On separating science from mysticism II

It Takes Great Faith to Be an Astrobiologist

Evolution News & Views January 22, 2015 4:28 AM | 

NASA's Astrobiology Magazine, funded with taxpayer dollars, illustrates the mystical view -- what else to call it? -- of nature in the astrobiologist community. In Elizabeth Howell's article, "How the Code of Life Passed Through Primitive Kinds of Cells," we see Harold Fellerman of the University of Denmark showing his mystical streak:

"I'm very interested in the creative potential of nature," he said. "Nature in general seems to be fertile with creativity that outperforms any human imagination. We find solutions to problems in nature that no engineer would envision." [Emphasis added.]

The statement is hardly distinguishable from animism. To see why, we need to nail down some rules. These rules should be uncontroversial to any modern scientist, because they follow logically from naturalism.

1. "Nature" to a materialist has no spirit, imagination, or goal.
2. Inanimate matter has no "desire" to become animate; vitalism is out.
3. "Building blocks of life" have no obligation or desire to assemble into a living thing.
4. A lucky accident in one part of the origin-of-life scenario has no obligation or desire to join forces with another lucky accident somewhere else.
5. A random chain of building blocks is not "information" in a biological sense, nor is a "pattern" of building blocks, nor are copies of a random chain or a pattern.
6. Investigators are not allowed to interfere with natural processes in origin-of-life scenarios, because this sneaks information into the system.
7. Wishful thinking is not science. One needs evidence. Putting the evidence into the future, "i.e., further research is needed," is a cop-out.
8. The complex functions of living cells cannot be used to infer origins in inanimate matter without begging the question raised by Rules 2 and 3.

Go ahead and call foul any time someone violates one of these rules in Howell's story:

• "Life's origins are a mystery, but every year scientists get a little bit closer to understanding what made life possible on Earth, and possibly on other planets or moons." [Violates Rules 1, 4 and 7]

• "We only have one known case study of life so far, on our own planet, but microbial life is considered possible in many other areas around the Solar System, such as on Mars, Jupiter's icy Europa, and on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn that erupts water as geysers." [Violates Rule 7]

• "One large wish of scientists these days is to create artificial cells that closely mimic what biological ones do so that it would be easy to create laboratory conditions to test out how they evolve." [Violates Rules 2, 6, 7, and 8]

• "Researchers would be happy to create an artificial protocell, but that's far from easy. Figuring out how inheritance work [sic] -- how traits of a parent protocell are passed on to the next generation -- is one of the largest problems facing scientists today." [Violates Rules 6, 7, and 8]

• "The researchers brought in a hypothesis from three decades ago that assumed that any sequence of polymers (chain of small molecules) can encode information, and can becopied from one polymer strand to another using a process called template directed replication." [Violates Rules 5 and 7]

• "When simulating information strings in the computer simulation, the researchers came up with a surprising discovery. Replication occurred as expected, with information strings duplicating themselves, but the scientists were surprised to see shorter and longer strings being created in strikingly regular patterns." [Violates Rules 3, 4, 5 and 6]

• "Over time, the simulation showed the information strings were occurring in equal proportions of long and short lengths in predictable patterns. While the scientists can't say for sure that this was a step along the road to life, they said it bears further investigation as they work to create artificial protocells." [Violates Rules 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8]

You get the idea. Check the rest of the article by the rules as an exercise in critical thinking. So what remains after the violations are stricken? Essentially, nothing. There is hardly a sentence in this article that does not violate one or more rules.

This stripped-down remainder is sheer mysticism, as expressed in the Fellerman quote:

"I'm very interested in the creative potential of nature," he said. "Nature in general seems to be fertile with creativity that outperforms any human imagination. We find solutions to problems in nature that no engineer would envision."

It takes great faith to be an astrobiologist.

Iconoclasm II

Now It's Whale Hips: Another Icon of Darwinian Evolution, Vestigial Structures, Takes a Hit

David Klinghoffer September 15, 2014 4:05 AM 

In the case presented by advocates of Darwinian evolution, vestigial organs are a star in the firmament, frequently and gloatingly pointed to. Darwin himself cited them as such in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, referring to body parts like the human appendix that, he believed, no longer serve a function:

On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility... should so frequently occur.

Of course the appendix is a great example of an organ once thought to be without utility that now turns out to serve a vital role.

