The LA Times’ David Zucchino Just Committed the Cardinal Sin of Journalism

It is what every journalism student learns not to do. From obtaining multiple sources to developing a writing style there are many do’s, but yellow journalism is the big don’t. The phrase conjurs up images of manipulation and sensationalism from days long gone. Today’s journalists would never engage in such a thing. Right?

Unfortunately David Zucchino’s piece in the LA Times today on Tennessee’s new Academic Freedom bill is proof that yellow journalism is alive and well. The bill states that the Tennessee education system:

shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about scientific subjects required to be taught under the curriculum framework developed by the state board of education. …

shall endeavor to assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum taught under the curriculum framework developed by the state board of education as it addresses scientific subjects that may cause debate and disputation.

And that the system will not:

prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught within the curriculum framework developed by the state board of education.

And finally that evolution’s religious dogma, thankfully, is not allowed:

This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion.

Plenty clear right?

Wrong, not for evolutionists who cannot stand the light of day. So how does Mr. Zucchino inform his readers of this new law? If there was any doubt it was gone with the headline:

Creationism discussions are now OK in Tennessee schools

The academic freedom bill is not about creationism. In fact it is difficult to imagine how the bill could have been any more clear. It is about objective evaluation of the “scientific subjects required to be taught” so students can understand “the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.”

In fact, the headline could have stated: “Evolution discussions are now OK in Tennessee schools.” Which is precisely why evolutionists have been so vociferously opposed to this new bill.

Could it be that the headline was written by an editor who forgot to read the article and knew nothing about the story?

Hardly.

Zucchino’s piece is just as yellow as the headline. He discusses the anti-science governor who opposed the bill. He discusses a group of religiously-motivated evolutionists who sent a letter against the bill. He mentions unnamed “critics” who disparaged the law and who predicted gloom and doom for the state of Tennessee. He quotes the anti-science director of government relations for the Tennessee Education Association, Jerry Winters. And he quotes Barry Lynn, a well known religiously-motivated, evolutionary mouthpiece who wants the religious theory of evolution to maintain its bogus legal protection while hypocritically labeling scientific criticism as “religious”:

This has always been a way for teachers to interject their religious viewpoints if they contradict evolution.

And finally, Zucchino literally fabricates his own bizarre and fictional version of bill:

The measure will allow classroom debates over evolution, permitting discussions of creationism alongside evolutionary teachings about the origins of life. … The state’s teachers are not allowed to raise alternatives to evolution but, under the new law, would be required to permit discussion of creationism and other beliefs if they are raised in class.

Incredible.

And strangely Zucchino forgot to talk to anyone who could speak in support of the bill. Funny how journalism works.

So what has happened to the LA Times? Of course journalism is not perfect, and it is no secret that political bias can seep into even the best publications. But this is nowhere close to a minor mistake or a lack of objectivity. This is jaw-dropping silliness. It might serve as an example of yellow journalism in a freshman undergraduate class. Except that the professor would never use such an obvious, ridiculous example. Even William Hearst never misrepresented a story and lied like this.

What has happened to the LA Times? What has happened is that this time it’s different because this time it is evolution that is threatened.

A 5.9 Magnitude Earthquake Just Occurred 168 Miles Off of Coos Bay

And 15 minutes later a 7.0 magnitude earthquake occurred along the southern Mexico coast.

Even Evolutionists Admit It’s a Mess

Here are nine myths that, apparently, even evolutionists admit to:

1) The myth of randomness. Evolution is constrained and its biological products seem to express a “self organising principle”. The evidence of widespread evolutionary convergence suggests “navigation towards an attractor”, but what is the attractor?

2) The myth of deep homology. Predependence on certain widely distributed regulatory genes does not explain, for example, the homology of eyes in creatures as different as cephalopods and vertebrates quite as tidily as some have imagined.

3) The myth of simplicity. However far back you go in evolutionary history, things are complicated. While eschewing the notion of irreducible complexity, the bacterial flagellum and its homologues illustrate the complexity of even the simplest organisms.

4) The myth of “Well, it will do”. Organisms are not cobbled together as a series of adequate compromises but are close to optimality. Examples of supposedly “poor design” often turn out to be “very well engineered indeed”.

5) The myth of a good fossil record. The overall history of life may be well known (Conway Morris would be horrified to find an Ordovician human!) but many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are still missing.

6) The myth of “missing links”. Convergence in fossil lineages is ubiquitous, such that, for example, theropods must have evolved flight independently multiple times. The evolution of birds (and theropods and tetrapods, etc) was, in some sense, inevitable.

7) The myth of mass extinctions. Mass extinctions made much less difference to the history of life than many have suggested. Bivalves would probably have come to dominate with or without the end-Permian event and likewise with the dominance of mammals after the end-Cretaceous event.

8) The myth of mentality. Sentience goes back much further than we tend to imagine and the molecular equipment for nervous systems evolved long before nervous systems themselves.

9) The myth of extraterrestrials. Although there are probably billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, the ETs are still elusive. The best explanation is that we really are alone.

Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.

Move Along, Nothing to See Here—Identical DNA Sequences Not a Problem, Back to Your Drinks

This week’s Darwinian Doublespeak award goes to Missouri professor Gavin Conant who describes the latest evidential absurdity—identical DNA sequences not only in animals but in plants also—as helping to “solve some of the mysteries of plant evolution.” Recall that long stretches of nearly identical, or in some cases completely identical, DNA sequences stunned evolutionists a few years ago. Species that are supposed to have been evolving independently for 80 million years were certainly not expected to have identical DNA segments. “I about fell off my chair,” exclaimed one evolutionist. That finding was followed by frantic searches for function. Surely these absurdly conserved sequences were utterly essential. But hundreds of tests failed to reveal the utter importance of the so-called ultra conserved elements. In fact many of the sequences could be removed altogether with little effect. Evolutionists had explained that this sort of finding would completely falsify evolution. And of course, as usual, that was Darwinian Doublespeak as we were told to move along yet again. No one so much as whispered a word of doubt about evolution and the scene returned to normal, just as in the Star Wars bar scene. Begin at the [1:30] mark and see how evolutionists respond to trouble at [2:15]:

Now we have even more absurdity: Long Identical Multispecies Elements, or LIMEs, in both plants and animals. And once again, the evolutionist demonstrates the Darwinian Doublespeak. To say that these LIMEs help solve the mysteries of evolution would be like saying a ship disappearing over the horizon helps solve the mysteries of how the Earth is flat. But when you’ve dedicated your career to understanding “the origins of novel features in evolution” then I guess doublespeak is all you have.

Move Along.

A Leading Philosopher is Now Saying Neo-Darwinism is “Almost Certainly False”

Leading thinker Thomas Nagel has a new book coming out later this year on why “the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable.” Evolutionists will be treated to yet more absurdities—this time focusing on the mind-body problem—which they have promoted for centuries. Evolution is so massive and influential, with so many apologists making absurd claims and so many fatal problems, that it will provide an abundance of material to pick over for centuries to come. Like geocentrism and Greek mythology, evolution will provide scholars with many career’s worth of material, for many years to come.

You Won’t Believe Who Denies Evolutionary Beliefs

Evolutionists insist their idea, that the species arose strictly via natural law, is a fact, and their proofs of this fact are religious. Sometimes this religion is obvious, such as when Stephen Jay Gould explained that:

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.

Other times the theism is slightly more subtle, such as when Charles Darwin explained that:

We cannot believe, that the similar bones in the arm of the monkey, in the fore-leg of the horse, in the wing of the bat, and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance.

