Archive: Eugenics, Sprites, Viruses, Mars, Rafting Rodents, More

Here are some of the stories we were reporting in mid-October 2001.

Note: some embedded links may no longer work.

New Eugenics Movement Underway, Claims Historian  10/12/2001
In this month’s edition of Science Magazine’s Essays on Science and Society, Garland E. Allen asks, “Is a New Eugenics Afoot?” and answers, “Yes.”

Allen is a historian of science at the Evolutionary and Population Biology Program of Washington University, St. Louis. After describing the history and thinking of the Eugenics movement that was popular in Progressivist America (1900-1930) but got really ugly in Nazi Germany, he argues that similar socioeconomic and cultural trends exist today. Today’s focus on the bottom line, ethnic prejudices, and tendencies to explain everything in the genes indicate we are “well on the road” to a new eugenics era.

This article is a must read. Allen does an admirable job of summarizing the thinking of the early twentieth century eugenics movement that led to the forced sterilization of 60,000 “defectives” whom the scientific and political elitists had decided were not worthy of having children. What Allen does not stress enough, however, is the Darwinist connection to eugenics. He does admit that “Eugenicists were to be the ‘managers’ of the human germ plasm, in the progressive spirit, and would take control of human evolution.” It was Darwinism that reduced humans to genes, and made them helpless expressions of heredity, with no responsibility. Many of the early eugenics advocates, like Haeckel, were staunch Darwinists and racists. They had an air of scientific respectability by appearing concerned about human suffering and economic prosperity, but their true motives were to be masters of human evolution, create a super-race, and exalt themselves as superior to those they viewed as defectives in the gene pool. It’s haunting to see how even elite scientists of the day deceived themselves by picking samples that proved their biases.

Could it happen again? It’s happening already. Cloning, stem-cell research, and abortion are essentially eugenics programs justified often in Darwinian terms. The Human Genome Project has a reductionist side, giving scientists incentive to explain all human failings in terms of bad genes. National Geographic TV recently had a special on how in the future we might design super-athletes and other “beautiful” people, or ideal warriors on the battlefield. Taking control of our own future evolution is a dominant theme among Darwinists. It was repeated in the recent PBS series Evolution. While positive eugenics (improving people) sounds noble, there is the dark, negative side of the coin: preventing “defectives” from being born in the first place. In many cases, abortion is eugenics in action: deciding that a baby with Down’s syndrome or some other genetic abnormality has no right to be born. Stem cell research treats the human genome as property to be manipulated.

Will we learn from history? It could get worse than the last time. With the new genetic tools at our disposal, guided only by Darwinian ethics, there bodes a grim future for anyone society may deem undesirable. Only the Christian ethic of human dignity and compassion for the weak can protect us from potentially catastrophic abuses of human rights ahead.

Lightning Sprites Aid Life  10/12/2001
A Penn State team has modeled the ephemeral electrical discharges in the atmosphere called sprites that accompany lightning, and found that they extend not only up to the ionosphere but down to the cloud tops. These forked streamers, which last only 10 milliseconds (a blink of an eye is 250 milliseconds), may therefore play a significant role in the formation of the ozone layer and in fixing nitrogen, vital to all life. Most scientists did not even believe in the existence of sprites until about ten years ago. The report in Nature Science Update includes pictures, movies and sound.

Yet another small wonder on which life depends is thus discovered. The world seems too complex a combination of fortuitous factors, producing a life-giving environment, to have been an accident.

Virus Evolution Claimed Despite DNA Differences  10/12/2001
“Structural biologists have found that two viruses with very different DNA share remarkably similar molecular structures,” says a report in Science Now. Comparing structure of a human virus with a bacterial virus, Roger Burnet of the Wistar Institute:

thinks the two viruses could have shared a common ancestor, because key parts of individual proteins resemble each other in both species. This has allowed the viruses to produce similar structures even as their DNA diverged. “The evidence makes it hard to imagine they didn’t come from some common ancestor,” agrees Roger Hendrix, a biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. The results, he says, support a growing body of evidence pointing to a billion-year-old family resemblance between bacterial viruses and human viruses—implying that viruses may be more closely related to one another than previously thought.

