Machine code Vs. Darwinism.

Time Machine: An Early Argument for Intelligent Design
Granville Sewell December 1, 2015 5:45 PM

As I begin my 12th year of work on TWODEPEP (now PDE/PROTRAN), I am intrigued by the analogy between the 11-year evolution of this computer code and the multi-billion year history of the genetic code of life, which contains a blueprint for a species encoded into billions of bits of information. Like the code of life, TWODEPEP began with primitive features, being capable of solving only a single linear elliptic equation in polygonal regions, with simple boundary conditions. It passed through many useful stages as it adapted to non-linear and time-dependent problems, systems of PDEs, eigenvalue problems, and as it evolved cubic and quartic elements and isoparametric elements for curved boundaries. It grew a preprocessor and a graphical output package, and out-of-core frontal and conjugate gradient methods were added to solve the linear systems.

Each of these changes represented major evolutionary steps -- new orders, classes or phyla, if you will. The conjugate gradient method, in turn, also passed through several less major variations as the basic method was modified to precondition the matrix, to handle nonsymmetric systems, and as stopping criteria were altered, etc. Some of these variations might be considered new families, some new genera, and some only special changes.

I see one flaw in the analogy, however. While I am told that the DNA code was designed by a natural process capable of recognizing improvements but incapable of planning beyond the next random mutation, I find it difficult to believe that TWODEPEP could have been designed by a programmer incapable of thinking ahead more than a few characters at a time.

But perhaps, it might be suggested, a programmer capable of making only random changes, but quite skilled at recognizing improvements could, given 4.5 billion years to work on it, evolve such a program. A few simple calculations would convince him that this programmer would have to rely on very tiny improvements. For example, if he could produce a billion random "mutations" per second (or, for a better analogy, suppose a billion programmers could produce one "mutation" per second each), he could not, statistically, hope to produce any predetermined 20-character improvement during this time period. Could such a programmer, with no programming or mathematical skills other than the ability to recognize and select out very small improvements through testing, design a sophisticated finite element program?

The Darwinist would presumably say, yes, but to anyone who has had minimal programming experience such an idea is preposterous. The major changes to TWODEPEP, such as the addition of a new linear equation solver or new element, required the addition or modification of hundreds of lines of code before the new feature was functional. None of the changes made during this period were of any use whatever until all were in place.

Even the smallest modifications to that new feature, once it was functional, required adding several lines, no one of which made any sense, or provided any "selective advantage," when added by itself.

Consider, by way of analogy, the airtight trap of the carnivorous bladderwort plant, which has a double sealed, valve-like door which is opened when a trigger hair is activated, causing the victim to be sucked into the vacuum of the trap (described by R.F. Daubenmire in Plants and Environment, John Wiley and Sons, N.Y. 1947). It is difficult to see what selective advantage this trap provided until it was almost perfect.

This, then, is the fallacy of Darwin's explanation for the causes of evolution -- the idea that major (complex) improvements can be broken down into many minor improvements. French biologist Jean Rostand, in A Biologist's View (William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1956) recognized this:

It does not seem strictly impossible that mutations should have introduced into the animal kingdom the differences which exist between one species and the next...hence it is very tempting to lay also at their door the differences between classes, families and orders, and, in short, the whole of evolution. But it is obvious that such an extrapolation involves the gratuitous attribution to the mutations of the past of a magnitude and power of innovation much greater than is shown by those of today.

The famous "problem of novelties" is another formulation of the objection raised here. How can natural selection cause new organs to arise and guide their development through the initial stages during which they present no selective advantage, the argument goes. The Darwinist is forced to argue that there are no useless stages. He believes that new organs and new systems of organs arose gradually, through many small improvements. But this is like saying that TWODEPEP could have made the transition from a single PDE to systems of PDEs through many five or six character improvements, each of which made it work slightly better on systems.

It is interesting to note that this belief is not supported even by the fossil evidence. Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, for example, in The History of Life, Volume II of Evolution after Darwin, (University of Chicago Press, 1960) points out:

It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution...This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?

Another way of describing this same structure is expressed in a recent Life magazine article (Francis Hitching, "Was Darwin Wrong on Evolution?", April 1982, which concludes that "natural selection has been tested and found wanting") which focuses on the "curious consistency" of the fossil gaps:

These are not negligible gaps. They are periods, in all the major evolutionary transitions, when immense physiological changes had to take place.

Unless we are willing to believe that useless, "developing" organs (and insect traps which could almost catch insects) abounded in the past, we should have expected the fossil structure outlined above, with large gaps between the higher categories, where new organs and new systems of organs appeared.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that the structure of the fossil record is the only argument against Darwin which has received much attention lately, this is not the real issue. The "problem of novelties" correctly states the real argument, but too weakly. Consider, for example, the human eye, with an aperture whose size varies automatically according to the light intensity, controlled by reflex signals from the brain; with a lens whose curvature varies automatically according to the distance to the object in view; and with a retina which receives the picture on color sensitive cells and transmits it, complete with coded intensity and frequency information, through the optic nerve to the brain. The brain superimposes the pictures from the two eyes and stores this 3D picture somehow in memory, and it will be able to search for and recall this image later and use it to recognize an older but familiar face in a different picture. Like TWODEPEP, the eye has passed through various useful stages in its development, but it contains a large number of features which could not reach usefulness in a single random mutation and which provided no selective advantage until useful (e.g. the nerves and arteries which service it), and many groups of features which are useless individually. The Darwinist may bridge the gaps between taxa with a long chain of tiny improvements in his imagination, but the analogy with software puts his ideas into perspective. The idea that all the magnificent species in the living world, or the human brain with its human consciousness, could have arisen from simple organic molecules guided by a natural process unable to plan beyond the next tiny mutation, is entirely comparable to the idea that a programmer incapable of thinking ahead more than a few characters at a time could, given a lot of time, design any sophisticated computer program.


I suggest that, with Jean Rostand, "we must have the courage to recognize that we know nothing of the mechanism" of evolution.

Rubiks Cube Vs. Materialism.

Rubik's Cube Is a Hand-Sized Illustration of Intelligent Design
Evolution News & Views December 2, 2015 4:15 AM

For those who have not made it a favorite pastime, solving a Rubik's Cube just adds unneeded stress to life. It's frustrating to twist and turn those colors, getting some to match but finding out your last move un-matched colors you had previously matched. Then to find some kid on TV doing it in seconds is enough to send you outside screaming. The world record is now 4.904 seconds by Lucas Etter, a teenager in Maryland, who set the record on November 24.

The cube has over 43 quintillion possible color combinations, mathematicians Tomas Rokiki and Morley Davidson tell us, but only one solution. For those who have screamed enough at these dastardly devices, mathematician Geoff Smith has posted the secret at The Conversation: "How to solve a Rubik's cube in 5 seconds." (It's not really fair to divulge this. We're supposed to be smart enough to figure it out on our own. But we've had enough. Help us! What is it?)

So how do the likes of Lucas Etter work out how to solve Rubik's cube so quickly? They could read instructions, but that rather spoils the fun. If you want to work out how to do it yourself, you need to develop cube-solving tools. [Emphasis added.]

