Archive: Sagan, Schools, Tools, Design, Noses, Fossils, Water, More
Here are some of the stories we were reporting in early November 2001, restored from archives.
Note: some embedded links may no longer work.
Carl Sagan Honored with new Astrobiology Center 11/09/2001
In one of his last official acts as NASA administrator, Dan Goldin has dedicated the new Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos at NASA-Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. November 9th would have been late astronomer’s 67th birthday. The multi-disciplinary center will try to answer the question for which Sagan was famous, “Are we alone in the universe?”
Carl Sagan has become almost synonymous with naturalistic cosmology. For atheists, Sagan replaced the hope of eternal life with the hope of mankind someday joining a community of galactic civilizations. Sadly, it didn’t do him much good personally.
Relativism Wanes as Sept. 11 Events Illustrate Reality of Evil 11/09/2001
The terrorist attacks of September 11 are causing many to recognize the reality of evil, says ABC News. Prior to that date, it would have been politically incorrect or judgmental to describe anyone’s world view as good or evil, but now many are saying the E-word is the only appropriate description for the deeds of the terrorists and the world view that produced them. ABC quotes various experts on whether it is deeds or people that are evil, whether everyone has the seeds of evil, and whether evil is an intrinsically religious concept or not. The article gives favorable press to spokesmen who believe there are absolute standards of good and evil – a concept often scoffed at by intellectuals prior to September 11.
We may be seeing the downfall of postmodernism. Remember how shortly after September 11, even scientists were appalled and were asking for prayer. As time goes by, will the postmodernists and relativists come out of hiding? We’ll have to see, but right now, most audiences would boo and jeer someone who would dare allege the moral equivalence of jihad and antiterrorism.
The Bible teaches the objective reality of evil. Evil began with Satan’s rebellion, infected all mankind at Adam’s fall, and is only conquerable through redemption in Christ. It also commands us to hate evil, and authorizes governments to punish evildoers. But in Darwinian philosophy, evil is an undefined term. If anything, evil could only be that which inhibits one’s reproductive success. hat definition doesn’t quite cut it with images of jumbo jets flying into buildings indelibly etched into our minds.
Short Takes: Nature Had It First Dept. 11/09/2001: Writing in Nature this week, two biologists respond to claims that engineers recently figured out how to transport liquid spheres on solid surfaces, saying bugs figured this out millions of years ago. They say, “In short, ‘liquid marbles’ are yet another example of how insects ‘developed’ a technology through natural selection long before humans got around to it. Technologists (high and low) and engineers should look for new solutions with the eyes of biologists.” For a description of how beetles collect dewdrops on their backs, see Science News 11/17/2001, p. 312.
Alabama Keeps Warning Stickers in School Science Textbooks 11/09/2001
The Alabama Board of Education approved without dissent the placement of warning stickers in its school science textbooks that say evolution is “a controversial theory . . . . Instructional material associated with controversy should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” The stickers are a milder form of earlier warnings that encouraged students to ask specific questions about evolution, such as why transitional forms were lacking in the fossil record. The new move is somewhat of a compromise between groups like the National Center for Science Education [NCSE] that wanted no warnings, and the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum who were concerned the board might drop the warnings entirely. Source: Los Angeles Times.
Isn’t it bizarre that evolutionists do not want students to think? These people are from the same mold that screamed academic freedom! to teach Marxism, anti-war sentiments and every liberal agenda in the 60s. From their point of view, questioning Darwinism is as silly as questioning gravity, but in actuality, it’s all about power. They want to maintain their stranglehold on educational policy relating to origins, because it is Darwinism that gives the appearance of scientific respectability to individual autonomy and moral relativism. So they continually portray the ones wishing for academic freedom to question Darwinism as religious radicals.
What’s so harmful about telling students that evolution is controversial and should be approached with an “open mind, studied carefully and critically considered”? Why must the world be kept safe for Darwinism? If anything illustrates the false facade of evolution as science, this is it. Science is supposed to be about weighing evidence with an objective mind. Let’s put the evidence out there and give students logical thinking skills so they can find out for themselves if evolution is credible. If evolution has to be protected from scrutiny, it is not science. Help your student ask questions and get straight answers: here are ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution, and if your state doesn’t provide the stickers, here are warning labels you can print and paste in yourself.
[Editor note: the law was challenged by the ACLU, which won an appeal against the Cobb County School District in 2007 forcing the stickers to be removed. See analysis by Casey Luskin at Evolution News, 9 March 2010.]
