Your inner bat:  You have another sense you may not be aware of: you can learn the art of echolocation.   It’s been known that blind people develop an ability to detect objects by their echoes, but Science Daily reported that even sighted people can train themselves to do it.  Some people are better at it than others, for unknown reasons.  Echolocation depends on very precise detection of timing differences between the two ears.

Self-healing holes:  Our blood vessels are made of a wonderful tissue, called epithelium.  It’s stretchy, stable, and watertight.  Science Daily says, “Measuring just a few hundred nanometers in thickness, this super-tenuous structure routinely withstands blood flow, hydrostatic pressure, stretch and tissue compression to create a unique and highly dynamic barrier that maintains the organization necessary to partition tissues from the body’s circulatory system.”

But there are immune cells, called leukocytes, that need to enter these passageways.  How do they do it?  The article presented findings by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where scientists studied how epithelial cells cooperate with leukocytes, creating holes for them to enter, then healing the holes behind them.

By and large, these ensuing “micro –wounds” are short-lived; as soon as the cells have crossed the endothelium, these pores and gaps quickly heal, restoring the system’s efficient barrier function. In cases when these gaps fail to close — and leakage occurs — the results can be devastating, leading to dramatic pathologies including sepsis and acute lung injury.…

Described in The Journal of Cell Biology, the new findings suggest that rather than structural robustness per se, the barrier function of the endothelium relies on an enormous self-restorative capacity.…

“The cell’s restorative capacity was just so striking,” says [Christopher V.] Carman. “But these early investigations were still inadequate to tell us how the breaches were being closed. We had to dig down to the sub-cellular level to understand the underlying activities and the molecular signaling mechanisms that were orchestrating these activities.”

Viruses, your friends:  You have another immune system scientists did not realize till recently, and it involves partnership with viruses.  Nature News reported that “Viruses in the gut protect from infection.”  Bacteriophages, tiny viruses that can invade and kill bacteria, find a home among the linings in your airways, by forming bonds with sugars in the mucus.  When bacteria invade, these killing machines, like a robotic army, take them out.  Medical Xpress called this a “new immune system” that has been discovered.  In more general terms, Science Magazine reviewed “our viral inheritance,” giving examples of good and bad ways that viruses interact with our bodies.  Even some endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) that seemed at first to be parasitic on our genomes now appear to be useful or beneficial.

Nose knowledge:  The sense of smell continues to be one of the most difficult to understand in humans and in fruit flies.  The molecules that land on olfactory receptors encode messages that are in some ways similar to those in the retina, but there appear to be timing dependences, too, Medical Xpress reported.  Science Magazine reviewed the growing science of “flavor,” trying to understand how we learn to associate smells and tastes with pleasure or displeasure.  “It’s a vastly more complex topic than they once thought,” the article said.

Your inner clock: We share a sense with the little flies we swat on our arms: a biological clock.  Because the human circadian clock is much more complex, scientists try to understand the clock in fruit flies.  Medical Xpress reported that a new component of the fruit fly circadian clock has been identified.

Six degrees of separation:  Because the brain is so heavily interconnected, any synapse is only about six steps away from any other.  This allows for an enormous amount of plasticity for “rewiring” circuits when one part is damaged.  Science Daily discussed work at UCLA that shows the brain “rewires itself after damage or injury.”  Understanding these processes could lead to therapies for stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients.  Last week, Science Magazine discussed “Why adults need new brain cells.”  Contrary to beliefs decades ago, neuroscientists now know that brain cell regeneration takes place.  Not only that, “a key function of adult neurogenesis is to shape neuronal connectivity in the brain according to individual needs,” the article said.  Because of the brain’s plasticity and massively parallel architecture, Sandia Labs is looking to the human brain as “a model for supercomputers,” PhysOrg reported.

To make a point without attempting to be morbid, these findings underscore why the death of a human being, whether in a tornado or an abortion lab, is such a traumatic thing.  It’s like smashing a supercomputer, destroying a working factory, obliterating a work of art.  A dead body returns to undifferentiated dust that fulfills none of these fantastically complex processes.

The Bible describes death as an enemy, the result of sin that infected the planet with a curse and judgment.  The only hope of a new body that can live forever is faith in Jesus Christ, who paved the way for salvation through His death and resurrection (I Corinthians 15).  If you marvel at the body you have now, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him”  (I Corinthians 2:9).

Moon

Flash shot:  On March 17, a flash was reported on the moon by NASA cameras (see video clip on Space.com).  The object was the size of a small boulder going 56,000 miles per hour.  The crater is estimated to be 65 feet wide.  It was the brightest of 300 such impacts seen, by a factor of ten, since NASA monitoring lunar impacts in 2005.  The video clip states, “Lunar meteor showers have turned out to be more common than anyone expected.”  About 55% come from known meteor swarms; the others are random stragglers.

The Earth’s atmosphere protects us from many such objects, but the fireball over Russia last Feb. 15 (Space.com), made by an object estimated to be 50 feet across (50 times larger than the lunar impactor), made big news as the biggest meteoroid to hit Earth in more than a century.