Now isn't that helpful. How to open a can? Develop a can-opening tool. Gee, thanks.

In this sense, a tool is a short sequence of turns which results in only a few of the individual squares on the cube's faces changing position. When you have discovered and memorised enough tools, you can execute them one after the other in order as required to return the cube to its pristine, solved condition.

If you think the secret is going to be easy, keep reading. After defining mathematical groups and commutators, Smith takes us into the labyrinth without a string. We expect the Minotaur to arrive any moment.

Think of the overall structure of the different configurations of a Rubik's cube as a labyrinth, which has that many chambers, each of which contains a Rubik's cube in the state which corresponds to that chamber. From each chamber there are 12 doors leading to other chambers, each door corresponding to a quarter turn of one of the six faces of a cube.

"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." We gave that game up in 1992.

The type of turn needed to pass through each door is written above it, so you know which door is which. Your job is to navigate your way from a particular chamber to the one where the cube on the table is in perfect condition.

Aaarggh! We knew that! Our job is to solve the cube! We plead for mercy.

The mathematical result in Rokicki and Davidson's paper shows that, no matter where you are in the labyrinth, it's possible to reach the winning chamber by passing through at most 26 doors -- although the route you find using your tools is not likely to be that efficient.

Now we begin to see a glimpse of the light out of the labyrinth. 26 doors? Tough, but accessible. Actually, the mathematicians have updated "God's number" as they call it to 20. We could do that. Not blindfolded, though, like some winners Smith talks about. But there's no way around memorizing a lot of moves.

A Useful Instructional Aid

For those interested in explaining ID to people without a lot of memory work, the Rubik's Cube can be a useful instructional aid. You don't have to master the art of solving it. Save your sanity; just buy two cubes, and don't touch the solved one. Lock it into a plastic case if you have to, so that you won't have to try all 43 quintillion combinations in front of your audience. Or, rent a kid who can fix it in a few seconds.

Explain that the cube is a search problem. Take the scrambled one, and show how you want to get from that one to the solved one. You need a search algorithm. Which approach is more likely to find the solution -- intelligent causes or unguided causes? The answer is obvious, but go ahead; rub it in. A robot randomly moving the colors around could conceivably hit on the solution by chance in short order with sheer dumb luck (1 chance in 43 x 1018), but even if it did, it would most likely keep rotating the colors right back out of order again, not caring a dime. It would take an intelligent agent to recognize the solution and stop the robot when it gets the solution by chance.

More likely, it would take a long, long time. Trying all 43 x 1018 combinations at 1 per second would take 1.3 trillion years. The robot would have a 50-50 chance of getting the solution in half that time, but it would already vastly exceed the time available (about forty times the age of the universe). If a secular materialist counters that there could be trillions of robots with trillions of cubes working simultaneously throughout the cosmos, ask what the chance is of getting any two winners on the same planet at the same place and time. The one concession blocks the other. And what in the materialist's unguided universe is going to stop any robot when it succeeds? The vast majority will never succeed during the age of the universe.

Now rub it in. It would vastly exceed the age of the known universe for a robot to solve the cube by sheer dumb luck. How fast can an intelligent cause solve it? 4.904 seconds. That's the power of intelligent causes over unguided causes.

Now really, really rub it in. The Rubik's cube is simple compared to a protein. Imagine solving a cube with 20 colors and 100 sides. Then imagine solving hundreds of different such cubes, each with its own solution, simultaneously in the same place at the same time. If the audience doesn't run outside screaming, you didn't speak slowly enough.


See? You didn't even need to solve it yourself to make a powerful, visual statement.

Darwinism Vs.Animal consciousness.

What Can We Hope to Learn About Animal Minds?
Denyse O'Leary December 4, 2015 3:36 AM

Human consciousness is difficult to define and "arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind," even though we experience it all our waking hours. If we can't even define our own consciousness, can we say whether a different type of life form has consciousness or a mind?

Some current philosophers have reasoned away the problem by positing that rocks have minds too. Their approach is summarized by New York Times writer Jim Holt as follows:

We are biological beings. We exist because of self-replicating chemicals. We detect and act on information from our environment so that the self-replication will continue. As a byproduct, we have developed brains that, we fondly believe, are the most intricate things in the universe. We look down our noses at brute matter.

Rocks, we are told, are full of chemical information, and in philosopher David Chalmers's slogan, "Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside."

On that view, it is simply impossible to demarcate anything between rocks and humans as a threshold of consciousness. That approach, if it lacks other merit, reveals the difficulty that consciousness creates for naturalism, the idea that nature is all that exists.

Consciousness (a mind) perceives and acts on information. But there are at least two -- more basic and probably unconscious qualities -- that distinguish life from non-life, and seem to act by processing information: self-preservation and adaptability.

Life forms constantly try to preserve themselves in a living state -- that is, they try to survive. They adapt their methods as needed, whenever possible. A rock falls from a high cliff and breaks; a cat has somehow learned to relax, turn in mid-air, and land on his feet. Or consider Slijper's goat and Faith the dog, both of whom, born without forelegs, adapted to a lifestyle that is quite unnatural for their species.

But why do life forms struggle so hard to remain alive when the option of simply dying -- ceasing to be a life form at all, and rejoining the chemical seas -- is readily available, and eventually inevitable?

Naturalist explanations don't turn out to be much help with any of this. Polymath Christoph Adami, interviewed in Quanta Magazine, sees life itself as "self-perpetuating information strings," and defines information as "the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance."

As it happens, he also thinks that "the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance":

On the one hand, the problem is easy; on the other, it's difficult. We don't know what that symbolic language was at the origins of life. It could have been RNA or any other set of molecules. But it has to have been an alphabet. The easy part is asking simply what the likelihood of life is, given absolutely no knowledge of the distribution of the letters of the alphabet. In other words, each letter of the alphabet is at your disposal with equal frequency.

So an alphabet arose by chance? Adami places some confidence in the idea that upheavals around volcanic vents began that alphabet. One can't help but wonder why volcanoes work so differently now.

Taking a slightly different tack, theoretical biologist Kalevi Kull, author of Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life Is the Action of Signs, asks whether life is a form of signaling. Perhaps so, but signaling places us in the world of purpose, not random events.

Communication begins far below the level of the whole life form. One can hardly talk about the genome now, it seems, without an understanding of its complex grammar, "more complex than that of even the most intricately constructed spoken languages in the world" according to Karolinska researchers:

Their analysis reveals that the grammar of the genetic code is much more complex than that of even the most complex human languages. Instead of simply joining two words together by deleting a space, the individual words that are joined together in compound DNA words are altered, leading to a large number of completely new words.

On Adami's view, all this purpose, adaptation, information, signaling, and language originates in the random creation of an alphabet in the ferment around a volcano. Such a position is forced by the claims of naturalism, but is in no way compelled by evidence.

And it all happens whether there is consciousness or not. We experience consciousness, so we assume that other humans do. When we say, informally, that an animal is conscious, we mean that its behavior suggests that it is aware of its own needs, sensations, and environment, of self vs. not-self, of relationships with "not-selves," and such.

