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!