Unhyping big science.

Let's Tell the Truth about Science Funding
Evolution News & Views

A false and sentimental glow surrounds science in the minds of many outside the science world. A reverent belief in the purity of scientists, so tender and mild (except for those intelligent-design scoundrels), is a badge of membership for the enlightened. The cult of science all but denies that professionals in the field are human beings, subject to the familiar corruptions that go with money, power, and prestige.

But then occasionally a scientist or other insider will come along and dash a pitcher of cold water on all that. letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal by Professor Daniel Metz is thus refreshing. He replies to an  op-ed by MIT president L. Rafael Reif, who laments what Reif sees as the underfunding of basic science.

Interesting guy -- Metz retired as a professor of General Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now races cars among other pursuits. Writes Dr. Metz:

Mr. Reif ignores some facts associated with government funding of research, much of which is funded at universities. Nearly all government-sponsored projects are funded in response to a request for proposals (RFPs). The directions of funded research are thus established not by scientists, but by bureaucrats in the funding agencies. The bureaucrats are graduates of an old-boy network that rewards alumni, contacts, trendism and longevity, with proposal quality coming dead last. It is positively guaranteed that any big, new, government research initiative will send money to Palo Alto, Berkeley, Austin, Ann Arbor, Madison, Champaign and Cambridge.

Government funding of university research has bastardized the definition of a "professor." New assistant professors are quick to realize that actually teaching classes has nothing whatsoever to do with their desire for long-term success and tenure, and in fact teaching is a disincentive. Only bringing in outside research money counts. Universities have become addicted to the mother's milk of government funding. Any major research university could reduce its budget by 50% or more simply by requiring the faculty to actually teach a few classes now and then.

Em. Prof. L. Daniel Metz
Champaign, Ill.

Indeed, the incestuous world of science grants is one of the best-kept secrets of the Federal Government. Billions of dollars are involved and Congressional oversight is unimpressive. Moreover, the system is so big that it effectively shapes research priorities of universities, rather than responding to them. The Federal Government controls and monopolizes science research, and the whole business is in the service of something quite other than the legendary disinterested search for truth.

Addicted and engorged, Big Science isn't what most of the public pictures it to be. Professors don't so much profess -- they suck money as through a straw, thanks to a system that epitomizes the kinds of corruption we associate with government. Now give them more funding? Come to think of it, Rafael Reif is not exactly disinterested on the subject.


Among all the reasons to doubt the authority of a scientific consensus on all matters, this would be one.

False flag?

Michael Zimmerman of Clergy Letter Project Joins Atheists in Making Hay from Dubious "Petition"
David Klinghoffer 

Writing for the Huffington Post, Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project has clambered onboard with atheist bloggers Jerry Coyne, P.Z. Myers, and Dan Arel to make hay from a petition effort to ban teaching evolution in public schools. As noted here yesterday, that effort is a very likely phony, transparently so, a false flag operation carried out not by evolution critics but by Darwinists.

That appears to be why the petition's initiator, purportedly seeking signatures, sent it out to P.Z. Myers and other likeminded folks. When I checked last, the few signatures it had received were almost all joke names.

Zimmerman, unlike Coyne, Myers, or Arel, is cagey and seems to hedge on whether the petition is genuine. He writes, "Make no mistake about it. I fully understand that the petition to ban the teaching of evolution is an amateurish publicity stunt -- one without any chance of becoming law." His headline announces, "A Petition Asking Mike Pence to Ban Evolution in the Name of Religion? Utter Hogwash!" But undeterred, he uses it to plunge into a standard lecture about how his Clergy Letter proves that evolution poses no challenge to religious faith.

The simplest and politest response to such a claim is to say that it is utter nonsense. Indeed, the mere existence of The Clergy Letter Project, an organization I founded and currently lead, offers incontrovertible proof of the absurdity of this claim. The Clergy Letter Project consists of more than 14,000 members of the clergy from all corners of the United States representing a wide array of religions and denominations. Members are liberal and conservative, male and female, young and old, and represent every race and ethnicity imaginable. They have only one thing in common: they know that religion and science can be compatible and that the latter poses no threat to the former.

What's that he said about "hogwash"? What Zimmerman has done is launched his own dubious publicity stunt on the back of another dubious publicity stunt. If the petition itself is phony, what you properly do is either point that out, or ignore it.

Obviously, a "moratorium" on teaching evolution is a stupid and wrong thing to propose (it's the opposite of what we advise). Or rather, it would be stupid and wrong if it were offered in sincerity. But a phony proposal intended to generate scare headlines by opportunistic atheists and Darwin apologists, to dishonestly cast evolution skeptics in a false and negative light, doesn't rise to the level of being evaluated on its merits. Zimmerman may think the petition is "hogwash" but if so, it should provide no platform for publicizing his Clergy Letter.

That having been said, I can't let this drop without addressing Zimmerman's own misleading stab at propagandizing for his organization. Take a moment to analyze his statement that "religion and science can be compatible and that the latter poses no threat to the former." As Darwinists often do, he elides there the question of whether Darwinian theory, the scientific idea in question, is satisfactory as science. Or is Darwinism, like the "petition," doubtful too? Agreed, religion is compatible with good science. Absolutely. However, is my religion or yours compatible with bad science, failed science, outdated science, any or all ideas that present themselves in the guise of "science"? That's not a case I'd be eager to try to make.

Zimmerman's Clergy Letter is all vague generalities, useful in efforts to cast orthodox evolutionary theory as something it's not: a harmless fuzzball. Empirical study tells a different story. As John West shows from new polling data in our recent report "Darwin's Corrosive Idea," the creaky, outdated science of neo-Darwinism is indeed at odds with traditional faith, on which it has a corrosive, documented effect. On the other hand, objective evidence of design, in biology and cosmology, is both strong science and what faith traditions would expect.


Take a moment and download the report now. See for yourself.