So can we determine accurately whether life forms are conscious? Brainless jellyfish, for example, are now thought to act with purpose when fishing.

Are the jellyfish conscious of that purpose? That would amount to having a mind without a brain. But the actual relationship between mind and brain is not -- as we shall see -- as straightforward as was once supposed. For one thing, there does not seem to be a "tree of intelligence," in the sense of a completely consistent correlation between size/type of brain and observed intelligence. We might be best to stick with observation for now, and defer classification till later.

Life forms communicate with each other to a degree that often surprises researchers. Prey animals, for example, warn predators of the danger of eating them or advise other prey that a hiding place is taken. But evidence suggests that plants can communicate too. The Scientist tells us:

Researchers are unearthing evidence that, far from being unresponsive and uncommunicative organisms, plants engage in regular conversation. In addition to warning neighbors of herbivore attacks, they alert each other to threatening pathogens and impending droughts, and even recognize kin, continually adapting to the information they receive from plants growing around them. Moreover, plants can "talk" in several different ways: via airborne chemicals, soluble compounds exchanged by roots and networks of threadlike fungi, and perhaps even ultrasonic sounds. Plants, it seems, have a social life that scientists are just beginning to understand.

So while communication, like purpose, is everywhere, the degree to which a life form is conscious of itself in communication with another life form is still elusive.

Naturalists who do not define the problem out of existence by insisting that even rocks have minds have generally adopted another approach. They try to find animal behaviors that are such close equivalents to human behavior that all such behaviors can be lumped together as, in Francis Crick's phrase, "nothing but a pack of neurons." Nothing remains but to provide a naturalist account, like Adami's, as to how they originally came to be a pack.

What the naturalists are doing is called anthropomorphism -- ascribing human qualities to life forms that may experience life very differently. It was once the province of folk tales. Not today. This year, we were told in the science press that bacteria have morals:

Far from being selfish organisms whose sole purpose is to maximize their own reproduction, bacteria in large communities work for the greater good by resolving a social conflict among individuals to enhance the survival of their entire community.

This finding supports group selection rather than the selfish gene. But it raises questions: Do bacteria have a mind in the absence of a brain? Or is group selection a purposeful force that can operate (as if by magic), in the absence of a mind or brain? Or is the concept of "morals" in fact specific to the human mind, in which case bacteria are not best described as acting that way even by analogy, lest the description become misleading?

In a similar vein, philosopher Stephen Cave argues that animals have free will, proposing to measure it by an FQ, a freedom quotient analogous to IQ:

Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. They can choose whether to wait for the juicier titbit or not -- but only if that titbit comes very soon. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes -- or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. I am guessing that you could manage a lot longer.

Without knowing who the "you" is, I'm not betting anything. Not so sure I'd bet on an unknown chimp either, given the spread cited above.

The research sounds fascinating, but Cave then tells us that

... all around us, every day, we see a very natural kind of freedom -- one that is completely compatible with determinism. It is the kind that living things need to pursue their goals in a world that continually presents them with multiple possibilities.

Obviously, if "free will" is completely compatible with determinism (and Darwinism, he tells us, accounts for that) then free will as we traditionally understand it doesn't exist and can't be measured in any life form. So why claim it does, and can?

Cave's thesis about free will differs significantly from the observation above that jellyfish pursue fish with intent: The intentional behavior of jellyfish is observed; we simply don't know if they know their own intentions. Cave, by contrast, wants to account for human as well as animal intentions as entirely determined while appearing free -- in order to support a fully naturalist perspective.

These two approaches to gathering information are likely to come into increasing conflict. Is the purpose of gathering the information to find out what is going on or to provide support for naturalism? A naturalist will probably answer "Both!" A materialist assumes that any finding can be interpreted from his perspective, however bad the fit, and will keep tinkering until he find a somewhat better fit. The rest of us are prepared to look around and see there may be a better explanation.

Similarly, consider the recent research on why hive workers sometimes kill their queens:

"Workers are assessing the situation in their colony and deciding to revolt against the queen only when the genetic makeup of the colony makes it favorable to do so," Loope said. "The main advantage is to allow your sister workers to lay male eggs, rather than the queen, who typically stops worker reproduction by egg eating, attacking reproducing workers, and by laying many of her own eggs. By eliminating the queen, a matricidal worker allows other workers and herself to lay male eggs."

...

"Hence the matricide," Loope said. "Workers are not mindless automatons working for the queen no matter what. They only altruistically give up reproduction when the context is right, but revolt when it benefits them to do so."

These short quotations from a longer account convey only in part the detailed reasoning hypothesized for the insects. That raises an obvious question: Who or what exactly is doing the reasoning? Some would say natural selection. But natural selection -- the fact that some life forms survive and pass on their traits, while others don't -- must be one of two things. Either it is a mind suited to detailed calculations of self-interest. Or it has somehow produced in the insects' minds capable of such a feat without, so far as we can see, having the brains to match.

Darwin believed that natural selection was the acting agent:

... natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

But Darwin wrote in an age when the behavior of life forms was not known to be this complex. He most likely had much simpler scenarios in view, squabbles over a kill perhaps.

Fortunately, we may not need to make sense of the current state of naturalism to gain at least some insights into animal mind. We humans have a sense of "self" that goes well beyond a drive to continue to exist. But to what extent do other life forms have this sense? Recent decades of research on apes and monkeys can give us some sense of the territory we are entering.


Next time, we'll discuss some of the hope, hype, and hard data about ape and monkey minds.

Between man and chimp the river impossible.

The Real Barrier to Unguided Human Evolution

Ann Gauger April 25, 2012 6:00 AM

Comparing DNA sequences and estimating by how many nucleotides we differ from chimps doesn't tell us much about what makes us human. Many of those nucleotide differences have no effect, because they are the product of neutral mutation and genetic drift. While these neutral mutations may affect the over-all mutation count, they don't answer how many mutations are required for the transition from chimp-like to human.

This problem is analogous to one we examined concerning protein evolution last year in the journal BIO-Complexity (Gauger and Axe 2011). Converting one protein to another's function can be viewed as a version, in miniature, of converting one species to another. But it is much easier to convert proteins than species.

We began by identifying two proteins that are close together in structure, but that have distinct functions. We examined what the minimal number of mutations to convert one protein to the other were. If all the places where they differed had to be changed, that would mean we would have to switch 70% of one protein to achieve conversion to the other's function. It's unlikely that all those mutations are required, however, since many if not most of those changes are due to neutral mutation and drift, just like in the chimp-like to human case.

So to estimate the minimal number of mutations required for conversion to a new function, we identified and tested the most likely amino acid candidates using structural and sequence comparisons, one by one and in combination. We ended up changing nearly the entire active site to look like the target protein, but failed to achieve conversion.

Based on the number of groups we changed, we made a minimum estimate that seven specific mutations would be required for a functional shift to be observed. To get seven coordinated mutations takes far too long, even for bacteria, with their high mutation rate and large population sizes. 10^27 years is our estimate, based on Doug Axe's population genetics model, also published in BIO-Complexity.

