), Jonathan Amos reports

The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.

The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste - everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.

It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors' complexity of thought.

And at Nature, Zoe Corbyn tells us of "African cave's ancient ochre lab: Find suggests that Stone Age sophistication extends further back than thought." (13 October 2011):

Previous evidence, such as shell beads, ochre engravings and ancient glue from various middle Stone Age sites, indicates that humans had evolved complex cognition by between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago. Henshilwood's finding stretches that further.

It also provides the earliest evidence for the use of containers, pre-dating previous examples by 40,000 years, says Henshilwood. The abalone shells' respiratory holes would probably have been plugged to contain the liquid mixture.

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In "From Blue Whales to Earthworms, a Common Mechanism Gives Shape to Living Beings" (ScienceDaily, (Oct. 13, 2011), we learn how the embryo gets organized, hourby hour, in two days:

Very specific genes, known as "Hox," are involved in this process. Responsible for the formation of limbs and the spinal column, they have a remarkable characteristic. "Hox genes are situated one exactly after the other on the DNA strand, in four groups. First the neck, then the thorax, then the lumbar, and so on," explains Duboule. "This unique arrangement inevitably had to play a role."

The process is astonishingly simple. In the embryo's first moments, the Hox genes are dormant, packaged like a spool of wound yarn on the DNA. When the time is right, the strand begins to unwind. When the embryo begins to form the upper levels, the genes encoding the formation of cervical vertebrae come off the spool and become activated. Then it is the thoracic vertebrae's turn, and so on down to the tailbone. The DNA strand acts a bit like an old-fashioned computer punchcard, delivering specific instructions as it progressively goes through the machine.

"A new gene comes out of the spool every ninety minutes, which corresponds to the time needed for a new layer of the embryo to be built," explains Duboule. "It takes two days for the strand to completely unwind; this is the same time that's needed for all the layers of the embryo to be completed."
This system is the first "mechanical" clock ever discovered in genetics. And it explains why the system is so remarkably precise.

And just think, it all happened by natural selection acting on random mutations, ... Well, let's just say it would be illegal to introduce, in American or British schools, any kind of doubt that that's the origin of the mechanism.

Also:

The Hox clock is a demonstration of the extraordinary complexity of evolution. One notable property of the mechanism is its extreme stability, explains Duboule. "Circadian or menstrual clocks involve complex chemistry. They can thus adapt to changing contexts, but in a general sense are fairly imprecise. The mechanism that we have discovered must be infinitely more stable and precise. Even the smallest change would end up leading to the emergence of a new species."

Ah yes, there's the ritual kowtow to Darwin ("who changed everything, greater than Copernicus" - E.O. Wilson), although in this case, the PR writers daren't be explicit.

In reality, "Even the smallest change would end up leading to the ... " death of the embryo.

The real lesson here is the importance of model. Embryo development must be precise, like a clock, and not randomly mutated due to the chances of chemistry.

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In "Megavirus May Be Stripped-Down Version of Normal Cell" (Wired,
October 11, 2011), John Timmer/Ars Technica discusses the view that the recently discovered megavirus is a former cell:

Giant viruses, its authors argue, have all these genes normally associated with cells because, in their distant evolutionary past, they were once cells.

Mimivirus was discovered in an amoeba, so the authors of the new paper used a simple technique to look for its relatives: take three different species of amoeba, expose them to a variety of environmental samples, and see if anything big starts growing in them. They hit pay dirt with a sample obtained from an ocean monitoring station just off the coast of Chile. Despite the oceanic source, the virus grew nicely in fresh water amoebae. The site also gave the virus its name: Megavirus chilensis.

The authors followed its lifestyle, showing that it behaved much like Mimivirus, forming similar structures within its host cell that could only be distinguished using electron microscopy. They also sequenced its entire genome, which turned out to be the largest virus genome yet completed: 1.26 million base pairs of DNA (Megabases). For decades, viruses were not regarded as a form of life, but that may need revisiting.

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In "Tiny fossil teeth re-write rodent record" (BBC News , 12 October 2011), Jonathan Amos reports on the oldest fossil rodents found so far (at 41 mya), pushing back rodents by 10 million years. The curious thing is that while the rodent was found in Peru,

the shape of the teeth and other factors point to the ancient animals being most closely related to African rodents.

"That maybe sounds like a fantastic tale, but in fact we do see things like this happening today. You can get big logjams of vegetation that get pushed out of rivers during storms, and often you will see mammals on them.

Okay, now all we need is to see that these raft do not break up before they cross the Atlantic about half the distance between continents as today. Wait:

"The odds of them making this crossing are obviously very low, but after millions and millions of years the odds of some animals making it go up considerably.

But this is magic numbers thinking. If, for example, you look hard among Indian yogi, you may find someone who can hold his breath for 15 minutes. You wont find someone who can hold it for 24 hours. Big numbers cannot conjure a way through a brick wall.

The raft idea is worth airing, if only for the creative thinking value. But consider:

Pumice rafts "floating laboratories" for early life.

Crocodiles swam to North America?

If it's aired too often, many will come to believe, in the notorious phrase, that it "must have" happened.

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In "A Tight Fit — Evolution and the Armadillo's Shell" (Wired, October 7, 2011),
Brian Switek reports,

Naturalists are still learning evolutionary lessons from armadillos. In a paper recently published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, biologists Mariella Superina and W. J. Loughry considered the ways in which the evolution of a tough carapace among armadillos shaped their evolution and lifestyle. What are the consequences, Superina and Loughry wonder, of being an armored mammal?

The armor which covers the 21 known species of extant armadillos is a combination of bone plates with tough, overlapping scutes. (Among the modern species is the pink fairy armadillo — Chlamyphorus truncatus — simultaneously one of the strangest and cutest mammals I have ever seen.) Contrary to what you might expect, though, we don't really know whether the armor provides any benefit as a defense against predators. The armor probably protects armadillos from abrasion by vegetation and their burrowing activities, and parasites have fewer spots to latch on to (they most often cling to the unprotected undersides of the mammals), but there is a dearth of research about whether or not armadillos suffer less predation compared to similar-sized mammals. This is an important bit of overlooked research. If the carapace of armadillos truly does provide a protective benefit, this fact may help partially explain why they are slow and have low metabolic rates. If you're always carrying a shield, you don't need to be very fast to protect yourself from attackers.

Given that the first three paragraphs of Switek's article are devoted to Darwin worship, he creates the impression that a key burden of research in the area is the time spent on litanies to Darwin, time that is presumably believed to be time well spent.

Some say that worship is not a method of learning, unless we are studying God.

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From "Lungfish Provides Insight to Life On Land: 'Humans Are Just Modified Fish'" ScienceDaily (October 7, 2011), we learn:

"We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs," said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal's body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology.

Neat experiment, demonstrating the generally held position that bony fish are closer to tetrapods. But note the conclusion: "Humans are just modified fish," said Professor Currie. "The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors." Yeah, that explains mermaids.

We're waiting for the paper that uses this data to show why guys are more likely to be attracted to mermaids than sharks.

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From Thomas Hayden, "How to Hatch a Dinosaur" (Wired September 26, 2011):

Human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees, but at that scale we're also pretty hard to tell apart from, say, bats.

Yeah, it figures. Batman.

Hints of long-extinct creatures, echoes of evolution past, occasionally emerge in real life—they're called atavisms, rare cases of individuals born with characteristic features of their evolutionary antecedents. Whales are sometimes born with appendages reminiscent of hind limbs. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail. Horner's plan, in essence, is to start off by creating experimental atavisms in the lab. Activate enough ancestral characteristics in a single chicken, he reasons, and you'll end up with something close enough to the ancestor to be a "saurus." At least, that's what he pitched at this year's TED conference, the annual technology, entertainment, and design gathering held in Long Beach, Calif

Key theorist Jack Horner explains,

Now all he needed to make it happen, he told his TED audience, was a few breakthroughs in developmental biology and genetics and all the chicken eggs he could get his hands on. "What we're trying to do is take our chicken, modify it, and make," he said, "a chickenosaurus."

