Reflectorites
Here are excerpts from web articles for the period 7- 16 July
2000, with my comments in square brackets.
Steve
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000166941319210&rtmo=aq49hqXJ&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/00/7/14/wkan14.html
Electronic Telegraph ... 14 July 2000. Kansas poll evolves into a debate on
Darwin .... Politics in America sometimes avoids fundamental issues, but
not in Kansas. As election season looms, very basic questions are being
batted back and forth: who are we, where did we come from and what role,
if any, was played by God? ... The state splits five to three in support of
scientific orthodoxy but the size of that minority of Christian social
conservatives makes this ... far more than a theoretical discourse: they are
part of election campaigns being fought fervently across the state.
Controversy sprang up last year when the Kansas State Board of
Education, an elected body that controls every aspect of schooling,
ordained new "standards" for science teaching that critics say wrote
Darwin out of the curriculum. The standards tell teachers what children
must know for the end-of- year exams. With growing emphasis on results,
critics say there is great pressure to teach only subjects in the standards.
The Board appointed a panel of experts to write the standards, but heavily
edited the resulting document, removing all references to Darwin,
evolution, the Big Bang, even tectonic plates. That triumph of Christian
conservatives over the curriculum provoked liberals and centrist members
of the Republican party, which dominates the state. Now, with a
Republican primary due on Aug 1 for one of four Kansas seats in
Congress, Darwin, Adam and Eve are key political players. The campaign
has split the party, pitting supporters of evolution against religious
conservatives. Greg Musil, campaigning for the liberal wing, says the board
embarrassed the state and could harm its economy. He asks: "Who wants
to invest somewhere where the workforce is ignorant of science everyone
else takes for granted?" ... In the middle, hoping to sweep up moderates
alienated by both sides, is Gary Morsch, a GP who believes in the theory of
"intelligent design", which accepts an evolutionary process but says God
originated and guided it. He says: "Sometimes an idea becomes so big and
so widespread that it should be taught in schools alongside the orthodoxy."
... [An unusually fair summary of the KBoE's actions - by a reporter *from
Kansas*. The liberal Musil's remarks about "science everyone else takes for
granted" unwittingly highlights the problem. It is gratifying to see that ID is
sinking in to the public consciousness as the moderate position. It is even
more gratifying seeing it in a *British* newspaper! An interesting thought
that ID should be taught alongside the scientific "orthodoxy" simply
because it is "so big and so widespread."]
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/scopes000713.html
ABCNEWS ... Scopes Trial Revisited Trial Still Relevant, But Now
Creationists Claim Censorship ... The Associated Press LAWRENCE,
Kan., July 13 - ... Seventy-five years after the Scopes "monkey trial" over
the teaching of evolution, parts of the landmark court case were reenacted
in Kansas, the latest ground zero in the battle over what to teach kids about
the origin of life. As about 1,500 people watched, actors read from
transcripts of the 1925 trial in Tennessee that pitted William Jennings
Bryan against defense attorney Clarence Darrow. The outcome was never
in doubt. Biology teacher John Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for
teaching evolution. His conviction was later overturned by the Tennessee
Supreme Court on procedural grounds. Trial Issues Still Relevant ... The
People for the American Way Foundation sponsored the event, as well as a
panel discussion and debate on evolution and creationism following the
performance. Foundation president Ralph Neas said ... "How Kansas
resolves this dispute will ripple out in all directions to affect the education
of millions of children who have never even set foot in this state," Neas
said. ... Evolution, first propounded by Charles Darwin, advocates that the
Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions of
years. Creationism, or creation science, teaches that the Earth and most life
forms came into existence suddenly about 6,000 years ago. Critics have
attacked it as a disguise for a literal translation of the Bible's Book of
Genesis. A Gallup Poll conducted last year found that 68 percent of
American adults favored teaching both creationism and evolution in the
public schools. By a margin of 55 percent to 40 percent, they opposed
replacing evolution with creationism. ... The debate has heated up recently
in a number of states ... from efforts to delete evolution from science
standards and tests to including a disclaimer in textbooks downplaying the
importance of the theory.... Creationists Complain of Censorship The
education board's decision to approve the standards has focused national
attention on Kansas and made evolution a political issue.... Linda
Holloway...the board's chairwoman ... is seeking re-election, said that while
the evolution debate continues 75 years after the Scopes trial, creationists
are the ones under attack now. "We've come 180 degrees; now we've got
censorship the other way," Holloway said ... Before the re-creation, Kansas
native Asner said scientists have accumulated evidence in "a million
different ways" to support evolution since the Scopes trial. "Kansas has put
itself in a more bumbling situation with this board than Tennessee was 75
years ago," he said. ... [I like the "a million different ways" - shades of the
famous AAAS claim that "the 100 million fossils identified and dated in the
world's museums `constitute 100 million facts that prove evolution beyond
any doubt whatever.'" (Fix W.R., "The Bone Peddlers," 1984, pp.xiv).
