Reflectorites
Below are web article links, headlines and paragraphs for the period 29 February -
11 March, with my comments in square brackets.
I am going to try to start putting the articles in order of importance to the
Creation/Evolution debate, rather than just date order. HIV/AIDS issues will still
be at the end.
Steve
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http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/031100sci-evolution-poll.html
The New York Times March 11, 2000 Poll Finds That Support Is Strong for
Teaching 2 Origin Theories ... By JAMES GLANZ An overwhelming majority of
Americans think that creationism should be taught along with Darwin's theory of
evolution in the public schools, according to a new national survey. Some
scientists characterized the seemingly contradictory findings as a quixotic effort by
the public to accommodate incompatible world views. But in some ways, even as
Americans continue to argue over what students should be taught about human
origins, the poll offers encouragement to both sides in the debate. The survey's
results were released yesterday by the People for the American Way Foundation,
the liberal civil rights group that commissioned the poll, which was conducted by
DYG Inc., the polling and research firm in Danbury, Conn. The survey involved
extensive interviews with 1,500 people drawn representatively from all segments
of society across the country. In results emphasized by the foundation, the survey
found that 83 percent of Americans generally supported the teaching of evolution
in public schools. But the poll, which had a statistical margin of error of 2.6
percentage points, also found that 79 percent of Americans thought creationism
had a place in the public school curriculum ... As for evolution, almost half the
respondents agreed that the theory "is far from being proven scientifically." And 68
percent said it was possible to believe in evolution while also believing that God
created humans and guided their development. "You can read the poll as half-
empty or half-full," said Daniel Yankelovich, chairman of DYG. ... the public's
sense that creationism and evolution are compatible "translates in a pluralistic
society and public to there being a place for both." ... a postmodern feeling that no
single view can provide complete understanding of most issues ... People on all
sides of the issue seemed to find something to like in the study. Dr. David Haig, an
evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, said that he was "cheered that the
majority of people are happy for evolution to be taught in the schools," .. Dr.
Duane T. Gish, a vice president of the Institute for Creation Research, a California
group that supports the teaching of creationism, also said he was generally pleased
with the results... the strictest creationists believe in a literal reading of Genesis:
that the universe, Earth and all the planet's species were created a few thousand
years ago in essentially their present form. Only about a third of the respondents in
the poll, though, defined creationism this way. Others said they understood it more
loosely as referring to God's having created humans ... The results indicate that
about 30 percent of Americans believe that creationism should be taught as a
scientific theory, either with or without evolution in the curriculum. At the other
end of the spectrum, 20 percent believe that evolution should be taught in science
class without any mention of creationism. ... The survey found little variation in
responses by geographic region. ... Dr. David W. Moore of The Gallup Poll ... said
[in] ... the days of the Scopes trial, when "most people probably rejected evolution
because they just couldn't believe that human beings descended from apes." Now,
he said, it seems unlikely most people would object to that proposition, "so long as
scientists are not saying that God had no part in the evolutionary process." ... See
also: http://dallasnews.com/national/46962_POLL11.html [This represents a major
problem for Darwinists and a huge plus for the ID movement's Wedge strategy
because the public is now becoming aware that the *real* issue is philosophical
materialism-naturalism. In my Biology class I have just finished two weeks being
conducted through a guided tour of the cell, with its myriad intricate molecular
machines for monitoring, transporting and producing life's necessities. The atheist
lecturer couldn't help but use the language of intelligent design in explaining how it
all worked. I had trouble not jumping up and shouting Hallelujah! :-) Once
students are permitted to consider that all this apparent design might be what it
looks like: *real* design, then it will be the beginning of the end for philosophical
materialism-naturalism's monopoly on science!]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25037-2000Mar7.html ... State
Capitals Stirred By Evolution ... By David J. Hoff Education Week Wednesday,
March 8, 2000 The Kansas board of education guaranteed that the battle over
teaching evolution ended the 20th century with a bang-and ushered in the new
millennium, and election season, with a flurry of activity. Since the board last
summer eliminated Charles Darwin's theories from the Kansas science standards,
conservatives in a number of other states have introduced similar measures as
legislation or state policy, keeping the debate over how to teach the origins of life
raging as it did throughout much of the past century. "This pops up all over the
place," said Ronald L. Numbers, a professor of the history of medicine at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of two books on the debate. "One
of the reasons that Kansas is attracting so much attention is because the activity is
now back up at the state level." ... It continues, Mr. Numbers and other experts
say, because public-opinion polls consistently show that almost half of Americans
believe the world was created by a God less than 10,000 years ago. Another 40
percent believe in a God that created humans millions of years ago. "It doesn't die
because it is a matter that is not settled ... in the hearts and minds of the American
people," said Edward J. Larson, a professor of law and history at the University of
Georgia in Athens and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 book on the
Scopes trial. "It's a profoundly important issue for some people. ... In the
intervening years, the battle moved to the local level, where school boards or
individual teachers fought over what should be taught in classrooms. "That's where
the political values are expressed," said Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at the
University of California, Berkley, and the author of Darwin on Trial, a book
critical of evolutionary theory. ... Such polls suggest that the issue of what and
how to teach about life's origins will not die. While historians once believed that
the debate had peaked with the Scopes trial three-quarters of a century ago, recent
scholarship suggests the trial simply gave the issue a bigger national stage. ...
