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Creationism News -- October 2012 创造论新闻 – 2012 年 10 月Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career

as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to make his excellent websites.

The contents of this presentation were taken from David Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. Pray for the Lord’s guidance and help in his excellent websites.

Pastor Chui

http://ChristCenterGospel.org

ckchui1@yahoo.com

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Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 Toddlers express the basic aspects of scientific thinking:

finding cause and effect by the experimental method. Put a 2– to 4-year old in a sandbox with a shovel and a

pail, and left to experiment, the child will figure out what works to get sand in the pail or move it to a bigger pail.  Give the child a music machine that turns on or off with two independent switches, and the child will find how to turn it on and off at will.  These are the findings of Alison Gopnick, who performed experiments with children at play and became convinced that, contrary to beliefs that children act irrationally and chaotically, the basics of scientific reasoning are present in the brains of young children.  She wrote in Science,

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Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 New theoretical ideas and empirical research show

that very young children’s learning and thinking are strikingly similar to much learning and thinking in science. Preschoolers test hypotheses against data and make causal inferences; they learn from statistics and informal experimentation, and from watching and listening to others. The mathematical framework of probabilistic models and Bayesian inference can describe this learning in precise ways.

Source: Alison Gopnick, “Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications,” Science, 28 September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6102 pp. 1623–1627, DOI: 10.1126/science.1223416.

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Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 The paper was summarized on Medical Xpress,

“What looks like play may really be a science experiment,” and on Live Science, “The Preschool Laboratory: Young Children Think Like Scientists.”

Live Science posted another article, “Why politicians need to think like scientists.”  Various inferences can be drawn by comparing the two articles.

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Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 It’s not surprising that children have

the basic instincts to reason about the world in a rational manner and “think like scientists,” because they are created in the image of a rational God.  What’s surprising is that some scientists act like children.  Take away their Darwin dollie and they throw a tantrum.

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Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D “ 大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 Scientists continue mining the biomimicry bonanza, but some

still give all the credit to time and evolution. Here are three new biomimetics articles about plants. Sunflowers as solar energy models:  A clever short video on 

Live Science finds nature, once again, providing the optimum solution to a problem.  The problem is arranging mirrors in a giant solar collection facility so as to minimize shadows.  The solution: mimic the sunflower.  The spiral arrangement of florets in the center of a sunflower, following the Fibonacci series, turns out to pack the most light collection in the smallest space while minimizing shadows on other mirrors.  The video did not mention another property that solar farms would have difficulty imitating: sunflowers exist on stalks that can turn and follow the sun.

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Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D “ 大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 Diatoms can feed, speed the world:  We are surrounded

by bounteous resources we can hardly imagine: microscopic organisms in water that live in glass houses, called diatoms. PhysOrg writes, “Ancient diatoms could make biofuels, electronics and health food—at the same time.”  Researchers at Oregon State are creating a “photosynthetic biorefinery,” the article says, getting the little nanofactories to make customized products by special order.  Give them water, some minerals and sunshine, and they could make a steady stream of affordable, eco-friendly products: biofuels, biomedical products, and even semiconductors.  “The key to all of this is the diatom itself, a natural nanotechnology factory that has been found in the fossil record for more than 100 million years.”

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Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D “ 大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 Drugs on demand from plants:  Plants make a host of

aromatic compounds they use for signaling, defense and symbiosis.  Now, mimicking “a crucial but obscure biochemical phenomenon,” scientists at Scripps have “followed nature’s lead” to figure out how to make terpenes, compounds hard to synthesize in the lab but made routinely by plants.  This could lead to faster and cheaper manufacture of drugs like the anti-cancer agent Taxol.  Science Daily quoted the senior investigator who said, “It’s exciting for us because we’re now making molecules that have never been made in the laboratory before, and we’ve done this by first observing what nature does.”

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Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D “ 大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 Biomimicry on a Roll One article really excited about biomimetics can be

found on PhysOrg from Mother Nature Network, titled: “Biomimicry: Science inspired by nature could feed the hungry, reduce impact of technology.”  This implies that many of our problems in civilization are not for lack of resources, but lack of know-how.  That know-how is all around us in plants and animals.  Whales, butterflies and fungi are just three of the examples in the article that can lead to more efficient machinery, more productive food crops, better medical devices and much, much more.

04/20/23 10

Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D “ 大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 “Biomimicry looks for how nature performs a

function,” Marie Zanowick, a certified biomimicry professional for the Environmental Protection Agency, told Boulder Weekly. “It mimics natural strategy and the best design principles on this planet.”

“Design principles” as humans devise them usually require many brain cycles of research and development (R&D).  That’s true in nature, too, the article said.  In order to adapt, be resource-efficient, integrate development with growth, be eco-friendly and responsive to the environment, living things have learned R&D.  “It’s based on 3.8 billion years of research and development, and the only organisms that survive are the ones that follow life’s principles.”

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Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D “ 大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 Need we keep repeating that neo-Darwinism is

completely, totally, and irrevocably incapable of R&D?  Evolution is blind.  It has no foresight.  It has no purpose.  It cannot, therefore, come up with “design principles.”  Giving it billions of years doesn’t help; it makes things worse.

Once we purge the last remaining fallacies out of biomimetics, it is poised to usher in a golden age of science grounded on what should be its foundation: intelligent design.

04/20/23 12

Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 Animals and microbes continue to inspire technologies that

could provide better health and security. Cell switches and diagnosis:  Want to get faster results from

that blood test?  Science Daily has a headline to perk your interest: “Bioengineers Design Rapid Diagnostic Tests Inspired by Nature.”  It only gets better from there:

By mimicking nature’s own sensing mechanisms, bioengineers at UC Santa Barbara and University of Rome Tor Vergata have designed inexpensive medical diagnostic tests that take only a few minutes to perform. Their findings may aid efforts to build point-of-care devices for quick medical diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), allergies, autoimmune diseases, and a number of other diseases. The new technology could dramatically impact world health, according to the research team.

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Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 All living things use “nanoswitches” to respond to

the environment, the article continued.  “The key breakthrough underlying this new technology came from observing nature.”  Cell surfaces, for instance, are covered with receptors that switch on and off depending on molecules detected.  The technology is not only effective, it’s beautiful: “The beauty of these switches is that they are able to work directly in very complex environments such as whole blood.”  In a few years, we may be able to get results of diagnostic tests in mere minutes instead of days.

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Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 Enzymatic assembly lines:  “All systems go at the

nanofactory,” reads another headline on Science Daily.  Researchers at LMU have created “little green men” in the form of fluorescent proteins that can help them guide delicate parts into position with nanometer precision.  “Green light on protein assembly!” the subtitle exclaims.  Assembling parts at this scale is like working in a hurricane, with all the thermal motions and molecular interference.  As the researchers attempt to imitate what cells do routinely, they are also gaining insight into how cellular machines work.  “If we can efficiently build mimics of these ‘enzymatic assembly lines’ by bringing individual proteins together, we could perhaps make a significant contribution to the exploitation of sustainable energy sources.”

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Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 Go to the ant, lesson #17:  Ants make good teachers, an article

on PhysOrg implies.  They avoid “information overload” by sharing information in efficient ways.  Complicated decisions, like comparing nest sites, are resolved by the entire colony rather than by lone geniuses.  “Living in a group is costly in many ways, so ants must get some benefit from doing it,” said Stephen Pratt at Arizona State University.  “By sharing the burden of decision-making, colonies avoid the mistakes that a solitary animal makes when taking on too much information.  What’s great about these ants is that we can see exactly how they do this, by making sure that no ant has to process more information than it is able to.”  If you’re reeling from too much multi-tasking, tell your boss you want to go to ant class.  “Pratt added that this is one problem ants can solve, but that there are other problems ants face that we might be able to learn from.”

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Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 Robo-tuna:  Tuna is not just for eating in sandwiches, but for

improving security.  Live Science said, “Speedy tuna capable of swimming tirelessly in the Earth’s oceans have inspired the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fund a lookalike robot for underwater patrols.”  The shape of the tuna’s body, combined with its strong muscles and short turning radius, make it an ideal model for maneuverability and efficiency.  Astrobiology Magazine said of humble tuna fish, “they’re one of the fastest and most maneuverable creatures on the planet, having extraordinary abilities at both high and low speeds due to their streamlined bodies and a finely tuned muscular/sensory/control system.”  A developer of the battery-powered surveillance device called BIO Swimmer said, “We’re using nature as a basis for design and engineering a system that works exceedingly well.”

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Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 What’s a biomimetics article doing on the evolution-

saturated NASA Astrobiology site?  They had to get their Darwin hooks into the story somehow.  “These technologies could also have applications in exploring some of Earth’s most extreme environments, helping astrobiologists understand the limits of life on Earth,” the article ended.  “In the future, biomimetic robotic technology could also have many uses in exploration beyond our own planet.”  Pathetic.  Exploration requires intelligent design.  Evolution is of no use to your story; drop the quaint Victorian myth, chuck Chuck, and get with the I.D. program that is driving the Biomimetics Revolution.

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Fossils are doing just fine, but the scientists who interpret

them are having a rough week (or century). Vege-Fang It looks like a dinosaur in a scary Halloween costume, but

it’s just a nice little guy that ate vegetables, Science Daily announced: “New Fanged Dwarf Dinosaur from Africa Ate Plants.”  Live Science even identified the costume: “‘Dracula’ Dinosaur Had Bristles and Fangs.”  Sure enough, the artist gave it the scariest demeanor possible.  Trick or treat: toss it a radish.  Even with scary fangs, Pegomastax africanus, found in South Africa 50 years ago but “languished in a museum drawer” till recently, was apparently a vegetarian.  This goes to show one can’t always tell carnivory by the teeth.

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 It was small, too, weighing less than a house cat.  

National Geographic said, “New Fanged Dwarf Dinosaur Found—‘Would Be Nice Pet’.”  Paleontologists think it might have used its porcupine-like bristles and fangs for defense or display, but mostly the teeth and jaws worked like “self-sharpening scissors for shearing plant parts.”  Live Science promised the little critter “may shed light on evolution,” but didn’t say exactly how; neither did Science Now.  Evolutionary paleontologist Paul Sereno [U of Chicago] ventured some light in National Geographic’s article:  “What’s more, the study revealed that P. africanus’ sophisticated jaw structure was ahead of its time, Sereno noted. Such structures evolved again millions of years later in mammals.”  Sereno did not point out where his light was shining.

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Vege-Behemoth Speaking of vegetarians (and speaking of animals ahead of their time),

evolutionists now say that duckbill dinosaurs were better equipped for eating plants than horses are (sidebar: grazing mammals supposedly evolved much later).  Charles Choi reported on Live Science that “Vegetarian Dinosaurs Were Champion Chompers.”  He began, “Giant plant-eating dinosaurs may have been champion chewers up there with the likes of mammals such as horses, bison or elephants, researchers say.”  Some hadrosaurs had 1400 teeth with flat, grinding surfaces perfect for grinding tough plants – and they could replace them when they wore out.  Their teeth were composed of six types of tissue that migrated, “exposing different surfaces as the teeth migrated across the chewing surfaces in the mouths of the dinosaurs over time.”  With teeth like that, “The finding could help explain why these behemoths dominated the plains of Europe, Asia and North America during the last part of the age of dinosaurs,” Choi speculated.

 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Hadrosaurs were “as sophisticated, if not more

sophisticated, than any known mammal,” one paleontologist said.  This makes it sound like evolution has been going downhill.  They thought dinosaur teeth would resemble those of other reptiles, like alligators, but found something quite different.  “The complexity of hadrosaurid teeth would have proved excellent tools for handling tough, gritty plants,” but can we trust their opinions?  Evolutionists can look a gift horse in the mouth, but “We still don’t have a good understanding even of how horse teeth work,” one of them confessed.  PhysOrg posted a cross-section of the “remarkably complex architecture” of one tooth of a hadrosaur (Edmontosaurus). 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Six tissues is four more than reptiles have, and two

more than horses.  Some of the tissues apparently functioned to prevent cavities and abscesses.  Not even vegan humans can boast that evolutionary innovation.

One more thing.  These teeth avoided decay for a long, long time, in their view.  “We were stunned to find that the mechanical properties of the teeth were preserved after 70 million years of fossilization,” Gregory Erickson on Mark Norell’s team said, “if you put these teeth back into a living dinosaur they would function perfectly.”

 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Lemur-Fish Whoops; a fossil thought to be that of a lemur (a primate)

for over a century has now been reclassified as a fish.  No kidding.  “That’s No Primate: It’s a Fish!” Science Daily exclaimed. PhysOrg echoed, “Fossil—thought for over a century to be the only trace of a prehistoric primate—is actually that of a fish.”  Paleontologists often pride themselves on how much they can tell about a creature from just a fragment.  They had even given this one a name: “Arrhinolemur scalabrinii – which translates literally to ‘Scalabrini’s lemur without a nose’.”  Pedro Scalabrini would be really embarrassed right now (he was a fossil hunter for whom it was named in 1898).

 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 George Gaylord Simpson had doubted the

classification half a century later and suggested it was fishy.  In 1986, Alvaro Mones agreed, even specifying the fish family.  But it wasn’t until two years ago that Argentinian scientists looked into it with more detail and settled on the fish identification.  Evolutionary paleontologists took credit anyway, saying, “It also helps us analyze evolutionary transitions — we can look at in the past and compare them to similar fish today to see what features have changed over time and try to understand why.”  It would seem that proper identification is a prerequisite for understanding.  114 years of misidentification is a rather long time.

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Mammoth Boy An 11-year-old Russian boy made the find of a

lifetime: a nearly complete mammoth carcass in the tundra of northern Russia – one of the best-preserved mammoths ever found.  Paleontologists claim it is 30,000 years old.  The article indicates that DNA is not expected to survive such ages for resurrecting a mammoth, even though cloning experiments are underway elsewhere.  “A big obstacle, of course, is degraded, ice-damaged DNA,” New Scientist’s report said, even though it would seem an ice freezer would offer the best possible preservation.

 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Evolutionary Weight Gain For neo-Darwinism to be true, mammoths had to have tiny

ancestors, maybe like mice (note: this is not an Aesop’s Fable; at least, not intentionally).  PhysOrg stepped to explain to the world about “Small winners in the mammalian race to evolve.”  Speaking for evolutionists at Monash University, PhysOrg explains how they examined the fossil record through evolutionary glasses (“We chose the generation as our basic measure of evolutionary time, as it is the shortest interval over which evolutionary change can occur”) , and deduced that it takes 24 million generations for a mouse to become an elephant, but only two million to shed all that weight and become tiny again. 

 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Tom Weller’s cartoon of a 

pond hippopotamus on a lily pad comes to mind.  Where are the mouse-sized elephants, if they can lose weight much faster than gain it?  “Bigger is not always better,” the reader is informed, except when it is, or else elephants would not have “appeared” from tiny creatures by evolution.  Alistair Evans almost expected incredulity: “Believe it or not, the ancestors of elephants were once as small as mice,” he said.  The option to disbelieve it is therefore held open.  

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 Molluscs: Complex to Simple A new fossil has been dubbed the ancestor of molluscs. 

One problem: it is more complex than its descendants.  The “armoured aplacophoran” name Kulindroplax, described in Nature,1 is touted as the “a kind of missing link with a worm-like body, bearing a series of shells like those of a chiton or coat-of-mail shell” by co-author Derek Briggs of Yale, according to the write-up on Science Daily.   The reader is assured this “discovery reinforces previous findings from molecular sequencing studies and helps clarify the evolutionary relationships of mollusks,” only to be told later that mollusc evolution has been controversial for a long time – particularly the worm-like group called aplacophorans (without armor):

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 The evolutionary relationships of worm-like mollusks,

known as Aplacophora, has been a subject of controversy. Previously thought to be a product of the explosion of diversity during the early Cambrian period, they are now shown to have evolved probably 40–50 million years ago by losing shells like those on Kulindroplax.

What this means is that the more complex animals came out of the Cambrian explosion, and the simpler ones evolved much more recently.  Kulindoplax is said to be 425 million years old, younger than the Cambrian explosion but much older than “40–50 million years ago”.  That’s why the article’s headline asked, “Which Came First, Shells or No Shells? Ancient Mollusk Tells a Contrary Story” – contrary, that is, to what evolutionists expected.

 

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 How this fossil helps evolutionary theory is not clear,

particularly when “The interrelationships of the Mollusca — one of the most diverse and species-rich animal phyla — have been contentious,” according to the Editor’s summary of the paper in Nature.1 Indeed, the authors concurred that “relationships among major molluscan taxa have long been a subject of controversy.”  Putting the more complex animal at the beginning, and the simpler animal as the more recent one, does not seem a good way to reduce contentiousness.

1. Sutton, Briggs et al., “A Silurian armoured aplacophoran and implications for molluscan phylogeny,” Nature 490, 04 October 2012, pp. 94–97, doi:10.1038/nature11328.)

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Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 The implication for molluscan phylogeny,

and all phylogeny, is that Darwinism is tosh (10/25/2011).  Its followers should say Bosh! and quash it.  We keep putting the evidence out there, right out of evolutionists’ own discoveries, hoping it will lead to a new Darwinian revolution from inside out, i.e., a revolt against sloppy speculation in the name of science in support of a predetermined naturalistic worldview.

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 The Great Salt Lake and other large extinct inland seas

in the desert remain a challenge to explain by conventional geology.

A press release from Stanford University suggests that “Tropical rain may have formed Utah’s Great Salt Lake, says Stanford Researcher,” but problems appear further down.  First, we learn that this is an old problem:

Between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, the deserts in the American Southwest were covered with enormous lakes. How all that water got there has long puzzled Earth scientists, but new work by a group of scientists that includes a Stanford climate researcher could provide an answer.

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 These lakes “covered about a quarter of

both Nevada and Utah.”  Till recently, the leading explanation called for a shift in the jet stream that dumped more precipitation in the southwest in the past.  Problem: that theory should show increased wetness from the coast inland that is not found.  That explanation has been “ruled out,” the press release indicated.

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 The researcher to the rescue is appropriately named:

he is Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences.  His theory calls for tropical rains from storms coming inland from the Pacific and Gulf.  These storms conspired to dump vast quantities of water in Utah and Nevada that formed giant lakes that dried up after the stormy period. Noah and colleagues published their idea in Science (Lyle et al., “Out of the Tropics: The Pacific, Great Basin Lakes, and Late Pleistocene Water Cycle in the Western United States,” Science 28 September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6102 pp. 1629–1633, DOI: 10.1126/science.1218390).

