Archive: Bluffing Darwinists, NASA missions, Failing Evolution, Honeybees, More
Here are some resurrected articles from the end of 2001.
Note: some embedded links may no longer work.
Top Science Stories of 2001 Listed 12/29/2001
Science News has catalogued what it considers the top science news of the year in the areas of Anthropology and Archaeology, Astronomy, Behavior, Biomedicine, Botany and Zoology, Cell and Molecular Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Environment and Ecology, Food Science and Nutrition, Mathematics and Computers, Paleobiology, Physics, and Technology.
These always make for a fascinating year-end review. There are too many stories to list here, but it can be noted that most of the stories (many of which were reported in Creation-Evolution Headlines) seem to fall into two categories: those that are repeatable and verifiable and have practical benefits, and useless speculations about the past that could never be verified. Most evolutionary stories fall into the latter category.
It is hard to find any value in hypothesizing which organism was the common ancestor of flowering plants, or which skull fragment fits into one team’s concept of human evolution, or whether a hypothetical parallel universe smashed into ours and ignited the big bang. Deciphering the human genome, or finding proteins implicated in cancer, or monitoring hurricane or sunspot activity, however, are examples of scientific studies that do impact our lives. A browse through the list in Science News Vol 160, No. 26 reveals a broad gray area between these extremes. Perhaps many of the claims made in 2001 are ripe to be reversed by new findings in 2002.
Evolutionists Tend to Exaggerate 12/27/2001
In the Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society, “Relationships fade with time: a meta-analysis of temporal trends in publication in ecology and evolution,” a study was made of publication bias in scientific papers about evolution and ecology. The authors claim to have found evidence that big effects on small populations tend to get published quicker, but the alleged effects fade with time. Publishers tend to bypass studies on large populations or studies that show smaller effects. This can distort the resulting theories or popular beliefs about them.
In conclusion, publication bias, whatever the underlying cause, appears to be a problem in biology because both year of publication and sample size are correlated with effect size. This raises questions about the validity of drawing general conclusions from the biological literature, using formal meta-analysis or traditional narrative reviews. … Publication bias is therefore a general problem, which is apparently not unique to strongly hypothesis-driven science.
We’ve been showing over and over in Creation-Evolution Headlines how evolutionists announce dramatic evidence for evolution in bold headlines that are overturned in fine print later.
This paper is an interesting look at the sources of bias in scientific publishing (which we were taught was objective, neutral, and self-checking). Yes, even scientists and their publishers are gullible for fads, bandwagons, and bravado, especially in a “hypothesis-driven” subject like evolution. Read this paper first before others in the same issue of the Proceedings about the evolution of peacock tails, vertebrate teeth, pheasant wattles, cabbages, kings, or anything else. (See also next headline.)
Six Methods for Estimating Evolutionary Ancestors Don’t Work 12/27/2001
In a study discouraging to evolutionists, A. J. Webster and Andy Purvis applied six common methods for estimating the traits of evolutionary ancestors to populations of foraminifera, and found that they all failed.
Writing in the Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society, “Testing the accuracy of methods for reconstructing ancestral states of continuous characters,” they also admitted that the morphological and genetic lineages are not compatible. They undertook the study because “Many methods are available for estimating ancestral values of continuous characteristics, but little is known about how well these methods perform.”
Unfortunately, “No method produced accurate estimates for any variable: estimates were consistently less good as predictors of the observed values than were the averages of the observed values.” The authors studied continuous characteristics: those traits assumed to vary gradually over time instead of in spurts. Their study was the largest to date of its kind, but “overall accuracy [of the methods] was less than zero.” (I.e., the methods did not correlate at all with the observations.)
The authors conclude that the evolutionary relationships between the subjects studied are too complex and too little understood to allow any method to infer the ancestral appearance of organisms from their descendents: “These problems–lineage identification, data error and phylogenetic uncertainty–are inevitable for any study that aims to compare estimates of ancestral traits based on descendants with estimates based on measurement of putative ancestors themselves. Further studies on groups with adequate fossil records are needed in order to determine the generality of the results found in this study and the robustness of the conclusions they suggest.”
Take heed, perceptive reader: these authors tested evolutionary storytelling and found it to be no better than dreams or lies! The storytelling methods have fancy names: “unweighted squared-change parsimony, two-parameter maximum likelihood model” and so forth, but they were worse than nothing– they showed no correlation whatsoever when used on living and fossil shellfish that have the best fossil record of all.
So how can they possibly describe the alleged common ancestor of apes and humans, or the common ancestor of whales and hippos, or the common ancestor of anything, especially when the fossil evidence is much weaker? They can’t, and these scientists demonstrated it. Evolution is a game for storytellers who cannot connect their stories to observational evidence.
Why don’t papers like this make it into the mainstream media, the Discovery Channel, and PBS? Why aren’t we told the truth about the disagreements between genetic and morphological evidence? Instead, we are treated to imaginary computer-generated make-believe animals that supposedly evolved into today’s zoo, with confident-sounding narration about how and when they evolved. This paper is a damaging admission. It provides ammunition for creationists who would claim that evolutionary storytelling is pure mythology. For another example, see the next headline below.
Bee Societies Evolved Repeatedly Without Intermediates 12/26/2001
A paper by Bryan Danforth of Cornell in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences investigates the origin of social behavior in insects, primarily bees.
Danforth compares phylogenies (evolutionary family trees) based on gene sequences with the observed social behavior of halictid bees (which have more diverse social behaviors than ants, termites and corbiculate bees, such as honeybees, that show advanced social structure from the beginning). He concludes that social behavior likely had few origins but multiple reversals back to solitary nesting.
