Transcript Document

Creationism News -- June 2012
创造论新闻 -- 2012年6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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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
Science Magazine (1 June 2012) Robert Coontz introduced
the feature: Endless mysteries lurk in the depths of
space. To pare the list down to eight—now, there’s a
challenge.… From the outset, the team decided that true
mysteries must have staying power (as opposed to
mere “questions” that researchers might resolve in the
near future). Some of the finalists are obvious shoo-ins;
others have received less of the popular limelight. The
final selection spans the entire history of the universe
on scales ranging from our sun and its planetary
system to the entire cosmos. Each mystery is sure to be
solved largely through astronomical observations—if it is
solved: In at least one case, experts aren’t sure that a
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seemingly simple question will ever be answered. 2
Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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The top eight mysteries selected by Science are:
What is dark energy? Adrian Cho began, “The nature
of the “dark energy” that is causing the expansion of
the universe to accelerate is now perhaps the most
profound mystery in cosmology and astrophysics.
And it may remain forever so.” (This is the
“seemingly simple question” Coontz worried would
never be answered.)
How hot is dark matter? Adrian Cho described the
decades-old controversy about whether dark matter is
hot (ordinary matter) or cold (unknown stuff). They
still don’t know what it is, but Cho believes “that could3
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soon change.”
Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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Where are the missing baryons? For laymen, baryons
are atoms and ions, or “ordinary matter.” But where
the missing baryons are is no ordinary matter;
astronomers can only account for less than half of
what they expected to find.
How do stars explode? Supernova explosions have
been animated by artists for years. That doesn’t mean
they are understood. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee lamented,
“Many details of what goes on inside a star when its
fuel has been spent and it explodes into a giant fireball
known as a supernova, as well as how that explosion
unfolds, remain a mystery.”
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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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What re-ionized the universe? According to
consensus theory, a few hundred million years after
the Big Bang, the universe became transparent when
matter re-ionized. TV programs explain this as just a
matter of fact, but as for what caused it, Edwin
Cartlidge admitted, “No one is sure.”
What’s the source of the most energetic cosmic
rays? Daniel Clery wrote, “After a century of cosmicray research, the most energetic visitors from space
remain stubbornly enigmatic and look set on keeping
their secrets for years to come.”
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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
Why is the solar system so bizarre? Richard A. Kerr
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described how each planet, when visited by
spacecraft, turned out to be more puzzling than
expected. “As exoplanet hunters get beyond stampcollecting planets solely by orbit and mass, they will
have a far larger number of planetary outcomes to
consider, beyond what our local neighborhood can
offer,” he concluded his tour. “Perhaps patterns will
emerge from inchoate diversity.”
Why is the sun’s corona so hot? Every once in awhile,
a new theory claims this mystery has been
explained. Apparently not; Richard A. Kerr surveyed
leading theories, but it still made Science’s Top 8
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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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“Why is the solar system so bizarre?” deserves a
closer look. Kerr said that Pluto has been partially
explained as a member of a previously undiscovered
population of trans-Neptunian objects. “The
mysteries of the remaining eight planets,” i.e., all of
them – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and Neptune – “are proving more
recalcitrant,” he said. Before space probes,
planetary scientists expected to find patterns that
would support a general theory of planetary
origins. That hope has evaporated:
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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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Looming over all the attempts to explain planetary
diversity, however, is the chilling specter of
random chance. Computer simulations show that the
chaos of caroming planetesimals in our still-forming
planetary system could just as easily have led to
three or five terrestrial planets instead of four.
Mercury may have largely formed with a thick rocky
shell only to have it blown away by a chance collision
with a still-forming planet nearly its own size. A rare
big hit to Uranus might have not only knocked it on
its side, where it spins to this day, but also shaken up
its rocky core. If so, the more organized churnings of a
shallow fluid shell could be generating its magnetic 8
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field, producing the observed tilt.
Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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“Ferreting out rare random events in the early days of the
nascent solar system could be problematic, scientists
concede. They may have to settle for working out many
of the rules of the planet-making game without pinning
down exactly how a particular planetary quirk came to
be.”
Thus the “inchoate diversity” of which he spoke (inchoate
meaning unorganized, disordered). Kerr left it to future
astronomers to find a way out of that chilling specter of
random chance. “As exoplanet hunters get beyond
stamp-collecting planets solely by orbit and mass, they
will have a far larger number of planetary outcomes to
consider, beyond what our local neighborhood can offer,”
Kerr ended as optimistically as possible. “Perhaps
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patterns will emerge from inchoate diversity.”
Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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What? Science doesn’t have the answers? These
are BIG mysteries. Some of them are the very
questions for which TV animators for the Science
Channel, NOVA and National Geographic offer
solutions that are neat, simple, and wrong. We
deceive students by teaching simplistic, wrong
answers without revealing that scientists have only
partial answers, if any. What distinguishes science,
whose root means “knowledge,” from other methods
of human inquiry that also have more questions than
answers?
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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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Batters get three strikes and are out. Planetary
scientists are zero for 8 as far as observations
meeting predictions (even worse when moons like Io,
Enceladus and Titan are included). Astronomers and
cosmologists are not batting any better. In any other
human endeavor, a zero score would be called utter
incompetence. Astronomers and planetologists are
very good at describing what is (i.e., stamp
collecting), but NOT how it came to be. Those two
skills are completely different. They can remain on as
stamp collectors, but not as prophets.
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Astronomers Wrestle with “Endless Mysteries”
天文学家角力“无穷奥秘”
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Notice that planetary science is stuck with the Stuff
Happens Law (the opposite of scientific
explanation). That’s what Kerr meant by the “chilling
specter of random chance.” If materialists are stuck
with throwing up their hands and saying, “stuff
happens” when asked why human beings won the
cosmic lottery, they need to step off the pedestal of
Knowledge and yield the platform to those who can
state a positive case for design (reference: The
Privileged Planet documentary). It’s the planetary
scientists – not the planets – that are being
recalcitrant.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Observations don’t always fit what evolutionists
expect. Darwin’s theory always wins anyway.
When you wish upon a bone: Roger Close of Monash
University looked at fossil wishbones and tried to find
an evolutionary pattern. There wasn’t any. The
furcula (wishbones) of mesozoic birds showed just as
much diversity as those of modern birds, if not more
so. The article on PhysOrg summarizing Close and
Rayfield’s paper in PLoS ONE did not mention
transitional forms, or any pattern from simple to
complex.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Close expected his research to “broaden our
understanding of the functional anatomy or
biomechanics of early avian evolution.” He expected
to clarify the findings in a 2002 study of wishbones by
Hui, but alas, “a murkier picture seems to emerge”
from his data set. In the PhysOrg article, Close left
the door open for Darwin: “While this may be
interpreted as evidence that early birds flew
differently to those alive today, it might equally well
indicate that they had evolved different anatomical
solutions to accomplish the same feats.”
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Adult birds as dinosaur fetuses: Two evolutionists, by
studying the shape of bird heads and dinosaur
hatchlings, came up with a new idea about the origin
of birds: they are dinosaurs that never grew
up. Somehow, the first birds were dinosaurs that
“sped up the clock” of embryonic development and
arrested it before maturity. As a result of what might
be called the Peter Pan theory of evolution, ostriches,
condors, hummingbirds and penguins were not far
behind.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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“What is interesting about this research is the way
it illustrates evolution as a developmental
phenomenon,” said Arkhat Abzhanov, associate
professor at Harvard and study co-author. “By
changing the developmental biology in early
species, nature has produced the modern bird —
an entirely new creature — and one that, with
approximately 10,000 species, is today the most
successful group of land vertebrates on the planet.”
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Is this a new law of nature? Are whales arrested
embryos of cattle? Are humans arrested embryos of
monkeys? In the report on Science Daily, they didn’t
point to any other instances of such an evolutionary
process, but added “arrested embryonic development”
to Darwin’s strategic toolkit:
Ultimately, Abzhanov said, the way the bird skull
evolved — through changes in the developmental
timeline — highlights the diversity of evolutionary
strategies that have been used over millions of
years.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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“That you can have such dramatic success simply
by changing the relative timing of events in a
creature’s development is remarkable,” he said.
“We now understand the relationship between birds
and dinosaurs that much better, and we can
say that, when we look at birds, we are actually
looking at juvenile dinosaurs.”
“It shows that there’s so much for evolution to act
upon,” Bhullar agreed.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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The article indicated that they were surprised by the
differences in development between birds and
dinosaurs: “What the researchers found was
surprising — while early dinosaurs, even those
closely related to modern birds, undergo vast
morphological changes as they mature, the skulls
of juvenile and adult birds remain remarkably
similar.” This evidence was not allowed to falsify
Darwinism, however; on the contrary, it was used to
reinforce it. Now Darwin has more diversity of
evolutionary strategies to use, and a bigger toolkit to
work with.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Bird feeder gets smaller: One would think birds would
love to eat giant insects, especially since pterodactyls
lunched on them. Apparently, the early bird got the
small insect. A prof and his grad student at UC Santa
Cruz had to look long and hard to find correlations
between insect size, oxygen levels and bird evolution,
but turned up enough to report on PhysOrg that the
“Reign of the giant insects ended with the
evolution of birds.”
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Facts and data gaps, though, kept getting in the way:
“But a 20-million-year gap in the insect fossil
record makes it hard to tell when insect size
changed, and a drop in oxygen levels around the
same time further complicates the analysis.” It left
them with a composite explanation involving multiple
possibilities: “These include the continued
specialization of birds, the evolution of bats, and
a mass extinction at the end of the
Cretaceous.” How any of these were related to bug
size was not clarified.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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The authors acknowledged that small insects have
always been around, even when the giants
reigned. It’s unclear, then, why they would invoke the
evolution of birds to drive the big bugs extinct, when
today’s oxygen level (21%) is lower than what they
assumed existed (30%) in the past and, according to
the “leading theory,” oxygen level was a limiting factor
on insect size. An evolutionary story was ready in
the wings, though: “With predatory birds on the wing,
the need for maneuverability became a driving
force in the evolution of flying insects, favoring
smaller body size.” Strange that the big bugs never
needed said maneuverability when the pterosaurs 22
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were around.
Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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Seal a can’t: Acknowledging that the strange fish
known as coelacanths are iconic “living fossils”
famous for their lack of evolution since the Middle
Devonian, disappearance from the fossil record, and
surprise re-appearance doing just fine in 1938. Since
then, several populations of the lobe-finned fish have
been found off the costs of South Africa, Tanzania and
the Comoros islands.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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European researchers “unexpectedly” found some
genetic diversity among the geographically-separated
living populations. Writing in Current Biology,(Volume
22, Issue 11, R439-R440, 5 June 2012) Lampert et al.
said, “Despite its undeniably slow evolutionary rate,
the coelacanth still diversifies and is therefore able
to adapt to new environmental conditions.” One
would expect a multitude of changes in environmental
conditions to have occurred in 400 million years. This
means the fish can evolve, but didn’t — until modern
times. The lesson? — old fuddy-duddies can still jive:
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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“Coelacanths are generally viewed as evolutionary
relics. Levels of population divergence and allelic
diversity are low and confirm the assumed slow rate
of molecular evolution in
coelacanths. Obviously, even such slow
evolutionary rates allow for local adaptation. As
shown earlier for coelacanths and recently for cycad
plants, near extinction need not be an evolutionary
dead end.”
One wonders what on earth held these talented
evolvers back from doing the Darwin thing till now.
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Tales Rescue Evolution from Unexpected Data
传说从意外的数据拯救进化
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We must get the evolutionary storytellers out of the
science building.
On second thought: what would we do for
entertainment? Look at the fun we just had: a new
Peter Pan show of bird evolution, a game of
Evolutionary Strategy, a Saturday Night Live skit
(since there is “so much for evolution to act upon”) of
elderly fish that can still jive, and a charlatan’s promise
that even YOU need not be an evolutionary dead end
(thank goodness).
Riddle: What is an evolutionary dead end?
Answer: the head of a Darwinist.
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Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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Today’s transit of Venus, in which our sister
planet appears to cross the disk of the sun, will
be the last till 2117. As observatories and
millions of people watch the rare planetary
alignment, few may know the stories of
astronomers who predicted them and explorers
who risked life and limb to observe them.
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Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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Watching the 7-hour event live on the internet
(see Space.com) is a privilege that was
unavailable the last time the paired events
occurred (they come in pairs 8 years apart,
separated by a more than a century). Because
some parts of Earth are in darkness when they
occur, Europeans often had to travel far to get to
places where they could watch. Only 4 pairs of
transits have been observed by humans since
Johannes Kepler predicted them: the pair of 1631–
1639, the pair in 1761–1769, the pair of 1874–
1882 (for which John Philip Sousa composed a 28
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special march), and this pair in 2004–2012.
Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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Science Daily described how 18th century
explorers had a much tougher time when they
realized that important measurements could be
made about the size of the solar system by
observing the transit of Venus:
The idea galvanized scientists who set off on
expeditions around the world to view a pair of
transits in the 1760s. The great explorer James
Cook himself was dispatched to observe one from
Tahiti, a place as alien to 18th-century Europeans
as the Moon or Mars might seem to us now. Some
historians have called the international effort the 29
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“the Apollo program of the 18th century.”
Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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Bolton Davidheiser, in his 1971 book Science and
the Bible (Baker Book House, out of print) told a
couple of lesser-known anecdotes about some of
the observers of the previous pair of transits in the
17th century:
The great astronomer John [Johannes] Kepler
had predicted mathematically that on December 6,
1631, the planet Venus would pass in front of the
sun. Kepler himself did not live to see this day, but
a Frenchman named Pierre Gassendi, prepared to
observe the phenomenon. He watched in vain, for
Venus made its transit across the face of the sun30
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after the sun had set in Europe.
Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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According to Kepler, a transit would not occur
again for over a hundred years. But an English
boy in his teens, Jeremiah Horrocks, did some
figuring of his own and found that Venus should
repeat its performance in just a few years.
Going over his calculations, he found that
indeed it was so and that Venus again should
pass in front of the sun on December 4, 1639.
He was too timid to mention this to anyone
except his best friend, William Crabtree.
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Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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Modem astronomers can tell at what time of
day such a phenomenon will be visible at any
place on earth where it can be seen, but the
calculations of Jeremiah Horrocks told him only
the day, and it was to be a Sunday. If he saw
this transit he would be the first to do so, for no
one ever before had observed Venus move
across the disk of the sun. After this day no one
on earth would have an opportunity to see it for
a hundred twenty-one years. Besides the rarity
of the event it had important theoretical
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implications in the science of astronomy.
Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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But the transit was due to occur on a Sunday
and “the inward voice seemed to tell him that
the Creator Himself is more worthy of worship
than the phenomena He has instituted for
admiration.” He watched the sun without
interruption from sunrise until it was time to go
to church. He went to church. When he
returned he hastened to his telescope. The
transit had just begun! Where his friend
Crabtree was watching, the sky was cloudy but
it cleared long enough for him to see it also and
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to confirm the observation of Horrocks.
Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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It is interesting to note, in contrast to this, the
experience of a Frenchman named Legentil who
went to India to observe the next transit of Venus a
hundred twenty-one years later. Because a war
was in progress his ship was delayed and he did
not reach land until after the transit was over. As
the following transit was to occur only eight years
later, he decided to remain in India and wait. When
the day of the transit arrived the sky was cloudy
and he saw nothing of it. After being shipwrecked
twice on his way home, he arrived in France to find
his heirs preparing to divide his possessions.
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Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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Between that time and the present, Venus has
crossed the face of the sun twice. The next
transit will occur on June 8, 2004. It is indeed
remarkable that a boy in his teens could make a
calculation of greater exactitude than the great
Kepler. It also is remarkable that he would risk
missing such an event instead of missing
church one Sunday.
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Venus Transit Recalls Adventures of Yore
金星凌日回顾往昔的探险
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If you missed the 2004 transit, don’t miss this
one–it will be the last in your lifetime. Share the
experience with children if you can; it will be a
nice memory and a teachable moment about
the clockwork regularity of the heavens, and
how our Privileged Planet gives us an ideal
platform for making scientific discoveries.
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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The way to make a concept impregnable is to use
rhetorical devices to render competition out of
bounds, and then nationalize the favored
view. An AP story demonstrates how this is done
with evolution.
John Hanna’s report on PhysOrg about draft science
standards in Kansas renders any competitors to
Darwinian evolution off limits. “Kansas is now
among 26 states helping to draft new science
standards alongside the National Research
Council, with the goal of creating standard,
nationwide guidelines,” he wrote. Here’s how the
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last sentence portrays evolutionary theory:
How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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The first draft of the multi-state standards
declares that evolution and its underlying
mechanisms are “key to understanding both
the unity and the diversity of life on
Earth.” The standards also say evolution is
among a few core concepts in life sciences
that “have a long history and solid
foundation based on the research evidence
established by many scientists working
across multiple fields.”
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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The only ones opposing this view, according to
Hanna, are conservative Republicans, except
for one “moderate Republican,” who ousted a
conservative Republican in 2006. She said
“she’s comfortable with the language in the
draft standards.” It doesn’t appear that the one
conservative Republican on the board, who
believes “the draft embraces naturalism and
secular humanism,” will get very far with his
argument, “They are preferring one religious
position over another.” Who would ever want to
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throw away the key to understanding?
How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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This article illustrates several propaganda
tactics evolutionists use to present themselves
as scientific and Darwin skeptics as religiously
motivated. It’s worth reviewing these again (get
out the Baloney Detector):
• Put “intelligent design” in scare quotes.
(Scare-mongering)
• Don’t define intelligent design, but imply that
whatever it is, it is against science.
(Association)
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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• Define evolution as a “key to understanding.”
(Big Lie)
• Portray evolution as a “core concept.” (Loaded
Words)
• Assert that it “has a long history”. (Glittering
Generalities, Half Truth– so does belief in
design)
• Assert that it has a “solid foundation”.
(Suggestion)
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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• Claim that the solid foundation is “based on
research evidence”. (Bluffing, Glittering
Generalities)
• Say evolution has been “established by many
scientists working across multiple fields.”
(Bandwagon)
• Worry readers that opposition to evolution
“invited some ridicule” (Fear-mongering).
• Scare readers that opposition to evolution
could prevent students from competing in “a
global job market” (Scare-mongering, Non- 42
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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• Quote the politician who believes “the board
should defer to scientists, science educators
and business leaders when considering
changes.” (Appeal to authority).
• Present the “scientists, science educators and
business leaders” as a unified front all
supportive of evolution. (Bandwagon,
Intimidation)
• Call their views “mainstream”. (Bandwagon,
Euphemism, Either-Or Fallacy)
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁
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• Give the opposition a statement but no
chance to explain what he means. (Card
Stacking)
• Quote the “moderate” party member as the
one promoting “common sense”. (Euphemism)
• Present the “conservative” party as the one
inviting ridicule. (Scare-mongering)
• Appeal to the views of the National Research
Council. (Appeal to Authority)
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁

Darwinism is one of the most successful,
longest-running propaganda scams in the
history of science. Its mandarins and publicists
rule through simple, easy-to-understand, cute,
fallacious catch-phrases that stop thinking and
put their opponents in clown suits. Now, they
want to nationalize their power, taking control
from local school boards and deferring to the
Darwin Oligarchy to impose nationwide
authoritarian rule over what students are
allowed to hear.
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How to Make Darwinism Impregnable
如何使达尔文主义铜墙铁壁

Only by understanding their rhetorical
tricks and calling them on the carpet for
self-serving talking points can
opposition leaders hope to level the
playing field and return the debate back
to where it should be: the evidence.
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46
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

Stalin, who read Darwin in divinity
school and turned atheist, became a
ruthless dictator whose reign of terror
killed multiple millions more than
Hitler. One of his evil deeds is being
remembered: a railroad project in
Siberia that was never completed
despite causing the deaths of at least
100,000 people.
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47
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

The BBC News told the story through
an eyewitness, Lyudmila Lipatova,
who survived the brutal years 1947–
1953 when a third of the 300,000
slave laborers sentenced to work on
the railroad perished due to weather,
starvation, or brutality of the guards.
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48
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

The story is horrific in the Stalin style. The same
dictator who ordered soldiers into minefields to
clear them for the motherland certainly had no
conscience when rounding up bodies to work his
grand scheme for a thousand-mile railway to link
eastern and western Siberia. Russian men and
women could be accused of crimes for the flimsiest
of reasons, or no reason whatsoever, their fate
doomed to hard labor in camps in temperatures of
–50°C in winter, continuing the work in deep snow,
and insufferable heat and mosquitoes in summer.
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49
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

Merciless guards would sometimes strip naked
workers who were less than cooperative and tie
them to posts to leave them to the onslaught of
the mosquitoes, a torment Lipatova called
“worse than any torture instrument.” The article
includes rare photographs. One haunting
portrait is of a beautiful young woman who was
sentenced to the railroad when she was
accused of embezzlement for no fault of her
own: rats had eaten bank notes in her
employer’s safe.
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50
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

The railroad was never finished, and
the fate of the prisoners was largely
forgotten–till now. Lipatova, now in
her 70s, is determined to keep their
story alive. Sixty years later, the
current regime is considering reviving
the “Railroad of Bones” project,
hopefully, this time, more leniently for
the construction workers.
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51
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

Jesus said, “You shall know them by their
fruits.” The divinity student who quickly ditched
his faith for Darwin shows he had no true faith
at all, except in his newly chosen idol, who
promised success to the fittest. Stalin took
“survival of the fittest” as a law of nature that
favored ruthless strength. His Darwinian faith
transformed him into a monster, torturing and
killing ministers, citizens and even his own
nearest advisors in a Reign of Terror the likes
of which made Hitler look like a novice.
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52
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

While he himself indulged in luxurious
pleasures, he created a cult of personality
that succeeded in brainwashing his own
victims to practically worship him as the
savior of their country. This tactic made
him a role model to the dictators of China,
North Korea, Cambodia, Iraq (Saddam
Hussein), Cuba, and others. Had not a
stroke disabled and killed him in 1953,
Stalin might well have turned nuclear
weapons on the west.
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53
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

It’s mind-boggling to consider the pain and
suffering one man can inflict. Yet today,
academics continue to preach the communist
“gospel” to impressionable students who never
learned the history of the 20th century
dictatorships that put Marxism into
practice. They are also not told of the
connection between Marx and Darwin. Are you
surprised that Stalin transformed many
churches into museums of atheism, and sent
many tens of thousands of pastors to the
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54
gulags and Siberia?
Stalin’s Railroad of Death Unearthed
斯大林的铁路死亡出土

(These pastors were the ones who were not
shot.) The BBC is to be commended for retelling this story, even though like most news
organizations they still embrace Darwin. The
Railroad of Bones is but one episode of a
horrific 12-year dictatorship that killed at least
20 million of Stalin’s own citizens and
imprisoned many more. If you know these
things, teach them to misguided youth who
think Darwin is cool and Stalin was a hero.
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55
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来

Bird stripes: Some evolutionists thought that sexual
selection led to color bands in zebra finches. “One of the
most replicated experiments in behavioral ecology is the
presumed manipulation of male attractiveness in zebra
finches by adding red or green color bands,” authors
in PLoS ONE said. Well, Seguin and Forstmeier replicated
the experiment and couldn’t confirm any evidence for
evolution. “Combining this new experimental data with all
the published evidence in a meta-analysis shows that
color bands seem to affect neither male courtship
rate (average effect size d = 0.02) nor male body
mass (d = −0.07),” they said. “…The present case is a
reminder that replication of experiments lies at the
heart of distinguishing between real effects and false56
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positive findings.”
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来

Living fossil fish: past fail, future hope and
change: “Living fossils reveal secrets of evolution,”
a headline on PhysOrg promised, but alas, no evolution
was found in the article. Bichirs are African fish that
“posses a number of archaic characteristics that are
otherwise found only in fossil fish,”
another PhysOrg article stated. A molecular clock
analysis of bichirs only offered a possibility to start to
begin to commence to “get a better understanding” of
how these living fossils might have evolved, despite little
change from the fossil record. The project “therefore
provided scientists with an important basis for future
studies of the anatomical and genetic development of
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57
early vertebrates,” the article stated hopefully.
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来


Cooperation of the fittest: By PhysOrg’s own
admission, cooperative species are an
evolutionary enigma that shouldn’t be:
Evolution by definition is cold and merciless: it
selects for success and weeds out
failure. It seems only natural to expect that
such a process would simply favour genes that
help themselves and not others. Yet cooperative
behaviour can be observed in many areas, and
humans helping each other are a common
phenomenon. Thus, one of the major questions
in science today is how cooperative behaviour
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58
could evolve.
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来

A new “theoretical model” sounds
promising in the article, but allows for
opposite outcomes in the computer
depending on how multiple factors are
tweaked. Natural populations have
ways of defeating computer software,
so without field work, the model seems
a post-hoc rationalization for something
Darwin didn’t expect.
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59
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来

Youth in Asia: How long have evolutionists
postulated humans originated in
Africa? Answer: at least since Darwin. Now,
however, a new primate fossil is causing
some to think the Asians beat the Africans to
the punch line. To rescue the textbook
story, according to Live Science, “This
migration from Asia ultimately helps set the
stage for the later evolution of apes and
humans in Africa.” Out of Asia, then Out of
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Africa. Get it?
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来

Slim-o-saurs: All the Godzilla movies will
have to be re-done. Dinosaurs weren’t the
big, lumbering beasts long portrayed in
movies. According to PhysOrg, a new
study by University of Manchester
comparing skeletons living mammals with
dinosaur bones, and then calculating the
body mass to skin wrapping volume, shows
that previous calculations of body mass of
large dinosaurs such as brachiosaurs were
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61
overestimated by almost 350%.
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来


Cave campfires: Wrong again. Evolutionary dating of
continuous fire use by human ancestors is off by 250%,
according to Nature (485, 31 May 2012, pp. 586–587,
doi:10.1038/nature11195). “An analysis of microscopic
and spectroscopic features of sediments deposited in a
South African cave one million years ago suggests
that human ancestors were using fire much earlier
than had been thought.”
With these upsets in evolutionary theory, the best way
Darwinists at Harvard have found to keep new disciples up
coming through the ranks is to avoid the Darwin Fail
stories, and instead, reach out and touch them with games
that create “tree-thinking” – as if students are not already
thinking like wooden stumps.
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62
“Darwin Fail” Entries Add Up
“达尔文失败”项加起来

A theory so flexible it can accommodate
any unexpected data is convenient,
accommodating, workable, long-lasting,
consensus-building, useful, convincing,
practical, stable, functional, pleasing,
agreeable, and unscientific.
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63
Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石



Dolomite, a common rock minerals of the world, suffers
from an “explanation gap.”
An article on PhysOrg admitted that a common type of
rock widespread on earth remains little understood since it
was first described over 200 years ago.
Not only in the Dolomites, but throughout the world
dolomite is quite common. More than 90 percent of
dolomite is made up of the mineral dolomite. It was first
described scientifically in the 18th century. But who
would have thought that the formation of this mineral
is still not fully understood, although geologists
are aware of large deposits of directly formed
(primary) dolomite from the past 600 million years.
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Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石

The process of recent primary dolomite
formation is restricted to extreme
ecosystems such as bacterial mats in
highly saline lakes and lagoons. “As
these systems are very limited in space,
there is an explanation gap for geologists
for the widespread presence of fossil
dolomite,” explains Dr. Stefan Krause,
Geomicrobiologist at GEOMAR |
Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research
Kiel.
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65
Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石

However it formed, dolomite seems to
have required vast quantities of
bacteria. A recent paper is alleged to
have brought “a light” into the “darkness
of this scientific riddle.” A team was
able to get some dolomite to crystallize
under conditions that prevail in the
current oceans. But that raised a new
question:
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66
Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石
Evidence of primary dolomite formation by a process as

common as microbial sulphate respiration under
conditions that currently prevail in the seabed, provides
new insights into the reconstruction of fossil dolomite
deposits. But why are large scale deposits from primary
dolomite no longer formed at the ocean floor? “Here we
are still faced with a puzzle,” says Professor Tina Treude,
head of the Working Group at
GEOMAR. “One possibility is that massive primary
dolomite can form particularly during times when large
quantities of organic matter in the seabed are degraded by
sulfate-respiring bacteria. Such conditions exist when the
sea water above the seafloor is free of oxygen. In Earth’s
history, several such oxygen-free periods have
occurred, partly consistent with time periods of intensified
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67
dolomite deposition.”
Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石

The “possibility,” though, invokes an
explanation that calls on conditions that at first
were described as those that currently prevail,
yet apparently do not prevail, because large
scale deposits of dolomite are not forming now
on the ocean floor. By admitting the puzzle,
and stating that the “possibility” is only “partly
consistent with” times assumed to have existed
in the unobservable past, the geologists
effectively restate that the “explanation gap” for
dolomite formation has not been substantially
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68
filled despite two centuries of research.
Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石

This would be a good topic for creation
geologists to examine in terms of global
flood conditions. At the very least, they
couldn’t do any worse than secular
geologists have during their two-century
turn at bat. The umpire should call foul
for stalling and let another team
play. They’ve been practicing, as
search lists
from ICR, CMI and AIG show.
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69
Geology of the Gaps: Dolomite
地质矛盾焦点：白云石

Not only in the Dolomites, but throughout the world
dolomite is quite common. More than 90 percent of
dolomite is made up of the mineral dolomite. It was first
described scientifically in the 18th century. But who would
have thought that the formation of this mineral is still not
fully understood, although geologists are aware of large
deposits of directly formed (primary) dolomite from the
past 600 million years. The process of recent primary
dolomite formation is restricted to extreme ecosystems
such as bacterial mats in highly saline lakes and lagoons.
“As these systems are very limited in space, there is an
explanation gap for geologists for the widespread
presence of fossil dolomite,” explains Dr. Stefan Krause,
Geomicrobiologist at GEOMAR | Helmholtz Centre for
Ocean Research Kiel.
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70
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕


Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have
trouble explaining living humans, let alone past ones.
Can’t tell a tough guy by his face: Are the
stereotypical wide-faced tough guys predictably
mean? Science Daily said not so; they actually might
be more self-sacrificing. “Existing research even
supports this association, linking wider, more
masculine faces with several less-than-cuddly
characteristics, including perceived lack of warmth,
dishonesty, and lack of cooperation,” the article
began. “But a new study suggests that men with
these wide, masculine faces aren’t always the
aggressive tough guys they appear to be.”
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71
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

