In My Fantasies, I'm the Hero Too!

I know just what to do if the Russians invade. I know this because I spent a substantial portion of my childhood thinking about it. Ask my brothers. I've shot camouflaged commies from every angle. I've taken the weapons off their still-warm corpses and continued the fight until I saved the country from certain tyranny and destruction! And then I woke up.

Many, many scientists need a similar awakening, even though sleeping is so pleasant. Most scientists are taught an anti-God worldview during their formative years in high school and college. Those that go into research (as opposed to applied sciences, such as chemical engineering or national defense) never escape the scholastic environment that taught them their humanist faith. Humanism, of course, teaches folks everything should be judged on how it benefits mankind. Ultimately, it teaches that man is God.

It should be no wonder, then, that in scientists worldview, they are the super hero.

If you're a microbiologist or some variant working at the CDC, then you're trying to find the next super bug that will wipe out half of earth's population. Even relatively benign viruses like Swine Flu are good candidates to underscore your importance to all of humanity!

So we must: Cover out mouths, wash our hands, don't drink after anyone, use a paper towel to open the bathroom door, use hand sanitizer!

If you're a climatologist, then you're sacrificing a quiet life to convince the hordes of distracted sheeple that they need to dramatically change the way they live in order to avoid consigning humanity to the fossil record!

So we must: Recycle, walk, car-pool, buy a hybrid, drink tap water, don't eat beef (I choked here), buy offsets, sell your private jet (to whom? Al Gore?) and fly coach, drip irrigate your garden, install solar panels, turn your thermostat to 80 degrees during the Summer, use electric hand dryers, don't consume electricity...with..your..electric hand dryers!

If you're a astronomer, then you want obscene amounts of money and political clout in order to find the next big rock flying through space that might wipe out all life on earth! In your worldview, you're the hero and can't understand why the world doesn't see how important your work is.

So we must: Strangely, I don't think there's anything you can do. Good bye, then.

At least the astronomer will have the satisfaction of being right, just one last time. Super!

So this Halloween, when many of the super-hero costumes aren't returned to the costume shop, you might want to run down to the college campus an check the science department. They don't like to wear white lab coats! That's just a cover up to conceal their secret identity!

Altered Beast: So Much From So Little 2

Story telling is a gift to those that have that talent. Story writing is even more of a gift, for I've never seen someone who couldn't tell a story they themselves wrote.

Some stories fascinate me. Without having had the experience of being marooned on an island, how could one sit in his attic and write a book like Robinson Crusoe? Even less likely, how could a man from the 20th century write a series of books like the Chronicles of Narnia? As a side note, how could he sell them given and odd name like "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe"? It must be intrigue...Anyway. But C.S. Lewis and Daniel Defoe must bow their heads in reverence to the talents of our next authors.

In a recent article in the National Geographic, scientists published their findings gleaned from a newly found insect. The insect was the largest insect on record: larger than a man! The scorpion-like insect was a heavy-weight champion weighing in at 8.2 feet in length! It fed on fish, and even each other. It was the alpha predator of its day! Its legs were too weak to lift its body without the buoying effect of the water. Contemporary sea creatures, such as fish, developed hardened heads and mouths to contend with the pressure from these mammoth sea scorpions! These terrible claws were designed for shooting out and grabbing any nearby prey, much like the Praying Mantis of today! The largest lobsters of our day would be mere bite-sized morsels for Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, the given name of this ancient insect!

Now, wait a second here. What did they say they found? A fossil? So a rock, then? It must have been a big rock, since Jaekelopterus rhenaniae was 8.2 feet in lengh and all. Oh, wait a second, they didn't find the whole creature...just an 18 inch claw. Hm. Well, all the flourishes did make it more readable! I might not have even read the article were it not for all the made-up parts. I kinda' think that was the point. Intrigue, I guess.

This is the first novel I've read from this emerging author, but he has a bright future, especially as much as the world of evolutionary biology appreciates good fiction these days!

The Forgiving Darwinist: Hope for Me!

