A page for randomness

Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.

Unlike most humans, however, individual animals generally cannot be classified as gay or straight: an animal that engages in a same-sex flirtation or partnership does not necessarily shun heterosexual encounters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homosexual tendencies that are a regular part of their society. That is, there are probably no strictly gay critters, just bisexual ones. “Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex,” says sociologist Eric Anderson of the University of Bath in England.

Nevertheless, the study of homosexual activity in diverse species may elucidate the evolutionary origins of such behavior. Researchers are now revealing, for example, that animals may engage in same-sex couplings to diffuse social tensions, to better protect their young or to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable—or simply because it is fun. These observations suggest to some that bisexuality is a natural state among animals, perhaps Homo sapiens included, despite the sexual-orientation boundaries most people take for granted. “[In humans] the categories of gay and straight are socially constructed,” Anderson says.

Read more: Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom: Scientific American

The twin STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 into Earth’s orbit about the sun to obtain stereo pictures of the sun’s surface and to measure magnetic fields and ion fluxes associated with solar explosions.

Between June and October 2007, however, the suprathermal electron sensor in the IMPACT (In-situ Measurements of Particles and CME Transients) suite of instruments on board each STEREO spacecraft detected neutral atoms originating from the same spot in the sky: the shock front and the heliosheath beyond, where the sun plunges through the interstellar medium.

“The suprathermal electron sensors were designed to detect charged electrons, which fluctuate in intensity depending on the magnetic field,” said lead author Linghua Wang, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics. “We were surprised that these particle intensities didn’t depend on the magnetic field, which meant they must be neutral atoms.”

Read more: First images of solar system’s invisible frontier | Eureka! Science News

The Linnaean Society of London listens to the reading of a composite paper on how natural selection accounts for the evolution and variety of species. The authors are Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Modern biology is born.

Scientists of the time knew that evolution occurred. The fossil record showed evidence of life forms that no longer existed. The question was, how did it occur?

Read more: 150th Anniversary of Theory of Evolution

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Read more: Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol - Times Online

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

Profound change

Mostly, the patterns Lenski saw were similar in each separate population. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

“It’s the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it’s outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting,” says Lenski.
Rare mutation?

By this time, Lenski calculated, enough bacterial cells had lived and died that all simple mutations must already have occurred several times over.

That meant the “citrate-plus” trait must have been something special – either it was a single mutation of an unusually improbable sort, a rare chromosome inversion, say, or else gaining the ability to use citrate required the accumulation of several mutations in sequence.

To find out which, Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution “replay” again.

Would the same population evolve Cit again, he wondered, or would any of the 12 be equally likely to hit the jackpot?

Evidence of evolution

The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”

Source: Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It’s nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.

And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.

Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.

Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.

Read more: Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered | LiveScience

One in eight U.S. high school biology teachers presents creationism or intelligent design in a positive light in the classroom, a new survey shows, despite a federal court’s recent ban against it.

And a quarter of the nation’s high school biology teachers say they devoted at least one or two classroom hours to the topics, with about half presenting it favorably and half presenting it as an invalid alternative.

Those results are part of a nationally representative, random sample of 939 teachers who filled out surveys between March 5, 2007, and May 1, 2007 on questions concerning the teaching of evolution. The figures have a 3 percent margin of error.

The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, also revealed that between 12 percent and 16 percent of the nation’s biology teachers are creationists, and about one in six of them have a “young Earth” orientation, which means they believe that human beings were created by God in their present form within the past 10,000 years.

Scientists, on the other hand, agree that humans evolved from a common primate ancestor in a process that stretches back tens of millions of years. The theory of evolution on which this is based is one of the most well-supported theories in science.

Read more: Creationism Creeps into U.S. Classrooms | LiveScience

It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.

Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.

Columbia’s fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.

The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.

Source: Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster

Science does not reject religious or “design-based” explanations because of dogmatic atheism.
Expelled frequently repeats that design-based explanations (not to mention religious ones) are “forbidden” by “big science.” It never explains why, however. Evolution and the rest of “big science” are just described as having an atheistic preference.

Actually, science avoids design explanations for natural phenomena out of logical necessity. The scientific method involves rigorously observing and experimenting on the material world. It accepts as evidence only what can be measured or otherwise empirically validated (a requirement called methodological naturalism). That requirement prevents scientific theories from becoming untestable and overcomplicated.

