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If we have learned anything at all in a century and a half of evolutionary biology, it is that facile generalizations are dangerous. The evolutionary process finds a way to create exceptions to every model we propose.
Next headline on: Human Body Politics and Ethics Origin of Life Bible and Theology Early Man Birds Terrestrial Zoology Cell Biology Darwin Amazing StoriesDarwin Debates Attract Rhetoricians, Some Pro, Some Not 08/31/2005
Nothing like a controversy to get people talking. Some understand the issues and speak with skill and style; some just like to be part of the excitement. Here are samples from the war of the words over evolution:
When the rhetoric flies, exercise sense, not sensationalism. Some get it right, some have no context. This debate has deep roots in history. Perpetuating buzzwords or labels is not going to make the debate over naturalism vs. design disappear. Caution: read news articles and editorials on this issue only with Baloney Detector engaged and in good working order but do read.Marvelous Puzzle: Enceladus South Pole Surface Less Than 1,000 Years Old 08/30/2005
Enceladus, a moon of Saturn smaller than the British isles (comparison image), has a region at the south pole that is less than 1,000 years old, and maybe only 10 years old. This conclusion, announced at Cassini science briefings in London August 30, is based on multi-instrument observations taken July 14 during the closest flyby ever of Enceladus (08/09/2005, 07/14/2005). Crystalline ice has been found in four 80-mile-long parallel canyons dubbed tiger stripes due to their appearance. Water ice has been observed venting into a plume of small particles from these cracks, which are noticeably warmer than the surrounding regions. Measurements from all the instruments aboard the Cassini spacecraft converge on the conclusion that Enceladus southern polar surface is young, probably active today.
Two instruments detected icy particles coming from the south pole. The Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) and the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) measurements reached a peak at closest approach (graph, flyby chart), showing that material is being emitted now, and probably accounts for at least some of the fresh material replenishing the E-ring around Saturn. The Magnetometer (MAG) confirmed the existence of this plume by watching its asymmetric influence on the magnetic field lines around Enceladus; the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (UVIS) arrived at the same conclusion. The Virtual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) (picture) and Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS, see article and picture) showed a temperature rise across the tiger-stripe cracks up to -279°F, almost 40° warmer than expected. Apparently this is warm enough to cause sublimation of ice from the surface. The crystalline nature of the ice constrains its age to 1000 years or less. Crystalline ice rapidly changes to an amorphous structure when exposed to solar radiation. Another odd thing about the tiger stripes is that each of them curves into a question mark shape at one end, all facing the same way (picture 1, picture 2). Could this be a rotational effect, or is it due to a massive flow from the west?
The closest-approach image (picture and zoom-in movie) revealed boulders about 20m in size that New Scientist said could be ejecta from eruptions. That Enceladus should be erupting material today is puzzling to the planetary scientists for several reasons. For one, the north pole is heavily cratered and therefore looks much older; why would the south pole be active, when normally the equatorial regions are the warmest? (compare prediction vs. observation). Another puzzle is the comparison with Mimas, a moon of similar size. Mimas is heavily cratered with no activity, even though it was pummeled by a colossal impact at some time in the past and is subject to greater tidal stresses due to its proximity to Saturn. Finally, small bodies cool the fastest. A moon the size of Enceladus should long ago have lost all its internal heat and remained forever frozen solid.
To account for the heat and resultant activity (03/04/2005), planetary geologists are constructing models combining radiogenic heat from a rocky interior and tidal heating from interactions with Saturn and other moons. So far, however, these energy sources seem to come up short by an order of magnitude or two (see New Scientist). This is a marvelous puzzle, said one scientist; another said that Enceladus is constantly evolving and getting a makeover. Enceladus joins a short list of bodies in our solar system where scientists have found internal activity, the press release said. That list includes Io (05/04/2004), Titan (06/09/2005, 05/18/2005, 04/08/2005), Triton (05/30/2002), Earth, and Venus (see Earths Ugly Sister Cant Get a Date, 08/16/2004). Most other solid planets and moons exhibit surface features that, while not active today, appear young (06/05/2003 commentary). The Cassini team expected that Enceladus would prove one of the prima donnas of the Saturn system. It appears that she delivered a stunning surprise of a performance.
Sources: JPL, Cassini press release, NASA Cassini page, New Scientist, BBC News, the Planetary Society, EurekAlert and the Cassini Imaging Team. The latter contains polar projection maps, a graph and flyby chart, and three models attempting to explain the heating process.
Scientists love a good puzzle, and being surprised is fun; we can all share the excitement of a new and baffling phenomenon. But what none of them seems to be asking is the obvious question: how could this moon be anywhere near 4.6 billion years old? Look at the size of those canyons 80 miles wide and 50 miles apart they speak of large-scale processes at work, not just minor eruptions. This revelation is just the latest in a long string of discoveries that challenge the consensus view of the age of the solar system. For all the flash and color of the model diagrams, New Scientist says that tidal heating and internal radioactivity are not anywhere near sufficient to drive the activity. Why not consider the possibility that Enceladus as well as the solar system that contains it is young.Back to School, Front to Darwinism Debate 08/30/2005
The national debate about how to teach origins in public schools continues to roil. Here are some recent developments:
If science were really so threatened by a few people using the D word design, the Darwinists wouldnt have to defend their pet story with loyalty oaths, signed statements, and discrimination. They could solve their little conflict with a little evidence. Thats where the wise advise aiming our eyes.Do You Belong in the Zoo? 08/29/2005
People are gawking at people in the London Zoo, each probably wondering what side of the cage they belong on. In one of the primate exhibits, eight scantily clad white people are on display, reports AP (see MSNBC and Yahoo). Wearing fig leaves pinned onto their swimsuits, they play, they scratch, they groom each other, they wave to the onlookers. The idea is to show that humans are nothing special, but just like other animals. Unlike the apes and chimpanzees in the other primate cages, however, the humans get to go home at night.
The stunt is drawing visitors who had never visited the zoo. Some viewers were disappointed to find the humans wearing clothes; didnt fig leaves come from the Genesis tradition? they wondered. Children, confused by the message of the display, have been overheard asking, Why are there people in there? An apocryphal story has one of the chimpanzees asking, Am I my keepers brother?
At least theyre using white people this time (see articles by Carl Wieland and Jerry Bergman). Mark Looy at Answers in Genesis couldnt keep silence any longer, especially when he had a Londoner on staff, Dr. Monty White, to interpret the zoos actions in light of Darwinian theory.Molecular Motors Galore: How Did They Evolve? 08/26/2005
Myosin is one of the cells little monorail motors that trucks cargo around the cell, pushes false feet into the surrounding environment, forces packages out the cell membrane, makes muscles move and wiggles hairlike cilia. Scientists reporting in Nature1 found twice as many varieties of myosin (37) than were previously known (17) and decided to plug them into the evolutionary tree of life and figure out how they diversified throughout eukaryotic lineages. Although they found many synapomorphies (apparent instances of convergent evolution), Richards and Cavalier-Smith think they reduced the diversity of myosins down to three ancestral types. They wrote, We conclude that the eukaryotic cenancestor (last common ancestor) had a cilium, mitochondria, pseudopodia, and myosins with three contrasting domain combinations and putative functions (emphasis added in all quotes). They did not elaborate, however, on how these mechanisms and functions arose in the hypothetical single-celled ancestor. Margaret Titus, commenting on this paper in the same issue of Nature,2 said, Analysis of their sequences in a wide range of organisms reveals an unexpected variety of domains, and provides insights into the nature of the earliest eukaryotes.
In another molecular-machine story, three scientists found that the cellular powerhouse motors named ATP synthase come in pairs. Reporting in PNAS,3 they actually photographed pairs of the miniature machines an incredible feat, considering they are only about 12 nanometers tall and found them bridged together at 40° angles. They suspect that this arrangement helps in the formation of cristae (curved membranes within the mitochondria) and stabilizes the little rotary engines as they generate ATP: This complex is assumed to improve the efficiency of ATP synthesis by substrate-product channeling. The authors did not speculate on the evolution of the motors or of the larger structure that they call an ATP synthasome complex. Additional proteins and enzymes, whose functions are as yet unknown, appear to take part in the operation.
1Thomas A. Richards and Thomas Cavalier-Smith, Myosin domain evolution and the primary divergence of eukaryotes, Nature 436, 1113-1118 (25 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03949
2Margaret A. Titus, Evolution: A treasure trove of motors, Nature 436, 1097-1099 (25 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4361097a.
Evolutionary theory is so useless. The first two scientists ought to be humbly standing in awe of cellular wonders at the fringe of our ability to comprehend them, and all they wanted to do was speculate about how machines built themselves by chance. Did Richards and Cavalier-Smith add any logical or observational support for evolution? Assuredly not. They merely assumed it from the start, then organized the observations into a presuppositional template. Could they delineate the actual mutations and selective forces that morphed one form into another? Could they tell how the original ancestral forms already highly complex emerged out of the primordial chemistry lab? Did they even for a moment consider the possibility that apparent design might represent actual design?Do Fossil Counts Match Sediment Counts? 08/25/2005
If evolution is true, the number of species coming and going should track the number of rock layers in which they are fossilized, at least roughly. The more sediments per unit time, the more new genera should arise within them. Shanan E. Peters (U of Michigan) decided to test this novel approach with marine fossils (the most abundant in the fossil record) over most of the geologic column, from Cambrian to Pliocene, and did indeed find a correlation. He wrote his conclusions in PNAS.1
Peters compared two databases: one that counted genera of marine organisms in the worldwide geologic column, and one that counted rock sections in the geologic column in the USA. (A section is a record of continuous sedimentation bounded by gaps, or unconformities.) First, he graphed genus richness against rock quantity; these measurements correlated well until the Cretaceous, when they diverged sharply. The divergence, he explained, could have been a statistical artifact of sampling called the pull of the recent; i.e., the tendency for recent epochs to be better represented than ancient ones. Thats OK, he explained; one would expect the correlations to be seen better at macro rather than micro scales. Second, he graphed first and last appearances of genera against the bottoms and tops of rock sections. These correlated fairly well for extinctions (r=0.75), but not as well for originations of genera (r=0.54 or less). This finding means, he tells us, that the average longevity of a genus in the fossil record is comparable with the average duration of a sedimentary section. In fact, the entire frequency distribution of genus longevities is remarkably similar to that of section durations. Third, he compared genus turnover with section turnover and also found similar positive correlation, though with some data points as prominent outliers. In his concluding discussion, he tried to explain what these correlations mean.