Mars

Orbiting spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) are allowing planetary scientists to gather “ground truth” data about meteoroid impact rates on another planet.  A press release from the University of Arizona discussed the 250 fresh craters detected by the high-resolution camera on MRO, based on before-and-after images.  Even though this implies hundreds of hits per year, the rate is lower than expected:

Taking before and after pictures of Martian terrain, researchers of the UA-led HiRISE imaging experiment have identified almost 250 fresh impact craters on the Red Planet. The results suggest Mars gets pummeled by space rocks less frequently than previously thought, as scientists relied on cratering rates of the moon for their estimates.

Can the new data provide any information on the age of Mars?  “Estimates of the rate at which new craters appear serve as scientists’ best yardstick for estimating the ages of exposed landscape surfaces on Mars and other worlds,” the article says.  There are, however, many variables to consider.  Meteoroids span a whole range of sizes, from dust particles to asteroid-size, each with its own probability of impact.  Objects above a certain threshold can spawn secondary impacts (9/25/07), making date calculations essentially unreliable (see 5/22/12)

Today’s rates, furthermore, cannot be extrapolated into the distant past without making unverifiable assumptions.  So when Alfred McEwen says, “Mars now has the best-known current rate of cratering in the solar system,” he can only speak authoritatively of knowledge in the observational period of the space program.

In addition to the major problem of secondaries, consider other complications when making calculations of crater rates and dates: speed of the impactor, angle of impact, gravity of the target, composition of the impactor and the target surface (e.g., porosity), atmospheric drag, magnetic field, sunlight pressure, focusing effects of other orbiting bodies.  Above all else it is impossible to know whether impact rates have been episodic.  One major swarm can throw all the dates off.  Planetary scientists try to infer a “Late Heavy Bombardment” from lunar data, but as we have seen, that inference is not without critics (4/26/12, 1/09/12, 9/17/10, 2/16/10).

By analogy, there are rivers in large canyons (including the Grand Canyon and, at Mt. St. Helens, Loowit Canyon) that did not carve the canyons—the rivers are relicts of catastrophic events.  Modern viewers might look at these canyons and conclude that the canyons formed by slow, gradual erosion over long periods of time, but we know from Mt. St. Helens that is not true.  The Yellowstone fossil forests were similarly thought to have taken eons of slow processes, but now are thought to represent catastrophic deposits.

So when you look at a crater-filled moon or Mars, or any of the other bodies in the solar system, you cannot know just from the number of craters how old the surface is, no matter what the textbooks and TV documentaries say.  If you won’t take our word for it, look at what Xiao and Strom said in Icarus a year ago (5/22/12).

The press all jumped on a report that some early fossil apes had “human-like” middle ear bones.   The paper, published in PNAS, alleges that the malleus (hammer) of Paranthropus and Australopithecus africanus have human-like proportions, whereas the incus (anvil) and stapes (stirrup) retain ape-like proportions.  Here’s how the press took this:

Nature News: “Hearing changes could be ancient in the human line.”

Science Now: “Earliest Ear Bones Sound Off on Human Hearing.”

New Scientist: “Early hominins couldn’t have heard modern speech.”

Science Daily: “Prehistoric Ear Bones Could Lead to Evolutionary Answers.”

Science Daily again: “Oldest Fossil Hominin Ear Bones Ever Recovered: Discovery Could Yield Important Clues On Human Origins.”

Few reporters seem to be asking follow-up questions of less dramatic import, such as: What is the natural range of variation in the malleus among apes, and what is the natural range of variation for humans?  Has there been any reworking of these tiny delicate bones since they were deposited?  Science Now did state, “The team is not entirely sure what this precocious appearance of a human-like malleus means.”  If so, it seems premature to think that this little bone can reveal anything significant about hearing in extinct apes, much less about human origins.

The little bone actually creates a problem for evolutionary theory.  Science Daily put it, “Since both the early hominin species share this human-like malleus, the anatomical changes in this bone must have occurred very early in our evolutionary history.”  Nature News quoted one evolutionary morphologist, Callum Ross (U of Chicago), who was “underwhelmed” by the announcement, stating that the outer ear has more influence on hearing than the ossicle bones.  He also discounts the importance of minute hearing changes in alleged human ancestors compared to bipedalism, feeding, and brain size.  (Speaking of brain size, another paper in PNAS asserts the surprising claim that “Human frontal lobes are not relatively large” – contradicting over a century of assumptions about human uniqueness in that regard.)

The authors of the original paper are not even sure if their work has any significance to human evolution.  Nature News ended, “But Quam is confident that his team will soon demonstrate the importance of changes in the ossicles.”  Thus, another promissory note was issued in lieu of conclusory evidence.

The operative word in most of these articles is “could.”  The discovery “could” yield important clues on human evolution; the bones “could” lead to evolutionary answers; hearing changes “could” be ancient in the human line.  Whenever you see that word in evolutionary claims, or its siblings “may” or “might,” you have every right to respond, “But then again, it might not lead to evolutionary answers; it may having nothing to do with human evolution; it could be irrelevant to the human line.”  After all, they have demonstrated nothing scientifically.  They are only dealing in possibilities.

That’s a theme we will have to explore in future posts: the prevalence of “possibility thinking” in evolutionary circles.  Think of the possibilities!  This little malleus bone could have opened up hearing for mid-range frequencies!  That could have spurred the development of language!  That could have brought the apes down out of the trees and motivated our ancestors to walk upright!  For shame.  That’s the very kind of faith they disparage in their critics.  When an evolutionist pulls his faith on you like that, tell him to go back into the lab and keep his mouth shut until he has something observable, testable, and repeatable to talk about.