A clash of Titans. XLI

 

History Judges Vladimir Lenin.

File under "Well said" XLIV

1Corinthians3:18NASB"Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise." The apostle Paul.

As tends to be the case:

Two Flagella Are Better than One
Evolution News & Views 

As imaging improves, so does knowledge of the workings of the bacterial flagellum. Two new papers point out new findings about these outboard motors that contribute to the argument that they are irreducibly complex and intelligently designed. As could be predicted, neither attempts any explanation of how they could have evolved.

Secondary Flagella


One  paper in PNAS by German scientists explores the advantage of having two flagella, one at the rear and another one or two on the sides. If you were a blind bacterium trying to find your way up a gradient, you would only have one trick in your steering kit: the "run-reverse-flick" move. Trouble is, when you operate that move, it often turns you 90 degrees. That's not helpful when you want to make progress up the gradient. The scientists found that having a secondary flagellum reduces that angle, even when it doesn't not provide extra power:

Flagella-mediated motility is an important or even crucial propagation factor for many bacteria. A number of polarly flagellated species possess a distinct secondary flagellar system, which, as current models suggest, allows more effective swimming under conditions of elevated viscosity or across surfaces. In this study, we demonstrate that such a secondary flagellar system may also exert beneficial effects in bacterial spreading by increasing the directional persistence through lowering the cellular turning angles. The strategy of increasing directional persistence to improve animal spreading efficiency has been proposed previously by theoretical modeling, and here we provide a specific example of how this strategy is used by bacteria. (Emphasis added.)
Corking the Torque

During assembly of a flagellum, the bacterium must avoid starting the engines before they are anchored in place. This is similar to fastening an outboard motor to a boat: turning the motor on could be dangerous.Another paper in PNAS  describes how a particular protein in the stator plugs its ion channel until the stator is properly positioned in the membrane. In essence, it waits for a signal that assembly is complete, then undergoes a conformational change that allows the ions that drive the motor to flow.
  Stator is the energy-converting membrane protein complex in the flagellar motor. Its ion-conducting activity is only activated when incorporated into the motor, but the mechanism for assembly-coupled activation remains a mystery. In this study, we solved the structure of a C-terminal fragment of the sodium-driven stator protein PomB (PomBC), the region responsible for anchoring the stator unit, at 2.0-� resolution. In vivo disulfide cross-linking studies of PomB double-Cys mutants and their motility assay suggested that the N-terminal region of PomBC changes its conformation, which is expected for MotB, the counterpart of PomB in the proton-driven Salmonella motor, in the final step of the stator assembly around the rotor.
It's remarkable that scientists can now look at parts of machines at two angstrom resolution -- two 10 billionths of a meter! The remarkable team at Nagoya University in Japan, who produced beautiful animations of flagella, has done it again, uncovering new aspects of these amazing molecular machines. The particular part of one protein essentially plugs up the ion channel, like a cork in a bottle:

Because the cross- linking did not affect stator assembly, we suspected that the cross-linking inhibits the ion conductivity of the stator channel. PomB/MotB has a periplasmic short segment called a "plug" just at the C terminal to their single transmembrane region...
The scientists mention in passing that the sodium-driven motors like in Vibrio routinely operate at over 100,000 RPM (1,700 Hz). Proton-driven flagella in E. coli and Salmonella are typically slower, about 300 Hz. The high-performance flagella have extra parts for their turbo-charged activity, just like one would expect to find in a Ferrari:

The basal body of the Vibrio motor has two unique ring structures, the T-ring and the H-ring. These extra rings are thought to reinforce the motor to resist the high-speed rotation. Recent structural study demonstrated that FlgT acts as an assembly base or scaffold for both the ring structures. The T-ring is made up of MotX and MotY, and is located beneath the P-ring, which is a part of a bushing structure for the rod, thereby believed not to rotate. The T-ring is an essential component to incorporate the stator into the motor. The periplasmic region of PomB is likely to bind to MotX, and MotX is connected to the basal body through the N-terminal domain of MotY. Thus, the stator of the sodium-driven motor is tightly fixed not only to the PG layer but also to the basal body through the interaction between PomB and the T-ring. Despite the rigid anchoring structure, the stator of the sodium-driven motor still shows a dynamic behavior dependent on the binding of sodium ion to PomB.
In this excerpt from their final discussion, notice how they describe the stepwise, coordinated assembly of parts before the ion-drive motor goes into action:

On the basis of this study and together with our previous results, we propose a model for activation mechanism of the Vibrio sodium-driven motor (Fig. S6). The stator diffusing in the cell membrane is in an inactive state. When the stator reaches around the rotor, PomA interacts with FliG. This interaction triggers opening of a"plug," allowing sodium ion to translocate into the channel of the stator. The sodium flow may induce the binding of PomB to the T-ring. This step probably includes a conformational change of the disordered N-terminal region of the PEM. After that, the N-terminal two-thirds of ?1 changes its conformation to an extended form to anchor to the PG layer [peptidoglycan layer, part of the external membrane].
This is just what Dr. Scott Minnich pointed out in  Unlocking the Mystery of Life 12 years ago. The assembly instructions, he said, are even more irreducibly complex than the motor itself. Parts are arriving on time and moving into place in a programmed sequence, with feedback to the nucleus affecting how many parts are to be manufactured. Dr. Jonathan Wells added, "What we see is irreducible complexity all the way down." Twelve years of closer looks at these astonishing machines have only amplified those conclusions.

Yet more iconoclasm

Now It's Whale Hips: Another Icon of Darwinian Evolution, Vestigial Structures, Takes a Hit
David Klinghoffer

In the case presented by advocates of Darwinian evolution, vestigial organs are a star in the firmament, frequently and gloatingly pointed to. Darwin himself cited them as such in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, referring to body parts like the human appendix that, he believed, no longer serve a function:

On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility... should so frequently occur.