You can read more about this subtle example of religious reasoning here. The problem is not that these proofs are invalid. In fact, the evolutionist’s logic is perfectly valid. But the arguments begin with metaphysical premises about a creator. In other words, the conclusion that evolution is a fact hinges on non scientific premises from theism. If those premises are true, then evolution is a fact. If the premises are not true, then we have no such confidence. It all depends on the religious starting point.

Now in our society, which holds science in such high esteem, evolution’s religious reasoning may seem like a terrible idea. But actually it is not. There is nothing wrong with non scientific, theistic, reasoning. In fact we use such reasoning commonly in our daily routines. Nor is such reasoning necessarily a problem within science. It happens more often than many think.

What is a problem is denying the religious reasoning. There is nothing wrong with making theistic premises, but there is everything wrong with masking the argument with some other label, to avoid the underlying religion. Not only is evolution motivated and justified by their religious beliefs, but those beliefs are routinely denied. You can read more about this denial here.

But evolutionists are not the only ones who deny this religious foundation. Such denial is also common amongst those who argue against evolution. Creationists, IDers and others commonly ascribe evolutionary thought to atheism rather than theism. In the face of a continual drumbeat of religious claims, these opponents say evolution arises from a rejection of theism. Consider these facts:

1. Evolution opponents have been labeling evolution as atheism for centuries, long before the recent surge of atheism.

2. This atheism label is applied to arguments that make theistic truth claims—claims that could not possibly derive from atheism. (Atheism states there is no god and only matter and energy exist. Therefore atheism cannot provide truth claims about a non material world).

3. This atheism label is applied to openly confessing theists, usually Christians.

4. It is true that atheists also assert evolution’s theistic truth claims, but this simply reveals an inconsistency with their claim to be an atheist. Theistic truth claims can only come from theism, no matter who is making the claim.

Consider the case of Thomas Burnet. Burnet was a seventeenth century Anglican cleric who made several religious arguments for a mostly naturalistic creation narrative. Burnet was an influential thinker and many of his arguments became important in evolutionary thought. But in 1692 Richard Bentley accused Burnet of atheism.

In the eighteenth century James Hutton, a devout Christian who advocated uniformitarianism, was accused of atheism by geologists of the day. In the nineteenth century one of the first serious criticisms of Darwin’s theory of evolution by Charles Hodge charged that the theory was atheism in disguise in spite of Darwin’s endless trail of religious claims. More recently Alvin Plantinga has also suggested atheism as the source the evolutionist’s confidence.

Plantinga has made a great many cogent observations and criticisms of evolution. And he correctly identified the claim that evolution is a fact, as non scientific. But in spite of the never-ending theistic claims, Plantinga suggests that the source of evolutionary certainty is a rejection of theism:

If you reject theism in favor of naturalism, this evolutionary story is the only game in town, the only visible answer to the question: Where did all this enormous variety of flora and fauna come from? How did it all get here? Even if the fossil record is at best spotty and at worst disconfirming, this story is the only answer on offer (from a naturalistic perspective) to these questions.

For more than three centuries evolutionary thinkers have been making theistic claims which mandate a naturalistic creation narrative. And for just as long, opponents have been denying those theistic claims.

Here’s How Evolutionists Hypocritically Criticize Others

The planets do not revolve about the Earth. Nor do the Sun or the stars. But if that is your model, you can force-fit the observations to it. In the case of geocentrism, dozens of bizarre adjustments were required to fit the observations. As the figure illustrates, these adjustments added a great deal more complication to the basic geocentric model. With the adjustments, the planets were not exactly rotating about Earth, but about some nearby point (which could be adjusted as needed). Furthermore, as the planets circle around the Earth or a nearby point, they also travel in smaller circles, or epicycles. And of course these epicycles can be adjusted as needed. The result is a complicated model of celestial motion with a large number of knobs which are adjusted to try to match what we observe from Earth. And it works. If your model has sufficient number of knobs, you can fit any data.

This is what evolutionists do as well. The species do not fit into an evolutionary tree of life. The fossil record does not reveal this, the anatomy of the species does not reveal this, their embryonic development patterns do not reveal this, nor does the DNA reveal this.

So evolutionists add a great number of evolutionary “epicycles” to their model. Genes are transferred between species as needed, identical designs independently evolve—like lightning striking twice—over and over, unique designs rapidly evolve over and over, and so forth. These are the evolutionist’s just-so stories of the many bizarre, unobservable ways that they imagine evolution to have occurred in order to fit the data. And evolutionists insist all of this is true. It is not merely a theory, it is a fact beyond any reasonable doubt, they resolutely maintain.

And so all of these epicycles do not bother the evolutionist. One evolution professor, after admitting that the evolutionary tree requires a vast number of gene transfer events for many species, nonetheless insisted that it would be perverse to suggest that the evolutionary tree does not work for animals:

To be sure, much of evolution has been tree-like and is captured in hierarchical classifications. Although plant speciation is often effected by reticulation and radical primary and secondary symbioses lie at the base of the eukaryotes and several groups within them, it would be perverse to claim that Darwin’s TOL [tree of life] hypothesis has been falsified for animals (the taxon to which he primarily addressed himself) or that it is not an appropriate model for many taxa at many levels of analysis. 

Perverse? Readers unfamiliar with the evolution genre may find that to be a curious choice of words. But in fact such sentiment, and this specific word, is not at all unusual in evolutionary thought. This is striking because “perverse” is a rather strong word that suggests more than merely a scientific mistake or misjudgment. It suggests mal intent perhaps driven by ulterior motive.

Evolutionists are so certain that the world arose spontaneously, all by itself, that anyone who even has the slightest doubt is viewed as harboring some irrational, deliberate opposition to the truth.

Are you getting the picture? Evolutionists hold to a religiously-driven creation story that is continually refuted by science. They dogmatically insist it is not merely a theory, but is a fact. And with self-righteous indignation they smear anyone who even so much as expresses doubt about theory dogma. It isn’t a pretty picture.

In this case, there are all kinds of scientific problems with the professor’s insistence that animals fit evolution’s tree of life model. Over and over the same designs are found in distant animals, in very different environments. At the other end of the spectrum, completely unique designs are found in animals that otherwise are highly similar. Likewise the embryonic development patterns reveal such unique differences in otherwise similar species. And the fossil record looks more like an inverted evolutionary tree, with bursts of diversity appearing followed by a reduction of diversity via extinction.

Now there are no easy answers to the question of origins. I’m not going to tell you I have the truth of why the fossil record, the embryonic patterns, the anatomical comparisons, and so forth, look the way they do. And when someone says they do, then run. For those who say it is all obvious, and smear those who disagree, have cards they’re not showing.

Evolution’s hole card is religion. It always comes out when the going gets rough. There are all kinds of proofs for why evolution is a known fact, and every single one of them is religious. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it is subtle. But it always is religious. That shouldn’t be too surprising since you certainly can’t use science to prove such an incredible claim.

Historically and today, evolution is underwritten by deep metaphysical truth claims. Then evolutionists turn around and claim it is all about science. And anyone who disagrees is perverse. It isn’t a pretty picture.

Evolutionists Celebrated This Prediction But When it Later Failed They Didn’t Care

Fifty years ago the revolution in molecular biology began to produce vast amounts of new data which evolutionists expected to be consistent with their already established evolutionary tree of life. And when they found such consistencies they claimed them as powerful evidence for their claim that the world just happened to arise somehow on its own is. As Niles Eldredge explained:

The basic notion that life has evolved passes its severest test with flying colors: the underlying chemical uniformity of life, and the myriad patterns of special similarities shared by smaller groups of more closely related organisms, all point to a grand pattern of descent with modification.

