Yet another zombie apocalypse.

To Launch Zombie Science with Jonathan Wells, Join Us April 18 at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

The mystery of life — accounting for the variety and complexity of animals to which history has given rise — is the heart of the evolution controversy. So what better place could there be to celebrate a provocative new contribution to that debate than at…the zoo?


Think of it. People go to a zoo to stand in awe at the wonder of life in its many forms. All those gorgeous animals, each appearing to be a superb work of art in itself, are together no more than the product of blindly swerving, shuffling bit of matters, unplanned, unwanted genetic junk washed up on Earth’s shore. That’s what Darwinists contend. And they claim to have the science all tied up in a neat bundle to prove it. Are they right? Biologist Jonathan Wells has been at the forefront of a movement in science arguing that evolutionists practice zombie science — animating a failed, empirically unsupported theory that ought to have been buried long ago.On April 18, join us at the renowned Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle for the national launch  of Dr. Wells’s new book Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution. Celebrate with us as Wells speaks about his book and leads a Q&A discussion with the audience. It’s the official publication date, so you can be one of the first people to get a signed copy!

Says paleontologist Günter Bechly, “Wells’s book represents an important contribution for a paradigm change that is long overdue.” Seattle’s own Michael Medved, nationally syndicated radio host, agrees: “Jonathan Wells delivers here with his customary gusto and clarity. This important new book makes a persuasive case.”

More than 15 years ago, Dr. Wells took the science world by storm with Icons of Evolution, a book showing how biology textbooks routinely promote Darwinism using bogus evidence — icons of evolution like Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings and peppered moths glued to tree trunks. Critics complained that Wells had merely gathered a handful of innocent textbook errors and blown them out of proportion. Now, in Zombie Science, Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist?

Science has enriched our lives and led to countless discoveries, but as Dr. Wells argues, it is being corrupted. Empirical science is devolving into zombie science, shuffling along unfazed by opposing evidence. Discredited icons of evolution rise from the dead while more icons — equally bogus — join their ranks. Like a B horror movie, they just keep coming!

Watch the trailer for the book here.

We’ll meet in the Education Center Auditorium, Woodland Park Zoo, 750 N. 50th Street in Seattle. There will be a reception at 6:45 pm, and auditorium doors will open at 7. The event will run from 7:30 to 9 pm. It’s free! But you must register.  Please do so here.

Zombies are make-believe, but zombie science is real, demanding absolute power in labs, journals, classrooms, culture, and the media. Is there a solution? Wells is sure of it, and he points the way.

The feather v. Darwin.

Feather Design Is Better than Thought
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Man-made designs often get simpler the deeper you look. Once you get inside a steel girder or wallboard, for instance, the material looks basically homogeneous. Biological materials, by contrast, “are complex composites that are hierarchically structured and multifunctional,” notes Theagarten Lingham-Soliar in a paper on  Nature Scientific Reports.

We all know that feathers have an elegant shape for flight and insulation: they are self-healing, aerodynamic, and lightweight yet strong. But when this materials scientist from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa inspected bird feathers with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), he found wonderful things — all the way down to the molecular level.

First, some terminology. The main shaft of a feather is called a rachis (rey-kis), which tapers from base to tip like a long, narrow cone. Branching off the rachis are barbs. Branching off the barbs are barbules with tiny hooks that zip the barbules together, forming the familiar feather surface. These are demonstrated in Illustra Media’s film Flight:  Flight: The Genius of Birds. (See a short video clip about feathers at the film site). If you examine the rachis in cross-section, you will see some medullary  pith in the center, surrounded by a stiff cortex of tough fibers made of the protein keratin.

Keratin is a very unique protein. Lingham-Soliar describes how the specific molecular arrangement of keratin makes it ideal for feathers:

Feathers of flying birds are subjected to extraordinary aerodynamic forces during flight. They are made of a remarkably hard material, keratin. During the first half of the last century pioneering X-ray studies indicated that the conformation of the polypeptide chain in the hard keratins of birds and reptiles is based on the β-pleated-sheet (β-form) rather than the coiled-coil α-helix (α-form) found in mammalian keratins. Early use of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) on chicken and seagull feather rachises showed that β-keratin was composed of a framework of fine microfibrils approximately 30 angstroms (Å) in diameter and that these long protein filaments were surrounded by an amorphous protein matrix, each filament possessing a helical structure with four repeating units per turn.
The cortical fibers of keratin along the rachis are called syncytial barbule fibers, or SBFs for short. “SBFs form long, continuous filaments of β-keratin, the majority of which are tightly assembled parallel to the longitudinal axis of the rachis,” Lingham-Soliar says — but not all of them. Therein lays a tale. What he found about those SBFs solves two design problems for the bird, and may inspire a new generation of structural engineers. Here’s the problem:

Perhaps one of the most intriguing questions in bird flight involves how toughness or a high work of fracture is achieved in the cortex of the rachis and barbs. Put another way, what are the material conditions that would help prevent (or delay) the feather from splitting or cracking down its length or across its hoop (circumference) during the stresses of flight. That question was intuitively first raised over 38 years ago by the notable aeronautical engineer, John Gordon although he declared it was a mystery at the time of writing. However, recent research on the cortical SBF structure of the rachis and barbs has allowed new light to be shed on the problem. But, as so often happens as we find new answers we also find more questions. I consider one such question here, which is also closely tied to bird flight. [Emphasis added.]
Lingham-Soliar could not understand how these SBFs could prevent catastrophic fractures in the feather. If the fibers were all parallel to the long axis, they would have to continuously terminate as the rachis tapers down toward the tip. This would open up thousands of fracture zones where small stresses could exacerbate the fractures, “analogous to the scissor-snip a tailor makes before tearing a piece of fabric,” leading to catastrophic failure of the feather.