Of course the appendix is a great example of an organ once thought to be without utility that now turns out to serve a vital role.


In the catalogue of purported vestigial parts, whale hips are "the marquee example,"  writes Stephanie Keep at the absurdly named "Science League of America" blog populated by our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Center for Science Education. Unfortunately whale hips have now gone the way of appendix.  paper in the journal Evolution reports reports that rather than being a useless reminder of the evolutionary past, when whale ancestor Pakicetus strode the land on all fours, they in fact serve an unquestionably important The pelvic bone supports the muscles that guide the penis. In male whales and other cetaceans, performance and thus successful sexual competition hinge on the size of the hips. The paper explains:

Male genitalia evolve rapidly, probably as a result of sexual selection. Whether this pattern extends to the internal infrastructure that influences genital movements remains unknown. Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) offer a unique opportunity to test this hypothesis: since evolving from land-dwelling ancestors, they lost external hind limbs and evolved a highly reduced pelvis which seems to serve no other function except to anchor muscles that maneuver the penis. Here we create a novel morphometric pipeline to analyze the size and shape evolution of pelvic bones from 130 individuals (29 species) in the context of inferred mating system. We present two main findings: 1) males from species with relatively intense sexual selection (inferred by relative testes size) have evolved relatively large penises and pelvic bones compared to their body size, and 2) pelvic bone shape diverges more quickly in species pairs that have diverged in inferred mating system. Neither pattern was observed in the anterior-most pair of vertebral ribs, which served as a negative control. This study provides evidence that sexual selection can affect internal anatomy that controls male genitalia. These important functions may explain why cetacean pelvic bones have not been lost through evolutionary time.

Under selection pressure from reality, Darwinists have already had to back away from Darwin's own understanding of what it means for a structure to be vestigial. Rather than serving no purpose, writes Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution Is True, now being vestigial can mean serving a different purpose than in one's distant ancestors. He defines "vestigial trait" this way:

A trait that is the evolutionary remnant of a feature once useful in an ancestral species but that is no longer useful in the same way. Vestigial traits can be either nonfunctional (the wings of the kiwi) or co-opted for new uses (the wings of the ostrich).

Stephanie Keep agrees:[T]here's a problem when vestigial structures are defined as evolutionary remnants that have no function. As I discussed in a previous post , the correct way to describe a vestigial structure is to say that it no longer has its original function.
   She is excited about Carl Zimmer's post on the subject, which elaborates:
     While [whale hips] may not be essential for walking, they still matter a lot to whales. To see why, we have to go back to those hips of land mammals. They are important for walking on land, but they serve other purposes, too. Among other things, they anchor muscles that control the sex organs. If these muscles are anesthetized in men, for example, they have a hard time gaining an erection.

As whale hips stopped mattering to walking, they didn't stop mattering to having sex. In male whales, the pelvis controls the penis with an especially elaborate set of muscles. In some whale and dolphin species, these muscles make the penis downright prehensile.You see the problem. Whale hips are "vestigial" yet still extremely important. Comments our colleague Michael Behe, "So doesn't that make everything a vestigial structure from a Darwinian viewpoint? And if so, of what use is the word?" Or as Jonathan Wells wrote here back in 2009 in reviewing Coyne's book ("The Myth of Vestigial Organs and Bad Design: Why Darwinism Is False"):
  As [biologist Steven] Scadding had pointed out nearly thirty years ago, ... Darwin's argument rested on lack of function, not change of function. Furthermore, if vestigiality were redefined as Coyne proposes, it would include many features never before thought to be vestigial. For example, if the human arm evolved from the leg of a four-footed mammal (as Darwinists claim), then the human arm is vestigial. And if (as Coyne argues) the wings of flying birds evolved from feathered forelimbs of dinosaurs that used them for other purposes, then the wings of flying birds are vestigial. This is the opposite of what most people mean by "vestigial."

In this way, the concept of a vestigial trait is reduced to meaninglessness. In the most minimal definition, evolution denotes change over of time. No trait goes unchanged. Under the framework of Darwinian evolution, therefore, everything is vestigial. So nothing is.

This is not just our observation. The scientists who revealed the usefulness of whale hips are rethinking what it means to be vestigial. Or so it sounds from the remarks of biologist Matthew Dean at USC, a co-author of the paper in Evolution, commenting in  Science Daily:
   "Our research really changes the way we think about the evolution of whale pelvic bones in particular, but more generally about structures we call 'vestigial.' As a parallel, we are now learning that our appendix is actually quite important in several immune processes, not a functionally useless structure," Dean said.

Anyone who thinks whale hips are functionless, just like your appendix, should try telling that to a lonely gentleman whale. The career of this evolutionary icon isn't over yet, I'm sure, but its importance in the evolutionary pantheon is due for a serious downgrade.

On the Piltdown Hoax and human exceptionalism

What the Piltdown Hoax Tells Us, 104 Years Later

Michael Flannery 

A curious anniversary falls this weekend. On December 18, 1912, the infamous Piltdown hoax was unveiled to an astonished audience of the Geological Society of London by lawyer and amateur archeologist Charles Dawson (1864-1916) and Arthur Smith Woodward (1864-1944) of the British Museum. What they showed was nothing short of amazing: the apparent remains of a human-like skull attached to an ape-like jaw. Allegedly unearthed at the Piltdown gravel pit in East Sussex, England, it was hailed as the missing link -- a truly history-making discovery!

It would take nearly 41 years to expose the artifact as a fraud. On November 21, 1953, officials of the British Natural History Museum revealed the shocking truth: Piltdown man was a hoax, the combination of three species, a medieval human cranium, the jaw of a centuries-old young orangutan, and some fossilized chimpanzee teeth. Various culprits have been proposed, including famed Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and physician/novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). But most recent investigation suggests that the imposture was likely perpetrated by Dawson alone in an effort to gain recognition and election as a Fellow into the Royal Society (see "Piltdown hoax solved," Forbes, August 10, 2016).