Personally, I think the chimp-like to human conversion would have to have taken many more years than any protein conversion, if it happened at all. A few years back Durrett and Schmidt published two papers in which they estimated how long it would take to get a single mutation, and then a second mutation to produce an eight base DNA binding site somewhere within a thousand base region near a gene. They stipulated that within the thousand base region there already was a sequence with six out of eight bases matching the target. The reason they chose to examine DNA binding sites? Many evolutionists think that evolution happens by changing gene expression, and changing gene expression most often requires changes to the regulatory regions around genes.

Their results? They calculated it would take six million years for a single base change to match the target and spread throughout the population, and 216 million years to get both base changes necessary to complete the eight base binding site. Note that the entire time span for our evolution from the last common ancestor with chimps is estimated to be about six million years. Time enough for one mutation to occur and be fixed, by their account.

To be sure, they did say that since there are some 20,000 genes that could be evolving simultaneously, the problem is not impossible. But they overlooked this point. Mutations occur at random and most of the time independently, but their effects are not independent. Mutations that benefit one trait may inhibit another. In addition, many if not all these traits are complex adaptations. Each trait requires multiple mutations to achieve a beneficial change. And many of the traits must occur together to be of any benefit. Take, for example, the changes required for upright bipedalism. Hips, legs, feet, spine, ribcage, skull all need to work together to allow free and efficient motion. All must be changed. But changing the hips before changing the angle of the legs would not be helpful. Changing to upright posture without lengthening the neck and setting the skull atop the spine would not work.

The point is this. There are hundreds of traits that distinguish us from chimps, probably requiring tens of thousands of mutations in total. But even if it takes only 30 or 40 specific trait changes to move from primate to human, and hundred of mutations, the time required would be astronomical. Longer than the age of the universe, actually.

Like Richard Sternberg's argument about whales, the argument from what is required to what is possible shows there just isn't time enough for it to have happened by unguided means.

The Watchtower Society's commentary on the biblical world.

WORLD:
This is the usual English term for translating the Greek koʹsmos in all of its occurrences in the Christian Greek Scriptures except 1 Peter 3:3, where it is rendered “adornment.” “World” can mean (1) humankind as a whole, apart from their moral condition or course of life, (2) the framework of human circumstances into which a person is born and in which he lives (and in this sense it is at times quite similar to the Greek ai·onʹ, “system of things”), or (3) the mass of mankind apart from Jehovah’s approved servants.

The King James Version used “world” to render not only koʹsmos but also three other Greek words in some of its renderings of them (ge; ai·onʹ; oi·kou·meʹne) and five different Hebrew words (ʼeʹrets; cheʹdhel; cheʹledh; ʽoh·lamʹ; te·velʹ). This produced a blurring or confused blending of meanings that made it difficult to obtain correct understanding of the scriptures involved. Later translations have served to clear up considerably this confusion.

The Hebrew ʼeʹrets and the Greek ge (from which come the English words “geography” and “geology”) mean “earth; ground; soil; land” (Ge 6:4; Nu 1:1; Mt 2:6; 5:5; 10:29; 13:5), although in some cases they may stand in a figurative sense for the people of the earth, as at Psalm 66:4 and Revelation 13:3. Both ʽoh·lamʹ (Heb.) and ai·onʹ (Gr.) relate basically to a period of time of indefinite length. (Ge 6:3; 17:13; Lu 1:70) Ai·onʹ may also signify the “system of things” characterizing a certain period, age, or epoch. (Ga 1:4) Cheʹledh (Heb.) has a somewhat similar meaning and may be rendered by such terms as “life’s duration” and “system of things.” (Job 11:17; Ps 17:14) Oi·kou·meʹne (Gr.) means the “inhabited earth” (Lu 21:26), and te·velʹ (Heb.) may be rendered “productive land.” (2Sa 22:16) Cheʹdhel (Heb.) occurs only at Isaiah 38:11, and in the King James Version it is rendered “world” in the expression “inhabitants of the world.” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (edited by G. Buttrick, 1962, Vol. 4, p. 874) suggests the rendering “inhabitants of (the world of) cessation,” while pointing out that most scholars favor the reading of some Hebrew manuscripts that have cheʹledh in place of cheʹdhel. The New World Translation reads “inhabitants of [the land of] cessation.”—See AGE; EARTH; SYSTEMS OF THINGS.

“Kosmos” and Its Various Senses. The basic meaning of the Greek koʹsmos is “order” or “arrangement.” And to the extent that the concept of beauty is bound up with order and symmetry, koʹsmos also conveys that thought and therefore was often used by the Greeks to mean “adornment,” especially as regards women. It is used in that way at 1 Peter 3:3. Hence also the English word “cosmetic.” The related verb ko·smeʹo has the sense of ‘putting in order’ at Matthew 25:7 and that of ‘adorning’ elsewhere. (Mt 12:44; 23:29; Lu 11:25; 21:5; 1Ti 2:9; Tit 2:10; 1Pe 3:5; Re 21:2, 19) The adjective koʹsmi·os, at 1 Timothy 2:9 and 3:2, describes that which is “well-arranged” or “orderly.”

Evidently because the universe manifests order, Greek philosophers at times applied koʹsmos to the entire visible creation. However, there was no real unanimity of thought among them, some restricting it to the celestial bodies only, others using it for the whole universe. The use of koʹsmos to describe the material creation as a whole appears in some Apocryphal writings (compare Wisdom 9:9; 11:17), these being written during the period when Greek philosophy was making inroads in many Jewish areas. But in the inspired writings of the Christian Greek Scriptures this sense is virtually, perhaps entirely, absent. Some texts may appear to use the term in that sense, such as the account of the apostle’s address to the Athenians at the Areopagus. Paul there said: “The God that made the world [form of koʹsmos] and all the things in it, being, as this One is, Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in handmade temples.” (Ac 17:22-24) Since the use of koʹsmos as meaning the universe was current among the Greeks, Paul might have employed the term in that sense. Even here, however, it is entirely possible that he used it in one of the ways discussed in the rest of this article.

Linked With Mankind. Richard C. Trench’s Synonyms of the New Testament (London, 1961, pp. 201, 202), after presenting the philosophic use of koʹsmos for the universe, says: “From this signification of κόσμος [koʹsmos] as the material universe, . . . followed that of κόσμος as that external framework of things in which man lives and moves, which exists for him and of which he constitutes the moral centre (John xvi. 21; I Cor. xiv. 10; I John iii. 17); . . . and then the men themselves, the sum total of persons living in the world (John i. 29; iv. 42; II Cor. v. 19); and then upon this, and ethically, all not of the ἐκκλησία [ek·kle·siʹa; the church or congregation], alienated from the life of God and by wicked works enemies to Him (I Cor. i. 20, 21; II Cor. vii. 10; Jam. iv. 4).”

Similarly, the book Studies in the Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament, by K. S. Wuest (1946, p. 57), quotes Greek scholar Cremer as saying: “As kosmos is regarded as that order of things whose center is man, attention is directed chiefly to him, and kosmos denotes mankind within that order of things, humanity as it manifests itself in and through such an order (Mt. 18:7).”

