Download May 2013

Creationism News – May 2013
创造论新闻– 2013年5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 his fast
recovery from cancer surgery.
Pastor Chui
http://ChristCenterGospel.org
[email protected]
5/3/2017
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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
How does a growing flower bud or feather follicle know
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where to put the intricate colors and patterns on a mature
flower or feather? Scientists are beginning to get partial
answers.
Flower art: Imagine you’re a flower bud. You are blind,
deaf, and dumb, but somehow you know how to create
beautiful artwork. Through your efforts, a lovely rose,
petunia or orchid will result. How would you do it? An
article on Live Science suggests an amazing, though
partial, answer: the bud has a map of the finished
product. “The shape of a flower’s petals and leaves
are dictated by a biological map hidden inside the
flower’s growing bud,” according to a new study from the
John Innes Centre and the University of East Anglia, both
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in the UK.
How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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“They discovered that concealed maps within
the flower buds are made up of patterns of
arrows that act as instructions for how each
cell in the bud should grow. As such, the
maps essentially influence a flower bud’s
cell polarity, or the functions of the cells.
The study’s findings not only shed light on why
geranium petals are unlike rose petals, they
also explain why an individual flower’s petals
and leaves are different shapes.”
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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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The “arrows” are made up of proteins
called PIN proteins that migrate to the tips of
cells. When they concentrate, a pointed leaf
results. When they fan out, a rounded shape,
like a flower petal results. Other proteins follow
the “arrows” to cause growth in those
areas. PLoS Biology discussed the paper in a
little more detail. The original paper in PLoS
Biology described how the growth proteins
follow the “polarity field” set up by
the PIN proteins.
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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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Feather art: Bird feathers are vastly different
from flower petals, but another amazing
“mapping” mechanism controls their
development. Feathers can contain stripes,
spots, and nano-patterns that play tricks with
light; see examples in PhysOrg’s coverage of a
paper in Science Magazine. What turns on the
dark and light patterns? The new research
paper by Lin et al., “Topology of Feather
Melanocyte Progenitor Niche Allows Complex
Pigment Patterns to Emerge,” offers the
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beginnings of an answer:
How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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“Melanocyte progenitors are distributed as
a horizontal ring in the proximal follicle, sending
melanocytes vertically up into the epithelial
cylinder which gradually emerges as feathers
grow. Different pigment patterns form by modulating
the presence, arrangement, or differentiation of
melanocytes. A layer of peripheral pulp
further regulates pigmentation via patterned agouti
expression. Lifetime feather cyclic regeneration resets
pigment patterns for physiological needs. Thus,
the evolution of stem cell niche topology allows
complex pigment patterning via combinatorial cooption of simple regulatory mechanisms.”
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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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By “evolution,” the authors cannot assume that
blind, undirected processes create the patterns
any more than they create intricate feathers
themselves. They merely mean that stem cells
are regulated to generate the patterns. But
what tells the stem cells to differentiate
according to a predetermined pattern? What
created the pattern in the first place that these
mechanisms execute? The explanation begs
even deeper questions.
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How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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Speaking of feathers, how would you like to dive into a
feather on the wing of a red-tailed hawk and see its
microscopic structure? You can live this adventure, along
with many others, in a new film just released in May
from Illustra Media entitled, Flight: The Genius of
Birds. (Click the link for trailer and ordering
information.) With cutting-edge science, stunning
photography, an original music score and a thoughtful
narration aided by the insight of biologists, the film makes
a convincing case for intelligent design. Along with the
previous release Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design
of Butterflies, this new entry forms the foundation to
Illustra’s new series of high-quality nature
documentaries, The Design of Life. Both were produced 8
5/3/2017
in High-Definition Blu-ray with 5.1 surround sound.
How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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We are very happy to co-sponsor Flight: The
Genius of Birds and will be drawing attention
to it all month. CEH Editor David Coppedge
worked closely with the producer on
scientific research and proofing, but it was
the genius of the production team led by Lad
Allen, with his editor Jerry Harned, working
with the biologists, the animators, the
composer Mark Lewis and the sound
technicians, and others, who made this film a
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masterpiece.
How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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The DVD is great, but if you have a good home
theater, this is a film to enjoy in an immersive
environment, with a Blu-ray player, a large screen
and a surround sound system. Flight is the equal
of secular nature documentaries—but without the
Darwinism that is merely assumed by the
others. It includes several incredible true stories
about particular bird species. After being amazed
by what you learn, and how beautifully it is
presented, we are sure you will want to order extra
copies of Flight to pass around. Order
today! DVD ships May 14, Blu-ray on June 11. 10
5/3/2017
How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers
花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案
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And by all means, if you haven’t yet
watched Metamorphosis, order them
both! Readers delighted with the exceptional
work of Illustra Media should support them
financially. They have plans to augment The
Design of Life series with more superb
documentaries on the wonders of the living
world. Nobody does it better than
Illustra! Their films are reaching around the
world. Be part of a team that is dismantling
Darwinist materialism with clear, powerful,
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convincing evidence for design.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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5/3/2017
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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found
找到完好的恐龙皮肤
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Some material that flaked off a fossil in Alberta was
not stone; it was dinosaur skin. Discoverers were
excited and puzzled: how could it last so long?
Here’s how Mauricio Barbi of the University of
Regina described their discovery, according to
PhysOrg:
“As we excavated the fossil, I thought that we were
looking at a skin impression. Then I noticed a
piece came off and I realized this is not ordinary –
this is real skin. Everyone involved with the
excavation was incredibly excited and we started
discussing research projects right away.”
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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found
找到完好的恐龙皮肤
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The reports on PhysOrg and on Nature World
News focused on figuring what color the skin
was. Readers who go all the way to the end of the
article, though, find out the really big question:
“But perhaps the greatest question Barbi is trying
to answer at the CLS is how the fossil remained
intact for around 70-million years.
“What’s not clear is what happened to this
dinosaur and how it died,” he said. “There
is something special about this fossil and the
area where it was found, and I am going to find
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out what it is.”
Intact Dinosaur Skin Found
找到完好的恐龙皮肤
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The fossil was found in an area described as a
“robust bone bed.” Barbi claimed it’s the only 3dimensional dinosaur skin fossil in the
world. According to the articles, the skin was
preserved “almost intact,” with tissues that can be
analyzed:
“For the experiment, the sample is placed in the path
of the infrared beam and light reflects off of it. During
the experiment, chemical bonds of certain
compounds will create different vibrations. For
example, proteins, sugars and fats still found in
the skin will create unique vibrational frequencies
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that scientists can measure.
Intact Dinosaur Skin Found
找到完好的恐龙皮肤
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“It is astonishing that we can get information
like this from such an old sample,” said Tim
May, CLS Mid-IR staff scientist. “Skin has fat
and lots of dead cells along with many
inorganic compounds. We can reflect the
infrared beam off the sample and we can
analyze the samples to give us very clear
characteristics.”
They will be studying melanosomes (pigment
cells) in the skin to try to determine what color
the hadrosaur was.
5/3/2017
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Intact Dinosaur Skin Found
找到完好的恐龙皮肤
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Barbi promised he is going to find out what is so
special about his fossil and the area in which it was
found. His only hope is to abandon the millions-ofyears Darwinian story. The reason the skin is
intact, and its tissues can still be studied, is that it
is recent—not 70 million years old. If he were to
propose that explanation, though, his career would
be over. So strong is the bias against Darwin
skeptics (even stronger against old-earth skeptics),
truth no longer matters. The primary goal of
evolutionary geologists and paleontologists is to
defend Charlie’s quaint Victorian myth against all17
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the evidence the world throws at it.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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5/3/2017
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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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The evolutionary story of extinction and the rise of
dinosaurs faces challenges, but survives when the
glue of imagination holds fragmentary evidence
together.
A frequent kind of upset in many evolutionary
scenarios is evidence that creatures and their
ancestors appeared earlier than thought. That’s
what happened to dinosaur ancestors, according
to Live Science: “Dinosaurs – or at least their
ancestors – may have gotten an earlier start
than once believed.”
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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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Fossils of archosaurs, thought to be dinosaur
ancestors by evolutionists, appear in Africa and
Antarctica doing just fine after the so-called
Permian extinction that should have wiped them
out along with 90% of other life forms, it is
alleged. One paleontologist has to insert a long
hiatus into the evolutionary story: “We get the
hint that the dinosaur radiation, which we
don’t really see in the fossil record until
about 20 million years later, is really starting
to take off in this region.”
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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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Yet the Permian extinction lacks any known cause: “No one
knows why the mass extinction happened,” the article
says. Could it be an artifact of the evolutionary approach to the
data, dependent upon a consensus? After all, “The fossil record
around the Permian extinction is spotty,” the article says, “with
most paleontological research coming from a few fossil sites in
Russia and in South Africa.” On that note, Science Daily cast
some doubt on the venerable event itself. Did 9 out of 10 species
perish? “It turns out, however, that scientists may have been
looking in the wrong places.”
By piecing together two “snapshots” before and after the alleged
Permian extinction using disconnected bits of fossil evidence from
different parts of the world, Christian Sidor, a biologist at the
University of Washington salvaged Darwinism. He made up a
story about different kinds of animals evolving to fill various niches
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in different ways after the presumed extinction.
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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That’s another evolutionary storytelling plot: if
you loosen up the competition, evolution will
take advantage of it. From Science Daily:
“These scientists have identified an outcome
of mass extinctions–that species ecologically
marginalized before the extinction may be
‘freed up’ to experience evolutionary
bursts then dominate after the extinction,”
says H. Richard Lane, program director
in NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences.
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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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According to the plot described by PhysOrg,
Dicynodon, a pig-sized animal with a small
tail, ever-growing tusks like an elephant and
a beak like a turtle, was the dominant
herbivore. “After the mass extinction at the
end of the Permian, Dicynodon disappeared
and other related species were so greatly
decreased that newly emerging herbivores
could suddenly compete with them.” But
how did these herbivores emerge? Where
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did they come from?
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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Sidor even got political. “He likened the change
to politics: It’s hard to dislodge an incumbent
politician, but once you do, anyone could
step in to fill the gap,” Live Science said. He
made up a term for that, PhysOrg reported:
“What we call evolutionary incumbency was
fundamentally reset.” Then Sidor alleged that
humans are causing another mass extinction in
our time. So what? Why couldn’t humans
claim it’s just another reset of evolutionary
incumbency?
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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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These articles are based on a press release from the National
Science Foundation that Astrobiology Magazine and others
republished without comment. Sidor published his ideas in
PNAS, where he introduced the concept of “evolutionary
incumbency” as a kind of “biotic control” on evolution. “The
recognition of heterogeneous tetrapod communities in the
Triassic implies that the end-Permian mass extinction
afforded ecologically marginalized lineages the ecospace to
diversify, and that biotic controls (i.e., evolutionary
incumbency) were fundamentally reset,” the abstract
states. “Archosaurs, which began diversifying in the Early
Triassic, were likely beneficiaries of this ecological
release and remained dominant for much of the later
Mesozoic.” His thesis appears to rely on the proverb, “If you
build it, they will come.” Open up the ecospace and new
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creatures will emerge by blind, unguided processes of evolution.
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
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恐龙进化的故事继续生存
Bird Evolution News
In other dinosaur news, PhysOrg claimed that Microraptor gui, a
hawk-sized bird that was a good flyer with feathers and all, ate
fish. The article still calls it a “small flying dinosaur.” Live Science
pulled out a Darwinian icon for its headline, claiming that small
feathered dinosaurs were “diverse like Darwin’s
finches.” Reporter Megan Gannon said this, replicating fallacies
and misinformation:
“Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural
selection was famously inspired by the diversity of beak
shapes among finches on the Galapagos Islands, which he took
as a sign that the birds had somehow adapted to the specific
environments where they lived. More recent research has
shown that Darwin’s finches can evolve quite quickly. For
instance, one species shrunk its beak size to better
compete with another bird for small seeds in a mere two
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decades.”
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
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恐龙进化的故事继续生存
What Gannon failed to acknowledge was that beak size merely
oscillated depending on the weather. There was no net
evolution. Also, Darwin was not inspired by the finches. The finch
story came later after his ideas on evolution were already formed. So
what does this do for the idea that “feathered dinosaurs” were like
Darwin’s finches? Simply that they “may have similarly adjusted
their beak size” in a similar way. But did they do that on
purpose? A Yale postdoc made this statement: “So, in a way, the
evolution of modern dinosaurs — birds — provides insight into
ancient, extinct dinosaurs.”
But the fossils she was talking about are caenagnathids. No fossils
of these small dinosaurs found in North America have been reported
with feathers. Wikipedia thinks they “would have been covered in
feathers.” Gannon posted an artist’s rendition of a recentlydiscovered Texas caenagnathid adorned with imaginary feathers – a
trick evolutionists have been using for six years
(2/08/06, 6/13/07, 9/29/08 commentary, 12/11/09 #2, 1/29/10 #1, 2/1
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8/11 #4).
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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Speaking of birds, another story on Science Daily and Live
Science claims that a bird that “lived after the time of
dinosaurs” is the ancestor of hummingbirds and swifts: the
analyses“ suggest that the bird was an evolutionary
precursor to the group that includes today’s swifts and
hummingbirds.” The small fossil, 12 centimeters from
head to tail and estimated to weigh just an ounce, was
found in the Green River formation of Wyoming. The
discoverers do not believe it could hover like
hummingbirds or had any of the distinctive traits of the
assumed progeny. Here’s the evolutionary spin:
“The size of the fossil would indicate that the ancestors of
swifts and hummingbirds evolved to be small before
they gained their unique flying characteristics,” one of
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the researchers said.
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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The fossil contains soft tissue, too –
remarkable for a specimen claimed to be
50 million years old: “carbon residues in
the fossils — once thought to be traces of
bacteria that fed on feathers —
are fossilized melanosomes, tiny cell
structures containing melanin pigments
that give birds and other animals their
color.”
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Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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For 12 years we have been showing that the Darwinian
conception of earth history is a huge fabrication, built on
imagination and ideology. Fossils are mere props for a fictional
story of millions of years that drives the search for
credibility. Since fossils are fragmentary and ambiguous, it is
easy to fudge this or that caenagnathid or this or that dicynodon
from Zambia or Tanzania into the Grand Myth. Learn how it’s
done. Learn their catch-phrases (such and such “sheds light on
evolution” etc.) and their propaganda techniques so that you
won’t be snookered. “Evolutionary incumbency”—good
grief. Clear the ecospace and watch the magic: new animals
will just “emerge.” If you build it, they will come. The
perpetrators of the myth are so inebriated with Darwine they
can’t see what they are doing. They think it’s science! Well,
what do you expect for research funded in part by the “Evolving
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Earth Foundation”?
Dinosaur Evolution Story Survives In Spite of Evidence
恐龙进化的故事继续生存
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A new book by Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, is coming
out in June. It will show convincingly how the Cambrian
explosion (all animal phyla appearing abruptly in the fossil
record) undermines Darwinism and argues for intelligent
design. If you order now (click the link), you can get it at
43% off, plus receive four e-books as a bonus. The
Illustra film Darwin’s Dilemma is also excellent on that
point, and Illustra’s new film Flight: The Genius of
Birds gives strong evidence for intelligent design of birds
as opposed to Darwinian stories about dino-to-bird
evolution. A two-volume work by PhD geologist Andrew
Snelling, Earth’s Catastrophic Past (read a review), shows
with examples from around the world that the evolutionary
millions-of-years story cannot stand up to the
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overwhelming geological evidence for a worldwide flood.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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5/3/2017
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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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Incredible advancements in technology are coming from
the imitation of nature, but engineers cannot yet attain
animal performance.
Look like a bug: “New Camera Inspired by Insect Eyes,”
announced Science Now. If you thought insects with their
compound eyes had inferior vision to ours, think that no
more:
“An insect’s compound eye is an engineering
marvel: high resolution, wide field of view, and
incredible sensitivity to motion, all in a compact
package. Now, a new digital camera provides the bestever imitation of a bug’s vision, using new optical
materials and techniques. This technology could
someday give patrolling surveillance drones the same
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exquisite vision as a dragonfly on the hunt.”
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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In the Illustra film Metamorphosis, Dr. Thomas Emmel
notes that butterflies have better color vision than
humans. They can see from infrared to
ultraviolet. And in the Illustra film Darwin’s Dilemma,
we see that compound eyes existed in the Cambrian
multicellular animals, including trilobites and
anomalocaridids.
According to PhysOrg, the new camera has an
“unmatched field of view.” Part of the challenge for
engineers at the University of Illinois was to develop
flexible electronics and optics that could accommodate
curved surfaces. Even so, their “low-end insect eye”
mimic does not reach the performance of
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the design that inspired it:
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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“Eyes in arthropods use compound
designs, in which arrays of smaller eyes
act together to provide image
perception. Each small eye, known as
an ommatidium, consists of a corneal
lens, a crystalline cone and a lightsensitive organ at the base. The entire
system is configured to provide
exceptional properties in imaging,
many of which lie beyond the reach of
existing man-made cameras.”
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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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It would appear difficult to rephrase that paragraph
in Darwinian terms, since it depends on the use of
concepts like design, configuration, and
exceptional properties. The project caught the
attention of Nature, and Science Daily twice. The
engineer’s paper was published in Nature, which
noted that arthropods differ in the number of facets
or ommatidia. Some ants have about 100 facets;
praying mantises have about 15,000, while some
dragonflies have up to 28,000. They ended by
saying, “Biologically inspired
schemes for adapting to different light levels
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are also of interest.”
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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Fly like a fly: A biomimetic robot that flies like a fly was
reported in Science this week. It caught the attention
of Nature and Science Daily. “RoboBee” doesn’t look
anywhere near as sophisticated as an actual fly (and lacks
digestive, neural, and reproductive systems), but Nature
called it a “manufacturing marvel.” One of its designers
said, “This is a major engineering breakthrough, 15
years in the making.” The little robot, weighing only 80
milligrams, has thin membranes for wings that it can flap
120 times a second, similar to a fly’s flapping rate (the
engineers admitted it is only “modeled loosely on the
morphology of flies”). Building a lightweight battery was
one of the biggest challenges, so they had to tether it to a
power source and computer with thin wire. Still, it’s “pretty
5/3/2017
fantastically cool,” an observer said for Science Now. 37
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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The engineering team faced many
challenges. For instance, if the wings weren’t
exactly symmetrical, it failed to fly. It “took
many rounds of tweaking the design before
it finally worked,” but when the team had their
“Kitty Hawk moment,” they were really
proud. RoboBee can only fly for 20 seconds,
and wears out after 15 minutes of use. But it’s
“the smallest flapping wing aircraft that has
ever been built and made fully functional,” they
said. The goal is to get the power supply, flight
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control computer and everything else on board.
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

They envision making swarms of these robots for
search and rescue. “When you scale things
down, smaller is better,” they said. That speaks
volumes about the actual living fly, which not only
has everything on board, but also contains
digestive, neural, and reproductive systems. A fly
or bee is comparatively large for insects, too
(consider gnats and mosquitoes, for
instance). Recently, a microscopic fairyfly
dubbed Tinkerbella nana was discovered with a
body length of 155 micrometers (see Science
Daily for picture). That’s packing a lot of systems
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into a very tiny space.
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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Sea horse armor: In other biomimetics
news, scientists at UC San Diego have their
eyes on seahorses for ideas. According
to Science Daily, “Sea horses get
their exceptional flexibility from
the structure of their bony plates, which
form its armor.” The plates slide past each
other. The plates can be compressed to half
their size without damage. The principle
behind the UCSD project is broader than one
particular animal:
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Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
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“The study of natural materials can lead to the
creation of new and unique materials and
structures inspired by nature that are stronger,
tougher, lighter and more flexible,” said [Joanna]
McKittrick, a professor of materials science at the
Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
McKittrick and Meyers had sought
bioinsipiration [sic] by examining the armor
of many other animals, including armadillo,
alligators and the scales of various fish. This
time, they were specifically looking for an animal that
was flexible enough to develop a design for a
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robotic arm.
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

Mr. Clean cicada: The 17-year locusts are
emerging from hibernation in some parts of the
south this year. Live Science reported on work
to understand how the bugs can stay so
clean. They don’t need to stand in the rain; the
structure of their exoskeleton allows the bugs to
be self-cleaning, researchers at Duke University
have found. “Apparently, grime can simply
leap right off them, given dew.” When
dewdrops merge together, they literally leap off
the bugs, carrying grime with them. This also
happens on lotus leaves and other “super5/3/2017
42
hydrophobic” surfaces.
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术
 “These findings not only can
help explain the mystery of how
cicada wings keep clean, but could
also lead to improved artificial selfcleaning materials. Jumping
droplets could also help remove
heat from power plants, Chen said.”
5/3/2017
43
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

Protein origami: Science Magazine published a
paper about the use of proteins for self-assembling
materials. A “Perspective” piece in the same issue
about the project said that synthetic biology “aims to
push natural biological systems in novel
directions or to generate biomimetic systems
with new properties.” The team from University of
Bristol learned how to control the self-assembly of
proteins to generate simple “cages” and patterns out
of coiled-coil elements of proteins. “The assembly
properties of the peptides are governed by how
their folding results in the projection of chemical
functional groups into space.”
5/3/2017
44
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

Short bows: Nature mentioned the “worminspired adhesive” that came from following
how a spiny-headed worm embeds itself in
the tissues of its host. A bandage built on
the principle is “more than three times as
adhesive as surgical staples for affixing skin
grafts.” Live Science posted “Seven Clever
Technologies Inspired by
Animals.” Entrants include butterflies,
sharks, worms, cockleburs, beetles, geckos,
and spiders.
5/3/2017
45
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

As usual, evolution was useless in all these stories. It
was only mentioned occasionally as an ideologicallydriven afterthought, such as “Nature has developed
and refined these concepts over the course of
billions of years of evolution” (PhysOrg). Nature is
not a developer! Nature is not a refiner. Nature
knows nothing of concepts. Those are terms from
intelligent design. The Nature paper on the compound
eye begins, “In arthropods, evolution has created a
remarkably sophisticated class of imaging
systems, with a wide-angle field of view, low
aberrations, high acuity to motion and an infinite depth
of field,” but then says nothing further about evolution.
5/3/2017
46
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

