Headlines over the Pacific Ocean

Hey, y'all ... Flying over the Pacific Ocean gives time to read a few international headlines I don't usually peek at. Here are comments on a few.

DU Take 1:

From The Nation (is that a British paper?), Sect 3B, Sunday, January 15. In an insightful article titled "Yr wrld n brif" on the tendency of our society to squeeze more into every moment while meaning and beauty get squeezed out, it seems long-treasured written texts are often most abused. Besides "The Odyssey" in haiku (3 lines and 17 syllables per sound bite) and terse texting (trs txtng), now you can get a Bible boiled down by a retired priest in Canterbury, England. Says The Observer writer Per Conrad:
"The original text," as the editor admitted, "is very often highly poetic and allusive." Such
obsolete graces have been replaced by bullet points that briskly enumerate "further
resurrection appearances" by the arisen Christ.
DU sez: If our third rock from the sun does not slow down a bit in the near future, we may all fly off for lack of anything sufficiently substantive to hold us down.

DU Take 2:

Front page articles from The Japan Times, Friday, January 13, 2006:
* "Bird flu confab faces global pandemic fear" I am going to have to go back and check the book of Revelation in the Bible to see if the profile may fit. Seriously.
* "Japan will deploy foreign spy planes in 2007" It seems that intelligence takes a lot of work unless it has to do with the origin of life, in which case the establishment says getting intelligent information is just rolling dice enough times. Hmm?
* "New 'dark energy' study pokes holes in Einstein's 'cosmological constant'." LSU astronomer Bradley Schaefer tossed a grenade into the universe expansion and dark matter debate, presenting new research to suggest that the force 'dark energy' exerts may have varied over time. But DU now predicts that, no matter what evidence might show up, the high priests of evolution mythology will continue to insist that all processes now acting have been exactly the same throughout all time past ("uniformitarian principle"). It is this uniformitarian principle that is used to define God out of the origins game. Keep watching on this one. Oh - and it is also interesting that the Asia Wall Street Journal put this article on the next to last page. I guess it if ain't money, it ain't page one even in the Asia version of WSJ.
* "Forests may emit a lot of greenhouse gas methane." This one could be a bombshell on the Kyoto accords for reduction of the planet's greenhouse gases. Forests had always been viewed as a "sink" for carbon dioxide (considered a "greenhouse gas"), but this study says they also may be a significant source for methane, also a "greenhouse gas." Kind of like "forest giveth and forest taketh away." I am still wondering if this is global warming is an overblown deal. Seems like I recall that some long-buried sediments suggest a past atmospheric CO2 content more than 10 times the present content. I'll have to keep watching this one also.

Let all nature praise the Creator

Let all nature praise our God, Creator of heaven and earth.

We should ask Darwin to explain beauty to us sometime. But of course, since Darwin is dead, he can not. And he never could. He may understand it much better now, but perhaps only from a distance.

D.U.

Evolution "science" apologists are thoughtful, discerning, objective. RIght? Right??

So much for Mr. Nice Guy.

Didja read about Chairman Paul Mirecki? Shoulda.

I was just taking out papers to recycle (yes, creationists occasionally have concern for the planet) when I spotted the article I had set aside for a future date. Well, as in most of life, the future is now.

Article was included in collected news snippets in The Oregonian, December 2, 2005. Seems Professor Mirecki, chairman of religious studies at the University of Kansas, had scheduled a class which was to be entitled, "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and other Religious Mythologies." Sounds a tad on one side, eh? But oh well, it's UK. Big deal - business as usual.

The rub came when the good prof sent an email to members of a student organization in which he referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" (rhymes with "undies") and said a course depicting intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face."

Problem is we (creationists) are everywhere, sometimes even lurking beneath white lab coats. The prof's intemperance was outed, class canceled, apology issued, and apology again issued by the university Thursday, Dec 1, 2005.

The only thing right in this scenario was that Professor Mirecki was (is, will be?) holding forth his evolutionary views in the religion department. Since evolution (unobserved, unrepeatable, burdened with innumerable failed predictions) is not science, why not in the religion department?