"There is a conflict of two fundamentally different kinds of thinking," said Mr.
Johnson of the University of California. "What [evolution's proponents] believe in
is naturalism, that nature did its own creating. Much of the world doesn't believe
that." ... [Despite his creationist upbringing and authoritative book on creationism,
Numbers does not (or cannot) understand what the real problem is. Larson, and
particularly Johnson, do understand.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000309/sc/science_extinction_2.html Yahoo!
... March 9 ... Earth Needs 10 Mln Yrs to Recover From Extinction By Andrew
Quinn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - It takes the Earth about 10 million years to
recover from the mass extinction of plant or animal species -- far longer than
previously thought ... And it takes the environment just as long to recover from the
extinction of even a few species, small events which nevertheless rip holes in the
biosphere that are impossible ever to fully repair. "When you lose a species, that
exact species is never coming back. You can't recreate an animal .... extinction is
final that way," paleontologist Anne Weil ... at Duke University, said. "What we
were looking for is the point at which entire ecosystems recover. The baseline is an
average of 10 million years." The study ... comes amid predictions that as much as
half of all the Earth's species could vanish over the next 50 to 100 years. ...
humanity itself would be extinct before anything resembling any of the vanishing
species is ever seen again on Earth. "If we deplete Earth's biological diversity, we
will leave a biologically impoverished planet, not only for our children and our
children's children, but for all the children of our species that there will ever be," he
said. The two scientists arrived at their findings by comparing the extinction rate of
fossil marine organisms with their rate of evolution, or "origination," over 530
million years. Looking at some five major extinction events, like the one that killed
the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, as well as smaller die-offs, they concluded that
the "lag" between extinction and revival of biodiversity was much longer than had
previously been believed, and was remarkably consistent. ... the speed with which
fragile environments are being overrun meant the choice would have to be made
soon. Many species, in fact, are disappearing from the Earth before human
scientists can even catalog them, he said. "It has been likened to burning down the
library when you don't know how many books are there, let alone what's written in
them," ... [More problems for slow, gradual Neo-Darwinist evolution. Not only to
species spend 90% of their time in stasis, but now they take much longer to
recover from major extinction events.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000309/sc/protein_stemcells_1.html Yahoo!
... March 9 ... Key Found to Helping Blood 'Master Cells' Grow By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A protein that
helps cells grow and divide may help scientists harness stem cells -- master cells
that may hold the potential to develop into many different kinds of cells --
scientists said on Thursday. They said their protein may open many new
opportunities for using the cells, which are the focus of intense scientific interest.
... hematopoietic stem cells, which are found in the bone marrow and blood. They
are the root source of all red blood cells and immune cells and are currently used
to treat leukemia patients and other cancer patients whose bone marrow is
destroyed by harsh therapies. Scientists do not yet know just what a stem cell
looks like or how it works. They just know the cells exist and that when they grow
a culture of blood or bone marrow, some of the cells in it act as nursery cells to
produce many others. The hope is that they can be used as tissue transplants, and
perhaps even someday as a source to grow entire new organs. ... "If we could
induce stem cells to proliferate without differentiating into specific types of blood
cells, we could get the numbers of stem cells we need from a single tube of blood
instead of having to extract a large amount of bone marrow." Many scientists have
tried to coax stem cells to grow using natural chemical signals known as cytokines.