Evolution is not a creator! Evolution does
not design sophisticated imaging systems
with desirable properties! Tanya Lewis
at Live Science dreamed, “Over time,
evolution has led to some incredible
developments, from the photosynthetic
machinery in plants to the human
eye.” She needs to awake from her
dogmatic Darwinian slumbers.
5/3/2017
47
Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech
臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术

The lingo that predominates in
biomimetics is design,
inspiration, exceptional
performance. Darwinians, pack
up your snake oil wagons and
get out of the way of this new,
popular I.D. parade.
5/3/2017
48
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
49
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌


Some claims by evolutionists sound cool, calm and
collected until you see them in context.
An example appeared in Science
Daily and Astrobiology Magazine – a claim that life
may have originated in salty, icy stalactites under
the sea ice. Need “clues to the origin of
life”? The article says, “Life on Earth may have
originated not in warm tropical seas, but with
weird tubes of ice — sometimes called ‘sea
stalactites’ — that grow downward into cold
seawater near Earth’s poles, scientists are
reporting.”
5/3/2017
50
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌

That’s a major shift toward further
implausibility. From Darwin’s own
speculations about a “warm little pond,”
origin-of-life researchers have long claimed
that heat is necessary to drive the reactions
for life. That’s why some have imagined
life’s origin at a hydrothermal vent, or lakes
near a volcano, or at least in the open ocean
exposed to sunlight. But “sea stalactites” of
ice in the coldest oceans on earth?
5/3/2017
51
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌


Even more desperate is the analogy the
researchers of the American Chemical Society
posed: these “brinicles,” as they have been
dubbed, look like “chemical gardens” kids play
with. They look like “children’s chemistry
sets, in which tubes grow upward from metal
salts dropped into silicate solution.” Being
made of the wrong stuff, those structures have
absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life.
From there, the article descended into rank
speculation:
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52
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌


“The analysis concluded that brinicles provide an
environment that could well
have fostered the emergence of life on
Earth billions of years ago, and could have done
so on other planets. “Beyond Earth, the brinicle
formation mechanism may be important in the
context of planets and moons with ice-covered
oceans,” the report states, citing in particular two
moons of Jupiter named Ganymede and Callisto.”
It’s safe to assume that if origin-of-life researchers
had something better than this to propose, they
would have proposed it long ago.
5/3/2017
53
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌

NASA’s Astrobiology Institute is a worthless
boondoggle that accomplishes nothing. Where
is their evidence? They study planets, rocks,
and possibly oceans, but there is still no
evidence for life beyond Earth’s biosphere. It’s
an enterprise built entirely on faith in a
Darwinian ideology. Astrobiology Magazine
publishes almost nothing original. Day after
day they re-post press releases from other
sources that say, “maybe this” and “maybe
that.” Did you see the government seal of
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54
approval on the webpage?
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌

When “astrobiology” was born as a “new science”
back around 1990 because of a rush to celebrate
possible fossils in a Martian meteorite (since
debunked), then-NASA-chief Dan Goldin
convinced Congress to fund research into life on
other worlds. Since then, nothing has been
accomplished to find life elsewhere, and now they
are so desperate they propose cold icicles “could”
be environments for the “emergence” of life on
other planets. Good grief. One of our readers
should research how many millions of tax dollars
the government has spent on this Darwinian
5/3/2017
55
fantasy trip.
Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles
检测到进化文章的恐慌

This is not to imply that many astrobiologists are not
intelligent, highly-educated scientists. It’s just that their
astronomy has nothing to do with biology. Detecting
extrasolar planets, studying planetary atmospheres, and
characterizing the nature of living creatures at deep-sea
vents is all fine and good, but to imply that life “emerged”
from non-living environments is supported by no
evidence whatsoever. The legitimate studies of planets
could have been funded without inventing a new
word. Astro-biology is a fabrication, spliced out of two
legitimate sciences, astronomy and biology. It is no
more legit than geo-psychology or planetary
sociology. Without evidence to justify its existence, it
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56
should be called astro-bio-mythology.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
57
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽


Forest fire ash is not all useless. It
contains signaling molecules that can
switch on the next generation of plants.
How is it that in the spring following a
forest fire, the ground comes alive with a
profusion of new seedlings? How do the
seeds, which may have lain dormant in
the soil for years, know that the ground
has been cleared, providing opportunities
for a new generation of growth?
5/3/2017
58
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽


An open-access paper in PNAS describes how a molecule
in the ash of plants after a forest fire turns on growth in
dormant seeds. According to the paper, “Germinationstimulating compounds, generated in the smoke of
burning plants, include a seed dormancy–breaking
compound” called karrikin-1. The scientists studied what
this molecule does to a seed. Inside the seed is a
protein, KAI2, that has a receptor for karrikin-1. When the
key fits the lock, the protein changes shape, switching on
a message cascade that tells the side to prepare for
sprouting.
A Salk Institute press release,“ Smoke signals: How
burning plants tell seeds to rise from the ashes,”
summarizes the findings:
5/3/2017
59
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽


“This is a very important and fundamental process of
ecosystem renewal around the planet that we really
didn’t understand,” says co-senior investigator Joseph
P. Noel, professor and director of Salk’s Jack H. Skirball
Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics. “Now we
know the molecular triggers for how it occurs.”
Noel’s co-senior investigator on the project, Joanne
Chory, professor and director of Salk’s Plant Molecular
and Cellular Biology Laboratory, says the team found
the molecular “wake-up call” for burned forests. “What
we discovered,” she says, “is how a dying plant
generates a chemical message for the next
generation, telling dormant seeds it’s time to
sprout.”
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60
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽



The original paper didn’t say anything about how evolution
produced this signaling system, but the press release took
a stab at it:
“In plants, one member of this family of enzymes has
been recruited somehow through natural selection to
bind to this molecule in smoke and ash and generate this
signal,” says Noel, holder of Salk’s Arthur and Julie
Woodrow Chair and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigator. “KAI2 likely evolved when plant ecosystems
started to flourish on the terrestrial earth and fire became a
very important part of ecosystems to free up nutrients
locked up in dying and dead plants.”
The researchers never explained how this recruitment
“likely evolved.” It was just “somehow.”
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61
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽
 Another article on Live Science about
plant ecology states that aerosols
produced by plants can modulate global
climate. “Plants release gases such as
water vapor and oxygen; these combine
with the aerosols released from plants
to form larger airborne particles that
reflect sunlight and form cloud
droplets.” The pleasing scent of a forest
comes from these aerosols.
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62
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽

The Salk press release provides a good example of
how evolution pretends to be scientific while only
gesticulating (hand-waving) in fantasyland. The
science about karrikins and KAI2 has nothing to do
with evolution; it’s just good old observational,
reproducible experimentation. The evolution stuff was
just tacked on at the end. But look at it! An enzyme
has been “recruited somehow through natural
selection,” we are told. OK, how? “Somehow.” It
just evolved. How do you know it evolved? It “likely
evolved.” Is this somehow likely? No; it’s not even
likely somehow. Proteins and enzymes are highly
complicated living machines that defy origin by chance
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63
(see online book).
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽

But even if in someone’s wildest
imagination KAI2 “emerged” somehow, unlikely as it
is, getting it to do anything requires a whole system of
other proteins, enzymes and genes to interact with it
for a functional purpose. When these scientists
asserted it is “somehow…likely” that natural selection
(an aimless, purposeless process) accomplished this
without meaning to, they did BAD (Bald Assertion of
Darwinism). They abandoned all pretense of
science. They are just gesticulating, speculating,
confabulating, somnabulating, absquatulating out of
their own imaginations, where miracles of emergence
happen when they wish upon a star.
5/3/2017
64
Burning Plants Tell Seeds When to Germinate
焚烧植物叫种子何时发芽

Everyone, therefore—even
Darwinians—believes in miracles
and the supernatural. Some can
defend their beliefs with reason
and evidence. Others, like these
Darwin addicts, just blow smoke
and hot air.
5/3/2017
65
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
66
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调


In a mathematical tour de farce, two Oxford
evolutionists have applied Darwinian natural
selection to the multiverse to try to explain why
it looks designed.
A press release from the University of
Oxford tells how evolutionary theorist Andy
Gardner and theoretical physicist Joseph
Conlon figured that universes give birth to other
universes through black holes. The ones with
the “fittest” parameters of physics get better at it
5/3/2017
67
and survive:
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调


“Cosmological natural selection proposes that, if
new universes are born inside black holes, a
‘multiverse’ of many possible universes could be
shaped by a process similar to natural selection so
that successive generations of universes evolve to
become better at making black holes.…
‘This idea of cosmological natural selection is
controversial, and physicists have pointed out all
sorts of problems with it. But we were interested in
seeing if its basic evolutionary logic actually
works,’ said Dr Andy Gardner of Oxford University’s
Department of Zoology, lead author of the paper. 68
5/3/2017
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

‘We found that a general equation from
evolutionary genetics, Price’s theorem, can
help us to model how selection can work not only
at the scale of genes and organisms but also at
that of something as unimaginably vast as
multiple universes,’ said Dr Gardner. ‘Our model
uses maths similar to the mathematical theory
underlying Darwinian adaptation in biology,
which explains how the dynamics of natural
selection leads to organisms appearing
designed to maximize their fitness.’
5/3/2017
69
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调


The Price equation, however, is not universally accepted
as a valid description of evolution, dependent as it is on
controversial ideas of kin selection and group
selection. Van Veelen and others criticized its use in
the Journal of Theoretical Biology last year. Tutorials
at Evolution and Games illustrate how Price’s theorem can
produce misleading results.
The Oxford team of two admitted that “the evolution of
universes is very different from the evolution of
animals,” but decided that “models of evolving
universes are quite similar to models of bacterial
evolution,” so they felt the similar logic made the exercise
worthwhile. Their original paper, published in Complexity,
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70
is available online in PDF format.
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调


So if models of evolving universes resemble
models of biological evolution, what does that say
about the latter?
Let’s use this paper with all its whiz-bang
equations to show how to respond to pseudoerudite atheists, without being intimidated by their
jargon and flawed mathematics. The idea to
master is that if your thesis is illogical, no amount
of jargon or math will make it logical. You don’t
have to be able to follow the math of these Oxford
scholars to conclude that their ideas are laughably
5/3/2017
71
absurd.
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

Suppose, for instance that you want to prove that
gnomes are capable of painting birds’ eggs in the
middle of the night. In your paper, you let G stand for
the available gnome population, E stand for the egg
density per acre, r the effective egg coloration rate
and F the gnomic fitness increase derived from the
Price equation, assuming the egg-painting activity
allows gnomes to produce more offspring. It doesn’t
matter if you can derive F = cov(G1 — G2) + cov(E1 —
E2) r -ewT or anything else, even more impressivelooking. If the assumptions are wrong, the
conclusions must also be wrong.
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72
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

Gardner and Conlon’s reasoning (and math) is
a house of cards on sand in a whirlwind. They
assumed Darwinism accounts for finely-tuned
adaptations in biology, like avian flight, blinding
their eyes, as did Francis Crick, who said that
“Biologists must constantly keep in
mind that what they see was not designed,
but rather evolved.” They leapt from that error
to assume that evolution can account for finetuning in the fundamental constants of physics.
5/3/2017
73
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调


They borrowed Lee Smolin’s controversial notion of
“cosmic natural selection,” which they admitted
“is only weakly analogous to Darwinian natural
selection.” They further assumed that finely-tuned,
life-giving universes can emerge from black holes
rather than dissipate in a sea of random particles by
Hawking radiation. They trusted the shaky math of
Price’s theorem, which embeds evolutionary
assumptions into the terms of its equation just like our
example embedded gnomes into its terms.
They know exactly what they are doing. Look at the
intellectual hurdles they simply walked around instead
5/3/2017
74
of facing:
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

“This idea relies on several important
assumptions, all of which are controversial.
First, it is key to the ideas of Smolin that the
endpoint of black-hole formation is actually a
new universe, rather than simply a quantum
mechanical state that will decay over time
and ultimately disappear through Hawking
radiation.…
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75
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

“Second, Smolin suggests that the fundamental constants
can change during the formation of new universes, but no
physical mechanism is known to account for this. Third,
Smolin assumes that the new universe inherits the
constants of the previous universe, up to small variations.
However, in the context of the multiverse, one should
expect not just the constants of the Standard Model to be
ambient, but also the gauge group (set of forces) and
particle content of the Standard Model to be ambient
properties as well. In this case, one would expect far more
dramatic changes to the physical laws (e.g., the absence of
electromagnetism as a long-range force) than simply a change
in numerical constants. These are all substantial
caveats (see [16] for an in-depth review). Here, we proceed76
5/3/2017
on the assumption that they are surmountable.
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调
 With a leap of faith like that, you can
simply discount everything they say
as foolishness. Isn’t that exactly what
Paul said the wise of this world do
when facing clear evidence for
design? Professing themselves to be
wise, they became fools. These two
fallible men know fully well how
designed the universe is:
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77
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

“The precise numerical values of these
constants determine much of the physics of
our universe and pose a double conundrum
for physicists and philosophers. First, the
values have a high degree of arbitrariness:
they are dimensionless parameters that range
over eight orders of magnitude, for no known
reason. Second, it is generally acknowledged
that even rather small modifications to some
of these values would lead to universes that
5/3/2017
are vastly less complex than our own.…” 78
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

No known reason? Here you witnessed a willful
escape from reason. Because they stubbornly
refuse to consider actual design by a designing
intelligence, they would rather leap into
absurdity, using their God-given talents for
abstract reasoning to manipulate numbers that
exclude the obvious out of existence in a
fantasy multiverse of their own imagination. It’s
just what Paul said: “For what can be known
about God is plain to them, because God has
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79
shown it to them.
Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to
Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe
宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and
divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since
the creation of the world, in the things that have been
made. So they are without excuse. For although they
knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks
to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their
foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:19–21). Futile
thinking implies the self-refuting fallacy. By thinking their
own reason emerged from a mindless cosmos, Gardner
and Conlon just undermined its validity. Such thinking
deserves pity, not funding from the Royal Society, whose
founders believed design came from the Designer about
whom Paul wrote. Today’s members honor fools by
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80
publishing their folly.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
81
Trouble for Mars Lifers
相信火星有生命的麻烦


Evidence disputes Mars water, let alone life. It’s
looking like a toxic place. Besides, where would the
water come from?
The big mound in Gale Crater, site of the Mars
Curiosity Rover, looked like a tantalizing place to look
for habitability. Mt. Sharp, as it is called, appeared to
be a mountain laid down by water. Now, however, it
looks more likely it was built by wind. Astrobiology
Magazine shared the bad news from Princeton: “If
correct, the research could dilute expectations that
the mound holds evidence of a large body of water,
which would have important implications for
understanding Mars’ past habitability.”
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82
Trouble for Mars Lifers
相信火星有生命的麻烦

Where would the water have come from, anyway? Live
Science proclaimed that Mars and the core of Jupiter
formed from “large space crashes.” The energy of
impacts would seem to obliterate volatile compounds
(including water). That’s why cosmogonists try to find
other sources for Earth’s oceans, assuming it crashed into
existence similarly. The highly speculative theory
proposed by U of Chicago scientists, given credence in the
article, relies on numerous improbabilities, among them:
(1) dust particles sticking together to make planetestimals,
(2) sufficient numbers of planetesimals colliding and
accreting together instead of breaking up into fine
particles, and (3) sufficient time before all the planetforming ingredients are expelled from the system.
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83
Trouble for Mars Lifers
相信火星有生命的麻烦

Michigan State scientists are divining the
meaning of Martian meteorites again, but they
admit the conclusions are unclear: “most
meteorites that originated on Mars arrived on
Earth so long ago that now they have
characteristics that tell of their life on Earth,
obscuring any clues it might offer about their
time on Mars,” a researcher confessed. Given
the confusion, they are only “laying
the groundwork for future researchers to
answer this age-old question.” In other words,
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84
they have nothing to say.
Trouble for Mars Lifers
相信火星有生命的麻烦

Mars must certainly not be a lively place now, given
what landers have found. There are “pesky
perchlorates all over Mars, ” Science
Magazine said. The chlorine compounds not only erase
carbon compounds by converting them to gas, they
make living on Mars dangerous. The perchlorates and
other chemicals like gympsum get into fine dust that
blows all over the planet, making it a dangerous place to
send humans. New Scientist described how “Toxic
Mars could hamper planned human missions.” The
fine dust could harm the lungs and thyroid glands of
future astronauts. Even in the safety of spacesuits, the
electrified dust would stick to everything, making its way
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85
unavoidably into astronaut living quarters.
Trouble for Mars Lifers
相信火星有生命的麻烦
 The bad news is not stopping children
of the Star Trek generation,
though. Some 78,000 have applied to
go on a proposed one-way trip to
Mars, New Scientist reported
elsewhere. Hopefully they won’t find
out too late that it’s a suicide mission.
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86
Trouble for Mars Lifers
相信火星有生命的麻烦

Mercury is a sterile hell, Venus is a sterile hell, Mars is
a toxic wasteland, and so on out. In between Venus
and Mars lies this blue jewel we call Earth, blessed
with abundant water, greenery, and life in almost
every nook and cranny. It has the right magnetic
shield, the right solar energy, the right continental
minerals, the right atmosphere, the right
carbon/oxygen/water/nitrogen cycles — the right
everything. Doesn’t that send a message we should
heed? Maybe the Creator gave us all these other
worlds to examine, so that we would appreciate all the
more how well designed our Earth is. For those not
drunk on Darwine, that has been the primary benefit of
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the planetary exploration program.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
88
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者


There are professors and leaders of special
interest groups whose sole purpose is to draw
students away from belief in a Designer and tempt
them to embrace the aimless, purposeless,
materialist processes of Darwinism. How can
students prepare for the challenge?
If evolution were true, well, then— who wouldn’t
want to embrace the truth, even if it means a
radical change to one’s beliefs? Ay, there’s the
rub. Any aimless material process has no
necessary connection to truth. As Charles Darwin
himself wrote to a friend the year before he died, 89
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
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
“But then with me the horrid doubt
always arises whether the convictions
of man’s mind, which has
been developed from the mind of the
lower animals, are of any value or at all
trustworthy. Would any one trust in the
convictions of a monkey’s mind, if
there are any convictions in such a
mind? (Letter to William Graham, 3 July
1881, posted at the Darwin
Correspondence Project.)”
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
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
What this implies is that the evolutionist, to
be consistent, must abandon all reason. Yet
paradoxically, they specifically employ
reason in their attempts to dislodge “faith”
(which they mean as anything that questions
the science of evolution). Whether ignorant
of or willfully ignoring this major selfcontradiction, some of them charge forward
anyway on their campaign to take students
hostage for Darwin. Two of them show how
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they do it.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者
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
Eugenie Scott and the NCSE
Retiring this year from her 26-year headship of the
National Center for Science Education (NCSE), an
organization whose sole purpose is to prevent “antievolution” from gaining any headway in public schools,
Eugenie Scott was honored by Science Magazine this
week. Jeffrey Mervis described the NCSE as a “U.S.
Center That Fights Antievolution Forces.” Whether that
means creationism, intelligent design, or simply honest
teaching of Darwinism with its pros and cons, Eugenie
Scott has been a tireless advocate of Darwin-only in the
schools, and a formidable opponent of even the academic
freedom laws that attempt to prevent school boards from
punishing teachers who teach evolution honestly.
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

Mervis’s article is filled with accolades for Dr. Scott from
like-minded Darwin-only people. She herself long ago
decided not to pose as anti-religious (after all, there are
liberal theologians who embrace evolution, and lately she
has tried to make overtures even to evangelical Christian
groups to agree on some of NCSE’s goals). Aware of the
political and cultural issues at hand, she relies on “powers
of persuasion” to defend what Mervis calls “integrity in
science education.” Uh— what was that Darwin quote
again? It would seem hard to define “integrity” in
Darwinian terms. To a Darwinian game theorist,
cooperation evolves by the same aimless processes of
natural selection that changes a finch beak, and noncooperation is just part of the game. None of that appears
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dependent on truth.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者


Melvin Konner and Daniel Dennett
Melvin Konner is a self-proclaimed admirer of Daniel
Dennett, a Darwinian philosopher (if that oxymoron
can be resolved). Konner loved Dennett’s earlier
books, but in a review in Nature, had a few problems
with his latest, titled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools
for Thinking. Konner usually appreciates Dennett’s
dedication to “facts” and “clarification of
discourse.” Strangely, he never seems to insist
Dennett define those terms from materialistic
processes of aimless selection. Maybe that’s because
Konner disclaims any expertise in philosophy, which is
obsessed with clarity.
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
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
In the course of his review, Konner described
how he likes to disabuse his students of their
doubts about Darwin. He had just puzzled
about the usefulness of Dennett’s categories of
“skyhooks” (“thinking-tools that hang an
explanation on nothing”) and “cranes”
(“concepts built on a solid factual
foundation”). Predictably, Konner pigeonholed
intelligent design as a “skyhook” for its
“explaining too-intricate bits of biological
machinery.” Anyway, here’s what he said he
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does to his students in class:
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

“But are skyhooks and cranes comparable kinds of ideas?
Symbiosis and sex are evolved processes like respiration or
photosynthesis; each began with random mutation and,
by gradual natural selection, produced a ‘design’ that
changed the history of life. But what do skyhooks and cranes
add to the basic principles of how we think about
evolution? The next time I comfort a student struggling
between faith and Darwin, it will not help me to say, “What
you learned in Sunday school about evolution needing a
‘big boost’? That’s just a skyhook.” Rather, I will do what I do
now: help the student to zero in on variation, inheritance,
selection and, crucially, how very many generations there
have been since evolution began. As Dennett states
elsewhere in this book, the word for this is not ‘crane’ but
‘algorithm’ — both more and better than a metaphor.”
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

It’s nice that Konner wants to “comfort” his
students instead of beat them over the
head, but it appears he just helped himself
to several immaterial,
purposeful concepts that depend for their
usefulness on truth and integrity: design,
principles, thinking, comfort, learning,
algorithm, and metaphor. Can he derive
those from natural selection? He doesn’t
feel he has to. Dennett has done it for
him:
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
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
I share many of Dennett’s views: a ‘designed’
nature without a designer; the mechanistic,
emergent character of consciousness; the
rejection of the homunculus argument, or the idea
that an entity (often characterized in discussion as
a little person) watches a theatre consisting of
the rest of the brain; and the compatibility of
free will with determinism.
It would be interesting to ask Konner if he really
agrees Dennett’s views are true, or if he considers
himself a “cooperator” in some kind of evolutionary
game. Incidentally, who is watching the watcher in
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the theater that doesn’t exist?
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