By those standards, design-based explanations rapidly lose their rigor without independent scientific proof that validates and defines the nature of the designer. Without it, design-based explanations rapidly become unhelpful and tautological: “This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer because this looks designed.”

A major scientific problem with proposed ID explanations for life is that their proponents cannot suggest any good way to disprove them. ID “theories” are so vague that even if specific explanations are disproved, believers can simply search for new signs of design. Consequently, investigators do not generally consider ID to be a productive or useful approach to science.

Read more: Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…: Scientific American

Premise Media is a film production company based in British Columbia, Canada. According to its website, Premise Media “develops, finances, and produces independent films, books, and DVD’s [sic] for the domestic and international marketplace.” Its motto is “Producing world class media that stirs the heart and inspires the minds to truth, purpose, and hope.”

Premise Media’s top management consists of two men. A. Logan Craft is Chairman of the Board of Directors and an Episcopal minister from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also produced a television show called “Church and State TV.” Walt Ruloff is Premise Media’s CEO. Prior to joining Premise Media, Ruloff was a salesman and entrepreneur who founded the software company ILTS in 1991, later selling it to Microsoft. Craft and Ruloff also appear to be the source of much of the funding for Premise Media and for Expelled.

Additional staff listed on Premise Media’s website included several that are associated with Rampant Films, including Mark Mathis. Also of interest is Paul Lauer, who is listed as the “Grassroots Marketing Director.” Lauer is the founder of Motive Marketing, an entertainment marketing firm that specializes in promoting entertainment geared towards the faith and family markets. Motive Marketing was behind such grassroots marketing campaigns as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and Walden Media/Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Lauer himself is described on the Motive Marketing website as “one of the most well connected entrepreneurs in the faith and family market.”

The connections between Premise Media and Motive Marketing, as well as the strong religious background of Craft, all point to a religiously motivated film. It is not surprising, then, to find that Expelled is not an unbiased documentary, but rather a movie with a clear religious agenda: to attack mainstream science, falsely presenting it as being anti-religious.

Of course, Premise Media has a free speech right to promote its views, religious or otherwise, and nobody is objecting to its exercise of that right. But its critics have a right to correct the record. And part of that record is the attempt to pass off to the public as a “documentary” a film that is clear propaganda.

Source: Expelled Exposed » What is Premise Media?

John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. He was 96.
Skip to next paragraph

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston.

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

Read more: John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96 - New York Times

NASA is serious, very serious, about launching the most difficult mission ever attempted by the human race - putting an astronaut on Mars. The voyage will cover hundreds of millions of miles and take two-and-a-half years roundtrip. It sounds like science fiction.

To make it scientific fact, the United States needs to first flex its deep space muscles again on familiar terrain - the moon.

It’s been nearly 40 years since Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind and almost as long since the American public was truly captivated by the space program. You may not know it, but as 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon reports, the journey to send humans back to the moon and beyond has already begun.

From the mountains of Utah to the factory floors of Cleveland, from the space center in Houston to the marshes of Virginia, spacesuits are being tested, rockets are being fired, and capsules are being designed. The United States is once again aiming to launch astronauts to the moon and yes, even, to Mars.

“What’s impossible? What can’t we do if we wanna do it badly enough?” says Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon. He calls his trip on Apollo 17 a visit to God’s front porch. He says anything seemed achievable in those days.

“When I came back from the moon in ’72, [I] stood on my soapbox and said, ‘We’re not only going back to the moon, we’re gonna be on our way to Mars by the turn of the century.’ I believed it with my whole heart. But my glass has been half empty for the last 30 years. Now, it’s half full.”

Read more: The Next Giant Leap For Mankind, 60 Minutes Reports On NASA’s Plans To Return Men To The Moon In Preparation For A Manned Flight To Mars - CBS News

An apparently scientific argument is said to be not even wrong if it is based on assumptions that are known to be incorrect, or alternatively theories which cannot possibly be falsified or used to predict anything. The phrase was coined by the early quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his colourful objections to incorrect or sloppy thinking. Peierls (1960) writes of Pauli, “… a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘That’s not right. It’s not even wrong’”.

Statements that are not even wrong may be well-formed but not refer to anything physical (as in “Souls are immortal”, because the noun “soul” is not well-defined in terms of experimental results), or may be mere word salad that appears to be devoid of meaning (as in some of the Time Cube writings).

The phrase “not even wrong” is often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It is considered mildly derogatory.

