White House to honor prominent evolutionist

Orange County Register ^ | May 9, 02 | Gary Robbins

[laureldrive]

UCI's Ayala wins National Medal of Science

Researcher famous for work in genetics, evolutionary biology.

By GARY ROBBINS

The Orange County Register

May 9, 02

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The National Medal of Science – the most prestigious award given for lifetime achievement – will be bestowed upon a University of California, Irvine, researcher who has done pioneering work in genetics and evolutionary biology, the White House announced today.

Francisco Ayala, 68, is one of 15 scientists and engineers who will receive the medal from President George W. Bush during a ceremony expected to be held in mid-June in Washington, D.C.

Ayala will receive the medal along with such eminent figures as Harold Varmus, the Nobel laureate who formerly headed the National Institutes of Health, and Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, a leader in global warming research.

"Each one of these individuals has helped advance our country's place as a leader in discovery, creativity and technology," President Bush said in a statement. "Their contributions have touched all of our lives and will continue to do so."

Ayala is the second UCI professor to win the National Science Medal. The late Frederick Reines, the "father of neutrino physics", was honored in 1983. A medal also was given to Corona del Mar instrument inventor Arnold O. Beckman in 1989.

Ayala is a former Dominican priest who left the clergy to study evolution and genetics. He achieved fame partly because of his work on the "molecular clock," a field in which scientists can date when some species diverged from a common ancestor. The timing of the clock involves analysis of DNA.

The Spanish-born biologist also is well-known for determining that some organisms have more genetic variation than predicted by sophisticated mathematical models.

Ayala was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980. A year later, he and famed Harvard scholar Stephen Jay Gould testified for the defense in McLean v. the Arkansas Board of Education, the so-called "balanced-treatment law." A federal judge ruled on behalf of the plaintiff, saying that it was unconstitutional for Arkansas to require teachers to devote equal class time to creationism and evolution.

He joined the UCI faculty in 1987, raising the university's profile in evolutionary science. Fellow biologist Walter Fitch says Ayala's presence was a main reason that he joined the faculty the following year.

More recently, Ayala helped recruit Douglas Wallace, a world-renowned geneticist from Emory University. Irvine recruited Wallace with a $3 million package in February.

[general_re]

I think that of the 8 lbs and 4 oz my daughter weighed at birth, it felt like the bulk of that weight was in her head

I would expect - once the head and shoulders exit, the rest is a bit narrower. And I think you're quite right about rising birthweights as well.

Sometimes human intervention makes a difference - my wife attests that our daughter's birth, at 8 pounds, 8 ounces, was much easier than the first child, her older brother, at 6 pounds, 15 ounces. The difference was, she didn't have any drugs for the first one ;)

[Virginia-American]

Human feelings, human conscience cannot be accounted for by either evolution or any other materialistic theory of the universe.

Any evidence to back up this sweeping claim?

[stanz]

Aha...that makes all the difference.
I never was the "martyr" type, but I did go for Lamaze classes. Somehow, I always knew I was in for the long haul, though. After eight hours of beginning labor and six hours of active labor, I reached over and told the doctor,"GIMMEE DRUGS" I got the epidural which lasted all of about 30 minutes. The next 3 hours were memorable.

[longshadow]

"Wildly elliptical" planetary orbits and 1⁷²⁰ placemarker

[general_re]

I can imagine - we didn't plan on her not having drugs, but the hospital we were at was really big on natural birth "if you think you can do it," so they never really offered it to her. But finally she said to them, look I don't think I can do this, I need something for the pain.

So the nurse goes "Well, let's see how you're doing....hmmm....uhhhh....okay. Honey, you're fully dilated and effaced - it's too late for drugs! Let's get on with it!" And that was how we ended up with natural childbirth the first time around.