Students: understand what you are up against. People like
Eugenie Scott (and her squadron of attack forces) and Melvin
Konner are on a mission: a mission to destroy “faith” and
replace it with “Darwin.” To them, “faith” means anything that
doubts their own faith in Darwinism, which they consider to be
“science” (in their thinking, synonymous with truth). What are
you going to do when the Professor Konner in your college
comes alongside you to “comfort” you in (what he perceives
as) your “struggle between faith and Darwin”? Why, he just
wants to ameliorate your worry about the conflict between what
your Sunday School teacher said about evolution and the
alleged “scientific” story of “variation, inheritance, selection” and
long ages (“how very many generations there have been since
evolution began”). He just wants to help you. What are you
going to say to him?
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
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
The answer is so important that we want you to think about it
for a day. Come back tomorrow for the continuation of our
commentary. Write down some problems you see with the
situation as described, and what some of your possible
responses might be. The article contains some clues. If you
don’t learn to think these issues through for yourself with
clarity and conviction, reading our advice will not help that
much. We are here to help you think in more cogent, clear,
convincing ways than many Sunday School teachers do
(speaking of the ones who say, “just have faith” or “maybe
you can have your faith and Darwin, too”). Your convictions
cannot survive Eugenie Scott or Professor Konner with that
kind of pablum. Think about your responses and check back
with us tomorrow. This is a good exercise for all readers, not
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just students.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

How did you do? Our suggested responses are
part pragmatic and part logical. First, the
pragmatic part. Recognize that in class, it’s an
unequal contest. The professor is in the power
position, and has the power to make or break
your grade, and possibly your career. In such
cases, discretion is usually the better part of
valor. You don’t have to agree with his
views. Be respectful, try to fulfill the class
requirements and get a good grade. Just make
sure you know what you would say if it were an
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equal contest.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

Logically, we hope you noticed that the Darwinian position
is self-refuting. Self-refuting positions are not just
misguided, they are necessarily false. They can never be
true, now or ever. This realization doesn’t dawn on most
Darwinians, but it did on Darwin himself (read that quote
from his letter to Graham again). Darwin said that this
“horrid doubt” always arises in his mind. He worried about
this right up to his death, long after he had become
famous for his theory of natural selection. How can the
convictions of a man’s mind be reliable? In the letter, he
had no answer! He never answered that doubt. As far as
we know, he died with that doubt in his mind, that
everything he had propounded was no more reliable than
whatever “convictions” exist in the mind of a monkey or 102
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one of the lower animals.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

To be consistent, Darwin would have had to admit that his views
are glorified monkey screeches. They have no necessary
connection to truth. What is truth? Ask the Konner-types if truth
evolves. Everything else in Darwin’s world changes. If truth
evolves, what is considered true today could be false
tomorrow. Evolutionary game theorists continually publish articles
in leading journals that claim all that we consider good, true and
beautiful is the result of behaviors that arise by natural selection,
not by purpose or intent. The aimless, mindless processes of
selection produce “emergent properties” that only appear to be
altruistic, truthful, and good. They really aren’t! They’re just
arbitrary states of matter. Even yeast colonies exhibit these
behaviors, they claim, trying to assert that human behavior is no
different. So why should we view the NCSE as anything but an
emergent property among human populations, that gains power for
awhile, till the “religious” population grabs the ball? Who is calling
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what religious, anyway? In Darwin’s world, nothing has meaning.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

This logical response is so crucial it is worth learning well. C. S.
Lewis used it. G. K. Chesteron used it. Now Alvin Plantinga and
other modern philosophers are using it. Understood and wielded
well, this sword stops the Darwinist in his tracks. We cannot allow
a Darwinian to “help himself” to concepts of truth or beauty,
because it’s a form of theft. If we told them “get your own dirt”
(see joke) they would be empty-handed. If they try to argue that
Darwinism is true, we must rap their knuckles and tell them to stop
and define truth. Does it evolve? If so, game over. A believer in
God, by contrast, has the resources to justify belief in truth,
because God, the eternal, unchanging One, is the source of Truth
with a capital T. As finite humans we may not always get our
views right, but we have the one and only pole star to hitch our
arguments to. We can justify our belief in truth. (Note: this is why
belief in an impersonal designing “force” is inadequate. A force
like gravity does not deal in concepts, and concepts require
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personal communication.)
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

Some Darwinians try to wriggle out of the
straitjacket by appeals to “evolutionary
epistemology.” This is the notion that natural
selection, to work, required that animals “get the
world right” to survive and reproduce. That notion
is easily dismissed by repeating the same point:
survival has no necessary connection to
truth. Survival is pragmatic. What helps an animal
survive today might not tomorrow, so what a
caveman thinks is true might be false in a million
years. At no time would an animal or human know
what truth is. Truth must be unchanging.
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Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

Once again we recommend the Discovery Institute’s recent
book, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism and
Society for an in-depth look at the “argument from reason” that
defeats materialism. But what about theistic evolution? The
argument works against that, too. Almost all theistic evolutionists
capitulate to the Darwinian notion that natural selection is aimless
and unguided. They refuse to think that God intervenes at any stage
in the process, because they want to be accepted within the scientific
community. But any unguided, aimless, purposeless process has no
necessary connection to truth, whether or not they believe in a God
behind it. What about those who think God set up natural selection
as a “law of nature” that would fulfill His purposes? Sorry, no dice
there, either. A law of nature that led inexorably to Adam and Eve
would be a contradiction of natural selection’s aimlessness. It would
be tantamount to a miracle—indeed, a whole sequence of miracles—
so nothing would be gained by theistic evolutionists who want to
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depend on “secondary causes” (natural laws), not miracles.
Students Should Deal with Evolution Evangelists
学生应该处理以进化传道者

The logical argument explained above is crucial to your surviving
evolutionary evangelists in college, the media, or elsewhere, but
there’s also an abundance of empirical arguments against
evolution. In June, Stephen Meyer’s new book Darwin’s Doubt will
discuss the problem of the Cambrian Explosion in detail. Illustra’s
excellent documentary Darwin’s Dilemma provides a one-hour
presentation of this problem Darwin himself recognized as a valid
argument against his theory. Meyer’s earlier book Signature in the
Cell, and our online book here, provide powerful, convincing
arguments that work not only to refute evolution, but to provide
positive evidence for intelligent design. There are so many empirical
arguments against evolution at creation sites and intelligent design
sites that our problem is knowing where to stop. Many good
resources are available at a collection called True Origin, where you
can find discussions about most issues in the creation vs. evolution
debate. Naturally we also recommend you avail yourself of our
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Search bar and categories here at Creation-Evolution Headlines. 107
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
A final (but important) piece of advice concerning debate
strategy. Don’t let the Darwinians define the issue or the
terms. They want to corner you into a supposed conflict between
“faith” and “science,” but that is a false dichotomy. If you accept their
terms, the deck is stacked against you. The truth is, everyone has
faith! The question is not faith vs. science, but their faith vs. your
faith; their religion vs. your religion; their science vs. your
science. You could even demonstrate to the Darwinian, using the
argument from reason, that they believe in miracles and the
supernatural. The key is to ask the right questions, as Phillip
Johnson so ably argued in his book of that name. The debate should
be stated, Can you arrive at human reason, and all the beauty and
complexity of the living world, by a material process that is
fundamentally aimless, purposeless, and unguided? Asked that way,
the Darwinian is at the disadvantage. His arguments collapse into
monkey screeches. Don’t let him say another word until he can
justify the existence of truth, integrity, and morality. As soon as he108
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opens his mouth to argue a point, you have won.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学


Complaints about a new diagnostic manual show that
psychiatry has a long way to go before being
considered a legitimate science. That hope might
never be fulfilled.
The occasion for scientific scrutiny on psychiatry is the
publication this month of DSM-5, the latest upgrade to
the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This 60-year
old “bible” to psychiatrists has had a long history of
problems. In New Scientist, Peter Aldhous, Andy
Coghlan and Sara Reardon hope that a
“scientific DSM will transform psychiatry.” That implies
that it is not scientific now.
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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学

An article on Evolution News & Views recounts the
many ways that psychiatry fails as a science. In the
future, New Scientist predicts, things will be
different. “It will be based on science, and will look
nothing like today’s Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders.” As we reported earlier
(5/18/12, 4/24/13), the DSM-5 has come under fire for
removing some categories of mental illness and added
many new controversial ones, such as “Hypersexual
Disorder” and “Binge Eating.” Many practitioners
dispute the method of clustering symptoms and giving
them names by consensus. Others have accused
the APA for being influenced by pharmaceutical
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companies.
Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学


Leading the charge to dump the DSM and work
toward evidence-based psychiatry is Thomas Insel,
head of the U.S. National Institute of Mental
Health. His blunt comments to the APA have been
cheered by many psychiatrists. But how soon can
psychiatry earn scientific credentials?
“Still, don’t expect the landscape of mental illness to
change any time soon. Insel accepts that it will take
at least a decade to conduct the research
necessary to devise a new approach to diagnosis.
In the meantime, patients’ illnesses will continue to be
diagnosed using the DSM’s symptom-based
categories.”
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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学

Evidence-based psychiatric diagnosis would require
mapping genes, neural abnormalities and other
“biomarkers” to mental illnesses, providing biological
underpinning for conditions like depression,
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. David Kupfer, who
led the DSM-5 revisions, had this to say: “We’ve been
telling patients for several decades that we are
waiting for biomarkers. We’re still waiting.” About
those biomarkers, Kupfer said they “may someday
culminate in
the genetic and neuroscience breakthroughs that will
revolutionise our field. In the meantime, should we
merely hand patients another promissory note that
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something may happen sometime?”
Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学

Other psychiatrists contacted by New Scientist agreed
that the idea of biologically-based diagnosis is ideal,
but had their doubts it will come anytime soon—or is
even possible. “These are incredibly complicated
disorders,” said one. Some worry that a focus on
physical causes (neurons, genes) might overlook
psychological causes. Brain damage, we know, can
cause behavioral problems. So can impacted wisdom
teeth. But those are not mental illnesses. If
psychiatry needs to anchor its science in the psyche
(Gr., soul), though, is that a proper realm for
science? How do you scan a soul with an MRI?
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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学

It appears that psychiatry (long thought to be
superior to psychology because it required a
medical degree), is poised for collapse. It
cannot float on promissory notes
forever. Kupfer said that they’ve been waiting
for biomarkers to undergird their diagnoses for
decades. DSM-5 is a highly controversial
placeholder, but many practitioners with
“physics envy,” who desire scientific empiricism
to validate their claims, are tired of waiting for
the legitimacy that never comes.
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Psychiatry Is Not (Yet) a Science
精神病学（然而）不是科学

The ENV article pointed out that many of the
causes of psychiatry’s crisis have parallels to
the situation with Darwinism. If something as
long-respected as psychiatry can collapse, it
may be a matter of time for the Darwin Party,
guilty of many of the same sins, falls. We’d like
to see the Darwin Party accuse the APA of
being pseudoscientific. Then the APA should
respond by calling the Darwinists mentally
ill. They should fight over this and fall down
together, but perhaps this is just a delusion.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸


The most information-rich medium known
to man has been found in abundance
under the sea, but man didn’t put it there.
In “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea
Floor,” Traci Watson described
for Science Now what deep-sea explorers
have found in the abyssal plains of the
Atlantic, 3 miles below the ocean surface:
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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸

“In the middle of the South Atlantic,
there’s a patch of sea almost devoid of
life. There are no birds, few fish, not even
much plankton. But researchers report
that they’ve found buried treasure under
the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in
the muck of the sea floor, which lies
5000 meters below the waves.”
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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸


The DNA is contained in fossils of foraminifera,
radiolarians and other planktonic creatures that have
settled to the sea floor. Pedro Martinez Arbizu, a
deep-sea biologist of the German Centre for Marine
Biodiversity Research, said, “We have been able to
show that the deep sea is the largest long-time
archive of DNA, and a major window to study past
biodiversity.” It’s like finding a new fossil record.
Some of the 169 forams and 21 radiolarian species
were unknown. Even species without hard shelly
parts yielded DNA. A British scientist said, “These
records are telling you new information that wasn’t
found in the fossil record.”
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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸

Another team found traces of DNA from 2700
species in the shallower bottom of the Black
Sea, including DNA from algae, fungi, and
dinoflagellates. Scientists expected
that DNA could not survive exposure to oxygen,
but apparently newer material cut off the
oxygen from deeper sediments, preserving the
genetic material. Watson said, “more recent
Black Sea sediments weren’t exposed to
oxygen at all.”
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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸
 The Black Sea team claims the
sediments are 9,600 years old; the
Atlantic team claims the DNA they
collected is 32,500 years old. The
article did not explain the dates, but
suggested that they were estimated
from “first appearance” of certain
species according to evolutionary
assumptions.
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Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸

Two observations should jump out at this
announcement. One is that even with evolutionary
assumptions, they are only claiming a 32,500-year
maximum date for what they found. That’s a tiny
fraction of the millions and billions of years they
assume plankton should have been settling onto the
sea floor. If the DNA is protected from oxygen by
what lies above it, why didn’t they find DNA hundreds
of thousands or millions of years old? After all,
evolutionists explain away dinosaur soft tissue by
claiming it can last over 70 million years. More likely,
the DNA is even younger than they think. It could not
survive degradation, under ideal conditions, for more
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than a few thousand years.
Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA
海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸

The other observation is the remarkable difference
between minerals and information. Non-living rocks
and mud are composed of relatively simple mineral
compounds that carry no message. DNA, by contrast,
bears information — the wherewithal to build a
complex organism like a radiolarian or foramina, with
all its molecular motors, digestive, respiratory, and
excretion systems. Some of the shells of these
creatures look like cathedrals or spaceships. What a
thought that information is still present in this dark,
cold, otherwise sterile realm. It’s like finding books
inside a cave, or hard drives on the moon. The best
explanation (from our common experience) for
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information-rich systems is intelligent design.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家



Two mysteries from the moon are forcing revisions to
textbooks. One concerns water in moon minerals. The other
concerns the moon’s magnetic field.
Mare Basalts Surprisingly Magnetic
“New research sets back date of moon’s dynamo 160
million years,” reported PhysOrg based on a paper
in PNAS. A team of geophysicists was surprised to find
evidence from magnetic signals in moon rocks that the moon
must have had a magnetosphere-generating dynamo that
lasted much longer than they thought possible. Current theory
must be inadequate, because “The lifetime of the ancient lunar
core dynamo has implications for its power source and the
mechanism of field generation,” the scientists wrote. They
were driven to postulate unlikely mechanisms to keep the
hypothetical dynamo going:
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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家

“These data extend the known lifetime of the
lunar dynamo by ∼160 My and indicate that
the field was likely continuously active
until well after the final large basinforming impact. This likely excludes
impact-driven changes in rotation rate as
the source of the dynamo at this time in
lunar history. Rather, our results require a
persistent power source like precession
of the lunar mantle or a compositional
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convection dynamo.”
Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家




Space.com’s headline reads, “Mystery of Moon’s Magnetic Field
Deepens.”
Improbabilities that Are All Wet
When a Mars-sized object hit the Earth to form the moon
(according to a popular theory), it should have obliterated all
volatile compounds, like water, requiring Earth’s oceans to form
later from impacts from wet comets or asteroids. That theory has
been impacted itself by studies of water-bearing minerals in moon
rocks, prompting Science Daily to report, “Moon and Earth Have
Common Water Source.” Another Science Daily article suggests
the new theory, “Water on Moon, Earth Came from Same
Primitive Meteorites.” A new analysis of Apollo moon rocks
dispels ideas that comets brought the water. It must have come
from carbonaceous chondrites, the study concludes.
Lisa Grossman at New Scientist believes “Moon water came
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from young wet Earth.”
Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家


“The notion that all Earth’s water was delivered by
comets or asteroids has just taken a hit. Chemical
analysis of lunar rocks suggests that Earth was born
wet, and it held on to its water long enough to
donate some to the moon.”
This is a flagrant reversal of the idea that a moonforming impact left the moon bone
dry. Measurements of water-bearing minerals on the
moon show it’s not just a little water they’re talking
about. “The minerals hold as much as those in
Earth’s upper mantle,” Grossman says. Nature
News portrays the head-scratching this finding causes
for modelers:
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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家

“That still leaves a potential gap in the Moonforming model. Some planetary scientists
had reasoned that the heat generated by the
collision would have boiled away any water
that Earth might have transferred to the
coalescing Moon. The findings “are
screaming that there’s something about the
Moon’s formation that we’re not quite
grasping”, says study co-author Erik Hauri of
the Carnegie Institution for Science in
Washington DC.”
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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家

The findings beg for a new explanation. Meteorites
could not have brought the water unless the moon
were still molten, but the moon would have solidified
too rapidly. All one of the researchers could figure out
was that the water came from the only place they
know had water: the Earth. So how did the Earth
“donate” some water to the moon? This calls for a
delicate scenario: the hypothetical impactor that hit
Earth had to loft just enough material off our primordial
planet to form a large moon without destroying all
Earth’s primordial water. Then, some of that water
lofted into orbit had to migrate to the moon:
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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家
“It no longer looks likely that all the water
in the material that formed the
moon evaporated instantly in the giant
initial impact. Instead, it now seems more
probable that water migrated over a
period of centuries out of the cloud of
debris that coalesced into the moon.”
 Apparently, “likeliness” has evolved in the
modeler’s minds. The new findings forced a
reassessment of what scientists thought was
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“probable.”

Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家



But the explanation begs a new question: where did the Earth
get its water to donate? Current theory does not allow a body
at Earth’s location to garner water from a spinning debris
disk. Adding a little more ad hoc can get the job done:
“[Alberto] Saal [of Brown University] thinks that Earth may
have formed near where the asteroid belt is now, which
is far enough from the sun for water to condense. The
planet would then have migrated inward. It’ll be a tough
theory to prove, because Earth’s geologic activity has been
recycling rocks, and thus erasing the evidence, for billions of
years.”
The new model would claim that the early Earth was not
habitable, but through a series of lucky breaks, migrated into
the habitable zone, where everything worked out just right for
microbes to emerge and become planetary scientists who
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figured it all out.
Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家

These reports should anger anyone who watches
science shows and reads textbooks that make the
formation of the Earth and its large Moon look so
easy. No theory can account for the
observations. Instead, secular moyboys (believers in
“millions of years, billions of years”) concoct fantastical
models to preserve their fantasies from the
evidence. Did you catch the howler in the quote
above? Earth has been “erasing the evidence, for
billions of years.” Quick! What does that imply? This
is a fact-free story – even the part about erasing the
evidence for billions of years.
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Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家

Before, the priests of the planetary evolution cult needed
just a delicate impact from a Mars-size object (itself a
highly improbable event) to form the moon, followed by
some hand-waving and chants, to bring in a series of
unknown wet impactors to form Earth’s oceans. That
was unlikely enough. Now, they need Earth to form out
in the asteroid belt, where water
can conceivably condense, followed by a lucky pitch
from Jupiter or Saturn to careen our dead planet right
into the batter’s box of the habitable zone. That all had
to happen before the Mars-size impactor came in, this
time even more delicately, to loft water into Earth orbit
without losing it, so that it could transfer the water to a
new moon (which happens to be just right to support life
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on Earth).
Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers
月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家


Nobody would believe this series of ad hoc events
unless it were absolutely necessary to preserve
secular materialism and long ages for Darwin. We
won’t even go into the much more highly fantastical
tales needed to get life, multicellularity, consciousness
and intelligence to “emerge” from hot wet muck.
Scientists speak of new data as “constraints” for their
models. That’s why raw data from planetary missions
is so valuable. The more constraints on storytellers,
the better. As of now, they appear to have just one
hand free to wave from the straitjacket the data have
put them in. Maybe the next data will constrain the
remaining hand-waving arm, and gag the mouth, too.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Talking Plants and Secret Networks
说话植物和秘密网络



There was a time when talking plants was
mythology. Now, it’s science.
Hidden Messages in Plain Sight
Plants don’t speak English, obviously. Somehow,
though, they communicate through channels scientists
are only beginning to understand. No less
than Science Magazine, the most respected journal in
America, said this: “Shhh, the Plants are Talking.” In
the “Science Shot” article, reporter Andrew Porterfield
described controlled experiments in Australia that
showed chilis grow better when basil is
nearby. Somehow, the basil coaxes the chili plants
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through a hidden mechanism:
Talking Plants and Secret Networks
说话植物和秘密网络

Because light, touch, and chemical
“smell” were ruled out, the team
proposes that the finding points to a new
type of communication between
plants, possibly involving nanoscale
sound waves, traveling through the dirt to
bring encouraging “words” to the
growing seeds. Understanding this novel
communication could help growers boost
crop yields and increase global food
supplies. How neighborly.
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Talking Plants and Secret Networks
说话植物和秘密网络



Live Science put it this way: “Even in the plant world,
babies fail to thrive without a friendly community
chattering nearby, according to a new study.” We weren’t
kidding about talking plants. Reporter Becky Olson
headlined her article, “Plants Talk: Seedlings Thrive with
Encouraging ‘Words’.”
The Underground Fungal Railroad
More evidence is arising that plants communicate throughout
ecological communities through a network of fungal threads
in the soil. The fungi reward the plants for sharing nutrients
by passing messages along, in a symbiotic
relationship. The BBC News featured more discoveries
about the underground network, as
did PhysOrg. The BBC article claims that work in the UK is
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the first to show plant communication via the fungal railroad.
Talking Plants and Secret Networks
说话植物和秘密网络


The research appears to show that a bean plant under
attack by aphids can send out a warning through the
underground communication channels. Plants getting
the message set up defenses, but plants without the
fungal network do not. One of the researchers was
delighted at this “abject surprise that it was just so
powerful — just such a fantastic signalling
system.”
The BBC called this an “evolutionary role” for the
fungus without explaining how a blind, purposeless
process could discover any role in complex
communications systems.
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Talking Plants and Secret Networks
说话植物和秘密网络