Evolutionists use the term convergent evolution to describe similarities in outward appearance (morphology) that they believe had different ancestries (phylogeny).

Evolutionists like to blow smoke when the evidence contradicts Darwinism. Here is a superficial resemblance between two bugs, but their DNA code is “very different.” Unless they can explain how the DNA went from one form to the other while preserving outward similarities, the “growing body of evidence” actually contradicts the theory they had common ancestors. What will it take to convince evolutionists to give up? No matter what shows up under the microscope, it is metamorphosed into evidence for evolution. Darwinists are like the Taliban being bombed to oblivion yet claiming victory.

Sea Cow With Legs Found  10/11/2001
National Geographic claims that a fossil sea cow with legs has been found in Jamaica:

This new find fills a significant gap in the fossil record, helping scientists complete the picture of how land animals evolved to sea creatures . . . . “The fossil record for whales is more complete than for sea cows, but every day the fossil record is getting better,” said [discoverer Daryl] Domning. “Major gaps are becoming minor gaps, and minor gaps are evaporating” . . . . The findings should go a long way toward settling the debate between creationism and evolution, said Domning. Creationists claim there is no evidence of macro-evolution– intermediate forms of animals demonstrating the evolution from one kind of animal to another. “We’re finding more and more dramatic evidence by the day that major changes have occurred in both appearance and adaptation,” said Domning. “It’s no longer a matter of theory. We have actual bones in hand representing all phases of the evolution, from land animal to sea animal, in different groups of animals.”

The report is published in the Oct 11 Nature.

We should be accustomed to National Geographic’s bluffing by now. This is the rag that gave us Piltdown Chicken, remember? Domning found a hippo-like creature; no flippers, able to walk around on land or in ponds; what does that prove? We have sea lions; we have otters; we have beaver; we have dogs that like to swim– that are all having a jolly time just being what they are. Let’s play the Darwin game and arrange them into an family tree. While we’re at it, let’s do the same with the wrenches in the garage.

This evolutionist is stretching an inch into a mile to prop up evolution, and NG does a disservice by exaggerating the recent whale fossil, which is fragmentary and disputed by evolutionists themselves. If that record is bad, and the sea cow lineage is worse (as claimed here), does this new fossil justify calling it “dramatic” evidence to prove evolution and refute the claims of creationists? Look at the evidence, not the words, and you see no such thing.

Evolutionists are dismayed by the rise of creationism. They are stepping on themselves to dig up transitional forms to fill the voids that they know are there, and to span the wide gaps with flimsy bridges made of questionable bones, glued together with bluffing and just-so stories. They won’t hold up.

Mars, a Watery and Stormy World  10/11/2001
Two Mars stories are circulating, one about the current global dust storm that Mars Global Surveyor is watching from orbit. The other story from NewsWise claims that Mars has a huge aquifer that has flooded large portions of the planet in the past.

Mars storytellers can’t resist the old tale, with assumptions stacked like cards, that since Mars had volcanoes, it might have had water; if Mars had water, it might have had hydrothermal vents; if Mars had hydrothermal vents, it might have had life:

More, there may be hydrothermally active sites in the basin/aquifer similar to hydrothermally active sites on Earth now known to harbor life, Dohm said. These potential aqueous environments are prime candidates for hydrologic, mineralogic and “exobiologic” exploration, Dohm and his colleagues emphasize.

Is this the only way they can lobby for more Mars missions?

Rodents Sailed to South America  10/11/2001
In an attempt to reconcile paleontological data with morphological data, scientists have proposed that South American rodents rode on rafts from Africa, because their distribution occurred too recently to have been due to continental drift. Others have suggested multiple convergent evolution. Now, according to EurekAlert, molecular biologists want to try to find the true story of their ancestry in the genes.

