Creationism News -- September 2012
创造论新闻 – 2012年9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 the
results of his discrimination lawsuit against JPL.
Pastor Chui
http://ChristCenterGospel.org
ckchui1@yahoo.com
3/21/2016
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Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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With the publishing of the Denisovan genome, the genetic profile of
interfertile humans has widened considerably.
From a single fingerbone, scientists at Max Planck Institute were able
to determine the complete genome of a surprising group of humans
in Siberia that have been named the Denisovans. According to
Scientific American on August 30 (reprinted by Nature News), the
individual’s DNA can reveal traits of the entire population. The
current interpretation is that the Denisovans were an isolated
population group in Asia with low genetic diversity, living 74,000 to
82,000 years ago (earlier estimates were half that, about 30,000 to
50,000 years ago), but that “the modern human line diverged from
what would become the Denisovan line as long as 700,000 years
ago—but possibly as recently as 170,000 years ago.” Writer
Katharine Harmon speculated that “the population on the
whole seems to have been very small for hundreds of thousands
of years, with relatively little genetic diversity throughout their 2
3/21/2016
history.”
Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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Enough commonality was found with modern
humans – about 6% – that it shows the
population must have interbred with them and
with Neanderthals, with whom they share more
commonality than with moderns. As for the
owner of the fingerbone, analysis is “consistent
with” dark hair and skin of a female. Charles Q.
Choi at Live Science took that as a cue to
proclaim, “Genome of Mysterious Extinct
Human Reveals Brown-Eyed Girl.” Perhaps
they will name her Denise.
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3
Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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That’s how the evolutionists are re-framing this find within their
standard timeline. It should be remembered, however, that the
Denisovan bones (a finger and two molars in a cave in Siberia)
came as a complete surprise to Svante Pääbo, his team at the
Max Planck Institute, and to anthropologists worldwide. John
Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of WisconsinMadison, who was not involved in the genome study, called
Denisova a “big surprise.” Early genetic indications of
interbreeding with modern humans were doubted by some, but
the newly published genome appears to remove all doubt. That
being the case, it is appropriate to consider Denisovans,
Neanderthals and modern humans as a single interfertile
species. Consider, by comparison, the diversity in dogs, all of
which are members of a single species, Canis familiaris.
3/21/2016
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Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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Several points in the Nature News article bear emphasis for
their surprise effects. For one, this fingerbone retained a
remarkable amount of DNA:
Most bone fragments would be expected to contain less
than 5 percent of the individual’s endogenous DNA, but this
fortuitous finger had a surprising 70 percent, the
researchers noted in the study. And many Neandertal
fragments have been preserved in vastly different states—
many are far worse off than this Denisovan finger bone.
Is it plausible this bone retained its DNA for up to 82,000 years?
or even 30,000? Another point is that Australian aborigines,
Melanesians and inhabitants of Papua New Guinea share
Denisovan DNA, but not modern residents of Asia:
3/21/2016
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Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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Yet contemporary residents of mainland Asia do not seem
to posses Denisovian traces in their DNA, a ‘very curious’
fact,” Hawks says. “We’re looking at a very interesting
population scenario”—one that does not jibe entirely
with what we thought we knew about how waves
modern human populations migrated into and through
Asia and out to Oceania’s islands. This new genetic
evidence might indicate that perhaps an early wave of
humans moved through Asia, mixed with Denisovans and
then relocated to the islands—to be replaced in Asia by
later waves of human migrants from Africa. “It’s not
totally obvious that works really well with what we
know about the diversity of Asians and Australians,”
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Hawks says.
Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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A third point in the article regards the expanded variability now
appreciated within the interfertile human line. Denisova may not be
the last population of diverse humans to be found. Harmon revealed
a little-known fact: there’s a lot of variability among living Africans:
The genomes of contemporary pygmy and hunter–gatherer tribes in
Africa, for example, have roughly as many differences as do those of
European modern humans and Neandertals. So “any ancient
specimen that we find in Africa might be as different from us as
Neandertals,” Hawks says. “Anything we find from the right place
might be another Denisovan.”
With a new sequencing technique available that can discern a
genome from one DNA strand rather than both, anthropologists
approach additional fossil sequences with excitement, and perhaps
some trepidation. What will the genome of H.
floresiensis reveal? Will additional human populations be found in
Asia? Pääbo said, “I would be surprised if there were not other
3/21/2016
7
groups to be found there in the future.”
Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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To discern how scientists are doing, watch for surprised looks
on their faces. The paleoanthropology community was caught
completely off guard by the Denisova fossils (read those links to
our five earlier reports about Denisovans to emphasize the
point). Archaic hominids in a Siberian cave, far from Europe,
who interbred who with modern humans? Impossible. Yet their
own analysis brings them to that conclusion. Don’t be fooled
when they recover their composure by switching from the
surprised look to the excited look and say (like John Hawks,
one of the more reasonable of the gang), “Going back further
in time will be exciting. There’s a huge race on—it’s
exciting.” Observe the plain fact: they were wrong! Their story
of human evolution was false. Tell them to stop the spin
doctoring within the Grand Tale of Human Evolution Story and
3/21/2016
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face the facts.
Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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We additionally know they were wrong because this finger had
quality DNA. It’s highly implausible that this bone contained
70% of its original DNA after 30,000 years, to say nothing of
82,000 years. Who could possibly believe that? It’s much
more likely that this individual lived just a few thousand years
ago at most, like the Table of Nations timeline of Genesis
describes. Fully modern, big-brained, ensouled humans spread
across the globe after Babel and began to interbreed in groups
that accentuated various traits without eliminating traces of their
common ancestry from Mr. & Mrs. Noah. The more isolated
groups became in more remote places, like Siberian caves, the
more distinctive their genomes became. Notice also the ability
of these people to travel far and wide around the globe. It
doesn’t take tens or hundreds of thousands of years for these
things to happen.
3/21/2016
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Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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That interpretation fits the facts without requiring us to
believe the impossible dream that Denisovans kept to
themselves as an isolated small population for
“hundreds of thousands of years” without ever thinking
of making wheels, building cities or riding a horse,
while flirting with modern humans from Europe once in
awhile. The folly of their long-age scenario should
sizzle in your brain till it “sheds light on evolution,”
showing it to be complete baloney. How can anyone
believe that? Why do they believe that? The answer:
they have committed their souls to protecting Darwin
from falsification.
3/21/2016
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Denisovan Genome Reveals Interbreeding With Modern Humans
Denisovan基因组揭示与现代人类混种
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It’s only a matter of time before history
laughs these charlatans off the
stage. Sure, they are intelligent, and good
at sequencing DNA. They’ve had a lot of
education. They can talk jargon and work
phylogeny software. Fantastic. But when
it comes to explaining the world, they are
a sorry bunch. Get the jump on the
historians of 2030 and start laughing now.
3/21/2016
11
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说
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There’s never been a surprise that a good
astrobiologist hasn’t been able to spin into an
evolutionary tale.
For a recent example, see the post “How old are
the first planets?” on NASA’s Astrobiology
Magazine or the reprint on PhysOrg. In this article,
every surprise or anomaly became fodder for Keith
Cooper’s imagination. Here are a few of the
unexpected observations in the article that Cooper
worked into the grand scenario of cosmic evolution
and the origin of life:
3/21/2016
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Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说
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1. Rocky planets: The Kepler spacecraft has found
rocky worlds around metal-poor stars that were
previously thought to lack ingredients for
planets. Solution: “one way of looking at terrestrial
planets is to see them as failed gas giant
cores.” Even more exciting, it means (contrary to earlier
beliefs) that rocky planets – and maybe life – may
abound around metal-poor stars! “If Earth-sized planets
do not require stars with high abundances of heavy
elements, then that has huge implications, expanding
the possible abodes for life throughout both space
and time.” Cooper even jumped from his imaginary
solution to the conclusion that it implies the “Galactic
3/21/2016
13
Habitable Zone” might be wider than thought.
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说
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2. Fermi Paradox: Point #1 raises the
ghost of the Fermi Paradox: if there are so
many rocky worlds with life, how come
none have visited the earth by
now? (Their inhabitants, presumably,
have had billions of years to evolve
advanced technology.) Solution: Dodge
the question with a distracting discussion
of how and when gas giants can evolve
around low-metal stars.
3/21/2016
14
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说
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3. Heavy metal galaxies: The evolutionary scenario
predicted heavy elements would gradually increase
over time; early galaxies, therefore, should be
depleted in heavy elements. “Twelve billion years ago
the chemistry of galaxies should have been fairly
primitive,” Cooper confessed, yet a distant galaxy
matched the sun in heavy elements. Solution:
“The best explanation so far is that a starburst –
a ferociously rapid bout of star formation – within
the inner regions of the galaxy has blown the heavy
elements into the galactic outlands.” In philosophy
of science, this is known as a post hoc rationalization.
3/21/2016
15
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说

4. Planet billiards: Gas giants should wreak
havoc with rocky planets, sending them
careening out of a star’s planetary system as
the gas giants migrate inward, but Kepler has
found rocky planets interspersed between gas
giants. Solution: claim that “what difficulties
gas giants can cause for habitable planets,
they don’t necessarily have to be a showstopper”. But if they are, it only takes one to
stop the show.
3/21/2016
16
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说

5. Impoverished gas giants: Gas giants
were thought to require an abundance of
heavy elements to form cores for accretion
of gas, but some have been found around
metal-poor stars. Solution: “it must have
formed very early in the history of the
Universe,” or, “Why gas giants have been
able to form around these heavy-metal
deficient stars is unknown, perhaps hinting
at an alternative process for gas planet
3/21/2016
17
formation.”
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说

These and other anomalies, failed expectations
and surprises are dealt with accordingly by Cooper
and his astronomer interviewees. Given a lively
imagination, no problem is too damning to falsify
biological evolution, planetary evolution, stellar
evolution, galactic evolution and cosmic
evolution. Here’s how Cooper roused his readers’
imaginations in a sweeping set of glittering
generalities (after dodging the 4th point above
about planet billiards, and while dodging example
#2 about the Fermi Paradox):
3/21/2016
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Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说
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Regardless, one thing is becoming clear: that
sufficient raw materials for building terrestrial planets
were available very soon after the Big Bang, raising
the possibility that there could be life in the Universe
far older than we. Perhaps they reside around long-lived
red dwarf stars, or have moved on from their home system
after their star expired. Or, perhaps, we really are the
first, which means that if life has happened just once
throughout the entire history of the Universe, our
existence must be a fluke and our planet very, very
special indeed.
Such a conclusion would allow for any eventuality: even
the uniqueness of life on earth would fit an evolutionary
3/21/2016
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scenario.
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说

In another article on PhysOrg, planetary theorist Alan Boss
came up with a novel way to get refractory compounds
into comets, where they were previously thought not to
exist: cook them near the sun, then send them out to the
fringes by special delivery. “Their meandering trips back
and forth could help explain the different compositions of
their rims.” This, along with a discussion of calciumaluminum inclusions (CAIs) in meteorites, was touted as
solving two solar system puzzles at one blow. “It’s nice to
solve two problems at once,” said Boss. “But there are
still many more puzzles about meteorites for us to
work on.” Incidentally, his theory of disk instability for the
formation of gas giants runs counter to the core accretion
3/21/2016
20
model Keith Cooper assumed in his article.
Turning Astrobiology Surprises Into Evolutionary Fiction
天体生物学成为进化小说

Astronomer Stephen Weinberg once defined an expert as “a
person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the
grand fallacy.” In this case, Cooper and his Darwin Party
experts don’t avoid any errors: they actually use the large errors
to sweep on to the grand fallacy. We might also recall that an
expert (ex-spurt) used to be a spurt, but is now just a drip. Oh,
their empirical observations are doing fine: the Kepler
spacecraft, the spectrometers, the equations – all built using
intelligent design – are pulling the scientific load. But the
scenario, the play, the imaginary story they repeat in spite of
the observations – these are what illustrate the skill of
evolutionist gumbies to twist any falsification into a celebration
of their gnostic powers. Historical note: Johannes Kepler, for
whom the planet-hunting spacecraft was named, was a
3/21/2016
21
creationist.
Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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Can evolutionists exempt themselves from the
uneducated masses who cling to supernatural beliefs?
Most educated Americans and Europeans would look
with pity on those who appeal to witchcraft to explain
disease or misfortune. To varying degrees,
evolutionists would include Christians, Jews and other
religious people as sadly misinformed about the ability
of naturalism to account for all phenomena of the
biological world including human
nature. Evolutionists commonly study their fellow
humans for how natural selection shaped their
responses to social stimuli, confident of the ability of
Darwinian selection to explain human psychology.
3/21/2016
22
Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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A recent example can be found in a University of Texas
press release that announced, “People Merge
Supernatural and Scientific Beliefs When Reasoning
With the Unknown, Study Shows.” In the study,
UT psychologist Christine Legare and her team sought to
identify predictable and universal ways that people handle
“supernatural” and “scientific” explanations for things:
Legare and her colleagues reviewed more than 30 studies
on how people (ages 5–75) from various countries reason
with three major existential questions: the origin of life,
illness and death. They also conducted a study with 366
respondents in South Africa, where biomedical and
traditional healing practices are both widely available.
3/21/2016
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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Unexpectedly, respondents’ supernatural beliefs did
not decrease with age or education. Instead, they
tended to accommodate the supernatural and
scientific explanations with either-or or both-and
concoctions: e.g., either witchcraft or a virus caused a
person to get AIDS, or both were involved.
The team concluded that belief in the supernatural is a
universal human trait that children never fully grow out
of:
Legare said the findings contradict the common
assumption that supernatural beliefs dissipate
with age and knowledge.
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
“The findings show supernatural explanations for topics of
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core concern to humans are pervasive across cultures,”
Legare said. “If anything, in both industrialized and developing
countries, supernatural explanations are frequently
endorsed more often among adults than younger children.”
The results provide evidence that reasoning about
supernatural phenomena is a fundamental and enduring
aspect of human thinking, Legare said.
“The standard assumption that scientific and religious
explanations compete should be re-evaluated in light of
substantial psychological evidence,” Legare said. “The data,
which spans diverse cultural contexts across the lifespan,
shows supernatural reasoning is not necessarily replaced
with scientific explanations following gains in knowledge,
education or technology.”
3/21/2016
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25
Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
Legare dubs this “coexistence thinking” –
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“As children assimilate cultural concepts into their intuitive belief
systems — from God to atoms to evolution — they engage in
coexistence thinking,” said Cristine Legare, assistant professor
of psychology and lead author of the study. “When they merge
supernatural and scientific explanations, they integrate them
in a variety of predictable and universal ways.”
Since the press release tagged this story with “evolutionary
psychology,” it can safely be assumed that the University of Texas
at Austin was not paying her to think outside the explanatory
toolkit of evolution: i.e., mutation and natural selection, studied
within the standard academic approach called methodological
naturalism. But the question remains: is belief in the supernatural
universal? or have evolutionary psychologists managed to escape
coexistence thinking, purifying their explanations of the
supernatural, to attain purely natural, scientific insight?
3/21/2016
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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Trick question. If it’s natural, it’s not insight; if it’s
insight, it’s not natural. Let’s get something straight at
the outset: everyone is a supernaturalist. To justify
this assertion, we must first provide clarity by defining
our terms. Robert Jastrow, the late astronomer,
defined materialism (a rough synonym for naturalism
and more useful, since “nature” is an equivocal word)
as “particles and the forces by which they
interact.” He said once you have identified these,
you’ve done it all – there’s nothing else to insert into
your explanation. What he failed to appreciate is
that explanation itself falls outside that
box. Explanation is not natural; it’s supernatural!
3/21/2016
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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Lest a reader contend that we are quibbling about words,
consider: “explanation” presupposes many things: among
them truth and honesty. Nobody wants an explanation
that is false or dishonest. Truth and honesty, however, if
anything, must refer to concepts (again, immaterial
things) that are universal, timeless, necessary, and
certain. This is not to say that scientists are capable of
attaining certainty; the quest itself, though, presupposes a
belief that a good explanation is out there, and when
found, will be true and honestly arrived at. Since all these
concepts lie outside of particles and forces – the limits of
natural things – it means that evolutionary psychologists
and all the other metaphysical or methodological
naturalists are supernaturalists in spite of
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28
themselves. Q.E.D.
Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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One way out would be for the evolutionary
psychologist to admit truth and honesty into their
definition of nature. This move, however, is a slippery
slope. Once they admit the ontological reality of
concepts that are timeliness, universal, necessary and
certain into their “natural box,” there is no way to keep
out God without making an arbitrary distinction (for
fuller explication, see “Naturalism Outline” PDF file at
this site). So, enough of this nonsense that
evolutionists can exempt themselves from belief in the
supernatural. The question becomes, who has the
most coherent supernatural explanation for human
nature?
3/21/2016
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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Most academics would like a way to exclude witchcraft from
the explanation for AIDS; so would Christians and Jews,
who believe in Satan and evil spirits. These are worthy
discussions. However, to pretend that methodological
naturalism is the best method is to make an arbitrary rule
within the set of supernatural explanations, and risks
missing the right explanation. It basically says, “we admit
we believe in the supernatural, but we choose to pretend
the supernatural does not exist.” Such a position is selfcontradictory, self-refuting, and self-limiting. The method
that has a solid foundation begins with the nature of God,
the ultimate source of truth, the embodiment of all that is
timeless, universal, necessary and certain. Honesty,
wisdom and other desirable traits for a scientist come pre-30
3/21/2016
justified with this approach.
Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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To know the nature of God, we cannot reason to it from
the bottom up with any certainty. It needs to be
revealed. Taking the Creator’s self-revelation in the
Bible gives us a reliable starting point. The attributes of
God as revealed in the Bible give the scientist assurance
that truth, honesty, justice, and wisdom matter;
therefore, scientific explanations are good to the extent
they measure up to those qualities. Knowing that
humans are created in the image of God, yet are fallen
into sin, provides the grounds for human psychology.
From knowledge of man’s fallen mind, it will take a good
deal of scholarly debate on the limits of human
knowledge (subjects, incidentally, that have generated
much lively debate from Augustine to C. S. Lewis).
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
All these considerations, however, just get us to the starting point

for scientific investigation. The Bible is a condensed book; it
does not provide exhaustive information on most questions of
interest to modern scientists. Knowing that we share the image
of God, however, we can utilize our God-given wisdom, creativity
and conscience to strive for the best explanations, confident that
the “truth” is out there in the mind of God. Other scientists, also
working from that foundation, can judge our conclusions,
measuring how well they comport with revealed truth and
observation. This approach at least has the hope of success
and is self-consistent. It’s the approach creation scientists have
used for centuries and continue to use. But let us all disabuse
ourselves of the notion that evolutionists avoid the supernatural:
they just employ an inconsistent supernatural worldview, stealing
the concepts of truth and honesty from the Christian worldview
while pretending the supernatural doesn’t exist.
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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Application. Let’s look at the Legare study with a
Christian approach. The data show that certain
South African people continue to assimilate their
belief in witchcraft with scientific explanations
for HIV transmission. First of all, we might
question Legare’s sample, and be reluctant to
speak of all South Africans this way. Second, we
would understand that the fallen mind is prey to
demonic delusions, such as witchcraft. Third, we
might ask different questions, like, how wellinformed are the participants about Biblical
theology?
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Is Belief in the Supernatural Universal?
信仰超自然是普遍？
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In our write-up, we might agree with Legare that
education doesn’t rid some people of false notions,
but would approach the conclusion, not from
evolutionary psychology, but from Biblical
anthropology, that men love darkness rather than
light, because their deeds are evil. Applying our
findings, we might encourage better Bible
education for these people. For fun, we might turn
the tables and analyze the “coexistence thinking”
of Legare and her colleagues, investigating why
they continue holding to naturalistic Darwinism
when educated into the fact that scientific
3/21/2016
explanation implies that naturalism is impossible.34
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
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There’s more going on under your skin than you
possibly realize.
Lung brush: Working 24x7, microscopic cilia lining
your bronchial passages sweep your lungs clean,
allowing you to survive in an atmosphere filled with
pollutants. Science Daily summarized a paper
in Science that described “A Periciliary Brush
Promotes the Lung Health by Separating the
Mucus Layer from Airway Epithelia” (Button et
al., Science, 24 August 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6097
pp. 937–941, DOI:
10.1126/science.1223012). Science Daily said,
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More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
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“The cilia are constantly beating, even while we
sleep,” he says. “In a coordinated fashion, they push
mucus containing foreign objects out of the lungs, and
we either swallow it or spit it out. These cilia even
beat for a few hours after we die. If they stopped,
we’d be flooded with mucus that provides a fertile
breeding ground for bacteria.”.…
The researchers used a combination of imaging
techniques to observe a dense meshwork in the
periciliary layer of human bronchial epithelial cell
cultures. The brush-like layer consists of protective
molecules that keep sticky mucus from reaching
the cilia and epithelial cells, thus ensuring the
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36
normal flow of mucus.…
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体

“This layer — this brush — seems to be
very important for the healthy
functioning of human airways,”
according to Rubinstein. “It protects cells
from sticky mucus, and it creates a
second barrier of defense in case
viruses or bacteria penetrate through the
mucus. They would not penetrate through
the brush layer because the brush is
denser.”
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More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
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Respiratory diseases such as COPD are apparently
caused by the collapse of this brush layer. The new
findings, which replace old notions that the mucus rested
on a liquid layer, may help people suffering from a variety
of lung problems. The BBC News write-up added this
comment:
Prof Stephen Spiro, vice-chairman of the British Lung
Foundation, said: “Mucus has a complex biological
make-up and forms a vital part of the lungs’ defence
mechanism against potentially harmful or irritating
substances, which are inhaled as small particles.
“Research such as this helps our understanding [of] how
this system works, and of the complex mechanisms
deep within our lungs which protect us from the
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38
atmosphere we breathe in.”
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体