According to a Florida State press release, a professor found that couples show more “prosocial” (i.e., constructive) behavior when one commits to pray for the other.  Frank D. Fincham, director of the Florida State University Family Institute, had this to say:

My previous research had shown that those who prayed for their partner reported more prosocial behavior toward their partner, but self-reports are subject to potential biased reporting,” Fincham said. “This set of studies is the very first to use objective indicators to show that prayer changed actual behavior, and that this behavior was apparent to the other partner, the subject of the prayer.”

All kinds of good things turned up for those who prayed: forgiveness, cooperation, and positive feelings.  While the benefits appeared substantial, some warning flags should turn up for applying some “scientific method” to a study like this.  For one, participants were asked if they were comfortable with praying before the study began.  For another, there was no designation of the object of the prayers.  And finally, Dr. Fincham only measured the behavior of the praying partner, not whether there was any real answer to the prayer.  Can science study such things?

Until recently, social scientists have stayed away from studying religion, spirituality and especially prayer, Fincham said, despite the fact that some 5 billion people, or about 75 percent of the world’s population, profess some religious faith.

But those faiths include everything from Christianity to Buddhism to Islam, whose objects of prayer and patterns of prayer are very different and often contradictory.  While a Jew or Christian might “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” for instance, some Muslims might pray for its destruction.  Some pray earnestly with their minds; others empty their minds and repeat mechanical prayers.  Can the scientific method study sincerity?

Prisoner’s Dilemma – or Darwin’s

Some evolutionists rush in where angels fear to tread.  It’s become common these days to study the “evolution of cooperation” in everything from bacteria to humans.  The thinking is that humans are mere animals that, like yeast or bacteria, exhibit certain behaviors by natural selection. For example, one team found “survival of the fastest” among microbes.  Publishing in Current Biology, they used a favorite situation in evolutionary game theory called “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (see video demonstration on The Conversation) to discern how microbes either cooperate or defect as a population grows.  “We conclude that colony growth alone can promote cooperation and prevent defection in microbes,” they said, extrapolating the behavior of microbes without minds to humans with them: “Our results extend to other species with spatially restricted dispersal undergoing range expansion, including pathogens, invasive species, and humans.”  It shouldn’t be surprising to find humans in a list with pathogens and invasive species.  After all, some advocates of climate control see humans as a kind of pathogen on the planet.  But it seems silly to link cooperative, prosocial behavior merely to colony growth.  Depending on how it’s defined, cooperation was arguably more common in the frontier than in New York City.

The Evolution of Capitalism by Natural Selection

Another case of applied evolutionary game theory was published in PNAS (open access), “Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene.”  Even though the authors, Bowles and Choi, deal with modern humans coming out of the hunting and gathering stage into agriculture, they speak of private property rights as a principle that “emerges” in the population under environmental pressures.  They could just as well be speaking of bird nesting sites or bacteria in a Petri dish.  Nowhere does their evolutionary model insert rational design into the equation as something human beings employed.  The paper is listed in the category of “evolutionary game theory.”

To see how seamlessly evolutionists move from bacteria to humans, consider a paper in Nature about bacterial microfilms.  In the same issue of Nature, Ute Römling reviewed the paper as a demonstration of “Bacterial communities as capitalist economies.”  Did we really need an Adam Smith to define the rational principles of capitalism?  It would seem that capitalism or communism are simply emergent properties, given the right environment.  If so, what are rational people to think of the talking heads in the news, the historians, the professors, making such a big deal over politics?  In Darwin’s world, biological entities simply self-organize according to natural selection.

These papers are illustrations of the radical scientism C. S. Lewis warned about, where the rampant application of evolutionary thinking to the human being would undermine all rationality and aesthetics (read The Magician’s Twin for documentation and elaboration).  You know the evolutionists are wrong, though, when you watch them exempt themselves from the power of evolution over them.  Tell your prof that he’s only teaching what he’s teaching because his evolutionary past makes him do it, and he will quickly get angry.  Call his anger an emergent property of selection pressure, and he will get angrier still.  No evolutionist can live with the implications of their own assumptions.  It is only by promoting themselves into the Yoda plane, where rationality matters, that they can speak their mind.  But the moment they do that, the moment they think of their pronouncements as anything beyond glorified monkey screeches or movements of bacteria in a dish, they are committing a technical foul.  That’s grounds for ousting them from their own evolutionary game, which vanishes in mist behind them.  Have they never considered that apparent cooperation in bacteria, yeast and animals are designed properties instilled into them for a purpose?  If not, why don’t they study the cooperation of rocks?

Regarding prayer, it goes without saying that God cannot be put in a test tube.  Any attempt to “scientifically” test the efficacy of prayer runs afoul of the sovereignty of God, who often delights in confounding the wisdom of the wise (1 Cor 1:18–29), and catching them in their own craftiness (Job 5:12–13, 2 Sam 22:26–27).  The God of Scripture, however, does invite testing by man on occasion.  In Malachi 3, after admonishing the Israelites for their sin of withholding prescribed Jewish tithes and offerings, the Lord offered them a test of His goodness: “put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.”  Psalm 34:8 says, “O taste and see that the Lord is good!  Blessed is the soul that takes refuge in Him.”  The Lord submitted to a test by fire, proposed by Elijah, against the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18).  And Isaiah pronounced to all the world that one can test the salvation of God: “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:6–7).  As for why God is not a proper subject of scientific inquiry, He continues: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).

