It would be a sin here at Telic Thoughts to pass up a story about bunnies, animal rights extremists, and teaching the controversy.

Students at the Community Building Children's Center arrived at their downtown preschool Monday morning to discover that their pet rabbit Sugar Bunny had been kidnapped over the weekend. Teachers found anti-circus flyers in his hutch.

"Somebody stoled him," said five-year-old Zion. "I'm sad."

At the bottom of the "anti-cicus flyers" were "PETA and the Northwest Animal Rights Network (NARN)."  Thankfully, however, this teacher was able to use this incident to "teach the controversy":

"We talked about how some people have different ideas about animals. Some people don't think they should be in cages," said Peters.

For years, I have been trying to flesh out the conceptualization of front-loading evolution at the origin of life. A working hypothesis has been that the first cells (uni-cellular life forms) were front-loaded with information that would facilitate the evolution of multi-cellular life. One possible candidate for such front-loaded "˜information' would be the homeodomain proteins. These proteins play essential roles in metazoan development and are considered part of the developmental toolkit as outlined by biologist Sean Carroll.

A few months ago, a study was published that outlines data and arguments that perfectly resonate with my front-loading views. Let's have a look.

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In previous essays, I highlighted the role that personality and serendipity has played in scientific discovery [1,2]. What's most significant is the relationship between these variables and the population size of the investigative community. A large population of investigators will likely display more diversity of personalities and more often reap the benefits of serendipity. This explains why science functions best as a community.

Yet there are other benefits that come from a community.

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Should it be a surprise to anyone that it took European bureaucrats to come up with an 11,700-word document to say that science is good, creationism is bad, and thus creationism should be kept out of the science classroom?

Not surprisingly, the bureaucrats think ID = creationism (yet complain creationism is contradictory because ID accepts evolution) and represents a threat to democracy:

the Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist ideas within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights which are a key concern of the Council of Europe.

Borrowing a page from George Bush's war strategy, the champions for human rights declare a preemptive strike:

Investigation of the creationists' growing influence shows that the arguments between creationism and evolution go well beyond intellectual debate. If we are not careful, the values that are the very essence of the Council of Europe will be under direct threat from creationist fundamentalists. It is part of the role of the Council's parliamentarians to react before it is too late.

Thank goodness they acted before it was "too late," as that ever growing Creationist Threat(iness) is always on the constant march.

But this made me wonder if the Champions for Science and Civilization had written at least 10% the number of words warning about the threat from extreme animal rights groups. After all, it is in a European country where construction workers must hide their identity because they dare build a science lab. So I did some Googling and couldn't find where the Council of Europe has defended science against the animal rights extremists.

But hey, I did find this.

At some time when we are growing up, most of us learn the standard definition of the scientific method "“ make observations, make a hypothesis, and conduct an experiment. There is no doubt that this is the cornerstone of science. But when surveying the history of scientific discovery, there is often much more to science than this. It's not always a question of just rolling up your sleeves and applying the method. There are two other factors that cannot be fitted into the formula, but have played crucial roles in discovery. These two factors are personality and serendipity.

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The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life by Eugene V Koonin, sets forth an answer to the question of life's origin based on chance and an infinite number of possibilities linked to the multiverse concept. Koonin notes the difficulties with current ideas:

Origin of life is a chicken and egg problem: for biological evolution that is governed, primarily, by natural selection, to take off, efficient systems for replication and translation are required, but even barebones cores of these systems appear to be products of extensive selection. The currently favored (partial) solution is an RNA world without proteins in which replication is catalyzed by ribozymes and which serves as the cradle for the translation system. However, the RNA world faces its own hard problems as ribozyme-catalyzed RNA replication remains a hypothesis and the selective pressures behind the origin of translation remain mysterious.

He then cites his alternative:

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I havn't read Behe's entire book yet, but I did get passed chapter 3. Out of curiosity I wanted to take a look at the critisms that were already out there. Fortunately I found some that were at least trying to address the arguments in Chapter 3.

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