Falk denies being a Darwinist but no one here has been able to discover an explicit point at which he does not agree with Darwinism. For example, he says,

If we recognize that human specialness rests on God’s fellowship with and call upon us, and that we—alone of all creatures—are enabled by God to bear his image in the world, then anything Darwin said about the physical continuity between humans and animals is irrelevant.

Then what does Falk think about questionable, scandal-ridden research claiming that chimpanzees have police or that monkeys have human-like levels of cognition? Research that flows directly from what Darwin asserted and Falk denies.

The explicit purpose of all such research is to show the continuity he denies. And to operate in complete oblivion of the blunt fact that those life forms are still screeching in the trees after all this time and we are not.

Worse, it is not clear that we ever were. That is assumed, not proved. An honest courtroom (English comon law rules of evidence) would make mincemeat out of most claims about human evolution.

The few claims for which we have hard evidence are stuff like cave art (which went downhill over the millennia) and temple complexes (Gobekli Tepe, about 12000 years old, went down over the millennia too), which doesn’t support Darwin’s gradual ascent thesis at all.

But Falk knows that if he denounces any nonsense explicitly, every Darwin hand would be against him. He’d need a troll monitor as much as we do.

Memo to Darrel Falk: Take the ghost of Darwin out and shoot it. Dawn.

Yes, you can shoot a ghost. It doesn’t affect the ghost, but it sure makes a difference for you.

Amber from Cretaceous deposits (110-105 my) in Northern Spain has revealed the first ever record of insect pollination. Scientists have discovered in two pieces of amber several specimens of tiny insects covered with pollen grains, revealing the first record of pollen transport and social behavior in this group of animals.

Given that 80% of today’s flowering plants depend on insect pollination, there must have been a good deal of co-evolution and horizontal gene transfer in the meantime.

Hey, perfect for the middle of the night. Shelly Kagan at Chronicle of Higher Education (May 13, 2012) offers,

But wait a minute, says Lucretius. The time after I die isn’t the only period during which I won’t exist. What about the period before my birth? If nonexistence is so bad, shouldn’t I be upset by the eternity of nonexistence before I was born? But that’s silly, right? Nobody is upset about that. So, he concludes, it doesn’t make any sense to be upset about the eternity of nonexistence after you die, either.

It isn’t clear how best to reply to Lucretius. One option, presumably, is to agree that we really do need to treat those two eternities of nonexistence on a par, but to insist that our prebirth nonexistence was worse than we thought. Alternatively, we might insist that there’s an asymmetry that explains why we should care about the one period but not the other. But what is that difference? Perhaps this: When I die, I have lost my life. In contrast, during the eternity before my birth, although I’m not alive, I have not lost anything. You can’t lose what you never had. So what’s worse about death is the loss.

But in that prenatal period, although I don’t have life, I’m going to get it. As it happens, we don’t have a name for that state. It is similar to loss but not quite like it. Let’s call it “schmoss.” Why do we care more about loss of life than schmoss of life? It’s easy to overlook the symmetry, because we’ve got this nice word “loss,” and we don’t have the word “schmoss.” But that’s not really explaining anything, it’s just pointing to the thing that needs explaining.

The graphic is worth the whole thing. After which, back to work.

Not all anomalocaridids had identical mouthparts, though. Peytoia and Hurdia had the classic four-part mouth shape, and Hurdia, in particular, possessed an extra array of small spines in the middle of its mouth. Clearly these animals were feeding on disparate prey and doing so in different ways – a conclusion supported by the variations in the spiny frontage appendages anomalocaridids used to grasp prey. “As opposed to being highly specialized trilobite predators, anomalocaridids were generalists occupying a range of ecological habits, from freeswimming ambush predators to sediment-sifting scavengers,” Daly and Bergström concluded. We’re only just starting to understand the ecology and biology of these absolutely fantastic animals. In this case, strange mouths hint that the celebrated idea of an intense Cambrian arms race between shutter-mouthed predators and trilobites was not as intense or dramatic as we thought.

Some Cambrian animals really do sound like science fiction. No guys, they didn’t invent science fiction. It’s convergent evolution.

Employing exotic unobservable entities such as dark matter may be an escape from scientific rigor in more ways than one. (May 14, 2012)

Recently, the notion that most of the universe is composed of dark matter took an evidential hit. Live Science said, “A sprawling collection of galaxies and star clusters surrounding our own Milky Way is challenging long-standing theories on the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to pervade the universe.” According to a survey of satellite galaxies of the Milky Way conducted at the University of Bonn, dark matter theories fail to account for the arrangement of matter in a region spanning 10 times our galaxy’s diameter. The astronomers extended the impact of their findings to the entire universe:

“Our model appears to rule out the presence of dark matter in the universe, threatening a central pillar of current cosmological theory,” said study team member Pavel Kroupa, a professor of astronomy at the University of Bonn. “We see this as the beginning of a paradigm shift, one that will ultimately lead us to a new understanding of the universe we inhabit.”

