Transcript Document

Creationism News -- July 2012
创造论新闻 – 2012年7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
[email protected]
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Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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Biomimetics is all about design – intelligent
design, mimicking the superb designs found in
nature. Why, then, are some scientists claiming
evolutionary theory is where the biomimetic
beef is?
Gecko toes: the impossible
dream. PhysOrg titled an article in big, bold
print: “How sticky toepads evolved in
geckos and what that means for adhesive
technologies.” Based on a paper
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in PLoS ONE
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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PhysOrg filled its coverage with the e-word evolution or its
derivatives no less than 15 times. The amazing thing,
though, is that believing the research paper requires
accepting the authors’ claim that geckos “evolved” their
intricate toe pads that allow them to walk on walls and
ceilings multiple times: “Geckos have independently
evolved their trademark sticky feet as many as 11
times, and lost them nine times, according to research
published June 27 in the open access journal
PLoS ONE.” The lead author, Tony Gamble (U of
Minnesota) seemed astonished himself at the gecko’s luck
in the mutational lottery: “To discover that geckos
evolved sticky toepads again and again is
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amazing,” he exclaimed.
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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What, exactly, does evolutionary theory contribute
to the engineers who want to copy gecko
technology? It’s not apparent how speculating
about gecko habitat changes in the unobservable
past would help a design engineer, nor does this
statement by a co-author of the paper: “The loss of
adhesive pads in dune-dwelling species is an
excellent example of natural selection in
action.” Where does he put that on the design
specifications, if he is trying to use intelligent
design? Maybe this statement about repeated
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evolution will help:
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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Repeated evolution is a key phenomenon in the
study of evolutionary biology. A classic example is
the independent evolution of wings in birds, bats and
pterosaurs. It represents a shared solution that
organisms arrived at separately to overcome
common problems.
Our representative engineer is still shaking his
head. The authors tell about how they studied the
family trees of more than 100 gecko genera. “The
family tree will also allow the authors to revise
gecko taxonomy to best reflect the group’s
evolutionary history.” The engineer is still
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wondering how this helps.
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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The best attempt to give evolution credit is at the
end of the PhysOrg article. Play engineer and see
if it tells you how to design a sticky-foot robot any
better than if you didn’t know anything about gecko
evolution, but were just intrigued by the
mechanism on living geckos:
“Gaining a better understanding of the complex
evolutionary history of gecko toepads allows
bio-inspired engineers to learn from these
natural designs and develop new applications,”
says co-author Anthony Russell, of the University
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of Calgary.
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
While scientists have a good understanding of how geckos stick
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at the microscopic level, they are just beginning to understand how
geckos use their adhesive toepads to move around complex
environments in the wild. Learning how gecko toepads have
evolved to move in nature is an important step in developing
robotic technologies that can do similar things. “It’s one thing to
stick and unstick a piece of ‘gecko tape’ to a smooth surface in a lab,
but something else altogether to get a robotic gecko to move across
a complicated landscape in the real world and stick to all the different
shapes and textures it will encounter,” says Gamble. Examining the
repeated evolution of gecko toepads will let scientists find
common ways natural selection solved these problems and
focus on the characteristics shared across different gecko
species.
It seems that information could be gained from observing living
geckos without knowing anything about a presumed
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evolutionary history.
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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Sponge semiconductors: Evolution appeared in the
title of another biomimetics article, this time on New
Scientist: “Evolution could generate new
semiconducting structures.” Here, evolutionary
theory was not claimed to provide insight on how to
design things, as in the previous article. Instead, the
engineers look at sponges and their proteins, and then
thought they could do better. They randomly varied
the proteins with the goal of discovering structures
useful for the semiconductor industry. This is another
case of artificial selection, therefore – not undirected,
unguided, purposeless evolution in the Darwinian
sense. It’s like cattle breeding; i.e., intelligent design.8
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Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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Self-assembling proteins: Another biomimetics article
on Science Daily gave evolution only a brief, passing
mention. In this story, researchers at the University of
Montreal came up with a better way to visualize how
proteins self-assemble in living cells. “Enabling
bioengineers to design new molecular machines for
nanotechnology applications is one of the possible
outcomes” of the study – that’s the biomimetics
angle. What’s the evolution angle or contribution to
understanding?
Proteins are made of long linear chains of amino acids,
which have evolved over millions of years to self-assemble
extremely rapidly — often within thousandths of a split
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second — into a working nanomachine.
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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Someone joked that a Senator is
someone who looks which way the
crowd is going, runs up to the front of
the line and declares himself their
leader. That’s what Senator Charlie D.
from Down-Down-Down House is trying
to do. He’s leading a shrinking band of
disciples down the hill to the Museum of
Has-Beens.
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Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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Darwinists, keep your grubby hands off of
biomimetics. It doesn’t belong to you. You
have nothing to contribute. If you want us to
believe that geckos evolved toes so well
designed they use Van der Waals atomic forces
to stick to ceilings, and not only that, but did it
11 times independently, then we will thank you
(for the funny joke). If you want to tell us that
evolution produced proteins that assemble
within thousandths of a split second into
working nanomachines by chance over millions
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of years, sayonara.
Evolutionists Taking Credit for Biomimetics
进化论者信用仿生学
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The rapid rise of biomimetics over the last
decade is a sign that people are tired of useless
just-so stories. Real cutting-edge science for
the 21st century, on the rise in both medical
genetics and biomimetics, is based on the
implicit assumption that natural structures are
intelligently designed and full of potential for
enlightenment, wonder, invention, benefit,
application, and progress.
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Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Another “feathered dinosaur” story has caused a flap
and flurry of news reports. But are they really
feathers, and do they help evolutionary theory?
An exceptionally preserved juvenile in typical
“dinosaur death pose” was unearthed in German
limestone and given the name Sciurumimus (“squirrelmimic”). Labelled Jurassic by the researchers who
announced the discovery in PNAS,1 this is the first
non-coelurosaur species described with
integumentary structures. It is leading some to
postulate that all the branches of dinosaurs had
“feathers,” as stated in National Geographic’s article:
“‘Probably all dinosaurs were feathered,’ scientist13
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Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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One will look in vain, though, for veined feathers with
barbs and barbules as found in birds. The authors
label the structures “type 1 feathers,” meaning single
filaments protruding from the skin (see 9/15/2011
entry). They are actually little more than fuzz, barely
noticeable in the photos. Co-author Helmut
Tischlinger said, “Under ultraviolet light, remains of
the skin and feathers show up as luminous
patches around the skeleton.”
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Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Some, like Brian Switek at Nature News, dub them
“protofeathers.” He wrote,
Palaeontologist Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History
Museum agrees that
the structures on Sciurumimus are probably protofeathers.
Although additional geochemical work is needed to study
the features’ details, Barrett says, the fossilized wisps are
very similar to the fuzz seen on other dinosaurs. But he notes
that the presence of these filaments among all dinosaurs is
“speculation”. Feathery structures might be a common feature
of dinosaurs, but it’s also possible that they evolved multiple
times. “We need more examples in both non-coelurosaurian
theropods, and particularly in the other big dinosaur groups,
before we can really speculate that these features are a
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character of dinosaurs as a whole,” Barrett says.
Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Reporters seem unsure what to make of the news. Coauthor Mark Norell said, according to Science Daily, “This is
a surprising find,” noting that it appeared in the same
limestone in northern Bavaria as Archaeopteryx (discovered
150 years ago), that was fully fledged with flight feathers:
meaning, at the very least, that this creature and birds with
powered flight were contemporaries. Clearly whatever the
fuzz was on this creature, it had nothing to do with
flight. Though the juvenile in the fossil was only 28″ long,
“Adult megalosaurs reached about 20 feet in length and
often weighed more than a ton,” Science
Daily reported. “They were active predators, which probably
also hunted other large dinosaurs.” Not even believers in
dinosaur-to-bird evolution think this creature was closely 16
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related to birds.
Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Of note is that this fossil came from a private collector and
looks, at first glance, almost too good to be
true. Assuming it is authentic and trustworthy, though,
paleontologists have their work cut out for
them. “Although the feathers look similar among different
dinosaur groups, it’s still possible the trait evolved
independently, without a common ancestor,” National
Geographic suggested (look for phrase “repeated
evolution” in the 7/01/2012 entry). Everyone seems to
agree there’s not enough information to make sweeping
conclusions. NG reporter Christine Dell’Amore quoted
Corwin Sullivan saying, “We paleontologists are going
to need to find more fossils—of things even less
closely related to birds than Sciurumimus—to be 17
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sure.”
Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Moreover, the discovery “upends [the] feather
theory,” National Geographic headlined, and also
upends the portrayal of dinosaurs as “overgrown
lizards.” Switek remarked, “If so, we will have to start
thinking about what kind of feathery covering
these creatures display when we depict them in art
and film.”
1. Rauhut, Foth, Tischlinger and Norell, “Exceptionally
preserved juvenile megalosauroid theropod dinosaur
with filamentous integument from the Late Jurassic of
Germany,” PNAS, published online July 2, 2012, doi:
10.1073/pnas.1203238109.
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Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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You have type 1 protofeathers, too. They’re called
hairs. Imagine finding a fossil skeleton of a horse so well
preserved, impressions of its mane and tail were clearly seen
in the rock (but strangely, none of the internal organs). Would
you be justified in saying that horses were evolving
flight? Horsefeathers. Would it make any sense to say that
the trait originated further back than expected, implying that
the common ancestor of birds and Pegasus had
protofeathers? If you didn’t already “know” the evolutionary
story about how mammals, dinosaurs and birds are supposed
to have evolved, it would be a similar inferential fallacy.
There’s still something very weird about these “feathered
dinosaur” discoveries. They are found in Germany or China,
often involve the same fossil-hunters, and often come from
private collectors.
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Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Even giving the evolutionists the maximum credibility
about the authenticity of the fossils, they still usually
create problems for Darwin. They don’t show a clear
path from fuzz to flight. The “protofeathers” are on the
wrong animals. They have an unknown function. Their
dates overlap, or belong in the wrong eras. They don’t
show a progression in complexity over time till true
powered flight is thought to have evolved. They are
either simple protrusions, or complex feathers found on
animals that clearly used them for flying or
gliding. Given how quickly animals equipped for flight
could conquer the globe, one would expect to find them
everywhere (compare pterosaurs, flying insects,
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bats). Informed skepticism is still in order.
Dinosaur Feather Story Gets Hairy
恐龙羽毛的故事生了毛
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Another lesson is how readers can be
distracted by the wrong questions. Stop
listening to the evolution tales, and ask other
questions: Why are dinosaurs so often found in
the typical death pose, suggesting rapid
suffocation in water (11/23/2011)? Why are
they exquisitely preserved? Why do so few
reporters fail to question the dates and stories
of the Darwinists? Why don’t they focus,
instead, on the high levels of complexity
required to have an animal run, hunt, fly, or live
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at all?
Animalympics
动物奥运会
As summer Olympics season approaches, we should remember
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that we humans are not the only ones with some amazing physical
abilities.
Giraffe-alympics: Humans may dive from 10 meters or more, but
the distance between heart and head does not change
significantly. Giraffes, by contrast, can lower their heads 18 feet to
drink water without their brains exploding. Then they can take off
galloping if a predator approaches, all the while maintaining
constant fluid pressure. PhysOrg wrote in a short article, “Giraffes
are living proof that cells’ pressure matters.” It’s about
researchers in France who came up with a better model to explain
fluid pressure in tissues when cells divide. The new model
explains how a tissue maintains a steady state between cell
division and cell death. “If that were the case, very tall
organisms such as giraffes could not exist, because the cells
in their lower body would die under pressure.”
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Animalympics
动物奥运会
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Lizard diving competition: Like cats, lizards land on their
feet after a fall; but unlike cats, they do it with a twist of the
tail. “Lizards in their natural environment encounter
various situations where they could
fall, PhysOrg explained. “For instance, they could fall
while fighting over territory, seeking food, or even mating.
To avoid injuries, they must have a way to turn themselves
during a fall to land safely on their feet. ” PhysOrg reported
how researchers from UC Berkeley took high-speed video
of green anoles and flat-tailed house geckos to see how
they do it. They were impressed enough to design a
Righting Bot robot that imitates the tail-flick trick. They
believe their findings “could also help engineers to design
air– or land-based robots with better stability.”
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Animalympics
动物奥运会
Ageless diving seabirds: One might think that animals with the
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most strenuous lives would age sooner, but guillemots (a
species of diving bird) maintain fitness until their last dive,
without showing signs of aging. “The guillemots — which look
similar to penguins but can fly — have the highest flight costs
of any bird and expend substantial energy for diving,” Science
Daily explained. “Their high metabolisms and frequent
dives should produce oxidative stress, causing the birds to
deteriorate as they age. But, the researchers discovered that
the birds stay fit and active as they grow older, maintaining
their flying, diving, and foraging abilities.” Kyle Elliott (U of
Manitoba) remarked, “Not only do these birds live very long,
but they maintain their energetic lifestyle in a very extreme
environment into old age.” Maybe they could help humans in
the Aging Competition in which everyone is participating.
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Animalympics
动物奥运会
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Now, back to our regular stadium coverage. Dr.
Michael Wilkinson still thinks Olympic runners would
train better by kicking off their training shoes. He’s
been running barefoot for six years, studying the
performance and health benefits of running
unshod. It’s not just more natural; Science
Daily quoted him explaining, “There’s a difference
between shod and barefoot running gaits that comes
about from feeling the ground. The sensory
feedback when running barefoot encourages runners
to put their feet down more gently in an attempt to
avoid the impact forces that would cause discomfort
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and are also linked to injury.” Need more reasons? 25
Animalympics
动物奥运会
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In new research, Dr. Michael Wilkinson found that when
runners who always wear shoes run barefoot they immediately
alter their gait to that characteristic of habitual barefoot runners,
and also use less oxygen during barefoot running compared to
running with shoes at the same speed. This indicates greater
running economy which is an important determinant of
distance running performance, especially in elite runners.
Habitual barefoot runners have a distinctive running gait —
using mid-foot landings, shorter stride lengths, faster stride
rates, and less time in contact with the ground. They are
also known to hit the ground with lower impact force and
loading rates than runners who land on the rear foot in
trainers. This cushions the force of landing, avoiding the
discomfort associated with striking the ground heel-first
common in runners who wear shoes.
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Animalympics
动物奥运会
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According to Wilkinson, barefoot running is a
hot topic among physiologists and foot racers,
but he warns against misinformation on some
internet sites. With proper supervision, athletes
new to barefoot running can quickly adapt and
enjoy the benefits of those who habitually run
barefoot, some of whom see a 3% to 6%
performance boost. See the 1/27/2010 entry,
“Barefoot is better.”
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Animalympics
动物奥运会
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Look at us. We applaud our champions at
the Olympics and carry on as if we inhabit
this planet alone. We think we are so
smart and fit, because we don’t spend
enough time learning from our animal
trainers – not humans who train animals,
but animals who can train us, if we paid
closer attention. For me, I’d like to learn
how the guillemots do it.
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Epigenetics refers to codes, processes and functions “above”
genetics, that control and regulate the genetic code: a “code
above the code,” as it were. Unlike a simple DNA strand, the
epigenetic code has a multitude of players that scientists are
still struggling to understand. For a good introduction, watch
this 12-minute video on YouTube; for more depth, read the
book The Mysterious Epigenome: What Lies Beyond DNA by
Woodward and Gills (available from the C.S. Lewis
Society and Amazon.com).
One thing is becoming clear; DNA is just a bit player in a much
vaster array of information. The big story now is what controls
and regulates the DNA. Many things in the nucleus once
considered “junk” are turning out to be the stars of the show. In
addition, the findings are becoming more and more difficult to
explain by neo-Darwinian mechanisms. Even more startling,
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epigenetics is undermining some key Darwinian principles.
Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Aging and epigenetics: Let’s begin with one close to home:
aging. “Epigenomes of Newborns and Centenarians
Differ: New Clues to Increasing Life Span,” announced
Science Daily in bold red type, alongside a photo of a
grandfather holding an infant. A new study shows defects
due to mutations not just to genetic code base pairs, but to
some of the epigenetic marks like methyl tags that help
switch genes on and off. “The results show that the
centenarian presents a distorted epigenome that
has lost many switches (methyl chemical group), put in
charge of inappropriate gene expression and, instead, turn
off the switch of some protective genes.” Understanding
these epigenomic processes will, obviously, be vital to
improving the health and longevity of every human who gets
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older.
Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Micro-RNA regulators of
regulators: Nature (June 28) reported that two
enzymes “autoregulate” the production of
micro-RNA’s (miRNA) which, in turn, regulate
gene expression in many pathways (Zisoulis et
al, Nature 486, pp. 541–544,
doi:10.1038/nature11134). This discovery is
“expanding the functions of the miRNA pathway
in gene regulation,” they said.
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Make space for the non-junk: “The myth of
junk DNA” continues to get exposed. New
Scientist reported that mouse “junk DNA” is vital
for gene regulation. Hannah Krakauer’s
opening sentence gives the gist of the article:
“Some junk is worth keeping. Non-coding, or
junk, mouse DNA contains vast amounts of
information vital to gene function – and
those regulatory functions take up much
more space on the genome than the allimportant coding segments.”
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Master regulator: PhysOrg’s article title summarizes
the message: “Forty’s a crowd: Study shows
that master regulator protein brings plethora of
coactivators to gene expression sites.” After a
discussion of a “behemoth” protein named Mediator,
this paragraph was notable:
Researchers know that all DNA-binding factors partner
with other proteins to switch genes on or off. What is
remarkable here is their sheer number. “It would be
very interesting to find out whether this is the norm,”
says Ron Conaway. “This work raises a ton of little
questions about mechanism.”
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Epigenetic disease: If diseases can be genetic in
origin, so can it be egigenetic in origin. Science
Daily wrote that epigenetics alters genes
implicated in rheumatoid arthritis. “It’s not just
our DNA that makes us susceptible to disease and
influences its impact and outcome,” the article
began. “Scientists are beginning to realize
more and more that important changes in
genes that are unrelated to changes in
the DNA sequence itself — a field of study
known as epigenetics — are equally
influential.”
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Epigenomes and cancer: One more example of the growing
interest in epigenetics over plain old genetics is seen in an
article in Science, “Genetic Events That Shape the Cancer
Epigenome” by Ryan and Bernstein (Science, 22 June 2012:
Vol. 336 no. 6088 pp. 1513–1514,DOI:
10.1126/science.1223730). Sure enough, “there is
increasing recognition that transmissible epigenetic
changes—chemical modifications to the genome or its
scaffold that do not involve a change in the nucleotide
sequence—may be acquired de novo, and that these
“epimutations” may also contribute to
carcinogenesis.” Scientists would not have understood this
had they not looked above and beyond the genome into the
epigenome. The Greek prefix “epi-” (above) appears poised
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to latch onto a number of old genetic vocabulary words.
Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Grammar and syntax, form and function: Remember the
phrase, “The Human Genome”? It sounds almost quaint
in hindsight. Not much more than a decade ago,
scientists thought mapping the DNA letters would help
us understand health, disease, and human
evolution. The new term, according to Science Daily, is
The Functional Genome – beyond mere basepairing. Starting with the mouse genome, scientists are
trying to understand the paragraphs and superstructure
within the genetic code, a language above the code
itself. So far, they figure they only understand 11% of
the mouse functional genome. Non-coding “cisregulatory elements,” for instance (once considered
junk), regulate adjacent DNA, the article explained. 36
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
Popularly dubbed “the book of life,” the human genome is
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extraordinarily difficult to read. But without full knowledge
of its grammar and syntax, the genome’s 2.9
billion base-pairs of adenine and thymine, cytosine and
guanine provide limited insights into humanity’s
underlying genetics.…
As expected, the researchers identified
different sequences that promote or start gene activity,
enhance its activity and define where it occurs in the
body during development. More surprising, said Ren,
was that the structural organization of the cis-regulatory
elements are grouped into discrete
clusters corresponding to spatial domains. “It’s a case of
form following function,” he said. “It makes sense.”
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Good interference creates epigenetic
memory: Why would some RNA transcripts
interfere with others? It’s all part of a regulatory
dance, scientists are finding out. Now, a new role
for RNA interference (RNAi) was announced
on PhysOrg: recognizing and silencing
foreign DNA, such as strands introduced by
viruses. It’s heritable, too: “Once identified, an
‘epigenetic memory’ of the foreign DNA fragments
is created and can be passed on from one
generation to the next, permanently silencing the
gene.” This has an eerie echo of Lamarckian 38
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“inheritance of acquired characteristics.”
Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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Once the DNA is identified as foreign and
silenced, an epigenetic memory is created
that silences the foreign gene from one
generation to the next. While the
inheritance of this memory requires further
exploration, the authors showed that
successive generations of C. elegans are
unable to express the foreign DNA even if
the corresponding piRNA is absent.
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命
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A vaster landscape: Geneticists used to speak of
the “genetic landscape” but now there’s a vaster
field: the “epigenetic landscape.” James Ferrell
discussed this concept in his review, “Bistability,
Bifurcations, and Waddington’s Epigenetic
Landscape” in Current Biology (Volume 22, Issue
11, R458-R466, 5 June 2012), saying,
“Waddington’s epigenetic landscape is probably
the most famous and most powerful metaphor
in developmental biology.” His rather lengthy
review did not contain any of the following words:
Darwin, phylogeny, evolution.
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命