Writing for Harper's on the second anniversary of the Piltdown exposure, paleontologist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), not one to look at an event or a phenomenon superficially, asked, "Was Charles Darwin Wrong About the Human Brain?" Eiseley noted that Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, was unimpressed with the Piltdown "find" from the beginning. Writing to a friend in August 1913 (just three months before his death), Wallace exclaimed, "The Piltdown skull does not prove much, if anything!" Why, asked Eiseley, had Wallace, almost alone among the scientific community, so summarily dismissed this apparently stunning missing link? The answer was simple: "he did not believe in a skull which had a modern brain box attached to an apparently primitive face and given, in the original estimates, an antiquity of something over a million years." The archeological "discovery" would have confirmed Darwin's Descent of Man in dramatic fashion. Indeed Piltdown man was, from a Darwinian perspective, even something that would have been predicted.

But Wallace's "voice of lonely protest," observed Eiseley, underscored "the abyss which yawned between man and ape" that Darwinians at the time blissfully ignored. Having observed primitive cultures in South America and the Malay Archipelago for more than twelve years, Wallace concluded (quoting Eiseley) that humans' "mental powers were far in excess of what they really needed to carry on the simple food-gathering techniques by which they survived." Certainly no process of natural selection was adequate to produce such superior powers of art, reason, and morals. For Wallace, the human brain freed mankind from the tyranny of natural selection:

Here, then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man. On this view of his special attributes, we may admit, that even those who claim for him a position as an order, or a sub-kingdom by himself, have some show of reason on their side. He is, indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irrestistibly modify all other organic beings (Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection

, 1870).

How, then, do we account for this impressive array of human attributes? Wallace thought that mankind might well have emerged comparatively recently, and that the rapid evolution of the modern human brain would confirm that "distinct and higher agencies" have been responsible for these mental attributes and attainments.

Eiseley confessed, "Since the exposure of the Piltdown hoax all of the evidence at our command -- and it is considerable -- points to man, in his present form, as being one of the youngest and newest of all earth's swarming inhabitants. . . . Today, with the solution of the Piltdown enigma, we must settle the question of the time involved in favor of Wallace, not Darwin." Although Eiseley thought some other wholly naturalistic explanation might account for the late and virtually saltationist expansion of the human intellect, he confessed that "science . . . has yet to explain how we have come so far so fast, nor has it any completely satisfactory answer to the question asked by Wallace long ago."

Today we still wait for an explanation, and it must be admitted that various speculations along the lines of blind chance and necessity or natural selection remain as unsatisfactory as when Eiseley was writing more than sixty years ago. A century after Wallace's dismissal of Piltdown man, science still confirms Eiseley's assessment and Wallace's vindication. The chart below shows the timeline for ascending brain size/body weight estimates for Sahelanthropus, Australopithecus afarensis, early Homo, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, H. heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, and H. sapiens.

This chart shows relative brain size as cm3 per 50 kg of body weight. Adapted with modifications from Robert Jurmain, Lynn Kilgore, et al.,

 Introduction to Physical Anthropology

 , 2013-2014 ed. (Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2014), p. 357, and "Homo habilis," 

 Encyclopedia Britannica

, updated August 15, 2015.

Clearly brain size and capacity has not only increased, but increased at a very late and remarkably accelerated pace. Of course brain size is not the only measure of intellectual capacity, other factors may be involved. Some, for example, emphasize that Neanderthals, the closest historically to humans, possessed brains that were larger in absolute size to us. But as recent analysis has uncovered, the Neanderthal brain was quite different from its human counterpart. Being much more elongated than globular, the indications are that Neanderthals "reached large brain sizes along different evolutionary pathways." Their speculation that unique patterns of brain development in H. sapiens would have become "a target for positive selection" merely begs Wallace's original question (see Gunz et al., "Brain development after birth differs between Neanderthals and modern humans," Current Biology, Nov. 2010).

So the question remains: How did humans acquire such vast intellectual capacities so comparatively recently and so rapidly? Wallace called upon an "Overruling Intelligence" to explain human intelligence and many other features of complexity in biology and the cosmos. While Darwinians continue to search for some naturalistic cause, others, like British physician James Le Fanu, point out that the disappointments in high-tech solutions to the nature of the intellect and the human mind so touted by the human genome project and promised in the "Decade of the Brain" in the 1990s should force a reassessment of our species as truly unique (Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, 2009).

Eiseley's long forgotten but intriguing article is fortunately now available as "The Real Secret of Piltdown" in a new 2-volume set of his collected essays. As we reflect on the 104th anniversary of arguably science's greatest fraud, Eiseley's conclusion rings is as pertinent today as when it was first written:

The true secret of Piltdown, though thought by the public to be merely the revelation of an unscrupulous forgery, lies in the fact that it has forced science to reexamine carefully the history of the most remarkable creation in the world -- the human brain.

If the Cambrian period of 530 million years ago poses serious challenges to Darwin's insistence upon slow, incremental change in the amazingly rapid proliferation of animals over a mere 5 to 6 million-year timespan (see Darwin's Doubt), then how much more should the transformational changes in the human brain over the past 100 to 200,000 years cause as serious reevaluation of the nature of human beings and the means by which they came to be. If the Cambrian "explosion" is just too much change over too little time to be explained by Darwinian processes, the human brain is way too much change over way too little time. Perhaps Wallace's view of the Piltdown hoax still holds an important lesson for us today. Maybe the most dramatic "explosion" of all is the one that rests within our crania.

Humpback Whales v. Darwin.