These results demonstrate that the temporal distribution of genus first and last occurrences in the marine animal fossil record is intimately related to the temporal continuity and quantity of sedimentary rock. Determining why this result is the case is more challenging than demonstrating that it is so. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)Since the two databases (genus counts and section counts) were presumed as independent as two data sets that share the same timescale could possibly be, he felt the correlations, rough as they were, indicated something significant. Either the results were artifacts of preservation bias (the luck of the fossilization process), or had a common-cause relationship. The former, he argued, seems unlikely: Thus, if stratigraphic correlation and the shared timescale are the only reasons for statistical similarity, then virtually all temporal patterns derived from the geologic record must be little more than methodological artifacts of binning and correlation. This possibility seems extremely unlikely (although quantifying the magnitudes of the statistical contributions of these factors is very important). That being agreed, which explanation selection bias or common cause best explains the data?
Assuming that macroevolutionary patterns derived from genus first and last occurrences have the potential to be meaningful in a biological sense, the task then becomes to explain why patterns in the genus fossil record are closely duplicated by analogous patterns in the sedimentary rock record. As discussed above, there are two possibilities, (i) preservation bias and (ii) shared forcing mechanisms (common cause).He showed that the latter possibility makes better predictions, but does admit one caveat: because only unconformity and rock quantity biases are being measured here, it is possible that facies biases and/or asymmetries in environmental preservation within sedimentary sequences are causing the stronger section-genus extinction correlation; i.e., the beginning and end of the story dont always reveal what happened in the middle. Nevertheless, he felt confident that taxonomists and geologists had not conspired to bias the conclusions: it seems unlikely that the work of hundreds of taxonomists has been so nonrandom as to render the survivorship patterns of >32,000 genera from across the tree of life little more than a quantification of the structure of the sedimentary rock record.
Why, however, would the genus extinction count correlate with the end of the rock section better than the origination count correlate with the beginning? Aha, the common-cause hypothesis predicted it would. The answer is in the way evolution works:
Under the common-cause hypothesis, however, genera are expected to originate early in a sedimentary basins history as new habitats and environments expand and to go extinct abruptly when environmental changes eliminate the basin environments altogether. Thus, similar average durations for sections and genera as well as corresponding peaks and troughs in rates of origination and extinction are expected. Interestingly, the common-cause hypothesis also predicts that the genus-section extinction correlation should be stronger than the genus-section origination correlation because genus extinction can match the timing of rapid environmental shifts that result in section truncation, whereas genus origination may not be capable of responding instantly to the macroevolutionary opportunities afforded by basin expansion. This possibility is sensitive to choice of timescale, but it is supported by analyses that find less empirical support for pulsed genus origination [i.e., punctuated equilibria] than for pulsed genus extinction at the same level of temporal resolution in the Phanerozoic.The remainder of Peters discussion delved into the meaning of these correlations for theories of environmental forcing of macroevolution and timing of mass extinctions. He favored gradualism over saltation for origination of species, and discounted the need for major catastrophes to explain extinction rates. He defended the challenging concept that much of the macroevolutionary history of marine animals is driven by processes related to the formation and destruction of sedimentary basins. If some evolutionists believe that extinctions and explosions of biological diversity can be forced by a meteorite impact, for instance, why not consider the possibility that macroevolutionary change can also be forced by slower geological changes? Thus, it would seem prudent to revisit some of the classic unifying hypotheses that are grounded in the effects of continually operating processes and to reevaluate seriously the extent to which unusual or episodic events are required to explain the macroevolutionary history of marine animals.
In conclusion, he admitted that more work will need to be done to rule out taxonomic biases. These remain a potential obfuscator of macroevolutionary patterns in all global taxonomic databases, he says; though he has shown some correlation, he is not trying to push his point too far. Further quantifying the relationships between the large-scale temporal and spatial structure of the geologic record and the distribution of fossil occurrences within this structure will be important, he ended, in overcoming persistent sampling biases and in testing the extent to which common-cause mechanisms have dominated the macroevolutionary history of marine animals.
1Shanan E. Peters, Geological constraints on the macroevolutionary history of marine animals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, August 30, 2005, vol. 102, no. 35, 12326-12331, published online before print August 16, 2005, 10.1073/pnas.0502616102.
This lengthy entry is exhibited here to show how evolutionists can fool themselves into thinking the observations support Charlies tall tale. In the first place, he used evolutionary assumptions to calibrate evolutionary assumptions: the common timescale of both databases is the geologic column, a theoretical arrangement of global sediments built on the assumption of evolution and millions of years. This is reminiscent of the joke about the church bell ringer who set his watch by the clock tower on the parliament building, only to find out that the clock tower maintenance man set his clock by the church bell. Second, the correlations are only marginally significant. His charts show severe outliers. Sometimes the anomalous data points have an important story to tell. Third, his use of gap-bound rock sections only concentrates on the beginning and ending of continuously-deposited sediments. In the old Dr. Seuss book The Cat in the Hat, the first and last pages of the book, showing the children contentedly at ease in a clean living room, belies all the chaos and commotion that occurred in the middle. Last, Peters trusted in the if you build it, they will come theory of evolution. He didnt explain how new genera of marine organisms would emerge when the sea level rose or fell; he just assumed that whenever organisms are given a safe haven, presto! macroevolution happens. In short, the evolutionary story rigged, controlled, operated and guaranteed the outcome of the entire analysis. Evolution is a self-fulfilling prophecy.Looking for Ethical Alternatives to Embryonic Stem Cells 08/24/2005
Pro-life advocates perked up their ears at the announcement of a new method that can produce stem cells without destroying embryos. National Geographic News and MSNBC News talked about the method, which uses skin cells and reprograms them to act like embryonic stem cells. Religion Journal thinks the ethical debate over stem cells may be over.
This story illustrates the need for conservatives who respect the sanctity of life to keep boundaries around maverick scientists motivated by dollars more than ethics. Researchers would not be looking for alternatives to grinding up human embryos if it werent that there were enough people outraged at the ethical malfeasance of killing one life to save others. The selfish motives of the stem-cell pushers became evident when some reporters showed them worrying that this discovery might reduce funding for embryonic stem cell research.Darwins Finches Evolve Back and Forth 08/24/2005
Whats new on the Galápagos? For those needing an update on Darwins famous finches, the researchers who have spent the most time studying them Peter and Mary Grant (Princeton) wrote a Quick Guide in Current Biology1 in question-and-answer format. Well skip the introductory material about how the birds got named after Darwin, and what makes them special in the history of evolutionary thought, to see if the Grants have any evidence that they have, indeed, evolved. The key question is: Are Darwins finches still evolving?
An often asked question may be phrased as follows: what can be said about evolution if it all happened in the past, for surely understanding where our biological diversity came from is then a mixture of scientific inference and inspired guesswork, almost impossible to verify? Imperceptibly slow evolution encourages such skepticism. In the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages.Moreover, when asked about finch genomics, they claimed the genes of the finches are evolving, though the evidence is only preliminary:
The molecular analysis of finch beaks has only just begun. In addition to this functional genetic study, molecular markers in the nuclear and mitochondrial genome have been used to estimate the phylogeny of the finches. With some exceptions they support the traditional grouping of the species on the basis of their plumage and beak characteristics. Molecular markers have also been used to track the exchange of genes between species that interbreed, albeit rarely, and the finding is dramatic. They show a pair of species on Daphne in a state of flux, at present converging genetically and morphologically, having diverged strongly in the past. This nicely captures the evolutionary dynamism that Darwins finches display to an unusual degree.Yet if they diverge then converge back to where they were before, is that really evolution? The Quick Guide moves on, leaving that question unasked and unanswered.
1Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant, Quick Guide: Darwins Finches, Current Biology, Volume 15, Issue 16, 23 August 2005, Pages R614-R615.