But with Professor Mirecki's character on full display, why not ask, "If objective truth really does exist, can I expect this guy to be dispensing it?"

Respectfully, D. U.

Even measuring bat testes does not change the fact that Darwin is dead

Here it is Jan 4 already. I should be working on my 2005 taxes, but maybe I'm just killing time until the USC-Texas squareoff this afternoon at the Rose Bowl. I just wish I had a wall-sized poster of Reggie Bush hurdling over the air-catching Arizona State defender on his way to the goal line a few weeks ago. That should be sports poster of the decade. Not that I am a Trojan fan - I'm not. I confess to being one among a group that snitched a "Tommy Trojan" sword from the USC campus statue a few decades ago. The very snazzy looking sword turned out to be a wooden replica. I guess Tommy Trojan sword snitching got too popular in that era - forcing even august USC to eschew putting out real metal. But it may be a hint for today's game. If the USC defense does not have true mettle, Texas may not need to bring enough heat to melt steel, but just enough to burn the Trojans real good.

On to the rant of the day. It's about a guy who studies the size of private parts on bats. I must admit feeling a bit weird talking about this, but maybe not as weird as our researcher feels while on task. Actually, in the great tradition of American higher education, it is likely the graduate assistant who gets the measuring job.

Soooo ... I just read today (article by Sarah Moses of Newhouse News Service) that Syracuse University biology professor Scott Pitnick looked at 334 species of bats and found that, in males, the bigger the testes, the smaller the brains (published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Science). Furthermore, it seems that the well-hung fellas seem to show up in the species with promiscuous rather than faithful females. "The reason for the bat findings: evolutionarily speaking, big testes win when female mates are promiscuous because larger testes allow male bats to fertilize more females," Moses quotes Pitnick as saying.

So what to make of this? It seems like the word "evolution" is dragged out and paraded around any time something makes a population shift. But it is the old bait-and-switch trick. The evolutionist-illusionist blithely displays a genetic drift within a population (such as sizes of bat brains/testes, or colors of moth markings in industrial England), while NOT SHOWING ANY NEW INFORMATION OR NEW STRUCTURES, OR NEW FUNCTIONS PRODUCED, and then makes the switch to claim this as evidence of the kind of evolution that produces people from particles. The process of selection within a population is equated to a process that creates entirely new structures and functions, as Darwin would suggest. They are simply not the same, and to suggest that they are lacks integrity. Discerning folks will figure it out, but it seems there is no hope for the Darwinist ideologues.

Now for observations instead of ruminations.

(1) Bat fossils supposedly millions of years old have been found virtually identical to modern-day living counterparts. See for example the G. L. Jepsen photo on the cover page of Science, December 9, 1966.

Hey - it's not like this is new stuff.

(2) And from Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, p. 463, "Like the pterosaurs, the flight structure of bats was already highly evolved when they first appeared in the fossil record. The oldest skeleton of a bat, Icaronycteris, from the early Eocene, appears almost indistinguishable from living bats."

Face it folks. A Bible creation model predicts (1) abrupt appearance and (2) stasis (plus gradual decay following the fall of man in Genesis chapter 3). A Darwinian evolutionary model predicts (1) gradual appearance, and (2) continual change. The Darwinian origins model clearly flunks the bat test. As Darwin continues to strike out time after time after time after time, maybe it is time for him to get a bigger bat. But since Darwin is dead, let's watch with a jaundiced eye those who are swinging the bat for him.

Young scientists - free your minds to consider intelligent design (Take 2)

My 2005 income taxes still await here on January 2. Maybe I am just avoiding their pain. But, here goes anyway .....

From my last post, a detail is changed and the bottom line ("Young scientists - free your intelligence to consider intelligence") is unchanged.