The skeletons of a chicken and a T. Rex re quite similar, he says.

He has some seed money and is looking for a developmental biology postdoc to help.

Here's his TED talk.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Higgs "God particle" boson has been in the news a lot lately, principally because it doesn't seem to exist ... not so far, anyway. Some panicked, and as a no-show at the opening of a glitzy new cosmology centre named after Stephen Hawking, it cast a pall over the festivities.

Now, from "Higgs boson real? We may know in a year" (MSNBC, October 6, 2011),we learn:

The long-sought Higgs boson, believed to have given shape to the universe after the Big Bang, will be found in the next 12 months or shown to be a chimera, heads of the three top physics research centers said on Thursday.

"I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn't exist," declared Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN whose Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is at the focus of the search.

He was echoed by KEK's Atsuto Suzuki and Pier Oddone of Fermilab, which last weekend shut off after 26 years its Tevatron accelerator, which has also been seeking the Higgs in the debris of billions of particle collisions.

Good for them. Making it definite like that encourages confidence that physics is a discipline. In essence, that means physics could tell us something wee didn't want to hear and we would accept it.

So it will be really interesting to see is whether, in a year or so, some sources are rewriting history to show that they never really thought there was a Higgs boson, in just the way that Darwinists insist they never thought junk DNA was just junk and conclusive evidence for their position, when in fact there is very considerable documentary evidence that that is exactly what they did think.

Incidentally, they doubt the faster-than-light neutrinos.

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target="another">Forrest Mims, according Discover one of the best brains in science, offers a glimpse into the earliest days of personal computing, when nerds hung around in garages with them newfangled machines, instead of cars (which most people thought they should have been doing instead):

One day in 1975 Ed Roberts (my MITS [Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems] co-founder) called and said he wanted me to meet his new programming genius. I hopped on the bike and was at MITS in a few minutes. After visiting with Ed a while, he took me to a room where a very young looking Bill Gates was giving a black board talk to three guys sitting or lying on the floor. Ed and I stood in the door waiting for Gates to acknowledge us, but he merely looked annoyed and ignored us. Finally, Ed said let's go and we left. As we walked away, Ed said, in essence, that Gates was a really smart kid, but he was also a smart alec.

Ed and Gates had a royal split up after Ed sold MITS to Pertec. In later years they reconciled, and Gates even visited Ed when he was dying in the hospital. His son David, who was present, described this remarkable visit to me at Ed's funeral. Gates didn't promote his visit, which made it all the more significant to the family.

I didn't know Paul Allen back then. I first met Allen at the opening of "StartUp," the museum gallery he founded at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. This gallery is dedicated to the earliest days of the PC era and includes some of my artifacts from early MITS days, including a photo of Minnie [Forrest's wife] typing the operating manual for the first MITS rocket transmitter. Next to her photo is the actual rocket I built to test the transmitter. I met Allen again at a rededication of the exhibit to Ed after Ed died. That's when he told me that Gates had not yet read his soon-to-be published memoir "Idea Man," the book that raised a controversy over its candid description of Gate's temper outbursts that Ed used to tell me about, which I target="another">reviewed.

Aside from co-founding MITS, my only direct connection with the Altair 8800 computer was writing the first operator's manual and developing the kit assembly manual style that I used for the MITS calculator kits. Ed gave me an Altair in exchange for writing the manual, and it's been on display at the Smithsonian for many years.

I've read that Steve Wozniak designed the Apple 1 because he could not afford the MITS Altair that he saw demonstrated at the Homebrew Computer Club.

Some Macintosh fans are just too numb to write about it.
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Here Philip Ball offers us "10 Unsolved Mysteries: Many of the most profound scientific questions—and some of humanity's most urgent problems—pertain to the science of atoms and molecules" (Scientific American, October 10, 2011): For example, #1:

How Did Life Begin?

The moment when the first living beings arose from inanimate matter almost four billion years ago is still shrouded in mystery. How did relatively simple molecules in the primordial broth give rise to more and more complex compounds? And how did some of those compounds begin to process energy and replicate (two of the defining characteristics of life)? At the molecular level, all of those steps are, of course, chemical reactions, which makes the question of how life began one of chemistry.

You'd think that, having gotten precisely nowhere for well over a century with assuming that how life began is a question of chemistry, people might want to consider alternatives. How about, life isn't principally chemistry, but information in motion. Now, how did that happen?

Probably easier to just plough the same old furrows fruitlessly.

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From "Last Universal Common Ancestor More Complex Than Previously Thought," ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2011), we learn:

Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.

New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

And they still have a job? Amazing?

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

No argument here. There are many no-speculation examples of life forms
shedding complex parts for survival - the way one might abandon a grand piano in the wilderness.

We'll leave the giant, gaping question for later.

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Well, after all, it explains everything, right. So here's a claim that natural selection explains the lowering of the age of first births to women in Quebec during a 140 year period. (In PNAS , October, 2011).

Before you read it, here is a potted history of Quebec: At the close of the Seven Years' War, France (the loser) had to decide between giving Britain (the winner) Quebec or Louisiana. The French king preferred the jazz and jambalaya (so to speak) to the "few thousand acres of snow" up north So it was worse, you see than Quebec losing the war - the Quebecois, so consciously French it hurt, were actually dumped by France. The British did not interfere with their religion (Catholic), their language (French), their culture (les habitants), or - within reason - their laws (civil code). But the Quebecois realized that they were at risk of becoming an endangered minority anyway. Up until about the 1960s, they were devout Catholics, and by a confluence of choices and events, they simply had more children than others. Some called it "revenge of the cradle." Of course, bigger families meant earlier marriage for women.

Now that Catholicism has collapsed in Quebec as a serious cultural force, the birthrate is very low, even for Canada, and the language and culture are in danger from that cause, despite sometimes extreme legislation to protect them, including outright paying people to have kids. In the light of this history, why would anyone be looking for a role that "natural selection" played in early marriage ages for Quebecois women, apart from the need to demonstrate Darwinism?

Evidence for evolution in response to natural selection in a contemporary human population

Emmanuel Milota,1, Francine M. Mayera, Daniel H. Nusseyb, Mireille Boisverta, Fanie Pelletierc, and Denis Réalea

Abstract

It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection. In contrast, recent studies show that selection can be strong in contemporary populations. However, detecting a response to selection is particularly challenging; previous evidence from wild animals has been criticized for both applying anticonservative statistical tests and failing to consider random genetic drift. Here we study life-history variation in an insular preindustrial French-Canadian population and apply a recently pro posed conservative approach to testing microevolutionary responses to selection. As reported for other such societies, natural selection favored an earlier age at first reproduction (AFR) among women. AFR was also highly heritable and genetically correlated to fitness, predicting a microevolutionary change toward earlier reproduction. In agreement with this prediction, AFR declined from about 26–22 y over a 140-y period. Crucially, we uncovered a substantial change in the breeding values for this trait, indicating that the change in AFR largely occurred at the genetic level. Moreover, the genetic trend was higher than expected under the effect of random genetic drift alone. Our results show that microevolution can be detectable over relatively few generations in humans and underscore the need for studies of human demography and reproductive ecology to consider the role of evolutionary processes.

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Here's an article about some really silly theologians MSNBC (Clara Moskowitz, October 2, 2011): "If intelligent extraterrestrials exist, what about God?: Experts say encountering E.T. would pose religious dilemmas, especially for Christians":

Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.

Right. Not like angels, devils, or the mysterious "sheep that are not of this flock." Or the extinct race of giants, mentioned in Genesis. Naw. Christians could never have believed anything like that ...

If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God's creatures?

