Via Wikipedia

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

New Hampshire took an early lead this year in the effort to dumb down school students and erode the separation of church and state in the education system by introducing two anti-evolution bills to its state legislature (h/t Mother Jones). The two laws are the first of their kind in the state since the late 90’s. According to the National Center for Science Education, House Bill 1149 would:

“[r]equire evolution to be taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.”

House Bill 1457 would:

“[r]equire science teachers to instruct pupils that proper scientific inquire [sic] results from not committing to any one theory or hypothesis, no matter how firmly it appears to be established, and that scientific and technological innovations based on new evidence can challenge accepted scientific theories or modes.”

State Representative Jerry Bergevin, who introduced HB 1149, believes such legislation is necessary because he thinks evolution is tied to Nazis, communists, and the shooters in the 1999 Columbine massacre. According to Bergevin, the political and ideological views of Darwin and other believers and evolutionary scientists, along with their positions on atheism, must be taught to students as well. The New Hampshire Republican told the Concord Monitor:

“I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights.”

He added “As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it. . . . Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there.”

Rep Gary Hopper, who introduced HB1457 said that “science is a creative process, not an absolute thing” and he wants creationism taught in classes “so that kids understand that science doesn’t really have all the answers. They are just guessing.”

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically “basic” emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

This means a recent move to train security workers to recognize “basic” emotions from expressions might be misguided.”What I decided to do in this paper is remind readers of the evidence that runs contrary to the view that certain emotions are biologically basic, so that people scowl only when they’re angry or pout only when they’re sad,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, the author of the new paper.

The commonly-held belief is that certain facial muscle movements (called expressions) evolved to express certain mental states and prepare the body to react in stereotyped ways to certain situations. For example, widening the eyes when you’re scared might help you take in more information about the scene, while also signaling to the people around you that something dangerous is happening …

Read more here.

Charles Darwin. Maull and Polyblank for the Literary and Scientific Portrait Club (1855).

A growing number of biology and medical students are rejecting the very basis of their chosen subject in favor of creationism, reports Steve Jones in the Telegraph:

…Now, though, we have evolution, the grammar of biology. More and more, students do not like it. I no longer teach medics but I do have a lot of contact with biology undergraduates and go to many schools and to student conferences. Over the past decade there has grown up a determined denial by many people of the truths of modern science.

At University College London we have numbers of Islamic students, almost all dedicated, hard-working and able. Some, unfortunately, refuse to accept Darwin’s theory on faith grounds, as do some of their Christian fellows; and just a couple of years ago a Turkish anti-evolution speaker (a Dr Babuna, as I remember) was invited on to campus to give an account of why The Origin is wrong. He was the scion of an extraordinary – and very rich – anti-evolution organisation based in his native land that has sent out thousands of lavishly illustrated creationist books and has linked Darwinism to Nazism and worse.

Much of their propaganda has been lifted from Christian fundamentalism and there is a certain irony in where it has ended up. I have had plenty of verbal complaints from undergraduates of both persuasions that I am demeaning religion, while others ask that they be excused lectures on my subject, or simply fail to turn up.

In schools things are worse: some kids will walk out rather than listen. Their teachers can be just as bad. The most virulent attack I have had in recent years came from a physics teacher in a respected north London state school, who – to the embarrassment of his colleagues – barracked my talk on evolutionary biology with repeated statements that Darwinism contradicted the laws of thermodynamics. I was forced, uncharacteristically, to be rude.

Anyone, of course, is free to believe whatever they wish. But why train to become a biologist, or a doctor, when you deny the very foundations of your subject? …

Read More: Telegraph

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for … “about a full day!” Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the “myth” of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong — according to another creationist rumour, he’d recanted on his deathbed, anyway — and here, at last, is scientific evidence!

Inevitably, those of us who aren’t professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn’t waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin’s theory of evolution — or, at least, Darwin’s theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it — is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Read More in the Guardian

Evolution, the theory goes, guarantees survival to the fittest. But we can blame evolution for some of today’s most pressing health problems, such as cancer, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

A 2009 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years. Many of them also think the human body is perfectly designed.

But most scientists—including biologists, anthropologists, paleontologists and geneticists—see the 21st century human body as a collection of compromises, jury-rigged by evolution as our ancestors adapted to changing conditions.

“In many ways, we are maladapted for modernity,” says Stephen Stearns, a Yale evolutionary biologist. He and others in the field are urging medical schools to include more evolutionary thinking when teaching doctors about modern diseases.

For example, the immune system was honed to fight off epidemics like malaria and cholera, which proliferated along with urbanization. According to the “hygiene hypothesis,” asthma and auto-immune diseases are increasing because the human immune system doesn’t face enough challenges in today’s cleaner environments and is picking fights with the body’s own systems instead.

The current epidemic of obesity also has prehistoric roots…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

[Note: If you are not up-to-date with the debate over Evolution, Creationism and Intelligent Design, you will want to read the Preface Notes first, identified by a [p] at the beginning of the sentence. Preface Notes will separate fact from fiction and rumor from humor in my prima facie case for Intelligent Design.]

[p1] Professor Richard Dawkins, one of the greatest living “experts” on blind Watchmakers and selfish gene-centric Evolution got out his Ouija Board to channel the spirit of Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species and the father of Naturalism and Atheism.

Contacting Darwin was considered of a dangerous and controversial nature because if his current residence is Hell then a whole lot of evolutionary biologists will be out of work.

[p2] Dawkins and company agreed it was worth the risk because there aren’t enough Evolutionists to rip out the pages of one million copies of Ray Comforts new book linking Darwin and Natural Selection to Hitler.

Richard Dawkins (RD) was the designated medium and Niles Eldredge took the following notes.

Everyone placed their fingers on the planchette and Mr. Dawkins asked the Ouija board the burning question, “Charles, are you in Hell?”

Spirit Response: “The subscriber you are trying to reach out of range, planchette will now channel hypothetically.”

What follows is pure Unadulterated Unverified Nonsense and reflects my belief that the scientific arguments and rational thinking of Intelligent Design is a thirst-quenching alternative from the obdurate (obstinate) Evolutionists whose only motivation is to eliminate God.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Since Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins or Niles Eldredge never attended a channeling session, neither of them could endorse these views, which may or may not prove to be correct.

RD: Mr. Darwin, everyone wants to know if there are any Evolutionists in Foxholes?

Darwin: Huh?

RD: [p3] Creationists are telling everyone you repented because you were reading the book of Hebrews to Lady Hope on a beautiful autumn afternoon a few days before you died.

Darwin: Ah yes, that autumn afternoon, I can still smell her perfume.

RD: So you were with her and reading the Bible before you died?

Darwin: Well, if you mean six months before I died and “with her” in a biblical sense, the answer is yes.

RD: You read a story from the Bible to get her in bed?

Darwin: She was an evangelical, what story should I have read? Richard, do you know the difference between girls aged: 8, 18, women 28, 38, 48 and ladies 58 and 68?

RD: No

Darwin: At 8 – You put her to bed and tell her a story. At 18 – You tell her a story and take her to bed. At 28 – You don’t need to tell her a story to take her to bed. At 38 – She tells you a story and takes you to bed. At 48 – You tell her a story to avoid going to bed. At 58 – You stay in bed to avoid her story.