Likewise, Christian de Duve triumphantly declared:

All [organisms] are descendants of a single ancestral form of life. This fact is now established thanks to the comparative sequencing of proteins and nucleic acids.

And even the keen-minded philosopher Michael Ruse was certain of this interpretation:

The essential macromolecules of life speak no less eloquently about the [evolutionary] past than does any other level of the biological world.

But as more details emerged the picture became more complicated. In fact those macromolecules did not reveal such a grand pattern of descent with modification after all. They did not speak so eloquently about an evolutionary past. In some cases, for example, similar genes showed up in not so similar species, or not so similar genes showed up in similar species.

But evolutionists continued with their triumphant claims that the evidence confirmed their expectations. They explained the discrepancies with a range of special-purpose explanations. Sometimes these explanations called for mechanisms which had never been observed.

One of their popular explanations is that genes transferred between species, not via common descent but via extremely complex molecular mechanisms that export and import genes. Sometimes their use of this lateral or horizontal gene transfer mechanism is a real stretch. And in any case, their story calls for evolution to have created this incredible mechanism which then was so important for adaptation and the supposed subsequent evolution. In other words, evolution created evolution.

But none of this has stopped the evolutionists. Today they commonly use horizontal gene transfer to explain contradictory patterns, as evidenced by this sampling of paper titles:

Ancient gene transfer as a tool in phylogenetic reconstruction.

Convergent evolution: gene sharing by eukaryotic plant pathogens.

Evolution of patchily distributed proteins shared between eukaryotes and prokaryotes: Dictyostelium as a case study.

Evolution of four gene families with patchy phylogenetic distributions: influx of genes into protist genomes.

Evolutionary origins of the eukaryotic shikimate pathway: gene fusions, horizontal gene transfer, and endosymbiotic replacements.

Evolution of glutamate dehydrogenase genes: evidence for lateral gene transfer within and between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

Evolutionary analyses of the small subunit of glutamate synthase: gene order conservation, gene fusions, and prokaryote-to-eukaryote lateral gene transfers.

Evolution of filamentous plant pathogens: gene exchange across eukaryotic kingdoms.

Evolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases--analysis of unique domain architectures and phylogenetic trees reveals a complex history of horizontal gene transfer events.

Gene transfers from nanoarchaeota to an ancestor of diplomonads and parabasalids.

Horizontal gene transfer facilitated the evolution of plant parasitic mechanisms in the oomycetes.

Horizontal gene transfer between microbial eukaryotes.

Horizontal gene transfer in nematodes: a catalyst for plant parasitism?

Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution.

Insertion of horizontally transferred genes within conserved syntenic regions of yeast genomes.

Interkingdom gene transfer of a hybrid NPS/PKS from bacteria to filamentous Ascomycota.

Lateral gene transfer in eukaryotes.

Lateral gene transfers and the evolution of eukaryotes: theories and data.

Lateral transfer of tetrahymanol-synthesizing genes has allowed multiple diverse eukaryote lineages to independently adapt to environments without oxygen.

Multiple lateral gene transfers and duplications have promoted plant parasitism ability in nematodes.

Phylogenomic analysis demonstrates a pattern of rare and ancient horizontal gene transfer between plants and fungi.

Phylogenetic analyses of diplomonad genes reveal frequent lateral gene transfers affecting eukaryotes.

In some cases evolutionists have no idea, beyond pure speculation, about how it could have happened. As they admit in one paper:

An alternative and more plausible possibility is that the STC gene has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism.

The fact of the matter is, once again evolutionists claimed a prediction, and it turned out to be wrong.

Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.

A New Paper on the Brain Says its Structure … Led to Evolution

A new, more powerful MRI scanner has produced far more detailed images of the structure of the brain. The images reveal an orderly, 3D grid structure of neurons that run in rows and columns, and cross at right angles. As one researcher explained:

Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables—folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric.

The researchers also argue that this brain architecture may support not only (i) a more efficient way for neurons to connect, but also (ii) the evolutionary process itself. That would be yet another incredible act of serendipity. Evolution evolved a brain architecture that was needed for evolution.

Off-Topic: Did You Forget About the Middle East Tensions?

It is easy to go through your busy day and forget about those far-away international news stories that tend to blend into the background. But one of those stories may just explode in the near future. We’ve all heard the news about Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, oil, nuclear weapons and how they’re all somehow intertwined. The chances of yet another Middle East war have been rising in recent years, and now seem to be at a fever pitch. President Obama has been doing a great job of negotiating for a peaceful resolution, but Middle East tensions have a way of not going away. If it occurs this conflict will involve more than just some rebels trying to overthrow a government (not that that isn’t a big deal). This conflict would involve several nations.

I’m not saying such a conflict is imminent or unavoidable. Cooler heads hopefully will prevail. But it’s good to be aware of this very real possibility.

Here is a Centuries Old Religious Reason for Evolution—On Video

What do Thomas Burnet, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Erasmus Darwin and … Joel Hunter all have in common? They all made the argument that the evolution narrative is theologically superior because it is a sign of a more magnificent, more marvelous, greater god. You can see Joel Hunter’s version of this at the [0.30] mark in this video where he approvingly explains how thinking Christians think:

Probably, I would say, the vast majority of our people sitting in those pews, who are very uncomfortable with: “Look, it was six 24-hour days, and if you think anything else, then you don’t believe in Scripture.” These are science teachers; these are scientists; these are bright businessmen and businesswomen, and people who have been thinking. And they just say: “Wait a minute, God is God. God could choose any way He wants to create the world. And it doesn’t make it any less marvelous, as a matter of fact, it makes it more marvelous. Because He would be so intricate in its creation.

I doubt these thinking Christians are up on their Burnett or Leibniz or Kant or E. Darwin. This argument is common, but not because it is passed on but because it reflects a deep tendency in our religious thought.

When you hear people repeating religious doctrines that have been issued for centuries, you know there is a common bond. And that common bond is not Anglicanism, or Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism. This common bond transcends denominations and parochial religious traditions. I call it theological naturalism because it, ultimately, is a theological mandate for a naturalistic creation narrative.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Is This What Jeff Schloss Said at That NYC Meeting Last Week?

This is troubling to watch. Maybe it’s because the misrepresentations are in a living color video rather than the usual black-and-white text. Maybe it’s because Schloss is so well-spoken. Maybe it’s because it is a friend doing the misrepresenting. Maybe it is because it was probably something like this that Schloss presented last week in NYC, which Christianity Today referred to as “elegant” and what no doubt so impressed the largely non scientific crowd, save NT Wright hopefully. At the [0.34] mark the Professor and Chair of Biology at Westmont College explains:

Evolution in the sense of whether that genetic change over time has resulted in the diversity of species, we see now, which is the proposition of common descent, that is an idea. That is an interpretation. But the evidence for the truth of that interpretation is overwhelming. And it ranges from biogeographic evidence, or where the species are located all over Earth, to the fossil column, to more recently the discovery of profound examples of genetic fossils. So that idea is very firmly established. And it is central to our understanding of how organisms work and how they are structured. 

This is the middle of three meanings or senses of the word “evolution” that Schloss explains. He begins with genetic change over time which, Schloss explains, is simply an empirical fact. Then, at the [0.34] mark, he moves on to the idea that this genetic change over time is the cause of the diversity of species. And finally, Schloss moves on to the explanations for what caused this genetic change over time which, Schloss explains, is largely mutations plus natural selection, but that a range of other factors currently under study were probably at work as well.

