Psalms1-7 New Jerusalem Bible.

1.1 How blessed is anyone who rejects the advice of the wicked and does not take a stand in the path that sinners tread, nor a seat in company with cynics,

2 but who delights in the law of Yahweh and murmurs his law day and night.

3 Such a one is like a tree planted near streams; it bears fruit in season and its leaves never wither, and every project succeeds.

4 How different the wicked, how different! Just like chaff blown around by the wind

5 the wicked will not stand firm at the Judgement nor sinners in the gathering of the upright.

6 For Yahweh watches over the path of the upright, but the path of the wicked is doomed.
2.1 Why this uproar among the nations, this impotent muttering of the peoples?

2 Kings of the earth take up position, princes plot together against Yahweh and his anointed,

3 'Now let us break their fetters! Now let us throw off their bonds!'

4 He who is enthroned in the heavens laughs, Yahweh makes a mockery of them,

5 then in his anger rebukes them, in his rage he strikes them with terror.

6 'I myself have anointed my king on Zion my holy mountain.'

7 I will proclaim the decree of Yahweh: He said to me, 'You are my son, today have I fathered you.

8 Ask of me, and I shall give you the nations as your birthright, the whole wide world as your possession.

9 With an iron sceptre you will break them, shatter them like so many pots.'

10 So now, you kings, come to your senses, you earthly rulers, learn your lesson!

11 In fear be submissive to Yahweh;

12 with trembling kiss his feet, lest he be angry and your way come to nothing, for his fury flares up in a moment. How blessed are all who take refuge in him!
3.1 [Psalm Of David When he was fleeing from his son Absalom] Yahweh, how countless are my enemies, how countless those who rise up against me,

2 how countless those who say of me, 'No salvation for him from his God!'Pause

3 But you, Yahweh, the shield at my side, my glory, you hold my head high.

4 I cry out to Yahweh; he answers from his holy mountain.Pause

5 As for me, if I lie down and sleep, I shall awake, for Yahweh sustains me.

6 I have no fear of people in their thousands upon thousands, who range themselves against me wherever I turn.

7 Arise, Yahweh, rescue me, my God! You strike all my foes across the face, you break the teeth of the wicked.

8 In Yahweh is salvation, on your people, your blessing!Pause.
4.1 [For the choirmaster For strings Psalm Of David] When I call, answer me, God, upholder of my right. In my distress you have set me at large; take pity on me and hear my prayer!

2 Children of men, how long will you be heavy of heart, why love what is vain and chase after illusions?Pause

3 Realise that Yahweh performs wonders for his faithful, Yahweh listens when I call to him.

4 Be careful not to sin, speak in your hearts, and on your beds keep silence.Pause

5 Loyally offer sacrifices, and trust in Yahweh.

6 Many keep saying, 'Who will put happiness before our eyes?' Let the light of your face shine on us. Yahweh,

7 to my heart you are a richer joy than all their corn and new wine.

8 In peace I lie down and at once fall asleep, for it is you and none other, Yahweh, who make me rest secure.
5.1 [For the choirmaster For flutes Psalm Of David] Give ear to my words, Yahweh, spare a thought for my sighing.

2 Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God! To you I pray,

3 Yahweh. At daybreak you hear my voice; at daybreak I lay my case before you and fix my eyes on you.

4 You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil, no sinner can be your guest.

5 Boasters cannot stand their ground under your gaze. You hate evil-doers,

6 liars you destroy; the violent and deceitful Yahweh detests.

7 But, so great is your faithful love, I may come into your house, and before your holy temple bow down in reverence of you.

8 In your saving justice, Yahweh, lead me, because of those who lie in wait for me; make your way plain before me.

9 Not a word from their lips can be trusted, through and through they are destruction, their throats are wide -- open graves, their tongues seductive.

10 Lay the guilt on them, God, make their intrigues their own downfall; for their countless offences, thrust them from you, since they have rebelled against you.

11 But joy for all who take refuge in you, endless songs of gladness! You shelter them, they rejoice in you, those who love your name.

12 It is you who bless the upright, Yahweh, you surround them with favour as with a shield.
6.1 [For the choirmaster For strings For the octachord Psalm Of David] Yahweh, let your rebuke to me not be in anger, your punishment not in the heat of wrath.