There you have it: the worlds leading authorities on the beaks that made Charlie famous, and they dont add a thing to what young-earth creationists already believe. The Grants merely repeated what is already admitted by intelligent-design researchers in the films Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Icons of Evolution; any observed changes are mere oscillations about a mean. These poor devoted people have measured beaks for over 30 years and have not found any persistent directional changes nor could they be expected to in one human lifetime. They even admit that today the birds remain interfertile and so have not really undergone speciation after however long they have lived on these islands. Yet they expect us to think that it is a scientifically sound inference to extrapolate their data, which, in evolutionary terms, constitute noise, into long-term directional trends.Your Brain Has Perfect Pitch 08/23/2005
Scientists have a knack for asking questions about things most of us take for granted. The whole orchestra tunes up to an A note from the oboe but how do our brains tell that all the different sounds are the same pitch? asks Robert J. Zatorre in Nature.1 This is a puzzling question to neurologists. Theres more, as Zatorre illustrates with a Disney story:
As Pythagoras knew, if you pluck a string, it will vibrate in its entire extent, as well as in halves, thirds and so on, and each of those vibrational modes will result in a separate harmonic frequency. Yet we usually perceive the pitch as corresponding to the lowest of these, which is the fundamental. For a simple demonstration of the missing fundamental effect, pick up a phone. Most telephone lines cut off the lower frequencies, resulting in a slightly tinny sound, yet the fundamental pitch does not change; a male voice does not sound like Mickey Mouse. The brain seems to figure out the missing pitch. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)Is this just learned behavior, or what? Apparently not. Researchers working with marmosets have found neurons that are pitch-sensitive:
Bendor and Wang studied the auditory cortex (the region of the brain that enables perception of sound) in the marmoset monkey. They show that there are neurons in this region that respond in essentially the same way to a variety of sounds that all have the same fundamental but do not share any frequencies. For example, a neuron that responds to 200 hertz also responds to the combination of 800, 1,000, and 1,200 hertz because all correspond to the same fundamental. This effect is unusual because neurons usually respond only within their receptive field, which is typically a narrow range of frequencies. The marmoset neurons, however, responded not only to frequencies in their receptive fields, but also when there was no frequency within the receptive field but the other frequencies in the stimulus were harmonically related to the missing one. This property makes psychologists happy, because it provides evidence (if not yet a mechanism) for perceptual constancy. These neurons respond to an abstract property pitch derived from, but not identical to, physical sound features. Presumably, therefore, it is thanks to such neurons that we can follow a tune as the instruments change.That leads to an evolutionary follow-up question, which Zatorre attempts to answer:
One might wonder why marmosets need such a system, given that they dont spend much time listening to iPods. But periodic sounds are important in the natural environment because they are almost exclusively produced by other animals, and so pitch is a good cue to segregate these sounds from background noise. Marmosets are highly vocal creatures, and the development of pitch-sensitive neurons would also be central to communication. From an evolutionary perspective, these abilities could be seen as precursors to human pitch perception, which has led to our unique development of music and is similarly crucial for speech.Thats that for now; he quickly changes the subject: Now that we know that there are pitch-sensitive neural units, we have to discover how they work. He has a long list of unanswered questions: How does the ear keep the information intact through the transformations between eardrum and cochlea? How does the brain extract details from the overall fabric of sound? What are the inputs to these pitch-sensitive neurons? are they hierarchical, or built up from multiple inputs from other structures in the brain? Do inputs from the higher cognitive regions of the brain participate? Are these neuronal properties hard-wired or learned? The list of answers is shorter: we dont know.
1Robert J. Zatorre, Neuroscience: Finding the missing fundamental, Nature 436, 1093-1094 (25 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4361093a.
This article almost earned a Dumb award for its useless evolutionary speculations. Zatorre committed the plostrum ante equum fallacy (cart before the horse), assuming that necessity was a sufficient mother of invention. Aside from the empty evolutionary fluff, though, the article underscored a fascinating aspect of hearing that merely hints at the engineering necessary to make it work. Music doesnt make evolutionary sense because it is a gift of God. If Bach appreciated that fact, how much more so should modern anatomists, physiologists and neurologists.Origin of Life: How Dry I Am? 08/23/2005
Stephen Benner (U of Florida) has stopped looking for life in water. A researcher into the evolutionary origin of life, he understands that water is a terrible solvent for life not life as we know it today, he means, but life at the beginning. This sounds strange, considering most astrobiologists believe in a follow the water approach to finding life in space. In Nature,1 he explained:
Benner points out that water is generally not a good solvent for doing organic chemistry which is, in the end, what life is all about. For one thing, water is rather reactive, tending to split apart the bonds that link the building blocks of biomolecules together. It readily breaks peptide bonds, for example, as well as many of the bonds in nucleic acids, such as RNA. The structure of RNA screams I did not arise in water! Benner asserts. He says that in about four out of five cases, synthetic organic chemists will avoid using water as a solvent. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)Benner shared his ideas at a conference in Italy earlier this year. Philip Ball investigated his ideas in the article, but puzzled over what Benner said and what we know about how life utilizes water:
But of course organic chemists arent usually trying to create life. Water has many properties that seem indispensable for the functioning of proteins and cells. It is an excellent solvent for ions, for example crucial for nerve signalling, enzymatic processes, biomineralization and the behaviour of DNA. It is also a master of weak intermolecular interactions such as hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic forces. The latter play a central role in protein folding and protein-protein interactions, whereas the former often act as bridges between protein binding sites and their substrates. And waters ability to absorb and lose heat without undergoing a large temperature change provides thermal cushioning, shielding cells and organisms from wild temperature swings.Because water is an enemy at the origin of life but an indispensable friend for sustaining it, chemical evolutionists have a conundrum on their hands. As an escape, they are asking what if questions about whether life could have arisen in other solvents.
Asking such what if questions might seem strange to biologists and chemists, but it is far more common in cosmology or physics [see 08/16/2005]. For cosmologists, the physical Universe seems to be precariously fine-tuned to make life possible. For example, the fine-structure constant, which determines the strength of electromagnetic interactions, is not fixed by any known fundamental theory; and yet if it was ten times larger, stable atoms could not exist....Others at the conference thought Benner was putting the cart before the horse: life on Earth is adapted to water rather than the other way round, they agreed. Benner, meanwhile, beset by the problems with RNA and proteins in water, is going to investigate uncharted territory: dry, frozen worlds with liquid methane, perhaps, like Titan (08/09/2005, 01/21/2005), or ones of his own making:
Benner is participating in a US National Academies panel funded by NASA that is looking at possible alternative chemistries for life, and which he hopes will identify research directions that funding agencies can pursue. He believes that researchers should aim high to create life forms that do not reproduce the chemistry that is found on Earth. In other words, if we cant easily get to other worlds, we should build them here.
1Philip Ball, Water and Life: Seeking the Solution, Nature, 436, 1084-1085 (25 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4361084a.
Steven Benner should know better. He knows more than most evolutionists how many and intractable are the problems with chemical evolution; the problems are so bad, in fact, that he joked that they are almost enough to make one consider becoming a creationist (see 11/05/2004 entry). Now that is really bad to a Darwinist! Nothing could be worse.Paleoanthropology: Start Over? 08/22/2005
The September issue of National Geographic, featuring the African continent, has arrived in homes. On page 1, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote about the quest for early man, asking, Are we looking for bones in all the right places? The bulk of the article describes the messy story of human origins. It used to be clean-cut, he said, but no longer:
Scientists are good at finding logical patterns and turning data into a coherent narrative. But the study of human origins is tricky: The bones tell a complicated story. The cast of characters keeps growing. The plot keeps thickening. Its a heck of a tale, still unfolding.That represents the bulk of the article: the simple picture is gone, we dont know who begat whom, we have no fossils of chimpanzees, the family tree is full of dead ends, and we may be trying too hard to tell a story from too few bones. Achenbach quotes Dan Lieberman of Harvard: Were not doing a very good job of being honest about what we dont know. Sometimes I think were trying to squeeze too much blood out of these stones.
Achenbach also contrasts the study of human evolution with the classical hard sciences:
Earth doesnt yield a perfect database. Still, its our scientific impulse to impose parsimonious explanations on complex problems in the same way that Newton realized that the fall of the apple and the motion of the planets were governed by the same simple force called gravity. But the process of evolution cant be observed like the fall of an apple. Lifedespite all the efforts of modern scienceis messy.One might be tempted to conclude, therefore, that the field is open to alternative explanations. Why, then, does Achenbach put this statement in the middle of his article? The central fact of human evolution is a givenhumans descended from a primate that lived in Africa six or seven million years agoand those who would doubt evolution are arguing against the entire enterprise of science. The basics are established, he claims; its only some key details that are unknown.
Is it any wonder why Achenbach wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week? Look at what he did. He demolished everything most of us were taught as evolutionary fact years ago. He admitted that the whole picture is a mess of disconnected, confusing pieces. He admitted that no one can make sense of it. He admitted that paleoanthropology is not in the same ballpark as Newtons hard science, and why?because the process of evolution cant be observed like the fall of an apple. There arent enough ape bones, there arent enough human bones, and there arent enough bones of anything in between that is not controversial. On top of all that, we might even just be imposing our own preconceptions on the data! He quotes someone who casts doubt on the honesty of paleoanthropologists. That seasoned veteran of the science of paleoanthropology believes the researchers are trying to squeeze too much blood out of their bones.I.D. vs. Evolution Rhetoric Continues Unabated 08/22/2005, updated 08/24/2005
The surge in articles and editorials about intelligent design vs. evolution, prompted by President Bushs remarks (08/13/2005) often seems to track the political philosophy of the person or group: Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal but not always. Recent salvos:
The wording may seem subtle but is significant. Anti-ID reporters are determined to portray intelligent design as inherently religious, so they employ the word supernatural to make their point: See? they gloat, hammerlocking their straw man; This cant be science, because its about the supernatural! But if the reference is to intelligent causes, those are already employed in scientific explanations in many fields. Science can investigate whether the cause was planned or unplanned without making any statements about who the Planner was or what the motive for the design was: this is done all the time in archaeology and criminology, for instance even in SETI itself, which makes DeVores position all the more ironic. Caught in a logical trap, all she can do is fall back on arguments from authority and bandwagon.You Otter Hair How Otters Keep Warm 08/22/2005
While on a sabbatical exploring Isle Royale National Park, John Weisel (U of Pennsylvania) decided to collect hair from various mammals. He found otter fur to be particularly interesting, says a press release from U of Penn Health System. Since otters dont have a layer of fat, he wondered, how do they keep warm in the icy water? Scanning electron microscopy showed the secret: the hairs fit together like tongue-and-groove woodwork: They found that the cuticle surface structure of the underhairs and base of the less-abundant guard hairs are distinctively shaped to interlock, with wedge-shaped fins or petals fitting into wedge-shaped grooves between fins of adjacent hairs (emphasis added). Click on the micrograph for additional photos and diagrams of how these hairs interlock.