What Schloss does not explain in this video is that in recent decades evolutionists have increasingly acknowledged that the vast change evolution requires did not, in fact, likely arise from the usual suspects of mutation, selection and adaptation. This is not a minor point of dispute. It is a fundamental problem of how new designs arose.

As for common descent, again, this has increasingly been questioned even by evolutionists. Why? Because the evidence does not fit the model very well. What is needed are vast amounts of lateral or horizontal evolution, to fill the gaps in the vertical (common descent) model. So evolutionists have increasingly and more liberally dipped into the soup of horizontal gene transfer as a way of making sense of the evidence from an evolutionary perspective.

This horizontal gene transfer explanation is problematic. First, it is a complex mechanism that evolution would somehow had to have created. Second, it means that evolution created a complex mechanism so that evolution could occur—evolution created evolution. Third, evolutionists need to use the mechanism to a far greater degree than is realistic. You can read more about this here, here and here.

In fact common descent’s model of an evolutionary “tree” has also been increasingly questioned by evolutionists. As one evolutionist explained, “incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree,” and another explained that:

Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal TOL [tree of life] rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true.

You can read more about this here.

In fact there are monumental problems with common descent. For instance, identical DNA sequences show up in distant species with little functional constraint (something that an evolutionist once told me would falsify the entire theory).

Likewise, strikingly similar, incredibly complex, designs show up on distant twigs of the tree. For example, the human and squid vision system are uncannily similar. This cannot be explained as arising from a common ancestor. Nor is this is a rare or uncommon finding in biology. Such contradictions to evolutionary expectations seem to be never-ending in biology.

On the other hand, otherwise very similar species (which evolution would assign as neighbors on the evolutionary tree) have big differences. From completely different development patterns to completely unique, different genes, these differences make no sense on common descent and evolution.

The list goes on and on. Evolutionists have imposed a model on the evidence which does not fit very well. Only by ignoring these problems or describing them as evolutionary “noise” can the models work.

And what about Schloss’ evidences? Do evidences such as biogeography, the fossils and genetic comparisons make the case for common descent? These are all circumstantial evidences. Biogeography tells us what species were located where and when. It doesn’t tell us how those species got there.

These evidences are often consistent with evolutionary expectations, so that is a plus. But evolutionary expectations are incredibly broad. A great many patterns would work. So the confirmed prediction is not particularly strong. We could say the sunrise is a confirmed prediction of geocentrism, but a great many different sunrises would be.

Indeed, there are some evidences from biogeography that do not work very well and are, as evolutionist Ernst Mayr once put it in his book What Evolution Is, “indeed almost unbelievable.” He called one example of lizard dispersal “truly miraculous.”

And in his book Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution Douglas Futuyma wrote that “The molelike and wolflike animals of Australia are marsupials, clearly related to each other, because only marsupial ancestors had reached Australia.” Once again, forcing the evidence into the evolution paradigm failed as a few years later placental fossil species were discovered in Australia.

Similarly the fossil record tells us what species were there, but not how they got there. And here there are a great many problems. More advanced versions sometimes appear earlier in the record, other organisms appear abruptly, and in general the findings do not form the expected tree pattern. Instead, evolutionists switch to a “bush” metaphor which has a great many twigs going in all directions. And the fossil record reveals a series of diversity explosions followed by extinctions that winnow out the diversity—precisely the reverse of the original evolutionary expectations.

The genetic fossils Schloss mentions are better evidence. But of course, these are the evidences we understand the least. And there are occasional problems here as well, where these “fossils” are found in patterns that violate common descent. These circumstantial evidences could be explained by common mechanism as much as by common descent. Granted we do not know what that mechanism is, but we also do not know what mechanism could evolve the species.

It is not that there is no evidence for evolution and common descent. There is quite a bit of evidence. But there also is quite a bit of evidence for geocentrism, and a host of other rejected theories. It is crucial to take the entire scientific record into account rather than picking and choosing our favorite items as though we were in a cafeteria.

It seems to me that there simply are no easy scientific answers available at this point. I certainly do not have any. But there is no question that evolution and common descent are not scientific facts, as evolutionists insist. When such claims are made, that cannot be justified on the empirical evidence, it is an indicator that there is more than mere science at work.

It is crucial for scientists, who hold specialized knowledge and who are asked to explain what we know to non technical audiences, not to violate that public trust. When Schloss explains that the evidence for the truth of common descent “is overwhelming,” I do not think he is providing a balanced, objective explanation of the science.

Unfortunately, this is the history of evolutionary thought. For centuries religion has held sway and mandated an evolutionary narrative. The metaphysical certainty that Schloss so confidently asserts goes back centuries. That certainty did not come from genetic “fossils,” the fossil record, biogeography, or any other scientific evidence. It came from theological convictions imposed on the science.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Lawrence Krauss Says He is "Painfully Aware" of Your Hang-Ups

Today’s evolution sermon comes from Lawrence Krauss, Director of the Origins Project at the tax-payer funded Arizona State University. In his Op-Ed piece, which the LA Times saw fit to print, Krauss begins with the usual anti-realism. Yes the world looks designed, but don’t be fooled:

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world was designed so that we could flourish. The position of the Earth around the sun, the presence of organic materials and water and a warm climate — all make life on our planet possible. 

It is all an illusion because, after all, it had to happen somewhere and, in any case, Darwin and the evolutionists have proved that life can spontaneously arise:

Yet, with perhaps 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, with ubiquitous water, carbon and hydrogen, it isn't surprising that these conditions would arise somewhere. And as to the diversity of life on Earth — as Darwin described more than 150 years ago and experiments ever since have validated — natural selection in evolving life forms can establish both diversity and order without any governing plan.

So don’t be fooled by the world’s apparent design. It is all an illusion coming from your inner psychological needs which, Krauss, because he’s a cosmologist, is painfully aware of:

As a cosmologist, a scientist who studies the origin and evolution of the universe, I am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

Krauss, of course, has no such biases as evidence by his brand new conclusion that man is the measure of all things:

Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible. And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.

That’s just good solid scientific research.

Here is a Completely Different Way of Doing Science

That new UCSF paper is yet another example of the intricacies of DNA and gives us a teaching moment on how science can be done in a completely different way. Consider the blood protein hemoglobin found throughout the vertebrate species, illustrated here to show its four protein chains and their many helices. Each of the four chains has about 140 amino acids which are glued together in a long line, and then fold up into a glob. Those 140 amino acids are encoded by the corresponding DNA gene. In the gene, there are three DNA nucleotides for each amino acid. For instance, the figure below shows a short segment of a human and a horse gene, both of which code for a hemoglobin chain. The letters, “ACGCT …” represent the nucleotides—small molecules that make up the DNA strand. The letters A, C, G and T stand for adenine, cysteine, guanine and thymine, respectfully.

As you can see, these two genes are quite similar. Of the 21 nucleotides shown in this short segment, only three are different between the human and horse. As shown, three nucleotides at a time code for a single amino acid and the table below shows the codes. For instance, as highlighted in both figures, guanine-adenine-guanine (GAG) codes for the amino acid Glu, or glutamic acid.

Notice that one of the differences, between the human and horse genes, results in a different amino acid (tyrosine in the human and phenylalanine in the horse) but the other results in no change (glycine in both). Different nucleotide sequences can code for the same amino acid because the DNA code is redundant. In this case, the glycine amino acid has four different codes, which you can see at the bottom right of the table above (GGT, GGC, GGA and GGG).