In his blog entry “The Evolution of Lying” on The Conversation, Rob Brooks, a professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at University of New South Wales, gave half-hearted credit to a new theory on deception as a by-product of the evolution of cooperation.  The open-access paper by two Irish evolutionists, Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson, was published by the Royal Society this week.  It posits lying as an evolutionary strategy:

Our results suggest that the evolution of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities. Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.

Brooks agrees that lying evolved, but feels the model of McNally and Jackson is too simplistic.  “I would like to see if it can help us understand the fine-scale tensions between cooperation and dishonesty in human affairs,” he said.  “There is a lot more to lying than simply misrepresenting the world.”  The liar can deceive himself as well, for instance, in order to make the lie more believable.

From there, Brooks considered Sam Harris’s short e-book Lying, in which Harris advocates we all try to do better at overcoming our evolutionary tendencies, “arguing we can both simplify our own lives and build better societies by telling the truth in situations when we might be tempted to lie.”  Here’s how Brooks concludes all this discussion about lies and truth (bold added, italics in original):

Harris gets bottom-up processes and the conflict between individual benefits and group functioning. His book is worth a read for his impassioned argument that each of us, as individuals, would benefit from resisting the urge to lie.

I’m not convinced. What would help right now is some theoretic and empirical evidence that showed the conditions under which Harris’ prescriptions might work. And that’s the beauty of papers like today’s one from McNally and Jackson.

Irrespective, a better understanding of how lying evolves, no matter how simple, might do enormous social good.

For one thing it might help constrain the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda.

The question none of them are considering is, if lying evolved, and if self-deception is possible, and if deception can be very convincing, how are the readers to know who is telling the truth?

Imagine a liar so skilled, he convinces his listeners that he is 100% against the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda.  He tells you he wants to achieve enormous social good to provide a better understanding of how lying evolves.  Now, add to it that he is self-deceived.  Doesn’t his credibility implode?  How could one possibly believe a word he says?

Brooks has the Yoda complex.  So do McNally and Jackson.  They believe they can look down on the rest of humanity from some exalted plane free of the evolutionary forces that afflict the rest of humanity.  No; they need to climb down and join the world their imaginations have created.  In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception.  It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment.

To see this, consider a majority of humans in a population that are self-deceived and believe that by giving magic Kool-Aid to the defectors, laced with cyanide, they will help them become cooperators.  The few defectors in that situation who try to stop them would be perceived by the majority as the real liars and non-cooperators.  By what standard would anyone in this Darwinian world know the difference between truth and lies?

Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary world collapses into power struggles.  The appeals by Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations to lie” are meaningless.  How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?  How can either of them know what is true?

Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves.  Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.

An even stupider notion came out of the Association for Psychological Science.  This is the evolutionary story that “political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength”  (see also Science Daily with its photo of a guy flexing his bicep).  A group of Darwine-drunk psychologists are trying to convince the world that “Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution.”  According to them, “an evolutionary perspective may help to illuminate political motivations, at least those of men.” Strong men oppose redistribution of wealth, namby-pamby men and women support it, they claim.  It’s not clear if they intended to impugn Obama’s masculinity this way, and those of all his staff, but it doesn’t really matter how many biceps they measured in their survey of political opinions. (Exercise: list exceptions to their “rule” from world history.)   You know their whole premise is false from their comment, “This is among the first studies to show that political views may be rational in another sense, in that they’re designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.”  OK, their point is?  If physical strength is a measure of fitness “designed” by natural selection, then anti-redistributionism is a measure of fitness, too.  Get the wimps out of the way!  They’re impeding evolutionary progress.  Isn’t “self-interest” the highest good in Darwinism?  We won’t belabor the misconception of conservatism they presented, because they already defeated their credibility by calling natural selection “rational.”  Readers are justified in dismissing everything these quacks say, too, if they had any inclination left to trust the word of “evolutionary psychologists” about anything.

Writing for Science Magazine, Gretchen Vogel titled an article, “Human Stem Cells From Cloning, Finally.”  She seems delighted that researchers may be able to treat humans like farm animals:

This time it looks like it’s for real: Researchers have made personalized human embryonic stem (ES) cells with a method similar to how Dolly the sheep was cloned—though with an added jolt of caffeine.

The success, which produced stem cells carrying DNA belonging to a baby with an inherited disorder, comes 9 years after South Korean researchers claimed in a famously faked paper that they had achieved a similar feat. After their story unraveled, a handful of researchers continued trying, but human eggs, or oocytes, responded poorly to the techniques that have worked in sheep, mice, cows, pigs, and other animals.

Now, thanks to years of work in monkey cells, a group led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton reports a recipe that works for human cells.

Of course, there are those people troubled by the ethics of such research:

While welcomed by many researchers, who envision creating personalized stem cells for therapies or research, the achievement is also likely to stir up old ethical debates about human SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer], including whether it should be regulated to prevent attempts at reproductive human cloning. In the short term, that shouldn’t be a worry, Mitalipov says.

