As the Dover trial gets under way, the Hype campaign starts, and the Darwin blogosphere starts cheering. I hold no brief for the ID contingent who will probably lose their incompetent case. But the Darwinists don't deserve to win. Enough's enough. If half-educated religionists from the Bible Belt are our only protection against Darwin propaganda, heaven help us.

Thus an otherwise fascinating article in the Washington Post appears suspiciously on Day One of the Dover trial promoting new proofs of Darwin's theory. If it were any other day than the first day of the new Scopes Trial I would adjourn for some fascinating study.

Yeah, yeah. The central tenet of evolutionary theory? What's that? More illuminating evidence for descent, no final conclusion about natural selection. In fact, the language always gets conveniently scrambled.

The vagueness of language, without any references that I could find, adjourning after a few paragraphs to the usual boilerplate about the triumphs of Darwin and claims for evolution and the evils of ID, leaves the article stranded. These articles use the 'stun gun' approach for the opening shot. The reader, even if knowledgeable, is on the defensive paragraph one, new research, proclamations of the experts, tough math noone understands, put the reader in 'take your word for it' mode, too tricky to challenge, fold your cards one more time. Then cut to the inability of ID to produce testable predictions. In reality, this is our failed champion population genetics, beefed up with some interesting genomic claims, a subject incapable of fully explaining evolution.

It is illogical! And still really hard to accept, because it is probably wrong. Why should evolution proceed from a source of noise? We should on the alert that reductionists are forcing evolution into their scientific box, and eliminating something essential. But if they could prove this, that would be the end of it. But look closely, smoke and mirrors at the crucial points.

I would be the first to acknowledge the complexity of the Cambrian, and resist misusing it, but Darwinists do essentially this by ignoring the implications of their own data. This evidence clearly conceals the problem Darwinists are having, for it shows a turning point in evolution, which shouldn't be there, the achievement of a series of basic structures in a relatively short interval from which a great diversity in unity appeared. We are not required by the evidence to take this as confirmation of Darwin's theory. The fossil record is skewed with a hump, a level of progression achieved. To simply annex this to Darwinian theory is missing the obvious. The evidence suggests we are in the presence of an elusive key we know nothing about yet. To put it plainly, the record suggests much more reasonably a complex evolutionary directionality, one that realizes a possible teleology ( a dangerous term that should be buffered by empirical statements about directionality) by moving in a step function progression (not the same as progress, necessarily) of some sort. In any case we are free to take the Cambrian interval as evidence of non-random patterning in the record (such statements avoiding like the plague that probably false claims for design here, that have driven Darwinists into their foxhole). At the end of this non-random pattern interval, we see toolkits come into existence! Come on. Stop destroying all common sense. I know design theorists are trying to steal the Darwinists' lunch here. But there's a source of counterevidence here, and it keeps getting covered up.

The article thus proceeds to the question of evo-devo, which probably resolves, or could resolve, many of the confusions, but which so far has been pressed into service in Darwin mode, when it should be grounds for liberating theory from Darwin. The strong suggestion of teleological mechanisms in DNA processes, these reduced to mutations in regulatory genes to generalize out of existence the question of macroevolution, is surely grounds for dissent. Darwinists are changing their story here. And a complex factor of regulation doesn't even strike them as discordant with their original claims. The whole thing is thrown into the Darwin stew. To suddenly find toolkit genes, the antithesis of pure natural selection, described in the very language of design, and marry this to natural selection, using the 'testable predictions' in isolated cases, and be unable to account for such genes arising, ought to at least give someone pause to reflect. But the momentum of the Hype machine is unstoppable. Everyone has become so confused by the Darwin debate it is impossible to make any sense of it. Contra Darwin, powerful evidence has emerged from the genetic revolution for teleological processes of a natural kind in the realm of DNA structures. That should make us wonder if something equivalent is not present in the non-genetic range of full evolution.

Thus, with respect the whole article's claims, Darwinists are producing more evidence for the claims of microevolution. This is now sitting ambiguously with the new discoveries of developmental biology. The missing element, more than probably a factor of macroevolution (which should be more than speciation, evolutionary directionality), is simply unmentioned in the discussion, because it is not supposed to exist. But the question of the Cambrian, most probably, powerfully suggests it. But the most important case is that of the descent of man, where we now know that the Darwin scenario won't work. First they claimed natural selection explained (away) macroevolution. Now they claim that natural selection/mutation in regulatory genes does this job, without pointing out they have changed their story, and without the correct proof.