The DNA code is redundant because it has 64 different codons (the three letter words) that code for only 20 amino acids and a stop signal. There are more codons available than amino acids to code for.

For evolutionists this redundancy was just another biological kludge revealing nature’s dysteleology. Their natural expectation was that mutations that produced no change in the amino acid sequence—the so-called synonymous mutations—would be worthless and discarded by evolution. The massive change required by evolution would come about by altering the amino acid sequences of proteins, and so the gene comparisons between species would mostly reveal mutations that did produce different amino acids—the so-called nonsynonymous mutations.

It was yet another in a long line of failed expectations. In fact gene comparisons between different species, as exemplified by the human and horse hemoglobin genes above, revealed that non synonymous sites are disproportionately more conserved than synonymous sites, sometimes by as much as an order of magnitude or more.

This finding became an impetus for the theory of neutral molecular evolution which said that useful mutations were exceedingly rare and evolution mainly proceeded via mutations which were basically neutral.

Decades earlier evolutionists had expected that mutations could produce all kinds of new designs, but laboratory experiments suggested otherwise. Mutations were, inevitably, not very useful and often harmful. So it was good that this finding was incorporated in the neutral theory.

But how then could evolution proceed if mutations were just neutral? The idea was that neutral mutations would accrue until finally an earthquake, comet, volcano or some such would cause a  major environmental shift which suddenly could make use of all those neutral mutations. Suddenly, those old mutations went from goat-to-hero, providing just the designs that were needed to cope with the new environmental challenge. It was another example of the incredible serendipity that evolutionists call upon.

Too good to be true? Not for evolutionists. The neutral theory became quite popular in the literature. The idea that mutations were not brimming with cool innovations but were mostly bad or at best neutral, for some, went from an anathema to orthodoxy. And the idea that those neutral mutations would later magically provide the needed innovations became another evolutionary just-so story, told with conviction as though it was a scientific finding.

Another problem with the theory of neutral molecular evolution is that it made even more obvious the awkward question of where these genes came from in the first place.

Mutation rate deviations

The discovery that DNA mutations can be synonymous or nonsynonymous also raised questions about the mutation rate. Since the neutral theory viewed the synonymous mutations as having little or no effect, they were interpreted as an indicator of the underlying mutation rate. That is, if the hemoglobin genes in two different species were compared, the differences that are synonymous were viewed as mutations that had occurred and were not rejected by evolution, since they were not harmful.

But if so, then evolution’s mutation rate would have to be wildly varying. This is because those synonymous genetic differences between different species, or even within the genome of a given species, were inconsistent.

Hence, evolutionists speak of substantial deviations in the basic mutation rate between different species, different genes, different locations within the genome and different locations within the cell (nuclear genes versus organelle genes). Evolutionists constructed all kinds of just-so stories to explain these wild variations.

There are many other problems when we use evolution to try to understand molecular biology. For instance, a few years ago researchers found that, when comparing genes such as hemoglobin genes between different species, the number of synonymous differences grew disproportionately large as the number of nonsynonymous differences grew.

From an evolutionary perspective, it meant that genes tended to undergo stronger selection when the mutation rate was higher. Huh? That made little sense. It was yet another finding that suggested perhaps there is a better way to do science.

A completely different way of doing science

Let’s step back from the mess for a moment and rethink the problem. What do we know and what do we not know? We know that when comparing protein-coding genes, such as hemoglobin genes, between different species, there are many differences. And we know that these differences can be divided into two broad categories: synonymous and nonsynonymous.

The synonymous differences have no effect on the resulting protein’s amino acid sequence whereas the nonsynonymous differences do effect the protein sequence.

We also know that a protein-coding gene sequence has many more functional effects, beyond merely determining the protein sequence. These effects can be divided into two broad categories: pre translational and post translational. That is, the effects can take place before the protein is constructed or afterwards.

In the pre translational category the gene sequence can have many different influences. For instance, the sequence can influence the DNA structure and how it may interact with protein machinery, the stability of the DNA copy—the so-called mRNA strand, and the mRNA interactions with proteins such as editing machinery.

And that new UCSF paper elucidates another pre translational effect. The DNA sequence can control the rate at which the protein is produced.

In the post translational category the gene sequence can also have many different influences. These include the protein folding process and the three-dimensional protein structure, the stability of that structure, the function of the protein, interactions of the protein with other proteins, instructions for transport, and so forth.

In principle the pre translational effects can be influenced by both synonymous and nonsynonymous DNA sequence changes, but the post translational effects are influenced for the most part only by the nonsynonymous sequence changes. This is illustrated in the table below:

So a protein-coding gene can have a wide variety of effects and as listed above, these effects can be divided into pre translational and post translational effects. Or, simply put, a gene can carry several different “messages.” This is analogous to a satellite communication link that can carry many different messages simultaneously.

And with each of these messages there is some “wiggle room.” For instance, as we saw above in the DNA code, there are four different ways to code for a glycine amino acid. Likewise, the speed of production of a protein can probably be controlled using different variations of a message.

And these different messages in a DNA gene often can use different parts of the gene such that the messages are orthogonal. On the other hand, message can overlap if necessary. For instance, the same DNA nucleotide can help to code for a particular amino acid while also helping to control the speed of production of the protein.

So a gene carries several different messages but (i) none of the messages require the full capacity, or bandwidth, of the gene, (ii) many of the messages can be expressed in more than one way, and (iii) many of the messages can be expressed without interfering with the other messages though they can also overlap.

All of this makes for a complicated messaging strategy. How can the different genetic messages be overlaid onto the same gene without sacrificing any of the particular messages? What kind of codes best support this requirement? Of course we have yet to learn what are all the different kinds of messages, as indicated by the new UCSF paper which revealed yet another type of pre translational genetic message.

In researching these and other such questions it is crucial to have a large number of solutions to look at. As Bacon advocated, we need to look at as many experiments as possible and isolate a system’s parameters to learn how nature works. Fortunately we have a great number of proteins, and variations on those proteins, in nature.

For instance, the hemoglobin protein has a relatively high sequence variation whereas the histone IV as a low sequence variation. Evolutionists say the hemoglobin high sequence variation is due to its low sensitivity to change and the histone IV low sequence variation is due to its extreme sensitivity to change. But this raises the question of how the protein could have arisen in the first place. Also, experiments have not revealed such extreme sensitivity.

But now, on the new view, we can view the high sequence variation as an instance where there is a great deal of message variation. Instead of being driven by the mandate that evolution is true, and therefore that the sequence variation arose from random mutations, we can view each hemoglobin sequence as a different solution to the messaging problem, in each particular species. In the case of hemoglobin, with its high sequence variation, the “channels” are being heavily used.

On the other hand, in the case of histone IV with its low sequence variation, it could be that the different signals in the different species are the same, or it could mean that some of the signals are simply not being used.

So whereas an evolutionist sees high sequence variation as a sign of a higher mutation rate and less sensitivity to mutational change, in this new view a high sequence variation is a sign of more information content. Either more channels are being used, or there is greater variation in the way that those channels are used in the different species, because different solution paths are being used.

And whereas evolutionist sees low sequence variation as a sign of a lower mutation rate and greater sensitivity to mutational change due to functional constraints and purifying selection, in this new view a low sequence variation is a sign of less information content. Either fewer channels are being used, or there is less variation in the way that those channels are used in the different species because the same solution path is being used.

Consider the case of this paper discussed above, which found that the number of synonymous differences grows disproportionately large as the number of nonsynonymous differences grow. For evolutionists this was confusing because it meant that genes tended to undergo stronger selection when the mutation rate was higher.