I was 73; taking Lady Hope to bed was a BIG story!!

RD: So you never regretted coming up with the Theory of Evolution?

Darwin: Of course not, my daughter told everyone as much and getting “life from non-life” is a hypothesis not a theory and I stole that from Anaximander. [f1]

RD: But you added a plausible mechanism, “Natural Selection.”

Darwin: Notice the word “plausible”. Just because some birds (i.e. finches) had long curved beaks so they could get fat eating tiny bugs on the Galapagos Islands doesn’t prove that life began in a “primordial soup”. [f2]

RD: That was only variety, what about similarity? If you look at an x-ray of the upper limb of a crocodile, a bird and a human, they all have five digits for “fingers” and two bones in the forearm. Similarities are evidence that we have all descended from some common ancestor.

Darwin: Sure, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it was a good design…worthy of being duplicated.

Look Richard, after 150 years I expected you guys to come up with something better than if a bird was born with the wrong beak he uses it to fight because a short stout beak is useless to get insects out of crevasses in the rocks.

RD: [p4] Well we might have if Michael Behe hadn’t written Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution based on your definition of “irreducibly complex.”

Darwin: So what? Only the religious dummies go to Christian bookstores. Bush Jr., Quayle and the Creationists prove Professor Lynn’s research that less than 7% of university academics believe in God. [f3]

RD: Normally, that would be so, but Behe makes a credible, sophisticated case for Creationism without using the Bible so his book is at Borders, Barnes & Noble. Thank “god” for Judge John E. Jones III, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, who ruled Intelligent Design is not science but essentially religious in nature and cited Behe’s testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. [f4]

But I got to tell you it’s hard to attack a reputable scientist from a reputable institution with a sophisticated argument even with a court case from a biased judge. And wait till you see his photo.

Darwin: So what’s the problem?

RD: Michael Behe represented himself as a scientist persuaded by the evidence, not a Creationist with an evangelical agenda like John Sanford with a toothy smile bragging about being saved: [f5]

Darwin: What’s Behe saying?

RW: He maintains that biological systems are irreducibly complex and possess incredibly complicated structures that can be reduced to very basic states.

Darwin: Didn’t I say that?

RD: Yes but he proved that if an everyday non-biological irreducible complex mousetrap could not have developed in stages then a species which originally possessed no eyes will never come to possess perfect ones due to a small chance development because it affords an advantage due to natural selection. Behe says, “such a system without an Engine of Change could not have evolved slowly, piece by piece.” Behe and his buddies found out modern genetics, not random radioactive mutation is the engine of change. [f6]

Darwin: Well, random mutations are random. Haven’t we proven a mutated gene can cause cancer, organ failure and death? New species result from trillions of trillions of random tiny “beneficial” random mutations. Did I mention they are random and life probably came about through… you guessed it, a series of … random mutations?

[TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED]

This is another favorite deductive method of the evolutionary theorist. The “improbability drive”, in which they decide upon a conclusion without any evidence whatsoever to support it, and then continually speculate a series of wildly improbable events and unbelievable co-incidences to support it, shrugging off the implausibility of each event with the vague assertion that sometimes the impossible happens (just about all the time in their world). There is a principle called “Occam’s Razor” which suggests that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation, Intelligent Design, is most likely to be correct. Evolutionists hate Occam’s Razor.

[TRANSMISSION RESUMED]

RD: Yes, Charles we get it. But Michael Denton wrote Evolution a Theory in Crisis and points out “The the tiniest bacterial cells are irreducibly complex, and are actually a microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery made up of a hundred thousand million atoms far more complicated than any machine made by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”

A new generation of bacteria typically grows in 20 minutes to a few hours and although there is much variation in bacteria and many mutations they never turn into anything new. They always remain bacteria.

Forget human vision being formed by Natural Selection, molecular biologists have demonstrated that the cell could not have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. [f7]

Darwin: Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you when “I freely confessed that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, WAS absurd in the highest degree.”

RD: But you said, “the absurdity was illusory and that the difficulty of believing a perfect and complex eye could be formed by Natural Selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real”… Of course, no one knows what the Hell you are talking about… “illusory, insuperable, can be considered real” but it was all we had.

Darwin: Yes, I wrote a confusing sentence, what did you want me to do? Admit I wanted to find an alternative to God because I could not persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” Richard, have you persuaded yourself there could be a beneficent God that would allow suffering?

RD: No, but I’m not omnipotent and why does there have to be a benefit in beneficent? On the other hand, a “perfect and complex eye” is a benefit for human vision.

Darwin: The “ayes” were a problem even before modern ophthalmology.

RD: Damn those eye scientists. They found three, almost imperceptibly tiny eye movements ‘tremors, drifts and saccades’ caused by minute contractions in the six muscles attached to the outside of each of your eyes. Every fraction of a second, they very slightly shift the position of your eyeball, automatically, without conscious effort on your part, making human vision possible.

Tremors — the tiniest and probably the most inexplicable of these movements, continuously and rapidly wobble your eyeball about its center in a circular fashion. They cause the cornea and retina (front and back) of your eyes to move in circles with incredibly minute diameters of approximately 1/1000 (.001) of a millimeter, or .00004 inch. [f8]

This size is about 70 times smaller than the thickness of a piece of paper.

Darwin: You can’t be serious, are you saying that 70 circles of the same diameter (OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO) all touching can be placed in a row straight across the thickness of the paper?

RD: Yep. There are other problems too; people are questioning the benefit of symmetrical mutations in aiding survival. How would you explain two symmetrical, arms, ears, nostrils and eyes?

Heck, I’m thinking an eye in the back of my head would be handy but on the other hand two arms are necessary to pop open a can of Beer.

Darwin: Well, an eye in the back of your head would be useful if your only concern was a predator sneaking up behind you when you were drunk, but you need to think Survival of the Symmetrists and Lady Hope. There would have been no story about taking her to bed if I looked like The Elephant Man.

By the way, did you go to inaugural Gordon Conference in Neuroethology in the UK?

RD: [p5] No, but Bora Zivkovic did and made the mistake of exposing Carl Zimmer for leaving out the Ampulex compressa (Emerald Cockroach Wasp) and its prey/host the American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana) out of his research.

Darwin: [p6] We have an explanation for the wasp: They represent an evolutionary transition.

In the beginning, wasps were bigger and strong enough to drag a paralyzed cockroach to their burrow where they laid an egg on the belly of the roach.

The egg hatches and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach and begins devouring the organs one by one for about eight days. However, the offspring of the fit wasps were stupid and ate the organs in the wrong order and the roach died before they could hatch. This gave an evolutionary advantage to the smart larva, one that saved the nervous system organs for dessert.

However, the larvae that survived weren’t strong enough to drag a big roach into its burrow so they had to learn how to retool the roach’s neural network that only affects the specific circuits that are involved in walking. The wasps took classes in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and neurochemistry so they could learn about the nervous systems, metabolism and the specific factors that regulate dendritic branching patterns of neurons; molecular, cellular and behavioral effects of neurotoxins in cockroaches.