Neas puts his finger on why Kansas is so important. It is instructive how
the two concepts are defined so that evolution can hardly be false and
creation can hardly be true: "Evolution ... Earth is billions of years old and
that life forms developed over millions of years" is contrasted with
"Creationism..." (note the "-ism!) "...the Earth and most life forms came
into existence suddenly about 6,000 years ago." It is interesting how the
wheel has turned full circle since 1925 and now it is the evolutionists who
are demanding State-supported censorship of opposing ideas!]
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0711-116.html
Darwinism, Design and the Consequences for American Education U.S.
Newswire. 11 Jul ... Darwinism, Design and the Consequences for
American Education ... Discovery Institute Fellows will be the main
speakers at a national symposium in Kansas City, Saturday, July 15, called
"Darwin, Design & Democracy: Teaching the evidence in science
education." The Kansas State Board of Education ignited a firestorm last
year when they adopted a new set of science standards that critics claimed
de-emphasized the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools.
Detractors screamed that Biblical creationism was pushing out scientific
evolution and the debate became a maelstrom of misrepresentation and
inaccuracies. Few pundits understood the politics of the debate or the
scientific evidence that fueled it. Now the Intelligent Design Network, Inc.
is gathering together a group of scientists and other scholars to explore the
debate between Darwinism and Design, and look at the consequences for
American education. The symposium will feature four fellows of Discovery
Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture: Michael J. Behe,
...Walter Bradley, ... David K. DeWolf, ... and Jonathan Wells, ... author of
the forthcoming book "Icons of Evolution" (Regnery Press, 2000). Panels
and presentations will include discussion of viewpoint neutrality in the
classroom, a critique of High school science textbooks, and answers to
criticism of intelligent design ... [The subtitle "Teaching the evidence in
science education" aptly summarised ID's position. That is, teach *all* the
evidence, including the hidden philosophical *assumptions* underlying
naturalistic evolution, and the *problems* for the theory!]
http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/82/xcursion/essay ... HMS Beagle. The
BioMedNet Magazine. Issue 82. July 7 - 20, 2000 ... Science in Translation
from Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures
and Time (pp. 232-235) by Scott L. Montgomery ... The University of
Chicago Press ...June 23, 2000 ... Here Montgomery describes the
introduction in the late nineteenth century of Darwin's theories to Japan ...
Western knowledge was embraced by the Japanese at this time in the
context of a nationalism ...The term for "evolution," shinka, Ishikawa either
coined himself or adopted from ...works...on Darwinian ideas, most notably
Izawa Shuji's 1879 translation of Thomas Huxley's Lectures on the Origin
of Species (1862). ... It was, however, an excellent choice: comprising the
characters for "advancement" and "change," ... It was a term that could be
said to have embodied two sensibilities at once: Darwin's own Victorian
view of evolution as a process of continual improvement and, more
immediately, the ideology of the Japanese Enlightenment, with its call to a
civilizing nationalism. The political side to Darwinian language, therefore,
was aptly retained, to serve the purposes of Japanese selfimagery. ...
Japanese authors, meanwhile, took up Spencerian ideas and disseminated
them broadly in copious writings, at times with government support.
