Reflectorites
Here are excerpts from web articles for the period 4 - 12 July
2000, with my comments in square brackets.
Steve
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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000712/sc/air_dc_2.html Yahoo! ...
July 12 ... Origin of Life Up in the Air -- Literally LONDON (Reuters) The
origin of life is up in the air -- literally, according to new scientific research
.... A team of international researchers argues life may not have begun in
the sea as previously thought, but in tiny droplets of water thrown up by
ocean waves and drifting high in the sky. In an article in New Scientist
magazine, the researchers argue such water droplets could have provided
just the conditions needed for complex chemicals like DNA and proteins to
form. They noticed that as opposed to just seawater, up to half of the
material in the droplets was organic matter -- picked up from oily
molecules on the ocean surface. As the water in the droplets evaporates,
the organic matter then becomes more concentrated and with energy from
sunlight, it could undergo chemical reactions to combine, they said. ... [I
haven't yet read the article, but if this was dated April 1, I would have
thought it was a joke! What is needed to be explained is not the
concentration of chemicals (although to obtain *all* the right chemicals in
pure optical isomer form at the same time is a problem enough) but the
origin of *information* (see tagline). Another obvious problem is that all
OoL simulations require there be no oxygen, but in that case there would
be no ozone layer and high-energy UV radiation would break down any
organic compounds in the air. Hopefully the take-home message that
members of the public will get is that modern science has no idea how life
originated, or even *could* originate. But at least it gives new meaning to
the saying "raining cats and dogs"!]
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/07/07/schoolprayer.games.ap/index.html
CNN ... Santa Fe schools end policy allowing student prayer before games
July 7, 2000 ... GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- Santa Fe school trustees
voted ... to eliminate a policy that allowed student-led prayer before
football games, declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court last
month. "Although we, along with most of the people across the nation are
disappointed with the ruling, in keeping with the district's pattern, we will
comply with the ruling," school board president Denise Cowart said ... The
policy had allowed students to deliver "a brief invocation and/or message"
over a speaker before football games. The case originated in Santa Fe in
1995 and resulted in a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling last month that bars
students from leading stadium crowds in meditation but could go much
further to restrict prayer in public schools. The court ruled that a school
that gives students the public forum for prayer is effectively sponsoring
the message. ... See also:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/06/columns/fl.sekulow.schoolprayer.06.21/
Living with the Supreme Court's mess ... June 22, 2000 (FindLaw) -- The
decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Santa Fe, Texas, "football
prayer" case is a school administrator's nightmare. The court's opinion
tells school districts at length what they cannot do but gives few clues as
to how to comply with the Constitution when allowing student speakers at
school events. Straightening out the legal mess unfortunately is going to
take years of expensive litigation. The dilemma is simple to state: If a
school censors a student speaker's message to prevent any religious
speech, the school violates the student speaker's constitutional rights of
free speech and religious freedom. If the school does not censor student
religious speech, it faces intimidation from ACLU lawyers claiming an
unconstitutional violation of "separation of church and state." The Santa
Fe Independent School District, enmeshed in litigation over precisely this
issue, tried the obvious solution: a hands-off approach. Let students decide
whether to have a speaker, let students pick the speaker and let the speaker
decide what to say. .... In Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, a
6-3 majority of the Supreme Court struck down the student pregame
speaker policy as unconstitutional. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for
the majority, opined that because the elected student speaker might say
something religious, the policy violated the Establishment Clause of the
First Amendment. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in dissent, charged
that the majority opinion "bristles with hostility to all things religious in
public life." Indeed, Stevens went so far as to rule that allowing student
elections under the Santa Fe policy was unconstitutional because religious
issues might become a subject of debate. (Stevens did not explain why
student debate is healthy on every other topic, but not on religious issues.)