Then the smaller smarter wasps can inject it’s venom very precisely into the subesophageal ganglion in the head of the roach so they can grab the roach by its antennae and walk it around like a dog on a leash back to its nest.

RD: And don’t forget the witty comment from “Kafka” on Zimmer’s blog:

“I had a dream that I was a cockroach, and that wasp Ann Coulter stuck me with her stinger, zombified my brain, led me by pulling my antenna into her nest at Fox News, and laid her Neocon eggs on me. Soon a fresh baby college Republican hatched out, burrowed into my body, and devoured me from the inside. Ann Coulter’s designs may be intelligent, but she’s one cruel god.”

Darwin: I must freely confess this example of evolutionary transition is absurd. By the way what are you doing to stop Ray Comfort from giving away his special edition of My Origin of Species making me responsible for Hitler’s “final solution”?

RD: We are using a favorite Creationist tactic: Unilateral resistance, book burnings and I’m telling the students to rip out the Introduction of the book.

Darwin: Is that working?

RWD: No, but it doesn’t matter because someone is now arguing the existence of God with Intelligent Design based on the perceived evidence of order, purpose, and design in nature. They got it from Plato and Aristotle.

Teleology: study of causes says the existence of God is intuitive and makes a prima facie case for an intelligent designer. Though modern science rejects creationism, which holds that the human race can be traced to a talking snake and a spare human rib, Kent Hovind stresses it requires even more faith to believe in evolution. [f9]

Buzzzt –Negative energy detected…Charles Darwin wanted to find an alternative to God; Richard Dawkins wants to prove he is smarter than God.

Please wait…. take a few deep breaths while we fill Richard Dawkins with an entirely different personality. Tuning RD to an Intelligent Designed spirit.

RD (Spirit-filled):

Creationists try and prove the existence of God, which is true with false and absurd statements from the Bible:

“In the beginning God…” Genesis 1:1 Actually the Bible doesn’t need to prove God. It simply declares His existence as a settled fact, and then tries to win the debate with a free pass to heaven for all that believe that he is, and a promise of Hell for those who those fools that hath said in his heart, there is no God”. Psalm 53:1. They know the bible is true because it couldn’t have been authored by men-it foretells the future with 100% accuracy every time.

Evolutionists try and prove that Macroevolution, which is false with Microevolution, which is true.

Microevolution can explain the types of bird beaks, the colors of moths and the length of the giraffe’s neck because they are variations in the gene pool of each species. Selective breeding cannot create a new species and when it goes too far the species doesn’t evolve into something different it dies out.

It’s been 150 years and no one has found a natural process that can show how things to fall together into organized complexity (macroevolution).

According to the brilliant English astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, the chances of higher life forms ever evolving is the same as a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard, assembling a Boeing 747 from the materials therein or about 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power.

To illustrate just how impossible it is, imagine this: On the ground are all the materials needed to build a house (nails, boards, shingles, windows, etc.). We tie a hammer to the wagging tail of a dog and let him wander about the work site for as long as you please, even millions of years. The swinging hammer on the dog is as likely to build a house as mutation-natural selection is to make a single new working part in an animal, let alone a new creature.

You can cross a cocker spaniel with poodle and get a cockapoo but if it looks like a dog, barks like a dog, a cockapoo is still a dog. If you want to prove The Theory of Evolution, then let’s see a frogapoo.

Darwin: I know not what course others may take, but as for me if it’s a choice between Evolution, Creation and Deism I’ll stay dead.

Epilogue

Believe it or not, the best essay about the debate over Evolution was written by Jim Pappas and published in the Indianapolis Christian Issues Examiner on September 11, 2009.

Of course, Jim is a Creationist who wants to show “how to mine the riches of God’s Word and ferret out the truth of history and science in the Bible”, but we won’t hold that against him.

[Beginning of “Emperor of evolution has no clothes”, by Jim Pappas]

“…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.” Dr. Richard Lewontin – 1997

You can see by many of the comments to this series on Dr. Lewontin’s quote that evolution’s adherents claim science is counter-intuitive, and often against common sense.

There is a plainly stated reason for this, “we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes”.

Evolutionists are “forced” by their “a priori adherence to material causes” to believe evolution is the only possible answer.

Why?

Because their pre-existing belief that there is no God, and there is nothing beyond the observed natural realm.

Evolutionists purposely limit their views to fit their presupposition, and anything that disagrees with them they decry is “unscientific” or “religious”.

The truth does not matter to the evolutionist; the only thing that matters is their absolute faith in material causes.

It does not matter to them that their explanations are counter-intuitive.

They just claim “science” is counter-intuitive.

But is science really counter-intuitive?

When the apple fell on Newton, was it counter-intuitive to think there is some force causing the apple to fall down, instead of falling up? Is it counter-intuitive to observe that mammals drown if they breathe under water because they need oxygen in the form of gas?

Is in counter-intuitive to understand that the heart is what pumps the blood through the body and not the liver? Science is NOT counterintuitive.

So what else are evolutionists left with?

Creating “an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations…no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.”

In the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (online), “mystify” means “to intentionally perplex the mind of”, “impose upon the credulity of” and “make obscure or difficult to understand”, or “to embellish (as fact) or fancifully”.

Why in the world would evolutionists want their concepts to “intentionally perplex the mind of” people, or make them “obscure or difficult to understand”?

It is so they will seem so intelligent and beyond question that people will follow lock step into their belief system because of their perceived brilliance without noticing that the Emperor of Evolution has no clothes.

Just who are these “uninitiated”?

The “uninitiated” are all people, and particularly all people who do not readily buy into the hoax of evolution. The “uninitiated” are anybody without advanced degrees who dare to question the so-called science used by evolutionists. What about the people with advanced degrees who disagree with evolution? Just ask an evolutionist, who will describe the highly qualified and educated scientists who disagree with them as “stupid”, “insane”, “out of their minds”, and “not really scientists”.

When you think about it, evolution is more of a fanatical religion whose adherents absolutely despise anyone who would defile their system of beliefs, than honest science. Do not dare expose their way of thinking, or their faith; unless their wrath means little to you.

[End of “Emperor of evolution has no clothes”, by Jim Pappas]

Preface and Footnotes

[p1] Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British biological theorist with a background in ethology and who came to prominence in 1976 book with his book The Selfish Gene, which popularized the gene-centered view of evolution. Dawkins was a co-founder of the Out Campaign, as a means of advancing atheism and free thought and is one of world’s most widely publicized atheists. He is a prominent critic of religion, creationism and pseudoscience

19th Century: Watchmaker analogy William Paley said that if you were walking through the woods and saw a smooth stone on the ground, no big deal, just a river stone formed by the forces of nature. But if you saw a watch on the ground, you would immediately know that this was made by a watchmaker because of its complexity. Since a living organism is more complex than that watch, it too must be designed.

Dawkins in 1986 said living systems “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” But then wrote “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design” to prove the “appearance of design” was only an illusion which could be explained by evolution and natural selection.

In the book he argued against the watchmaker analogy, and described a dysteleological perspective on the process of evolution by natural selection as “blind”, without a design or a goal.

In his 2006 million-selling book The God Delusion, he contended that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist, writing that beliefs, based on faith rather than on evidence are a delusion.