The phrase has also come to mean science that is well-meaning and based on the current scientific knowledge, but that cannot be used for prediction and cannot be falsified. Such theories are non-scientific, even when they are speaking in scientific language. The phrase has been applied to aspects of the super string theory of physics on the grounds that, although elegant mathematically, it does not provide predictions or tests.

Source: Not even wrong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For a long time, I have been disquieted by the fact that many people want to give patently ridiculous ideas as much standing as reality. One problem with this is that once you open the door to fantasy, any and all flavors of it can walk on through, as in the example above. But it also elevates fantasy to the same level as reality, and that is simply wrong.

I taught a few classes back when I was a grad student. If someone had answered a question on a test saying the Earth was 6000 years old, I would have marked it as incorrect. That’s because — and sit down for this breaking news — that answer is wrong. The student could complain, they could take it to the dean, the president, the Supreme Court for all I care — I wouldn’t have backed down. Wrong is wrong.

I don’t care what your religious belief is, there are some things that are simple facts. An object with mass has gravity. A lump of lithium dropped into water will create heat and hydrogen gas. An accelerating charged particle will emit radiation. These are facts. It doesn’t matter what you believe: reality is that which, when you go to sleep, doesn’t go away.

What I find most ironic about this legislation — and there is a rich, rich field of irony to choose from — is that it was passed by conservatives, people who no doubt would rail against political correctness and relativism (for example, the bill’s primary author, Sally Kern, has spoken clearly about her being against “the gay lifestyle” — she even compares being gay to cancer), yet this is exactly what this legislation is all about. The problem here is that they are trying to legislate relativistic reality. And that’s simply wrong.

Read more: Bad Astronomy Blog » Oklahoma: One Step from Doom

A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

Astronomers at the University of Sydney, in Australia, first discovered the unusual and beguilingly beautiful star system eight years ago in the Constellation Sagittarius. One member of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, thought to be the final stage of stellar evolution to precede a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

“When it finally explodes as a supernova, it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way”, said Peter Tuthill, lead researcher of the team who report their findings in the current Astrophysical Journal.

Read more: Binary ‘deathstar’ has Earth in its sights | COSMOS magazine

Science is not simply a database of knowledge. It’s a method, a way of finding this knowledge. Observe, hypothesize, predict, observe, revise. Science is provisional; it’s always open to improvement. Science is even subject to itself. If the method itself didn’t work, we’d see it. Our computers wouldn’t work (OK, bad example), our space probes wouldn’t get off the ground, our electronics wouldn’t work, our medicine wouldn’t work. Yet, all these things do in fact function, spectacularly well. Science is a check on itself, which is why it is such an astonishingly powerful way of understanding reality.

And that right there is where science and religion part ways. Science is not based on faith. Science is based on evidence. We have evidence it works, vast amounts of it, billions of individual pieces that fit together into a tapestry of reality. That is the critical difference. Faith, as it is interpreted by most religions, is not evidence-based, and is generally held tightly even despite evidence against it. In many cases, faith is even reinforced when evidence is found contrary to it.

To say that we have to take science on faith is such a gross misunderstanding of how science works that it can only be uttered by someone who is wholly ignorant of how reality works.

Read more: Bad Astronomy Blog » Is science faith-based?

fgets - C++ Reference
char * fgets ( char * str, int num, FILE * stream );

<cstdio>

Get string from stream

Reads characters from stream and stores them as a C string into str until (num-1) characters have been read or either a newline or a the End-of-File is reached, whichever comes first.
A newline character makes fgets stop reading, but it is considered a valid character and therefore it is included in the string copied to str.
A null character is automatically appended in str after the characters read to signal the end of the C string.

Parameters

str
Pointer to an array of chars where the string read is stored.
num
Maximum number of characters to be read (including the final null-character). Usually, the length of the array passed as str is used.
stream
Pointer to a FILE object that identifies the stream where characters are read from.
To read from the standard input, stdin can be used for this parameter.

Return Value
On success, the function returns the same str parameter.
If the End-of-File is encountered and no characters have been read, the contents of str remain unchanged and a null pointer is returned.
If an error occurs, a null pointer is returned.
Use either ferror or feof to check whether an error happened or the End-of-File was reached.

US ‘doomed’ if creationist president elected: scientists

A day after ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee finished first in the opening round to choose a Republican candidate for the White House, scientists warned Americans against electing a leader who doubts evolution.