During the 1880s and 1890s, as the intellectual atmosphere of Japan grew
increasingly conservative and nationalistic, many thinkers, officials, and
students found themselves drawn to the concept of a struggle between
nations, with "higher" species eventually winning out over "lower" ones
(Nagazumi 1983). Indeed, the theory had no small attraction for those who
argued against further Westernization .... "Survival of the fittest" became
"victory of the superior and defeat of the inferior ... the language of
evolution took on a more striking cast ... by the late 1880s and early 1890s,
the pitch of nationalism had shifted to more reactionary concerns about
national moral standards, loyalty among the people, and at the same time,
about national destiny in terms of empire (teikoku). Western nations were
being viewed more in oppositional terms, again as colonial aggressors, and
as destructive models for Japanese character and virtue. ... Not satisfied
with a literal rendering of Darwin's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest,"
so central to Spencer's own philosophy, Kato felt compelled to evoke more
of what he perceived to be its deeper significance ... "victory of the
superior and defeat of the inferior." This, he asserted, was "the law of
heaven," governing the world of plants and animals as well as that of
human beings and the cultures they build...For a brief time, Kato's "victory
of the superior. . ." was actually adopted into biological discourse. Though
largely abandoned before the second decade of the twentieth century ...
Kato's phrase was nonetheless revived during the era of rising militarism in
the 1920s and 1930s, when eugenics came to Japan. ... [So Darwinism was
responsible for providing the ideological justification not only for Nazism,
Marxism, Stalinism, `robber-baron' capitalism, but even for Japanese
militarism!]
http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/07/13/fossil.air.enn/ ENN ... Earth's
ancient atmosphere trapped in rocks ... July 13, 2000 ... Scientists on a
quest to characterize the long-term chemical evolution of Earth's
atmosphere need to understand what the air was like millions of years ago.
To do this, they've come to realize they can leave no stone unturned.
Uncovering the signature of so-called "fossil air" in terrestrial rocks and
sediment is reported for the first time ... The signature is in the form of an
irregular isotope of oxygen that gets transferred from ozone and other
atmospheric oxidants to sulfate during the oxidation of reduced sulfur
gases, according to Huiming Bao ... These oxidized gases become
incorporated into sulfate minerals in solid deposits on Earth's surface.
Scientists have searched for this signature for decades. They finally found it
in gypsum deposits from the Namibian desert in Africa and in volcanic ash
deposits in Nebraska and South Dakota. Detection of the isotope anomaly
gives scientists an important new tool to answer questions about the
composition of Earth's early atmosphere, the atmospheric processes of
ancient volcanic eruptions, past ocean circulation patterns and early
biological productivity. "No one has found a way you can measure the
ancient atmosphere in solid examples," said Mark Thiemens ... "Ice cores
don't go back far (about 250,000 years). Now one can go back hundreds of
millions of years or billions of years." .... See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_830000/830514.stm [It
will be interesting if they can tell whether the early Earth's atmosphere ~4.0
bya contained significant amounts of oxygen. Even small amounts of
oxygen ruin origin of life simulations.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_836000/836148.stm BBC
... 16 July, 2000 ... Biting beetle gives away secrets ... Scientists have
described a species of beetle that lived at least 66 million years ago, even
though they have little idea of what it looked like because they have no
fossil of the creature's body. The only record they have of the minibeast are
the marks it left as it chomped its way through its favourite food, ancient
ginger leaves. ... Each had the characteristic chew marks that on some
modern ginger plants and heliconias are left only by what are referred to as
rolled-leaf hispine beetles. Paleobotanist Dr Wilf ... "People ask how we
can claim a beetle did the damage when we don't have its fossil. But these
traces in the leaves are as diagnostic of a beetle as tyres marks on a
highway are of a skidding car. There's just no doubt about it." ... Dr Wilf's
group say the oldest bite marks they have come across date back 66 million
years, to the Mesozoic. This is about 20 million years older than any body
fossils so far found ... The researchers believe the fossilised bite marks may
be vital in shedding light on the evolutionary relationship between beetles
and flowering plants. ... One theory has it that as flowering plants evolved
many new species in the late Cretaceous so many new beetles evolved to
fill in the ecological niches that suddenly became available. "The suggestion
is that the reason we have hundreds of thousands of beetles today has
everything to do with the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of
species of flowering plants, " Dr Wilf said. With so few body fossils to
study, the researchers say that the best way to test this theory is to look at
the damage the insects left on the plants instead. "The damage can provide
valuable data that otherwise would be unavailable if one depended only on
the body-fossil record of insects," said co-author Dr Conrad Labandeira ...