In the 1920s, Griffith showed that according to thermodynamic principles the magnitude of the stress concentration at a crack tip is dependent on the crack length (L) i.e. that the strain energy released in the area around the crack length (L2, proportional to the crack length) is available for propagating the crack. From this principle we see that there is a dangerous potential of numerous self-perpetuating cracks in the feather cortex. How then have birds in the 150 million years of their evolution been able to respond to this threat? The present hypothesis is that there must be a means to eliminate this potentially catastrophic condition in a structure critical to bird flight — i.e., crucially a structural mechanism to avoid an inherent condition of notches or cracks in the feather rachidial cortices. To this end the feather cortices and comprising SBFs are investigated.
For the first time, Lingham-Soliar could see the answer. He had to look at the detailed microstructure of the SBFs on the order of millionths of a meter (micrometers) with SEM. What came to light was “a biomechanically ‘ingenious’ and novel architecture of the fibre organization” that solves the fracture problem and does something else, too: it distributes the stress load throughout the feather. This multi-functional “distinctive architecture of the SBFs” is bound to inspire engineers faced with the demands of designing lightweight yet strong materials that can absorb stress without failing.

Here’s the basic idea: instead of terminating along the rachis, some of the SBFs (fiber bundles) branch off into the barbs. As you travel down the tapering shaft, you see more SBFs branch out, thinning the cortex toward the tip. It’s an elegant solution. Here’s what the author says about it:

Here I report a new microstructural architecture of the feather cortex in which most syncitial barbule fibres deviate to the right and left edges of the feather rachis from far within its borders and extend into the barbs, side branches of the rachis, as continuous filaments. This novel morphology adds significantly to knowledge of β-keratin self-assembly in the feather and helps solve the potential problem of fatal crack-like defects in the rachidial cortex. Furthermore, this new complexity, consistent with biology’s robust multi-functionality, solves two biomechanical problems at a stroke. Feather barbs deeply ‘rooted’ within the rachis are also able to better withstand the aerodynamic forces to which they are subjected.
It’s actually more sophisticated than it sounds. In addition to the branching, there’s a glue-like substance that holds adjacent SBFs together. The glue has properties that “improved the tensile stiffness of the material by improving lateral slippage.” The SBFs are also held together longitudinally by hooks and rings.

Think about the design problem as the feather emerges from the follicle during development. How do some of the SBFs know to bend out into a barb? What teaches these growing fibers to cross over the longitudinal access in successive waves and branch out left and right into the barbs, leaving enough material behind to continue building the cortex all the way to the tip? What concentrates the glue where it is needed, in the right amount? What tells the barbs to grow barbules with hooks and channels that fit just right? Building a machine that could do this by extrusion would seem like an engineer’s nightmare.

Lingham-Soliar examined the feathers of different birds — chickens, falcons, eagles, swans, geese, ibises, pheasants, macaws, and toucans — and found that all their feathers use this design principle. As an evolutionist, he assumes they all got it from a common ancestor. But he seems conflicted at the design facts visible under his microscope and the story that must be told, “perhaps the most controversial question, the origin and evolution of the feather.” Unfortunately, he sticks to the Darwin story:

It is clear that this extraordinary cortical microstructure of the feather has evolved and been perfected over the millions of years of bird evolution….
After describing what engineers learned from gluing nanotubes to increase tensile strength, he says:

But we also see that the architecture of SBFs in the feather is more sophisticated compared to the engineered tubules i.e., with respect to the dogbone shape (aided frequently by hooks), which functions in fibre pull-out… This must be a tribute to over 150 million years of feather evolution in response to extreme aerodynamic stresses involved in bird flight.
It’s tragic to watch scientists who have been trained to think Darwinly becoming enslaved to chance explanations for fantastic designs that are so good, engineers want to imitate them.

The field of biomimetics is relatively new but has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. Biological materials are complex composites that are hierarchically structured and multifunctional. Their mechanical properties are often outstanding, considering the weak constituents from which they are assembled. Structures in nature have evolved over millions of years (frequently hundreds of millions) and because of their multifunctionality are difficult to resolve or break down into simpler components that could help in engineered materials. Whereas current engineering designs benefit from simplicity, future ones might be more sophisticated with a much wider performance envelope and broader range of applications inspired by biology’s vastly different scales of architectural organization and robust multi-functionality. As biologists and evolutionists we hope to help untangle some of the complexities of natural materials by extensive investigations and to collaborate with materials scientists and engineers with the ultimate goal of mimicking them in synthetic systems.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someday soon the shackles of methodological naturalism were taken off, so that authors could freely talk about design in nature? Darwinian evolution and eons of time don’t contribute anything of value to this investigation. The author could have left out that “most controversial question” about feather origins and evolution entirely. He came close. “Their unique morphology, which includes nodes with hooks and rings, plays a major part in the design strategy of keeping the filaments locked together,” he said earlier.