Some day soon we may decipher the
language of plants. Here are some
predictions. Favorite joke: that some
humans think the underground railroad
evolved. Favorite saint: Basil. Weather
report: Chili today and hot
tamale. Favorite pastime: sending
intelligently designed signals. Favorite
cowboy line: Where never is heard a
discouraging word. Favorite hymn: Praise
God from Whom all blessings flow.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes
令人惊讶的动物走极端


Today’s entry features a mammal, a bird and an insect that have
good reasons to show off.
The insect: A little moth has hearing unsurpassed in the animal
kingdom (but we already know, from the film Metamorphosis, that
any lepidopteran undergoing transformation from caterpillar to
flying insect has much to boast about already). Humans with
optimum hearing can hear about 20 kHz. That’s nothing for the
greater wax moth. Science Daily reported research at the
University of Strathclyde that measured sensibility up to 300 kHz
in this little, inconspicuous, gray insect. The lead researcher
remarked, “We are extremely surprised to find that the moth
is capable of hearing sound frequencies at this level and
we hope to use the findings to better understand air-coupled
ultrasound.” The moth’s hearing system appears overdesigned
for detecting bat echolocation calls, so why would this extreme
hearing evolve? Ultrasound tends to drop in intensity through air
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faster than lower frequencies do.
Surprising Animals Go to Extremes
令人惊讶的动物走极端

The mammal: Speaking of bats, one flower-feeding bat
species has a dynamic tongue that works like a nectar
trap. Live Science and National Geographic have electron
micrographs of the tongue tip from Pallas’s long-tongued
bat. Researchers at Brown University showed that blood in
the tongue instantly fills dozens of papillae, or protrosions, in
the tongue, allowing the bat to lap up much more nectar than
a flat tongue could. This all happens in less than the blink of
an eye – 0.04 second. A slow-motion video on National
Geographic reveals action too fast for the eye: the papillae
straighten and the tongue tip grows by 50% when the tongue
hits the nectar. The bat benefits from this mechanism
because it has to expend a lot of energy hovering near the
flower, so the more nectar retrieved from each sip, the
better. The full paper can be found on PNAS.
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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes
令人惊讶的动物走极端

The bird: Those emperor penguins that starred in
the documentary March of the Penguins looked
mighty cold out there in the Antarctic
wind. Surprisingly, their outside feathers are even
colder! New Scientist told how their freezing
exteriors prevent heat from leaking out of their
bodies. Now for a bird bonus about the flying
variety: PhysOrg told about how scientists are
using tiny geolocators on migrating birds like the
Manx shearwater to understand how they adapt
their behaviors to changing environmental
conditions.
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Surprising Animals Go to Extremes
令人惊讶的动物走极端

The movie: Illustra Media’s new
documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds is
being released on DVD today. It has another
fascinating tongue story to tell, and a great
migration story, too — just two glimpses into a
film packed wonderful scientific discoveries
about avian flight, told beautifully in this new
documentary with great cinematography and
outstanding animation. You can order a copy
right now by clicking the link. Watch the trailer
full-screen here. Join the Illustra Facebook
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page for news and updates.
Surprising Animals Go to Extremes
令人惊讶的动物走极端


Learning details of wonders in the animal world
provides immunity against Darwinian
indoctrination. That’s why we love sharing the latest
discoveries here.
We highly recommend the new Illustra film Flight: The
Genius of Birds. You can order the DVD today, but if
you have a good home theater, you might want to wait
till June 11 to get the Blu-ray version with its
outstanding detail and sound. Or, you can get
the DVD now to watch and give away, ordering the
Blu-ray version for your library to go with your
HD copy of Metamorphosis: the Beauty and Design of
Butterflies —a terrific pair you’ll want to watch again
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and again.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木



Researchers at Vanderbilt University are tied up in knots
trying to locate Darwin’s branching tree in contradictory
data.
A press release from Vanderbilt University summarizes a
paper in Nature this week:
“These days, phylogeneticists – experts who painstakingly
map the complex branches of the tree of life – suffer from
an embarrassment of riches. The genomics
revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that
they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary
history that connects all living beings. But the
unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious
problem: The trees produced by a number of wellsupported studies have come to contradictory
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conclusions.”
Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木


Salichos and Rokas, in their Nature paper, had to
resort to postulating rapid periods of diversification
and long periods of stasis to keep Darwin’s vision
intact against the onslaught of data. The press
release continues,
“In a study published online May 8 by the
journal Nature, Rokas and graduate student
Leonidas Salichos analyze the reasons for these
differences and propose a suite of novel
techniques that can resolve the
contradictions and provide greater accuracy
in deciphering the deep branches of life’s
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tree.…
Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木

“The study by Salichos and Rokas comes at a critical
time when scientists are grappling with how best to
detect the signature of evolutionary history from a
deluge of genetic data. These authors
provide intriguing insights into our standard
analytical toolbox, and suggest it may be time to
abandon some of our most trusted tools when it
comes to the analysis of big data sets. This significant
work will certainly challenge the community of
evolutionary biologists to rethink how best to
reconstruct phylogeny,” said Michael F. Whiting,
program director of systematics and biodiversity
science at the National Science Foundation, which
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funded the study.”
Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木


Problem is, the data looks more like a bush than a
tree. The record is punctuated by rapid, sudden
appearances of organisms. The authors
acknowledged the problem of the Cambrian explosion:
“In broad terms, Rokas and Salichos found that
genetic data is less reliable during periods of rapid
radiation, when new species were formed rapidly. A
case in point is the Cambrian explosion, the
sudden appearance about 540 million years ago of
a remarkable diversity of animal species, without
apparent predecessors. Before about 580 million
years ago, most organisms were very simple,
consisting of single cells occasionally organized
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into colonies.
Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木


“A lot of the debate on the differences in the trees has
been between studies concerning the ‘bushy’
branches that took place in these ‘radiations’,”
Rokas said.”
Calling this a “paradox,” the researchers found that even
within yeast species a thousand genes did not match up
to phylogenetic trees generated by standard software
methods. The same conflicts were found in larger data
sets involving vertebrates and metazoans. In response,
they claimed that genetic dating becomes as unreliable
as radiometric dating the farther back in time one
searches, creating “considerable challenges to
existing algorithms to resolve radiations” congruent
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with Darwin’s presumed ancestral tree.
Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木


One whole subsection in the paper is titled, “All gene
trees differ from species phylogeny.” Another is titled,
“Standard practices do not reduce incongruence.” A
third, “Standard practices can mislead.” One of their
major findings was “extensive conflict in certain
internodes.”
The authors not only advised throwing out some standard
practices of tree-building, but (amazingly) proposed
evolutionists throw out the “uninformative” conflicting data
and only use data that seems to support the Darwinian
tree: “the subset of genes with strong phylogenetic
signal is more informative than the full set of genes,
suggesting that phylogenomic analyses using conditional
combination approaches, rather than approaches
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based on total evidence, may be more powerful.”
Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木
 In conclusion, they had no solid
answers for the conflicts. They called
on other evolutionists to “to develop
novel phylogenomic approaches and
markers to more accurately decipher
the most challenging ancient
branches of life’s genealogy from
the DNA record.”
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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木


This is scandalous! It’s also old news. Evolutionists have
been concocting Darwin trees in spite of the evidence ever
since Darwin acknowledged the Cambrian explosion as a
real problem that lodged a valid objection to his theory (get
the new book Darwin’s Doubt for details, and the
film Darwin’s Dilemma).
Darwinism is a classic case of Finagle’s Rule #3, “Draw
your curves, then plot your data.” Guru Charlie drew his
little tree sketch by faith, then sent his disciples out on a
hopeless quest to find evidence to support it. Now, here it
is May 15, 2013, and these guys are still telling us the tree
vision is in conflict with the data! They have to finagle their
methods (“novel approaches”) to try to force a match with
the uncooperative genes.
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Darwin’s Tree of Life is a Tangled Bramble Bush
达尔文的生命之树是纠结的灌木

And here, we saw they are even willing to
lie, tossing out “uninformative” data sets
and only using data that appear to support
their foreordained conclusion. Were you
told this in biology class? Did your
textbook mention this? No; but you hear it
here on CEH all the time, because we
bring out into the open the dirty deals
evolutionists whisper to themselves in the
journals.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手


When a fossil violates Darwinist expectations, it
never falsifies the theory. It just creates a new
round of imaginative gesticulations.
Bad, monster, bad: National Geographic wrote
a headline, “New Sea Monster Found,
Rewrites Evolution?” The question mark
implies, “Of course not,” even though the partial
ichthyosaur fossil found in Kurdistan is “Out of
time,” according to Live Science. Actually, it
wasn’t lacking time. It had plenty of time to
create problems for Darwinists:
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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手


“Researchers had previously believed that
ichthyosaurs declined throughout the
Jurassic Period, which lasted from 199 million to 145
million years ago, with the only survivors rapidly
evolving to keep ahead of repeated extinction events.
The new fossil, however, dates from the
Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to
66 million years ago. It looks remarkably like its
Jurassic brethren, revealing a surprising
evolutionary statis [sic, stasis].
The fossil “represents an animal that seems ‘out of
time’ for its age,” study researcher Valentin Fischer
of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a
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statement.”
Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

Now, the gesticulation: one evolutionist called it
a “ghost lineage” (i.e., “changing very little
over millions of years”). Another called it a
“living fossil of its time.” One “never even
imagined” it could survive so long. One said “it
shouldn’t be there, but it is.” The new story
will apparently read: “The resulting ichthyosaur
family tree suggests these marine reptiles
stayed diverse into the Cretaceous, only to go
mysteriously extinct 95 million years
ago.” National Geographic is holding out hope
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that a single specimen won’t “rewrite evolution”.
Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手


Go, ginkgo: Speaking of stasis, the unusual tree Ginkgo
biloba is a classic “living fossil.” Because it is the now the
“most abundant cityscape tree in the world,” one might be
growing in a park near you. Evolutionists, though,
consider it an exception to their rule, “evolve or
perish.” J. C. McElwain wrote in Science Magazine about
a new book about the ginkgo tree by Peter Crane:
“Ginkgo is among Earth’s oldest-living organisms,
reaching ages of around 1500 years. It is a “living
fossil,” belonging to a family line extending back over
200 million years. It is a symbol of morphological
stasis yet incredible persistence, having survived two
of the five great mass extinction events in Earth
history.”
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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

Now, the gesticulation: maybe it’s because it
invented lignotubers, “among ginkgo’s
adaptations that have ensured its persistence
and resilience through hundreds of millions of
years of global change.” Funny no other plant
borrowed that idea. McElwain relishes in some
tidbits of “subtle” evolutionary change, even though
the tree is a “poster child for morphological
stasis”. He puts a positive spin on how ginkgo
fossils can “inform us about the tempo and
nature of plant macroevolution.” Then he
relishes how Crane makes the most
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of reverse evolution:
Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

“He holds that Darwinian microevolutionary
processes and contingency can account for
most of the patterns observed in the plant
fossil record, and he downplays (but does
not entirely discount) the roles of
evolutionary innovations and
environmentally driven macroevolutionary
processes. Crane also draws a nice parallel
between the trajectories of horse and ginkgo
evolution—both belonged to once highly
diverse families and both were “winnowed”
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to a single extant species.”
Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

The human network: Categories of early
humans are falling like dominoes, now that
Svante Pääbo’s team has found more
evidence of interbreeding between
Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern
humans (see 9/01/12). Elizabeth Pennisi’s
report in Science Magazine about a wellattended talk he gave in Germany last week
seems devastating to evolutionary attempts
to parse out human ancestors to various
species and make a tree out of them:
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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手


“With all the interbreeding, “it’s more a network than a tree,”
points out Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist from the Institute of
Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. Pääbo hesitates to call
Denisovans a distinct species, and the picture is getting more
complicated with each new genome.
Pääbo’s team also deciphered additional Denisovan DNA, both
nuclear and mitochondrial, from two teeth found in different layers in
Denisova Cave. The nuclear DNA confirmed that both teeth are
Denisovan. But, surprisingly, one tooth showed more than 80
mitochondrial DNA differences from both the other tooth and the
pinkie bone. These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at
different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans
from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals
from throughout their range, says Susanna Sawyer from Pääbo’s
lab. Such diversity implies that the Denisovans were a relatively
large population “that at some point may have outnumbered
Neandertals,” Pääbo said.”
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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

Now, the gesticulating: Pennisi reported
that the evolutionists feel the new data will
help clarify “genetic changes that
underlie our own evolution.” They might
be able to line up genes from these
“archaic people” and find out which are
unique to our species, compared to genes
of apes and monkeys. See also
the 9/05/11 and 8/12/11 entries.
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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

The observations show solid horizontal lines
between interbreeding kinds, but dashed
vertical lines where the evolution is
supposed to have happened. Where is the
tree? It’s all a tangled bramble bush. When
the fossils don’t tell the Darwin tale, they
have to invent terms like “morphological
stasis” and wave their hands to keep you
from seeing what the evidence
implies. Ignore the waving hands. If they
can’t get the tree right, what makes you think
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they got the dates right?
Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

Pääbo has basically undermined the Neanderthal
myth. Evolutionists give arbitrary names to populations
of Homo sapiens, giving them new species designations
like Homo neanderthalensis. Since it fits Darwin’s
expectations, it quickly becomes textbook
orthodoxy. Artists go to work to make the new species
look as different as possible from us. But what have we
just heard? “These Denisovans, who lived in the same
cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as
two living humans from different continents and more
diverse than Neandertals from throughout their
range.” It’s all phony baloney categorizing among true
humans, whose ability to interbreed proves they are one
species.
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Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands
混乱化石使达尔文挥手