All humankind. Koʹsmos, or the “world,” is therefore closely linked and bound up with mankind. This is true in secular Greek literature and is particularly so in Scripture. When Jesus said that the man walking in daylight “sees the light of this world [form of koʹsmos]” (Joh 11:9), it might appear that by “world” is meant simply the planet Earth, which has the sun as its source of daylight. However, his next words speak of the man walking at night who bumps into something “because the light is not in him.” (Joh 11:10) It is primarily for mankind that God gave the sun and other heavenly bodies. (Compare Ge 1:14; Ps 8:3-8; Mt 5:45.) Similarly, using light in a spiritual sense, Jesus told his followers they would be “the light of the world” (Mt 5:14), certainly not meaning they would illuminate the planet, for he goes on to show their illuminating would be for mankind, “before men.” (Mt 5:16; compare Joh 3:19; 8:12; 9:5; 12:46; Php 2:15.) The preaching of the good news “in all the world” (Mt 26:13) also means preaching it to mankind as a whole, even as in some languages “all the world” is the common way of saying “everybody” (compare French tout le monde; Spanish todo el mundo).—Compare Joh 8:26; 18:20; Ro 1:8; Col 1:5, 6.

In one basic sense, then, koʹsmos refers to all humankind. The Scriptures therefore describe the koʹsmos, or world, as being guilty of sin (Joh 1:29; Ro 3:19; 5:12, 13) and needing a savior to give it life (Joh 4:42; 6:33, 51; 12:47; 1Jo 4:14), things applicable only to mankind, not to the inanimate creation nor to the animals. This is the world that God loved so much that “he gave his only-begotten Son, in order that everyone exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life.” (Joh 3:16, 17; compare 2Co 5:19; 1Ti 1:15; 1Jo 2:2.) That world of mankind forms the field in which Jesus Christ sowed the fine seed, “the sons of the kingdom.”—Mt 13:24, 37, 38.

When Paul says that God’s “invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made,” he must mean from the creation of mankind forward, for only when mankind appeared were there minds on earth capable of ‘perceiving’ such invisible qualities by means of the visible creation.—Ro 1:20.

Similarly, John 1:10 says of Jesus that “the world [koʹsmos] came into existence through him.” While it is true that Jesus shared in the production of all things, including the heavens and the planet Earth and all things in it, koʹsmos here applies primarily to humankind in whose production Jesus likewise shared. (Compare Joh 1:3; Col 1:15-17; Ge 1:26.) Hence, the rest of the verse says: “But the world [that is, the world of mankind] did not know him.”

“The founding of the world.” This clear connection of koʹsmos with the world of mankind also aids one in understanding what is meant by “the founding of the world,” as referred to in a number of texts. These texts speak of certain things as taking place ‘from the founding of the world.’ These include the ‘shedding of the blood of the prophets’ from the time of Abel onward, a ‘kingdom prepared,’ and ‘names being written on the scroll of life.’ (Lu 11:50, 51; Mt 25:34; Re 13:8; 17:8; compare Mt 13:35; Heb 9:26.) Such things relate to human life and activity, and hence “the founding of the world” must relate to the beginning of mankind, not of the inanimate creation or the animal creation. Hebrews 4:3 shows that God’s creative works were, not started, but “finished from the founding of the world.” Since Eve was evidently the last of Jehovah’s earthly creative works, the world’s founding could not precede her.

As shown under ABEL (No. 1) and FOREKNOWLEDGE, FOREORDINATION (Foreordination of the Messiah), the Greek term (ka·ta·bo·leʹ) for “founding” can refer to the conceiving of seed in human conception. Ka·ta·bo·leʹ literally means “a throwing down [of seed]” and at Hebrews 11:11 may be rendered “conceive” (RS, NW). Its use there evidently refers to Abraham’s ‘throwing down’ human seed for the begetting of a son and Sarah’s receiving that seed so as to be fertilized.

Therefore “the founding of the world” need not be taken to mean the beginning of the creation of the material universe, nor does the expression “before the founding of the world” (Joh 17:5, 24; Eph 1:4; 1Pe 1:20) refer to a point of time prior to the creation of the material universe. Rather, these expressions evidently relate to the time when the human race was ‘founded’ through the first human pair, Adam and Eve, who, outside of Eden, began to conceive seed that could benefit from God’s provisions for deliverance from inherited sin.—Ge 3:20-24; 4:1, 2.

‘Spectacle to world, both to angels and men.’ Some have understood the use of the word koʹsmos in 1 Corinthians 4:9 to include both invisible spirit creatures and visible human creatures, by the rendering: “We are made a spectacle unto the world, both to angels and men.” (AS) However, the footnote offers an alternative reading in saying: “Or, and to angels, and to men.” This latter rendering is also the way in which other versions render the Greek text here. (KJ; La; Mo; Vg; CC; Murdock) Young’s translation reads: “A spectacle we became to the world, and messengers, and men.” Just preceding this, in 1 Corinthians 1:20, 21, 27, 28; 2:12; 3:19, 22 the writer uses the word koʹsmos to mean the world of humankind, so that evidently he does not depart from that sense immediately afterward in 1 Corinthians 4:9, 13. Hence, if the rendering “both to angels and men” is admitted, the expression is merely an intensification, not to enlarge the meaning of the word koʹsmos, but to enlarge on the spectatorship as going beyond the world of mankind, so as to include “angels” as well as “men.”—Compare Ro.

The human sphere of life and its framework. This does not mean that koʹsmos loses all of its original sense of “order” or “arrangement” and becomes merely a synonym for mankind. Mankind itself reflects a certain order, being composed of families, tribes, and having developed into nations and language groups (1Co 14:10; Re 7:9; 14:6), with their wealthy and poor classes and other groupings. (Jas 2:5, 6) A framework of things that surround and affect mankind has been built up on earth as mankind has grown in number and in years of existence. When Jesus spoke of a man as ‘gaining the whole world but forfeiting his soul in the process,’ he evidently meant gaining all that the human sphere of life and human society as a whole could offer. (Mt 16:26; compare 6:25-32.) Of similar significance are Paul’s words about those “making use of the world” and the married persons’ ‘anxiety for the things of the world’ (1Co 7:31-34), as also is John’s reference to “this world’s means for supporting life.”—1Jo 3:17; compare 1Co 3:22.

In the sense of signifying the framework, order, or sphere of human life, koʹsmos has a meaning similar to that of the Greek ai·onʹ. In some cases the two words can almost be interchanged. For example, Demas is reported to have forsaken the apostle Paul because he “loved the present system of things [ai·oʹna]”; while the apostle John warned against ‘loving the world [koʹsmon]’ with its way of life that appeals to the sinful flesh. (2Ti 4:10; 1Jo 2:15-17) And the one who is described at John 12:31 as “the ruler of this world [koʹsmou]” is identified at 2 Corinthians 4:4 as “the god of this system of things [ai·oʹnos].”

At the close of his Gospel, the apostle John says that if all the things Jesus did were set down in full detail, he supposed “the world [form of koʹsmos] itself could not contain the scrolls written.” (Joh 21:25) He did not use ge (the earth) or oi·kou·meʹne (the inhabited earth) and thereby say that the planet could not contain the scrolls, but he used koʹsmos, evidently meaning that human society (with its then existing library space) was not in position to receive the voluminous records (in the book style then used) that this would have entailed. Compare also such texts as John 7:4; 12:19 for similar uses of koʹsmos.