But cytokines cause cells not only to grow, but seem to help them to differentiate
into various kinds of cells -- something that scientists might not necessarily want
them to do. Scadden's team tried a different approach, using a protein called p21,
known to control the replicative cycle of cells. ... scientists might be able to get
around a huge area of current debate -- whether human embryos should be used as
a source of stem cells. Some research suggests that stem cells taken from human
embryos might be more potent than adult stem cells, and might be more easily
coaxed into becoming various forms of tissue -- for instance pancreatic tissue to
treat diabetes patients. But right-to-life groups and several dozen members of
Congress oppose the use of human embryos for any such experiments. They point
to experiments that show hematopoietic stem cells from mice can give rise to nerve
and muscle cells. ... "If we had the ability to make a larger number of stem cells
and put them into adults, that suddenly becomes a resource that is hugely
valuable," Scadden said. ... "We're trying to get stem cells on demand," he said.
[More on this point that scientists don't yet know how to recognise stem cells.
Let's hope that ways become available of growing stem cells without needing to
harvest them from human embryos.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000306/sc/japan_cloning_2.html ... Yahoo! ...
March 6 ... Japan Readying Bill to Ban Human Cloning TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan
is readying a rare bill that will ban human cloning, even at a research level, and
could punish offenders with jail sentences. "We feel that human cloning could
damage human dignity and promote social turmoil by muddling family ties," ... the
bill will outlaw the act of putting a cloned human embryo -- in which a body cell is
transplanted into an unfertilized egg from which the nucleus has been removed -
back into the womb of humans or animals. It will also ban the transplant of hybrid
embryos, or human egg cells fertilized with animal sperm, as well as chimera
embryos made by combining human and animal embryo cells. ... European Union
rules ban procedures to clone human beings and the commercial use of human
embryos, and Britain bans the cloning of human embryos for reproduction and
research. ... Also:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/cloning000307.html [This is
noteworthy in that it is an objection to cloning not based on specifically Judeo-
Christian ethics. "Muddling family ties" seems a very good reason not to clone
human beings.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000306/sc/genome_coalition_1.html ...
Yahoo! ... March 6 ... Public-Private Gene Coalition Falls Apart -Sources By
Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An
effort to combine public and private approaches to mapping the human genome --
the collection of all the genes in the body -- may have fallen apart before it ever got
started, researchers said on Monday. ... the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
among others, rejected demands made by Celera Genomics for any collaboration.
... one NIH staffer ... [said] " ... there's got to be more movement toward principles
of providing the scientific community with free, unimpeded, data," ... "If a
collaboration were initiated, however, Celera indicated they would expect
exclusive commercial rights of distribution of the merged product," ... The Human
Genome Project first started its efforts in 1995 and Craig Venter, now head of
Celera, was one of its chief initiators. The idea was to map every gene in the
human body and make this information freely public. But a few years later Venter
jumped to the private sector, helping to found Celera and saying he had a quicker
way to map the genes, called shotgun sequencing. He said in January his company
had sequenced 90 percent of the human genes and planned to finish the job later
this year -- using some of the Human Genome Project's published information.
Venter said his company would patent some of these genes, but would make most
of the information available publicly. He said he intended to make money by
leasing Celera's database... "I'm sort of disgusted that they would send us this
threatening 'confidential' letter with a time deadline on it, then fax it to the press,"
Venter was quoted ... "I don't even know what to make of it. It's such a low-life
thing to do." ... Also:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20000306_3748.html [Strong words by
Venter. It will be interesting to see what happens when the human genome is
published what litigation ensues. Personally I believe that genes should not be able
to be patented but applications based on them can be.]
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/03/02/galileoplunge.ap/index.html CNN
... Scientists worry Galileo probe might contaminate Europa ... March 2, 2000 ...
TUCSON, Arizona (AP) -- A NASA spacecraft exploring Jupiter and its moons
may be deliberately crashed to avoid any chance that it could strike and
contaminate the moon Europa, where scientists believe simple life forms may exist.
Galileo, launched in 1989, has traveled 500 million miles to study the giant planet.