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 “We think that the extra precipitation may have

come in the summer, enhancing the now weak summer monsoon in the desert southwest. But we need more information about what season the storms arrived to strengthen this speculation,” said Mitchell Lyle, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University and lead author of the study.

They plan to drill dry lakebed sediments for clues. Nevertheless, as it stands, their hypothesis leaves many unknowns, betrayed by the number of times they used words like maybe and perhaps.

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 With the data now in existence, it is impossible

to determine whether summer precipitation was more enhanced than winter precipitation between 17 and 14 ka. However, if winter storms were the major precipitation source, it is difficult to understand why coastal California remained dry.… The evidence suggests that precipitation in the glacial western United States originated from the tropical eastern Pacific, perhaps via stronger spring/summer precipitation fed by tropical air masses rather than higher numbers of westerly winter storms.

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 The hypothesis, or speculation as Lyle called

it, leaves unanswered why the storms brought in so much precipitation then and not now, and why they impacted the Great Basin so heavily but not the coast of California.  Is there any other place on earth where inland seas have been observed to grow year after year from tropical storms in a restricted region?  If so, they didn’t refer to any modern analogues.  They just invoked the trendy phrase “climate change.”

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 The Flood explains these lakes in a

straightforward and plausible manner.  After the global flood, any landlocked basin retained its water.  In addition, increased precipitation during the (one) Ice Age kept them filled.  As climate conditions subsided and stabilized over the next few centuries, some of the lakes breached their dams and drained out.  Many remnants of these escape channels can be seen today, such as the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington. 

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 The Grand Canyon is likely a relic of a colossal

dam breach, as both Walt Brown and Steve Austin have proposed.  Smaller dam breach events are recognized by secular geologists, like the cascade of lakes from Owens Valley down to Lake Manly, now the parched playa in Death Valley.  Austin also found evidence for a catastrophic dam breach that explains the Santa Cruz river canyon in Argentina, a river that had misled Charles Darwin to believe in Lyell’s slow and gradual millions of years (see video on YouTube).  

04/20/23 40

Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 Creation geologists ascribe these lakes to effects

of a one-time event, the global Flood.  From small-scale analogues we can extrapolate to the kinds of forces necessary to create the lakes and canyons.  The required forces are far beyond anything observed today, undermining Charles Lyell’s concept of “the present is the key to the past” (uniformitarianism), a Victorian myth largely discarded today anyway (5/22/2003,11/04/2003, 4/30/2009).  By contrast, the calculated forces fit well with the global flood model.

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 The problem Noah Diffenbaugh and Mitchell

Lyle face when attempting to provide a secular, materialist hypothesis for the dried-up inland seas is coming up with a “law of nature” that can account for them.  If tropical rains or jet streams cause giant lakes, why are they not building up vast inland seas today?  Why aren’t hurricanes creating new Lake Bonnevilles in Louisiana that we can watch grow year by year?  Why then, and not now? What was different?  Don’t just say “climate change.”

 

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Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 Secular scientists generally discourage ad hoc

mechanisms in theories.  While the Flood is a singular event, it is not ad hoc.  It has written testimony for support: the detailed record in Genesis 6–9.  Textual evidence suggests the record could have been originally written by Noah, an eyewitness, then handed down through his son Shem and his descendents, eventually compiled by Moses (the Babylonian and other accounts, with their absurdities, being corruptions of the real event).

 

04/20/23 43

Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood 使用没有洪水来解释内海 Contrasted with all the failures of Darwin and

Lyell, the Genesis explanation should be taken seriously on its merits, whether or not the secularists mock, as they were predicted to do nearly two millennia ago (2 Peter 3:1–9) – another independent corroboration.  Which Noah is more trustworthy – one who wasn’t there, who leans on Charlie & Charlie, or one who was an eyewitness and told us what happened, with effects we can still see today with our own eyes?

 

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Ethicists are becoming alarmed at the explosive

increase in scientific fraud cases – and those are just the ones that were caught.

Fraud on the Rise It’s a truism that scientific research requires

honesty (as with any intellectual endeavor).  For some reason, fraud cases have increased dramatically.  Is it due to better detection and reporting, or to a disturbing trend that no longer values honesty in academia?  Some recent articles weigh in on the problem.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 In Nature News Oct 1, an article headlined,

“Misconduct is the main cause of life-sciences retractions.”  That’s misconduct in contrast to slipshod error, as Zoe Corbyn expressed:

Conventional wisdom says that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. Not so, according to one of the largest-ever studies of retractions. A survey published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Results of the survey were published in PNAS (Fang,

Steen and Casadevall, “Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications,” PNAS October 1, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109).  Of the 2,047 retracted papers surveyed, 43% were fraud cases and 24% were due to either duplicate publication or plagiarism.  And this was from leading journals, including Nature, Science, and PNAS itself.  Only a fifth, Science Insider said, were due to mistakes.  Science Magazine (Random Sample, Oct 5) noted that while plagiarism predominated in China, fraud predominated in the United States.  New Scientist said these numbers were “higher than thought.”  The Scientist speculated about the reasons:

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 The disproportionate number of fraud-related retractions

from high-IF journals likely reflects the pressures on scientists to publish impressive data in prestigious journals. “There’s greater reward,” said Resnik, “and more temptation to bend the rules.”

But lots of people work under stress without bending the rules, and temptations hit everyone.  Scientists are supposed to be models of integrity, aren’t they?  Whatever the reason, research misconduct is not a victimless crime.  One of the ethicists conducting the survey wanted to “dispel any notion that scientific misconduct may be a crime that only affects the perpetrators.”  Scientists often publish on issues society really cares about.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Science Insider tried to whitewash the problem with statistics: Although retractions are on the rise, they remain relatively

rare in science. Well under 0.1% of papers in PubMed have been retracted, the study found; the database contains more than 25 million papers going back to the 1940s.

The problem with that analysis is that nobody knows how many papers should have been retracted but were never exposed for fraud, error, or misconduct.  That’s not just an idle concern.  “What’s troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven’t yet been detected and retracted,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, lead author of the paper (quoted in Science Daily).  And then there’s the question, why are retractions on the rise?  Why now?

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Science Daily listed Casadevall’s

suggestions for improvement: such as, more emphasis on quality over quantity, less rating for impact, more cooperation and collaboration, and better funding processes.  These would undoubtedly help, but one can imagine whole groups conspiring to commit fraud if honesty is not valued.

04/20/23 50

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Shocking Self-Promotion The Scientist uncovered another trend in fraud: self-

congratulation.  Some scientists are logging in under another name and writing great reviews of their own work.

At least four scientists have been cheating the peer review system in a whole new way: when submitting a paper to a scientific journal, they suggest reviewers with email addresses that track back to themselves; then they write a glowing review.… “I find it very shocking,” Laura Schmidt, an Elsevier publisher, told The Chronicle. “It’s very serious, very manipulative, and very deliberate.” .…

This “has taken a lot of people by surprise,” Irene Hames, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics that advises journals on how to handle misconduct, said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “It should be a wake-up call to any journals that don’t have rigorous reviewer selection and screening in place.”

04/20/23 51

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Psychologist, Shrink Thyself As reported earlier, some high-profile cases of

fraud have come from the psychologist community.  Now, according to Nature News, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman is calling on them to clean up their act.  He wants them “to restore the credibility of their field by creating a replication ring to check each others’ results.”  He told them in an email, “your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research.  I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess.”

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Diederich Stapel, one of the poster children for psychology

fraud, is now under investigation by Dutch prosecutors, according to Science Now.  25 of his papers have been retracted and others are being considered for retraction.  He had received 2.2 million euros in research funding.  Other high-profile cases include Dirk Smeesters (7/05/2012), Lawrence Sanna, and Marc Hauser (9/05/2012)

Kahneman proposed a “daisy chain of replication” to avoid unverified results.  Norbert Schwarz, a social psychologist from U of Michigan, agrees something must be done.  “I hope that this becomes part of a broader movement in psychology to be more self-critical, and to see if there are gaps in the way we do everyday science.”

04/20/23 53

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Sleeping at the Syringe Another shocking fraud case was by an anesthesiologist,

Yoshitaka Fujii in Tokyo.  David Cyranoski wrote in Nature News, “Retraction record rocks community: Anaesthesiology tries to move on after fraud investigations.”  This is not one person’s problem, Cyranoski showed:

One of the biggest purges of the scientific literature in history is finally getting under way. After more than a decade of suspicion about the work of anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, formerly of Toho University in Tokyo, investigations by journals and universities have concluded that he fabricated data on an epic scale. At least half of the roughly 200 papers he authored on responses to drugs after surgery are in line for retraction in the coming months.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Like many cases of fraud, this one has

raised questions about how the misconduct went undetected for so long. But the scope and duration of Fujii’s deception have shaken multiple journals and the entire field of anaesthesiology, which has seen other high-profile frauds in the past few years.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Unquestionably, this could be serious.  Fraudulent

claims about drugs could conceivably reach right into the hospital where your loved one is trusting the doctor’s advice on medication.  Suspicions arose about Fujii when he published more papers than seemed possible in the amount of time, and they looked “too perfect.”  By spreading his publications out in multiple journals, he avoided some of the suspicion.  Another trick, since he worked for five institutions, was to claim that ethics approval for studies had been granted at a previous post.

04/20/23 56

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 While Fujii’s is an exceptional case,

colleagues are worried about their field.  One who suspected the fraud doesn’t want to write off Fujii as merely a bad apple.  “It’s a system failure,” he said.  Indeed, if peer review and replication are not working, the vaunted “self-correcting” quality of scientific research is compromised.

04/20/23 57

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Assessment Perhaps no other field of scholarly activity generates as

much writing as science – publications that are supposed to be peer reviewed, inspected, and replicated.  Thousands of titles are printed and posted every week by labs all over the world.  For the self-checking processes of science to work, fellow scientists would have to spend vast amounts of their time replicating other scientists’ results.  How could they?  Even if they could, they might be motivated by rivalry or the desire for approval from superiors.  Some research is clearly too difficult to replicate: how many countries can build a Large Hadron Collider to look for the Higgs boson? Much work is not reproducible without great effort or luck, like snapping a photo of an ivory woodpecker.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Peer review and replication remain idealistic in principle

but too often unattainable in practice.  Consequently, vast numbers of scientific papers slide through the process without adequate review, attaining the illusion of validity in the public’s eye.  When fraud is caught, it’s often long after the damage has been done.  The Scientist gave the example of the measles epidemic that resulted when parents feared, based on a fraudulent study, that inoculations caused autism.

While it may be encouraging to see rising concern over scientific fraud and misconduct, who’s watching the watchers?  Somebody, somewhere, has to abide by some pretty old-fashioned values: courage and integrity.

04/20/23 59

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Integrity: evolve that, Darwin.  Rule: if it evolves,

it’s not integrity. In the article on Marc Hauser (9/05/2012), we

made the point that evolutionary materialists really have nothing to complain about.  Cheating is part of evolutionary game theory.  Cheaters are necessary to produce the evolution of morality; Hauser himself taught that in his own book, and his colleagues all agree.  How can they fault him for living consistent with his own views?  He was performing a necessary role.  For those who take this view of morality, all the cheaters mentioned in this article should get rewards.

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Critics might respond that misconduct is

rife in churches, too.  It’s true.  From time to time, high-profile pastors get exposed for sexual misconduct.  Some preachers plagiarize others’ work by downloading sermons and preaching them as if their own.  Yes, there are sinners in the church!

04/20/23 61

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 The difference is that the Biblical

worldview accounts for sin; evolution does not.  Bible believers know that God is holy, but humans are fallen. While the Bible teaches that we are each responsible for our sin, and have no excuse, we all sin.  The history of sinners, even among great men like King David, is long; even the most righteous among us knows temptation and stumbling.  But the Bible is also a story of redemption.  Christ came into the world to save sinners (Romans 5:6–11). 

04/20/23 62

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 Accepting his gift of righteousness, purchased by

his death on the cross, provides imputed (legal) righteousness before God, but practical righteousness only over time.  The Christian life is a long process of sanctification that will not be completed in this lifetime.  Christ founded the church (Matthew 16:13–19) as a community of disciples who would encourage and admonish each other toward righteousness (Colossians 3), with godly leaders teaching and applying His inspired Word (I Peter 5), which is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness (I Timothy 3:16).

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 The point is that the Biblical worldview accounts

for sin and has means for dealing with it.  The more a church maintains high standards, is aware of sources of temptation, has policies for transparency and accountability, the less likely major cases of misconduct will appear.  Nevertheless, because of our fallenness and ever-present temptation, some will stumble and fall into sin.  When it happens, there are Biblical policies for dealing with it (e.g., Matthew 18), and redemptive policies for rehabilitating the sinner (II Corinthians 2:3–7).

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Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 The secular scientific community, by

contrast, pretends shock and dismay over the misconduct of their members, but cannot account for why the misconduct is wrong.  There is no “should” in evolutionary theory.  They can’t say stuff should happen, and other stuff should not happen; they can only say stuff happens.

04/20/23 65

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 The only way secularists can set up ethics boards, policies

and procedures, and investigate and punish misconduct is to borrow from Judeo-Christian moral principles.  They have to steal from the smorgasbord of Christian values.  This means they have to commit misconduct (plagiarism and theft) to fight misconduct!  Reaching into their own beliefs, they have no grounds for calling anything of the above incidents wrong.  It’s all evolutionary games; it just happens, like hyenas sneaking in bites at the lion’s catch.  Conceivably, a new power could evolve that would make right wrong and wrong right.  Ethics boards in an evolutionary future might punish the honest folks and reward the cheats.  (Wait; that’s already happened—e.g., in communist countries built on Darwinian “ethics”.)

04/20/23 66

Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 We shouldn’t let the Casadevalls, Schmidts and

Kahnemans of the secular science community pretend righteous indignation when, to the scientific consensus, righteousness evolved by an amoral, aimless process of natural selection (9/12/2012).  Only those whose worldview can ground righteousness in timeless, unchanging attributes of a righteous Creator have the justification for righteous indignation.  This means that only Bible believers are qualified to rise up and demand honesty and integrity from scientists.  Let them do their duty with all diligence, considering themselves, lest they also be tempted (Galatians 6:1–5).

04/20/23 67

Survival of the Nicest最好的生存 Baboons monitored for personality did

best if they fell in the “Nice” category. Science Now put up a headline that would

have surprised Darwin: “For Some Primates, Survival of the Nicest.”  Three evolutionists watched 45 baboons for 7 years and classified their behaviors based on their grunts, and their hormones from droppings.

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Survival of the Nicest最好的生存 We identified three relatively stable personality

dimensions, each characterized by a distinct suite of behaviors that were not redundant with dominance rank or the availability of kin. Females scoring high on the “Nice” dimension were friendly to all females and often grunted to lower-ranking females to signal benign intent. “Aloof” females were aggressive, less friendly, and grunted primarily to higher-ranking females. “Loner” females were often alone, relatively unfriendly, and also grunted most often to higher-ranking females. Aloof and Loner females were rarely approached by others.

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Survival of the Nicest最好的生存 Personality dimensions were correlated in different ways

with three measures previously shown to be associated with fitness: stress levels and two behavioral indices reflecting the closeness of dyadic bonds formed by individuals. Females who scored high on Nice had high composite sociality indices (CSI) and stable partner preferences, whereas females who scored high on Aloof had lower CSI scores but significantly more stable partner preferences. Loner females had significantly lower CSI scores, less stable partner preferences, and significantly higher glucocorticoid levels.  (Seyfarth, Silk, and Cheney, “Variation in personality and fitness in wild female baboons,” PNAS, 73/pnas.1210780109 PNAS October 1, 2012.)

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Survival of the Nicest最好的生存 This finding seems to contradict over a century and a

half of Darwinian thinking.  “By being a nice baboon, you increase the likelihood of having strong social bonds, which in turn translates to a better chance of passing on your genes,” Live Science wrote in “It pays to be a nice baboon.”  Actually, the experiment found both Nice and Aloof females doing about the same in terms of reproductive fitness.  The only losers were the loners.  Whatever the findings say about evolution appears ambivalent: “It remains to be determined which of the Nice or Aloof personality dimensions is more adaptive, or whether variation is maintained by contrasting effects on fitness.”

04/20/23 71

Survival of the Nicest最好的生存 Survival of the nicest.  Good grief.  All those

genocides for nothing. This is silly.  Did the researchers watch the

baboons 24 x 7 for seven years?  Maybe the baboons did all their selfish Darwinian antics when the researchers were asleep and on vacation.  Why didn’t they watch the males?  Are they sexist?  We can’t let these so-called scientists get away with rewriting history by using bogus categories. 

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Survival of the Nicest最好的生存 Even Science Now, supposedly a functionary of that

bastion of Darwinism, the AAAS, said, “Females who scored high on the ‘nice’ meter were friendly to all females.”  How do you calibrate a nice meter?  How do you measure friendliness?  What is that, in Darwin terms?

No, we can’t let evolutionists get away with this.  Too much is at stake.  Darwin’s reputation must be preserved intact.  The triumph of German militarism and Russian conquest must maintain its scientific justification on true Darwinism.  Eugenics must not be undermined by those ID people.  No more Mr. Nice Baboon.  Give me survival of the fittest, and give me death!

04/20/23 73

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Is “convergent evolution” a convenient escape

clause for evidence that contradicts evolution? Evolutionary theory has a classification scheme

that cannot lose.  Darwin’s original tree diagram described “divergent evolution,” a process beginning with speciation followed by the accumulation of variations that make the two branches more and more dissimilar over time.  Animals with similar structures on the same branch are said to have “homologous” traits, because they derive from the same common ancestor. 

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 But the living world is filled with traits that resemble

each other on different branches.  What caused that?  Ah, the evolutionist replies: those traits are due to “convergent evolution.”  The similarities are “analogous” traits, because they do not derive from the same common ancestor.  With this classification scheme, evolution explains everything: if similar animals are related, they evolved; if they are unrelated, they evolved.  Is this a description of reality, or rather a convenient strategy for rendering evolution immune from falsification?  Here are some recent examples of “convergent evolution” from the literature.

04/20/23 75

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Jelly-Bird:  PhysOrg wrote, “Ion selectivity in

neuronal signaling channels evolved twice in animals.”   Sea anemones and birds have complex channels in their cell membranes called voltage-gated sodium channels, responsible for passing signals along nerves.  Yet their respective branches on the tree of life supposedly separated 600 million years ago.  The channels in the marine invertebrates “differ from those found in higher animals, yet show the same selectivity for sodium.” 