Coming “into the world.” When one is ‘born into this world,’ then, he is not merely born among mankind but also comes into the framework of human circumstances in which men live. (Joh 16:21; 1Ti 6:7) However, while references to one’s going or coming into the world may refer to one’s birth into the human sphere of life, this is not always the case. Jesus, for example, in prayer to God said: “Just as you sent me forth into the world, I also sent them [his disciples] forth into the world.” (Joh 17:18) He sent them into the world as grown men, not as newborn babes. John speaks of false prophets and deceivers as having “gone forth into the world.”—1Jo 4:1; 2Jo 7.

The many references to Jesus’ ‘coming or being sent forth into the world’ evidently do not refer primarily, if at all, to his human birth but more reasonably apply to his going out among mankind, publicly carrying out his assigned ministry from and after his baptism and anointing, acting as a light bearer to the world of mankind. (Compare Joh 1:9; 3:17, 19; 6:14; 9:39; 10:36; 11:27; 12:46; 1Jo 4:9.) His human birth was solely a necessary means to that end. (Joh 18:37) In corroboration of this, the writer of Hebrews represents Jesus as speaking words from Psalm 40:6-8 “when he comes into the world,” and Jesus logically did not do this as a newborn babe.—Heb 10:5-10.

When his public ministry among mankind came to its close, Jesus knew “that his hour had come for him to move out of this world to the Father.” He would die as a man and would be resurrected to life in the spirit realm from which he had come.—Joh 13:1; 16:28; 17:11; compare Joh 8:23.

“The elementary things of the world.” At Galatians 4:1-3, after showing that a child is like a slave in the sense of being under the stewardship of others until he is of age, Paul states: “Likewise we also, when we were babes, continued enslaved by the elementary things [stoi·kheiʹa] belonging to the world.” He then proceeds to show that God’s Son came at the “full limit of the time” and released those becoming his disciples from being under the Law that they might receive the adoption of sons. (Ga 4:4-7) Similarly at Colossians 2:8, 9, 20 he warns the Christians at Colossae against being carried off “through the philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary things [stoi·kheiʹa] of the world and not according to Christ; because it is in him that all the fullness of the divine quality dwells bodily,” stressing that they “died together with Christ toward the elementary things of the world.”

Of the Greek word stoi·kheiʹa (plural of stoi·kheiʹon) used by Paul, The Pulpit Commentary (Galatians, p. 181) says: “From the primary sense of ‘stakes placed in a row,’ . . . the term [stoi·kheiʹa] was applied to the letters of the alphabet as placed in rows, and thence to the primary constituents of speech; then to the primary constituents of all objects in nature, as, for example, the four ‘elements’ (see 2 Pet. iii. 10, 12); and to the ‘rudiments’ or first ‘elements’ of any branch of knowledge. It is in this last sense that it occurs in Heb. v. 12.” (Edited by C. Spence, London, 1885) The related verb stoi·kheʹo means “walk orderly.”—Ga 6:16.

In his letters to the Galatians and Colossians, Paul was evidently not referring to the basic or component parts of the material creation but, rather, as German scholar Heinrich A. W. Meyer’s Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book (1884, Galatians, p. 168) observes, to “the elements of non-Christian humanity,” that is, to its fundamental, or primary, principles. Paul’s writings show this would include the philosophies and deceptive teachings based purely on human standards, concepts, reasoning, and mythology, such as the Greeks and other pagan peoples reveled in. (Col 2:8) However, it is clear that he also used the term as embracing things of a Jewish nature, not only non-Biblical Jewish teachings calling for asceticism or “worship of the angels” but also the teaching that Christians should put themselves under obligation to keep the Mosaic Law.—Col 2:16-18; Ga 4:4, 5, 21.

True, the Mosaic Law was of divine origin. However, it had now been fulfilled in Christ Jesus, “the reality” to which its shadows pointed, and it was therefore obsolete. (Col 2:13-17) Additionally, the tabernacle (and later temple) was “worldly” or of human construction, hence, “mundane” (Gr., ko·smi·konʹ; Heb 9:1, Mo), that is, of the human sphere, not heavenly or spiritual, and the requirements related thereto were “legal requirements pertaining to the flesh and were imposed until the appointed time to set things straight.” Christ Jesus had now entered into the “greater and more perfect tent not made with hands, that is, not of this creation,” into heaven itself. (Heb 9:8-14, 23, 24) He himself had told a Samaritan woman that the time was coming when the temple at Jerusalem would no longer be used as an essential part of true worship but that the true worshipers would “worship the Father with spirit and truth.” (Joh 4:21-24) So the need to employ such things that were only “typical representations” (Heb 9:23) within the human sphere picturing the greater things of a heavenly nature had ceased with Christ Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven.

Hence the Galatian and Colossian Christians could now worship according to the superior way based on Christ Jesus. He, and not humans and their principles or teachings, or even the “legal requirements pertaining to the flesh” as found in the Law covenant, should be recognized as the appointed standard and the full means of measuring the truth of any teaching or way of life. (Col 2:9) Christians should not be like children by voluntarily placing themselves under that which was likened to a pedagogue or tutor, namely, the Mosaic Law (Ga 3:23-26), but they were to be in a relationship with God like that of a grown son with his father. The law was elementary, “the A B C of religion,” as compared with the Christian teaching. (H. Meyer’s Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book, 1885, Colossians, p. 292) Anointed Christians, because of their being begotten to heavenly life, had, in effect, died and been impaled to the koʹsmos of the human sphere of life, in which regulations such as fleshly circumcision had been in force; they had become “a new creation.” (2Co 5:17; Col 2:11, 12, 20-23; compare Ga 6:12-15; Joh 8:23.) They knew that Jesus’ Kingdom was not from a human source. (Joh 18:36) They certainly should not turn back to “the weak and beggarly elementary things” of the human sphere (Ga 4:9) and thereby be deluded into giving up the “riches of the full assurance of their understanding” and “accurate knowledge of the sacred secret of God, namely, Christ,” in whom are concealed “all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge.”—Col 2:1-4.

The world alienated from God. A use of koʹsmos unique to the Scriptures is in making it stand for the world of mankind apart from God’s servants. Peter writes that God brought the Deluge “upon a world of ungodly people,” while preserving Noah and his family; in this way “the world of that time suffered destruction when it was deluged with water.” (2Pe 2:5; 3:6) It may again be noted that the reference here is not to the destruction of the planet or of the celestial bodies of the universe, but it is restricted to the human sphere, in this case the unrighteous human society. It was that “world” that Noah condemned by his faithful course.—Heb 11:7.