Abandon? These people watch too many Star Trek movies. Curiously, during the age of exploration, when we were first beginning to learn about the lands and peoples of our planet, many early explorers had explicit Christian missionary intentions. They didn't think God had abandoned peoples, but that he had made them responsible for telling those peoples the Gospel. Serious Christians react that way today. But that would just plain end the discussion, which professional thinkers never like to do.

All this said, traditional Christians are less likely than others to credit space alien tales.

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From "Fish Uses Tool to Dig Up and Crush Clams" (ScienceDaily Sep. 28, 2011), we learn:

n the video, an orange-dotted tuskfish digs a clam out of the sand, carries it over to a rock, and repeatedly throws the clam against the rock to crush it. Bernardi shot the video in Palau in 2009.

"What the movie shows is very interesting. The animal excavates sand to get the shell out, then swims for a long time to find an appropriate area where it can crack the shell," Bernardi said. "It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal."

Yes, it is a pretty big deal, but what it mainly shows is how "tree of life" theories, now in ruins, have caused us to underestimate the intelligence of exothermic animals. Why was it sacrosanct that fish were too stupid to do this.

Smashing something against a rock is enterprising, but does not constitute using a tool. For one thing, implicit in the idea of a "tool" is that it is made for a purpose. That includes the assumption of some entity somewhere that the world could be different from what it is (as a result of using the tool). A stretch for most animals, including fish.

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From Wendy Zukerman, "Domestic violence gets evolutionary explanation" (New Scientist September 2011):

Each year more than 500,000 women in the US alone report to the police violent attacks by current or former male partners. There is a reason why domestic violence is so widespread, says David Buss, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas in Austin: it carries a selective advantage, tied with reproductive success. In other words, men who are violent are trying to make sure that their partner has his child and not another man's.

Does that also explain men who violently force their wives to abort their own children that they know are theirs?

Sure! Darwinism explains everything.

By the way, where are the Christian Darwinists when these things surface? We still got the legal right to wonder why the sandals-off types are never around when we face these problems..

For some people, it is not an abstract issue.

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From “The flawed multiverse,” Alastair I M Rae’s Physicsworld (Sep 22, 2011) review of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World:

According to the quantum-information theorist David Deutsch, our modern understanding of how the world works has provided us with "good explanations" that open up essentially infinite possibilities for future progress. One of these explanations is the idea of the quantum multiverse, which Deutsch discussed in the May issue of Physics World (pp34–38, print version only) and to which he devotes a chapter in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

I believe the many-worlds theory is open to criticism for reasons other than extravagence. One of these concerns probabilities in a situation where both outcomes occur in parallel. If both options are happening, how can it be meaningful to say that one is more probable than the other – as is experimentally the case if the reflector is not exactly 50/50?

As he described in his Physics World article, Deutsch's response is to propose that before the measurement, the photon is not just a single particle but is actually an (uncountable) infinity of identical or "fungible" particles. After interacting with the reflector, an infinite number of fungible photons exist in both output channels, but the ratio of these numbers is finite, so that each has a "measure" proportional to the squared modulus of the wavefunction. Even though an observer knows they are going to evolve into two copies of themself, they can apparently assign relative probabilities to which copy they expect to become. These probabilities are given by the Born rule. [Registration required.]

Rae isn’t convinced that this Deutsch fixes - or others - resolve the problem, and is put off by the book’s dogmatic tone. He comments,

Deutsch willingly accepts that much of his inspiration comes from the work of Karl Popper, whose mantra "we have a duty to be optimistic" clearly underlies his thinking. However, he would have done well to remember that Popper was often dogmatic, to the point where some wags said that his book The Open Society and its Enemies should have been called "The Open Society by one of its Enemies"!

See also: Information as real and irreducible to physics? – David Deutsch’s surprising response

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, we covered Baylor philosopher of law Frank Beckwith in the Synthese affair, but there was an older dustup involving Baylor that got covered in debris from later conflicts, and we just now remembered:

Twenty-nine members of the J.M. Dawson family have called on Baylor University to remove the associate director of the institute that bears Dawson's name.

In an open letter dated Sept. 11, Dawson family members question the appointment of Francis Beckwith as associate director of Baylor's J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies.

However, two of Beckwith's key colleagues have claimed the protest is misguided, affirmed Beckwith's qualifications and championed Baylor's right to select a diverse faculty.- from Marv Knox, “Dawson family protests Beckwith's appointment to Baylor institute,” Baptist Standard , 9/19/2003

In short, the Dawsons were taking the position that, because they had been generous with the university - and old J. M. Dawson held certain opinions re separation of church and state - they could dictate who sat at the desk named after him.

It was clearly a position that any university would have to reject. What would prompt such a public display of ignorance of the principle of academic freedom among otherwise worthy citizens?

"The Discovery Institute works to get the concept called 'intelligent design' into the science curriculum of public school textbooks, claiming that intelligent design is a scientific, not a religious, concept. In our judgment and in the judgment of the scientific community, this is a ruse for getting a religious notion into the public schools--clearly a violation of the separation of church and state."

Surprisingly, despite the hype, the Discovery Institute does not do that, and didn’t then. It presses for the right of students and teachers to examine the evidence for Darwinism as the supposed key mechanism of evolutionary change.

Of course, to a Darwinist, all doubt amounts to heresy. And the Dawsons were possibly assisted in looking like back country hicks by a Darwin pressure group. All blown over now, thankfully, but we’ve been saying for years that the Darwin lobby are bad people to know.

It’s okay for them to engage in censorship and career muggings of decent people. But if you try it at their urging, at best you’ll come off looking foolish. At worst, facing legal fees and settlements, if anyone takes you seriously and the victims follow up.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, we noted that Dr. Khan, of the Khan Academy education vids, seems to fancy himself a theologian and - on that basis - attacks design in nature in one of them.

(Just in case your kid isn't getting enough religion in Sunday school, Khan thoughtfully provides that too - but is it a religion you accept?)

This revelation left some parents scrambling for an alternative (lucky them if they have any say!) A friend points us to Interactive Biology ("Struggling with Biology? We'll Make it Fun.") for high schoolers.

Here's the teacher behind it:

We all know that there are MANY people out there who don't like biology. Ok, ok, there are even many out there who HATE it with a Passion. I know . . . it's hard to believe - such a fascinating topic with so much valuable information and people actually don't like it. Can you fancy that?

Here's the thing - I have a theory. My theory is that most people who don't like it, don't like it because of the way it was taught to them - A bunch of $100 words ...

Our friend comments,

Unlike Khan Academy, I couldn't find any videos on Darwin or evolution.... just straight biology. What a concept: teaching biology without Darwin. Is that good or bad? (What? You mean no just-so stories?)

Let's hope not. It's nice that we don't currently have the least idea whether Dr. Samuel thinks, BioLogos-style, "God would have/wouldn't have done it that way." Or the other "would haves," "may haves," and "might haves" starring in the endless reruns of the Darwin, Meet Reality Show.

If your kid wants religion at school, tell him to sign up in the Comparative Religion course or the World Philosophy course. Biology is the study of what actually does or did happen, not what we think about God.

Note r. Samuel contacted Uncommon Descent to say that he does not address the Darwin controversies. His note appears with the article.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "The flawed multiverse," Alastair I M Rae's Physicsworld (Sep 22, 2011) review of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World:

According to the quantum-information theorist David Deutsch, our modern understanding of how the world works has provided us with "good explanations" that open up essentially infinite possibilities for future progress. One of these explanations is the idea of the quantum multiverse, which Deutsch discussed in the May issue of Physics World (pp34–38, print version only) and to which he devotes a chapter in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

I believe the many-worlds theory is open to criticism for reasons other than extravagence. One of these concerns probabilities in a situation where both outcomes occur in parallel. If both options are happening, how can it be meaningful to say that one is more probable than the other – as is experimentally the case if the reflector is not exactly 50/50?