Who’s worried?  After all, the scientists don’t really want to clone human beings for a Star Wars army — at least not in the short term.  They just want to get their hands on those precious embryonic stem cells (ES), and this “success” opens the door for them.  Even so, “the team had surprisingly good success generating embryos,” Vogel said.

But this begs the question: who needs ES cells, when induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are just as good without the ethical problems?

This high efficiency could mean that SCNT is not as impractical for creating personalized human stem cells as many observers had expected. But it faces stiff competition from the current method of making genetically matched pluripotent cells, called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. By adding extra copies of several genes to skin or other cells, scientists can reprogram them to behave like ES cells. That technique is much easier than SCNT, and it doesn’t require a supply of human oocytes. (The oocytes used in Mitalipov’s experiments were donated by healthy volunteers for research purposes; donors were paid $5000 for their time and trouble, the local rate paid to egg donors for fertility treatments.)

Some researchers have found evidence, however, that there may be subtle but potentially significant differences between the genes expressed in iPS cells and ES cells derived from embryos. The chance to compare SCNT-derived human ES cells with iPS counterparts is one of the most important aspects of the new advance, Daley says. “There may be advantages to SCNT-ES cells, but this must be rigorously proven,” he says. In practice, he says, making iPS cells “remains considerably easier.”

So just on the supposition that there might be a difference, some researchers are willing to destroy human embryos to find out.  Does that sound ethical?  She quoted a researcher who thinks both methods are “useful” — the language of pragmatism, not ethics.  Vogel had no further ethical qualms.

To the editors at New Scientist, it’s “back to the future” all over again.

A few years ago, therapeutic cloning looked like the future of medicine. It promised to realise the dream of repairing damaged tissues and organs using a patient’s own cells. But it also had a dark side: producing its supply of stem cells required the creation of human embryos which were later destroyed.

What did Nature say about this?  David Cyranoski wrote in Nature this week wearing ethics on his sleeve from the first paragraph:

It was hailed some 15 years ago as the great hope for a biomedical revolution: the use of cloning techniques to create perfectly matched tissues that would someday cure ailments ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. Since then, the approach has been enveloped in ethical debate, tainted by fraud and, in recent years, overshadowed by a competing technology. Most groups gave up long ago on the finicky core method — production of patient-specific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from cloning. A quieter debate followed: do we still need ‘therapeutic’ cloning?

Mitalipov’s experiment “is sure to rekindle that debate,” Cyranoski continued.   He described how Mitalipov used a “university advertising campaign” to attract women to donate eggs for his lab at the Health and Science University in Beaverton, Oregon.  (He first practiced on skin cells obtained from fetuses.)  His method sounds a little Frankensteinish, using electric jolts and caffeine to coax the stubborn skin cells to form stable stem cell lines.  It took longer to get human cells to work than monkey cells, he said, because much of the time was spent “navigating US regulations on embryo research.”

Mitalipov is apparently most concerned about making his process more efficient, why? to attract funding:

Such improvements might be necessary to convince people that SCNT research is still worthwhile. Egg donors for the experiment received US$3,000–7,000 in compensation. This is expensive and, according to some bioethicists, risks creating an organ trade that preys on the poor. Because the technique requires the destruction of embryos, funds from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) cannot be used to make or study SCNT-derived cell lines, hampering further clinical research. (Mitalipov maintains a separate laboratory for NIH-funded research.)

Another “sticking point” is public fear of human cloning.  Stem-cell opponents might “capitalize on” such fears, the article says.  Mitalipov is trying to convince opponents that creation of a human clone, like Dolly the sheep, is not possible (at least, at this time).

But other stem-cell researchers are wondering why Mitalipov is wasting his time.  “Honestly, the most surprising thing [about this paper] is that somebody is still doing human [SCNT] in the era of iPS cells,” said a specialist in regenerative medicine.  Watchers will be waiting to see whether iPS and ES cells really differ in significant ways.

New Scientist thinks the ethical battles will be muted during the Obama era:

Will we now see a revival of the stem cell culture wars in the US? Probably, but they should be less polarised this time round. The Bush-era laws were relaxed by President Obama in 2009 to no great hullabaloo. The fact that the breakthrough work was done in Oregon may also help: home-grown success has a way of changing hearts and minds. What is clear is that we have entered a new phase in the long-running stem cell soap opera. Expect drama aplenty.

But if this is a “soap opera,” it’s one where innocent human lives are at stake — and not only the lives of fertilized human embryos, but potential adult clones.  Live Science asked if this might lead to human cloning someday.  What worried reporter Rachael Rattner more, the pragmatics, or the principle of the thing?

Although it would be unethical, experts say it is likely biologically possible to clone a human being. But even putting ethics aside, the sheer amount of resources needed to do it is a significant barrier.

Rattner concentrated on practical problems with human cloning.  “It’s like sending your baby up in a rocket knowing there’s a 50–50 chance it’s going to blow up,” she quoted one researcher quipping.  “It’s grossly unethical.”  Practical problems, though, can be remedied with enough research.  If Rattner is willing to put ethics aside rhetorically, the day could come when unscrupulous, pragmatic researchers with government funding will put it aside for real.

