dacook

An article entitled “Architectural Analysis and Intraoperative Measurements Demonstrate the Unique Design of the Multifidus Muscle for Lumbar Spine Stability,” in the current issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, nicely refutes Dobzhansky’s pontifical pronouncement that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
The abstract is available online, though the full text article requires a subscription. This errant concept has been discussed previously on UD by DonaldM, but I thought it worth revisiting when I saw this example of the absolute lack of any usefulness of any concept of evolution in understanding at least this type of biological form and function.

The most striking thing about this article from a heuristic standpoint is that understanding the muscle under study depends completely on a design perspective, and owes nothing to any understanding of evolution. This is implicity acknowledged by the authors in the wording of their descriptions and conclusions:

“The architectural design … demonstrates that the multifidus muscle is uniquely designed as a stabilizer to produce large forces.”

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A recent multidisciplinary study on the two-phase increase in the size of life has concluded that there must exist a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to explain the sudden increase in size and complexity which occurred twice in the history of life, both times following increases in atmospheric oxygen.

From the earliest bacteria to the largest organisms, there has been a 16 orders of magnitude increase in size. Far from the gradual progression over much time which one would expect from a Darwinian explanation, however, this increase was not incremental, but occurred in two very large steps, involving about a million times increase in size over very brief periods of time.

And things didn’t just get bigger, but much more complex as well:

Each size step required a major innovation in organismal complexity—first the eukaryotic cell and later eukaryotic multicellularity.

The investigators conclusion? There must have been a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to account for the rapid changes:
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Rich Akin, CPA and CEO of Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI), has reported to its membership the completion of a successful five-city educational event, titled What Darwin Didn’t Know, in Spain this past January.

A week prior to the first event the national newspaper El País published a full page article that portrayed these presentations as the Americans bringing creationism to Spain. While riddled with distortions and inaccuracies, the article listed a link to the on-line registration site. The article also carried the times and locations of each event and even placed next to the article the poster prepared to advertise the events, likely increasing attendance.

This article acted like an alarm, awakening and riling up the Darwinists, who immediately began a campaign of intimidation against the locations where the events were scheduled. Read More ›

I recently assisted my daughter with a most interesting project for her 8th grade science class. The assignment was to learn about a Biome, write a report on it, then design an animal to live in it.
The students were to provide a description of the characteristics of their animal which suited it to life in the Biome they selected, and make a model of the animal for display. My daughter selected arctic tundra for the Biome. We read up on it, she did the report, then the fun began.

She has a housecat, (felis-catus) named Chester of whom she is very fond. He seemed a good starting point. We designed several adaptations to Chester to enable him to thrive in the arctic tundra. First, and most obviously, we made him all white to blend into the snow. Then we regressed his legs to vestigial stumps and flattened him out dramatically so he could hug the ground and better avoid being picked off by predators, as well as stay low out of the wind. His species is therefore felis-flatus. (That’s “flatus” as in flat to the ground, rhymes with “catus” not the other meaning which my son already had fun with.)
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The cover story of the current (March 2008)issue of National Geographic is “Inside Animal Minds.”
It is an interesting, persuasive, and I’m sure quite unintentional argument against the Darwinist position that mind is an illusory epiphenomenon of the material brain.

The article presents truly interesting examples of studies involving dogs, elephants, fish, primates, sheep, octopus, dolphins, and birds purportedly showing that these animals have real minds and are not just behavioristic, deterministic biological machines.
The article further credits Darwin with the original insight that “earthworms are cognitive beings”

The examples they cite do make a good case that animals have real minds, not just a set of biologically and environmentally encoded behavior, and argues against “behaviorism, which regards animals as little more than machines.”
It asks the really excellent question: “But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained?” (page 48)
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I’ve just received the following notice from PSSI (Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity), of which I am a member. I’m taking the liberty of posting it up here in case anyone else is interested in this debate. Fresh from our What Darwin Didn’t Know events in Spain, Dr. Geoff Simmons, author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links is scheduled to debate evolutionist PZ Myers, who runs the caustic pro-Darwinism blog Pharyngula. The one hour debate will begin at 1 PM PST tomorrow (Thursday) on radio station KKMS, AM 980 in Minneapolis. You can listen to the debate live on the web by logging onto http://kkms.com/LocalHosts/15/ and clicking on the Listen Live button at the top. Read More ›

Similar to the Cambrian explosion of animal life, it appears there was an earlier similar explosion for plants, at least the Ediacaran variety.
In what the ScienceNOW Daily News is calling Another Big Bang for Biology, the oldest assemblage of macroscopic life forms on earth, Ediacaran plants, appeared suddenly and fully diversified.
This plant life “explosion” coincides exactly with a sudden rise in ocean oxygenation.
The study authors, paleontologists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, call their findings The Avalon Explosion.
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Another surprise for Darwinists has been found in the genome of the lowly, primitive sea anemone.