In reading a recent article on the National Geographic Online website, I came across a startling admission. In previous posts, I've protested the sub-sub-categorization of fish species. Every time Evolutionary biologists come across a specimen who's fin is slightly smaller or dots are slightly lighter, they want to declare it to be a new species, give it a Latin surname and celebrate the onward march of evolution, right before our very eyes!

Now, my argument, and that of many others, has been that this is not an example of evolution, but is only a slight variation in what the Bible calls a 'kind'. God proclaimed that each should reproduce after it's kind. Evolutionists haven't been able to show that to be untrue, and never will. The variation between trout species does not make them each their own 'kind', just variations within a single 'kind'.

Now this article continues to push the evolutionary faith just like everything else on the National Geographic website. But it also contains a shocking admission that I've never seen before: that out of zeal for the evolutionary faith, past scientists tended to find many species in the fossil record where few or one actually existed. Here's the full text of the admission in question:

Mistakes Made

Andy Currant is a paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

"Most large fossil herbivores tend to tune down to a smaller number of taxa [biological classifications] when you look at them closely," he said.

But, he added, the mistakes made by early investigators are easy to forgive. Researchers used to be hypersensitive to variation in specimens and did not really understand how much variation there can be between males and females within a population, he said.

Marcelo Sánchez, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said: "Solving such a specific taxonomic problem may not seem important. But individual-species research like this is ultimately what major claims about evolution depends[s] upon."

Now let's quickly break down what this man is saying.

First, he's pointing out that when paleontologists and taxonomists look "closely" at the evidence, what was once thought to be evidence of many species is found to be very few. There is a pressure on paleontologists to discover new species of dinosaurs to fill in the "gaps" in the evolutionary tree! Their theory is not benefited by fewer unique animals. They need more!

But, thankfully, Kaplan has struck a conciliatory tone with past scientists for skewing scientific evidence to support their evolutionary presuppositions. Magnanimity on this scale is rare to the scientific community. Perhaps it's part of a rising trend of a traditionally Christian valu...er...never mind.

I haven't found the website where you register to be forgiven by the scientific community, but perhaps there is now hope for me!

Software and Genetics: A Comparative Analysis

As I've been reading about and discussing evolution over the past year or so, I've noticed a disconnect in people's minds concerning genetic variation and origins. People seem to gleefully state that variation in a species over time somehow shows that evolution is happening, and thus, the Theory of Evolution must be true!

But there's just one problem. The Theory of Evolution does not simply state that lifeforms change over time. It states that these changes, going backward in time, account for the origins of the species. As I count it, however, these folks have not thought through things very thoroughly.

I'd like to make a comparison between two things. The one must be genetics, since that's what contains the data being passed onto the offspring of a specimen. The other is computer software. At first, this might seem like too simplistic a comparison, but I think you'll see where I'm going with it if you'll persevere.

The genome of any species is merely an extremely long set of repeating chemical sequences known as base pairs. These base pairs are arranged in a certain order that is meaningful to some interpretive mechanism that uses these base pairs to know how to build all the building blocks of a particular cell, and indeed, the entire organism. Even though each cell has only one "type" (with the obvious exception of stem cells), every type of cell has all the information contained in it to rebuild the entire organism if called upon (which it's not).

Now, these base pairs aren't consumed while building the pieces of the cell such as the chloroplasts or the golgi vesicles. Rather, they are interpreted the way a builder uses a blueprint. After the vascuole of a new cell is constructed using the DNA, the DNA is still 100% intact, having all the base pairs in place and in the same sequence.

The many, intricate parts of the cell are described by DNA in a method known to geneticists and bioinformaticists as "coding". They use this term because the way DNA codes for the body is very similar to the way the binary numbering system, the building blocks of all computer programs, codes for software. The user of the software thinks in terms of windows, buttons, pictures, menu items, etc. The organism thinks in terms of fingers, toes, ears and eyes. But beneath each set of abstractions (windows and toes), lies a language that describes to an interpreter how to build them. The interpreter for computer software is called the CPU or Central Processing Unit, manufactured by Motorola, Intel or AMD. The interpreters for DNA coding are several fold. Most internal components of the cell (15 or so categories) in some way interpret either the DNA or the biproducts of the DNA produced by other interpreters.