[p2] “We have a clip on livingwaters.com of Richard Dawkins speaking about ‘Survival of the fittest.’ In responding to the statement ‘So the way we have created our human society where we look after the weaker people is counter evolutionary,’ he said, ‘profoundly counter Darwinian, and thank goodness for that.’”

Ray Comfort is the Founder/President/CEO of Living Waters Publications. After relocating from New Zealand to Southern California in the late 1980s, Ray introduced a long line of pastors and churches to a biblical teaching which he called Hell’s Best Kept Secret.

If the special edition of Ray Comfort’s special edition of The Origin of Species that presents the case for Intelligent Design is as weak as atheists maintain, why would Dawkins telling his followers to rip it out? Answer: Because it would strengthen the case for evolution? But it does the opposite, and that’s why they are so threatened,” Comfort says. “Among other things, they don’t want students to discover how Hitler used evolution as the catalyst for his ‘final solution.’” Los Angeles, Nov. 24 /PRNewswire-US Newswire/

[p3] Darwin’s theory of evolution according to an “Urban Legend” bothered Darwin later in life because he was worried it would lead to atheism. He, himself, admitted that something as infinitely complex as the human eye could not come about through blind random chance. Shortly after his death, Lady Hope addressed a gathering of young men and women at the educational establishment founded by the evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody at Northfield, Massachusetts. She had, she maintained, visited Darwin on his deathbed on a beautiful autumn afternoon. He had been reading the Epistle to the Hebrews, had asked for the local Sunday school to sing in a summerhouse on the grounds, and had confessed: “How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done.” He went on, she said, to say that he would like her to gather a congregation since he “would like to speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation, being in a state where he was eagerly savoring the heavenly anticipation of bliss.”

However a letter written by Darwin’s daughter on February 23, 1922 to The Christian, a religious journal refute any such savoring of heavenly bliss, her comments:

“I was present at his [Darwin’s—BT] deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought and belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think that story of his conversion was fabricated in the USA. In most of these versions, hymn singing comes in and a summerhouse where the servants and villagers sang hymns to him. There is no such summerhouse and no servants or villagers ever sang hymns to him. The whole story has no foundation whatsoever (see Hawton, 1958, p. 4).”

Also to be considered is this: many of the “facts” of the Lady Hope story are, quite simply, wrong. For example, Darwin died April 19, 1882. But the story of Lady Hope specifically states that she visited him on a beautiful autumn afternoon. That would have left six months between her visit, and his demise. Yet evidence available to us proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Darwin was neither bedridden nor “on his deathbed” during that six-month period

[p4] Michael Behe is a biophysics professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and his book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution released last summer, has been causing a firestorm of activity in academic circles ever since. Creationist books are rarely sold in secular bookstores or reviewed in secular publications and are usually released by Christian or small secular publishers willing to take a chance. Darwin’s Black Box has gained the attention of evolutionists not normally accustomed to responding to anti-evolutionary ideas in the academic arena. People like Niles Eldredge from the American Museum of Natural History, Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and author of The Blind Watchmaker, Jerry Robison of Harvard University, and David Hull from the University of Chicago have all been forced to respond to Behe either in print or in person. In summary, the reason for all this attention is that they readily admit that Behe is a reputable scientist from a reputable institution and his argument is therefore more sophisticated than they are accustomed to hearing from creationists. Creationists and intelligent design theorists are usually dismissed Ad Hominem, but not Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box.

Behe’s simple claim is that when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the cell was a mysterious black box. We could see the outside of it, but we had no idea of how it worked. In Origin, Darwin stated,

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

Behe found the case in the Black Box and your everyday non-biological irreducible complex mousetrap. It is composed of five basic parts: a catch (to hold the bait), a powerful spring, a thin rod called “the hammer,” a holding bar to secure the hammer in place, and a platform to mount the trap. If any one of these parts is missing, the mechanism will not work because each individual part is integral and therefore must be…irreducibly complex. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/review.html, Darwin’s Black Box Irreducible Complexity or Irreproducible Irreducibility? by Keith Robison

[p5] Revenge of the Zombifying Wasp, Bora Zivkovic, February 04, 2006

I am quite surprised that Carl Zimmer, in research for his book Parasite Rex, did not encounter the fascinating case of the Ampulex compressa (Emerald Cockroach Wasp) and its prey/host the American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana, see also comments on Aetiology and Ocellated).

In 1999, I (Bora Zivkovic) went to Oxford, UK, to the inaugural Gordon Conference in Neuroethology and one of the many exciting speakers I was looking forward to seeing was Fred Libersat.

The talk was half-hot half-cold. To be precise, the first half was hot and the second half was not.

In the first half, he not just introduced the whole behavior, he also showed us a longish movie, showing in high magnification and high resolution all steps of this complex behavior (you can see a cool picture of the wasp’s head here).

First, the wasp gives the roach a quick hit-and-run stab with its stinger into the body (thorax) and flies away. After a while, the roach starts grooming itself furiously for some time, followed by complete stillness. Once the roach becomes still, the wasp comes back, positions itself quite carefully on top of the roach and injects its venom very precisely into the subesophageal ganglion in the head of the roach. The venom is a cocktail of dopamine and protein toxins so the effect is behavioral modification instead of paralysis.

Apparently, (apparently is a word evolutionary psychologists often use when trying to describe events that took place centuries ago. In the absence of hard evidence speculation reigns supreme) the wasp’s stinger has receptors that guide it to its precise target:

“To investigate what guides the sting, Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat of Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel, first introduced the wasp to roaches whose brains had been removed. Normally, it takes about a minute for the wasp to find its target, sting, and fly off. But in the brainless roaches, the wasps searched the empty head cavity for an average of 10 minutes. A radioactive tracer injected into the wasps revealed that when they finally did sting, they used about 1/6 the usual amount of venom. The wasps knew something was amiss.”

The wasp then saws off the tips of the roach’s antennae and drinks the hemolymph from them. It builds a nest – just a little funnel made of soil and pebbles and leads the roach, by pulling at its antenna as if it was a dog-leash, into the funnel. It then lays an egg onto the leg of the roach, closes off the entrance to the funnel with a rock and leaves. The roach remains alive, but completely still in the nest for quite some time (around five weeks). The venom, apart from eliminating all defensive behaviors of the roach, also slows the metabolism of the cockroach, allowing it to live longer without food and water. After a while, the wasp egg hatches, eats its way into the body of the roach, eats the internal organs of the roach, then pupates and hatches. What comes out of the (now dead) cockroach is not a larva (as usually happens with insect parasitoids) but an adult wasp, ready to mate and deposit eggs on new cockroaches.

Why was the second half of the talk a disappointment?

I know for a fact I was not the only one there who expected a deeper look into evolutionary aspects of this highly complex set of behaviors. However, the talk went into a different direction – interesting in itself, for sure, but not as much as an evolutionary story would have been. Libersat described in nitty-gritty detail experiments that uncovered, one by one, secrets of the neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and neurochemistry of the cockroach escape behavior – the one suppressed by toxin – as well as the chemistry of the toxin cocktail. Ganglion after ganglion, neuron after neuron, neurotransmitter after neurotransmitter, the whole behavior was charted for us on the screen. It’s an impressive feat, but disappointing when we were all salivating at a prospect of a cool evolutionary story. http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2006/02/revenge-of-zombifying-wasp.html

[p6] Transitional Fossils

“The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.” Charles Darwin

Transitional Fossils, 150 years later: have they found them yet? No.

