Saturn's Enceladus and three of Jupiter's moons very likely have subsurface oceans, so Titan would not be unique in that respect. But Titan is the only known moon with a thick atmosphere and with large lakes of methane. A liquid ocean there strengthens the possibility that life could have made, and may still be making, Titan's methane.

Close-up onto the striated (red, horizontal) and smooth (red, vertical) muscle cells of the hydrozoan jellyfish Clytia hemisphaerica. Cell nuclei are coloured in blue. Credit: Johanna Kraus

"As this specific myosin has so far only been found in muscle cells, we expected that its origin coincided with the evolution of muscle cells. We were very surprised to see that the 'muscle myosin' evolved probably in unicellular organisms, long before the first animals lived," explains Ulrich Technau who led the study.

"This study sheds light onto how seemingly complex biological structures, such as striated muscles, could have evolved independently based on very ancient components."

Genes that exist before the appearance of the features they encode, and identical features that appear to evolve independently several times, are baffling for darwinism. But in cosmic ancestry, all genes are derived from "ancient components" that precede the features they encode. And following various gene transfer events, the genes would easily appear to have had multiple, independent origins.

"The authors of this study hypothesized that epithelial cells in the intestine might take up miRNAs in food, package them into MVs [plasma microvesicles] and release them into the circulatory sytem. The secreted MVs could then deliver exogenous plant miRNA to target organs where they could regulate cognate mRNAs."

To the left is an image from the Nordic Optical Telescope of one of the quasars researchers have looked at. After having removed the quasar light from the image, the distant galaxy appears, which is indicated by an arrow in the image to the right. ...The galaxies from the very early Universe had a surprisingly large quantity of heavy elements. — Niels Bohr Institute

"We have studied 10 galaxies in the early Universe and analysed their light spectra. We are observing light from the galaxies that has been on a 10-12 billion year journey to Earth, so we see the galaxies as they were then. Our expectation was that they would be relatively primitive and poor in heavier elements, but we discovered somewhat to our surprise that the gas in some of the galaxies and thus the stars in them had a very high content of heavier elements. The gas was just as enriched as our own Sun," explains Professor Johan Fynbo from the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

What? Have they seen those images of lava flowing down Hawaiian slopes into the sea? Doesn't that lava acquire organics from the biology it mops up? Couldn't the resulting material, after a few billion years of subsequent alteration, possibly exhibit a simlar ubiquitous distribution of organic carbon? We are truly puzzled.

Beginning with insights from his heroes, mainly Alan Turing and John von Neumann, he defines biology as "software archaeology." We especially welcome his focus on software and his question, Where do new genes come from? He favors a scheme he calls cumulative evolution, using algorithmic (as opposed to point) mutations. He believes these could continually improve a given program's solution to the standard "Busy Beaver" problem, and this would constitute a logical proof of Darwinian evolution. And, as hinted by work in "evo-devo," algorithmic mutations might enable evolution to go much faster than the exhaustive search method, although not necessarily fast enough.

We are glad Chaitin knows that viruses can play a big part in evolution, installing their own or others' genes into species everywhere. But where those genes come from remains unanswered. And we suspect that experimenters who have already worked in Artificial Life for ten or twenty years may see Chaitin's newly announced field of "metabiology" as simply another suggestion among many. But if his enthusiasm ignites new interest in Artificial Life, excellent.

Before 1887, Al Michelson and Edward Morley looked for the luminous aether that, they were sure, had to exist. That year, their definitive experiment detected none. Subsequently, science recognized new possibilities and the theory of relativity ensued. Similarly, Chaitin wants to prove what he is already sure about. But he thinks the proof might take 300 years. So, apparently, no amount of failure would prompt him to consider other possibilities? This seems unscientific to us.

Complaints aside, Proving Darwin is a fun and easy read. Chaitin knows the history of computers, and compares modern, artificial sortware to DNA's ancient, natural software as few others do. Recommended!

Their ability to survive in such impoverished conditions supports the belief that bacteria could also survive in material ejected into space from a planet by an asteroid impact. Such space-borne microbes could later be deposited, as stowaways on a meteorite, on a different planet.

When I asked why MSL wasn't looking for life, NASA's representative answered that it is difficult to identify biological fossils on Earth, so it would be much harder on Mars. But I was asking about viable life such as Viking may have detected, not fossils. I felt that we were speaking different languages. I was too stunned to followup. Good for Dirk Schulze-Makuch (pictured) of Washington State University, for promoting an actual search for life on Mars. The project is named Biological Oxidant and Life Detection (BOLD).

"...(d) Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught." SENATE BILL 893 [PDF] HOUSE BILL 368 [PDF]

The law makes no reference to creationism or Intelligent Design, so it will not so easily be overturned in court. Nonetheless, committed darwinists and other, well-meaning activists are complaining that the bill is merely a trojan horse to sneak religion into science class. Obviously, the gridlock between darwinism and creationism/ID is as rigid as ever.

Here in our home state, maybe science teachers will ask us for a third opinion? We'll see.

A distinguished international team has studied how stickleback fish have adapted from saltwater to freshwater habitats, apparently thousands of times. To do so, the researchers sequenced the whole genomes of a representative sample of 20 fish from both categories around the world. They found that certain genetic loci are consistently involved in the adqaptation, and that 87% of these are in regulatory, as opposed to coding, regions. In commentary, Hopi E. Hoekstra observes, Thus, it seems that repeated evolution of traits may often, but not always, arise from genetic variation that already existed in an ancestral population.

Making use of genetic programs that already exist is standard procedure in cosmic ancestry. Of course, nothing prevents strictly darwinian evolution from deploying pre-existing programs as well. Darwinism however, purports also to account for the origins of those programs. Where is that evidence?