In my last post I said NO improved plant species resulted from the artificial mutagen exposure plus intense artificial (intelligent) selection in a few decades of the 20th century. Some info from "Dr. S" mentions one "notable exception" - low phytate corn, which has certain advantages in animal feeding. "The low phytate corn was created by mutagenizing corn, and then selecting for strains wherein the genetic machinery which directs the phytic acid production had been damaged. Although the resulting mutant may be desired for a specific agricultural purpose, it was accomplished through net loss of information and the loss of biological function." (complete reference info will be supplied at a later date).

This sounds much like the so-called "beneficial" mutation producing sickle-cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia may be beneficial in a limited environmental condition such as in malaria-infested jungles ("phenotype" advantage), but profoundly deleterious in the world at-large, say in Washington, D.C. ("genotype" degeneration).

So it seems the occasional "beneficial mutations" we hear trumpeted from time to time have the same common feature: local and limited advantage while speeding the slide into reduced viability or even extinction at the total population level. Hardly stuff to give substance to Darwin's fantasies of new-and-improved species.

Bottom line is still the same: young scientists, don't waste your lives invested in Darwinian dead-ends. Do something useful.

Respectfully, D.U.

Young scientists - free yourselves from the intellectual prison of Darwin's impotency

Why am I still doing this when on January 1, 2006, I should be working on my taxes while I have a bit of time? Compulsive-obsessive would say my sweet loving wife. But just a word of encouragement for young scientists as they ("you" I hope) may be looking at 2006 as the beginning of a truly meaningful life of scientific investigation.

Here is my word of encouragement:

Eschew (stay away from like the plague) uncritically swallowing Darwin and Darwinism. It is a sure dead-end unless you just want to spend your life writing meaningless papers in journals that really do not help anyone anywhere at a practical level. Just remember that your old professors may have so much vested in the totally impotent neo-Darwinian theory that they will never break free of their shackles. That does not mean you should not free your intelligence to consider intelligence as the source of the "breathtaking" design in nature.

Just one example before I move on to my IRS 1040. Titillated by the hope of neo-Darwinian evolution creating new-and-improved species via mutation and selection, plant geneticists in a few decades of the 20th century spent years and lives irradiating plants/seeds and applying intense intelligent selection to the mutant results. What did they get? NO improved species. Just weakened and less viable plants, wasted lives, lost years, lost money, and who-knows-how-many unnecessary starvations. The "green revolution" that has been feeding the world in the last four decades came when folks at the empirical practical real level decided to toss Darwin overboard and just use intense intelligent selection on existing natural plants. (Sorry - no comment on "g-m" foods here and now.)

So the natural chemical/radiation environment plus unintelligent "natural" selection is supposed to have produced the wonderful biological world of plants that feed the world today, while intense radiation and intense intelligent selection among mutants only got worse results? Get real. Throw off those old shackles. Get on with a real productive life in science by "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

Respectfully, D.U.

INFORMATION, INTELLIGENCE, AND DESIGN

Well, "Repack Rider" has commented on my last post and bemoaned the "ignorance" of the young Jewish woman in Florida who said,

"Saying life comes from evolution is like saying a library was made
by someone spilling a bottle of ink."

Apparently Repack has not been clued into the difference between information and the medium upon which it is contained. Further, Repack blissfully plugs ahead in spite of the occasionally observed fact that information does not self-organize.

I sha'nt belabor the point here. Why should I? In the context of the creation-evolution controversy, it has been well covered by the late Dr. Wilder-Smith in his book "The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution." Maybe it was written originally in German, I am not sure. I read an English version about 10 years ago. Very cogent, very precise, very scientific. Thanks to Dr. Wilder-Smith, and I offer great respect to his memory. By the way, Dr. Wilder-Smith wrote several books along this line, and the others I have glanced at seem to be of the same quality.

I recommend the book as a good read. If you wish a similar but more recent book, try "In the Beginning There Was Information" by Dr. Werner Gitt, either in English or in Geman. Personally, I still prefer Wilder-Smith as more readable in dealing effectively with the same point that "Rider" has missed.

Respectfully, D.U.