As he described in his Physics World article, Deutsch's response is to propose that before the measurement, the photon is not just a single particle but is actually an (uncountable) infinity of identical or "fungible" particles. After interacting with the reflector, an infinite number of fungible photons exist in both output channels, but the ratio of these numbers is finite, so that each has a "measure" proportional to the squared modulus of the wavefunction. Even though an observer knows they are going to evolve into two copies of themself, they can apparently assign relative probabilities to which copy they expect to become. These probabilities are given by the Born rule. [Registration required.]

Rae isn't convinced that this Deutsch fixes - or others - resolve the problem, and is put off by the book's dogmatic tone. He comments,

Deutsch willingly accepts that much of his inspiration comes from the work of Karl Popper, whose mantra "we have a duty to be optimistic" clearly underlies his thinking. However, he would have done well to remember that Popper was often dogmatic, to the point where some wags said that his book The Open Society and its Enemies should have been called "The Open Society by one of its Enemies"!

See also: Information as real and irreducible to physics? – David Deutsch's surprising response

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "'Accelerating universe' could be just an illusion" (MSNBC, September 27, 2011), Natalie Wolchover reports, "If true, theory would rid cosmology of its biggest headache - dark energy":

Now, a new theory suggests that the accelerating expansion of the universe is merely an illusion, akin to a mirage in the desert. The false impression results from the way our particular region of the cosmos is drifting through the rest of space, said Christos Tsagas, a cosmologist at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Our relative motion makes it look like the universe as a whole is expanding faster and faster, while in actuality, its expansion is slowing down — just as would be expected from what we know about gravity.

If Tsagas' theory is correct, it would rid cosmology of its biggest headache, dark energy, and it might also save the universe from its harrowing fate: the Big Rip. Instead of ripping it to bits, the universe as Tsagas space-time envisions it would just roll to a standstill, then slowly start shrinking.

Folding up nicely, one supposes, into a duffle. And this is simpler:

Tsagas may have shown that the universe either has dark flow or dark energy, but not both. Dark flow is by far the less mysterious of the two: While no one knows what dark energy is, or how we might find it, dark flow is merely movement.

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by Denyse OLeary
ARN correspondent

From "Salty Water and Gas Sucked Into Earth's Interior Helps Unravel Planetary Evolution" (ScienceDaily Sep. 26, 2011), we learn:

Lead author Dr Mark Kendrick from the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences said inert gases trapped inside Earth's interior provide important clues into the processes responsible for the birth of our planet and the subsequent evolution of its oceans and atmosphere.

"Our findings throw into uncertainty a recent conclusion that gases throughout the Earth were solely delivered by meteorites crashing into the planet," he said.

It's a lot to ask of the meteorites.

Because the composition of neon in Earth's mantle is very similar to that in meteorites, it was recently suggested by scientists that most of Earth's gases were delivered by meteorites during a late meteorite bombardment that also generated visible craters on Earth's moon.

"Our study suggests a more complex history in which gases were also dissolved into the Earth while it was still covered by a molten layer, during the birth of the solar system," he said.

These days, go for the more complex history.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Critics haven't yet got to "it's just a fluke."

However it turns out, lawyer Edward Sisson writes to say,

The Frank Close argument presented below [here] (that the distance may have been mis-measured) is a question that would have been central to the design of the experiment in the first place, long before any actual data-collection was done. Thus, it seems to me that the people designing the experiment would not even have bothered to go ahead with it, unless they were satisfied that their technique for measurement of distance was reliable. The questioning of the distance-measuring technique is now being raised because the result of the experiment does not fit the theory. Selective special scrutiny of only aberrant results, rather than every result, produces an inherently biased experiment.

This reminds me of Milliken's "oil drop" experiment to determine the charge on the electron, which was the subject of one of the episodes of the 1980s physics TV series "The Mechanical Universe." Each time the experiment produced a result that was in accord with the theory, it was accepted as accurate, but each time the experiment produced a divergent result, there was a lot of inquiry into possible flaws in the operation of the experimental apparatus during that particular trial. The point made in the TV series is that the scrutiny of the apparatus only occurred with divergent results, never with consistent results.

See also: Rob Sheldon's take on the neutrinos here.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Anyone who has suffered through business motivation books has learned about the reptilian brain - the supposedly primitive part of the brain that difficult co-workers and family members are supposedly channelling.

You heard that? Now forget it. Not remotely related to real life. For one thing, as we learn in "Cold-blooded cunning Reptiles are more intelligent than previously thought" (The Economist, Jul 14th 2011), a species of anole lizards are at least as clever as tits (a bird well-studied for intelligence), researchers face a problem:

Having established that lizards are at least as clever as birds at such simple tasks, Dr Leal hopes to go on and explore the evolutionary forces behind lizard intelligence. He does, however, have a problem—and it is one that might help to explain why, besides phylogenetic prejudice, the lizard mind has not been properly investigated before. Tits, being warm-blooded, have to eat a lot and thus have a strong incentive to collaborate with researchers in such experiments. The average lizard, by contrast, is happy to consume a single grub a day. It may therefore be some time before the next paper appears on the subject.

In short, while Darwinism reigns (= the only explanation for intelligence is the need to compete for food, and mates), nothing can be learned about intelligence that gets past the fatuous motivation manual. What if curiosity were a motive?

See also: A really smart lizard would conceal the extent of its knowledge

Smart reptiles watch: So much for the dumb, unfeeling reptilian brain

Hat tip: AITSE

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Invasion of Genomic Parasites Triggered Modern Mammalian Pregnancy, Study Finds" (ScienceDaily, Sep. 26, 2011), we learn:

"In the last two decades there have been dramatic changes in our understanding of how evolution works," said Gunter Wagner, the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EE and senior author of the paper. "We used to believe that changes only took place through small mutations in our DNA that accumulated over time. But in this case we found a huge cut-and-paste operation that altered wide areas of the genome to create large-scale morphological change." nonlocalizability, ...

Cut and paste from where, guys?

The Yale team studying the evolutionary history of pregnancy looked at cells found in the uterus associated with placental development. They compared the genetic make-up of these cells in opossums -- marsupials that give birth two weeks after conception -- to armadillos and humans, distantly related mammals with highly developed placentas that nurture developing fetuses for nine months.

They found more than 1500 genes that were expressed in the uterus solely in the placental mammals.

Which natural selection completely accounts for, operating in a glacially slow series of steps ...

It gets better:

Intriguingly, note the researchers, the expression of these genes in the uterus is coordinated by transposons -- essentially selfish pieces of genetic material that replicate within the host genome and used to be called junk DNA.

So the Darwinists fronting junk DNA were and are wrong. The Christian Darwinists who preach that junk DNA proves that Christians must embrace Jesus n' Darwin are wrong.

Notice how the announcement is cloaked in "we've figured it out now" language. But Darwin is dead. No matter what his lobby forces scared people to say or dense people to believe.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

First, how the calculated the measurements here.

From Frank Close at The Guardian:

"Renowned physicist Frank Close urges caution before we abandon the theory of relativity and prepare for time travel"

Sending a radio signal up to a satellite, at the instant the neutrino leaves Cern, which then passes it on down to the receiver in Rome, and comparing which arrives first, and by how much, has its own difficulties. The speed of radio waves through the atmosphere is affected by magnetic fields, and by other phenomena; it is far from simply a radio beam passing through a vacuum at "the speed of light". I would bet that a subtle error in the measured distance or time is more likely than that their ratio - the inferred speed - exceeds Einstein's speed limit. (24 September 2011)

(Note: Here at UD News, we don't propose making this our lives, but it's in a pretty interesting phase right now. For one thing, physicists may learn a lot from the error, if that is what it turns out to be. In an age of crackpot cosmologies and political science as the only kind, this proves physics really is a discipline.)