The original paper did not mention
evolution, except to say in passing,
“Mucus clearance in the mammalian
lung has evolved to trap and clear a wide
variety of inhaled toxicants and infectious
agents from airway surfaces,” passing the
support for that claim to three other
references. Neither Science Daily nor
the BBC saw fit to include evolution.
3/21/2016
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More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
Muscle builder: Early reports about irisin, a newly-discovered

hormone that mimics the effects of exercise by converting white
fat into brown fat (see Live Science Jan. 2012) may not pan
out, according to Nature this week (Timmons et al., “Is irisin a
human exercise gene?”, Nature 488, 30 August 2012, pp. E9–
E10, doi:10.1038/nature11364). Timmons et al. found only
modest benefit in humans, particularly highly-active elderly
people. No need to despair, though: Science Daily just
reported a “hulk protein” that may allow humans to grow
stronger without working out. Researchers found that mice with
the Grb10 gene disrupted grow more muscular. Don’t turn in
your gym membership just yet, though, the researchers
warned: “the classic prescription still applies: lift heavy things,
eat and sleep right, and have your hormones checked.” They
hope, though, that further understanding of these genetic
processes may help people suffering from muscle-wasting 40
3/21/2016
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体

Protein attraction: Your body’s proteins need to
work together. Cornell scientists have found how
proteins can feel attractive forces as far as 20
nanometers, a considerable distance at their
scale. It involves fractal-like patterns in cell
membranes that form near the “critical point of the
liquid-liquid phase separation of the cell membrane,
which is the subtle temperature and composition
point at which the two phases
separate.” PhysOrg included this quote by Ben
Machta, grad student and co-author of the study:
“We were intrigued that it seems like biology does
want to tune itself closely to this critical point.” 41
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More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
Gift-wrapped neurons: Many neural cells come wrapped in

myelin, a membranous, lipid-rich sheath that composes the
“white matter” of the central nervous system. What does it
do? “The myelin sheath around nerve fibres serves to speed
up electrical nerve signals, Nature News explained. “But it
turns out that it also supplies neurons with fuel to support
their high metabolic activity.” In particular, “lactate provided
by or through the myelin sheath is crucial for neuronal
survival.” A diagram in the article reveals the complex
interactions of astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, ATP and blood
vessels in this feeding process. The finding “expands the roles
of myelin sheaths,” the authors said. This is not necessarily the
only known function of myelin, which “supports neurons in
other, less-well-understood ways.” Source: Rinholm and
Bergerson, “Neuroscience: The wrap that feeds
neurons,” Nature 487, 26 July 2012, pp. 435–436,
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42
doi:10.1038/487435a.
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
Work in your sleep: Sleep learning is possible,

reported Science Daily, because while you rest and dream,
your brain is creating associations and memories of what you
perceive through the senses, and these associations remain
after you wake up. Experiments at the Weizmann Institute of
Science showed that sleeping participants given Pavlov-like
associations of tones with odors retained the association when
awake: when hearing the tone, they would breathe in deeply for
memories of pleasant odors, but take short sniffs when the tone
was associated with a foul odor – even when having no
conscious memory of the association. Researchers believe this
finding suggests that “we could probably learn more complex
information while we sleep,” but they expect limits. Don’t place
your homework under your pillow, for instance. More detail
provided in the coverage on Nature News August 26.
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More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体

Support for circumcision: Parents worrying about the
decision whether to circumcise their baby boy might elect
to do so, now that medical doctors from the American
Association of Pediatrics endorsed it August
27. The AAP feels it can reduce sexually-transmitted
diseases and improve boys’ health, such as reducing risk
of penile cancer and urinary tract infections. Some
disagree strongly with tampering with nature on
philosophical or religious grounds; some worry about
complications for the baby. Although still controversial,
the AAP believes ” the medical benefits outweigh the
risks of the procedure” and advises insurance companies
to pay for it. Source: Nature News, August 28; see
also Live Science, which also reported August 20 that a
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drop in circumcisions would boost health care costs.
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
Circumcision remains a parental choice; if undertaken, it should

be for health reasons, not religious reasons. For Christians, the
apostle Paul declared that “circumcision is nothing and
uncircumcision is nothing” in terms of ceremonial significance,
“but keeping the commandments of God” is what counts (I Cor.
7:19). In Romans he proved that circumcision is no longer a
requirement for pleasing God, from whom salvation is by grace
alone through faith. In Galatians, he strongly condemned the
Judaizers who insisted that Christians must be circumcised,
declaring them to be hypocrites: “As many as desire to make a
good showing in the flesh, these would compel you to be
circumcised, only that they may not suffer persecution for the
cross of Christ. For not even those who are circumcised keep
the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may
boast in your flesh.
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More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体
But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our

Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me,
and I to the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation.” (Galatians
6:12–15). Nevertheless, he did have Timothy circumcised to
avoid offense as the young disciple entered a ministry to a
mixed church of Jews and Gentiles (Acts 16:1–3). Some
people get really adamant about their positions for or against
circumcision, but consider: God would not have required a
seriously damaging procedure for his people the Jews in the
Old Testament; they did, after all, do a pretty good job of being
fruitful and multiplying. If you agree with the AAP that the
benefits outweigh the risks, or if you have some pragmatic
reason, like wanting your boy to fit the cultural norm, have at
it. If you want your boy to remain all natural, you will not
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46
thereby displease God.
More Reasons to Appreciate Your Body
更多理由去欣赏你的身体

We hope all the stories in this entry will
remind us all how “fearfully and
wonderfully made” we are (Psalm 139),
from the level of the whole body all the
way down to the individual proteins in our
cells. Browse through our “Human Body”
category to read about many more
wonders that make human life
precious. Be grateful again today to your
Maker, and promote the sanctity of human
life in your voting and behavior.
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47
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望



Your dog learned the most effective way to
shake water off: by evolution, maybe. Maybe
evolution did other things, too.
Spin-Dry the Dog
Anyone with a dog has been amused or
amazed at how well they shake water off after
coming out of the pool or lake. The shakes
start at the head and move like a spin-drying
machine down to the tail. Did you know most
mammals, except humans, have the same app
pre-installed?
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Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望

David Hu at Georgia Tech decided to take his
students on a science safari and find out the
evolution of the doggy shake, according
to PhysOrg, “Planet of the Apes: Furry
mammals evolved a tuned spin dry.” What
they found was pretty remarkable: “The
seemingly casual jiggle imparts enough
centrifugal force to expel 70 percent of the
water in his coat in a fraction of a
second.” They put stickers on dogs to
measure the action, and found about a 303/21/2016
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degree angle of shake.
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望
The team watched 30 other mammals, from “mice, rats, cats,


goats, sheep, lions, tigers, bears, and giant pandas” do a
similar shake, despite being widely separated
geographically. Smaller animals have to shake faster to get the
same centrifugal drying effect, but the behavior is similar. It’s
not just the shaking that does the job; the skin is also loose
enough to impart the energy to the fur. Good thing; animals
could face hypothermia if they can’t get the water away from
their skin fast enough.
The original paper on the Royal Society website Aug. 17 (open
access) had very little to say about evolution: just one mention
in passing, that “Many animals evolved physical adaptations
to minimize infiltration of water into their furs or
feathers.” The PhysOrg article, by contrast, seemed obsessed
with saying how this behavior evolved. It brought in Frank Fish
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as chief storyteller:
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望

Shaking is a useful adaptation, but did it show up in
some ancestral mammal millions of years ago, or did
it evolve independently in different lines? That’s hard
to say, said evolutionary biologist Frank Fish of West
Chester University. Fish said mammals probably coopted the ability to shake, which originated far back
in the evolutionary tree. Sharks, for example, do some
fast twisting to help them tear up their prey. “We can see
the ability to twist all the way back to the first
vertebrate.” Since evolution is basically a descent by
modification, he said, mammals probably inherited
the ability to shake from distant ancestors, and then
modified it as a way to get dry.
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Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望


Teleological language is, unfortunately for Fish,
verboten in evolutionary explanations. Fish was then
challenged with the fact that humans don’t do the wet
doggy shake (try it; it’s hard). He extended his story
thus: “Humans don’t have fur,
so perhaps our ancestors lost the ability
somewhere along the evolutionary line. There’s
also one type of hairless guinea pig that doesn’t
shake off water, he said.” Evolutionary loss, though,
does not help explain the origin of the trait.
The authors in the Royal Society paper, meanwhile,
seemed more interested in what human engineers can
learn from the iDog Shake app. It might even
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help JPL with its next Mars rover:
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望

Water repellency has previously been viewed as a
static property of surfaces such as plant leaves and
insect cuticle. An equally important trait is dynamic
water repellency, whereby muscular energy is
applied to remove water. This may have use in
sensor design. For example, digital
cameras already rely upon internal shakers for
removing dust from sensors. Such functionality may
have improved the capability of the Mars Rover,
which suffered reduced power from the accumulation
of dust on its solar panels. In the future, selfcleaning and self-drying may arise as an important
capability for cameras and other equipment subject
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to wet or dusty conditions.
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望
Count the Cubs



Bears do the shake, but they can count, too. National
Geographic said they can count as well as apes. Right off the
bat, the evolutionary story had to make its entrance: “the black
bear (file picture) may have evolved its smarts to find food.” This
begs the question why all the other mammals needing to find food
(presumably, all of them) didn’t “evolve” equivalent smarts.
To reporter Christine Dell’Amore, though, it was perfectly natural:
“It makes sense that bears would be smart—as loner
omnivores, the animals must problem solve to root out a variety
of food sources,” she said, leaving readers wondering if a need is
sufficient to generate beneficial mutations for natural selection.
More practically, though, “the finding may open up possibilities
for comparing the cognitive abilities of bears and primates,”
she ended. Maybe evolutionists will decide humans evolved from
bears, if not the Clark’s nutcracker (2/17/2004).
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Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望
Hold the Mustard Evolution



When you see a science article start with “The evolution of…,” you
can be fairly sure a just-so story is coming. “The evolution of the
mustard’s spice” is PhysOrg’s latest entry. “The tangy taste a
mustard plant develops to discourage insect predators can be
the difference between life and death for the plants,” the summary
states. “A new study has used this trait and its regional variations to
conquer the difficult task of measuring the evolution of complex
traits in a natural environment.”
So did the evolutionists from Duke University explain why mustard
“developed” this tangy taste, but the watermelon did not? Did they
explain why insects didn’t develop a taste for mustard in the
meantime? No; first, we are told in the article why humans don’t
douse their hot dogs with mustard (at least, normal humans don’t),
and it’s not to keep the insects away: “Mustard plants produce a spicy
chemical intended to discourage insects from eating them lest they
suffer a bad case of heartburn, and it has essentially the same 55
3/21/2016
effect on us.”
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望

This is a strange statement, considering the
widespread attraction for hot chilis among
masochistic people. In the end, even though
the scientists conjured up amino acids related
to spice development in the 3,000 years that
supposedly separates mustard from the lab
plant Arabidopsis, all the article offered was
future hope and a pun: “We finally have the
tools to find the genes and
to understand their influence on physiology
and fitness, and that’s pretty cool.”
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Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望
A Rose Arose, Evolution Knows



Double flowers are the delight of gardeners, but most natural
flowers, like wild roses, are single. PhysOrg offers its readers a
“glimpse into the evolution of flowering plants” in its report
on work by researchers at the University of Washington. So
what’s the glimpse? Well, readers are told that evolution is an
entrepreneur:
“The flower is one of the key innovations of flowering
plants. It allowed flowering plants to coevolve with pollinators
– mainly insects, but other animals as well – and use those
pollinators for reproduction,” [Verónica] Di Stilio said. “Many
scientists are interested in finding the genetic underpinnings of
flower diversification. Just how flowering plants become so
species rich in such a relatively short period of geologic
time has been a question since Darwin.”
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Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望
For inquiring minds, it is not very helpful to find that


evolutionists are still working on a 153-year-old
question. Anything more specific? Actually, yes; readers are
told that “scientists have proved the same class of genes”
identified in the lab plant Arabidopsis “is at work in a
representative of a more ancient plant lineage, offering a
glimpse further back into the evolutionary development of
flowers.” But that’s not really evolution; that’s stasis. Di Stilio
said so: “It’s pretty amazing that Arabidopsis and Thalictrum,
the plant we studied, have genes that do the exact same kind
of things in spite of the millions of years of evolution that
separates the two species.”
Other than a brief mention of jumping genes and mutants that
produce double flowers in the lab, the article never really got
around to offering the “glimpse into the evolution of
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flowering plants” the headline promised.
Whole Lotta Evolvin’ Goin’ On
一大堆不断进化的展望

Has there ever been a “scientific” theory
more useless and unproductive than
evolution? It’s unproductive in the sense
of never providing firm answers even after
153-year long efforts. It’s very productive
as a motivator for research, we must
admit; who wouldn’t be attracted to the
possibility of telling just-so stories in the
name of science? Time to re-read
the 12/22/2003 commentary on what
Darwin did to the science lab.
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Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地



Marc Hauser, Harvard evolutionary psychologist who
resigned under a cloud, was found guilty of scientific
misconduct and admitted to some of it.
Nature News reported: “Former Harvard University
psychologist Marc Hauser has admitted to making
‘mistakes’ in his research that led to findings of
research misconduct announced today by the US Office
of Research Integrity, which polices research funded by
the National Institutes of Health.”
Hauser’s confession is reported by the Boston Globe. He
admitted some mistakes, but stood by most of his work: “I
am saddened that this investigation has caused some to
question all of my work, rather than the few papers
and unpublished studies in question.”
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Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地


The Harvard Magazine, though, printed a substantial list
of misconduct investigators found, including fabricating
data and falsely describing results. Hauser resigned last
year when the investigation began. The magazine says,
“he had planned to return to Harvard after his leave,
but resigned following a psychology department
faculty vote against having him resume teaching
duties.” An update states that Harvard instigated the
investigation and agrees with the US Office
findings. (See note following our 12/24/2010 entry for
first indications of misconduct.)
The magazine stated, “Hauser studied the evolution of
language and cognition, in research involving
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monkeys and humans.”
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

In a column today in Nature unrelated to the
Hauser investigation, Jim Woodgett of Mount Sinai
Hospital wrote that scientists must be open about
their mistakes. “The scientific community must be
diligent in highlighting abuses, develop greater
transparency and accessibility for its work,
police research more effectively and exemplify
laudable behaviour,” he warned. “This
includes encouraging more open debate about
misconduct and malpractice, exposing our
dirty laundry and welcoming external
examination.”
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Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

Update 9/11/2012: Nature News reported that there
are questions about whether Hauser intentionally
committed misconduct. Outsiders cannot know due to
privacy rules of the investigation. According to
reporter Eugenie Samuel Reich, projects tainted by
the misconduct were funded by the NIH up to
$790,000. Now that Hauser is gone from Harvard, he
has turned his attention to education, working with a
company that develops computer games to teach
students cognitive skills and self-control. “his work is
deeply satisfying and I look forward to making new
contributions to human welfare, education and the role
of scientific knowledge in understanding human
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nature,” he said.
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

Update 9/13/2012: Science Magazine 14 September gave
a balanced report on the Hauser investigation, presenting
views of accusers and defenders, as well as specifics on
the alleged instances of misconduct. Apparently
whistleblowers from his own lab tipped off Harvard’s
investigation, which was followed up and confirmed by
the ORI at NIH. Some of his colleagues call him solely
responsible and are bothered by his refusal to accept
responsibility: “It is sad that Hauser still will not admit to
the charges that have been found against him when he
does appear to nonetheless accept that the evidence
exists and is legitimate,” Gerry Altmann wrote in an e-mail
to Science. Some of his lab workers are now disgruntled
that their work has been tainted by their association with
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him.
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

Science noted that his “provocative work” garnered
“media attention” and that the publication of his
book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our
Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, “he had
moved into the rarified sphere of the public
intellectual.” Some colleagues in the evolutionary
psychology community, nevertheless, are standing
by him and downplaying the seriousness of the
misconduct, some of which was not published. As
part of the discipline, any research Hauser does
with funding from the Public Health Service must
be supervised, and he is barred from peer
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reviewing others’ work, for 3 years.
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

Marc Hauser’s “research” was often reported in these
pages. In 9/21/2005, we saw him referring to human
capabilities as “the chimpanzee mind.” 5/29/2006, we
found him joining the Darwin Centurions against the I.D.
Visigoths. In 10/27/2006 and 11/06/2006, we saw his fellow
Darwinists adoring his new book Moral Minds: How Nature
Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (by
natural selection). In the 2/22/2008 entry, we saw him
engaging in “paleofantasy,” trying to rescue Darwin from the
huge cognitive gulf between chimpanzees and human
children. In 4/07/2009, we saw him divining into “the
evolution of dogs and the evolution of
humans.” In 7/06/2009, we saw him attributing animals’
ability to count to evolution. In 2/08/2010, just months before
he was caught, we saw him trying to evolutionize religion to66 a
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point that even appalled Nature reporter Phillip Ball.
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

This is the guy, you might remember, who
taught his toddler to adore Charles Darwin:
“When my youngest daughter was about three
years old, I pulled a cheap trick on her,
teaching her that whenever I asked ‘Who’s the
man?’, she should reply ‘Darwin!’ She does
this quite well now,” he said
(see 7/03/2007 entry). Let’s hope his new
work with students on Cape Cod does not
involve this kind of Darwin brainwashing. Is
this the person you want teaching your kid
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self-control?
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

So while we don’t rejoice over anyone’s
downfall, we are not surprised. Actually, we
think Hauser should have been
rewarded. Remember, he wrote a book about
how “nature” (a.k.a. natural selection)
produced our “moral minds,” our “sense of
right and wrong.” It’s not really right or wrong,
he said; it’s just a “sense” of it that the
aimless, purposeless, amoral process of
selection produced in us. Natural selection
allows room for cheaters in its schemes for
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how morality evolved.
Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

Cheaters are not doing wrong; they’re just
participants in the game (3/25/2010). Harvard
needs cheaters like Marc Hauser to keep their
evolutionary game going. It gives the “punishers”
something to do (1/13/2010). Hauser actually
played a vital role, therefore, at Harvard, and
illustrated how evolutionary game theory was
supposed to work (11/16/2009). Remember the
evolutionist who said, “it becomes advantageous
for some individuals to cheat, and vice versa,
which allows co-existence between cheaters and
cooperators to arise”? (4/07/2009).
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Evolutionist Disgraced
一进化论者的名誉扫地

Yes! Reward Marc Hauser. He illustrated the
morality of “the chimpanzee mind” in real-world
experiments. The joke was on Harvard, not
him. He really showed his daughter that Darwin is
The Man. He is a consistent Darwinian. Should
Harvard punish a faithful devotee of
Darwin? Should the U.S. Office of Research
Integrity punish someone who revealed that
integrity is a farce, an illusion, a relic of natural
selection? (7/23/2010) Reward the
cheater! Reward all the Darwinian cheaters. We
like that, because it will hasten the implosion of the
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Darwin totalitarian regime.
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话


At least 80% of the human genome is functional, scientists now
say, based on a genetic survey called ENCODE that may force
reassessment of what a gene is.
The big news in human genetics this week is the publication of
results by the ENCODE(Encyclopedia of DNA Elements)
consortium, “the most ambitious human genetics project to
date,” and what it reveals about function in the human
genome. When the human genome was first published,
scientists were surprised that only about 3% of it coded for
proteins. That was before they knew about all the coded
information in the “epigenome,” which includes RNA transcripts
that regulate the code. The new results show that at least 80%
of the human genome is, in fact, functional, rendering the
evolutionary notion of “junk DNA” (leftovers from our
evolutionary past) incorrect. Evolutionists themselves are
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71
writing the “eulogy for junk DNA.”
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话
 There is so much buzz about this story that came
out in Nature this week, all we can do is list some
of the more prominent headlines. References
to Nature are from the 26 September 2012 issue,
volume 489, no. 54. Popular reports in the news
media are too numerous to list.
 Nature’s news feature “ENCODE: The Human
Encyclopaedia” by Brendan Maher begins, “First
they sequenced it. Now they have surveyed its
hinterlands. But no one knows how much more
information the human genome holds, or when
to stop looking for it.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

Evolution is mentioned in some of the Nature papers, but after
notions of “evolutionarily conserved” and “evolutionary
constraints” are removed (which refer to lack of evolution), what
is left is mostly assumption rather than discovery. In Nature’s
summary article “Genomics: ENCODE Explained,” one mention
of evolution was not particularly helpful to Darwinists: “Why
evolution would maintain large amounts of
‘useless’ DNA had remained a mystery, and seemed
wasteful,” Barroso wrote. “It turns out, however, that there
are good reasons to keep this DNA.” Then Barroso listed
some of the good things the non-coding DNA does. In the
section “Evolution and the Code,” two of the authors stashed
most of the understanding in the future: “many aspects of posttranscriptional regulation, which may also drive evolutionary
changes, are yet to be fully explored.” The other three
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authors did not mention evolution.
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

Nature looked back at a quote by Nobel laureate David Baltimore
11 years ago when the human genome was first published:
“Unless the human genome contains a lot of genes that are
opaque to our computers, it is clear that we do not gain our
undoubted complexity over worms and plants by using many more
genes. Understanding what does give us our complexity —
our enormous behavioural repertoire, ability to produce
conscious action, remarkable physical coordination (shared with
other vertebrates), precisely tuned alterations in response to
external variations of the environment, learning, memory … need I
go on? — remains a challenge for the future.” Now, Peter Bork
and Richard Copley state that the ENCODE data “may
offer insight into function and regulation beyond the level of
individual genes. The draft is also a starting point for studies
of the three-dimensional packing of the genome into a cell’s
nucleus. Such packing is likely to influence gene regulation … The
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human genome lies before us, ready for interpretation.”
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

Nature posted a video by members of
the ENCODE team explaining what their published
results mean to human genetics. ENCODE Lead
Coordinator Ewan Birney describes the hundreds of
terabytes of raw data generated in the 5-year project
involving hundreds of people. “There are probably
things that we have no idea what they’re doing and
yet they’re going something important,” he says,
hinting at potentially more than 80% function. “It’s very
hard to get over the density of information,” he
said. Genes can no longer be considered discreet
sections of code. The data looks more like a
jungle. There are “places in the genome we thought
were silent and they’re teeming with life,” he said. 75
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话