Now, for the second one, my wife remembered all this very well, as I'm sure you can imagine, so she asked for drugs literally as we we walking in the door. "Don't you want to see how it goes before you decide?" the nurse asks. Nope - have the anesthesiologist ready and waiting. And he was ;)

[stanz]

Thank goodness. It's that ole' maternal memory that kicks in. Women always say that you forget all the pain and anguish when they hand you that little bundle. Well, to a degree...it's the kind of pain you know will end and it produces a wondrous little person...but you never forget it.

[PatrickHenry]

Planet Seven placemarker.

[Junior]

Geez, won't you ever learn? HWWNBN does not need evidence; it is so because he says it is so. End of story.

[Junior]

Gary Seven placemarker (an obscure Trek reference).

[bzrd]

There is a fallacy in your argument. Faulting medved for not having a mechanism to base his mathematical model on, is "Darwin's fault", not medved's. The only way to go on this is to take what information we have--which is little in the way of plausible mechanisms--and run the probabilities from there.

I suppose we can always hold out hope that the mechanism is there, waiting to be discovered...

Brian.

[Bogey78O]

Go take a deck of cards. Shuffle then draw 13 cards. What are the odds of drawing that specific hand? Well you've just beaten those odds. Amazing? No. Not really.

You can't derive the statistical probability of random events that have happened. If you want another example what are odds that a civilization exactly like America would form? Inconceivable. But America exists.

[medved]

None of the world's better class of mathematicians see any validity in that sort of argument when you're talking about the kinds of odds which are involved in evolutionism.

[RnMomof7]

Point of order... Mr. Ayala.....why hasn't evolution allowed mother's birth canals to develop large enough for the increased brain size?

After 7 children my husband will tell you it has :>))

[medved]

Evolution, and the Redneck Watermelon Truck

The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.

Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.

Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for somebody like Algor to get elected president and immediately outlaw the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money trucking watermelons from Florida to Chicago and selling them for what they paid for them.

Likewise, If comebody could provide a coercive case for the fact that American Indians dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis, then the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrines would be demolished, the entire doctrine of evolutionism, broken. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.

---

In this regard, evolutionists and geologists would appear to have developed a sort of a dinosaur-in-the-livingroom problem over the last few years. Take the case of Mishipishu, the "Water panther" for instance.

Petroglyphs show him with the dorsal blades of the stegosaur and Indian legends speak of him using his "great spiked tail" as a weapon. Remarkably, the Canadian national parks which maintain these pictographs are unaware of the notion of interpreting Mishipishu as a stegosaur, and refer to him only as a "manatou", or water spirit.

Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.

One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.

Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:

Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.

Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today

In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.

---

Then there is the case of the Brontosaur Pictograph on rough stone.

This petroglyph, in fact, first came to light with the Doheney Expedition to Java Supai, the report of which comes not from the National Enquirer, but from the Peabody Muscum of American Ethnology at Harvard University.

Then there is the case of the man and brontosaur petroglyph at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah:

A book on Indian rock art sold atthe park visitors center notes:

"There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all." (Prehistoric Indians, Barnes and Pendleton, 1995, p.201) The desert varnish, which indicates age, is especially heavy over this section.

Then again, there is the picture which the people at Bible.ca snapped of Don Patten with the petroglyph of the triceroptops:

And the pterodactyle at San Rafael Swell in Black Dragon Wash, Utah:

Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.

[RickyJ]

God's design is perfect. And this nitwit will soon learn that in a place prepared for the father of lies and his angels (hell).

[apochromat]

"I would not want to do anything with a God who would design things so badly"

More evidence for a design that is more intelligent than anyone can ever comprehend scientifically, I suppose.

[Junior]

Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I think so, Brain, but wouldn't Mark Placer sound a little strange?

[Bogey78O]

I've heard it referred to as "evolutionary wheels". Basically why don't animals evolve wheels if their looking for speed. Wheels would get you a lot faster. But there's no way a wheel could be biologically possible.

[Bogey78O]

How does he explain the drawings of people looking creatures with spikes in their heads and webbed feet? A lost species?