Someone should tell them it won’t work. We already reported that the DNA clock is unreliable, and molecular phylogenies don’t match evolutionary trees made the old way (by looking at the animals and fossils and guessing their family history). This is an exercise in futility, trying to force fit data into preconceived theories of common ancestry. This story contains numerous interesting admissions, such as:

• The idea that the South American group shares a common ancestry with the African group has been controversial for years. 
• Scientists have indeed suggested that caviomorph rodents in South America had multiple origins….
• Recent discoveries in molecular evolutionary biology are changing significantly the traditional ideas about mammalian evolution….
• That finding [regarding ape and gorilla evolution] sent the entire paleontological community in a tailspin because it was so counter to what they had been proposing….
• How many fossils have anything to do with a direct ancestry of the lineages we see living today? And how do we fit those fossils to the genetic evolutionary tree?….
• This work will help reconstruct more accurately the tree of life, which is a really important goal for the future….

It should be evident that the evolutionists are living in a fantasy world of storytelling and wishful thinking, not scientific evidence.

Article 10/10/2001: Phillip E. Johnson is back on the speaking tour. In his Weekly Wedge Update he finds rationalist Frederick Crews shooting himself in the foot.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry Goes to One-Handed Experts  10/10/2001
As reported in Nature Science Update, the experts are not one-handed, but the subjects of their study are. Sharpless, Noyori and Knowles have helped the pharmaceutical industry immensely by devising ways to sort lefties out of mixed populations of chiral molecules, since the body can only use one-handed versions of many medicines. By developing chiral catalysts, they have made it much easier to mass produce quantities of only one hand.

So again we see that intelligence can sort the two with Nobel-level expertise, but who was there at the origin of life to produce only left-handed proteins? Left- and right-handed forms are chemically equivalent but can have drastically different effects on life, while proteins composed of both hands are useless. This is the mystery of the left-handed proteins, which in evolutionary circles remains unsolved.  Getting the first protein all one-handed, without the aid of natural selection, is immensely improbable, so much as so as to rule out a naturalistic origin of life on that basis alone.

Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to Discoverers of Cell Cycle  10/09/2001
The 100th Anniversary Nobel Prizes for medicine or physiology have been awarded to three cell biologists who helped understand the cell cycle, the process that leads to cell division, according to Scientific American. The report also has a link to an interview with Paul Nurse, one of the recipients.

The intelligence of these brilliant scientists is no match for the intelligence built into the simplest yeast cell. The cell cycle is a wonderfully complicated system of feedbacks and checks and triggers and switches. Leland Hartwell, one of the recipients, discovered that there are checkpoints that tell the cell whether to proceed with the operation or not, or to self destruct if damage has occurred. The operations are all controlled by proteins, some of which are turned on and off by other proteins. It is only when something goes dreadfully wrong in the system that we get cancer or other diseases; for trillions of times in our lifetimes, the systems work perfectly. In a world cursed because of sin, it’s amazing that cell operations still work as well as they do.

If we could see a cell the size of a building in operation, we would be utterly amazed. It would be a huge factory run by robots, sending cargo down subway tunnels, producing tools on automated assembly lines, sending instructions from the master library, and for the grand finale, on cue, replicating itself! Can you think of any human invention that even approaches this level of technology? The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews said that Christ is worthy of more honor than Moses, just as the builder of the house has more honor than the house (Heb 3:3). Similarly, who deserves man’s highest prize more, the scientists, composed of cells, who look at and try to understand the cell, or the Maker of the cell?

Bacteria Inspire Efficient Fuel  10/08/2001
Lowly bacteria possess a tool that is the envy of auto makers: an enzyme called hydrogenase that can produce clean-burning hydrogen from acids. Researchers at the University of Illinois are trying to imitate the active parts of this enzyme to produce hydrogen economically for tomorrow’s fuel cell engines that can run a car with water as the waste product. See summary report on the paper from the Journal of the American Chemical Society in Nature Science Update.

The bacterial enzyme hydrogenase is a complex and precise structure. It is composed of a chain of amino acids (all left-handed), that coils into a helical shape and then, due to precise placement of side chains on the amino acids, folds (with the help of other enzymes) into a complex three-dimensional structure. The presence of iron and nickel atoms at precise locations creates the “active site” that allows the hydrogenase to extract hydrogen from acids. The fact that molecular engineers have to apply a lot of intelligence to reverse engineer this molecule means the original is elegantly designed. How can evolutionists believe this and a thousand other precision tools in the cell are the handiwork of blind, mindless, undirected forces?