In the News

In ScienceDaily, it is reported that thhe mantis shrimps in the study are found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and have the most complex vision systems known to science. They can see in twelve colours (humans see in only three) and can distinguish between different forms of polarized light.

Special light-sensitive cells in mantis shrimp eyes act as quarter-wave plates -- which can rotate the plane of the oscillations (the polarization) of a light wave as it travels through it. This capability makes it possible for mantis shrimps to convert linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light and vice versa.

Dr Nicholas Roberts, lead author of the Nature Photonics paper said: "Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp's eye. It really is exceptional - out-performing anything we humans have so far been able to create."

More...

-----------------------------------------------------

And how did this evolve through only natural processes? Given enough time anything can happen?

Michael Behe posts on ENV that Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution.

Behe comments that "Before reading their paper, even I would have happily conceded for the sake of argument that random mutation plus selection could convert an MR-like protein to a GR-like protein and back again, as many times as necessary. Now, thanks to the work of Bridgham et al (2009), even such apparently minor switches in structure and function are shown to be quite problematic. It seems Darwinian processes can't manage to do even as much as I had thought."

More for details...

Michael Behe posts that Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution.

The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is entitled "An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution". The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State's Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it points strongly to the conclusion that such walls are common throughout all of biology.

More...

Reported in Science Daily, the lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

Now, some of those same researchers are back, reporting on the first-ever study of the appendix through the ages. Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Duke scientists and collaborators from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University conclude that Charles Darwin was wrong: The appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected.

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"

More...

Just another example of the power of Darwinism to slow down life science discoveries...

Natalie Angier, for the NY Times, reports that scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body's defense system than anyone suspected.

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.

"The parallel in military terms is a standing army," said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. "You don't want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it."

More...

Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is close to taking over the top spot at the National Institutes of Health, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

Collins, who was the director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, is in the final stages of being screened by the administration of US President Barack Obama, an unnamed source told Bloomberg.

Elias Zerhouni, Collins' would-be predecessor, voiced his approval for the pick, telling Bloomberg that Collins has "done things many scientists wish they could do once in their lifetime, and he's done it repeatedly."

Collins recently unveiled a new foundation, BioLogos, that promotes "the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives," according to the organization's Web site. Collins, who is an evangelical Christian, has said that his new foundation is an attempt to resolve Christian faith with scientific evidence, especially with regard to evolution. In 2006 he published a bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that stirred some controversy in the scientific community.

More...

A new Web site, by Cornelius Hunter is up and running.

Click HERE, for DarwinsPredictions.org

Popular writer Frank Turek writes in townhall.com on the fine-tuning of the universe.

"When I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens recently, one of the eight arguments I offered for God's existence was the creation of this supremely fine-tuned universe out of nothing. I spoke of the five main lines of scientific evidence."

More...

David Perlman, for the San Francisco Chronicle, reports that President-elect Barack Obama's decision to name two of the nation's most prominent scientists to crucial roles in his administration was being heralded in the scientific community as a signal that the new president is serious about taking on the challenges of climate change and creating a new energy policy for the nation.

"Holdren is a physical scientist who is very comfortable dealing with biology, and this scientific multilingualism is ideal for a post like science adviser," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education that monitors school district clashes between Darwin supporters and advocates of "intelligent design," or creationism.

More...

---------------------------------------

Hold on to your hats...it's going to be a bumpy ride.

NewScientist reports that it's not just the nature of dark matter that's a mystery - even its abundance is inexplicable. But if our universe is just one of many possible universes, at least this conundrum can be explained.

Seems as if scientism will continue to bow to their transcendent "maker", multiverse. Intelligent designer or eternal multiverse. Which is more plausible?