.... In the wake of Santa Fe, however, school districts across the nation will
need to reexamine their policies regarding student speakers at school-
sponsored assemblies such as graduation and sporting events. In their
efforts to reach a workable solution to the twin problems of forbidden
censorship and forbidden establishment of religion, school districts face a
daunting task. The very extreme nature of Stevens's opinion makes the
challenge that much greater. Stevens called into question even
scrupulously neutral policy wording. "Even if the plain language of the
[football] policy were facially neutral," he wrote, "the Establishment
Clause forbids a State to hide behind the application of formally neutral
criteria and remain studiously oblivious to the effects of its actions." In
the Santa Fe case, as a matter of fact, there were no untoward "effects" --
the policy was challenged before it ever became operational. But this did
not matter to Stevens either: "even if no Santa Fe High School student
were ever to offer a religious message, the [football] policy fails a facial
challenge because [of] the attempt by the District to encourage prayer,"
Stevens declared. Further, Stevens dismissed the fact that the audience
was free to ignore or disagree with the student speaker: "Even if we regard
every high school student's decision to attend a home football game as
purely voluntary, we are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of a
pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to
participate in an act of religious worship," Stevens declaimed. Under this
distorted reasoning, everyone attending the halftime concert becomes a
musician. So the dilemma remains: How can a school district
simultaneously avoid forbidden content censorship of student speakers and
forbidden sponsorship of potential student prayers? There is, of course,
one safe option -- simply ban all student speakers at school events. This
would satisfy Stevens' concern that no religious words be uttered. This
would also neutrally stifle secular as well as religious messages,
eliminating any claim of content censorship. But clearly, that is not what
the First Amendment requires. The Supreme Court has repeatedly
recognized that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom
of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." The challenge for school
districts will be to make that promise of student free speech a reality for
every student -- including students who have a religious message ... [I
apologise as an Australian commenting on the USA's legal situation, but
this sounds absurd. Clearly the Founding Fathers did not intend by the
Establishment of Religion clause to *outlaw* all public manifestations of
religion! If 90% of the population believe that there is a God who, in one
way or another, created mankind, it is amazing that the 10% who don't are
able to enforce their will with the full power of the State. I agree with
Chief Justice Rehnquist that this supposed neutrality is, in its effect, if not
its intent, "hostility".]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/sc/microbes_dc_2.html
Yahoo! ... July 8 ... Scientists Find Super-Hardy South Pole Microbes
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a finding that could have an impact on the
search for life on Mars and other planets, scientists say they have detected
hardy microbes that seem to thrive in the radiation, cold and darkness at
the South Pole. "If the team's conclusions prove true, the discovery not
only has important implications for the search for life in other extreme
environments on Earth, but also for the possibility that life -- at least at the
microscopic level -- may exist elsewhere in the solar system," the National
Science Foundation (NSF) said ... "While we expected to find some
bacteria in the South Pole snow, we were surprised that they were
metabolically active and synthesizing DNA and protein at local ambient
temperatures of ... minus 12 to minus 17 Celsius ... the South Pole
microbes may have enzymes and membranes that help them cope with
their arid, frigid environment ... Also at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_827000/827063.stm BBC
... 10 July, 2000 ... Snow microbes found at South Pole ... The microbes
have DNA sequences similar to a category of bacteria known as
Deinococcus. ... first discovered in cans of irradiated meat in the 1950s,
and is able to withstand extreme dryness and large doses of radiation. ...
Deinococcus is thought to form one of the earlier branches in the bacterial
evolutionary tree, and is much older than Antarctica in its present
location.... it is unlikely that the newly discovered microbes evolved in
Antarctica. ... [If these bacteria are in snow they may not be experiencing
the extremes of UV radiation and temperature at the surface. The *mean*
temperature of Mars is only -23C ("Mars," Encyclopaedia britannica,
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,52341+1+51083,00.html),
so it must fluctuate much colder than this. And it is even colder on planets
further from the Sun, so it is wishful thinking to extrapolate this finding to
"elsewhere in the solar system", if not to Mars. Deinococcus is not a
simple bacteria-it achieves its resistance to radiation by redundancy and
self-repair mechanisms. If it turns out that the earliest bacteria were more
complex than later ones, and the later bacteria `devolved' from them, this
would fit a creation or ID model better than an evolution model.]