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Thus, “This study shows that different parts of the

channel changed in a convergent manner during the evolution of cnidarians and higher animals in order to perform the same task, namely to select for sodium ions,” the article alleged. “This demonstrates that important components for the functional nervous systems evolved twice in basal and higher animals, which suggests that more complex nervous systems that rely on such ion-selective channels could have also evolved twice independently.”

04/20/23 77

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Jelly-Man:  Nature News claims that muscles, too, evolved

twice.  In “Evolutionary biology: Muscle’s Dual Origins” (12 July 2012), Andreas Hejnol said, “Jellyfish move using a set of muscles that look remarkably similar to striated muscles in vertebrates.  However, new data show that the two muscle types contain different molecules, implying that they evolved independently.”  Adding to the puzzle is the fact that comb jellies, on a different branch, also have striated muscles, while most other invertebrates do not.  “Whether this comb jelly’s striated muscle is related to that of jellyfish or vertebrates, or represents another convergent evolution event, remains to be determined.”  The claims become even more astonishing:

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 These results suggest that, despite their

remarkable physical resemblance, the striated muscles of jellyfish and humans are constructed using a vastly different set of genes. Steinmetz and colleagues have revealed an extraordinary instance of convergent evolution — the evolution of highly similar traits in distantly related organisms.

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Remarkable, exquisite, striking:  Another paper in 

Nature begins, “In a remarkable example of convergent evolution, insect species spanning 300 million years of divergence have evolved identical single-amino-acid substitutions that confer resistance to plant cardenolide toxins.”  This is not as dramatic a convergence as the previous two, because the trait involves one amino acid substitution, and the species are all insects.  The authors, though, thought this really something: they said it “represents an exquisite case of convergent molecular evolution, in which distantly related insect species have evolved a common adaptive response in a single gene.” 

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 What makes it “a striking case of convergent

molecular evolution” is that the common trait occurred 4 times in unrelated insects that feed on the same kind of host plant.  The authors dressed up this “textbook example of convergent evolution at the molecular level” with adjectives like “autoecological convergence” and “functional convergence.”  (Whiteman and Mooney, “Evolutionary biology: Insects converge on resistance,” Nature 489, 20 Sept 2012, pp. 376–377, doi:10.1038/489376a.)

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 The nose knows:  The concept of convergent evolution

shows up in two papers in PLoS Biology about olfaction (the sense of smell).  Fruit fly maggots and humans could hardly be further apart in the evolutionary tree, but three Cambridge evolutionists found an “unpredicted degree of similarity” between their odor-detection equipment.  They said, “Our results reveal an unexpected degree of similarity between the development of the olfactory systems invertebrates and the Drosophila larva.”  (Prieto-Godino LL, Diegelmann S, Bate M (2012) Embryonic Origin of Olfactory Circuitry in Drosophila: Contact and Activity-Mediated Interactions Pattern Connectivity in the Antennal Lobe. PLoS Biol 10(10): e1001400. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001400). 

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 In the same journal, Janelle Weaver commented on the

surprise without using the “convergent evolution” phrase specifically: “The findings reveal surprising similarities between vertebrates and insect embryos in the formation of olfactory networks.”  She even ventured a philosophical explanation: “Because neural circuits in other sensory and motor systems share similar properties, the findings may represent general mechanisms that underlie the development of networks in the nervous system.”  (Weaver J (2012) Striking Similarities in Fly and Vertebrate Olfactory Network Formation. PLoS Biol 10(10): e1001401. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001401.)  Note: Weaver did not mention evolution in her summary, but neither did she disagree with the other paper’s references to evolution.

04/20/23 83

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Convergent bloodsuckers:  A paper about fleas

in PLoS ONE states, “Blood feeding evolved at least ten times within arthropods, providing a scenario of convergent evolution for the solution of the salivary potion.”  (Ribeiro JMC, Assumpção TCF, Ma D, Alvarenga PH, Pham VM, et al. (2012) An Insight into the Sialotranscriptome of the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44612. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044612.)

04/20/23 84

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Convergent crayfish:  Another paper in PLoS ONE

 found convergent evolution in 12 subgenera of Appalachian crayfish.  They couldn’t get the subgenera into the same monophyletic tree, so they had to use convergence to explain the similarities.   They referred to a previous study that “suggested that convergent evolution was more common in invertebrates than previously thought.”   Not only that, they figured that convergence is all over the place, confounding the work of taxonomists to figure out what’s related to what:

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 We find convergent evolution has impacted the morphological

features used to delimit Cambarus subgenera. Studies of the crayfish genus Orconectes have shown gonopod morphology used to delimit subgenera is also affected by convergent evolution. This suggests that morphological diagnoses based on traditional crayfish taxonomy might be confounded by convergent evolution across the cambarids and has little utility in diagnosing relationships or defining natural groups. We further suggest that convergent morphological evolution appears to be a common occurrence in invertebrates suggesting the need for careful phylogenetically based interpretations of morphological evolution in invertebrate systematics.  (Breinholt JW, Porter ML, Crandall KA (2012) Testing Phylogenetic Hypotheses of the Subgenera of the Freshwater Crayfish Genus Cambarus (Decapoda: Cambaridae). PLoSONE 7(9): e46105. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046105.)

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Convergent everything:  When you find similarities

between plants, invertebrate animals and vertebrate animals, you have a real conundrum; yet all three unrelated groups show similar signaling pathways in their innate immune systems.  This led Frederick M. Ausubel to reject divergence and embrace convergence (“Are innate immune signaling pathways in plants and animals conserved?” Nature Immunology 6, 973 — 979 (2005), 21 September 2005 |doi:10.1038/ni1253):

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 It is commonly reported that these

similarities in innate immunity represent a process of divergent evolution from an ancient unicellular eukaryote that pre-dated the divergence of the plant and animal kingdoms. However, at present, data suggest that the seemingly analogous regulatory modules used in plant and animal innate immunity are a consequence of convergent evolution and reflect inherent constraints on how an innate immune system can be constructed.

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 In that quote, Ausubel used a common explanatory

device to explain why traits on vastly unrelated organisms end up being alike: nature imposes constraints on how systems can be constructed.  For instance, if a creature wants to fly, it needs wings.  That’s a requirement.  Birds, flying insects, pterosaurs and bats, therefore, all had to obey that design requirement in order to fly. It could be argued, however, that animals could have evolved rockets or helicopter blades (discounting unpowered gliders like maple seeds).  There’s often more than one solution to an engineering challenge.

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 The Wikipedia entry on “Convergent Evolution” shows

that the concept has undergone a bit of taxonomic diversification itself: there’s functional convergence, homoplasy, synapomorphy, parallel evolution, re-evolution and evolutionary relay.  Convergence might be detected at the morphological level or at the molecular level.   As for causes of convergent evolution, the article claims that animals with similar niches are likely to evolve similar equipment.   And yet that can hardly be a “law of nature,” because many organisms occupy similar niches without “convergent” traits.  Thus, they are divergent except when they are convergent – an explanation that explains opposite concepts.

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Wikipedia’s article ends with a statement that

reveals that “convergent evolution” is an incomplete and controversial notion:

Convergence has been associated with Darwinian evolution in the popular imagination since at least the 1940s.… The degree to which convergence affects the products of evolution is the subject of a popular controversy. In his book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould argues that if the tape of life were re-wound and played back, life would have taken a very different course.  

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Simon Conway Morris counters this argument, arguing

that convergence is a dominant force in evolution, and that, since the same environmental and physical constraints act on all life, there is an “optimum” body plan that life will inevitably evolve toward, with evolution bound to stumble upon intelligence — a trait of primates, crows, and dolphins — at some point. Convergence is difficult to quantify, so progress on this issue may require exploitation of engineering specifications (e.g., of wing aerodynamics) and comparably rigorous measures of “very different course” in terms of phylogenetic (molecular) distances.

It may be a work in progress, but it’s a convenient phrase for evolutionists to toss around in their papers.

04/20/23 92

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 A constraint can no more evolve a trait than a stop sign

can evolve a car.  An “engineering specification” can no more cause a system to emerge than air can create an airplane.  These guys are kidding themselves.  One of the above spoke of “general mechanisms that underlie the development” of such-and-such a complex system.  What are these guys, Platonists?  Is there some Universal Form that gets impressed on the evolving animal?  As Randy Guliuzza explained in a series of articles on ICR, evolutionists are tricksters, transferring the “natural selector” to the environment, as if a blind world could force organisms into the engineering department.  He argues that ability to adapt had to be “designed in” to the organism by a Creator who doesn’t have any more to learn about engineering.

04/20/23 93

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 What the evolutionists have concocted with

their term “convergent evolution” is a strategy for avoiding falsification.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there really is a Creator, and one of his designs for preventing people from believing in evolution (i.e., that nature created itself) was to create complex organisms in nested hierarchies with similarities across hierarchies and within hierarchies, with all organisms using the same basic genetic code. 

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 This is the argument Walter ReMine elaborated

in his book, The Biotic Message: it would reveal a single Creator who did not use an evolutionary process.  The complexity rules out chance, the universal genetic code rules out polytheism, and the similarities across hierarchies rule out Darwinism.  This is what we see in the living world.  Rather than follow the clear biotic message, though, man’s willful ignorance leads him to concoct schemes to imagine evolution in spite of the evidence.

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 Clever phraseology, like “convergent evolution,” to

escape being cornered, is never an argument.  It’s a dodge.  The desperation of some evolutionists to maintain their belief in spite of the biotic message is revealed by how they will multiply miracles to avoid the obvious.  For instance, they will flippantly point to cases where their faith requires them to believe that complex traits evolved two, three, or more than a dozen times independently (examples: 9/20/2011, 7/27/2011 #9, 2/25/2011 #1, 11/10/2010 #2,  1/16/2003)   Even the pro-Darwin Wikipedia page shows incredible cases of convergence, like skulls of a thylacine (marsupial wolf) and gray wolf that, though unrelated, are similar in many detailed points.

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Convergence Convenience收敛便利 “Convergent evolution” is also an insult to

the Creator who has revealed His wisdom so clearly in the intricate systems of life. Like Guliuzza pointed out, natural selection is not a design process.  It’s not a process at all, any more than monkeys playing pinball with no banana.  It’s not a mechanism for development, either.  It’s nothing; it’s just “stuff happens.”  Evolutionists use magic words to try to make it into a designer substitute. 

04/20/23 97

Convergence Convenience收敛便利 The only thing that should converge when we look

at this world filled with wonderful engineering designs, often similar among unrelated groups, is agreement that it is due to “common design.”  Such a simple, elegant theory is foreign to the ears of those who reject God, but the facts of nature support creation, not “convergent evolution.”

For a host of remarkable examples of similarities among unrelated groups, see Brett Miller’s humorous but penetrating essay, “The Convergence Concoction” on EvidentCreation.com.

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Eating Meat Made Us Human 吃肉使我们成为人 Sorry, vegans; evolutionists tell us that eating meat

1.5 million years ago made us what we are today. In “Anthropologist Finds Evidence of Hominin

Meat Eating 1.5 Million Years Ago: Eating Meat May Have ‘Made Us Human’,” Science Daily swallowed the evolutionary line without asking where’s the beef.  “A skull fragment unearthed by anthropologists in Tanzania shows that our ancient ancestors were eating meat at least 1.5 million years ago, shedding new light into the evolution of human physiology and brain development.”

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Eating Meat Made Us Human 吃肉使我们成为人 If meat eating made us human, what does that make T.

rex?  Lots of animals ate meat.  Carnivores go way back.  Didn’t the anthropologist consider that?

“Meat eating has always been considered one of the things that made us human, with the protein contributing to the growth of our brains,” said Charles Musiba, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, who helped make the discovery. “Our work shows that 1.5 million years ago we were not opportunistic meat eaters, we were actively hunting and eating meat.”

But lots of carnivores hunt their meat.  That’s what makes a carnivore a carnivore and not just a scavenger.  Is hunting meat what makes eagles human?

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Eating Meat Made Us Human 吃肉使我们成为人 Somehow Musiba built his conclusion on a malnourished

juvenile “hominin,” as inferred from the skull fragment. The reader looks in vain for deeper thinking about this than the headline suggested.

The study offers insights into the evolution of hominins including Homo sapiens. Musiba said the movement from a scavenger, largely plant-eating lifestyle to a meat-eating one may have provided the protein needed to grow our brains and give us an evolutionary boost.

Some scientists have argued that we became human when we became carnivorous-omnivorous creatures.

“Meat eating is associated with brain development,” he said. “The brain is a large organ and requires a lot of energy. We are beginning to think more about the relationship between brain expansion and a high protein diet.”

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Eating Meat Made Us Human 吃肉使我们成为人 Certainly a T. rex or a lion eats much more protein per

ounce of brain than a human does.  How can Musiba say such things?  How can Science Daily publish it uncritically?  Musiba says that chimpanzees have smaller brains and eat less meat, but nowhere did he apply his notion to the large carnivores that have inhabited earth.

He may be convinced of his hypothesis: he said that our meat eating “separates us from our distant cousins.”  But he also can’t explain why our ancestors went to the meat market: “The question is what triggered our meat eating? Was it a changing environment? Was it the expansion of the brain itself? We don’t really know.”

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Eating Meat Made Us Human 吃肉使我们成为人 This story is so full of baloney it’s hard to

know where to start slicing.  First, he says meat eating made us human (ignoring all the other carnivores that ever stalked the earth).  But then he offers the idea that the expansion of the brain came first. This guy needs an evolutionary boost, all right; a boost out of the garbage bin he’s in.

04/20/23 103

Eating Meat Made Us Human 吃肉使我们成为人 So let’s just take him at his word.  “We don’t

really know”  (the “we” referring to himself and his fellow baloney sellers).  Science Daily knows even less, because the editors didn’t call him on it.  What do you do with people who don’t know what they’re talking about?  Ignore them.

We can’t ignore the sad fact, however, that thousands of people read this kind of baloney and think it is wonderful science.

Assignment: Feed meat to a guinea pig, wait a million years, and see if it starts writing books on logic.

04/20/23 104

Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 The mother’s immune system learns how to

protect the embryo instead of attacking it as foreign material.

The immune system is blind; it has no brain on its own.  It is programmed to identify and fight foreign substances; that it does very well.  How, then, can it identify a firstborn implanted embryo as a feature that needs protection instead of attack?  The embryo contains antigens from the father, and its own unique genetic blend, that should rouse the mother’s immune system to fight it as an invader.

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 Specific proteins in specific immune cells are there to

help.  They “learn” that pregnancy is a good thing, and they remember it when the next baby is on the way.  A paper in Nature described new findings about this elaborate process.

Pregnancy is an intricately orchestrated process where immune effector cells with fetal specificity are selectively silenced. This requires the sustained expansion of immune-suppressive maternalFOXP3+ regulatory T cells (Treg cells), because even transient partial ablation triggers fetal-specific effector T-cell activation and pregnancy loss. .…

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 Here we show that pregnancy selectively stimulates

the accumulation of maternal FOXP3+ CD4 cells with fetal specificity using tetramer-based enrichment that allows the identification of rare endogenous T cells. Interestingly, after delivery, fetal-specific Treg cells persist at elevated levels, maintain tolerance to pre-existing fetal antigen, and rapidly re-accumulate during subsequent pregnancy.… Thus, pregnancy imprints FOXP3+ CD4cells that sustain protective regulatory memory to fetal antigen.   (Rowe et al., “Pregnancy imprints regulatory memory that sustains energy to fetal antigen,” Nature 490, 4 Oct 2012, pp. 102–106, doi:10.1038/nature11462.)

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 In the same issue of Nature, Alexander G. Betz

described the challenge a mother’s immune system faces:

Pregnancy poses a conundrum for the immune systems of placental mammals. A pregnant female’s immune system has to defend both mother and fetus from pathogens, while at the same time tolerating the fetus, which contains antigens that the maternal immune system recognizes as foreign because they are the products of genes inherited from the father.

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 On page 102 of this issue, Rowe et al.

demonstrate that, during pregnancy, immune cells called regulatory T cells that recognize these paternal antigens proliferate in the mother and specifically suppress the maternal immune response against the fetus. Furthermore, the authors show that a pool of these cells remains long after delivery, facilitating tolerance in subsequent pregnancies.  (Alexander G. Betz, “Immunology: Tolerating pregnancy,” Nature 490, 4 Oct 2012, pp. 47–48, doi:10.1038/490047a.)

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 How did this protective system evolve?  Rowe et

al. did not discuss evolution at all, but Betz offered his opinions:

Genetically, a fetus is half mother, half father. From an evolutionary perspective, maternal exposure to paternal antigens in the fetus is a relatively new problem: most animals lay eggs, so tolerance is not an issue. Yet physical attachment of the developing mammalian fetus to the mother’s uterine wall by the placenta provides clear benefits — it allows gas exchange, nutrient uptake and waste disposal through the mother’s blood circulation, providing optimal conditions for the growth of the developing fetus. 

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 A systemic immune suppression to facilitate

this fetal ‘implantation’ would be much too risky because it would expose the mother and developing offspring to infection. So placental animals had to evolve a mechanism for localized and specific immune suppression.

One wonders how many babies had to die before evolution came up with this “mechanism,” this “intricately orchestrated process,” by chance.

04/20/23 111

Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 Over and over again we see evolutionists wasting

time with stupid notions that are contrary to their own principles.  Evolution does not, and cannot, evolve something “for” something.  Evolution has no foresight, remember?  If it does anything, it recklessly damages what exists, with no care in the world, and then goes on to damage something else with chance mutations.  Whatever remains is that which was lucky enough not to die.  How many millions of embryos had to die for the Darwin lottery to keep the embryo from being destroyed by the immune system?

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 If that were evolution’s only challenge, it would be one

thing.  But pregnancy is a part of a hugely complex, interconnected system (“intricately orchestrated process”) involving three individuals: father, mother, and child.  Betz was wrong to say, “Genetically, a fetus is half mother, half father.”  No–a fetus (for humans, a baby) is its own individual being, different from both parents even though related.  If Betz were right, every child would be identical.  We all know that each baby is unique in the universe despite inheriting some clear similarities from both father and mother.  There’s no one else like you; no one else has an identical genetic makeup.

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 How did an egg-laying animal develop a uterus

in which the embryo would implant itself in the first place?  Egg laying is very different from pregnancy.  One only has to watch the documentaries on fertilization, implantation, development, and childbirth to get just a fragment of a glimpse into the numerous matching systems that all have to work perfectly together, right on time (example: David Menton’s lecture on YouTube). 