Not much on a mammals body seems simpler than hair, but like everything else in living things, simplicity evaporates on closer inspection. Not only are these hairs shaped just right to produce a tight, insulating pattern, but the blueprint has to be encoded in DNA and transcribed by the cellular construction factory according to spec, and extruded from each hair follicle at the right time, with the right shape, the right color and the right length. Lecturer Dr. David Menton can keep an audience entranced for an hour about the wonders of hair. The structural details on the micro level are necessary to produce the macro result: a sleek, playful otter that makes a living in cold water. It doesnt take much water to keep a daughter otter happy. Two pints makes one cavort.Why Mathematical Formalism Eludes Evolutionary Theory 08/19/2005
An important mathematical tool used by evolutionists has been discredited. To study life history evolution (i.e., the changes over time in a populations reproductive age, maximum size, age at death, etc.) evolutionists have relied on Charnovs concept of life history invariants. These invariants, which are dimensionless ratios of two life history traitsfor instance, age at maturity and average length of life, according to Gerdien de Jong writing in Science,1 have been a staple of evolutionary models, providing generalizations leading to an understanding of universal life history strategies. Now, warns de Jong about work by Nee et al. in the same issue,2 the principal method of detecting life history invariants has been called into question. The authors have determined that the approach is misleading, throwing the very existence of the concept into doubt. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
Ratios can fall on a straight line when plotted, suggesting a mathematical relationship, but Nee et al. have demonstrated that the relationships are figments of the method and not necessarily real. The same data plotted between groups of animals might yield a straight line, for instance, but when plotted within isolated groups of animals can yield lines offset from one another. The regression analysis is therefore misleading, de Jong says. The same problem can exist within other biological models. Are the patterns real, therefore, or contrived? Are they meaningful in evolutionary terms?
Life history evolution is not the only field where invariants or universal constants are proposed. The Universal Temperature Dependence of metabolism proposal asserts that the metabolism of all organisms can be described by a single equation. Scaling laws (as, for instance, basic metabolic rate scale as mass to the power 3/4) are called universal over all life. This hankering for universal explanations has been criticized not only on technical grounds but also for ignoring biology and the variation between organisms. Interesting biology might not be in life history invariants but in biological variation.De Jong illustrates, for example, that two species of fish in the same habitat can have completely different ratios of sex to social rank. De Jong doesnt go so far as to argue that it is a waste of time to look for mathematical relationships in biology, just that We should be wary of treating an average across species as an explanatory general life history invariant.
1Gerdien de Jong, Evolution: Is Invariance Across Animal Species Just an Illusion?, Science, Vol 309, Issue 5738, 1193-1195, 19 August 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1117591].
2Nee et al., The Illusion of Invariant Quantities in Life Histories, Science, 2005 309: 1236-1239.
Evolutionists desperately want their theories to be considered scientific, but the language of science is mathematics. They should recall the difference between the hard sciences and biology, as expressed by the Harvard Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it *@#&! well pleases. The deception is even worse when evolutionary psychologists measure human behavior according to Koestlers Ratomorphic Fallacy, treating people like lab rats, or when they try to describe altruism, whether in humans or bacteria, in terms of the equations of game theory. One of the ugliest of recent examples involved anthropologists trying to measure the evolution of anti-Semitism (see 07/19/2005).Saddle Up Your Algae: Scientists Harness Flagellar Motors 08/19/2005
1805: Beast of burden of choice: oxen.
2005: Beast of burden of choice: algae.
Science Now reported an unusual item: scientists have learned how to hitch their loads to a single-celled green alga named Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (see Yale description). Researchers are actually calling their little teams micro-oxen.
Scientists are increasingly interested in harnessing biological motors for use in micro- and nanotechnology, but recent research has mainly involved taking moving parts out of cells and adapting them for use elsewhere. Its a complicated process that can require protein engineering. So, chemist Doug Weibel of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues wondered if they could simply use an intact organism as a beast of burden instead. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)This alga contains whiplike flagella that propel them through liquid like motorized paddleboats (see U of Wisconsin description). These algae are very reliable, Weibel said. See also the BBC News report.
In other flagellum news, Howard Berg of Harvard, writing in Current Biology,1 described how bacterial flagella (the rotary kind) receive feedback from the environment: the flagellum senses wetness, he reported. The wetness of the environment affects antagonistic regulatory proteins that control flagellum production. Research by Q. Wang et al. found that a suppressor is pumped out of the cell by the flagellar transport apparatus once assembly of the basal part of the flagellum is complete, Berg said. What for? This prevents the cell from wasting energy on flagellin synthesis when this protein cannot be put to use. The scientists sprinkled a little water on dry colonies for 90 seconds and, sure enough, got them to produce more and longer flagella that exhibited normal swarming behavior. Berg describes it: Swarming is a specialized form of bacterial motility that develops when cells that swim in broth are grown in a rich medium on the surface of moist agar. The cells become multinucleate, elongate, synthesize large numbers of flagella, secrete surfactants and advance across the surface in coordinated packs.
1Berg, Howard, Swarming Motility: It Better Be Wet, Current Biology, Volume 15, Issue 15, 9 August 2005, Pages R599-R600.
The intelligent design movement could get a load of this. It was amazing enough that some flagella are built like high-tech rotary motors. For humans to harness that power and use it underscores the claim that these really are molecular machines. Its there; it works; why reinvent the wheel?Do Emperor Penguins Know the Meaning of True Love? 08/19/2005
The nature film sensation March of the Penguins is capturing the public imagination because of its portrayal of emperor penguins in almost anthropomorphic visions. Strutting upright in their feathery tuxedos, these Antarctic seabirds seem almost human: they love, they walk, they sacrifice, they grieve over the loss of a chick, they endure hardship bravely, they rejoice at a family reunion. Its a bit over the top, reports Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News. She quotes biologists who cast doubt on whether penguins can experience true feelings. Penguins respond to hormones, biologists tell us, and their social behavior is instinctive. Still, the movie is worthwhile, the article confesses; the simplistic portrayal is useful, helping make some aspects of the life cycle of penguins more accessible to the general public.
Mayell is right about the fallacy of imputing human emotional and moral qualities to birds. Still, birds are among the smartest of animals (03/23/2004, 02/17/2004, 08/09/2002). Who could know what they think and feel without becoming a birdbrain? (Remember, that is a compliment, not an insult02/01/2005). To believe that such behaviors are mere emergent properties of matter in motion seems inadequate. In evolutionary terms, animal behaviors that look playful or emotional seem senseless in a world of survival, and evolutionists are at a loss to explain them (03/24/2005). Maybe the fact that we humans can relate to the cries, chirps, and behaviors of emperor penguins indicates that there is, at some level, a non-material element to their ontology, a kind of psyche. While avoiding the fallacy of personification, we must also not commit the fallacy of reductionism.From Emperors to Monarchs.... 08/19/2005
If lion is king, and penguin is emperor, who would have thought a dainty insect would be monarch? EurekAlert posted a story earlier this month too good to pass up: monarch butterflies follow the light ultraviolet light to their breeding grounds. Scientists at Hebrew University, working with monarchs in a specially-designed flight simulator (see 05/09/2005, 07/09/2002), found that UV light was the key to keeping them on course. But thats not all: Further probing revealed a key wiring connection between the light-detecting navigation sensors in the butterflys eye and its brain clock, the article states. Thus, it was shown that input from two interconnected systems UV light detection in the eye and the biological clock in the brain together guide the butterflies straight and true to their destination at the appointed times in their two-month migration over thousands of miles/kilometers (emphasis added). Think how tiny a butterfly brain is to store that kind of programming.
Next headline on: Terrestrial Zoology
Italy Going Soft on Darwinism
The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is the unifying principle of the biological sciences. Unfortunately in the Italian academic system, evolutionary biology is not acknowledged as an independent research area, so no faculty positions in evolutionary biology can be established, and most students hear only a brief summary of evolutionary theory in the final hours of their introductory zoology, paleontology, or genetics courses. To make matters worse, during the past two years, several creationist organizations have been publicly attacking the teaching of evolutionary theory. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)Its time to take action, says the Italian Society for Evolutionary Biology. Last year, they established the Coordinamento Italiano dei Biologi Evoluzionisti CoEvol for short to both strengthen collaborations between Italian evolutionists and to improve the teaching of evolution in Italy and to increase the involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in evolutionary studies. Activities include a new cyber-journal club allow evolutionists to discuss recent papers, annual meetings, and the announcement of the new Italian Society for Evolutionary Biology. More significantly, CoEvol hopes to become a lobby group that will foster collaboration among Italian evolutionary biologists in Italy and abroad and represent our interest in making evolutionary biology a priority in the Italian educational system. They have established a website: www.coevol.org.
1Announcements, Letter from the Italian Society for Evolutionary Biology, The American Naturalist, Vol. 166, Sept. 2005, pp. i-ii.
Today, class, we will learn about the evolution of the pizza. The pizza was not created by intelligent design, as those rascally creationists allege. Instead, it emerged out of the primordial dough. Over millions of years, it became just one species of Italian food on the evolutionary Cuisine of Life, with spaghetti, linguini, tortellini and macaroni branching off early and forming the Pasta Kingdom, incorporating parmesan by lateral cheese transfer. Some theorists believe that pepperoni was once a free-living organism that became incorporated into pizza as an endosymbiont during the Prosciutto epoch of the Paleocarne Era. The pizza class experienced a rapid diversification into many forms on the North American continent, as the Italian fast-food restaurant niche opened after the last Ice Cream Age. This stimulated an explosive period of adaptive radiation, producing the Round Table family, the Shakeys family, and the Chuck E. Cheese family, among others. The microwave pizza, with no phylogenetic connection to the old-world pizzas of the Italian peninsula, provides a striking example of convergent evolution....Meteorite Impacts Solar System Theories 08/18/2005
A study partly funded by NASA and published in Nature1 has thrown a monkey wrench into theories of the origin of the solar system, according to a press release from the University of Toronto. Small grains of minerals called chondrules in two meteorites are young too young to have been formed in the assumed primordial solar nebula. When Alexander Krot and Yuri Amelin dated these chondrules, they found them too young to have formed at the beginning of the solar system. They postulate that heat from a collision much later might have formed them. It soon became clear that these particular chondrules were not of a nebular origin, Amelin said. And the ages were quite different from what was expected. It was exciting.