This implies that a new study overturned
“existing research” that was considered by
some to be authoritative at the time. Although
psychologists at University of St. Andrews
believe their own predictions were confirmed,
and they were able to place their results into an
evolutionary story, it’s hard to believe that
genes for face width have anything to do with
genes for aggression, or that games played by
students can be generalized to describe men
around the world.
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72
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

Hold that politically-correct report: “New
Studies challenge established views development
of children raised by gay or lesbian parents,”
announced a headline on Science
Daily and PhysOrg. A researcher at St. Louis
University was very cautious to say, in these
politically-charged times, that “Not a single study has
found children of lesbian or gay parents to be
disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to
children of heterosexual parents.” That disclaimer
done, though, he proceeded to discount the science
on which previous politically-correct findings have
been made, such as by the American Psychological 73
7/16/2015
Association (APA).
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

“The jury is still out on whether being raised by
same-sex parents disadvantages children”, Dr.
Loren Marks said. “However, the available
data on which the APA draws its
conclusions, derived primarily from small
convenience samples, are insufficient to
support a strong generalized claim either
way.”
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74
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕


Prior work was slipshod, he felt:
Of the 59 studies referenced in the APA brief, more
than three-quarters were based on small, nonrepresentative, non-random samples that did not
include any minority individuals or families; nearly half
lacked a heterosexual comparison group; and few
examined outcomes that extend beyond
childhood such as intergenerational poverty,
educational attainment, and criminality, which are a
key focus of studies on children of divorce,
remarriage, and cohabitation. In other words, “A lack
of high quality data leaves the most significant
questions unaddressed and unanswered,”
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75
concludes Marks.
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕


Further reading shows that Marks did discover significant
disadvantages for children raised by gay couples, and
confirms the advantages to children of growing up in a
traditional, stable, nuclear family:
According to his findings, children of mothers who have
had same-sex relationships were significantly
different as young adults on 25 of the 40 (63%) outcome
measures, compared with those who spent their entire
childhood with both their married, biological parents. For
example, they reported significantly lower levels of
income, more receipt of public welfare, lower levels of
employment, poorer mental and physical health,
poorer relationship quality with current partner, and
higher levels of smoking and criminality.
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76
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

“This study, based on a rare large probability
sample, reveals far greater diversity in the
experience of lesbian motherhood (and to a lesser
extent, gay fatherhood) than has been previously
acknowledged or understood,” explains
Regnerus. “The most significant story in this
study is arguably that children appear most apt
to succeed well as adults when they spend
their entire childhood with their married mother
and father, and especially when the parents
remain married to the present day.”
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77
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

Control thyself: “This is your brain on no self
control” announced a headline on Science
Daily. Brain scans seem to show “self-control
is a finite commodity that is depleted by
use. Once the pool has dried up, we’re less
likely to keep our cool the next time we’re faced
with a situation that requires selfcontrol.” That’s a new theory by William
Hedgcock (U of Iowa) that contradicts previous
views that self-control is like muscle that gets
stronger with use.
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Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

It’s not clear, though, that his MRI scans of
selected subjects given self-control games to
play can be generalized to the population at
large. It might have taxed subjects’ selfcontrol to continue taking part in the
experiment with all the noise of the scanner
going on. Besides, it would seem
presumptuous to associate MRI maps of a
person’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with a
moral quality like self-control; which causes
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79
which?
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

Confusing cause and effect: A story on Science
Daily purports to show that religions “use” prohibitions
against extramarital sex to guarantee
paternity. Buried within the article, though is an
admission that a new NSF-funded study by Beverly
Strassman (U of Michigan) “contradicts the
prevailing view that traditional populations have high
rates of cuckoldry.” Her team generalized taboos
about adultery found among the Dogon people of
West Africa to all religions that preach against it, but
did not explain why “biological pressures” in some
unguided evolutionary process would care about
paternity.
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Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

If any sexual union breeds fitness, why should any
male care what happens after he moves on? The
team apparently did not consider that a universal nonbiological entity, namely conscience, might give all
religions and tribes “pressure” to stay faithful. “In the
United States,” Strassman found, “frequent church
attendance and belief that the Bible is the word of
God were the two most robust predictors of lower
rates of self-reported extra-partner
copulations.” This fact appears to have struck
secular materialists as surprising. Strassman seemed
especially fond of the scientific term cuckoldry, which,
incidentally, is etymologically related to cuckoo.
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Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

Incorrigible storytelling: Given the questionable success
by evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists to
describe their living fellow humans, therefore, it would
seem the height of presumption to propose why unseen
ancestors would use marital faithfulness as an
evolutionary strategy eons ago. Yet that is exactly what
Sergey Gavrilets proceeded to attempt in his PNAS paper,
“Human origins and the transition from promiscuity to
pair-bonding” in which he freely admitted at first, “How
such a transition from promiscuity to pair-bonding
could be achieved is puzzling.” Indeed, he showed that
four current models of such a transition are “not feasible
under biologically relevant conditions”; i.e., Darwinism
cannot account for it. Having trampled his predecessors’82
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models, he sallied forth:
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

“Then, I show that the transition can happen if one
accounts for male heterogeneity, assortative pair
formation, and evolution of female choice and
faithfulness. This process is started when low-ranked
males begin using an alternative strategy of female
provisioning. At the end, except for the top-ranked
individuals, males invest exclusively in provisioning
females who have evolved very high fidelity to
their mates. My results point to the crucial importance
of female choice and emphasize the need for
incorporating between-individual variation in
theoretical and empirical studies of social dilemmas
and behaviors.”
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Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

Yet his 4-part composite theory begs the
question of how and why females had “evolved
very high fidelity to their mates” or what “female
choice” refers to in a mindless, biological
process that would seem incapable of inventing
an investment strategy without intelligent
design. Gavrilets’ new model leaves one
wondering what his wife or partner might say
upon approaching a mating episode with, “this
is my investment strategy in female
provisioning” – if she had any female choice in
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84
the matter.
Myth Busters: Flubs in Evolutionary Anthropology
切断神话：人类进化学的糟糕

It gets so tiring to read the latest barf (i.e., technicolor
yawn) emanating from the evolutionary psych and
anthropology literature. What do they know that will
not be overturned by the next study? How much is
political correctness determining the procedure, let
alone the outcome, of the findings? Do they do any
better than fortunetellers at a sideshow? Why does
anyone listen to these pukers, who with a mighty
heave-ho try to throw their cookies farther than the last
guy? It’s clear these “studies” offer little more than
predigested evolutionary ejecta as sacrifices to
Charlie, knowing the media will pick it up and
regurgitate it faithfully for special delivery to the feet 85
of
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the Bearded Buddha.
South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争
Give just one side of a controversy the press, and you


will get a one-sided presentation of the issues. That
happened this week in the journal Nature.
A piece by Soo Bin Park published in Nature on June
5 has all the elements of John Draper and Charles
White’s “warfare between science and religion”
hypothesis. (Even Wikiepedia states this portrayal is
not supported today by historians and philosophers of
science.) War rhetoric peppers Park’s presentation
like machine gun fire: “South Korea surrenders to
creationist demands,” the headline reads. According
to Park, creationists use tactics, have a campaign, are
making headway, and “seem to be winning
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its battle with mainstream science.”
South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争

Actually, South Korea’s Society for Textbook
Revise (STR) seems more interested in
cleaning out old errors from textbooks: the
horse evolution series, portrayal
of Archaeopteryx as a transitional form, and
Darwin’s finch beaks. Park is alarmed that
South Korea’s growing number of “creationists”
(a term he uses to encompass anything from
Darwin critics to Biblical creationists) have an
ulterior motive, to undermine evolution itself.
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South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争

As expected, Darwin critics were portrayed as religiously
motivated, but evolutionists not. Park presents
evolutionists as defenders who need to rise up and fight:
“Silence is not the answer, says Dayk Jang. He is now
organizing a group of experts, including evolutionary
scientists and theologians who believe in evolution,
to counter the STR’s campaign by working to improve
the teaching of evolution in the classroom, and in
broader public life.” Strangely, Park opposes
debates. “Having seen the fierce debates over
evolution in the United States, he adds, some
scientists also worry that engaging with creationists
might give creationist views more credibility among
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88
the public.”
South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争

Suppose a mugger accused you in court of
assaulting him, and that he had a right to call on
muggers to defend themselves against your
threats. That’s a bit like how the Darwin Party tries
to defend its Darwin-only-Darwin-only (D.O.D.O.)
position on public education. They don’t want
open discussion of the evidence. They want to
shut down discussion. Yet when anyone questions
their presumptive authority against what has been
the default position of human beings for millennia
(i.e., that the world and life shows evidence of
intelligent design), they go bonkers and turn up the
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battle rhetoric.
South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争





If you only read Nature, you would be indoctrinated
in the following propaganda:
1. Creationism has been a threat to science only in
the U.S., but now South Korea poses a new threat.
2. Creationists have “anti-evolution sentiment,” but
evolutionists do not have the reverse.
3. “Mainstream science” is a monolithic block
threatened by another monolithic block called
creationism.
4. Creationists are doing battle with evolution (as if
they started it).
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South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争



5. Evolutionists are justified in preserving outworn and
discredited evidences of evolution in textbooks just
because they fear that creationists have an ulterior
motive to “attack” their pet theory.
6. As “one of the most famous observations in Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,” finch beaks should
remain in textbooks, despite showing only oscillations
varying with climate, not evolutionary progress.
7. Creationists use Archaeopteryx and Darwin’s
finches as part of a strategy to attack evolution itself,
but evolutionists are too pure as unbiased scientists to
employ strategies to attack creationism.
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South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争



8. Creationists have “antipathy” to evolution, but
evolutionists don’t have antipathy toward
creation.
9. Creationism is tied to religion (especially
Christianity), but evolution is not tied to atheism.
10. Evolutionists need to improve the teaching
of evolution, but creationists do not need to
improve the teaching of alternatives to
evolution, or even to clear up false, discredited,
or misleading examples in textbooks.
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South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争

Evolution News & Views presented the South Korea
situation in more pacifist terms. Without battle
terminology, it spoke of the growing freedom to speak
up against evolutionary dogma. It spoke of the
increasing numbers of scholars who view intelligent
design as “the frontier of science” in several parts of
Asia. The only indirect battle references consisted of
true stories about some who have suffered from
evolutionary forces in the past, including professors
who have been outed by “informants” in China and
have been expelled for criticizing Darwin or publishing
pro-ID material.
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South Korea “Creationism” Means War
韩国“创造论”意味着战争

No wonder Park worries about open
debate. Put Evolution News & Views coverage
alongside his, and what would the public
think? South Koreans, Chinese and other
Asians are glad to have some freedom to hear
both sides for once. What’s Park
and Nature afraid of? Open the bunker
windows and let some fresh air in.

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Too Hot to Handle: Io and Enceladus
太热处理：木卫一和土卫二


Two moons in the solar system are turning up the heat
on beliefs that they could be billions of years old.
Jupiter’s Io: The most volcanic body in the solar
system, Io, continues to stump planetary scientists. “A
new study finds that the pattern of heat coming from
volcanoes on Io’s surface disposes of the generallyaccepted model of internal heating,” announced
a Science Daily article (see JPL press release)
summarizing new findings published in Icarus. “The
heat pouring out of Io’s hundreds of erupting
volcanoes indicates a complex, multi-layer
source.”
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95
Too Hot to Handle: Io and Enceladus
太热处理：木卫一和土卫二

Further reading suggests that tidal heating
remains insufficient to account for the volcanic
activity. “The fascinating thing about the
distribution of the heat flow is that it is not in
keeping with the current preferred model of
tidal heating of Io at relatively shallow depths,”
said Ashley Davies. One good puzzle deserves
another: “Instead, the main thermal emission
occurs about 40 degrees eastward of its
expected positions.” So is the heating deep or
shallow? Both, said Dennis Matson of JPL.
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Too Hot to Handle: Io and Enceladus
太热处理：木卫一和土卫二


Then the team really poured the heat on:
A mystery has also emerged. The team found
that active volcanoes accounted for only
about 60 percent of Io’s heat. This component
mostly emanates from flat-floored volcanic
craters called paterae, a common feature on Io.
But where is the “missing” 40 percent? “We are
investigating the possibility that there are
many smaller volcanoes that are hard, but
not impossible, to detect,” said Veeder. “We
are now puzzling over the observed pattern
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97
of heat flow.”
Too Hot to Handle: Io and Enceladus
太热处理：木卫一和土卫二

These findings show that Matson and
his JPL colleagues have made little progress
explaining how Io’s volcanoes could last for
billions of years since our first story
on Creation-Evolution Headlines 12 years ago
(see 8/16/2000).
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Too Hot to Handle: Io and Enceladus
太热处理：木卫一和土卫二

Saturn’s Enceladus: Saturn’s geyser moon Enceladus
(a.k.a. Cold Faithful) continues to baffle planetary
scientists who need to keep the activity going billions
of years. Now, as reported by New
Scientist, PhysOrg and other media outlets, the
geysers produce a plasma unlike anything seen
before: tiny dust grains that pick up negative ions from
water molecules pumped out the
geysers. Moreover, “It seems that Enceladus
provides most of the plasma in the magnetic
bubble, or magnetosphere, surrounding Saturn,”
an astonishing influence for an Arizona-diameter
moon to have over billions of cubic miles. Has this 99
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been going on for 4.5 billion years?
Too Hot to Handle: Io and Enceladus
太热处理：木卫一和土卫二


Planetologists are typically reluctant to invoke
special conditions that allow phenomena to
commence near the time humans became
available to observe them.
Observers of planetary scientist psychology are
sure to notice two conditioned responses
peculiar to that sub-population of Homo
sapiens: (1) an eagerness to connect any
mention of water with life, and (2) a reluctance
to discuss the age implications of small active
bodies like Io and Enceladus. Peculiar, indeed.
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Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

Nutcracker sweet: The mantis shrimp won
another gold medal after triumphing in the
circularly-polarized eye
competition. PhysOrg, New Scientist and Live
Science all gave it thumbs up for its club-like
hammer claw, found to be the “strongest club in
the world” able to deliver a force 1,000 times its
own weight without breaking. Not only that, the
clubs accelerate to 10,000 g’s, have the fastest
moving parts in the animal kingdom (23 m/sec),
and are so durable they deliver a thousand
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blows before the next molt replaces them.
Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

Unsurprisingly, manufacturers of body armor
are raising eyebrows with visions of joining the
club. Mantis shrimp use their weapons to break
open molluscs and crabs. They have been
known to break aquarium glass with their little
karate choppers. The clubs survive breakage
through construction with hard, then medium,
then soft layers that distribute the force and
inhibit cracks from forming. The original paper
in Science (8 June 2012) calls the claw “A
Formidable Damage-Tolerant Biological
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Hammer.”
Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