But this new view has a completely different interpretation of the findings. Instead of force-fitting the results onto the highly unlikely evolutionary framework, we now understand these results to mean that the ratio of the normalized non-synonymous-to-synonymous gene sequence changes, between any two species, tends to increase with overall gene variability.

In other words, gene families such as hemoglobin that exhibit a wide range of sequence variation across species, are observed to have a higher proportion of non-synonymous DNA sequence differences

Very simply put, what this means is that as you increase the overall information content in a gene, a greater proportion of that information content is found in the non-synonymous changes, which are primarily the ones that can cause the post translational effects.

This could be explained, for instance, by the hypothesis that the pre translational sequence effects, and their associated signals, are more widespread such that most genes have these signals.

Then some genes, such as hemoglobin, have more post translational sequence effects and their associated signals, so for those genes you observe both higher signal content (which shows up as greater mutational rates in the gene to an evolutionist) and most of this content is observed in the non-synonymous DNA differences.

It is a completely different way of doing science that tries to figure out how nature works rather than how to solve difficult metaphysical conundrums and constraining science to an incredibly unlikely, religiously-driven, creation narrative.

Here’s What That New UCSF Paper Says in Plain English (And Why Evolution Needs Another Do-Over)

If you had a four-letter alphabet and all words were three letters, then how many words would there be? The answer is 4 times 4 times 4, or 4-cubed, or 4^3, or 64. That’s how the DNA code works. Our DNA has four molecular “letters” and to create a protein the letters are taken three at a time in words called “codons.” Each codon specifies an amino acid and these 64 different codons are mapped to 20 different amino acids (and a “stop” signal). Since the 64 different codons far exceeds the 20 different amino acids and the stop signal, the code is degenerate. In other words, there are multiple codons that map the same amino acid (just as “absurd” and “ludicrous” have similar meanings).

But why the mismatch? If only 20 different amino acids are coded for, why are there 64 different codons? There is quite a bit of unused messaging power, or what engineers call “bandwidth.” According to evolutionists, it was just another biological kludge revealing nature’s dysteleology.

But ever since its discovery the DNA code has continued to yield hidden treasures of intricacy. For example, the code is cleverly designed at several levels, including minimizing the effects of errors and maximizing information content (such as in supporting overlapping messages).

This makes it even more difficult for evolutionists to explain how the code evolved.

Furthermore the code’s unused bandwidth has been found to be used in a variety of creative ways where additional information is layered on the basic message indicating the amino acid sequence. You can see some examples here, here, here and here.

The new UCSF paper is another such an example of yet another layer of information in the “unused” bandwidth that evolutionists thought was just an inefficient fluke. It has been known for years that a DNA gene, that is used to construct a protein, has some special signals near the beginning that will help the translating process get started correctly.

Now, the new research indicates that similar signals are used throughout the gene. Their purpose is not to help the protein production process get started correctly, but rather to fine-tune the speed of the production process.

It is yet another example of the many different types of information that are layered in a DNA gene which have evolutionists rewriting their script and explaining that “It’s over. None of that happened.”

The Key Question About That NYC Meeting This Week: What Was NT Wright Thinking?

Jeffrey Schloss presented an “elegant overview” of the evidence for evolution to an invitation-only, closed meeting of mover-and-shaker evolutionists this week in New York City. It would have been a “preaching-to-the-choir” event with folks like Joel Hunter listening who once apparently commented:

But the fact of evolution is (and has been for some time) as fully established as the fact of the sphericity of the earth and the historicity of the Holocaust. Someone can deny both of those facts to their heart’s content, but that doesn’t mean they merit further investigation or refutation. They do not because they oppose common sense and empirical demonstration.

Common sense? Millions of species arising spontaneously has been empirically demonstrated? Well there was one person listening who might have, like Willie Keith, seen the real message. The key question is: What was NT Wright Thinking? Hopefully it was something like this or this.

Give Credit Where Credit is Due: This Powerful Prediction by Darwin Came True (And We Have it on Film)

As evolutionists will tell you, it may seem like all the evidence is against evolution, but when you put them all together, and keep on repeating to yourself that evolution is true, then it makes sense. Well here’s one incredible example of just that. As insiders know there were some, little known, bizarre aspects of the seemingly normal television show Little House on the Prairie. For instance there was the incredible increase in intelligence of the cast. This became particularly obvious by the final season when Michael Landon was teaching the little girls quantum mechanics on an Etch-a Sketch.

Now here, in a Darwin’s-God exclusive, our internal research staff now explains this seemingly bizarre phenomenon. We quote from the historian sharp-shooter, none other than Peter Bowler:

To explain human intelligence, Darwin could have called on the progressionists' assumption that this was an advantage that would be boosted by natural selection. But he realized that this assumption begged an important question: why had the human branch of evolution been able to exploit this advantage while the apes had not? He theorized that the difference was brought about by an adaptive change involving a transition from a forest environment to the open plains. Our ancestors had moved out onto the plains and had become fully upright because this was now the best means of locomotion. This had freed their hands from playing a role in locomotion among the trees; thus the hand, with its fully opposable thumb, had developed a much more precise ability to grasp objects, and this consequence of the adjustment to bipedalism indirectly had favored selection for increased intelligence. Our ancestors had developed bigger brains because their hands allowed them to make use of sticks and stones as primitive tools. The apes had stayed in the trees, where their hands continued to be used mainly for grasping branches, and thus had not had the need for additional intelligence. [Evolution: The History of an Idea, p. 213]

Incredible. Darwin was such a genius. Of course, bipedalism is the key. And how did bipedalism come about? By the prairie of course. Rather than being stick-in-the-muds like their ape friends, those venture-some pioneers moved out of the jungles and into the prairies where they became, naturally, fully-upright and much smarter. The rest, as they say, is history. It is all so obvious when you think about it. How brilliant.

The great irony here is that about the time Darwin was putting his brilliant thoughts to paper, Michael Landon and family were actually migrating out of the forest and out onto the prairie. It’s amazing how ironic evolution is—everything just works.

Here’s How Designs in Biology Are Being Used in Advanced Engineering

This week’s 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in San Diego featured symposiums on biomimetics where scientists “literally take inspiration from Mother Nature, probing and adapting biological systems in plants and animals for use in medicine, industry and other fields.”

Several papers were presented on the wonders of cellulose and one researcher concluded that “We are in the middle of a Golden Age, in which a clearer understanding of the forms and functions of cellulose architectures in biological systems is promoting the evolution of advanced materials.”

Designs from biological systems are leading to advanced materials? Scientists “literally take inspiration from Mother Nature.” It is amazing how random mutations can create such optimized designs for our best scientists and engineers to learn from.

Into the Bureaucratic Nightmare of "Human Resources": How JPL's Harassment Investigation Denied Fairness and Due Process to David Coppedge

If you want the details of how NASA Jet Propulsion Lab worked up their charges against David Coppedge, you can see the details over at Evolution News and Views.

Here Are Those Two Protein Evolution Falsifications That Have Evolutionists Rewriting Their Script

About twenty years ago the television show Dallas was in trouble. The writers had eliminated a popular character named Bobby and the show was losing popularity. The writers began thinking up ways to solve the problem. They finally decided that the previous year of programming would become nothing more than a dream in the mind of another character named Pam. It was a ridiculous solution, but it was all they had. A new show would begin with Pam restlessly awakening, only to discover Bobby was not dead, but alive and well. Everything was back to normal as Bobby announced to the loyal viewers at the 2:10 mark that “It’s over—none of that happened.” Dallas needed a do-over, and it got one.