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

This week has seen the launch of a new website, with the title: "Teach evolution, not creationism!" registered by the British Humanist Association. The issue relates to education and the way the subject of origins is handled. The organisations in the campaign are the British Humanist Association, the Association for Science Education, the British Science Association, the Campaign for Science & Engineering and Ekklesia. There are 30 individual signatories and most publicity has been given to Sir David Attenborough. The Daily Telegraph's report said that "The naturalist joined three Nobel laureates, the atheist Richard Dawkins and other leading scientists in calling on the government to tackle the "threat" of creationism." What they want is "enforceable statutory guidance" that will allow legal sanctions to be taken if any publicly-funded school allows creationism or intelligent design to be presented as science. The only point science teachers would be allowed to make would be to declare these topics out-of-bounds for science students. The joint statement reads:

Creationism and 'intelligent design' are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly-funded schools. There should be enforceable statutory guidance that they may not be presented as scientific theories in any publicly-funded school of whatever type.
But this is not enough. An understanding of evolution is central to understanding all aspects of biology. The teaching of evolution should be included at both primary and secondary levels in the National Curriculum and in all schools.

Should students be taken for a ride in a school bus by Dawkins? (source here)

The key features of the statement will be familiar to ARN readers. The statement takes a demarcationist view of science: they hold the view that science can be clearly distinguished from non-science and that creationism and ID are definitely outside science. Furthermore, they consider that the state has the responsibility to preserve the purity of science education by providing enforceable statutory guidance. In particular, the campaign is concerned that the teaching of evolution is not getting the emphasis it deserves: they view evolution as central to all aspects of biology and they want all schools to be teaching it at primary and secondary level.

The UK media coverage explained the campaign in some depth. The Daily Telegraph quoted Andrew Copson, chief executive of the BHA, who said: "the threat of creationism and 'intelligent design' being taught as science is real and ongoing, particularly as more and more schools are opened up to be run by religious fundamentalists". The Daily Mail said: "Those behind the call for 'evolution not creationism' say teaching that God created the world is dangerous and must be prevented by law." The Guardian reported: "The Department for Education says all schools must teach a broad and balanced curriculum, and creationism should not be taught as scientific fact. But a spokesman for the British Humanist Association (BHA) said: "That's precisely what we want to be monitored.""

Two organisations were highlighted in the Campaign's Position Statement as examples of what they are complaining about:

"Organisations like 'Truth in Science' are encouraging teachers to incorporate 'intelligent design' into their science teaching. 'Truth in Science' has sent free resources to all Secondary Heads of Science and to school librarians around the country that seek to undermine the theory of evolution and have 'intelligent design' ideas portrayed as credible scientific viewpoints. Speakers from Creation Ministries International are touring the UK, presenting themselves as scientists and their creationist views as science at a number of schools."

These two examples illustrate the paranoia that is afflicting the BHA and its collaborators. Neither of these offending organisations are departing from the Government guidelines about how creationism and intelligent design should be treated in schools. Truth in Science put a statement to this effect on its website here: "Truth in Science [. . .] has never advocated the teaching of creationism in science lessons in schools. It has consistently advocated, promoted and distributed materials that encourage a more critical approach to the teaching of Evolution as an important component of science education, allowing individuals to follow the evidence wherever it leads." The guidelines do not prohibit the development of critical thinking skills when evolutionary concepts are taught, and there is no shortage of evidence suggesting the textbooks are imposing theory based on ideology rather than grounding theory upon evidence. The CMI response is found here. The trigger for this complaint goes back to May 2011, when a CMI speaker was invited to speak to students at a Religious Education study day at a Church of England school in the city of Exeter. The students also heard a different view from another visiting speaker, designed to stimulate debate. This is also perfectly compatible with the government RE guidelines which encourage teachers to give students opportunities to explore the issues. However, of all the media reports, only the Guardian was prepared to represent the views of these two organisation:

"Truth in Science denied advocating the teaching of creationism in schools. "We wish to highlight the scientific weaknesses of neo-Darwinism and to encourage a more critical approach to the teaching of evolution in schools and universities," it said in a statement.
Creation Ministries International was unavailable for comment."

At this point, most normal people will wonder what all this fuss is about. Why this campaign - when the two prime examples are compatible with government guidelines? Why the apoplectic comments about "threats" and why are they insisting that teaching "that God created the world is dangerous and must be prevented by law"? To explain this, it is necessary to see the relevance of their demarcation arguments. They deem it vital to show that creationism and ID are delusions that belong outside science. They are not prepared to contemplate a situation where scientific arguments are used to falsify the evolution of molecules to man. Yet this is what they are faced with: arguments about information that allow design inferences to be made (as here and here); arguments about the fossil record that falsify gradualism (as here and here); arguments based on exquisite design rather than 'tinkering' design (as here and here), and so on.

The only way such discussions can be excluded from science is to redefine science. This is exactly what the humanists/atheists are seeking to do. This means that they are re-framing science so it fits their philosophical preconceptions. This results in them wanting to trample all over the academic freedom of people (teachers, parents, students, scientists) who do not share their philosophical stance. The ID community has drawn attention to these issues repeatedly, as in this past ARN blog. Here is a recent example from Dr Alastair Noble, Director of the Centre for Intelligent Design, UK.

"You might rule out an explanation which invokes intelligent mind because it does not fit within the ideological naturalism which is invading science. In that case you're no longer doing science, but have adopted an overarching philosophy of nature into which you then try to fit the data - a faith position in effect. [. . .] If the science of origins cannot be debated freely, in schools or anywhere else, then it's not creeping creationism we should be concerned about, but galloping intolerance."

There's much more that needs to be said. What is needed though is a wider debate. Until parents, educators and scientists generally see the practical importance of these issues, we face the prospect of a small elite group imposing its will on the majority by influencing policy-makers, journal editors and science organisations. We need academic freedom in schools, colleges and universities, but unless we stand against the thought-police, we have only ourselves to blame when we lose it.

More blogs on academic freedom:

Tyler, D. An appeal for authentic science studies, ARN Literature blog (5 February 2010)

Tyler, D. "Darwin's golden retriever" portrays ID as an assault on science, ARN Literature blog (5 June 2009)

Tyler, D. How to move beyond damaging pestilential wars, ARN Literature blog (15 February 2009)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Evolutionary Tree of Life for Mammals Greatly Improved" (ScienceDaily, September 23, 2011), we learn:

Springer explained that the research team looked for spikes in the diversification history of mammals and used an algorithm to determine whether the rate of diversification was constant over time or whether there were distinct pulses of rate increases or decreases. The researchers found an increase in the diversification rate 80-82 million years ago, which corresponds to the time -- specifically, the end of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution -- when a lot of different orders were splitting from each other.

"This is when flowering plants diversified, which provided opportunities for the diversification of small mammals," Springer said.

Springer and colleagues also detected a second spike in the diversification history of mammals at the end of the Cretaceous -- 65.5 million years ago, when dinosaurs, other large terrestrial vertebrates, and many marine organisms went extinct, opening up a vast ecological space.

Hmmm. Almost as if it were spring-loaded.

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Deprogam here:

Brains on Bias: When Atheists Factor In Faith, Guess Who Looks Stupid?

Edward B. Larson (1947–2002), an epidemiologist and psychiatrist, noticed a curious fact some years ago:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) used many case examples that characterized religious patients as "psychotic, delusional, incoherent, illogical, and hallucinating," suggesting a general psychopathology that misrepresented clinical experience.

He observed that "the same scientists who were trained to accept or reject a hypothesis based on hard data seem to rely solely on their own opinions and biases when assessing the effect of religion on health."

Do we hafta call the paramedic, or are you used to this already?

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In “Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern” (BBC News , September 22, 2011) , Jason Palmer reports,

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early. nonlocalizability,

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

The neutrinos appear to have exceeded the speed of light. So,

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

More.

Imagine if incredible Darwin claims were treated this carefully .... As if. If Darwinism were the problem, rewriting the scene would be the solution. Whatever had to happen to prove it would be true.

Fortunately, physics seems a bit sounder than biology just now.