In the catalogue of purported vestigial parts, whale hips are "the marquee example," writes Stephanie Keep at the absurdly named "Science League of America" blog populated by our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Center for Science Education. Unfortunately whale hips have now gone the way of appendix. A paper in the journal Evolution reports that rather than being a useless reminder of the evolutionary past, when whale ancestor Pakicetus strode thThe pelvic bone supports the muscles that guide the penis. In male whales and other cetaceans, performance and thus successful sexual competition hinge on the size of the hips. The paper explains:

Male genitalia evolve rapidly, probably as a result of sexual selection. Whether this pattern extends to the internal infrastructure that influences genital movements remains unknown. Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) offer a unique opportunity to test this hypothesis: since evolving from land-dwelling ancestors, they lost external hind limbs and evolved a highly reduced pelvis which seems to serve no other function except to anchor muscles that maneuver the penis. Here we create a novel morphometric pipeline to analyze the size and shape evolution of pelvic bones from 130 individuals (29 species) in the context of inferred mating system. We present two main findings: 1) males from species with relatively intense sexual selection (inferred by relative testes size) have evolved relatively large penises and pelvic bones compared to their body size, and 2) pelvic bone shape diverges more quickly in species pairs that have diverged in inferred mating system. Neither pattern was observed in the anterior-most pair of vertebral ribs, which served as a negative control. This study provides evidence that sexual selection can affect internal anatomy that controls male genitalia. These important functions may explain why cetacean pelvic bones have not been lost through evolutionary time.

Under selection pressure from reality, Darwinists have already had to back away from Darwin's own understanding of what it means for a structure to be vestigial. Rather than serving no purpose, writes Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution Is True, now being vestigial can mean serving adifferent purpose than in one's distant ancestors. He defines "vestigial trait" this way:

A trait that is the evolutionary remnant of a feature once useful in an ancestral species but that is no longer useful in the same way. Vestigial traits can be either nonfunctional (the wings of the kiwi) or co-opted for new uses (the wings of the ostrich).

Stephanie Keep agrees:

[T]here's a problem when vestigial structures are defined as evolutionary remnants that have no function. As I discussed in a previous post, the correct way to describe a vestigial structure is to say that it no longer has its original function.

She is excited about Carl Zimmer's post on the subject, which elaborates:

While [whale hips] may not be essential for walking, they still matter a lot to whales. To see why, we have to go back to those hips of land mammals. They are important for walking on land, but they serve other purposes, too. Among other things, they anchor muscles that control the sex organs. If these muscles are anesthetized in men, for example, they have a hard time gaining an erection.

As whale hips stopped mattering to walking, they didn't stop mattering to having sex. In male whales, the pelvis controls the penis with an especially elaborate set of muscles. In some whale and dolphin species, these muscles make the penis downright prehensile.

You see the problem. Whale hips are "vestigial" yet still extremely important. Comments our colleague Michael Behe, "So doesn't that make everything a vestigial structure from a Darwinian viewpoint? And if so, of what use is the word?" Or as Jonathan Wells wrote here back in 2009 in reviewing Coyne's book ("The Myth of Vestigial Organs and Bad Design: Why Darwinism Is False"):

As [biologist Steven] Scadding had pointed out nearly thirty years ago, ... Darwin's argument rested on lack of function, not change of function. Furthermore, if vestigiality were redefined as Coyne proposes, it would include many features never before thought to be vestigial. For example, if the human arm evolved from the leg of a four-footed mammal (as Darwinists claim), then the human arm is vestigial. And if (as Coyne argues) the wings of flying birds evolved from feathered forelimbs of dinosaurs that used them for other purposes, then the wings of flying birds are vestigial. This is the opposite of what most people mean by "vestigial."

In this way, the concept of a vestigial trait is reduced to meaninglessness. In the most minimal definition, evolution denotes change over of time. No trait goes unchanged. Under the framework of Darwinian evolution, therefore, everything is vestigial. So nothing is.

This is not just our observation. The scientists who revealed the usefulness of whale hips are rethinking what it means to be vestigial. Or so it sounds from the remarks of biologist Matthew Dean at USC, a co-author of the paper in Evolution, commenting in Science Daily:

"Our research really changes the way we think about the evolution of whale pelvic bones in particular, but more generally about structures we call 'vestigial.' As a parallel, we are now learning that our appendix is actually quite important in several immune processes, not a functionally useless structure," Dean said.

Anyone who thinks whale hips are functionless, just like your appendix, should try telling that to a lonely gentleman whale. The career of this evolutionary icon isn't over yet, I'm sure, but its importance in the evolutionary pantheon is due for a serious downgrade.e land on all fours, they in fact serve an unquestionably important purpose.

Iconoclasm

Moth turns from black to white as Britain's polluted skies change colour

 The Peppered moth, which changed its colour from white to black in areas of Britain with heavy pollution, is now reverting to its original appearance.The moth was white with small black speckles but over time it evolved to being almost black in parts of the UK because of heavy industrial pollution. The change made it less obvious to predators against backgrounds of grime and soot.

Having declined by more than two thirds compared to 40 years ago, it is regarded as a classic example of natural selection and has consequently become known as "Darwin's moth."