A profile of Ewan Birney was written by Elisabeth Pennisi in
the current view of Science(Sept 7, 337:6099, page 1167–
1169, doi:10.1126/science.337.6099.1159). Birney is “a selftaught programmer turned bioinformatician” who brought
hundreds of people together and worked very hard to bring
knowledge of the human genome to this point.
“Human Genome Is Much More than Just Genes,”
Elizabeth Pennisi wrote for Science NOW. The project
provided a kind of “Google Maps” for the genome, allowing
studies of the epigenome (codes above the genetic code)
and regulatory elements that might be implicated in disease.
“ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA” is another
article by Elizabeth Pennisi in Science Sept 7, pp. 1159–
1161. Sample quotes by scientists:
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话





“I don’t think anyone would have anticipated even close to
the amount of sequence that ENCODE has uncovered that
looks like it has functional importance,” says John A.
Stamatoyannopoulos, an ENCODE researcher at the University of
Washington, Seattle.
These results are going “to change the way a lot of
[genomics] concepts are written about and presented in
textbooks,” Stamatoyannopoulos predicts.
“It’s a treasure trove of information,” says Manolis Kellis, a
computational biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in Cambridge who analyzed data from the project.
“What we found is how beautifully complex the biology really
is,” says Jason Lieb, an ENCODE researcher at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
“Regulation is a 3D puzzle that has to be put together,”
Gingeras says. “That’s what ENCODE is putting out on the table.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话
 Alongside a beautiful artwork of the DNA double
helix, New Scientist echoed the theme that “junk DNA”
is obsolete. “The reams of ‘junk’ DNA that make up
the majority of our genetic code appear to have a
purpose after all, according to the results of a global
research project.” Switches, for instance, have a
purpose: “The switches also appear to be spread out
over the genome, with some being located at a
distance from the gene they are controlling,”
reporter Jessica Hamzelou wrote. “Around 95 per
cent of the genome appears to be very close to a
switch, suggesting that almost all of our DNA may
be doing something important.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

On Science Daily: “Mapping a World Beyond
Genes” commented on the epigenome so
central to the ENCODE project: “The term
‘epigenome’ refers to a layer of chemical
information on top of the genetic code,
which helps determine when and where (and in
what types of cells) genes will be active. This
layer of information includes a suite of
chemical changes that appear across the
genetic landscape of every cell, and can differ
dramatically between cell types.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

“Yale Team Finds Order Amidst the Chaos Within the Human
Genome,” announces another article on Science Daily. After
describing the hierarchical information structure of the epigenome,
likening it to management levels in a company (but with less
“middle management” bottlenecks), this article looked for evidence
for evolution in pseudogenes, calling them ” stretches of
fossil DNA, evolutionary remnants of an active biological
past.” These pseudogenes, though, are not dead: “However, the
Yale team shows many of them are resurrected to produce
non-coding RNAs, which scientists now know are crucial to the
activation and silencing of protein-coding genes throughout
the genome.” Remarkably, one of the Yale team members said
this proves evolution is smartly economical: “This is
another example of nature not wasting resources, a story we
see repeated time and time again throughout the 3 billion letters of
our genome.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话


Another article on Science Daily seems to dilute the
evolutionary claim, though, claiming that ENCODE is a
forward-looking project casting off obsolete evolutionary
notions: “Fast Forward for Biomedical Research:
Massive DNA Encyclopedia Scraps the Junk.” It
includes another quote by Birney: “Our genome is simply
alive with switches: millions of places that determine
whether a gene is switched on or off.”
Science Daily also printed a press release from the
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
titled, “Major Advances in Understanding the
Regulation and Organization of the Human
Genome.” This article stressed how ENCODE is filling the
“knowledge gap” that the notion of “junk DNA” explained
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away.
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话


“Biochemical Functions for Most of Human Genome
Identified: New Map Finds Genetic Regulatory Elements
Account for 80 Percent of Our DNA” is the title of another
article on Science Daily. This one also mentioned
evolution, but only briefly, referring to percentages of
genes conserved across mammals. Some of these “newly
evolved regulatory regions,” however, work to “encode
regulators that activate other genes.”
In a similar vein, another Science Daily article announced,
“Millions of DNA Switches That Power Human
Genome’s Operating System Are Discovered.” This
article discussed not only the computers the scientists
used, but how DNA has its own computer-like operating
system.
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

“Human Genome Far More Active Than
Thought: GENCODE Consortium Discovers Far More
Genes Than Previously Thought” announced another
article on Science Daily. What is GENCODE? The article
explained, “The GENCODE Consortium is part of the
ENCODE Project that, today, publishes 30 research
papers describing findings from their nearly decade-long
effort to describe comprehensively all the active
regions of our human genome.” The GENCODE team
is looking for more genes and finding them. In addition,
they found 11,000 “pseudogenes” and found “There is
some emerging evidence that many of these genes,
too, might have some biological activity.” This hints
that pseudogenes may be elevated from evolutionary junk
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as more is learned about them.
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话
 Of interest to philosophers of science is whether
the ENCODE results will leave the notion of a “gene”
intact. Another article on Science Daily is headlined,
“In Massive Genome Analysis ENCODE Data
Suggests ‘Gene’ Redefinition.” For one thing, the
“junk DNA” advocates were wrong: “Far from being
padding, many of these RNA messages appeared to
be functional.” Even more important: genes are
sometimes not distinct loci: “The additional
knowledge that parts of one gene or
functional RNA can reside within another were
surprising, and suggested a picture of the
architecture of our genome that was much more
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complex than previously thought.”
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话
 Functions for the remaining 20% of DNA left undefined
by ENCODE may be found in the differential gene
expression within body tissues, because “a large
percent of non-protein-coding RNAs are localized
within cells in a manner consistent with their
having functional roles.” And even though some
RNAs are not associated with genes, they are
increasingly viewed as something greater: a “giant,
complex switchboard, controlling a network of
many events in the cell by regulating the processes
of replication, transcription and translation.” With
these new realizations, one team member
commented, “New definitions of a gene are needed.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

According to an article in Science Daily,
“The full ENCODE Consortium data sets can
be freely accessed through
the ENCODE project portal as well as at the
University of California at Santa Cruz genome
browser, the National Center for Biotechnology
Information, and the European Bioinformatics
Institute. Topic threads that run through several
different papers can be explored via
the ENCODE microsite page
at Nature.com/encode.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

The Wall Street Journal provides a sample of coverage from
a media site not devoted to science per se: “‘Junk DNA’
debunked” is the headline. “The discovery ‘is like a huge
set of floodlights being switched on’ to illuminate the
darkest reaches of the genetic code, said Ewan Birney of the
European Bioinformatics Institute in the U.K., lead analysis
coordinator for the Encode results.” Stamatoyannopoulos
commented, “We created a dictionary of the genome’s
programming language.” Noting that humans have about
30 times as much ‘junk DNA’ (regulatory elements, actually)
as other species, the WSJ said, “The unexpected level of
activity seen in the genomic hinterlands may also help
explain what makes us human.” With 30+ papers on
the ENCODE project in print and more coming, “The flood of
scientific data is likely to keep researchers busy for a long 87
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time.”
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

In contrast to all the above articles celebrating information
and function in non-coding DNA, New Scientist posted a
hold-out article advocating, “Don’t junk the ‘junk DNA’
just yet.” Is there still “function” in that vanishing
term? “The ENCODE project has revealed that 80 per
cent of our genome does something, but doing
something is not the same as doing something
useful,” the article points out: “there are still very good
reasons for thinking that most of our DNA is far from
essential.” The statement confuses “essential” with
“adaptive” and begs the question whether something
useful must be essential. A second hand is useful but not
essential or else amputees would never have
children. The short article was not specific and did not
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refer to evolution.
ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话


“ENCODE is an epic project that will undoubtedly lead to many
advances, but it is premature to leap to grand conclusions,” the
article warned. “Just as the much anticipated human genome project
revealed more than a decade ago, ENCODE tells us we still have an
enormous amount to learn from the book of life.”
Intelligent Design advocates are, meanwhile, gloating over the
demise of “junk DNA” and pointing to the exceptional
complexity ENCODE has revealed. Casey Luskin at Evolution News
& Views whipped out “Junk No More: ENCODE Project Nature
Paper Finds ‘Biochemical Functions for 80% of the Genome’” on
the day of Nature’s announcement. Robert Crowther reminded
readers of Evolution News & Views that “Jonathan Wells Got It Right
In The Myth of Junk DNA,” published by the Discovery Institute. “In
2010 in The Myth of Junk DNA, biologist Jonathan Wells exposed the
false claim that ‘junk DNA’ provides decisive evidence for Darwin’s
theory,” he said. “Now he has been vindicated by the leading
scientific publications in the world.”
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ENCODE Study Forces Evolutionists to Retract “Junk DNA” Myth
ENCODE的研究驱动进化论者要收回“垃圾DNA”的神话

Evolutionists are desperately struggling to
hang onto their theory in the floodlights
revealing layers of complexity far beyond
anything Darwin could have
conceived. Blobs of protoplasm, ha! How
about operating systems, switchboards, and
hierarchical management structures? It’s
over, Darwinists. You messed up on
vestigial organs, the fossil record and now
junk DNA. Please step aside and let the
science of the information age take care of
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what the evidence demands.
Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见


Everybody except liberals knows they are intolerant of
conservatives, but now a new survey won’t let them
deny they have a real bias problem.
Conservatives in academia have long been aware that
for their own protection they need to keep their views
quiet. Liberals, however, walk around thinking of
themselves as the most tolerant people in the world. An
anonymous online survey of 800 social psychologists,
about to be published by Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers
this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science (a
journal of the Association for Psychological Science),
caught social psychologists with their tolerant pants
down, Science Daily just reported. Here are some of the
most revealing excerpts:
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见

Every ten years or so, someone will
make the observation that there is a lack
of political diversity among
psychological scientists and a
discussion about what ought to be
done ensues. The notion that the field
discriminates against and is skewed
toward a liberal political perspective is
worthy of concern; scholars, both within
and outside the field, have offered various
solutions to this diversity problem.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见


Their findings confirm the field’s liberal bias, but
they reveal some surprises as well.… Inbar and
Lammers found an overwhelming liberal majority
when it concerned social issues, but greater
diversity on economic and foreign policy issues.
It seems that conservative social psychologists
hide their views because they perceive the field as
hostile to their values. The more conservative
respondents were, the more likely they were to
report that they had experienced an intellectually
unfriendly climate. Importantly, self-defined
liberals did not seem to have the same
perceptions of hostility.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见


Furthermore, liberal respondents were more likely
to say that they would discriminate against
psychologists who displayed clear conservative
views in the context of a paper or grant review, a
symposium invitation, and in faculty hiring.
Social tolerance and fairness are important
values for many psychological scientists, so
it’s surprising to find intolerance of a different kind
in the field. And despite the fact that psychological
scientists are well aware of the potentially harmful
effects of cognitive biases, they are clearly not
immune to such biases themselves.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见



Several of the commentaries raise serious questions
about how ideology might be shaping the issues
and questions that social psychologists
systematically choose — and do not choose — to
explore.
It may be the case that the field attracts a certain kind
of inquiring and open mind that tends to embrace
liberal values, and that conservatives self-select out of
the field. But this, most of the commentators
agree, does not change the fact that pervasive
liberal bias is unhealthy for intellectual inquiry.
The article ends with Inbar and Lammers declaring the
“time is ripe for self-examination in the field.”
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见

The time is ripe for housecleaning, not just
navel-gazing. Nothing will change until parity is
achieved. These people lack self-awareness of
their intolerance because the only ones they
hang out with are people like themselves. They
have no idea about how they stifle true diversity
and open debate by their cluelessness,
engendered by self-fulfilling prophecies and
group reinforcement. Watch the
documentary Indoctrinate U – it’s about campus
leftist idealogues so pathetically unself-aware,
they are downright funny.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见

Don’t fall for the baloney that conservatives
self-select out of the field because they lack an
“inquiring and open mind.” That’s leftist hot
air. Notice, instead, that the leftist bias actually
influences the very scientific questions they find
worthy to explore! That’s why you so often find
social psychologists analyzing religious people
instead of conservative psychologists analyzing
leftists. We need more studies on leftism as a
mental disorder that produces delusions of
tolerance.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见

Notice that some of the social psychos in
the survey even admitted they would
discriminate against conservatives! They
would prevent them from getting hired or
getting grants or tenure. Well, duh! No
wonder they’re all leftists.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见

Since social psychologists are overwhelmingly
Darwinians, this undoubtedly includes Darwin
skeptics, who have felt their wrath and found
themselves among the ranks of The
Expelled. Ironically, you can bet on it that their
universities or institutions have a written policy on
“diversity and inclusion” – about as worthless as
a UN committee on anti-terrorism run by
jihadis. Your commentator had to take a campuswide quiz on “diversity and inclusion” at a scientific
institution, only to find himself expelled a few years
later by the organization’s intolerance of intelligent
design.
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Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists
心理学家调查暴露自由主义偏见


Someone show this article to radio talk show host
Dennis Prager, who has often beat the drum about
the blindness of leftists in academia (he prefers
calling them “leftists” instead of “liberal”–a good
word misused). Prager recently stated wisely that
leftists are incapable of love, because they are not
intolerant of evil. It takes intolerance of evil to
produce true love. Celebrate “tolerance” without a
hatred for evil, and the hate gets directed at those
who don’t buy into the groupthink.
For an explanation of why tolerance is impossible
as a universal standard of virtue, see the Baloney
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Detector on “Self-Refuting Fallacy.”
Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走


Strict application of the “scientific method”
is blinding some scientists to the real
world, two authors claim.
We need a new science to get “back to
the future,” a press release from the
University of Arizona claims – actually,
“back to the past” might be more
accurate. Two U of A researchers have a
new book out saying scientists need to get
out more, like they used to.
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Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走


Mars rover Curiosity is doing it. School children
strolling through the woods with binoculars are doing
it. Charles Darwin was doing it. Observing the
natural world around them was how the early
naturalists started what would later become known
as ecology – the science of how living things interact,
depend on each other and how their habitats and
communities change over time.
In their book, “Observation and Ecology,” ecologists
Rafe Sagarin and Aníbal Pauchard make the case that if
scientists are to tackle the enormously complex
problems the world is facing, researchers and
funding agencies have to leave their comfort zone of
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well-controlled experimental manipulations.
Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走

Sagarin and Pauchard argue that a strict
indoor application of the so-called “scientific
method” (a philosophically vexed notion), i.e.,
testing hypotheses in the lab, cannot provide
insight into complex problems that have too
many variables. Direct observation, though,
like getting outside and walking around with
one’s eyes open, can. They apply this to
global warming. No amount of modeling can
surpass the simple act of getting out and
observing what animals and plants are being
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affected by climate change.
Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走

Even historical records and tribal legends
can be useful to scientists. Those can’t be
tested in a laboratory; they need
observers willing to get out and find
them. Some field experiments, further,
might be unethical, like moving animals to
a different habitat to see if they
suffer. Better to observe them in their real
habitats.
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Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走

People used to do more observing outdoors,
they point out. “In the 1930s, more people in
the U.S. went to birding parties than to
professional baseball games,” Sagarin
said. While technology tends to drive scientists
(and teenagers) more indoors, it doesn’t have
to; for instance, groups of young people can
take their smart phones and collect data over
wide areas with data-sharing apps. These
might lead to fundamental insights by citizen
scientists.
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Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走

The authors are trying to supplement lab
science, not supplant it; they also argue
that they are not trying to take science
back to “stamp collecting” (merely
cataloging observations and classifying
things). But large numbers of
observations, they argue, can inform the
kinds of experiments worthy of testing.
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Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走

We post this not so much to agree with all they say,
but as an illustration that the so-called “scientific
method” is not set in stone. This story also points out
that “sociology of science” affects the kinds of
questions scientists ask and what they consider
significant. Further, it illustrates that science “evolves”
over time; even Darwin, they point out, spent a lot
more time looking at nature than many evolutionists
today who concoct models out of data sets and
computerized organisms. (Too bad Darwin didn’t
have an electronic microscope or history might have
been different – perhaps a much earlier Intelligent
Design Movement.)
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Scientists Need to Get Out More
科学家们需要多出去走走
 Most will probably agree that it is
worthwhile to get out into nature and
be more observant. There’s no
substitute for real world learning.
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Star Chemistry Constrains Habitable Zone
星化学约束可居住区
 The chemistry of a parent star can have drastic effects


on the habitability of an earth-like planet.
Scientists at the University of Arizona have added
another factor to consider when looking for habitable
planets. PhysOrg reported,
As a star evolves, it becomes brighter, causing the
habitable zone to move outwards through its solar
system. The team’s study indicates that a greater
abundance of oxygen, carbon, sodium, magnesium and
silicon should be a plus for an inner solar system’s longterm habitability because the abundance of these
elements make the star cooler and cause it to evolve
more slowly, thereby giving planets in its habitable zone
more time to develop life as we know it.…
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Star Chemistry Constrains Habitable Zone
星化学约束可居住区

The stellar abundance of oxygen seems crucial
in determining how long planets stay in the
habitable zone around their host star. If there
had been less oxygen in the Sun’s chemical
makeup, for example, Earth likely would have
been pushed out of the Sun’s habitable zone
about a billion years ago, well before complex
organisms evolved. Considering the first
complex multicellular organisms only arose
about 650 million years ago, such a move
would have likely destroyed any chance of
complex life taking hold on Earth.
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Star Chemistry Constrains Habitable Zone
星化学约束可居住区

There are probably other factors, too: “Habitability is very
difficult to quantify because it depends on a huge number of
variables, some of which we have yet to identify,” said the
university’s assistant professor of School of Earth and Space
Exploration, Patrick Young.
Update 9/11/2012: The BBC News claims that habitable
planets may be more abundant due to the fact that water can
exist under the surface, even outside the habitable zone
where liquid water can exist. There are, however,
constraints on how long a body’s internal heat can
last. Water is not alive; many other factors are required for
life. Even if life were possible in a deep, dark, subsurface
ocean, it would not be the kind humans would be able to
learn about or would want to contact. That being so, it
remains a theoretical possibility only, not conducive to
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observation.
Star Chemistry Constrains Habitable Zone
星化学约束可居住区









Let’s tally up the factors we’ve reported so far that make the
“Goldilocks Zone” more complicated than just allowing for liquid
water:
Galactic Habitable Zone, where a star must be located (09/29/2009);
Circumstellar Habitable Zone, the right radius from the star where
liquid water can exist (10/08/2010);
Continuously Habitable Zone, because too much variety can be lethal
(07/21/2007);
Temporal Habitable Zone, because habitable zones do not last
forever (10/27/2008);
Chemical and Thermodynamic Habitable Zone, where water can be
liquid (12/30/2003);
Ultraviolet Habitable Zone, free from deadly radiation (08/15/2006);
Tidal Habitable Zone, which rules out most stars that are small
(02/26/2011).
Stable Obliquity Habitable Zone (1/12/2012)
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Star Chemistry Constrains Habitable Zone
星化学约束可居住区

The list will probably continue to grow. Although the
current paper assumes billions of years of evolution,
it’s a problem for evolutionists of all stripes: atheistic,
deistic and theistic. Why? They all need billions of
years. Theistic evolutionists, for instance, would
need for God to intervene and move the earth as the
habitable zone evolves. If the solar system were
created much more recently, this is not a problem at
all. The hopes of Carl Sagan and other astronomers
of the 1980s for billions and billions of worlds filled
with life are looking more simplistic with each new
discovery. The earth is looking more Biblical all the
while.
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Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动


Learn about how cheetahs accelerate from 0 to 60 in
3 seconds, and other wonders of the living world.
Cheetah power: The distribution of muscle fiber
types in the rear legs and forelegs of the cheetah
allows it to achieve its phenomenal acceleration and
speed, the BBC News reported. Type IIx fibers, built
for speed, predominate in the rear legs, but Type I
fibers, more resistant to fatigue, predominate in the
front legs. This allows the cheetah to gain explosive
bursts of power on takeoff with its rear legs but
decelerate and stand with its forelegs. This is
explained in the article based on a paper
in Mammalian Biology.
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Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动

Formation flight: Airbus is aiming to flock
like the birds. PhysOrg reported on how
the airline giant believes that formation
flight will achieve fuel economy: “High
frequency routes would allow aircraft
to benefit from flying in formation like
birds during cruise bringing efficiency
improvements due to drag reduction
and lower energy use.” Might look kind
of neat, too, to see a flock of airplanes in
V-formation.
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Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动

Effortless flight: Wandering albatrosses
can fly for many hours at a time with no
effort, riding the wind without ever flapping
their wings. A paper in
PLoS ONE explains how scientists are
learning about the wandering albatross to
imitate it with aircraft:
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Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动


Albatrosses do something that no other birds are able to do:
fly thousands of kilometres at no mechanical cost. This is
possible because they use dynamic soaring, a flight mode that
enables them to gain the energy required for flying from
wind. Until now, the physical mechanisms of the energy gain in
terms of the energy transfer from the wind to the bird were mostly
unknown. Here we show that the energy gain is achieved by a
dynamic flight manoeuvre consisting of a continually repeated
up-down curve with optimal adjustment to the wind. We
determined the energy obtained from the wind by analysing the
measured trajectories of free flying birds using a new GPS-signal
tracking method yielding a high precision. Our results reveal an
evolutionary adaptation to an extreme environment, and may
support recent biologically inspired research on robotic
aircraft that might utilize albatrosses’ flight technique for
engineless propulsion.
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That was the only mention of evolution in the entire paper.
Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动
 Egg physics: You probably know from experience
that the tip of a chicken egg is the hardest part to
break. According to Live Science, it took physicists
at Oxford and MIT to find out why. “We didn’t set out
to understand the shape of an egg, it was just an
inspiration,” one of the researchers said. They
learned that the sharper the egg (assuming constant
thickness), the harder it is to crack. It’s not easy to
learn this from real eggs, which contain microcracks
that can effect experiments, so they used silicone
casts of eggs and computer models. The knowledge
gained from this kind of “biophysics” research may
have practical applications in medical delivery
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vesicles and other container designs.
Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动