A member of the Galileo imaging team says NASA are considering crashing the
spacecraft into Jupiter or one of its icy moons in 2002 because it might still contain
microbes from Earth. ... "It was never put into quarantine or cleaned up before it
left the Earth, though I can't imagine any bugs would be alive on it after all the
radiation it's been exposed to," .... Scientists suspect that Europa has an ocean
beneath its ice shell that might contain simple life forms. ... [More on the life-on-
Europa hope. There is an irony in this that NASA is claiming very hardy bacteria
may have survived in Europa's hell-hole environment, yet they think they can
ensure that no bacteria will stow away on any spacecraft that eventually lands
there. If any bacteria was found on Europa it would have to be radically different
from Earthly bacteria, otherwise the simplest hypothesis would be they were
stowaways. Therefore there is no point worrying about stowaways, for that reason
at least.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_661000/661572.stm BBC ... 1
March, 2000, 01:28 GMT Pump implant may treat haemophilia Haemophiliacs
currently receive plasma transfusions Scientists have created a thimble-sized
implant which may solve the problems of current haemophilia treatment. The
device sits inside the body and activates inert blood-clotting factors which are
already present in the patient's blood. ... The new implant avoids all these problems
by using a factor which is already present in the patient's blood. Factor VII is
inactive and unable to help clot blood but when it seeps through the tiny pores of
the implant it encounters an enzyme which activates it - factor XIIa. ... The
centimetre-sized implant sits in the peritoneal cavity, next to the stomach, and
pumps by diffusion, needing no power. ... However, he said it had not yet been
shown whether the implant raised the levels of factor VIIa to high enough levels to
improve blood clotting significantly: ... It also remained to be seen how long the
factor XIIa in the implant would last before it needed replenishing. ... [This sounds
promising. It highlights the amazing zero net energy enzyme diffusion `pumps'
already in the eukaryotic cell, which I am just learning about. All put together by
the `blind watchmaker'! :-)]
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/03/01/sunspots/index.html CNN ... Sun
aims powerful flares at Earth ... By Richard Stenger CNN Interactive Staff Writer
March 1, 2000 ... (CNN) -- The sun should place the Earth squarely in its sights
this week as it aims its solar ray gun. Astronomers tell terrestrial dwellers not to
sweat it too much, despite the fact that solar activity is approaching an 11-year
peak. Two large sunspots moving across the surface of the sun are expected to
directly face the Earth soon for up to several days, according to solar scientists.
Such sunspots often herald powerful coronal mass ejections and solar flares, space
storms that can disrupt weather and electrical systems on Earth. Solar flares are
the largest explosions in the solar system. A typical one can release the energy
equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at once. ...
Coronal mass ejections are much more likely to produce effects, Gurman said.
Like flares, they send streams of highly charged particles, but they also can emit a
billion tons of plasma, or ionized gas. Fortunately the Earth's magnetosphere
usually bears the brunt of plasma particles. "If we were exposed to them, we
literally would be fried," Gurman said. ... [Yet another fine-tuned design feature of
our Earth, without which life as we know it would not be possible.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000301/sc/health_gene_1.html Yahoo! ...
March 1 ... Scientists Look to Exploit Gene Police By Bill Rosato LONDON
(Reuters) - Scientists may be able to use what they describe as a cell's security
force to switch genes off at will ... Genetic engineers are using this new tool to
"reveal gene function or generate genetically modified crops that lack natural
toxins and allergens," ... Research into "gene silencing" began 10 years ago when
an effort to deepen the color of petunia petals by inserting extra "color" genes
failed and indeed caused petals to become lighter. Not only did the inserted gene
fail to work but the plant's own copies of the "color" gene also failed ... Foreign
genes and some viruses trigger gene silencing by producing distinctive double
stranded transcripts of genes (RNA) which activate the switching off process ...
Once triggered, the gene silencing spreads to other cells enabling geneticists to
switch off genes in fungi, plants, protozoa and nematodes. No one has
demonstrated gene silencing in humans or other vertebrates. ... When human cells
sense double stranded RNA they produce an enzyme -- a chemical message --
called PKR which prevents the cell from producing proteins and slows down viral
replication. In certain circumstances the cell commits suicide and the virus is
deprived of its host or the cell produces another chemical called interferon which
boosts PKR production. ... [More layers of error-checking in the genome.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000301/sc/hemophilia_gene_1.html Yahoo! ...