1Krot et al., Young chondrules in CB chondrites from a giant impact in the early Solar System, Nature 436, 989-992 (18 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03830.
By young, Amelin and Krot are not claiming really young, but only a few millions less than billions: some 5 million years after the assumed birthday of the solar system, when meteorites were supposed to have formed. They exaggerate this birthdate to five significant figures: 4.5672 plus or minus 0.0007 billion years ago. With such contrived precision (see 06/05/2003 entry), Amelin and crew feed the Age of the Solar System (q.v. acronym) Myth. The rest of the scientific community falls in line, never questioning these ages. Here, we see that Dr. Moyboy himself ("millions of years, billions of years") has found an anomaly that allows him to throw in a thickening to the plot and get more fame in Nature. If this helps solar system theorists question their assumptions a little, thats a modicum of progress. Does it demonstrate that these two chondrules really are 4.5627 +- .0005 and 4.5628 +- 0.9 billion years old? Better read the caveats at the end of their paper:Fossil Brachiopod Shows Soft Part Details 08/18/2005This formation event [the hypothetical impact that formed the chondrules] has probably homogenized radionuclides in chondrules and metal of the CB chondrites, and reset short-lived radiogenic isotope systems.... For establishing consistent Solar System chronology, these chronometers have to be linked together and tied to an absolute timescale. Most meteorites are made of components formed at different time, and/or experienced complex and prolonged post-formation metamorphic history, and are not suitable for linking short-lived chronometers. In contrast, the correlated studies of multiple short-lived isotope systems in CB chondrites can potentially test the consistency among them and provide a tie to an absolute timescale, which will be an important step towards the unified timescale of the earliest Solar System. (Emphasis added.)With such wheeling and dealing going on behind the scenes, would you trust a resultant date to five significant figures? If so, try Madame Bluffys panacea potion. She mixed a pinch of bat wing, a smidgeon of spider eye and a handful of shredded Amanita mushroom gill in a solution of approximately half goat milk and half vodka. She guarantees it 99.263 +- .004% effective in the treatment of warts, goiter, acid reflux and toenail fungus.
American and British paleontologists described in Nature1 the discovery of nearly complete brachiopods with calcified soft parts intact. They exhibited intricate details never before seen in fossils of these organisms, sometimes called lamp shells. Brachiopods, a type of marine animal that attached itself to the sea floor with a pedicle or stalk, were very abundant in the Cambrian, but are rare now.
By carving off the concretion encasing the fossil a layer at a time, and photographing each layer, Sutton et al. were able to produce a computerized 3-D model of the entire organism. The two specimens differ from extant brachiopods in some respects. The fossils were found buried in a Herefordshire (UK) volcanic ash bed estimated to be 425 million years old.
See also the reports in EurekAlert #1 and #2. The latter is entitled, Still shellfish after 425 million years: Clam-like creature preserved perfectly in ancient fossil.
1Sutton et al., Silurian brachiopods with soft-tissue preservation, Nature 436, 1013-1015 (18 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03846.
Except for the shells, brachiopods are extremely delicate. That is why, even though they were abundant in the past, no complete fossil with the soft parts intact has been found until now. That these ones could be preserved so completely, with such fine detail, is remarkable enough, but to be told that these fossils lay undisturbed for 425 million years stretches credibility.Dumb Down or Wise Up? Rhetoric Over ID Intensifies 08/17/2005
More and more reporters, scientists and scientific societies are weighing in with their opinions on evolution vs. intelligent design (ID) this week (see 08/13/2005 entry). Here are some of the more interesting of the recent salvos:
If the Darwinists dont come up with better talking points, theyre going to lose. They all sound like each other, throwing around loaded words and ridicule with talk of flat earth, bogeymen, Taliban, pseudoscience, fundamentalism and, worst of all, creationism. Come on, you guys, wise up. Tell ID how molecular machines built themselves and theyll turn down the heat. It is indeed strange how tolerant the materialists are of religion when it is the Eastern, mystical kind, maybe because it only makes them meditate instead of think. They can relate to that. After all, Darwinian storytelling puts one into an altered state of consciousness.Cambrian Fossil: What Is It? 08/17/2005
A Cambrian fossil discovered in China may represent a new phylum, reports BBC News. Vetustodermis, discovered in 1979, looks like a flatworm with eye stalks and antenna. It resembles a mollusk or arthropod in some ways, but scientists arent sure how to classify it. Forcing it into any existing group requires pushing and pulling that is messy, the article states. David Bottjer (USC) seems willing to open up a new category. We have always been intrigued by the many molluscan features of these fossils, he said, but in the great menagerie of organisms that have inhabited Earth through lifes long history, we may come to conclude that Vetustodermis indeed represents a new phylum. (Within each kingdom, a phylum [pl. phyla] is the highest rank of classification.)
Jonathan Todd (Natural History Museum, London) doesnt want to create new phyla willy-nilly any time a new organism is found with unique features. His reasoning is evolutionary; he criticizes fellow taxonomists who are not thinking in the phylogenetic sense to establish where each discovery fits into the greater evolutionary tree of life. He reasons, recent phyla have got to connect somehow.
One thing is for certain: this animal was complex. Within the evolutionists own dating scheme, this animal is right at the beginning of multicellular life, and already has antennae, eyes, and propulsion. Only the cartoonish Popeye theory of evolution (05/31/2005) could believe such complex systems emerged suddenly without precursors.Can Atheism Breathe in an Anthropic Universe? 08/16/2005
Astronomers Martin Rees and Mario Livio considered Anthropic Reasoning in a Science perspectives article.1 The question bears not only on SETI, and whether intelligent life exists elsewhere, but why it exists here. They state the issue:
We can imagine universes where the constants of physics and cosmology have different values. Many such counterfactual universes would not have allowed the chain of processes that could have led to any kind of advanced life. For instance, even a universe with the same physical laws and the same values of all physical constants but onea cosmological constant lambda (the pressure of the physical vacuum) higher by more than an order of magnitudewould have expanded so fast that no galaxies could have formed. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)And thats not the only constant that appears finely tuned. They also discuss the presence of baryons (like protons and neutrons), the fact that our universe is not perfectly smooth, allowing structure to form (designated by the parameter Q), and a gravitational force that is weaker by a factor of nearly 1040 than the microphysical forces that act within atoms and moleculeswere gravity not so weak, there would not be such a large difference between the atomic and the cosmic scales of mass, length, and time.
A key challenge confronting 21st-century physics is to decide which of these dimensionless parameters such as Q and are truly fundamentalin the sense of being explicable within the framework of an ultimate, unified theoryand which are merely accidental....Anthropic reasoning investigates the nature of such biophilic domains. Some cosmologists used to assume that inflation theory put these enigmas to rest, but new ones have arisen recently. Anthropic considerations are beginning to be seriously discussed, they say, especially in relation to dark energy. This factor not only impinges on the question of whether life could arise in a universe of arbitrary constants, but why it should exist now:
The question that arises is why we happen to live in the first and probably only time in the history of the universe in which the matter density and dark energy density are roughly equal.If lambda were larger, the universe would have expanded too fast for galaxies to form. Is lambda a random variable, one that could take on any conceivable value? If so, its precision today is amazing enough, but thats not all: The situation becomes more complex when more than one physical parameter is postulated to be a random variable. Is Q also contingent, or is it dependent on the value of lambda? The more random variables there are, the luckier our presence appears.
The authors discuss two reasons why anthropic reasoning tends to raise the blood pressure of some physicists. First, proposing an ensemble of unobservable universes seems to run counter to the scientific method of observation and experimentation. It lies within metaphysics, not physics. The authors counter that the more we test our cosmological models, the more we can infer that alternate universes might exist. Second, some physicists feel that anthropic reasoning seems to point to a fundamental limitation of physics, the end of physics as it were. The authors respond that this is merely a psychological objection.
Physicists would like, above all else, to discover a uniquely self-consistent set of equations that determines all microphysical constants, and the recipe for the big bang. They therefore hope that future theories will reveal that all physical parameters are uniquely determined. But there is no reason why physical reality should be structured according to their preferences. It is good that many physicists are motivated to seek a theory that uniquely derives all fundamental numbers and constants, but they may be doomed to failure.Last, they discuss whether anthropic reasoning has any predictive power. They argue that, in principle, it does. If lambda is random, they say, there would be a an upper limit above which structure and complexity would not emerge. Assuming we inhabit a mediocre universe in the ensemble (as Copernican humility would require, they reason that we ours would be just below the upper limit. As it turns out, however, the value determined from observations of high-redshift supernovae and from the spectrum of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background is smaller than the threshold by only a factor of 5 to 10, not inconsistent with anthropic expectations.
In conclusion, they anticipate that better measurements of dark energy, and the detection of gravity waves from inflation, might eventually shed light on whether a multiverse exists and whether our laws of physics are unique. Our universe isnt the neatest and simplest, they claim. It has the rather arbitrary-seeming mix of ingredients in the parameter range that allows us to exist. Until we know for sure which type of universe or multiverse we live in, anthropic reasoning is certainly one option in the physicists arsenal.
1Mario Livio and Martin J. Rees, Perspectives: Cosmology: Anthropic Reasoning, Science, Vol 309, Issue 5737, 1022-1023, 12 August 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1111446].