We say, toss the evolutionary talk and leave it at that. This is a design paper that inspires design. It can inspire us all to appreciate even more “the genius of birds.” After learning about those SBFs, we will never look at a crow the same way again.

Why macro evolution is DOA

Fitness Terrains and Their Challenge to Darwinian Theory
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

A new episode of ID the Future on fitness terrains is quite relevant to the fish-to-man question I wrote about earlier today. Evolutionists picture major innovations in the history of life as no big deal. Forget fish-to-man — consider the more modest challenge of fish-to-amphibian, as Dr. Miller notes.

As Center for Science & Culture research coordinator Brian Miller explains in a conversation with Sarah Chaffee, minor changes (microevolution) lie with the reach of unguided Darwinian processes. But major inventions are a different story.

Remember, in the Darwinian understanding, every modification, building up successively over generations, must be advantageous to survival and reproduction or, at worst, neutral. From human innovation, he gives the example of trying to transform a car into a helicopter. Imagining such a thing necessarily entails catastrophic losses of function along the way, something that evolution could never tolerate.


Brian Miller is a fine and lucid science explainer. Listen to the episode  here, or download the podcast here.

Storytelling in lieu of science.

Evolution Proponents: Try Rewriting This Video Without the Teleological Language
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Northwestern University promotes the research of one of its scientists with this adorable video about the evolution of fish to man,  “Our short-sighted inner fish: Vision explains why our fish ancestors came on to land.”

400 million years ago, fish made the evolutionary leap from water to land. If they hadn’t, you might not be reading this sentence. Why? Because it led to more complex cognition. A new study by Northwestern professor Malcolm MacIver and Claremont Colleges professor Lars Schmitz discovered a near tripling of eye size might be what triggered the invasion of land.
Molecular biologist Douglas Axe watched it and was impressed by the persistent use of language inflected with teleology, attributing intelligent motivation not only to animals, but to their individual organs, and to the process of evolution as a whole. So, how did fish come on to land?

It all seems to have started when the first fish peeked above the water’s surface….And behold — a smorgasbord of tasty land dwellers! To capitalize on this discovery, the fish would have to evolve. Its eyes soon moved to the top of its head and tripled in size. And its fins began evolving into limbs so that it could stalk its new prey like a crocodile. [Emphasis added.]
Dr. Axe tweets: “Evolutionary reasoning is all about storytelling. Hard to tell stories without invoking purpose, as this vid shows.”

Yep. On that note, here’s an exercise for evolution proponents. Try rewriting the script of this evolution video without using any teleological language. Tough, isn’t it?

As a side point, too, look at how the video ends. The fish evolves into man, but man has a problem. Despite his keen vision, he doesn’t look ahead to see the consequences of his actions. We see him mowing the law, and he pulls off his shirt and gets a sunburn. To cool off, his neighbor hands him a beer, which he drinks and immediately gets fat. Meanwhile, perhaps from the exhaust of the law mower, he causes global warming, resulting in melting glaciers and sad polar bears.

In the final scene, a group of human beings are show donning virtual-reality headsets. The narrator concludes:

Understanding the relationship between vision and planning may help us engineer solutions, like using technology to bring far away things closer. That just might give us the evolutionary advantage we need to survive the next 400 million years.
Right. So we’ll save the planet by cutting ourselves off from other human beings and interacting not with the reality in front of us but with computers and simulated reality. That’s the “solution” to human problems — stick a computer in front of everyone’s face.


Someday, thoughtful people will look back and see the madness of that pervasively influential way of thinking — quite apart from the silliness of trying to deny the obvious workings of purpose in nature. But that time has not yet come.

2Peter New Revised Standard version Catholic Edition

Salutation
1 Simeon[a] Peter, a servant[b] and apostle of Jesus Christ,

To those who have received a faith as precious as ours through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:[c]

2 May grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

The Christian’s Call and Election
3 His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by[d] his own glory and goodness. 4 Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature. 5 For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, 7 and godliness with mutual[e] affection, and mutual[f] affection with love. 8 For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For anyone who lacks these things is short-sighted and blind, and is forgetful of the cleansing of past sins. 10 Therefore, brothers and sisters,[g] be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never stumble. 11 For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.

12 Therefore I intend to keep on reminding you of these things, though you know them already and are established in the truth that has come to you. 13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body,[h] to refresh your memory, 14 since I know that my death[i] will come soon, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. 15 And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.

Eyewitnesses of Christ’s Glory
16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved,[j] with whom I am well pleased.” 18 We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.

19 So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. 20 First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, 21 because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.[k]

False Prophets and Their Punishment
2 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions. They will even deny the Master who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2 Even so, many will follow their licentious ways, and because of these teachers[a] the way of truth will be maligned. 3 And in their greed they will exploit you with deceptive words. Their condemnation, pronounced against them long ago, has not been idle, and their destruction is not asleep.

4 For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell[b] and committed them to chains[c] of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment; 5 and if he did not spare the ancient world, even though he saved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood on a world of the ungodly; 6 and if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction[d] and made them an example of what is coming to the ungodly;[e] 7 and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the lawless 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by their lawless deeds that he saw and heard), 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment 10 —especially those who indulge their flesh in depraved lust, and who despise authority.