“The logic that convinces us that evolution is a fact is the same logic we use to say smoking is hazardous to your health or we have serious energy policy issues because of global warming,” University of Michigan professor Gilbert Omenn told reporters at the launch of a book on evolution by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

“I would worry that a president who didn’t believe in the evolution arguments wouldn’t believe in those other arguments either. This is a way of leading our country to ruin,” added Omenn, who was part of a panel of experts at the launch of “Science, Evolution and Creationism.”

Former Arkansas governor Huckabee said in a debate in May that he did not believe in evolution.

A poll conducted last year showed that two-thirds of Americans believe in creationism, or the theory that God created humans at a single point in time, while 53 percent believe that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life — the theory of evolution.

Around a quarter of Americans said they believe in both.

The evolution versus creationism debate has crept into school classrooms and politics, where it is mainly conservative Republicans who espouse the non-scientific belief.

“If our country starts to behave irrationally whereas all the other countries coming up and chasing us (to take over as the world leaders in science and technology) behaving rationally, we are doomed,” Omenn said.

The book targets teachers and the general public, and presents in simple terms the current scientific understanding of evolution and the importance of teaching it in the science classroom.

A day after his win in Iowa, Huckabee, toned down his anti-evolution stance, saying in a television interview that the question of whether to teach creationism in schools was “not an issue for our president.”

Omenn and the other scientists and teachers on the panel at the book launch were more categorical, saying creationism has no place in science classrooms.

“Scientific inquiry is not about accepting on faith a statement or scriptural passage. It’s about exploring nature, so there really is not any place in the science classroom for creationism or intelligent design creationism,” said Omenn.

“We don’t teach astrology as an alternative to astronomy, or witchcraft as an alternative to medicine,” said Francisco Ayala, a professor of biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

“We must understand the difference between what is and is not science. We must not teach creationism as an alternative to evolution,” he said.

X-Rays Expose Evolution’s Secrets
Paleontologists have created detailed three-dimensional images of evolution’s first multicellular creatures in their embryonic stages, some so detailed that they reveal more about the development of long-extinct creatures than scientists know about their modern counterparts.

A team of Chinese, Swedish, Swiss and British scientists repeatedly scanned tiny balls of fossilized cells with powerful X-rays and then used a computer to assemble the views into microscopic CT scans.

Some of the embryos exhibit hitherto unknown mechanisms of embryonic development that have since gone extinct. Others have combinations of traits that put them near the lowest branches of the animal kingdom’s evolutionary tree.

“The results are truly orgasmic,” said Philip C. Donoghue, a paleontologist at Bristol University in England who led the team that created the images.

The pictures appear in Thursday’s issue of the British journal Nature.

Paleontologists have been using acid to dissolve the embryo fossils out of rocks for about a decade, focusing on specimens from the time about 500 million years ago when multicellular animals began to proliferate. Tons of rock must be dissolved to retrieve a few hundred embryos, none of which are more than a fraction of a millimeter across.

Until now, Donoghue said, the specimens have mostly been treated as “curios of fossilization.”

Using the new technique, he and his colleagues have been able to create cutaways, cross-sections and, by stringing together images of embryos at different stages of development, virtual time-lapse sequences of the animals’ metamorphosis.

The Drake Equation
Estimate the possible number of communicating civilizations within our galaxy

The Size Of Our World

Graphical representations of the size of Earth against other astronomical bodies.

SkepticReport * Those Naughty Vestigial Bits and Other Bad Engineering
by Bob Riggins

Human Embryos

…especially very small ones, actually have tails and gill slits. So do all mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, and fish embryos. One would almost think they are related somehow. Thank goodness for modern Creation Science, which has taught us how to ignore, deny, or find some rationalization (anything at all will do) to explain away this and all other evidence of evolution. (Yes, Ernst Haeckel fudged his diagrams of embryos to emphasize the similarities among the youngest ones. But he didn’t make up the tails and gill slits. They’re there. Look closely at some of your favorite fetus photos. Quit writing me about this until you’ve done your homework.)

Unusual Babies

…with such birth anomalies as being born with a tail, or covered with fur. Tails (abnormally extended coccyges ) are more common than most people realize, since they are, of course, surgically removed immediately, and often the child himself is never told. For furry people, refer to the famous Mexican family, several of whom are circus performers.