This entry is offered for your amusement and amazement at the mental gymnastics atheists go through to deny the obvious: that our universe was designed for life. Rees and Livio mourn that anthropic arguments will offer the only explanation that we will ever have for some features of our universe. This is the despair of atheism. Have they not known? Have they not heard? Has it not been told them from the beginning? Isaiah has a lot to say about that, but those unwilling to look at ancient sources might instead at least be willing to listen to what secular scientists like Robert Jastrow, Donald Brownlee and Paul Davies had to say in the recent film, The Privileged Planet. The design features in our universe that make life possible were not abstruse or hidden to these secular astronomers; they were abundantly evident astonishingly so. Why should anyone run so hard from the obvious interpretation, that our universe really was designed for a purpose? It would seem that the evidence for a Creator would be a source of hope, joy and gratitude, provided one is willing to swallow his pride.Origin of Life Studies: Motion or Emotion? 08/15/2005
Harvard is going to fund origin-of-life research to the tune of a million dollars a year, according to an AP release reported by LiveScience.com, MSNBC News and the Washington Post. The goal is to reduce lifes origin to a series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention, according to Harvard chemistry professor David Liu (emphasis added in all quotes). Part of the motivation for this initiative appears to be a counterattack to recent advances by the intelligent design (ID) movement: MSNBC titled their copy, Harvard jumps into evolution debate.
Evolution is a fundamental scientific theory that species evolved over millions of years. It has been standard in most public school science texts for decades but recently re-emerged in the spotlight as communities and some states debated whether school children should also be taught about creationism or intelligent design....Pro-evolutionists like Eugenie Scott have usually tried to keep the issue of the origin of life in the background, and treat it as a separate question. ID isnt letting the issue get lost in the shadows. ID publications such as the popular film Unlocking the Mystery of Life are hoisting the issue into the limelight in order to point out the inadequacy of naturalism to account for life at its most fundamental level. This may be spurring evolutionists to accelerate their efforts to show progress at most, or to look busy at least, so as not to concede an important piece of territory to their opponents. They know that if ID persuades enough people that life required intelligence at the start for the first cell, then naturalism risks appearing inadequate or even superfluous for explaining the origin of birds, mammals, trees and all the rest by an unguided, mechanistic process of natural selection. Though ID remains agnostic about identity or nature of the intelligent cause, to permit a Designer, God or undefined intelligence at any point would undermine the credibility of naturalistic science to explain the entire history of the universe without reference to divine intervention.
One strategy is to downplay the difficulty of the problem or portray it in easy-to-visualize metaphorical language. In a recent press release, for instance, the Geological Society of America suggested that meteor impacts might have jump-started life. The evidence is strictly circumstantial: Its interesting to note, says [Gordon] Osinski [Canadian Space Agency], that on Earth the heaviest meteor bombardment of the planet happened at about the same time as life is believed to have started: around 3.8 billion years ago.
Another strategy is to claim partial success. Three confident-looking young scientists appeared in a recent press release from University of Bath, with the title announcing, Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle and point to hot soup at the origin of life. Actually, all they did was hypothesize that life began with a two-letter DNA code, and subsequently graduated to a three-letter code when a larger vocabulary of amino acids became necessary. Yet at the very time their model assumes the genetic code evolved naturally, the article points out that the genetic code possesses qualities generally characteristic of designed systems: translational integrity, robustness, optimization, and high fidelity:
The theory also explains how the structure of the genetic code maximises error tolerance. For instance, slippage in the translation process tends to produce another amino acid with the same characteristics, and explains why the DNA code is so good at maintaining its integrity.Its not likely that the opponents of evolution will be impressed by any of these three salvos, nor will retreat from pressing their case that evolutionary theory is bankrupt when accounting for the origin of life.
Not all motion is progress. It might just be emotion, commotion, or self-promotion (04/22/2005, 04/11/2005). Evolutionists are generating a lot of commotion these days trying to find lifes potion in the ocean, with unmixed devotion to the notion that natural causes can explain everything, even a Laotian. Harvard argues that science has a history of solving problems without reference to divine intervention. They think that by running faster they will get there eventually, but what if they are running in circles? They think that by investing more money they will win, but what if the investment is a stock fraud? They think that by digging faster they will find the buried treasure, but what if they have cordoned off from consideration the very spot on the island where the treasure map says it is buried?Evolution vs. ID: This Means War 08/13/2005
President Bushs mild off-the-cuff remarks about students needing to hear alternatives to evolution (see 08/02/2005) set off a firestorm of reaction pro and con in the media. Get your ringside seat here for the war of the words:
We are living in momentous times. No, not because of war, the cost of gasoline or the debate over climate change, but over the heart and soul of science. The party that rules science (i.e., knowledge) rules the world. Is this the verge of the collapse of the Age of Darwin? Or will Big Science succeed in forcing a naturalistic imprimatur on all scientific endeavor? Will Darwinism remain immune from criticism, or has the crack opened for the wedge? Will the ID challenge succeed, or will its leaders tire and retreat into oblivion because of the relentless attacks by the scientific elites? Not long ago for over a century Big Science ignored creation arguments, sloughing them off as irrelevant and irrational, merely religiously motivated pseudoscientific nonsense (not that they were, but Darwinists had amassed enough power to coast on bravado). Its power never seriously threatened, it sufficed to wave the challengers off, like pesky mosquitos, with a few memorized vituperations, which were duly broadcast by the lapdog media. No longer. The Darwin Partys champion is roused, and he is angry. IDs stone has hit its mark, but did it hit it hard enough? And will the army rally if he falls, or be satisfied to cut and run with a peace treaty?Plant Communication: How Leaf Calls Bud 08/12/2005
Plants communicate with themselves in email (07/13/2001), and the messages are being hacked by scientists. Miguel Blázquez, writing in Science,1 discussed three recent studies that help solve the problem of how a plant, without a nervous system, buds into flowers all at once. Two of the studies describe a couple of proteins that, working in concert, turn on the budding process. The third paper by Huang et al. in this weeks Science Express, he writes climactically, reports how the two factors meetFT transcript travels from leaf to shoot via the plant vascular tissue (emphasis added in all quotes). This is just one example of a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, long-distance movement of RNAs through the phloem has been well documented in plants, he writes.
Robert Roy Britt has written a popular account of this research on LiveScience.com. See also the Max Planck Society press release about a related study.
1Miguel A. Blázquez, The Right Time and Place for Making Flowers, Science, Vol 309, Issue 5737, 1024-1025 , 12 August 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1117203].
This is just too cool. Imagine plants communicating via microscopic packets of information through their vessels. You thought those tubes just carried water and nutrients from the soil. Had you any idea that, included in that oozing sap, was all kinds of coded information? Think of it: plants invented TCP/IP before man did. To Comprehend Plants / Information Processing.Dinolava Theory Back in Eruption 08/12/2005
Meteor impact or volcanic eruption? Science Now reports that the volcano theory of dinosaur extinction has rejuvenated, challenging the long popularity of the Chicxulub impact hypothesis.
Notwithstanding all the dramatic animations on science documentaries of a cataclysmic meteor wiping out the dinosaurs, the article by Carolyn Gramling states that Scientists have long wrangled over the cause of the extinctions.... A new French study of magnetic alignments of lavas in the Deccan Traps of India, some of the biggest lava fields in the world, suggests that the cataclysmic eruptions occurred over a much shorter time period than previously believed 30,000 years instead of millions short enough, they claim, to affect worldwide climate. Some of the older eruptions may have happened even more rapidly because there is no evidence of weathering between successive layers.
A Dutch proponent of the impact scenario is not convinced, however. He said we dont know enough about behavior and variability of the Earths magnetic field to make strong arguments based on magnetic alignments in rocks. Gramling says, He also questions whether any known geophysical mechanism could have spewed out so much lava in such a short time.
Readers, take note: the Science Channel and all the documentaries present their scenarios as fact, and try to make them seem so certain that all scientists agree. The dating of events, especially, is rarely if ever questioned. Here, one side is claiming that the old dates of the Deccan Traps are wrong; the other side is questioning whether we can tell anything from magnetic alignments (even though they are commonly used to convince the viewing public of the precision of dating methods). Since, in the above article, neither theory overlaps the other (see 10/01/2003 entry), each must independently make its case. Do you begin to get the idea that neither side knows what on earth they are talking about? Good. Your eyes are open.Whats On the Agenda? Kansas Votes in New Science Standards 08/11/2005
Science Now (from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science magazine) reported that Kansas voted 6-4 to adopt the new science standards yesterday that allow for the teaching of alternatives to evolutionary theory. It alleged that scientists (unspecified by name or number) say that the new draft standards are a thinly disguised attempt to slip intelligent design (ID) into the science curriculum.
The brief report admits that the standards do not mention intelligent design (ID); it only calls for students to learn about the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory. To anti-ID professor Steve Case, though, the intent is implicit: the draft is is littered with language that is routinely used by intelligent design advocates.
Case was also concerned that the change in definition of science from seeking natural explanations to using observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena opens the door to inserting supernatural explanations into science (see 05/18/2005 entry).
The report recalls that the six days of hearings in May were boycotted by scientific organizations on the grounds that the board was simply trying to confer scientific legitimacy to ID (see 04/21/2005 story). Last week, Science magazine in its Random Samples section1 mentioned that anti-ID historian Niall Shanks called this a huge mistake, a criticism that riled Steve Case. Shanks just joined the philosophy department at Wichita State, ground zero for the creationism movement, although he claims the controversy is not what he is interested in; he may extend his work from the study of biological self-organization and complexity into the philosophy of medicine.
Access Research Network posted an analysis of the new Kansas science standards. After an external review, they will go into effect this fall.
1Random Samples, Science, Volume 309, Number 5736, Issue of 05 August 2005.