In the book The Mysterious Epigenome: What Lies
Beyond DNA mentioned above, Woodward and Gills
describe in verbal animation what it would be like to
ride a sci-fi ship into the nucleus of a cell and watch
gene regulation at work. Their second-to-last chapter,
“An Infinitely More Complex Genome,” is like a 4th of
July Grand Finale – a rapid-fire series of new
discoveries and possibilities that portend a golden age
of research in the years ahead, described in vivid
metaphors like air traffic control, overlapping
messages, codes here there and everywhere, and
functional treasure in the “junk“ yard.
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Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命

Two practical effects of the Epigenetic Revolution will
be: (1) a realization that we are not slaves of our DNA,
but that with healthy lifestyle changes, we can control
the expression of genes (for instance, a vigorous
workout at the gym makes observable effects on gene
regulatory tags); (2) increasing pressure against
Darwinism. The realization is growing that there is far
more functional information in the cell than neoDarwinists ever imagined. If the genetic code was a
challenge to explain by undirected processes
operating stepwise by natural selection, what will be
the reaction to codes upon codes, master regulators of
other regulators, and millions of molecules performing
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42
a living symphony?
Epigenetics: the 21st-Century Scientific Revolution
表观遗传学：21世纪科学革命


Got irreducible complexity? Here, Charlie. Come and look
what we brought you: a little gift for your ailing stomach.
Dr. Thomas Woodward,* a Christian theology professor,
historian of science and president of the C. S. Lewis
Society in Tampa, Florida, feels justifiably excited to see
this vast new panorama of epigenetics as vindication par
excellence for the Biblical world view. Not only that, he
and co-author Dr. James P. Gills, a world-renowned
ophthalmologist and modern pioneer of cataract surgery,
see that world view in light of these discoveries
contributing to human health: a new way to cultivate a
spirit of wellness. This is not surprising, since Jesus said
that a good tree produces good fruit (Matthew 7:17), and
both ends of the Bible describe the Tree of Life that God
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43
planted.
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

Doctrines of demons: Clare Wilson at New
Scientist reported on how psychologists at the University
of British Columbia are using Ouija boards to probe the
unconscious of experimental subjects. Many conservative
theologians consider these devices to be devices for
contacting deceiving spirits (I Timothy 4:1; see The
Berean Call), and not a few non-theologians consider
them dangerous (search Google on “ouija board
dangerous”). Even if such theological views are deemed
unscientific by secular psychologists, there is no question
that these devices have an occult reputation: “Beloved of
spiritualists and bored teenagers on a dare, the Ouija
board has long been a source of entertainment, mystery
and sometimes downright spookiness,” Wilson wrote44
7/7/2015
up front.
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

It’s not as if the psychologists are trying to
debunk paranormal theories in their
experiments. The psychologists employed the
devices as probes of inner mental mysteries,
believing in a Freudian doctrine that “the
unconscious plays a role in cognitive functions
we usually consider the preserve of the
conscious mind.” One of them asked a
question that borders on contact with the devil:
“How can we communicate with that
unconscious intelligence?”
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45
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

The experimenter may not realize whose intelligence
he is communicating with. According to Wilson, the
results were a little spooky: “When using the
computer, if the subjects said they didn’t know the
answer to a question, they got it right about half the
time, as would be expected by chance. But when
using the Ouija, they got those questions right 65
per cent of the time — suggesting they had a
subconscious inkling of the right answer and the
Ouija allowed that hunch to be expressed.” (Note:
the experimental subjects were blindfolded.) Maybe
that’s why the URL to Wilson’s story asked, “is-there7/7/2015
46
anybody-there”.
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

Father of lies: Jesus spoke of Satan as a liar and the father
of lies (John 8:44), the classic first lie starting in the garden
(Genesis 3:4–5). All humans fall prey to bearing false
witness at times, but it is especially egregious when
scientists, ostensibly committed to intellectual integrity, follow
the father of lies. Last year the fraud of Diederik Stapel
“shook the field to its core” (see11/05/2011); now, another
psychology fraud from the Netherlands was reported
in Science magazine (6 July 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6090 pp. 21–
22), this time by a software algorithm devised by Uri
Simonsohn to detect fraud. In the category “Scientific
Ethics,” Martin Enserik headlined, “Fraud-Detection Tool
Could Shake Up Psychology” because the ripple effect
could affect more than just the career of latest perpetrator,
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47
Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam:
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔


The method may help the field of psychological
science clean up its act and restore its credibility, he
adds—but it may also turn colleagues into adversaries
and destroy careers. The field will need ample debate on
how to use it, Nosek says, much the way physicists had
to grapple with the advent of nuclear physics. “This is
psychology’s atomic bomb,” he says.
Simonsohn already created a stir last year with a paper
in Psychological Science showing that it’s
“unacceptably easy” to prove almost
anything using common ways to massage data and
suggesting that a large proportion of papers in the
field may be false positives.
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48
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

While the validity of Simonsohn’s statistical tool is still
being evaluated, Smeesters didn’t help matters much
when he included in his explanation this cop-out: ” the
odd data patterns found by Simonsohn emerged
because of what he calls ‘questionable research
practices’ that aren’t uncommon in his field, such
as doing multiple analyses and picking the most
convincing one, or leaving out certain subjects.”

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Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

Update 07/12/2012: Nature News reported another
catch. Simonshohn found suspicious anomalies in the data
of Lawrence Sanna, who retired inexplicably at the end of
May from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, after
requesting retraction of 3 of his papers. Again, Sanna’s data
was too good to be true. Simonsohn had been questioning
Sanna since fall, but the university would not explain the
reason for his resignation, and Sanna is not responding to
requests for information. Simonsohn denies being on a
fishing expedition. ““Some people are concerned that this
will damage psychology as a whole and the public will
perceive an epidemic of fraud,” he said. Claiming that
retractions are common in many fields, he said, “I think
that’s unfounded.” He claims he’s just trying to set an
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50
example for how research data should be reported.
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔


What is implied by the quote, “The method may help the
field of psychological science clean up its act and
restore its credibility”?
Suppose, just for the sake of illustration, that
Screwtape’s junior devil Wormwood decided to help out
the experimental subject (“The Patient”) with the Ouija
board and improve her score from chance to 65%
correct. Wormwood, you realize, is a liar just like his
mentor, Screwtape, and their master, “Our Father
Below,” Satan. (To call these beings “deceiving spirits”
would be a great compliment to them, from their point of
view.) Knowing this background, let’s watch the dupe,
the psychologist, perform his experiment, as we imagine
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51
the cackles of glee in the background.
Psychologists Go Demonic
心理学家进入恶魔

The psychologist notices that the Patient is getting correct
answers to a surprising number of questions she shouldn’t
know. To alleviate any suspicions of trickery, he asks the
Patient, “Am I communicating with your unconscious
mind?” The blindfolded Patient moves the marker to the
Yes mark on the board. “Is there any kind of outside
influence acting on you right now?” Answer: No. “Do you
believe in demons?” Answer: No. “Demons don’t exist,
do they?” Answer: No. “Theologians are unscientific to
believe in devils, aren’t they?” Answer: Yes. “Am I a good
scientist?” Answer: Yes. “Should I write this up in a
journal as experimental proof of the
Unconscious?” Answer: Yes. “Are all my colleagues in
psychology honorable and noble seekers of the
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truth?” Answer: Yes.
Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？


Music continues to be a distinctively human trait,
despite evolutionists’ attempts to find its origin in
mutation and natural selection.
A new entry in the evolution-of-music genre is “What
Makes Us Musical Animals” on Science Daily. The
headline should have included a question mark,
because no answer was forthcoming. All it could say
was that researchers at the University of Amsterdam
found two traits of musicality that are “conditional to
the origin of music,” namely relative pitch (the ability to
recognize a melody independent of its pitch) and beat
induction (the ability to pick out a beat, even if it varies
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53
in tempo).
Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？

Necessary conditions, however, are not necessarily
sufficient conditions. The Amsterdam band only
tossed out these conditions as candidates: “Both
relative pitch and beat induction are suggested as
primary candidates for such cognitive traits, musical
skills that are considered trivial by most humans,
but that turn out to be quite special in the rest of
the animal world,” the article said. Besides, the
researchers did not explain where these traits came
from. Mutations? The article admitted the difficulty of
explaining music in evolutionary terms:
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54
Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？

While it recently became quite popular to address
the study of the origins of music from an
evolutionary perspective, there is still little
agreement on the idea that music is in fact an
adaptation, that it influenced our survival, or that it
made us sexually more attractive. Music appears to
be of little use. It doesn’t quell our hunger, nor do we
live a day longer because of it. So why argue that
music is an adaptation? There are even researchers
who claim that studying the evolution of
cognition is virtually impossible (Lewontin, 1998;
Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009).
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55
Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？

So the Amsterdam band took a different tack:
distinguish music from musicality. Despite their
billboard on Science Daily, though, they still produced
no music and no audience. Maybe, some day, they
will put on a concert: “Once these fundamental
cognitive mechanisms are identified, it
becomes possible to see how
these might have evolved,” the article ended. “In
short: the study of the evolution of music cognition
is conditional on a characterisation of the basic
mechanisms that make up musicality.”
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Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？

OK, time’s up. You evolutionists admitted back
in 2008 that you had no clues (5/19/2008), and
that your bandleader Charlie, who is all suit and
no sound, all tux and no tune, all hand-waving
but no harmony, was equally baffled by music
153 years ago. Yet here you remain, hogging
the footlights, pretending to be the greatest
show on earth. You are still not in the
countdown, let alone the first measure. We
asked back then, how much time should you
get before admitting defeat?
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57
Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？

You know that monkeys don’t have an ear for
music (12/13/2004), but to humans, musicality is
so innate, it’s trivial. After all this time, you still
have nothing to say—nothing! Look at what you
said in 2008, and here is the same refrain again:
“Once these … mechanisms are
identified…” Good grief. This is like saying, “Once
we find some instruments and some charts in this
pile of randomness, and find some animals who
accidentally learn how to play the instruments and
read music, then we’ll really have a show!”
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58
Are You a Musical Animal?
你是一个音乐的动物吗？

You admitted back then, “Music’s origins have
remained puzzling in the years since [Darwin],
although there is no shortage
of speculation on the subject.” You realize
that science is not a perpetual license to make
up stories. You’ve had your time, and it’s run
out. Get off the stage and into the balcony. As
imposters posing as scientists, you are hereby
sentenced to listening to Handel’s Messiah till
you repent.
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Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失


According to widely accepted theory, planets evolve
from orbiting dust disks surrounding stars. If so, planets
trying to form in the dust around one young star didn’t
have much time. The disk evaporated within 3 years.
In “Astronomy: Warm dust makes a fast getaway”
on Nature News, Margaret Moerchen summarized a
paper by Melin et al., in Nature (“Rapid disappearance
of a warm, dusty circumstellar disk,” 487 05 July
2012, pp. 74–76, doi:10.1038/nature11210) that is pretty
shocking: “A rapid drop in infrared emission from a
Sun-like star could indicate that a drastic event has
cleared a circumstellar disk of dusty debris — the
material from which planets form.”
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60
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Describing the “generally accepted” planetesimal
hypothesis, Moerchen bluffed that “We know that such
processes were involved in forming the architecture of
the Solar System, as well as that of the ever-increasing
number of planetary systems being discovered around
stars other than the Sun,” but then confessed that
“the precise timescales and conditions required for the
formation of planets in the disks are still under
investigation,” to put it mildly: there’s at least 4 to 6
orders of magnitude difference between expectations and
observations here. “Notably, even for some disks in
which the amount of dust present is considered likely to
be transient and evolving rapidly, significant changes in
that amount are expected to take at least thousands of
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61
years,” she said. Another put it into the millions.
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

None of the believers in the consensus planetesimal
hypothesis expected to witness such a rapid change:
reduction of infrared emission by a factor of 30 in 3
years, caused by, the astronomers believe, “a
correspondingly drastic depletion of the dust disk”
in short order. With characteristic understatement,
Moerchen added, “the system in question
is remarkable for the speed with which its
surrounding material seems to have
disappeared.” Where did it go? Why
now? According to current theory, the star is 10
million years old. Why would it shed its dust disk right
at the epoch when astronomers have the tools to
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62
watch it?
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Nature News wouldn’t leave an embarrassing problem
like this unresolved, would it? Moerchen offered some
suggestions, but alas, confessed, “However, these
hypotheses… can be excluded…” Then she offered
the authors’ favored two solutions, but added,
“However, both models have unresolved issues.” A
couple of other solutions were put forth
unenthusiastically, because they are catastrophic: the
runaway accretion model, and the collisional cascade
model, “in which gravitationally bound dust grains
experience successive cratering or wholly
destructive collisions that eventually yield grains
small enough to be blown out of the system” – i.e.,
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63
complete pulverization to smithereens.
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失


That’s hardly conducive to planet formation, which is
what the planetesimal hypothesis purports to explain.
Moerchen ended with the best positive spin she could
muster, commenting that “the extremely rapid
changes in this dusty system are certain to provoke
further discussion of planetarysystem evolution.” Indeed, the authors themselves
confessed in their abstract, “Such a phase of rapid
ejecta evolution has not been previously predicted
or observed, and no currently available physical
model satisfactorily explains the
observations.” Her final paragraph is a model of
theory-rescuing rhetoric in the face of evidential
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64
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

The disappearance of the excess infrared radiation
from TYC 8241 2652 1 in less than two years
is incredibly fast by our current understanding,
and the impact of this is difficult to predict. The
dust-clearing models proposed by Melis et al. could
be refined to bring them more into line with
conventional theory. And theories that have been
developed for other stars and that were adapted
to TYC 8241 2652 1 could be redeveloped.
However, perhaps the most exciting possibility is
that the brightness drop represents a stage of
terrestrial-planet formation that occurs so quickly
that we have not been lucky enough to glimpse it
7/7/2015
65
until now.
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

How did the popular press report this anomaly? PhysOrg led
off with the banal evolutionary formula, “New study sheds new
light on planet formation.” The press release from University
of Georgia featured home boy Inseok Song standing proudly by
his telescope while the university’s spin machine turned the
anomaly into a victory for evolution theory: “A study published
in the July 5 edition of the journal Nature is challenging
scientists’ understanding of planet formation, suggesting that
planets might form much faster than previously thought
or, alternatively, that stars harboring planets could be far
more numerous.” Yes, that’s right: instead of millions of years,
planets might form in a few! Think of the possibilities that “new
light” allows: rapidly forming planets could now be much more
common! The press release author seemed to take liberties
with Song’s more humble interpretation of the unexpected
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66
finding:
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

“The most commonly accepted time scale for
the removal of this much dust is in the hundreds of
thousands of years, sometimes millions,” said
study co-author Inseok Song, assistant professor of
physics and astronomy in the UGA Franklin College of
Arts and Sciences. “What we saw was far more
rapid and has never been observed or even
predicted. It tells us that we have a lot more to
learn about planet formation.”
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Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

There were even appeals to magic. “Now you see it,
now you don’t,” quipped lead author Carl Melin
of UC San Diego, describing the classic magician’s
line. “Only in this case we’re talking about enough
dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is
gone.” (See before-and-after artwork in
the PhysOrg coverage). Ben Zuckerman
of UCLA added his own analogy: ““It’s as if you took
a conventional picture of the planet Saturn today
and then came back two years later and found that
its rings had disappeared.”
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68
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Readers of the headline and not the fine print in the
innards of the press release might miss this confession:
“The researchers explored several different
explanations for how such a large quantity of dust
could disappear so rapidly, and each of their
explanations challenges conventional thinking
about planet formation… Like many important
discoveries, the scientists’ finding raises more
questions than it answers.” Song added that each
one of the “uncomfortable” proposals to explain the
phenomenon “has non-traditional implications.” Any
answers are in the future: “my hope that this line of
research can bring us closer to a true understanding
7/7/2015
69
of how planets form.”
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Here’s a non-traditional proposal that was
actually traditional before secular evolutionists
reclassified it as non-traditional: stars and
planets were created, and because of the laws
of thermodynamics, they are breaking up, not
building up. Unfortunately, Song’s chosen “line
of research” will never take him there, because
that route has been ruled out of bounds by a
certain minority of human beings with a lot of
power.
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Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Well, isn’t this a fine situation we find science in
today. We have “conventional thinking” that is
dead wrong, findings that raise more questions
than answers (as with “many important
discoveries”), and non-traditional proposals that
make people “uncomfortable”. Since when was
comfort a requirement of truth? As they say,
the truth hurts.
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71
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Suppose you had left your house to the care of a steward,
and returned to find all your possessions gone. Would you
laugh if he gave you a sheepish grin and said, “Now you see
it, now you don’t”? After pressing him for answers, would
you be satisfied if he tossed out some possibilities, but said
each of them has “unresolved issues”? Suppose he said he
had developed an answer, but could redevelop it. Suppose
he tried to cheer you up by saying that the unexpected
disappearance was “sure to provoke further
discussion.” Suppose he tried to impress you with the
“exciting possibility” that the spontaneous disappearance of
the material was so quick, we were never lucky enough to
glimpse it until now! No; if you were too gracious to fire him
on the spot, you would certainly demand a credible answer
and give him a time limit to produce it.
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72
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

We entrust our scientists with the job of
explaining the natural world. (Remember the
big difference between scientific discovery and
scientific explanation; it is noble to make these
observations, but ignoble to maintain a false
theory in the face of contradictory evidence by
invoking ad hoc rescue devices that refuse to
consider non-paradigmatic solutions, such as
design). In any other line of business, a
colossal failure of expectations of this
magnitude would be grounds for dismissal.
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73
Stellar Dust Disk Vanishes in 3 Years
恒星的尘埃盘在3年内消失

Honor would require the failing steward to step
up to the plate and say, “I was wrong; I failed; I
will resign.” These losers, including their
publicists, should at least forgo any taxpayer
dollars designated for their failed analysis until
and unless they demonstrate return on
investment to those paying for their
services. They can continue to observe and
report findings, but if they want to engage in
speculative theorizing with no obligation to get
the world right, let them start a Flat Disk Society
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74
and do it on their own time and their own dime.
Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶


The latest human evolution star, Australopithecus sediba, ate
leaves, according to its publicist, Lee Berger. In Nature
News on July 5 (Margaret J. Schoeninger entertained the
idea, giving credit to the star behind the star, the father of
evolution:
In 1871, Charles Darwin proposed that our earliest
ancestors lived in Africa alongside the ancestors of today’s
gorillas and chimpanzees, and ate a diet of fruit, leaves, seeds
and nuts, similar to that of these extant primates. More
recently, however, an alternative hypothesis has taken
precedence — that the human lineage split from the apes in
part as a result of our ancestors’ ability to obtain foods in open
habitats, such as grasslands and savannah woodlands,
that emerged in Africa following climatic changes during the
Late Miocene epoch approximately 7 million years ago.
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Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