March 1 ... Hemophilia Gene Therapy Seen Better Than Expected By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gene therapy
experiment meant to show only that the treatment was safe has had surprising
results in two patients with hemophilia, allowing them to greatly reduce their
standard treatment regimens.... It is the most successful gene therapy experiment
yet in a field battered by failures and scandal. [they]... were working on a gene
therapy treatment for hemophilia B, a bleeding disorder that affects about 1 in
50,000 males. These patients have a defective gene for a protein known as Factor
IX, important for helping the blood clot. ... They used a so-called adeno-associated
virus (AAV) to carry the gene into their patients' bodies. Such viruses do not cause
disease in humans but are very good at getting into cells, and are considered safer
than other viruses used in gene therapy... "One patient had a 50 percent reduction
in the need to administer Factor IX and the other had an 80 percent reduction," ...
Kay said he hoped his study would help people realize that gene therapy is not
always dangerous. .... The researchers in Gelsinger's case used an adenovirus, a
relative of the common cold virus, and said his body had a huge and unexpected
immune response that killed him. ... [This is good news, but three patients hardly
justifies a claim that this gene therapy is not dangerous. Many patients had
received the same gene therapy as Gelsinger did before he died of it.]
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/exped_seti000229_part3.html
ABCNEWS ... A Signal! Wait ... Never Mind But When E.T. Calls, You'll Know
... By Seth Shostak Special to ABCNEWS.com ARECIBO, Puerto Rico, Feb. 29 -
Halfway through the swing shift last week ... A narrowband signal - the type we
expect from distant transmitters - had successfully run the verification gauntlet
described in the previous dispatch, including supposed confirmation at the Jodrell
Bank telescope in England. The Project Phoenix software, ever alert, dutifully
woke our research staff in California with a middle-of-the-night phone call. ... the
putative ping from outer space was merely interference from a Puerto Rican radar
station.... False alarms happen, but (as far as we know) close calls don't. Either a
signal is truly extraterrestrial or it isn't. SETI is like pregnancy - close calls don't
register. We've checked out 500 star systems so far without hearing E.T.'s radio
whine. But the next star might change all that.... just because a signal passes our
computer's toughest test doesn't mean it's been certified as an alien transmission.
After all, what looks like a broadcast might be only a software bug, or possibly
even a prank. Before we'd believe in a signal - and start booking our flight to
Stockholm for the Nobel Prize dinner - we'd insist on verification by another
telescope, sporting completely independent hardware and computer code. That
independent verification takes time. After all, somebody will need to give up their
use of a telescope (never a nice thing to ask of an astronomer), and engineers with
hot soldering irons and cold crescent wrenches will have to wrestle an appropriate
receiver into place. Gathering convincing proof that E.T. has been found might
take a few days. This process would involve approximately one hundred people at
several observatories ... [More on SETI's version of the ID's `explanatory filter'.
Once law, chance and false positives are eliminated, what is left is design.]
HIV/AIDS:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000302/sc/health_aids_1.html Yahoo! ...
March 2 ... Protein Discovery Gives New Insight Into HIV AMSTERDAM
(Reuters) - The Dutch University of Nijmegen has discovered a human protein that
gives new insights into HIV-1 infection, the virus that causes AIDS. While the
discovery of the protein does not yet result in new treatments of the disease, it
offers new insights into the dissemination of the HIV-1 virus through the immune
system. "The Nijmegen researchers demonstrate that without the help of this
protein, the T cells of the immune system can hardly be infected by HIV-1," ... The
protein, which the researchers call DC-SIGN, strongly binds HIV-1 cells and then
acts "like a Trojan horse" in transporting HIV into the heart of the immune system,
it said. ... [Hopefully this might lead to something. But with all the other toxic
drugs in the cocktail being pumped into HIV+ and AIDS patients, how would they
ever know if it worked, or would have worked?]
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"The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some
people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that is a
tautology. A tautology like "All tables are tables" is not, of course, testable;
nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear
that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate
the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those
organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. And C. H.
Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in other
places) that "Natural selection...turns out...to be a tautology". However, he
attributes at the same place to the theory an "enormous power...of
explanation". Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero,
something must be wrong here." (Popper K., "Natural Selection and the
Emergence of Mind," Dialectica, Vol. 32, Nos. 3-4, 1978, pp.339-355,
p.344. Ellipses in original.)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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