These would, of course, be some of the “throwbacks” which creationists assert must, of course, occur if evolution is real. But since evolution is, of course, not true, the good creationist, upon being presented the very evidence he demanded, will, of course, not be fazed in the slightest.

Of course.

A small footnote: back in the good old days, when everyone was a literal-creationist, and religion was science (known as the Dark Ages, with good cause), such babies were identified as the spawn of Satan, and killed instantly, along with their mothers, who were, naturally, witches.

Their Own Coccyges

…when examined closely via X-rays or a prepared skeleton, look disturbingly like the vestigial remnants of tails . They certainly serve no purpose nowadays (or very little–the few muscular attachments they still have could easily be re-engineered onto a less vulnerable structure), and if you’ve ever broken yours, you’ve probably wondered why we were Created with such a useless source of potential agony. (Besides, coccyx sounds downright obscene.)

Their Appendixes

Same problem as the coccyx , only it’s even more likely to cause the average creationist great discomfort, and occasionally death. The scientifically literate, when cursed with appendicitis, might bewail the incomplete evolution that has left him with a useless and sometimes dangerous abdominal organ. Perhaps the creationist praises his Creator for blessing him with a “cross to bear.” (Part of the Improving the Gene Pool Project: If you’re a young-Earth creationist, the next time you have an attack of acute appendicitis, or better yet a ruptured appendix, rush with it to the nearest Peter Popoff Healing Crusade. Stay away from those modern “doctors,” who actually think we’re mammals ! And for those folks who have heard that the appendix may serve some role in endocrine or immune functions, in the words of Carl Drews, “Something that explodes and kills people is definitely a mixed blessing, even if it does help somewhat with immune functions.” Folks whose “god-given” appendixes have been removed don’t seem to suffer from their absence, and I’ve never met one who wished he had it back.)

The Cause of Cancer

And who wouldn’t hate that? But I don’t mean the carcinogens that set it off, like tobacco tars, asbestos, or solar ultraviolet; I mean the root cause that makes it possible for things like those to start cancers growing. And that cause turns out to be evolution in action! A cancer starts when a carcinogen, or sometimes just a random accident, causes a mutation in a gene of one cell. That mutation “switches on” genes that are normally “off,” and makes the cell start reproducing wildly, as though it were an embryonic cell, and not a dedicated part of an adult body. A mutation is one unit of evolution. In this case it is harmful, but the ability to mutate is so valuable to DNA–it lets it adapt to new conditions–that that mutability cannot be given up, even if it sometimes produces fatal cancer. It is perhaps significant (it makes evolutionary sense) that cancers in people are very rare until after their peak reproductive years.

The Hair on the Backs of Their Necks

…which stands up at the very thought that their children might actually be exposed to an evil-lutionist at school. When they stop to think why the hair on the backs of their necks should stand up, at that or any terrifying situation, the only explanation that makes sense is that it’s a vestigial reaction inherited from our mammal ancestors. Other mammals’ hair rises in response to “hair-raising experiences” as a defense. It’s a warning sign of aggression, and may make the animal look bigger and fiercer. We’ve apparently given up that signal, maybe in favor of words or other body language. About the only trace left is that creepy feeling about nape of the neck and scalp, which is almost impossible for others to see.
(suggested by Ron Tolle)

Goosebumps

(the bumps, not the books [although many creationists hate those "occult" books, too]) Goosebumps were obviously “created” to erect and “fluff up” the hair or fur on a hairy or furry mammal ancestor, thereby improving its insulation value against the cold. Since most of us nowadays have so little body hair as to render it useless for insulation purposes, goosebumps are another vestigial reaction whose tool (fur) is no longer with us.

A creationary epiphany! : since God wouldn’t create a useless bodily function, goosebumps were originally useful! Adam and Eve had FUR! (For folks who have stockpiled food and weaponry in anticipation of the Coming Race War, an epiphany is a sudden realization of a great truth.)

Wisdom Teeth

Steven Gay reminds us that wisdom teeth are a bit of a problem for modern humans–and any parts of our bodies that serve no purpose, are in the way, or are just more trouble than they’re worth are a bit of a problem for creationists to rationalize. Why would a Master Creator give us more teeth than will fit in our jaws? I don’t think I know anybody who has had all four third molars grow into place with the others and serve as useful chewing teeth. In some people they never erupt. My top two grew out, but having no bottom ones to work against, they were useless for chewing. A great many people simply have to have them removed or suffer severe dental problems–because modern jaws are just too small to accommodate third molars. Wisdom teeth make sense as evolutionary leftovers (probably in the process of evolving away entirely). What sense can creationists make of them (especially if one lives to the biblically promised threescore and ten)? (Thanks to the folks who have written to me to tell me that they have all four functional third molars. All have noted that they and their dentists recognize that they are rare exceptions.)