These foods included grasses, sedge plants,
grass-eating insects and small animals. On
page 90 of this issue,1 Henry et al. present
evidence that our early relatives had a more
diverse diet, and ate items such as fruits,
leaves and bark. The findings will trigger a
rethink of the selective
pressures that resulted in the separation of
the ape and human lineages, and the traits we
now consider to be unique to each.
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76
Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

Any paleoanthropology discovery failing to
“trigger a rethink” would break tradition
(trigger? Remember, this is not a crime
story). Berger gave Amanda Henry the
limelight as first of 9 authors of the
paper,1 but Au. sediba is his baby. Whether his
baby ate leaves and bark from trees is less
interesting to most readers as whether it
belongs on the human family tree at
all. Scheoninger barked about some of the
uncertainty involving bigger issues than just
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77
diet:
Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

The significance of these results extends
beyond whether a diet based on C4 foods is a
fundamental hominin trait. It also brings into
question our understanding of the evolution
of bipedalism — another trait that is thought
of as being fundamentally human. The species
in which bipedalism emerged, and
the evolutionary pressures that drove this
adaptation, remain topics of debate.…
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Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

How does the suggestion of dietary variation among
hominins fit with this understanding of bipedalism and the
branching of hominin species? Researchers
have suggested that there was an adaptive radiation event
approximately 2 million years ago, in which a common
ancestor relatively rapidly gave rise to a range of bipedal
species with novel traits that allowed them to move into new
habitats. The unexamined assumption that all bipedal
species share a unique genealogical relationship is
reminiscent of evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould’s
question: “What, if anything, is a zebra?”. Gould examined
whether the three species of modern zebra are more closely
related to one another than to other non-striped horse species.
He concluded that striping evolved only once. We should
also ask: what, if anything, is a hominin?
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Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

Perhaps all ancestral ape-like species that walked
on two legs and had a C4–focused diet were
uniquely related to each other but were not
necessarily human
ancestors. Maybe humans emerged from some
other hominin groups around 2 million years ago
that were also bipedal and had more general,
opportunistic foraging strategies, including meateating. Only enterprising studies into other
aspects of australopithecine and hominin life, like
Henry and colleagues’ analysis of Au. sediba’s
diet, will provide us with definitive answers.
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80
Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

Since definitive answers are lacking here, readers might like to
look elsewhere. One place to look is Discovery Institute’s latest
book, Science and Human Origins by Ann Gauger, Douglas
Axe and Casey Luskin, announced June 20 on Evolution News
& Views . A later post on ENV by David Klinghoffer described
one chapter by Luskin that presents the appearance of the
genus Homo as a “big bang” reminiscent of the Cambrian
explosion. Postulating ape-like australopithecines to be human
ancestors is “plagued with problems,” Luskin’s research survey
revealed, a fact that the media “labor to
obscure”. Particularly, Au. sediba presents evolutionary tree
problems, Klinghoffer commented in another post on ENV: a
diet of bark and leaves makes it less hominin-like and more
ape-like than Berger wants. So if Au. sediba eats shoots, barks
and leaves, is Berger barking up the wrong tree?
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Eats Shoots and Leaves
吃茎和叶

“Eats shoots and leaves” is a humorous phrase teachers
use to point out the importance of punctuation to
understanding (is it about a criminal or a koala?). But
even if we take Berger’s meaning, it doesn’t mean he
has understanding: especially if, after 141 years,
Darwin’s tribe of forensic investigators still has to stuff
their understanding in the pigeonhole labeled “things to
do tomorrow.” We wonder what kind of “enterprising
studies” Scheoninger has in mind. If history is any
guide, the Darwinian form of “enterprising studies”
belongs at Comedy Central, where they try to keep you
laughing but never serve the beef; just empty promises
that further studies will provide understanding. Shoot;
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make like a tree, and leaf for a real burger joint.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

The cosmological inflation theory made Alan
Guth famous back in 1981. In case the
enthralled didn’t get the message, it was a
colossal failure, Amanda Gefter broke the news
on New Scientist. To set up Humpty Dumpty’s
fall, she began with its seeming successes: “in
one fell swoop,” it rescued big bang theory
from the flatness problem and horizon problem.
That was before cosmologists stopped admiring
the “munificence” of inflation and starting
thinking about its implications: it leads to
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nonsense:
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

The problem is that once inflation starts, it is nearly
impossible to stop. Even in the tiny pre-inflation
cosmos, quantum fluctuations ensured that the inflaton
field had different energies in different places — a bit like
a mountain having many balls balanced precariously at
different heights. As each one starts rolling, it kicks off
the inflation of a different region of space, which races
away from the others at speeds above that of light.
Because no influence may travel faster than light,
these mini-universes become completely
detached from one another. As the inflaton continues its
headlong descent in each one, more and more bits of
space begin to bud off to independent existences:
7/7/2015
an infinite “multiverse” of universes is formed… 84
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

This is not good news for our hopes for
cosmic enlightenment. In a single universe,
an underlying theory of physics might offer a
prediction for how flat the universe should be,
say, or for the value of dark energy, the
mysterious entity that seems to be driving an
accelerated expansion of the
universe. Astronomers could then go out
and test that prediction against
observations.
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

That’s not possible in an infinite multiverse:
there are no definite predictions, only
probabilities. Every conceivable value of
dark energy or anything else
will exist an infinite number of times among
the infinite number of universes, and any
universal theory of physics valid throughout
the multiverse must reproduce all those
values. That makes the odds of observing any
particular value infinity divided by infinity: a
nonsense that mathematicians call
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“undefined”.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

Gefter quoted Max Tegmark of MIT who likened
inflation theory to a charismatic guest who wore
out his welcome and wouldn’t stop talking. It
sounded so good at first. ““‘That would have
been the perfect point for inflation to bow, wait
for applause and exit stage left’,” says
Tegmark. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, inflation kept on predicting still
more things — things that nobody
wanted.” Tegmark and others now agree
inflation theory died:
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

“We thought that inflation predicted a smooth, flat
universe,” says Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University,
a pioneer of inflation who has become a vocal
detractor. “Instead, it predicts every possibility an
infinite number of times. We’re back to square one.”
Tegmark agrees: “Inflation has destroyed itself. It
logically self-destructed.” Sean Carroll was only a
little less pessimistic. ““Inflation is still the dominant
paradigm,” he said, “but we’ve become a lot less
convinced that it’s obviously true.” By starting with
such precisely balanced conditions, it explains less
than the flukes it was intended to explain. ““If you pick
a universe out of a hat, it’s not going to be one that
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starts with inflation,” he said.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


Brane Drain
Gefter took a brief tour into other cosmological
theories that arose to replace inflation, such as brane
theory: two 4-D projections of 5-D surfaces collided at
perfect parallels, yielding a big-bang lookalike. One
benefit for those uncomfortable with a cosmic
beginning is that it resurrects old hopes of a cyclic
universe with an infinite past. Any theory, though, that
tries to explain special conditions (e.g., our universe)
with even more special conditions fails to show the
kind of scientific progress cosmologists prefer–simple
beginnings leading to complex observations, a “theory
of everything.” Thus, a “brane drain,” as Gefter
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉
If nothing else, the cyclic model introduced some


competition into the big bang market. “It shows
that you’re not stuck with inflation — other ideas
are possible,” says Steinhardt. “But whether or not
you like this particular alternative is a matter of taste.”
Not everyone did. Models of the big bang that involve
a singularity in our space-time, including the
inflationary big bang, neatly excuse us from
explaining what happened at the universe’s
beginning: the singularity is a place where the
universe falls off the cliff of existence and the laws
of physics break down. But in the cyclic model, we
must explain how the fifth dimension survives its
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momentary lapse into a singularity.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

“To me, it doesn’t seem to work,” says
Thomas Hertog of the Catholic University of
Leuven (KUL) in Belgium, who worked on the
idea for a couple of years. “The calculations
suggest that the transition through the
singularity is very unlikely.” The many clashes
between branes that the model implies just
compound the problem, says Carroll. “If you
follow the cyclic universe backward in time,
the conditions that you need become more
and more special, or unlikely.”
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


No Boundaries
Next came the “No-Boundary Proposal” of Stephen Hawking
and James Hartle, made famous in the former’s best seller, A
Brief History of Time. Gefter described it as a kind of
“multiverse in reverse,” where Hawking and Hartle “added up
all the possible histories that began in a universe with no
boundary and ended in the universe we see today.” Though
some were initially attracted to the proposal because it seemed
to get rid of a beginning to the universe, it hardly merited a
couple of paragraphs in Gefter’s review: “That all sounds very
neat, but there was still no reason to believe the noboundary proposal was true. It was difficult to see where it
fitted in to the sort of unifying theoretical constructs, such as
string theory, which are needed to explain events in the early,
high-energy days of the universe.”
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


Cosmic Combo Plate
Nothing seemed to work. How about a
combination? Gefter tried to end on a cheerful
note by suggesting that maybe a combination of
inflation, string theory, the no-boundary
proposal might serve up a universe that solves
the problems inflation tried to solve without
making things worse. Adding bad ideas
together might seem another bad idea. There
had to be at least one new trial ingredient, and
string theory served up the spaghetti:
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

That might just have changed, thanks to one of
the most profound ideas to come out of string
theory in recent years: the holographic
principle. This states that the physics of
a 4D universe such as ours, including gravity, is
mathematically equivalent to the physics on
its 3D boundary without gravity. The implication
is that the world we see around us is nothing
but a holographic projection of information
from the edge of reality. It sounds implausible,
but the principle pops up not just in string theory,
but in almost any approach to unifying relativity
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and quantum theory dreamed up so far.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

If this sounds bizarre, remember that in modern
cosmology, bizarre is beautiful as long as it gets
rid of intelligent design. It may also sound like a
stretch of desperation. To Gefter and her
cosmology protagonists, the Holographic
Principle comes to the rescue of the NoBoundary Proposal, string theory and inflation
in the nick of time. One weird aspect of the
idea she explained:
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


Although the no-boundary proposal says that the universe has
no boundary in the far past, it does give a boundary in the
infinitely far future. By calculating the physics on this
boundary, Hertog extracted the probabilities of all the
possible universes that can emerge as its holographic
projections. Remarkably, the probabilities for things like the
homogeneity of the cosmic background or the amount of
dark energy are the same as those that you get from the
no-boundary wave function. This supplies a direct connection
between string theory, the most popular route towards a theory
of everything, and the no-boundary proposal, which produces
inflation naturally.
“Originally the no-boundary wave function was sort of
picked out of thin air,” says Hertog. “But now we see that it
lies at the heart of the holographic principle. This is very
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encouraging for inflation.”
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


Cosmologists are still “digesting” the combo plate, Gefter
ended. Some are “questioning whether the assumptions it
makes are justified.” Even Alan Guth, whose inflation theory
the new proposal rescues somewhat, is not sure about the
validity of its specific holographic correspondence, but is willing
to give researchers time to play with it. Gefter decked the halls
of the holodeck with bows of jolly, hoping the Holographic
Principle may bring back the doubters, like Tegmark, who
consider inflation an imposter. “We are not yet there, at the
true story of the beginning of the universe,” she ended. If
we can consistently apply quantum mechanics to the fabric of
the universe, we might get there. “Only then will we truly
know what kind of a bang the big bang was.”
At least secular cosmologists are in complete agreement
on 3 things: the universe exists today, it originated in the
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past, and the explanation is in the future.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


Cosmologist: a highly intelligent person, very gifted
in mathematics, who devotes his life to rationalizing
insane ideas. If you think this is harsh, remember
what Prophet Berman said 8 years ago?
(10/06/2004). Modern cosmologists are clueless,
they’re right out of The Emperor’s New Clothes, and
nothing they say is likely to be true.
For further proof, look at how their biggest ideas
have all been undermined. They are like white
tourists in Fiji trying to do firewalking. They dance
from one hot rock to another in a kind of Brownian
motion, grinning for a few milliseconds on each one
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before the pain is unbearable.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

Learn an important lesson here. Cosmologists and
the press leapt onto inflation like flies to a carcass,
so excited that the brilliant genius Alan Guth
(Grand Unified Theory Huckster) saved the big
bang from the Flatness Problem and the Horizon
Problem. “In one fell swoop,” Gefter reminded us,
he saved the day. Inflation was simple. It was
elegant. It was beautiful. It was wrong. Tegmark
likened it to the gift that keeps on giving till it got
sickening, or like the performer that should have
bowed out but kept giving encores nobody wanted,
to the point they ran out of the theater screaming.
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

So they retreated to other irrationalities, like brane
theory or the no-boundary proposal. As with
inflation, brane theory turned out to create more
problems than it explained: it required even finer
tuning than the fine-tuned universe we see. As for
Hawking & Hartle’s Hilarious Hoopla (4H) that
proposed a no-beginning in a no-time fantasyland,
remember it was a proposal, not a theory
(proposal, n.:the act of offering or suggesting
something for acceptance, adoption, or
performance). It was a suggestion they offered,
like “try this.” That’s not even a hypothesis yet.
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

So now, it’s back to inflation, with a combo plate of
no boundaries, strings and The Holodeck. We’re
all like Lt. Commander Data wandering in an
imaginary Holographic universe that is a projection
of something real we cannot be sure is really
there. As usual with everything evolutionary, the
answer is all futureware and promissory
notes. Why does anybody listen to these
people? It doesn’t matter if they can write
equations all over the blackboard. If the inputs to a
“proposal” are bogus, no amount of mathematical
manipulation can rescue a lie.
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Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉

If you really want to see what’s motivating these folks, look at
a slide show by Max Tegmark from a symposium, reproduced
on Scribd. The wiggle room in cosmology would make a
mouse in a boxcar feel crowded. Tegmark reasons himself into
a multiverse with the flimsiest of arguments, all while struggling
to defend his naturalism against the clear implications of our
low-entropy universe. “Sound too crazy?” one slide asks in
large yellow print on a black background. (This means he
knows it’s crazy.) But his justification for his craziness is seen
on the very next slide: it’s a portrait of Charles Darwin, with the
caption, “We’re not taking this guy seriously
enough.” What, you ask, has Darwin to do with a
multiverse? Ah, you see, this is all part of the Religion of the
Bearded Buddha: try to explain everything from the bottom up
without that despised, dreaded Designer. Anything but that!–
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even irrationality.
Inflation Again: This Time with Feeling
再次膨胀：这一次有感觉


We would direct your attention back a few slides in
Tegmark’s show to a photograph of a group of sharplooking college students wearing black T-shirts with redand-white lettering. Tegmark knows all about the
symbols in white: those are Maxwell’s Equations, a set
of four equations that James Clerk Maxwell, a Christian
and creationist, derived to explain all electromagnetic
phenomena. The caption in red letters reads, “And God
said,” [Maxwell’s Equations], “and there was light.” (See
similar design close up here.)
We invite these highly intelligent but misguided
individuals, lost in the dark, to come to the light. It’s so
much easier to work with proper lighting; much more
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satisfying, too.
Are Two Cambrian Explosions Better than One?
两个寒武纪爆炸，比一个好？

Science Daily just picked up on a press release
from Oxford University that came out two weeks
ago: the discovery of exquisitely-preserved
Ediacaran creatures. Both articles explained that
the Ediacaran fauna appear to bear no relationship
to the Cambrian animals that came (in Darwin
years) millions of years later, even though “where
exactly they fit in the tree of life is
unclear.” The discoverers believe the animals are
baby rangeomorphs, animals with frond-like
structures that “lived deep beneath the
ocean where there would have been no light.”
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Are Two Cambrian Explosions Better than One?
两个寒武纪爆炸，比一个好？

That’s where their explanation for the burial
seems puzzling: “A volcanic eruption around
579 million years ago buried a ‘nursery’ of the
earliest-known animals under a Pompeii-like
deluge of ash, preserving them as fossils in
rocks in Newfoundland, new
research suggests.” Lest one think this was an
undersea volcano, Professor Martin Brasier
clarified it:
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Are Two Cambrian Explosions Better than One?
两个寒武纪爆炸，比一个好？


‘We think that, around 579 million years ago, an
underwater ‘nursery’ of baby Ediacaran fronds
was overwhelmed, Pompeii-style, by an ash
fall from a volcanic eruption on a nearby
island that smothered and preserved them for
posterity.’
By all accounts, the inhabitants of Pompeii that
were buried by the ash fall from Mt. Vesuvius did
not live at the bottom of the sea. One would
think the ash would float, get diluted or be swept
around by currents, not fall to this spot at the sea
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floor where the animals were living at the time.106
Are Two Cambrian Explosions Better than One?
两个寒武纪爆炸，比一个好？

It’s also not clear how the professors were able
to spin the story into a blessing for
Darwin. “The discovery confirms a remarkable
variety of rangeomorph fossil forms so early
in their evolutionary history,” the article
said. Professor Brasier added another difficulty
to the fact that they appeared in a remarkable
variety out of nowhere: their diversification
came “in an ‘Ediacaran explosion’ that may
have mirrored the profusion of new life
forms we see in the Cambrian.”
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Are Two Cambrian Explosions Better than One?
两个寒武纪爆炸，比一个好？

When you look in a mirror, you usually see an
image of yourself. How the Ediacaran fauna
could have mirrored the Cambrian, when there
was no relationship between the creatures, is
strange, unless it is like you looking through a
clear glass at a tree and you both explode at
the same time. Apparently this is what the
eminent Professor professes: the Ediacaran
explosion was just as rapid, and produced as
many pieces of debris, as you and the tree.
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Are Two Cambrian Explosions Better than One?
两个寒武纪爆炸，比一个好？

This story is more proof that anything goes in
Evolutionary Fantasyland, as long as Darwin
gets the gory glory. Maybe one should ask,
instead, why scientists keep finding so many
examples in the fossil record of abrupt
appearance of complex life, rapid burial, and
exquisite preservation. What’s “evolutionary
history” got to do with it?
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Arsenic Life Isn’t
不是砷的生命


Remember the claim in 2010 that living organisms were
discovered using arsenic instead of phosphate? Further
tests show it was not the case.
The announcement of alien life on our own planet
captivated the media briefly in December 2010
(see “Arsenic and Old Lake, 12/02/2010). This week,
though, PhysOrg, National Geographic,Live
Science and Astrobiology Magazine were among news
outlets announcing Felisa Wolf-Simon’s claim was
wrong. If true, it “would have revolutionized how we think
about life,” NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine noted, but two
subsequent studies have apparently confirmed that the
organism does require phosphate, not arsenic, in its
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110
based life.”
Arsenic Life Isn’t
不是砷的生命

National Geographic said the life-form
named GFAJ-1 (after Felisa’s initials) does not
represent a “second Genesis” of life on
Earth. Astrobiologist Paul Davies, however,
contends that one falsification does not invalidate
his quest to continue looking for alien life on our
own planet. Wolf-Simon is not conceding,
though. She thinks that if the organism ingests
tiny amounts of arsenic, it will still validate her
claim. Most of the other scientists looking into it
say she will have to provide much stronger
evidence.
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Arsenic Life Isn’t
不是砷的生命

Isn’t this a good example of science at
work? Doesn’t this show that science is a selfcorrecting process, like the late positivist Carl
Sagan emphasized? Aren’t scientists showing
themselves to be unbiased truth-seekers,
willing to debunk an idea even if they prefer it
were true, if the facts do not confirm it? Aren’t
they setting a good example of intellectual
integrity?
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Arsenic Life Isn’t
不是砷的生命