2 Have pity on me, Yahweh, for I am fading away. Heal me, Yahweh, my bones are shaken,

3 my spirit is shaken to its very depths. But you, Yahweh . . . how long?

4 Yahweh, relent and save my life rescue me because of your faithful love,

5 for in death there is no remembrance of you; who could sing your praises in Sheol?

6 I am worn out with groaning, every night I drench my pillow and soak my bed with tears.

7 My eyes waste away with vexation. Arrogance from all my foes!

8 Away from me, all evil-doers! For Yahweh has heard the sound of my weeping,

9 Yahweh has heard my pleading. Yahweh will accept my prayer.

10 Let all my enemies be put to confusion, shaken to their depths, let them retreat in sudden confusion.
7.1 [Lament Of David Which he sang to Yahweh about Cush the Benjaminite] Yahweh my God, I take refuge in you, save me from all my pursuers and rescue me,

2 or he will savage me like a lion, carry me off with no one to rescue me.

3 Yahweh my God, if I have done this: if injustice has stained my hands,

4 if I have repaid my ally with treachery or spared one who attacked me unprovoked,

5 may an enemy hunt me down and catch me, may he trample my life into the ground and crush my vital parts into the dust.Pause

6 Arise, Yahweh, in your anger, rise up against the arrogance of my foes. Awake, my God, you demand judgement.

7 Let the assembly of nations gather round you; return above it on high!

8 (Yahweh judges the nations.) Judge me, Yahweh, as my uprightness and my integrity deserve.

9 Put an end to the malice of the wicked, make the upright stand firm, you who discern hearts and minds, God the upright.

10 God is a shield that protects me, saving the honest of heart.

11 God is an upright judge, slow to anger, but a God at all times threatening

12 for those who will not repent. Let the enemy whet his sword, draw his bow and make ready;

13 but he is making ready instruments of death for himself and tipping his arrows with fire;

14 look at him: pregnant with malice, conceiving spite, he gives birth to treachery.

15 He digs a trap, scoops it out, but he falls into the snare he made himself.

16 His spite recoils on his own head, his brutality falls back on his own skull.

17 I thank Yahweh for his saving justice. I sing to the name of the Most High.

Darwinists continue to squabble over the family album.

As a Taxonomic Group, "Homo habilis" Is Challenged in the Journal Science
Casey Luskin September 9, 2015 3:40 PM

The limits of our genus Homo have long been controversial. One problem is that evolutionary biologists sometimes try to shoehorn un-human-like fossils into Homo in order to make it appear that ape-like and human-like creatures are kin. It's a classic case of scientists letting their evolutionary bias direct taxonomy.

What's less common is to see evolutionary paleoanthropologists admitting this has happened. Now in a recent article in Science, "Defining the genus Homo," Jeffrey H. Schwartz and Ian Tattersall explain that Homo habilis (literally, "handy man") was originally placed within Homo because researchers wanted an old species that apparently made tools:

In 1964, Leakey and colleagues attributed the newly discovered ~1.8-million-year-old partial mandible, skullcap and hand (OH7) and foot (OH8), plus other materials from Olduvai Gorge, to the new species Homo habilis. This species replaced the very roughly contemporaneous South African australopiths in Mayr's transformationist scenario, although there was scant morphological justification for including any of this very ancient material in Homo. Indeed, the main motivation appears to have been Leakey's desire to identify this hominid as the maker of the simple stone tools found in the lower layers of the Gorge, following the dictum of Man the Toolmaker. This association has subsequently proven highly dubious. The inclusion in Homo of the H. habilis fossils so broadened the morphology of the genus that further hominids from other sites could be shoehorned into it almost without regard to their physical appearance. As a result, the largely unexamined definition of Homo became even murkier.
As Schwartz and Tattersall explain, the link between "Homo habilis" and tools is dubious. Indeed, the link between "habilis" and "Homo" is dubious. A major review article by Wood and Collard in Science found that habilisis different from Homo in body size, body shape, mode of locomotion, jaws and teeth, developmental patterns, and brain size, and should be reclassified within Australopithecus.
Elsewhere Tattersall has critiqued the entire species Homo habilis by calling it "a wastebasket taxon, little more than a convenient recipient for a motley assortment of hominin fossils." He has called it "a rather heterogeneous assemblage, and it is probable that more than one hominid species is represented." Paleoanthropologists Daniel E. Lieberman, David R. Pilbeam, and Richard W. Wrangham likewise co-write that "fossils attributed to H. habilis are poorly associated with inadequate and fragmentary postcrania." In an article titled "Who Was Homo habilis -- and Was It Really Homo?" in Science, Ann Gibbons notes that "researchers labeled a number of diverse, fragmentary fossils from East Africa and South Africa 'H. habilis,' making the taxon a 'grab bag... a Homo waste bin,' says paleoanthropologist Chris Ruff of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland."