The most striking finding, he says, is the lack of correspondence of the phylogeny with the complexity of the societies. Some species, for instance, have huge colonies right off the bat with no “intermediate” stages of social complexity, and “Likewise, the magnitude of queen/worker dimorphism [body difference] also shows no clear phylogenetic pattern …. The pattern of social evolution is one of increased and decreased social complexity independent of the phylogeny” (emphasis added).
This paper demonstrates that theories about the evolution of social behavior are contrived. What is the observational evidence? Only that different species of bees have widely different amounts of social behavior and dimorphism within their colonies. Fitting these observations into assumed family trees is based on the prior assumption of evolution, not the evidence. Although he believes eusociality evolved somehow, Danforth admits that the family trees and the observed social behaviors appear to have little to do with each other. So why even claim it evolved? See one entomologist’s frustration with the pressure to force-fit observations into Darwinian tales in our 12/21 headline.
Bee social behavior is an amazing phenomenon that defies Darwinian explanation. For good visuals and explanations of the complex relationships, roles and communications of bees, see the Moody Science film Wonders of God’s Creation, part 2, Animal Kingdom.
Kepler Spacecraft Approved to Search for Earthlike Planets 12/26/2001
About 80 planets around other stars have been discovered to date (indirectly by their gravitational tugs on the stars), but almost all these have been giants in the Jupiter-size class. NASA has just approved a new mission for launch in 2006 that will include a specially-designed telescope targeting earth-size planets.
Although unable to image such small planets directly, the telescope will hunt through the light of thousands of stars simultaneously, looking for extremely faint changes in brightness caused by the passage of a planet across the face of a star (a transit). The mission is named after Johannes Kepler, the 17th century astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and who speculated whether life exists in outer space.
See our biography of Kepler on The World’s Greatest Creation Scientists. Although Kepler would have enjoyed such a search, he would not have believed life could evolve on a planet. He was a firm believer in the Creator God as revealed in the Scriptures.
[Note: the successful Kepler Mission found over 2,600 exoplanets by the transit method, adding immensely to our knowledge of orbiting bodies around other stars. Many of these exoplanets defied consensus ideas about planet formation and upset favored theories. Search for our articles on the Kepler mission.]
Dawn Mission Approved to Study Evolution of Solar System by Observing Asteroids 12/26/2001
Another Discovery mission approved by NASA is called Dawn. It will orbit the asteroids Ceres and Vesta to look for clues to the early evolution of the Solar System. Scheduled for 2006 launch, it will take nine years to arrive at its targets, using an ion-drive engine.
The UCLA Dawn website home page uses the word evolution eight times in as many paragraphs. But it also says “Dawn has the potential for making many paradigm-shifting discoveries.” Maybe one of those will be that evolution is untenable.
[Note: the successful Dawn Mission found surprising evidences for youth at these asteroids. Search for Ceres and Vesta in our search bar for findings.]
Butterfly Author Launches Tirade Against Darwinian Establishment 12/21/2001
William Dembski found a coffee-table book on butterflies, loaded with pretty pictures, that has a surprising introduction: an angry description of the Darwinian scientific establishment, which the author describes as a “global pseudo-scientific cultism” and “totalitarian absolutism of unproveable dogma” among other sizzling epithets.
In his book review posted on the Intl. Society for Complexity, Intelligence and Design website*, Dembski describes Bernard d’Abrera’s new 2001 Concise Atlas of Butterflies of the World (available for order online at www.biobooks.com at a discount till January 1), to be an otherwise standard taxonomy book with some of the most stunning pictures of butterflies he has ever seen, by one of the world’s best renowned lepidopterists from the British Museum of Natural History.
The author’s apparent “public call to allow informed dissent of Darwinism” in the introduction was a surprise; Dembski portrays d’Abrera as a victim of a “suffocating ideology” whose purveyors are bullies, and a man who “has seen himself, his colleagues, and their work pushed around long enough and will not stand for it any longer.”
Dembski includes some choice quotes from d’Abrera’s fire-breathing introduction … quite revealing! The review is short; read it.
[Note: d’Abrera’s book is available at Amazon.com in 2024. The ISCID site has been superseded by Evolution News and Science Today. A comment about his beliefs was made in 2010 by David Klinghoffer.]
Science Lists Breakthroughs of the Year 12/21/2001
Nanotechnology is top on its list, but several stories referenced in Creation-Evolution Headlines were voted as runners-up in Science Magazine’s most significant science breakthroughs of 2001:
- RNA Molecules have become increasingly recognized for their versatility of functions in the cell. There is a whole new class of regulators made up of short pieces of RNA, and some RNA molecules have enzymatic activity.
- The solar neutrino mystery has apparently been solved.
- Neurons use signals to guide their growing tips to the correct junction.
The RNA story is pretty amazing; look at the picture of the enzyme for an idea of the complexity of enzymes. Keep in mind this is a simplification: each helix is composed of left-handed amino acids that twist in this way, and the whole complex is intricately folded into a precise shape for the function it must perform. The magazine’s statement that “RNA could have preceded DNA in the earliest life-forms” is just whistling in the dark.
The neutrino story was convincing enough for creation writer Dr. Walter Brown to retract the solar neutrino deficit as evidence for a shrinking sun in his detailed book, In the Beginning, but this has no impact on evidence for creation or the age of the earth. The latest edition of the entire book is online at creationscience.com.