Well, nes and yo (those are inextricable mixtures of yes
and no). Sure; to a degree they have illustrated a desire
for strong evidence in this instance. But this one was
easy. The organisms are right here on our home planet,
easily collected and studied in the lab (easy compared to
studying life on Europa or some extrasolar planet). They
still believe in evolution despite 153 years of falsifying
evidence since Darwin published his storybook. Take a
look at this quote from the PhysOrg article: “NASA has
conducted numerous probes at eastern California’s
Mono Lake, an unusually salty body of water with high
arsenic and mineral levels, as it is likely to reflect
conditions under which early life evolved on Earth,
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or perhaps Mars.”
Arsenic Life Isn’t
不是砷的生命


With silly evidence-free tales like that, contrary to
all we know about probability and the complexity of
life, their brief escapade into integrity is too little
too late. Evolutionists are still straining out a
bacterium and swallowing a camel. They pay their
tithes of mint, phosphate and arsenic but ignore
the weightier issues of the law of nature, that
design demands a Designer. They remain blind
leaders of the blind on the really big questions.
OK, so here’s 2 cents for your honesty here, but
pay up on your trillion-dollar promissory notes that
expired 152 years ago.
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Volcano Tour Planned
火山旅游计划


A key researcher of the catastrophic geology at Mt. St.
Helens is leading hikes on the volcano next month.
Dr. Steve Austin, well known creation geologist whose
studies have taken him to Alaska, Grand Canyon,
Argentina and Israel, spent years studying the rapid
geologic processes that were evident after the 1980
eruption of Mt. St. Helens. He even did scuba dives to
the bottom of Spirit Lake to study the vertical
emplacement of trees on the bottom, and discovered a
1/40 scale Grand Canyon cut in a day by a
mudflow. He also found where fine and coarse
laminations in a cliff were deposited in days, not in
tens of thousands of years.
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Volcano Tour Planned
火山旅游计划

Dr. Austin will be returning to the volcano
August 3–4 to lead two instructional hikes for
those interested. Since most visitors cannot get
permits for the areas on the tour, this is a rare
opportunity to gain hands-on understanding of
volcanology with a field geologist who was
influential in reviving catastrophism in geology,
and has inspired many to rethink the secular
geological timescale. The hikes are expected
to be vigorous, so a certain level of physical
fitness is required.
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Maple to the Rescue
枫叶救援

The SWAT team surrounds the
compound. An officer tosses a maple
seed into an open window and checks
the readout on his computer. The team
bursts in and, surprising the terrorists,
rescues the hostages safely.
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Maple to the Rescue
枫叶救援

This scenario may become a reality, thanks to a
new flying robot called Samarai, fashioned after
the winged “samara” shape of the maple
seed. A high-energy video clip at Live
Science tells the story of a tiny drone developed
by Lockheed Martin for the military. Engineers
analyzed the shape of the seed’s wing and
studied its flight dynamics. Then they outfitted
a plastic replica with a motor and a camera to
create their miniature surveillance tool.
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Maple to the Rescue
枫叶救援


Like a maple seed, Samarai has the advantage
of very stable flight. It can be launched from
the floor, by a flick of the wrist, or from an
elevated platform. A remote control allows the
operator to make it rise or turn in an any
direction, or hover indefinitely. (See
“Introducing the Maple Copter,” 10/21/2009.)
One problem was how to produce images on a
spinning camera. The team developed
software that can take out the blur and stitch
together the frames into a normal wide-angle
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motion picture, providing a stable 360° image.
Maple to the Rescue
枫叶救援

This would allow our
imaginary SWAT team to see inside the
building to pinpoint the location of the
terrorists and hostages. The military
would love to have these on the battlefield
for reconnaissance. Some day Samarias
could be standard equipment for law
enforcement, search and rescue, and
other applications – thanks to the
common, humble, ordinary maple seed.
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Maple to the Rescue
枫叶救援

If it ever comes to the day when government
snoops on citizens this way, be sure to have a
strong fly swatter handy. More likely, this will
be one of the coolest toys for Christmas
sometime. Lawyers will undoubtedly find new
opportunities to go after people spying on their
neighbors. Wise parents, though, will take their
kids into the forest with their toy, let them enjoy
it for awhile, then show them that the Creator
designed it first. The Creator even devised a
way to stabilize an image from a moving
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platform.
Anxiety May Shorten Your Cell Life
焦虑可能会缩短你的细胞寿命


Two newly published studies involving thousands
of nurses show that lifestyle and attitude might
influence the age of your cells.
Telomeres are special “end caps” on
chromosomes that keep them from
unwinding. Cells begin with a number of caps;
each time a cell divides, a cap is lost (although the
telomerase enzyme can add new
telomeres). Much remains to be learned about
telomeres, but they seem to be implicated with
aging. When a chromosome runs out of
telomeres, it can no longer divide, and the cell 122
7/7/2015
dies.
Anxiety May Shorten Your Cell Life
焦虑可能会缩短你的细胞寿命

Can lifestyle and attitude influence
telomeres? This is largely unknown
territory. Starting in 1976, thousands of female
nurses participated in a Nurses Health Study
(NHS) by filling out questionnaires on their
health habits and anxiety levels and following
up every 2–3 years. In 1988–1990, thousands
submitting blood samples. This data has now
been correlated with telomere counts in the
leukocytes (white blood cells), important cells in
the immune system.
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Anxiety May Shorten Your Cell Life
焦虑可能会缩短你的细胞寿命

One study by Qi Sun et. al, published in May
in PLoS ONE, found a correlation between
telomere shortness and unhealthy
lifestyles. Another study by Okereke et al., just
published July 11 in PLoS ONE, found a
possible connection between “phobic anxiety”
and telomere shortness. This study was
summarized on Science Daily.
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Anxiety May Shorten Your Cell Life
焦虑可能会缩短你的细胞寿命

The authors of these papers realize that
correlation is not causation, and even correlation
is difficult to measure, due to errors and
omissions such as inconsistencies in
questionnaire responses, lack of follow-up blood
samples, evaluation of a single cell type, and
evaluations of one gender only. Nevertheless,
the researchers found statistically significant
correlations that remained stable even after
cross-checking their data various ways. These
studies had the advantage of large data sets
involving thousands of participants.
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Anxiety May Shorten Your Cell Life
焦虑可能会缩短你的细胞寿命

If the correlations remain robust in similar
studies, it would indicate that mental
states and lifestyle choices can produce
epigenetic effects on our genes. Most of
us realize that poor lifestyle choices and
anxieties are unhealthy, but these studies
suggest a detailed physical connection
between mind and body about which
many of us were unaware.
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Anxiety May Shorten Your Cell Life
焦虑可能会缩短你的细胞寿命

Since it’s very difficult to have high confidence
in correlation studies like this, we’ll mark this as
interesting and potentially valuable to know. It
fits well with what biologists are learning about
the “mysterious epigenome” (see 07/04/2012
entry). Wouldn’t it be something if your fears or
choices have a tangible effect on the action of
the telomerase enzymes in your cells? Don’t
make your telomerase say, “What’s the
use? My owner doesn’t care about all the work
I do.”
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Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹


Red hot peppers! Can evolution “design”
anything, especially a chemical bomb a plant
uses to be sure its seeds get spread properly?
There’s a desert plant in the Middle East that
has an ingenious way of dispersing its
seeds. Many plants rely on animals for help,
but there’s a problem: the animal helper needs
to spread the seed without destroying it. For
instance, many plants surround their seeds by
fleshy, delicious fruits, but if the animal
munches the seeds, there they go, into oblivion
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instead of into the soil.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

Current Biology tells the story of Ochradenus
baccatus (“Taily Weed”; see photo in Flowers of Israel), a
homely desert shrub that has a “mustard oil bomb” method
of attracting animals but protecting its seeds from getting
eaten. It attracts rodents with the delicious fruit, but if they
bite into the seeds, a chemical reaction occurs between
the fruit juice and the seed juice, and pow! a distasteful,
toxic mustard oil bomb goes off in the mouth. The rodents
quickly learn to spit out the seeds rather than eat
them. Fortunately for the plant, the rodents (to avoid
getting eaten by their own predators), take the fruits to
their rocky habitats, the best places for the seeds to
grow. This provides an especially tight example of
commensal mutualism, where both parties benefit equally
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from their interaction.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

In the Current Biology review article, K. C.
Burns (U. of Wellington) did his best to
evolutionize the story while admiring the
designs of the plant world. First, he plagiarized
the title of a well known book by Darwin
champion Richard Dawkins, headlining his
article, “Seed Dispersal: The Blind BombMaker.” In the attempt, though, he personified
evolution too often, starting right in the first
paragraph:
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Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

Seed dispersal sets the stage for everything
that happens to a plant during its lifetime —
after germination, plants will never again be able
to travel across the landscape. Seeds can’t move
very far on their own, though, so they rely
on wind, water or animals to get the job done.
For example, coconuts float on water to reach
their destination. Maple seeds fly through the air
using auto-rotating wings that operate similarly to
helicopter blades. Dandelion seeds use feathery
plumes that function like parachutes. Another
common mechanism of seed dispersal is to enlist
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the help of animals.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

Many plants surround their seeds with fleshy pulp
to strike up mutualistic partnerships with fruitconsuming animals, who swallow seeds whole and
defecate them intact in new locations. Animalassisted seed dispersal can be a highly effective
means of seed transportation, but it is often
fraught with difficulty. In a new study in this
issue of Current Biology, Samuni-Blank et al.
demonstrate that a desert plant has taken an
ingenious step towards solving the problems
associated with animal-mediated
seed dispersal.
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Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

Presumably, evolution taught problem-solving
skills to the plant. The plant’s difficulty is
simultaneously attracting partners and resisting
predators. Well, red hot peppers! Chilis found a
way, he said: they sneak capsaicin into the fleshy
fruit. In mammals (except for some masochistic
humans), the capsaicin sets the mouth on fire
and sends the eater running for the cold water
faucet. Birds, which are not affected by
capsaicin, eat the fruit with the seeds and
defecate them unharmed elsewhere via air mail,
but rodents learn to leave the chilis alone.
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Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹


Did you know your summer picnics are part of this
symbiotic interplay?
We can relate to the rodents’ plight.
Watermelons (Citrullus lanatus) are filled with large
seeds, and most of us spit them out before swallowing
the juicy pulp, largely because the seeds have a sour
taste. This sour taste is our bodies’ way of telling us that
the seeds are defended chemically. By listening to our
taste buds and spitting the seeds out, we avoid
investing the energy to metabolise these defensive
chemicals and avoid any harmful effect they might have
after ingestion. However, in the case of O. baccatus, it is
the combination of chemicals stored separately in the
fruit pulp and in the seeds that creates the chemical
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deterrent, not just the seeds themselves.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”

“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹
Here’s where Burns mixed his metaphors. He reminded us that
human engineers have designed bombs that don’t detonate till
two components mix, but then attributed a similar “design” to
the unguided processes of evolution. He first presented
the “evolutionary conundrum” for plants needing seed
dispersers without attracting seed predators. He claimed that
the Taily Weed and rodent “co-evolved” their mutualistic dance
of seed dispersal and feeding. And then in the case of the chili
pepper, he said, “capsaicin triggers receptors located in
mammalian mouths that have been designed by evolution to
respond to excessive heat.” Burns never quite bothered to
explain how the complex secondary metabolites in the fruit
(glucosinolates) and the enzyme (myrosinase) in the seeds that
detonates the “mustard oil bomb” evolved by mutation and
natural selection in the first place, let alone the complex heat
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receptors in the mammalian mouth.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

It’s noteworthy that the main paper Burns was
summarizing said nothing about evolution
(Samuni-Blank et al., “Intraspecific Directed
Deterrence by the Mustard Oil Bomb in a Desert
Plant,” Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 13,
1218–1220, 14 June 2012,
10.1016/j.cub.2012.04.051). In fact, it begins with
a 4-minute video narrated cheerfully by lead author
Michal Samuni-Blank (Israel Institute of
Technology), who describes, without mentioning
evolution once, how her team discovered and
tested the “directed deterrence hypothesis” with
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chemical analysis and good old field work.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

Let’s have some fun with the phrase, “evolutionary
conundrum” (pretending, for the moment, that it
is not redundant). So: Wonders of design happen
whenever Evolution, the fairy godmother (identified as
Tinker Bell), waves her mutation wand with no goal or
purpose in mind. Our mouth receptors were Designed by
Evolution to respond to excessive heat, we just
learned. The capsaicin, on the other hand, was Designed
by Evolution to turn these receptors on and signal, “Fire in
the hole!” But then, the brains of weird people were
Designed by Evolution to fan the flames and make chilis
part of their fine cuisine. The plant was therefore
Designed by Evolution to get these weird people to
cultivate even more chilis so that they would spread their
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selfish genes even further.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹
Watermelon seeds, by contrast, were Designed by Evolution

to make humans spit them out. Humans, in response, were
Designed by Evolution to create watermelon seed spitting
contests (or was that Evolution designing the watermelon to
make the humans do this?). Evolution designed humans to
retaliate by designing seedless watermelons. (This is known
as an evolutionary arms race.) But if Evolution is such a
good Designer, why didn’t Tinker Bell find the mutation to
design watermelons with delicious seeds that pass through
the human digestive tract? Oh, we get it; it’s because
Evolution designed the human to design toilets and sewer
systems, so the seeds would never make it to the soil. But
the watermelon has the last laugh, because Evolution
designed the human to realize that without propagation by
other means than seeds, their favored watermelons would138go
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extinct.
Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

It must be fun to be an evolutionist. All
you need is imagination, and imagination
has no limits. To them, evolutionary
imagination is like capsaicin. Most of us
run for the cold water of observable
science, but to them, imagination is
delicious. They have lost all feeling. The
fiery heat of imagination is normal; the
more the better!
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Ingenious Seed Bomb “Designed by Evolution”
“进化设计”巧妙的种子炸弹

For a great 100% Darwin-free
documentary on seed dispersal, see the
Moody Video Journey of Life (also
incorporated as Volume 1 of Wonders of
God’s Creation). You’ll see the examples
Burns mentioned and many others:
coconut, dandelion, maple seed, and
many more – illustrations of little living
miracles all around us that can enrich our
lives just to learn about.
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好


The moon stabilizes Earth’s axis and regulates the
tides, but enjoy it from a distance. Now there are
more reasons you wouldn’t want to live there.
“Long-term human exposure to the lunar environment
has never been studied in depth, and it’s quite
possible that — in addition to the many inherent
dangers of living and working in space –the Moon
itself may be toxic to humans,” wrote Jason Major
wrote at Universe Today(emphasis in original). He
was reporting on a paper produced by an
international team of physiologists, pharmacologists,
radiologists and toxicologists from 5 countries, who
sought to quantify the dangers to humans of extended
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好

In the ArXiv paper by Linnarson et al.,
“Toxicity of Lunar Dust,” (open access),
the researchers attempted to fill the
“knowledge gaps” about health hazards in
lunar dust while recognizing that “ground
truth” on actual effects will require in situ
measurements. According to Major’s
summary, the risks include inhalation of
fine dust, skin damage and eye damage.
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好

Lunar dust is not subject to the erosional
processes on Earth, so the particles tend to
have sharp edges. These can be compared to
“pollutants encountered on Earth, such as
asbestos and volcanic ash,” Major said; “lunar
dust particles are small enough to penetrate
deep within lung tissues, and may be made
even more dangerous by their long-term
exposure to proton and UV radiation.” In
addition, the microgravity environment of the
moon may loft these particles around the
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airways.
Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好

The dust is dangerous on the outside,
too. Apollo astronauts noticed that the dust
clings to everything. Long-term exposure to the
sharp-edged particles, even in the safety of a
lunar base, could cause skin abrasions,
particularly on the fingers, knuckles, elbows and
knees. And if the dust were to irritate or scratch
the cornea of the eye, would there be an
opththalmologist in the base to prevent
blindness?
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好

These were just a few of the risks of extended
lunar habitation. Some of the fine particles
might enter tissue cells, or activate the immune
system. They might release free radicals into
tissues and organs. Even if the dust problems
could be overcome, the moon remains
unprotected from solar UV radiation, the solar
wind, solar flares, micrometeorites and highenergy cosmic rays.
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好

The authors listed 34 remaining “knowledge
gaps” about lunar toxicity. If any of these
(many suspected to be high to very high risk)
were to prove serious, it might cause a
reconsideration of the wisdom of sending
humans to the moon for extended stays. Since
some of the risks apply to Mars as well (and
since the moon would probably be a training
base), these findings could put a damper on
hopes for manned missions to Mars.
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好

God’s green Earth is starting to look quite
nice, isn’t it? Maybe you’re fretting the
heat, the rain, the wind, or the cold. After
a week on the moon, you would count the
days to get back home. There are
hazards on Earth, too, but at least you can
breathe the air, get dirty in the garden and
shower it off, and usually live out a lifetime
without the constant protection of an
artificial bubble.
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Our Poisonous Moon: Better from a Distance
我们有毒的月亮：离远更好


Consider that the moon is almost exactly at the
same distance from the sun as Earth. That’s
why all the astrobiological optimism about
extrasolar planets within habitable zones is
mostly hype. The moon is in the perfect
habitable zone, too! Many other factors are
required to make a body habitable. Time to
watch The Privileged Planet again and count
your lucky star.*
*The word lucky used here loosely to include
Providence.
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Birdifying Dinosaurs


变成鸟的恐龙
Birds and dinosaurs have oval eggs and big eyes. Does this
necessarily mean they evolved from a common ancestor?
Hopeful ovals: Intent on evolving sparrows out of T. rex kin, some
paleontologists are selectively basing arguments for common
ancestry on similarities that do not seem all that impressive. For
instance, a report on PhysOrg allowed researchers from
Barcelona to claim common ancestry based on oval egg
shape. “Researchers from Spain identified in Lleida a series of
dinosaur eggs with a unique characteristic: They are oval in
shape,” the subtitle announced. “The discovery represents
proof in favor of the hypothesis that birds and non avian
theropods, dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, could have
a common ancestor.” The reporter later downgraded from proof
to the milder phrase that it “suggests a connection with bird
eggs.” If such a shape had been found in an unrelated animal
group’s eggs, Darwinists would have undoubtedly attributed it to
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“convergent evolution.”
Birdifying Dinosaurs

变成鸟的恐龙
Peter Pan evolution: Nature on July 12 declared that “Birds
have paedomorphic dinosaur skulls” (paedomorphic
referring to “retaining a morphology as adults that resembles
that of the juveniles or embryos of most other
archosaurs”). The team of Bullar et al. (Nature 487, 12 July
2012, pp. 223–226, doi:10.1038/nature11146) performed
detailed measurements of skulls of birds and theropods, and
hypothesized that bird skulls represent a stage of arrested
development of dinosaur skulls. Are they implying that a
dinosaur didn’t finish maturing, and became a bird
instead? Apparently so, and don’t think for a minute that we
humans are exempt from this kind of hypothesis. They added,
“Heterochrony—change in the timing or rate of
developmental events—has been implicated in the
evolution of major vertebrate lineages such as mammals,
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including humans.”
Birdifying Dinosaurs
变成鸟的恐龙

They didn’t even try to hide their evolutionary
dogmatism. The first sentence begins, “Birds are living
theropod dinosaurs”. Yet they recognized the uniqueness
of birds, too: “The unique bird skull houses two highly
specialized systems: the sophisticated visual and
neuromuscular coordination system allows flight
coordination and exploitation of diverse visual landscapes,
and the astonishing variations of the beak enable a wide
range of avian lifestyles.” Still, they stuck to their story that
“the heterochronic process of paedomorphosis, by which
descendants resemble the juveniles of their ancestors, is
responsible for several major evolutionary
transitions in the origin of birds,” counting at least four
episodes of arrested development (except for bird beaks,
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which advanced beyond dinosaur developmental stages).
Birdifying Dinosaurs
变成鸟的恐龙