[The point is that beetles' distinctive mouthparts were already designed in
advance to fit beautifully with the flowering plants' reproductive systems
when they appeared: "The great radiation of modern insects began 245
million years ago and was not accelerated by the expansion of angiosperms
during the Cretaceous period. The basic trophic machinery of insects was
in place nearly 100 million years before angiosperms appeared in the fossil
record" (Labandeira, C.C., & J.J. Sepkoski, "Insect Diversity in the Fossil
Record," Science, Vol. 261, 16 July 1993, p.310)]
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/heart000713.html
ABCNEWS ... The two, separate primordial heart buds of a zebra fish
embryo. Scientists have found the substance that causes the two halves to
join. (University of California San Francisco) ... July 13 - There is a
moment in the life of every vertebrate, be it fish, human or hamster, when
the heart literally comes together. This is when two separate, primordial
heart buds join inside the embryo and begin to beat. Now scientists have
located the molecule that jump-starts this critical merging. "... called S1P ...
but the name of the gene that triggers S1P to start working is ..."miles
apart." Zwartkruis identified the "miles apart" gene in ... the zebra fish. ...
The eggs are transparent, as are the embryos inside. ... scientists have
observed as two heart buds inside the zebra fish embryo migrate toward
each other and merge about 22 hours into the embryo's life. The heart
begins beating soon thereafter. To zero in on the gene and the molecule
that cause the two sides of the heart to join, Didier and Zwartkruis
analyzed the eggs of zebra fish whose mutations prevented their primordial
heart halves from binding. When it isn't blocked, the S1P molecules create
a field that attracts the heart buds and draws them together. ... S1P... plays
a significant role in wound healing. The presence of the molecule causes
cells to cluster around the edges of a wound and then heal up. ... "There
are no good models of wound healing," .... "But by studying the molecule
in the Zebra fish, we might find ways to speed up the healing process." ...
understanding how the heart forms is also interesting in itself ...the two
human primordial heart buds join when the embryo is about three week's
old. By understanding what substances cause this critical fusion to happen,
Didier says scientists are one step closer to understanding how life
develops at its earliest moments. [This sounds like another Irreducible
Complexity problem. To prepare two halves of a system and then bring
them together at a final stage would normally be considered a mark of
advanced intelligent design. But to make it so that it would also serve in
wound healing is the mark of a virtuoso! I would be interested to see an
explanation of how an undirected `blind watchmaker' mechanism even
*could* discover such an *ingenious* solution (see tagline), bearing in
mind that having some form of heart and wound healing is *fundamental*
to animal life: "The circulatory system is the first functional unit in the
developing embryo, and the heart is the first functional organ" (Gilbert
S.F., "Developmental Biology," 1994, p.342)]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_830000/830193.stm BBC
... "It may be impossible for humans to live in weightless conditions" ... 12
July, 2000 ... Space living 'would damage health' Lack of gravity in space
causes problems for the body's cells Scientists have uncovered a compelling
reason why the dream of colonising space may be a non-starter. It seems
that the skeletons within living cells may not form properly in zero gravity.