For the Love of Humpback Whales
Evolution News & Views

In the intelligent-design documentary  Living Waters, Illustra Media offers beautiful footage of humpback whales from above and below the ocean surface, heaving their massive bulk into the air, coming down with a mighty splash. Even more wondrous, though, is the design of these mammals that are perfectly adapted to full-time aquatic life, though they breathe air, lactate and give birth to live young like other mammals.

The film only had time to treat a couple of specific design aspects of whales, such as their complex vocal communications and the internal testes of the males -- traits that defy explanations based on gradual Darwinian evolution. There's much more to tell.

Humpbacks have been a lot in the news since August  and  November of last year. Before going further, take a minute to watch a new drone video posted by  National Geographic showing "The Rare Beauty of Dozens of Migrating Humpback Whales." Then look at 21 art-quality photos of the whales in a gallery on the same page. They are truly amazing creatures, larger than any dinosaur that ever lived.

Flipper Phone and Breaches of Etiquette

You may remember the film's discussion about humpback whale singing, but New Scientist shares a new twist in their communication.

It's something all whale-watchers yearn to see. The sight of whales breaking the surface and slapping their fins on the water is a true spectacle -- but the animals don't do it just for show.
Instead, it appears that all that splashing is about messaging other whales, and the big splashes are for long-distance calls. [Emphasis added.]

Researchers from the University of Queensland followed 94 different groups of humpbacks during their annual migration. They found that breaching was more frequent when another pod was more than four kilometers away, but fin-slapping was more common when other whales were coming or leaving the pod. They also seemed to be doing it more often in windy conditions, perhaps because the conditions made vocalizations less audible. It may be that the whales aren't just engaging in these energy-intensive behaviors for fun or to dislodge parasites; they could be texting messages over the waves.

Mugging for the Camera

Live Science posts a short article showing humpbacks "mugging" for tour boats, seeking attention, indicating their social intelligence and curiosity. Sometimes a whale will lift one eye out of the water as if to get a better look. The article lists some of the superlatives of humpback whales:

They can grow as long as 60 feet (18 meters) in length.

They migrate farther than any other mammal.

Than can eat up to 3,000 pounds of food a day.

These don't sound quite like traits that could be inherited from a wolf- or cow-like ancestor.

Again, watch the short video clip in the article taken from a drone. The whales dwarf the tour boat. Undoubtedly the tourists were glad they were not surrounded by great white sharks.

Conservation Success

Whale sightings have increased off the coast of New York and New Jersey in recent years. Last month, a humpback was spotted miles up the Hudson River. In the past, marine biologists took this as a sign of distress, since they are usually not found there. This time,  Phys.org  says, they think the cleaner water due to conservation efforts is allowing more fish to thrive, enticing the beasts to swim in closer to New York City. In addition to humpbacks, New Yorkers have seen endangered right whales making rare appearances.

Population Boom

Before whaling was banned in 1965, humpbacks in the North Pacific dropped from an estimated 15,000 individuals to less than a thousand,  Science Daily says. After they were further protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1973, their numbers began to climb. Now, there are about 21,000 individuals frolicking in the area. "The recovery has been slow, in part because humpback whales can live to be 70 years of age and their recovery is driven primarily by local fidelity and recruitment."

What do they mean by "local fidelity and recruitment"? A paper in  Endangered Species Research explains. Oregon State marine biologists have determined that most individuals they observed in Glacier Bay are either the same individuals that were present decades ago, or their descendants. This implies that individuals remember their favorite feeding grounds. Outsiders do not often stumble in to an area. Instead, the knowledge of where to go is primarily inherited. This has important implications for conservation efforts.

How can scientists identify specific whales? Science Daily says that the markings on humpbacks are unique to each individual. "Each individual whale has a tail, or fluke, as unique as a fingerprint," National Geographic adds. "No two flukes are alike, which makes the whales easy to track."

Conservation Challenges

Despite these successes, all is not well. BBC News  posted a worrying video clip of a humpback whale calf caught in shark nets off the coast of Australia. Its mother kept pushing it up so it could breathe. Fortunately, a rescue team saw the predicament and moved in to cut away the nets; mother and calf swam away calmly.

Entanglement in fishing gear has been a longtime concern of Captain Dave Anderson, who appears in Living Waters. "Nearly 1,000 dolphins and whales die every day due to fishing gear entanglement," his  Whale Rescue page says. The page includes a video clip of his team going to great efforts day and night to approach entangled animals and cut away the ropes and nets that endanger their lives. Sometimes a freed whale will come near the boats afterward as if to say "Thank you."

Solving the problem of entanglement will require cooperation between marine biologists, governments and fishing companies. Science Daily reports on the magnitude of the problem:

Left-behind fishing gear that continues to catch -- sometimes called ghost fishing -- entraps sea life from the world's largest animal, the blue whale, to the critically endangered small tooth sawfish, according to a new study.
"Entanglement is the likely cause of death for many marine organisms, particularly whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, sharks, turtles and rays," lead author Martin Stelfox told Seeker. Stelfox is the founder and director of the Oliver Ridley Project, which is working to combat derelict nets and other equipment that continue to fish in the Indian Ocean. The problem occurs worldwide, however.

After compiling a list of losses, the researchers found that "Humpback whales were the most commonly caught animals, followed closely by the North Atlantic right whale." One promising trend is to make fishing gear out of biodegradable material, but fishermen need to be educated on the risk to these magnificent animals and learn to retrieve their nets and deposit them in designated collection points. We can each help by reducing plastic pollution that reaches the ocean, and by keeping mylar helium balloons from floating out to sea, where they are mistaken for food by whales, dolphins, and sea turtles.

Enjoy Humpbacks Up Close


If you are ever in Southern California, be sure to book a trip with Captain Dave Anderson's Whale and Dolphin Safari. He runs trips all year off Dana Point, which he calls the "Serengeti" of marine mammals. His trips have sighted humpbacks for most of the last few days.

Walt Disney and the future that was.