They boasted that “Evidence for heterochrony is
clear.” The array of skull diagrams, phylogenetic trees
and other scientific apparati seem convincing. Yet to
believe their hypothesis requires, first, accepting common
ancestry as a given, and second, rejecting prior
evolutionary theory: “Strong support for a progenetic
paedomorphic origin of the bird skull seemingly
contradicts early work suggesting that simple
paedomorphosis in the form of having ‘retained a
juvenile shape’ was not involved in the origin of the
bird skeleton” – i.e., the rest of the body below the skull
does not show heterochrony. It would indeed seem
strange if the skull stopped developing while the rest of the
body went on to maturity.
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Birdifying Dinosaurs
变成鸟的恐龙

But that’s what they suggested, tossing those hot
potatoes to the references: “Cranial evolution
is modular with respect to the rest of the body and
it is not unusual to find divergent rates of
transformation between crania and postcrania,
for instance in the origins of pterodactyloid
pterosaurs19and the origin of mammals20,
21.” Not only that, they have to explain why the
beak and brain proceeded well beyond whatever
evolution had cooked up for the long reign of the
dinosaurs. “In addition, birds do not have
embryonic brains,” they confessed.
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Birdifying Dinosaurs
变成鸟的恐龙


To explain this, they came up with a novel idea for
evolution: “The brain emerges in this analysis as a
major driver of theropod cranial anatomy.” Isn’t that
the responsibility of mutation and natural
selection? Calling the brain a driver smirks of intelligent
design, as if the evolving theropod was planning out the
rest of its skeleton. Surely that is not what they meant. To
remain consistent with neo-Darwinism, it would have to
mean that brain mutations at random resulted in all the
specializations enjoyed by birds: their wings, unique flight
muscles, avian lungs, and modifications to every
physiological system.
From there, the rest of the paper collapsed into complete
speculation with a series of maybes, perhapses,
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suggestions and imaginary possibilities:
Birdifying Dinosaurs
变成鸟的恐龙

Cranial transformations driven by optic
elaboration during the origin of birds parallel olfactory
elaboration during mammalian origins23. The brain is an
early signalling centre during facial development25 and it
is possible that the posteroventral rotation of the brain is
in part responsible for the collapse of the facial
region in birds. Archaeopteryx–like elaboration of visually
associated brain regions also appears in Eumaniraptora
and may be correlated with some degree
of volancy26 [i.e., gliding or flying]. Although it has
been suggested that reduction in body size, which we
show accompanied heterochronic transformation I,
was associated with the advent of dinosaurian flight16,
our results agree with work suggesting that size
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18
reduction preceded powered flight .
Birdifying Dinosaurs


变成鸟的恐龙
This reduction may, however, have been a necessary
precursor to flight exapted [i.e., function not acquired by
natural selection] in its service. The origin of flight was a
multistep process and it remains unclear
precisely when volancy and powered
flight respectively originated18. Finally, the peramorphic
enlargement of the premaxilla to form a long, pointed beak is
coupled with progressive loss of manual grasping ability as
digits became bound into the wing27. Modern birds are known
to perform fine manipulations with the precision tips of their
beaks28. It may be that the beak evolved in part as a
replacement for the eponymous raptorial hands of
maniraptoran dinosaurs.
In short, ascribing a few similarities in skull shape to
heterochrony as an explanation for the origin of birds from 156
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Birdifying Dinosaurs

变成鸟的恐龙
The desire to force data into evolutionary stories is overpowering to
Darwin disciples. It has come to the point where they are willing to
deploy the fallacy of suggestion recklessly to support their
belief. Look how many times they used it in that one paragraph
above. The sprinkling of observational data is a
distraction. Remember when 19th century evolutionists
meticulously measured skulls to support their racial
biases? Evolutionists need to explain much, much more than minor
changes to skull shape to make their case. The carelessness of
their hypothesis is also seen in its selective application: the eyes
evolved by heterochrony, but the beak and postcranial skeleton are
the opposite–they are peramorphic (advanced beyond the adult
stage). That’s a convenient dodge that makes no sense unless you
start and end with assuming evolution. If we were to apply their
method as recklessly as they do, we could claim (since humans
exhibit heterochrony, too), that our noses are heterochronic
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elephant trunks, but our femurs are peramorphic dog legs.
Birdifying Dinosaurs

变成鸟的恐龙
Evolution is a gimmick where data are only props to support a
belief. You can pick props at will; use the ones that support the
belief, discard the ones that don’t. When you can’t avoid the obvious,
toss your hot potatoes (difficult questions and anomalies) to other
evolutionists by referring to their papers in your references. The
times we have checked those references, we find those evolutionists
doing the same thing: making bold claims by the power of suggestion
with little data to support it, then tossing their hot potatoes to the next
guy in line. It’s like a large circle of evolutionists tossing their hot
potatoes round and round, never holding onto one long enough to
show they can take the heat of serious objections. Another trick is
the futureware excuse: offer a suggestion and promise that
confirmation will come with further study. It gives the illusion of
progress. But that’s all it is—an illusion. If you need proof, look at
how evolutionists have been using this gimmick for over 150 years
since Darwin taught them how to get away with it, yet they still have
major unanswered questions about the evolution of anything and 158
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everything.
Birdifying Dinosaurs

变成鸟的恐龙
Don’t confuse precision measurement of skulls with scientific
progress. Evolutionists need to explain every complex life
form by an unguided, purposeless process of
mistakes. Evolution is NOT PROGRESSIVE. Progress
implies a goal, an end point, a purpose, a plan. Natural
selection is not progressive. There is no selector! That is the
personification fallacy. A selector implies purpose, choice,
plan, a goal. The adaptability of living things is evidence of
design, not evolution. Why? Because evolution, being
pointless and aimless, is a restatement of the Stuff Happens
Law – whatever happened, happened. That’s an abdication of
scientific explanation. It’s a gimmick masquerading as
science. When you remove the assumption of evolution, their
research, their papers, their work collapse into a pile of nonexplanations. The assumption is the superstructure that holds
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the house of cards together.
Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件


What is life? It’s software that runs biological robots,
says a leading geneticist.
In 1943, before the genetic revolution, physicist Erwin
Schrödinger spoke at Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
on the subject, “What Is Life?” It was unusual for a
physicist to address a biological subject. Approaching
life in physical terms, Schrödinger realized that life
needs to store information. By its nature, biological
information has to be aperiodic (i.e., non-repeating)
yet stable, like a crystal. This led him to ponder the
possible future discovery of an aperiodic, crystalline
“genetic code” as a conveyor of biological information.
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Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

Schrödinger’s prescient insight occurred before the
computer revolution, and a decade before Watson
and Crick’s elucidation of the structure of DNA. It
not only inspired many to view life through a
physical lens, it also encouraged more physicists
and chemists to ask biological questions. Those
questions presaged the discovery of an actual
genetic code written in DNA, on informational
macromolecules. As we know, that discovery led
to a genetic revolution that has continued
unabated to the present day of genetic
engineering.
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Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

Claire O’Connell used this background for her report
in New Scientist on the current meetings at Trinity that
are ending today (July 15). In Schrödinger’s
footsteps, Craig Venter took the stage at Trinity to
discuss the same question, “What Is Life?” O’Connell
sees this as “passing the baton” from one influential
scientist to another; Venter’s name will be familiar to
many, not only as the entrepreneur who raced
the US government’s Human Genome Project to the
finish line, but as the charismatic TED showman who
has wowed large audiences by boasting his team’s
successful creation of the first synthetic cell whose
parents are a computer. (Actually, Venter plagiarized
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existing life; see 5/22/2010 and 6/2/2010).
Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

Venter’s description at the meeting underscores how
far we have come in our conception of the nature of
life. A brief history: for centuries, life was seen as
fundamentally different from non-life. The synthesis
of urea in 1828 by Wöhler was a first bombshell to
old thinking; scientists began to see an overlap
between organic chemistry and regular
chemistry. That line of thought remained productive
till Schrödinger, Watson and Crick revealed another
special trait of biological chemistry: it is a conveyer
of information. Venter’s statement this week now
brings together physics, chemistry, information
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science and robotics:
Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件


“All living cells that we know of on this planet
are ‘DNA software’-driven biological
machines comprised of hundreds of thousands
of protein robots, coded for by the DNA, that
carry out precise functions,” said Venter. “We are
now using computer software to design
new DNA software.”
The digital and biological worlds are becoming
interchangeable, he added, describing how
scientists now simply send each other the
information to make DIY biological material rather
than sending the material itself.
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Venter: Life Is Robotic Software



文特尔：生命是机器人软件
Venter speaks freely these days about DNA software, genetic
design, and digital life. His team even programmed text
messages into their synthetic cell. To emphasize the
informational nature of DNA as software, O’Connell pointed out
that human-designed DNA software even has bugs:
But perhaps the most intriguing anecdote Venter shared was
his description of how his team ‘watermarked’ their
synthesised DNA with coded quotations from James Joyce,
Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman, only to learn that
they had included a mistake in the Feynman quote. Venter’s
rather airy description of how they just went back in and
fixed it drove home just how far we’ve come in being able to
understand, and even manipulate, our own DNA molecules.
James Watson, now 84, was present at Venter’s speech and
shared the applause with Venter.
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Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

Secular scientists are apparently viewing
this as a victory for materialism, but it’s
actually the opposite. Information is not
material. This is clear from the fact that
the same information can be conveyed by
a blackboard, an email, skywriting or
voice. There’s a growing realization that
Information must be added to particles
and forces as a fundamental entity
needed to describe the universe.
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Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

The very fact that we can take the DNA code and
program it with a computer shows that its essence is
software – a form of complex specified information. Our
human experience with software, codes and messages
makes it the most rational inference that software-driven
biological machines operating protein robots have an
intelligent cause. This should be the death of
materialism, actually. Combining these discoveries with
the principle of conservation of information (i.e., that
information cannot exceed its source, and degrades
without intelligent proofreading and maintenance), the
evidence now more strongly than ever implies that
biological information has an intelligent cause greater
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than the effects we observe.
Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

Those who wish to take the next step beyond
science in the direction the evidence points can
locate that intelligence in God. “By faith,”
the author of Hebrews said, “we understand that
the universe was created by the word of God, so
that what is seen was not made out of things that
are visible.” Look how modern that statement
sounds. The universe was created by the word of
God (information, communication), so that what is
seen (material) was not made out of things that are
visible. In short, the invisible information came first
by the Word (logos, as in John 1:1), then the
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material.*
Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

Also noteworthy in Claire O’Connell’s story was
that it never mentioned evolution. Darwin is
disappearing stage left as Venter, Watson and a
new generation of information engineers rise to the
footlights, describing life as fundamentally
information-rich software. They may still be
materialists, but they cannot justify materialism by
their own science. As materialism dies, so will its
ground of relativism and amorality. Before
tinkering with the biological software, then, man
with his limited knowledge and questionable
wisdom had better rethink his accountability to the
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omniscient and all-wise Creator.
Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

*Footnote: O’Connell’s statement about biologists
sending each other the information instead of the
biological material itself suggests, for Christians,
an interesting possibility about the
resurrection. Skeptics have scoffed at the idea of
the resurrection of the dead. The biological
material of a human body quickly degrades. What
if a man is eaten by a shark, which is caught and
eaten by a fisherman? Whose body will be
raised? It’s possible your body contains the atoms
of countless dead people that have been recycled
through the food chain.
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Venter: Life Is Robotic Software
文特尔：生命是机器人软件

But if the essence of the body is software, not its
material substance, it is simply a matter of
reconstructing the atoms from the code – analogous to
how technicians can rebuild a company’s computer
center at an offsite location on new hardware with
backup tapes. Venter stated in his TED talk that a
third of all humanity’s DNA genomes would fit on the
proverbial head of a pin. For the Biblical Creator who
called life into existence by His Logos, it’s no problem
at all to resurrect every person’s physical body right
out of the spot where it died, assembling the atoms
from the code and upgrading it to Body 2.0 on the
way up.
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Boat Men or Float Men
小船人或浮动人


Alleged human ancestors may have drifted to islands
without boats, an evolutionist claims.
“Hominins did not need boats to settle island,”
wrote Jeff Hecht at New Scientist. He was thinking
about the ancestors of The Hobbit, Homo
floresiensis. But the suggestion of “hominins” drifting
out to sea on flotsam to islands without planning to do
so could extend to true humans like Neanderthals, too,
even though they had access to boats 100,000 years
ago in the evolutionary timeline. “The new finding
suggests that in both cases the hominins could have
reached the islands without boats.” How exactly? –
“hominins may have arrived as castaways, carried172
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Boat Men or Float Men
小船人或浮动人

Lest readers find the hypothesis of two guys
from UK hopelessly implausible, Hecht
reminded them that other evolutionists have
suggested that’s how rats got to the islands of
Indonesia. Small elephants might have swum
across the channel. The short article did not
refer to any examples in recorded history of
castaways floating on debris from floods or
tsunamis and landing on islands, ready to start
building a new civilization.
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Boat Men or Float Men
小船人或浮动人

One problem with the idea is getting enough
fertile couples to arrive simultaneously to
establish a stable population. You need about
five young couples to get a population going for
500 years. Robinson Crusoe was a dead end,
in other words; so was the Swiss Family
Robinson. To overcome the problem, the two
guys from UK suggested “throwing in between
one and four additional castaways every 50
years” to increase the odds.
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Boat Men or Float Men
小船人或浮动人


Evolutionary anthropologists sure don’t give our
ancestors much credit. If Neanderthals didn’t learn
from the last castaways to stay out of the storm, they
deserved the Darwin Award for vacationing by
accident on the Isle of Debris. Actually, if those
members of Homo were like the ones we know, they
would have established shipping lanes for a lively
seafaring trade with the islanders in short order – no
tens or hundreds of thousands of years required, no
need to throw in more castaways every 50 years.
Exercise: count the weasel words in the article: may
have, suggests, could have, etc.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板


Your body contains a lot of things engineers would like to
copy, and not just at the scale of C3P0-like humanoid robots.
Pore over this: Your cell membranes have pores that let
good things pass through but block the rest. One of the most
important is the ion channel, responsible for passing
electrical signals in the nervous system. The extreme
selectivity of these pores, some of which can pass potassium
ions but block sodium ions, is desirable to chemical
engineers, but difficult to achieve in synthetic
materials. “Inspired by nature,” a press release from the
University at Buffalo began, “an international research team
has created synthetic pores that mimic the activity of
cellular ion channels, which play a vital role in human
health by severely restricting the types of materials allowed
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to enter cells.”
Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

The team’s synthetic pores are pretty
crude by cellular standards. They are just
stacks of nanotube rings at this stage;
achieving high selectivity is a future
goal. But the lead researcher is hopeful:
“The idea for this research originated
from the biological world, from our
hope to mimic biological structures,
and we were thrilled by the results.”
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板
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
Home sweet homeostasis: The body’s ability to maintain
stability in a dynamic world (homeostasis) requires control
and regulation at many levels. Wouldn’t it be nice if
chemists could do something like that in the lab? A
Harvard team publishing in Nature thought so:
Living organisms have unique homeostatic abilities,
maintaining tight control of their local environment
through interconversions of chemical and mechanical
energy and self-regulating feedback loops organized
hierarchically across many length scales. In contrast,
most synthetic materials are incapable of continuous
self-monitoring and self-regulating behaviour owing to their
limited single-directional chemomechanical or
mechanochemical modes.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Applying the concept of homeostasis
to the design of autonomous materials
would have substantial impacts in
areas ranging from medical implants that
help stabilize bodily functions to ‘smart’
materials that regulate energy
usage. (from the abstract of Ximin He et
al, “Synthetic homeostatic materials with
chemo-mechano-chemical selfregulation,” Nature 487, 12 July 2012, pp.
214–218, doi:10.1038/nature11223)
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

The team put together a bilayer gel that
was able to maintain one parameter—
temperature—within a narrow
range. Crude, but it’s a start, and it gave
something for the people at Harvard’s
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering to aim for.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Shedding tears over clogged ink-jet printers: Tired
of paying for ink cartridges for that old ink-jet
printer? Part of the cost is waste. Because the ink
in the nozzle dries after last use, fresh ink has to
blast through a crust of dry ink each
time. Engineers at the University of Missouri took
a cue from the human eye and made a
breakthrough with a new clog-free nozzle. How
did they do it? They shed tears over the nozzle, in
the form of silicone oil, that keeps the nozzle moist
just like tears keep the cornea moist so that your
eyelids don’t stick shut when you close your eyes.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板


“The nozzle cover we invented was inspired by
the human eye,” said Jae Wan Kwon, associate
professor in the College of Engineering. “The eye
and an ink jet nozzle have a common problem:
they must not be allowed to dry while,
simultaneously, they must open. We
used biomimicry, the imitation of nature, to
solve human problems.”
The engineers at Mizzou think that this simple trick
inspired by the blink of an eye can save
businesses thousands of
dollars. Source: PhysOrg.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Froggy network: How can wireless networks avoid stepping on
each other? Let Kermit show the way. “Frog calls inspire a
new algorithm for wireless networks,”
reported PhysOrg. Male Japanese tree frogs know a trick called
“desynchronization,” i.e., not sending their calls at the same
time, to avoid confusing the female. Researchers at the
Polytechnic University of Catalonia took this cue to discover an
algorithm for coloring network nodes that prevents any two
adjacent nodes from having the same color, while minimizing the
number of colors. “This study falls under the field of ‘swarm
intelligence’, a branch of artificial intelligence that aims to
design intelligent systems with multiple agents,” the article
explained, showing how the idea can be extended to other
situations. “This is inspired by the collective behaviour of
animal societies such as ant colonies, flocks of birds, shoals
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of fish and frogs, as in this case.”
Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Lizard rover: With the new Mars Curiosity rover about to land in a
couple of weeks (see landing video), engineers are thinking ahead
to the next generation of rovers. As we all know, it’s easy for cars
to sink in sand and get stuck, and running or walking across sand
takes more energy. Lizards, though, scamper across the sand like
a walk in the park. According to Michael Slezak at New Scientist,
the Georgia Tech bioengineers have bested the UC Berkeley team
in the robotic sand-run competition. They did it by imitating lizards
instead of UCB’s cockroach model (note: cockroaches do not
normally run on sand, but lizards do). The Georgia Tech team
studied slow-motion video of lizard footsteps and found that lizardlike legs and their speed of travel makes the sand behave more
like a fluid that the lizard can push off of without sinking in. With
memories of the multimillion-dollar Spirit rover stuck in Martian
sand, rover designers are undoubtedly paying attention. Maybe
some day earthbound adventurers, too, can benefit, with a new184
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feature on their 4WD sports vehicles: retractable lizard feet.
Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Here is more cutting edge, Darwin-free
science and engineering that is helping
humanity. Darwinian storytelling is
becoming like smoking. In decades past,
almost everyone in the science lab
smoked, and nobody worried about
it. Then, non-smokers meekly requested
smoke-free environments. Companies
gradually began obliging by designating
areas for non-smokers. Still, the smoke
drifted into the nostrils of those offended.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Simultaneously, the public was becoming more
aware of scientific discoveries about the dangers
of cigarette smoke. Soon, non-smoking areas
became the default, and smokers found
themselves having to go outside to designated
smoking areas, as smoking became prohibited in
more and more public areas. Warning labels
became more prominent and cigarette taxes
rose. Today, smokers still engage in their dirty
habit, but they are increasingly frowned upon in
polite society, while managers look askance at
smoking breaks as non-productive use of time.
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Body Double: Your Body as a Template for Inventors
双体：你的身体作为一个发明家的模板

Darwin storytelling is like smoke in the biomimetics
lab. It’s still taken for granted, and everyone is used to
the smell, but over time, it may be increasingly viewed
as useless, even harmful. We shouldn’t outlaw
storytelling, but should issue warning labels: “Warning:
this scientific explanation contains neo-Darwinism,
which is hazardous to societal health” (11/30/2005). It
would be gracious of the Darwinists to voluntarily take
their filthy habit outside of the scientific journals into
designated storytelling areas, provided they keep it to
themselves and don’t try to influence the young. The
upcoming generations of scientists, enjoying the
invigorating fresh air of bio-inspiration, need to maintain
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their health for the good of us all.
Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显