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From “Gravitational Waves Can Explain Dark Energy And Axis of Evil, Says Cosmologist” (KFC, Physics Arxiv Blog, September 22, 2011), we learn:
“Cosmos-sized gravitational waves would distort our view of the universe in a way that matches some of cosmologists' most puzzling observation, says cosmologist” First there was the Big Bang. But that didn’t explain everything. So now,

Until now, cosmologists have considered only waves with relatively short wavelengths. But Schluessel's idea is to imagine what the universe would look like if it contained much bigger waves with a wavelength of the order of the curvature of the cosmos itself, that's some 10^10 light years. These would be waves left over from the big bang that continue to resonate slowly on a vast scale

Here's the thing. Schluessel says these waves would distort the microwave back ground radiation in way that matches the preferred directions cosmologists see today. What's more, it would also distort the light from distant objects in way that would make them look as if they were accelerating away.

But won’t Larry Krauss’s religion, and all cosmology generally disappear in the chaos? He knows the Truth about how it all has to end. And if he’s wrong, wow.

You can see why we run these stories through the graveyard shift.

See also: Celeb atheists Dawkins and Grayling don’t want to debate apologist Craig because … maybe a reason is now emerging … Larry Krauss!

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by Denyse O"Leary
ARN correspondent

Back in the 1920s when, as the Scopes Trial showed, no Official Smart PersonTM questioned Darwinism, a scientist came across a curious phenomenon: Beetle eggs, stacked Of course he knew what to make of it.

"The discovery of the beetle laying eggs on top of each other is not a novel discovery," said Deas. "But they thought it"s a way to compete: That the beetles are stacking eggs on top of other beetles" eggs to crush them. They didn"t actually do any lab experiments to prove that those eggs are from exactly the same female."

In the 1970s, another researcher did the same thing. Joseph Deas, University of Arizona Entomology, decided to quit telling Darwin legends and find out whether it was true that the eggs on top were laid by a competitor beetle.

They weren"t. All the eggs in a stack were laid by the same beetle. Stacked, the clutch was better protected from a parasitic wasp that kills beetle larvae by laying its own larvae inside them:

Deas measured the parasitism on eggs laid individually versus on bottom eggs in a stack to see whether having one or more eggs on top was sufficient to protect the bottom eggs. And sure enough, Deas found the individual eggs were parasitized much more frequently than those eggs that were shielded at the bottom of a stack

The capper:

As often happens in science, Deas came upon the discovery of M. amicus" strategy through the course of a different investigation.

It doesn"t happen nearly as often as it should.

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Most investigators, faced with either doing science or announcing Darwin"s truths, will settle for announcing Darwin"s truths. It"s easier and safer and, in a journal article, it will look like science to the rest of us.

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by Denyse O"Leary
ARN correspondent

And take the space aliens with them?

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It's the only solution.

Here.

Zool Syst Evol Res doi: 10.1111/j.1439-0469.2008.00505.x

W. J. Bock

Design – an inappropriate concept in evolutionary theory*

Abstract

The concept of accident in evolution refers to causes which are stochastic with respect to selective demands arising from the external environment and acting on the organism, while the concept of design refers to causes which meet the requirement of these selective demands. The condition _with respect to selective demands_ is generally forgotten so that evolutionary changes are described as being design modifications. Design is an invalid synonym for adaptation. Further it implies a designer and has been used by some authors since before Darwin to argue that design in organisms demonstrates the existence of a designer and hence a plan. Yet if evolution depends on two simultaneously acting causes, one of which is accidental, then the process of evolution and all attributes of organisms are accidental. The concept of design is inappropriate in biology and should be eliminated from all biological explanations.

Get this: "Yet if evolution depends on two simultaneously acting causes, one of which is accidental, then the process of evolution and all attributes of organisms are accidental."

Try to apply that to daily life: You set out to clear snow of the sidewalk, which is not accidental, and you skid and fall, which is. So everything that happened was accidental! Case closed ... or ... Well, now you see why they have to ban the concept

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

And you can download it for free from the Royal Society until September 24, here.

Transitional forms between the three domains of life and evolutionary implications

Emmanuel G. Reynaud1,* and Damien P. Devos2,*

The question as to the origin and relationship between the three domains of life is lodged in a phylogenetic impasse. The dominant paradigm is to see the three domains as separated. However, the recently characterized bacterial species have suggested continuity between the three domains.

Here, we review the evidence in support of this hypothesis and evaluate the implications for and against the models of the origin of the three domains of life. The existence of intermediate steps between the three domains discards the need for fusion to explain eukaryogenesis and suggests that the last universal common ancestor was complex.

We propose a scenario in which the ancestor of the current bacterial Planctomycetes, Verrucomicrobiae and Chlamydiae superphylum was related to the last archaeal and eukaryotic common ancestor, thus providing a way out of the phylogenetic impasse.

If the last universal common ancestor was complex ... and how long ago was that?

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In August we noted that National Center for Science Education was running a bumper sticker contest

They may have declared their winner. Folk have been seeing this bumper sticker around town:

We have the fossils. We win.

That would be good news for Darwin, who didn't think the fossil record supported him, but hoped it would, one day.

The trouble is, that has been the trade secret of paleontology (Stephen Jay Gould) that it doesn’t support him. It supports sudden, rapid emergence, which almost certainly means a non-Darwinian origin for change in life forms.

However, the lobby's choice seems intuitively right. The slogan appeals to people who don't know much about the issues except where they stand. Who they support. And what their views are.

These days, those people make the best, most reliable Darwinists.

Here's the promo for the sticker, for example:

A reminder that in the argument over evolution there is really only one type of evidence, and it's overwhelmingly on the side of those who believe in evolution.

Oh? Only fossils matter? So all that supposed genetic evidence is bunk?

In many cases - if the history we are piecing together is correct - the fossils only tell us something in the light of other types of evidence. When two lines of evidence must be taken together, we cannot say there is really only one type of evidence."

So, on the whole, Darwin’s pressure group has done right to connect with its base. The people who do not wonder about things like that.

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The real battle in cosmology today is the war on rationality and orderliness. Let the balloons of naturalism drift unaccompanied into their endless night.

From physicist Bruce Gordon, "Balloons on a string," The Nature of Nature (ISI Books, 2011) p. 585:

The mindless multiverse "solution" to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally, a metaphysical non-starter. What the absence of efficient material causality in fundamental physics and cosmology reveals instead is the limit of scientific explanations and the need for a deeper metaphysical understanding of the world's rationality and orderliness. That explanation has always been, and will forever be, Mind over matter.

When the logical and metaphysical necessity of an efficient cause, the demonstrable absence of a material one, and the realized implication of a universe both contingent and finite in temporal duration, are all conjoined with the fact that we exist in an ordered cosmos the conditions of which are fine-tuned beyond the capacity of any credible mindless process, the scientific evidence points inexorably toward transcendent intelligent agency as the only sufficient cause, and thus the only reasonable explanation.

In short, a clarion call to intellectual honesty and metaphysical accountability reverberates throughout the cosmos: release the strings of nihilism and let the balloons of naturalism drift unaccompanied into their endless night. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Brainy molluscs evolved nervous systems four times" (New Scientist, September 16, 2011), Ferris Jabr tells us,

The mollusc family includes the most intelligent invertebrates on the planet: octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. Now, the latest and most sophisticated genetic analysis of their evolutionary history overturns our previous understanding of how they got so brainy.

The new findings expand a growing body of evidence that in very different groups of animals – molluscs and mammals, for instance – central nervous systems evolved not once, but several times, in parallel.

Which is more consistent with design - or law - than Darwinian selection without plan or purpose.

Now, all this is based on certain methods of configuring how evolution happened. The methods could be right or wrong. But if they hold up,

The four groups that independently evolved centralised nervous systems include the octopus, a freshwater snail genus called Helisoma, Tritonia – a genus of strikingly coloured sea slugs – and Dolabrifera, another genus of sea slugs, albeit less aesthetically interesting.