The picture of Niall Shanks posted in Science makes him look like a pouting loser, but maybe that is his ordinary expression. The Darwin Storytelling Festival is coming to an end, and now scientists will have to work for a living: they will have to do science the old-fashioned way, using observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena. For loafers reclining on couches entertaining tantalizing speculations (see 12/22/2003 commentary), they will have to learn a new word: rigor. It will be like making bums work for their welfare checks.Nature Rallies Troops Against I.D. to the Defense of Science 08/10/2005
President Bushs endorsement of intelligent design has sparked a national debate in which scientists are well positioned to prevail, editorialized Nature this week,1 with the a rallying-cry title, Keeping religion out of science class. This editorial, along with a news item by Virginia Gewin, Scientists attack Bush over intelligent design,2 was prompted by President Bushs off-the-cuff remarks last week that students should be allowed to hear alternative views to evolution (see 08/02/2005 entry). Both articles reiterated common themes of those opposing the intelligent design (ID) movement: ID is not science, ID is religiously motivated, ID is creationism in disguise, all scientists reject ID and creationism, and ID is not just anti-evolution but anti-science and anti-reason. The editorial went beyond these oft-stated arguments. It challenged the scientific to rise up and fight this attack on science with the encouragement, The fight will go on but science and reason can ultimately win.
1Editorial, Keeping religion out of science class, Nature 436, 753 (11 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/436753a.
2Virginia Gewin, Scientists attack Bush over intelligent design, Nature 436, 761 (11 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/436761a.
Noticeably absent from this pep talk was any defense of Darwinism and evolutionary theory in general. Big Science and the Darwin Party seem to know that it would be a losing fight to prop up Charlies decaying corpse before the public, so they are sticking to what they feel will be a winning strategy for maintaining their power. Since science is a sacred cow in our society, they assume all the Untouchable masses will genuflect before it, even if it is just a stuffed cow. So the strategy is to portray ID promoters as beefeaters who want to slay the bovine, and to play the role of Savior of the Sacred Cow. Knowing that the masses will rally to a fight, even if they dont understand the cause of it, they portray their mission in terms of holy war: we must protect the Sacred Cow from those evil beefeaters.What Do You Get When You Cross a Lion with a Tiger? 08/10/2005
A liger, thats what. No kidding: you get a big cat with a mane and faint stripes that likes to play in the water. National Geographic News has a special article, with photos, about ligers.
This is offered without much comment, just for those who want to learn about something unusual in the animal kingdom, and what it means about species, taxonomy, genetics, etc. A mule is another example of this kind of thing.Planetary Wanderings 08/09/2005
Here are news briefs that are out of this world:
1R. A. West et al., No oceans on Titan from the absence of a near-infrared specular reflection, Nature 436, 670-672 (4 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03824.
2Richard A. Kerr, Cassini Catches Mysterious Hot Spot on Icy-Cold Enceladus, Science, Vol 309, Issue 5736, 859-860, 5 August 2005,[DOI: 10.1126/science.309.5736.859a].
3Amos Banin, The Enigma of the Martian Soil, Science, Vol 309, Issue 5736, 888-890, 5 August 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1112794].
The Enceladus-Mimas dichotomy may force scientists to re-examine assumptions about cratering rates. If impactors flying around the solar system do not pummel nearby objects equally, then either some moons are able to cover the craters, or the impactors are not randomly distributed. Cratering rates are commonly assumed in determining ages of surfaces. If you cannot constrain the density and frequency of impactors, and if the weathering processes are not well known, then crater-count dating is an exercise in guesswork.Biblical Archaeology News 08/09/2005
One point where theology and science intersect is in the field of archaeology. Here are a few recent stories that bear on historical claims in the Bible.
Each new artifact or structure uncovered in the lands of the Bible brings excitement, but why any more than the greatest, most detailed inscription of all, the Bible itself?Editorial: Faith-Based Evolutionism 08/09/2005
Dr. Roy Spencer (Principal Research Scientist, U of Alabama) on Tech Central Station wrote his view about the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design controversy. He claims that evolutionism in the sense of common ancestry of all living things has no observational support and is just as religious as creationism. He defends intelligent design, which he claims he embraced on the scientific evidence alone, as a constitutionally protected and an intellectually more satisfying approach that will not impede scientific progress, whereas queries into the evolutionary origins of things only tease intellectual curiosity and tend to perpetuate the same beliefs. Demonstrating that evolutionism is a faith, he turns the Constitutions Establishment Clause back on the Darwinists, and denies that theistic evolution is an acceptable compromise. No one would disagree with his ending expression of appreciation for the freedom that we have in a free society to discuss, and study, such issues.
This is a short, cogent, reasoned, non-threatening, thoughtful, complete statement that is well worth reading. Writers should take note at this good example of making a compelling case in an article that would fit on one sheet of paper.History Channel Documentary on Human Ancestry: History or Fiction? 08/09/2005
The History Channel aired a program called Ape to Man Monday evening August 7, alleging that modern science had finally pieced together the solution to the puzzle of human evolution. Although it included debunking episodes of Piltdown (11/18/2003) and Java Man (02/27/2003), the flavor of the show was that the picture of human origins has become clear because we now know (02/15/2002) that tool use and not brain size (12/30/2004, 11/05/2002, 07/04/2002) is the key to understanding what makes us human, and we know (11/05/2003, 10/20/2003, 03/07/2002, 02/15/2002) that humans emerged from Africa and not Europe (as the proud Europeans had wanted to believe, making them gullible for the Piltdown hoax). An animation, often repeated, showed a long string of transitional forms over millions of years in a lineup that the animation camera swept over in rapid succession, giving the impression of linear and slow gradual change over hundred thousands of generations. Another episode portrayed clumsy, imbecilic Neanderthalers (02/25/2005) sneaking up to a wildfire to learn the secret of the mysterious flames.
Ape to Man was rebroadcast on Thursday evening Aug. 11. The History Channel advertising poster mocked the Michelangelo fresco The Creation of Man by showing the hand of God pointing to a hairy half-ape arm. Below it, a timeline purports to show 5 million years of human evolution. Brad Harrub at Apologetics Press, co-author of The Truth About Human Origins, was quick to post a rebuttal listing the inaccuracies and falsehoods in the show.
Brief glimpses at this program by your faithful editor led to the perception that the writers of Ape to Man were either liars (11/19/2004), clueless (12/21/2004, 05/24/2004, 03/25/2004) or had not done their required reading assignment on Creation-Evolution Headlines (12/30/2004, 09/23/2004, 07/23/2004, 06/11/2003, 03/28/2003). The animated ape-to-man lineup, for instance, is contrary to what even the evolutionists believe (02/16/2005). They admit that the human family tree was not a Victorian picture of orthogenesis, leading in a single line from ape to man, but was a complex, branching bush of mosaics of features that are difficult to classify. Understanding this background, Ape to Man appears as unvarnished bluffing, tarnishing the credibility of the History Channel (usually one of the few watchable cable networks). Harrub will tell you everything else you need to know about this travesty of casuistry, this mockumentary that does little more than deceive the public while providing job security for fully-human but depraved actors (03/19/2003) who like to wear makeup and hair (06/10/2003) instead of clothes. Dont show it to impressionable adults. They might not be as bright as Brother Neanderthal (see 10/01/2004, 05/19/2005, 03/27/2003).Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week 08/06/2005
In a CNN Presents program August 6 about astrobiology and SETI called, Is Anyone Out There?, Miles OBrien one-upped Carl Sagan with this gem: We are made of starstuff. Mix and blend for 15 billion years, and out pops us an intelligent, sentient soufflé.
Have any of you baked a soufflé that was sentient? Tell us how you communicated with it. Has anyone called you a soufflé before? Describe your feelings. What would you do to someone who called you a soufflé? Hint: consider some angles on the definition of soufflé: a dish that is made primarily from beaten egg whites and yolks and baked until puffed up.Body Scan: How Precision Engineering Aids Human Acumen 08/05/2005
Often the most interesting science stories are the ones about us how our bodies and minds function. Actions we perform each day without much thought are made possible by precision engineering, sometimes at the molecular level. Here is a selection of news briefs about human superpowers.
A body is a terrible thing to waste (speaking of waist, there can be too much of a good thing). Whether your body is fully functional or afflicted with a malady or two, you have a marvelous set of capabilities, and a dignity underscored by the complexity of the engineering that went into your making. Even if you are completely disabled, there is more complex engineering working properly under the skin than you could possibly realize. Fill in the box you were given. Exercise, eat right, practice. Maintain your machinery in optimum working order. Aim your body at something noble and worthwhile. You have a huge support infrastructure, with a staff of trillions behind the scenes, hoping you will make the right choices.Origin of Life: Can A Liability Be Turned Into an Asset? 08/05/2005
Most of us know the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2TD) as the law of decay and disorder, and would tend to assume it would constitute a major obstacle to theories of the origin of life by chemical evolution (see online book); certainly creationists Duane Gish and Henry Morris frequently employed the 2TD skilfully in their debates with evolutionists. Surprisingly, Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan (Carl Sagans son by his first wife, the Gaia theorist Lynn Margulis) praised the 2TD as a life-giving principle in their new book, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life. Cool is not enough remarked J. Doyne Farmer (Santa Fe Institute) in his review of the book in Nature.1 Unimpressed with the concept, he smirked, Theres more to life than the second law of thermodynamics.