Spinach power: Why re-invent the
photosynthesis machine? Scientists at
Vanderbilt took spinach leaves and put them
to work in solar cells. At first, the
orientations of the sun collectors canceled
out the current. Then they found a way to
align them, and boosted the current output
by 1,000 times. Their “biohybrid” solar cell,
according to Science Daily, is not quite ready
for production, but this experiment in literal
“green energy” is moving along
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handsomely. Popeye would be proud.
Cheetahs Prosper with Rear-Wheel Drive
猎豹使用后轮驱动

Everywhere you look, there are living things doing
amazing things. Who could not be thankful to live
in such a varied, inspiring world? The Apostle
Paul wrote that one of the main reasons the
Creator gave men over to a depraved mind was
that they were not thankful (Romans 1:18–
25). Evolution is the ultimate thankless
philosophy. Instead of praising the engineering
genius of the Creator, they smirk and say, “Stuff
happens.” The inventors flocking to biomimetics
exemplify a kind of implicit gratitude; would that
they would make it explicit.
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Jerusalem Cistern Found from First Temple Era
耶路撒冷第一圣殿时代发现水箱


A huge cistern near the Temple Mount has been found
that was part of Solomon’s Temple complex.
While excavating a cardo (street) that passed from the
City of David to the Temple Mount, a team broke into
a huge cistern. Dating from the time of Solomon
based on inscriptions and the type of plaster used, the
cistern helps explain where the priests and worshipers
obtained the large quantity of water that were needed
for the Temple. The discovery is reported fully
at Israel Hayom. A short YouTube video shows
explorers walking inside the huge cavernous water
reservoir. Live Science also reported the find, as
did Bible Places Blog.
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Jerusalem Cistern Found from First Temple Era
耶路撒冷第一圣殿时代发现水箱

The discovery solves a water logistics
problem. Historians had thought that
Jerusalem’s only water supply was the Gihon
Spring, some 800 meters away from the
Temple. But that would have required an
implausible number of donkey trips to haul the
water. By catching rainfall from the Tyropoean
Valley adjacent to the Temple, this cistern could
have stored a vast water supply for the priests to
use in the sacrificial ceremonies and for the large
crowds coming to the Temple for holy days. It
could also have protected the city during times of
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siege.
Jerusalem Cistern Found from First Temple Era
耶路撒冷第一圣殿时代发现水箱

One of the discoverers was ecstatic about
the find. “There is nothing like this in
Jerusalem. This is the first time that we
can date a reservoir in Jerusalem, and two
small cisterns beside it, to the First
Temple era. We have never found
anything like this in all the digs in
Jerusalem, since the 19th century.”
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Jerusalem Cistern Found from First Temple Era
耶路撒冷第一圣殿时代发现水箱

Archaeology is an intelligent-design
science. Researchers look for signs of
intelligence: artifacts, inscriptions, or other
material that bear the hallmarks of
intention. Intelligent beings are capable of
organizing natural materials for purposeful
uses. We see it in archaeology; we see similar
marks of purpose in living cells. In addition,
archaeologists are keen observers. They don’t
just model things in computers; they get out and
dig (although there is a growing convergence of
computer technology with old-fashioned
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shoveling techniques).
Jerusalem Cistern Found from First Temple Era
耶路撒冷第一圣殿时代发现水箱

This particular find shows, also, that contrary to
“minimalist” interpretations of Biblical history, the
people of Solomon’s time were highly intelligent, able
to dig deep into the rock to store the water needed for
the Temple. Far from being simple tribal chieftans
over nomadic clans, David and Solomon were city
planners and builders par excellence. Most likely the
plans for this cistern and the entire Temple Mount
complex were developed long before actual
construction began. King David was laying up
materials and building contracts with neighboring
kingdoms before his death (I Chronicles 22). The
cistern is another testament to their skill, and to the
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historical accuracy of the Biblical record.
Hopes for Wet Mars Diminished
湿火星希望减少了




The clays on Mars that were thought to be indicative
of a wet past could, instead, be formed by volcanoes.
Live Science said: “New Mars Theory Questions
Red Planet’s Watery Past.”
Astrobiology Magazine said, “Clay Not Evidence of
Lakes on Mars.”
New Scientist said, “Not so moist Mars: Clays may
come from lava, not lakes.” The article quotes Brian
Hynek saying, “Such a result would imply that early
Mars may not have been as habitable as
previously thought at the time when Earth’s life was
taking hold.” Live Science, though, said Hynek is
holding out hope that some of the Martian clays could
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Hopes for Wet Mars Diminished
湿火星希望减少了

Live Science includes a 6-minute video
update by John Grotzinger, project
scientist for the Curiosity rover. He’s still
hoping to find evidence of a watery past in
Gale Crater. If history is a guide,
scientists expected to find water-laid
deposits in Gusev Crater where the earlier
Spirit rover landed. Spirit, however, only
found dry volcanic deposits (8/06/2004).
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Hopes for Wet Mars Diminished
湿火星希望减少了


Belief in Martians dies hard, though. In
a PhysOrg article, Lawrence Krauss states in a
video clip he would “not be surprised” if
Curiosity finds evidence of life on Mars. He
even thinks life evolved there first and polluted
the Earth with life when Martian meteorites
landed here, like the infamous ALH84001 that
launched the new “science” of astrobiology
(see 9/02/2012).
Do astrobiologists have anything better than
hope and imagination? How can anyone call
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their faith scientific?
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？


Evolutionists are determined to keep morality from
succeeding as a defeater for natural selection.
“Evolving righteousness in a corrupt world” is
the eye-catching title of a short summary on
PhysOrg of a paper on PLoS ONE by the same
title. PhysOrg stated, “Initially cooperative
societies devolve toward corruption, but
introducing small ‘payments’ in conjunction with
punishment can lead to stable, righteous
societies, according to a modeling study
published Sep. 12 in the open access
journal PLOS ONE.”
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

In their abstract, Edgar A. DuéñezGuzmán and Suzanne Sadedin of
Harvard’s Department of Organismic and
Evolutionary Biology make
“righteousness” synonymous with
“cooperation.” But can’t societies
cooperate on unrighteous deeds? Their
paper views “righteousness” (cooperation)
as merely a mechanical game played by
natural selection on any group of
organisms, whether humans or ants:
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？
Righteousness, by stabilizing cooperation and providing a


higher payoff to cooperative groups, constitutes a mechanism to
shift the scale of selection from an individual to a group level.
Unlike alternative mechanisms to maintain cooperation, such as
reputation, righteousness requires no individual recognition or
memory. Righteousness does require some ability to discriminate
between punishers and non-punishers, but such discrimination
can occur without complex cognition; for
example, ant punishers are often larger and more aggressive than
non-punishers.
Because the collective payoff of righteousness is higher than that
of alternative outcomes, righteous groups are likely
to outcompete those that have converged on defection or
corruption. As a result, righteousness is expected to spread
either culturally or genetically. This mechanism may explain
the observation of righteous punishment in some ant species and
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some human societies.
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

Thus we see that, in their view,
“righteousness” is not really moral at all; it
involves no conscience, no moral choice,
and no definition of right or wrong. It
might spread “either culturally or
genetically,” they said. But if culture is an
artifact of genes, then so is
“righteousness.” If ants and bacteria can
be righteous, it’s just not really
righteousness at all. It’s an artifact of
selection that looks like righteousness.
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

This article is typical of evolutionary explanations for
morality. Hardly a paper in this genre fails to
mention that morality is a conundrum for
Darwinism. Why would an individual self-sacrifice
for the good of others? Think of a grandmother
sending a check for the relief of hungry children she
has never seen in a faraway country. Morality
threatens Darwinism. It’s an observational fact that
defies evolution. For Darwinism to survive as the allencompassing explanation of everything in the living
world, it must be Darwinized. It must be brought
within the sheepfold of phenomena explainable by
the mindless, aimless, purposeless mechanism of133
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mutation and selection.
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？


Still, it remains a challenge ever since Darwin suggested that
human psychology and sociality are selective effects. That’s
why evolutionary journals and articles constantly try to tackle
it with new models and approaches.
In Science 31 August 2012 (Vol. 337 no. 6098 p. 1042, DOI:
10.1126/science.1225641), Buyun Zhao reviewed a new
book on the topic called Moral Origins: The Evolution of
Virtue, Altruism, and Shame by Christopher Boehm. Zhao
agreed that “Prima facie, morality (our sense of right and
wrong) appears to be an evolutionary paradox.” So he
was relieved that “With its cautious rhetoric and
deep introspection, [Boehm’s] account provides a
convincing tale” – a strange description for a scientific
theory. Even conscience is brought within the fold of natural
selection:
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

Uncomfortably inherent in this account,
the counterintuitive notion that our sense
of fairness arose prior to the formation of our
conscience presents us with a philosophical
dilemma. However, Boehm tactfully argues that
understanding the rules of the social game should
precede its true emotional internalization.
He suggests that our conscience arose merely as a
“Machiavellian risk calculator”—a process of
thoughts that conceptualizes the game theory of
prohibitive punishment costs versus defection
benefits. This seems to me the most persuasive
description of the emergence of conscience yet.
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

Philosophers might retort at this solution to the
dilemma, however, asking for clarity about the
meaning of introspection, thoughts, and
conceptualizations. Sweeping past such
questions, Zhao found it “profoundly satisfying”
to see a fellow evolutionist bringing these difficult
concepts into the Darwinian fold: “The book’s
greatest value lies in its elegant naturalistic
explanation for morality, which dovetails
Darwinian history with philosophy.” Now if
Zhao can just get philosophy to arise by natural
selection, he might be able to locate the genes that
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produce the illusion of profound satisfaction.
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

Speaking of fairness, PhysOrg announced that “Fairness
can evolve by imitating one’s neighbor.” And who tells
us this? Physicists, the headline said. This would suggest
that robots can learn fairness. But if robots do it, who
determines if it is fair? A robot referee? Who
programmed the robot referee with the fairness
algorithm? Omitting to address such philosophical
questions, the article about models developed by eastern
Europeans continues the selectionist line:
“Studies have shown that, while models of natural
selection favor the evolution of the rational Homo
economicus who accepts anything and offers
little, arranging the game spatially can lead to the
evolution of fairness.” The question-begging lights really
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137
flash on the words favor, rational, and arranging.
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

Some evolutionists try to adorn their models with lab
experiments. An example is found on BBC News, where
reporter Victoria Gill told readers that “Puppet
experiment suggests humans are born to be
fair.” This tale rests, once again, on evolution by
natural selection. Speaking of experiments on fair play
with non-human primates, Gill made it clear that “these
studies are trying to unpick its evolutionary
origins.” Even though the results of the experiments
showed that true altruistic behavior (helping others for
no reward) is unique to humans, no theologians were
allowed to opine on how fairness might be a created trait
in the beings God made in His image. Instead, answers
will have to await better models from evolutionary
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biologists and psychologists.
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？
Time would fail to list all the other attempts to evolutionize

morality, such as the paper this month in PNAS by Suchak and
de Waal, “Monkeys benefit from reciprocity without the
cognitive burden” (an attempt to identify the “mechanisms”
that led to the “origins of human prosociality” via natural
selection), or the paper in Science about “Microbial
Cooperative Warfare” by Helene Morlon (Science 7
September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6099 pp. 1184–1185,DOI:
10.1126/science.1227512) that tried to answer the valid
question, “But how can such social systems
evolve? Antibiotic production comes at a fitness cost to the
superkillers, and in a Darwinian world of survival of the
fittest, why should an individual help others at its own
expense?” Morlon found respite in the prospect that
cooperation can appear to evolve, even in bacteria, and that
further research may find out why some day.
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？
It should be no surprise, given this tendency to evolutionize

morality, that evolutionists look at hot political issues in similar
terms. For instance, the latest Live Science entry by Stephanie
Pappas headlined, “Providing Abortions Can Be the Moral
Choice, Doctor Says.” With the emphasis on “fairness” as an
artifact of game theory and models of natural and social
selection, now Pappas’ arguments make a kind of sense, if
sense has any grounding in selectionist theory. If conscientious
objectors can be granted immunity from prosecution for
refusing to perform abortions due to religious beliefs, then the
ones who want to perform abortions as their “moral choice”
should also be granted immunity. It’s only fair. It’s also
convenient: one doesn’t have to consider the rights of the
unborn, a mass of evolving genes with surrounding
tissue. Bystanders might well wonder what soap box Pappas is
standing on to teach fairness, if fairness is an illusion brought140
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？
 Pastors, listen up: these articles
reveal just how pernicious the Darwin
Industry is. Ever since Huxley,
Tyndall and Darwin turned the
selectionist storytellers loose on the
humanities (see Evolution News &
Views), Darwinists have rationalized
the worst atrocities in human history
with their ideology of evolutionary
naturalism.
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If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

It’s pernicious on at least three grounds: (1) They
redefine words like righteousness, morality,
and altruism, turning them into empty evolutionary
artifacts devoid of meaning; (2) They bastardize
science by telling stories; and (3) They turn around
and rationalize evil with their foolish models. We
might add a fourth: (4) They shoot themselves in
the foot. In their Yoda trances, they assume a
stance outside the universe of evolved behaviors,
pretending to explain rationally and truthfully what
goes on in the minds of everyone else but
themselves. For this reason alone, we can dismiss
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all they say as nonsense.
If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?
如果道德进化而来，它是公义的吗？

But give them enough power to exclude other
views, and they are the most dangerous
ideologues on earth. If you think Darwinian evil
was spent on the 20th century, just wait: the
same corrupted minds are corrupting young
minds in universities across the world,
equipping the next Lenin or Pol Pot with a
pseudoscientific justification to commit unheardof atrocities, all in the name of natural
selection. An altruistic person like yourself
would never let that happen, would you?
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Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度
If a horseshoe crab is neither horse nor crab, what is an


evolutionary explanation?
Horseshoe crabs are prime examples of “living fossils” that have
evolved little since their appearance in the fossil record hundreds
of millions of years ago,* but now some evolutionary
paleontologists want to shout that a fossil horseshoe
crab “illuminates the evolution of arthropod limbs.” Indeed,
Derek Briggs and his Yale gang, publishing in PNAS ( September
11, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1205875109), are convinced that we
can all learn oodles of wisdom by observing that some relatives
had single legs and others had split legs. Of less concern to them
is why horseshoe crabs (Limulus) remained basically unchanged
for 445 million years (or more, if Cambrian arthropods with similar
body plans are considered). Joined or single limbs might seem
minor compared to eyes, guts, muscles, nerves, sexual organs
and all the other complex features of these enduring animals that
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appear abruptly in the fossil record.
Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度


PhysOrg jumped right on the evolutionary bandwagon,
posting the Yale press release uncritically and with a
jazz riff by Briggs himself:
“This fossil provides remarkable confirmation of the
loss of a limb branch during horseshoe crab
evolution, a change predicted by the common
presence of two branches in the arthropods that
appeared earlier, during the Cambrian explosion,”
said Derek E. G. Briggs, director of the Yale Peabody
Museum of Natural History and lead author of a paper
to be published online the week of Sept. 10 in the
journal PNAS. The fossil dates from the Silurian
period, about 425 million years ago.
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Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度

What apparently was not as remarkable to
Briggs was that this creature, threatened by
man today, survived all the major mass
extinctions that wiped out 90% of organisms
in the Permian and all the dinosaurs in the
Cretaceous, and other mass extinctions in
the evolutionary timeline. Yet somehow it
never evolved much in far more Darwin
Years than it took for cows to become
whales and chimps to become
humans.
Evolution
works
in
strange
ways.
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Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度


What in particular “illuminates the evolution” in this
fossil? PhysOrg was just thrilled to explain, it’s “the evolution of
these ancient arthropods—the transformation of two-branched
legs into nearly identical but separately attached limbs, one of
which was destined to disappear.” Oh. Interesting.
Speaking of disappearance, one poor little Limulus recorded its
“death march” in stone, BBC News said. The last drunken walk of
this creature, asphyxiating in a lagoon lacking oxygen, was
revealed in stunning clarity in Lagerstaette (fossil beds of exquisite
preservation) on the England-Wales border, “a site rich in well
preserved, soft-bodied fossils,” according to PhysOrg. If you
want to follow its death march, Live Science in its coverage added
a photo gallery to help you pity the creature’s last gasp. Since this
was a death story, none of these articles mentioned the e-word
evolution. Remarkable how identical the critter looks to living
horseshoe crabs after 150 million years.
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Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度

Speaking of crab legs (although Limulus is not a
crab), another article about legs shows how no
matter what observations the evolutionists have to
concede, they play the victor. Intelligent design is
their straw man to knock down without
debate. PhysOrg posted a press release from the
University of Dublin asking a design question then
immediately throwing the score to Darwin: “Are our
bones well designed? Insects and crabs have a
leg up on us.” Even though this would seem a foul
for Darwin, since humans are further along the
evolutionary ladder, the deceptive play apparently
fooled the referee:
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Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度


“Like all Arthropods, grasshoppers and crabs have so
called exoskeletons made from a very special
material called cuticle,” said Professor David Taylor,
of the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering at Trinity
College Dublin, Ireland. “This exoskeleton protects
the animal like a knight’s suit of armour. Recently
we have shown that this cuticle is in fact one of the
toughest natural materials.”
“In terms of evolution, having your bones on the
outside has been a pretty good concept,” said his
colleague Dr. Jan-Henning Dirks. “Since millions of
years animals with exoskeletons such as insects,
spiders and crustaceans can be found basically in
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every ecosystem in the world.”
Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度

The article went on and on about how fine
exoskeletons are. My, why would evolution
throw out such a “good concept” (don’t say
“design”) when it came to mammals? The
reason the Darwin Team scored on this one is
that the judges are Darwinians, too. The fighting
Irish even presumed to play intelligent designer,
just for the irony of it: “Using the same amount of
bone material and taking into account
its mechanical properties, the human
thighbone could be ‘redesigned’ as an
exoskeleton to be twice as strong as it is
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now.”
Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度



Then, unfortunately, Taylor fouled out by using the
d-word design in the same sentence with the e-word,
thus winning Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:
“Of course there are numerous other factors
determining the evolutionary advantages of
endo– and exoskeletons,” said Taylor.“However,
we think that by taking a design engineer’s view
on the problem we’ve been able to shed some
light on the evolutionary development of skeletal
forms.”
* “Horseshoe crabs are often referred to as living
fossils, as they have changed little in the last 445
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million years” (Wikipedia).
Horseshoes and Crab Legs: New Evolutionary Angles
马蹄蟹腿：新的进化角度

More evidence that Darwinism is going to be
viewed someday as the funniest losing act in
the show, “Science’s Got Talent.” You
don’t have to wait for the audience to get the
joke. If you laugh out loud now, you might
start something like the wave at a football
stadium, initiating what everybody wanted to
do anyway, but were afraid to start. Even
the Darwin-leaning judges will have a hard
time letting the act continue if the whole
audience
is
yucking
it
up
hysterically.
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Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃
Two papers in Geology this month cast serious doubt on




assumptions used to date rocks.
Hundreds, Not Hundreds of Thousands
A “giant ore deposit” in Hungary thought to require hundreds of
thousands of years of slow, gradual deposition to form has been
re-examined. Conclusion: it formed in just hundreds of years due
to the action of microbes. The abstract posted today in the
journal Geology says it all:
The Úrkút (Hungary) manganese (Mn) ore, hosted by Jurassic
black shale, was studied using high-resolution mineralogical,
microtextural, and chemical methods. Two independent
superimposed biostructures were identified consisting of
rhythmic laminations that provide important proxies for
paleoenvironments and duration of ore formation. Millimeterscale laminae reflect a depositional series of Fe-rich biomats,
mineralized microbially produced sedimentary structures. 153
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Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃
These biomats formed at the sediment-water interface under


dysoxic and neutral pH conditions by enzymatic Fe2+ oxidizing
processes that may have developed on a daily to weekly
growth cycle. The early diagenetic sedimentary ore is
composed of Ca rhodochrosite, celadonite, and smectite, and
also shows a 100-μm-scale element oscillation that produces
Mn(Ca)-rich and Si(Fe clay)-rich microlaminae. This
microlamination may reflect a 10 h to daily rhythmicity
produced by the growth of microbial communities. If true,
then the giant Úrkút ore deposit may have formed over
hundreds of years, rather than hundreds of thousands of
years as previously thought.
Source: Polgári et al., Microbial action formed Jurassic Mncarbonate ore deposit in only a few hundred years (Úrkút,
Hungary), Geology, 10.1130/G33304.1 v. 40 no. 10 p. 903–906
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.
Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃
Cosmogenic Clock Reset
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

A dating method that relies on constant bombardment by cosmic rays
has new troubles. Geologists had thought that cosmogenic radiation
damage in the rocks accumulated at a steady rate. They overlooked
the scrambling of data due to debris flows, reports a Swiss team. In
Geology, the abstract of their paper, “Debris-flow–dependent
variation of cosmogenically derived catchment-wide denudation
rates” explains the problem:
Catchment-wide denudation rates (CWDRs) obtained
from cosmogenic nuclides are an efficient way to determine
geomorphic processes quantitatively in alpine mountain ranges
over Holocene time scales. These rate estimations assume steady
geomorphic processes. Here we use a time series (3 yr) in the Aare
catchment (central Swiss Alps) to test the impact of spatially
heterogeneous stochastic sediment supply on CWDRs. Our
results show that low-frequency, high-magnitude debris-flow
events significantly perturb cosmogenic nuclide (10Be, 14C) 155
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concentrations and thus CWDRs.
Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃
The Be concentrations decrease by a factor of two following


