Archive: Fossils, Education, Communism, Genetics, Dodos, Mars, Icons of Evolution

Here are some of the stories we were reporting at the beginning of March 2002, restored from archives.

Note: some embedded links may no longer work.

Earliest Fossil Bacteria Claim Causes Debate   03/07/2002
Dr. William Schopf of UCLA, the champion finder of precambrian fossils, has claimed a new record that has scientists arguing over its validity. Published in the March 7 Nature, the alleged fossils are claimed to be 3.5 billion years old, almost a billion years older than the previous record. Henry Gee comments: “Given that Schopf was one of the first to cast doubt on the biogenicity of another celebrated suite of purported microfossils – in the martian meteorite ALH84001 – it is ironic that his own work should be subjected to such scepticism. But that is the name of the game for claims of life at the extremes of time and space.” See also this summary on Nature Science Update.

Be a good sceptic [sic] and doubt both the dates and the fossils. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, remember?

India Intensifies Teaching of Evolution   03/06/2002
Exclusive  An Indian pastor, in the U.S. gathering materials for his mission Ray of Hope, told us that the teaching of Darwinism in his country has intensified since a new nationwide educational policy was enacted in 2000. All colleges now teach evolution as fact, and unbelievers are often subjected to ridicule and sometimes persecution. Christopher Hukkeri, who works in the state of Goa where 60% are Hindu, 30% are Catholic and 10% are “other”, said that the Hindu population has no problem with Darwinism, since evolution is, at its heart, based on a pantheistic world view similar to Hinduism. Hindus also believe the monkey god created man, and see a correspondence to what evolution teaches.

Mr. Hukkeri commented that Darwinism is affecting the faith of Christians, who are in the minority to begin with. The rising influence of Darwinism in the schools is a major problem to missionaries and pastors in India right now. It feeds the prejudices of the increasing population of intellectuals and students against Christianity. Hindus tend to equate Christianity with Catholicism, he explained, since that is mostly what they hear about. The Catholics in his state in India, however, have a reputation for loose morals and drunkenness, and do not stand for anything, so Hindus tend to feel superior, and despise “Christianity” altogether. Surprisingly, the Bible Society is under Catholic control, but does not wish the people to read the Bible! They want to keep people in darkness, he claimed. For this reason, Christopher recently translated the New Testament into the Konkani language himself, along with the Old Testament books of Joshua, Proverbs, and (almost completed) Isaiah, so that people in his city could have access to the Word of God. He told how a high government official was recently saved by reading the entire New Testament three times. Nevertheless, Jesuits in the state of Goa persecute the Christians and cause great difficulty for missionaries like Hukkeri who strive to get the Bible into the hands of the people.

One of Hukkeri’s goals on his visit to America was to obtain a video projector so that he can continue to show Moody Science films and other visual aids to present creation and argue against evolution. (He was very excited to hear that Discovery Media Productions [later renamed Illustra Media] is continuing to produce new films of the same quality.) Hukkeri is also working to build a creation-oriented planetarium.

In spite of the darkness in his native land, Christopher sees God’s hand at work. The devastating earthquake that hit on January 26, 2001 destroyed a diamond trading center, in which corrupt, evil traders perished with their wealth. At the same time, a group of Christians were praying on the third floor of a building for God to intervene against an anti-Christian law that was being debated by the government. At 9:00, while they were praying, the earthquake hit, and the building they were in collapsed to the ground – yet all of them escaped unscathed. After that, it was the Christians who had access to the devastated regions with food, blankets, medicine and messages of hope for the suffering, while corrupt government bureaucrats were intercepting and keeping for themselves the aid packages sent by international relief agencies.

Found on the Net 03/06/2002: “Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children” from Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers, the communist spy convicted with Alger Hiss in the 1950s, tells how he came to reject communism while looking at his infant child eating breakfast:

My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear–those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

Chambers explains how Communism was the vision of Man without God. What that vision led to is expressed in horrifying detail as a series of screams in the night:

What Communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of the Lubianka, from all the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton. They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist State. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or Bogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps. They come from children whose parents are suddenly, inexplicably, taken away from them–parents they will never see again.