Which all just happened, right?

See also: Here’s the best online port of call for convergent evolution

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Caroline Crocker, director of AITSE and author of Free to Think, recounts the cost of curiosity, for a student who chose to present both sides in a project about Darwinism:

Evelyn frowned, "The teacher didn’t seem to mind. She just wants me to be sure to give evidence for both sides of the debate."

I did not want to be paranoid, but I also wanted to protect this brilliant young lady from those who might not hesitate to ruin her future. "Okay, just be sure that you're careful about what you say."

Crocker herself is one of the Expelled. She should know.

"Would it also be okay for us to meet, to talk about any questions I have about the project?"

I smiled, witing my phone number on a scrap of paper. "Sure, why don't we get together at Starbucks. We can talk then."

As it turned out, Evelyn did stay in contact with me by e-mail up until the time she gave her presentation although we didn't have a chance to go for coffee. She shared her own journey towards doubting neo-Darwinian evolution, However, after her presentation, I did not hear from her again. Cheryl, a friend of hers, told me that this was because a group of faculty members had confronted Evelyn about her views on evolution, leaving her shaking and in tears.

Barry, where are you?

It was so painful and frightening that Evelyn had decided that in order to secure her future she should never again mention her doubts about neo-Darwinian evolution. In addition, she resolved that she should also never again speak to me. Unfortunately, her decision came to late; I later learned that she was denied entrance into medical school. (p. 132)

Barry?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(Who said science was useless ... ?)

From "Captivated by Critters: Humans Are Wired to Respond to Animals" (ScienceDaily, Sep. 9, 2011), we learn:

... researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and UCLA report that neurons throughout the amygdala -- a center in the brain known for processing emotional reactions -- respond preferentially to images of animals.

Working with 41 epilepsy patients who were already monitored for stress, they found.

"Our study shows that neurons in the human amygdala respond preferentially to pictures of animals, meaning that we saw the most amount of activity in cells when the patients looked at cats or snakes versus buildings or people," says Florian Mormann, lead author on the paper and a former postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Biology at Caltech. "This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala."

Mormann says this striking hemispheric asymmetry helps strengthen previous findings supporting the idea that, early on in vertebrate evolution, the right hemisphere became specialized in dealing with unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli, or with changes in the environment. "In terms of brain evolution, the amygdala is a very old structure, and throughout our biological history, animals -- which could represent either predators or prey -- were a highly relevant class of stimuli," he says.

Hmmm. The researchers are likely onto something, but a better explanation for their find is surely needed. "Unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli" could include fire, flood, and nearby lightning strikes - none are life forms, but all are "biologically relevant" if the biology in question is one's own. The same could be said for long lost allies or strangers who appear suddenly from nowhere, and offer no word of greeting.

The thing about animals is that we know they are sentient. And variously endowed with intelligence, but not rational. That may be the significance of a separate way of reacting to them. Their behaviour is sensed as neither automatic nor the product of national choice - rather, a middle ground that suggests different responses.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a recent Fox News poll,

45 percent of voters accept the Biblical account of creation as the explanation for the origin of human life on Earth, while 21 percent say the theory of evolution as outlined by Darwin and other scientists is correct. Another 27 percent say both explanations are true.

Belief in creationism, however, fails to explain Republican presidential primary preferences. Frontrunner Rick Perry is the top choice for GOP primary voters who believe in creationism as well as those who believe in evolution.

That's probably because the upcoming US election will likely turn on beliefs about the economy rather than origins. There's been an increase in the number of people who believe Darwin, from 1999 through 2011: From 15% to 21%. And a decrease in those who believe "the Biblical account" (down to 45 from 50%). Which is just enough to be statistically significant.

That said, the current enthusiasm of Republican prez hopefuls (the latest was Ron Paul) for nixing Darwin is most likely due to the reverence paid him by the Ivy League. These are bad times in which to be an establishment expert.

See also: When science is nuts, anti-science is newly respectable

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

In response to "Geneticist W.-E. Loennig replies to Darwinist Nick Matzke: Which is more important: Darwin or facts?", Nick matze pretty much removed any doubt, replying,

Continued silliness. The generalization that carnivorous plants tend to live in nutrient-poor environments applies to Utricularia as well. There might be some exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions to the general rule.

We need look no farther than Wikipedia:

Distribution and habitat

Utricularia can survive almost anywhere where there is fresh water for at least part of the year; only Antarctica and some oceanic islands have no native species. The greatest species diversity for the genus is seen in South America, with Australia coming a close second.[1] In common with most carnivorous plants, they grow in moist soils which are poor in dissolved minerals, where their carnivorous nature gives them a competitive advantage; terrestrial varieties of Utricularia can frequently be found alongside representatives of the carnivorous genera–Sarracenia, Drosera and others–in very wet areas where continuously moving water removes most soluble minerals from the soil.

Although, if you like, I could start quoting experts which even Loennig would agree are experts (since he cites their work at various points in his monograph). I have all of the major works on CPs [carnivorous plants].

Now, I am happy to debate carnivorous plant evolution with folks, but there is really no point if you guys (and Loennig) can't accept basic facts of the case without obfuscation and insult. This question must be answered before any further discussion on the evolution of carnivorous plants can take place: is the above statement basically correct, or not?

He adds here,

The standard theory is that carnivory in plants is an adaptation to increase nutrient uptake in environments where (chemically available) nutrients are scarce. Low nutrients = the primary selective pressure that gave an advantage to variations that allowed the improved trapping of insects.

Now, if the above were accepted, we could move on to have a discussion of whether or not it is reasonable to thing that the necessary variations to produce plant carnivory could occur — and from there, we could then move to a discussion of whether or not the processes that could produce sticky-leaf-traps and pitcher-plant traps could also eventually produce Utricularia-type bladder traps.

But, Loennig and his fans have launched a series of UD posts claiming that the evolutionary explanation of plant carnivory is bogus idiocy from the get-go, because they apparently think that it's not true that CPs typically live in nutrient poor habitats, thus there is no reason for natural selection to favor such adaptations. They have been raising hell about it in a half-dozen posts, but without any attempt to review the massive and well-known (and available) literature on this topic. Loennig undoubtedly knows better, deep down, but he's letting his fans get away with very silly statements.

So, like I said, there's no point in continuing unless this kind of basic observational fact is accepted on all sides.

Everything seems to depend here on whether the standard theory is a correct statement of the behaviour of carnivorous plants - because that theory is under evidence-based dispute, it cannot be cited to judge the case.

In any event, Dr. Loennig replied re Dr. Matzke's comments, as follows:

Well, Matzke is strongly beating about the bush. Instead of answering in detail
key questions like

Why does Nick not answer Nachtwey's questions on the evolution of Utricularia's trap? Suction in half a millisecond: How did the trap become watertight and functional as a suction trap with all its synorganized anatomical and physiological details by a series of random 'micromutations' with slight or even invisible effects on the phenotype (Mayr)?

- he simply presupposes his mutation-selection theory as being entirely correct. And the infinite invention of non-testable evolutionary scenarios of how something could have evolved puts the synthetic theory outside science. See the details and discussions on such scenarios here.

Also, the question of how many of the aquatic Utricularia species can and do live in meso- to eutrophic (instead of oligotrophic) environments is, of course, not answered by quoting a general statement from the Wikipedia. For a scientifically correct answer the question has to be further investigated whether most (or exactly how many) of these species really occur in oligotrophic environments only and how or to what extent the 7 exceptions I mentioned so far (really all that I have precisely checked until now) disturb or even disprove the adaptionist viewpoint. And what about the almost 100 Pinguicula species that I have mentioned earlier? And many more cases are known. (Of course, I do not deny that many carnivores like Dionaea muscipula and most Drosera species and others really live - together with many non-carnivorous plants - "in nutrient impoverished substrate" - Fleischmann 2010, p. 843).