Penn State University paleoanthropologist Alan Walker explains the severity of disagreements over this species: "[T]his is not a matter of some fragmentary fossils that are difficult to agree on. Whole crania are placed by different people in different species or even genera." One reason for the disagreements is that the quality of the fossils is often poor. As Walker puts it, "[d]espite the number of words published on this species... there is not as much bony evidence as we would like."

In any case, Schwartz and Tattersall end their recent article by stating:

If we want to be objective, we shall almost certainly have to scrap the iconic list of names in which hominin fossil specimens have historically been trapped, and start from the beginning by hypothesizing morphs, building testable theories of relatedness, and rethinking genera and species.
Following this would mean we should not use the name "Homo habilis" because it's not like Homo, probably didn't use complex tools, and may not even be a true species. None of this bodes well for habilis which has, at times, been called a "link" between human-like members of Homo and the apelike australopithecines.

They conclude: "In contrast to Mayr's austere linearity, we may find that human evolution rivaled that of other mammals in its evolutionary experimentation and luxuriant diversity." I'll recast their ending in my own words: The hominid fossil record doesn't include a neat line of fossils leading to humans. In reality, there are so many diverse fossils that evolutionary relationships are extremely unclear.

Yet more on life's antidarwinian biasII

Life Continues to Ignore What Evolution Experts Say

Denyse O'Leary September 9, 2015 3:18 AM

ecently, philosopher James Barham published a series of articles called "Seeing Past Darwin," in which he looks at the recent growth and enormous implications of non-Darwinian biology and its approach to evolution. We've been discussing some of the specific issues in this series.

One motif recurs: Darwinian evolution -- which most lay hearers assume to be "evolution" period -- assumes that evolution is vertical: Organisms take their form from genes inherited with slight modifications from their ancestors through their parents. And these slight changes add up gradually over time to immense and profound changes.

Non-Darwinian biology studies mechanisms for evolution that don't really work that way, including horizontal gene transfer and epigenetic change.

Demonstrating these mechanisms doesn't "disprove" common ancestry. Rather, it shows that common ancestry drives far less evolution than current popular science media lead us to expect. Also we can no longer assume that when a change does occur, a satisfactory account must be Darwinian. It will take some time to unpack the controversial implications of our newfound knowledge of actual causes of evolution.

Some non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution we haven't yet looked at play at least a small role in the history of life:

-- Genome doubling. Some plants can duplicate their chromosomes (polyploidy) to foster explosive growth without undergoing cell division. Thus, they can recover quickly from damage, such as being half eaten by grazing animals. The process, long considered a major force in plant evolution, immediately gives the cells much more DNA to work with, favoring adaptation to challenging new circumstances.

-- Jumping gene. We've looked at horizontal gene transfer between life forms. But some genes, transposons, can also move around within them. As Nature Education explains:

Some of the most profound genetic discoveries have been made with the help of various model organisms that are favored by scientists for their widespread availability and ease of maintenance and proliferation. One such model is Zea mays (maize), particularly those plants that produce variably colored kernels. Because each kernel is an embryo produced from an individual fertilization, hundreds of offspring can be scored on a single ear, making maize an ideal organism for genetic analysis. Indeed, maize proved to be the perfect organism for the study of transposable elements (TEs), also known as "jumping genes," which were discovered during the middle part of the twentieth century by American scientist Barbara McClintock. McClintock's work was revolutionary in that it suggested that an organism's genome is not a stationary entity, but rather is subject to alteration and rearrangement-a concept that was met with criticism from the scientific community at the time.