This story is very disturbing on the heels of the Kermit Gosnell trial.  Remember that abortion was sold in the 1970s in terms of concern for poor women who needed access to “reproductive health” needs.  The callous disregard for human life that resulted from that slippery slope has shocked the nation with revelations about Gosnell’s and other abortion mills described as “houses of horror” by investigators, who found abortion doctors twisting the heads off babies born alive, leaving them struggling for 20 minutes before severing their spinal cords with scissors, and telling mothers that the dead baby in the womb after chemical abortion is just “meat in a crockpot.”  Horrified nurses would find babies swimming in toilets and packed in bloody bags in refrigerators.  Do you think for a minute that “sanctity of human life” will fare any better among those who want free rein with human embryos?

Speaking of abortion, Tanya Lewis wrote an interesting article for Live Science about ultrasound and how it has changed attitudes about abortion.  While ultrasound can backfire in cultures that want to use it for sex selection (aborting many female babies), for the most part it has given expectant mothers a view the abortionists never told them about: their baby is a living human being.

Ultrasound has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception by pregnant women. In addition to revealing the baby’s health, the images themselves provide a keepsake. “Overwhelmingly, pregnant women expect to be scanned, and are moved and excited by seeing the fetus,” Nicolson said — especially if the baby moves. In fact, Nicolson said, some women report not feeling pregnant until they’ve seen the ultrasound image.

Seeing a developing fetus has a humanizing effect, too. Donald, the physician who helped develop the technology, was a devout High Anglican, and knew the images carried moral significance for women contemplating having an abortion.

Lewis cited anecdotal evidence that expectant mothers who see their baby with ultrasound are less likely to terminate their pregnancy.  Each moving baby that the mother rejoices to see on the ultrasound scanner was a single cell just a few months earlier.  The DNA for a full human is there in both cases; the difference between a moving baby in the womb and a fertilized cell is only a matter of time.

Bad, monster, bad:  National Geographic wrote a headline, “New Sea Monster Found, Rewrites Evolution?”  The question mark implies, “Of course not,” even though the partial ichthyosaur fossil found in Kurdistan is “Out of time,” according to Live Science.  Actually, it wasn’t lacking time.  It had plenty of time to create problems for Darwinists:

Researchers had previously believed that ichthyosaurs declined throughout the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 199 million to 145 million years ago, with the only survivors rapidly evolving to keep ahead of repeated extinction events. The new fossil, however, dates from the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. It looks remarkably like its Jurassic brethren, revealing a surprising evolutionary statis [sic, stasis].

The fossil “represents an animal that seems ‘out of time’ for its age,” study researcher Valentin Fischer of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a statement.

Now, the gesticulation: one evolutionist called it a “ghost lineage” (i.e., “changing very little over millions of years”).  Another called it a “living fossil of its time.” One “never even imagined” it could survive so long.  One said “it shouldn’t be there, but it is.”  The new story will apparently read: “The resulting ichthyosaur family tree suggests these marine reptiles stayed diverse into the Cretaceous, only to go mysteriously extinct 95 million years ago.”  National Geographic is holding out hope that a single specimen won’t “rewrite evolution”.

Go, ginkgo:  Speaking of stasis, the unusual tree Ginkgo biloba is a classic “living fossil.”  Because it is the now the “most abundant cityscape tree in the world,” one might be growing in a park near you.  Evolutionists, though, consider it an exception to their rule, “evolve or perish.”  J. C. McElwain wrote in Science Magazine about a new book about the ginkgo tree by Peter Crane:

Ginkgo is among Earth’s oldest-living organisms, reaching ages of around 1500 years. It is a “living fossil,” belonging to a family line extending back over 200 million years. It is a symbol of morphological stasis yet incredible persistence, having survived two of the five great mass extinction events in Earth history.

Now, the gesticulation: maybe it’s because it invented lignotubers, “among ginkgo’s adaptations that have ensured its persistence and resilience through hundreds of millions of years of global change.”  Funny no other plant borrowed that idea.  McElwain relishes in some tidbits of “subtle” evolutionary change, even though the tree is a “poster child for morphological stasis”.  He puts a positive spin on how ginkgo fossils can “inform us about the tempo and nature of plant macroevolution.”  Then he relishes how Crane makes the most of reverse evolution:

He holds that Darwinian microevolutionary processes and contingency can account for most of the patterns observed in the plant fossil record, and he downplays (but does not entirely discount) the roles of evolutionary innovations and environmentally driven macroevolutionary processes. Crane also draws a nice parallel between the trajectories of horse and ginkgo evolution—both belonged to once highly diverse families and both were “winnowed” to a single extant species.

The human network:  Categories of early humans are falling like dominoes, now that Svante Pääbo’s team has found more evidence of interbreeding between Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans (see 9/01/12).  Elizabeth Pennisi’s report in Science Magazine about a well-attended talk he gave in Germany last week seems devastating to evolutionary attempts to parse out human ancestors to various species and make a tree out of them:

With all the interbreeding, “it’s more a network than a tree,” points out Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. Pääbo hesitates to call Denisovans a distinct species, and the picture is getting more complicated with each new genome.

Pääbo’s team also deciphered additional Denisovan DNA, both nuclear and mitochondrial, from two teeth found in different layers in Denisova Cave. The nuclear DNA confirmed that both teeth are Denisovan. But, surprisingly, one tooth showed more than 80 mitochondrial DNA differences from both the other tooth and the pinkie bone. These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals from throughout their range, says Susanna Sawyer from Pääbo’s lab. Such diversity implies that the Denisovans were a relatively large population “that at some point may have outnumbered Neandertals,” Pääbo said.