10
debris-flow events, resulting in a doubling of inferred CWDRs.
The variability indicates a clear time and source dependency
on sediment supply, with restricted area-weighted mixing of
sediment. Accordingly, in transient environments, it is critical to
have an understanding of the history of geomorphic
processes to derive meaningful CWDRs. We hypothesize that
the size of debris flows, their connectivity with the trunk stream,
and the ability of the system to sufficiently mix sediment from low–
and high-order catchments control the magnitude
of CWDR perturbations. We also determined in situ 14C in a few
samples. In conjunction with 10Be, these data suggest partial
storage for colluvium of a few thousand years within the
catchment prior to debris-flow initiation.
Source: Kober et al., Debris-flow–dependent variation of
cosmogenically derived catchment-wide denudation
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rates, Geology, doi: 10.1130/G33406.1 v. 40 no. 10 p. 935–938.
Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃

Most of us learn the lesson, “never assume,”
the hard way. Both dating methods
assumed simple, uniform, slow-and-gradual
processes produced these deposits. In one
case, errors were found at least 3 orders of
magnitude, leading to the conclusion that a
giant ore deposit took only a few hundred
years to form, not hundreds of thousands of
years. In the second case, assumption of
“steady geomorphic processes” was
exaggerated
by
a
factor
of
two
or
more.
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Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃

None of this is to allege that these geologists have
changed their minds about the standard evolutionary
billions-of-years timeline. The first authors, for instance,
believe the quick deposition of the ore occurred in the
Jurassic, over 100 million years ago. The second
authors are only cautioning about calculating dates with
steady-state assumptions. The lesson here concerns
philosophy of science: measurements by fallible humans
who weren’t there and don’t know all the factors can
produce erroneous conclusions that become ensconced
in textbooks as The Truth About the World. No; the
second paper states: “it is critical to have an
understanding of the history of geomorphic processes to
derive meaningful” rates. But there’s the rub; is this 158
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possible?
Geological Dates Collapse
地质日期崩溃

What human being is capable of gaining “an
understanding of the history of geomorphic
processes” for any location, when he or she
was not there to watch? There could always
be some other geomorphic (landscapeforming) process that was not considered,
such as the debris flows discussed
here. What else will be suggested in future
studies? Can anybody except an Eyewitness
ever claim that, yes, “now we know” ALL the
processes that contributed to a given
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landscape? The question answers itself. 159
From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员
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
Lizards have spongy hearts. Birds and humans
have advanced electrical hearts. Just stretch out
the sponge, and voila!
Advancing a theory vaguely resembling Haeckel’s
biogenetic law, some Danes have deigned to
relegate our hearts’ design to the reptiles. Coldblooded reptiles get by with spongy tissue. Warmblooded birds and humans, by contrast, need
electrically-conducting tissue to keep the pulse in
sync across the blood-pumping organ. Is there an
evolutionary connection somewhere? If so, it’s
been a mystery for a long time:
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From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员

An elaborate system of leads spreads
across our hearts. These leads —
the heart’s electrical system —
control our pulse and coordinate
contraction of the heart chambers. While
the structure of the human heart has been
known for a long time, the evolutionary
origin of our conduction system has
nevertheless remained a mystery.
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From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员
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According to Science Daily, researchers have
found “Our Inner Reptilian Hearts.” They looked
into the hearts of lizards, frogs and fish, hunting for a
gene that forms conductive properties. They
“discovered a common molecular
structure that’s hidden by the anatomical
differences,” they claimed.
Buried within the article is the Darwinian connection:
“The studies show that it is simply the spongy
inner tissue in the fetal heart that gets stretched
out to become a fine network of conductive
tissue in adult birds and mammals.” This is cause
for celebration:
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From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员

Researchers have finally succeeded in
showing that the spongy tissue in reptile
hearts is the forerunner of the complex
hearts of both birds and mammals. The
new knowledge provides a deeper
understanding of the complex conductive
tissue of the human heart, which is of key
importance in many heart conditions.
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From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员

Oddly, the main Dane immediately reined the
discussion into how this Darwinian light could help
grieving mothers: “Our knowledge about the
reptilian heart and the evolutionary background
to our conductive tissue can provide us with a
better understanding of how the heart works in
the early months of fetal life in humans, when
many women miscarry, and where heart disorders
are thought to be the leading cause of
spontaneous abortion.” It’s not clear how a doctor
could use this “knowledge” in practice.
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From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员


He never elaborated on how the reptilian sponge
tissue stretched into a bird heart or human heart. Was
it ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny? And why did
two unrelated branches on Darwin’s tree converge on
similar pumping designs? The closest statement was
only a puzzle: “Since the early 1900s, scientists
have been wondering how birds and mammals
could have developed almost identical conduction
systems independently of each other when
their common ancestor was a cold-blooded
reptile with a sponge-like inner heart that has
virtually no conduction bundles.”
Those questions were lost in the hoopla over “Our
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Inner Reptile Heart.”
From Lizard to Gymnast in One Hearty Stretch
一下子从蜥蜴成为体操运动员

This is what passes for science these days. Darwin gets a
pass from the media for the lamest excuses at
explanation. Why don’t they state the obvious from the
observations? Reptiles, birds, and humans have
intelligently designed hearts, made by One Designer into
forms that are perfectly adapted for each animal’s needs,
allowing a lizard to race across a sand dune or even a
pond, a bird to dive into the water to catch a fish, and a
human to run a marathon or do a back walkover on a
balance beam. Whom did Gabriel Douglas thank for that –
God or a serpent? The only “inner reptile” she and other
Christians have learned to resist is the father of lies, one of
the worst of which is mindless, guideless, Godless
evolution. Watch over your heart with all diligence, for
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from it flow the springs of life (Prov. 4:23).
Survival of the Dude
纨绔子弟的生存
Don’t tell us that “survival of the fittest” was a myth.



What? All
those genocides for nothing?
In a story that could be called “survival of the dudest,” PhysOrg now
tells us, “Ancient, bottom-dwelling critter proves: newer isn’t
always better.” The dude in the story is a tiny sea creature called a
rhabdopleurid. An ancient one of these dudes is being called “an
ancestor of more elaborate species that have since died off”
called graptolites, a kind of pelagic (free-floating)
plankton. Apparently all that fitness exercise never paid off. “Tiny
sea creatures called rhabdopleurids reside on the ocean floor,
building homes of collagen on the shells of dead clams, the article
states. “Rhabdopleurid colonies are small, and the critters are
by no means the dominant animals in their ecosystem.”
The article claims that the simple dudes have survived for 500
million years, while the more elaborate descendents went
extinct. There’s a lesson here for fitness freaks, explained Charles
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Mitchell:
Survival of the Dude
纨绔子弟的生存

“We think that change is always going
to lead us to a better place, that
evolution is always going to lead to
something better,” said Mitchell, a
University at Buffalo geology professor.
“But all this progress in making all
these wonderful pelagic graptolites
didn’t lead them to take over the
world. They didn’t survive, but these
simple dudes, these bottom-dwelling
creatures, did.”
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Survival of the Dude
纨绔子弟的生存

Sure enough, the paper by Mitchell and team found
that rhabdopleurids “were some of the most
primitive graptolites that ever existed.” What’s
the use of working so hard on the evolutionary
treadmill to get fit? “While their
zooplankton relatives evolved rapidly, splitting into
many new species and evolving many new traits,
rhabdopleurids pretty much stayed the same over
the course of history.” And thus they survive to
this day, 500 million years later. “The
rhabdopleurids survived and are still around
today, living in areas from Bermuda to the Bering
Sea” while the fancy zooplankton graptolites all went
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extinct.
Survival of the Dude
纨绔子弟的生存


Mitchell called this “the conservative approach” to
evolution and likened it to investing: you can be
conservative or aggressive in your investment portfolio,
depending on how much risk you are willing to take.
Even dudes can be beautiful in their own way. “Though
humble, rhabdopleurids and the colonies they build are
beautiful to behold under a microscope. The creatures
themselves are about a millimeter long and Y-shaped, with
a pair of tentacled arms extending from a narrow body to
filter food from the water,” the article describes them (see
accompanying photos). “The colonies they fashion
are whimsical-looking structures, consisting of a
network of copper-colored tubes that resemble tiny
elephant trunks, each one bearing numerous ridges.”
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Survival of the Dude
纨绔子弟的生存

Mr. Mitchell, investing is done by intelligent
design. Animals cannot pick the mutations that hit them,
and they have no long-range investment
goals. Your analogy is useless. Why don’t you just
admit that the evidence you published falsifies
evolutionary theory? (again)? With the downfall of
“survival of the fittest” something else collapses: the
myth of millions of years. What creature would ever
want to sit there that long, letting the evolutionary fitness
boom completely pass it by? Why didn’t all animals take
the conservative approach? Why do we have peacocks
and blackbirds, cheetahs and sloths, skinny and obese
people? If evolution explains all these things, it explains
none of them. It’s an empty catch-all theory that
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reduces to, “Stuff happens.”
Survival of the Dude
纨绔子弟的生存
 Please tell all your colleagues and
politicians that “survival of the fittest”
is defunct, so we don’t get any more
genocides – not that we want a new
“simple dude” fad either.
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事


Similar-looking blind fish couldn’t have swum across the
world, so did they evolve separately?
Where would a fish want to go be? A goby fish wants to
go be in dark caves. The BBC News announced that
“Goby fish 6,000km apart share eyeless common
ancestor.” Herein lies a puzzle: blind gobies in
Madagascar and Australia are very similar. How will
evolutionary theory explain this? Reporter Jonathan Ball
said, “A study in PLoS One showed Madagascan and
Australian cave fish inherited their blindness from a
common ancestor” (Source: Chakrabarty P, Davis MP,
Sparks JS (2012) The First Record of a Trans-Oceanic
Sister-Group Relationship between Obligate Vertebrate
Troglobites. PLoS ONE 7(8): e44083.
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

Though living in different parts of the
world the cave fish shared important
features: they were small — under 10cm
in length — eyeless, colourless and lived
in freshwater, limestone caves. How
such similar fishes came to be living
on different sides of the world was the
question the researchers wanted to
answer.
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

They considered convergent evolution:
“When separate species are exposed to the
same selective pressures they often come
up with the same solutions —
a process known as convergent
evolution.” An alternate possibility is that
these species inherited their particular
characteristics from a common ancestor: “In
the case of the cave fish, an alternative
possibility was that their odd features — or
traits
—
were
adaptations
inherited
from
an
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ancestor common to both.”
Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事



A genetic comparison suggested the latter:
Though separated by thousands of
kilometres of ocean, the cave-dwelling fish of
Madagascar and north-western Australia
were genetically more similar to each other
than to any other goby: they inherited
their unusual suite of characteristics from a
common ancestor.
“That they’re 6,000 km apart in Madagascar
and Australia is pretty remarkable,” observed
Dr Chakrabarty.
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

The researchers believe that the ancestor
lived on Gondwanaland, which joined
Madagascar and Australia in the
past. Their hypothesis is that those two
lands split 60 million years ago, leaving
the two species of cave-dwellers 4,000
miles apart, no longer able to share a
common gene pool.
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事


Nice hypothesis, Ball suggested, “But the
study threw up some anomalies.” Why
didn’t the blind gobies go be in India,
which was also part of
Gondwanaland? Maybe they went extinct
there. Or, perhaps evolutionary ideas of
Gondwanaland “might need updating.”
A researcher found it “intriguing” that
some of the blind gobies in Madagascar
had pigment; “they show that caves are
not evolutionary dead-ends,” he said.
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

The observation of similar blind cave fish
separated by 4,000 miles is a worthy puzzle
for scientific investigation by both creationists
and evolutionists. How did they get
there? Evolutionists typically take the
microphone and start waving their
hands. They reach into their story toolkit and
pull out “convergent evolution”. They grab the
magic wand of “millions of years.” They play
their puzzle of slowly wandering continents,
as they look into their genetic crystal balls for
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visions of long-lost common ancestors.
Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

Unfortunately for them, these tactics flop. First
of all, blindness is degeneration, not
evolution. Even creationists allow for that kind
of change from an initial created kind of goby
that diversified without adding new genetic
information. Second, “convergent evolution”
is a distraction. It is not a “process”; it is
merely a story used whenever needed to
show similar things that should not have been
related. And, the evolutionists admitted that
their popular story of Gondwanaland’s
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separation “might need updating.”
Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

The authors admitted in their paper that
evolutionary theory is not sitting confidently
in the seat of scientific explanation here:
“A major issue plaguing our
understanding regarding the evolution of
cave animals has been a lack of basic
information regarding the assembly of
these biotas, including mechanisms of
speciation and phylogenetic
origin.” Ahem; why, then, are you holding
the microphone?
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Evolutionary Fish Story
进化鱼的故事

The most useless part of their hypothesis
is time. It doesn’t take 60 million years for
eyes to degenerate; that can happen in
one or two generations. Sixty million
years is far more time than all the alleged
major transitions in mammals are said to
have occurred. Why would these fish just
sit there in caves on opposite sides of the
ocean, not changing at all, looking closer
to one another genetically than to other
gobies? Does that make sense?
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Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活


An interview with oceanographer Bob Ballard
shows him taking glee at proving the scientific
consensus wrong.
Bob Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, is a
proud maverick. With his submarines and
robotic vehicles, he has overturned at least
three scientific notions long taught in
textbooks. Now working on another film series
called “Alien Deep,” this “Carl Sagan with
gills” was interviewed on Live Science. He was
asked about the deep sea vents he filmed for
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the show.
Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活


We found another world. What I like doing
is throwing text books away.
When I was a geology student, I was taught the
old school of geology. I had to memorize a
whole lot of crap. I was part of the revolution in
Earth sciences, where we knew more than the
professors, which was dangerous because
you didn’t want to embarrass them. How’d you
like to defend your Ph.D. with a professor that
doesn’t believe you?… They didn’t believe in plate
tectonics, so you had to gingerly get around
that. So, we threw the geology book out the
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window.
Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活


Then to biology: We were taught all life on
earth was due to photosynthesis. Baloney. We
found a life system that completely defied
this. Instead of living off the energy from the
sun, we found a system that lived in total
darkness off the energy of the Earth.
We then found black smokers blasting off on
the bottom of the ocean in 1979. We
discovered that water actually goes into the
planet. The entire volume of the ocean goes
into and out of the Earth every 6–8 million
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years.
Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活

Of these black smokers, the interviewer
described them as “vents on the ocean floor that
spew out water from within the Earth, which
wasn’t previously thought possible.” Douglas
Main, the interviewer, assumes this affected
theories on the origin of life, but did not quote
Ballard on that point. Main said, “He has helped
find new and unknown life forms around deep
sea vents, which ‘threw out the textbook’ on
biology and the origin of life, which
was previously thought to
have originated from energy captured from
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sunlight.”
Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活

Ballard’s maverick discoveries have
not hindered him from a productive
scientific career. National
Geographic lists his numerous awards
and honors. “By his own admission,”
the interviewer said, “Ballard is a
heretic,” a label he apparently wears
with pride.
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Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活

Ballard is no Carl Sagan. Sagan protected
the textbooks from criticism; Ballard is
unabashed to throw them out the window
when they’re wrong. Professors of evolution
today make students “memorize a whole lot of
crap,” too. A revolution is coming in life
sciences. Brave students are needed to lead
it. As Ballard himself knows, a grad student
has to “gingerly get around” the problem of
disagreeing with his or her adviser. Get your
Ph.D. and then turn the tables in your
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observational work.
Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活

Speaking of observational work, Ballard has not
witnessed the ocean going through black
smokers for 6–8 million years. That’s
an extrapolation from present rates. Ballard is
an evolutionist who has not yet learned to throw
out that textbook. Some bold student reading
this, though, who knows how to call “Baloney”
when he sees it, might be inspired to become
the “heretic” to launch the revolution against
evolution. A generation of students are waiting
to follow a leader, and give Darwin textbooks
the heave-ho out the window.
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Bob Ballard Throws Out Textbooks for a Living
鲍勃·巴拉德抛出教科书的生活

Speaking of deep sea vents, consider this verse
from the Book of Job. God the Creator is
questioning Job about his “scientific” knowledge of
the earth and the cosmos: “Have you entered the
springs of the sea? Or have you walked in search
of the depths?” (Job 38:16). Ballard may not have
walked there or entered the springs, but he has
done the next best thing: discovered them and
observed them from a submarine, proving that the
Bible was right all along, leaving consensus
scientists mumbling about something they said
“wasn’t previously thought possible.” What do
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they know compared to eyewitnesses?
Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽


Now that “human ancestors” from 300,000 years ago show
comparable mental acuity to ours, the gradual upward slope
to man looks more like a cliff.
Neanderthal chieftan: The big news from Clive Finlayson’s
team this week is that Neanderthal cave sites have feathers
– not just by chance, but by design. The BBC News said that
the cave’s inhabitants used feathers as “personal
ornaments,” indicating that “Neanderthal thinking ability
was similar to our own” (see original open-access paper
by Finlayson et al., “Birds of a Feather: Neanderthal
Exploitation of Raptors and Corvids,” PLoS ONE 7(9):
e45927. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045927). “The earliest
observation of this behaviour in Gibraltar preceded the arrival
of Modern Humans in Europe by several thousand years,”
they said; “There is therefore no possibility that the practice
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was acquired from Modern Humans.”
Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

Many modern human groups, such as American Indians,
have used feathers for decoration, rank, or status. It’s
an “exclusively human trait.” The practice
presupposes a mental appreciation for the beauty of
feathers as well as the ability to obtain them in the first
place. Paleoanthropologists have assumed, based on
the lack of cave paintings, beads and figurines at
Neanderthal sites, that they had no appreciation for art.
Finlayson’s team inspected nearly 1700 sites for
evidence, and found numerous bird bones from which
the Neanderthals apparently extracted feathers for
decoration. These findings fly in the face of
“The prevailing paradigm among Palaeolithic
archaeologists today,” they said – the notion that birds
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were too hard for dumb Neanderthals to catch:
Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

The large number of bones, the variety of
species processed and the different
temporal periods when the behaviour is
observed, indicate that this was a systematic,
geographically and temporally broad,
activity that the Neanderthals
undertook. Our results, providing clear
evidence that Neanderthal cognitive
capacities were comparable to those of
Modern Humans, constitute a major advance
in the study of human evolution.
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

Retreat might be a better
word. The BBC News article shows an early
20th century drawing of a stooped over, hairy,
ape-like Neanderthal with the caption, “Our
views of Neanderthals have come a long
way since this representation was painted in
1909.” But again, this is a retreat “a long way”
back to the prior paradigm: namely, that
humans have always been uniquely endowed
with reason and aesthetics, unlike the apes
from which Darwinians believe humans
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evolved.
Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

Finlayson thinks this find is just the tip of
the iceberg. “It is showing
that Neanderthals simply expressed
themselves in media other than cave
walls. The last bastion of defence in
favour of our superiority was
cognition,” he said; now, despite their
differences, it must be acknowledged that
“their processes of thinking were
obviously very similar” to ours.
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

We have shown that Neanderthals were associated
with raptors and corvids of particular
characteristics (dark remiges, scavenging or colonial
cliff nesters) across the entire geographical space
of the Palearctic and they directly processed their
bones for their feathers. In this respect they were
distinctly human. The absence of parietal art in
caves occupied by Neanderthals, and also of bone
and shell ornaments, is a key argument cited in
support of the superior cognitive capacities of Modern
Humans. Our results put this long-standing
contention in doubt, by providing strong evidence
that Neanderthals simply used media, other than
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cave walls, to express themselves.
Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽


The point of the spear: Another indication of mental
acuity is the ability to fashion materials for organized
hunting. Who would have expected to find modernlooking spear points in coal dated 300,000 years
old? That’s what has been described in a press release
from the University of Tübingen – the “oldest known
weapons anywhere” – indicating that the designers were
skilled hunters. These were not flaked rocks for cutting
up dead animals, but rather designed instruments for
hunting live prey. “Tools preserved in lignite show
capacity for abstract thought, Tübingen researchers
say.”
What’s also interesting about the discovery is the site: a
coal mine that till recently was soaked in water:
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

The bones of large mammals – elephants,
rhinoceroses, horses and lions – as well as the
remains of amphibians, reptiles, shells and
even beetles have been preserved in the brown
coal. Pines, firs, and black alder trees are
preserved complete with pine cones, as
have the leaves, pollen and seeds of
surrounding flora. Until the mining started 30
years ago, these finds were below the water
table. The archeologists say they are now
carrying out “underwater archaeology
without the water.”
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

More finds are expected from this
extraordinary site in north-central
Germany. Already, they have found “a
water buffalo in the context of human
habitation, an almost completely preserved
aurochs (one of the oldest in central
Europe), and several concentrations of
stone artifacts, bones and wood.” The
press release did not explain how any of
these artifacts could be so well preserved
in the presence of water for 300,000 years.
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

Now, the evolutionary tale: How are evolutionists
going to explain the abrupt appearance of human
traits farther back than they previously thought
possible? One theory appeared on the
BBC News: a highly speculative idea by veteran
paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall that harks back
to old social-Darwinian notions of advance
through conflict. “Conflict and ‘boom-bust’
explain humans’ rapid evolution,” the headline
blared. Tattersall knows that recent findings are
problematic. Speaking at a conference at
Gibraltar, he said,
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

“However you slice it, evolution within this
[human family] has been very rapid indeed,”
Prof Tatersall, from the American Museum of
Natural History (AMNH) in New York, told the
conference. “I think it’s fair to say that our
species Homo sapiens and its antecedents
have come much farther, much faster than
any other mammalian group that has been
documented in this very tight timeframe.” This phenomenon of accelerated
evolution is known as “tachytely”.
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

Giving something a name, though, is not the same as
explaining it. It’s hard to convince doubters that mere
inter-group conflict, and coming down out of the trees,
could “drive” human evolution at such a rapid pace. If
that were a law of nature, it would seem many other
animals would have evolved bigger brains, art and
cognition by now. It also begs the question of who was
the driver: was changing habitat and starting conflicts a
cause or effect of cognitive ability? Apparently
someone at the conference thought about that. “At the
conference, Richard Wrangham from Harvard University
offered an alternative view, questioning the role of
conflict as a driver. He pointed out that human
hunter-gatherers had similar rates of inter-group 202
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aggression to chimpanzees.”
Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