At first, Pääbo and other evolutionists tried that
with the bones from Denisova cave, but now is
reluctant to call those cave dwellers a distinct
species. How could he? The DNA is all
scrambled, showing they were all members of a
single species: human beings. The people in
that cave were smart. They were networking
way back when they lived, just like we do
today. None of them were stupid enough to try
mating with apes, or to think that’s where they
came from. If you respect evidence, help toss
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the Darwin Party out of power.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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Human Cloning Is Back
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If you thought work on human cloning and
embryonic stem cell research went out of style
with the discovery of induced pluripotent stem
cells, watch out. The pro-cloning people, who
never lost their lust for toying with human
embryos, are back.
Writing for Science Magazine, Gretchen Vogel
titled an article, “Human Stem Cells From
Cloning, Finally.” She seems delighted that
researchers may be able to treat humans like
farm animals:
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“This time it looks like it’s for real: Researchers have made
personalized human embryonic stem (ES) cells with a method
similar to how Dolly the sheep was cloned—though with an
added jolt of caffeine.
“The success, which produced stem cells
carrying DNA belonging to a baby with an inherited
disorder, comes 9 years after South Korean researchers
claimed in a famously faked paper that they had achieved a
similar feat. After their story unraveled, a handful of
researchers continued trying, but human eggs, or oocytes,
responded poorly to the techniques that have worked in
sheep, mice, cows, pigs, and other animals.
“Now, thanks to years of work in monkey cells, a group led by
Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research
Center in Beaverton reports a recipe that works for human
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cells.”
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Of course, there are those people troubled by
the ethics of such research:
“While welcomed by many researchers, who
envision creating personalized stem cells for
therapies or research, the achievement is also
likely to stir up old ethical debates about
human SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer],
including whether it should be regulated to
prevent attempts at reproductive human
cloning. In the short term, that shouldn’t be a
worry, Mitalipov says.”
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Who’s worried? After all, the scientists don’t
really want to clone human beings for a Star
Wars army — at least not in the short
term. They just want to get their hands on
those precious embryonic stem cells (ES), and
this “success” opens the door for them. Even
so, “the team had surprisingly good success
generating embryos,” Vogel said.
But this begs the question: who needs ES cells,
when induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are
just as good without the ethical problems?
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“This high efficiency could mean that SCNT is not as
impractical for creating personalized human stem cells
as many observers had expected. But it faces stiff
competition from the current method of making
genetically matched pluripotent cells, called induced
pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. By adding extra copies of
several genes to skin or other cells, scientists can
reprogram them to behave like ES cells. That technique
is much easier than SCNT, and it doesn’t require a
supply of human oocytes. (The oocytes used in
Mitalipov’s experiments were donated by healthy
volunteers for research purposes; donors were paid
$5000 for their time and trouble, the local rate paid to
egg donors for fertility treatments.)
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“Some researchers have found evidence,
however, that there may be subtle but
potentially significant differences between
the genes expressed in iPS cells and ES cells
derived from embryos. The chance to
compare SCNT-derived human ES cells with
iPS counterparts is one of the most important
aspects of the new advance, Daley says.
“There may be advantages to SCNT-ES cells,
but this must be rigorously proven,” he says. In
practice, he says, making iPS cells “remains
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considerably easier.”
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So just on the supposition that there might
be a difference, some researchers are
willing to destroy human embryos to find
out. Does that sound ethical? She
quoted a researcher who thinks both
methods are “useful” — the language of
pragmatism, not ethics. Vogel had no
further ethical qualms.
To the editors at New Scientist, it’s “back
to the future” all over again.
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“A few years ago, therapeutic cloning
looked like the future of medicine. It promised
to realise the dream of repairing damaged
tissues and organs using a patient’s own
cells. But it also had a dark side: producing
its supply of stem cells required the creation
of human embryos which were later
destroyed.”
What did Nature say about this? David
Cyranoski wrote in Nature this week wearing
ethics on his sleeve from the first paragraph:
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“It was hailed some 15 years ago as the great
hope for a biomedical revolution: the use
of cloning techniques to create perfectly matched
tissues that would someday cure ailments ranging
from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. Since then,
the approach has been enveloped in ethical
debate, tainted by fraud and, in recent
years, overshadowed by a competing
technology. Most groups gave up long ago on
the finicky core method — production of patientspecific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from
cloning. A quieter debate followed: do we still
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need ‘therapeutic’ cloning?”
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Mitalipov’s experiment “is sure to rekindle that
debate,” Cyranoski continued. He described how
Mitalipov used a “university advertising campaign” to
attract women to donate eggs for his lab at the Health
and Science University in Beaverton, Oregon. (He first
practiced on skin cells obtained from fetuses.) His
method sounds a little Frankensteinish, using electric
jolts and caffeine to coax the stubborn skin cells to form
stable stem cell lines. It took longer to get human cells
to work than monkey cells, he said, because much of the
time was spent “navigating US regulations on embryo
research.”
Mitalipov is apparently most concerned about making his
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process more efficient, why? to attract funding:
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Such improvements might be necessary to
convince people that SCNT research is still
worthwhile. Egg donors for the experiment
received US$3,000–7,000 in compensation. This
is expensive and, according to some
bioethicists, risks creating an organ trade that
preys on the poor. Because the
technique requires the destruction of embryos,
funds from the US National Institutes of
Health (NIH) cannot be used to make or study
SCNT-derived cell lines, hampering further clinical
research. (Mitalipov maintains a separate
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laboratory for NIH-funded research.)
Human Cloning Is Back
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Another “sticking point” is public fear of human
cloning. Stem-cell opponents might “capitalize on”
such fears, the article says. Mitalipov is trying to
convince opponents that creation of a human
clone, like Dolly the sheep, is not possible (at least,
at this time).
But other stem-cell researchers are wondering why
Mitalipov is wasting his time. “Honestly, the most
surprising thing [about this paper] is that
somebody is still doing human [SCNT] in the
era of iPS cells,” said a specialist in regenerative
medicine. Watchers will be waiting to see whether
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iPS and ES cells really differ in significant ways.
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New Scientist thinks the ethical battles will be
muted during the Obama era:
“Will we now see a revival of the stem cell
culture wars in the US? Probably, but they
should be less polarised this time round.
The Bush-era laws were relaxed by President
Obama in 2009 to no great hullabaloo. The fact
that the breakthrough work was done in Oregon
may also help: home-grown success has a way
of changing hearts and minds. What is clear is
that we have entered a new phase in the longrunning stem cell soap opera. Expect drama
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aplenty.”
Human Cloning Is Back
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But if this is a “soap opera,” it’s one where
innocent human lives are at stake — and not
only the lives of fertilized human embryos, but
potential adult clones. Live Science asked if this
might lead to human cloning someday. What
worried reporter Rachael Rattner more, the
pragmatics, or the principle of the thing?
“Although it would be unethical, experts say it
is likely biologically possible to clone a human
being. But even putting ethics aside, the sheer
amount of resources needed to do it is
a significant barrier.”
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Human Cloning Is Back
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Rattner concentrated on practical problems
with human cloning. “It’s like sending your
baby up in a rocket knowing there’s a 50–50
chance it’s going to blow up,” she quoted one
researcher quipping. “It’s grossly
unethical.” Practical problems, though, can
be remedied with enough research. If Rattner
is willing to put ethics aside rhetorically, the
day could come when unscrupulous,
pragmatic researchers with government
funding will put it aside for real.
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Human Cloning Is Back
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This story is very disturbing on the heels of the Kermit
Gosnell trial. Remember that abortion was sold in the 1970s
in terms of concern for poor women who needed access to
“reproductive health” needs. The callous disregard for
human life that resulted from that slippery slope has shocked
the nation with revelations about Gosnell’s and other abortion
mills described as “houses of horror” by investigators, who
found abortion doctors twisting the heads off babies born
alive, leaving them struggling for 20 minutes before severing
their spinal cords with scissors, and telling mothers that the
dead baby in the womb after chemical abortion is just “meat
in a crockpot.” Horrified nurses would find babies swimming
in toilets and packed in bloody bags in refrigerators. Do you
think for a minute that “sanctity of human life” will fare any
better among those who want free rein with human embryos?
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Human Cloning Is Back
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Speaking of abortion, Tanya Lewis wrote
an interesting article for Live
Science about ultrasound and how it has
changed attitudes about abortion. While
ultrasound can backfire in cultures that
want to use it for sex selection (aborting
many female babies), for the most part it
has given expectant mothers a view the
abortionists never told them about: their
baby is a living human being.
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“Ultrasound has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception by
pregnant women. In addition to revealing the baby’s
health, the images themselves provide a keepsake.
“Overwhelmingly, pregnant women expect to be
scanned, and are moved and excited by seeing the
fetus,” Nicolson said — especially if the baby moves. In
fact, Nicolson said, some women report not feeling
pregnant until they’ve seen the ultrasound image.
“Seeing a developing fetus has a humanizing effect,
too. Donald, the physician who helped develop the
technology, was a devout High Anglican, and knew
the images carried moral significance for women
contemplating having an abortion.”
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Human Cloning Is Back
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Lewis cited anecdotal evidence that
expectant mothers who see their baby
with ultrasound are less likely to terminate
their pregnancy. Each moving baby that
the mother rejoices to see on the
ultrasound scanner was a single cell just a
few months earlier. The DNA for a full
human is there in both cases; the
difference between a moving baby in the
womb and a fertilized cell is only a matter
of time.
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Gloria Deo
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Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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If lying evolved as a fitness strategy, can we
believe anything an evolutionist says?
In his blog entry “The Evolution of Lying” on The
Conversation, Rob Brooks, a professor of
Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Evolution
& Ecology Research Centre at University of New
South Wales, gave half-hearted credit to a new
theory on deception as a by-product of the
evolution of cooperation. The open-access paper
by two Irish evolutionists, Luke McNally and
Andrew L. Jackson, was published by the Royal
Society this week. It posits lying as an
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evolutionary strategy:
Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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“Our results suggest that the evolution
of conditional strategies may, in
addition to promoting cooperation, select
for astute cheating and associated
psychological abilities. Ultimately, our
ability to convincingly lie to each other
may have evolved as a direct result of
our cooperative nature.”
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Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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Brooks agrees that lying evolved, but feels the model of
McNally and Jackson is too simplistic. “I would like to see if
it can help us understand the fine-scale tensions between
cooperation and dishonesty in human affairs,” he
said. “There is a lot more to lying than simply
misrepresenting the world.” The liar can deceive himself
as well, for instance, in order to make the lie more believable.
From there, Brooks considered Sam Harris’s short ebook Lying, in which Harris advocates we all try to do better
at overcoming our evolutionary tendencies, “arguing we can
both simplify our own lives and build better societies by
telling the truth in situations when we might be tempted to
lie.” Here’s how Brooks concludes all this discussion about
lies and truth (bold added, italics in original):
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“Harris gets bottom-up processes and the conflict between
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individual benefits and group functioning. His book is worth a
read for his impassioned argument that each of us, as
individuals, would benefit from resisting the urge to lie.
“I’m not convinced. What would help right now is some
theoretic and empirical evidence that showed the conditions
under which Harris’ prescriptions might work. And that’s the
beauty of papers like today’s one from McNally and Jackson.
“Irrespective, a better understanding of how lying evolves,
no matter how simple, might do enormous social good.
“For one thing it might help constrain the worst dishonesties
in politics, public relations and propaganda.”
The question none of them are considering is, if lying evolved,
and if self-deception is possible, and if deception can be very
convincing, how are the readers to know who is telling the 196
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Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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Imagine a liar so skilled, he convinces his
listeners that he is 100% against the worst
dishonesties in politics, public relations
and propaganda. He tells you he wants to
achieve enormous social good to provide
a better understanding of how lying
evolves. Now, add to it that he is selfdeceived. Doesn’t his credibility
implode? How could one possibly believe
a word he says?
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Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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Brooks has the Yoda complex. So do
McNally and Jackson. They believe they
can look down on the rest of humanity from
some exalted plane free of the evolutionary
forces that afflict the rest of humanity. No;
they need to climb down and join the world
their imaginations have created. In the
evolutionary world, there is no essential
difference between cooperation and
deception. It’s only a matter of which side
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is in the majority at the moment.
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To see this, consider a majority of humans
in a population that are self-deceived and
believe that by giving magic Kool-Aid to
the defectors, laced with cyanide, they will
help them become cooperators. The few
defectors in that situation who try to stop
them would be perceived by the majority
as the real liars and non-cooperators. By
what standard would anyone in this
Darwinian world know the difference
between truth and lies?
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Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary
world collapses into power struggles. The appeals by
Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations
to lie” are meaningless. How can anyone overcome
what evolution has built into them? How can either of
them know what is true?
Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved
as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to
distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially
confess to lying themselves. Their readers are
therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and
dismissing everything they say, including the notion
that lying evolved.
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Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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An even stupider notion came out of the Association for
Psychological Science. This is the evolutionary story that
“political motivations may have evolutionary links to
physical strength” (see also Science Daily with its photo of a
guy flexing his bicep). A group of Darwine-drunk psychologists
are trying to convince the world that “Men’s upper-body
strength predicts their political opinions on economic
redistribution.” According to them, “an evolutionary
perspective may help to illuminate political motivations, at
least those of men.” Strong men oppose redistribution of
wealth, namby-pamby men and women support it, they
claim. It’s not clear if they intended to impugn Obama’s
masculinity this way, and those of all his staff, but it doesn’t
really matter how many biceps they measured in their survey of
political opinions. (Exercise: list exceptions to their “rule” from
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world history.)
Evolutionists Confess to Lying
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You know their whole premise is false from their comment,
“This is among the first studies to show that political views
may be rational in another sense, in that they’re
designed by natural selection to function in the conditions
recurrent over human evolutionary history.” OK, their point
is? If physical strength is a measure of fitness “designed” by
natural selection, then anti-redistributionism is a measure of
fitness, too. Get the wimps out of the way! They’re impeding
evolutionary progress. Isn’t “self-interest” the highest good in
Darwinism? We won’t belabor the misconception of
conservatism they presented, because they already defeated
their credibility by calling natural selection
“rational.” Readers are justified in dismissing everything
these quacks say, too, if they had any inclination left to trust
the word of “evolutionary psychologists” about anything. 202
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Gloria Deo
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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷
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Cooperation exists in nature. Does that
mean it evolved? Only if evolution is the
sole mechanism in your toolkit.
According to a Florida State press
release, a professor found that couples
show more “prosocial” (i.e., constructive)
behavior when one commits to pray for
the other. Frank D. Fincham, director of
the Florida State University Family
Institute, had this to say:
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“My previous research had shown that
those who prayed for their partner
reported more prosocial behavior toward
their partner, but self-reports are subject
to potential biased reporting,” Fincham
said. “This set of studies is the very first
to use objective indicators to show
that prayer changed actual behavior,
and that this behavior was apparent to
the other partner, the subject of the
prayer.””
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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷
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All kinds of good things turned up for those who
prayed: forgiveness, cooperation, and positive
feelings. While the benefits appeared substantial,
some warning flags should turn up for applying
some “scientific method” to a study like this. For
one, participants were asked if they were
comfortable with praying before the study
began. For another, there was no designation of
the object of the prayers. And finally, Dr. Fincham
only measured the behavior of the praying partner,
not whether there was any real answer to the
prayer. Can science study such things?
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Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
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“Until recently, social scientists have stayed away
from studying religion, spirituality and especially
prayer, Fincham said, despite the fact that some 5
billion people, or about 75 percent of the world’s
population, profess some religious faith.”
But those faiths include everything from Christianity to
Buddhism to Islam, whose objects of prayer and
patterns of prayer are very different and often
contradictory. While a Jew or Christian might “pray for
the peace of Jerusalem,” for instance, some Muslims
might pray for its destruction. Some pray earnestly
with their minds; others empty their minds and repeat
mechanical prayers. Can the scientific method study
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sincerity?
Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷
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Prisoner’s Dilemma – or Darwin’s
Some evolutionists rush in where angels fear to
tread. It’s become common these days to study the
“evolution of cooperation” in everything from bacteria
to humans. The thinking is that humans are mere
animals that, like yeast or bacteria, exhibit certain
behaviors by natural selection. For example, one team
found “survival of the fastest” among
microbes. Publishing in Current Biology, they used a
favorite situation in evolutionary game theory called
“Prisoner’s Dilemma” (see video demonstration
on The Conversation) to discern how microbes either
cooperate or defect as a population grows.
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“We conclude that colony growth alone can promote
cooperation and prevent defection in microbes,” they
said, extrapolating the behavior of microbes without
minds to humans with them: “Our results extend to
other species with spatially restricted dispersal
undergoing range expansion, including pathogens,
invasive species, and humans.” It shouldn’t be
surprising to find humans in a list with pathogens and
invasive species. After all, some advocates of climate
control see humans as a kind of pathogen on the
planet. But it seems silly to link cooperative, prosocial
behavior merely to colony growth. Depending on how
it’s defined, cooperation was arguably more common in
the frontier than in New York City.
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The Evolution of Capitalism by Natural Selection
Another case of applied evolutionary game theory was
published in PNAS (open access), “Coevolution of
farming and private property during the early
Holocene.” Even though the authors, Bowles and Choi,
deal with modern humans coming out of the hunting and
gathering stage into agriculture, they speak of private
property rights as a principle that “emerges” in the
population under environmental pressures. They could
just as well be speaking of bird nesting sites or bacteria
in a Petri dish. Nowhere does their evolutionary model
insert rational design into the equation as something
human beings employed. The paper is listed in the
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category of “evolutionary game theory.”
Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
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To see how seamlessly evolutionists move from
bacteria to humans, consider a paper in Nature about
bacterial microfilms. In the same issue of Nature, Ute
Römling reviewed the paper as a demonstration of
“Bacterial communities as capitalist
economies.” Did we really need an Adam Smith to
define the rational principles of capitalism? It would
seem that capitalism or communism are simply
emergent properties, given the right environment. If
so, what are rational people to think of the talking
heads in the news, the historians, the professors,
making such a big deal over politics? In Darwin’s
world, biological entities simply self-organize
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according to natural selection.
Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
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These papers are illustrations of the radical
scientism C. S. Lewis warned about, where the
rampant application of evolutionary thinking to
the human being would undermine all rationality
and aesthetics (read The Magician’s Twin for
documentation and elaboration). You know the
evolutionists are wrong, though, when you
watch them exempt themselves from the power
of evolution over them. Tell your prof that he’s
only teaching what he’s teaching because his
evolutionary past makes him do it, and he will
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quickly get angry.
Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
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Call his anger an emergent property of selection
pressure, and he will get angrier still. No evolutionist
can live with the implications of their own
assumptions. It is only by promoting themselves into the
Yoda plane, where rationality matters, that they can
speak their mind. But the moment they do that, the
moment they think of their pronouncements as anything
beyond glorified monkey screeches or movements of
bacteria in a dish, they are committing a technical
foul. That’s grounds for ousting them from their own
evolutionary game, which vanishes in mist behind
them. Have they never considered that apparent
cooperation in bacteria, yeast and animals are designed
properties instilled into them for a purpose? If not, why
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don’t they study the cooperation of rocks?
Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
亲社会性和合作：进化与祈祷
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Regarding prayer, it goes without saying that God
cannot be put in a test tube. Any attempt to
“scientifically” test the efficacy of prayer runs afoul of
the sovereignty of God, who often delights in
confounding the wisdom of the wise (1 Cor 1:18–29),
and catching them in their own craftiness (Job 5:12–
13, 2 Sam 22:26–27). The God of Scripture, however,
does invite testing by man on occasion. In Malachi 3,
after admonishing the Israelites for their sin of
withholding prescribed Jewish tithes and offerings, the
Lord offered them a test of His goodness: “put me to
the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the
windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a
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blessing until there is no more need.”
Prosociality and Cooperation: Evolution vs. Prayer
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Psalm 34:8 says, “O taste and see that the Lord is
good! Blessed is the soul that takes refuge in Him.” The
Lord submitted to a test by fire, proposed by Elijah, against
the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18). And Isaiah
pronounced to all the world that one can test the salvation of
God: “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him
while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the
unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that
he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will
abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:6–7). As for why God is not a
proper subject of scientific inquiry, He continues: “For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my
ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my
thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).
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Gloria Deo
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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论
It doesn’t take much to stimulate an
evolutionist’s imagination. A tiny middle ear
bone will do.
 The press all jumped on a report that some
early fossil apes had “human-like” middle ear
bones. The paper, published in PNAS,
alleges that the malleus (hammer)
of Paranthropus and Australopithecus
africanus have human-like proportions,
whereas the incus (anvil) and stapes (stirrup)
retain
ape-like
proportions.
Here’s
how
the
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press took this:

From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论

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
Nature News: “Hearing changes could be
ancient in the human line.”
Science Now: “Earliest Ear Bones Sound Off on
Human Hearing.”
New Scientist: “Early hominins couldn’t have
heard modern speech.”
Science Daily: “Prehistoric Ear Bones Could
Lead to Evolutionary Answers.”
Science Daily again: “Oldest Fossil Hominin
Ear Bones Ever Recovered: Discovery Could
Yield Important Clues On Human Origins.” 218
5/3/2017
From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论

Few reporters seem to be asking follow-up
questions of less dramatic import, such as: What
is the natural range of variation in the malleus
among apes, and what is the natural range of
variation for humans? Has there been any
reworking of these tiny delicate bones since they
were deposited? Science Now did state, “The
team is not entirely sure what this precocious
appearance of a human-like malleus
means.” If so, it seems premature to think that
this little bone can reveal anything significant
about hearing in extinct apes, much less about
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human origins.
From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论

The little bone actually creates a problem for evolutionary
theory. Science Daily put it, “Since both the early hominin
species share this human-like malleus, the anatomical
changes in this bone must have occurred very early in
our evolutionary history.” Nature News quoted one
evolutionary morphologist, Callum Ross (U of Chicago),
who was “underwhelmed” by the announcement, stating
that the outer ear has more influence on hearing than the
ossicle bones. He also discounts the importance of
minute hearing changes in alleged human ancestors
compared to bipedalism, feeding, and brain
size. (Speaking of brain size, another paper in PNAS
asserts the surprising claim that “Human frontal lobes are
not relatively large” – contradicting over a century of
5/3/2017
assumptions about human uniqueness in that regard.) 220
From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论

The authors of the original paper are not
even sure if their work has any
significance to human evolution. Nature
News ended, “But Quam is confident that
his team will soon demonstrate
the importance of changes in the
ossicles.” Thus, another promissory note
was issued in lieu of conclusory evidence.
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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论

The operative word in most of these articles is
“could.” The discovery “could” yield important
clues on human evolution; the bones “could” lead
to evolutionary answers; hearing changes “could”
be ancient in the human line. Whenever you see
that word in evolutionary claims, or its siblings
“may” or “might,” you have every right to respond,
“But then again, it might not lead to evolutionary
answers; it may having nothing to do with human
evolution; it could be irrelevant to the human
line.” After all, they have demonstrated nothing
scientifically. They are only dealing in possibilities.
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From Tiny Bones to Whopper Conclusions
从微小的骨头弥天大谎结论

That’s a theme we will have to explore in future
posts: the prevalence of “possibility thinking” in
evolutionary circles. Think of the possibilities! This
little malleus bone could have opened up hearing for
mid-range frequencies! That could have spurred the
development of language! That could have brought
the apes down out of the trees and motivated our
ancestors to walk upright! For shame. That’s the
very kind of faith they disparage in their
critics. When an evolutionist pulls his faith on you
like that, tell him to go back into the lab and keep his
mouth shut until he has something observable,
testable, and repeatable to talk about.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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224
Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞
New impacts observed on the moon and Mars allow space
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scientists to learn about crater formation in near real
time. What conclusions can be drawn?
Moon
Flash shot: On March 17, a flash was reported on the
moon by NASA cameras (see video clip
on Space.com). The object was the size of a small
boulder going 56,000 miles per hour. The crater is
estimated to be 65 feet wide. It was the brightest of 300
such impacts seen, by a factor of ten,
since NASA monitoring lunar impacts in 2005. The video
clip states, “Lunar meteor showers have turned out to
be more common than anyone expected.” About 55%
come from known meteor swarms; the others are random
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stragglers.
Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞
 The Earth’s atmosphere protects us
from many such objects, but the
fireball over Russia last Feb. 15
(Space.com), made by an object
estimated to be 50 feet across (50
times larger than the lunar impactor),
made big news as the biggest
meteoroid to hit Earth in more than a
century.
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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

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Mars
Orbiting spacecraft like the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) are allowing
planetary scientists to gather “ground truth”
data about meteoroid impact rates on another
planet. A press release from the University of
Arizona discussed the 250 fresh craters
detected by the high-resolution camera
on MRO, based on before-and-after
images. Even though this implies hundreds of
hits per year, the rate is lower than expected:
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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

“Taking before and after pictures of
Martian terrain, researchers of the UA-led
HiRISE imaging experiment have
identified almost 250 fresh impact craters
on the Red Planet. The results suggest
Mars gets pummeled by space rocks
less frequently than previously
thought, as scientists relied on cratering
rates of the moon for their estimates.”
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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

Can the new data provide any information on the
age of Mars? “Estimates of the rate at which
new craters appear serve as scientists’ best
yardstick for estimating the ages of exposed
landscape surfaces on Mars and other
worlds,” the article says. There are, however,
many variables to consider. Meteoroids span a
whole range of sizes, from dust particles to
asteroid-size, each with its own probability of
impact. Objects above a certain threshold can
spawn secondary impacts (9/25/07), making date
calculations essentially unreliable (see 5/22/12)229
5/3/2017
Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

Today’s rates, furthermore, cannot be
extrapolated into the distant past without
making unverifiable assumptions. So
when Alfred McEwen says, “Mars now has
the best-known current rate of cratering
in the solar system,” he can only speak
authoritatively of knowledge in the
observational period of the space
program.
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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

In addition to the major problem of secondaries,
consider other complications when making
calculations of crater rates and dates: speed of the
impactor, angle of impact, gravity of the target,
composition of the impactor and the target surface
(e.g., porosity), atmospheric drag, magnetic field,
sunlight pressure, focusing effects of other orbiting
bodies. Above all else it is impossible to know
whether impact rates have been episodic. One major
swarm can throw all the dates off. Planetary scientists
try to infer a “Late Heavy Bombardment” from lunar
data, but as we have seen, that inference is not
without critics (4/26/12, 1/09/12, 9/17/10, 2/16/10).
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Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

By analogy, there are rivers in large canyons
(including the Grand Canyon and, at Mt. St.
Helens, Loowit Canyon) that did not carve the
canyons—the rivers are relicts of catastrophic
events. Modern viewers might look at these
canyons and conclude that the canyons formed
by slow, gradual erosion over long periods of
time, but we know from Mt. St. Helens that is
not true. The Yellowstone fossil forests were
similarly thought to have taken eons of slow
processes, but now are thought to represent
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catastrophic deposits.
Fresh Impacts Viewed on Mars, Moon
观看火星，月亮的新鲜冲撞

So when you look at a crater-filled moon
or Mars, or any of the other bodies in the
solar system, you cannot know just from
the number of craters how old the surface
is, no matter what the textbooks
and TV documentaries say. If you won’t
take our word for it, look at what Xiao and
Strom said in Icarus a year ago (5/22/12).
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
234
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实
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There are more wonders in your body than you
can possibly imagine. Here are half a dozen new
findings for conversation starters.
Your inner bat: You have another sense you may
not be aware of: you can learn the art of
echolocation. It’s been known that blind people
develop an ability to detect objects by their echoes,
but Science Daily reported that even sighted
people can train themselves to do it. Some people
are better at it than others, for unknown
reasons. Echolocation depends on very precise
detection of timing differences between the two
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ears.
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实
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Self-healing holes: Our blood vessels are made of a
wonderful tissue, called epithelium. It’s stretchy, stable,
and watertight. Science Daily says, “Measuring just a few
hundred nanometers in thickness, this super-tenuous
structure routinely withstands blood flow, hydrostatic
pressure, stretch and tissue compression to create
a unique and highly dynamic barrier that maintains the
organization necessary to partition tissues from the
body’s circulatory system.”
But there are immune cells, called leukocytes, that need to
enter these passageways. How do they do it? The article
presented findings by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center, where scientists studied how epithelial cells
cooperate with leukocytes, creating holes for them to
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enter, then healing the holes behind them.
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实
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“By and large, these ensuing “micro –wounds” are short-lived;
as soon as the cells have crossed the endothelium, these pores
and gaps quickly heal, restoring the system’s efficient barrier
function. In cases when these gaps fail to close — and leakage
occurs — the results can be devastating, leading to dramatic
pathologies including sepsis and acute lung injury.…
“Described in The Journal of Cell Biology, the new findings
suggest that rather than structural robustness per se,
the barrier function of the endothelium relies on an enormous
self-restorative capacity.…
“The cell’s restorative capacity was just so striking,” says
[Christopher V.] Carman. “But these early investigations were still
inadequate to tell us how the breaches were being closed. We
had to dig down to the sub-cellular level to understand the
underlying activities and the molecular signaling mechanisms
that were orchestrating these activities.””
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Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实

Viruses, your friends: You have another immune system
scientists did not realize till recently, and it involves
partnership with viruses. Nature News reported that
“Viruses in the gut protect from
infection.” Bacteriophages, tiny viruses that can invade
and kill bacteria, find a home among the linings in your
airways, by forming bonds with sugars in the
mucus. When bacteria invade, these killing machines, like
a robotic army, take them out. Medical Xpress called this
a “new immune system” that has been discovered. In
more general terms, Science Magazine reviewed “our viral
inheritance,” giving examples of good and bad ways that
viruses interact with our bodies. Even some endogenous
retroviruses (ERVs) that seemed at first to be parasitic on
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238
our genomes now appear to be useful or beneficial.
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实

Nose knowledge: The sense of smell continues
to be one of the most difficult to understand in
humans and in fruit flies. The molecules that
land on olfactory receptors encode messages
that are in some ways similar to those in the
retina, but there appear to be timing
dependences, too, Medical
Xpress reported. Science Magazine reviewed
the growing science of “flavor,” trying to
understand how we learn to associate smells and
tastes with pleasure or displeasure. “It’s a vastly
more complex topic than they once thought,”
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239
the article said.
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实

Your inner clock: We share a sense with
the little flies we swat on our arms: a
biological clock. Because the human
circadian clock is much more complex,
scientists try to understand the clock in
fruit flies. Medical Xpress reported that a
new component of the fruit fly circadian
clock has been identified.
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240
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实