Bold and willful, they are not afraid to slander the glorious ones,[f] 11 whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not bring against them a slanderous judgment from the Lord.[g] 12 These people, however, are like irrational animals, mere creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed. They slander what they do not understand, and when those creatures are destroyed,[h] they also will be destroyed, 13 suffering[i] the penalty for doing wrong. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their dissipation[j] while they feast with you. 14 They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children! 15 They have left the straight road and have gone astray, following the road of Balaam son of Bosor,[k] who loved the wages of doing wrong, 16 but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.

17 These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm; for them the deepest darkness has been reserved. 18 For they speak bombastic nonsense, and with licentious desires of the flesh they entice people who have just[l] escaped from those who live in error. 19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. 20 For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first. 21 For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment that was passed on to them. 22 It has happened to them according to the true proverb,

“The dog turns back to its own vomit,”
and,

“The sow is washed only to wallow in the mud.”

The Promise of the Lord’s Coming
3 This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you; in them I am trying to arouse your sincere intention by reminding you 2 that you should remember the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken through your apostles. 3 First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died,[a] all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!” 5 They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, 6 through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. 7 But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless.

8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. 9 The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you,[b] not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.[c]

11 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening[d] the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? 13 But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Final Exhortation and Doxology

14 Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; 15 and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. 17 You therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lose your own stability. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.[e]

The mammalian Jaw v. Darwin.

Evolutionists Have a Simple Proposal for the Mammalian Jaw
Cornelius Hunter

Somehow random mutations creating an incredibly complicated set of bones, muscles, teeth, and behaviors, with “extremely precise”  functions, all of which “likely” arose independently rather than through common descent, just doesn’t sound right. So as usual evolutionists view the problem teleologically. According to the latest study of the mammalian jaw, it seems that “mammal teeth, jaw bones and muscles evolved to produce side-to-side motions of the jaw, or yaw, that allowed our earliest ancestors to grind food with their molars and eat a more diversified diet.”

To produce?

As we have seen numerous times, the infinitive form tells all. Aristotelianism was not rejected, it was incorporated.

But how could such interdependent complexity evolve in the first place? The jaw, dental, and ear characters comprise so many highly complex, moving parts that need each other to work. And furthermore, they appear in different lineages. The answer is simple: simultaneous, concurrent, convergent evolution.

Based on results of the morphometrics and functional analyses, I develop a novel hypothesis for the simultaneous origin of unique jaw, dental, and ear characters in cladotherians. […] Here, I examine concurrent evolutionary changes to functional anatomies of jaws, molars, and ears in early cladotherian mammals […] The jaws, molars and ears of australosphenidans (which include monotremes) are morphologically similar to those of therians, suggesting convergent evolution of similar functional traits in this group.

All of this, the study concludes, “may have been an especially significant event in mammalian evolution.” Indeed. But for a paper titled “The evolutionary origin of jaw yaw in mammals,” there is remarkably little explanation of just how this design evolved.


The bottom line is the evidence does not fit the theory. If the answer is simultaneous, concurrent, convergent evolution, then let’s just admit the obvious.

On atheism's creation myth.

Daniel Dennett and Secular Creationism
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

“This,” says an article in  The New Yorker  profiling materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett, “to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation.” Here it is:

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun.

The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves—constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made.

Life, Dennett thinks, “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” So it’s not a matter of a “miracle” exactly, but you might say, and some have put it this way, a “near miracle.”

On such “near miracles” and the origin of life:

Israeli philosopher of science Iris Fry has written very insightfully about the concept. She argues that the “near miracle” position, widely held in evolutionary theory (e.g., by Crick, Mayr, Dawkins, Monod), amounts to what she calls a kind of secular creationism. Note the language in The New Yorker that comes close to acknowledging this. In fact, she goes further, contending that “near miracle” actually implies creationism, and renders impossible any empirical study of the origin of life.

When someone says, “The origin of life was a near-miracle,” or words to that effect, what they mean is this:

Well, abiogenesis happened, somehow, but I haven’t a clue how, and the evidence points away from a discoverable natural process or pathway. BUT IT WASN’T INTELLIGENT DESIGN. And I reject out of hand any argument or evidence that suggests otherwise.


Such a position shuts down scientific inquiry absolutely. For more, see Fry’s paper, “Are the Different Hypotheses on the Emergence of Life as Different as They Seem?” in Biology & Philosophy 10 (1995), pp. 389-417.

Thunder lizards get their family album tweaked.

Dinosaur Phylogeny Gets a “Radical Shakeup,” Requiring Convergent Evolution
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

A paper in Nature, “A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution,” presents fresh ideas about dinosaur relationships that reveal the extent to which dinosaur traits are not distributed in a treelike pattern. One news article calls this a “radical shakeup of the dinosaur family tree” because it would overturn a century of evolutionary thinking about dinosaurs:

The analysis, which has already sparked controversy in the academic world, suggests that the two basic groups into which dinosaurs have been classified for more than a century need a fundamental rethink. If proved correct, the revised version of the family tree would overthrow some of the most basic assumptions about this chapter of evolutionary history, including what the common ancestor of all dinosaurs looked like and where it came from.