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 Most are matters of life and death.  For

instance, after relying on its mother’s placenta for 9 months, a newborn baby has to switch on its own independent breathing, with the heart sending to the lungs and liver, or it will die.  In your wildest imagination, suppose evolution got it to that point, but failed to find the lucky mutation to say, “Baby, breathe!”  How many trillions of babies died waiting for the thousands of beneficial mutations to “happen” that Darwinism requires?  Good grief; you get the point.

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Pregnancy Protects the Unborn from Immune Attacks 怀孕保护未出生婴儿的免疫攻击 Betz’s speculations about what

mechanisms evolution came up with “for” surviving pregnancy add nothing but baloney to a great scientific paper that was doing just fine till Betz felt his inner compulsion to offer sacrifice to Charlie.  Maybe Nature asked him to do it so intelligent design would not be so obvious an inference.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 A fossil Cambrian arthropod shows a large complex

brain, prompting evolutionists to propose that evolution ran backwards from there.

“Complex brains evolved much earlier than previously thought, 520-million-year-old fossilized arthropod confirms” is how PhysOrg headlined a press release from University of Arizona that found “remarkably well-preserved brain structures” in a fossil from China.  A similar headline is found on Science Daily:  “Cambrian Fossil Pushes Back Evolution of Complex Brains.”  Science Now announced, “Spider ancestor had big brain.”  The press release continued the un-Darwinian refrain:

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 The remarkably well-preserved fossil of

an extinct arthropod shows that anatomically complex brains evolved earlier than previously thought and have changed little over the course of evolution. According to University of Arizona neurobiologist Nicholas Strausfeld, who co-authored the study describing the specimen, the fossil is the earliest known to show a brain.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 Cambrian arthropods, including trilobites, clearly had brains,

but this one preserved the imprint of soft brain matter so clearly that scientists were able to trace the neural pathways from the brain to the eye stalks.  The press release states that it “represents an extinct lineage of arthropods combining an advanced brain anatomy with a primitive body plan.”  They must mean “primitive” with respect to age on the evolutionary timeline, else why would a “primitive” animal need a complex brain?  One of the researchers, Nicholas Strausfeld, said, “In principle, Fuxianhuia’s is a very modern brain in an ancient animal.”  Live Science suggested “primitive” equates with “simple” – “The rest of the animal is incredibly simple, so it’s a big surprise to see a brain that is so advanced, as it were, in such a simple animal,” Strausfeld told Live Science.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 In the press release, Stausfeld, a neurobiologist at the

University of Arizona, made other statements that run counter to evolutionary expectations, even though he assumed the brain evolved:

The fossil supports the idea that once a basic brain design had evolved, it changed little over time, he explained. Instead, peripheral components such as the eyes, the antennae and other appendages, sensory organs, etc., underwent great diversification and specialized in different tasks but all plugged into the same basic circuitry.

“It is remarkable how constant the ground pattern of the nervous system has remained for probably more than 550 million years,” Strausfeld added. “The basic organization of the computational circuitry that deals, say, with smelling, appears to be the same as the one that deals with vision, or mechanical sensation.”

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 Another evolutionary expectation was

shattered by this fossil.  Fuxianhuia protensa is a malacostracan, a group with complex brains, including crabs and shrimp.  Evolutionists preferred to believe that insects evolved from simpler-brained branchiopods (including brine shrimp).  The discovery of a complex brain deep in the Cambrian explosion shatters not only that expectation but turns evolution backwards:

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 Because the brain anatomy of branchiopods is

much simpler than that of malacostracans, they have been regarded as the more likely ancestors of the arthropod lineage that would give rise to insects.

However, the discovery of a complex brain anatomy in an otherwise primitive organism such as Fuxianhuia makes this scenario unlikely. “The shape [of the fossilized brain] matches that of a comparable sized modern malacostracan,” the authors write in Nature. They argue the fossil supports the hypothesis that branchiopod brains evolved from a previously complex to a more simple architecture instead of the other way around.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 The paper in Nature by Stausfeld, a Londoner and two Chinese

colleagues stated that “early-diverging arthropods have scarcely been analysed in the context of nervous system evolution.”  This was, therefore, the first and clearest opportunity to analyze it with Fuxianhuia, “exhibiting the most compelling neuroanatomy known from the Cambrian.”  The authors had to make the astounding claim that later branchiopods underwent an “evolutionary reduction” in brain structure instead of the progressive increase as would have been expected.  “The early origin of sophisticated brains provides a probable driver for versatile visual behaviours, a view that accords with compound eyes from the early Cambrian that were, in size and resolution, equal to those of modern insects and malacostracans,” the abstract stated. (Ma, Hou, Edgecomb and Strausfed, “Complex brain and optic lobes in an early Cambrian arthropod,” Nature 490, 11 Oct 2012, pp. 258–261, doi:10.1038/nature11495.)

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 However they sliced it, the authors had to conclude that “the brain

and optic lobes of Fuxianhuia suggest that the arthropod nervous system acquired complexity by the early Cambrian.”  The editor’s summary of the paper stated again what this fossil means for evolutionary theory:

The Cambrian explosion refers to a time around 530 million years ago, when animals with modern features first appeared in the fossil record. The fossils of Cambrian arthropods reveal sophisticated sense organs such as compound eyes, but other parts of the nervous system are usually lost to decay before fossilization. This paper describes an exquisitely preserved brain in an early arthropod from China, complete with antennal nerves, optic tract and optic neuropils very much like those of modern insects and crustaceans. This suggests that if insects evolved from quite simple creatures such as branchiopod shrimps, then modern branchiopods have undergone a drastic reduction in the complexity of their nervous systems.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 The authors found about 50 specimens in various

orientations, leading them to infer that “the eye stalk assemblage possessed a considerable degree of rotational freedom and thus allowed active vision”.  The preservation was so remarkable that they were easily able to compare structures with those from living malacostracans, insects and chilopods, each group having a similar tripartite brain.  “Indeed, it is expected that optic lobes would have already evolved sophisticated circuits even more deeply in the arthropod stem-group, enabling high-level visual processing of the kind presumed to be associated with large compound eyes belonging to the stem-group arthropod Anomalocaris.”

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 Spin Doctoring In the same issue of Nature, Graham E. Budd tried to rescue

evolution from this evidence, using the worn-out cliche that the fossil “may shed new light” on how brain tissues evolved.  His opening paragraph is a masterpiece of spin doctoring, listing various unexpected fossil surprises as triumphs for evolution:

Even to paleontologists, the fossil record can resemble the chaotic attic of an eccentric relative, stacked with ancient bric-a-brac of dubious usefulness. But the record has recently been throwing up some surprises that are bringing new order to this jumble. Our concept of dinosaurs, for example, has evolved from what were essentially bolted-together lumps of bone into living creatures covered in graceful feathers — and in colour too.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 Other fossil finds have brought changes to the scale

of our understanding of evolution. For example, the discovery of exceptionally well-preserved fossil muscle fibres throughout the record and fossilized embryos from at least the Cambrian period, some 500 million years ago, have provided remarkable insight into the fine-scale evolution of these tissues and life stages. Now, on page 258 of this issue, Ma and colleagues describe preserved nervous tissue from the Cambrian — a find that grants palaeontologists access to the exclusive zoological club of those who study the brain and nervous system.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 None of these “surprises” were anticipated by

evolutionists, yet Budd described them all as providing “insight into the fine-scale evolution” of life stages.  But clearly, in his own words, the only thing that has “evolved” is their “concept” of how evolution works.  How complex muscle fibers and embryos from the earliest parts of the record could provide “insight” into evolution was left unexplained.  His reference to dinosaurs covered in colorful feathers is also dubious.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 From there, Budd disputed the authors’ claim that complex

brains appeared early in the arthropod lineage.  His alternative?  “Convergent evolution” (see 10/08/2012) or else a grab bag of rearrangement options:

However, there are two potential alternatives to this far-reaching conclusion. It is possible that the arrangement in Fuxianhuia is convergent to that in the modern crustaceans or insects; in other words, similar brain assemblies to that reported for Fuxianhuia evolved again in later arthropods. Or it may be that we need to rethink the systematic position of Fuxianhuia. That latter option would entail a substantial rearrangement of our present understanding of early arthropod evolution — not least in the highly vexed issue of the ‘great appendage problem’.

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 This refers to the controversial identity of a large

anterior appendage found in many Cambrian arthropods, and seemingly also in the Fuxianhuia specimen described here. Discovering which part of the brain this structure is innervated from will add vital information to this debate. Either way, Ma and colleagues’ findings will prompt hasty re-examination of many old specimens, and quite possibly some recasting of recent theories.

(Graham E. Budd, “Palaeontology: Cambrian nervous wrecks,” Nature 490, 11 October 2012, pp. 180–181, doi:10.1038/490180a.)

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Cambrian Explosion Began with Big Brains 寒武纪大爆炸开始更大的大脑 We want to help our buddy Budd recast some

recent theories without having to do any hasty re-examination of old specimens.  Appealing to the fossil evidence, we point out abrupt appearance of all the animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, with complex brains evident in the early Cambrian and no transitional forms.  From there, diversification and simplification occurs according to built-in variability and adaptation mechanisms, but the original complex designs endure.  This theory of descent is known as intelligent design.  Reference: Darwin’s Dilemma.

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Upper Limit Set on DNA Age DNA年龄的上限设定 Forget Jurassic Park; DNA cannot last anywhere

near 65 million years, researchers say. Using bone fragments from extinct Moa birds that

died between 600 and 8,000 years ago, researchers from Denmark and Australia calculated a half-life of 521 years for DNA in fossils.  While slower than earlier estimates, this rate of decay would put an upper limit of 6.8 million years for the last trace of DNA, by which time all bonds would be broken.  The finding was reported by Nature News, Live Science, New Scientist and PhysOrg, which said:

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Upper Limit Set on DNA Age DNA年龄的上限设定 This figure is incompatible with the idea of

finding intact DNA in an 80 million year old dinosaur remnant, as was famously alluded to in the Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park, but is much older than the currently accepted record of 450,000 to 800,000-year-old DNA from Greenlandic ice cores.

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Upper Limit Set on DNA Age DNA年龄的上限设定 Some scientists are holding out the

possibility that DNA could last a little longer under different conditions, say, in caves or permafrost.  “The calculations in the latest study were quite straightforward, but many questions remain,” Nature News said.  The oldest DNA claimed is from Greenland ice cores said to date back 800,000 years.

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Upper Limit Set on DNA Age DNA年龄的上限设定 Here’s a project for creation scientists: look for

intact DNA in dinosaur bone.  It would militate against the idea that the bones are 65 million years old or older.  What impact would this have on the scientific community?  Unfortunately, probably none.  Creation scientists have found traces of carbon 14 in diamond and coal, even more impossible in the evolutionary timeline, and evolutionists totally ignored it.  This disorder, known as cognitive dissonance, is epidemic in the Darwin Party.  Outsiders, though, often take great interest and understand the implications, especially if it revives their hopes to go to Jurassic Park some day.  (That notion will have to be quelled with other considerations.)

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Sean B. Carroll is frustrated so many still deny

evolution, but he shoots his own argument in the foot.

Carroll, portrayed as wandering around the Smithsonian in ecstasy at all the exhibits showcasing evolution, was given ample space in a press release from Tufts University (echoed on PhysOrg) to rant about all the fools who disagree with him.  He can’t believe that people enter the museum and continue to carry their God bias even after sights like these:

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” The sign in front of the tall display case at the Smithsonian

Institution’s Museum of Natural History lures visitors to “meet one of your oldest relatives.” Inside stands a morganucodon, a mouse-like animal from the Late Triassic period, 210 million years ago. “A close relative of this tiny creature was the first mammal on earth,” the sign says. “Its DNA was passed on to billions of descendants, including you.”…

The facts of evolution may be written in stone and bone and DNA, but close to half the American public “accepts a biblical creationist account of the origins of life,” according to the Pew Research Center for People & the Press. Evolution is just one front in a broader conflict between science and individual belief.

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Much of the essay about “science denialism,” is

buttressed with the views of fellow Tufts graduate Paul Offit.  Offit and Sean B. Carroll (not to be confused with Sean C. Carroll of Caltech) positioned themselves as the promoters of reason and evidence.  “All I have on my side is reason,” Offit said.  “We are about evidence and weighing evidence,” Carroll said.  They portrayed the “science deniers” as impermeable to evidence, being swayed instead by theistic bias or general distrust of experts.  This is the either-or fallacy, overlooking the fact that science depends on belief and that many evolution skeptics are keen on scientific evidence, pointing to key evidences that evolutionists and advocates of consensus science ignore or re-interpret due to their “individual belief” (e.g., 10/12/2012, 10/08/2012, 9/26/2012).

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Freelance writer Phil Primack brought in two authorities

who claim that science deniers follow instinct rather than evidence.  “We like to think that we’re smart, rational beings, but most of our perceptions are subjective and powerfully influenced by instinct and emotion,” said David Ropeik, a former TV journalist who wrote a book about confirmation bias – a human tendency to believe statements that confirm their biases and disbelieve statements that do not.  Carroll and Offit agree that confirmation bias can affect scientists, too: “There’s good reason to be skeptical about information we get. But you have to be discriminating in the authorities you’re going to doubt,” Carroll wisely suggested but without supplying criteria for discrimination.

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Much of Primack’s article, which first appeared in

the summer 2012 issue of Tufts Magazine, concerned public fear of vaccines or fluoridation of water, and doubts about anthropogenic global warming.  Carroll lumped in skepticism of Darwinism with these.  Surprisingly, he gave a revisionist view of evolution’s recent history in biology:

But the wages of science denialism are not always obvious. According to Carroll, Americans’ resistance to the theory of evolution, while less noxious than measles outbreaks or climate woes, has had a real impact.

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” “Thirty years ago,” he says, “there was not

much interest in evolution within the life sciences community. Life scientists were interested in biological mechanisms, but they were studying them without an evolutionary context. Now it’s a different ballgame. As we’ve leaped forward and conquered biological frontiers on so many fronts, all of life science now sees that evolution is the fundamental thread that holds together the whole picture of life on earth.” But public education has not yet caught up to that reality. Evolution is still “under taught and underemphasized.”

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Thirty years ago would be 1982, when

evolution had had complete dominance in both schools and scientific labs for some 25 years since the space race and the 1959 centennial of Darwin’s Origin of Species – a dominance that has remained unmitigated to the present day, despite court cases and the rise of the modern intelligent design movement.

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Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” In addition, Carroll committed 

card stacking with the “biological frontiers” that he claims support evolution, ignoring the falsifying evidences from the Cambrian explosion (10/11/2012), the genetic code, the epigenetic code, and the discoveries of molecular machines in the cell. This is also a besetting sin of the global warming consensus (7/22/2012).

04/20/23 143

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Third, he did not support his allegation that

evolution is under-taught and under-emphasized, when in fact school boards across the country have had difficulty allowing even factual criticisms of Darwinism to enter science classes, let alone presentations of intelligent design or creationism, which have long been suppressed.  For 60 years, textbooks, when it comes to questions of origins, have been 100% Darwin dogma – some with overt factual errors about Haeckel’s embryos, peppered moths and other icons of evolution.

04/20/23 144

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Primack says that Carroll was recently named vice president

for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “It’s his job to find ways of fostering public respect for, understanding of and enthusiasm about science.”  Carroll is so discomfited by deniers of evolution that he wants to get into the storytelling business on film:

Carroll aims to give vivid form to such lessons in the educational videos he is overseeing on evolution and other topics. The Hughes film production unit will spend $60 million over the next five years. (“I’m putting Howard’s money where my mouth is,” Carroll deadpans.) Under his creative stamp, he promises there will be no talking heads, no dull graphics, just great storytelling. “Teachers deserve all the help we can give them,” he says.

04/20/23 145

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” They need help, he thinks, because Bible believers

have a much better “story” than evolutionists: Something else tilts the playing field toward those

untroubled by an allegiance to scientific rigor: “What if the message of one story is more appealing than another?” Carroll asks. “If you have been told that you have been specifically created by a higher being with some plan for your life, that can be a bit more reassuring than thinking that you’re just one of billions of genetic combinations that has come about at this moment in time after millions of years of hominid evolution, with no plan and no explicit purpose.”

04/20/23 146

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Like Bill Nye the Science Guy (see 

8/26/2012), Carroll expressed the non-sequitur that denial of evolution will negatively impact America’s leadership.  “If we don’t value science and education, there is not a lot of incentive for people to pursue those fields, which means we will see less implementation of knowledge in our public policy,” he said.  “We’ll have forfeited an edge in science that the world has envied for sixty years.”

04/20/23 147

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” Surprisingly, the article was decorated with a photo of a

dinosaur in the pervasive “death pose” indicating suffocation in water (11/23/2011, 2/15/2012) .  Then Carroll ended with a reference to the Scopes Trial, during which evolutionists were clamoring for academic freedom – the very thing that is being denied to critics of evolution.   And while Primack stipulated that “doubters of evolution are often linked to the political or religious right,” he did not ask if the converse is true: i.e., whether supporters of evolution are often linked to atheists and the political left (8/22/2012, 7/26/2012, 12/02/2004).  He did state, though, that skeptics of vaccines and fluorine tend to be politically left, unlike their anticommunist forebears in the 1960s.

04/20/23 148

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” First off in our commentary, let’s list some points of

agreement – all in a spirit of fairness and cooperation with dear Dr. Carroll, our fellow created human being.  We agree that much public unreasoning folly is regrettable; look at the scads of sick souls at slot machines who, against all probability or logic, lose their shirts in the vain hope they will get rich quick.  We also would disparage those who fear vaccines and fluorine based on flawed reporting and science, though our own reporting from mainstream journals suggests some justification for questioning the consensus about anthropogenic global warming (e.g., 9/26/2012, 8/02/2012, 7/22/2012, 5/30/2012).

04/20/23 149

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” We also agree that “you have to be discriminating in the

authorities you’re going to doubt.”  That advice alone is good reason to doubt Drs. Carroll and Offit themselves.  Would you follow the advice of someone who committed multiple logical fallacies?  In this one article, Carroll and Offit and their prophet Primack committed the either-or fallacy(scientists vs individual belief), fear mongering (denialism forfeits an edge in science), non-sequitur (criticism of evolution decreases knowledge for public policy), association(Darwin skeptics associated with vaccine/fluorine deniers), card stacking (ignoring evidences that falsify evolution), glittering generalities (evolution equated with reason and progress), loaded words (“science denialism”), and many of the other fallacies and tricks listed in the Baloney Detector.