In PLoS ONE, “The Pace of Cultural Evolution,” (7(9): e45150.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045150), Charles Perreault of the
Santa Fe Institute argued that cultural evolution is faster than
biological evolution “because of its Lamarckian nature and
because cultural information is transmitted through different
routes than genetic information.” He compared rates of
biological evolution with archaeological data. His hypothesis,
however, reasons in a circle: it assumes evolution to establish
evolution. It also begs the question of when the light of
cognition turned on. What, furthermore, was the source of
genetic information and cultural information? His ideas,
thereby, would never convince a Darwin skeptic, who might
point to the very evidence by Finlayson and the University of
Tübingen cited above to argue that the evidence shows – in
contrast to what evolutionists believed and taught for decades –
that humans have always been humans, and apes apes.
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Man Is Man and Ape Is Ape: The Gulf Widens
人就是人与猿就是猿： 差距加宽

We need evolutionary paleoanthropologists like
ambassadors need terrorists. Don’t let them near
the dynamite of scientific explanation. They keep
setting it off in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Explanation is powerful but dangerous. It
needs intelligent design for proper application. It
needs a real mind – not an evolved ape brain hit by
cosmic rays – to understand the risks. And it needs
real morality – not game theory – to use the power
for good and not harm. Evolutionary anthropologists
never catch on that their Darwinian explanation is
like a suicide vest. It destroys their own mind while
flinging mental shrapnel around the classroom, the204
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civilization, and the world.
Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口


A kimberlite crater in Canada, said to be 53 million
years old, yielded exquisitely preserved unfossilized
wood.
Miners were digging for diamonds and found
unfossilized wood encased in the rock. Diamonds
are usually found in kimberlite dikes that erupt the
gems rapidly from deep in the earth in “explosive
phreatomagmatic events”
(1/12/2012, 5/07/2007). The discovery was reported
on PLoS ONE by Wolfe et al. (“Pristine Early
Eocene Wood Buried Deeply in Kimberlite from
Northern Canada,” PLoS ONE 7(9): e45537.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045537):
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

We report exceptional preservation of fossil wood buried
deeply in a kimberlite pipe that intruded northwestern Canada’s
Slave Province 53.3±0.6 million years ago (Ma), revealed
during excavation of diamond source rock. The wood
originated from forest surrounding the eruption zone and
collapsed into the diatreme before resettling in volcaniclastic
kimberlite to depths >300 m, where it was mummified in a
sterile environment. Anatomy of the unpermineralized wood
permits conclusive identification to the genus Metasequoia
(Cupressaceae). The wood yields genuine cellulose and
occluded amber, both of which have been characterized
spectroscopically and isotopically. From cellulose δ18O and δ2H
measurements, we infer that Early Eocene paleoclimates in the
western Canadian subarctic were 12–17°C warmer and four
times wetter than present. Canadian kimberlites
offer Lagerstätte-quality preservation of wood from a region
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with limited alternate sources of paleobotanical information.
Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

The genus Metasequoia includes the dawn
redwood, a “living fossil” rediscovered in
China. “Metasequoia was common in southern
Alaska in the Late Paleocene and Early Eocene,
producing a rich record of foliage and cones,”
they said. Fossils are rare in the discovery
region due to extensive denudation and erosion
by subsequent glaciers. Finding warm-climate
conifer wood in a glaciated environment indicates
huge climatic changes over time, and periods
that supported extensive forestation in spite of
much higher relative temperatures.
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口
 Fossil material can fall into a kimberlite
crater as a result of the eruption, or can
be washed in later. Both mechanisms
occurred in the many kimberlite pipes in
the region. Numerous pieces of fossil
wood have been found by diamond
miners over the years. The authors
believe the “exceptional” sample they
analyzed was entombed at the time of
eruption:
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

We envisage that the source tree collapsed into
the diatreme at the time of kimberlite
emplacement. The great depth of
burial suggests that it entered a narrow marginal
boundary layer between the blast zone and the
wall rock before becoming entombed. We
consider the wood to be representative of the
Early Eocene forest growing at the site at the
time of magmetism. The lack of
permineralization suggests that burial was
rapid, and that little post-eruptive thermal or
tectonic alteration has occurred at the locality.
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口



Photographs of the wood tissues in the paper show clear
cellular tissues at the microscopic level that retain their
original material (“unpermineralized”), including tracheids
and parenchyma cells. Most surprising was original
cellulose, still intact:
Cellulose preservation in fossil conifers varies
tremendously given the labile nature of constituent
polysaccharides, mandating the need for quality control
prior to isotopic analysis.… To our knowledge, this is the
oldest verified instance of α-cellulose preservation to
date, testifying to the remarkable preservation potential
of kimberlite-hosted wood.
Amber fragments were also found within the wood. How
could such delicate features survive a high-temperature
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eruption?
Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

Despite the relatively subtle features attributed
to thermal alteration noted above, we find little
evidence that either the quality of cellulose
preservation or the isotopic signatures of
the various analyzed fractions have been
overprinted. We thus envisage that cooling of
the igneous body following emplacement in the
diatreme was extremely rapid,
potentially near-instantaneous,
and surmise that any chemical changes to
the entombed organic matter occurred in a
closed system.
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口


From oxygen isotope ratios, they inferred that the forest lived
in a much warmer climate with rainfall four times higher than
today. “The state of preservation of this wood is
unequalled for material of this age, as exemplified by
the exquisite quality of anatomical detail and the
presence of α-cellulose,” they said, using the word
“remarkable” three times in the paper. The crater was dated
by the rubidium-strontium isochron method to be 53.3 million
years old.
Update 9/22/2012: Live Science reported on the
discovery. The article includes a photo of the specimen; it
looks like a good-size chunk of firewood. The tree lived in a
“swampier past” it said, noteworthy for the high latitude today
(Northwest Territories); the fragment was found 1,000 m
down in the kimberlite pipe.
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

Well, this should raise some eyebrows. Original
intact cellulose 53.3 million years old? Here’s
another opportunity for skeptics of the Moyboy
Club (millions-of-years, billions-of-years) to look
critically at this evidence. How long can original
cellulose survive intact? You can’t even keep it
in your freezer for a century. The problem is not
the data, but the story painted over it to make it
look ancient, like an antiquing trick. (For reasons
why isochron dating methods can produce
fictitious results that are meaningless, see
the1/12/2005 entry.)
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

The millions-of-years riff adds nothing. It’s
like waving a magic wand over the
observations to hypnotize the reader into
thinking the wood must be incredibly
ancient. Why? Because Darwin needs the
time. Well, Darwin skeptics don’t. Notice
how everything else in the story was rapid:
explosive eruption, tree falls in that same
minute, cools “instantaneously,” — 53
million yearzzzzzzzzz — quick discovery of
intact cellulose in 2012.
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Pristine Wood Found in Diamond Crater
原始的木在钻石火山口

The authors didn’t think to look for carbon 14 in the
wood, undoubtedly, because they believe (based
on their commitment to deep time) that it would be
hopeless – all traces of carbon 14 should be long
gone. Here’s an experiment someone should
undertake. If these scientists got samples, there
must be many others. Someone go look for
carbon 14. Remember, the Moyboys were wrong
before. They thought Metasequoia died out 20
million years ago, only to find them alive and well
in China. Now you can buy dawn redwoods at the
local nursery. Grow this “living fossil” in your yard
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as a living lesson in the fallibility of experts.
Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”
A new biochemical atlas finds consistency,
complexity, and precision in the human
brain.
 The Allen Institute for Brain Science has just
published its Human Brain Atlas in Nature
(Hawlyrycz et al., “An anatomically
comprehensive atlas of the adult human
brain transcriptome, Nature 489, 20 Sept.
2012, pp. 391–399,
doi:10.1038/nature11405). Science
Daily printed this summary of what they did:
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
Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

The results of this study are based on extensive
analysis of the Allen Human Brain Atlas,
specifically the detailed all-genes, all-structures
survey of genes at work throughout the human
brain. This dataset profiles 400 to 500 distinct
brain areas per hemisphere using microarray
technology and comprises more than 100 million
gene expression measurements covering three
individual human brains to date. Among other
findings, these data show that 84% of all genes
are expressed somewhere in the human
brain and in patterns that are substantially
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similar from one brain to the next.
Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”



Even so, they “only scratched the surface” of the contents of
their data set. The findings should lay to rest two common
misconceptions in popular mythology, (1) that humans only
use 10% of their brains, and (2) that right-brained people
are different than left-brained. Science Daily said,
The right and left hemispheres show no significant
differences in molecular architecture. This suggests that
functions such as language, which are generally handled by
one side of the brain, likely result from more subtle
differences between hemispheres or structural variation in
size or circuitry, but not from a deeper molecular basis.
In addition, they found high homogeneity in the gray matter,
suggesting that “same basic functional elements are used
throughout the cortex”.
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Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

The statement that brain patterns are
substantially similar between brains may
inform philosophical questions about how
well we can communicate with one
another. The three examined were “highquality, clinically unremarkable brains,”
they said – i.e., not geniuses, but ordinary
folks. (The sample size is still too small to
make generalizations about differences
due to sex and ethnicity.)
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219
Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

Overall, the complexity of the brain was the
story. Science Daily put it this way: “human brains
share a consistent genetic blueprint and
possess enormous biochemical complexity.” One
collaborator said, “The tremendous variety of
synapses we see in the human brain is quite striking.”
The paper began, “The enormous complexity of the
human brain is a function of its precise circuitry,
its structural and cellular diversity, and, ultimately,
the regulation of its underlying transcriptome.” The
“transcriptome” refers to the set of genes that are
transcribed into proteins. As stated, the team found
84% of all genes are expressed in the brain.
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Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

There was only one reference to evolution in the
paper, and that in the last sentence. The team was
discussing differences between brains of animals
and humans. “The primary feature that distinguishes
the human brain from that of other species is
the enormous expansion of the neocortex relative
to total brain volume.” They commented on the fact
that transcription appears relatively uniform across
brain regions. All they could say about evolution was
a suggestion: “the relative homogeneity of the two
largest neuronal structures… is striking and
suggests an evolutionary expansion of a
canonical cortical blueprint.”
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Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

Evolution was useless in the paper, as
usual. Their final comment has the
hallmarks of a required pinch of incense to
Caesar Darwin. The team was looking for
transcription (a design function) and
structure (a design function) and found a
lot of it. They found precision. They
found complexity. They found
consistency. What’s Darwin got to do with
it?
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Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

It’s worth remembering that examination of
the structure of the brain have little bearing
on the soul. You can look all you want at
gene, neuronal, and protein activity and
never see “consciousness” or personality. It
would be like looking at the inner workings of
Big Ben and looking for time. You will not
see time. You will see machinery and
processes, but time is a concept beyond the
materials and methods used to measure it.
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Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

The data set will also not support common
ancestry. Take any strict Christian or Jew and they
will agree that we have much in common with the
animals, including eyes, legs, and brains. They
believe we are creations made for the same habitat
as the other animals. We breathe the same air and
eat similar food. It is not surprising we share the
same basic machinery with similar structure and
composition. Chimpanzees have a cerebellum; so
do we. Since the soul is not located in neurons or
proteins, this says nothing about the existence of the
soul. The paper did point out that only humans have
a much larger neocortex. That’s reasonable,
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because we reason.
Human Brain: “Enormous Biochemical Complexity”
人脑：“巨大的生化复杂”

Similarity can show common design or common
ancestry. Precision machinery of high complexity, by
contrast, points to a factor beyond its components:
intelligence. To say the brain created itself by an
aimless process is just as foolish as claiming an
supercomputer network with multiple interacting
components (both hardware and software) emerged
out of random shuffling of metals and electrons. Only
intelligence can bring together multiple disparate parts
and fashion them for complex function and
communication. What more evidence does anyone
need for an intelligent cause commensurate with the
product observed? The very act of thinking about that
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225
shows we share that kind of intelligence.
Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化


This week’s just-so story is, “How the kitty got its
stripes.” All the news are on it; they just don’t
answer the question.
News media are not the least embarrassed to
invoke the Kipling just-so story formula, “how the x
got its y.” In this week’s iteration about cat
stripes, Live Science headlined, “How the tabby
got its stripes.” Science Daily was a little more
creative (or verbose) with, “How the Sub-Saharan
Cheetah Got Its Stripes: Californian Feral Cats
Help Unlock Biological Secret.” Even the
prestigious journal Science’s news site got into the
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act with, “How the Tabby Got Its Blotches.” 226
Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化

What the original paper in Science found were
genes in tabby cats that, when mutated, form
blotches rather than stripes. Then the research
team checked mutant cheetahs with blotches and
found the same mutation. That’s about all. The
paper is by Kaelin et al., in Science, “Specifying and
Sustaining Pigmentation Patterns in Domestic and
Wild Cats” (21 September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6101
pp. 1536–1541, DOI:
10.1126/science.1220893). The most detailed
summary was on Science Daily, echoing a Stanford
press release, “How the Cheetah Got Its Stripes:
A Genetic Tale by Stanford Researchers” (there 227
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they go again).
Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化

“We were motivated by a basic question,” said
Barsh of the turn to the study of big (and little)
cats. “How do periodic patterns like stripes
and spots in mammals arise? What
generates them? How are they maintained?
What is their biological and evolutionary
significance? It’s kind of surprising how little
is known. Until now, there’s been no obvious
biological explanation for cheetah spots or
the stripes on tigers, zebras or even the
ordinary house cat.”
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Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化

That’s about all that was said by anyone about
evolution: only questions. None of the scientists
or authors explained how these genes “emerged”
in the first place. None of them explained how
genes, inside of cells, create precision patterns
on the external fur of multicellular
mammals. The press release said that many
animals, such as fish and insects, have patterns,
but they grow them differently: they add more
stripes as the animal grows, whereas your
kitten’s pattern will remain the same as it grows
to adulthood. That was cause for more
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229
questions:
Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化


“Somehow, cells in the black stripes know they
are in a black stripe and remember that fact
throughout the organism’s life,” said Barsh. “We
were curious about what’s happening at the
boundary between light and dark stripes and
spots. How do these spots know to grow with
an animal?”
Even though it is evident that a cheetah’s spots or
a tiger’s stripes aid camouflage, nobody explained
why some cats are monocolored, some are
spotted, some are striped, and some have chaotic
markings with no clear function at all. In short,
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230
they promised but did not deliver.
Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化

So the question is, does Darwin provide a better
explanation than Kipling’s? We learned about a couple
of genes, it’s true. We know that mutations create
observable changes in the pattern. We know the same
mutation found in a tabby cat creates a similar change in
a cheetah. But do we know How the tabby got its
stripes? No! – not by evolutionary theory, the
explanatory toolkit that is advertised as the great
principle that makes sense of everything in biology. All
we know is that when a cat embryo grows, certain genes
are switched on and regulated by other genes. We may
know which genes are involved, and how they are
regulated, but we still don’t know “How the
tabby/cheetah got its stripes.” Moreover, we don’t know
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231
why some animals have them and others don’t.
Your Cat and Evolution
你的猫与进化
 Think of all the ways Kipling’s story is
better than Darwin’s. It’s
amusing. It’s entertaining. It can be
understood by children. It’s
whimsical. It’s fanciful. It has no
connection to reality. Wait– we take
that back. That’s all true of Darwin’s
story as well.
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Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？



Pollute, freeze, zap. Goal: “to better understand
how life arose on Earth.”
With pride instead of shame, Science
Daily promoted the idea that modern scientists in
high-tech labs, brewing organic molecules on ice
and zapping them with lasers, are poised to
announce to the world “How Life Arose On
Earth.” They can’t be faulted with inventing the
story, because it came right out of a press release
from Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was promptly
picked up the NASA astrobiology publicity crew at
NASA-Ames in their Astrobiology Magazine.
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233
The convoluted tale goes something like this:
Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？

In a new study published in the Astrophysical
Journal Letters, the research team provides the
first direct look at the organic chemistry that
takes place on icy particles in the frigid
reaches of our solar system, and in the even
chillier places between stars. Scientists think
that the basic ingredients of life, including
water and organics, began their journey to
Earth on these lonesome ice particles. The ice
and organics would have found their way into
comets and asteroids, which then fell to Earth,
delivering “prebiotic” ingredients that could
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have jump-started life.
Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？

The number of personifications in that
story is astonishing: carbon soot
molecules “found their way” onto comets,
which fell to earth “delivering” ingredients
that could have “jump-started life.” While
true that organic (carbon-based)
molecules have been found in comets and
meteorites and interstellar dust, they are
as far from life as alphabet letters from
software.
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Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？



The remainder of the scenario provides neither necessary
nor sufficient conditions for life. It also contradicts all the
other scenarios from many others in the origin-of-life field
about where the molecules came from (e.g., volcanoes,
deep sea vents, shallow pools); only a minority consider
special delivery from space a valid option. Nevertheless,
that paragraph was followed by an understatement of the
year, spun as a float in the scientific parade of progress:
The various steps needed to go from icy organics to
slime molds are not clear, but the new findings help
explain how the process works.
What is the empirical basis, if any, for the
experiments? The “organic molecules” hyped are nothing
more than poisons:
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Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？


The organics looked at in the study are called
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs for short.
These carbon-rich molecules can be found on Earth
as combustion products: for example, in barbecue
pits, candle soot and even streaming out of the tail
pipe of your car.
PAHs were described as “strong, stubborn
molecules” later in the press release. It appears they
are doing their best not to come alive, but by zapping
them with lasers, the evolutionists coaxed some of
them to break up and become other non-living carbon
molecules. The article never did get around to
explaining what any of this has to do with the origin of
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life.
Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？

NASA-JPL and NASA-Ames are well known
for pushing the poison-to-life myth – a
colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. What
have they learned in the 60 years since Miller
and Urey entranced the logically illiterate with
visions of Frankenstein sparks creating the
“building blocks of life” in a completely
unrealistic apparatus with unrealistic
ingredients leading to irrelevant products?
(5/02/2003) Nothing! How much more time
do these modern alchemists deserve to be on
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the public dole?
Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？

If you don’t believe it, listen to Robert Hazen
wax eloquent about the vision in the Teaching
Company’s lecture series, “Origins of
Life.” Hazen’s skill as a teacher and his
enthusiasm for the subject cannot rescue him
from the obvious conclusion after the last
lecture that evolutionists remain absolutely
clueless how life got here. He describes
several competing groups whose theories each
falsify one another, none of them confirming
one another. A circular firing squad does not
lead to progress.
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Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？

What the purveyors of the OOL follies consistently fail to
address in their haste to find the “building blocks” is
the specified complexity these ingredients must
produce. To visualize the problem, imagine jetliners
dropping tons and tons of children’s ABC blocks into a
hurricane. Building blocks (a misleading
phrase pregnant with personification) are nothing without
a builder. A builder can take a pile of building blocks
and make something meaningful out of them. Random
chance and natural law cannot. The meaning
(semantics) of a sentence made out of ABC blocks is not
inherent in the blocks; the sentence could just as well be
written with chalk or with electrons on a cathode-ray
tube. Without semantics, all this effort zapping icy soot
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with lasers is quite literally MEANINGLESS.
Is This Any Way to Learn About the Origin of Life?
什么办法来了解生命起源呢？

In the new book The Magician’s Twin about C. S.
Lewis’s ideas on evolution (highly recommended; you
can download chapter 7 for free), Lewis comments on
the logic of causes. He argues that the cause for a
railroad train like England’s Rocket requires a greater
cause than itself: “You have to go outside the sequence
of engines, into the world of men, to find the real
originator of the Rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to
look outside Nature for the real Originator of the natural
order?” As applied to OOL, one has to look not at the
ingredients of life, but for the superior cause outside the
ingredients that organized them into life. Otherwise, one
has explained nothing at all – except the ability of human
minds to use their intelligently-designed bodies to zap241
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ice with intelligently-designed lasers.
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷


More evidence points to a fully-formed universe very soon
after the beginning.
Using the magnifying glass of a gravitational lens,
astronomers at Johns Hopkins University have located “a
galaxy dating back to a mere 500 million years after the
big bang,” reported Science Magazine (Yudhijit
Bhattacharjee, “Warped Light Reveals Infant Galaxy on
the Brink of the ‘Cosmic Dawn’,” Science 21 September
2012: Vol. 337 no. 6101 p. 1442, DOI:
10.1126/science.337.6101.1442). The discovery was
announced in the rival journal across the
pond, Nature (Wei Zheng et al., “A magnified young galaxy
from about 500 million years after the Big
Bang,” Nature 489, 20 September 2012, pp. 406–408,
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doi:10.1038/nature11446).
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷

This is the latest of a trend to find mature structures
closer and closer to the big bang – leaving cosmologists
little time to go from random particles to “lumpy”
structures like stars and galaxies (see links in
commentary below). This galaxy’s redshift (z = 9.6) is a
record, indicating it existed close to the beginning: “Light
from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2
billion light-years before reaching NASA’s
telescopes,” PhysOrg stated. “In other words, the
starlight snagged by Spitzer and Hubble left the galaxy
when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present
age.” Even so, the galaxy was estimated by the
astronomers at 200 million years old. This implies its
formation was even earlier. The original paper
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in Nature said,
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷

We estimate that it formed less than 200
million years after the Big Bang (at the
95 per cent confidence level), implying a
formation redshift of ≲14. Given the
small sky area that our observations
cover, faint galaxies seem to be
abundant at such a young cosmic age,
suggesting that they may be the dominant
source for the early re-ionization of the
intergalactic medium.
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Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷

Modern cosmological theory places an
“epoch of re-ionization” after the first
generation of stars that ionized the
interstellar medium. Something with enough
energy broke up the hydrogen gas into
protons and electrons. Nature’s paper was
pretty straightforward, explaining how the
discovery was made and the math used to
determine its redshift, etc. But Science
Magazine took the occasion to point out
substantial
gaps
in
current
cosmological
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theory:
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷

In the timeline of cosmic evolution, the galaxy
represents an era that is still filled with mystery. The
universe was a soup of hot plasma for a few hundred
thousand years after the big bang. Then the electrons
and protons in the soup combined to form hydrogen.
The first stars and galaxies are believed to have
been born some 300 million years after the big bang.
Over the next 700 million years or so, something re
ionized the universe, breaking its hydrogen back into
electrons and protons. Studies of the cosmic microwave
background have broadly confirmed this timeline. But
key early details are missing, including what led to the
reionization. Many astrophysicists have suggested that
ultra violet (UV) radiation from early galaxies may have
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played an important role.
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷

Nature probably did not have time to
incorporate the latest findings from the South
Pole Telescope, reported
by PhysOrg. Astronomers now put the epoch
of re-ionization earlier and shorter than
previously thought – between 250 and 500
million years after the big bang, not 750 or
more. Assuming stars were involved in the reionization, this implies “First Stars, Galaxies
Formed More Rapidly Than Expected.” The
article explained the implications:
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Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷


The epoch’s short duration indicates that reionization
was more explosive than scientists had previously
thought. It suggests that massive galaxies played a
key role in reionization, because smaller galaxies
would have formed much earlier.
But if massive galaxies played a key role, it compresses
the time available for the first stars to form, the first
dwarf galaxies to form, and then the massive galaxies to
form. The early birds must have been awesome. They
had to be in order to have the energy required for the reionization epoch: “The first stars that formed were
probably 30 to 300 times more massive than the sun
and millions of times as bright, burning for only a few
million years before exploding.”
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Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷




The trend over the last decade has been for observations
to exacerbate the lumpiness problem in cosmology (the
puzzle that a smooth beginning produced stars, galaxies,
clusters, superclusters and other “lumpy” objects,
separated by large voids of empty space). Follow the
trend with these previous entries:
5/30/01: Cosmologists still lack many basic answers. How
did galaxies form? “The details are devilishly difficult to
understand.”
6/05/01: Quasar 800 million years after big bang. It’s
going to turn a great number of astronomical theories on
their head and confirm others.”
1/08/02: Universe began with fireworks grand finale. The
idea that “the fireworks ran backwards… is not at all
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intuitively what one would have predicted.”
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷



1/23/04: Should cosmologists get worried yet? “It’s not
quite time for theorists to panic, but we’re getting there,”
said astronomer Roberto Abraham of the University of
Toronto, Canada, after announcing his group’s discovery
of a startling number of mature galaxies in the young
universe.”
10/14/05: Old man in the stellar maternity ward. “These
chunky babies may be pointing to a cosmic crisis. They
don’t seem to fit the leading theory of galaxy formation,
which cosmologists have relied on for more than 2
decades.…”
8/18/06: Early spiral resembles Milky Way. It is also
puzzling that the most massive galaxies were more
abundant and were forming stars more rapidly at early
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epochs than expected from models.”
Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷



9/24/06: Mature galaxy 700 million years after big bang.
“The simplest explanation is that the Universe is just too
young to have built up many luminous galaxies at z
approximately ~7–8 by the hierarchical merging of small
galaxies.”
12/08/09: Hubble Ultra Deep Field. “600 million years
after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at
such early times.”
12/17/10: Whopping celestial baby boom revealed in early
universe. “The new glimpse of such a productive early
universe – seen as it looked 3 billion years after the Big
Bang – may change the way scientists think about star
formation.”
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Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷




3/09/11: Young galaxy cluster already
mature. “Surprise! Ancient Galaxy Cluster Still Looks
Young.”
4/14/11: Mature galaxy with old stars 950 million years
after big bang pushes star formation earlier, suggests “that
the first galaxies have been around for a lot longer than
previously thought.”
6/17/11: Clumpiness of distant universe surprises
astronomers: twice the clumpiness per unit distance found
than was predicted.
1/11/12: Cosmologists forced to “In the Beginning.” —
“serious threats to our existing understanding of the
cosmos.”
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Earliest Galaxy Points Out Flaws in Secular Cosmology
最早星系指出世俗宇宙的缺陷


Other examples
Look through the Cosmology links for other
examples. Upsets are common, confirmations
of theory are not. Secular cosmologists did not
expect to find early maturity, like old men in a
maternity ward — but they did. Remember
these stories when someone tries to pull
a scientism bluff on you.
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Why Exercise Builds Muscle
为什么运动增大肌肉



You have stem cells alongside your muscles that provide a
ready pool of new muscle cells.
In special “niches” alongside muscle cells, muscle
progenitor stem cells are at the ready. When called upon,
they can differentiate into new muscle cells. This is the
finding of a German team announcing it in a press release
from the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine.
A signaling pathway called Notch ensures that the
progenitor cells occupy their niche. How, though, do they
stay stem cells? Notch has a second function:
suppressing their differentiation until the called
upon. Consequently, as the headline implies, Notch
ensures these stem cells are “at the right place at the
right time.”
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Why Exercise Builds Muscle
为什么运动增大肌肉



Update 9/27/2012: Accompanied by a photo of
a strong bicep, Science Daily reported that
there may be a way to make old muscles feel
young again – by replenishing the pool of
muscle precursor stem cells to their original
state.
In other stem cell news:
Medical researchers are finding ways to use
carbon nanotubes to coax adult stem cells into
repairing damaged hearts. (PhysOrg)
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255
Why Exercise Builds Muscle
为什么运动增大肌肉




Scientists at UC San Francisco are figuring out how
chromatin modifications during development transform
an embryo’s stem cells into heart tissue (Science Daily).
Programming of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) is
becoming more efficient. (PhysOrg)
Scientists are probing the epigenetic signatures of
iPSCs to see if they retain signatures of their progenitors
(PNAS). This will undoubtedly become an active area of
research in light of the ENCODE project findings.
“Stop worrying about human embryonic stem cells –
they may not be needed any more,” an article
on Gizmag shouted. Adult stem cells are making them
obsolete.
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Why Exercise Builds Muscle
为什么运动增大肌肉

Speaking of human cells, the BBC News happily
announced improvement to hearing in gerbils with
use of human embryonic stem cells. The rest of
the article, though, indicated that the improvement
was incomplete (45%), and then stressed that
treatment on humans is unlikely. “While there is
excitement at the prospect of using stem cells to
restore nerves in the ear this exact technique will
not help the vast, vast majority of people with
hearing loss,” the article said, adding, “There are
also questions around the safety and ethics of
stem cell treatments which would need to be
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addressed.”
Why Exercise Builds Muscle
为什么运动增大肌肉

If there is no need to use human embryonic
stem cells, then stop. Adult stem cells do not
have any ethical problems. Why use ESCs? A
human being is a continuum from zygote to
adult. If it is unthinkable to dissect unborn
babies for medical research, then where is the
dividing line between growing blastula and
newborn? The last remaining hangouts
for ESC research need to cease and desist. All
they need to do can be done with adult stem
cells and iPSCs.
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Cambrian Soft Animal Survived Unchanged 200 Million Years
寒武系软动物2亿年存活不变


A fossil soft-bodied lobopodian has been found in
Carboniferous strata in Illinois.
Lobopodians (“lobe-footed”) are soft-bodied worm-like
animals with cylindrical legs that are well known from the
Cambrian explosion. The best-known fossils were from
Sweden, although members have been found in the
Burgess Shale in Canada. The taxonomy of these classic
Cambrian-explosion animals has been confusing; some
evolutionists think they are related to modern tardigrades
(water bears) or were ancestral to
arthropods. Paleontologists had thought they died out in
the middle Cambrian, but now, an exquisitely-preserved
fossil has been found in Carboniferous rock in
Illinois. This one is not related to onycophorans. Current
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Biology reported,1
Cambrian Soft Animal Survived Unchanged 200 Million Years
寒武系软动物2亿年存活不变

Lobopodians, a nonmonophyletic assemblage
of worm-shaped soft-bodied animals most
closely related to arthropods, show two major
morphotypes: long-legged and short-legged forms.
The morphotype with stubby, conical legs has a long
evolutionary history, from the early Cambrian
through the Carboniferous, including the living
onychophorans and tardigrades. Species
with tubular lobopods exceeding the body diameter
have been reported exclusively from the Cambrian;
the three-dimensionally preserved Orstenotubulus
evamuellerae from the uppermost middle Cambrian
“Orsten” (Sweden) is the youngest long-legged
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lobopodian reported thus far.
Cambrian Soft Animal Survived Unchanged 200 Million Years
寒武系软动物2亿年存活不变

Here we describe a new long-legged
lobopodian, Carbotubulus waloszeki gen. et sp. nov., from
Mazon Creek, Illinois, USA (∼296 million years ago).
This first post-Cambrian long-legged
lobopodian extends the range of this morphotype by
about 200 million years. The three-dimensionally
preserved specimen differs significantly from the associated
short-legged form Ilyodes inopinata, of which we also
present new head details. The discovery of a
Carboniferous long-legged lobopodian provides a more
striking example of the long-term survival of Cambrian
morphotypes than, for example, the occurrence of a
Burgess Shale-type biota in the Ordovician of Morocco
and dampens the effect of any major extinction of taxa
at the end of the middle Cambrian.
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Cambrian Soft Animal Survived Unchanged 200 Million Years
寒武系软动物2亿年存活不变

This discovery, therefore reveals several problems for
evolutionary theory and the geologic time scale. For
one, these are delicate, soft-bodied animals that did just
fine for 200 million years in evolutionary time, through all
the twists and turns of fate that led to mass extinctions of
other animals. For another, the exquisite preservation of
the fossilized details of soft tissues challenges beliefs
they lasted nearly 300 million years through many other
geologic and climatic upheavals. Third, finding one of
these in Illinois, when others were known from Sweden
and Canada, shows a “remarkable range extension” of
these small, delicate creatures that further reduces “the
impact of any major turnover of taxa at the end of the
middle Cambrian.”
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Cambrian Soft Animal Survived Unchanged 200 Million Years
寒武系软动物2亿年存活不变


Finally, the fossil shows virtually no evolution for
200 million years: the authors said, “the
morphology has not changed in any significant
aspect.” If living tardigrades and velvet worms
represent modern counterparts of lobopodia, then
evolution within this phylum has been scant or
non-existent for the whole duration of the fossil
record from the lower Cambrian onward.
1. Haug, Mayer, Haug, Briggs, “A Carboniferous
Non-Onychophoran Lobopodian Reveals LongTerm Survival of a Cambrian Morphotype,” Current
Biology, Volume 22, Issue 18, 1673–1675, 09
3/21/2016
August 2012, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.066. 263
Cambrian Soft Animal Survived Unchanged 200 Million Years
寒武系软动物2亿年存活不变

Though small and delicate, lobopodians are
complex organisms. They are not mere
amoebas with pseudopodia; they are
multicellular animals with coordinated legs,
bilateral symmetry, a gut, and behavior suited
for their life. Viewers of the
documentary Darwin’s Dilemma may recall the
strange-looking Hallucigenia, a long-legged
lobopodian from the Burgess Shale. This
finding adds to the challenge against Darwinism
that movie so effectively made.
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Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学


Long before man discovered quantum
mechanics, birds and other living creatures
were using it to good advantage.
Quantum mechanical effects typically work at
atomic scales. Quantum entanglement is a
phenomenon in which distinct objects share the
same existence, regardless of the distance
between them. There’s potential there for
quantum computing if the states of the two
objects can be manipulated.
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Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学

The ability to store and use quantum
information is a challenge to modern engineers,
reported Technology Review from MIT, but
birds fly by it. “Now Vladko Vedral at the
University of Oxford and a few pals have
calculated just how good nature could be at
this game. The answer is very good: it looks
as if nature has worked out how to preserve
entanglement at body temperature over time
scales that physicists can only dream
about.”
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Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学

How does a bird navigate with quantum
computing? In the back of a bird’s eye,
molecular sensors can detect both photons and
the earth’s magnetic field. When a photon is
absorbed, an entangled electron pair is formed,
each electron briefly occupying different parts of
the molecule. The magnetic field flips the “spin”
(a quantum property) of one of the electrons, so
that when they recombine 100 microseconds
later, that information can be sensed by the
bird. “The result is that the bird ‘sees’ the
earth’s magnetic field as it flies,” the review
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said.
Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学


Maintaining the entangled state for 100
microseconds is “an extraordinary figure,” the
article states. The best human engineers have
achieved is 80 microseconds. Furthermore, the
bird does it at body temperature.
The article referred to a previous Technology
Review entry that explained how plants produce
quantum entanglement in photosynthesis. “Given
that nature seems to have created the
conditions in which entanglement thrives,
the big question now is whether there are any
natural systems that exploit it.”
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Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学


At the level of cellular molecules (10/27/2010), it’s
been noted that molecular machines
like ATPsynthase (4/30/2005, 3/16/2011) and
myosin (5/30/2007, 4/19/2010) can employ
Brownian motion — the random thermal wiggle of
molecules — to drive their moving parts in a
preferred direction by a ratchet mechanism.
How did life master quantum mechanics? The
first Technology Review article stated flatly, “while
researchers have been puzzling over this
problem for a few years now, nature has had
4.5 billion years to work on it using the tools of
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natural selection.”
Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学
 Don’t you just hate it when evolutionists
ruin a good science story with
regurgitated Darwin tricks? Here we
see the personification fallacy and the
magic wand of time. Nature is not a
person. A non-person cannot use
tools. Natural selection is not a tool,
anyway. And time is not a magic wand
for working miracles of chance.
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Life Uses Quantum Mechanics
生命用量子力学

Too bad the story was tainted with
baloney. Next time you watch a flock of
pigeons, think about the quantum
entanglement that allows them to use the
earth’s compass to find home. Who
gave them that ability? The birds didn’t
think this up. Creatures have been
endowed with abilities that are the
marvel of our best
engineers. Endowment implies an
Endower.
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Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学


If you question evolution or man-caused global warming, be
prepared for a smear. If you are a Christian, be prepared for
hate. But the skeptics may have the facts on their side.
Bill Nye was at it again (see 8/26/2012), smearing
creationists onMSNBC.com, arguing (again) that U.S.
science is threatened by those who don’t embrace
evolution. He targeted Bible-believing Christians in
particular. According to AP reporter Dylan Lovan, “The man
known to a generation of Americans as ‘The Science Guy’
is condemning efforts by some Christian groups to cast
doubts on evolution and lawmakers who want to bring
the Bible into science classrooms.” No examples were
cited: only the vague fear that “Nye, 56, also decried efforts
in recent years by lawmakers and school boards in some
states to present Bible stories as an alternative to
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evolution in public schools.”
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学


Aside from the fact that academic freedom laws try to
allow scientific criticisms of Darwin in science class,
not the Bible, the article refers to Christian as
believers in the Genesis account, ignoring the fact that
many Jews and Muslims do also. While strongly
urging Christians to “question your beliefs,” Bill Nye
appears unready to question his own. In a photo, Nye
is shown shaking hands with President Obama. Some
of the comments after the article are filled with
unmitigated vitriol against creationists.
Live Science took aim at Fox News, a cable TV news
service that advertises itself as “fair and balanced”
because (unlike its competitors) includes conservative
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and liberal viewpoints.
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学

The headline shouts, “Fox News Climate Coverage
93% Wrong, Report Finds.” The evidence cited by
reporter Stephanie Pappas, though, consisted of little
more than circular reasoning: “The researchers found
that Fox News and the Journal were
consistently dismissive of the established scientific
consensus that climate change is happening and
that human activities are the main driver.” This is
akin to a syllogism: “a. Everybody who is somebody
agrees with me. b. You don’t agree with me. c. You
are not somebody.” Ignoring specifics, Pappas
referred to “established science— in this case,
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caused climate change is occurring.”
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学


A look at the literature, though, fails to establish it as
established science. As seen in leading journals,
scientists – even though they agree with the
consensus – are often the very ones pointing out flaws
in their models and doubts about the sweeping
conclusions.
Recently, for instance, the Editors of Nature (19 Sept
2012) warned, “Better models are needed before
exceptional events can be reliably linked to global
warming.” Tying visible effects to the theory require
“enormous research effort,” they said, considering
the political and economic fallout that may ensue from
claims that particular events or threats (“event
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attribution”) are of man’s doing.
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学

At a recent workshop, “some speakers questioned whether
event attribution was possible at all.” Here’s how
indecisive the evidence is: “One critic argued that, given the
insufficient observational data and the coarse and
mathematically far-from-perfect climate models used to
generate attribution claims, they are unjustifiably
speculative, basically unverifiable and better not made at
all,” they said. “And even if event attribution were reliable,
another speaker added, the notion that it is useful for any
section of society is unproven.” How does that jive with the
certainty Stephanie Pappas exhibited? The editors
of Nature, certainly a pro-warming fountainhead, had more
subdued advice: “when communicating their
results, scientists must be open about shortcomings in
the models used.” The editorial generated some lively
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comments.
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学

Just a week earlier, in a letter to Nature Sept 13, two
scientists (who agree with the consensus) noted causes
for public skepticism of the climate
alarmists. “The public-image problem of current
models stems partly from scientists’ failures to
identify the limitations openly,” they said, suggesting
that the public is often given bold pronouncements
without proper scientific caution. “It is important to
distinguish between questions for which current models
are useful as prediction engines and those for which the
models merely probe possibilities. The role of
science is to reflect on
the plausibility and relevance of such
possibilities.” Memories of fraud seem to have faded 277
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into the background.
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学

It’s not even clear that warming is bad. “Rather than kicking
off the expected cycles of extinction, periods of warming in
Earth’s history were accompanied by increased
biodiversity, according to a report published this week,” Nature
News wrote. The article hedged its bets that human-caused
warming will be worse. Such reports of significant past
warming, though, such as the inference about climate from the
redwoods in northern Canada kimberlite (9/19/2012) make it
difficult for skeptics to get worked up about what is going on
now. The researcher was actually surprised by what he found:
“given that climate change is generally viewed as
disruptive, Mayhew admits it was a ‘big surprise” to find that
eras of warming were accompanied by increases in
biodiversity.’” His out was to say that the current warming is
happening too fast for nature to cope. By the time that can be
proven, however, we will all be dead from old age.
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Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学

In another example of surprise, researchers studied the
effects of global warming on migrating cormorants
(Gienapp and Bregnballe, “Fitness Consequences of
Timing of Migration and Breeding in
Cormorants,” PLoS ONE 7(9): e46165.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046165). They didn’t find
what they expected. They thought the birds would be
disrupted by the climate shifts, but “the increasing
selection pressure on timing seems to be unrelated
to climate change as the climatic variables that were
related to selection strength did not increase during
the study period.” They tossed the ball to previous
papers in footnotes to allege that climate change has
disrupted other organisms, but they did not find
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disruption in their own work.
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学
 Researchers using a submarine in the North Sea
expected to find methane reservoirs locked in ice
to be coming loose as the climate warms,
unleashing more of the greenhouse gas that is
more potent than CO2. What they
found, Science Daily reported, was that the
submarine vents have been spewing out
methane for centuries, long before the industrial
revolution. “[T]he fear,” therefore, “that the gas
emanation is a consequence of the current
rising sea temperature does not seem to
apply.… the observed gas emanations
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are probably not caused by human influence.”
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学

Beneath the permafrost of Bylot Island in Canada’s arctic,
dead leaves, tree trunks and pollen tell of a time when a
diverse forest thrived there, filled with willow, pine and
spruce. Can a frozen forest rise again? Live
Science reporter Jeanna Brynner investigated this fossil
forest, said to be 2.6 to 3 million years old. The actual
wood is preserved, bearing tribute to a much warmer and
pleasant past – a surprise, considering how the trees
would have had to live in a land of the midnight sun and
months of darkness. Certainly man was not to blame for
a significant climate shift. And that’s not all: even farther
north, “Fossil forests of a similar age have also been
found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, where
so-called ‘mummy trees’ were uncovered in the wake
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of a melting glacier.” (See 3/17/2011.)
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学
 What exactly, then, are pro-consensus advocates
worried about? Biblical creationists deny these
fossil forests are millions of years old, a seemingly
more reasonable interpretation of the
evidence. Darwin skeptics at school boards are
not trying to insert religious texts into the science
classroom; they generally want to get the lies and
distortions about Darwin evolution corrected in
textbooks, and mitigate the scare tactics in
presentations of global warming. Meanwhile, the
U.S. remains the scientific leader in the world
despite millions of his creationist bogeymen. What
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precisely is Bill Nye worried about?
Intolerance Grows for Skeptics of Consensus Science in Spite of Data
不容忍现象:尽管数据增长持怀疑态度的共识科学


By all accounts, the hard-core warmist alarmists and
Darwin bulldogs are far left in their politics
(8/22/2012, 7/26/2012) . It’s just like leftists to divide
people into us-vs-them and use fear and hate to denounce
their critics. It’s just like them to use glittering generalities
to advance their view, and associate themselves with
“science” (a.k.a. scientism), while sidestepping the
uncooperative facts that undermine their position. They
don’t want a reasoned discussion; they want power. Once
you understand their propaganda tactics and how to refute
them, your timidity will subside. Then, learn how to use
evidence and logic to put the proud boasters in their place.
Project: Encourage Bill Nye to take his message to Saudi
Arabia, Iran, and Syria.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？



When you can’t convince the public, try zapping or
manipulating them.
A disturbing paper appeared
in PNAS recently: “Selectively altering belief
formation in the human brain.” Why would anyone
want to do that? The abstract explains,
Humans form beliefs asymmetrically; we tend to
discount bad news but embrace good news. This
reduced impact of unfavorable information on belief
updating may have important societal implications,
including the generation of financial market bubbles, ill
preparedness in the face of natural disasters, and
overly aggressive medical decisions.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

Here, we selectively improved people’s
tendency to incorporate bad news into their
beliefs by disrupting the function of the left
(but not right) inferior frontal gyrus using
transcranial magnetic stimulation, thereby
eliminating the engrained “good news/bad
news effect.” Our results provide an instance
of how selective disruption of regional human
brain function paradoxically enhances the
ability to incorporate unfavorable information
into beliefs of vulnerability. (Sharot et al., PNAS,
September 24, 2012, doi:
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10.1073/pnas.1205828109.)
Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