Evolution also needs a do-over. In fact evolution routinely needs do-overs as the scientific evidence continually refutes the theory. And so evolutionists are constantly rewriting their script. For instance, evolutionists expected that proteins arose relatively quickly in the early stages of evolutionary history and new, de novo, proteins would not appear thereafter. Here is how evolutionist François Jacob explained it in an influential article which appeared in Science, one of the world’s leading journals:

Obviously, for life to emerge, a number of new molecular types had first to be formed. During chemical evolution in prebiotic times and at the beginning of biological evolution, all those molecules of which every living being is built had to appear. But once life had started in the form of some primitive self-reproducing organism, further evolution had to proceed mainly through alterations of already existing compounds. New functions developed as new proteins appeared. But these were merely variations on previous themes. A sequence of a thousand nucleotides codes for a medium-sized protein. The probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero. In organisms as complex and integrated as those that were already living a long time ago, creation of entirely new nucleotide sequences could not be of any importance in the production of new information.

Of course we now know this is false. Plenty of de novo proteins have been discovered in single species and evolutionists are now walking it back with up all kinds of speculation. For instance, they say that these de novo proteins aren’t very good proteins. They really don’t do much, and aren’t comparable to the well-studied proteins that appear in many species. And when, in the future, a de novo protein is shown to be a real protein, evolutionists will simply walk it back some more.

In addition to predicting that no de novo proteins would be found, evolutionists also predicted that the well-studied proteins evolved rather rapidly. They have to say this because these proteins are found in many different species which, for evolutionists, means that such a protein must have evolved from an early version present in an ancient, common ancestor, such as ancient single-celled bacteria. But if the protein was present so early in history, then it must have evolved quickly. As Jacob explained:

During chemical evolution in prebiotic times and at the beginning of biological evolution, all those molecules of which every living being is built had to appear.

This means evolution had only a few tens of millions of years to evolve these proteins. Call it 100 million years to be conservative. The problem here is that science tells us this doesn’t make sense.

Several different studies indicate that, at a minimum, about 10^70 (a one followed by 70 zeros) evolutionary experiments would be needed to get close enough to a workable protein design before evolutionary mechanisms could take over and establish the protein in a population.

For instance, one study concluded that 10^63 attempts would be required for a relatively short protein. And a similar result (10^65 attempts required) was obtained by comparing protein sequences.

Another study found that 10^64 to 10^77 attempts are required, and another study concluded that 10^70 attempts would be required.

This requirement for 10^70 evolutionary experiments is far greater than what evolution could accomplish. Even evolutionists have had to admit that evolution could only have a maximum of 10^43 such experiments. It is important to understand how tiny this number is compared to 10^70. 10^43 is not more than half of 10^70. It is not even close to half. 10^43 is an astronomically tiny sliver of 10^70.

Furthermore, the estimate of 10^43 is, itself, entirely unrealistic. For instance, it assume the entire history of the Earth is available, rather than the limited time window that evolution actually would have had. Even more importantly, it assumes the pre existence of bacteria and, yes, proteins. In fact, the evolutionists assumed the earth was covered with bacteria, and each bacteria was full of proteins. That of course is not an appropriate assumption for the question of how proteins could have evolved in the first place.

And so evolutionists are having to continue to rewrite the script. What they told us before—forget it. “It’s over—none of that happened,” they now tell us.

If Odd Arrangements and Funny Solutions are the Proof of Evolution, Then What About These Optimized Designs?

You’ve heard all those evolutionary arguments about how nature’s sloppy, repetitive, inefficient and downright evil designs prove evolution. Then what about the many optimized designs in biology, such as those in this New York Times article, suggested by a friend, such as our eye’s ability to detect even a single photon:

Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped. …

Photoreceptors exemplify the principle of optimization, an idea, gaining ever wider traction among researchers, that certain key features of the natural world have been honed by evolution to the highest possible peaks of performance, the legal limits of what Newton, Maxwell, Pauli, Planck et Albert will allow. 

So all those sloppy, repetitive, inefficient, evil designs revealed and proved evolution because, after all, evolution has no guiding light but can only work with whatever random mutations will give it. But when optimized designs are found, evolution suddenly becomes the brilliant physicist, honing master designs.

There are many more such examples of optimized designs, such as how bacteria optimize their search for food, how fruit fly embryos use the concentration of a particular protein, and how sharks detect tiny voltages in the water:

Scientists have identified and mathematically anatomized an array of cases where optimization has left its fastidious mark, among them the superb efficiency with which bacterial cells will close in on a food source; the precision response in a fruit fly embryo to contouring molecules that help distinguish tail from head; and the way a shark can find its prey by measuring micro-fluxes of electricity in the water a tremulous millionth of a volt strong — which, as Douglas Fields observed in Scientific American, is like detecting an electrical field generated by a standard AA battery “with one pole dipped in the Long Island Sound and the other pole in waters of Jacksonville, Fla.” In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants.

As usual, all this is a surprise to evolutionists:

On Wednesday, Dr. Bialek will discuss his take on biological optimization at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in a public lecture fetchingly titled “More Perfect Than We Imagined: A Physicist’s View of Life.”

Muscles provide more examples of optimization:

Dr. Todorov has studied how we use our muscles, and here, too, he finds evidence of optimization at play.

And the brain:

The brain, too, seems built to tolerate bloopers and static hiss. Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University has proposed that the brain’s wiring system has been maximally miniaturized, condensed for the sake of speed to the physical edge of signal fidelity.

Aside from the problem of how random mutations are supposed to have accomplished such wonders, and aside from the obvious just-so story that “evolution did it again,” there is the other problem such fine-tuning of designs may well be beyond the resolution of selection. Can we really believe that the ability to detect a single photon provided an important advantage over a higher threshold, such as two photons, or ten, or 20?

The answer, of course, is “of course.” After all, that’s the design, and it must have evolved.

Here’s the Latest on the Evolutionist’s Blackballing of David Coppedge

Back to that other court case, it turns out that David Coppedge was not fired from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab due to his Intelligent Design sympathies after all. Instead, it was all about Coppedge’s job performance. Turns out Coppedge is a downright terrible worker according to his annual performance reviews. Strange how the NASA lab didn’t notice this for so many years before the ID issue arose. JPL somehow erroneously gave Coppedge all kinds of positive, glowing performance reviews in those earlier years. Only after meeting with their lawyers did the management take notice of the true quality of Coppedge’s work. Funny how lawyers can really open your eyes. Only after that did those performance reviews begin to get it right. You can read all about it in David Klinghoffer’s latest report.

Here’s the Real Message Behind This Week’s Sunday Book Review

Tired of the New Atheists, and the old atheists as well? Delighted to see the likes of Philip Kitcher taking them down in this week’s Sunday Book Review? Philosophers Kitcher and David Albert reviewed books by atheists Alex Rosenberg and Lawrence Krauss in an exercise that was more like shooting fish in a barrel than any kind of literary review. But wait a minute, what is Philip Kitcher—who once wrote that evolution illuminates “a wealth of biological details” and whose book was endorsed by arch evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould—doing tossing Molotov cocktails into the atheist camp? Isn’t evolution just atheism in disguise? Kitcher’s and Albert’s reviews are another example of what is the fundamental name-of-the-game, and most people will continue not to get it.

Atheists such as Rosenberg and Krauss make for great targets, but the question that Kitcher and Albert did not ask is “why?” Why do otherwise very intelligent thinkers present such silly ideas? These atheists make bogus, anti-intellectual moves and, sure, that ought to be exposed.