Six degrees of separation: Because the brain is so heavily
interconnected, any synapse is only about six steps away from
any other. This allows for an enormous amount of plasticity for
“rewiring” circuits when one part is damaged. Science
Daily discussed work at UCLA that shows the brain “rewires
itself after damage or injury.” Understanding these
processes could lead to therapies for stroke victims and
Alzheimer’s patients. Last week, Science Magazine discussed
“Why adults need new brain cells.” Contrary to beliefs
decades ago, neuroscientists now know that brain cell
regeneration takes place. Not only that, “a key function of
adult neurogenesis is to shape neuronal connectivity in the
brain according to individual needs,” the article said. Because
of the brain’s plasticity and massively parallel architecture,
Sandia Labs is looking to the human brain as “a model for
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241
supercomputers,” PhysOrg reported.
Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实

To make a point without attempting to be
morbid, these findings underscore why the
death of a human being, whether in a
tornado or an abortion lab, is such a
traumatic thing. It’s like smashing a
supercomputer, destroying a working
factory, obliterating a work of art. A dead
body returns to undifferentiated dust that
fulfills none of these fantastically complex
processes.
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Amazing Body Facts
惊人的身体事实

The Bible describes death as an enemy, the
result of sin that infected the planet with a
curse and judgment. The only hope of a
new body that can live forever is faith in
Jesus Christ, who paved the way for
salvation through His death and resurrection
(I Corinthians 15). If you marvel at the body
you have now, “Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard, nor have entered into the heart of
man the things which God has prepared for
those who love Him” (I Corinthians 2:9). 243
5/3/2017
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
244
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化


Science reporters are dancing with happy feet about a news
story supposedly explaining how penguins evolved.
The new documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds states, “More
than 9,000 species of birds have been identified in the world,
and nearly all of them can fly.” The “nearly all” reserves room
for flightless birds, such as ostriches, kiwis and penguins. The
flightless cormorant on the Galapagos, with its pathetically
stunted wings, appears to have descended from mainland birds
capable of flight, later becoming adapted to flightlessness on
the islands where swimming was sufficient for survival. This is
a similar kind of “evolution” to that of blind cave fish, descended
from normal fish, losing their eyes as they became adapted to
total darkness. In addition, some fossils alleged to be
“feathered dinosaurs” are thought by some paleontologists to
have been secondarily flightless birds (4/27/12). But what
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about penguins?
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

Penguins are superb swimmers, well adapted to their
Antarctic climate. They use their wings to “fly” in a
different fluid—water, not air. The sight of a swarm of
penguins darting through the water under the ice with
speed and grace makes for dramatic film
footage. Most of the major science news sites
(e.g., BBC News, National Geographic, Science
Now, Nature News, New Scientist) are claiming that
the “puzzle” of penguin flightlessness has been
“solved” in a new study published in PNAS. Earlier
theories suggested that the lack of predators led to
flightlessness, or that evolution had a hard time
producing a wing that was good at both flying and
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246
swimming.
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

An international team took a different
approach. They measured the energy
demands of flight. There’s no question
that maintaining flight in the air is
costly. Some birds, like cormorants and
penguins, are good at both. But if aerial
flight is not required for successful
feeding, a bird could focus its wings, feet,
and other body parts on just the
swimming.
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247
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

The authors measured the energy cost of flying for the
guillemot, a bird that looks remarkably like a penguin but
can fly (see photo on PhysOrg’s article; see
also 7/23/12 entry). They found that its wings allow it to
barely stay aloft; it is exhausting for the bird, that swims
effectively to catch fish. They feel the guillemot is near a
“tipping point” where it might some day reach an
“evolutionary trade-off” to give up aerial flying. They also
compared the energy expenditures for murres (10/27/11)
and cormorants (5/24/04), two other kinds of fishing
seabirds. One co-author put it, “Basically
the hypothesis is that as the wings became more and
more efficient for them to dive, they became less
and less efficient for them to fly.” The abstract says,
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The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

“These results strongly support
the hypothesis that function constrains
form in diving birds, and that optimizing
wing shape and form for wingpropelled diving leads to such high
flight costs that flying ceases to be an
option in larger wing-propelled diving
seabirds, including penguins.”
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The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

But how is the change explained in evolutionary
theory? Surprisingly, none of the articles mentioned natural
selection, even though National Geographic’s headline quipped,
“Why Did Penguins Stop Flying? The Answer Is Evolutionary.”
There was no mention of a mechanism for evolving a penguin out
of a flying seabird. Presumably, the loss of aerial flight occurred
by some kind of negative selection, or “de-evolution.” This doesn’t
explain, though, why some seabirds maintained both swimming
and flight. Guillemots do not seem to be evolving into something
else. In the 7/23/12 entry, researchers found that the birds
maintain their energy fitness into old age, even though flight is
costly. Certainly, none of the flightless birds thought about
exercising an “option” to go swimming only. Somehow, the
adaptation had to make it into the genes, otherwise it sounds like
Lamarckism (use and disuse, inheritance of acquired
characteristics).
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250
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

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None of the articles, in addition, exhibited a chain of fossil
birds leading to the penguin. On the contrary, National
Geographic offered only speculation:
“Scientists don’t have fossils of flighted penguin
ancestors, and the earliest known penguin dates to just
after the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (58 to 60 million
years ago).
“It is tempting to speculate that the evolution of
penguins happened in that explosive radiation [of
mammal species] that happened just after the K-T event,”
when many species went extinct, Speakman said.
“However, there is no direct evidence to support this,
and it could have happened any time during the late
Cretaceous.”
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251
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

So the first fossil penguin was already a
penguin. The phrase “explosive
radiation,” further, offers no mechanism
for evolution to produce complex
creatures like elephants and giraffes with
new organs requiring large increases in
genetic information. Penguins, by
contrast, contain all the same basic
features as other birds. With their
modified wings, they continue to fly—
underwater.
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The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

Speaking of fossil birds, PhysOrg reported that
the classification of Archaeopteryx has been
disputed again. One disputant offered this
advice: “methodological choices should be
based on the adequacy of the assumptions for
particular kinds of data rather than on the
recovery of preferred or generally accepted
topologies, and that certain probability
methods should be interpreted with
caution as they can grossly
overestimate character support.”
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The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

National Geographic, we know it’s
tempting to speculate. You must learn to
resist temptation. Speculation is the
besetting sin of Darwinists. Readers, did
you catch the reference in that quote to
Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law? “It is
tempting to speculate that the evolution of
penguins happened in that explosive
radiation… that happened.…” Review
the 9/15/2008 commentary.
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254
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

It’s reasonable to assume that many creationists,
even strict recent-creation advocates, would allow
for penguins to have ancestors that flew like the
guillemot. The similarities are very striking. If
creationists can believe blind cave fish “evolved”
from seeing fish in a short time, it’s not a stretch for
them to suppose that penguin ancestors flew in the
Antarctic originally, then lost their wings as life
under the sea ice proved sufficient for their
needs. This is not Darwinian evolution, because it
does not require increases in information, but only
modifications to existing genes and gene
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255
regulation.
The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

There are reasons, though, to believe that penguins
have always been penguins. One is the fossil
record. Where is the ancestral evidence for flying
penguins? Perhaps one will turn up some day, but in
the meantime, we should accept the evidence at face
value, that penguins have always been flightless in
air. The Creator outfitted each kind of bird with the
traits it needed to fill the Earth with a profusion of
amazing creatures reproducing after their kind. As
usual, the fossil record shows a profusion of larger
and stronger representatives in the past (read about
“super-penguin” in our 10/01/10 entry). Our world is
impoverished after the Deluge.
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The Evolution of Penguins
企鹅的进化

To appreciate in more detail the
mechanisms inside birds that make them
such watchable flying machines, be sure
to get the new Illustra Media
documentary, Flight: The Genius of
Birds. You can watch the episode about
development in the egg from the film right
now on Illustra’s Facebook page. Become
a subscriber and join the discussion.
5/3/2017
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
258
Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future
市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来
 NASA’s Astrobiology Program is charting a new roadmap for future




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


projects, and the public is allowed to voice its opinions.
Astrobiology Magazine announced “A Roadmap for the Future of
Astrobiology.” Born in 1996, the new “science” of astrobiology was
an interdisciplinary effort with the following 7 goals:
Understanding the nature and distribution of habitable
environments in the universe
Exploring for habitable environments and life in our own Solar
System
Understanding the emergence of life
Determining how early life on Earth interacted and evolved with its
changing environment
Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms and environmental
limits of life
Determining the principles that will shape life in the future
Recognizing signatures of life on other worlds and on early 259
5/3/2017
Earth.
Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future
市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来


Yet after 17 years, no solid evidence for “astro”biology
exists. Since NASA’s projects in astrobiology are
funded with tax dollars, the public has a right to
express its views on the value of these questions, and
whether a new consortium of scientists is needed to
address them. Many of these subjects have long
been studied without the formation of a new “science”
garnering additional funds.
Members of the public interested in voicing their
opinions about the future of astrobiology can log
in at astrobiologyfuture.org and express
themselves. In addition, there is always the avenue of
writing one’s representatives.
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Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future
市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来

Astrobiology is one of the biggest boondoggles
in NASA. In 1996, an overly hyped NASA press
conference about possible fossils in a Martian
meteorite (since debunked) launched the new science of
astrobiology; now we’re stuck with it (coincidence?). Any
new science is not just a name; it’s an institution. It
costs money to print materials, hold conferences, run
websites and do all the other things that come along with a
new label. How would you like it if NASA invented a new
“science” called “astropsychology” and asked the
government for millions of dollars for establishing new
journals, building research centers, and holding
conferences for scientists to speculate about what they
know nothing about? (Oh, wait a minute—wasn’t that
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261
called SETI?)
Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future
市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来

There’s astronomy, and there’s biology, but never the
twin shall meet until and unless life is actually found
beyond Earth. Fifty years of searching has turned up
nothing. It’s a mythical science. Studies of extrasolar
planets and their habitability could be performed, and
have been performed, without calling it
astrobiology. All the rest is predicated on belief in
materialistic Darwinian evolution. Darwinists have
been studying all that stuff for decades, long before
1996, and they probably would on their own dime
anyway. (Don’t you love #3, “Understanding the
emergence of life” — the old Stuff Happens
Law. Without the magic word “emergence,”
5/3/2017
Darwinism wouldn’t have a concept to talk about.) 262
Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future
市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来

“Astrobiology” is a euphemism for materialistic philosophy
masquerading as science. Here’s a roadmap for them, all
right: a big U-turn and refund. Can we still afford this
boondoggle in a struggling economy, with foreign enemies
trying to kill us and our allies? Why not fight cancer with
the money? You have a brief opportunity to
tell NASA what you think about the way they are spending
your tax dollars to speculate in front of the nation about
“emergence” by materialistic means of the most complex
systems in the universe. Even the simplest functional
protein can be calculated as so astronomically improbable,
it will never “emerge” under the most hopeful conditions
(source). Yet faith in the impossible drives these shamans
to convince gullible people that they, too, emerged on a
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lucky planet once upon a time. If this riles you, speak up.*
Public Invited to Participate in Astrobiology’s Future
市民应邀参加在天体生物学的未来

*Please be discreet if you state your views
on their website. Ranting only
backfires. Also, appeals to religion or
creationism will be rejected without
consideration. There are plenty of
scientific and philosophical questions that
they cannot dismiss at the outset. Learn
the art of asking the right questions and
stating opinions in a way that commands
respect.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”
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
Evolution is one of the most carelessly-used words in
science, as several recent articles show. Not all change is
evolution the way Darwin meant it.
Roaches check in, and they also check out: Those
omnivorous pests have outsmarted engineers again. Even
though they like sugar in the wild, they have learned to avoid
sugary-tasting poison in roach traps. Sure enough, you can
watch the smarter bugs in a video clip on Live
Science. Stephanie Pappas headlined the story,
“Yikes! Cockroaches Evolved to Avoid Sugary
Baits.” The authors of the paper in Science claimed that
the German cockroaches “rapidly evolved
an adaptive behavioral aversion to glucose.” They spoke
of glucose aversion as a “gain of function adaptation” that
“emerged” in their study population.
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

The scientists did not state, though, if the glucoseaverse roaches represent a new species. Darwinian
evolution is not just about changes of adaptive
behavior within a species, but the arrival
of new species. If the glucose-averse roaches are
interfertile with the wild type, no evolution has
occurred. In the Live Science article, furthermore, one
of the paper’s authors admitted that glucose
avoidance could have been an ancient trait that
surfaced under the new environmental condition of
encountering man-made bait traps. “Some plants
produce toxic bittersweet compounds that
roaches would have needed to avoid before
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humans came around.”
Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Even worse, the glucose-avoiding roaches may
be less healthy. In Science Daily, that same
co-author admitted they grow more slowly in the
lab without the environmental
stress. “Cockroaches have to adapt to a varied
and unreliable food supply, and glucoseaversion places an additional restriction on
obtaining adequate nutrition.” In any case,
this is certainly not a case supporting Darwinian
evolution—universal common ancestry via
natural selection.
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Name it and claim it: Just claiming something evolved
does not make it so. Asking why some
flowers close at night, Elizabeth Palermo on Live
Science credited evolution. Those plants are “highly
evolved,” she said. That’s no better than ridiculing
another human as being less evolved than you
are. Then she admitted, “scientists are not quite
sure why some plants, particularly flowers,
evolved this way.” You can’t just say that the trait
might be a “highly evolved defense
mechanism against a plant’s nocturnal
predators.” Without an explanation based on mutation
and natural selection, this is mere speculation. For all
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Palermo knows, plants were designed that way.
Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Negative selection: Some developmental processes
involve killing of cells that are not needed in the finished
adult form. It happens in the developing thymus, for
instance; in PLoS Biology, Caitlin Sedgwick wrote, “To
prevent autoimmunity, developing T cells undergo a
process called negative selection, wherein strongly
‘self-reactive’ T cells are provoked to undergo apoptosis
(cellular suicide) before they leave the thymus.” This is
not evolution, either, even though she boasted of
“Bringing You Negative Selection, Alive and In
Color.” The word “selection” might cause one to think
this is about Darwinian evolution. It’s not; the only
evolution here is the “evolution [i.e., unfolding] of
apoptotic events.”
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Not everything Darwin said is evolution: Charles Darwin
wrote about a lot of things, not all of which support his idea of
universal common ancestry via unguided natural
processes. A story on PhysOrg is a case in point; “research
proves Darwin prediction,” the headline reads, but the
principle at issue is whether “productivity increases with
species diversity.” Creationists would accept a substantial
amount of variation within created kinds. Although the
researcher mentioned “evolutionary distance,” the distance
doesn’t have to be evolutionary. Creationists acknowledge a
lot of morphological distance between a zebra and a
zebrafish. Even critics of Darwin recognized he was right
about some things. Nothing in the data of this story
necessarily supports Darwin’s most famous notion, that
zebras are descendants of microbes.
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Guided variation is not evolution: It’s like a pesky
urban legend that won’t die: artificial selection is not
evolution. It’s intelligent design, even if the engineers
use random variation in the process. Another
example appeared on Live Science, where Wynn
Parry wrote, “Evolution May Help Build Better
Robots.” Then he transferred the design from the
engineers to the robots themselves, claiming, “In the
real world, animals have evolved the ability to get
from point A to B by galloping, crawling and jumping.
Now, robots in the virtual world have
accomplished something similar.”
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Turtle embryonic development is not
evolution: On Science Daily, the word “evolution” was
used in connection with observations of turtle
development from the embryo. First, the article said that
turtles are “not primitive reptiles as previously
thought, but are related to the group comprising birds
and crocodilians, which also includes extinct
dinosaurs.” Whether that relationship illustrates
common ancestry or not, the statement argues against a
simple-to-complex process. Then the article confused
embryonic development with evolution. Here again,
though, was a conundrum: “The study also reveals
that despite their unique anatomy, turtles follow the
basic embryonic pattern during development.”
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Even if the shell arrives late in the process, when limb
development normally occurs, the highly complex
process of development can hardly be used to support
the notion that “turtle shell evolved by recruiting
part of the genetic program used for the
limbs.” Evolution is not a recruiter. That’s the
personification fallacy. Yet based on this, one of the
researchers stated, “The work not only provides
insight into how turtles evolved, but also gives
hints as to how the vertebrate
developmental programs can be changed to
produce major evolutionary novelties”—all that
after admitting that these “evolutionary monsters”
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are unique in the animal kingdom.
Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

Data points within natural variation of a species are not
evolution: The Chinese found another “new hominin” in a
cave based on its teeth. But then, the article
on PhysOrg admits, “the size of these teeth all
falls [sic] into the tooth size variation of Chinese modern
humans.” How, then, are these teeth assumed to be from a
different ancestral species? As usual, when the data are
unconvincing, more research is needed: “Our excavation
shows the cave has great potential perspectives,” the
researcher said. “Further excavation and laboratory
study of cave development, filling sequence, hominin teeth
morphology, dating, and environmental change from the
Fuyan Cave as well as some adjacent caves will help better
understand the human evolution and adaptive behavior in
Southwest Hunan, east Guangxi, and north Guangdong.” 275
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Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution”
蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用“进化”

This is how scientists get away with claims that
evolution is essential to biology, and is supported
by mountains of evidence. Why, look at all the
scientific papers and articles about it! How can
Darwin skeptics claim it is unscientific? Well, we
can, and we just showed you why. Ask them for
evidence supporting universal common ancestry of
all life by unguided natural processes, and this is
the kind of fluff you get. They accuse their critics
of being people of faith, but Darwinians are people
of fluff. Point that out to them, and they become
people of froth. There’s nothing as pitiable as
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people of froth supporting their fluff by faith.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事


Here are some new ways scientists are
imitating plants and animals to understand their
designs and make new products.
Polymer Breakthrough Inspired by Trees and
Ancient Celtic Knots (Science Daily). “A new
slow-motion method of controlling the synthesis
of polymers, which takes inspiration from
both trees and Celtic Knots, opens up new
possibilities in areas including medical devices,
drug delivery, elastics and adhesives.”
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New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

Ant studies to aid design of search and rescue
robots (BBC News). Stick your finger in sand and the
hole fills back in. Somehow, fire ants can make narrow
tunnels in sand—any kind of sand or soil, even sand
composed of artificial glass beads. A video clip in the
article shows fire ants constructing narrow tunnels not
much wider than their own bodies, allowing them to
catch themselves to prevent falling in vertical
orientations. Nick Gavish at Georgia Tech wants to
learn how they do it. He envisions search-and-rescue
operations taking advantage of loose rubble to build
passageways for victims. So he is going to the ant to
distil “the principles by which ants and other animals
manipulate complex environments.”
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New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

Moth-Inspired Nanostructures Take the Color
out of Thin Films (Science Daily). We’ve
learned in previous biomimetics entries about
enhancing colors with “photonic crystals,”
structural designs found on butterfly wings. The
reverse effect—diminishing reflections—can
also be achieved structurally, by cancelling out
wavelengths through destructive
interference. That’s how a moth’s eye works –
and scientists at North Carolina State are
“mimicking that concept” to improve the
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performance of solar cells.
New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

Snake’s ultra-black spots may aid high-tech quest (PhysOrg)
– and that quest is “to create the ultimate light-absorbing
material.” How does the snake illustrate the ultimate? “The
West African Gaboon viper, one of the largest in Africa and
a master of camouflage, has dark spots in the
geometrical pattern of its skin that are deep, velvety black
and reflect very little light.” the article says. That’s because
“Interwoven with white– and brown-coloured scales that are
very reflective, this creates a high contrast that renders the
snake difficult to spot on the richly-patterned rainforest
floor.” Following the “snake’s nanotechnology” could prove
beneficial to man: “The micro-ornamentation on the
snake’s velvet black scales is a further example that the
same physical law applies to both nature and
technology and leads consequently to similar
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constructions.”
New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

DNA-Guided Assembly Yields Novel RibbonLike Nanostructures (Science Daily). DNA
continues to be an ideal molecule to work
with. It acts in unique ways due to its small
size. “Scientists at the U.S. Department of
Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have
discovered that DNA ‘linker’ strands coax nanosized rods to line up in way [sic] unlike any
other spontaneous arrangement of rodshaped objects.” What cannot be done at the
macro scale can work for nano-fabrication.
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New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事
 Advanced Biological Computer Developed (Science
Daily). We’ve reported on DNA computing before, but
now, “Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and
enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology have developed and constructed an
advanced biological transducer, a computing machine
capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using
the output as new input for subsequent
computations.” Biological computing is attractive
because it can interact directly with living things. Maybe
that will someday be a cause for alarm, but for now, they
have benefits to human health in mind. One statement
in the article that emphasizes the close ties between
natural and artificial computing could have been written
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by an advocate of intelligent design:
New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

“All biological systems, and even entire living
organisms, are natural molecular
computers. Every one of us is a biomolecular
computer, that is, a machine in which all
components are molecules “talking” to one
another in a logical
manner. The hardware and software are complex
biological molecules that activate one another to
carry out some predetermined chemical
tasks. The input is a molecule that undergoes
specific, programmed changes, following a specific
set of rules (software) and the output of
this chemical computation process is another well
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defined molecule.”
New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

A look back at the first biomimetics: Velcro is
one of the classic cases of the imitation of
nature. At Live Science, Ryan Goodrich told
the story of Swiss engineer and amateur
mountaineer George de Mestral, who
conceived the natural “zipperless zipper” by
observing cockleburs on a hike in 1948. The
article reveals where the name came from, and
brings the story up to the present by mentioning
a few of the many applications of this highly
useful product that was “Inspired by Nature.”
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New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事

Most of these instances of biomimetic
technology have not been mentioned in
previous entries. That suggests that much,
much more awaits to be discovered. Why not
join the fun, and look around your yard for
ideas? What solutions to real-life problems
have been solved by plants or animals around
you? Maybe you could become the next
millionnaire, plagiarizing what the Creator
already invented. Give Him the glory and He
will not mind the imitation.
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New Biomimetics Stories
新仿生学的故事
 The quote above is a keeper. Show
that to someone who thinks intelligent
design is a science stopper or a
religious concept. On the contrary,
I.D. is the only way to understand
biology in the 21st century. ID ID > IDEA (meaning, IDentify Intelligent
Design as a forward-looking idea).
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此