l.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000706/sc/space_hubble_dc_1.html
Yahoo! ... July 6 ... Hubble Captures Black Hole's Cosmic Searchlight ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A blue blast of electrons, shining like a
cosmic searchlight and powered by a gluttonous black hole, has been
captured in images ... by astronomers working with the Hubble Space
Telescope. What looks like a searchlight beam in space is actually a jet of
electrons and other sub-atomic particles being emitted at nearly the speed
of light from the heart of galaxy M87, 50 million light-years from Earth.
The jet itself is about 5,000 light-years long. ... At its center, galaxy M87
hides a supermassive black hole that has already gobbled up 2 billion
times the mass of our Sun, the astronomers said. This monstrous matter-
sucking space drain is invisible to astronomers except for the activity
around its edges, where superheated gas swirls around before being
gulped down by the black hole. The jet originates in this circle of gas and
is concentrated and then thrown out into space by the intense, twisted
magnetic fields in this region ... In addition to the visible blue jet, there is
also a jet emanating from the black hole made of radio waves, which is at
least 10 times longer .. many others may exist. But ... there does not
appear to be one in our own Milky Way, where the central black hole is
rather ordinary in size when compared with the supermassive one in
M87. "If there is any jet (in the Milky Way), it's very, very weak," he
said. ... [Another design parameter? If galaxies do normally have
supermassive black holes at the centre and if these all have jets that
sweep the whole galaxy, life may be impossible in them?]
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/070400sci-archaeo-greece.html
The New York Times ... July 4, 2000 Greek Myths: Not
Necessarily Mythical ... Adrienne Mayor regards ... evidence... that
supports her theory that the natural historians and artists of early Greece
understood fossils as organic remains ... Ms. Mayor found a striking
resemblance between the monster on a Corinthian vase ... and the skull of
an extinct giraffe, top. Because the monster is not typical of Greek images,
art historians had assumed the vase was the work of an incompetent artist.
... Ancient texts contain stories about heroes and giants; the giants, Ms.
Mayor says, could have been created by arranging the bones of a
mammoth to resemble an upright human skeleton ... Mayor has
nonetheless done some digging deep into the past and found literary and
artistic clues -- and not a few huge fossils -- that seem to explain the
inspiration for many of the giants, monsters and other strange creatures in
the mythology of antiquity. "I have discovered that if you take all the
places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil
sites," .... "But there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those
myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing
for prescientific people." Her years of research thus challenge the widely
held view that natural historians in classical Greece and Rome lacked the
knowledge to interpret large vertebrate fossils as organic remains of the
past. That conceptual breakthrough, representing the start of the modern
science of paleontology, was supposedly made by the French naturalist
Georges Cuvier in 1806. Yet much like today's fossil hunters, Ms. Mayor
found, ancient Greeks and Romans collected and measured the petrified
bones they encountered and displayed them in temples and museums.
They, too, recognized fossils as evidence of past life, now extinct,
anticipating Cuvier by more than 2,000 years. Still, the ancients often let
their culture-bound imaginations run in unscientific directions. ... Dr. Kate
A. Robson Brown, an anthropologist at the University of Bristol in
England, thinks that some of Ms. Mayor's fossil-myth connections may be
a stretch. As she noted in the current issue of Natural History magazine,
"Many cultures around the globe have colorful giant lore -- Norse fables
and Australian creation stories come to mind -- without the benefit of rich
fossil deposits." Ms. Mayor said her study of ancient texts revealed ample
evidence of a "bone rush" among Greeks in the fifth century B.C. Every
discovery of huge bones, it seems, prompted speculation that they
belonged to this hero or that giant. ... showed that the perceptive ancients
were able to relate a fossil species to living animals, well before modern
paleontology. The revised myth of the war elephants showed that they
were responsive to new zoological knowledge, adapting mythology the
way scientists today sometimes have to reshape theory. [Another antidote
to our modern hubris? If true, this would further blur the artificial
distinction between religion and science. The comment about Australian lack
of fossils is wide of the mark. For starters Australian aboriginal myths
are usually about existing animals and natural features. Also, fossils of
at least one huge species of marsupial has been found in Australia, and
besides, the first aboriginal immigrants to Australia may have encountered
them as *living*!]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000706/sc/aids_conference_dc_1.html
Yahoo! ... July 6 ... Little Hope on Horizon at AIDS Conference ...