Too Much Design Proves Evolution 11/09/2001
“Indeed, not the least of Darwin’s achievements was to lay the argument by design to rest,” declare two evolutionists in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But how are we to explain the bewildering complexity in the living cell? In a dexterous turnaround, two evolutionists parry evidence for over-design into evidence for no design. Gerald Edelman and Joseph Gally first distinguish between redundancy and degeneracy. Engineers often use redundancy (backup systems of the same structure), but otherwise trim their design to the essentials, avoiding superfluous parts. Degenerate systems, on the other hand (no moral connotations in this context), contain multiple different structures that accomplish similar functions: more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.
Edelman and Gally next establish that life is replete with examples of degeneracy: (1) There are multiple DNA codons for the same amino acid, (2) Genomes have long repetitive strands of so-called “junk DNA” and multiple genes for the same function, (3) Organisms lacking essential proteins sometimes find alternate ways to fulfill the missing ingredient’s function, (4) Antibodies that are structurally different can have the same immune effect, (5) Nervous systems are characterized by an overabundance of pathways. They argue that degenerate systems like these are both a prerequisite for and product of natural selection, not design. Unguided, non-directed processes of evolution would be expected to have a degenerate pool of possibilities to draw from. Selection pressures would preserve whatever ingredients achieve better fitness.
The authors concede this is just a tentative hypothesis, but believe that the concept of degeneracy will prove fruitful in understanding many aspects of evolution: “In our limited experience so far, we have found that systems selected for high degeneracy with respect to any given set of outputs also show high complexity. Although a general functional dependence of degeneracy on complexity has not yet been formally derived, it is an interesting conjecture [emphasis added] that the two properties go hand in hand.”
PNAS should have a separate category for “interesting conjecture” papers to segregate them from real scientific papers. These authors think they have hit on something new, but there are several reasons their speculation won’t work. First, the number of useful combinations of anything is just a tiny fraction of the sea of possibilities. We reported September 6 that biochemists are looking for a needle in thousands of haystacks when trying to identify useful polypeptides among all the possible combinations of amino acids. What advantage would a cell have in carrying around quintillions of useless structures for the one or two that might do the trick? Wouldn’t natural selection select these away as dead weight?
Furthermore, many cellular structures are irreducibly complex and must have been completely functional from the beginning, before natural selection could be considered. Also, this provides no help for the chirality problem, the origin of handedness in biomolecules, again preceding natural selection.
The authors try to replace an engineering god with a tinkering god, but they second-guess what a designer would do. True, organisms maintain a plethora of alternatives, but these are not random; they work together in a variety of effective ways. A better explanation is that the Creator built a high level of adaptability into the system to cope with changing environments. Animals migrate into forests and deserts, and have to survive winter and summer, wet and dry, high and low, and a host of other challenges.
Evolutionists cannot just knock over a human engineering model of design like a straw man and think they have disproved a Designer. The authors of this paper claim that Darwin disproved the argument from design, but then stare incredible design in the face and claim it proves Darwin right. It’s ironic that they use Poe’s Purloined Letter as a symbol of something right under your nose that you can’t see.
Early Man Developed Bone Tools 30,000 Years Earlier Than Expected 11/08/2001
Specialized bone tools found at Blombos Cave in South Africa are estimated at 70,000 years old, at least 20,000 and maybe 30,000 years older than previous theories suggested, according to National Geographic. Scientists used to think bone tool-making did not achieve prominence until about 35,000 years ago, primarily in Europe, but the new finds are causing them to reassess their theories. One paleoanthropologist said, “I think that when we start to get a big sample, the picture of modern human evolution is going to look very different.”
Evolutionary just-so stories about early man are as entertaining as the weather in South Dakota: if you don’t like it, wait five minutes.
Early Cambrian Animals Are Evolutionary Experiments (Maybe) 11/08/2001
On the one hand, early Cambrian multicellular organisms might have been evolutionary experiments, says EurekAlert. But on the other hand, they might have just reflected a strange environment with microbial mats all over the seafloor, claims David Bottjer of the University of California: “So we are suggesting a different evolutionary explanation than what has been offered before, and, in that sense, are breaking from tradition.” The article concludes, “This discovery provides a piece for the ongoing puzzle work of understanding how animal life first evolved on Earth.”
*Sigh*. In a game where only naturalistic explanations are allowed, you get two choices: dumb and dumber.
BBC Releases Walking With Beasts 11/08/2001
The sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs, BBC’s new six-part docudrama Walking With Beasts covers the period after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Smarting from criticism that the prequel blurred the distinction between fact and guesswork, the creators were spurred to double-check their research.