You know what? I think a harmful mutation in Lamarck's original two level theory produced a degenerate ideological version of evolution adapted to Darwinian Whigs, attempting to survive as classical liberals. As S. J. Gould pointed out (without quite doing him justice) in Structures of Evolutionary Theory, Lamarck, his nonsense about adaptation in giraffe's necks apart, had the correct form in potential for a true theory of evolution, which requires a two-level approach that avoids the hopelessly confusing one-level monism of Darwin and his descendants. Moral: mutants may well prove viable, but real evolution will have to pick up from the beginning and leapfrog a dead end mess.

Thus population genetics has never been shown to really explain the phenomenon of evolution, which is well established, but whose full mechanism defies simple or complete understanding so far. Note that claims for microevolution do establish the fact of evolution. The critics of Darwin in the creationist/Id camp make life easy for Darwin defenders. All they have to do is show the clear evidence for microevolution, then change the subject. A true theory must explore the context of these genetic events, and show the sole efficacy of natural selection for the total organism, over the whole stretch of time, and show that speciation, not just in one, but in all, cases, follows the adaptational scenario. Microevolution could be simply the bass note in a broader picture where evolutionary directionality or other factors are at work.

Thus reductionists routinely deny aspects of man that don't square with the futile effort to produce one-dimensional continuity. If that's their game, fine, but they should be quarantined from the public and not be allowed to usurp the issue of evolution.

In fact, a theory of microevolution is unable to explain why one or selected lines of simians became hominids, or why one or selected lines of hominids became homo sapiens, while all the other branches remained relatively static. Microevolution was constant through all of this, predictably so, we have the Seven Daughters of Eve data, but behind all this a massive change in evolutionary direction occurred that noone has even documented, let alone explained in a theory.

Thus bashing ID/creationism for lack of testable predictions is par for the course, but fails to consider that most of the claims for Darwinian accounts of the descent of man make testable predictions that can't really be tested. Did language evolve by random mutation and natural selection? At least discipline the argument to acknowledge the evidence is so far insufficient.

Students of the eonic effect know the hogwash lurking in such claims, btw. We know almost certainly now that, as far as the descent of man is concerned, purely genetic evolutionary theory is insufficient.

It is an understandable wish to define the problem as one of science, but even that won't work. What is a science of evolution? As we look at the sequence chimps/man we find the transition from evolution to history emerging, and the adaptational scenario is highly problematical as evolution closes on the present. We know already that a science of history gets into contradictions, that evolution and formally defined history overlap, and that therefore the same doubt about a theory of evolution for man, at least, is going to exist. And the evidence is there, almost.

The data of the eonic model predicts that something like an eonic effect is going to appear in the earlier evolution/history of man, and sure enough it is there in the evidence for the Great Explosion. Such statements, we must be honest where Darwinists are not, are not yet at a critical threshold in early evolution. But the evidence exists in recorded history. The point brings home that Darwinian claims on the descent of man make a host of claims 'testable in the abstract' but never verified in practice, and probably false. The whole scenario of microevolution goes on and on, but is not likely to account for the emergence of man from chimpanzees. If that is not true, at least provide some proof. Or have the humility to stand back and say you don't have a real theory yet.

It is not enough to force evolution in a scientific standard. To say that something isn't science might mean that the claim so made means a science of evolution is not possible for that data. The assumption that there is a full science of evolution is itself under trial. That doesn't justify going off the deep end with metaphysical design claims, but it does remind us that the very gesture of doing science can restrict the domain of discourse to the point where the phenomenon in question is shrouded in reductionist confusions, far short of its full scope.

One might note in closing that the article nicely references Wallace, for once. Let it be noted that Wallace actually beat Darwin to the gun, and was the first to publish a theory of natural selection. The record got rigged by Darwin and his cronies to highlight Darwin's priority. Apart from that, Wallace had the honesty later in life to renounce natural selection in the emergence of man, because he could see that it won't work. His confusions over spiritual explanation harmed his case, but his basic point is clear. Man has a complex potential (which might be embryonically present in chimps, we don't know) that could never have emerged from selectionist scenarios. The point is clear from the simplest attempt to account for the evolution of ethical man. To sweep this into the category of random mutation/selection is a sign of either reductionist obsession or complete stupidity. But to claim that a real theory of evolution exists as yet is the height of brazen distortions.