Two reports indicate that what we know we don’t
know vastly exceeds what we think we know.
Isaac Newton once said of his monumental
scientific work, “I was like a boy playing on the
sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.” Some scientists today
err on the pride side, using the oft-repeated phrase
“Now we know” this or that. Two recent reports
prefer Newton’s assessment.
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

What creatures inhabit our planet? There are
billions of people on this globe, living almost
everywhere, even in Antarctica. Humans have
driven submarines to the deepest ocean
trenches, and sampled the upper
atmosphere. They have sampled every portion
of every continent. One would think they’ve
seen everything by now. Not so; in an article
entitled, “What We Know and Don’t Know
About Earth’s Missing Biodiversity,” Science
Daily said,
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

Most of the world’s species are still unknown
to science although many researchers
grappled to address the question of how many
species there are on Earth over the recent
decades. Estimates of non-microbial diversity
on Earth provided by researchers range from 2
million to over 50 million species, with great
uncertainties in numbers of insects, fungi,
nematodes, and deep-sea organisms.
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

…and that’s just living species. The fossil
record hints of far greater biodiversity in the
past, multiplying our ignorance about life on
Earth. When we don’t know what is alive today,
we can’t know what medicines they might be
able to provide (consider, for example, that
penicillin was discovered in a fungus). One
researcher remarked, “The problem is how one
protects an animal that has never been
seen.”
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

What makes the cosmos work? We’ve reported
several times that most cosmologists believe
that 95% of the universe is composed
mysterious, unknown stuff called dark matter
and dark energy. But that’s just the unseen
unknowns. More profoundly, most of the stuff
shining right into our telescopes remains
unknown. Another Science Daily article
explained,
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

Our day-to-day lives exist in what physicists
would call an electrically neutral
environment. Desks, books, chairs and bodies
don’t generally carry electricity and they don’t
stick to magnets. But life on Earth is
substantially different from, well, almost
everywhere else. Beyond Earth’s protective
atmosphere and extending all the way
through interplanetary space, electrified
particles dominate the scene. Indeed,99% of
the universe is made of this electrified gas,
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known as plasma.
Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

This implies that most of what science busies itself
with represents 1% of visible reality. Astronomers
certainly know about electromagnetic forces, but
except for those working in a few specialized fields
(such as stellar and planetary magnetospheres),
they are wont to talk about the atoms, subatomic
particles and gravity (i.e., the other three
fundamental forces) of stars and galaxies, ignoring
the electromagnetic properties of plasma that are
possibly more critical to explaining their
nature. Many questions remain about the plasma
of our local star, the sun, and the electrical
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environment around our own planet Earth:
Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

Scientists want to understand not only
the origins of electrified particles —
possibly from the solar wind constantly
streaming off the sun; possibly from an area of
Earth’s own outer atmosphere, the ionosphere
— but also what mechanisms gives the
particles their extreme speed and energy.
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

The universe at large, however, is filled with
extremely energetic processes like supernovae,
gamma ray bursts, and black holes, where
plasma predominates. A new NASA mission
called Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) to
be launched in August will try to answer some
of the local questions described in the Science
Daily article. It’s only a stepping stone to that
great ocean of truth that lays undiscovered
before us:
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显


While the most immediate practical need for studying
the radiation belts is to understand the space weather
system near Earth and to protect humans and precious
electronics in space from geomagnetic storms, there is
another reason scientists are interested in this area.
It is the closest place to study the material, plasma,
that pervades the entire universe. Understanding
this environment so foreign to our own is crucial to
understanding the make up of every star and galaxy
in outer space.
Embedded within that paragraph is an admission of
how little is understood by scientists today about that
foreign environment that makes up 99% of visible
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reality.
Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

Speaking about that leftover 1%, how much of that is
really understood? Consider how much remains to be
explained about epigenetics, archaeology, health and
medicine, cell biology, geology, paleontology – you name
it – every field of science within our non-representative,
electrically-neutral bubble is riddled with further
questions. Then consider the time dimension, both past
and future: we have limited access to our past, and no
“scientific” access to the future except for educated
guesses based on induction (a philosophically vexed kind
of logic). Pile on top of that our complete ignorance of
the “unknown unknowns” and the “unknowable
unknowns” (see Evolution News & Views). It is easy to
conclude that scientists know very little at all.
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Scientific Ignorance Becomes Apparent
科学的无知变得明显

Scientists discover many things that are
useful for the present. In terms of
understanding reality, though, science is a
pacifier that grants false assurance that
everything is OK. Those big people
behind the glass have things under
control. Now suck on your pacifier and
stop worrying about it.
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在


Tie “survival of the fittest” to “larger brains are more fit”
and what do you get?
The horrors of 20th century social Darwinism are well
documented. Ideas have consequences. Giving
power-hungry leaders two principles that, when mixed
together, justify their wildest ambitions in the name of
science, is like giving bomb ingredients to a terrorist –
only on a much more massive scale. Those two ideas
are: (1) might makes right, because nature has
determined that only the fittest survive, and (2) some
brains are more fit than other brains. Need we detail
the racial atrocities, genocides and wars that exploded
from that toxic blend?
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

A recent article in Nature News, had a title that should
raise eyebrows: “Mostly the big-brained survive.” It
suggests that the toxic ideas themselves survive, even
if under the surface in an innocent article about
conservation. Emma Marris wrote like a caring
conservationist concerned about the welfare of
endangered species. But she expressed social
Darwinian ideas as if oblivious to what happened in
the 20th century: “Large-brained animals may
be less likely to go extinct in a changing world,
perhaps because they can use their greater
intelligence to adapt their behaviour to new
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size ratio usually means a smarter animal.”
Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在


Although Marris did not use the word fitness or the
phrase “survival of the fittest,” the idea was implicit in
the notion that smarter animals are less likely to go
extinct. A corollary is that nature favors the smarter
animal.
Marris and Eric Abelson (Stanford U), whose research
she highlighted, were discussing brain size of
mammals in general. A picture of a cute tarsier
adorns the article. To their credit, they included
several points that could exonerate them from any
allegations of social Darwinism. For one, they were
not talking about humans specifically at all. Secondly,
they pointed out the disadvantages of the big-brained:
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

For species larger than about 10 kilograms, the
advantage of having a large brain seems to
be swamped by the disadvantage of being
big. Large species tend to reproduce later in
life, have fewer offspring, require more
resources and larger territories, and catch the
attention of humans, either as food or as
predators. Hunting pressure or reductions in
available space can hit them particularly hard.
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

Third, Marris ended with a list of other factors
(besides brain size) that could affect extinction
risk, like “variations in body size, diet,
population density, home range, lifespan and
growth rate.” She quoted Walter Jetz of Yale
who argued that “analyses of extinction risk
using many traits will probably be more
powerful and accurate than predictions based
on single traits.” Then she ended by pointing
out that even Abelson waffles about the
meaning of his own analysis:
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在


Abelson is agnostic on how the extinction-brain
size relationship should inform conservation
efforts. One could argue for expending more
resources on the smaller-brained species that are
at high risk. Or one could decide to spend more
energy smoothing the way for the smarter, more
adaptable species, since they might have a higher
likelihood of surviving. “All I can say is that I hope it
is useful for whoever is making those decisions,”
he says.
Having diluted the ingredients of the social Darwinism
bomb, Marris went on her way with a clear
conscience. Scientific American reprinted the article205
7/7/2015
Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

Is the reference to social Darwinism inappropriate for
an innocent little article like this about species
conservation? They didn’t even mention Darwin or
evolution, for crying out loud. Is it not a fact of nature
that animals differ in brain-to-body size ratios and
basic intelligence? Didn’t Marris and Abelson
adequately distance themselves from the really bad
ideas of social Darwinism and their
implications? Didn’t they give both sides, and remain
agnostic on whether brain size matters at all to
extinction? Isn’t this much ado about nothing? Isn’t it
profoundly unfair to suggest a connection with 20th
century atrocities of social Darwinism?
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

We certainly don’t want to be unfair to Marris
or Abelson, but they should have known
better. They could have done more to
ensure safety precautions before playing
with fire like this topic. They could have
explicitly stated that their work has nothing to
say about human intelligence or brain
size. They could have specifically
mentioned the harm that overemphasis on
this trait in humans has done.
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

Those were the sins of omission. The sins of
commission are: (1) using an incendiary title, “Mostly
the big-brained survive”; (2) engaging in useless
speculations that are impossible to prove: (3)
assuming that brain size correlates with intelligence
(perhaps not: quality might matter more than quantity);
(4) linking intelligence to survival; (5) assuming that
the smart are worth saving more than the stupid; (6)
shuffling off the responsibility for the decision to
others. Abelson said he hoped his information might
be “useful” to “whoever is making those decisions” –
i.e., what species deserve saving from extinction, the
smart or the dumb. Can you imagine a scientist using
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that excuse in Nazi Germany?
Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

The Darwinist mindset is that nature favors the fit, and
the fit are the smart and the strong. Says who? Jesus
Christ taught to honor the weak and reach out to the
feeble-minded. He took the children in his arms and
said that the kingdom of God belongs to such as
these. We’re all weak and stupid compared to our
Creator. We should each individually try to develop the
gifts and talents God has given us to their fullest extent,
to improve our intelligence, wisdom and strength, so that
we can help our neighbor in time of need. A society that
cares for its weaker members while maintaining
individual responsibility is a healthy society. The social
Darwinist societies viewed the weak as parasites and
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burdens that nature itself sought to eliminate.
Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

Some readers may dislike the previous
paragraph because it mentions God and
Jesus. OK then, stick to the science. Are you
not embarrassed by the sloppy science
Abelson did, Marris promoted,
and Nature printed? It’s useless and
illogical. The basic hypothesis is that smarts
help you avoid extinction. That idea is more
full of holes than Swiss cheese. They know it:
Marris said that being smart has just as many
disadvantages to fitness as advantages.
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Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

Later, she aired Jetz’s list of factors that could
matter just as much to survival: “variations in body
size, diet, population density, home range, lifespan
and growth rate.” That’s probably not an
exhaustive list. It’s illogical, too: if nature favored
the smart, then why are the dumb still
around? Even if you restrict the category to just
mammals, or just rodents, you would expect all the
dumb ones to have gone extinct long before now,
and natural selection to have brought the survivors
to a high level of intelligence. Clearly that hasn’t
happened or Abelson would have a flat curve, and
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nothing to measure.
Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

Finally, animal intelligence should have nothing to do with
decision-making about conservation. We don’t let turkeys
go extinct just because they are dumber than crows. Even
if Darwinists do not want to believe that our Creator has
entrusted humans with a stewardship over the creatures of
this world, they cannot get away from ethics. Someone
needs to decide how to spend limited resources on
conserving what species we can. Did you notice that
conservation implies helping the weak? We are the
smartest animals on the planet, right? All the others are
dumber than us. We’re fit; we’ve survived so far. If they
were consistent Darwinists, why should they care? Even
with our intelligence, there are questions whether we will
be smart enough to avoid destroying ourselves and
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everything else.
Roots of a Dangerous Darwinian Doctrine Live On
危险的达尔文主义根源仍在

In short, for these reasons and more, we do
not exonerate Marris, Abelson, Nature and
Scientific American for posting this
pseudoscientific poison. It is empirically
unsound, practically useless, and
dangerous. Let them all re-read the history
of the 20th century and be reminded that
such thinking can be used to justify
unspeakable horrors. Time to shed these
notions and stop blessing them with the
name of science.
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Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？


As the carnage of the latest mass murder is being
assessed, TV commentators look predictably to
psychologists for answers.
Psychology has a questionable past as a
science. Nearly every fad theory since its inception
has been overturned. Even today, the field is riddled
with scandal (11/05/2011), and their methods are
questionable (7/05/2012). Psychiatry is supposed to
be a step better, since one has to earn an M.D. to be a
psychiatrist. But recently, their own “Bible” of
diagnosis, the DSM-V, has been criticized as politically
incorrect mumbo-jumbo that is so wrong it’s not even
wrong (5/18/2012).
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Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

Yet when tragedy happens, and people
search for answers as to what would
motivate a person to commit mass
murder, the experts that TV anchors call
on are not Bible scholars, pastors or
theologians. It’s psychologists and
psychiatrists with their presumed appeal
to offer “scientific” answers.
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Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

To date, there is not enough information about James
Holmes’ background for anyone except perhaps his
parents to have an informed opinion about what made
him shoot an assault rifle into a crowded theater this
morning. All that is known is that this PhD candidate in
neuroscience was not your typical mass murderer. He
was smart, and his act had to be premeditated. It was
not a sudden snap, but a decision that had a
history. The details will surely be forthcoming as the
investigation proceeds. One fair assumption is that his
studies in neuroscience at UC Riverside and University
of Colorado were saturated with Darwinism and
materialism, with their inherent meaninglessness and
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lack of personal responsibility.
Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

What doesn’t help at all is for fake experts in psychology
(“soul science”—a contradiction in terms) to lend their
useless opinions and empty jargon to fill up air time. It
wasn’t hard to find them, as usual, tossing out their
meaningless words, like psychosis, neurosis, depressive
disorder, as if that represents understanding. (You can
play psychologist yourself. Just watch some person do
something you don’t understand, and give it a label:
“impulsive reverse toilet paper roll placement disorder.” )
Even the more commonly-used disorders cannot be
diagnosed with any certainty; individual psychiatrists
often come up with a different diagnosis for the same
patient. This is indicative of quackery. Meanwhile,
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experts on the Bible were hard to find in the discussion.
Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

The Bible has the Operations Manual from the
Manufacturer. That should be the beginning
point of wisdom for any human who wishes to
qualify as an expert. “The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of
the Holy One is understanding,” Solomon said
(Proverbs 9:10). This implies that secular
psychologists and psychiatrists are not even at
the beginning; in fact, they are behind the
beginning, marching off in the wrong direction—
their own understanding (Proverbs 3:5–
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6, Psalm 1).
Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

Any intersection of their teachings with
reality happens either by chance (the
broken clock that is right twice a day), or
from common sense observation, such as
“students learn better when they
concentrate” or “experiencing awe makes
you feel better” (seriously; see Live
Science). All their false teachings about
motives of the soul stand in opposition to
the Manual from the only One in the
universe who knows what makes us tick.
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Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

The brain is a physical organ that can develop physical
problems. These physical problems can affect
behavior. The diagnosis is not “mental illness” but
physical illness causing behavioral symptoms. To call it
“mental illness” when someone with no physical brain
problems (and in fact a good record of intelligence and
achievement) goes off on a shooting rampage completely
overlooks the real root of the problem: sin. Jeremiah
wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all else, and
desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jer.
17:9). Solomon warned his son to “Keep watch over your
heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of
life” (Proverbs 4:23). Real moral choices in life can lead
to horrendous evils if unchecked, even if they simmer 220
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Can Science Explain Mass Murder?
科学可以解释大规模屠杀？

As we watch the investigation into the Holmes case, look for
evidence of either a physical problem or a sin problem. Initial
hints show him obsessed with hard rock music and violent
movies. Don’t be snookered into buying the snake oil of
falsely-so-called scientists peddling “Joker Resemblance
Syndrome” or “Movie-Reality Dualism Incompatibility
Disorder” or whatever else they will try to label it. The word
is sin. Sin includes hate, envy, jealousy, lying, and lack of
self-control – all sins that Holmes could have nurtured till
they festered, leading to that heinous act of mass murder. It
is not compassionate to excuse his sin as some kind of
psychological syndrome. We are all personally responsible
for our actions. Each one of us will have to give an account
to our Maker. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of
God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
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Dark Matter Remains Missing
暗物质仍然失踪


The most sensitive test to date for dark matter in
the form of weakly interacting massive particles
(WIMPs) has turned up nothing.
Live Science announced that a sensitive
underground detector in Italy has turned up no
definitive evidence for WIMPs after 13 months of
searching. This either means (1) WIMPs are
harder to detect, (2) WIMPs don’t exist, or (3) dark
matter is MACHO: Massive Compact Halo Objects
made up of ordinary matter. Serendipitously, the
article was accompanied by a picture of a macholooking bodybuilder advertising a muscle-building
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product.
Dark Matter Remains Missing
暗物质仍然失踪


Reporter Clara Moskowitz said that “Dark matter is
thought to make up about 83 percent of the matter
in the universe, yet scientists can’t see or touch
it.” She didn’t specify who thought this.
By now everyone has heard the tentative reports of
the Higgs Boson being found at last. John Horgan
put the discovery in context at Scientific American,
remarking that “the Higgs doesn’t take us any
closer to a unified theory than climbing a tree
would take me to the Moon.” He also had some
sharp words about the political hype over the
misnomer, “God particle.”
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Dark Matter Remains Missing
暗物质仍然失踪

If they want to keep looking for the
mysterious unknown stuff, nothing is
stopping them, as long as they pay for it
themselves. It’s happened before
(alchemy, phlogiston, caloric). There
should be a reasonable time limit and
funding limit before requiring them to drop
a dead-end theory and work on something
that explains 83% of reality better.
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The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

What has become known as “climate
science” offers an opportunity to
investigate the sociology of science and
ask how political biases influence
individual scientists. Since the lukewarm
political response to the Rio conference,
news articles indicate that climate science
has a climate of its own – one that’s
heating up over the inability to convince
the public.
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The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

Punk eek in the data: Even before the Climategate
scandal, skeptics of human-caused global warming
pointed to historical warming trends that preceded
factories and SUVs. Another paper in Science this
past week added to the ways that non-anthropogenic
factors can cause major climate changes. Wortman
and Paytan published a paper proposing “Rapid
Variability of Seawater Chemistry Over the Past
130 Million Years” that “are likely to affect ocean
productivity, the global carbon cycle, and climate,”
even though humans were not around then in the
evolutionary timeline (Science 20 July 2012: Vol. 337
no. 6092 pp. 334–336, DOI:
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10.1126/science.1220656).
The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

The fluctuations they found could be true of the entire
geologic column. “The record is characterized by long
phases of stasis, punctuated by short intervals of
rapid change,” they said, reminiscent of punctuated
equilibria (“punk eek”) in Stephen Jay Gould’s biological
theory of evolution. The paper was summarized
by Science Daily. “Humans get most of the blame for
climate change, with little attention paid to the
contribution of other natural forces,” the summary
began. “Now, scientists from the University of Toronto and
the University of California Santa Cruz are shedding light
on one potential cause of the cooling trend of the past 45
million years that has everything to do with the
chemistry of the world’s oceans.” Whether cooling
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trend or heating trend, the point is that humans didn’t do it.
The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学
Laughing gas: Another factor in the battle for public

acceptance of anthropogenic global warming is the apparent
silliness of some of the scientific claims. On New Scientist,
for instance, Michael Marshall headlined his latest article,
“Belch of laughing gas could heat up our planet.” He
wasn’t talking about climate skeptics laughing over the latest
claims, releasing carbon dioxide in their breath, but natural
releases of nitrous oxide after the ice age. Even so, part of
the problem for skeptics is making sense of the conflicting
data. Each new revelation is greeted with a tentative
announcement: it “could” heat up our planet. But how would
anyone test the idea? This natural gas release, long before
the industrial revolution, opposes putting humans at fault: if
ancient warming released laughing gas, why should we be
blamed if current ice sheet melting releases it again?
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The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

Drastic actions: A third factor antagonizing the public is the
extremity of proposed measures to fight global
warming. The proposed redistribution of wealth by taxing
of industry is well known, but some measures are even
more severe. National Geographic listed “6 Extreme
Climate Fixes” that “geoengineers” are proposing to
reverse human-caused warming, including dumping vast
amounts of iron into the ocean to promote plankton
blooms, creating “artificial volcanoes” to pump reflective
particles into the atmosphere, creating seaweed farms,
cooking agricultural waste, “greening” the desert, and
building an armada of cloud-making ships. Most of these
ideas would barely make a dent in the problem as climate
scientists fear it. What’s more, they fail to ask the logical
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follow-up question, “At whose expense?”
The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