Fifty Years Later, Recalling Walt Disney and Scientism

John G. West 

Editor's note: December 15 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of filmmaker Walt Disney. Discovery Institute Senior Fellow John West is author of the new book  Walt Disney and Live-Action, which explores the meaning and making of Walt Disney's live-action features. In this article, he explores the role of scientism in Disney's work.

Someone once quipped that Walt Disney harbored "19th-century emotions in conflict with a 21st-century brain." The characterization was apt.

Disney, who died fifty years ago on December 15, was known for championing traditional morality and promoting nostalgia for a simpler past epitomized by small-town America. At the same time, he was widely recognized as a visionary futurist who enthusiastically embraced the new horizons offered by science and technology.

Disney's idiosyncratic mixture of moral traditionalism and techno-optimism didn't always seem to cohere, and it led people to admire him for vastly different reasons. Conservatives embraced Disney for his defense of Judeo-Christian morality, his unrepentant support for American republicanism, his love of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, and his distrust of big government and the welfare state. By contrast, fellow futurists were attracted to Disney's modernist ideas about urban planning, his exalted view of science and technology, and his utopian visions of human progress.

Although I have a keen appreciation for Disney and his achievements, I admit I'm not one of those who are especially enamored with his techno-optimism. During the last century, we've seen far too much destruction arising from the abuse of science and technology for me to believe that science can fundamentally reform the human heart or usher in a utopia. For me, scientific and technological progress is bittersweet. I think Disney was correct to see that science and technology can produce wondrous benefits for humanity. But they also make it easier for humans to accomplish their own destruction -- and that darker side of scientific and technological progress was rarely on display in Disney's projects as a futurist.

Consider his "Carousel of Progress," a stage show first developed for the 1964 World's Fair in New York City and later relocated to Disneyland and then Walt Disney World (where it still operates). Featuring "audio-animatronic" robots rather than live actors, the Carousel of Progress depicts the benefits to American society of the rapid technological advances during the first half of the 20th century. The audience meets an iconic middle-class American family at home circa 1900, the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1960s.

In the 1900s, the family marvels over laborsaving inventions such as cast-iron stoves, gas lamps, ice boxes, and telephones. In the 1920s, the home has been wired for electricity, leading to electric lights, electric sewing machines, refrigerators, toasters, and coffee percolators. In the 1940s, the home adds even bigger and more efficient electric appliances, and by the 1960s, electric appliances have made preparations for previously exhausting holidays like Christmas a breeze.

Each act of this unfolding march of progress is linked together by the song "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," a secular hymn to man's creativity and his mastery of his environment penned by Richard and Robert Sherman of Mary Poppins fame. The infectious tune boasts that human knowhow can make dreams a reality and usher in "a great, big, beautiful tomorrow":

So there's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow

Shining at the end of every day

There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow

Just a dream away

Disney's techno-optimism was also on display in the "Tomorrowland" area in Disneyland, and his planned but never-built "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT) in Florida. There is something alluring about the cheerful optimism of these efforts. But there is also something more than a little disturbing. The Carousel of Progress celebrated -- apparently without irony -- the use of television as parents' new "electronic babysitter," and the relocation of grandparents from their children's homes into segregated communities of seniors. The "House of the Future" at Disneyland featured modernist, plastic interiors and "irradiated food." Disney's vision for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was even more hideous, exhibiting many of the worst features of modernist urban planning: top-down micro-management of every part of life; the artificial separation of where people live and work and play; bleak Bauhaus-style architecture; and the attempt to herd everyone into mass transit.

The visual center of EPCOT was a modernist 30-story hotel that was designed to be seen from miles around, although more traditional architectural forms weren't completely forgotten. The city's 50-acre business and shopping district was supposed to include faux buildings and streets patterned after architecture from other parts of the world, all located within a giant, temperature-controlled enclosure -- in essence, one great big shopping mall. The narrator of an early promotional film for EPCOT promised: "In this climate-controlled environment, shoppers, theatergoers, and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions, protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity." Disney, who loved nature, who grew up amidst real small towns and farms, and who loved to travel to other parts of the world, planned to dispense with the natural environment in his city of the future. In his new artificial downtown, no one need ever experience the discomfort of the elements. Of course, neither would they experience its joys, including sunsets or summer breezes or raindrops or the songs of birds.

What rescued Walt Disney from being a completely uncritical champion of scientific and technological progress was not his ventures into theme parks or urban planning. It was some of his films. To be sure, his educational productions often promoted the same lop-sided techno-optimism, whether championing nuclear power in Our Friend the Atom (originally prepared for his weekly television show in 1957) or extolling the virtues of mass bombing in Victory Thru Air Power (1943). Fortunately, Disney's fictional productions displayed more ambiguity.The film in the Disney canon that offers arguably the most explicit warning about the abuse of science and technology is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), still the definitive cinematic adaptation of the Jules Verne novel of the same name. 20,000 Leagues depicts a supposedly civilized world where international powers employ science and technology for enslavement and death. The film's Captain Nemo is a twisted genius who ostensibly opposes the misuse of science, but who himself willingly employs science to kill others, even those not directly implicated in the crimes he opposes. At the end of the film, Nemo blows up his discoveries in an iconic mushroom cloud. To audiences in the 1950s, where fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills were a fact of life, the film's ending was likely even more powerful than it is today.

Softening the film's otherwise bleak ending, Disney included a hopeful voiceover before the final credits, repeating the words of Captain Nemo himself from earlier in the film: "There is hope for the future. And when the world is ready for a new and better life, all this will someday come to pass, in God's good time." But what ultimately makes 20,000 Leagues so powerful is not those hopeful words, but the film's unflinching portrait of the human capacity to misuse science, a depiction that even its final words cannot completely obliterate.The dangers of science and technology can also be seen in Disney's comic fantasies, especially The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963), two phenomenally popular films starring Disney's everyman, Fred MacMurray, as Professor Ned Brainard of mythical Medfield College. Brainard invents flying rubber, aka "flubber," a gooey substance that makes things defy gravity. Brainard is portrayed as a scientific genius, but also as a complete blunderer as a human being. With his single-minded devotion to science, he neglects his human relationships, leading him to miss his own wedding. Brainard is also oblivious to the societal consequences of his research. In Son of Flubber, he runs an experiment that inflicts widespread damage on the rest of his community even while he remains utterly clueless about what he has just done.