The basic issue is this: For the past hundred years, dinosaurs were classified into two primary groupings. Dinosaurs within Ornithischia, which have hips like a bird, and dinosuars within Saurischia, with hips like a lizard. Before you read any further, don’t presume that these old divisions foreshadow the now-popular theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs: the theropod dinosaurs, the group from which birds supposedly evolved, belong to the “lizard-hipped” Saurischia and are not “bird-hipped”! This obviously bothered some proponents of the bird-to-dino hypothesis.

The new scheme aims to fix this annoying problem. Under the new classification, theropods are now grouped with dinos that used to be within the bird-hipped Ornithischia, such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops. This new designation, “Ornithoscelida,” is supposed to create a fundamental group of dinosaurs that is less hostile to the dino-to-bird theory.

The grouping of course pleases longtime dino-to-bird advocates like Kevin Padian, president of the National Center for Science Education. He defends the classification in a News & Views article in Nature, stating that “their results cannot be dismissed as simply a different opinion or speculation.”

Indeed, The Guardian reports that people are already using this new classification scheme to imagine feathered dinosaurs where they don’t exist — on totally non-feathered types of dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Triceratops! Consider these comments by the study’s lead author, Cambridge University graduate student Matthew Baron:

The findings also support the possibility that dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops, traditionally portrayed as tank-like armoured beasts, may have been feathered.

[…]

“Maybe we did have fluffy Triceratops and fluffy Stegosaurus,” said Baron. “It could be that the feathers would have been poking out between the scales, it could have been a beautiful fluffy colourful plumage … or scales covered in downy feathers. It’s possible.”

Such unwarranted speculation hints at what agendas may truly be driving this new classification scheme.

In any case, the official reason for the new view of dinosaurs is that it better explains the distribution of traits among various dinosaur species. For example, the technical paper explains that the old Ornithischia/Saurischia division required convergent evolution to clarify the hand anatomy of early dinosaurs — a problem the authors claim to solve:

Recent studies have led to a general consensus that the earliest dinosaurs were relatively small and bipedal, and this idea finds further support within our hypothesis, as both basal sauropodomorphs and basal ornithoscelidans are small bipeds. Manus anatomy in many early dinosaurs also appears to be very similar, with supinated, non-weight-bearing, ‘grasping’ hands appearing in basal saurischians such as Herrerasaurus and basal ornithoscelidans such as Heterodontosaurus and Eoraptor. As pointed out in several previous studies, these similarities were often considered to represent convergences given the supposedly distant relationship between taxa such as Heterodontosaurus and Herrerasaurus. Within our new framework, the supinated, grasping hands seen in some early taxa are interpreted as the primitive dinosaurian condition.

But solving one problem sometimes creates another, and it does so here. By reorganizing major parts of the dinosaur tree, evolutionary paleontologists are now confronted with the prospect of rampant convergent evolution among traits found in various carnivorous dinosaurs as required by their new phylogeny. The technical paper in Nature explains these difficulties:

This new tree topology requires redefinition and rediagnosis of Dinosauria and the subsidiary dinosaurian clades. In addition, it forces re-evaluations of early dinosaur cladogenesis and character evolution, suggests that hypercarnivory was acquired independently in herrerasaurids and theropods, and offers an explanation for many of the anatomical features previously regarded as notable convergences between theropods and early ornithischians. … Herrerasauridae is recovered as the sister clade to Sauropodomorpha, suggesting that some of the theropod-like features of their anatomy have evolved independently of those found in theropods. This is most likely a direct result of their fully carnivorous feeding strategy; in our hypothesis a fully carnivorous feeding strategy is not recovered as the plesiomorphic condition for Dinosauria and we are forced to interpret some of the anatomical similarities between herrerasaurids and theropods as convergences. The convergent evolution of hypercarnivore morphology within Dinosauria raises interesting questions about the drivers of early dinosaur evolution. For example, did a dentition composed exclusively of sharp, recurved and serrated teeth, such as those that are present in representatives from both of these clades, evolve independently of each other? The earliest representatives of each of the major dinosaur clades often possess at least some recurved, serrated teeth, most commonly as part of a heterodont dentition. However, no known members of Sauropodomorpha or Ornithischia exhibit dentitions that are exclusively composed of recurved, serrated teeth, nor does the early theropod Eoraptor. Hence, it seems probable, within our new framework, that at least some of the recurved, serrated teeth that make up the dentition of derived theropods and herrerasaurids have convergently adopted this morphology. Furthermore, the rostral extension of the dentary tooth row appears also to be convergent between theropods and herrerasaurids; in members of both clades, the dentary tooth row extends to the rostral tip of the dentary.

And then of course there is the fact that lizard-hipped dinosaurs are now separated into two different groups. Presumably that also would require convergent evolution.

Convergent evolution is a problem for Darwinian evolution because it means that biological similarity does not necessarily result from inheritance from a common ancestor. This undermines the basic logic used to construct phylogenetic trees, and casts into doubt the entire project of tree-construction.

The reality is that no matter what classification scheme you use, a dinosaur tree is going to require convergent evolution. This is because key dinosaur traits are not distributed in a tree-like manner.

Because of the convergent evolution it requires, the new hypothesis has already proven controversial. As Nature News reports:

Hans-Dieter Sues, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, says the study should stoke discussion. “But I caution against totally reorganizing the dinosaur family tree just yet,” he says. For one thing, palaeontologists’ analyses of relations among species are keenly sensitive to which species are considered, as well as which and how many anatomical features are included, he says.