In an article published in Science and summarized here
we discover that:

The newly decoded DNA of a few-centimeter-tall sea anemone looks surprisingly similar to our own, a team led by Nicholas Putnam and Daniel Rokhsar from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, reports on page 86. This implies that even very ancient genomes were quite complex and contained most of the genes necessary to build today’s most sophisticated multicellular creatures.

The work is truly stunning for its deep evolutionary implications,” says Billie Swalla, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Ill say it is. Just how the heck is the Darwinian paradigm going to explain this? Advanced genetic programs installed before there was any chance of natural selection acting on them. Yikes! Another finding in the real world not predicted by, or even possible within, the Darwiniam paradigm. Another surprise for Darwinists.
Sooner or later they’ve GOT to start questioning underlying assumptions. (Naive, ain’t I?)

One of the big surprises of the anemone genome, says Swalla, is the discovery of blocks of DNA that have the same complement of genes as in the human genome. Individual genes may have swapped places, but often they have remained linked together despite hundreds of millions of years of evolution along separate paths, Putnam, Rokhsar, and their colleagues report.

To repeat the obvious question, where the heck did these codes come from?
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I thought this was worth sharing: On Page 8 of a Report from the National Research Council there is an interesting admission: “Natural selection based solely on mutation is probably not an adequate mechanism for evolving complexity.” Of course the report itself supports the concept of Darwinian evolution. But I think the admission that mutation is an insufficient mechanism is significant. They invoke lateral transfer of genes as the alternate explanation: “More important, lateral gene transfer and endosymbiosis are probably the most obvious mechanisms for creating complex genomes…” Of course this begs the question; where did the genes come from that are being laterally transferred? As far as I saw in the report, the authors only indirectly address this problem Read More ›

Life’s capabilities continue to astound. Another assumption of mainstream science is overturned: Now we find that some kinds of fungi can grow very nicely, thank you, in very high radiation environments, and even appear to thrive, using radiation as an energy source.
I wonder; in what sort of environment did these organisms evolve to account for this remarkable ability?

From a report on a study by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine:

“Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.
“The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they’re making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth’s energetics—in particular, the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy—may need to be recalculated,” says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and senior author of the study, published May 23 in PLoS ONE.”

It seems that certain fungi, specifically those containing melanin, the same stuff that give us those nice cancerous tans, thrive in high radiation environments. In their discussion the researchers note:
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A team of neurobiologists led by Bjorn Brembs of Free University Berlin have found experimental evidence in fruit fly behavior indicating that these much-abused bugs may have an element of free will. A report on the study in LiveScience notes that:

For centuries, the question of whether or not humans possess free will — and thus control their own actions — has been a source of hot debate.
“Free will is essentially an oxymoron — we would not consider it ‘will’ if it were completely random and we would not consider it ‘free’ if it were entirely determined,” Brembs said. In other words, nobody would ascribe responsibility to one’s actions if they were entirely the result of random coincidence. On the other hand, if one’s actions were completely determined by outside factors such that no alternative existed, no one would hold that person responsible for them.

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This is the first article I’ve authored for this site; I apologize in advance if I format wrong or make some other mistake.

As is so often the case, I ran across the most interesting material while looking for something else, and thought others might be interested as well.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was an important 19th-Century philosopher. He was also an obnoxious curmudgeon. He wrote an essay: “38 Ways to Win an Argument,” which details all the unfair, manipulative, and downright mean tactics which can be employed to win an argument, especially a public one, whether or not the truth is on your side. Reading through these techniques it struck me how many of them are employed by the Materialist/Darwinist side against ID and other positions critical of their claims.

I have picked out a few examples, with their original numberings from his essay (quotes from Schopenhauer are in italics if I’ve figured out this formatting system right). These were taken from a translation of Shopenhauer by T. Bailey Saunders: The Art of Controversy, and Other Posthumous Papers, London: Sonnenshein/New York: Macmillan, 1896.
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