Whenever you hear “all scientists agree” or “we now know,” it’s
no guarantee a finding won’t be disputed years later. In the
following examples, CEH focuses not so much on the content
of the disputed subjects as the implications for philosophy of
science.
The big warm up: One very strong consensus among
establishment scientists right now is that humans are causing
global warming. Science Daily reported a survey of 4,000
abstracts of scientific papers that indicated an “overwhelming
consensus among scientists,” as high as 97%, “that recent
warming is human-caused” (cf. fallacy of statistics). Yet
contrary data still arise from time to time. For instance, New
Scientist reported that re-analysis of global temperatures over
the last decade shows that “Earth will warm more slowly over
this century than we thought it would” – diminishing some of
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the frantic appeals for immediate action of past years.
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此
Apparently the rate of heating hit a plateau even with more


greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere. It
doesn’t change the consensus; the new data are just
“buying us a little more time to cut our greenhouse gas
emissions and prevent dangerous climate change,” the
article continued. Likewise, PhysOrg spun the new data to
mean that we still face a “Dire outlook despite global
warming ‘pause’,” according to the study published
in Nature Geoscience. Skeptics of global warming like to
point out that a few decades ago, the consensus warned that
Earth was approaching a period of global cooling that would
have drastic effects on human life.
What will the consensus believe about climate change in a
few years or decades? Nobody knows. It’s instructive,
though, to look at other examples of shifting consensus in 290
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science.
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

Salt is good: Jesus once said “Salt it good” (intending
a spiritual application, Luke 14:34), but dietary salt has
been a bogeyman for many years according to the
scientific community. That’s why it was shocking to
find a report in Science Magazine that “smashes the
paradigm that lower [salt intake] is better.” It’s a
serious overturn, too: “an expert panel … says that
there is little evidence that dropping below 2300 mg
of salt lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease—
and some hints it might actually do harm.” Some
scientists, to be sure, are complaining that the report
is flawed, but the problem is that science may never
be able to figure out what advice is sound:
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科学家们同意的事情不是如此

“Radically reducing your salt intake is good
for your health. Or is it? That question is at
the center of a passionate debate once
again after an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report
last week called into question official
recommendations advising people to
consume less sodium. The high-profile
study is the latest in a controversy that has
raged for decades—and some researchers
say the science of salt is so complex that
they may never find solid answers.”
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科学家们同意的事情不是如此

Those already at risk of cardiovascular
problems might benefit from lower sodium
intake, but what about the majority of healthy
people? Scientists still agree that American
consumption is too high; it’s mainly the advice
for radical reduction that is being
questioned. But who knows? Evidence linking
high salt intake to disease for healthy people is
spotty. Philosophically, there’s also a risk of
confusing cause and effect:
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科学家们同意的事情不是如此
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
“The evidence is far from clear-cut. It mainly comes
from studies on patients treated for serious diseases,
which means there is a danger of confusing cause and
effect, Antman warns. For instance, patients with heart
failure or metastatic cancer might have a low sodium
intake simply because they eat less. “This is not solid
evidence,” he says.”
The article goes on to give physiological reasons why
reduced sodium might cause harm in some people. There
may be political and rhetorical reasons behind the low-salt
craze, too: “Sodium is just easier to measure and make
public policy around,” one remarked. Another said, “If
you are going to ask people to change something, you
need to have at least a clue that there will be a
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benefit.”
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

Fat is not all bad: Here’s another surprise. Obesity has
been a large topic for discussion in the news. Fat certainly
doesn’t improve one’s looks, but does it shorten
life? Possibly not, reported Nature. In “The big fat truth,”
Virginia Hughes revealed a kind of scientific conspiracy:
“More and more studies show that being overweight
does not always shorten life — but some public-health
researchers would rather not talk about them.” And it’s
not just that being a little overweight is less harmful than
thought. Look at this: a recent study published in
the Journal of the American Medical Association provided
evidence that “people deemed ‘overweight’ by
international standards were 6% less likely to die than
were those of ‘normal’ weight over the same time period.”
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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

This caused an outrage at Harvard, where
organizers of a packed-out event wanted to explain
“why [the] new study about weight and death was
absolutely wrong.” It’s a “pile of rubbish,” one
scientist said, worried about how the fast-food
industry might spin the
story. Nevertheless, Nature sided with the need to
remain objective about the “obesity paradox” a
string of findings showing that, while obesity is
clearly bad, having a few extra pounds is not
necessarily unhealthy—and might actually be
beneficial.
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科学家们同意的事情不是如此


The story illustrates how the political and sociological
influences on scientific consensus cannot be
ignored. The article tied into our first discussion about
climate change:
Willett says that he is also concerned that obesityparadox studies could undermine people’s trust in
science. “You hear it so often, people say: ‘I read
something one month and then a couple of
months later I hear the opposite. Scientists just
can’t get it right’,” he says. “We see that time and
time again being exploited, by the soda industry, in
the case of obesity, or by the oil industry, in the case
of global warming.”
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科学家们同意的事情不是如此

But isn’t it science’s job to “get the world
right,” not to worry about policy? Can they
blame individuals and industries for taking
advantage of findings that contradict the
consensus? That’s how the lead author of
the JAMA paper feels. “Our job is not to
make policy, it’s to provide accurate
information to guide policy-makers and
other people who are interested in these
topics,” Katherine Flegal said.
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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此


Ethicists act ethically, right? Readers might be
disturbed to find out that experts whose business it
is to judge ethics do not necessarily act any more
ethically than the rest of us. Science Daily wonders
who is watching the watchers:
“Do ethicists engage in better moral behavior
than other professors? The answer is no. Nor
are they more likely than nonethicists to act
according to values they espouse, according to
researchers from the University of California,
Riverside and Stetson University in Florida.”
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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

Volcano winter, not: It made for a good story. A supereruption of Indonesian supervolcano Mt. Toba 70,000
years ago—the largest eruption of the past 2.5 million
years—changed the course of human evolution, driving
our ancestors nearly extinct in a kind of “nuclear winter”
scenario as ash blocked the sun and made early man
shiver to death. Maybe not; Live Science reported,
based on a paper in PNAS, that new evidence shows
little if any effect on humans in Africa or India, even
though ash has been found twice as far away as
previously thought. Even though Mt. Toba put out over
200 times as much ash as Krakatoa, there was no
evidence of cooling in lake sediments in Africa, and
artifacts from India show that people got along fairly well.
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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

Who’s crazy? As reported before (5/10/13, 5/18/12),
psychiatry is embroiled in controversy with the release
of its new bible of psychiatric diseases, DSM-5, this
month. Are we to believe one article in New
Scientist that 1 in 5 children develops a mental
disorder each year? Or is Live Science more correct
to question the controversial diagnoses in the field’s
bible? Maybe the authors of the manual need a
serious diagnosis themselves if they think 20% of the
population is abnormal. Evolution News &
Views considered this an example of how a “science”
can collapse, comparing 14 of psychiatry’s faults with
those of Darwinian evolution.
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Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此
Bye-bye, instinctual attachment theory: It was all the rage in

the post-World War II era: “instinctual attachment
theory.” Have you seen those black-and-white photos of Harry
Harlow getting a monkey baby to cuddle up to a fake mother
made of wire and cloth? The conclusion drawn from such
experiments by Konrad Lorentz and John Bowlby was that
infant humans are like baby ducks, imprinting on their mother at
a critical period of “instinctual attachment.” Without it, they
develop psychological problems. The researchers apparently
ignored other factors, like peer influence, on
maturation. Writing for Science Magazine, Ben Harris did not
have much good to say about this flawed theory in hindsight as
he reviewed a new book on it by historian of science Marga
Vicedo, titled The Nature and Nurture of Love From Imprinting
to Attachment in Cold War America (U of Chicago Press). The
take-home message is larger than one story about how a few
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scientists fooled themselves and the public:
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

“As the reader learns, animal research was not
the only discipline misrepresented by
the radical instinctivists. Anna Freud, for
example, complained that Bowlby excised the
subjective, psychological essence of
psychoanalysis in his fervor to biologize the
infant-mother bond. In her chronicles of such
disagreements between Bowlby and his critics,
Vicedo’s analysis of scientific evidence is
thorough enough to be used in a course on
research methodology.
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
“As a historian of science, however, she is after
bigger game. Sheasks how a scientific theory can
endure when its evidence and logic are
persuasively refuted by experts. Her answer is that
Bowlby’s attachment theory brought the authority of
biology to the seemingly less rigorous field of
developmental psychology. It also borrowed from
enough scientific and social-scientific specialties
to outflank critics who only knew one discipline. And
compared to their opponents, Bowlby and
Lorenz presented a united front that persisted for
decades—while others moved to new research
questions.”
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科学家们同意的事情不是如此

Caveat emptor: When evaluating “What science says”
or “What scientists believe,” we should remember H. L.
Mencken’s proverb, “For every complex problem there is
an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Politicians
and special-interest groups are all too hasty to cite the
consensus in support of their agendas, charging their
opponents with being “deniers” or worse if they dispute
what “science says.” Mario Livio, writing for Nature in
the aftermath of some recent high-profile retractions and
frauds, called on scientists to embrace their
mistakes. There’s a human tendency to want to cover
up research mistakes, but in actuality, even the mistake
can trigger scientific progress in other directions.
5/3/2017
305
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

In the “Science and Culture Update” on talk-show host
Michael Medved’s radio program this week (hear it
on ID the Future), Discovery Institute fellows Stephen
Meyer and Jay Richards chatted with Medved about
the problems with scientific consensus. When should
an individual doubt a concensus? Richards explains
that “the consensus says” can be a catch-phrase that
signals an appeal to authority – else the debater would
simply cite the evidence to support his claim. Meyer
emphasized that good science thrives on open
debate, not just about the evidence, but about the
interpretation of the evidence. “Saying there’s a
consensus means we don’t have to argue. That’s
5/3/2017
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what’s unscientific,” he said.
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

In 2003, the late novelist Michael Crichton gave
a devastating critique of consensus to an
audience of scientists at Caltech, where he
said, “Consensus is the business of politics.
Science, on the contrary, requires only one
investigator who happens to be right, which
means that he or she has results that are
verifiable by reference to the real world. In
science consensus is irrelevant.” For more of
his comments, see the 12/27/2003 entry or the
entire speech here.
5/3/2017
307
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

As we consider these lessons for their application to the
creation-evolution debate, we offer a quote by William Patten
of Dartmouth from 1930: “Evolution itself has long since
passed out of the field of scientific controversy. There is no
other subject on which scientific opinion is so completely
unanimous. It is the one great truth we most surely
know.” In 1943, Edwin Grant Conklin said, “The fact of
evolution is no longer questioned by men of science.” Yet
evolution remains controversial to the present, a majority of
the public disagreeing with the scientific consensus. The
Darwinians continue using their consensus as a bandwagon
fallacy to try to keep their critics at bay. We think scientific
conclusions should be determined by the evidence, not the
consensus. If one Darwin skeptic were right, and a million
scientists disagreed, who would you believe?
5/3/2017
308
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
科学家们同意的事情不是如此

This entry is primarily about scientific consensus, but the
flip side is that non-scientists can also hang onto notions
that aren’t true. To that problem, we would like to show
that gullibility is part of human nature, something we all
need to address. While scientists are “supposed to”
have more rigorous standards of evidence, we wrongly
assume that the category “scientist” is different in kind
from that of “people” in general. Here’s a quote by C. S.
Lewis that ties us all together: “Experimental verification
is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the
deficiencies of mere logic. We should therefore
abandon the distinction between scientific and nonscientific thought. The proper distinction is between
logical and non-logical thought.”
5/3/2017
309
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
310
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？


Birds evolved from dinosaurs; that’s the evolutionary
consensus. Let’s examine the evidence for that
scenario.
In “Feathers Before Flight,” Julia Clarke [U of Texas]
gathered together the evidence birds evolved from
dinosaurs in a Review article
for Science Magazine. To the untrained eye, the
confident assertions can seem convincing. Buried
within the text, though, are the bits and pieces of
actual fossil evidence used to support the
conclusion. Do they support the evolutionary
picture? Her first paragraph seems to have more gap
than link:
5/3/2017
311
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

“Feathers are branched structures consisting of β-keratin—a
rigid protein material formed by pleated β sheets—with a
hollow central shaft. They are strikingly different from
other forms of vertebrate integument such as scales,
skin, and hair. Until recently, evolutionary hypotheses
envisioned their origin through elongation of broad, flat
scales driven by selection for aerial locomotion such as
gliding or flapping flight. Over the course of the past two
decades, fossil discoveries, especially from
northeast China, have revealed that the early precursors of
feathers were filament-like rather than expanded scales
and that branched pinnate feathers of modern aspect
predate the origin of active flight. The revolution in our
understanding of feather evolution continues, driven by
rapid fossil discoveries and by new information from the312
5/3/2017
study of extant birds.”
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？
She implies that the scale-to-feather theory is out.


Somehow,
filaments emerged where scales once existed. Two statements
stand out in this quote: that feathers are “strikingly different
from any other forms of vertebrate integument,” and that
“branched pinnate feathers predate the origin of active
flight.” The first is confirmed by discussions in the new Illustra
Media documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds, where an
animation of a single feather shows a complex structure
complete with a hook-and-groove microstructure that provides
an ideal mechanism for flight: lightweight, flexible, and
strong. The second claim, that feathers predate flight, will have
to be supported further down in Clarke’s review.
Clarke calls the new ideas of feather evolution
“transformative,” suggesting that previous evolutionary
scenarios taught in textbooks are no longer correct. Most
notable in transforming evolutionary beliefs have been the 313
5/3/2017
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

“The Chinese deposits provide one such unique
snapshot, where over a thousand specimens
with fine details of soft tissues such as feathers,
hair, and skin are preserved in ash-rich lake
deposits ranging from the Late Jurassic
(∼150 million years ago) to the Early
Cretaceous (∼120 million years ago). Fossils
from these deposits have revealed that
dinosaurs that were inferred from bone
characteristics to be closely related to living
birds also share more features of feather
5/3/2017
314
structure.”
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

Acceptance of the evolutionary story is going to
require acceptance of the dates, and with that, the
belief that a lake was repeatedly buried in ash over
a period of 30 million years – a very long time for
an ecological community to survive with volcanoes
going off. Has anyone thought that
through? Would a dinosaur with filaments get
buried in ash, then a lake form again, then moreevolved creatures with more-advanced feathers
happen along, only to be buried in fine ash again,
preserving soft tissues? Would this cycle repeat
for 30 million years?
5/3/2017
315
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

Between Clarke’s retellings of the consensus dinosaur-tobird scenario, curious statements appear. “The latter
forms do not fit the hypothesis of flat scales morphing
directly into flat feathers,” she writes. “But these hollow
filaments or ‘protofeathers’ are similar to structures
seen early in feather development; a simple hollow
cylindrical sheath arises first in feather ontogeny from the
collar of the feather follicle before the barb ridges, linked to
the development of its branching shape, form.” There are
two problems for evolution here. One is the gap between
scales and filaments. The other is that her statement
sounds like Recapitulation Theory: a modern bird’s
feathers remember their ancestral forms as they
develop. The idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”
5/3/2017
316
is generally frowned upon in evolutionary circles.
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？


Another problem is her statement, “Fossil data
indicated dramatic shifts from scale to
filament, to bunches of filaments, to branched
feathers in theropod dinosaurs.” Evolutionists
typically like to avoid dramatic shifts, preferring
gradual changes that mutation and selection
can accommodate. (Whether theropod
dinosaurs had branched feathers will have to
wait for the fossils she presents.)
But then, Clarke mentions another gigantic
conundrum confronting the simple scenario:
5/3/2017
317
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

“The more recent discoveries of a basal ornithischian
dinosaur with a filamentous body covering, and another
ornithischian more closely related to Triceratops with a
bristle-covered tail, force reconsideration of the timing of
this transition. These fossils indicate that filamentous
structures may be ancestral to dinosaurs. Filaments
called pycnofibers also covered some
pterosaurs. Ornithischian dinosaurs, sauropod
dinosaurs, and pterosaurs are on evolutionary branches
that split from that of theropod dinosaurs and birds
about 230 million years ago in the Triassic. If these
structures have the same evolutionary origin, a form of
filamentous integumentary structure evolved from
scales nearly 100 million years before the locomotor
transition that we call the origin of birds (see the figure).”
5/3/2017
318
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

If 30 million years is a problem, how about 100
million? The findings (accepting the
evolutionary dates) now require filaments to
evolve from scales way back, 230 million years
ago, long before Triceratops, T. Rex and
pterosaurs (let alone feathered theropods) –
only to come and go in various species for 80 to
100 million years. Is that plausible? And why
would feathers “evolve” out of scales long
before any functional adaptation?
5/3/2017
319
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

The figure Clarke referred to should be fodder for
creationists. It shows true pinnate feathers and simple
filaments emerging virtually simultaneously in different
branches, long after the split from Archosauria. Not only
does this show abrupt appearance; it shows no ancestral
relationship between the filaments and the true
feathers. What’s more, the feathers are used for flight in
some of the creatures suddenly at the earliest appearance of
any integumentary structures. Instant birds! If her diagram
is authoritative for the evolutionary story, it has “evolution of
filaments” a good 50 million years before the first fossil
bearing those filaments or feathers – simply because the
timing of presumed evolutionary splits between various
groups requires the filaments to be in the common
ancestor. Apparently, it is too difficult a pill to swallow for 320
5/3/2017
“convergent evolution” of these structures.
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？
The emerging evolutionary story is far from simple.


Clarke
points out important questions it raises:
“The recent fossil data suggest that key integumentary
shifts might be related not to flight but to innovation in
stance, terrestrial gaits, and life history in early archosaurs,
which came to dominate terrestrial ecosystems by the end of
the Triassic. However, there are unanswered
questions. Were there at least three independent and
convergent shifts from scales to filaments in Archosauria,
with only one of these linked to the origin of feathers and
flight? Or was there a single ancient origin of filaments,
with subsequent losses in some species and, much later, a
second period of novelty seen in the evolution of a
branching feather form? Answering these questions is key
to understanding the evolution of feathers and other
5/3/2017
321
integuments.”
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

That these key questions remain unanswered undermines
simplistic portrayals that “birds are dinosaurs.” Generally,
composite explanations are not useful in science. Clarke says that
“key integumentary shifts might be related not to flight but to
innovation in stance, terrestrial gaits, and life history in early
archosaurs.…” Well, which is it? Composite explanations won’t
do for the student who excuses his missing homework with “either
the dog ate it, or my sister threw it away, or I forgot it was
due.” Science needs definitive explanations. Besides, abrupt
appearance is the norm throughout this story. What is a “key
integumentary shift,” anyway? Did it just “happen”
somehow? What is “innovation,” or a “single ancient origin,” or a
“period of novelty” but a confession of ignorance of any
mechanism to explain how it arose? Where are the fossils? The
figure caption reads, “Filamentous feather precursors may have
originated nearly 100 million years before the origin of flight,
5/3/2017
322
but very few fossil deposits sample this period.”
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？


So despite the confidence shown on TV and museum
displays, the critical fossil evidence for the origin of flight is
missing.
“These questions send paleontologists back into the
field. Early fossils of most major archosaur lineages are
known from records in the Late Triassic and Early to Middle
Jurassic (∼225 to 165 million years ago).However, no
dinosaur older than the Late Jurassic has been
recovered with preserved integuments (scales or
feathers). Early pterosaurs are virtually unknown in the
fossil record; their earliest fossils with integuments are also
Late Jurassic in age (see the figure). A Late Triassic or Early
Jurassic site with fine-scale soft tissue preservation would
offer crucial insight into this question. However, very few
candidate sites are known.”
5/3/2017
323
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

Clarke becomes more confident again, if the early evolution can
be ignored. “The fossil snapshots that we do have offer much
more insight into the evolution of pinnate feathers seen in living
birds,” she says, launching into a discussion of what feathers
might have been used for before flight emerged. Maybe it was
for sexual display. “There is no known analog of archosaur
filaments in adult living animals, but bird feathers are
known to have diverse functions, for example, in flight,
display, camouflage, and heat retention.” Feathers on modern
birds might be used for sexual selection, she notes. But she’s
talking about “living birds” there, not where they came from. It’s
only inference that dinosaurs used them for sexual selection
before they thought of taking to the skies. How did that
happen? It’s time to get specific about the origin of
flight. Remember as you read her statement that living birds
5/3/2017
324
are irrelevant. Where are the fossils?
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

“Evidence is thus accruing for the function of early pinnate feathers in
sexual selection, but there is little consensus on shifts in feather
function associated with the evolution of flight. Reconstruction of
ancestral conditions for the bird lineage requires consensus on the
evolutionary relationships of key species. These species differ in
feather shape as well as in their organization and layering on the
forelimb and hind limb. Whether observed differences can
presently speak to a gliding or flapping origin for flight is
debated. Species with elongate feathers or a “wing” on the hind limb
show characters consistent with a form of aerial locomotion but
not one seen in living birds. At the same time, continued research
indicates a broader variety of locomotor functions for forelimb
feathering in living birds other than powered flight; young living birds
flap short pinnate feathers on the forelimb, increasing traction to
climb highly inclined surfaces. Although historically, feathers were
firmly linked to flapping flight, the evolution of their early
locomotor function in climbing, taking off, turning, landing, 325
5/3/2017
gliding, or flapping is a key outstanding question.”
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

The reference to “young living birds” on
“inclined surfaces” is a hat tip to Ken Dial’s
“WAIR” hypothesis (wing-assisted incline
running), in which he watched living
partridge chicks raising their forelimbs as
they scuttled up ramps (see story and
comments from 12/22/03, 12/03/12). Her
final paragraph is basically an admission
that there are more questions than
answers about the origin of flight:
5/3/2017
326
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

“The evolution of feathers is now seen as one part
of a broader story concerning the origin of novel
integumentary structures in archosaurs, although
data on the early parts of this story are very
limited. New data multiply the set of questions we
must ask about the locomotor transition that we
call the evolution of flight. Model-based approaches
are needed to explore the varieties of aerial
and nonaerial locomotor strategies that extinct
dinosaurs may have employed. These must take
into account not only the diverse locomotor strategies
in living birds but also potential differences in feather
properties, shape, and plumage organization.”
5/3/2017
327
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？