04/20/23 150

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” But the fallacy that really undermines their whole case is

the self-refuting fallacy.  Their personal bias led them to shoot their own feet of reason and evidence.  How?  For one thing, Carroll said one must be discriminating in the authorities to be doubted, but then he denies the right for intelligent, informed skeptics of evolution to do just that: to doubt him.  For another, as an evolutionist, Carroll must stay within the circle he drew around himself: “just one of billions of genetic combinations that has come about at this moment in time after millions of years of hominid evolution, with no plan and no explicit purpose.”  How, then, can he explain his own plan and purpose to make films to fight the creationists?  Where did plan and purpose evolve from?

04/20/23 151

Evolutionist Beside Himself with “Science Denialism” 进化论者的“科学拒绝主义” To stand on a soapbox of self-righteousness with a

plan and a purpose, Carroll had to reach outside of his own worldview and steal from the goods of Bible believers, who ground righteous plans and purposes in the nature of the Judeo-Christian God.  He therefore exposed himself as a de facto believer in Biblical values in spite of himself – a disobedient one at that.  We can therefore ignore his advice, not only for the fallacies, but for the fact that he left himself with no feet to stand on.  With Tufts University sending out graduates like that, don’t send your kids there if you want them to keep their feet.

04/20/23 152

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Here are links to recent science findings and

claims sure to stimulate thinking and further research.

What’s the use of elephant hair?  A paper in PLoS ONE finds that elephant hair dissipates heat.  PhysOrg and Live Science summarized it, saying this is the opposite of what some evolutionists predicted why hair evolved: i.e., to warm the body.

Epigenetic stress:  Nature commented on 11 Oct 2012 that stress makes an epigenetic mark on individual’s DNA, but that individuals handle stress differently.

04/20/23 153

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Beastiaries and philosophy of science:  Caspar

Henderson at New Scientist examined 13th-century“beastiaries” with their allegories and symbols, only to conclude that human fascination with bizarre animals hasn’t changed much.  Hume and Darwin supposedly dispensed with allegorical views of the world, but Henderson believes we are returning to it.  “Much of life is governed or at least heavily influenced by what we imagine, what we value or fail to value,” he said, claiming that we are animals who dream and seek meaning, but preaching that we should act responsibly with humility.

04/20/23 154

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Diamond planets:  National Geographic and PhysOrg

 reported on discoveries of a new class of carbon planets sure to give new meaning to “Twinkle twinkle little star” – planets made of diamond.

Flood facts:  Live Science composed a list of flood types along with information on some historic floods.

Embryo to body:  Science 12 Oct had a special issue on how a zygote develops into a body.

Brain signal machinery:  Nature 11 Oct published a paper about “Molecular machines governing exocytosis of synaptic vesicles.”

04/20/23 155

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Investigating Vesta:  Science 12 Oct also

published 3 papers on the DAWN spacecraft’s findings at the asteroid Vesta.

Neanderthal brethren:  National Geographic summarized the recent paradigm-breaking findings about Neanderthals that are making them seem more and more just like us.  Svante Pääbo said that any two living humans differ more from each other genetically than Neanderthals differ from the average modern human.

04/20/23 156

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Carbon resonance:  PhysOrg reported on recent

work that elaborates on the resonance that allows stars to make abundant carbon-12, “life’s most crucial isotope.”

Simulated reality:  Matrix fans might like to watch on PhysOrg how some cosmologists try to determine whether or not our universe is a simulation.

Fly eye:  Did you know fruit flies have the fastest visual response known in the animal kingdom, five times faster than ours?  PhysOrg explains how the photoreceptors work.  More detail in the paper on Science 12 Oct 2012.

04/20/23 157

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Nazca predecessor:  Space.com showed an aerial

photograph of an elk-shaped geoglyph discovered in Russia that is thought to predate the Nazca lines by thousands of years.  It’s not just an etching; the structure contains walls and passageways.

Stem cell retraction:  Science Now reported that a high-profile claim in Japan of 6 patients with heart disease cured by adult stem cells has been called into question.  The Stem Cell Research Facts website, though, tells the true story of a fitness instructor with heart disease who was treated with adult stem cells and got strong enough to run a half marathon (video clip included).

04/20/23 158

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 Stem cell politics:  The scientists trying to block

human embryonic stem cell research(2/13/2011) are awaiting the decision of the Supreme Court, Science Now reported; but if Romney wins, the case may be moot, because he could block it with executive order.

Nice testosterone:  The hormone blamed for male aggression may actually make men more honest, Science Daily reported.

Political balance: In a rare show of fair reporting,  Science Insider interviewed a scientist in Iowa who supports Romney, without criticizing her views.

04/20/23 159

Weekend Grab Bag 周末集锦 These are just a few examples of the

variety of subjects that fly by the editor’s desk at Creation-Evolution Headlines.  We wish we could report and comment on more of them, but time constraints force us to be selective and cover only a fraction of them in detail, fascinating as some are.  Maybe you can grab a ball and run with it.

04/20/23 160

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 Two more finds show spectacular stasis – the lack of

evolution. Echinoderms:  A core from the North Sea shows fossils

of echinoderms (a phylum including sea stars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers) doing just fine at an evolutionary date of 114 million years (early Cretaceous) – far earlier than previously supposed.  European scientists said, “the evidence points to an early Mesozoic or older colonization of deep-sea habitats by the modern fauna.”  This discovery causes another rethink: deep sea marine organisms are more resistant to presumed mass extinctions in the geological timeline than previously thought.  From the abstract of their paper in PLoS ONE:

04/20/23 161

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 Our discovery provides the first key fossil evidence that

a significant part of the modern deep-sea fauna is considerably older than previously assumed. As a consequence, most major paleoceanographic events had far less impact on the diversity of deep-sea faunas than has been implied. It also suggests that deep-sea biota are more resilient to extinction events than shallow-water forms, and that the unusual deep-sea environment, indeed, provides evolutionary stability which is very rarely punctuated on macroevolutionary time scales.  (Thuy B, Gale AS, Kroh A, Kucera M, Numberger-Thuy LD, et al. (2012) Ancient Origin of the Modern Deep-Sea Fauna. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46913. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046913.)

04/20/23 162

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 The summary on PhysOrg emphasized the problem for

evolutionary theory by quoting the lead author Ben Thuy, who said, “We were amazed to see that a 114 million year old deep-sea assemblage was so strikingly similar to the modern equivalents.”  Watch the two instances of “than previously thought” in this quote:

According to the authors, this evidence shows that the ancestors of modern deep-sea animals have lived in these deep waters for much longer than previously thought. That this collection of fossils appears to have survived several drastic changes in oceanic climates also suggests that deep-sea biodiversity may be more resilient than shallow-water life forms, and more resistant to extinction events than previously thought.

04/20/23 163

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 Another Cambrian explosion problem:  Priapulids are

strange worms that show almost no evolution since the Cambrian explosion.  Science Daily shows a picture of a modern, living priapulid along with an article that describes how they cause selective physical pain to evolutionists:

He explained: “The fossils from the Cambrian period can cause a real headache for evolutionary biologists. Instinct tells us to expect simple organisms evolving over time to become increasingly more complex. However during the Cambrian period there was an apparent explosion of different major groups of animals, all appearing simultaneously in the fossil record. 

04/20/23 164

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 We looked at priapulid worms, which were

among the first ever predators. What’s remarkable is that they had already evolved into a diverse array of forms — comparable to the morphological variety of their living cousins — when we first encounter them in the Cambrian fossil record. It’s precisely this apparent explosion of anatomical diversity that vexed Darwin and famously attracted the attention of Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould.”

04/20/23 165

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 Here at Creation-Evolution Headlines, we frequently

publicize findings that contradict Darwinian expectations.  Here is a prime example: evolutionary biologists themselves, along with their lapdog media, state clearly and without contradiction that these fossil finds were unexpected, were surprising, and cause headaches.  The second story especially shows absolutely no evolution in 530 million years! (see Casey Luskin’s comparison photographs at ENV).  Science Daily stated clearly that [evolutionary] “instinct” told them what to expect, but “different major groups of animals” appeared “simultaneously in the fossil record.” 

04/20/23 166

More Fossils Appear Abruptly 更多化石突然出现 This reality “vexed Darwin” and still causes a “real

headache for evolutionary biologists” today, 153 years later, because the situation has gotten worse since Darwin barfed over it.  How much falsification do you need?  Our pages are loaded with 12 years of evidence like this.  We need to hold this evidence up in front of the Sean Carrolls and Eugenie Scotts of the Darwin Party Propaganda Machine and confront them with it, without letting them get away with sidestepping or bluffing or red herrings.  They expected x, but they got non–x and even anti–x.  It’s game over for Darwin.  Make them face up to it.

04/20/23 167

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 With over 2,000 extrasolar planets found around nearly as

many stars, there’s still no place like home. “Why aren’t we finding other planetary systems like

our own?” PhysOrg asked.  While the menagerie of planets discovered by the Kepler spacecraft is exotic and curious, it primarily shows that our earth escaped certain death.

Most planetary systems found by astronomers so far are quite different than our own. Many have giant planets whizzing around in a compact configuration, very close to their star. An extreme case in point is a newly found solar system that was announced on October 15, 2012 which packs five—count ‘em—five planets into a region less than one-twelve the size of Earth’s orbit!

04/20/23 168

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 An attending scientist at the American Astronomical

Association’s Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting commented, “If we can understand this one, hopefully we can understand how these types of systems form and why most known planetary systems appear different from our own solar system.”  Now, though, it is not clear.  Most planets orbit very close in, but our sun’s planets are widely spaced.

The fact that almost all solar systems found so far are so different than our own has astronomers wondering if we are, in fact, the oddballs. A study from 2010 concluded that only about 10 – 15 percent of stars in the Universe host systems of planets like our own, with terrestrial planets nearer the star and several gas giant planets in the outer part of the solar system.

04/20/23 169

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 This might be a selection effect based on what our

instruments are capable of detecting, but the discovery of so many close-in planets is sending theorists back to the drawing board.

There are several theories about the formation of the large planets in our outer solar system which involves the planets moving and migrating inward and outward during the formation process. But why didn’t the inner planets, including Earth, move in closer, too?

Fact is, “We don’t know why this didn’t happen in our solar system,” the spokesperson said.  It’s going to require “a new generation of theories to explain why our solar system turned out so differently.”

04/20/23 170

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 Several science sites like National Geographic gawked at

another oddball system that finds a planet orbiting a four stars, leading to inevitable comparisons with Tatooine of the Star Wars mythology.  The real story is that the planet also “challenges conventional notions of how planets form,” an astronomer said.  “The discovery of these systems is forcing us to go back to the drawing board to understand how such planets can assemble and evolve in these dynamically challenging environments.”

Update 10/17/2012:  An earth-size planet has been found! –but you wouldn’t want to visit there. Space.com said that the earth-size planet orbits a member of the Alpha Centauri system closer than Mercury orbits the sun, making it a “hellish, lava world.”  On Oct 18, Space.com used the opportunity of this discovery to list some of the requirements (and desirements) for a planet to be hospitable for life.

04/20/23 171

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 This is not what the astrobiologists, astronomers

and modelers expected.  Migration was brought into the nebular hypothesis in response to discoveries, not as a prediction of those discoveries.  What have “conventional notions” done for you lately?  The sight of experts rushing back to their drawing boards implies that planetary evolution theory is in a mess.  Hot Jupiters abound, requiring them to posit rapid migration toward the star.  Who knows how many fell in?  On the way in, if indeed they migrated, they would have sent rocky planets with interior orbits careening out of their stellar systems.

04/20/23 172

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 Another problem posed by the hot Jupiters and closely-

orbiting rocky planets is the realization that planets had to form much more quickly than the nebular hypothesis allowed.  Instead of slow “core accretion,” theorists invented new ideas out of whole cloth, like “disk instability,” trying to get gas giants to form in decades or centuries instead of millions of years, to allow them time to clear out their orbital debris before the nebula dragged them inward.  This is another example of how inept astronomers are at explaining planets despite their admirable skill at observing and describing them.   Virtually every planet in our solar system surprised them: none of them fit the predictions of the nebular hypothesis and billions of years.

04/20/23 173

More Evidence Our Solar System Is Uniquely Suited for Life 更多证据太阳系是唯一适合生命 Meanwhile, here our earth sits, safe

inside our sun’s habitable zone, as most of us pay these cosmic billiard games little mind.   Instead of thanking your lucky star, you might try thanking your Creator.

04/20/23 174

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 Brain size can’t be used as an independent measure

of fitness, five evolutionary anthropologists contend. How long have evolutionists told us that our relative

brain size gave us the fitness edge as we evolved from apes?  That assumption has been called into question by Jeroen B. Smaers and four European colleagues in a new paper in PNAS (Smaers et al., “Comparative analyses of evolutionary rates reveal different pathways to encephalization in bats, carnivorans, and primates,” PNAS October 15, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212181109).

First, Smaers & friends pointed out the long history of the assumption.  A summary of the paper on Science Daily says,

04/20/23 175

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 Dr Jeroen Smaers (UCL Anthropology

and UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), lead author of the study said: “When using brain size relative to body size as a measure of intelligence, the assumption has always been that this measure is primarily driven by changes in brain size. It now appears that the relationship between changes in brain and body size in animals is more complex than has long been assumed.

“Changes in body size often occur independently of changes in brain size and vice versa. Moreover, the nature of these independent changes in brain and body size, are different in different groups of animals.”

04/20/23 176

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 Brain size and body size interact in evolution, they claim,

and interact differently in bats, carnivores, and primates.  It’s incorrect to assume, therefore, that natural selection is simply trying to increase neuronal capacity when brain size increases relative to body size.  It’s possible, as with some species of bats, that evolution favored some species with smaller bodies to improve maneuverability, while leaving brain size intact.  More often than not, they inferred, nature seemed to be selecting for body size, not brain size. That’s why Science Daily used the headline from the UCL press release, “Evolution mostly driven by brawn, not brains.”  No, it’s not a return to “might makes right.”  It’s an acknowledgement that evolutionists have been misinterpreting the evidence.

04/20/23 177

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 The problem is deeper, though, and many

touch on many other evolutionary assumptions.  “Considering that one-way tradeoff mechanisms are unlikely to provide satisfactory evolutionary explanations,” they wrote, “we introduce an analytical framework that describes and quantifies all possible evolutionary scenarios between two traits.”

04/20/23 178

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 Because of the disconnect they inferred in

animal body/brain dynamics, they concluded that “Our approach allows a more detailed interpretation of correlated trait evolution and variation in the underlying evolutionary pathways.”  Focusing on one trait to the exclusion of others “confounds the effects” and thereby risks “hiding important aspects that may contribute to explaining animal diversity.”

04/20/23 179

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 Being evolutionists, they would never

conclude that animal bodies and brains are intelligently tailored for their lifestyle needs, no matter how clear the adaptive evidence.  Instead, their take-home lesson is “that relative brain size can not be used unequivocally as evidence of selection for intelligence.”

04/20/23 180

Brain Size: Another Evolutionary Assumption Shot in the Head 大脑的大小：另一种进化论的假设头部中枪 Someone should tally up the debunked

evolutionary assumptions we have uncovered in these pages.  A quick search on “evolutionary assumption” got 63 hits; there are undoubtedly more.

Project: Write up a description of evolutionary theory, one phrase per line.  Then link a scientific finding (like this one) that debunks the assumptions behind each statement.  Will there be anything left?

04/20/23 181

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Apollo ended 40 years ago, Neil Armstrong is

dead; but lunar geologists are still using the moon rocks they brought home to construct a story of the moon’s “evolution”.

Hit and Run Science news outlets went “luney” (luna=moon)

this week with stories of a new impact hypothesis.  If you thought the impact hypothesis was old news, it’s back.    Wasn’t it solved years ago with the proposal that a Mars-sized object (it even had a name: “Theia”) hit the Earth to form the Moon?  Well, yes and no.  In August, PhysOrg revisited the “Lunar Paradox”—

04/20/23 182

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Over the past decades scientists have simulated this

process and reproduced many of the properties of the Earth-Moon system; however, these simulations have also given rise to a problem known as the Lunar Paradox: the Moon appears to be made up of material that would not be expected if the current collision theory is correct.…

If current theories are to be believed, analyses of the various simulations of the Earth-Theia collision predict that the Moon is mostly made up of material from Theia. However, studying materials from both Earth and the Moon, shows remarkable similarities. In fact, elements found on the Moon show identical isotopic properties to those found on Earth.

04/20/23 183

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 That’s too improbable–for an interloper to

be that similar.  What to do?  Idea: envision a faster “hit-and-run” collision that lets Theia’s matter escape, but lets the debris reassemble into the Earth and Moon.  Problem solved?  Not yet; the author of a paper in Icarus hopes that additional computer simulations ” may finally lead to the long-searched solution of the lunar paradox,” i.e., one that can be “believed”.

04/20/23 184

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Tough Nuts to Crack Maybe beefing up the simulations with better

supercomputers will help.  PhysOrg promised on September 17 that “Improved simulation methods help scientists bolster theories of Moon’s formation.”  This article began with the sad story of the collapse of all three leading moon-formation scenarios after Apollo brought home the “ground truth”.  The giant impact hypothesis saved the day, supposedly.  “But this hypothesis also involves discrepancies that still have not been possible to fully resolve to date.” 

04/20/23 185

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 There are lots of tough nuts to crack in

the models on the formation of the Moon, for example the fact that the rocks from the surface of the Earth and the Moon have the same isotopic composition. The Moon has a significantly lower density, and the total angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system is high compared to other planets.

04/20/23 186

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Reading the Rocks Understandably, then, evolutionary geologists were giddy

to have something new to talk about this week.  Geologists use moon rocks as tea leaves, looking beyond the ingredients to visions of colliding worlds.  Zinc is the latest element they use as a divination tool.  Science Daily said,

The researchers discovered that the volatile element zinc, which they call “a powerful tracer of the volatile histories of planets,” is severely depleted on the moon, along with most other similar elements. This led them to conclude that a “planetary-scale” evaporation event occurred in the moon’s history, rather than regional evaporation events on smaller scales.

04/20/23 187

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Geochemist James Day of Scripps believes that a huge

impact was required to deplete all that zinc on the moon.  “You require some kind of wholesale melting event of the moon to provide the heat necessary to evaporate the zinc” and all the other volatiles. The vision became golden as he pondered the missing zinc:

According to Day, a gigantic planetary collision resulting in global transformations might be responsible for eradicating such elements. Day recently led a study in the journal Nature Geoscience that showed how such a collision might have brought precious metals such as gold and platinum to Earth, likely just after the solar system formed.