Or new claims about why the old theory is still right. We just hope nobody gets trampled in any given stampede.

In “Darwin Was Wrong: Why We Need to Update Our Model of Evolution” (Huffington Post, May 5, 2012), artist Ellen Grace Jones riffs,

This week the University of Sheffield announced results of experiments which promulgate Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. Scientists claim we humans continue to be subject to the forces and whims of natural selection like other species.

“We have shown advances have not challenged the fact that our species is still evolving just like all the other species ‘in the wild,’” posited Dr Virpi Lummaa, from the University of Sheffield’s department of animal and plant sciences. “It is a common misunderstanding that evolution took place a long time ago, and that to understand ourselves we must look back to the hunter-gatherer days of humans.”

The study, however, was nebulous in terms of expressing precisely what ‘evolutionary changes’ they found from the church records of almost 6,000 Finns born between 1760 and 1849.

An interesting experiment and indeed correct in that we are still evolving, however to attribute it to the Victorian, matter-based, Darwinian model of evolution is backward-thinking and flawed given the recent leaps and bounds in metaphysical sciences and physical historical evidence disproving linear evolution. The ideology we randomly mutated from ocean slime to our knuckle-dragging neanderthal long-long lost cousins to our current incarnation is one that’s been dogmatically accepted into mainstream evolutionary hegemony without challenge until recent years.

Do you realize what this means? Jones actually noticed that the researchers had not discovered anything spectacular that sanctified Darwin.  And she gave herself the right to say so.

Darwinism will be in serious trouble when every thinking person in the world gives themselves the right to doubt it when the evidence base is thin.

Jones should enjoy her freedom to notice that because it may soon be made clear to her that Darwinism is in fact a source of Really Important Enlightenment to power brokers and that she has no actual freedom to question it if she does not want to be marginalized.

Heck, even a doctor who saves kids’ lives can be subjected to insult if he doubts their mob’s code.

Unthinkable in a civilized society, but thinkable in a Darwinized one.

Since I am a historian who has studied and published on the history of evolutionary ethics, I was rather surprised by the Emory faculties’ consternation over Dr. Carson’s belief that evolution undermines objective ethics and morality. Last summer, I attended a major interdisciplinary conference at Oxford University on “The Evolution of Morality and the Morality of Evolution.” Thus, I am well aware that there are a variety of viewpoints in academe on this topic. Nonetheless, many evolutionists — from Darwin to the present (including quite a few at that Oxford conference) — have argued and are still arguing precisely the point that Dr. Carson was highlighting: They claim that morality has evolved and thus has no objective existence.

One of the keynote speakers at the Oxford conference was the leading philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, who stated in a 1985 article co-authored with Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson: “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.” Why do biologists at Emory try to make Dr. Carson appear foolish for asserting that evolution undermines ethics, while one of the leading evolutionary biologists and one of the leading philosophers of science admit that evolution destroys any objective morality? Professor Wilson in his book “Consilience” argued: “Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions.” He rejected the former explanation, which he called transcendentalist ethics, in favor of the latter, which he named empiricist ethics.

Doctors who help kids should be dissed so that the Darwinists can conceal their real beliefs from the public?

Sure, Emory faculty. Make your priorities clear. Disgusting “morality is an illusion” theories over kids.

Note: People who have a child or grandchild whose mental faculties were saved by a pediatric neurosurgeon are not a fan group for the Emory Darwinbots.

engraved limestone/Raphaëlle Bourrillon

From “Anthropologists Discover Earliest Form of Wall Art” (ScienceDaily, May 14, 2012), we learn,

Anthropologists working in southern France have determined that a 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone constitutes the earliest evidence of wall art. …

The research team, composed of more than a dozen scientists from American and European universities and research institutions, has been excavating at the site of the discovery — Abri Castanet — for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard have long been recognized as being among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism. Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.

“Early Aurignacian humans functioned, more or less, like humans today,” explained New York University anthropology professor Randall White, one of the study’s co-authors. “They had relatively complex social identities communicated through personal ornamentation, and they practiced sculpture and graphic arts.”

Aurignacian culture existed until approximately 28,000 years ago.

Makes you wonder what happened to them

The State Board of Education is scheduled to review science materials in summer 2013, when Amarillo attorney Marty Rowley, Amarillo Independent School District board president Anette Carlisle and a handful of other contenders for seats on the panel hope to stir anew efforts to kindle classroom discussion of alternatives to evolution.

Here, politics play a significant role because the State Board of Education is an elected, rather than appointed, body.

Science standards regarding evolution have been debated in board races throughout the state in the run-up to the May 29 primary. All 15 board seats are up for re-election because of redistricting. Early voting starts Monday.

The current state science curriculum says, “In all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of the scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.”

That sentence replaced language in 2009 that addressed the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including evolution, according to Texas Education Agency.

Pin down yer hats. Should be fun.

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