How could Schneider and Dorian Sagan turn a liability like 2TD into an asset? Farmer gives their thesis a two-paragraph synopsis:
The authors central thesis is that the broad principle needed to understand self-organization is already implicit in the second law of thermodynamics, and so has been right under our noses for a century and a half. Although the second law is a statement about increasing disorder, they argue that recent generalizations in non-equilibrium thermodynamics make it clear that it also plays a central role in creating order. The catchphrase they use to summarize this idea is nature abhors a gradient. Being out of equilibrium automatically implies a gradient in the flow of energy from free energy to heat. For example, an organism takes in food, which provides the free energy needed to do work to perform its activities, maintain its form and reproduce. The conversion of free energy to entropy goes hand in hand with the maintenance of organization in living systems.Interesting, Farmer mumbles, but uh-uh. This is an intriguing idea but I am not convinced that it makes sense. He proceeds to criticize their vagueness of the selection process or why things should tend to increase in complexity. Yes, the 2TD is important for understanding the operation of complex systems, but the authors claim that non-equilibrium thermodynamics explains just about everything falls flat, he contends. For example, consider a computer. A computer has a power supply, but the need for power tells us nothing about what makes a laptop different from a washing machine. At this point, things get interesting. Farmer starts arguing intelligent design; is this J. Doyne Farmer speaking, or Stephen Meyer?
To understand how a computer works, and what it can and cannot do, requires the theory of computation, which is a logical theory that is disconnected from thermodynamics. The power supply can be designed by the same person who designs them for washing machines.With this, Farmer left the origin of life as an unsolved problem. Understanding the logical and physical principles that provide sufficient conditions for life is a fascinating and difficult problem that should keep scientists busy for at least a millennium, he wrote. Thermodynamics is just one of many actors in the play, and not even the principal one; The others remain unknown.
1J. Doyne Farmer, Cool is not enough, Nature 436, 627-628 (4 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/436627a.
Theyre not unknown; theyre right in your hotel room drawer. This review was interesting because Farmer invoked arguments similar to those used by creationists and intelligent design theorists. Since it is highly doubtful that Farmers review was religiously motivated, this supports the contention that arguments against chemical evolution arise from the facts, not the motivation.President Bush Votes Yes on ID 08/02/2005
Asked whether ID was a valid alternative to evolution, President Bush told reporters August 1, Both sides ought to be properly taught ... so people can understand what the debate is about.... Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. Youre asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes. According to Answers in Genesis, Bushs science advisor John Marburger tried to soften this statement by claiming that evolution is the cornerstone of biology. Regardless, the Discovery Institute commended the president for his stance. See Fox News for the context of the remarks. Science magazine took note, quoting the director of the Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas, who said that if Bush wanted to promote ID as an alternative to evolution, that would be a terrible mistake. On the other side, David Limbaugh, in an editorial on TownHall.com, thought the anti-ID folks were making the mistake. The remarks caused enough notice to make the cover of Time Magazine.
Update 08/04/2005: On Breakpoint August 4, Chuck Colson also praised President Bush for his position, then added some interesting new information about the former atheist Antony Flew (see 12/09/2004 story). Colson met Flew in Oxford last week and verified that ID had shaken Flews evolutionary beliefs. Then, Colson posed a follow-up question that made Flew admit it was a provocative point worthy of thought: He [Flew] could prove theism was the only philosophically sustainable position, but he could not prove who God was. I said, If you could prove who God was, you could not love Godwhich is the principle object of life. Whether further reflection on that question will move Flew from atheist to deist to Biblical theist is a story in progress.
Predictably, the usual heathen (NCSE, ACLU, AUSCS, etc.) beat their voodoo drums over the presidents remarks. Who will heed the call, and send missionaries to these tribes, lost in darkness and ignorance? We want to hear Antony Flew respond, Here am I: send me.


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Great news – I found my sketchbook! It is too late to send it in for the Sketchbook Project this year, but at least it was found!
I came across these interactive sketchnotes and doodles by Gerren Lamson from the SXSW panels that he attended this year and really enjoyed scrolling through them! You can see all of them on his blog.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
DiscoverCircuits.com, has 40,000+ electronic circuits, cross-referenced
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We make every effort to link to original material posted by the designer.
Please let us if you would like us to link to or post your design.
Charger Circuits
Battery Charges
Lead Acid
Last Updated on:
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1.3V Power Supply - This is a replacement power source for 1. 3V mercury cells or other small batteries. It has
many uses and I use this circuit in my computer to power a front panel multi adapter which has a digital
thermometer. . . [Andy Collinson's design]
12 Volt Gel Cell Charger - Recently, a fellow amateur was looking for a gel cell charger which would first charge at a
fixed rate and then later switch to a trickle charge when the cell was fully charged. After reviewing several
catalogs and web sites, the MAX712 IC was discovered. This IC meets all the requirements for almost any type of
battery charging system. The circuit in Figure 1 was designed specifically for 12 volt gel cells. . . [Radio
Amateur Society of Norwich]
12V input 12V battery charger
- Well suited for charging gelled batteries from a car,
with the engine running or stopped. . . . [Manfred Mornhinweg]
12V, 4-AA Cell Differential Temperature
Charger - This project makes a number of improvements over
my Temperature Controlled NICD Charger circuit. The new circuit runs on 12VDC, allowing it to be used in a car or
from a 12V solar power system. Additionally, a current sensor LED verifies that the cells are receiving charging
current. Note that the current sensor circuitry. . . [G. Forrest Cook]
2-12v Battery Isolator Circuit
with a LTC4412 - has just announced a neat little
chip (LTC4412) . It has been designed to be used in conjunction with an external P-channel power FET, to form an
ideal diode function with a very low 0. 05v voltage drop. The chip monitors the voltage on eit . . . [Hobby
Circuit designed by David A. Johnson P.E., 08/07/08]
3.3V lithium-cell supply requires one inductor - 08/05/99 EDN Design Idea Because ofgrowing popularity of lithium-ion (Li-ion]batteries and
3. 3V power supplies, portable-equipment designers must often create a 3. 3V supply that a single Li-ion cell can
power. . . [by Matt Schindler and Jay Scolio, Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA]
5v Solar Charger - This project uses the 1. 2v
rechargeable battery and solar panel from a Solar Garden Light. These lights can be bought for less than $5. 00
in most $2. 00 shops or similar shops that sell general household items. . . . [email Colin Mitchell: talking AT
Cell Lithium Ion Battery Charger Version 2 - Jim
Wilber looked at my design for a battery charger and sent me some suggested changes. He suggested using the
LTC4412 ideal diode IC to switch off the current path from the solar cell to the battery in darkness. He also
noted that the 2. 5v regulator from Seiko I had selected was no longer in production and suggested using the
shunt reference . . . [Circuit by David A. Johnson P.E., 05/21/13]
A Solar Cell Battery
Charger - A Simple Regulator for Charging Lead Acid
Batteries from a Solar Cell. . . . [G.L. Chemelec, designer]
A Solar or Wind Charger/Dump
Circuit - Solid State design, No Relays. This is just a
Preliminary design. . . . [G.L. Chemelec, designer]
Amplified Zener - A 13 volt Zener diode will work well for charging a 12 volt battery on Standby use. Or use a
14 volt zener a diode for a Standard 14. 6 volt charge. . . . [G.L. Chemelec]
Another Battery Charger for small
battery's or battery Packs - This Trickle Charger is Both
Current and Voltage Regulated for Sealed Lead Acid or NiMh types. It uses a Wall Adapter as the main Power Source
and Can charge a 6 or 12 Volt ones. . . . [G.L. Chemelec, designer]
Atmel Solar Panel Battery
Charger - Batwatch is a simple monitor for a solar panel
battery charger, using an Atmel ATtiny13V. It periodically measures the charge current and battery voltage, and
shows them by blinking two LEDs. I built this circuit into the plug of a VW solar charger panel that is used to
prevent a discharge of the battery when a car is not used for some time. A modern car contains a large amount of
electronics, and a quiescent current of 40-50mA (about 1Ah per day!) is considered "normal". . . .
Auto Batteries Charger - Schematic only, no circuit description]. . . [by IQ Technologies Industry, unless otherwise
noted online]
Automatic 12V Lead-Acid Battery Charger - schematic only,
no circuit description at this time. . . [Designed by Andrew R. Morris]
Automatic Trickle Charger - Scroll down to find this circuit. Here is the schematic for the automatic charger I have
been using for my kids' battery cars. The charger is a small molded unit that probably doesn't supply more than
an Amp and this circuit would have trouble with much more. No current limit is provided by this circuit. . .
[Charles Wenzel (unless otherwise noted)]
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Interactive Computer Technology, ICT
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ICT is a computer consulting and contracting business operated by Don Wright, in association with other skilled individuals and companies. ICT specializes in RTE-based application software consulting, contracting, and support, including HP 1000 system hardware and software upgrades:
Consulting and Contracting
The HP 1000 computer has been around since 1966, with many improvements in both hardware and the RTE operating system and utilities up until November, 2000. Although it is a real-time computer, it has been used for a wide variety of applications. Hewlett Packard sold the HP 1000 hardware and software until 2000, and supported it until 2005. ICT still supports the HP1000, both hardware and software. Disk problems? Other problems? We can fix 'em!
The HP 1000 is no longer the computer of choice for most new applications. However its reliability, guaranteed long life, and excellent forms-mode capability provide a strong incentive to upgrade some existing applications to the most modern HP 1000 CPUs, peripherals, and operating system so that those applications can run for another 10 years or more.
ICT can assist aerospace and military users of HP 1000 computers who may need security upgrades to their RTE-A systems to remain in compliance with changing government regulations.
For more information about HP 1000 consulting and contracting, call 651/770-3728.
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CONNECT is a file-transfer and virtual-terminal package allowing the HP 1000 running most versions of RTE to connect to and exchange files with almost any other multiuser computer, including other HP 1000's.
SYLOG is a system-integrity monitoring package which can log all RTE-A system-console messages to a file, send alarm messages to another terminal, automatically delete inactive sessions, and more.
For more information about CONNECT or SYLOG, call 651/770-3728 or send an e-mail.
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