Lee Spetner recounts in The Evolution Revolution:

McClintock pursued her research despite it being considered a backwater area, and eventually the importance of her work was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee in awarding her the Prize in Medicine in 1983. The transposable genetic elements she discovered have been subsequently revealed to be members of a class of genetic rearrangements that do not occur spontaneously by chance but are under strict cellular control.

One jumping gene in the model plant Arabadopsis was found to improvedisease resistance. But jumping genes are not always useful or welcome; they can cause harmful mutations. Some are even under investigation for promoting cancer:

Study author Dr Paul Edwards, at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, said: "These jumping genes play hopscotch across our genetic code in cancer cells more than in normal cells. When one of these mobile genetic sequences plants itself in the middle of a gene that controls the cell's growth it radically alters how the cell behaves, which can sometimes cause cancer.

-- Hybridization We've already seen that cross-breeding blind cavefish from different caves can restore devolved sight in at least some offspring (because the mutations that result in loss of sight differ from group to group, and some hybrids end up with all the necessary equipment). But natural hybridization can produce such changes too. Characteristics that are not evidenced in a given generation may remain as potentials.

Ferns separated 60 million years have interbred. The wolf and dog populations of North America are so heavily hybridized that it is a challenge to make sense of them at all in the face of "all the contradictory claims." Researchers have also identified at least three potential hybridization events (interspecific mating) in Eurasian mice. One scientist noted that other studies "may have missed evidence of hybridization because the researchers weren't specifically looking for it." That means we do not currently know how frequent it is. More strangely, common baker's yeast turns out to have two different versions of its genome, thought due to a hybridization event 100 million years ago.

As a mechanism, hybridization may have developed a taint due to implausible hypotheses such as the supposed pig-chimp hybrid that, according to one theory, produced humans. But, within the bounds of the plausible, it is a means of producing long-term changes in life forms over time.

-- Symbiosis. The theory of cell mergers (sometimes called endosymbiosis or symbiogenesis) was pioneered by University of Massachusetts biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011). She proposed that one organism might absorb another and that the second would continue to function as part of the first one, creating greater complexity. AsBritannica puts it, in 1970 " her theory was regarded as far-fetched, but it has since been widely accepted."

Sometimes it can seem like a series of nested dolls. For example, two species of bacteria live together, one inside the other, inside mealybugs. One researcher said, "The effort has revealed a level of molecular-level integration between bacterial species that scientists have never before seen," in that one bacterium has divested many key life functions, now taken care of by another. An animal (the bdelloid rotifer) avoids sex but escapes extinction by eating other life forms' DNA. One lichen turned out to have at least 126 species of fungi living symbiotically: "As the team notes in their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, until very recently, the lichen was believed to have just one species of fungus." That's probably still in the textbooks.

Symbiosis can be "almost hilariously complicated," according to University of Montana microbiologist John McCutcheon. For example:

Mealybugs only eat plant sap, but sap doesn't contain all the essential amino acids the insects need to survive. Luckily, the bugs have a symbiotic relationship with two species of bacteria -- one living inside the other in a situation unique to known biology -- to manufacture the nutrients sap doesn't provide....

The researchers discovered the already complex three-way symbiosis actually depends on genes from six different organisms -- three more than the number of species that are currently found in the symbiosis.

Again, we don't know how common symbiosis (termed by one writer "slavery, but with benefits") is. While it is certainly a form of evolution, it does not typically originate new features. Rather, like horizontal gene transfer, it enables life forms to borrow each others' features, sometimes discarding some of their own, in return for more efficient operations overall. In that case, this mechanism of evolution can amount to an overall loss in complex machinery. But life goes on.

Readers may well wonder about the term "mechanism" of evolution, as used here. Consistent with Michael Behe's question, "How, exactly?", it means a process observed to account for inherited change. If a bacterium is observed to absorb antibiotic resistance genes from another bacterium and pass them on during cell division, we will term that a mechanism. It is not a theory about what "must have happened" over vast tracts of time; it is an event we have witnessed, produced by causes we can identify.

But what drives the process? That is, why do living cells attempt to protect themselves in ways that rocks and rotting wood do not? As we shall see, a number of non-Darwinian biologists now focus on the way that cells have changed and do change themselves to respond to challenges in their environment -- natural genetic engineering.