There are limits to how much you can know from bones. Even comparing with known animals, there are details that can never be known, even if a prehistoric animal were to be hatched in a lab like in Jurassic Park. Concern for detail is admirable, but won’t fix the major problem: a slavish commitment to Darwinism and evolutionary time scales. Enjoy the series as entertainment, not history.
Update 12/03/2001: Answers in Genesis posted a review of Walking with Beasts, claiming it is virtually fact-free and perpetuates myths about creatures like Ambulocetis and Lucy that have long been debunked.
Nose Speaks an Odor Language 11/07/2001
The nose knows, but how does the brain understand the signals it sends? Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have mapped the olfactory nerves to the brain and found a surprise. Wondering how just 1000 nerves could respond to 10,000 odors, they discovered that the receptors combine their signals into a kind of language to vastly multiply the possible messages to the brain. So “instead of dedicating an individual odor receptor to a specific odor, the olfactory system uses an ‘alphabet’ of receptors to create a specific smell response within the neurons of the brain.” The paper is published in the Nov 8 Nature.
The sense of smell has been one of the least understood of the senses, and now it just got tremendously more complex. Sorry, evolutionists; it must be tough these days.
Fossil Cockroach Found in Exquisite Detail 11/07/2001
Paleontologists have found the largest fossil cockroach ever (3.5 inches long) in a coal mine in Ohio (click this Ohio State press release for details and pictures). The fossil shows fine details, even veins in the insect’s wings. The fossil is alleged to be 300 million years old.
The fossil roach is similar to living roaches, only larger. It is alleged to be basically unchanged for 300 million years, during which time the dinosaurs arose, evolved for 180 million years, went extinct, and mammals arose and diversified into their many forms. Ask yourself whether it is reasonable to (1) believe roaches didn’t evolve for 300 million years, or (2) question the credibility of evolutionary stories.
Why the Chinese Didn’t Develop Geology 11/07/2001
The Geological Society of America thinks that the reason the Chinese never developed a science of geology is apparent in their art. Chinese landscapes lack perspective and shadow, and according to Gary Rosenberg of the University Indiana, this reflects their Taoist worldview. The lack of interest in a geometric characterization of space reflected their priority to experience the “void beyond time and space, the source of primal energy,” in contrast to Western European artists who “were obsessed with geometric perspective because it manifested the existence of God in Nature . . . Western geometric space also visually facilitated an understanding of the continuity of spatial relationships that was vital to geology and which the Chinese perspective of resonance obscured.”
The world view of a religion or philosophy is intimately tied to the development of all the sciences (see our explanation in the introduction to The World’s Greatest Creation Scientists or this paper by Michael Bumbulis). It’s ironic that the GSA here acknowledges the Christian world view in the development of their own science–geology–yet takes a dogmatic anti-creation pro-evolution position, avidly pushing the slanted PBS Evolution materials, fighting creationism, and even writing a letter to Congress protesting a proposal to discourage teaching evolution with dogmatism.
Life Depends on Water Dance 11/07/2001
“Water shows surprising behavior at molecular level,” declares a headline from EurekAlert. Researchers at the University of Maine have found that water molecules are able to enter tiny carbon nanotubes in single file, in short bursts. They were studying how water reacts in the open and in pores when they discovered that “water acts in unexpected ways. The causes, they suggest, are fluctuations in density and a kind of naturally occurring molecular dance that happens between the hydrogen bonded water molecules in bulk water and in pores.” The behavior of water, still mysterious in many ways, directly affects many biological functions, such as the passage of nutrients in and out of tiny pores in membranes. The paper is published in the November 8 issue of Nature.
If scientists are still trying to figure out water, one of the simplest molecules, available for study right under their noses, how can they make dogmatic claims about what supposedly happened during the Big Bang billions of years ago under conditions not reproducible in the laboratory? Water is an amazing substance absolutely crucial to life in countless ways. How something so “simple” as water, composed of just two elements and three molecules, can baffle scientists for centuries should teach us a lesson about how little we really know.
Sweat for Your Protection 11/05/2001
Maybe you should return that antiperspirant; scientists have found a disinfectant in human sweat. According to Scientific American, a protein named Dermcidin is remarkably effective against several bacterial and fungal pathogens. This protein bears no resemblance to two other known antiseptic proteins secreted in other parts of the skin. It is secreted in the sweat glands and then dispersed onto the skin surface.
Another front-line defense against disease is thus revealed. You are actually sweating all the time, but only profusely when hot or active. There’s a reason for everything; scientists keep finding more and more confirmations of Psalm 139:14– we are fearfully and wonderfully made.