The Last Little Piggy

…the one who went, “Wee, wee, wee!” all the way home. (For those with deprived childhoods, I’m talking about little toes.) They’re one more body part that is in the way, all too easily injured, and, when you stop to think about it, useless. We don’t use them in walking. In parts of the world where people go barefoot most of the time, little toes missing through accident or disease are quite common, and don’t hinder the person’s mobility at all. Think we need them for balance or something? Our cloven-hoofed fellow mammals get by with two toes on the ground. Horses manage to be mighty fast with just one! Predatory mammals generally put four down. Do we need the extra because we’re bipedal? Ostriches are on their feet all day, and can outrun anybody you know–how many toes do they use? Think about it: other primates have prehensile toes. Kids notice right away that monkeys really have four hands . A fifth digit is pretty useful if you’re scrambling through branches (and secondarily manipulating objects). Our little fingers are truly useful and probably in no danger of disappearing. But we quit climbing in trees with our rear “hands” and they became feet–which explains why they have useless fifth digits. And while we’re at it…

Doggie Toes

What is that thing hanging off the back of your dog’s lower leg? It’s his “dewclaw,” and it’s entirely useless. On some dogs it’s so much in the way that it’s surgically removed. It’s not a result of selective breeding, either. Cats have ‘em, wolves have ‘em, tigers have ‘em. What would it possibly be except a now-useless fifth toe, in the process of disappearing through evolution?

Lower Back Pain

Kate Harrop-Allin asks the perceptive question: Why should this condition afflict such a huge percentage of the adult population (I read somewhere that more working days were lost for this than for almost any other reason) when we were supposedly “created” in our present bipedal form? Other associated problems with our relatively recently-acquired bipedalism (that other animals don’t seem to have much trouble with):extreme difficulty in childbirth, varicose veins, arthritis ……. all of which indicate that we evolved, and quite recently too, from an animal that was predominantly quadrupedal.

Their Own Eyes

…defeat them doubly. First, creationists trot out that old saw about how “nothing as complex as an eye could evolve in stages, since a half-eye is no good at all.” Darwin himself trounced that one roundly by merely observing that there are creatures alive today with eyes in all “stages of development,” from a few light-sensitive cells, to a cup-shaped receptor with no proper lens, to eagle eyes far sharper than ours. Other creatures seem to get along fine with half-eyes and even 1/100 eyes.

Then for the final insult, human (the pinnacle of creation) eyes are clearly an engineering mistake! The retinas are inside out. The nerves and blood vessels come out through the light-sensitive area of the retina, producing a blind spot, then spread over the front of the light-receptor cells, so that light has to get past the fibers into the receptors. Why aren’t the nerves and capillaries behind the receptors, where they would be out of the way and there would be no need for a blind spot? Squid eyes are arranged just that way. Since ours aren’t, one is reminded of the maxim that evolution has to work with the materials at hand, adapting systems already in place, with results that often seem jury-rigged or needlessly complicated. Would an Ultimate Engineer make such an obvious blunder, especially having got it right in creatures created earlier?

Their Own Fingers

The problem is, there are five. That puts us firmly in the mammal “family” (layman’s term). All other mammals have five digits per limb, or the vestigial remains thereof, or we can trace the gradual shrinkage and loss of digits through the fossil record (as with horses). But the principle remains: Mammals have five digits–even when there’s no good reason. Why should whales have the bones of exactly five digits buried in their flippers? Why should bats have wings seeming awkwardly stretched over exactly five fingers? “Similarity of design”? Oh, come on. The “Designer” found more efficient ways of making aquatic fins and wings for other creatures. Same old song: the commonality of five digits among the mammal family makes sense only if we are all descendants of a five-digited ancestor. Some of us mammals have good use for five digits, some have already got rid of a few, and some of us are still stuck with useless ones (like dolphins). Remember, that’s what a family is: descendants of a common ancestor.
-suggested by Kjetil Furnes

Snake Hips and Whale Pelvises

No, I haven’t finally gone around the bend. Although there’s not a trace left on the outside, boas, pythons, and blind snakes all have completely useless vestigial hipbones buried in their bodies. So do whales. Now why would an as-is Creation ex nihilo include creatures with functionless bones that really look like the evolutionary leftovers of lost limbs?