Do you notice any fish today growing little stumps, legs, so they can crawl up on land?

Are there any reptiles developing feathers today?

We should be able to see this sort of evidence if evolution is occurring today. Why don’t we see half formed organs instead of complete ones?

Stephen Jay Gould knew about the absence of transitional fossils and invented the idea of “punctuated equilibrium” to explain this absence. The basic idea is that there were periods of extreme biological changes that occurred over short periods of time which precluded the build-up of a fossil record due to lack of time.

What is his primary evidence for his theory?

Answer: The lack of evidence!

What do we actually find in the record?

We find a sudden appearance of a vast number of highly complex organisms (known as the Cambrian explosion) then stasis.

How can this support a transitional theory?

Non-viability of transitional forms

Two lizards had some little babies. They noticed their scales were a bit fuzzier than normal. Then these fuzzy scaled lizards passed on these traits to their offspring and the scales continued to mutate to more feather like things.

You see, these are the pre-cursor to wings. But the feathers are getting so long now, they are getting in the way and even though they can’t yet fly, they can’t run very well either. They are having trouble escaping predators and getting food.

This is the problem with transitional forms for complex features. Until some primitive if not complete functionality is there, there is no advantage. This is known as the non-viability of transitional forms.

Footnotes:

[f1] Many people misunderstand what Darwin’s theory is about. Perhaps the most common error is that it is a theory of the origin of life (”abiogenesis”), that is not the case – Darwin’s theory does not deal with that matter, but rather is only about how successive generations of organisms change over time (”evolution”). Another common point of confusion about Darwin’s work is that he was the first person to propose the idea of evolution – this is far from the case – evolutionary ideas date back to at least the 6th century BCE (e.g. the Greek philosopher Anaximander). Instead Darwin’s great “insight” was “natural selection”, which is an explanation of how evolution works to produce new species and to create organisms suited to their environments.

[f2] Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882 was trained to be a Clergyman of the Church of England. After graduating from Cambridge at the age of 22, he gave up the Christian ministry to become a naturalist.

Charles Darwin is today known for his theory of evolution by natural selection. He developed this theory over a number of years after returning from a 5 year (1831 to 1836) round the world voyage on HMS Beagle. He observed the varieties of plants, animals and fossils in different regions of the world and noticed certain similarities in some species and came to the conclusion that simpler life forms evolved into more complex life forms. The outline of the theory was first presented in a paper read to the Linnean Society by Charles Darwin’s friends, Sir Charles Lyell and John Dalton Hooker (Darwin himself was unable to attend this presentation of his work because of the recent death of his infant son from scarlet fever) on July 1st 1857. Darwin then presented his ideas to a wider public, and at considerably greater length, in his classic 1859 book, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, which today is usually referred to simply as “On the Origin of Species.”

[f3] In a forthcoming paper for the journal Intelligence, Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, argues that there is a strong correlation between high IQ and lack of religious belief and that average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 countries. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God.” A survey of Royal Society fellows found that only 3.3 per cent believed in God – at a time when 68.5 per cent of the general UK population described themselves as believers. A separate poll in the 90s found only seven per cent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God. Times Higher Education magazine.

[f4] The decision of the court in the Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al. case: Judge John E. Jones III, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, made a very strong ruling that intelligent design is creationism not science and that members of Dover’s school board lied under oath to hide their religious motivations. Archive includes transcripts of the trial, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v_dover_decision.html

[f5] Curriculum vitas of:

Dr. John Baumgardner John is a highly respected geophysicist in both Christian and secular circles, and is the leading creationist figure in developing the model of Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.

Dr. Rob Carter Rob is CMI–USA’s head scientist and speaker in Atlanta, Georgia. A marine biologist and expert in genetics (doctorate from the University of Miami) he is also a co-researcher with the Institute for Creation Research on their GENE Project.

John Sanford, a former Cornell University professor, is well known in genetic engineering circles as inventor of the gene gun. A scientific convert to six-day creation, his groundbreaking new book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome demonstrates why human DNA is inexorably deteriorating at an alarming rate and therefore cannot be millions of years old.

[f6] Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael Behe http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/darwinbx.html

[f7] Michael Behe and Darwin’s Black Box, Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/Behe.HTM

[f8] The Saccades Of The Oculomotor System In Vision Processes In Biological Vision, http://www.neuronresearch.net/vision/reading/saccades.htm, Creation ex nihilo 16(4):10–13
September 1994, by Tom Wagner

[f9] From Florida’s “Florida Today” Jan 24, 3:51 PM 
Seminar debates evolution theory by Breuse Hickman,
Florida Today

However, the first ID scientists were actually motivated by the inability of modern biology to explain the origin of the digital information encoded in the DNA molecule well prior to the 1987 ruling. And many physicists during the 60’s and 70’s, including Fred Hoyle who coined the famous “Big Bang” quote, had increasingly been persuaded by the evidence of a finely tuned universe ideally suited to support the existence of life.

There is however an interesting tension between the ID movement in science and Christians who believe the Genesis account of creation literally. The ID people do not advocate any particular designer or even refer to God at all. That is not their interest. This tension is not to say that ID is not a friend to Christians who believe the Bible Creation story. Their scientific arguments and rational thinking are a refreshing respite from the bulldog like evolutionists whose primary motivation appears to be to eliminate God.

It may not have the dramatic sweep of “Inherit the Wind,” but a local court case involving a documentary film that addresses the origins of life on Earth has bigwigs in the museum world talking.

The California Science Center, located in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, has been sued for allegedly canceling an October screening of a documentary that criticizes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

A group called the American Freedom Alliance has sued the L.A. museum, claiming that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum’s Imax theater when it nixed the screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.”

The AFA, which sued the museum in L.A. Superior Court, is seeking punitive damages and compensation for financial losses, as well as a legal declaration from the court that the science center violated the United States Constitution and cannot refuse the AFA the right to rent its facilities for future events.

“Darwin’s Dilemma” explores fossil records that some say point to the appearance on Earth of animal-like organisms without the evolutionary steps Darwin had predicted.

Also dragged into the legal mess is the Smithsonian Institution, which counts the California Science Center as one of its affiliates. Though not a defendant, the Smithsonian is mentioned prominently in at least one document that is now an exhibit in the lawsuit…

[continues in the Los Angeles Times]

The molecular origins of our species wide insanity
The fundamental causality of our self inflicted suffering

Solving the mystery of human evolution using Darwin’s basic theory required no more than a simple reinterpretation of existing data and the application of basic biological principles. The same approach simultaneously resolves several other major enigmas in disciplines rarely considered within the same context. By following in the footsteps of William of Ockham, the path of least resistance leads to a simple, coherent and elegant explanation for our unique physiological traits and sheds light on the state of our mind.