Al G. Lightner, NRG: Algae and bacteria accomplish a
feat green engineers drool over: the ability to harvest
light efficiently for energy. Artificial fuel cells need
their secrets to make green energy competitive with
fossil fuels (which, by the way, are by-products of
plants that used photosynthesis to make the complex
hydrocarbons). PhysOrg reported on new attempts at
Lawrence Livermore Labs to use X-ray diffraction to
probe the secrets of Photosystem II, the plant antenna
where the magic happens and water is decomposed
into hydrogen, oxygen and electrons. The article paid
customary lip service to Mother Nature and long ages
without explaining how the complex process arose: 103
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Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

“For more than two billion years, nature has
employed photosynthesis to oxidize water into
molecular oxygen. Photosystem II, the only known
biological system that can harness visible light
for the photooxidation of water, produces most of
the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere through a fivestep catalytic cycle (S0-to-S4 oxidation
states). Light-harvesting proteins in
the complex capture solar photons that energize the
manganese-calcium cluster and drive a series of
oxidations and proton transfers that in the
final S4 state forms the bond between oxygen atoms
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that yields molecular oxygen.”
Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

Overall, though, the article was about how
human designers, using cutting-edge tools to
probe the “photosystem II complex” for secrets,
have been unable to duplicate what single cells
accomplish. “Doing this study was a
monumental achievement that required a
large team to make it happen,” one noted. Why
so much effort? “We hope to learn from
nature’s design principles and apply that
knowledge to the design and development of
artificial photosynthetic systems.”
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Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

DNA Disk: Hey, DNA is already “the molecule that already
stores the genetic blueprints of all living
things,” PhysOrg says. Why not use it for a hard
drive? Drew Endy, a pioneer in synthetic biology at
Stanford, was interviewed in the article to explain how he
intends to “turn the basic building blocks of nature into
tools for designing living machines.” He’s thinking
ahead to applications for waste treatment, medicine,
manufacturing and others he can’t even imagine. As for
his DNA hard drive, he didn’t say how the USB interface
might work, but he did share his feelings a bit: “What we’re
likely to end up with will not look like classical
electronics. Biology is beginning to teach us how to be
a little bit more sophisticated in our engineering
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designs, which is a lot of fun.”
Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

“Biomimetic” is a trendy word more frequently
encountered in scientific papers every year, as
in this paper’s title, “Biomimetic emulsions
reveal the effect of mechanical forces on cell–
cell adhesion” (PNAS, June 1, 2012, doi:
10.1073/pnas.1201499109 PNAS June 1,
2012). The team in that paper not only studied
cells for ideas about adhesion, but used a
“biomimetic approach” to doing their
science. The emphasis in these sciences is on
(1) understanding and (2) application for the
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benefit of mankind.
Animal Olympians Inspire Engineers
动物奥运健儿激励工程师

Was Darwinism ever “a lot of fun”? If it was, it
was the fun of entertainment: telling tall tales
around the cave campfire, not getting at the
truth to produce understanding, for the purpose
of designing tangible benefits for the world. All
for biomimetics over Darwinism please signify
by imitating the mantis-shrimp karate chop on
useless speculation.
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

“Heidelberg Man” has been a modern name
imposed on certain fossil humans that have
been unable to speak for themselves. Now,
their bones appear to overlap with
Neanderthals. But don’t modern humans have
Neanderthal DNA? Do the distinctions make
any sense?
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

Constructive scientific debate? According
to PhysOrg, anthropologist Chris Stringer is
now claiming that the largest cache of
Heidelberg Man fossils were really
Neanderthals. The article reveals various forms
of data manipulation to reformat the story of
human evolution, such as recalculating the date
of Sima fossils from Atapuerca, Spain
(previously labeled Heidelberg) from 600,000
years old to 350,000 years old, so that they fit
within the Neanderthal category.
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

That’s because the Sima fossils show some
Neanderthal characteristics both from
anatomical and genetic data. Stringer put a
positive spin on the reclassification, stating,
“These new views on
the dating and classification of the Sima
material have led to a constructive scientific
debate with the Atapuerca team, which will help
to progress our understanding of the place of
these important fossils in human evolution.”
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

Constructive artistic debate? Cave paintings in from
Spain have been re-dated as 40,800 years old, too old
to be made by “modern” humans, and possibly made by
Neanderthals. Live Science reported one anthropologist
claiming “It would not be surprising if
the Neanderthals were indeed Europe’s first cave
artists.” That would have been very surprising not long
ago. “Neanderthals have been portrayed as brutish,
animalistic cavemen,” reporter Stephanie Pappas
wrote, “but the archaeological evidence suggests
they weren’t dummies. They buried their dead, made
complex tools, and used decorative pigments.” So why
not make art on the walls of their caves? Another
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112
anthropologist is convinced it is Neanderthal art.
Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊


Putting these two articles together, it appears
the distinctions between Heidelberg Man,
Neanderthal Man and Modern Man are flexible,
being subject to the whims of certain
living Homo sapiens who like to describe their
disagreements and frequent changes of opinion
as “a constructive scientific debate.”
Constructive for whom?
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

The real tragedy of these reversals is the momentum
of falsified stories. There is a long time lag from the
time old ideas are discarded to the time textbooks,
museum displays and TV documentaries are
replaced. Students are not told there is a
“constructive scientific debate.” They are not told
there is any debate! Under the flawed direction of
evolutionary anthropologists, artists (working in the
present) create imaginative dioramas of fake histories
that are presented as fact to impressionable
minds. Students graduate and go on to their own
careers with these false impressions; how many of
them ever hear the evolutionists say they were
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wrong?
Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

Do you think the makers of BBC specials that
hire naked actors and CGI (computer generated
imagination) animators to portray alleged
“human evolution” are going to go back and fix
the many mistakes in documentaries made
years ago, that continue to be shown on TV and
continue to make money for them? The debate
is destructive, not constructive. The new view
does not “progress our understanding”; it is a
regression, if not a blind drunken sailor’s walk.
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

We must keep in mind that the labels and stories are
all recent and artificial. Heidelberg Man didn’t exist in
the past with that name; neither did Neanderthal
Man. Various populations of humans with certain
trivial differences in anatomy lived in various places —
that’s all. The categories and interpretations are all
made up in the present. The bones are just props for
an evolutionary story that was predetermined by
Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, and his
disciples have been descending deeper into folly ever
since.*
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

The bone pile, growing higher since 1871 but not
substantially so, only serves to illustrate the folly of
believing that humans had ape ancestors, which
had shrew ancestors, which had fish ancestors,
which had bacteria ancestors, all built on the follyacious assumption that Stuff Happens because of
random mutations. Why? Because the story
keeps changing, and the bones never fit into a
stable story that shows progress in
understanding. Humankind’s only verifiable,
documented, intelligently designed family tree is
found here and here.
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Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

To illustrate once again the folly of the evolutionary
tale of “human evolution,” it requires accepting the
notion that “Heidelberg Man” emerged some 800,000
imaginary years ago, and “Neanderthal Man” emerged
some 400,000 imaginary years ago. Both of these
groups were virtually identical, physically and
anatomically, with us – save for trivial differences such
as bone thickness, some facial features, pelvic width,
etc. There are more differences between living
humans than those artificially-categorized ancestors
(compare Watusi and pygmy, Inuit and
European). But they walked upright and had
comparable skull capacities with us – for
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Neanderthals, larger on average than ours.
Neanderthal-Heidelberg Distinction Blurs
尼安德特人海德堡人的区别模糊

Moreover, they used fire, hunted mammoths (can
you do that?), were skilled spearmen and toolmakers, used language and created art (at least
for Neanderthals, although not finding Heidelberg
art doesn’t mean it didn’t exist). With that in mind,
evolutionists expect us to believe that these people
walked this earth for 100 times the length of all
recorded history (during which humans went from
living in villages to walking on the moon and
launching NuStar) without ever figuring out how to
plant a farm or ride a horse or discover
America. Let the folly of that Darwinian tall tale 119
7/16/2015
simmer between your ears.
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风

Planetary scientists this week cautiously suggested the
possible presence of an equatorial lake on Saturn’s
moon Titan. In Nature this week (486, 14 June 2012)
Griffith et al., announced the “Possible tropical lakes
on Titan from observations of dark terrain.” “Possible”
is the operative word; the discovery depends on
interpretation of spectral signatures obtained by the
Cassini orbiter flying by the giant moon of Saturn. Most
lakes have been found in polar regions. This would be
the first semi-permanent body of liquid methane found in
“tropical” (e.g., equatorial, not “warm,” since Titan is –
290 degrees Fahrenheit). Most of Titan’s mid-latitudes
are covered with sand dunes made of icy grains coated
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with hydrocarbons.
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风

In short, if the scientists interpret the color bands
correctly, within the margin of error, a dark oval patch
about the size of Great Salt Lake might be a lake of
liquid methane. But other options are possible from
the data – for instance, it could be a mudflat, a rain
puddle, or a patch of dry hydrocarbon-coated
sand. Cautiously, the scientists could only state that
the data are consistent with it being a liquid methane
lake as the best explanation – but even that
hypothesis raises new problems, because lakes in
tropical regions on Titan are thought to be unstable
due to prevailing winds that pile up grains into giant
dunes.
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Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风


So if it is a lake, the scientists surmised that the
methane would have to come from below, like
groundwater in marshes or oases on Earth,
instead of from the atmosphere. But they can’t
tell (if it is a lake) how deep it is, or how long it
has been there, other than to note it has been
observed since 2004 (eight years).
A lake – an oasis – a marsh – tropics –
those suggestive words were all the news
media needed to go nuts with visions of
certainty.
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Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告
风
Here’s how it got reported:







Live Science: “Giant Tropical Lake Found on Saturn
Moon Titan” (Charles Q. Choi).
PhysOrg: “Lake detected near equator of Saturn’s
moon Titan.”
New Scientist: “Titan’s tropical lake hints
at hydrocarbon wells.”
National Geographic: “Saturn Moon Has Tropical
“Great Salt Lake,” Methane Marshes” (Andrew
Fazekas). This one even had artwork.
CNN: “A moon of Saturn may have ‘tropical’ lakes.”
Nature News: “Tropical lakes on Saturn moon could
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123
expand options for life” (Maggie McKee)
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风


All but Live Science tied the report in with “building
blocks of life,” but what they didn’t report is that
even if this is a methane lake, it is a paltry pittance
of one, compared to what scientists expected in
the 1990s to find: a global ocean of liquid ethane
and methane several kilometers deep. And
only Live Science went into any detail about the
problems with the lake hypothesis.
The problem gets even worse. Nature’s final
paragraph pointed out that scientists are puzzled
how any methane could still remain after the
presumed 4.5 billion years of Titan’s existence, 124
7/16/2015
given that methane is destroyed rapidly:
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风

“General circulation models demonstrate
that long-lasting tropical lakes several
metres deep must be replenished,
depending on the ethane content, within
a ten-thousand-year timescale. Taken
together, tropical lakes and studies of
Titan’s lakes suggest that, currently,
subterranean liquid supplies
methane to Titan’s surface and
atmosphere.
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125
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风

“A supply of on average
6 × 10−4 kg m−2 yr−1 is needed to explain the
composition of Titan’s atmosphere, because
methane, the progenitor of the moon’s
organic species, is destroyed in 10–100
million years through solar ultraviolet
photolysis. More observations are needed to
determine whether this 4.5-billion-year-old
moon is undergoing a specific recent
flourish of geological activity, because it is
freezing and its orbit decaying.”
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126
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风

What that last sentence implies is that
scientists are being forced by the
evidence to consider special conditions –
“a specific recent flourish of geological
activity” – to account for the presence of
methane on Titan at all. At most, the
methane on this bizarre moon would all be
gone in 100 million years, one fortieth the
assumed age of Titan, unless it were
constantly being supplied from
somewhere.
7/16/2015
127
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风


Underground reservoirs might provide a convenient
(unobservable) hiding place for the stockpile, but that
solution arouses geological puzzles about how deep the
methane would need to be, how it would form, and how it
could erupt onto the surface. Added to that are indications
that since Titan is freezing and its orbit is decaying, there
should be less geological activity, not more.
Secular scientists are generally reluctant to invoke any
“specific recent flourish” of activity occurring right at the
time humans are around to observe it. Why now, and not
throughout Titan’s lifetime? The contrast between
scientific caution in the paper and media exuberance
provides a case study in how science is communicated to
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128
the public.
Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind
泰坦湖新闻：投警告风
If reporters are this reckless with a nonbiological story like methane on Titan,
how careful do you think they are
reporting Darwin fables?
 Enjoy Space.com’s Titan picture show
with its real, observable data from the
historic Huygens landing (January 14,
2005), a welcome escape from hypedup stories.

7/16/2015
129
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化


The so-called “scientific method” (if there is such a
thing) has undergone dramatic changes throughout
history, but there is one constant that can be relied
upon: the myth of scientism.
Scientism is the belief that the “scientific method” is a
disinterested formula that, provided a bias-free
scientist follows the steps, is guaranteed to lead to
knowledge that progresses toward understanding of
nature that invariably improves over
time. Philosophers of science, historians of science
and sociologists of science know that this simplistic
description is a myth.
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130
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

On the 50th anniversary of Thomas
Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions this
year, and the “Science Wars” that ensued in the
decades following its publication in 1962, one
would think that scientism went out with logical
positivism and vinyl records, but some reporters
remain stuck in that groove. A recent example
is found on Live Science, where Robert Roy
Britt and Kim Ann Zimmermann provided a
definition straight out of the 1950s:
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131
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

“Science is a systematic and logical approach
to discovering how things in the universe work. It
is derived from the Latin word “scientia,” which
translates to knowledge. Unlike the arts, science
aims for measurable results through testing and
analysis. Science is based on fact, not opinion
or preferences. The process of science
is designed to challenge ideas through
research. It is not meant to prove theories, but rule
out alternative explanations until a likely conclusion
is reached.”
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

This definition, followed by a step-by-step “recipe” for
the Scientific Method, reveals none of the complexities
of real-world science. For instance, not all
scientists follow this method, if indeed any
do. Different fields of science use different
methods. It overlooks tacit knowledge, hunches and
social pressures that short-circuit the method. It
mentions nothing of the scientific culture or
consensus, Kuhn’s paradigms and scientific
revolutions. It conflates scientific discovery with
scientific understanding, yet it distinguishes facts from
theories as if facts cannot be theory-laden.
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133
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

It ignores profound differences between
operational sciences (which can be replicated)
and origins sciences (which cannot, but rely on
inference). And it creates an either-or fallacy
that segregates “science” from all other forms of
inquiry, some of which are not only just as
systematic and logical, but may be even more
measurable, reliable, and amenable to
knowledge. Those are just a few of the
questions that arise from the Live
Science article.
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

Even the article’s ending section, “brief history of
science,” overlooks the fact that what was
considered “knowledge” in the past is often
considered foolishness today. Almost everything
that was believed about the universe, the earth
and life back in 1900 has been debunked. We
have no guarantee, therefore, that scientists of the
future will not look on today’s “scientific” beliefs as
foolishness. The phrase “now we know” is often
the prelude to collapse (for an interesting example
from geology, read a quote posted by Uncommon
Descent).
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

Britt and Zimmermann also neglected to address
how scientific knowledge is manufactured. There
was nothing about peer review, for instance. Yet
even Nature this past week acknowledged that a
revolution is underway in peer review with new
internet resources that may render traditional print
journals obsolete. On June 12, Richard van
Noorden explored some of the radical new
initiatives like PeerJ (an outgrowth of the inventors
of PLoS ONE) that will allow scientists to pay one
price for unlimited online publishing. Notice his
explosive metaphor:
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化