This means that it may be impossible to live in space over the long-term
without creating a form of artificial gravity. Most cells have skeletons made
up of microtubules made from fibres of the protein tubulin. ... When the
mixture was warmed to body temperature for six minutes, microtubules
began to form in distinct bands at right angles to gravity. Next, the team
sent up tubulin on a European Space Agency ... rocket to expose it to the
effect of weightlessness. They found that when microtubules formed, they
pointed in all directions. Dr Tabony said: "This shows gravity triggers the
pattern." ... Dr Lewis's team tested the impact of weightlessness on human
white blood cells that were flown on board the space shuttle. After a day in
orbit, the microtubules grew in random directions. The findings might
explain some of the health problems people living in space have, such as
depressed immune systems. ... Anderton, an expert in cell structures ... said
microtubules played a vital role in the successful division of cells. ... This
could blunt the function of the immune system, which relies on rapid
production of white blood cells to fight off invaders when the body is
infected. It could also cause problems with the renewal of epithelial tissues
which line organs in the body. For instance, it could cause problems with
the gut. ... "If it is really true that weightlessness interferes with
microtubule function one could expect to see the same kind of adverse
effects that are associated with quite a lot of anti-cancer drugs." ... [More
problems with extended space travel and colonisation. Also, another
finetuning parameter for life-maybe cells can only exist on a planet within a
narrow Earth-like gravitational range?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000713/sc/aids_drugs_dc_3.html
Yahoo! ... July 13 ... Drug Firms Face Fight on Generic AIDS Drugs By ...
DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) - Officials from developing countries
and the U.N. have been meeting behind closed doors to devise ways to get
cheaper generic drugs to AIDS patients despite international patents on
many of the products. .... The talks, facilitated by the U.N.'s own AIDS
agency, UNAIDS, could make critically needed drug treatments affordable
for the nearly 35 million people living with HIV or AIDS, most of whom
are in the developing world ... Drug representatives reacted angrily to the
efforts in Durban, denouncing the rise of "pirated drugs" as medically
dangerous and a deterrent for the industry to make investments to find a
cure for AIDS, which is crippling large parts of the developing world. ...
Western drug firms could see potentially vast markets for their AIDS drugs
in developing countries curtailed by an initiative to supply cheaper generic
versions of their products to the world's poorest AIDS victims, ... Talks
with generic producers stem from the growing frustration of some African
and Asian governments over what they see as heavy-handed tactics by
leading drug firms who are charged with being slow to reduce prices on
branded drugs. ... A joint offer in May by the world's top five drug firms
and the United Nations to cut prices of some drugs by 85 percent was ...
not satisfactory ... International medical aid group Medecins Sans
Frontieres (MSF) has joined the growing chorus of pressure groups urging
the use of generic drugs to get them into the hands of the poor. ... See also:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000713/sc/aids_apotex_dc_1.html
Yahoo! ... July 13 ... Corporation Joins Call for Generic AIDS Drugs ...
MONTREAL (Reuters) - Drug maker Apotex Inc. joined the international
call for generic AIDS drugs ... saying it would be prepared to make them at
cost if the Canadian government lifted the 20-year patents on brand-name
medications. ... manufacturers of generic drugs would have to circumvent
patents that protect the drug firms that make and market medications to
which they own property rights. ... At the AIDS conference ... Canada
would support the suspension of international drug patent agreements to
make generic drugs more accessible to developing countries, especially in
cases of emergencies. "...AIDS is war and that we must use every weapon
we have to fight it," ... "We encourage the federal government to
immediately use its powers under the Patent Act to grant the licenses that
are required to save people who are dying needlessly." ... [If the drug
companies really believed that hundreds of millions of people in poor
nations will die of AIDS unless they receive their drugs, then they are
morally bound to provide those drugs at a price that the poor nations can
afford. To put their huge profits ahead of hundreds of millions of lives
would be morally monstrous. Of course if they know their drugs don't
work, there is a different moral problem!]
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"Evolution by natural selection is, as stressed above, in essence merely a
special case of problem solving by trial and error. This implies that every
evolutionary route followed during the course of evolution to every
adaptive end must have been initially discovered and traced out as the
result of a process which is in the end nothing more nor less than a gigantic
random search. While it is easy to accept that a random search might hit on
mutational routes leading to relatively trivial sorts of adaptive ends, such as
the best coloration for a stoat or ptarmigan or the most efficient beak forms
for each of the different species of Galapagos finch. But as to whether the
same blind undirected search mechanism could have discovered the
mutational routes to very complex and ingenious adaptations such as the
vertebrate camera eye, the feather, the organ of corti or the mammalian
kidney is altogether another question. To common sense it seems incredible
to attribute such ends to random search mechanisms, known by experience
to be incapable, at least in finite time, of achieving even the simplest of
ends." (Denton M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books:
London, 1985, p.61)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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