04/20/23 188

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 In accordance with Murphy’s Second

Corollary (“Every solution brings new problems”), Day’s vision leaves unexplained why the earth still retained its zinc.  That will take further research (keep that NASA funding flowing).  Day also wants to divine where earth’s water came from — another long-sought scenario.

04/20/23 189

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Proof or Goof? PhysOrg had the audacity to claim, in its

headline, that the “New study proves Moon was created in massive planetary collision.”  As if blushing, the subtitle added, “It’s a big claim, but Washington University in St. Louis planetary scientist Frédéric Moynier says his group has discovered evidence that the Moon was born in a flaming blaze of glory when a body the size of Mars collided with the early Earth.”  If a scientist thinks so, that’s proof, right?

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The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Science Daily gave this story two separate articles, one from a

a UC San Diego press release honoring home boy James Day, another from a University of Washington at St. Louis press release honoring home boy Frédéric Moynier (complete with smiling portrait and caption that Moynier is a “very special student,” more special than all the students who are special, each one).  UW is beaming with pride he made Nature with his psychic vision.   “The evidence might not seem all that impressive to a nonscientist,” the press release warned.  Scientific shamans have special powers to see flaming blazes of glory in the crystals that might escape the senses of outsiders using only their eyes.

Space.com, and Live Science, naturally, joined the chorus in unison, since their writers and editors are all part of the same disciple group.  “Proof of Moon’s Birth in Giant Impact Found in Zinc: Study.”  This article, though, added a comment from a scientist outside the study: Denton Ebel of the American Museum of Natural History:

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The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Ebel noted that the isotope study confirms

a prediction of the impact theory of the moon’s formation. There are still a lot of questions, though. For example, the moon’s composition is broadly similar to the Earth’s mantle – as the impact theory predicts. But the Earth’s mantle is depleted in potassium, and the moon’s should look the same. It doesn’t.

04/20/23 192

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Spin Doctoring Update: No sooner had this entry been posted when news

media pumped out new, improved models with faster spin and video clips.  The impactor was spinning rapidly, New Scientist said, it’s headline alleging that this “settles mystery of moon’s make-up.”  Space.com stated, more modestly, “Huge moon-forming collision theory gets new spin.”  Nature News claims, “Moon-forming impact theory rescued” by doctoring not only the spin, but the size of the impactor.  Murphy’s Second Corollary interfered once again, though: New Scientist noted that the two new models “the very young Earth spinning much faster than was thought possible – resulting in a day lasting just 2.5 hours.” 

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The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 That’s 4 times faster than Jupiter.  This also raises

a new puzzle of why the Earth spins so slowly now.  The modelers were ready: “a known but often-overlooked gravitational interaction between the Moon and the Sun could have drained the spin of a rapidly rotating Earth.”  Nature News referred to other models that deliver a moon without as much spin, ending that this is a “very lively and evolving area” of research.  Maybe the modelers feel like they’re playing billiards, because the final sentence was, “The game goes on.”

04/20/23 194

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Robin Canup, the gal who saved Saturn’s

rings two years ago by inventing an unseen big moon that slowly wandered in too close and became one with the gas giant (10/7/2010), got a few more minutes of fame in the press with her alternate model.  “New Model Reconciles the Moon’s Earth-Like Composition With the Giant Impact Theory of Formation,” Science Daily and PhysOrg both announced, implying the impact theory might have died a natural death without her heroic efforts.

04/20/23 195

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 The Science of Lunacy No worries, though, as long as NASA-funded scientists are

working the problem.  Diana Lutz, the UW press release author, realized the importance of the moon for stabilizing Earth’s axis:

Without the stabilizing influence of the moon, the Earth would probably be a very different sort of place. Planetary scientists think the Earth would spin more rapidly, days would be shorter, weather more violent, and climate more chaotic and extreme. In fact, it might have been such a harsh world, that it would have been unfit for the evolution of our favorite species: humans.

Leave it to evolutionists to save the Earth-Moon system for our evolutionary debut.

04/20/23 196

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Anyone offended at our suggestion that

the science news outlets went “luney” with their moon manufacturing models should look at Nature’s perspective on them (18 Oct), titled, “Galvanized lunacy.”  Presumably, like iron, the galvanized form is stronger than regular lunacy.  Tim Elliott wrote, “This flurry of recent developments emphasizes a waxing interest in our ever-puzzling satellite.”

04/20/23 197

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 It’s not science to be busy.  Alchemists were very busy. 

It’s not science to make models on computers.  Economists do that, but still can’t tell us what is going to happen tomorrow.  It’s not science to receive government funding.  Acorn got that.

It’s only science to the degree a theory gets the world right.  The formation of the moon cannot be done with science, because no matter how good the vision or model, no scientist was there to observe it.  Eyewitness testimony in such cases is far superior.  Science can only guess, and guesses are dependent on assumptions.  If the assumptions are wrong, the conclusions can only be correct by accident (the broken clock, right twice a day). Should they hunt for the missing zinc?  Maybe it’s missing because it was never there.  How would they know?

04/20/23 198

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 These “scientists” are all too happy to

spend your taxpayer money telling stories that have not gotten the world right for 40 years now.  How much more time do they get?  Is this perpetual job security?  Why not put the money on something that can really help civilization, like finding cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease?  The soothsayers can always get a real job, or if their work is so important, find private funding.

04/20/23 199

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 The major discoveries in astronomy in the first half

of the 20th century, you recall, were funded by Andrew Carnegie, one of those greedy capitalists who supposedly don’t pay their fair share in taxes.  The Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations—not the government—donated millions of dollars to public projects including the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories, where Hubble discovered external galaxies and the expanding universe.  The Carnegie Institution continues to support science with the remnants of wealth Carnegie earned and gave back. 

04/20/23 200

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 Today’s scientists go apoplectic whenever

there is a hint of decrease in government entitlements for their work.  Who just launched a balloon and a state-of-the-art space capsule, with command and control center, allowing Felix Baumgartner to break records for highest and fastest free-fall?  Red Bull, an energy drink manufacturer!  Meanwhile the government is broke to the tune of $16 trillion in debt.

04/20/23 201

The Missing Zinc: Moon Rocks Still Tell Tales 缺少锌：月球岩石还告诉的故事 If indeed the moon was designed for life (and

the scientists admit the necessity of our moon), then evolutionary scientists are guaranteed to get the world wrong, no matter how close their simulations come to their mythical vision.  The long path of lunar formation theories littered with discarded models should be a lesson: it’s one thing to examine a moon rock for what it contains now, but a completely different thing to play shaman and look beyond the rock into a vision of an unobservable history.  Shame on them.

04/20/23 202

Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 Impacts are a favorite tool for planetary

scientists to create beautiful things. The press had just gone wild with visions of a

colossal impact creating the Earth-Moon system (10/18/2012), when Saturn cried, “Me, too!”  A spate of reports claims the improbable assortment of moons at the ringed planet are the result of another dramatic impact (at least in simulations).  The story was carried by Space.com, Live Science, Science Daily and Nature News (i.e., the usual suspects).

04/20/23 203

Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 It’s not that the Saturn system “did” form this

way; it’s that it “could” have, as Nature News’ headline states: “Moon-merge model could explain Saturnian system;  Simulation suggests that the moons of Saturn were once more like Jupiter’s.”  The Jupiter system is hard enough to explain, but planetologists feel it is a little more orderly than Saturn’s odd collection of small icy bodies (with active Enceladus and inactive Mimas), big icy bodies, and Titan, the oddest of all.

04/20/23 204

Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 With widely ranging densities and

locations, Saturn’s six mid-size satellites are among the strangest in the outer Solar System. Measuring between 300 and 1,500 kilometres in diameter, the moons have varying characteristics: several are made almost entirely of frozen water; one, Enceladus, is rockier and geologically active; and some show evidence of submoons and rings. How did they get this way?

04/20/23 205

Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 With their charming impact video, the Saturnian

modelers are apparently trying to share the limelight with the Galvanized Lunacy club: “Earth’s moon is thought to have formed from a giant impact about 4.5 billion years ago. And just as the moon and Earth are geochemical twins, the half-dozen or so medium-size moons of Saturn are similar in composition to Titan’s icy mantle, researchers said.”

Science Daily included this gaffe by the modeler:

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Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 “What makes the Saturn system so beautiful

and unique could be its youth,” Asphaug said. “While we don’t have a preferred timeframe for this origin scenario to play out, it could have happened recently if something came along to destabilize the Saturn system, triggering the collisional mergers that formed Titan.”

Nature News, though, called on Hal Levison, whose toy models have trouble creating Uranus and Neptune (8/06/2004), to do the reality check:

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Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 But Hal Levison, an astronomer who studies

planetary dynamics at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says that the model is currently too simple to work. As the model is now configured, he says, the mid-size moons would inevitably accrete on to Titan rather than survive in isolation.

Perhaps he said this to help keep his colleagues in the planetary billiards hall employed, and to keep the game going (10/18/2012).

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Making Saturn’s Moons with a Bang 土星的卫星得有声有色 Warning: never buy a house from these folks. 

They bang the materials against each other and hope something emerges.

The best part of this story is Eric Asphaug admitting that Saturn’s system looks young.  At the 15th anniversary of Cassini mission, he is well aware of the problems with the rings, Enceladus, Titan and other things that cannot fit into the standard 4.5 billion year timeline.  It’s a tacit admission that the evidence does not fit the standard story without a colossal ad hoc rescue device.

04/20/23 209

New Jaws Sequel Has Evolutionists Teething 新大白鲨续集叫进化论者出牙 The evolution of teeth got pushed back farther in time,

thanks to analysis of a placoderm fossil. According to Science Magazine’s Science Shot,

“Ancient Jaws Had Real Teeth.”  Live Science headlined, “Evolution’s Bite: Ancient Armored Fish Was Toothy, Too.”  The best graphics are on PhysOrg’s coverage, “Looking for the evolutionary origins of our pretty smile.”

The artist’s rendition of this shark-like fish’s smile is anything but pretty.  Neither is the evolutionary implication, stated on Science Shot: “The evolutionary origin of teeth and jaws has long been shrouded in mystery, but the new findings reveal that even the earliest jawed vertebrates had choppers.”

04/20/23 210

New Jaws Sequel Has Evolutionists Teething 新大白鲨续集叫进化论者出牙 Placoderms supposedly lived between 360–420

million years ago, far earlier than expected for vertebrate teeth.  The placoderm teeth had no roots, and grew out of the jawbone, but otherwise were clearly adapted for big bites.  What it means is that jaws had teeth from the beginning; teeth were not a later addition.

“It has long been thought that the first jawed vertebrates were gummy— [they had] jaws without teeth, capturing prey by suction-feeding,” researcher Philip Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, told LiveScience.

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New Jaws Sequel Has Evolutionists Teething 新大白鲨续集叫进化论者出牙 But even though Donoghue claimed this study

“solves the debate on the origin of teeth,” it would seem more challenging to explain the origin of both jaws and teeth at the same time.  Live Science said, “This discovery that the earliest jawed vertebrates were toothy suggests teeth evolved along with or soon after jaws did.”

According to the paper in Nature, the authors believe jaws came first, then teeth, but their conclusion fails to explain what mutations could have led to neat rows of functional teeth in the first place (for details, see quote below).

04/20/23 212

New Jaws Sequel Has Evolutionists Teething 新大白鲨续集叫进化论者出牙 This fish looks perfectly adapted for

the life it lived.  Evolution adds nothing but storytelling from a naturalistic, millions-of-years worldview.  With its gummy jaws but no bite, evolution is parasitic on real science.

04/20/23 213

Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 Painted lady butterflies make an even more

spectacular migration than the famous Monarchs, observers just found.

The Monarch butterfly travels about 6,000 miles round trip in its migration from Canada to Mexico.  That record has been bested by painted ladies, which fly 9,000 miles, it has just been discovered.  This amazing feat was just reported today on the BBC News and Science Now.  Richard Fox, the survey manager of Butterfly Conservation said,

04/20/23 214

Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 “This tiny creature weighing less than

a gram, with a brain the size of a pin head, and no opportunity to learn from older, experienced individuals, undertake [sic] an epic intercontinental migration.”

04/20/23 215

Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 Why wasn’t this discovered before now?  Brits

thought the colorful insects just died off at the end of summer.  It turns out, rather, that they land in the British Isles as a feeding stop on their intercontinental migration from tropical Africa to the edge of the Arctic Circle and back.  While in the UK, they increase their numbers till they leave in two waves, one in August and one in October.  They were not seen migrating because they fly super-high: average 500 meters, but as high as 1,000 meters.  It took radar to spot them.

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Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 Thousands of participants took part in solving

the mystery of where they went.  As with Monarchs, it takes up to six generations of butterflies to complete the annual trip.   With favorable winds they can fly 30 miles per hour.

Painted ladies with their bright orange-dappled wings have been appreciated casually for millennia, but only now have their epic migrations been recognized.  One of the authors of the paper said, “So we’ve kind of got this amazing creature right under our noses without really realising.”

04/20/23 217

Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 This discovery suggests that more

incredible stories are still out there.  Here it is, 2012, and we are just finding out this amazing migration story.  Congratulations to all those who took part; everyone who loves natural wonders should be very pleased.  Will more epic migrations be found in Russia, China, or other parts of the world?  It would be surprising if Monarchs and Painted Ladies are the only species that travel this far.

04/20/23 218

Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 A new 3-D IMAX film about Monarchs is out

this month, Flight of the Butterflies.  Interesting observation: There’s a quote on the home page, “Evolution is written on the wings of butterflies.”  A couple of weeks ago, Charles Darwin was listed as the source.  Today, his name has been scrubbed, but the quote is still there.  Wonder what happened; was there a complaint? Is Darwin’s name too controversial?

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Monarch Deposed by Painted Lady 涂小姐蝴蝶废黜君主蝴蝶 If you want a documentary that takes on the

assumption of evolution, be sure to watch Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies from Illustra Media (available in DVD and Blu-Ray with surround sound).  The film masterfully shows many species of butterflies in all their glory, with a focus on their amazing life-cycles that defy evolution, and then reveals the Monarch migration in a heart-lifting true-life adventure story.  This is a wonderful tool to share the positive case for intelligent design.  Now it looks like a sequel featuring painted ladies would be in order.

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Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 An evolutionary standard for dating key events in

human evolution has been shown to be half off, even by their own assumptions.

In “Turning Back the Clock: Slowing the Pace of Prehistory,” Ann Gibbons reported in Science Magazine Oct 12 the bad news: “New work suggests that mutations arise more slowly in humans than previously thought, raising questions about the timetable of evolutionary events.” Since “timing is everything” in the scenario of human evolution, this clock reset has ripple effects throughout the whole story.

04/20/23 221

Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 Now it seems that the molecular clock ticks more slowly

than anyone had thought, and many dates may need to be adjusted. Over the past 3 years, researchers have used new methods to sequence whole human genomes, allowing them to measure directly, for the first time, the average rate at which new mutations arise in a newborn baby. Most of these studies conclude that the mutation rate in humans today is roughly half the rate that has been used in many evolutionary studies since 2000. “Together, these papers make a convincing case that the human sequence mutation rate is substantially less than the one previously used,” says Harvard University population geneticist David Reich, co-author of one recent study. “As a result, genetic estimates of dates for ancient events are going to be older than previously reported.”

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Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 As a result, timing of key evolutionary events is now “very

murky,” according to London paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer.  John Hawks warned, “We can’t figure out how things happened if we don’t know when they happened.”

Gibbons mentioned other drawbacks with dates in human evolution: (1) the first appearance of a fossil may not represent the first appearance of the species; (2) “there are no fossils of our closest living relatives: chimps and gorillas”; (3) genes might diverge long before species do; and (4) mutation rates can differ between apes due to other factors, like generation time (years between generations).  Mutation rate is important to evolutionists, because “It is the raw material for all human evolution—for better or worse, because most new mutations are deleterious.”

04/20/23 223

Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 New studies have shown about 36 mutations between

generations in Icelandic families.  The rates seem to be converging on “1.2 × 10−8 mutations per generation at any given nucleotide site,” or “1 in 2.4 billion mutations per site per year,” which is less than half the previous estimate.  Hawks said, “Some people will be happy with these rates, and some will not.”  For instance, while it pushes the Neanderthal-modern human divergence from 272,000–435,000 years ago to 400,000–600,000 years ago, bring Heidelberg Man closer to the mix, Chris Stringer feels a strain at pushing the divergence past 500,000 years.  When considering earlier evolution, the clock goes haywire:

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Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 What’s more, the new rate slows the pace of

evolution in apes to a downright crawl… It puts the split of humans and chimpanzees, for example, at between 8.3 million years ago and 10.1 million years ago—far too early, given current fossil dates. The split of the lineages leading to orangutans and the African apes, including humans, goes back to 34 million to 46 million years ago, Reich says. “A human-orangutan split at 40 million years is absolutely crazy,” says paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto, St. George, in Canada, who notes that fossils of likely orangutan ancestors date from 9 million to 13.9 million years ago.

04/20/23 225

Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 Spin doctors went to work with a fix, proposing that

the “mutation rate was faster early in primate evolution, then slowed in the African apes, and perhaps slowed even more in human evolution.”  They even gave the fix a name:”—the so-called hominoid slowdown.”  A critic said, “the magnitude of slowdown required to reconcile these dates is extreme.”  Others are trying to bring back the old dates by proposing that the new study didn’t catch all the mutations.  Overcompensating there, however, causes problems with other favored fossils that would fall out of the story.

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Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 Gibbons did not end on a confident note with a

preferred solution – only with other factors that further confuse the situation.  For instance, she mentioned how “risky it is to assume that the mutation rate was constant in humans and apes, because so little is known about what might speed up or slow the clock over great sweeps of time.”  But since you can draw more curves the larger the error bars, this would allow evolutionists to be unconstrained and say anything that fits in the general scheme.  She left the situation open.  Reich warns that “to do evolutionary analysis, you want to calibrate our clock properly,” but the question of the true mutation rate “remains open.”

04/20/23 227

Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 Evolutionists are kidding themselves.  The only

empirical pieces in this conflict are: 1. mutation rates of particular humans in a certain part of the world right now, and 2. some fossil bones with no dates on them.  The rest is storytelling.  In vain they look into mutations as sources of novelty, “the raw material for all human evolution,” knowing full well that “most new mutations are deleterious.”  But as they sift through the damage for hoped-for beneficial mutations, none of which have been confirmed without controversy, they ignore the millions of neutral or nearly-neutral mutations that cause code decay over time.