The discovery of new dinosaur species or more complete specimens of those already known might also drive future analyses back toward more currently accepted arrangements of dinosaur lineages, Sues says.

What’s fascinating is that this whole kerfuffle was started by the discovery of a new species of dinosaur named Saltopus elginensis. But when you consider the poor quality of this fossil, it casts more doubt on the proposal, as The Guardian, again, explains:

Langer argues that, while Saltopus might be statistically a good candidate for a common ancestor, given the patchy nature of the fossil it is a poor choice. Rather than attempting to identify the true ancestor of all dinosaurs – which can never be known — scientists’ aim is to find an animal that is a decent approximation of the general form and traits displayed by that ancestor we know must have existed.

The fossil, found in a Lossiemouth quarry, comprises a pair of legs, some hip bones, and vertebrae, all of which have been badly squashed.

“It looks like a chicken carcass after a Sunday roast,” Baron acknowledges.

The Guardian finds scientists who are skeptical of the new proposal:

As anticipated, the conclusions have been met with robust criticism from some rival scientists, including Max Langer, a respected palaeontologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

“There’s nothing special about this guy,” he said. “Saltopus is the right place in terms of evolution but you have much better fossils that would be better candidates for such a dinosaur precursor.

[…]

Vinther, whose background is in mollusc research, said that unlike most dinosaur scientists he was not invested in any particular result, but added: “I’ve heard a bit of murmuring already from people who are not too thrilled about this hypothesis.”


Given the controversy that’s already brewing, it seems likely that over time critics will adduce further reasons to doubt this new dinosaur classification scheme.

File under "well said" XLVIII

A clever person knows what to say; A wise person knows when to say it.

    Anonymous 

While the rest of the world looks the other way.

Why the idolising of higher ed may be blinding us to the path to true success.

On Darwin v. Mendel.

Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig on Darwinism and Gregor Mendel’s “Sleeping Beauty”
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Gregor Mendel is, of course, the father of the science of genetics. In a new peer-reviewed paper, “Mendel’s Paper on the Laws of Heredity (1866): Solving the Enigma of the Most Famous ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in Science,” geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig asks why Mendel’s theory of heredity, developed in the 19th century, was initially rejected or ignored by many other scientists. Writing in the journal eLS, Dr. Lönnig concludes that it’s because at that time, the scientific community was completely enamored with Darwinian evolution and unwilling to consider ideas that did not fit with Darwin’s models of evolution and inheritance.

Darwinism cast a shadow over the study of heredity. As Lönnig puts it:

His [Mendel’s] analysis, discernment and exposition of the laws of heredity as well as his views on evolution diametrically defied and contradicted the ideas and convictions of Darwin and his followers.… [T]he basic reason for the neglect of the laws of heredity was essentially this: To imply something like a static definition of the species by constant hereditary elements right into a momentous process vigorously favouring the Darwinian revolution (continuous evolution by natural selection without any teleology intimately combined with the inheritance of acquired characteristics, to underscore the latter, often forgotten point once more) was met — although usually silently — with skepticism, deliberate ignorance and strong opposition.

In other words, if you implied as Mendel did that species were static, you were doing that at a time when science “vigorously” favored Darwinism. That is why Mendel’s ideas met with skepticism and opposition. More:

And there is no doubt concerning Darwin’s overwhelming victory in the battle for the scientific minds in the nineteenth century, so much so that Mendel’s performance before the Natural History Society of Brünn was even met with “scornful laughter”….

Lönnig quotes Italian biologist Giuseppe Sermonti who concurs with this explanation: “What really happened was that Mendel ruled out almost all the forces that Darwin had invoked to explain evolution.”

Mendel’s theory of inheritance produces “all-or-nothing traits.” Lönnig explains that this conflicted with Darwin’s ideas about gradual evolution:

[P]erhaps even more important, Mendel’s discoveries cast doubt on another definitely decisive and essential part of Darwin’s theory: continuous evolution, for which Darwin had postulated “infinitesimally small inherited variations,” “steps not greater than those separating fine varieties” and “insensibly fine steps,” “for natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps.”

According to Lönnig, “[I]n Mendel’s view, endless evolution was neither probable for cultivated plants nor for species in the wild.”

What does the phrase “sleeping beauty” refer to in Lönnig’s title? In a science context, it means an idea or publication that lies dormant for decades, “asleep,” until being rediscovered and winning deserved acclaim and acceptance. From an article on this fascinating subject:

The most famous case of a “sleeping beauty” was that of Gregor Mendel’s seminal study on plant genetics that received widespread recognition 31 years after its publication. “Sleeping beauties” led to Nobel prizes (Herman Staudinger, Nobel in Chemistry 1953; Peyton Rous, Nobel in Chemistry 1966). They usually reflect premature discoveries that the scientific community was not ready to recognize when published. Some suppose that this has to do with most scientists’ tendency to adhere to their established paradigms.


The paradigm in this case was Darwin’s theory. In impeding the emergence of genetics, Darwinian evolution was a science stopper, and not for the first time.

Are the differences between political Islam and democracy irreconcilable?:Pros and cons.

Free speech;Who needs it?:Pros and cons.

Not their finest hour.

A product of Darwinian processes.