“PeerJ is just one of a flurry of experiments,
encouraged in part by the gathering momentum of
open access, that might shape the future of research
publishing. “We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of
experiments with new publishing models. It’s going
to be an interesting period for the next few years,”
says Binfield.
The metaphor implies no clear connection between
the old way and several radical new ways of
publication. This example shows that one aspect of
the “scientific method,” peer review, is undergoing a
dramatic change before our eyes after decades —
even centuries — of standard operating procedure. 137
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化


Another example from Nature confesses that
there may be limits to our understanding. Climate
change certainly looms large in scientific
discussions these days. Just as the latest global
climate change conference is concluding in Rio,
Maslin and Austin said in Nature June 14 (486, pp.
183–184) that climate models may have reached
their limits:
For the fifth major assessment of climate science
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), due to be released next year,
climate scientists face a serious public-image 138
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problem.
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

The climate models they are now working with,
which make use of significant improvements in
our understanding of complex climate processes,
are likely to produce wider rather than smaller
ranges of uncertainty in their predictions. To
the public and to policymakers, this will look as
though the scientific understanding of climate
change is becoming less, rather than more,
clear.….… Why do models have a limited
capability to predict the future? First of all, they are
not reality. This is perhaps an obvious point, but
it is regularly ignored.
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

By their very nature, models cannot capture
all the factors involved in a natural system,
and those that they do capture are often
incompletely understood. Science historian
Naomi Oreskes of the University of California,
San Diego, and her colleagues have argued
convincingly that this makes climate models
impossible to truly verify or validate.
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化



Surprisingly, they stated that ignorance is no reason for
inaction:
Scientists need to decide how to explain this effect.
Above all, the public and policymakers need to be
made to understand that climate models may have
reached their limit. They must stop waiting for further
certainty or persuasion, and simply act.
This statement appears to be naked advocacy for political
action in spite of scientific understanding. Regardless of
one’s views on human-caused global warming, the quote
illustrates powerful influences between politics and
science. It also reveals that scientists, like other fallible
human beings, are not necessarily bias-free, but are
subject to motivations and collective beliefs.
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Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化

Pallab Ghosh, writing for the BBC News, reported on the
growing trend toward open-access journals on the internet,
away from traditional subscription-based journals. One of
the arguments in favor of open access is that if the public
is paying for the research, they ought to be able to read
about it. Some scientists are strongly in favor of the
movement, seeing it as the democratization of
science. “Critics have argued that commercial
publishers have made excessive profits from scientific
research that has been paid for from public money,”
Ghosh wrote. “Critics also say that denying access to
publicly-funded research is immoral.” One significant
upshot of the trend is that leading journal editors will have
less veto power over what gets published, and less control
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over what kind of research is deemed significant.
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化


Don’t ever be fooled into assuming that scientists, and
especially science reporters, have been educated out of
scientism. Many scientists never took a philosophy of
science course. Some of them, influenced by their
science professors, were trained to distrust philosophers
of science. But the question “What is science?” is not a
question of science. It is a question of
philosophy about science. Scientists therefore,
operating within the scientific culture, are the least
qualified to answer the question.
It’s time to suggest again two Teaching Company lecture
series that explore in detail the philosophical issues of
the “scientific method.” Here are links to them. Take
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note that the courses periodically go on sale.
Scientific Method Evolves
科学方法的进化



Kasser, Philosophy of Science
Goldman, Science Wars: What Scientists Know and
How They Know It
Notice that neither professors are friendly to intelligent
design; they both accept Darwinian evolution. But
after listening to them explain the many difficulties in
verifying even the simplest scientific concepts, and
hearing about the welter of contradictory opinions
about what science is, and how misguided previous
“now we know” claims have been, no reader
of Creation-Evolution Headlines should remain
vulnerable to the fallacy of scientism.
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Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下


Beethoven may indeed be rolling in his grave, but not
for the reasons some Darwin-loving reporters think.
“Roll over Beethoven: you’re no longer needed,”
began Andy Coghlan on New Scientist. “From now
on, the great unwashed masses can evolve their
own compositions – no composers, songwriters
or musical training required.” His article, “How to
Evolve Your Own Musical Melodies,” reports on a
project by Bob MacCallum and Armand Leroi at
Imperial College London to “evolve” music by “natural
selection.” PhysOrg joined in the overture, writing
about “On the origin of music by natural selection.”
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Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

MacCallum and Leroi invite public participation in
their DarwinTunes website. There, using an
evolutionary algorithm, a selection of random 8second sound loops can be “selected” by users for the
most pleasing sound, producing more complex
patterns over time. The selected loops are allowed to
reproduce until something the listener enjoys
results. On PhysOrg, Bob MacCallum explains on a
recording how the process works (the BBC News adds
video). MacCallum goes so far as to say that the
winning loops have sex and reproduce, while the
unpleasing loops get killed off. “It’s brutal, but that’s
evolution for you,” he smirks. The article continues,
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Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

The scientists set out to test a theory that
cultural changes in language, art and music
evolve through Darwinian natural selection,
in a similar way to how living things
evolve. They simulated this cultural evolution
by harnessing the power of a 7,000 strong
internet audience in an experiment that was
designed to answer several questions. Can
music exist without being the product of a
conscious, creative act? If so, what would that
music sound like? Does everyone’s ideal tune
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sound the same?.…
Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

Dr Bob MacCallum, another co-author and a
mosquito genomics bioinformatician in the
Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College
London, said: “We knew our evolutionary
music engine could make pretty good music
in the hands of one user, but what we really
wanted to know was if it could do so in a
more Darwinian setting, with hundreds of
listeners providing their feedback. Thanks to
our students’ and the general public’s
valuable input, we can confidently say it
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does.”
Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

The BBC News insulted Mozart, too, but later
admitted that the experimental music eventually
ground down to a monotonous stasis that needed
some kind of unspecified, unobserved
breakthrough (punctuated equilibria?) to evolve
further: “Of course it never slows down forever, it
never just stays there,” Leroi said in attempt to
rescue his hopes from observation. “Eventually
you will get another burst of
evolution as something new comes
along and breaks through a boundary, and we
think that will happen here too.”
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Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

The experiment clearly has nothing to do with Darwinian
natural selection, but everything to do with artificial
selection (i.e., intelligent design). There’s nothing
natural about it. It’s like artificial breeding of chickens,
dogs or cows to get what a human mind desires. It
doesn’t matter if the artificial selector involves one or a
hundred people: it’s still being selected by minds having
a purpose, not by an unguided, impersonal, random
process like Darwin envisioned. Even unwashed
masses can be intelligent designers. MacCallum admits
as much, stating that “market forces, consumer choice,
is itself a creative force.” He also admitted that many
of the selectors were undergraduate students (that fact
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may or may not impress Darwin skeptics).
Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

Calling this sound “music,” furthermore, is
dubious. It consists of a conglomeration
of repetitive loops, lacking the structure
and serial organization of a Beethoven
symphony or Mozart concerto. It might be
likened to group selection of the most
pleasing wind chimes arranged in a
hodgepodge that is the “least ugly” among
a random set. There is no sonata form,
no development, no recapitulation — no
form whatsoever.
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Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

Another project by a different composer produced
intelligently-designed music a different way. This time it
was Michael Blake, who composed a fugue-like
composition based on the Golden Ratio. This
ratio (1.6180339887…) known to be ubiquitous in nature
and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, is also pleasing to
the ear. In another article on New Scientist by another
reporter, Jacob Aron, an embedded music video shows
Blake performing his work. See a write-up on Evolution
News & Views about the design implications of Blake’s
project. For a stunning animation about how the Golden
Ratio and Fibonacci Series are related, and how they turn
up in phenomena as diverse as sunflowers and nautilus
shells, click here (intelligently-designed music track
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included).
Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下

How can Darwin keep taking credit for intelligent
design? Darwin’s theory is the antithesis
of ID. William Dembski showed clearly in No Free
Lunch that no evolutionary algorithm is superior to
blind search once external information is identified and
excluded from the algorithm. The DarwinTunes
scientists and reporters prove they understand neither
music nor Darwinism. They don’t understand the
difference between natural and artificial
selection. They don’t understand that “reproduction”
of selected sound loops bears little if any relationship
to biological reproduction. And the results occur within
a day under mental selection– not over millions of
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years.
Beethoven Rolls Under Darwin
贝多芬辊在达尔文下


Yet the mythology marches on. It’s not only the
Emperor in this parade who has no clothes; it’s the
drum major and all the band players, too. The media
have joined in, tapping their bare feet to the drumbeat
of the “natural selection” myth. It’s enough to make
the normal people wonder about their normality.
Don’t worry. If you find this bizarre, it’s because it
is. You’re normal. It’s time for some letter-writing to
expose the perpetrators (as if they have not already
exposed themselves). Let the rumbling of a thousand
master composers like Beethoven rolling in their
graves stir you to action until they rest in peace, or
(shall we say), de-compose in peace.
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Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石


Evolutionary paleontologists have a mystery on their
hands: how did turtles in the act of mating become
fossilized?
Most of the news media are amusing themselves
with prurient attention on turtle sex, using double
entendres and French or Latin expressions to
remind themselves that “turtles do it,” too:
“Palaeontologists catch turtles in
flagrante,” PhysOrg headlined, while Live
Science put up in bold type, “Coitus Interruptus:
Ancient Turtle Sex Fossilized” (we’ll spare our
readers further titillating examples of sexting as
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155
news).
Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石

A more obvious question reporters seem to be
skipping over is, how quickly would an animal
have to be buried to be preserved in the sex
act? The BBC News article showed a
photograph of the exquisite preservation of one
of the pairs of fossils claimed to be 47 million
years old. About nine pairs have been found at
the Messel Pit in Germany, most of them
apparently in mating positions.
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Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石



Evolutionary paleontologists were not without a
turtle tale to tell. The BBC News article told it
this way:
Researchers think the turtles had initiated sex
in the surface waters of the lake that once
existed on the site, and were then overcome
as they sank through deeper layers made
toxic by the release of volcanic gases.
The animals, still in embrace, were then
buried in the lakebed sediments and locked
away in geological time.
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Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石


Notwithstanding the romantic visions in this tale,
wouldn’t turtles drifting downward in a toxic lake
have become separated? Wouldn’t their bodies
have decayed on the bottom before enough
sediments could bury them? Only Nature
News mentioned reasons why this explanation
makes little sense:
Edwin Cadena, a doctoral student in palaeontology
at North Carolina State University in Raleigh,
agrees that the study shows “strong evidence to
consider this the first case of coupling captured in
the fossil record of vertebrates”.
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Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石

More controversial, he says, is the
interpretation of what the Messel lake was
like. The notion of a stratified lake works as an
explanation for the turtles’ fate, Cadena
says, “but not so well for other fossils found
at Messel, for example bats or birds or even
other small mammals”. If the upper layers of
the lake were inhabitable, Cadena asks,
then what caused the death of airborne and
terrestrial animals? The turtles are just part
of an ongoing fossil mystery.
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Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石

These specimens add to a long list of fossils
showing nearly instantaneous burial: ichthyosaurs
trapped while giving birth, fish caught while
swallowing other fish, fish with undigested small
fish in their stomachs. How many seconds does
turtle sex take? Are we to believe they remained
in mating posture long enough to sink to the
bottom of a lake and wait to be buried, even if
poisons in the water killed them on the way down?
Wouldn’t Tom Turtle shout, “Gasp! I can’t breathe!”
and disengage from Myrtle Turtle? We can’t
assume turtles would have the same priorities as
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humans.
Mating Turtles Fossilized Instantly
交配的海龟立即变化石


Rapid burial with exquisite preservation as
found in this and so many other fossils speaks
of catastrophic conditions. Since the
evolutionists can only offer made-up stories and
mysteries, let their explanations be ruled out in
favor of explanations that can account for the
observations. Remember that “geological time”
is a moyboy* phrase that locks away
evolutionary mysteries out of sight, out of mind.
*A moyboy is someone who thinks that “millions
of years, billions of years” solves every problem
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in evolutionary theory.
Belief in Hell Lowers Crime
相信地狱降低犯罪


A psychologist has determined that belief in hell
reduces the crime rate.
A finding like this might belong in the “Well, duh”
category, but more interesting is the interpretation:
what does the correlation mean? Science
Daily explained how a research team led by Azim F.
Shariff decided to check the intuitive idea that worry
about afterlife consequences tends to make people
behave better. They studied crime data covering 26
years from 67 different countries, and found that hope
for reward in a blessed heaven is not enough; that
hope by itself is actually a predictor of higher crime
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rates. The fear of hell is what changes behavior: 162
Belief in Hell Lowers Crime
相信地狱降低犯罪

“Supernatural punishment across nations
seems to predict lower crime rates,”
Shariff said. “At this stage, we can only
speculate about mechanisms, but it’s
possible that people who don’t believe
in the possibility of punishment in the
afterlife feel like they can get away with
unethical behavior. There is less of a
divine deterrent.”
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Belief in Hell Lowers Crime
相信地狱降低犯罪

For instance, last year “Shariff reported
that undergraduate students were more
likely to cheat when they believe in a
forgiving God than a punishing
God.” He published this in
the International Journal for the
Psychology of Religion. (There is not,
apparently, an International Journal for the
Religion of Psychology.)
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Belief in Hell Lowers Crime
相信地狱降低犯罪

The article recognized that “these are correlational
data, and so caution should be taken with the
conclusions.” Correlation is not the same as
causation. As for what the findings might mean, the
article did not explore whether heaven or hell have
any basis. Instead, it and the researchers appear to
have assumed that beliefs about heaven and hell
evolved by a kind of cultural selection. “The new
findings, he added, fit into a growing body of evidence
that supernatural punishment had emerged as
a very effective cultural innovation to get people to
act more ethically with each other.”
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Belief in Hell Lowers Crime
相信地狱降低犯罪

That statement does not elaborate on what, or who,
caused supernatural punishment to “emerge,” or why
hell would prove more effective than heaven,
when PhysOrg just announced a contrary finding, that
“Carrots, not sticks, motivate
workers.” Furthermore, assuming the psychologists
are evolutionists (a safe assumption), they did not
explain why evolution would select for ethical behavior
in the first place. After all, another PhysOrg article
had just stated that “Evolution by definition is cold
and merciless” (see 6/08/2012 entry). Ethical
behavior or cooperation should, it would seem, be
regarded as contrary evidence to “evolution by
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definition.”
Belief in Hell Lowers Crime
相信地狱降低犯罪

Maybe there really is a hell. Did anyone
consider that? There is
credible eyewitness testimony. Maybe
that’s why it acts as a deterrent, because
it’s true. A good scientist should examine
all the evidence. Since fear of judgment
appears to be a natural trait of humanity, it
would seem natural that a solution
exists. Fortunately, there is one.
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Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖


The R&D 100 award, previously given for inventions
like the fax machine and automated teller machine,
has been given this year for a biologically-inspired
design that could revolutionize society in many ways.
Pitcher plant: How would you like a non-stick frying
pan that really is non-stick? Self-cleaning
windows? Clothes that don’t stain? These may be
coming due to SLIPS, a non-stick surface developed
at Harvard School of Engineering by a team led by
Joanna Aizenberg, a core professor at
Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering (see entry from10/10/2011).
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Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖


The Harvard Press release announcing its win said,
“‘SLIPS’ technology … has transformative potential
for everyday life.” Surgeons and hospitals will
benefit from tools and surfaces that resist bacteria. Oil
will someday flow through pipes that resist
sticking. Refrigerator coils will no longer have ice
buildup. The possibilities are endless, and this
prestigious award, on its 50th anniversary, went to a
technology inspired by a pitcher plant. In a video
on PhysOrg’s article, Aizenberg describes SLIPS and
demonstrates its effectiveness.
Biomimetics is solving the world’s problems in
numerous other ways:
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Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖

Anti-bacterial coating: PhysOrg reported that
the BIOCOAT project in Belgium is “looking to develop
a new concept of coating stainless steel surfaces
through bio-inspired processes which respect the
environment and are not costly.” Researchers have
developed a “bio-inspired multi-functional polymer”
that can be applied to stainless steel by soaking or
spraying. It will resist bacteria and thus improve the
safety of numerous objects humans touch every day
that otherwise could be vectors of disease. Someone
should invent a way to apply this to TV remotes,
among the germiest objects found in hotels.
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Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖

Micro-adhesion: How do cells stick
together? Scientists publishing
in PNAS wanted to know. The paper by
Pontani et al., “Biomimetic emulsions reveal
the effect of mechanical forces on cell–cell
adhesion” (PNAS, June 1, 2012, doi:
10.1073/pnas.1201499109 ) produced
measurements that may “reveal adhesion
strengthening with increasing external pressure
even in the absence of active cellular
processes.”
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Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖

Deepwater horizons: Research into how ocean
microbes responded to the Gulf oil spill two
years ago is providing insight into how they
degraded the oil quickly and effectively at
certain depths, according to Science
Daily. This knowledge may allow future
responders to catastrophic oil spills to deploy
“cleanup microbes” to forestall damage
naturally. Maybe the robotic fish reported
on Live Science could be the first responders to
find pollutants.
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Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖


Moth eye: Would you like less reflection on
your TV display? PhysOrg reported, “Drawing their
inspiration from nature,” (in this case the eyes of moths),
“researchers develop a brand new type of anti-reflective
plastic.” The article began with a sermonette for
biomimicry (but no mention of evolution):
Nature has long been a source of inspiration for both
scientists and artists alike. Some of the most
ingeniously designed products and gadgets familiar to
millions of people worldwide owe their origin to
seemingly simple forms and patterns found in plants
and wildlife. The ability to adapt these natural forms to
develop ever more innovative products and processes
has given rise to the field of biomimetics — literally 173
7/16/2015
meaning ‘imitation of life’.
Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖

Natural robots: A recent symposium at
Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically
Inspired Engineering, reported
by PhysOrg, described how biomimetics is
inspiring a new generation of
robots. Participants “heard about how
advances in the field are improving artificial
limbs, about how other devices are teaching
injured people to walk, about manufacturing
and control of small flying robots, and about
advances in ‘swarm intelligence’ controlling
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bunches of machines.”
Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖

Copying clumsiness: Ever wonder why insects bump
against walls and windows? That apparently clumsiness
is a way for them to learn about their environment. The
light bulb went on in the heads of Swiss researchers
who, according to Live Science, are creating flying
robots that do just that: use bumps for exploring their air
space. This allows them to operate in unstructured,
cluttered environments without the high overhead of
remote sensing software. “The ability to actively bump
around unfamiliar environments means that AirBurr
could navigate even with the loss of GPS indoors or
underground,” the article ended. “Having cheap swarms
of such robots may prove the path forward for making
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robots ready for the real world.”
Pitcher Plant Inspires R&D Award
猪笼草激发研发奖

If a robot can be natural, can nature be
considered robotic? Maybe plants and
animals use a kind of robotics
technology that was bioengineered by
an Intelligent Designer. No wonder we
can learn from them.
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Why Your Inner Ear Has a Spiral Shape
为什么你的内耳螺旋形状


The cochlea in the inner ear, where sound is
transmitted to the brain, has a spiral shape resembling
a snail shell. It’s not just to save space, researchers
have found.
For many years, physiologists assumed that the coiled
shape of the cochlea simply saved space. Six years
ago, though, scientists found that the coiling has an
auditory enhancement function: it improves perception
of low-frequency vibrations, like having a mega-bass
booster in your head (see 2/28/2006). Now, another
function has been found for the peculiar spiral shape:
it helps you locate sound vertically.
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Why Your Inner Ear Has a Spiral Shape
为什么你的内耳螺旋形状

PhysOrg reported on work in China that tentatively
identifies the spiral shape as critical for detecting the
vertical orientation of a sound source. Having two
ears helps us locate the direction of sound
horizontally; that’s because the sound waves arrive at
each ear a tiny fraction of a second apart, and the
brain can use that delay to help us perceive stereo
sound. That’s fine and good for a concert hall or
headphones, but what if the sound is at different
distances overhead? Two ears don’t help in that case,
because each ear hears the sound at the same
time. Bats, in particular, need that critical information
as they hunt insects in the dark.
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Why Your Inner Ear Has a Spiral Shape
为什么你的内耳螺旋形状


Measurements of “beamforming” showed the
researchers that a coiled cochlea carries more
information than a straight cochlea when detecting
vertically-displaced sounds. They believe the brain
uses this extra information for vertical sound
orientation. They plan to test this hypothesis further.
“The finding that vertical sound localization can be
improved purely by geometric changes supports
the argument that the cochlea’s coiled shape is
useful not just for conserving space,” they
said. “The results could be helpful for designing
cochlear implants and echolocation systems, in
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which sound waves are used to detect objects.” 179
Why Your Inner Ear Has a Spiral Shape
为什么你的内耳螺旋形状

Every part of our bodies, from the molecules to
the organs, is so exquisitely designed, it’s
amazing the whole body works as well as it
does with its trillions of parts. Even if some
things are wearing out or not working well in
your body, you have plenty of reasons to be
thankful. Use what works and glorify your
Creator for giving you a gift that is “fearfully and
wonderfully made,” even down to the detailed
level of advanced acoustical engineering.
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Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手


Lady Luck is often clearly the stated referee of
evolutionary events, but the vast number of
times evolution wins suggests design afoot.
In “Lucky You! Accidents of evolution that
made us human” on New Scientist, Clare
Wilson was unabashed in stating that “Evolution
is a game of chance.” Here’s how she started
her story with hysterical drama:
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Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手


EARTH, several million years ago. A cosmic
ray blasts into the atmosphere at close to the speed of
light. It collides with an oxygen atom, generating a
shower of energetic particles, one of which
knocks into a DNA molecule within a living
creature.
That DNA molecule happens to reside in a
developing egg cell within an ape-like animal living
in Africa. The DNA is altered by the collision —
mutated — and the resulting offspring is slightly
different from its mother.
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Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手

The mutation gives the offspring an advantage
over its peers in the competition for food and
mates, and so, as the generations pass, it is
carried by more and more of the population.
Eventually it is present in nearly everyone, and
so the altered version of the DNA should really
no longer be called a mutation — it’s just one
of the regular 23,000 or so genes that make up
the human genome.
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Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手


While cosmic rays are thought to be one source of
mutations, DNA-copying errors during egg and sperm
production may be a more common cause. Whatever
their origins, these evolutionary accidents took us
on a 6-million-year journey from something similar
to a great ape to us, Homo sapiens.
Surely a string of lucky wins like that qualifies as lottery
jackpot of the past billion years, but evolutionary theory
is chock full of similar stories of lucky wins – not just for
humans, but for every cell, plant and animal on the
globe. Wilson listed six such accidents that “made us
human” but hardly a day passes without evolutionists
claiming multiple lottery winnings that beat astronomical
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odds. Here are some recent examples:
Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手

Fast-folding protein machines by chance: Science
Daily admitted that there exists an “astronomically
large number of other possible forms” that protein
chains can fold into, but somehow they get it right
every time, even within fractions of a second too quick
to observe. How did that happen? According to
evolutionary thought, the universe’s premiere gambler,
evolution, had plenty of opportunities to roll the dice:
“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 second – into a working
nanomachine.”
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Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手

Sex, rock & roll: How did sex originate? In ‘Sex born
from hard rock and heavy metal,” New
Scientist reporter Will Ferguson said it’s easy; just add
granite. The granite that started erupting onto the
crust two billion years ago wasn’t trying to invent
anything, Ferguson knows; sex was just an
unintended consequence of granite’s erosion
providing more variety of elements for evolution to
play with. This lottery was won on one of the first
draws, too: “The findings offer
further evidence that evolution on land may have
commenced far earlier than previously thought,”
he quoted a scientist stating. (Ferguson did not
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connect the dots between complex life and sex).
Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手
Taken for granite: PhysOrg reporters watched the


gambling table and validated the winnings:
“Now scientists have discovered that granite
played an important role in a major episode over
1.5 billion years ago, which eventually led to human
life on Earth.”
Gambler’s hunch: The origin of life remains a
“puzzling question” to astrobiologists, but Harry
Lonsdale (himself a chemist and entrepreneur) is
willing to spend up to $2 million of his money to fund
research on the puzzle. The article on Astrobiology
Magazine admits that natural selection doesn’t work
before replication, leaving chance alone as the cause
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of the first self-replicating entity (see online book).
Evolution as Lottery Manipulator
进化成为彩票机械的手
Since evolution seems to have been on a roll with the


lottery, it sounds like a good bet for a gamblin’
man. Strange that there aren’t many other gamblers
investing, though (except NASA, which has its own
hunches that life began in outer space). Reporter
Nola Taylor Redd noted that there are “very little
international or multinational opportunities” for
astrobiologists to research the mystery of life’s origin –
a question that remains unanswered (by evolutionists)
ever since Darwin looked into his imaginary warm little
pond.
Evolutionists, be forewarned: we are saving up all
these quotes for a gigantic laugh fest after your
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Bearded Buddha idol topples.
Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹
Do you have any idea how many emergencies are resolved


inside your body every day without your conscious
knowledge or control? Here are just 3 examples.
Sugar cops: The surfaces of many body cells are covered
with what look like a thin forest, where the trees are sugar
molecules. A recent article on PhysOrg explained how this is
a frontier of biology: “The “glycome”—the full set of sugar
molecules in living things and even viruses—has been one
of the least understood domains of biology, the article
said, but the glycome “encodes key information that
regulates things such as cell trafficking events and cell
signaling.” Largely independent of the genetic code, which
builds proteins, the glycome represents another kind of code
or signalling system vital to health.
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Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

Tissue graveyard: When epithelial cells (common
in body tissues) die, how are they disposed of? A
kind of burial at sea takes place automatically as
neighboring cells squeeze out the bad cell, Current
Biology said (Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue
11, R453-R455, 5 June 2012,
10.1016/j.cub.2012.04.036). It’s called “crowdinginduced live cell extrusion.” This is important
because “To maintain a functional and
harmonious epithelial society, the number and
quality of cells need to be tightly controlled,”
Katoh and Fujita emphasized.
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Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

Immigration policy: “We are not alone,” Michael Balter
wrote, but he was not discussing SETI or aliens, he was
introducing a special feature in Science last week about
the “microbiome,” the set of microbes that travel with us
everywhere we go. “Our bodies, inside and out, are
teeming with trillions of microbes. Most of them are
our friends, helping us to digest food, strengthen our
immune systems, and keep dangerous enemy pathogens
from invading our tissues and organs.” Needless to say, if
our own cells did not keep tight regulation of these alien
cells, we would be in constant danger. In his introductory
article (Science 8 June 2012), Balter wrote, “Evidence is
building that this resident community of microbes, called
the microbiome, plays a major role in health and
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disease.”
Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

We look out our eyeballs like a captain looks out the
window of a cruise ship, thinking we are in control of
this large vessel we inhabit. But actually, just like the
captain of the ship, we are clueless as to what is really
going on in the hull. In a large cruise ship with
hundreds of employees and thousands of guests, little
emergencies happen all the time: a fire in the kitchen,
a suspicious character in the wrong place, anomalies
in the engine room. If the captain had to know every
incident, he would be distracted from steering, for one
thing, and wouldn’t know what to do about most
problems anyway.
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Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

Fortunately, each department on the ship has policies
and procedures for handling just about every
contingency. The captain smiles, hands on the wheel,
confident the ship is under control. In our bodies,
things are far more precarious. We are beset daily by
broken DNA strands hit by cosmic rays or ionizing
radiation, unhealthy food materials, improperly folded
proteins, and a host of bacteria and viruses that vastly
outnumber our own cells. As with the cruise ship,
there are built-in policies and procedures for handling
most of these situations that operate without our
conscious knowledge or control.
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Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

One biology professor was fond of remarking, “The
amazing thing is not that we get sick. The
amazing thing is that we are ever well.” Are you
having a nice day today? Are you basically
healthy? Count your blessings. You have so
many trillion helpers inside of you, you could not
possibly know what they do or why. Not even our
leading scientists have a grasp on all the
relationships, signals and pathways involved. We
know a little about white blood cells that patrol our
internal highways. We know a little
about DNA damage repair.
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Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

We know a little about tissue regeneration
and replacement. But far more remains
unknown, such as the glycome. One thing
becomes clearer each passing day: we
owe our existence to fantastically
complex, interrelated processes that
boggle the mind, things that Darwin never
knew about when he concocted his little
myth.
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Wonders Inside You
在您里面的奇迹

As you peer out the windows of your
cruise ship today, smile and enjoy the
view, knowing things are under
control. Just don’t take so much credit for
it. There’s a higher Authority that
assigned you your ship, temporarily, with
all its crew. Respect the crew and follow
the Authority’s orders, knowing you will
give an account. With great privilege
comes great responsibility.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻


For an enterprise that has failed for 50
years, SETI gets good press. There are many worthy
enterprises on the planet; what is it about SETI that
gets honorable mention with nary a critical word?
Galaxy Quest: The second SETI Con is underway in
Santa Clara, with not only scientists, but artists,
entertainers and “people from all walks of life whose
area of interest intersects on the topic of the search for
intelligent life somewhere other than here on planet
Earth,” reported PhysOrg. All the SETI bigwigs are
there: Frank Drake, Seth Shostak, Tim Allen (not sure
about that one). It’s a bit of a send-off for Jill Tarter,
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reported Live Science.
SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

Tarter is retiring from the SETI Institute
after spending 35 years looking at
nothing. Even though the event is “much
more upbeat than the last” SETI Con in
2010 because of the Kepler spacecraft’s
discovery of over a thousand
planets, SETI is not about planets; it’s
about intelligent signals from beings like
us. There haven’t been any yet, except…
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

The Wow, and how: Figuring large in SETI lore is the
“Wow!” signal, “a mysterious radio transmission
detected in 1977 that may or may not have come from
extraterrestrials,” said Space.com. Its signal strength
was so strong that SETI researcher Jerry Ehrman
wrote “Wow!” by it. Even though “No one
knows whether the seemingly unnatural signal really
was beamed toward us by aliens, and despite great
effort, scientists have never managed to detect a
repeat transmission from the same spot in the
sky,” Space.com reported that a reply is being
planned.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