04/20/23 228

Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 This is what John Sanford explained thoroughly

in his book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome. Genetic entropy is an observational fact that even Gibbons admits is occurring: even a “slow” rate of 36 mutations per generation is deadly.  Humanity cannot last many tens of thousands of years at that rate of change, let alone hundreds of thousands or millions.  Why?  You can see with analogy of typos in a book.  As they accumulate, the book becomes less and less readable.  At some point its informational usefulness collapses.

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Human Mutation Clock Half Off 人类突变时钟半折 It’s superfluous to add, after that, that older dates

for modern humans add to the conundrum of why it took so long for them to plant a farm or ride a horse.  The puzzles that are causing so much furrowed brows in the Darwin camp, making them resemble their putative ancestors with brow ridges – those puzzles collapse when you take away the “great sweeps of time” they depend on.  Humans have not been around that long.  That’s why civilization, agriculture and the technology appeared abruptly, just like history shows, less than 10,000 years ago.  What’s the problem?  The problem is the cult that Charlie started in 1859.

04/20/23 230

Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Fifteen years after cosmologists proposed the

existence of dark energy, they have learned nothing about it.

In “Cosmology: Out of the Darkness,” Matthew Chalmers discussed the current thinking of Brian Schmidt, who shared the Nobel prize in 2011 for discovering cosmic acceleration (actually, an inference based on light from supernovae; see 9/30/2012).  “Fifteen years after Schmidt’s initial discovery, the ‘dark energy’ invoked to explain this cosmic acceleration is still a mystery,” Chalmers began.

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 The dark energy proposal brought with it “the most

sobering fact in physics,” Chalmers said: the thought that 96% of existence is something we cannot see or understand (dark energy, 73%,  and dark matter, 23%); “their existence is inferred by the effect they have on ordinary matter, but their natures are unknown,” yet they are the primary ingredients of today’s “standard model” of cosmology.  Some have hopes that dark matter will be detected some day, but dark energy represents “a new kind of bafflement,” he wrote.  A cosmologist remarked, “You have no intuition or guidance because the physics is so different to anything we have experienced.”

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Brian Schmidt studied the supernovae that led to

this “crazy” conclusion.  Before introducing Schmidt’s current views, Chalmers digressed into a brief history of the past decades offerings to explain dark energy: the cosmological constant, the multiverse, and some versions of the anthropic principle.  This has left cosmologists at an impasse despite 7,500 papers with the phrase “dark energy” in the abstract.  They are in need of a “big leap,” Schmidt said in a paragraph Chalmers entitled with Disney lingo, “Imagineering the universe.”  This led into a digression about scalar fields and whether they exist or not, followed by this admission:

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 However, scalar fields are only one option.

“There are hundreds if not thousands of possibilities,” says [Pedro] Ferreira [Oxford U]. Dark energy might be a vector field — one that has both a magnitude and a direction at each point in space. Other, wilder theories postulate higher dimensions of space. But Ferreira laments the overall lack of progress. “I don’t think that we’ve learned anything significant about dark energy since 1998.”

04/20/23 234

Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Yes, imagineering is a large, wild playground.  Other

cosmologists are beginning to wonder if dark energy is real or not.  It could be an artifact of assumptions in the standard model: namely, that relativity holds throughout the universe, and that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic.  “So far, both assumptions have been supported by observations, yet at distant regions of space they might break down.”  One critic said,  “We are in a mess with dark energy.”  Another said, ““In terms of understanding the rhyme or reason of how it works, there have been many papers on dark energy but no breakthrough ideas.”  Schmidt still defends the standard model, with the worry that “it requires us to invent 96% of the Universe.”

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Chalmers spent the rest of the article hoping that new

missions and techniques might someday find dark energy.  He humorously suggested that astronomers had better hurry up, then ended on an anthropic note:

They need to seize the moment: if the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, then in a few tens of billions of years everything will have disappeared over the cosmic horizon and be too far away for its light to ever reach us. “We are losing information by the second,” says Schmidt. “The number of atoms that are in our horizon is dropping rapidly and has been for about 6 billion years, so it’s an interesting time that we live in.”

Indeed, why should humans exist at an “interesting time” when so much of the universe is still visible?

04/20/23 236

Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Matrix Reloaded Believe it or not, this is not the only crazy

idea in cosmology circles.  PhysOrg reported on efforts to determine if our universe is real or a simulation.  Matrix cult members might like to ponder that one.  Could beings interior to a simulation ever know?  The question seems to lead to an infinite regress, because the simulation could have planned for its inhabitants to ask the question.

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 The Surprise Theory of Everything A saner look at cosmology was presented Oct.

15 by cosmologist Vlatko Vedral on New Scientist.  Against a backdrop of 19th century work by Carnot, Clausius, Joule, Maxwell, Boltzmann and other physicists, he led up to the latest thinking about thermodynamics and information, which he calls a physical property of the universe.  He then proposed that the Second Law of Thermodynamics – the law of entropy – could be the “surprise theory of everything” cosmologists seek.

04/20/23 238

Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 The law of entropy survived both relativity and

quantum mechanics, he said – the two biggest (even “absolute”) scientific revolutions if there ever were any.  It explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe; and it will constrain any future theory of physics.  Quantum uncertainty has filled in the concept of entropy and made the Second Law robust.  Even gravity, Vedral argued, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.  In “One theory to rule them all,” he concluded:

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Take all this together, and we begin to have a hint

of what makes thermodynamics so successful. The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe — among other things, to construct theories to further our understanding of it. Thermodynamics is, in Einstein’s term, a “meta-theory”: one constructed from principles over and above the structure of any dynamical laws we devise to describe reality’s workings. In that sense we can argue that it is more fundamental than either quantum physics or general relativity.

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Accept that and we can put “all our trust in the

laws of thermodynamics,” he said.  We can use thermodynamics to drive our theories forward.  Since the law of entropy prohibits certain actions, and comports with our observations of nature, “The ultimately ‘correct’ theory of physics — the logically tightest — is the one from which the smallest deviation gives us something that breaks those taboos.”  Time vanishes into the mix, becoming a consequence of allowed and disallowed processes.

On a roll now, Vedral got downright theological.  In “God the Thermodynamicist” he said,

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Such an approach would probably please Einstein,

who once said: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” A thermodynamically inspired formulation of physics might not answer that question directly, but leaves God with no choice but to be a thermodynamicist. That would be a singular accolade for those 19th-century masters of steam: that they stumbled upon the essence of the universe, entirely by accident. The triumph of thermodynamics would then be a revolution by stealth, 200 years in the making.

His article generated a lively stream of comments.

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 God is not constrained by His creation; as

the transcendent Creator, He does as he pleases.  Vedral’s article, though, even if it’s not the last word, made a lot more sense than the crazy ideas of materialists who force reality into their own evolutionary concepts and have to invent 96% of reality as something impervious to observation and reason. 

04/20/23 243

Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Mainly, Vedral’s “surprise theory of everything”

comports with everything Drs. Henry Morris and Duane Gish used to argue in their debates against evolutionists: that the laws of thermodynamics (1) are universal, (2) are the best examples of laws of nature we have, and (3) prohibit evolution.  The first law forbids any new matter or energy from entering the universe, and the second law ensures that all real processes run down, not up.  That’s no surprise at all.

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Before evolutionists get uptight about that

generalization, Morris and Gish realized (as Vedral also explained), that local increases in complexity can be offset by entropy increases in the environment.  That’s why a baby can grow into an adult, locally and temporarily–provided it is intelligently guided with a  program and an energy conversion mechanism aimed to implement the program.  Vedral enhanced the argument in terms of Maxwell’s Demon, a thought experiment set up to ask whether the second law could be overcome by a living or mechanical choice, adding that the choice being made is not just selection of hot or cold particles, but storage of information.  He said,

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 An intelligent being can certainly rearrange things

to lower the entropy of its environment. But to do this, it must first fill up its memory, gaining information as to how things are arranged in the first place.  This acquired information must be encoded somewhere, presumably in the demon’s memory. When this memory is finally full, or the being dies or otherwise expires, it must be reset. Dumping all this stored, ordered information back into the environment increases entropy — and this entropy increase … will ultimately always be at least as large as the entropy reduction the demon originally achieved.

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 Since there are no known exceptions to

the second law, it is the law that should guide what theories of origins we design.  The universe itself had to begin in a state of incredibly, unfathomably low entropy, and run down from there.  This implies high information content at the start.  The source of information is intelligence. 

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Shining Light on Dark Energy光照射暗能量 The intelligence could not be part of the cosmos

(pantheism, panentheism or materialism), but had to transcend it and not be bound itself by the law of entropy.  The only Being fitting that description is the Judeo-Christian God.  Creation by God is, therefore, the best explanation for the cosmos, both theoretically and observationally.  The vacuousness of the alternatives shown above only strengthens the case that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  If Schmidt and Chalmers need a “big leap,” let them take this one – back to rationality.

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 Skycrapers of the future may shine in brilliant

butterfly colors.  Optical biosensors may be made from spider webs.  These are just a few of the engineering marvels coming from biomimetics—the imitation of nature.

Walls of butterfly light:  A press release from University of Pennsylvania features Shu Yang’s work to imitate two desirable properties of butterfly wings: optical intensification with “structural color,” and hydrophobicity (exceptional water resistance).  Both of these properties work for butterflies because of the structure of the wing scales.

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 By etching wafers with a laser, Yang’s team has

succeeded in creating material with these properties.  Joanna Carver on New Scientist asked why this research is important, and found out what’s coming for futuristic cities:

Why do this? As it turns out, we have plenty to gain from butterflies. Yang has a grant to develop butterfly-inspired hydrophobic coatings for drier, cleaner and hence more efficient solar panels.  But it doesn’t stop there — Yang has a vision of butterfly cities. She’s working with architects to create a low-cost version of her artificial butterfly wing material. “Specifically, we’re interested in putting this kind of material on the outside of buildings,” Yang said. “The structural colour we can produce is bright and highly decorative.”

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 The colors can be controlled

electronically, Yang says.  Building coated by this material will also be more energy efficient, environmentally friendly, and self-cleaning.  So instead of the drab concrete look of many old downtown buildings, futuristic cities may shimmer and shine with beautiful colorful light, inspired by butterflies.  The story was picked up by Science Daily and PhysOrg.

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 Spider optics:  Did you know spider silk

conducts light almost as good as glass fibers?  That “hidden talent” was featured in a press release from the Optical Society of America (OSA), which is working on harnessing silk’s optical properties for use in biosensors, lasers, and microchips.  The copy on PhysOrg begins with a photo of a handsome golden orb web spider, decked out in yellow spotted coat and striped legs, balanced upside down on its web of ideal material engineers seek to replicate.

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 “Spiders use their silk to catch lunch. Now

physicists are using it to catch light,” the OSA press release begins.  One team is using actual spider silk to guide light in photonic chips, while another is trying to imitate the proteins to manufacture the silk.  Like the butterfly wing, the spider’s material is eco-friendly, hardy and renewable.  Spider silk was already highly prized for its flexibility and durability.  For it to have this additional property is remarkable.  One engineer remarked, in fact, “There are materials that can do one of each, or a few of each, but seldom all of each.”

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 That’s not all the OSA is looking at.  How

about “spider plastic”?  Imitation plastics made of spider silk might some day be used for implantable devices that the patient’s body can resorb.  Even a prototype biodegradable laser was created from the stuff.  The “spider optics” experiments showed that silk can direct light as well as transmit it.  Another benefit is that it comes out of the spider ready to use.

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 The press release states that Biomedical

engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts University in Boston gave a TED talk last year about his work with silkworm silk, hoping that “these recent successes will help more people become excited about the potential of this remarkable material.”  Biomimetics is a 99% Darwin-free, sociologically friendly research program everyone can get behind.  The remaining 1% consists of the usual Darwin spin some reporters put on it, but evolution really contributes nothing.

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 This is the way out for imprisoned science.  It

makes people excited, it stimulates research, and it helps humanity.  What’s there to dislike?  This could well be the thing needed to give science education a shot in the arm without any school board fights.  Textbooks can silently ditch the Haeckel embryos for pictures of butterflies next to skyscrapers, and drop the peppered moths for orb-web spiders next to state-of-the-art optical devices. 

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Butterfly Cities and Spider Optics 蝴蝶的城市和蜘蛛光学 Think of the fun science labs and science fair

projects!  Students will eagerly learn the details of biology in the process.  Nobody will miss the old icons of evolution in the gold rush over new knowledge, improved living and wealth and job creation by the new generation of biomimetics entrepreneurs.  NSF and NIH, put our money here!  Job creation from biomimetics projects via technology transfer will raise revenues.  Everybody wins.  Darwin was so 1859; this is 2012.  Let’s all get with the 21st century program; it’s not zero-sum, it’s win-win!

04/20/23 257

Dinosaur Soft Tissue Case Strengthened 恐龙软组织案例加强 At a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate

Paleontology, Mary Schweitzer gave more evidence she found soft tissue in dinosaur bone.

Katie Wong reported on Schweitzer’s Oct. 17 talk on Scientific American.  It was reprinted by Nature News.  Wong reviewed the controversy about whether the tissues were original or were from later biofilms imitating soft tissue, then said that new tests have been done on two species of dinosaur:

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Dinosaur Soft Tissue Case Strengthened 恐龙软组织案例加强 Schweitzer and her colleagues have continued to amass

support for their interpretation. The latest evidence comes from a molecular analysis of what look to be bone cells, or osteocytes, from T. rex and Brachylophosaurus canadensis. The researchers isolated the possible osteocytes and subjected them to several tests. When they exposed the cell-like structures to an antibody that targets a protein called PHEX, found only in bird osteocytes* (birds are descended from dinosaurs), the structures reacted, as would be expected of dinosaur osteocytes. And when the team subjected the supposed dinosaur cells to other antibodies that target DNA, the antibodies bound to material in small, specific regions inside the apparent cell membrane.

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Dinosaur Soft Tissue Case Strengthened 恐龙软组织案例加强 In addition, she found protein

sequences in the bone “matched sequences from proteins called actin, tubulin and histone4 that are present in the cells of all animals.”  She argued these were distinguishable from similar proteins in soil bacteria.

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Dinosaur Soft Tissue Case Strengthened 恐龙软组织案例加强 Schweitzer joked with the audience by offering

to show “the data in support of a biofilm origin” of the tissues – then put up a blank slide.

Update 10/23/2012:  Science Daily showed pictures of the osteocytes reacting to antibodies and dyes just they do with bird bones, but not with microbes.  Schweitzer continues to believe these proteins can be “preserved over time” (millions of years), and is no creationist.  She said: “Hopefully these findings will give us greater insight into the processes of evolutionary change.”

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Dinosaur Soft Tissue Case Strengthened 恐龙软组织案例加强 This is an important claim that seems to be withstanding

challenge.  It will be interesting to watch for more evidence.  You can ignore Wong’s consensus talking point “birds are descended from dinosaurs” as irrelevant to the story; same for Schweitzer’s personal faith in evolution and millions of years. The meat of the story is about soft tissue in supposedly 70-million-year-old bone.  As long as the soft-tissue claims hold up, they argue strongly against the consensus view that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.  For a new creationist article on the subject that mentions the implications of soft tissue in dinosaur bone along with findings the media typically don’t talk about, see “The so-called age of dinosaurs” on Creation.com.

04/20/23 262

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ Creationists looked in what evolutionists called “junk DNA”

and found gems.   Evolutionists are still looking for their gems in junk mutations.

Like gift wrapping, headlines of science articles do not always reveal what’s inside.  Some people send dead flowers in pretty boxes to make a statement.  Evolutionists are still looking for something beautiful in mutations, as evidenced by this title on PhysOrg: “Insects show how DNA mistakes become evolutionary innovation.”  As if to avoid embarrassment, the subtitle quickly added, “One of the more difficult aspects of evolution for some people to swallow is the notion that random copying errors in DNA can add up to anything useful.”  That’s a clever parlay; the problem is yours, not Darwin’s! (see “Shifting the Burden of Proof” fallacy.)

04/20/23 263

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ What did reporter Faye Flam offer as proof for this “notion”? 

Two papers that claim mutated copies of a gene allowed insects to avoid death when ingesting toxins called cardenolides (old news; see 7/25/2012).  The “innovation,” therefore, is not a new organ or capability that didn’t exist before, but a reduced vulnerability.  The article celebrated this as an “evolutionary trick” that produced “convergent evolution” in different insect lineages.  Evolution, though, should produce new species (like Darwin titled his book, The Origin of Species).  Flam could not claim that the varieties able to ingest the toxins were new species; in fact, the article confessed at the end, “The way new species are born is another longstanding puzzle in evolution that DNA is helping scientists to solve.”  Come back later for the promised proof of innovation.

04/20/23 264

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ Speaking of Darwin, another press release from the Vienna

University of Evolutionary Medicine echoed on Science Daily promised to help Darwin out by showing “New Understandings of How Populations Change Over Time.”  The article set the stage with a low drum roll portending disaster (note the ominous reference to “climate change”):

Since 1859, when Darwin’s classic work “On the Origin of Species” was published, we have known that populations change over the course of time. The ability to adapt to changing surroundings is the basis for evolution and is crucial for animals and plants to come to terms with new environmental conditions, for example as a consequence of climate change. Despite the obvious importance of the process, however, we still do not understand the underlying mechanisms. It is clear that organisms change their DNA in response to selection pressures. But how?

04/20/23 265

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ First off, readers may be puzzled why the

“But how?” question has not been answered since 1859, since that was the main thing Darwin’s best-seller was supposed to have solved.  And second, observers have known long before Darwin that populations change over time.  But anyway, where’s the gem in this mutational junkpile?  Has Christian Schlötterer rescued Darwin by showing how a random genetic change is linked to genetic changes?

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Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ Well, yes and no.  Schlötterer cruelly

subjected fruit flies to cold temperatures and shouted “Evolve or perish!” so to speak.  He did find some genetic changes, but didn’t associate them with adaptive benefits.  “It will be intriguing to try to find out whether the two categories of gene affect distinct groups of traits,” he said.

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Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ One of the biggest studies of gene duplication was

reported in Science this week.  The title is catchy: “Real-Time Evolution of New Genes by Innovation, Amplification, and Divergence” (Näsvall et al., Science 19 October 2012: Vol. 338 no. 6105 pp. 384–387, DOI: 10.1126/science.1226521).  There must be gems in this pile!  Alas, Elisabeth Pennisi in her review in the same issue was not so sanguine, despite her hopeful title, “Evolution: Gene Duplication’s Role in Evolution Gets Richer, More Complex” (Science 19 October 2012: Vol. 338 no. 6105 pp. 316–317, DOI: 10.1126/science.338.6105.316).  The phrase “More complex” is code for “harder to understand.”  It’s not a simple victory for Darwin.