Sandy Petersen adds the following: “Pythons and boas actually have tiny vestigial claws on either side of their cloacas, which are [associated with] their useless hips. So you can pick up any python (I suggest a small one, like my family’s pet ball python), turn it over, and SEE the tiny, useless claws that would never ever be there if snakes had been designed ‘from scratch.’”

Chicken Legs

The lower part of a chicken’s legs are not covered by fur, hair or feathers. What’s there? Scales. Is this a sign of their evolutionary past when they evolved from their reptilian ancestors? I think this solves the chicken or the egg riddle: the egg came first in the form of the chicken’s ancestors.
-verbatim from Jim Lobach

Male Nipples

My grandfather, down on the farm, used to have a quaint expression, usually leveled at some lazy individual: as useless as the tits on a boar. Creationists, think hard and send me a carefully reasoned answer explaining why God would create both boars and men (and all other male mammals) with useless nipples (which can even be dangerous–men can get breast cancer). The simple biological-evolutionary answer is that as embryos we are all structurally female first, including proto-breast tissue. Only later in fetal development do the male hormones kick in and modify the feminine genital structures into the masculine. But we men are left with useless breast tissue and nipples, which never get the hormonal signal at puberty to develop into functioning organs. The whole thing seems a messy and cobbled-up system for producing two sexes. Why in Heaven’s name would a Designer worth His salt come up with so inefficient a system, with useless (and sometimes dangerous) parts left over? (Evidence of our heritage: in some of our more “primitive” relatives, gender is changeable throughout life. Some species of fish and reptiles can switch genders without the help of a Danish surgeon. They just respond to environmental cues.)
-suggested by David Pickering…but hey, I was thinking of it too!

Blind Cave Fish

…and other cave critters that still have vestigial but absolutely useless eyes. Evolution can be that sloppy, but can a perfect Creator?
-Donald Wilson

Their Own Hemoglobin

If hemoglobin were designed by God, it was designed to have far too much affinity for carbon monoxide. This great affinity has resulted in countless deaths.

Carbon monoxide is a colorless and odorless gas. This is, if anything, an even nastier bit of “design.” At the very least, carbon monoxide could have been given a smell to help warn us (unless the Designer was constrained by the laws of chemistry–surely no impediment). It remains one of life’s traps for the unwary, with its victims often being infants in poorly ventilated winter homes. Or perhaps it is just one of evolution’s quirks, a chance attraction which natural selection has not eliminated because there is too little selection pressure against it. Evolution can play seemingly malicious tricks (think about it: the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning is such a recent development in our evolutionary history that we have acquired no ability to detect it), but could a Perfect Designer? (suggested by Roger Scott)

Pseudogenes

Pseudogenes (also known as junk DNA) were discovered in 1994. They are remnants of genes that no longer function but continue to be carried along in DNA as excess baggage. Pseudogenes also change through time, as they are passed on from ancestors to descendants, and they offer an especially useful way of reconstructing evolutionary relationships. The more remote the last common ancestor of two organisms, the more dissimilar their pseudogenes will be. When the pseudogenes of a human and a chimpanzee are compared, the differences are relatively few. Slightly more differences are present when comparing the pseudogenes of a human with those of a rodent. Yet more disparity is evident between the pseudogenes of a human and those of, say, wheat. This is compelling evidence for an evolutionary origin of Homo sapiens.
(from Steven Mahoney)

And some cases in point from Kevin Dorner: Pseudogenes. One of the more “evolutionary” sets of pseudogenes I’ve read of are those of the sense of smell. There are about a hundred genes for odour receptors in humans. About seventy of them are pseudogenes (broken), but in other mammals they are all functional, indicating that our sense of smell was no longer as important at some time in our past, so is gradually disappearing. Dolphins also have a complement of odour receptors, but they have all become pseudogenes. As dolphins don’t have noses, this is difficult to reconcile with a sudden creation (without silly, untestable, ad hoc guesses, that is) but makes perfect sense if dolphins evolved from a terrestrial ancestor that returned to the ocean, as other cetaceans did, losing their noses in the process.

