Reflectorites
Below are web articles for the period 3 - 9 April with my comments in
square brackets.
Steve
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http://www.ljworld.com/section/archive/story/501 Law professor unleashes fury
on macro-evolution Sunday, April 9, 2000 A California law professor condemns
Darwinism in two speeches in Lawrence. ... Explaining away evolution meant
accusing Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway of intimidation for one
creationist who spoke Saturday in Lawrence. University of California-Berkeley law
professor Phillip Johnson spoke about intelligent design -- a God-driven creation
theory discounting evolution. ... The chancellor's condemnation of the Kansas
Board of Education's August decision to de-emphasize teaching evolution drew
criticism from Johnson, ... "He (Hemenway) doesn't want to teach creation
because he's afraid they'll believe it," Johnson said. "What we should do is teach
the controversy. That's education." Johnson... proposes focusing on science and
not mixing the Bible in the debate because he says science itself refutes macro-
evolution. Johnson doesn't disagree with the principles of micro-evolution ... But
macro-evolution based on naturalistic materialism, the belief that nature is self-
generating, doesn't make sense...he said. He used an analogy to demonstrate what
he considers the absurdity of evolution: it may improve, but it can't create. "You
may be able to fix a sputtering radio by hitting it," he said. "But hitting a radio
won't turn it into a television set." Johnson also leaves no room for compromise
between God-guided evolution and supernatural creation. "God-guided evolution
isn't evolution at all...it's soft-core creation," ... But some found Johnson's message
offensive. Liz Craig, a member of the Kansas Citizens for Science, said that
Johnson misrepresented science as an atheist philosophy. She said scientists were
too busy doing useful research to sit around and plot ways to wipe out God as
Johnson accused. "There's nothing to creation science except debunking evolution,
which it has failed to do," Craig said. ... Johnson also spoke to about 200 people at
Washburn University in Topeka and about 600 at KU on Friday. Drew Ryun, the
forum's event director, compared Johnson to the parable about the emperor's
clothing. He said evolution was the emperor and Johnson pointed out that the
emperor was naked. "He's very bold and that's what I like about him," Ryun said.
"He gives a strong argument for what is right, and that's what is appealing about
him." [Craig unwittingly confirms one of Johnson's main points that evolutionists
automatically assume that any questioning of the scientific evidence for evolution
must be "creation science"!]
http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/04/07/dolphin.cam.enn/index.html CNN ...
Marine mammals stroke-and-glide to depth... April 7, 2000 ... Video supplied by
cameras attached to dolphins, seals and whales reveals how the marine mammals
employ a stroke-and-glide sequence that enables them to perform long, deep dives
that seem to exceed their aerobic capacities. "Basically, they're turning the motor
on and off in the course of the dive, and that enables them to reduce oxygen
consumption," said Terrie Williams... [she] previously believed that dolphins
carried out their dives at a constant, efficient speed. But her calculations showed
that the mammals would have to exceed their oxygen requirements by more than
25 percent on dives 650 feet deep. ... In the field, her subjects - bottlenose dolphins
- routinely went on dives deeper than 650 feet and returned with ample reserves of
oxygen. Williams and her colleagues were perplexed. To solve the conundrum, the
researchers attached video cameras to the backs of dolphins, seals and whales in
the Pacific and Antarctic oceans ... The study reveals that the marine mammals,
despite their independent evolution of swimming methods and differences in body
size and propulsive mechanisms, all started their dives with a few powerful
swimming strokes and completed their descent mostly in a relaxed glide. ... Seals,
dolphins, whales and other marine mammals share an anatomical feature that
makes the gliding descent possible and protects the animals from getting nitrogen
narcosis, or the bends, said Williams. The lungs of these mammals are designed to
collapse progressively with increased water pressure at depth so that air is forced
out of the air sacs and into the upper part of the respiratory system. As the
increasing pressure compresses the animal's body and the air in its respiratory
system into a smaller and smaller volume, a marked change in buoyancy occurs.