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Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ She discussed Susumi Ohno’s 1970 theory that

gene duplication lets the copy evolve, then Michael Lynch’s late-1990s theory that genes with two functions can duplicate and divide the work (subfunctionalization).  Nice ideas, but they didn’t satisfy everyone, and are now seen as simplistic.  And there were problems: “Given natural selection’s tendency to purge unnecessary genes, how would the gene copy stick around long enough to take on a new or subfunction?”  Hold it; wasn’t that the claim behind junk DNA?

04/20/23 269

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ The details about how Näsvall et al. coaxed a

bacteria to make tryptophan from precursors when a gene for making it was disabled, and how it had to wait for the right mutation to arrive by promoting duplication, are described in Pennisi’s article.  The point of the experiment, though was to show innovation, not just getting back to where the bacterium was before a gene was broken. The researchers stated that two mutations were required to produce the “innovation” (which was actually more like a “restoration” of a deleted function).

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Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ Other scientists called this “a nice, elegant

experimental system” (sounding like faint praise), but were not convinced it’s a general principle applicable outside the bacterial world.  “No matter what, Näsvall’s experiment will encourage more experimental tests of gene-duplication scenarios,” someone said (translation: send more funding).

04/20/23 271

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ Empty promises, endless promissory notes, why

do we trust these guys?  Where is the really big innovation attributable to mutations?  Duplications are a form of mutation, but just because you get a second copy of a text message on your smartphone, it doesn’t mean the second one will evolve into a new, helpful message when cosmic rays hit it.  This is all wishful thinking in dreamland, hyped by ideologues with power.  Darwin was supposed to explain the big things– the trunk on the elephant, the wing on the bird, the brain in the Einstein. 

04/20/23 272

Mutations and Duplications: Pools of Innovation? 突变和重复：创新池？ All we get are tiny, questionable instances of

possible adaptive changes in bacteria (remember that bacteria can swap information through lateral gene transfer, and may have designed mechanisms to control their own mutations).  These get wildly extrapolated into vast scenarios of evolution, completely unwarranted by the meager data that is often subject to interpretation.  But they KNOW that there’s enough innovation in that junkpile of mistakes to explain elephants, birds and humans, why?  Because EVOLUTION IS A FACT!   Now you know why living in Darwinland is like being trapped in a cult compound.

04/20/23 273

Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 A new website helps visualize evolution.  But does

it confirm or obfuscate the real world? OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer is a new web tool

that lets viewers play a kind of “Google Earth” with Darwin’s “tree of life.”  Produced by a computer programmer at Imperial College London, it’s being seen as a tool “to teach people about the evolution and diversity of life, and to help make attractive and engaging displays for venues such as zoos and museums.”  Science Daily says it went live Oct. 16.  The mammal tree is up now.  The front page explanation says,

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 OneZoom is committed to heightening

awareness about the diversity of life on earth, its evolutionary history and the threats of extinction. This website allows you to explore the tree of life in a completely new way: it’s like a map, everything is on one page, all you have to do is zoom in and out. OneZoom also provides free, open source, data visualization tools for science and education, currently focusing on the tree of life.

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Its fractal-like diagram allows viewers to use

their mouse to zoom in and out of branches, twigs and leaves via computer or smartphone.  Each branching point is labeled with its evolutionary divergence time on the geologic timescale, and each species is linked to a Wikipedia page.  Students will be able to zoom in and see themselves as just one leaf on a branch of primates shared with the great apes, located between rabbits and hedgehogs.

04/20/23 276

Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 As our entry on Visualization in the Baloney

Detector shows, visuals can be good or bad depending on how they are used.  A picture is worth a thousand words to the human mind.  Every good teacher relies on visuals.  However, visuals can be used as propaganda tools of indoctrination when they obscure relevant details, distract from solid arguments with eye-catching pictures, or otherwise distort the truth.  OneZoom is a perfect example.

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Understand that creationists and evolutionists recognize

our morphological similarities with apes.  Both recognize the validity of classification schemes that put rodents in one group, elephants in another group, and generally separate living things into hierarchical categories (kingdom, phylum, order, class, family, genus, species).  In fact, the father of taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus, was a creationist!  Of course everyone knows we bear similarities with apes more than with mice; we were all made by the same Creator.  The great divide that Darwin fomented is whether all life is related by common ancestry via a mindless, purposeless, aimless process of natural selection acting on random mutations.  OneZoom will present only the Darwinist world view.

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 We have reported how the “tree” of common

ancestry Darwin sketched in his notes was only a heuristic “notion” that has not borne the weight of observation.  The tree has been described more like a lawn or web.  By forcing every living thing into a single prefabricated tree diagram, OneZoom directs students’ eyes away from the real world and into a fantasy world from Darwin’s dreams.  The real world doesn’t act like that.  Students should get out into the fields and forests and oceans for their information. What OneZoom “leafs” in is less important than what it leaves out:

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Will students be taught about the controversies in

almost every branch of this mythical tree?  No. Will the designers of the website update it every

time a new paper shows a radical revision of thought, which is almost daily?  No.

Will they be told about the huge unanswered questions, like the distribution of marsupials and the “convergent evolution” of marsupials and their placental look-alikes, that cannot possibly be closely related?  No.

Will they be told how some of the apparently close twigs cannot possibly be related because they live on opposite sides of the world?  No.

04/20/23 280

Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Will they be told about the major controversies and

upheavals about human evolution? No.Will they be told that the origin of life, the base of the tree, is the most puzzling problem of all to evolutionists? No.

Will they be told about abrupt appearance of most species?  No.

Will they be told about living fossils, stasis, or the Cambrian explosion?  No!  And forget about creationist debaters with PhD’s getting any hearing to point out flaws in this colossal hoaxes-pokes-us scheme, cute as it looks.

04/20/23 281

Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Darwinism thrives on visualization.  Look how

the Icons of Evolution survive, despite numerous debunkings by evolutionists as well as creationists.  The impossible becomes plausible in Darwinland’s storybook kingdom: life emerges magically from the sea in Disney’s Fantasia, animals magically morph into each other in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, a theropod runs and takes off as a bird in a BBC documentary on TV.  Shameful examples are legion, shamelessly promoted by the Darwin Party in one-sided presentations that present evolution as undisputed fact.  Take away their pictures and force them to debate the evidence, and they wimp out.

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Parting thought:  notice how OneZoom will also

be a tool of environmentalists.  Individual leaves are tailored to point out whether they are “endangered species,” a vexed concept with political overtones.  But zoom in on Homo sapiens, and what do you read?  “Population status: least concern.”  Lesson: the beings that are of most concern to the Creator, so much that He sent His Son to die for them, is of “least concern” to the evolutionists.  Think of the consequences of those opposite worldviews.

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Darwin Tree Visualization Tool Obscures More Than It Educates 达尔文树直观化工具模糊超过它教导 Project: Describe how the information in

OneZoom could be recast without the Darwinian “tree of life” motif, showing both the unity and diversity of life without ascribing it to common descent via natural selection.  Sketch a diagram and think about how an alternative educational website could display the same information in an attractive but non-evolutionary way.

04/20/23 284

Archer Fish Amplifies Muscle with Physics 弓箭手鱼使用物理扩大肌肉 The secret of the archer fish’s powerful

spits has been discovered, and it isn’t powerful muscles.

The fish that shoots bugs out of the air uses physics, a paper in PLoS ONE declared.  By letting physics amplify the momentum in the drop shot out of the water, the fish achieves six times the wallop its own muscles can attain.  Nature News posted a video of the fish and described how it works:

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Archer Fish Amplifies Muscle with Physics 弓箭手鱼使用物理扩大肌肉 The researchers found that the first

section of the water to leave the fish’s mouth was traveling about two meters per second. But as the fish continued to expel water into the jet, the speed increased. This back-end power forced more water and momentum into the “head” of the jet. “As a result, the power that the head of the jet can deliver upon impact increases during shooting,” the authors explained in their paper.

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Archer Fish Amplifies Muscle with Physics 弓箭手鱼使用物理扩大肌肉 Vailati and team found that this is similar

to a mechanism used by on-demand inkjet printers.  In a strange symbiosis of biomimetics, printer engineers may be able to improve their designs by studying how the fish accomplishes what they came up with independently.

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Archer Fish Amplifies Muscle with Physics 弓箭手鱼使用物理扩大肌肉 Nature News also quoted the authors’ evolutionary

inclinations from their paper: The fish’s strategy is evolutionarily clever. “This

advantage would come without the evolutionary cost for the development of highly specialized internal structures dedicated to the storing of mechanical energy,” the authors noted.

See also PhysOrg and BBC News.   Source: Vailati A, Zinnato L, Cerbino R (2012) How Archer Fish Achieve a Powerful Impact: Hydrodynamic Instability of a Pulsed Jet in Toxotes jaculatrix.PLoS ONE 7(10): e47867. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047867.

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Archer Fish Amplifies Muscle with Physics 弓箭手鱼使用物理扩大肌肉 Evolution is not clever.  Evolution

does not calculate the cost of development.  Evolution does not design specialized internal structures dedicated to the storing of mechanical energy.  Once again, we see evolution tacked on to a design story like some kind of vestigial organ from the 1800’s.

04/20/23 289

Archer Fish Amplifies Muscle with Physics 弓箭手鱼使用物理扩大肌肉 The archer fish was one of the illustrations of

design used by early films from Moody Institute of Science.  It remains a good illustration today, in fact, even more so.   There’s much more than muscle involved.  The fish has to correct for distortion at the air-water interface, have a perfect aim, calculate the height, and know the energy required to get the bug to release its strong grip on the twig.  All these things must work together for the fish to eat.  How many archer fish had to die before the right mutations came along?  Get real; get intelligent design.

04/20/23 290

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 The first North American “feathered dinosaur” has

put the media in a frenzy of celebration over questionable data.

Three Canadians from Alberta took a look at old fossils of the “ostrich-mimic” dinosaur Ornithomimus stored in drawers at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and found fibrous impressions in the sandstone they interpret as feathers on the forewings.  News media immediately launched an artwork-laden campaign of touting this as the first “feathered dinosaur” found outside of China and Germany (Archaeopteryx being the German claim).

04/20/23 291

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 As soon as the paper hit Science, as if on

cue, Science Daily, PhysOrg, Live Science, the BBC News and the other usual suspects put up Julius Csotonyi’s creative artwork from their paper in their coverage with no critique or alternative analysis whatsoever.  Strangely, the popular reports added colorful backgrounds of sky and forest that were not present in the small image in the paper, though the University of Calgary press release came fully illustrated.  Moreover, the popular reports simply parroted the interpretation of the feathers as courtship displays, while soft-pedaling the problems.

04/20/23 292

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 And there are problems.  First of all, the rock impressions

of the “feathers” consist mostly of straight lines that look nothing like the pennaceous flight feathers of Archaeopteryx.  One will read Zelenitsky’s paper in vain for mention the words vane, pennaceous or barbule in the main paper or supplemental information, except (for barbule) in the following curious circumlocution, “Evidence of shafted feathers {i.e., feathers with a rigid shaft, with or without interlocking barbules [type 3 feathers or higher (11, 12)]} is preserved on the forelimb bones of an adult Ornithomimus skeleton.”  The authors call them “filamentous feathers” with filamentous meaning just that: a filament or shaft, much simpler than the complex vanes of true feathers with their barbs, barbules and interlocking hooks.

04/20/23 293

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 So do the photos of the fossils show these to be true

feathers?  No; even the interpretive sketches show nothing but straight lines, with the exception of a very few tiny fragments shaped like a U or curve that, with copious imagination, might be interpreted as hooks for something, though they are disconnected from any barbs or barbules, which are not evident anywhere.  Further, these “feathers” are not connected to the skeleton, being separated by a centimeter or more at various angles from parallel to almost perpendicular.  They look like scratches in the rock.  Since the fossils were buried in sandstone instead of the limestone of German and Chinese fossils, license has to be taken to assume that such delicate impressions could be made in sandstone in this singular instance.  The authors tempted other researchers to go on a search for feathers in sandstone.

04/20/23 294

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 Other problems present themselves with the “feathered

dinosaur” interpretation.  All the others were theropods in the group of saurischian (lizard-hipped) dinosaurs.  This one is completely outside that group.  It’s in the ornithischian (bird-hipped) branch.  While that might sound like a plus for dinosaur-to-bird evolution theories, it would require evolutionists to postulate the emergence of the feather-whatever-things in the common ancestor long before flight supposedly evolved.  These feathers had nothing to do with the evolution of  flight.  The creatures were far too heavy for that.  The authors admit this by postulating that the “filamentous feathers” (found only on the adult) were used for courtship display.

04/20/23 295

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 There was only one adult that showed the scratch marks, and one

juvenile without them.  A third had markings on the bone.  Notice how their handling of the specimens adds to the confusion:

Preparation of specimens with feathersTwo ornithomimosaur skeletons associated with fossilized feathers, TMP2008.70.1 and TMP 2009.110.1, were preserved in hard, cemented sandstone blocks and prepared in 2008–2009. Preparation of this matrix could only be achieved with a Chicago Pneumatic (CP-9361) Airscribe. In order to expose the feathers preserved in TMP 2008.70.1, the rock had to break along the parting plane on which the structures are preserved. In many instances, the rock did not break along that plane, resulting in the partial destruction of some filaments. In TMP2009.110.1, the parting plane fortunately occurred between the sandstone and the ferruginous coating, revealing the presence of filamentous feathers in the ironstone.

04/20/23 296

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 A third skeleton (TMP 1995.110.1) was

preserved in a siltstone to fine-grained sandstone and displays markings on the left radius and ulna, inferred to be traces left by shafted feathers.  Although the markings were first discovered on the bones during specimen preparation in 1995, feathers impressions were not found in the matrix at the time. (Supplemental Information, p. 2).

04/20/23 297

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 The photo of 1995.110.1 shows only dark criss-

cross markings on the bone that they “inferred to be traces left by shafted feathers.”  They don’t bear any resemblance to actual feathers.  This means that only one fossil had the carbonized impressions extending from parts of its forelimbs at some distance from the bones, leaving plenty of leeway to speculate about what they were, or whether they had any connection to the animal.  Yet their artwork shows the adult with fully-fledged wing feathers, barbs, barbules and all, and even multiple colors!

04/20/23 298

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 Even the language they use to describe the

“feathers” is couched with escape hatches.  “Their distribution and orientation are similar to the insertion pattern of covert feathers (20, 21), which form the bulk of the feather covering in modern bird wings,” they said.  “The shapes of the individual markings are consistent with the morphology of the rigid shafts of such feathers.”  The authors continually described their fossils as “primitive” as opposed to “modern” birds.

04/20/23 299

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 There’s no way this specimen can have

anything to do with the origin of avian flight.  The authors did not even try to connect it to flight.  Feathers on this bulky dinosaur don’t help the arboreal or cursorial hypothesis.  It’s a stretch to connect it to courtship, either; the authors didn’t say if it was a male or female.  Any dinosaur so outfitted with feathers as the artwork suggests would seem to be seriously hampered from eating between courtship displays. 

04/20/23 300

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 The authors used the power of suggestion to state,

“Several roles have been proposed for primitive wings [gliding (23, 24), predatory behaviors (25, 26), or terrestrial locomotion (27, 28)], but their occurrence in a clade of ground-dwelling herbivorous (29) non-maniraptorans [the group that used to lump theropods with birds] suggests that they did not originate for predatory behaviors or aerial locomotion.” Reference 27 points to Ken Dial’s “wing assisted incline running” speculation he dreamed up by watching chukar partridge chicks (5/01/2006, 12/22/2003).  Since chukars are 100% birds, this amounts to a kind of recapitulation theory.

04/20/23 301

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 Despite these problems, Science Now promoted the

Zelenitsky paper with this overblown concoction of dogma, suggestion and composite explanation:

Dinosaurs still walk—and fly—among us: We call them birds. Most paleontologists think birds descended from a group of winged dinosaurs, and thus dinos never went completely extinct. But where did the wings come from? New discoveries from Canada suggest that both wings and feathers arose earlier in dinosaur evolution than previously thought, possibly to attract members of the opposite sex or to protect hatching baby dinos.

04/20/23 302

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 The headline was, “Dinosaurs Sprouted Wings

Earlier Than Previously Thought,” even though the original paper only referred to the presence of a “pennibrachium,” defined as “a forelimb bearing long feathers that form a planar, wing-like surface but are not necessarily used in aerial locomotion.”   This definition is theory-laden since it was defined in reference to “feathered dinosaurs” (Royal Society).  Zelenitsky et al. referred to it as a “wing-like structure” but it’s basically a wrist adaptation that allows the arms of a dinosaur to fold, whether or not it was feathered.  Humans can fold their arms, too.

04/20/23 303

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 Whatever the markings mean, therefore, they

complicate the story of dinosaur-to-bird evolution.  One final observation: the specimens are found in upper Cretaceous, meaning that true birds were already flying around when it lived.  And an encore: the adult specimen exhibits the “dinosaur death pose” that indicates suffocation in water (2/16/2012, 11/23/2011).

Original paper: Zelenitsky et al., “Feathered Non-Avian Dinosaurs from North America Provide Insight into Wing Origins,” Science 26 October 2012: Vol. 338 no. 6106 pp. 510–514, DOI: 10.1126/science.1225376.

04/20/23 304

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 This shameful display of suggestive

reporting in a leading scientific journal, promoted uncritically by the media, reveals the sad state of science these days.

04/20/23 305

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 Ornithomimus was so named because of its

resemblance to an ostrich.  Ostriches have feathery wings used for display and balance.  If this “dinosaur” had some kind of “filamentous feathers” (granting extremely generous license to speculation), so be it.  But evolutionists are going to need a lot better evidence than this.  More likely, the emotional mad dash to establish connections between dinosaurs and birds gives some researchers a Gold Rush mentality to strive for fame and fortune by stretching the truth.  Journal editors and science reporters are only to happy to oblige them, since another “feathered dinosaur” makes for good headlines, particularly when accompanied by wickedly overdrawn artwork (suggestion, extrapolation, visualization).

04/20/23 306

Another Flap Over Dinosaur Feathers 恐龙羽毛的另一个襟翼 Experienced readers will withhold

acceptance of such wild claims, knowing full well a re-interpretation is likely, if not a retraction, after less Darwin-inebriated scientists take a look at the specimens.  Critics like Alan Feduccia and the Oregon State squad will doubtless have something to say (AIG).