It’s a bit of a publicity stunt by the National Geographic
Channel to promote their new series, “Chasing UFOs,”
even though most SETI researchers discount UFOs
as scientifically unsupported. Interested parties can
use Twitter to contribute to a crowd sourced message
that will be beamed toward the signal source by the
Arecibo radio telescope, in a publicity stunt
reminiscent of the first Arecibo message of 1974. This
may concern some SETI researchers who worry that
aliens may use the information to attack us 30,000
years from now (see last paragraphs of report
from Astrobiology Magazine), but like Keynes said, by
then we’ll all be dead.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

SETI 3.0: Just when the Allen Telescope Array (ATA)
is shutting down for lack of funds, visionaries are
planning a granddaddy SETI project reminiscent of
NASA-Ames’ 1971 pipe dream, “Project
Cyclops.” That was to be a monster array of 1,000
radio telescopes, each 100 meters across, linked as a
giant interferometer to listen in on
alien TV shows. The ridiculously unaffordable
proposal was never taken seriously, but the next best
thing is coming: SKA, the Square Kilometer Array, to
be based in South Africa and Australia. Astrobiology
Magazine described how this ambitious project, to be
completed in 2024, will make the ATA look like a stick
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horse at the Kentucky Derby.
SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

Even so, new worries have come up. If aliens repeat
human history, leakage of their TV transmissions to
space will be temporary, dramatically decreasing the
detection window for each
planet. Furthermore, Astrobiology Magazine did not
say who’s paying for all the hardware, software and
personnel. “Assuming funding is in place,
construction on phase one is set to begin in 2016,” it
said, which is like the philosopher’s solution to
opening a lone can of tuna among survivors on a
desert island: “Assume a can opener.” Presumably,
the SETI faithful can hitchhike on the array that will be
used for serious astronomical research.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

As SETI researchers continue to hope for signals, they have
plenty of time to ask philosophical and even theological
questions. On Live Science, in an article adorned by a scene
from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the suggestive but
discredited microphoto inside Martian Meteorite ALH 84001 that
launched the contentless science of Astrobiology, Mike Wall
speculated, “Would Finding Aliens Shatter Religious
Beliefs?” The short answer is, No, because religion thrived
after Copernicus, who (according to popular myth) removed
man from the center of the universe (watch The Privileged
Planet documentary for needed correctives). SETI Institute
talking heads Seth Shostak and Doug Vakoch were given the
typical softball questions for granting Live Science readers
authoritative opinions about a field – theology – for which they
are unqualified.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

Wall did not consider the inverse question, “Would not
finding aliens shatter naturalistic beliefs?” Nick Lane
did, though. On New Scientist, he asked an either-or
fallacy question, “Life: is it inevitable or just a
fluke?” Most inhabitants of Earth believe an unstated
third option, that it was designed, but to humor Mr.
Lane for awhile, we watch as he puzzles over the
Fermi Paradox (the “Where are they?”
conundrum). He was clearly astonished by the
complexity of Earth life’s energy transport
systems. He even including a link to an animation
of ATP synthase in his article.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

For relief of headache caused by contemplation of
irreducible complexity, he practiced transcendental
meditation repeating Michael Russell’s mantra that life
could have started in hydrothermal vents
(see 2/15/2008 and its embedded links). “Such vents,
Russell realised, provide everything needed to
incubate life,” Lane comforted himself as he prepared
to recline back to his naturalistic slumbers; “Or rather
they did, four billion years ago.” Drifting off, the
thought generated a nightmare: if life is a fluke,
intelligent life might indeed be rare. Maybe that’s
why SETI hasn’t heard anybody yet.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

The acronym that is being ignored here
is TESI: Theology of Evolutionary Scientist
Imagination. Anyone see science
here? (Note: antenna engineering is not
derivative of SETI, but ancillary to it; same
for Kepler’s planet hunting). There is no
science in SETI, because there have been
no observations supporting its reason for
being. SETI, nevertheless, is replete with
imagination based on theological
assumptions.
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SETI Gets Good Press
搜寻地外文明取得好新闻

The answer, therefore, to the question
“Would not finding aliens shatter
naturalistic beliefs?” is, No, because
evolutionary imagination is boundless and
creative. Hollywood would never let their
imagineers lose hope. In TESI’s favorite
scripture, I Vulcans 13, thus saith
Shostak, “But now abide funds, hope, and
imagination: but the greatest of these is
imagination, with the other two close
behind.”
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导
In historical sciences, observable phenomena are often used as


indicators of past phenomena. Some recent examples show
how these can mislead researchers.
Ice cores: A press release from University of WisconsinMadison, echoed on NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine, has
climate scientists scrambling. For decades, they have used
Greenland ice cores as proxies for historical climate change,
particularly the ratios of oxygen isotopes in bubbles in the
ice. Now, research has shown that these ratios are misleading
and can exaggerate temperatures. The press release is
concerned with one particular period scientists have labeled the
Younger Dryas, alleged to be 13,000 years ago, when the
temperature supposedly plummeted, according to the old
interpretation of oxygen ratios in Greenland ice. Trouble is, that
indicator is at odds with other indicators.
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导


“We don’t believe the ice cores can be interpreted
purely as a signal of temperature,” says Anders
Carlson, a University of Wisconsin–Madison
geosciences professor. “You have to consider where the
precipitation that formed the ice came from.”
So, will a simple correction bring the data into
conformance with theory? “It’s a fresh reminder from
an ancient ice core that climate science is full of
nuance,” Carlson said. “Abrupt climate changes have
happened, but they come with complex shifts in the
way climate inputs like moisture moved
around. You can’t take one difference and interpret
it solely as changes in temperature, and that’s what
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we’re seeing here in the Greenland ice cores.”
Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导

Gravitational lenses: A press release
from JPL today has cosmologists worried. They
found an arc of light where it shouldn’t
be. According to theory, arcs are the light of
distant galaxies distorted by intervening
matter. “The giant arc is the stretched shape of a
more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the
monster cluster’s powerful gravity, an effect called
gravitational lensing,” the article explained. “The
trouble is, the arc shouldn’t exist.” This sent
one observer of the Hubble image into a
psychological crisis:
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导

“When I first saw it, I kept staring at it, thinking it
would go away,” said study leader Anthony Gonzalez of
the University of Florida in Gainesville, whose team
includes researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “According to a statistical
analysis, arcs should be extremely rare at that
distance. At that early epoch, the expectation is that
there are not enough galaxies behind the cluster
bright enough to be seen, even if they were ‘lensed,’ or
distorted by the cluster. The other problem is that galaxy
clusters become less massive the further back in time
you go. So it’s more difficult to find a cluster with enough
mass to be a good lens for gravitationally bending the light
from a distant galaxy.”
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导

The lensing galaxy is extremely distant and
massive, containing an estimated mass of 10
trillion suns – but the galaxy behind it, whose light
is distorted, is so close to the time of the big bang,
it shouldn’t exist. “The chance of finding such a
gigantic cluster so early in the universe was
less than one percent in the small area we
surveyed,” one JPL team member said. “It shares
an evolutionary path with some of the most
massive clusters we see today, including the
Coma cluster and the recently discovered El Gordo
cluster.” It’s unlikely this giant cluster is unique.
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导


There are several lessons here, and one of them
is not the triumphal march of scientific progress.
First, consider that all the papers written up to these
discoveries are now wrong. Are they going to be
corrected? Unlikely. The errors will continue to be
cited, perpetuating falsehoods. The IPCC will use
Greenland ice cores as proof positive of climate
fluctuations in the unobservable past. The fictional
Younger Dryas and Older Dryas periods will continue
to be spoken of in textbooks. As we have seen with
the Haeckel embryos and other undying frauds, myths
are as hard to exterminate as ants in the kitchen.
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导

Second, these revelations reveal knowns turning into
unknowns, and a couple of unknown unknowns
become known unknowns. But if one does not know
the extent of the unknown unknowns, or
the unknowable unknowns (see Evolution News &
Views), there is no confidence that future revelations
will not undermine today’s knowns further, showing
scientific regress rather than
progress. Philosophically, it is impossible in any
system whose boundaries are unconstrained to
account for it from within. As with Godel’s Theorem,
you can’t prove arithmetic with arithmetic, or geometry
with geometry. Higher-order information is needed.
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Scientific Markers Can Mislead
科学的标记可能会误导
Third, flexible theories contradict scientific progress.


If
gravitational lensing theory is correct, the observation described
above has just cast serious doubt on evolutionary
cosmology. The most massive galaxies should not exist so
close to the big bang. Since the observation can’t be tweaked,
the evolutionary story will have to give. But even if the standard
model gets rescued somehow by alterations of theory, it goes
to show that theories are plastic. That will have to be said of
the rescued theory, and possibly other theories considered
well-established today.
It was cute of Carlson to sugar-coat the ice-core problem with
a euphemism: “This goes to show that climate science is full
of nuance” (i.e., subtle distinctions). Phonetically speaking, we
can translate “nuance” to mean that what they knew once they
don’t know now.
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中


A revolution in scientific publishing may fundamentally
alter the power structure over science and result in
openness for all.
The traditional method of publishing scientific results has
been the peer-reviewed journal paper. Nature, Science,
and countless other journals are for-profit enterprises that
justify their existence by adding value to research and
providing editorial review. Printing a journal is costly; no
question, but it is also a powerful position: the editors
make the call on what gets published. Traditional journals
took early advantage of the internet by providing online
subscriptions. Universities and research institutions have
to buy costly site licenses; individuals have to pay
hundreds of dollars and are forced to get the print edition
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with the online access.
Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中

A new method is pulling the rug out from journal editors:
open access publishing. These “author pays” systems
allow everyone to read the paper without a
subscription. The success of arXiv, Public Library of
Science and other open-access sites is putting pressure
on the traditional print journals to join the bandwagon or
get left behind. Why pay when readers can get good
science for free? Who owns research, anyway? Much
research is government-funded. Why should readers pay
a for-profit company to read what their tax dollars have
paid for? Even if an individual author has to pay for the
privilege of publication, he or she can do it, or can get the
institution to do it. Government funding can still foot the
bill. But now, everyone in the world can read it.
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
Nature addressed this situation in its editorial today (Nature, 486,


28 June 2012, p. 439, doi:10.1038/486439a). Surprisingly, the
editors are in favor of open access. Maybe they realize trends are
leaving them no other option. They are starting to look like those
evil, self-seeking corporations everyone demonizes because they
appear greedy for profit:
Publishers in such an environment will need all the more to
demonstrate that they add value to the research process. This
sits alongside their need to deliver a reasonable profit —
whether to fund learned-society activities or to reduce their
publishing charges (the aim of the Public Library of Science) or,
like many suppliers of services and equipment to researchers, to
deliver a return to their investors. The perception of publishers
as profiteers is strong, and understanding of the value they
add is weak. Not noted for their transparency, publishers will
have to work hard to develop trust amid a fundamental shift
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their customer base.
Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
In the same issue, Nature published the opinion of Geoffrey


Boulton, who is also strongly in favor of open access (“Open your
minds and share your results,” Nature News, Jan 27, 2012). He
not only wants open access publishing; he wants open data, and
openness to the public:
We also need to be open towards fellow citizens. The massive
impact of science on our collective and individual lives has
decreased the willingness of many to accept the
pronouncements of scientists unless they can verify the
strength of the underlying evidence for themselves. The furor
surrounding ‘Climategate’ — rooted in the resistance of climate
scientists to accede to requests from members of the public for
data underlying some of the claims of climate science — was in
part a motivation for the Royal Society’s current report. It is vital
that science is not seen to hide behind closed laboratory
doors, but engages seriously with the public.
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中