Above all: Even in (the wrong) case or scenario that all Utricularia species were living in oligotrophic environments - this would, of course, not explain the origin of their suction traps by mutations and selection (without ID) anymore than the adaptation of automobiles (wheels, motors, brackets, lights etc.) to roads and a thousand different tasks would explain their origin without intelligent design.

As to the details on Kingsley see p. 8 ff.: I did not simply copy Taylor's mistake but commented on it in detail in the paper just referred and linked to above already several years ago; it would really consume a lot of time to correct all the doubtful or false presuppositions and statements of Nick Matzke, who obviously did not carefully study my papers.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From "Jumping Gene's Preferred Targets May Influence Genome Evolution" (ScienceDaily, Sep. 6, 2011) , we learn:

The scientists used the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, one of the premier "model" organisms for studying genome structure and gene function. They focused on one particular transposon, called the P element, which has an unsurpassed ability to move that has stimulated its widespread use by Drosophila researchers. " "
Remarkably, P elements have only been present in Drosophila melanogaster for about 80 years, at which time they were acquired from the genome of a distantly related fruit fly species by an unknown process. P elements remain highly "infective" today. Adding just one copy to the genome of one fly causes all the flies in a laboratory population with which it breeds to acquire 30 to 50 P elements within a few generations. The original goal of the Spradling team's research was not to understand how transposons spread or genomes evolve, but something much simpler: To learn why P elements insert at some locations in the genome but not in others.

P elements insert into DNA very selectively. Nearly 40% of new jumps occur within just 300 genes and always near the beginning of the gene. But the genes seemed to have nothing in common. When these sites were compared to data about the Drosophila genome, particularly recent studies of Drosophila genome duplication, the answer became clear. What many P insertion sites share in common is an ability to function as starting sites or "origins" for DNA duplication. This association between P elements and the machinery of genome duplication suggested that they can coordinate their movement with DNA replication.

Definitely an idea worth pursuing, but what they must now demonstrate is permanent, functional improvements resulting from this process.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Darwin's failures are positive sources of information for ID," I noted

Failures of Darwinism are not merely a negative. They are a positive. The growing number of stress points at which Darwinism fails can, taken together, form a picture, one that points to general laws that govern how high levels of information are produced in life forms.

And in "All renovation projects start as teardowns"

Throwing out assorted Darwinisms is like renovating a badly treated century home. The first thing we do is rent a dumpster. Because we must clear away the rubbish to rescue the core value. One outcome is that 99% of the initial work is, unavoidably, teardown.

The teardown takes longer and costs more than we hope. But now we're here. So what's next?

Next is assessing the size and shape of the fail points. What are the similarities and the differences between the gaps that Darwinism* cannot bridge without violating the boundary of what, it is generally agreed, cannot happen by chance in this universe. Darwinists do everything they can to stop people from applying that obvious measure.

Ignoring them, can we gain information that enables us to make successful predictions that can be generalized?

It's hard to say what comes afterward simply because we need the answers to some of these questions to know precisely where further research into actual causes of evolution would pay off.

Put another way: Intelligent design will prevail when engineers rule.

*Darwin himself usually resorted to slippery, well-executed rhetoric at these points. We admire such displays but prefer information.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

In "The last five years: Darwin's failures are positive sources of information for ID," I noted

Failures of Darwinism are not merely a negative. They are a positive. The growing number of stress points at which Darwinism fails can, taken together, form a picture, one that points to general laws that govern how high levels of information are produced in life forms. Obviously, as with dpi, the more such points, the clearer the picture. We can't have too many of them, though eventually, there will be enough to work productively with.

Throwing out assorted Darwinisms is like renovating a badly treated century home. The first thing we do is rent a dumpster. Because we must clear away the rubbish to rescue the core value.
One outcome is that 99% of the initial work is, unavoidably, teardown.

In the case of evolution, as Mike Behe realizes, we must compute the edge of natural selection's ability to create new information: Just beyond that edge may lie the principal sources of new information.

Of course, computing the edge involves a number of questions: Is it the same for all life forms? If not, which ones differ and what characteristics might they have in common?

Of course, sidelining the usual, tiresome, untethered "Darwin dunit" accounts would be a plus, but it is certainly not the motive for the project.

See also: How far has ID come in the last five years

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.
Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Geometry of Sex: How Body Size Could Lead to New Species" (ScienceDaily, Aug. 29, 2011), we learn:

Different species of scincid lizards, commonly known as skinks, rarely interbreed, but it's not for lack of trying. According to Jonathan Richmond, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, different species of skinks in western North America will often try to mate with each other when given the opportunity, but mechanical difficulties caused by differing body sizes can cause these encounters to fail.

After observing hundreds of cross-species mating attempts in the lab, Richmond and his colleagues developed a computational model showing how size differences create reproductive barriers between skink species. In order to align their genitals for successful insemination, the male must corkscrew his body around the female. Once the sizes of the male and female diverge outside the threshold of the researchers' model, successful mating was very rare. The model elucidates the role body size plays in splitting skinks into separate species. For skinks, it apparently isn't behavioral preference that prevents gene flow between species. It's the mechanics of body size.

This is most enlightening, but it doesn't really explain how speciation happened.

What it really explains is why "de-speciation" doesn't happen in skinks Even discussing this question implies, without saying it, that retreats from speciation are common and normal in life forms. (The dog, wolf, and coyote never succeeded in making a clean break, but then they remained within a size range, more or less.*)

Given that most skinks would be better off, from the point of view of spreading their genes, in a large population of just-right mates, we still need to understand how size came to vary so much despite that fact.

"As size diverges, the corkscrew fails," Richmond said. "In this case, it just happens that this is about the only thing necessary to get the ball rolling for speciation."

Wait a minute, Dr. Redmond. We haven't yet figured out why size diverges so much. But this is a promising start.

Here's a truly formidable scientific explanation from a dog: "If you're not with the one ya love, ya love the one yer with! Yap! Yap! Yap!"

See also: Land-based fish helps researchers assess how animals moved to land – and stayed there

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Stone tools shed light on early human migrations" (Nature, August 31, 2011), Matt Kaplan tells us that "Hominins with different tool-making technologies coexisted,"

The axes, found in Kenya by Christopher Lepre, a palaeontologist at Columbia University in New York, and his team are estimated to be around 1.76 million years old. That's 350,000 years older than any other complex tools yet discovered.

e significant finding is that the hand axes from 1.5 million years ago were found beside primitive chopping tools of a type used a million years earlieDid one type of human make both types of tools? Stone toolmaking is hard work, and it may be that no one saw a need to embellish a device that worked fine as it was for chopping meat or vegetables.

File under: Older than thought

See also: Stone tools nearly 2 million years old – and Michael Cremo is still wrong?

Were people cooking two million years ago?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The emotional hunger of Darwin-driven science to find new human species (especially, unusually simian ones) has led to an amusing search for terminology to describe minimal differences. The word choices can be fun.

For example, in "Who Were the Denisovans?"(Science, 26 August 2011), Ann Gibbons explains,

Several fossils belonging to a previously unknown type of archaic human were found last summer in a remote cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The discovery team called them the Denisovans after the cave.

"Type" as in "He's not my type"? As it happens, these people were somebody's type because genome mapping shows that our ancestors "mingled" with these people from 30,000 to 50,000 years ago and - it is thought - provided us with useful immunities. All the rest is shrouded in archaic darkness. A December 22, 2010 National Geographic News article by Ker Than, "New Type of Ancient Human Found—Descendants Live Today?", reveals a similar wrestle with terminology. From Evolution's "new twist": Neanderthal-like "sister group" bred with humans like us,"

A previously unknown kind of human—the Denisovans—likely roamed Asia for thousands of years, probably interbreeding occasionally with humans like you and me, according to a new genetic study.

"Kind", as in "He's not the marrying kind," surely; National Geographic