"The mass of the animal remains the same while its volume decreases, so it starts
to sink," she said. "The progressive collapse of the lungs in marine mammals pre-
adapts them for taking advantage of the buoyancy change." In humans and other
land animals, air gets trapped in the air sacs as the lungs are compressed, forcing
nitrogen into the bloodstream. This can cause nitrogen narcosis, or the bends, a
life-threatening syndrome that afflicts divers who return too quickly from ocean
depths. The researchers say that this form of diving, called intermittent
locomotion, allows marine mammals to save their energy for hunting or avoiding
predators. ... [This is another stunning example of convergence. All *three* major
marine mammals: dolphins, seals and whales, which are not thought to be closely
related, all share the same unique respiratory system, not shared by other land
mammals, which enables them to dive deeply without getting bends! That a `blind
watchmaker' random mutation and natural selection mechanism could
independently arrive at the same result in three widely separated lines of large
mammals which have long gestations, low reproduction and long generation times,
is unlikely. Since there is very little scientific evidence of positive natural selection
(Kimura, 1976, 1983), this is IMHO more good evidence for progressive mediate
creation by the supernatural guidance and/or intervention of an intelligent
designer.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000407/sc/genome_conference_1.html
Yahoo! ... April 7 ... Ethical Issues Trouble Human Genome Researchers ...
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Genetic researchers, poised to
complete the first version of the basic blueprint to the human body, are still
wrestling with the social questions that arise from the information being
discovered. International scientists who have collaborated in the Human Genome
Organization ... hope the more than 600 researchers expected to gather for the
three-day conference will also advance the difficult ethical debate over how the
benefits of the scientific knowledge should be shared. ... President Clinton and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair put the ethical issue of human gene mapping in
the public spotlight last month with a joint declaration that scientists should have
free access to the basic information being developed. ... But while there is general
agreement among scientists that the basic genomic blueprint should be freely
available, there is disagreement on issues such as how quickly it should enter the
public domain. ... Celera Genomics ... plans to use the genes of five different
people to make up a final genome sequence, and then sell information from its
database. Leaders of the Human Genome Project have said they hope to finish a
"working draft" that will include 90 percent of the human DNA sequence by late
May or early June, and have a final version ready on or before 2003. ... Scientists
acknowledge the issue of patenting genetic information will be difficult to resolve,
because it is not clear whether it would hinder or help future research. ...
competition with Celera and other private companies may already have been
beneficial by making the project speed up its work. "Initially, remember, we were
talking about the human genetic sequence being available in 2005. Then it was
2003. Now it's 2001 and maybe even 2000," ... [If Celera publishes its genome text
first, HUGO may be in breach of copyright if it publishes an identical copy later?
Maybe it will all turn on how successful Celera's final stage of putting together all
its fragments by computer is. The HUGO tortoise may still beat the Celera hare!]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000407/sc/space_planet_1.html Yahoo! ...
April 7 ... NASA: Suspected Extra-Solar Planet Probably a Star WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - It looked like a planet, the first directly detected outside our solar
system, but NASA researchers and the astronomer who discovered it now believe
it is probably just a faraway star. It is just too hot to be a planet ... The weird space
object photographed three years ago by the Hubble Space Telescope is most likely
a star far in the background, with its light dimmed by interstellar dust, so that it
looks like it is close to a double-star system in which it was supposed to be a
planet. The 1997 Hubble image of the object, known to astronomers as TMR-1C,
shows a dot at the end of a long streamer of reflective dust, located some 450
light-years away in the constellation Taurus the bull. ... Susan Terebey ... first
reported the discovery in 1998, and suspected the object was a young, hot
"protoplanet" several times the mass of Jupiter. ... "The new data do not lend
weight to the protoplanet interpretation and the results remain consistent with the
explanation that TMR-1C may be a background star," Terebey reported ...