Your ability to read and understand this article, your perception, state of mind and sense of self is directly related to the co-ordinated real time variations in structure and cascading flood of chemical and electrical chain reactions in your brain. That is not to say your consciousness is the structure, rather one facilitates the other. Forget for now the so-called hard problem, how does consciousness arise or emerge from a large glob of fatty stuff, or the esoteric realms of physics where the nature of matter and energy is indeterminate. Let us begin with a model based on the concept of structure, in this case the microstructure and molecular arrangement of our brain as an understanding at this level may shed light on some of the more esoteric mysteries.

A single brain cell is more complex by many orders than anything most of us have ever imagined, a comparison with the best of our technology would be laughable. Sub atomic, atomic and molecular engineering of extraordinary elegance, a whole dynamic ecosystem in constant yet precisely orchestrated flux.

These diagrams (borrowed from Wikipedia) provide some concept of the scale, complexity and the engineering marvel that we are when compared to the best of our technological innovation. However they fail to do justice to the dynamic reality and wonders of bio-molecular engineering, more on that later.

Take around 100 billion or so of these supremely advanced organic machines and organise them into a coherent interconnected and self-regulating whole and we have the human brain. It manages its biological support systems, processes and translates sensory input into something comprehensible and appears to give rise to or at least facilitate a sense of ‘I’. The correlation between structure and function is very good, the tiniest change in its structure can and usually does result in major changes in our sense of who or what we are. From congenital defects in the developmental process to minor accidents as small as a pinprick through to the use of appropriately termed mind altering molecules the result is always the same, micro change in structure, macro change in consciousness. So for this model to develop we will assume the brain acts like a lens for our sense of self or consciousness. The arrangement of the molecular architecture directly relates to its resolution or the quality of consciousness in the same way the design and structural integrity of a telescope lens and mirror relates to its ability to resolve light and the sharpness of the image it produces.

If we take the lens analogy as read it would be useful to look at its design and how it evolved and developed. Not quite the current paradigm re human evolution rather a modern translation of an earlier paradigm when somewhat circuitously the theory outlined below predicts the archaic traditions on which it is based would be more accurate than much of what is currently in vogue. So sit back and enjoy the ride and lets see if it correlates with the world you inhabit or whether it offers any practical insights as to where we go next….

Expansion

During the latter stages of its evolution the human brain was on a rapid and accelerating curve of expansion. This exceptionally rare phenomenon was the by-product of an increasingly symbiotic and co-evolutionary relationship with flowering plants that resulted in the emergence of a number of unusual traits. These traits were the direct consequence of a heavily and progressively modified transcription environment at all stages of growth and development. Rather than selective adaptation working on DNA mutation the primary mechanism was a form of genetic engineering or more accurately epigenetic engineering. The increasing dependence on a bio-chemically complex diet, very rich in transcription altering, endocrine disrupting and neuro-active flavonoids drove the expansion of the brain. As the brain enlarged and its fuel requirement disproportionally increased the expansion cocktail was liberally laced with simple sugars. In order meet its appetite for fuel it was compelled to ingest an ever-greater amounts of the chemicals that were responsible for its growth in the first place.

New structure

The tumour like proliferation of the new brain, the neo-cortex, increasingly freed from the constraints of specialised differentiation and survival related function took a quantum leap in its development. It had acquired highly advanced cognitive abilities and begun acting as an executive layer with built in automatic enhancing capabilities for earlier more primitive neural structures. It had also reached sufficient complexity to experience self recognition, not the self we ‘think’ we are today, rather a self we would now describe as something wholly other. In addition and related to its self recognition capacity its experience of itself could be described in terms of rapture, a perpetual sense of profound wonder and intense sensual joy.

Contraction

Then around two hundred thousand years ago the rapid expansion of our brain abruptly stalled and turned to contraction. The huge reduction and near loss of the wet tropical forests during the driest period of the last ice age pulled the plug on the fomenting cauldron of chemicals that had been responsible for re-designing, re-organising and re-engineering the evolutionary development of our brain. When the last of our lineage were ejected from the forests womb like protection that had hot housed our evolution, the neural system it had nurtured was exposed to the kinds of hostile ecological and biochemical environments it had not encountered for millions of years. The physiological traits that had emerged and were dependent on a heavily modified transcription environment inevitably began to regress.

Catastrophic failure

Since that time our brain has suffered a progressive and catastrophic failure in its development, massive loss of its structural integrity at a molecular and cellular level and near total loss of the most complex biochemical cocktail in evolutionary history essential for its optimum function. Archaic genetic specialisation asymmetrically encoded between the cerebral hemispheres resulted in the predisposition of one side of the brain to fail more quickly than the other. Paradoxically as the developmental retardation progressed the more retarded side assumed control, its greater loss of function and the associated psychology of fear provided the drive to dominate. Finally as sex steroids such as testosterone are fundamental in brain development and the evolutionary effect of flavonoids significantly modified their activity the severity of the symptoms is gender related with males exhibiting a more extreme spectrum of symptoms than females.

Ancient treatment

Our ancestors being significantly more functional than we are, were acutely aware of their predicament. They developed a number of ingenious practices and techniques in an attempt to treat the emerging symptoms of their neurodegenerative disease and slow its rate of progression. Through the insight of their minds alone they achieved a high science of consciousness now largely forgotten and dismissed as the mythological ramblings of our ‘primitive’ forebears. They were faced with a condition so insidious it is difficult for us to imagine, symptoms include the inability to accurately perceive reality and a progressive blindness to the nature and severity of the condition itself. Ultimately their best efforts failed, though the relics of their treatments can offer a powerful insight into the specific nature of the condition when considered within a neurological framework.

The lights went out, there is no one home

From the most advanced consciousness system this side of the Milky Way the human brain has been reduced to a zombie like state, unable to recognise itself, paralysed by a profound sense of paranoia, plagued by deeply rooted psychosis and driven to control anything beyond its rapidly diminishing experiential capacity. In the most recent and severe period of degeneration, what we now refer to as recorded history (a necessary response to the failure of our eidetic memory) it has created a world in its own demented image. The stratification of society along neurodegenerative lines resulted in the emergence of hierarchical and patriarchal structures that reward delusion and dysfunction with power and control. This has further accelerated our plunge into a culture dominated by fear where the least functional members of society inevitably end up creating a world that reflects their underlying dysfunction. Ironically labelled civilisation, built on foundations of deep psychosis, devoid of reality, empathy or any sense of beingness, a living hell where only the deluded sense of being in control at any cost provides temporary respite from the self inflicted nightmare.

Examples of catastrophic structural failure

Design and development, real time function, build quality

1 Congenital development and design specification: The earliest phase of neural development is the most crucial, the highly sensitive neural cells are at their most responsive and plastic. The foundations for lifelong neural structure, organisation and function are laid down during specific developmental windows in the first few weeks and months of our life. While our brain maintains much more plasticity much later in life than previously thought the way the brain develops during these key windows is a very significant factor in permanently shaping its functional parameters.

The design for this period of development is locked in the DNA blueprint and like all blueprints it needs to be read. A major part of this mechanism is hormonal, the translation of the genetic blueprint into molecular and neurological structure depends on the complex interaction of many hormonally active chemicals. These chemicals play a direct role in dictating the timing and duration of the developmental windows as well as what happens at a structural level within each window.