The excerpt is posted by the Augustine Club at Columbia University. For more on this subject, read “The Darwinian foundation of communism,” by Jerry Bergman, at Answers in Genesis.

Marx said Darwin gave him the scientific rationale for his views on communism. (Grok/XI)

Evolution Monkeys with Duplicate Genes   03/06/2002
An Asian monkey has a duplicate gene that evolved to perform a different function, claims evolutionary geneticist Jianzhi Zhang of the University of Michigan, reports Nature Science Update. A gene for ribonuclease now codes for a digestive enzyme. Zhang believes that two processes were involved in the evolution of the new gene: both positive selection (preserving an advantage) and lack of negative selection (a neutral mutation free to evolve till it “finds a new job”). The report ends with a caution:

Shozo Yokoyama, an evolutionary biologist at Syracuse University in New York state, says Zhang’s functional tests are a difficult and essential step toward understanding the role of duplication. But “the final answer is still not there,” he says. More research is needed to show not only how the amino acid changes reduced the ribonuclease’s old function, but also how they helped it reach its new function.

Zhang’s paper is published in the March 2002 Nature Genetics.

There is too much play and too little known to assert the conclusion. Each step has to provide a survival advantage for natural selection to preserve a change. Yokoyama’s caution is well taken; more research is needed before concluding this is evolution in action. Just saying so doesn’t make it so. Besides, the monkey is still a monkey.

Dodo Bird Gains Respect   03/05/2002
Not just a poster child for extinction and evolutionary dead ends, the dodo was a creature well adapted to its unique environment, the island of Mauritius. So says National Geographic, which explains that the dodo had no ground predators till its discoverers brought them on ships. Flightlessness and gigantism helped the bird to survive harsh conditions on the island. Moreover, the pictures we’ve seen of the fat, ungainly oddballs, like in Alice in Wonderland, are caricatures of a bird that was probably more sleek in reality. Recent molecular analysis has related the species to pigeons that may have arrived from the mainland. The research is reported in the March 1 issue of Science, which admits that “The evolutionary history of the dodo is very poorly understood.”

We know that pigeons can show quite a remarkable diversity in appearance, yet belong to the same kind, similar to the diversity in dogs. Note that the odd-looking characteristics of the dodo involve loss of function (flight) and exaggeration of traits from severe inbreeding. This is allowed in both creation and evolution models; there is no gain in information or function. Also, it does not take millions of years for such variations to become pronounced.

Darwin training his class on how to groupthink as a Darwinist.

Mars Has Ice, Maybe Life?   03/05/2002
The way the Los Angeles Times puts it, scientists might expect Mars to be a playground of critters romping in the snow. Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer, in “Vast Ice Fields Suggest Life on Mars Possible,” writes that scientists are buoyed by the first results from the Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft that suggest water ice is abundant in the soil of the red planet, since water is vital to life. The NASA – Ames Astrobiology Institute didn’t hesitate to post the L.A. Times article on its web page.

H₂O is to life as ink to a textbook. You need ink to write a textbook, but you wouldn’t expect a textbook to arise spontaneously from inkblots on paper. To make it more fun, try using frozen ink. Then bombard the ink and the paper with microscopic bullets and wait for something like Principia to emerge.