"Finding a clearer answer is difficult for an object as faint as TMR-1C." While
TMR-1C would have been the first planet directly observed outside our solar
system, it would not have been the first detected by indirect means. Planet-hunters
believe there are 30 or more so-called extra-solar planets, which have been
detected by the characteristic wobble their gravity exerts on the stars they orbit. ...
Also at: http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/04/07/not.a.planet/index.html
[This means that no extra-Solar System planet has actually been observed. I
suppose the laws of physics would be against stars just wobbling?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000406/sc/britain_genes_1.html Yahoo! ...
April 6 ... Scientists Urge End to UK Ban on Embryo Cloning LONDON
(Reuters) - An influential panel of British scientists urged the government ... to lift
a ban on the cloning of human embryos for medical research. The Nuffield Council
on Bioethics said such cloning -- where scientists can create "spare parts" from
cloned embryo tissue -- could lead to "major advances in healthcare." But it
stressed the technique would not mean human beings would be cloned. ... Media
reports ... said the government was poised to lift its ban on the cloning of human
embryos for use in medical research. Government officials refused to confirm or
deny the reports. But the suggestion that the ban may be lifted sparked a row
between supporters of embryonic cloning ... and pro-life campaigners who argue
that the practice effectively creates human beings and then kills them. ... scientists
worry that if the ban on therapeutic cloning is not lifted Britain may lose out to
countries with less stringent rules such as the United States. ... [It will probably
come down to the `if we don't do it someone else will' rationalisation.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000406/sc/genome_patents_3.html Yahoo! ...
April 6 ... Gene Patents Won't Hurt Research: Scientists ... WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The scientist at the center of controversy over patenting human genes
pledged on Thursday that he would not use the law to prevent other scientists from
mining the human genome for insights or for profit. The White House and publicly
funded researchers also stressed that no one wants to restrict the right to patent
and profit from new discoveries. Last month, shares in the entire biotechnology
sector plunged when President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair
issued a joint statement urging that genome information be made freely available to
the public. ... Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera
Genomics, said his company's intentions have been misunderstood. "One of
Celera's founding principles is that we will release the entire consensus human
genome sequence freely to researchers on Celera's Internet site when it is
completed," Venter told a hearing of the Energy and Environment subcommittee
of the House Committee on Science. "We are not attempting to patent the human
genome, any of its chromosomes, or any random sequence," he added. "We will
place no restrictions on how scientists can use this data ... The only protection that
we have indicated that we would seek is database protection, as exists in Europe,
to inhibit other companies from selling the Celera database."Venter, whose
company announced Thursday it had the pieces of the entire sequence of a human
being, said it would patent the rights to a few "medically important" genes, but
planned to make money from selling analysis of the genes, not their simple
sequences. ... [There might be a sting in this tale (pun intended!). As soon as
Celera publishes its text of the human genome on the Internet, normal copyright
would presumably mean that no one else, including the Human Genome Project,
could republish a copy of it, even if they derived it independently?]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000113078204876&rtmo=3wnAunHM&atmo=lllllljx&pg=/et/00/4/6/ecflan06.html
Electronic Telegraph 06.04.00 ... Why we don't speak the same language. ...
THERE are no fossils to tell us how language came into being. But the reason that
humans communicate with strings of words rather than grunts can now be
explained. The answer lies not in linguistics but mathematics. In the past year, a
leap in understanding the architecture of language has come from evolutionary
game theory, a field pioneered in Britain by John Maynard Smith and Bill
Hamilton, who died last month. The field combines the evolutionary insights of
Charles Darwin with the mathematical analysis of games pioneered by the
computer pioneer John von Neumann . ... Prof Nowak and Dr David Krakauer
began by examining the "primordial soup" of language present throughout the
animal kingdom as primitive signalling between cells, the dance of bees, territorial
calls and birdsong. They showed how natural selection guides three steps in the
evolution of human language, from sounds to words to a "proto-grammar" spoken
by our distant ancestors. ... [Sounds like running an old `just-so' story through a
computer to make it look like a new `just-so' story? The problem is that man's
language system is not simply the animal grunt system improved, but a whole new
system involving several independent parts of the brain, the thorax, the tongue, the
basicranium and the larynx. Without any one of these subsystems, the whole
unique human speaking-hearing-comprehension system would not work at all.