DURBAN (Reuters) - When 11,000 doctors, scientists, health workers and
AIDS activists descend on this Indian Ocean port city later this week, they
will not hear of any dramatic cures for AIDS. They will not hear about
some new vaccine that will prevent its spread, they will not hear about
new drugs that keep patients healthy and they will not hear of some
miraculous new way to keep people from spreading it around ... Instead
they will hear more of what they already suspect -- that AIDS is spreading
at astonishing rates in the developing world and will keep on spreading for
the next few years, no matter what anyone does. ... there is nothing else to
test. There is no other product ready to move into phase III ... the last stage
of testing before a drug company can seek approval from the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration. ... doctors are intrigued by approaches aimed at
helping the body cope with the virus on its own, such as carefully
monitored interruptions in treatment and the use of natural proteins to rev
up the immune system. ... Some won't come because they feel we have
reached a plateau with the science. It is going to be a policy discussion in
Durban." ... [This is exactly what Duesberg predicted!]
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/local.pat,local/37749438.701,.html The
Kansas City Star ... Kansas evolution decision got widespread criticism
and praise ... 07/01/00 It was shades of H.L. Mencken. In the days
following the Kansas Board of Education's decision last summer to de-
emphasize evolution in state science standards, commentators from around
the world gleefully proclaimed Kansas full of hayseeds. Like Mencken,
who with biting commentary covered the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" in
... the Baltimore Sun, editorial writers and cartoonists from Los Angeles to
London found a plethora of ways to poke fun ... The Kansas evolution
decision got prominent display in The New York Times, The Times of
London, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Economist ....
Not to mention plenty of guffaws from late-night talk show audiences. ...
National organizations, from the American Chemical Society to the
American Association of University Women, condemned the board's
decision as a giant step backward for science education. But the decision
received its fair share of support from conservative quarters. ... University
of California-Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who has written
books critical of the theory of evolution ... called the Kansas board
"courageous" and predicted it would open debate about what
schoolchildren would learn about the origin of life. Biochemist Michael
Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, said ... he was heartened by the
Kansas board's decision. Far from ridiculing the Kansas board,
conservatives across the country have been emboldened by the board's
decision to question Charles Darwin's theories of the origins of life, said
Wendy Wright ... of Concerned Women for America ... The negative
reaction was disturbing and was engineered by the science community,
which felt scorned by evolution's rejection ... "This almost was like a
warning shot across the bow of anyone who would deviate from this hard-
core evolution standpoint," ... [The `take home' lessons from Kansas were:
1) the almost fanatical overreaction from all around the world about not
making *macroevolution* examinable (it can still be taught) to school kids
in one State of the USA, revealed a growing insecurity among
evolutionists; 2) the heavy-handed use of ridicule and intimidation by the
evolutionists rather than admitting there are major philosophical
assumptions and scientific problems with macroevolution; 3) the steep rise
in public awareness of the ID movement; and 4) the encouragement it
gave to anti-evolutionists that their giant opponent really does have feet of
clay! (Dan 2:33]
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"The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the
problem of the origin of biological information. In accordance with this, the
idea of biological information emerges as *the* fundamental concept in the
physicochemical theory of the origin of life." (Kuppers B-O., "Information
and the Origin of Life," [1986], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1990, p.170.
Emphasis in original)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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