All this talk about testable predictions and evidence confirming natural selection as a macro agent. It isn't there. It won't work on the descent of man. Students of the eonic effect are aware of evidence of the one thing Darwinists dread most, the full scale context behind the low gear microevolution of genetics. The real evolution of man is secondarily genetic. Real evolution, at least in the human case, shows a complexity and range beyond anything Darwinists could imagine. http://www.history-and-evolution.com/introduction.htm

New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory

Pa. Trial Will Ask Whether 'Alternatives' Can Pass as Science

By Rick Weiss and David Brown

Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 26, 2005; Page A08

When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins.

But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.

If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.

"That's a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.

Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.

Their analysis was just the latest of many in such disparate fields as genetics, biochemistry, geology and paleontology that in recent years have added new credence to the central tenet of evolutionary theory: That a smidgeon of cells 3.5 billion years ago could -- through mechanisms no more extraordinary than random mutation and natural selection -- give rise to the astonishing tapestry of biological diversity that today thrives on Earth.

Evolution's repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists and others are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with "alternative" explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.

Today, in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa., a federal judge will begin to hear a case that asks whether ID or other alternative explanations deserve to be taught in a biology class. But the plaintiffs, who are parents opposed to teaching ID as science, will do more than merely argue that those alternatives are weaker than the theory of evolution.

They will make the case -- plain to most scientists but poorly understood by many others -- that these alternatives are not scientific theories at all.

"What makes evolution a scientific explanation is that it makes testable predictions," Lander said. "You only believe theories when they make non-obvious predictions that are confirmed by scientific evidence."

Lander's experiment tested a quirky prediction of evolutionary theory: that a harmful mutation is unlikely to persist if it is serious enough to reduce an individual's odds of leaving descendants by an amount that is greater than the number one divided by the population of that species.

The rule proved true not only for mice and chimps, Lander said. A new and still unpublished analysis of the canine genome has found that dogs, whose numbers have historically been greater than those of apes but smaller than for mice, have an intermediate number of harmful mutations -- again, just as evolution predicts.

"Evolution is a way of understanding the world that continues to hold up day after day to scientific tests," Lander said.

By contrast, said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Intelligent Design offers nothing in the way of testable predictions.

"Just because they call it a theory doesn't make it a scientific theory," Leshner said. "The concept of an intelligent designer is not a scientifically testable assertion."

Asked to provide examples of non-obvious, testable predictions made by the theory of Intelligent Design, John West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based ID think tank, offered one: In 1998, he said, an ID theorist, reckoning that an intelligent designer would not fill animals' genomes with DNA that had no use, predicted that much of the "junk" DNA in animals' genomes -- long seen as the detritus of evolutionary processes -- will someday be found to have a function.

(In fact, some "junk" DNA has indeed been found to be functional in recent years, though more than 90 percent of human DNA still appears to be the flotsam of biological history.) In any case, West said, it is up to Darwinists to prove ID wrong.

"Chance and necessity don't seem to be good candidates for explaining the appearance of higher-order complexity, so the best explanation is an intelligent cause," West said.

Simple and Hard

The controversy that has periodically erupted around evolution can be attributed at least in part to the fact that it is both simple to understand and hard to believe.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, working independently in the early- to mid-1800s, each came up with the concept of "natural selection." Each sought to explain the astounding diversity of life he found in exotic places, Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and Wallace in Brazil.

Their idea was this:

By some accident of nature whose workings neither man could explain, an organism may exhibit a variation in shape, color or body function new to the species. Although most of these new traits are damaging -- probably lethal -- a small fraction actually help. They may make it easier to hide from predators (like a moth's coloration), exploit a food source (an anteater's long tongue), or make seeds more durable (the coconut's buoyant husk).

If the trait does help an organism survive, that individual will be more likely to reproduce. Its offspring will then inherit the change. They, in turn, will have an advantage over organisms that are identical except for that one beneficial change. Over time, the descendants that inherited what might be termed the "happy accident" will outnumber the descendants of its less fit, but initially far more numerous, brethren.

There are two important consequences of this mechanism.

The first is that organisms will tend to adapt to their environments. If the planet's atmosphere contains lots of oxygen but very little methane gas, living things are going to end up tolerating oxygen -- and possibly even depending on it. But do not expect to see many methane-breathers.

This appearance of "perfect fit" makes it seem as if organisms must have been the product of an intelligent force. But this appearance of perfection is deceiving. It gives no hint of the numberless evolutionary dead ends -- lineages that, according to the fossil record, survived for a while but then died out, probably because changes in the environment made their once-perfect designs not so perfect anymore.