Award-Winning Biochemist Calls Mother Nature a Brilliant Engineer   03/04/2002
Scientific American posted an interview with Roderick MacKinnon (see our Jan. 17 headline), who has devoted his research to figuring out how ion channels work in the cell. He describes how the potassium channel, for instance, with its very effective selectivity filter, is able to allow potassium ions through but reject smaller sodium ions that also have the same positive charge. The effect is based on finely-tuned arrangement of oxygen atoms that make it energetically favorable for potassium ions to slip through the channel, but not others. MacKinnon describes the design of the channel as extremely interesting and unpredictable before it was actually observed. He explains his feelings about it:

And then to finally see it was extremely satisfying. In some aspects, it was satisfying because many things were predicted, and in other ways it was satisfying because some things that were not predicted were almost more beautiful than anybody would have predicted. For example, the cavity and these helices were just a marvelous arrangement that Mother Nature used to solve this problem, you know, as if a very brilliant engineer did it all. I think that was very satisfying to see.

The interview contains a diagram of how the potassium ion channel works.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. This is no Mother Nature if you are an evolutionist. Why does it look as if a brilliant engineer did it all, if a Brilliant Engineer did not do it all? To parry Dobzhansky’s famous quote against him, in light of the recent findings of biochemistry, Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of intelligent design.

Debate Over Icons of Evolution Continues   03/04/2002
When Jonathan Wells spoke at Univ. of California at San Diego on January 29, a majority responded positively, but it aroused the ire of some students. In response to Wells’ talk based on his popular book Icons of Evolution, which basically says everything you were taught about evolution is wrong, Nick Tamzek has posted a rebuttal called, “Who’s the real fraud? Scientific mistakes, distortions, and sleights-of-hand in Wells’ book Icons of Evolution.” On March 3, Casey Luskin on Access Research Network posted a detailed response to Tamzek’s arguments.

This is a good debate on which to become familiar with the arguments on both sides. Who is doing the real obfuscation or sleight of hand? See also Wells’s own response to critics on this January 23 headline. When judging a debate, always have your Baloney Detector in good working order.

In this second book, Jonathan Wells gives more examples of discredited Darwinian icons that keep rising from the dead.

First Mars Odyssey Images Released   03/01/2002
At a press conference today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists unveiled with excitement their first pictures and science results from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. The ship arrived in October and recently attained its mapping orbit. Scientists showed some razor-sharp images from the infrared camera that produces images 30 times sharper than the previous best.

The gamma ray spectrometer detected possible abundant water ice in measurements of hydrogen under the soil. The radiation experiment determined that cosmic ray exposure at the surface ranges from moderate to hazardous, depending on elevation, because the Martian atmosphere is so much thinner than the Earth’s protective blanket. In addition, astronauts en route to Mars would experience nearly twice the daily dose of damaging cosmic rays endured by dwellers in the Earth-orbiting space station.

These health risks will certainly be of concern in planning future manned missions to the red planet, which will require up to three years exposure to these levels of radiation.

Mars is a fascinating place, but today’s news is a reminder of the many “cosmic accidents” that make Earth habitable for life. See also our 05/02/2001 headline and 09/14/2000 headline about the Martian radiation environment. We wouldn’t be surprised if some evolutionist announces to the press that the cosmic rays will be a shower of blessing, helping future inhabitants of Mars evolve faster.

Don’t Just Give Chocolate; Dress In It   03/01/2002
Science Now reports on a new theory on sexual selection by biologists writing in the March 7 Royal Society Biology Proceedings B. Male guppies grow bright orange spots to look like the females’ favorite sweet snack: orange fruit. This attracts the females to come closer, where the males can then strut their stuff. “The spots may first catch a lady’s eye, but she’ll soon check out traits more reflective of mates’ genetics,” ends the review. “So don’t buy that chocolate shirt unless you’ve got the goods to back it up.”

Yes, take off the shirt and hand it to her to eat while you flex your muscles, guys.  Good grief.

We have reported earlier how evolutionary theories of sexual selection commit the personification fallacy by putting human emotions into fish brains. Now they’ve gone further and made males into a candy store for dimwitted females who can’t tell the difference between an orange gummy worm and a member of their own species. The story is worthless except to notice this sentence: “The research challenges the standard theory of sexual selection, which maintains that sexy traits reveal the quality of a prospective mate’s genes.” Which, being translated, means: dumb has been replaced with dumber.