Now, the gesticulating: Pennisi reported that the evolutionists feel the new data will help clarify “genetic changes that underlie our own evolution.”  They might be able to line up genes from these “archaic people” and find out which are unique to our species, compared to genes of apes and monkeys.  See also the 9/05/11 and 8/12/11 entries.

The observations show solid horizontal lines between interbreeding kinds, but dashed vertical lines where the evolution is supposed to have happened.  Where is the tree?  It’s all a tangled bramble bush.  When the fossils don’t tell the Darwin tale, they have to invent terms like “morphological stasis” and wave their hands to keep you from seeing what the evidence implies.  Ignore the waving hands.  If they can’t get the tree right, what makes you think they got the dates right?

Pääbo has basically undermined the Neanderthal myth.  Evolutionists give arbitrary names to populations of Homo sapiens, giving them new species designations like Homo neanderthalensis.  Since it fits Darwin’s expectations, it quickly becomes textbook orthodoxy.  Artists go to work to make the new species look as different as possible from us.  But what have we just heard?  “These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals from throughout their range.”  It’s all phony baloney categorizing among true humans, whose ability to interbreed proves they are one species.

At first, Pääbo and other evolutionists tried that with the bones from Denisova cave, but now is reluctant to call those cave dwellers a distinct species.  How could he?  The DNA is all scrambled, showing they were all members of a single species: human beings.  The people in that cave were smart.  They were networking way back when they lived, just like we do today.  None of them were stupid enough to try mating with apes, or to think that’s where they came from.  If you respect evidence, help toss the Darwin Party out of power.

A press release from Vanderbilt University summarizes a paper in Nature this week:

These days, phylogeneticists – experts who painstakingly map the complex branches of the tree of life – suffer from an embarrassment of riches. The genomics revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary history that connects all living beings. But the unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious problem: The trees produced by a number of well-supported studies have come to contradictory conclusions.

Salichos and Rokas, in their Nature paper, had to resort to postulating rapid periods of diversification and long periods of stasis to keep Darwin’s vision intact against the onslaught of data.  The press release continues,

In a study published online May 8 by the journal Nature, Rokas and graduate student Leonidas Salichos analyze the reasons for these differences and propose a suite of novel techniques that can resolve the contradictions and provide greater accuracy in deciphering the deep branches of life’s tree.…

“The study by Salichos and Rokas comes at a critical time when scientists are grappling with how best to detect the signature of evolutionary history from a deluge of genetic data. These authors provide intriguing insights into our standard analytical toolbox, and suggest it may be time to abandon some of our most trusted tools when it comes to the analysis of big data sets. This significant work will certainly challenge the community of evolutionary biologists to rethink how best to reconstruct phylogeny,” said Michael F. Whiting, program director of systematics and biodiversity science at the National Science Foundation, which funded the study.

Problem is, the data looks more like a bush than a tree.  The record is punctuated by rapid, sudden appearances of organisms.  The authors acknowledged the problem of the Cambrian explosion:

In broad terms, Rokas and Salichos found that genetic data is less reliable during periods of rapid radiation, when new species were formed rapidly. A case in point is the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance about 540 million years ago of a remarkable diversity of animal species, without apparent predecessors. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were very simple, consisting of single cells occasionally organized into colonies.

“A lot of the debate on the differences in the trees has been between studies concerning the ‘bushy’ branches that took place in these ‘radiations’,” Rokas said.

Calling this a “paradox,” the researchers found that even within yeast species a thousand genes did not match up to phylogenetic trees generated by standard software methods.  The same conflicts were found in larger data sets involving vertebrates and metazoans.  In response, they claimed that genetic dating becomes as unreliable as radiometric dating the farther back in time one searches, creating “considerable challenges to existing algorithms to resolve radiations” congruent with Darwin’s presumed ancestral tree.

One whole subsection in the paper is titled, “All gene trees differ from species phylogeny.”  Another is titled, “Standard practices do not reduce incongruence.”  A third, “Standard practices can mislead.”  One of their major findings was “extensive conflict in certain internodes.”

The authors not only advised throwing out some standard practices of tree-building, but (amazingly) proposed evolutionists throw out the “uninformative” conflicting data and only use data that seems to support the Darwinian tree:  “the subset of genes with strong phylogenetic signal is more informative than the full set of genes, suggesting that phylogenomic analyses using conditional combination approaches, rather than approaches based on total evidence, may be more powerful.”

In conclusion, they had no solid answers for the conflicts.  They called on other evolutionists to “to develop novel phylogenomic approaches and markers to more accurately decipher the most challenging ancient branches of life’s genealogy from the DNA record.”

This is scandalous!  It’s also old news.  Evolutionists have been concocting Darwin trees in spite of the evidence ever since Darwin acknowledged the Cambrian explosion as a real problem that lodged a valid objection to his theory (get the new book Darwin’s Doubt for details, and the film Darwin’s Dilemma).