The pre-Flood unrighteous world, or human society, ended, but mankind itself did not end, being preserved in Noah and his family. After the Flood the majority of mankind again deviated from righteousness, producing another wicked human society. Still there were those who took a separate course, adhering to righteousness. In course of time God designated Israel as his chosen people, bringing them into covenant relationship with himself. Because the Israelites were thus made distinct from the world in general, Paul could use koʹsmos, “world,” as equivalent to the non-Israelite “people of the nations,” or “Gentiles,” at Romans 11:12-15. (NW; KJ) He there pointed out that Israel’s apostasy led to God’s revoking his covenant relationship with them and that it opened up the way for the Gentiles to enter into such relationship and its riches, by being reconciled to God. (Compare Eph 2:11-13.) The “world,” or koʹsmos, then, during this post-Flood and pre-Christian period again designated all humanity outside of God’s approved servants, and specifically those outside Israel during the period of its covenant relationship with Jehovah.—Compare Heb 11:38.

In a similar manner and with great frequency, koʹsmos is used to signify all non-Christian human society, regardless of race. This is the world that hated Jesus and his followers because they bore witness concerning its unrighteousness and because they maintained separateness from it; such world thereby showed hatred for Jehovah God himself and did not come to know him. (Joh 7:7; 15:17-25; 16:19, 20; 17:14, 25; 1Jo 3:1, 13) Over this world of unrighteous human society and its kingdoms, God’s Adversary, Satan the Devil, exercises rulership; in fact, he has made himself “the god” of such world. (Mt 4:8, 9; Joh 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; compare 2Co 4:4.) God did not produce such unrighteous world; it owes its development to his chief Opposer, in whose power “the whole world is lying.” (1Jo 4:4, 5; 5:18, 19) Satan and his “wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places” act as the invisible “world rulers [or, cosmocrats; Gr., ko·smo·kraʹto·ras]” over the world alienated from God.—Eph 6:11, 12.

Not simply humanity, of which Jesus’ disciples were a part, but the whole organized human society that exists outside the true Christian congregation is meant in such texts. Otherwise Christians could not cease to be a “part of the world” without dying and ceasing to live in the flesh. (Joh 17:6; 15:19) Though unavoidably living in the midst of that society of worldly persons, including those engaging in fornication, idolatry, extortion, and similar practices (1Co 5:9-13), such Christians must keep themselves clean and unspotted by that world’s corruption and defilement, not entering into friendly relations with it, lest they be condemned with it. (1Co 11:32; Jas 1:27; 4:4; 2Pe 1:4; 2:20; compare 1Pe 4:3-6.) They cannot be guided by worldly wisdom, which is foolishness in God’s sight, nor can they ‘breathe in’ the “spirit of the world,” that is, its selfish and sinful activating force. (1Co 1:21; 2:12; 3:19; 2Co 1:12; Tit 2:12; compare Joh 14:16, 17; Eph 2:1, 2; 1Jo 2:15-17; see SPIRIT [Impelling Mental Inclination].) Thus, through their faith they ‘conquer the world’ of unrighteous human society, even as did God’s Son. (Joh 16:33; 1Jo 4:4; 5:4, 5) That unrighteous human society is due to pass away by divine destruction (1Jo 2:17), even as the ungodly pre-Flood world perished.—2Pe 3:6.


Ungodly world ends; humankind preserved. Thus, the koʹsmos for which Jesus died must mean the world of mankind viewed simply as the human family, all human flesh. (Joh 3:16, 17) As to the world in the sense of human society alienated from God and in actual enmity toward God, Jesus did not pray on behalf of such world but only for those who came out of that world and put faith in him. (Joh 17:8, 9) Even as human flesh survived the destruction of the ungodly human society, or world, in the Deluge, so Jesus showed that human flesh is to survive the great tribulation that he likened to that Flood. (Mt 24:21, 22, 36-39; compare Re 7:9-17.) “The kingdom of the world” (evidently meaning of humankind) is, in fact, promised to become “the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ,” and those reigning with Christ in his heavenly Kingdom are due to “rule as kings over the earth,” hence over humankind apart from the deceased ungodly human society dominated by Satan.—Re 11:15; 5:9, 10.

DeMythifying science.

Science Doesn’t Work the Way You Might Think
Not even for Einstein
THOMAS LEVENSON  NOV 10, 2015   SCIENCE


One hundred years ago this month, Albert Einstein put the final polish on a new theory, one that transformed how humankind understands the fundamental nature of reality. With his general theory of relativity Einstein displaced the most famous idea in science, Newton’s theory of gravity, replacing the old idea of a force with a radically strange vision of a cosmos in which space warps and time bends.

When, four years later, during a total eclipse, measurements of starlight curving around the sun confirmed general relativity, Einstein became a global celebrity, and the first line of the catechism of science was reaffirmed: A single brute fact can destroy the most beautiful idea.


Richard Feynman once phrased that credo a bit more gracefully, writing that science gains its unique power to determine “whether something is so or not” through the commandment that “observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.” In one form or another, that’s what would-be scientists (and the rest of us) are told from a first-science-fair Coke-and-Mentos volcano onwards: Science advances because at every turn it is subject to the test of reality, the judgment of nature from which there is no appeal.That’s what happened, or seemed to, when the British scientists who measured the path of starlight around the sun reported to a meeting of the Royal Society that they had observed a number that matched Einstein’s prediction and contradicted Newton. A single unequivocal observation had spoken: Light swerves along the contours of spacetime, and just like that, the 200-year-old Newtonian cosmos came crashing down.There’s only one problem: It didn’t happen that way.

Albert Einstein had no need to wait four years for confirmation of his theory. From at least a week before he completed general relativity in its final form, he already knew that nature agreed with him. When he did his sums, what had seemed a tiny error in an obscure measurement could be completely accounted for by his theory. For him, that was enough: The general theory was the real thing.

At first glance, that’s just another example of how Feynman said science ought to work. But actually, the mystery that convinced Einstein had gone unsolved for over half a century—and no one, not even Einstein himself until the very end, had recognized the phenomenon for what it was: a decisive challenge to Newton’s whole approach. Instead, decades were spent in pursuit of a planet that by every reasonable measure should have existed, but didn’t.

The story of that missing planet begins with one that was and is very much present. A definitive analysis of the orbit of Mercury in 1859 had revealed a glitch. A tiny wobble, less than one part in 10,000 of the innermost planet’s track around the sun could not be explained by any known source of gravity within the solar system. Within the framework of Newtonian gravitation, the explanation was obvious: If every recognized body had been accounted for, then Mercury’s misbehavior could only be explained by something yet to be discovered, a planet between it and the sun.
First sight of the expected body, captured in transit across the face of the sun, came almost immediately, in December 1859. The new planet was so obviously necessary that there was no hesitation in naming it: Enter Vulcan. Astrophotography—the technique of attaching cameras to telescopes—was in its infancy, so this first observation was drawn and described, but to be confirmed, it would have to be repeated by someone else. No one did, but no matter. Professional and serious amateur astronomers would glimpse their version of Vulcan at least a dozen times over the next 20 years.


The final “Eureka!” came at the great American eclipse of 1878, when James Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, recognized Vulcan in a small reddish object within a few degrees of the limb of the shadowed sun. Unfortunately, none of the other professional astronomers at the eight stations set up by the federal government to observe the eclipse saw anything out of the ordinary.