That the Darwinian mutation-selection mechanism can generate pseudo-
explanations with only minimal contact with the real world, highlights the
fundamentally delusional nature of `Darwin's dangerous idea'.]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000113078204876&rtmo=3wnAunHM&atmo=lllllljx&pg=/et/00/4/6/ecndom06.html
Electronic Telegraph 06.04.00 ... Architects of Dome 'plagiarised spiders' ... AN
Oxford professor has accused the architects of the Millennium Dome of
plagiarising a design created by nature millions of years ago. Fritz Vollrath
...claims that the web of the tiny Oecobius spider is strikingly similar to the
Greenwich project - albeit in miniature. The web is the culmination of hundreds of
millions of years of evolution by spiders to produce lightweight cable structures
that defy gravity.... "The London Millennium Dome is a giant among buildings, yet
structurally it is but a huge spider web, a lightweight cable structure." The
Oecobius spider ... measures a few millimetres. Small stones are collected by the
spider to supply the stays that, in the Millennium Dome, are provided by complex
steel poles. ... Spider silk would be a better material for the roof of the Millennium
Dome ... with such high performance structures, spiders have attracted the
attention of architects [and] engineers ... "Why is the little spider that invented its
own millennium dome thousands of millennia ago not represented in the
Millennium Dome? Where are the spiders, the ultimate architects of lightweight
structures and manufacturers of superfibres?" ... The insects are masters of cost-
sensitive engineering and wizards of polymer science. ... "Web silk is a material
that outperforms the best of man-made polymers. At the same time it seems to cost
the spider little in terms of extra metabolism. Web architecture typically
outperforms the best of man-made threads." [Another example of what Norman
Macbeth (see tagline) called "Too Much Perfection" for a Darwinian explanation?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000405/sc/science_sharing_1.html Yahoo! ...
April 5 ... Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Share ... LONDON (Reuters)
Sharing and cooperation are two of the first lessons parents teach their children but
... the traits extend beyond humans. Primate experts ... have shown that capuchin
monkeys -- small South American primates -- also share and work together, which
they say has implications for understanding the give-and-take between people. "In
chimpanzees we had fairly strong indications for what I call calculated reciprocity
but to find this in monkeys is really spectacular," Dr Frans de Waal ... said ...
Capuchin monkeys are not as intelligent as chimpanzees, although they share food,
use tools in captivity, hunt cooperatively and live to for 50 years. "The split
between our branch of the (evolutionary) tree and theirs is 35 million years ago,
whereas a chimpanzee is about five million years ago. It's a very distance group,"
... So he and his colleagues were amazed when experiments they conducted ...
showed that the monkeys not only learned to cooperate quickly but shared food
and reciprocated for help in obtaining it. "It is important to know where these
tendencies come from,"...l. "It ties into economy, co-operation and morality which
I think are very big issues. Human morality is not a unique or out-of-the-blue
phenomenon. What we see here in monkeys are similarities in this sort of area."
During the three-year study ... monkeys in a test chamber cooperatively worked
for food when they were separated by a mesh partition. ... When two worked
together to pull the tray, they shared the food. The more successful the monkeys
were, the more food they shared. .... "It shows that the tendency to exchange
services or to have a system of reciprocity is probably fairly widespread in the
animal kingdom. These most sophisticated forms, payment for services, may also
be quite ancient and exist in a wide range of primates," ... Also at:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/04/05/monkeysharing.ap/index.html CNN ...
De Waal's research has raised eyebrows among some primatologists and behavior
scientists because he sees the roots of humans' complex cognition and morality in
the behavior of apes and monkeys. Previously, he detailed how chimpanzees
resolve conflicts in their groups. ... [Competition is supposed to be what makes
natural selection work. But its opposite, cooperation, is in fact "widespread in the
animal kingdom"! Personally I think it Biblically important that Anthropoidean
primates are cooperative.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000405/sc/health_antibiotics_1.html Yahoo!
