PageRank is computed based on the links in the page graph, not domains. Knol was all over the news, so it has links from a variety of other high-pr sites.
It also ranks high in Yahoo search -- do you believe that they are in on the conspiracy too?
I didn't bother searching msn. I'm sure the results vary from query to query, as they do for all sites. The point is that many of these pages are ranking quite high on Yahoo as well. Either you can attribute that to Yahoo being in on Google's evil plan, or you can understand that these pages naturally rank quite high because they are linked to from the front page of a highly linked site that has been all over the news and blogs recently (Knol).
Unfortunately the truth is not as dramatic as these "Google is evil" stories, so people often prefer the later.
It still remains that pages on Knol are getting much higher rankings than the pages themselves warrant. I wondered why the front page of Knol had such a random collection of content links - it seemed very ungoogle - now it looks like SEO that's damaging the reputation of their search engine.
It sounds innocent enough, but it does point to some problems with their search ranking. The quality of their search results has to be far more important than Knol.
That'd certainly put pages linked to from the front knol page up quite high. It does make me wonder what happens when a page changes its outlinks a lot, does pagerank get distributed along the last snapshot or does it amalgamate them. If this is whats driving the high page ranks they'll certainly drop off in time.
To preserve their reputation as an impartial index they should make those front page content links nofollow.
It also ranks high in Yahoo search -- do you believe that they are in on the conspiracy too?