Recent research has identified a number of chemicals that are known to interfere with this natural process. Generally termed endocrine disrupters they can alter the period of developmental windows and what happens during those windows by interfering with the activity of hormones integral to or by acting directly on the transcription process.

Chemicals found in plastics or pesticide residues have been identified as potentially dangerous endocrine disrupters and recommendations to limit their effect particularly during early development have been implemented.

Interestingly enough flavonoids have also been designated endocrine disrupters and the potentially harmful effects of flavonoids in Soya infant formula have been the subject of serious investigation.

So while the design for our brain and all aspects of our physical form are encoded in the genetic blueprint the final structure is dictated by the precise cocktail of chemicals in the developmental environment.

A powerful mix of endocrine disrupting flavonoids was known to be an integral part of our transcription environment for many millions of years. They influenced the molecular and cellular structure of our brain so inevitably altered our state of mind. Those designer drugs are now almost entirely absent during our neural development, the consequence cannot be anything other than the congenital malformation of our brain.

2 Microtubules: Generally considered part of the cells skeleton these supremely delicate and complex structures are increasingly associated with cognition and intelligence particularly in neural cells where they are especially abundant, some theories even suggest a central role in higher consciousness. Either way like most biological structures, their precise design and molecular arrangement, is dictated by DNA. However they display a very high level of plasticity in response to their biochemical environment, an excellent example of real time hormonal and chemical effect on the transcription, configuration and functionality of structures directly related to cognition and consciousness. For example a minor change in the cellular concentration of the neuro-active hormone melatonin will radically alter the structure of these extraordinary intelligence-related machines. Is it any wonder that the near total loss of the complex and hormonally active chemicals present and essential during the evolution and development of our brain has left the most delicate and hormonally sensitive parts of our consciousness system twisted and distorted literally out of all recognition.

3 Super structure: A major structural and functional component in the central, peripheral and enteric nervous system as well as cell membranes are fatty acids. A class of highly volatile, incredibly delicate, long-chain molecules that are extremely susceptible to oxidative degeneration. In nature they are always very heavily protected, wrapped up and immersed in a cocktail of powerful anti-oxidants which is very handy and no accident. Retaining them in their protective matrix at a molecular level until they are assimilated and incorporated into the neural and cellular structures is absolutely essential to prevent damage. The expansion of the human brain to its colossal proportions presents a major engineering headache in simply protecting such a volatile mass from rapid degeneration. To meet this requirement biological pumps maintain a concentration of vitamin C in the brain to a level 100 times higher than that of blood. In addition the pineal gland pumps out the neuro-active hormone melatonin, as an antioxidant it is around 50 times more effective than vitamin C. As yet an unrecognised part of the evolutionary equation are the powerful antioxidant activities of flavonoids. Increasingly studied in isolation or as part of our typical dietary intake and slowly creeping into nutritional recommendations or offered as supplements they also have more protective action than vitamin C. Here is the paradox, flavonoids were known to be present along with the more familiar protective vitamins as part of our evolutionary diet at levels at least 20 times higher than what is currently considered normal. A perpetual flood of 1000s of anti-oxidant compounds present 24/7 from conception to death. This constant immersion in a highly protective chemical soup was absolutely essential to prevent the most complex feat of molecular engineering we know, constructed from some of the most delicate and highly volatile molecules we know, from structural and functional degeneration. As a bonus some groups of flavonoids also elevate the production of melatonin by stimulating the activity of the pineal. Check it out for yourself, our nearest living relatives the forest dwelling apes currently, today and everyday flood their system with at least 20 times more of these antioxidants than we do and we have a proportionally much larger and therefore more vulnerable brain. Now we have lost virtually all that protection, at least a 95% deficiency, in fact its more like 98% and it’s the reason why it takes a while for the implications to sink in… In addition we are chronically deficient in fatty acids the raw construction materials for the neural systems super structure, finally we tend to separate them from their natural protection, then heat them to extremely high temperatures in oxygen before incorporating them into the structural integrity of our brain.

Now pay attention, you might have to read this again and again and again to begin to understand the catastrophic failure at a molecular level this represents. Not only is it profoundly shocking, it certainly should be, your ability to assimilate this information is seriously compromised by severe neurodegenerative dementia, whatever your age. What we currently define as dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply the inevitable and extreme ends of a spectrum of life long neuro-degeneration due to the near total loss of functional and protective biochemistry.

How would our ‘advanced’ engineering fare in similar circumstances?

Applying these principles to modern feats of engineering can provide a basic understanding regarding the impact of minute changes in basic specification. For example instructing the research and development team at a major engineering corporation to add 1% to the blueprints design dimensions, to reduce the quality of the construction materials by 5% and to vary the fuel quality or power supply by 10%.

If you applied these specification changes to some of the most advanced technology the human mind has created then you begin to get the idea. Take any of the following examples of ‘advanced’ engineering, Concorde, The Northrop Grumman B-2 Stealth bomber, The Space Shuttle, The large Hadron Collider or The Hubble Telescope. Such a change in specifications would likely render their construction impossible, even if construction were possible the idea that they would work would be reasonable grounds for being institutionalised. Apply the same parameters to more basic technology such as your car or personal computer and the outcome would be the same. You might just get away with building or at least shoehorning your car together, it might even start but would you drive it if you knew about the changes in specification?

Everyday life and death decisions are made on behalf of millions of people based on the untested presumption that the most complex piece of engineering we know is even remotely functional. You might think that the basic scientific protocol of never presuming your primary instrument of investigation is working would be applied to the one piece of equipment we use for absolutely everything. Perhaps its flawless performance throughout recent history has provided us with the confidence to ignore what would be considered ’bad science’ in any other context.

The accepted evidence for the structural basis of our insanity is staring us in the face, as might be expected we fail to recognise its profound significance.

Our own sex hormones retard the development of the dominant side of our brain!

+

Our flavonoid rich ancestral diet inhibited the action of our sex hormones during the evolution of our brain!

=

The complexities of the human brain are so far beyond our current thinking we really have no idea how it works. What we do know is that our own sex steroids such as testosterone play a major role in all aspects of neural development. In addition through testosterone’s conversion to estradiol via the enzyme aromatase it is also responsible for the masculinization of the brain. Strangely enough this ‘normal’ process is known to retard its development in the uterus by modifying the way DNA is transcribed, in turn changing its molecular and cellular structure with testosterone referred to as a neuro-toxin. Cambridge based researcher Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, building on findings dating back 20 years or more has concluded that the ‘normal’ male brain is simply at one end of the spectrum of ASD due to the effects of hormonal retardation. Of course the reference point for normal is based on the presumption that the activity of our sex hormones is normal.

We also know that for the greater part of its evolution the human brain was immersed in a chemical cocktail that inhibited and diluted the action of our own sex steroids as well as the action of the enzyme aromatase. It is inevitable that the near complete loss of these inhibitory effects has radically altered the development of our brain and therefore our state of mind. The very acceptance of ‘retardation’ as normal within the context of a recently expanding brain that is now shrinking would be cause for great concern if it were a modern hi tech engineering project. These two pieces of the evolutionary jigsaw alone should set alarm bells ringing as they are well evidenced and accepted, that they don’t is a direct consequence of the hormonal retardation on our minds ability to see context. That we now build the most complex product of biological evolution from materials that have never been part of that 3 billion year process might be another. The very simple equation above should be enough on its own to initiate the kind of response when we are faced with a massive natural disaster, what is your response?