Cancer Research Delivers Stark Reminder to Evolutionists
David Klinghoffer 

New research revises the most common understanding of cancer and its causes, while also serving as a telling reminder to evolutionists. From  Science News:

Random mutations play large role in cancer, study finds

Researchers have identified new enemies in the war on cancer: ones that are already inside cells and that no one can avoid.

Random mistakes made as stem cells divide  are responsible for about two-thirds of the mutations in cancer cells, researchers from Johns Hopkins University report in the March 24 Science. Across all cancer types, environment and lifestyle factors, such as smoking and obesity, contribute 29 percent of cancer mutations, and 5 percent are inherited.

That finding challenges the common wisdom that cancer is the product of heredity and the environment. “There’s a third cause and this cause of mutations is a major cause,” says cancer geneticist Bert Vogelstein.

…

To attribute so many cancer mutations to chance seems to negate public health messages, [biological physicist Bartlomiej Waclaw of the University of Edinburgh] says, and some people may find the calculation that 66 percent of cancer-associated mutations are unavoidable disturbing because they spend a lot of time trying to prevent cancer. “It’s important to consider the randomness, or bad luck, that comes with cellular division,” he says.

Darwinian theory attributes the most wonderful creativity to the power of random mutations (sifted by natural selection). Orthodox evolutionists believe that such mutations are the very fuel of innovation, producing exquisite function and complexity, all the wonders of life. This research tells us what we already know, not merely believe: typos, mistakes, and the like are a source of disorder, disfunction, and death.


When it comes to explaining major biological novelties, the evolutionary story is a matter of extrapolation and imagination. Biologic Institute molecular biologist Douglas Axe tweets: “Cancer is what random mutations really can produce.”

Examining yet another challenge to life's no free lunch law.

Breaking Sticks
Winston Ewert December 5, 2015 5:30 AM

This is the fourth and final post in a series in which I have examined criticisms from Joe Felsenstein (University of Washington geneticist) and Tom English (Oklahoma City computer scientist) in response to two arguments for intelligent design: specified complexity and conservation of information. Look here for Parts 1, 2, and 3.

A large portion of post by Tom English, "The Law of Conservation of Information is defunct," is devoted to an example of conservation of information involving broken sticks. He argues that we can obtain active information without any bias in the initial process. Since active information is a measurement of bias in a system, this would mean that our use of active information was fundamentally broken.

English's process involves sticks that are broken into six pieces randomly. The sticks are six meters long (English does not give units, so I picked meters). The average length of a broken stick will be one meter. However the process is such that some pieces will end up much longer than other pieces.

English claims to compute the active information of these outcomes:

Suppose that the length of the 3rd segment of the broken stick is 2. Then the evolutionary process is biased in favor of outcome 3 by a factor of 2. ... These biases are what Dembski et al. refer to as active information.

This calculation is absolutely not active information. Active information is defined as being the logarithm of relative probabilities. English can be forgiven for skipping the logarithm, but using the observed length of a stick instead of a probability is nonsensical. If English wishes to criticize active information, he should actually follow the definitions of active information.

Let's consider another scenario, which may be what English is getting at. I have two coins. One is weighted so that 99 percent of the time it lands on heads. The other is weighted so that 99 percent of the time it lands on tails. If I pick a coin at random and flip it once, the result is actually fair despite the use of biased coins. Both heads and tails are equally likely. However, if I flip the coin 100 times, the sequence will be either mostly heads or mostly tails.

Suppose I observe the process of flipping 100 coins, and see that 99 are heads. Then following something like English's logic, I could argue that the probability of heads is 99 percent, and thus calculate positive active information. But this would be incorrect. Estimating the probabilities this way would only be valid for independent events. In this case, the events are all dependent due to sharing the same biased coins.

Let's compare the confused attempt to establish these probabilities with the logic I argued for in the case of birds:

Clearly, some configurations of matter are birds. However, almost all configurations of matter are not birds. If one were to pick randomly from all possible configurations of matter, the probability of obtaining a bird would be infinitesimally small. It is almost impossible to obtain a bird by random sampling uniformly from all configurations of matter.

Note that I am not saying the frequency of birds observed in biology can somehow represent an estimate of the probability of birds. It is in fact a reductio ad absurdum that implicitly invokes specified complexity. If birds were no more probable than any other configuration of matter, the total probability of birds would be miniscule. In the terminology of specified complexity, they would be highly complex. This in itself would not be a problem, but since birds constitute a specification, their presence gives us good reason to reject that the idea that birds are no more likely than any other configuration of matter. For birds to have arisen in the universe, they must be probable enough that they would no longer constitute a large amount of specified complexity. That's why I can argue that birds must be more probable than random chance.

English's attempt to dismantle conservation of information fails. It is based on a confused interpretation of how to compute active information. He does not compute probability, nor provide any justification for treating the length of a stick as a probability. Even if I consider a related scenario that has probabilities, anything like his technique is invalid for estimating probability. The method we use for arguing that the probability is higher is entirely different from the caricature presented by English.

Conclusion

English and Felsenstein have been engaged in knocking down straw men. Felsenstein attacks a version of specified complexity that Dembski never articulated. He misrepresents the actual idea promoted by Dembski as being pointlessly circular. Both critics misrepresent conservation of information as a simplistic argument that only intelligence can produce active information. They misrepresent us as claiming that Darwinian evolution is only as good as a random guess, despite the explicit published demonstration that repeated queries are a source of active information. English misrepresents our reasons for thinking that birds are more probable than a random configuration of matter. Their arguments are valid objections to these straw men, but our actual arguments lie elsewhere.