Both films highlight how non-scientists try to manipulate scientific discoveries for their own ends, satirizing in particular the behavior of politicians, the military, the IRS, and big business. Professor Brainard himself is shown to be corruptible, misusing his discoveries to take revenge on his romantic rival. For all of their celebration of the creativity of science, these comedies also warned against the pervasive dangers scientific progress can pose. As beneficial as science may be for society, it cannot be left free from social norms, and scientists themselves may not be the best judges of the cultural consequences of their discoveries.

But perhaps Disney's most scathing indictment of the dark side of technological progress came in a 1952 animated short based on the award-winning children's book, The Little House, which tells how a beloved house in the country is eventually swallowed up by the encroaching city. Disney's version of the tale was considerably darker than the original book, with the forces of technological development portrayed by Disney as nothing less than demonic.

The film explicitly attacks the modern slogan of "progress." While the screen reveals the depressing tenements now towering over the little house, the narrator ironically comments: "Everything was bigger and better, for this was the age of Progress." Each new wave of "progress" in the film produces ever more nightmarish results, finally resulting in an Inferno of crime and noise and traffic and tawdry 24-hour-a-day neon lights.

Here was a hellish vision of technological progress that seemed to represent the very antithesis of the techno-optimism of EPCOT. Disney may well have viewed EPCOT as an answer to the problems posed by technological progress in the past, showing how science and technology in the future could be harnessed to build better urban environments through all-pervasive master planning. How Disney squared his proposed micromanagement of civic life in EPCOT with his own faith in human freedom, free enterprise, and limited government is anybody's guess. For myself, I don't think Disney ever completely reconciled the tensions between his techno-optimism and the rest of his worldview.

But it's those unresolved tensions that made him all the more intriguing as a shaper of pop culture, and his films all the more worth watching.

A brave new world is closer than you think.

Experimenting with live patients / Some experts think it's OK to use vegetative human subjects
Wesley J. Smith

In the new novel "Hunters of Dune," biotechnologists of the future create "ghoulas" -- clones made from the dead -- in breeding contraptions known as "axlotl tanks." About 100 pages into the novel, the reader is shocked to learn that axlotl tanks are really unconscious women whose bodies have been expropriated to serve the greater good as so many gestating vats.

Happily, "Hunters of Dune" is science fiction. In the real world, we have a higher sense of morality and ethics. We would never use catastrophically disabled human beings so crassly. We understand that treating people as mere things violates the intrinsic dignity of the individual and the equal moral worth of all human life.

Well, most of us do.

Unfortunately, many bioethicists would feel right at home in a world in which unconscious people are converted into mere biological machines. Indeed, some of our most prominent bioethical and philosophical thinkers have published articles in the world's most respected medical and bioethical journals proposing that unconscious patients (those diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state) be used both as vital organ donors and the subjects of human medical experimentation.

Those we would exploit, we must first dehumanize. A favored proposal for stripping these vulnerable patients of their humanity is to redefine a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state into the legal equivalent of death -- even if the "dead" patient breathes without assistance.

"The essence of human existence," the influential Georgetown University bioethicist Robert Veatch wrote several years ago in the Journal of Clinical Ethics, "is the presence of integrated mind and body. ... For the human to exist in any legal, moral or socially significant sense, these two features must be present." And, since those diagnosed as vegetative are thought to be unaware, according to Veatch and many of his colleagues, they are merely "respiring cadavers" who could even be buried except that it "is simply unaesthetic to bury someone while still breathing."

The proposed redefinition of these living patients into dead, albeit breathing, bodies is intended to pave the way for using them as so many organ farms.

A 1996 article in the British medical journal Lancet put it this way: "If the legal definition of death were to be changed to include comprehensive irreversible loss of higher brain function, it would be possible to take the life of a patient (or more accurately to stop the heart, since the patient would be defined as dead) by a 'lethal' injection and then remove the organs needed for transplantation, subject to the usual criteria for consent."

  More recently, the notion that the bodies of persistent vegetative patients should be exploitable has been extended to the realm of cutting-edge medical research -- perhaps for the purpose of using these profoundly disabled people in place of primates or other animals.

Illustrating how respectable these radical views have become among the medical intelligentsia, articles and letters published during the past two years in the Journal of Medical Ethics have gone so far as urging that vegetative patients be used to test the safety of "xenotransplantation," that is, of transplanting animal (usually pig) organs into humans.

The usual ethical approach in medical research is to complete animal testing and then cautiously move into human trials with patients who could conceivably benefit from the experimental drug or procedure. But some bioethicists worry about the social, personal and sexual contacts of early pig organ recipients allowing a porcine virus to cross the species boundary and setting off a pandemic.

But quarantining pig organ recipients is seen as violating their personal autonomy. The proposed "ethical" remedy for this conundrum is to use persistent vegetative bodies in place of patients who actually need new organs in early xenotransplantation experiments.

"If it can be agreed upon that PVS bodies can be regarded as dead," Belgian professor An Ravelingien and several co-authors wrote in 2004, "then experimenting on them is legitimate under the same conditions as experiments on cadavers," so long as they consented to be used in this fashion prior to their impairment. To illustrate the extent to which these bioethicists dehumanize people diagnosed as , Ravelingien asserts that "living cadavers" in persistent vegetative state should not be called "patients" because that wrongly humanizes them and "impedes the discussion."