Presumably, it is concern for the biosphere driving
the urge to stem global warming, yet some of the
proposed measures could be extremely harmful to
species or could shift the food chain in unexpected
ways. Environmentalists have a reputation for
stopping private construction projects and
preventing landowners from making decisions
about their own property out of concern for
endangered species. Where were they when
became widely known that “green
energy” windmills were killing thousands of birds
and bats each year? Where are they now with the
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proposal to alter the world’s oceans?
The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学
Selective evidence: Members of the public might be

understandably forgiven for expressing doubt when anything
and everything is summoned as evidence for anthropogenic
global warming: cold winters and warm winters, wildfires and
excessive rains. Are the fearmongers crying wolf too
often? Nature News held up the ominous spectre of wildfires
to human guilt: “As temperatures soar, forests blaze and
houses burn, the media and public may be forced to face
up to the reality of a changing climate, says Max A.
Moritz.” Moritz did not put wildfire statistics into any historical
context, nor did he take into account the encroachment of
human habitation into forested areas. For these and other
reasons, one commenter didn’t buy it: “Once again Nature
editors are pushing the catastrophic man made global
warming mantra,” he complained.
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The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

Selective indignation: At the BBC News,
reporter Richard Black was apparently more
concerned over the news that the Norfolk police
force, after two and a half years, is dropping its
investigation into the release of the emails in
the Climategate affair, than he was of the lies
and coverups by the IPCC exposed in those
documents:
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The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学


Here was a crime with international
ramifications that happened on their patch —
the theft and release of more than 6,000 emails and other documents that lit a fire under
mainstream climate science, perhaps
contributing to the torpor in the UN climate
process and raising the level of doubt in
public minds.
Yet despite engaging help from the UK’s
specialist e-crime unit, IT security consultants
and police forces in other countries, they’ve
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identified not a single suspect.
The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

This kind of selective indignation
understandably rankles climate skeptics
who want the focus to be on the data, not
the leakers. These same people did not
show similar outrage over Wikileaks
actions that jeopardized national security;
some of them actually cheered it.
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The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

As an academic discipline, the sociology of
science seeks to uncover non-empirical factors
that cause scientists behave the ways they do:
peer pressure at conferences, consensus
construction and maintenance, treatment of
maverick views, and more. Empirical scientists
have just as much right to return the ball and
question the sociological biases of the
sociologists and the validity of their
data. Onlookers can watch and decide whether
any human being acting in the role of scientist
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is free of bias.
The Sociology of Climate Science
气候科学社会学

Climate change (a.k.a. global warming) if off-topic
for CEH except in the fact that the same doctrinaire
warming advocates tend to be doctrinaire
Darwinians. They also tend to be political leftists by
virtue of the fact that they expect the government or
the UN, not the people, to make decisions for
everyone else, with no regard to individual rights,
private property or the burden on
taxpayers. Incidentally, some of them display the
same carelessness with data – willingness to ignore
data that contradicts their ideology. Understanding
the political dynamics of this parallel issue can go a
long way to interpreting the next news from the Darwin
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Party.
Asteroids as Water Balloons Gave Us Oceans
小行星像水气球给我们海洋


Planetary scientists are looking to asteroids as the
source of Earth’s water – not from evidence, but
from desperation.
The Bible’s book of Genesis describes Earth
covered with water from its creation. Not so, say
the secular evolutionists: Earth began as a hot,
dry, rocky body spewing volcanoes and facing a
bombardment of space debris. Problem: why is it
covered with water today? Even though the
oceans are a relatively thin veneer on the globe,
making up about 1% of Earth’s mass, their
prominence is one of the defining characteristics237of
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our “water planet.”
Asteroids as Water Balloons Gave Us Oceans
小行星像水气球给我们海洋

There have been three suggestions to answer the
“H2O Enigma” (see 3/26/2002): a lucky strike by a big
wet planetesimal, condensation from the solar nebula,
and comets. The first two hypotheses are pretty much
defunct, leaving comets. But for the last several
years, secular planetary scientists have doubted that
comets brought the water (see 11/03/2009), primarily
because the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio in cometary
ice differs substantially from Earth water. (Deuterium
abundance is thought to increase with distance from
the sun.) In addition, direct observation of comets by
Stardust and Deep Impact have shattered theories
about their origins
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(12/27/2007, 9/24/2008, 4/18/2011).
Asteroids as Water Balloons Gave Us Oceans
小行星像水气球给我们海洋


As Space.com reported recently, it’s unlikely scientists can
retreat back to condensation from the local solar
nebula. The so-called “snow line” in planet formation theory
is now thought to be even farther out than previously
believed. Earth started out dry. Volatiles like water had to
come special delivery.
Taking all the difficulties into account, NASA’s Astrobiology
Magazine considered one last option: asteroids. In
“Meteorites Most Likely Source of Earth’s
Water,” NASA pointed to work by Carnegie Institute
scientists who believe water-bearing carbonaceous
chondrites, with their lower deuterium ratios, could have
been the delivery vehicles. Because the deuterium ratio is
lower, they might have formed in the asteroid belt. The last
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paragraph shows this is only a suggestion:
Asteroids as Water Balloons Gave Us Oceans
小行星像水气球给我们海洋


“Our results provide important new
constraints for the origin of volatiles in the
inner Solar System, including the Earth,”
Alexander said. “And they have important
implications for the current models of the
formation and orbital evolution of the planets
and smaller objects in our solar system.”
A constraint is not a theory any more than an
implication is. Scientists generally frown on ad
hoc explanations that rely on luck to fix a
problem.
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Asteroids as Water Balloons Gave Us Oceans
小行星像水气球给我们海洋

Did any of them think this through? How many
asteroids would it take? Unlike comets, asteroids
are mostly rock. It would seem to squeeze enough
water out of the rocks of carbonaceous chondrites,
they would have to coat the whole Earth with a
veneer of them. That should be clearly
detectable. Also, the timing is critical in their
hypothesis. It would have to arrive after the
volcanoes stopped burying the land in lava; what
made the asteroids come in then? Furthermore,
the asteroids had to be the right size. Too big, and
they would have boiled away any oceans being
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formed. This theory is ad hoc all over the Earth.
Asteroids as Water Balloons Gave Us Oceans
小行星像水气球给我们海洋

There is nothing in science that demands a bottom-up
explanation. Science should go with where the evidence
leads: top-down (i.e., intelligent design) or otherwise,
without a pre-selected bias. A theory that includes an
eyewitness account should be given more credence than
one that relies on inferences from the unobservable past
(unobservable, that is, to humans). For these reasons,
given the implausibilities of the secular account,
the Genesis account can be called the most accurate
scientific explanation of the origin of the Earth’s
oceans. Peter is harsh on the latter day uniformitarian
scoffers, claiming they willfully forget that the world was
created with its water from the beginning (2 Peter 3:3–
6). The scientific data did not demand their bottom-up,
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242
mindless view. it was a choice.
Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人


The chambered nautilus is on the decline, after
500 million years of survival from the world’s
greatest extinction events. Guess who’s to blame.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Faye Flam wrote
about the nautilus, a “living fossil” that has survived
all that planet Earth could throw at it for 500 million
years. It survived the Permian Extinction that
wiped out 90% of species on Earth, and the fabled
K-T extinction event that wiped out the
dinosaurs. But now, its days are numbered, and
humans are to blame. Presumably, it’s because
hunting of the prized shells caught them by
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243
surprise:
Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人

So as hardy as these creatures have proven
over hundreds of millions of years, a new
fitness factor is becoming increasingly
important — the ability to coexist with 7
billion human beings. There’s nothing the
nautilus can do to adapt to the threat from
humans — it came on too suddenly. The
future of these animals depends not on what
they do, but on what we do.
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Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人

This is Flam’s latest entry under “Planet of the
Apes,” a blog on evolution. Her post, echoed
on PhysOrg, contained some implausible
elements. For one, was human hunting of the
nautilus any more sudden than an asteroid
impact? Second, how many out of 7 billion
human beings are nautilus fishermen? Third,
how big is the nautilus habitat in the vast
oceans of the world? Fourth, what does the
nautilus have to do with evolution?
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Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人

Ammonoids, of which the nautilus is a member,
are complex animals that appeared in the
Cambrian Explosion, “Darwin’s Dilemma” – the
abrupt, non-evolutionary appearance of all the
animal phyla in a geological eye-blink in
evolutionary terms. “Nautiloid fossils have been
dated as early as 500 million years ago —
soon after animals started leaving fossils,”
she wrote. And they are “living fossils,”
basically unchanged in body plan for over 500
million years.
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Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人


In addition, Flam reduced evolution from the
realm of natural law to happenstance:
The story of the nautiloids helps illustrate the
role of chance in evolution.
Extinction doesn’t reflect some kind of flaw
or weakness or inability to adapt. The term
“fitness” as scientists use it depends on the
environment — don’t think of workouthardened athletes but of individuals that fit
well into their surroundings. And on this
planet, the surroundings are always subject
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to change.
Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人

But if fitness is chance adaptation to a
chance environment, everything is
chance. This not only undermines the
position of many Darwinians about
fitness and adaptation for over a
century, it means that evolutionists have
no grounds for predicting or explaining
anything in the living world.
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Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人

Undoubtedly Faye Flam confidently
expected to hit a grand slam as a pinch
hitter for Darwin, but count the strikes: (1)
Cambrian explosion, (2) living fossils, (3)
Stuff Happens. She’s out, but mercifully
we’ll give her one more pitch. Tell us, Ms.
Flam, does the nautilus look like a product
of random mutation?
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Man Blamed for Living Fossil Extinction Threat
活化石灭绝的威胁责怪人


The spiral shells are divided into chambers, the
biggest outermost one providing a home for the
creatures and the empty ones providing
an adjustable buoyancy system that allows the
nautilus to move up and down after food. Not
only is the nautilus a member of an ancient
lineage, but individual creatures are long-lived.
They may live upwards of 100 years… When it
comes to smell, “they are like wolves, picking up an
unbelievably small number of molecules,” [Peter]
Ward said.
Nice try. Game over. (The Darwin team’s manager is
7/7/2015
heard yelling, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”)250
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假


Evolutionary theory gets credited for changes that really
do not help Darwin’s view of a universal tree of life. Three
examples show how.
Toxin resistance by insects: Science Daily reported on a
study out of Cornell University that showed the same
mutation occurring in four orders of insects, conferring
resistance to plant toxins called cardenolides. “This
is truly a remarkable level of evolutionary repeatability
and suggests that evolving resistance to the plant
toxin had very few effective options,” lead research
Anurag Agrawal said, hinting that evolution might in some
way be predestined. But as Dr. Michael Behe argued,
single point mutations, even double mutations, lie within
the “Edge of Evolution” and can thus be explained by 251
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chance.
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Insects gaining the mutation will survive and proliferate
because the cardenolides will no longer bind to enzymes
required by the insects’ sodium pump. The insects are
still the same species, however. They have not
generated any novel genetic information, let alone a new
irreducibly complex structure. Point mutations cannot
explain the origin of the sodium pump and the enzyme in
the first place. At best, this mutation represents a loss of
genetic information that happened to help the insects
escape death, so it falls in the category of “cutting of a
hand makes you immune to handcuffs” – hardly a
mechanism that can generate the diverse and complex
wonders of the living world. See also the explanation
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at Uncommon Descent.
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Speciation by gene duplication: A case of a new “species”
of monkeyflower emerging from a whole-genome
duplication was reported by Live Science. The new hybrid
apparently cannot crossbreed with other similar
monkeyflowers, but whether this represents “newly
evolved species” seems a stretch; it is still a
monkeyflower, very similar in appearance to the sibling
monkeyflowers without the duplication. “While many new
species of plants are thought to arise this way, it has
only been witnessed amongst wild plants a handful of
times in history,” one scientist was cited as saying. He
also placed most species evolution in the unobservable
past, claiming, “most species originated thousands of
years ago” by processes he could only describe as a
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253
“series of unlikely events”.
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Again, no new genetic information was
added. Nothing was stated about the flowers
fitness other than that is seen growing in the
wild (most hybrids are sterile). Since
duplicating this paragraph would not explain the
origin of the paragraph or make it more
meaningful, it’s a stretch to call this evolution as
Darwin envisioned it; if anything genetic
duplication adds to genetic load—a burden on
the DNA copying mechanisms that now require
double the work with every cell division.
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Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假
Darwin’s robots: The most egregious examples of

evolutionary excess come when Darwin’s name gets
attached to intelligent design. Michael White did this
in Science in his review of John Long’s new book, Darwin’s
Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the
History of Life and the Future of Technology. (White,
“Evolution and Robots,” Science 20 July 2012: Vol. 337 no.
6092 pp. 294–295, DOI: 10.1126/science.1224874). White,
who boasts of studying “the evolution of robots” himself,
enjoyed Long’s “compelling and wide-ranging conversation.”
he said. “This includes discussions of the mechanics of fish
backbones, how we practice science, the nature of
evolution, what it means to be intelligent, our dystopian
robot future, and, most important, the crucial role of good
models in science.” It appears both White and Long could255
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use a refresher course on the “nature of evolution” —
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Darwin’s Devices recounts the efforts of Long and
his colleagues to study the biomechanics
and evolution of vertebrae in fish using
autonomous, aquatic robots as models. Long is
interested in whether natural selection for more
efficient food-seeking behavior could have led
to the appearance of stiff backbones in the
earliest vertebrates. By allowing robots with
different backbone properties to compete with
each other and by having the winners pass their
traits down to the next generation of robots, Long
and his collaborators follow backbone evolution
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256
in their population of robotic fish.
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Clearly, Long was doing artificial
selection—a form of intelligent design—
not natural selection. He had a goal and
he acted as the intelligent selector. He
also designed the robotic fish to begin
with. How he could leap from ID selection
into “natural selection,” which has no goal
and no intelligent selector, shows that
misconceptions about Darwinism persist
even among Darwinians.
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257
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Are you getting good at spotting the magic
words? Darwinians love magic words. Here
they were: “whether natural selection… could
have led to the appearance of”. That’s the
sleight of hand: (1) could, invoking the Stuff
Happens Law by the power of suggestion, (2) led
to, a fallacy of goal-directed behavior
inconsistent with Darwin’s undirected processes,
and (3) the appearance of, an “abracadabra”
phrase conveying no information about how a
stiff backbone could have “appeared” by any kind
of scientifically describable process.
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258
Evolution Falsely So Called
所谓进化虚假

Notice also the investigator interference at every
stage. Long was “allowing” the robots “to compete” with
each other. He allowed “winners [to] pass their traits
down”. Who were the winners? The ones Long
predetermined would have stiff backbones, of course. If
this is what it means to “follow backbone evolution,” then a
puppeteer is following puppet psychology. If Long really
wanted to test natural selection (even granting the
existence of his designed robotic fish), he would have had
to turn them loose, then walk out, lock the doors, and
come back in a million years to observe what happened –
without interfering in any way. It appears that before
Darwin skeptics can win debates with Darwinians, they will
have to teach Darwinians what Darwinism is.
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259
Humans by Mistake
人类的错


Scientists from Scotland claim to trace our
origins to a genetic mistake 500 million years
ago.
In large bold print on Live Science, reporter
Jennifer Viegas announced this headline: “500
Million-Year-Old ‘Mistake’ Led to
Humans.” The opening tried to dramatize
claims made by scientists at the University of
Dundee about a marine creature named
amphioxus:
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260
Humans by Mistake
人类的错


Over 500 million years ago a spineless creature on
the ocean floor experienced two successive doublings
in the amount of its DNA, a “mistake” that
eventually triggered the evolution of humans and
many other animals, says a new study.
The good news is that these ancient DNA
doublings boosted cellular communication
systems, so that our body cells are now better at
integrating information than even the smartest
smartphones. The bad part is that communication
breakdowns, traced back to the very same genome
duplications of the Cambrian Period, can cause
diabetes, cancer and neurological disorders.
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Humans by Mistake
人类的错

It’s a long way from amphioxus, indeed. PhysOrg called
this an “evolutionary upheaval” that resulted in an
“evolutionary leap” over 500 million years. One of the
scientists justified this storytelling by claiming it sheds light
on the origin of disease: “Analysis of these gene families
from an evolutionary point of view helps to navigate
through the increasingly large data sets on protein
interactions in a more focused and productive way,
speeding the way towards establishing the links between
particular proteins and diseases as well as highlighting
new potential disease targets.” He did not explain why
comparative genomics requires the assumption of
evolutionary common ancestry, nor did he give any
measure of focus and productivity using the evolutionary
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point of view.
Humans by Mistake
人类的错

Let’s be logical, here. Professor, if we are
the result of a mistake, then you are the
result of a mistake. Ergo, unless you can
explain the evolution of truth, your claim
about our origins is
mistaken. Consequently, it is a mistake to
pay your theory any attention. Q.E.D.
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Humans by Mistake
人类的错

This is a good one to keep for the day the
Darwin idol collapses. Enlightened
philosophy of science teachers will have
fun showing their students what
professors with PhD’s once claimed was
solid science. The professor will hear
gasps from the class when he explains
that the media reported these things
uncritically, and nobody laughed.
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Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传


For an enterprise supposedly as apolitical and
bias-free as science classically is supposed to
be, conservatism is surprisingly rare.
Since we last reported the leftist bias in
scientific institutions (Jan 19, 2012), has there
been any shift to the right? any penitence for
embracing and promoting one political
party? No; it has gotten worse. Here are just a
few of the most egregious examples in recent
days. These not only state leftist positions, but
openly advocate them.
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Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

Anti-Israel: The only redeeming feature of this
example is that at least Science magazine
published a protest letter by John R. Cohn of
Thomas Jefferson University. The Science May
18cover story was a special feature on “Human
Conflict.” Out of all the possible pictures of
human conflict imaginable, what did the editors
of Science choose? It was a photo of a
bombed-out building attributed to the Israeli
Defense forces. Cohn’s letter, published two
months later, accused the editors of politicizing
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science:
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传


I am writing in reaction to the cover photo and
accompanying caption selected for the 18 May special
issue on Human Conflict. It seems disingenuous to claim
that of all the world’s conflicts, a building identified as
destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was “not
[chosen] for any political message or
endorsement.” Nobody eschews war more than
Israelis, who, unfortunately, also know the
consequences.
If the editors wanted striking visual impact and
gruesome evidence of inhumanity, there were better
choices: the killing fields of Cambodia, the destruction of
the World Trade Center, Rwanda, Dresden, Hiroshima,
Bataan, Darfur, Armenia, Normandy, Auschwitz…
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267
unfortunately, the list of greater carnage is nearly endless.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

By identifying the IDF as perpetrators, the caption
undermined the photo’s role as a generic illustration
of the consequences of conflict. Indeed, there was
no need to identify the details. They were a
distraction. The photo no longer represented
abstract human violence, but rather one more
illustration of Israel, taken out of
context. Portraying Israel as the
aggressor obscures the fact that the country is
trying to defend itself against decades of
assaults provoked by ethnic hostility—attacks
still taking place. That is politicized science, which
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268
serves to encourage—not discourage—conflict.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

Scientists advising Obama: What should a science
news site have to do with presidential
politics? Nothing, really. But PhysOrg published the
views of two UK scientists taking it upon themselves
to act as his campaign advisors: “Obama needs to
show Americans he’s still ‘one of them’,” the
headline reads, followed by PhysOrg’s summary,
“To win a second term in office, President
Obama needs to persuade voters that he is still
one of them – and recapture some of
the charisma that help [sic] propel him to the top
four years ago.” No such advice was found
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269
anywhere on PhysOrg advising Romney how to win.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

Scientists advocating for leftist NGO’s: It is common
knowledge that environmental groups, particularly
non-governmental agencies (NGOs) such as the
Sierra Club, are predominantly (though not
exclusively) leftist in ideology – particularly those
lobbying for government intervention in private
property rights and action against global
warming. Another PhysOrg article advocated this in
its headline: “Environmental groups should pool
efforts to reach the public.” One would think a
science news site would stick to the facts about the
environment, not provide advice on how to sway
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270
public opinion.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