What, then, would be necessary to demonstrate that we are wrong? As I've argued, conservation of information shows that evolution requires a source of active information. We have not proven that such a source must be teleological. Nevertheless, we've argued that the sources present in available models of evolution are indeed teleological. Our argument would be refuted by the demonstration of a model with a source that is both non-teleological and provides sufficient active information to account for biological complexity.

Felsenstein hints at trying to do this when he talks about the weakness of long-range physics interactions. He thinks that by invoking these interactions he can obtain "quite possibly all" of the necessary active information to account for complexity in biology.

Some, quite possibly all, of Dembski and Marks's "active information" is present as soon as we have genotypes that have different fitnesses, and genotypes whose phenotypes are determined using the ordinary laws of physics.

However, when discussing the amount of active information that he can obtain from his assumption, he can only go as far as:

[T]he ordinary laws of physics, with their weakness of long-range interactions, lead to fitness surfaces much smoother than white-noise fitness surfaces.

Arguing that the weakness of long-range interactions produces sufficient active information to explain complexity in biology because it outperforms random search is like arguing that I can outrun a jet because I move much faster than a snail. However, if Felsenstein could demonstrate that the weakness of long-range physics interactions, or something equivalently non-teleological, could account for the active information in biology, it would dismantle the argument we have made. Furthermore, it would be a massive contribution to the fields of computational intelligence and evolutionary biology.


I cannot prove that Felsenstein cannot do this. I can point to past attempts, which all incorporated teleological decisions. They all show the effect of having been designed. My prediction is that you cannot build a working model of Darwinian evolution without invoking teleology. Felsenstein, English, or anyone else is invited to attempt to falsify my prediction.

Reviewing peer review.

Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem

Updated by Julia Belluz on December 14, 2015, 7:00 a.m. ET


After toiling away for months on revisions for a single academic paper, Columbia University economist Chris Blattman started wondering about the direction of his work.

He had submitted the paper in question to one of the top economics journals earlier this year. In return, he had gotten back nearly 30 pages of single-space comments from peer reviewers (experts in the field who provide feedback on a scientific manuscript). It had taken two or three days a week over three months to address them all.

So Blattman asked himself some simple but profound questions: Was all this work on a single study really worth it? Was it best to spend months revising one study — or could that time have been better spent on publishing multiple smaller studies? He wrote about the conundrum on his blog:

Some days my field feels like an arms race to make each experiment more thorough and technically impressive, with more and more attention to formal theories, structural models, pre-analysis plans, and (most recently) multiple hypothesis testing. The list goes on. In part we push because want to do better work. Plus, how else to get published in the best places and earn the respect of your peers?

It seems to me that all of this is pushing social scientists to produce better quality experiments and more accurate answers. But it’s also raising the size and cost and time of any one experiment.

Over the phone, Blattman explained to me that in the age of "big data," high-quality scientific journals are increasingly pushing for large-scale, comprehensive studies, usually involving hundreds or thousands of participants. And he's now questioning whether a course correction is needed.

Though he can't prove it yet, he suspects social science has made a trade-off: Big, time-consuming studies are coming at the cost of smaller and cheaper studies that, taken together, may be just as valuable and perhaps more applicable (or what researchers call "generalizable") to more people and places.

Do we need more "small" science?

Over in Switzerland, Alzheimer's researcher Lawrence Rajendran has been asking himself a similar question: Should science be smaller again? Rajendran, who heads a laboratory at the University of Zurich, recently founded a journal called Matters. Set to launch in early 2016, the journal aims to publish "the true unit of science" — the observation.

Rajendran notes that Alexander Fleming’s simple observation that penicillin mold seemed to kill off bacteria in his petri dish could never be published today, even though it led to the discovery of lifesaving antibiotics. That's because today's journals want lots of data and positive results that fit into an overarching narrative (what Rajendran calls "storytelling") before they'll publish a given study.

"You would have to solve the structure of penicillin or find the mechanism of action," he added.

But research is complex, and scientific findings may not fit into a neat story — at least not right away. So Rajendran and the staff at Matters hope scientists will be able to share insights in this journal that they may not been able to publish otherwise. He also thinks that if researchers have a place to explore preliminary observations, they may not feel as much pressure to exaggerate their findings in order to add all-important publications to their CVs.

Smaller isn't always better

Science has many structural problems to grapple with right now: The peer review system doesn't function all that well, many studies are poorly designed so their answers are unreliable, and replications of experiments are difficult to execute and very often fail. Researchers have estimated that about $200 billion — or about 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on poorly designed and redundant studies.

A big part of the reason science funders started emphasizing large-scale studies is because they were trying to avoid common problems with smaller studies: The results aren't statistically significant, and the sample sizes may be too tiny and therefore unrepresentative.


It's not clear that emphasizing smaller-scale studies and observations will solve these problems. In fact, publishing more observations may just add to the noise. But as Rajendran says, it's very possible that important insights are being lost in the push toward large-scale science. "Science can be small, big, cure diseases," he said. "It can just be curiosity-driven. Academic journals shouldn't block the communication of small scientific observations."