Now in post-industrial Britain, 200 years after Darwin's birth, the moth is changing back to its original white colour.

Scientists at Butterfly Conservation, based in Dorset, are now appealing to the public for help in finding out how widespread this change has become.

As part of Garden Moths Count 2009 they want people to search their gardens for the moth and log their sightings.

"We have seen these moths making a big swing back to their original colour," said Richard Fox, project manager of Moths Count.

"It has been happening for decades as air pollution is cleaned up and with the demise of heavy industry in the big cities.

"The moths have been responding to this and the numbers of black and white moths will vary across the county.

"In Dorset it is very rare to see the moth in its dark form, but in industrial cities 150 years ago they were almost all black and that's where we will notice the greatest changes now."

He said they were also hoping to discover why the moth has been declining so dramatically since the 1960's.

"It's an iconic moth, the one that everyone learns about at school because it is such an amazing example of natural selection," he said.

"But it has actually undergone a major decline of 61 per cent since the 1960's and we don't know why.

"We will be fascinated to see where people are finding the two different forms of the moth and whether in fact people are finding it in their gardens at all."

Moth experts are also asking the public to look out for the beautiful day-flying Scarlet Tiger, which until recently was rarely seen outside South West England and South Wales.

In recent years the moth has spread to further parts of Britain as a result of climate change.

Scientists want to access how far they have flown to access the impact of climate change on our wildlife.

Garden Moths Count is part of the national Moths Count project, established after research indicated massive declines in moth numbers, especially in the southern half of Britain.

Some people are put off moths by the myth that they all eat clothes.

But in reality only half a dozen of Britain's 2,500 moth species do this - and they prefer dirty items that are hidden away in the dark in places where they are not disturbed.

Mr Fox added: "Moths are important indicators and observing them can tell us a lot.

"They are an essential food source for many birds and they are important pollinators in the garden.

"Some are very beautiful and, despite their recent decline, there are still very colourful moths to be seen in all of our gardens."

Sightings of moths seen by day or at night can be logged at the Garden Moths Count website www.mothscount.org .

Store bought sense V Horse sense II

The latest body blow to religious liberty in Russia

Russian Federation Supreme Court Decision Sets Dangerous Precedent for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia

On November 12, 2014, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld a lower court ruling that declared the Local Religious Organization (LRO) of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Samara to be extremist. The prosecutor’s office in Samara initiated its case against the Samara LRO in 2014 after law-enforcement officials searched facilities that the Witnesses rent for religious meetings and “found” a handful of their religious publications that have been banned nationwide. The banned publications had earlier been declared extremist by Russian courts and were posted on the Ministry of Justice’s Federal List of Extremist Materials. * However, the Witnesses in Samara had already complied with these Russian court decisions and removed the publications from the facilities that they rent for worship.

The Witnesses argued before the lower court and in the Supreme Court that the police conducting the search had planted the banned literature as a pretext to initiate charges. The Witnesses also explained that the European Court of Human Rights is currently examining the legality of earlier Russian court decisions that banned some of their publications. Additionally, the Witnesses argued that even if the Samara prosecutor’s allegations were true—that they had stored banned literature—the punishment was disproportionate for such a minor offense. Storing banned literature is an administrative violation punishable with a fine or a temporary suspension of the LRO’s activity, not the severe measure of liquidation. However, the Supreme Court dismissed these arguments.

Liquidation of a Legal Entity—One Step Closer to Criminal Prosecution?

The Samara LRO liquidation is following a pattern similar to that of the case in the city of Taganrog, where the Rostov Regional Court liquidated the LRO in 2009 on extremism charges. Subsequently, Taganrog law-enforcement authorities interpreted that decision as a de facto ban on the religious activity of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the area. Sixteen Witnesses in Taganrog were criminally charged in 2013 for merely carrying out their religious worship—the same practices that Jehovah’s Witnesses perform worldwide, including in Samara. Seven Witnesses were heavily fined; four of them, who are congregation elders, were also given lengthy prison sentences. However, the judge waived the fines because the investigation and trial exceeded the statute of limitations, and he imposed suspended sentences. The Witnesses have appealed these convictions, and on December 12, 2014, the Rostov Regional Court ordered a new trial with a new judge.

The 1,500 of Jehovah’s Witnesses living in the Samara region are now at risk of being criminally prosecuted merely for carrying out their worship. Where will it end? Russian authorities are conducting similar investigations of Witness LROs in various parts of the country. How these repressive state actions will affect the nearly 180,000 Witnesses living in Russia remains to be seen. However, the Supreme Court decision sets a dangerous precedent that jeopardizes the freedom of Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities in Russia.

Mark13:9NASB "But ^[e]be on your guard; for they will deliver you to the ^[f]courts, and you will be flogged in the synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them."