Like Illustra’s film on Flight says about current speculations on
the evolution of flight, “Each of these theories is highly
controversial.” The film contends that the functional
requirements for powered flight cannot be achieved piecemeal
by gradual steps. “It’s really an all-or-nothing proposition,” Paul
Nelson explains; “You don’t partly fly, because flight requires not
just having a pair of wings, but having your entire biology
coordinated towards that function.” Even if dinosaurs were
capable of employing “nonaerial locomotor strategies” of some
undefined nature, how did a “locomotor transition” occur, leading
to all the biological “innovations” required for powered flight?
Clarke began with a promising title, “Feathers Before
Flight.” She ended on a series of unanswered questions –
primarily, “New data multiply the set of questions we must
ask about the locomotor transition that we call the evolution
5/3/2017
328
of flight.”
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？

Oh, wow, this article is so classic of the evolutionary genre, it’s a
virtual gift to creationists. Aside from the obvious evidential
conclusion that dinosaur-to-bird evolution is a myth, Clarke used
all the evolutionary tricks of the trade we’ve been pointing out in
the Darwin lit for 12 years now: the Stuff Happens law, just-so
stories, shielding complex changes in words like “novelty” and
“innovation,” promissory notes, the coulda-woulda-shoulda habit,
embedding evolution in terms like “protofeathers,” the
convergence concoction, using passive verbs and subjunctive
mood as covers for ignorance, composite explanations, punk eek,
incredible stasis, ghost lineages, “more research is needed,” job
security for storytellers, glossing over soft tissue in supposedly
ancient material, tidbits of Lamarck and Haeckel as needed when
gradualism doesn’t work, forcing uncooperative data into prefab
scenarios, parading naked Emperor Charlie in public, sacrificing
brains at his shrine – everything. Hardly a sentence of this article
5/3/2017
329
is devoid of fallacies masquerading as science.
What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
在飞行前的羽毛证据是什么？


We hope you caught these things before the commentary
began. If not, you need Creation-Evolution Headlines as a
deprogramming course. Bookmark this site and come for
your daily therapy. Since Ken Dial made an off-camera
appearance, we like all beginners to get the shock
treatment in our commentary from 12/22/03 – the first time
(now a decade ago, still cited favorably by Darwinists) the
Montana drunkard-on-Darwine presented living partridge
family chicks as possible props to an evolutionary
tale. Read that color commentary now; know the tricks,
and you won’t be fooled again.
Flight: The Genius of Birds is now on sale
in DVD format! The Blu-ray edition is coming June
11. Get breaking news and join the discussion on Illustra’s
5/3/2017
330
Facebook Page.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/3/2017
331
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈



Stem cells continue to show promise for dramatic
healings, but reporters don’t always clarify what lived
or died to produce the cells. Adult stem cells inhabit
all living humans; embryonic or fetal stem cells require
a human death.
Adult Stem Cell News
Cord blood awakens boy: Parents of a boy with
pediatric cerebral palsy are glad they froze samples of
his cord blood when he was born. At age 2–1/2, he
had a cardiac arrest with severe brain damage that left
him in a persistent vegetative state. Now, Science
Daily reported, after the first successful treatment with
stem cells from his autologous cord blood, the boy has
5/3/2017
332
awakened. He can move and speak simple sentences.
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

Mesenchymal stem cells and ALS: It’s an odd
reversal of ethics to put human stem cells in rats,
but Medical Xpress reported progress against
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by injecting
engineered human mesenchymal stem cells into
the furry rodents, causing them to produce growth
factors that delay onset of the disease. The article
pointed to a benefit of adult stem cells: “By
using adult mesenchymal stem cells, the
technique avoided the danger of tumor that can
arise with the transplant of embryonic stem cells
and related ‘do-anything’ cells.”
5/3/2017
333
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

Blood stem cells and cancer: Science
Daily reported on significant improvements in
survival for cancer patients with
lymphomas, leukemias and other blood
cancers, thanks to adult blood stem cells from
donors and the patients themselves. “The
significant improvements we saw across all
patient and disease populations should offer
patients hope and, among physicians, reinforce
the role of blood stem cell transplants as a
curative option for life-threatening blood
5/3/2017
334
cancers and other diseases.”
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈



Embryonic and Fetal Stem Cell News
hESC and blindness: New Scientist reported a rare
success with human embryonic stem cells. Implanted into
the retina, a man with a form of macular
degeneration went from 20/400 (legally blind) to 20/40
(sighted) over time. Results have not yet been published.
Fetal stem cells and stroke: New Scientist reported
modest improvement in stroke victims injected with stem
cells in a new clinical trial. The article only mentioned
where the cells came from in passing. The researcher
“thinks that the fetal neural stem cells injected into the
volunteers’ brains may stifle inflammation and catalyse the
formation of new blood supplies to stroke-damaged
tissue.”
5/3/2017
335
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈


Cloner trouble: The embryonic stem cell
success at University of Oregon
(see 5/17/13) has come under fire for two
things: a rush to publication, and sloppy
errors. New Scientist and Nature reported
the controversy. So far, it appears none
of the errors affected the experimental
results. Mitalipov admitted the mistakes
but defends his work.
How This Translates to Policy
5/3/2017
336
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈
Protecting the right to kill: In the wake of the Mitalipov

success, Nature’s editors urged the journal’s scientific members
to take ownership of the stem cell debate, lest public fears stifle
progress. The editors acknowledged, “It is true that the
research faces ethical controversy on three fronts: egg
donation, embryo destruction and cloning.” They also
acknowledged that induced pluripotent stem cells appear so far
to work just as well as hESC without the ethical problems:
“crucially they do not require egg recruitment, embryo
destruction or cloning.” Yet the editors seemed more
concerned about preventing a public outcry against the
destruction of human embryos. Without proof, they said,
“Whatever the outcome of those investigations, there are some
clinical applications for which cloned stem cells could be the
best option.” The prior week, though, Nature editors urged
scientists to accept more social responsibility for risky new 337
5/3/2017
technologies.
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

Why stop at embryos? In an article entitled “Alzheimer’s
disease, the soft target of the euthanasia
debate,” Medical Xpress aired the views of Megan-Jane
Johnstone (Deakin University) about euthanasia. Johnstone
sees a softening of public attitudes about euthanasia with so
many elderly declining into dementia. “The proposal to
allow euthanasia as a morally warranted option in the
treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is
neither simple nor straightforward,” she said. “Anything less
than an honest, transparent and accountable debate,
which has been lacking to date, would be an assault on the
integrity of all—both those for and against the euthanasia
proposal—who are trying in their own ways to care for those
who are confronting the hard-nosed reality of their inevitable
mortality.”
5/3/2017
338
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

Why stop at euthanasia? New
Scientist provoked controversy with this eyecatching headline: “Is extinction really such a
bad thing?” Consultant Shaoni Bhattacharya
was not proposing it for humans or anything like
that; she was just commenting on a new exhibit
on extinction at London’s Natural History
Museum. “A thoughtful exhibition at
London’s Natural History Museum explores
the benefits of extinction, and the possibility
of humanity eradicating itself.” The world
5/3/2017
339
view is both Darwinian and Malthusian:
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈


“Survival is tough, and in a masterful stroke, the exhibition
drives this home with a retro video game. In the species
extinction game, the player must manoeuvre a Pac-Man-like
creature around a world beset with creeping ice ages,
fiery volcanoes and relentless winds, all the while
competing with other animated species to snaffle sparse
food supplies. A genius touch is the availability of
“adaptation” tokens, which allow your creature to evolve
traits to help it survive longer in its hostile world.”
The museum portrays extinction as a part of life. “Extinction
isn’t necessarily the end of the world, it could be just the
beginning…,” one sign reads. “In a thoughtprovoking section, the museum presents the concept
of Homo extinctus — humans wiped out forever.” Sweet
dreams.
5/3/2017
340
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

The choice is clear. Evolution is pro-death, creation is
pro-life. Evolution sees death as a good thing;
creation sees it as a curse. Evolution says “what’s the
big deal?”; creation says humans, made in the image
of God, are more precious than animals. Evolution
sees millions of years of senseless struggle against
elements just for the reward of passing on one’s
genes in an endless cycle of meaninglessness that
ends in a charred, dead world. Creation sees death
as an intruder, an enemy, that will be conquered in the
new heavens and new earth, and has been conquered
for those who accept Christ’s death and resurrection
on their behalf. Choose you this day.
5/3/2017
341
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

The sanctity of human life is the dividing
issue for stem cell research, abortion and
euthanasia. It’s easy to see why
evolutionists are so dismissive of the
ethical qualms “religious people” worry
about. They only see cells and fetuses as
clumps of matter, when in fact, a human
embryo, even from the single-celled
zygote, contains the entire genetic
program for an adult human being.
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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

Evolutionists tend to be pragmatists. If people are
having abortions anyway, why not grab some of the
stem cells? (They fail to see how this legitimizes
abortion and creates a market for it.) If women are
producing eggs anyway, why not harvest
them? (They fail to take seriously the potential abuses
to women.) If human blastocysts can’t produce adult
clones (yet), why not harvest their stem cells? If old
people can’t communicate any more, why not help
them die? If everything competes for resources, why
not let humans go extinct? If humans are wrecking
the planet, why not drastically cut their numbers? OK,
evolutionist, set the example – you first.
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Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

The New Scientist article on extinction
shows that some evolutionists still think
Malthus had the right idea: competition for
scarce resources guarantees lots of
death. That notion that spurred Darwin to
use the “struggle for existence” as a driver
for natural selection has been debunked
(7/02/09, 12/09/09 #3, 9/18/10) but it keeps
returning. In actuality, freedom lets human
society blossom, but tyranny destroys
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it. Need proof? The 20th century.
Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal
根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈

Evolutionists would not want to live in the world
their world view is leading toward. Those who
love Christ need to keep the leaven of his
teachings spreading through a lost world. Keep
the salt in the decaying meat. Keep the light
shining in the darkness. All that is required for a
brave new world to embrace death is for godly
people to do nothing. “I call heaven and earth as
witnesses today against you, that I have set
before you life and death, blessing and cursing;
therefore choose life, that both you and your
descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). 345
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经


How can you tell where sounds come
from? The brain is quicker than the speed of
sound between your ears.
There’s only about 8 inches between your ears
(more, perhaps, for fatheads). The speed of
sound is finite. The tiny time lag between the
arrival at one ear compared to the other is what
enables us to sense the source direction of the
sound, but there’s more to it than that. If
signals did not get processed in the brain faster
than the time lag, the information would not be
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useful.
Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经


How can you tell where sounds come
from? The brain is quicker than the speed of
sound between your ears.
There’s only about 8 inches between your ears
(more, perhaps, for fatheads). The speed of
sound is finite. The tiny time lag between the
arrival at one ear compared to the other is what
enables us to sense the source direction of the
sound, but there’s more to it than that. If
signals did not get processed in the brain faster
than the time lag, the information would not be
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useful.
Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经
Science Daily asks, “How Do We Locate the Spatial Position


of Sounds? Mechanism Responsible for Creation of Giant
Synapses Discovered.” Sure enough, there are massive hubs
or neural intersections in our brains that can process
information faster than the speed of sound. Here’s the upshot
(notice the astonishment):
“Humans and most mammals can determine the spatial origin
of sounds with remarkable acuity. We use this ability all the
time — crossing the street; locating an invisible ringing
cell phone in a cluttered bedroom. To accomplish this small
daily miracle, the brain has developed a circuit that’s rapid
enough to detect the tiny lag that occurs between the
moment the auditory information reaches one of our ears, and
the moment it reaches the other. The mastermind of this
circuit is the “Calyx of Held,” the largest known synapse in
the brain. EPFL scientists have revealed the role that a certain
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protein plays in initiating the growth of these giant synapses.”
Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经


Because it resembles the calyx of a flower, anatomist H.
Held described it as such in 1893. Regarding
it, Wikipedia says, “This structure is specially designed
for fast, efficient transportation of information from one
cell to the next.” The part of the brain that processes
auditory information has a number of these structures.
According to the Science Daily article, studies at the Ecole
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) show the
Calyx of Held to act “almost like peer-to-peer
communication between neurons.” These synapses
have hundreds of inputs. “The result is that information
is processed extremely quickly, in a few fractions of a
millisecond, instead of the slower pace of more than 10
milliseconds that occurs in most other neuronal circuits.”
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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经
EPFL scientists identified a protein
named BMP that is implicated in
developing the contact points for the Calyx
of Held. “The impact of this study will go
well beyond increasing our
understanding of the auditory system,” the
article says. “The results suggest that
the BMP protein plays an important role
in developing connectivity in the brain.”
 Medical Xpress begins with an image of the
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giant synapse.

Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经

“The brain has developed” this
circuit. Funny; did you ever ask
your brain to do that? There’s
another example of pulling off
evolutionary magic by
misdirection.
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Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经

In his excellent book, The Wonder of Man (1999), Dr.
Werner Gitt provided numerous amazing details about
our senses. The ear, “our highest precision sense
organ,” is able to detect energy ratios of one million
million to one, an “astonishing feat” that approaches
auditory perfection. Since each ear provides two sound
paths, we actually get four inputs for localizing sound
sources. Considering the path lengths and the speed of
sound, the brain must be able to process inputs arriving
as close as 0.00003 seconds apart. “In acoustic
orientation terms this means that a sound source located
only about 3° from the centre line of the head is
recognized as being off-centre,” he said. The slight
difference in sound intensity between the two ears also
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gives us information on the distance to the sound.
Hear Ye! Directional Sound Enabled by Superfast Neurons
你们要听！定向声音启用超快神经

Dr. Gitt’s book, though 14 years old, is highly
recommended if you can find it. It’s well
illustrated and extremely interesting. Not only
does he provide a wealth of information about
the senses and other body organs, he gives the
glory not just to an unspecified designer, but to
the Lord Jesus Christ. [Note: None of the
secular sources in this entry dared mention
their idol, Charlie.] The power of the Christian
explanation for the wonders of creation is in the
details that this book so beautifully presents.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言


Here are some recent fossil finds that, whether they fit or not,
are claimed to shed light on evolution.
Goby a fish: Otoliths are rocks in the head of many vertebrates
that aid with orientation and gravity sensing. An article
on PhysOrg claims that fish otoliths provide “unprecedented
insight” into the evolution of gobioid fishes, one of the most
numerous groups of bony fish. But what can really be told from
little rocks? What is the “eloquence of the otoliths,” as the
headline teases? Does the body of the article live up to the
hype? Actually, even though a team claims to have produced a
detailed phylogeny, and claims it can read otoliths like a genetic
code, the major finding from “perfectly preserved” otoliths in
Italy just moves one fish family to another clade. Moreover, the
lack of fossils that can be dated “has hampered
understanding of the evolutionary history of this highly
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successful group of fishes.”
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Turtle on the half shell: A fossil of a turtle-like animal with back
ribs that are not fused together, as in modern turtles, is
attracting interest. Both Science Now and Science Daily put
their headlines just-so story form, like “How the Turtle Got Its
Shell” (see 10/09/08). The comparison of the fossil to a turtle
looks convincing that the fossil is an evolutionary ancestor, but
that inference requires believing that the “beginnings of the
turtle shell started 40 million years earlier than previously
thought” according to another Science Daily article. It also
requires believing that the turtle’s novel respiratory system
evolved in concert with changes in the ribs. “If
you incorporate your ribs into a protective shell, then you
have to find a new way to breathe!” one researcher
exclaimed. That being the case, they are only claiming that the
South African fossil named Eunotosaurus may provide “clues”
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to turtle evolution.
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Scrambled dino eggs: Fossil dinosaur eggs are rare,
especially ones that contain fossil embryos. National
Geographic used the “missing link” meme in its
announcement of theropod eggs found in
Portugal. Lucky for evolutionists, they fit in a gap that
“has frustrated scientists because many of the birdlike aspects of reproduction seem to have
appeared during the gap.” Scientists inferred a few
things about the eggs, such as that they must have
been buried, but nothing definitive of increase in
complexity or information except a single layer as
opposed to two or three layers of assumed later
dinosaurs and birds.
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Triceratops cousin: Live Science announced a new
ceratopsian dinosaur claimed to have lived “12 million
years before the rise of its more famous younger
relative.” It’s being called “a new kind of three-horned
dinosaur” that “may be the oldest cousin
of Triceratops yet.” Judging from the artist
reconstruction, though, it’s hard to see much
difference. Judiceratops (from the Judith River
formation, Montana) has the frill and three horns and
most other features Triceratops, yet the article asks
readers to believe that these dinosaurs evolved rapidly,
with “a lot of turnover” as older species were replaced
by newer ones. Whatever differences might be apparent
to paleontologists on the outside seem trivial compared
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to the complexity of the inside of both creatures.
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Wood you believe: PhysOrg posted a
story of a buried forest in Switzerland that
is being studied for
dendrochronology. Claimed to be 13,000
years old in Zurich clay, the pine wood
was discovered by accident. The data
have not been formally published, but the
article includes a picture of some cross
sections being analyzed.
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

The early bird: No sooner had our entry on “Feathers before
flight” gone to press (5/28/13) that a new “feathered
dinosaur” announcement hit the wires (paper in Nature). All
the secular sites went nuts, as expected: “New candidate
for world’s first bird” (National Geographic); “New
feathered dino may be world’s first bird” (Live Science);
“New contender for first bird” (Nature News). The
reconstruction makes this creature look something like a
bantam chicken with teeth, but fully fledged with modernlooking feathers and wings. A consequence of calling
Aurornis xui the first bird is that it puts Archaeopteryx back
on the bird line (BBC News, New Scientist), after the
controversial shake-up by Xing Xu in 2011
(see 7/28/2011). Science Now, though, is not sure this fossil,
found by a Chinese farmer and sold to a museum, is
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authentic:
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

“But Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles County in California, says
that Aurornis must fly through at least one important hoop
before it can claim to be the first bird: Its authenticity must
be proved. That’s because the specimen was not found
during excavations by Godefroit’s team, but—like most early
birds and feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning province,
including many studied by Xu—it was supposedly found by
farmers and acquired from a Chinese fossil dealer,
who sold it to the province’s Yizhou Fossil and Geology Park.
China’s museums and research institutions have been plagued
in recent years by the circulation of fake or altered fossils,
including the infamous “Archaeoraptor” fake of the late 1990s, a
claimed “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds
published by National Geographic.”
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Many of the science news sites though,
including National Geographic, let their
imaginations take wings, asserting that it is truly
a feathered dinosaur ancestral to birds. The
original paper was more concerned about
phylogenetic placement of this fossil than about
explaining how powered flight could have
evolved. The supplementary information
file claims there was no evidence of forgery but
concurred that most of the spectacular
feathered dinosaur fossils have come from
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dealers.
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Mammoth blood: A potentially gigantic, though
controversial, finding came from Siberia this week:
mammoth blood preserved in ice (see Siberian
Times, “Exclusive: The first pictures of blood
from a 10,000 year old Siberian
mammoth”; Live Science, “Perfectly preserved
mammoth blood unearthed in ice”). The photos
show clear pictures of blood vessels, red meat and
liquid blood collected in a vial. Nature urged
caution in its announcement, “Can a mammoth
carcass really preserve flowing blood and
possibly live cells?” but could not rule out the
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authenticity of the claim:
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

“The Siberian Times obtained striking photos of the
specimen showing the reddish tissues and a vial of
the dark brown liquid said to be blood that was
found in ice cavities under the animal’s belly, as
well as additional details of the discovery. The story
quotes mammoth researcher Semyon Grigoriev of the
North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, who led
the recovery of the mammoth, as speculating that the
blood contains “a kind of natural anti-freeze” and
declaring the specimen — a female that was between
50 and 60 years old when she died — to be “the best
preserved mammoth in the history of
paleontology.””
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Moreover, the report says this specimen gives
researchers “a really good chance of finding live
cells” — no wonder the Nature reporter said,
“Wow!” before mentioning a few caveats: “The
upshot: it really does appear to be an incredible
find, but some of the claims about it are
incorrect as reported or have yet to be
established as fact.” A few experts weighed in on
the possibility that the claims are true. None of
them claimed they were definitely false. One
asked, “Another question is, how were these
samples preserved in this state for so long?
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

The discoverers postulated that some kind of natural
antifreeze protected the blood and soft
tissues. They said they are working with South
Korean researchers who want to clone a mammoth,
using an elephant for gestation. Speaking of
mammoths, Science Daily presented a new theory
for their extinction: a meteor impact changed the
climate. Considering that mammoths and
mastodons lived throughout much of the world, and
some are buried in mass graves like those in Hot
Springs, South Dakota, impact theories require
auxiliary hypotheses to explain why a meteor would
be selective in its effects.
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

The last two stories are the most
interesting (early bird and
mammoth blood). The prior ones
show evolutionists doing what they
usually do, forcing obscure pieces
of evidence into their worldview
picture (see 5/01/08 commentary,
“How not to work a puzzle”).
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Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Regarding Aurornis, skeptical readers should watch
these “feathered dinosaur” fossils like a
hawk. Science made a very damaging admission by
stating that most of the fossils come from
dealers. Just think—very few, if any, were found intact
in the strata, including those found by master dinobird
storyteller Xing Xu (5/01/10). Forgers fooled the
experts once with “Archaeoraptor” back in 1999. Is it
possible that many of the most controversial
“feathered dinosaurs” are fakes? Those that are not
fakes (like Archaeopteryx, found across the world in
Germany) are genuine, but it was a bird, capable of
powered flight. Consider: the motivation for forgery is
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strong.
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Poor Chinese farmers can gain riches and fame for
finding what evolutionists want. Maybe the forgers
learned lessons from “Archaeoraptor” and have gotten
better at their craft. Why can’t the paleontologists pull
authentic fossils out of the strata themselves? Is it
because the fossils are not there? Why are the same
species never found anywhere else in the world in
comparable strata? If forgery is proved for some or
any of them, creationists will be all over it like white on
paint. It would seem in the best interests of the
evolutionists, therefore, to err on the side of caution,
stop the hype, and go dig up some in situ specimens,
documenting their provenance. Their reputations
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depend on it.
Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling
恰当的化石有利于进化寓言

Regarding the mammoth blood, this is an amazing
story worth watching. More analysis is needed that
can satisfy scientists, but the fact that many frozen
mammoths are already known would seem to discount
motivation to commit a forgery. In July or August the
discoverers are bringing other researchers to the cold
site where the specimen is preserved. Imagine if live
cells and intact blood are actually proved. That would
be a “Wow!” indeed—a finding that would cast serious
doubt on the dating methods used to claim this beast
died 10,000 years ago. Until we have more reliable
information, though, creationists should include
disclaimers in their coverage.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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