The second result of Darwin and Wallace's mechanism is that over time it will create species diversity. As additional "happy accidents" alter an organism's descendants over millions of years, those descendants will come to look less and less like other organisms with which they share a common ancestor. Eventually, the descendants will be able to mate only with each other. They will be lions and tigers -- each a distinct species, but both descended from the same ancient cat.

What is hard to understand about this process is that it is essentially passive. The mechanism is called "natural selection" because the conditions at hand -- nature -- determine which accidents are beneficial and which are not. Organisms do not seek ends.

Giraffes do not decide to grow long necks to browse the high branches above the competition. But a four-legged mammal on the savannah once upon a time was endowed with a longer neck than its brothers and sisters. It ate better. We call its descendants giraffes.

That a mechanism driven by random events should result in perfectly adapted organisms -- and so many different types -- seems illogical.

"Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise, natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere," Jacques Monod, a French biologist and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in 1970 in the book "Chance and Necessity."

Natural selection was really hard to accept in Darwin's day. But it has become easier with the discovery of genes, DNA and techniques that have made it possible to watch natural selection happen.

DNA is a stringlike molecule made up of paired beads called nucleotides. It carries the instructions for making proteins and RNA, the chief building materials of life. Individually, these instructions are called genes.

The random changes Darwin knew must be happening are accidents that happen to DNA and genes. Today, they can be documented and catalogued in real time, inside cells.

Cells sometimes make errors when they copy their DNA before dividing. These mutations can disable a gene -- or change its action. Occasionally cells also duplicate an entire gene by mistake, providing offspring with two copies instead of one. Both these events provide raw material for new genes with new and potentially useful functions -- and ultimately raw material for new organisms and species.

Richard E. Lenski, a biologist at Michigan State University, has been following 12 cultures of the bacterium Escherichia coli since 1988, comprising more than 25,000 generations. All 12 cultures were genetically identical at the start. For years he gave each the same daily stress: six hours of food (glucose) and 18 hours of starvation. All 12 strains adapted to this by becoming faster consumers of glucose and developing bigger cell size than their 1988 "parents."

When Lenski and his colleagues examined each strain's genes, they found that the strains had not acquired the same mutations. Instead, there was some variety in the happy accidents that had allowed each culture to survive. And when the 12 strains were then subjected to a different stress -- a new food source -- they did not fare equally well. In some, the changes from the first round of adaptation stood in the way of adaptation to the new conditions. The 12 strains had started to diverge, taking the first evolutionary steps that might eventually make them different species -- just as Darwin and Wallace predicted.

In fact, one of the more exciting developments in biology in the past 25 years has been how much DNA alone can teach about the evolutionary history of life on Earth.

For example, genome sequencing projects have shown that human beings, dogs, frogs and flies (and many, many other species) share a huge number of genes in common. These include not only genes for tissues they all share, such as muscle, which is not such a surprise, but also the genes that go into basic body-planning (specifying head and tail, front and back) and appendage-building (making things that stick out from the body, such as antennae, fins, legs and arms).

As scientists have identified the totality of DNA -- the genomes -- of many species, they have unearthed the molecular equivalent of the fossil record.

It is now clear from fossil and molecular evidence that certain patterns of growth in multicellular organisms appeared about 600 million years ago. Those patterns proved so useful that versions of the genes governing them are carried by nearly every species that has arisen since.

These several hundred "tool kit genes," in the words of University of Wisconsin biologist Sean B. Carroll, are molecular evidence of natural selection's ability to hold on to very useful functions that arise.

Research on how and when tool kit genes are turned on and off also has helped explain how evolutionary changes in DNA gave rise to Earth's vast diversity of species. Studies indicate that the determination of an organism's form during embryonic development is largely the result of a small number of genes that are turned on in varying combinations and order. Gene regulation is where the action is.

Consequently, mutations in regulatory portions of a DNA strand can have effects just as dramatic as those prompted by mutations in genes themselves. They can, for example, cancel the development of an appendage -- or add an appendage where one never existed. This discovery refuted assertions by Intelligent Design advocates that gene mutation and natural selection can, at most, explain the fine-tuning of species.

"The mechanisms that make the small differences between species are the same ones that make the big differences between kingdoms," said Carroll, author of a book, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful," that describes many of these new insights.

Although the central tenets of evolution have done nothing but grow stronger with every experimental challenge, the story is still evolving, Carroll and other scientists acknowledge. Some details are sure to be refined over time. The question to be answered in Harrisburg is whether Intelligent Design has anything scientific to add for now, or whether it belongs instead in philosophy class.