... April 5 ... US Scientists Develop Antibiotic Alternative-Study ... LONDON
(Reuters) - American scientists have taken tips from Mother Nature to make a new
bacteria-killing molecule that could be an alternative to antibiotics and help
overcome the problem of drug resistance. Early laboratory tests have shown the
molecule is effective against strains of bacteria, or so-called superbugs, that have
shown resistance to the most powerful antibiotics. "What we've done is mimic a
molecule living organisms use to fend off bacterial invasions," said Samuel
Gellman ... "It is a new kind of antibiotic and I think it could be representative of a
large class of compounds, not only for antibiotic applications, but for lots of other
medicinal applications as well," ... Most antibiotics are closely related to molecules
found in nature. Gellman, ... and ... colleagues patterned their new molecule on
natural peptides that fight invading organisms. ... "These natural antimicrobial
agents are very effective. They operate by disrupting bacterial membranes and that
mechanism does not seem to be prone to the development of resistance. That's
why the mechanism is the thing we wanted to try to mimic," ... The new molecule
is more stable and less toxic to human cells than the real thing. "We've mimicked
the shape of one class of these natural antibiotic peptides with an unnatural type of
molecule," ... It is also unlikely that the bacteria will be able to build up a
resistance to it because the new molecule is so different. ... so it could take a long
time for bacteria to evolve mechanisms to overcome it. Superbugs have flourished
because doctors have overused antibiotics and scientists have failed to realize how
dynamic bacteria are. ... the next step is to test the molecule in animal studies and
to see if it evokes an immune response. ... [It will be interesting if nature's general
purpose immune system can generate rapid resistance to this too. Antibiotic
resistance in bacteria is often cited as evidence for Darwinism, but Darwinists did
not predict its rapid development, because as Kimura pointed out, a large pool of
heterozygous alleles was contrary to the expectations of selectionists.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_697000/697383.stm BBC ... 3
April, 2000 ... Lethal 'switch' kills pests ...Scientists have found a novel way to
kill an insect that involves throwing a lethal "switch" hidden in its genes. The pest
remains perfectly healthy and can reproduce only so long as it has a particular
food in its diet. When this is removed, a repressed gene gets turned on and the
creature is killed by a toxic chemical produced in its own body. ... The Oxford and
Manchester team hope their new method can overcome all the shortcomings of the standard
SIT [sterile insect technique]. They made a modification to the genetics of fruit flies
(Drosophila melanogaster) which collapsed only the females' ability to process and
store nutrients and run an effective immune system. This fatal modification was designed
to lay dormant for as long as the antibiotic tetracycline was included in the diet.
When the team removed the food additive, all the females in their experiment died.
... "The big challenge is getting this to work in a real pest species like Medfly ...
and the yellow fever mosquito ... "However, there is the issue of getting all this to
work on a factory scale. Error rates we cannot measure in the lab could become
apparent when things are massively scaled up." ... [Showing how an intelligent
designer can set things up genetically and then when the time is ripe, throw a
genetic switch.]
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"Second Corollary-Too Much Perfection. Darwin formulated this himself in
the first edition of The Origin of Species: `Natural selection tends only to
make each being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other
inhabitants of the same area.'. Eiseley reports that in 1869, after only ten
years, it was brushed aside by no less a person than Alfred Russel Wallace,
co-inventor with Darwin of the doctrine of natural selection. Perceiving
that the gap between the brain of the ape and that of the lowest savage was
too big, Wallace announced a heresy: `An instrument has been developed
in advance of the needs of its possessor.' He challenged the whole
Darwinian position by insisting that artistic, mathematical, and musical
abilities could not be explained on the basis of natural selection and the
struggle for existence. Something else, he contended, some unknown
spiritual element, must have been at work in the elaboration of the human
brain." (Macbeth N., "Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason," Gambit:
Boston MA, 1971, pp.102-103).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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