This year, Heather Draper, a bioethicist from Birmingham, England, took Ravelingien's argument one step further: "My own view is that people in a PVS are still alive," she wrote. But this seemingly obvious observation should not, in Draper's view, preclude these helpless patients from being used in animal organ transplant experiments. "I see no objection in principle to the proposal that competent people can decide, in advance, to participate in research when they become incompetent."

Nor, apparently, would Draper limit such human experimentation to those believed to be unconscious. "Helping others by taking part in clinical research is undoubtedly a good way to live out what may be years in a PVS or other less-compromised states," she writes.

Consider the kind of scenario this advocacy contemplates: Alice, a woman in her late 20s, nearly drowns. Aggressive CPR restarts her heart but she remains unresponsive for six months. Doctors tell her husband Jack she is in a persistent vegetative state -- and although the diagnosis is difficult to make with certainty and is often wrong -- they conclude she will never awaken.

Since the law now considers a persistent vegetative state the same as being dead, the state issues a death certificate. Jack assures doctors that Alice wanted her body used for science if she ever died or became profoundly incapacitated. Accordingly, her "breathing cadaver" is transferred from a nursing home to a major organ transplant center. Soon, her kidneys are removed for transplantation into renal patients. Doctors then implant pig kidneys. Alice survives the surgery and continues to breathe on her own. She lives for years in isolation as researchers continually test for dangerous porcine viral infections. When the experiment concludes, Alice is lethally injected -- which is not considered euthanasia because she is already legally dead -- and her remains are cremated.

It's an ugly picture, and it is important to emphasize that transplant surgeons do not currently harvest the organs of vegetative patients, nor do medical researchers use these most vulnerable people in unethical medical experiments. But if we want to keep it that way, we will have to make it unequivocally clear to the bioethicists and our lawmakers that patients diagnosed with persistent vegetative state are people, too. It's wrong to reduce them into the nonfictional equivalents of axlotl tanks.

C.S.I Unhyped?

Darwinists' Just so stories are beyond parody.

The 12 Points of Evolution: Evolutionists Outdo The Office

And Air Travel.
Cornelius Hunter

When The Office manager Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) gives a guest lecture at the local business school, he reveals not only the depths of his ignorance but his lack of self-awareness. At one point he hilariously makes an attempt at profundity, informing the students with all assuredness that “There are four kinds of business: Tourism, food service, railroads, and sales.” Realizing his categories have left something out he quickly adds “And hospitals-slash-manufacturing. And air travel.” Scott hasn’t had a deep thought in his life, yet is certain his knowledge and intellect tower over those around him.

I was reminded of Carell’s hilarious portrayal of Scott this week when evolutionist Dan Graur made an attempt to describe “All of evolutionary biology” in 12 points. One can picture Graur, like Carell, starting with the four main points of evolution, and quickly realizing there is another point or two that he left out. But Graur’s first point is beyond anything fiction writers could have dreamed up:

1. Evolutionary biology is ruled by handful of logical principles, each of which has repeatedly withstood rigorous empirical and observational testing.

Logical principles? Rigorous empirical testing? You’ve got to be kidding. The entire biological world arising by chance comes from logical principles? A theory that contradicts science at every turn has repeatedly withstood rigorous testing? The sheer pompous absurdity leaves Carell in the dust.

But it gets better.

5. All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point.

Here Graur has spoken the unspeakable. In his ramblings Graur has laid bare the uncomfortable truth: evolutionary thought holds that the world arose spontaneously. Those Epicurean chance events, whether swerving atoms or mutating molecules, conspired to create everything we see. The idea is prima facie ridiculous and evolutionists do everything to dress it up with more palatable notions of natural selection, fitness landscapes, and all manner of Aristotelian euphemisms (“Dinosaurs were experimenting with flight”).

Not surprisingly evolutionists rushed in to cover over the embarrassment. Outdoing Steve Carell, Matthew Cobb hilariously added predation:

I think the main thing that’s not quite right about this is 5, “All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point”. While this is essentially true, it misses out two of the most significant novelties in the history of life, which were not created by mutation, but instead by instances of predation that went wrong and instead produced symbiosis, with one kind of cell living inside another. The first such event took place around 2 billion years ago, somewhere in the ocean. Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small organisms called prokaryotes which had no cell nucleus or mitochondria (these are the tiny cellular structures that help provide you and me and giraffes and mushrooms with energy). Everything changed when one unicellular life-form, known as an achaebacterium, tried to eat another, called a eubacterium. On this one occasion the eubacterium survived inside its would-be predator and became trapped, losing many of its genes to its host and eventually turning into a molecular powerhouse – the mitochondrion – that produced energy from chemical reactions and was used by the new eukaryotic cell. These new eukaryotic life-forms were a weird hybrid, composed of two different organisms. They were our ancestors. A second, similar, event occurred around a billion years ago, when a eukaryotic cell, complete with mitochondria, engulfed a eubacterium that had long ago evolved the trick of acquiring energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. Predation went wrong again, and another form of symbiosis eventually appeared. This gave rise to algae and eventually plants, in which small organelles called chloroplasts, the descendants of the intended eubacterial victim, turn light into energy for the benefit of the eukaryotic host.

Of course one could also add any number of other evolutionary just-so stories, from Woese’s network of horizontal gene transfer creating a coordinated lateral evolution to retroviruses controlling embryonic development, evolutionary story-telling has no shortage of mechanisms that, as luck would have it, not only were created by evolution but, in turn, have produced more evolutionary change of their own.

The serendipity is staggering. Cobb’s fortuitous predators, as well as all the other imagined evolutionary mechanisms must have been, ultimately, created by those random mutations.

Graur put his finger on it.

All the evolutionary just-so stories, no matter how ridiculous, nonetheless owe their existence to those chance mutations. The rest is serendipity, just ask Michael Scott.