Darwinism is a classic case of Finagle’s Rule #3, “Draw your curves, then plot your data.”  Guru Charlie drew his little tree sketch by faith, then sent his disciples out on a hopeless quest to find evidence to support it.  Now, here it is May 15, 2013, and these guys are still telling us the tree vision is in conflict with the data!  They have to finagle their methods (“novel approaches”) to try to force a match with the uncooperative genes.

And here, we saw they are even willing to lie, tossing out “uninformative” data sets and only using data that appear to support their foreordained conclusion.  Were you told this in biology class?  Did your textbook mention this?  No; but you hear it here on CEH all the time, because we bring out into the open the dirty deals evolutionists whisper to themselves in the journals.

The insect:  A little moth has hearing unsurpassed in the animal kingdom (but we already know, from the film Metamorphosis, that any lepidopteran undergoing transformation from caterpillar to flying insect has much to boast about already).  Humans with optimum hearing can hear about 20 kHz.  That’s nothing for the greater wax moth.  Science Daily reported research at the University of Strathclyde that measured sensibility up to 300 kHz in this little, inconspicuous, gray insect.  The lead researcher remarked, “We are extremely surprised to find that the moth is capable of hearing sound frequencies at this level and we hope to use the findings to better understand air-coupled ultrasound.”  The moth’s hearing system appears overdesigned for detecting bat echolocation calls, so why would this extreme hearing evolve?  Ultrasound tends to drop in intensity through air faster than lower frequencies do.

The mammal:  Speaking of bats, one flower-feeding bat species has a dynamic tongue that works like a nectar trap.  Live Science and National Geographic have electron micrographs of the tongue tip from Pallas’s long-tongued bat.  Researchers at Brown University showed that blood in the tongue instantly fills dozens of papillae, or protrosions, in the tongue, allowing the bat to lap up much more nectar than a flat tongue could.  This all happens in less than the blink of an eye – 0.04 second.  A slow-motion video on National Geographic reveals action too fast for the eye: the papillae straighten and the tongue tip grows by 50% when the tongue hits the nectar.  The bat benefits from this mechanism because it has to expend a lot of energy hovering near the flower, so the more nectar retrieved from each sip, the better.  The full paper can be found on PNAS.

The bird:  Those emperor penguins that starred in the documentary March of the Penguins looked mighty cold out there in the Antarctic wind.  Surprisingly, their outside feathers are even colder!  New Scientist told how their freezing exteriors prevent heat from leaking out of their bodies.  Now for a bird bonus about the flying variety: PhysOrg told about how scientists are using tiny geolocators on migrating birds like the Manx shearwater to understand how they adapt their behaviors to changing environmental conditions.

The movie:  Illustra Media’s new documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds is being released on DVD today.  It has another fascinating tongue story to tell, and a great migration story, too — just two glimpses into a film packed wonderful scientific discoveries about avian flight, told beautifully in this new documentary with great cinematography and outstanding animation.  You can order a copy right now by clicking the link.  Watch the trailer full-screen here.  Join the Illustra Facebook page for news and updates.

Learning details of wonders in the animal world provides immunity against Darwinian indoctrination.  That’s why we love sharing the latest discoveries here.

We highly recommend the new Illustra film Flight: The Genius of Birds.  You can order the DVD today, but if you have a good home theater, you might want to wait till June 11 to get the Blu-ray version with its outstanding detail and sound.  Or, you can get the DVD now to watch and give away, ordering the Blu-ray version for your library to go with your HD copy of Metamorphosis: the Beauty and Design of Butterflies —a terrific pair you’ll want to watch again and again.

Hidden Messages in Plain Sight

Plants don’t speak English, obviously.  Somehow, though, they communicate through channels scientists are only beginning to understand.  No less than Science Magazine, the most respected journal in America, said this: “Shhh, the Plants are Talking.”  In the “Science Shot” article, reporter Andrew Porterfield described controlled experiments in Australia that showed chilis grow better when basil is nearby.  Somehow, the basil coaxes the chili plants through a hidden mechanism:

Because light, touch, and chemical “smell” were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging “words” to the growing seeds. Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.

Live Science put it this way: “Even in the plant world, babies fail to thrive without a friendly community chattering nearby, according to a new study.”  We weren’t kidding about talking plants.  Reporter Becky Olson headlined her article, “Plants Talk: Seedlings Thrive with Encouraging ‘Words’.”

The Underground Fungal Railroad

More evidence is arising that plants communicate throughout ecological communities through a network of fungal threads in the soil.  The fungi reward the plants for sharing nutrients by passing messages along, in a symbiotic relationship.  The BBC News featured more discoveries about the underground network, as did PhysOrg.  The BBC article claims that work in the UK is the first to show plant communication via the fungal railroad.

The research appears to show that a bean plant under attack by aphids can send out a warning through the underground communication channels.  Plants getting the message set up defenses, but plants without the fungal network do not.  One of the researchers was delighted at this “abject surprise that it was just so powerful — just such a fantastic signalling system.”

The BBC called this an “evolutionary role” for the fungus without explaining how a blind, purposeless process could discover any role in complex communications systems.

Some day soon we may decipher the language of plants.  Here are some predictions.  Favorite joke: that some humans think the underground railroad evolved.  Favorite saint: Basil.  Weather report: Chili today and hot tamale.  Favorite pastime: sending intelligently designed signals.  Favorite cowboy line: Where never is heard a discouraging word.  Favorite hymn: Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.