But far more interesting and important is the question of how anyone, let alone very intelligent people, make such moves in the first place. If you see Michael Jordan pass the ball to the wrong team, score at their goal, and so forth, you don’t point out the mistakes and laugh. You wonder what in the world could be going on. In the case of the atheists (old and new), the answer is not that complicated.

All manner of theologians, philosophers and scientists have been explaining and insisting, for centuries, that the world arose by law, not miracle. Anglicans, Lutherans, Roman Catholics and others have agreed that God did not intervene to create the world. For everyone knows that a greater god works according to secondary causes. Miracles make for a capricious creator and, in any case, we must not make god out to be like a man. Furthermore the world is obviously not designed, for its patterns reveal no designer behind the design. Even more importantly, the world is far too inefficient and evil to have been intended. And in any case, science would be impossible if the world did not operation according to natural laws.

These and other arguments have been forcefully advanced since the Enlightenment, and is it really such a surprise that, having been handed the news that the divine is as superfluous as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, a logical few would venture just one tiny step farther and conclude that, gee, maybe we can say more than just that the divine isn’t necessary. Maybe this divine just isn’t, period.

Could it be that this god is dead? He is invisible and doesn’t do anything. Is not atheism practically a necessary consequence?

What the religious skeptics, from Hume and Huxley to Dawkins and Krauss, have done for the rest of us is to perform a rather reasonable reductio ad absurdum on evolutionary thought. But as we know from centuries of history, the smart money won’t go there.

It reminds me of Lieutenant Thomas Keefer (Fred MacMurray) in The Caine Mutiny, who encouraged the mutineers, only then to shift back into the shadows to maintain plausible deniability when the judgment came. Or of Captain Renault (Claude Rains) in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on in the casino. Or of Peter Townsend’s lyric, “And the men who spurred us on; Sit in judgment of all wrong.”

Where were the Kitcher’s and Albert’s of the world when Leibniz, Ray and Burnet imposed their religion on science? Where were they when Darwin made his silly metaphysical mandates that the species just happen to arise on their own? Where were they when Gould, Coyne, Miller and Haught continued the tradition of theology telling science what the right answer is, and the supplied right answer is a polite version of sheer absurdity? They were nowhere to be found, of course.

You see the smart money knows not to go against the flow or make rash statements. It takes advantage of those low-risk, high-payoff opportunities as they arise, like criticizing the dumb-money atheists.

The evolution debate is not about atheism. It never was. Atheism is the unwanted black sheep of the family. What’s important in the evolution debate is the men who spurred them on. For atheism doesn’t come from, well, atheism. It comes from, as historian Alan Charles Kors found out, religion:

[My] inquiry led not to a prior history of free thought, most of which culminated in deeply theistic deisms or in antiphilosophical skepticisms, but to the orthodox culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France. It was, above all, within the deeply Christian learned culture of those years that there occurred inquiries and debates that generated the components of atheistic thought. It was, to say the least, not what I had expected; it indeed was what I found. … Before one can understand the heterodoxy of early-modern atheism, one first must understand the orthodox sources of disbelief. [Atheism in France, 1650–1729, Volume I: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief, Princeton Univ Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990, p. 4.]

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

These Philosophers are Now Beginning to Say What Needs to be Said

Tired of all those non life scientists—such as theologians, philosophers and historians—dogmatically insisting on evolutionary dogma. Every time a John Polkinghorne or Daniel Dennett or Michael Ruse explains why evolution is a fact the world loses a top-notch theologian, philosopher or historian and gains a lousy biologist. I remember hearing a leading physicist comment that either evolution is true or there is a “cosmic conspiracy.” I even spoke with him later to confirm what it sounded like he was saying. It was, not surprisingly, the usual religion masquerading as science. But I was struck at how such an accomplished physicist would compromise his name with such malarkey.

Now there is an ever so slight glimmer of hope and change. In this week’s Sunday Book Review two philosophers began to talk some sense. Not that either one is disavowing evolutionist claims that all the proteins, every molecule, the laws of genetics, all of biology on Earth, and for that matter all of Earth, arose spontaneously from a cloud of gas. But expectations are so very low these days that any faint glimmer will do.

That may be short-selling David Albert’s review of Lawrence Krauss’s latest book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, where the Columbia philosopher hits it out of the park:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. 

“I kid you not” is the appropriate response to jaw-dropping, evolutionary absurdity. For instance, from where did natural laws arise, and from where did the stuff of the universe arise?

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. … But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all. … they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

Krauss has heard all this before, but fails to reckon with the problem:

And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing. But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! 

Albert’s level-headed views are refreshing, and he finishes his review with a great summary of the vacuity of Krauss’ arguments:

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

Another philosopher, Philip Kitcher, also had some cogent criticism for vacuous thought in this week’s Sunday Book Review. His target was Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. Again, the problem is that common sense is nowhere to be found:

Since atheism is thought to be territory already secured, the targets now in view are the Big Questions, questions about morality, purpose and consciousness that puzzle softheaded people who muddle over them. … Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.
Rosenberg’s cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg’s book is evolutionary psychology on stilts. Similarly, the neuroscientific discussions serenely extrapolate from what has been carefully demonstrated for the sea slug to conclusions about Homo sapiens.

The evolutionist Kitcher, who once abused science in his book Abusing Science when he parroted the evolutionary falsehood that “Variation is not directed toward advantageous characteristics. The rigors of the environment do not induce variations designed to cope with them,” now goes so far as to advocate open-mindedness:

Instead of forcing the present-day natural sciences to supply All the Answers, you might value other forms of investigation — at least until physics, biology and neuroscience have advanced. Or you might be agnostic, wondering whether a future scientific treatment of, say, ethical behavior is possible even in principle.

You might be agnostic? That would be an astonishing concession for evolutionists. Too bad Kitcher doesn’t take some of his own medicine when it comes to the spontaneous origin of everything on Earth. But at least Kitcher is exercising common sense when it comes to all out scientism:

Storytelling might be seen as a cultural universal with biological roots, without indulging Darwinian speculations about a human yearning for tidy plots. Respect for science, and an enthusiasm for learning from it, are fully compatible with rejecting scientism. Scientism, whether Rosenberg’s today or E. O. Wilson’s a generation ago, is impatient with history (“The Atheist’s Guide” declares it to be “bunk”)

Kitcher makes a reasonable call for avoiding false dichotomies. We need not ditch all of science just because we don’t think it can be applied to all of reality at this very moment.

Unfortunately Kitcher is no stranger to false dichotomies. In his anti-creationist book Abusing Science he promoted the mother of all false dichotomies—that the origins debate is between fixity of species and evolution:

The main thesis of evolution is that species are not fixed and immutable.

No, Darwin’s main thesis was that independent creation is untenable and so natural law must explain the origin of species. Darwin’s argument specifically against the fixity of species was one of dozens against creationism, not his “main thesis.” Perhaps Kitcher was using the fixity of species as a proxy for all of creationism. But Kitcher continues to present a misleading version of evolution:

Evolutionary biologists believe that the birds are all descendants of a particular kind of reptile and that both cats and dogs have come from a common mammalian stock.

Cats and dogs come from a common mammalian stock? Sure, but evolutionists also believe that cats and dogs both come from the same microbe, along with all other life for that matter. Why leave that out? This is not a minor omission. They believe that biological complexities we cannot fathom or even recreate arose spontaneously. Evolutionists have a long way to go, but at least there is a glimmer.