Much as altruistic people might like to help the
misinformed learn to exercise better judgment in
financial decisions and disaster preparedness, or
to alleviate the sufferings of those with phobias
or schizophrenia, this Frankenstein method of
“magnetic stimulation” to alter beliefs resurrects
visions of psychopolitics (think Soviet Russia or
North Korea). People with knowledge of 20th
century history might be justly alarmed by
scientists who come with promises, “we just want
to help you.” Why not put the magnets away and
try reasoning with people as fellow human
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beings?
Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

A reference to “the evolution of overconfidence”
reveals where these psychologists are coming
from. Evolution, they say, has left us vulnerable to
bad beliefs. Humans don’t engage in good Bayesian
reasoning. They don’t update our beliefs when
presented with new
information. “The consequences of readily
integrating good news into our beliefs while
underweighting bad news are likely to be
considerable for an individual and
for society.” This raises fearsome questions about
what should be done – and by whom. Yikes; look at
what they did to their subjects, right out of
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Frankenstein:
Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

TMS [trans-cranial magnetic stimulation] pulses
were delivered by a Magstim Rapid2 Stimulator
(Magstim) at 40% of the maximum stimulator
output using a small TMS coil (figure-of-eight
shape, 50-mm diameter). We used an off-line
continuous cTBS protocol, which consisted of
three pulses at 50 Hz repeated at 200-ms
intervals for a total duration of 40 s. A 5-min
rest period was implemented after the
termination of cTBS before participants started
the task.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

Oh sure, they were nice to the 30 adult
participants, all of whom had given informed
consent. The interviewers were undoubtedly
courteous as they asked the subjects questions
before and after the “treatment.” But this
smells like something out of The Twilight
Zone. If “psychologists” and “neuroscientists”
can find the secret to manipulate our beliefs
with magnets, where will this lead? Will
politicians or a scientific oligarchy armed with
this information care about “informed consent”
when they decide it’s time to “fix society”? 289
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

There are even scarier ways, believe it or
not, to manipulate people. One is the
“nudge” tactic advocated by Cass
Sunstein, President Obama’s czar for
“Information and Regulatory
Affairs.” Don’t force new ideas on
people, he advises; they’ll just
react. Instead, “nudge” them bit by bit,
and over time, they will come
around. (This sounds like the “frog in the
pot” method.)
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

Be very worried, then, about what’s on the minds
of the Economic and Social Research Council, a
group whose motto is “Shaping Society.” In
a press release echoed uncritically by PhysOrg,
the council discussed the pros and cons of the
“nudge” strategy vs. the “think” strategy. Whew;
they didn’t toss out the “think” strategy. But what
they decided works best could be as deceptive
as a half-truth: use both! If people think you’re
making them think, when you are simultaneously
nudging them, they may think you’re looking out
for their best interests.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

They didn’t use magnetic pulses on their
experimental subjects. They didn’t have
to. They thought nudging, and nudged
thinking. Remember “community
organizing”? Here’s how they envisioned their
goal: “The findings are very positive and
supports the idea that a local approach using
nudge and think techniques can lead
to citizens getting involved in collective
neighbourhood activities.” Very
nice. Strangely, notions of individual liberty were
absent from the strategizing about “techniques.”
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

The ESRC press release seems harmless in
itself. After all, rhetoric (the art of persuasion)
has a long history. People should want to
influence other people. But what if leaders of a
society determine that its people need to be
deprogrammed from “misinformation”? People
can be misinformed, can’t they? Sure; look
how many people think Justin Bieber has
talent. What’s disturbing is (1) when powerful
leaders set themselves up as judges of what
comprises misinformation, and (2) when the art
of rhetoric turns to the science of manipulation.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

Look now at Science Daily’s entry, “Misinformation: Why
It Sticks and How to Fix It.” Here’s how the article starts:
“Childhood vaccines do not cause autism. Barack Obama
was born in the United States. Global warming is
confirmed by science. And yet, many people believe
claims to the contrary.” The concern here is not whether
these statements are true or not (although regarding
global warming, be sure to read yesterday’s entry). What
should raise eyebrows is that psychologists are
experimenting on humans to figure out how to “fix” their
erroneous beliefs. “Misinformation is especially sticky
when it conforms to our preexisting political, religious,
or social point of view,” the article said, ignoring preexisting “scientific” points of view, which by implication, are
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infallible (10/24/2011).
Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

“Because of this, ideology and personal worldviews
can be especially difficult obstacles to
overcome.” There’s the rub: a worldview, in the
minds of these self-proclaimed experts, is
an obstacle to be overcome. Think here about how
manipulators might want to nudge overcome a
Christian’s views on gay marriage, abortion, or the
deity of Jesus Christ. After all, religious people have
an ideological worldview, whereas scientists have
none. Scientists are objective, rational, and
unbiased. They care. They want to help, but all those
misinformed Christians with their preexisting religious
worldview ideologies are hindering progress.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

There’s no disputing that misinformation is rampant in
society. A misinformed person, by definition, is “someone
who disagrees with me.” Who doesn’t want to win friends
and influence people? These psychologists want to do it,
too, using reasoned discussion, evidence, and
persuasion. So far so good. But the manipulation shows
through in some of their methods: (1) “Provide people with
a narrative” (code for “talking points”). (2) “Focus on the
facts you want to highlight, rather than the myths”
(presupposing the psychologists know the
difference). Fairfax’s Law comes to mind (“Any facts which,
when included in the argument, produce the desired result,
are fair facts for the argument.”). Points 3 and 4 are sound
rhetorical counsel (keep your point brief, know your
audience). Point 5, though is “Strengthen your message
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through repetition.” Ah yes, brainwashing.
Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？


Repetition is not necessarily bad. Every good teacher
uses it; students know that practice makes perfect. But
let’s say a psychologist wants to deprogram
conservatives from their opposition to gay marriage or
gun control. Or let’s say “The New Teacher” walks in
the door to welcome the children to the new regime (see
must-read commentary to 12/21/2005 entry). When the
speaker views himself or herself as the elite, and the
listeners are the misinformed who need to be educated
out of their myths, training in these manipulative arts can
be powerful and dangerous tools for indoctrination
(think 1984).
These worries are not just fiction. A Nature book review
on Sept. 6 pointed out the dark history of eugenics. 297
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

In The Science of Human Perfection: How
Genes Became the Heart of American
Medicine (Yale, 2012), Nathaniel Comfort
described the disturbing legacy of an “everevolving group of geneticists, eugenicists,
psychologists, medics, public-health workers,
zoologists and statisticians intent on using
heredity to improve human life” over the span of
a century. Lest one think that detour is behind us,
the reviewer warned, “Today’s hybridized
discipline, he says, is noble in intent but rife
with social and ethical questions centred on
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the ‘illusion of perfectibility’.”
Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？


Psychologists are our friends, aren’t
they? They just want to help us, don’t
they? Just don’t let the populace know that
evolutionary psychologists have an unsavory
history of fraud
(9/05/2012,8/15/2012, 11/05/2011) and are
overwhelmingly leftist in ideology
(9/07/2012). Ditto for evolutionary
anthropologists and sociologists (2/16/2011).
Maybe the take-home technique should be:
Psychologist, nudge thyself.
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？

One of Rod Serling’s most memorable
Twilight Zone episodes was “The
Obsolete Man,” a parable about how an
elitist who had eliminated others became
the victim when the regime came to view
him as obsolete himself. Psychologists,
suppose a time came when your
opponents were in the majority. Would
you want them to use these techniques
of manipulation on you?
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Will Elitist Science Lead to Mind Control?
精英科学会导致精神控制？
 Forewarned is forearmed. We may
want four arms to combat the
manipulative “techniques” that elitists
desire to use on all us uncooperative
sons of liberty, but one is sufficient, if
it is armed with the truth – a word
sadly lacking in all the above articles.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑


Sometimes Darwinians are funny. They
take themselves so seriously, applying
natural selection to everything on earth
except their own seriousness.
Charlie Green: At New Scientist, Mark
van Vugt and Vladas Griskevicius think a
little applied Darwinism can turn us a
different color. “Let’s use evolution to
turn us green,” they said. People want to
be green, but they are too stuck in their
old ways.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

Why? It may be time to trawl our deep
evolutionary roots for some
answers. Natural selection has endowed
humans with a psychology best suited to
a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which means
that a large portion of human-inflicted
ecological damage may well be caused, or
seriously exacerbated, by innate
tendencies to value self-interest, shorttermism, relative status and social imitation,
and
by
our
ability
to
ignore
novel
threats.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

What this implies, naturally, is that Vugt & Griskevicius
themselves have innate tendencies for self-interest,
such as getting paid to write articles claiming natural
selection creates their own psychology. On what basis,
therefore, could they appeal to reason, logic and
morality to get us all to change our behavior, against the
pressure of our evolutionary legacy? Should we fight
the very forces that so endowed us? Apparently
so. They didn’t get the message that other Darwinians
now think there’s no way old caveman genes can have
any psychological influence on us now
(8/20/2012, 2/16/2011). They also apparently haven’t
heard that the Easter Island myth of self-destruction is
too simplistic (5/19/2010, #4). Maybe all can agree that
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having some trees downtown is nice.
Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

Gender neutrality in the Rabbit
Hole: Apparently feeling the “Red Queen
Hypothesis” of Darwinism
(8/13/2012, 2/25/2010 #3) is discriminatory,
evolutionists at the Max Planck Institute want to
add a throne for the Red King. You can read
why in the MPI press release or on Science
Daily. The Red Queen’s slip is showing,
however: by adding a Red King, the Darwinians
state that the old matriarchy was “too
simplistic.” Lewis Carroll would be insulted at
this suggestion of malice in Blunderland.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

Spark in the forest: Sparks and trees usually connote
forest fires, but to Jeff Hecht at New Scientist, “Tall trees
may have sparked [the] evolution of gliding.” He
divined natural selection’s spark in the mere existence of
tall trees in southeast Asian rain forests. The forests do
contain a fair number of gliding animals – among them,
lizards, geckos, flying squirrels, colugos and frogs, but
how can trees cause gliding? He quoted a researcher that
ascribed thoughtful reflection to the inanimate processes
of mutation and selection: “It makes more energy
sense for a small animal to glide between trees than to
climb all the way down one tree and then climb back up
another.” Sure, if Froggie thinks about it. Whether that
sense should be ascribed to chance or design is an
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interesting (but unasked) question.
Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

They came from beneath: Snakes alive, Darwinians have
to change the textbooks again. Snakes didn’t evolve in
the ocean; they evolved underground, blind as bats. “The
results show that almost all groups of snakes
arose from within a bizarre group of burrowing blind
snakes called scolecophidians” is the new story,
according to PhysOrg. “This finding implies that
snakes ancestrally lived underground, and that the
thousands of snake species living today on the
surface evolved from these subterranean
ancestors.” Spooky. Apparently Darwin was not kind
enough to grant them legs again. “Snakes have kept this
same basic body shape as they have
evolved to invade nearly every habitat on the planet –
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from rainforest canopies to deserts and even the oceans.”
Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

Selective ancestry: “Innate barometer in birds evolved
from ancient fish sense organ,”
announced PhysOrg confidently, describing how
“the evolutionary remnant of an ancient sense
organ found in sharks and sturgeons” emerged in birds to
help them with altitude changes as they fly. Surely, a
barometer is a handy device to have in both
environments. It’s unclear, then, why a spiracle is present in
alligators and tuataras, neither of which swim or fly. Maybe it
is “related to jaw movement,” they speculated. “It is not
clear why the PTO [paratympanic organ] was lost in the
other amniote lineages – mammals, turtles, lizards and
snakes – but the PTO’s function is likely to have been
modified in birds for detecting air pressure during
flight.” It’s also not clear who the modifier was.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑

Blind test: There’s nothing like an all-purpose
explanation to help us understand
everything. New Scientist has a new story line:
“Evolution could help explain the placebo
effect.” Here it is: our minds evolved a switch
to turn our immune system on and off
depending on the environment. Seems to work
for gerbils; it must work for us, too; but “our
subconscious switch has not yet adapted to
this,” we read. And that, children, is why
evolution fools us with sugar pills.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑
Still playing games: After all these years (see 2/10/2004), some

evolutionists are still goofing off on work time and calling it
research. They’re playing “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “The Dictator’s
Game” instead of locating the mutation for kindness. Our natural
inclination to help others, an article in Medical Xpress tells us, is
really selfishness in disguise. It has to be, since Darwinism is built on
self-interest (8/15/2012). Surprise! When you are really trying to be
“as rational or reflective as possible and submerging
personal instincts,” you’re really a jerk, operated like a puppet by
your selfish genes. Whether test subjects in a contrived game reveal
anything about true human nature, or some unobserved contingency
in a cave hundreds of thousands of years ago, is not as interesting as
keeping the game going. Bystanders are apparently not blowing the
whistle on these goof-offs. “Fellow scientists said they were
intrigued by the study, but said they wanted to see more
research done before they accepted its conclusion.” Good! More
games! Everybody wins.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑
 It’s odd that none of these won this
year’s Ig Nobel Prizes that
were announced last week (Sept
20). The last prize for an evolution
tale was in 2009, “Fetal Load and the
Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in
Bipedal Hominins.” That one was
apparently too funny even for the
Darwin-loving judges.
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Evolution Funnies
进化搞笑
 How long will the nonsense
continue? These are the ones who
hold themselves up as paragons of
scientific intelligence. They silence
any who use reason and evidence
against them. Outrage they will
ignore; offensives they will
quash. They have few defenses,
though, against laughter. Use it.
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Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
行星和卫星的表面之下
Can science peel back the surfaces of objects to see what’s


underneath? Can they go under the observations to find the
explanations?
Investigating Vesta: The $466 million DAWN spacecraft left
asteroid Vesta recently after a year in orbit, and is now on its
way to the largest asteroid, Eros. Two surprises were shared
on the news recently: (1) Vesta is “surprisingly covered in
hydrogen,” reported Space.com. (2) “Surprising troughs”
belting the equator might have resulted from a collision. One
theory says that the troughs, “a puzzling finding,” that
resemble earth grabens (sunken valleys between faults),
resulted from a collision – but only if Vesta has a differentiated
interior. Another theory suggests a collision that caused the
south pole crater may have spun the equator so fast it
bulged. Either way, the troughs are phenomenal: longer than
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the Grand Canyon and three times as deep.
Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
行星和卫星的表面之下

Timing Titan: More “surprising” news comes from
Saturn’s large moon Titan, reported Science Daily. Now
that we have data from an entire Titan year (29.5 years,
counting data from Voyagers 1–2 and Cassini), we can
see seasonal changes occurring. “Dr. Athena Coustenis
from the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France has
analysed data gathered over this time and has found that
the changing seasons of Titan affect it more than
previously thought.” Changes are primarily atmospheric,
though. The article mentioned the continuous ethane
production from solar radiation but did not get into the time
problem this creates (2/09/2011). Coustenis did not
elaborate on why Titan is interesting to study because of
“astrobiology” even though no life is found there.
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Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
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
Europe on Europa: A European scientist has
concluded that if Europa has an ocean under its ice, it
is deeper down than thought. “Missions hoping
to explore the huge subsurface ocean thought to
exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa may have to dig
deep — really deep,” Space.com said, like 25–50
kilometers instead of just a few miles as previously
hoped. “There could be areas of liquid water at much
shallower depths, say around 5 kilometers, but these
would only exist for a few tens of thousands of
years before migrating downwards,” the French
Czech said. This would put the quash on mission
plans to dig down to the water, where the life
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presumably is.
Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
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
The Martian water war: Opinions are still swinging
between a wet Mars and a dry Mars even after the
revelation that many of the lakes or gullies were likely
caused by volcanoes
(see9/11/2011). The MSL Curiosity Rover has just
taken a stunning picture of conglomerate and gravel
that seems diagnostic of flowing surface water from
sometime in the past, at least on an alluvial fan in
Gale Crater. JPL rushed the photo in a press
release because of its significance on Sept.
27. “Bingo!” Science Magazine responded. But New
Scientist held open the possibility that fluids other than
water could have deposited the gravels.
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Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
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
When did the water flow, if it did? “We think what
we’re looking at is several billion years old,” Bill
Dietrich said, who calculated the flow of water that
might have produced the deposits. “How to get better
than that, I don’t know. This is a common
discussion point.” The very next day,
though, Science Daily reported on findings that show
that Gale Crater may be “drier than
expected.” Water cannot exist on the surface now
due to the low atmospheric pressure, one hundredth
that on Earth. If Mars ever had an atmosphere that
allowed liquid water, it may have been lost by an
atomic-level erosion from the solar wind called
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sputtering, PhysOrg reported.
Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
行星和卫星的表面之下
 The Martian Earth: Astrobiology
Magazine believes that analogous
terrains on Earth (like the Atacama
Desert of Chile and the salt pans of
Tunisia) can help us understand
processes on Mars. Without water,
oxygen and life, though, the
differences may outweigh the
similarities.
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Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
行星和卫星的表面之下

Messages from Mercury: Curiosity is not limited to
Mars; there’s some at Mercury, too, where since
March 2011 MESSENGER is in orbit checking out the
innermost planet. NASA calls Mercury’s surface a
“curiosity,” Space.com reported, because it is
smoother than expected, “with less elevation than
observed on volcanic Mars or the
moon.” Planetologists are “divining water ice,” the
article continued, by looking for ice traps in
permanently-shadowed craters at the poles. For
Mercury to maintain a magnetic field by an electric
dynamo, theorists have to keep a molten core going,
“since liquid cores are believed to generate magnetic
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fields.”
Planets and Moons Beneath the Surface
行星和卫星的表面之下

If you always keep in mind the
difference between observation and
divination, between empiricism and
speculation, between discovery and
explanation, you can still enjoy the
space program.
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的


Bang! goes a star. Watch how fast its contents move,
and you know the date, right? Watch its light curve, and
you know the type, right?
Kepler’s Supernova: We can date Kepler’s Supernova,
because Johannes Kepler watched it in 1604 and said it
was visible in the daytime for three weeks. It was a
Type 1a supernova, the kind cosmologists use to
measure the size and expansion rate of the
universe. Ah, that things were so simple. PhysOrg’s
article on Kepler’s Supernova revealed some nasty
complications. “Ironically, the precise distance to the
remnant of Kepler’s supernova is not very well
known,” the article mentioned. Estimates range from
10,000 to 25,000 light-years.
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的

Too bad the nearest Type 1a can’t help calibrate the
“linchpin in calibrating standard distance candles”
with better precision. Another complication is that
there are “clear signs that the explosive blastwave
encountered a dense circumstellar shell” – a
phenomenon that could affect the dating of other
supernova remnants by slowing their expansion
rates. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently reestimated to “probably greater than about twenty-one
thousand light-years, although additional research
is needed to strengthen this conclusions.” What
wasn’t mentioned is the undermining effect Chandra’s
estimate has on the other techniques used to measure
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the distance.
Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的

Chinese 1006 Supernova: Type 1a, take five: a
supernova witnessed by the Chinese in 1006 – so
bright they could read at midnight by its light – was
another Type 1a supernova, PhysOrg reported, but
“what kind of Ia supernova was it?” The article
went on to describe at least three kinds of events that
fit this classification: (a) the blast when a red giant’s
gas leaks onto a white dwarf, (b) the kind where two
white dwarf stars merge and explode (the rapid kind),
and (c), the kind where a white dwarf leaks slowly onto
the other white dwarf (the slow kind). The Chinese
Supernova is believed to be the slow kind. But then
the article pulled the rug out from reliable cosmic
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dating with this statement:
Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的

The new finding would mean that there are
now five documented type Ia super novae,
with four being the rapid kind and just one the
slow, leading the research team to
suggest that perhaps only twenty percent of
all such explosions are of the slow moving
variety, which matters because
astrophysicists use such explosions to
calculate how fast the universe is
expanding, which in turn impacts theories on
dark energy, which appears to cause the
expansion to speed up.
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的

The original paper in Nature said, “It is also the only one
whose type has never been disputed.” Then the paper
went on to dispute it. Of the two kinds of white-dwarf
mergers, the team from Spain said, “the relative
proportions of their contributions remain a fundamental
puzzle in astronomy.” They came up with a number of
20% for the type the 1006 Supernova represents, for
now, “or [it] preferentially involves main-sequence
companions with masses more probably below that of
the Sun.” The PhysOrg article (quote above) indicated
this is just a suggestion based on statistics. (Gonzalez
Hernandez et al., “No surviving evolved companions of
the progenitor of SN 1006,” Nature 489, 27 Sept. 2012,
pp. 533–536, doi:10.1038/nature11447).
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的
 Now read about a “strange star” that
“resists ageing” and has found the
“secret to eternal youth”
on Space.com. There’s more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamt
of in cosmic philosophy, Shakespeare
might say – and more philosophy in
the dreams than astronomers admit.
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的

Now you know some of the guesswork on
which rests major cosmological
theories. All the talk about dark energy
and cosmic acceleration rests on the back
of five shaky turtles, the five types of
“Type 1a Supernovae”. Originally
supernovae were simple supernovae —
exploding stars. Then there were Type 1
and Type 2. Then Type 1a got subdivided
into Type 1a and Type 1b.
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的
 Now there are five different kinds of
Type 1a – the primary tools for
measuring the cosmos! And they aren’t
sure what causes the five different
types. On top of that, it’s very rare to
actually observe a nearby Type 1a, and
even when we do, it’s challenging to
figure out how far away it is, what
companion stars remain (if any), and
how fast the debris is moving.
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Supernova Dating and Classification Is Not Simple
超新星定年和分类不是简单的

Even if astronomers ever get the classification
down, how would anyone know the
variability within Type 1a events? Progenitor stars
come in a range of sizes; but even if those limits
were constrained within acceptable error, there
could be variations in stellar composition or
conditions that might enlarge or reduce the
explosion beyond what is assumed. Yet these are
the “standard candles” cosmologists use. They
look anything but standard, and a lot of
cosmological baggage hangs on them. Just wait
till a sixth Type 1a is discovered that brings this
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house of cards crashing down.