Unhealthy theists: Another prominent science news
site promulgated a highly questionable psychological
study that materialists are healthier – questionable
because such studies are loaded with untestable
variables. In “Mind Vs. Body? Dualist Beliefs
Linked With Less Concern for Healthy
Behaviors,” Science Daily uncritically promoted the
idea that those who believe the mind is separate
from the brain are likely to engage in unhealthy
behavior, calling the research “findings” instead of
suggestions or opinions. Without doubt, hard-core
secular Darwinists are likely to be materialists, not
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271
attributing the mind to a soul or spirit.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

Same-sex marriage and the church: A particularly egregious
example of leftist ideology masquerading as “science” is
found in a PhysOrg story entitled, “College students likely
to disagree with religious teachings that homosexuality
is a sin.” Saturating this report about University of Michigan
Michael Woodford’s views on how to overcome student’s
parental and church teachings about marriage are biased
words intended to show conservatives as backward and
liberal churches as open-minded. PhysOrg joined left foot in
to the leftist professor’s advocacy of same-sex marriage:
“College students’ beliefs about same-sex relationships can
be shaped by their church’s teachings, but some are willing
to oppose their religion’s position on the issue, a new
University of Michigan study indicated. And this can
influence students’ views about same-sex marriage.” 272
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Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

Topics like sin and marriage have no
place in a science news site, but
PhysOrg’s complicity in Woodford’s anticonservative advocacy that seeks to undo
what parents and churches have taught
their children echoes intolerant rhetoric
this week from certain politicians attacking
the Chick Fil-A food chain for its
president’s vocal stand for traditional
marriage (see Family Research
Council article).
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273
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传
Burn the heretics: What happens when a scientist goes

rogue and steps outside the leftist consensus? He or she
had better wear armor and combat boots, if not a flame-proof
fireman’s suit. Look at the case of Mark Regnerus (U of
Texas), whose politically-incorrect research (reported
here 6/10/2012) indicated that traditional families are better
for children than same-sex parent homes. All fury broke
loose against him from the sociological science community,
according to Christian Smith at the Chronicle of Higher
Education, who likened their response to an “academic autoda-fé” (a reference to Spanish Inquisition celebrations of
burning heretics at the stake). Regnerus’ attempt to state
his findings in the gentlest, fairest, most tolerant manner
possible were no protection. See also “Science Lies
Bleeding: A Ballad for Honesty” by Kathryn Jean Lopez 274
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at National Review.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传


Wait a minute, the reader hesitates … I’m
confused. Aren’t liberals supposed to be the
champions of tolerance? Aren’t these the ones
promoting diversity? Isn’t their favorite
word inclusion?
Now you understand the mindset of the Darwin
Party. With few exceptions, they are cut of the
same cloth. Leftists whimper for academic
freedom when in the minority. But once they get
power, they become intellectual bigots and bullies,
with no tolerance for the inclusion of diverse views
outside of those that are progressive, leftist, liberal,
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and even radical.
Scientific Institutions Engage in Leftist Advocacy
科研机构从事左翼宣传

If you find any politically conservative
Darwinists who support traditional
marriage, the US Constitution, private
property rights, the free market,
individual liberty, limited government,
free speech and scientific integrity, send
him to the embassy for protection from
the next academic auto-da-fé.

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Animals Win the Gold
动物赢得金牌




As the Olympics begin in London, it’s fun to
consider how animals would compete against
humans.
The BBC Nature News wrote up a list of amazing
animals that, adjusted for size, could outperform
humans in certain Olympic events.
100 meter sprint would be won by the cheetah, the
brown hare, or the patas monkey.
Marathon could be run in under an hour by a
pronghorn if it could sustain its peak rate that long;
but humans are the ultimate long-distance runners
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277
(11/18/2004).
Animals Win the Gold
动物赢得金牌


High jump: humans would have trouble, size for
size, outcompeting grasshoppers, kangaroos or
frogs. A nocturnal primate called the bush baby
(see video clip) at human proportions could jump
over two stacked double-decker London
buses. Then there are jumping spiders, able to
jump 30 times their body height, springtails, able to
jump (at human size) over the Eiffel Tower. The
gold would probably go to fleas, able to jump 200
times their size.
Javelin champs in the animal world are the bolas
spider (see video), and that hat thrower fungus, a
5
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278
cm organism able to throw a sport 2 meters.
Animals Win the Gold
动物赢得金牌


“Luckily,” reporter Jeremy Coles wrote,
“modern Olympic athletes do not have to
compete with nature’s greatest as they
would be out sprinted by a monkey, out
jumped by a springtail and out thrown by a
tiny fungus.”
Science Daily posted a similar comparison
of human-animal capabilities.
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279
Animals Win the Gold
动物赢得金牌

We may not fly like eagles or run like cheetahs, but
we humans were given a remarkable suite of
special abilities. What other creature can run a
marathon, swim the English Channel, jump 2.5
meters, lift 167 kg overhead, dive from 20 meters
flipping and spinning to enter the water without a
splash, perform complex floor exercise moves to
music, spin around a pommel horse by the hands,
ride horses over hurdles, shoot arrows and bullets
with extreme accuracy, and all the other Olympic
feats – to say nothing of writing books, composing
music, and showing compassion and stewardship
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280
over all the other creatures on the planet?
Animals Win the Gold
动物赢得金牌

What we can’t do, we can build: we fly aircraft to follow
the birds, build submarines to follow the whales, and set
up bases at the south pole to follow the penguins. We
create protective coverings for all kinds of
environments. No other animal explores space or
ponders the origin and fate of the universe. No animal
does science, prays, and shows true agape love. No
other earthly being shows righteous indignation. No
animals hold sporting events to celebrate their physical
gifts. It’s not so bad being human. As we celebrate they
joy of victory for those who have worked for years to
become the very best, remember that we really are
celebrating our Creator’s gifts to us. Let us use these281
7/7/2015
gifts to honor our Maker, not just ourselves.
Left-Handed Amino Acid Puzzle Remains
左撇氨基酸之谜仍然存在
A NASA Goddard press release reported that amino


acids found in the Tagish Lake meteorite (British
Columbia, 2000) showed some preference for lefthanded aspartic acid, but less excess for alanine. As
usual, the science news media (e.g., Astrobiology
Magazine, Science Daily, PhysOrg) and blogs
(e.g., Darwiniana) all echoed the press release
uncritically, graphics and all, so Creation-Evolution
Headlines will have to do the job they should have
done: evaluate the significance of the claim and see
whether it solves the long-standing homochirality
problem in biology (for background,
see here and here).
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282
Here are problems admitted by the press release:
Left-Handed Amino Acid Puzzle Remains
左撇氨基酸之谜仍然存在




Only 2 of the 20 amino acids used by life were
mentioned.
The excess of one hand was 4x for aspartic
acid, but only 8% for alanine.
The scientists do not know what process
created the excess, but it was not polarized
light, because it must have occurred inside the
meteorite. “Perhaps” it was due to properties of
crystallization.
The meteorite amino acids were enriched in
carbon-13, not the carbon-12 common in life. 283
7/7/2015
Left-Handed Amino Acid Puzzle Remains
左撇氨基酸之谜仍然存在




An astrobiologist admitted, ” “Synthetic proteins
created using a mix of left– and right-handed
amino acids just don’t work.”
Left-handed amino acids and right-handed
sugars were noted as “a prerequisite for life.”
All ordinary methods of synthetically creating
amino acids result in equal mixtures of left– and
right-handed amino acids.
The finding complicates searches for
extraterrestrial life, because it means finding
one-handed molecules may not be a biomarker.
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284
Left-Handed Amino Acid Puzzle Remains
左撇氨基酸之谜仍然存在





Here are more problems not mentioned in the
press release:
Life requires 100% purity of one hand.
A mere “excess” is not enough; one wronghanded amino acid ruins the protein chain.
The astrobiologists still have no theory for how
the meteorite enriched one hand in the aspartic
acid.
The astrobiologists still have no theory for how
a prebiotic “cell” ended up with 100% pure
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285
amino acids.
Left-Handed Amino Acid Puzzle Remains
左撇氨基酸之谜仍然存在




Their “snowball” analogy for how crystals might
amplify the excess is worthless, because cells had to
incorporate amino acids in solution, not as crystals.
The article used wishful-thinking words like perhaps,
could, and might a dozen times.
The article said further experimentation is needed.
In summary, since the press release proposes no
physical theory for the excess, and no testable
hypothesis for how the excess originated, could have
been sustained, or could have been incorporated into
life, the press release adds little more than anecdote
to the puzzle of one-handedness, and nothing in the
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286
way of understanding.
Left-Handed Amino Acid Puzzle Remains
左撇氨基酸之谜仍然存在

Same old story; irrelevant mumblings
we’ve been reporting for over a decade
(e.g.,2/17/2001, 5/09/2012; search on
“homochirality” for more). Come back
when you have a materialist explanation,
not a just-so story. Intelligent design
explains the observations. Face up to the
physics, don’t twist them to your
worldview, Darwinists.
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Science of the Ten Commandments
科学十诫


Thinking about the Ten Commandments
reduces cheating, even for atheists.
In his weekly TV program on Fox News, John
Stossel interviewed Dan Ariely, psychology
professor at Duke University. An iconoclastic
reporter, libertarian and evolutionist, Stossel
seems happiest when dismantling myths and
showing that reality is often opposite what we
believe or have heard. He seemed speechless,
though, when Ariely brought up the Ten
Commandments.
7/7/2015
288
Science of the Ten Commandments
科学十诫

Stossel was expressing the idea that everybody
cheats. Ariely, a mythbuster himself, and not an
obvious fan of the Decalogue, recalled an
experiment he ran in which students reduced their
cheating when asked to think about the Ten
Commandments – even if they could not list them
and didn’t believe the Bible. On his blog post July
1, he explained, “We once ran a study on cheating
where we asked students to try to recall the Ten
Commandments before an exam, and found
that this moral reminder deterred them from
cheating.” (For more detail on the experiment, see
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289
his May 26 article on the Wall Street Journal.)
Science of the Ten Commandments
科学十诫

His blog post continued by citing
an MBA professor, so upset with rampant
cheating, that he asked his students to
sign an honor pledge that listed the Ten
Commandments and warned them if they
violated it they would “be sorry for the rest
of [their] life and go to Hell.” Needless to
say, complaints and controversy ensued
at that school, but Ariely ended with some
wit:
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Science of the Ten Commandments
科学十诫


Still, though I don’t doubt its effectiveness, the
question remains whether we want to invoke
such stringent punishments (stringent for those
who believe, that is) on an MBA exam. Judging
from the reactions in this case, I’m guessing
that for most people, the answer is “no.” But it
also makes me wonder about the people
who didn’t want to sign this pledge….
Stossel and Ariely must also be wondering what
is it about the human psyche and the Ten
Commandments that produces this kind of
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291
reaction in students but not apes.
Science of the Ten Commandments
科学十诫
Well, no wonder. People have a
conscience.
 Exercise: Run an experiment in which
students are warned before an exam to
ponder the Fifteen Evolutionary
Gems (hear podcast on ID the Future).

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Olympic Plants Perform in Place
奥运植物执行到位


They may be rooted in the ground, but plants
run their own Olympic organization.
Command and control center: Running any
large organization requires command and
control. Plants have one, too – one that runs
on hormones. A command and control center
needs to respond to emergencies; plants can
do that, too. To see how they accomplish these
functions, read “Lighting up the plant hormone
‘command system’” on PhysOrg. The article
ends with words from Zhiyong Wang of the
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Carnegie Institution:
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“This command system seems not only
to accept various inputs, but also to send
branches of output signals, too, because
each component acts interdependently on
shared targets, but also independently on
unique sets of target genes,” Wang said.
“This complex network contains multiple
layers and controls major plant growth and
developmental processes. We believe this
network will be a major target for engineering
high-yielding crops.”
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Intelligence agency: Another article
on PhysOrg has the attention-getting title, “Tel Aviv
University researcher says plants can see, smell,
feel, and taste.” The first paragraph adds to the
wonder:
Increasingly, scientists are uncovering surprising
biological connections between humans and
other forms of life. Now a Tel Aviv University
researcher has revealed that plant and human
biology is much closer than has ever been
understood — and the study of these similarities
could uncover the biological basis of diseases like
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cancer as well as other “animal” behaviors.
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Prof. Daniel Chamovitz’s new book What a Plant
Knows “could prompt scientists to rethink what they
know about biology,” the article states. “Ultimately,
he adds, if we share so much of our genetic makeup
with plants, we have to reconsider what
characterizes us as human.” He wasn’t thinking of
people who “veg out” instead of working out, but
noted similarities, such as the human response to
light in their circadian rhythms that is similar to that
in plants. They “see” by using light “as a behavioral
signal, letting them know when to open their leaves
to gather necessary nutrients.” They “smell” and
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have “memory” too–
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And that’s not the limit of plant
“senses.” Plants also demonstrate
smell — a ripe fruit releases a “ripening
pheromone” in the air, which
is detected by unripe fruit and signals
them to follow suit — as well as the
ability to feel and taste. To some degree,
plants also have different forms of
“memory,” allowing them to encode,
store, and retrieve information.
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Even more intriguing, plants have some of
the same genes that are implicated in
breast cancer and cystic fibrosis in
humans. “Plants might not come down
with these diseases, but the biological
basis is the same, says Prof.
Chamovitz,” a remarkable fact hard to
square with evolutionary theory which
would put the common ancestor of plants
and humans far back in the microbial
world.
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Communications hub: The sight of a whole
field of wildflowers blooming simultaneously is
beautiful, but raises the question: How do they
know when to flower? In a featurette about
women in science, PhysOrg reported about
professor Carolyn Dean who studied that very
question. The short answer is that plant
flowering genes have repressors that prevent
flowering until environmental factors remove
them. “The way this memory works is very
conserved which means it works in a similar
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way in many organisms including humans.”
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Environmental responsibility: Plants are
certainly part of “green” energy use and
pollution control, but now, the American
Chemical Society says that “Green plants
reduce city street pollution up to eight
times more than previously
believed.” City planners would do well to
include more ivy, hedges and planters in
“urban canyons” to clean up their act,
reported PhysOrg.
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As usual, these articles had little or nothing to say
about evolution, because none of the findings are
helpful to evolutionary theory. They provide
negative arguments against Darwinism, such as
requiring the complexity to appear inexplicably far
back into some microbial common ancestor; and
they provide positive evidence for intelligent
design, such as the ability to “encode, store, and
retrieve information.” The natural inference from
our experience is that commonality in complex
features implies common design. Follow this
evidence to its logical conclusion, and you will
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undoubtedly enjoy the plants around you more.
Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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A new study shows that scientific research on moth
camouflage does not require evolutionary theory.
Evolutionary biologists from Seoul, South Korea filmed
moths resting on tree trunks. According to PhysOrg,
they were trying to understand how moths in the wild
orient themselves on the bark for greatest
camouflage. That’s a very different question than the
ones asked by Kettlewell, Majerus and other past
researchers who were looking for natural selection of
peppered moths. In those old studies, camouflage
was a happenstance, not a behavior within the
moth. The opening paragraph referred to the old
ideas as if preparing to dismiss them:
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Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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Moths are iconic examples of camouflage. Their
wing coloration and patterns are shaped by
natural selection to match the patterns of
natural substrates, such as a tree bark or
leaves, on which the moths rest. But,
according to recent findings, the match in
the appearance was not all in their
invisibility… Despite a long history of
research on these iconic insects, whether
moths behave in a way to increase their
invisibility has not been determined.
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Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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In other words, Kettlewell and Majerus
didn’t take into account the moths’
behavior. They treated moths as passive
creatures that would alight on tree trunks
at random. They placed the selective
power in the environment, with lower
contrast producing greater camouflage,
leaving the high-contrast moths vulnerable
to birds.
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Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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The South Korean researchers found,
instead, that moth behavior plays a vital
role in the camouflage. They “found out
that moths are walking on the tree
bark until they settle down for resting;
the insects seem to actively search for
a place and a body position that makes
them practically invisible.” A video clip
embedded in the article shows the moths
doing this.
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Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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To determine whether this final spot indeed made the moth
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really invisible, the researchers photographed each moth at
its landing spot (initial spot) and at the final spot at which
the moth decided to rest. Next, the researchers asked
people to try to locate the moth from the photograph as
quickly as possible. People had more difficulty finding
the moths at their final spots than the same moths at
their initial landing spots. Amazingly, this was even true
for the species (Hypomecis roboraria) that only changed its
resting spot on the tree bark without changing its body
orientation. Therefore, the researchers concluded, that
moths seems to actively choose the spot that makes
them invisible to predators. How do they know how to
become invisible? The research team is now trying to
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answer this question as the next step.
Peppered Moths Without Evolution
胡椒蛾没有进化
The only mentions of evolution in the article concerned (1)
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the researchers calling themselves “evolutionary biologists,”
(2) the fact that they work at the Laboratory of Behavioral
Ecology and Evolution at the Seoul National University, and
(3) their research being published in the Journal of
Evolutionary Biology. The abstract of that paper seemed
very cautious about inferring evolution, stating: “Our study
demonstrates that the evolution of morphological
adaptations, such as colour pattern of moths, cannot be
fully understood without taking into account
a behavioural phenotype that coevolved with the
morphology for increasing the adaptive value of the
morphological trait.” While this suggests the authors are
proposing coevolution of behavior with camouflage, the
statement is a backhanded swipe at earlier evolutionary 307
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research that neglected behavior.
Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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Speaking of moths, Live Science posted an
interesting list of “7 Things You Don’t Know
About Moths, But Should.” These include their
importance as pollinators, their role in the food
chain for many other animals, and the males’
ability to smell females from seven miles away. If
we could get over the yuck factor, we might even
find their caterpillars a nutritious superfood,
meeting the minimum daily requirements of several
important nutrients. Moths are a sister family to
butterflies in the Order Lepidoptera, and share
many of the same characteristics.
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Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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This story underscores the uselessness of
evolutionary theory. For decades, evolutionary
biologists have strained at moths and swallowed
camels. They watched the simple things, like how
closely a moth’s wings match tree bark, but
ignored the weightier matters of moth
complexity. Those little flying things circling the
lights in your backyard are astoundingly complex
machines: they have compound eyes with
hundreds of facets, jointed appendages, digestive
systems, reproductive systems, navigation
systems, communication systems, flight systems –
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all packed within their tiny, lightweight bodies.
Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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Even tougher on evolutionary theory, they
undergo metamorphosis – a complete
transformation of body plan three times in
their lifecycle: egg to caterpillar, then
caterpillar to pupa or chrysalis, then
chrysalis to adult flying insect. This is
shown exquisitely in Illustra’s beautiful
film Metamorphosis, which ends with
sound reasons why Darwinism cannot
explain these abilities.
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Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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Yet for decades, evolutionists were obsessed with finding
an example of natural selection in one species of moth,
whether it landed on light or dark tree trunks. And now we
are told by the South Korean researchers that “evolution of
morphological adaptations, such as colour pattern of
moths, cannot be fully understood without taking into
account a behavioural phenotype” – in other words, you
cannot just play “Pin the Peppered Moth on the Tree
Trunk.” You have to watch what a living peppered moth
does after it lands. If Kettlewell had simply kept his grubby
evolutionary hands off the moths, he might have found
dark moths walking on a light-barked tree trunk looking for
a better place to blend in, and vice versa. More likely, the
moths would be too smart to land on a high-contrast
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surface in the first place.
Peppered Moths Without Evolution
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Trying to invoke “coevolution” as a magic word is
folly. It means that evolutionists have to invoke a
second miracle: first, the match between wing
coloration and tree trunks, and second, the ability
of the moth to actively search out and select a
suitable spot for camouflage. What causes that
behavior? The researchers have no idea. As
usual, they use the futureware escape trick: “more
research is needed.” The article said they are
clueless: “How do they know how to become
invisible? The research team is now trying to
answer this question as the next step.” Save a
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step: ask a creationist.