With that the scientific consensus came to rest: Each “discovery” had been a mistake; a sunspot, a mis-identified star, a wish. Vulcan had every right to exist. In Newton’s universe it had an obligation to be there. It wasn’t.

The next move was obvious, except no one dared make it: Could Newton be wrong? A few astronomers proposed ad-hoc solutions: Maybe the sun was fatter around the middle than believed (it’s not); perhaps there is an unseen halo of dust that could exert a gravitational tug on Mercury (there isn’t); maybe one could play with Newton’s numbers a bit to make all the sums work out (they don’t). But for the most part, for the next 30 years, Mercury’s rambles faded into obscurity. On one side, there was the most successful theory in the history of modern science. On the other, a tiny unaccountable anomaly. It was no contest.


The challenge to Newton did come, of course. In 1905, Albert Einstein published the special theory of relativity, which showed that the tick of time and the measurement of space must differ for observers in motion relative to each other. By 1907, Einstein realized that the logic of this first theory of relativity conflicted with the classical understanding of motion and gravity. For one example: In Newton’s view, the force of gravity leaps across empty space instantly, the sun’s tug grabbing earth with no time delay at all, while under Einstein’s relativity, nothing, not even force, can move faster than the speed of light.There were other issues as well, but it was that kind of contradiction and no mere awkward observation that led Einstein to extend relativity into a theory of gravity. It would take him eight years, but finally, in November of 1915, he had got it: both the physical picture of a universe in which energy and matter deform space and time—and the mathematical framework that allowed him to calculate the paths matter-energy must take in this new cosmos.And so, when Einstein had finally tuned his math to the point where he could calculate an actual example from the real world, he turned to the case of a planet traveling close to its star: Mercury. Sometime in the week between November 11 and November 18, he inserted the appropriate numbers and cranked through the equations. Twenty-four steps later and he had his answer. Mercury’s path, Vulcan-inspiring wobble and all, appeared on the page in all its glory—or, as Einstein wrote: “This theory agrees completely with the observations.”

With that, Einstein knew. He told one friend that on seeing Mercury drop out of his equations that he felt his heart stumble, and another that he was “beside himself with joy.” There was no need to wait for the eclipse—which is why he once said that if the British expedition had come back with the “wrong” numbers “I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”
A century on, we celebrate general relativity and Einstein’s re-imagining of how the universe organizes itself. Vulcan now rates barely a footnote to the history of astronomy. But it has its uses. Contrary to the myth of science, facts are not autonomous. They gain meaning from the frameworks within which human beings interpret them. It can be—it was for Vulcan—almost impossibly hard to see past what ought to exist to what does.

The decades Vulcan lasted as almost-real mark the distance separating our myth of scientific progress and the way science actually happens day by day. Its biography is perhaps the cleanest example of how hard it is in the midst of the fray to recognize the decisive observation, but it is hardly the only such case.

The strangeness of the geology and fossil evidence behind the theory of continental drift helped drive a half-century of resistance to the idea. Siddhartha Mukherjee documented in his book The Emperor of All Maladies how a fixation on the cure for a misconceived disease inhibited recognition of the complexity of cancer for a generation. It took decades before physicists came to grips with experiments that showed that the speed of light was constant for every observer—and even then, only the very young Einstein took that observation seriously enough to produce his first relativity theory.

In the long run, it’s true: Reality imposes a final and authoritative judgment on the rights and wrongs of any idea. In the moment, though, each moment, including ours, meaning in science emerges painfully, slowly, one fallible, historically contingent, self-deceiving and (very) occasionally triumphant scientist at a time. In other words, Vulcan’s brief brush with existence (1859-1915, RIP) is no mere curiosity. It’s a caution.

The terms "species " and "speciation" Just became a bit coudier

Snake turns out to be six different “species”
November 29, 2015 Posted by News under News, speciation

From ScienceDaily:

The Persian dwarf snake is wrongly classified as one species, scientists say. New research shows it is composed of six different species, a finding which might be important for the conservation of the snake.

Well, the new finding might be important for the conservation of the snake but, together with many other instances, it isn’t doing much for a science-based use of the term “species.”

That’s been noted here before. except for claiming instances of evolution right under our noses on weak evidence.

The research, which was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, revealed that the Persian dwarf snake is not a single species at all. It is composed of 6 different species, wrongly classified as the species Eirenis persicus. A molecular clock analysis revealed that the divergence and diversification of the E. persicus species group mainly correspond to Eocene to Pliocene orogeny events subsequent to the Arabia-Eurasia collision.

The six species are Eirenis nigrofasciatus, Eirenis walteri, Eirenis angusticeps, Eirenis walteri, Eirenis mcmahoni and Eirenis occidentalis. Except for E. occidentalis, which is a completely new discovery by the researchers, these species were already described between 1872 and 1911. However, during the last half of the previous century, herpetologists considered them as a single species with some difference in color and pattern, because the overall morphology is quite similar. More.

The fact that the very concept of “species” is such a mess, with no sign of taking the matter in hand, is the sort of thing that causes some to call biology the “social sciences of the sciences.”* Apparently, the hallowed popular status of On the Origin of Species is enough warrant for comfort with chaos.

See also: Single jaw finds three species to be one

* Note: And social sciences return the compliment. Psychology Today informed us in 2009 that social sciences are branches of biology.I Oh no! It can’t be as bad as all that!

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Here’s the abstract:


The Persian dwarf snake Eirenis (Pseudocyclophis) persicus (Anderson, 1872) has a wide distribution range in south-western Asia. This species group was comprehensively studied here using traditional biometry, geometric morphometrics, ecological niche modelling, and genetics. Our analyses revealed that E.?persicus is split into two clades. A western clade, bearing at least two different species: E.?persicus, distributed in south-western Iran, and an undescribed species from south-eastern Turkey and western Iran. The eastern clade consists of at least three species: Eirenis nigrofasciatus, distributed across north-eastern Iraq, and western and southern Iran; Eirenis walteri, distributed across eastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and western and southern Pakistan, and Eirenis angusticeps, distributed in north-eastern Pakistan. Ecological niche modelling revealed that the distribution of the species in the western clade are mainly affected by winter precipitation, and those in the eastern clade are mainly affected by the minimum temperature of the coldest month. A molecular clock analysis revealed that the divergence and diversification of the E.?persicus species group mainly correspond to Eocene to Pliocene orogeny events subsequent to the Arabia–Eurasia collision. This study confirms that specimens with the unique morphology of having 13 dorsal scale rows on the anterior dorsum, occurring in the Suleiman Mountains in central Pakistan, can be referred to Eirenis mcmahoni (Wall, 1911). However, at this moment we have insufficient data to evaluate the taxonomy of this species. © 2015 The Linnean Society of London Open access – Mahdi Rajabizadeh, Zoltán T. Nagy, Dominique Adriaens, Aziz Avci, Rafaqat Masroor, Josef Schmidtler, Roman Nazarov, Hamid Reza Esmaeili, Joachim Christiaens. Alpine-Himalayan orogeny drove correlated morphological, molecular, and ecological diversification in the Persian dwarf snake (Squamata: Serpentes:Eirenis persicus). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/zoj.12342