Discover how astounding you really are:

A short exercise to re-calibrate your perception

Before pondering the pictorial summary below, watch this excerpt from a recent animation that provides just a hint of the unimaginable dynamic complexity that you are (full-length version with narrative here). Do not buy into your perceptually limited mind telling you ‘this is just what happens in my cells’. Although near the cutting edge of biological animation and still a relatively crude representation of the molecular biology that you are in action, right now, it does begin to reveal what extraordinarily complex beings we are, divine poetry in molecular motion.

Watch it a couple of times and allow yourself to imagine that this is what you are, then multiply the molecular and cellular complexity and transpose that to the structures that play a major role in facilitating our sense of self, our neural cells, when watching this very simple animation.

Now imagine the aqueous environment in which all this highly sensitive and interactive molecular machinery depends on being completely flooded with extremely reactive biochemistry. The most complex biochemical cocktail in evolutionary history also produced by equally complex molecular machines in one almighty orchestrated molecular dance.

Finally once you to begin to recognise how extraordinarily complex your evolutionary process is then take a look at the simple pictorial summary below and try to see way beyond the ‘trees’ the ‘humans’ the ‘fruit’ etc and imagine a single interconnected molecular organism.

While your brain was evolving it was effectively an extension of the most complex ecosystem we know. Scale that into molecular ecology that involved the plant chemistry reading our DNA and directly modifying the evolution and development of our mind and you begin to realise that we were not and could not be fully functioning once we were chemically separated.

(pdf version of pictorial summary)

Any Change in Neural Structure or Neurochemistry Alters Consciousness

The Expansion & Degeneration of Human Consciousness, Tony Wright, ECR, Consciousness in

Science & Philosophy, Uni. Of E. Illinois, Nov. 1998.

Conclusion

Minutely modifying the molecular structure or chemical cocktail of our brain radically changes our sense of self, our psychology and behaviour, how we perceive and react to each other and the world we create and inhabit. We have recently had our brain structure and neurochemistry massively and detrimentally altered so inevitably our state of mind and sense of self has also massively and detrimentally altered. An accurate account of the catastrophic failure of our consciousness system is preserved in ancient mythology, a diagnosis of a progressive neurodegenerative condition that results in severe and all encompassing psychotic delusion. Evidence from several modern scientific disciplines supports the ancient accounts and provides compelling evidence of species wide hormonal ‘retardation’ of our brain and associated dysfunction.

Expecting to address the serious perceptual and psychological deficiencies that have resulted without addressing the underlying structural damage and neuro-chemical deficiencies is utterly futile and symptomatic of the condition itself. All that is required to restore our sanity is to repair the precise molecular structure and restore the neuro-chemical regime that is absolutely essential to perceive reality. This is already well within our reach and with a common sense approach likely to yield spectacular results within a generation. While we may be less aware than our ancestors we have the potential to mobilise the industrial scale technologies and bio-sciences we have invented and currently deploy to wage war on our selves or provide distraction with endless plastic shit. It might be fitting to turn these machines of destruction built on the broken backs and broken spirits of millions of lives and lost generations to creating something other than quiet desperation for a tiny minority and abject misery for everyone else. Even a partial fix is likely to yield a profound improvement in our mental health and bring with it the cognitive capacity to effect a complete restoration. Prioritising anything other than the immediate structural repair of our mind simply highlights how far we have fallen into the abyss of our own insanity.

It may all seem just a little challenging yet a solution would take a fraction of the colossal effort and resource wasted every single day in maintaining the unsustainable and destructive systems of control and the mindless consumer societies we all inadvertently support. Of course it would simply not be tenable to propose such a catastrophic failure if there were not an overwhelming body of evidence to support it. Aside from ‘hard’ evidence that would have to exist in the biological sciences it would require no more than reading a newspaper on any day you like to see the scale and depth of perceptual and psychological symptoms or if you are really brave just look in the mirror.

This modern translation of the ancient science of the mind was brought to you courtesy of a partially retrofitted and rebuilt neural system, repeated periods of cerebral dominance reversal and the treatment of chronic and clinical deficiency in neurochemistry via frequent self medication and supplementation with neuro-chemical analogues.

For more information visit leftinthedark.org.uk

and beyond-belief.org.uk or read

‘Left in the Dark’ and find explanations

to long standing enigmas such as

‘why very big brains really do grow on trees’

On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.

In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song.

This miniature evolutionary saga is described in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s authored by Peter and Rosemary Grant, a husband-and-wife team who have spent much of the last 36 years studying a group of bird species known collectively as Darwin’s finches.

The finches — or, technically, tanagers — have adapted to the conditions of each island in the Galapagos, and they provided Darwin with a clear snapshot of evolutionary divergence when he sailed there on the HMS Beagle. The Grants have pushed that work further, with decades of painstaking observations providing a real-time record of evolution in action. In the PNAS paper, they describe something Darwin could only have dreamed of watching: the birth of a new species.

The species’ forefather was a medium ground finch, or Geospiza fortis, who flew from a neighboring island to the Grants’ island of Daphne Major, and into their nets, in 1981. He “was unusually large, especially in beak width, sang an unusual song” and had a few gene variants that could be traced to another finch species, they wrote. This exotic stranger soon found a mate, who also happened to have a few hybrid genes. The happy couple had five sons…

[continues in Wired]

A new piece of Creationist drivel asks some inane questions meant to be provocative to the flummoxed “Darwinian fundamentalist”:

“Can you explain which came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before the vessels evolved or after they evolved?”

If asked in honest curiosity by a middle school child before entering her first formal biology lessons, the questions might merit praise, and the child might be assumed to genuinely value the answers.  Alas, in the case quoted above, the questions are meant rhetorically, believed to have no plausible answer, and posed by an incurious – if outspoken – evangelical propagandist named Ray Comfort.

With these questions and more, Comfort, the co-founder (with former actor Kirk Cameron) of The Way of The Master Ministries, has decided to shamelessly advertise his ignorance of evolutionary biology in an introduction appended to a limited printing of the field’s foundational text, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.  What’s more, on Thursday, November 19, 2009, Comfort and Cameron intend to freely distribute 50,000 of the defaced scientific classic at universities across the nation.

“The only reasonable answer to these questions”, Comfort declares, “is that God made the human body (and the bodies of all the other creatures) with a heart, lungs (to oxygenate the blood), kidneys (to filter wastes from the blood), blood vessels, arteries, blood, skin (to hold it all in), etc., at one moment in time, as the Bible states.”

Though it may come as no surprise that a man who does not believe in evolution may leap from point A to point Z without recognizing any intermediary stages, it does seem more than a little odd that a man who so publicly pits his Creationist fantasies against established scientific theory should be so clearly ill-versed in not only biology, but in contemporary Creationist refinements as well.

The “Intelligent Design” movement’s argument that the human organism is too complex, with too many strictly defined interwoven components that serve no purpose apart from each other, to have evolved from simpler components, is marketed by the name of “irreducible complexity” by Comfort’s more savvy peers.  And it’s an argument that has been confronted and answered…

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