"Coding" is a good word for the information contained in DNA, because just like the 1's and o's of computer code are not windows, buttons, images, and browsers, so the A, C, T and G of the human genome are not fingers, eye balls, lungs, or brains. But where the computer code needs and interpreter and a hundres or so external hardware devices to manifest anything meaningful, the DNA is interpreted, literaly, by things produced by...DNA! So DNA is the code, the interpreter, the manufacturer of the interpreter, the manufacturer of the whole organism and the source of new DNA!

Software development is a very involved and deliberate process that takes years to master, is fraught with pitfalls and is very much a trial and error process. It can take years to develop a complex software system into something that is featured, performant and robust enough to deploy into a production environment.

The comparison between DNA and Software breaks down at some point. The place where DNA and software breaks down is that the software running on the CPU does not describe how to make, maintain, repair and alter the CPU. That is a whole different level of intelligence which modern technology has not been able to broach.

Science fiction often imagines a world where thinking machines improve themselves and "evolve" independently of their creators. They suppose that once a machine reaches a certain level of complexity, it will be able to continue its upward progress independent of its designers.

While that assertion is yet to be proven, it's interesting that they assume that a very high degree of complexity is required before a machine is able to change independent of its original programming. And they are correct. An even higher degree of complexity would be required for a machine to reproduce itself and upload a copy of its own software to the new unit. Interestingly, if you copied computer software with random copy errors, it would cease to function. DNA doesn't. It manages to cope in nearly all cases. Only when the copy errors are large and dangerous to the offspring does it react defensively and cause the offspring to be sterile, preserving life, but ensuring these errors don't further promulgate into the larger populace. This tendency towards defensive sterilization is also a design feature, not intended by the specimen, but engineered into it's very fiber by its designer.

To pause a moment, consider that when arguing that variation in a modern form shows the origin of that form, one must assume that the unit of life was already at a sufficiently complex state so as to begin the upward progression to its current form. Without that assumption, you have no explanation for how that cycle of creation, variation, reproduction got started. It's like saying, "If I was really smart, I wouldn't have to go to school!" You have to assume the first part for the second part to be true. But the debate on origins is not a discussion of how mankind lost control of some futuristic robotic monster which reproduced and took over the world (i.e. how environmentalist talk of humans), it's a question of how the futuristic robotic monster came together in the first place without the aid of a designer?! How did it achieve the level of complexity and sophistication where it had the ability to decide on its own, envision a more capable self than its current form and design a sequence of events that would lead to that improved state.

When one begins to understand the unfathomable complexity of the inter workings of even a single cell, then the idea of it coming together without an intelligent designer is shown to be a simple impossibility. Bringing a machine (organism) from crude materials (iron, silicon, water, carbon, etc) to the level of being able to recognize non-toxic foods, adjust its behavior to match its environment, consume matter to produce energy, repair itself, reproduce itself and improve in reproduction is ALL of the problem of explaining origins. Once it has reached that level of complexity, variation is a matter of carrying out its original design, whether in direct obedience to its programming or as a byproduct of unintended side affects.

With millions of engineers adding their lives, experience and expertise to the problem of making autonomous machines, we are just now beginning to produce what is called "semi-autonomous" machines which can make simple decisions of navigation with only occasional guidance from humans, but without the ability to self-repair, reproduce or self-improve. We are not even close to this level of sophistication, and the self-improve part is only theoretical. It is not certain that it is even possible. And sophistication alone does not automatically bequeath the abilities listed above. Those machines that have these semi-autonomous characteristics were designed with those abilities in mind. It has never happened accidentally. Most sophisticated machines and systems have none of these traits.

My whole point is this: Many people accept and offer observable variations in species as proof of origins. This is a false assumption. Variation is a deliberate design feature that is currently beyond the technology of or even the dreams of modern scientists and engineers. To think that any entity, mechanical or biological, could achieve this level of targeted sophistication is far beyond faith, its belief in the mathematically impossible. Those that have this faith despite this fact either rebelliously wish to orphan themselves from their Designer or haven't thought things through very well.