He continued, “Everyone will benefit from a more
open approach.” There are challenges, for sure; how
to make abstruse data intelligible to the public, and
how to solve issues about confidentiality, costs, and
discoverer’s priority. Judging from scientist
comments, though, there’s a strong feeling that it’s
about time. One researcher who benefited from open
access to the arXiv database said, “it remains an
important venue for exploration of
alternatives to that quaint atavism pre-publication
peer review – a bottleneck whose justification
would be further reduced if the supporting data
were itself freely available.”
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
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It’s the transparency issue that holds the greatest
potential for a change in science publishing. How did
journal editors decide what research merits
publication? How were reviewers picked? That lack
of transparency, that perpetuation of status-quo
science has long been the complaint of many
“maverick” scientists who felt stymied by
consensus. Open access may change that
dramatically. Now, they may have a solution in openaccess publication, where the reviewers are the
public, the research is public, and scientists around
the world can engage in the critique.
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
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With every revolution will come new challenges,
though. Does this mean crackpot theories will
have easier paths to fame? That problem already
exists. Traditional journals publish wild ideas all
the time, and some crackpot theories turn out to be
mainstream (e.g., fractal geometry, plate tectonics,
expanding universe). The right question is, who
determines what is crackpot or not? What
standards will determine scientific merit? How will
they be maintained? Who owns science,
anyway? It’s going to be an interesting sea that
scientists set sail on.
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
Intelligent design is considered crackpot by Nature, Science and
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many other mainstream journal editors, but ID advocates (most with
legitimate PhDs) who feel stymied by the consensus and power
structure) consider the Darwinian trash that gets published weekly to
be crackpot. Whether open access publishing opens the doors of the
Darwin Dark Castle and lets in some fresh air remains to be seen.
“Every solution breeds new problems,” Peer’s Law says. We’ve seen
this with Wikipedia. It sounded great. No more bookshelves with
heavy tomes; just search on a keyword and presto! instant
encyclopedia material online, peer reviewed by everyone! Problem:
certain elements in society make it their mission in life to undo any
changes to their opinions. ID advocates cannot fix outright lies
before online censors immediately change them back. As a result,
falsehoods endure with no way to correct them. In essence, the antiID censorship just shifted from journal editors to unemployed, selfproclaimed guardians wearing pajamas. Open access journals may
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face similar obstructions.
Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
It’s worth a try anyway. It doesn’t seem like it can be any
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worse than the status quo. There’s always book publishing,
another tried and true method that gave the world some of
the greatest science of all time (e.g.,
Newton’s Principia). The free market allows for
entrepreneurs to offer a better service than Wikipedia and
sap its power, just like Facebook put MySpace out to pasture
(now Google’s market dominance needs some competition,
but people use it because they like what it provides). Big
Music was horrified at the prospect of music downloads, but
online access to music has revolutionized the way we buy
entertainment, and most users are happy with all the new
options. It has also brought great new talent to the surface
that never would have seen the light of day by powerful
corporations.
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Who Owns Science? Publication Revolution Underway
谁拥有科学？出版革命进行中
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Traditional journals are for-profit businesses. They can’t
pretend some kind of divine right to do things the old way;
they need to go with the flow, to adjust to changing
markets. Protectionism rarely works.
What do you think? Will open access publishing improve
science? Will it open doors long closed to politicallyincorrect views like intelligent design? How will the public
recognize quality science and reject crackpot ideas? Will
new power structures emerge? Will new problems with
censorship outweigh the benefits, making us wish for the
good old days? Can the open marketplace of ideas work
in today’s highly-polarized world? Join the conversation;
add your comments.
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Thank Your Cilia
感谢你的纤毛
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Throughout your body, cilia (protrusions on
cells, singular cilium) are monitoring the
environment and sweeping your passages
clean.
Live Science posted an article about cilia. The
simple-looking hairlike projections on cells are
anything but simple. “These hairs are tiny,
but mighty,” the article began. Your life
depends on them.
Here are some wonders of cilia:
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Thank Your Cilia
感谢你的纤毛
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“A single cilium is made up of some 600 protein
pieces—more than many other cellular structures.”
Primary cilia (non-motile) act like antennae,
sensing the external environment. Filled with
proteins that amplify the signal, they act as a
communications hub for the cell.
During development, motile cilia direct the liver on
the right side of the body and the heart on the left.
Cilia sweep the airways clean of mucus by moving
in concert in a wave-like motion.
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Thank Your Cilia
感谢你的纤毛
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Motile cilia direct the female egg to the uterus. An
extra-long cilium propels a sperm cell toward the
egg. (This is called a flagellum but does not work
the same as the rotary flagellum found in bacteria.)
Cilia “circulate the fluid needed for proper brain
function.”
“More than a dozen rare but serious genetic
disorders stem from cilia glitches.”
Reporter Amber Dance did not discuss how these
organelles might have evolved. Instead, she
reported that scientists at Brandeis University are
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trying to imitate them.
Thank Your Cilia
感谢你的纤毛
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This article was true to form: mentions of evolution
are inversely proportional to the detail of
complexity discussed. Biochemist Michael Behe
made cilia an example of irreducible complexity in
his first book Darwin’s Black Box, and discussed
them in more mind-boggling detail in his second
book, The Edge of Evolution. Make the design
inference: (1) Cilia are composed of multiple
interacting parts, all of which must be present for
the cilium to work. (2) Removal or damage to a
single part destroys the cilium and results in
serious disease to the organism. Charlie, where
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are you?
Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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Some evolutionary papers are filled with verbs like arose,
emerged, and originated. Do these convey scientific
understanding, or are they veils concealing ignorance? Is it like
saying “abracadabra” to say something “arose” by evolution? A
recent paper about sophisticated metabolic enzymes in plants
is a case in point.
In a paper by Weng, Philippe and Noel in Science (29 June
2012: Vol. 336 no. 6089 pp. 1667–1670; DOI:
10.1126/science.1217411), the magic starts right in the title:
“The Rise of Chemodiversity in Plants.” It rose to a crescendo
throughout the overture to evolution’s uncanny power to bring
things forth out of nothing.1 In the following excerpts, the magic
words, hedging words and personifications are highlighted in
bold:
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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The Emergence of Metabolism
New metabolic branches continuously arose throughout landplant evolution.…
Since its origin as a fundamental property of the cell,
metabolism is generally regarded as having evolved toward
increasing order and catalytic efficiency.…
Primary metabolism likely arose from promiscuous primeval
metabolic reactions and evolved toward greater catalytic
precision and efficiency. Specialized metabolism likely
emerged from primary metabolism.
Even deleterious changes appearing in one paralog may be
tolerated and not eliminated by selection, when the other
paralog contributes to fitness. In such cases, the evolution
of advantageous activities can now be favored in new
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environments.
Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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.…increased catalytic promiscuity likely molded the
evolution of specialized enzymes.
Once a duplication-derived progenitor emerged,
mutations may have loosened the energetic
interdependencies.…
For instance, the evolution of rosmarinic acid biosynthesis
in Lamiaceae herbs arose from gene duplication of
a BAHD acyltransferase.
The emergence of rosmarinic acid synthase (RAS) in
Lamiaceae likely followed substrate permissiveness of its
evolutionary progenitor HCT, a more conserved enzyme
ubiquitous in land plants.
By exploiting the broader substrate recognition of
ancestral DFR, I. gesnerioides evolved a red flower color.…232
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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After a gene-duplication event, one gene copy likely was
selected for increased activity toward this substrate, resulting
in the emergence of a new metabolic step.…
Recurring Patterns of Metabolic Evolution
The phenotypic outcome of an evolving plant-specialized
metabolic system relies on the recruitment of multifunctional
enzymes…
In addition to the recruitment of individual enzymes
into emerging pathways, enzymes with expanded substrate
recognition that act consecutively in a particular pathway can
reappear, operating on disparate metabolites.
Surely the authors attempted to explain how things “emerged,”
didn’t they? Indeed, they did in a couple of places. But the
magic words are there again:
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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In contrast to primary metabolism, in which selection
constrained mutations to maintain the most stable and
functional enzyme forms, we hypothesize that specialized
metabolic enzymes may have emerged through early gene
duplication, followed by mutations that broadened substrate
selection and flattened activation barriers of their catalyzed
reactions. The resulting mechanistic elasticity allowed single
enzymes to catalyze multiple reactions and biosynthesize
multiple products (Fig.1A). This scenario is consistent
with directed evolution focused on enzyme promiscuity and
the biochemical characterization of mutant libraries derived
from phylogenetic relationships in several plant-specialized
metabolic enzyme families.…
A little later, they stated:
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变

Supporting this view, a number of current specialized
metabolic enzymes exhibit, on average, a
greater ability to accept a broader range of substrates
and to employ multiple energetically similar reaction
mechanisms than related primary metabolic enzymes.
Moreover, these enzymes seem to traverse functional
space more easily than their structurally related cousins in
primary metabolism to evolve new and often several
metabolic products while retaining a modicum of their
original function.… Diminished catalytic efficiency of
multifunctional metabolic enzymes probably coincided
with greater substrate permissiveness and the
occurrence of several mechanistic routes to multiple
products with little cost to the fitness of the host
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population.
Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变

As long as the enzyme that must produce multiple
products by virtue of its chemical mechanism yields
at least one conferring a fitness advantage, the
enzyme can be retained, barring issues of byproduct toxicity. An enzyme does not have to
evolve to perfection or absolute product specificity; it
merely has to produce enough of
the desired compound for the gene to be maintained
in the population. As populations experience
fluctuating abiotic and biotic ecological changes, one
of the minor metabolites may also assume an
advantageous function, thus resulting in fixation of the
multifunctional paralog.
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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It’s not clear, however, that suggestive terms like
“mechanistic elasticity,” “enzyme promiscuity,” or
“substrate permissiveness” provide visible light or
black light. They may be merely giving the illusion of
making emergence glow without aiding
understanding of how unguided processes produced
highly complex, functional molecules that human
researchers have a hard time duplicating. A critical
reader might wonder why these scientists are
helping themselves to “barring issues of byproduct toxicity,” for instance. Poison kills. Can
they sweep this problem away by arbitrarily barring
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it?
Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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And without defining functional space, which by all
accounts is an extremely tiny subset of a vast
sequence space (most of which is functionless or
toxic), they seem to be taking liberties to say that
mutated molecules will traverse functional space in
a finite time. “Mechanistic routes” are, by
definition, mindless and without purposeful
aim. Manufacture of these metabolite molecules,
furthermore, requires coded information in the
genome, and molecular machines to assemble
them.
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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In the “Future Directions” section at the end, the authors’
Darwinian proclivities emerged amidst of flock of stage doves:
Although a few studies have interrogated the minimum set of
mutations that dictate the emergence of specific functions in
divergent plant-specialized metabolic enzymes„ no particular
study has addressed all viable mutational paths in these
metabolic systems. This limits our ability to postulate
evolutionary scenarios consistent with the stepwise
assembly of mechanistically divergent metabolic pathways
within the framework of Darwinian evolution2 and
to quantify the incremental emergence of new activities with
each mutational step. Could specialized metabolic enzymes
and their pathways evolve along a wider set of evolutionary
trajectories than their cousins in primary metabolism?
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
To make sure the audience appreciated the difficulty of their
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magic act, they wrote in conclusion:
The remarkable chemodiversity in plants and its underlying
metabolic diversity are reached via exploration of sequence
space restrained by enzyme catalysis, protein
stability, emerging and extant metabolic pathways, and,
ultimately, organismal fitness. The ability to bridge the fields of
evolutionary biology, chemistry, biophysics, and mechanistic
enzymology to cooperatively tackle the complexity of
specialized metabolism will provide a more informed
understanding of the amazing tapestry of plant-specialized
metabolites that are so essential to the sessile lifestyle of
plants.
This implies that their understanding, if any, was less informed
than it should be.
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变

By contrast, another paper in the same issue
of Science had little to say about evolution, but
a lot about revolution. In “Mining the
Biodiversity of Plants: A Revolution in the
Making” (Science, 29 June 2012: Vol. 336 no.
6089 pp. 1658–1661, DOI:
10.1126/science.1217410), four scientists from
Brock University were excited about the
potential health benefits for humans of “mining”
the diversity of plant metabolites for medical
applications:
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
Approximately two-thirds of new drugs in the past 25 years
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have originated from the discovery of particular secondary
metabolites derived from natural biodiversity. This success has
been attributed to the structural complexity of molecules
found in living organisms, which have an average of 6.2
chiral centers per molecule as compared to an average of 0.4
chiral centers found in combinatorial libraries. Such chemically
complex molecules are very difficult and costly to produce
efficiently by chemical synthesis.…
…but plants do it so well for us, the message continued, we can
and should exploit their design prowess for our benefit. These
authors didn’t use the word “originated” in a magical
sense. The new drugs “originated” not by unguided processes,
but by intentional search and discovery, a form of intelligent
design.
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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1. The authors’ job was not to describe degradation or
variations of existing functional molecules, but to explain how
new cellular machines (proteins and metabolites) that provide
new, useful functions arrived: i.e., how plants that did not have
these functional molecules got them. Darwinians need to start
from the bottom up; creationists start from the top
down. Creationists do not discount natural variations, but
question the ability of an unguided, aimless, purposeless
process like neo-Darwinism to “innovate” new complex
functions possessing more genetic information than
before. Every scientist knows, furthermore, that entropy cannot
be ignored.
2. In a similar vein, they stated, “Positing that
protein functional promiscuity serves as the starting point
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for functional innovation through natural selection.…” 243
Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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Caught in the act! The authors of the first paper
just admitted, in print, that they have limited their
thinking to postulating “evolutionary
scenarios consistent with the stepwise assembly
… within the framework of Darwinian
evolution.” How to we translate that into plain
English? Storytelling! What’s a scenario? A
play. What’s a framework? A stage. What’s the
plot? Darwinian evolution only. And what is the
acronym for “Darwin Only, Darwin
Only”? D.O.D.O. We just watched a comedy! It’s
tragic.
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Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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It’s tragic, and it’s magic. These authors did little more
than wave their hands and shout “Abracadabra!” Behind
black curtains, they pulled Darwin rabbits out of Darwin
black hats under Darwin black light, and then had the
gall to tell you the rabbit “emerged, arose, originated,
occurred.” The fast-talking magicians distracted you
with a steady stream of impressive phrases like
“substrate permissiveness,” “mechanistic elasticity” and
“evolutionary trajectory”. They even tossed in a little
sexual titillation, talking about “enzyme
promiscuity.” SUCH WORDS CONVEY NO UNDERSTANDING. They are the tools of snake oil salesmen
and charlatans, used only to distract and impress you245
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while they steal your watch.
Evolution Worked Magic in Plants
植物神奇演变
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Think of CEH as your backstage guide to show
you how the Darwin magic tricks are
done. They tried to steal your watch, but you
watched them steal. You were ready. You
were alert. When you know the secret, and you
train your mind not to be distracted by the
irrelevant jargon, the act looks more like what it
is: an act. Sorry to spoil the show, but you
need to know. Now teach someone
else. Better yet, bring them to daily CEH
deprogramming sessions.
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Explanatory Filter in Action: Fairy Circles in Africa
非洲童话界的解释性过滤
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The old “crop circle” craze fanned the curiosity of many, till
humans were filmed making them. Now, scientists have a
different circle mystery, and they’re stumped.
The “Explanatory Filter” devised by William Dembski
(see IDEAcenter.org) includes intelligent causes as a last
resort, once natural law and chance are ruled out. Often,
it takes time to work through the filter. When the crop
circle craze hit, the simplicity of the circles suggested a
natural cause at first. But then the patterns got more and
more elaborate, exhausting the probabilistic resources of
chance or natural law (or both) to account for them. In
addition, they exhibited complex specified information, like
mathematical forms only minds would comprehend. This
shows that scientists intuitively use the filter, even if they247
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don’t accept Dembski’s intelligent design theory.
Explanatory Filter in Action: Fairy Circles in Africa
非洲童话界的解释性过滤

A test case is underway in Africa. Live
Science reported that researchers are stumped at
mysterious circles out in the middle of nowhere,
111 miles from the nearest village. “In the sandy
desert grasslands of Namibia in southern Africa,
mysterious bare spots known as “fairy circles” will
form and then disappear years later for no reason
anyone can determine,” reporter Stephanie
Pappas wrote. “A new look at these strange
patterns doesn’t solve the wistful mystery but at
least reveals that the largest of the circles can
linger for a lifetime.”
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Explanatory Filter in Action: Fairy Circles in Africa
非洲童话界的解释性过滤
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Geometric circles are familiar in the plant
kingdom. Some mushrooms grow in circles called “fairy
rings.” Some superstitious people coming across these
near-perfect circles of mushrooms jumped to the
conclusion that mystical spirits were at work in the forest
(thus the name). They didn’t use the explanatory filter
correctly; it shows that rushing to a design inference can
be unwarranted. Some grasses and bushes can also be
found growing in circles. The usual explanation is that
the organism moves outward in all directions as
nutrients in the center are exhausted. That explanation,
though, does not fit the African fairy circles. They
cannot yet be explained by nutrients, toxic vapors,
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termites or other natural causes so far examined.
Explanatory Filter in Action: Fairy Circles in Africa
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非洲童话界的解释性过滤
“The why question is very difficult,” said study researcher Walter
Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University. “There are a number
of hypotheses on the table, and the evidence for none of them is
convincing.”
This is an example of the Explanatory Filter in action (though
Tschinkel should have said the how question, not the why question–
the province of philosphy). Natural causes are the default, and will
most likely be found for such simple geometric shapes. These
circles, ranging from 12 to 40 feet in diameter, are not perfect, some
are oblong, and they appear randomly spaced. Still, since it is a
“persistent enigma,” scientists cannot and should not rule out design
(i.e., that unseen tribes have a purpose for clearing the ground in an
unusual way).
Researchers are treating this like a puzzle-solving expedition that,
even though unlikely to be solved soon, will yield an answer
eventually. “That’s science, isn’t it?” Tschinkel remarked. “If you
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knew the answer ahead of time, it wouldn’t be much fun.”
Explanatory Filter in Action: Fairy Circles in Africa
非洲童话界的解释性过滤
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There’s nothing unusual about approaching a scientific
puzzle Dembski’s way. The Explanatory Filter is an
intuitive puzzle-solving method that can be mathematically
formalized, as Dembski has done. The controversy comes
when evolutionists do think they know the answer ahead
of time, and it is “not design.” Yet they will turn around
and accept the design inference for crop circles and SETI.
We believe a natural explanation will be found for these
African “fairy circles,” but the goal of every scientist should
be to keep an open mind, consider all the reasonable
causes (including intelligent causes, which we can
determine from uniform experience and probability), and to
follow the evidence where it leads.
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