Vitamin C

Roger Scott has discovered that God is a dog’s best friend: Humans must have vitamin C in their diets. Without it they will develop scurvy and eventually die from vitamin C deficiency. Apparently we have a pseudogene for producing vitamin C. Dogs, on the other hand, have the real thing. Their copy of the gene actually works, and they do not need vitamin C in their diets. They make it themselves. Roger speculates that this may show how much more God loves dogs than humans. Being omniscient, God knew in advance that sailors on long sea voyages would suffer terribly, but did nothing about it. God made sure that dogs on these voyages would not suffer. Ships’ mutts were looked after, but not the sailors.

The Plantaris Muscle

Dr. Richard Brown of Bristol, UK, submits the following: Ever since I first dissected the plantaris muscle in the human calf as a medical student, I have been a convinced evolutionist. In the monkey it is a useful muscle which causes all the digits to flex at once, and thus is useful in swinging from trees by the feet. In the human it is atrophied, may be absent, and does not even reach the toes, but disappears into the Achilles tendon. There is no sensible reason for its existence in the human, except a common ancestry with monkeys. Try telling that to a creationist, however. In my experience they change the subject!

Shark Reproduction

J. E. Hill has a few questions for the Guy Who created sharks: Some sharks lay eggs, such as the horned shark; some sharks produce eggs which actually hatch inside of them, such as the gray, nurse and whale sharks; some sharks are placental, having live young, such as the great white and hammerhead. This seems so uneconomical for an intelligent designer or grand creator to spend his/her/its time on when one type would have been sufficient. Unless there is another explanation. Additionally, some snakes, such as the rattler, also have live young, while the majority of reptiles lay eggs. How did an intelligent designer determine which would and wouldn’t?

Their Own Eye Teeth

…which they would give for just ONE bit of evidence that would stand up. (From Michael Arndt) Another fact of the human body that cannot be explained without evolution is the size of the root of your upper canine teeth. In monkeys, the canine teeth are much larger than they are in humans, and as such, they require much larger roots to anchor them. In humans the canines are now much smaller, but if you run your finger over your upper gums, you can feel the bump of your unnecessarily large canine root (even through your lip).

Colorblindness

From yet another contributor: The ability to see colors in humans came from our “ape” ancestors. It evolved because a good portion of their diet (and the same goes for our modern cousins), when the fruits, berries, etc. were not in season, was leaves and stalks, etc. The most nutritious of these are the younger or new growth, which is red in a lot of cases instead of green. The ability to tell the difference would be a plus. Colorblindness, especially the difficulty in telling the difference between red and green, is on the rise in humans. With our ability to raise our own food, it is thought that this ability is not so important, and we are losing it. That’s a reasonable evolutionary explanation for the increasing incidence of colorblindness. Can you think of a “creationary” one?

The Human Genome Project

Here’s the shortest version: We have inherited our DNA from earlier species. We share genes with reptiles, fish, insects, worms, and even bacteria. We use the same DNA patterns to do things as other species do. We don’t have any more genes than an ear of corn, and only about twice as many as a fruitfly–and some we have in common with fruitflies. We have lots of useless “junk” DNA that was once useful to some remote ancestor. Bits of it can sometimes be “awakened,” with disastrous results. The scientists that have deciphered the human genome, and those of an ever-increasing number of other species, all agree that there is no other reasonable explanation for the cobbled-up mess of code that builds human beings except an evolutionary accumulation through a chain of ancestors leading back to bacteria.

Sudden Jerks

Not boors that surprise you by ringing your doorbell with a fistfull of Watchtowers, but those sudden jerks that you make when you’re asleep. A reasonable (but not proven) evolutionary hypothesis is that it was a defensive response that developed when we slept in trees. Any slight sense of unbalance would promote an automatic jerk and instant awakening. Sometimes it accidentally goes off even nowadays, even when you’re planted firmly on your Certa Perfect Sleeper. That’s the beauty of evolutionary explanations: there has to be one, and it has to make sense–but you don’t have to commit adamantly to it. A better one may present itself as more evidence is considered. Think of a good “creationary” explanation for those sudden jerks, preferably better than “God made us that way and He moves in mysterious ways.”

Their Prostate Glands

The urethra, essential for urination, runs through the prostate, which is vulnerable to infection. When the prostate becomes infected and swells, it pinches off the flow in the urethra, making urination painfully difficult.