Frequently asked question.

Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Have a Paid Clergy

Following the model of first-century Christianity, Jehovah’s Witnesses have no clergy-laity division. All baptized members are ordained ministers and share in the preaching and teaching work. Witnesses are organized into congregations of about 100 members. Spiritually mature men in each congregation serve as “older men,” or elders. (Titus 1:5) They do so without being paid for their services.

The Junk DNA meme continues to take flak

Stanford U: Ancient viruses are part of us and we need them
November 25, 2015 Posted by News under Genomics, Human evolution, News


From The Telegraph:

The human genome is littered with sequences left behind from long-ago viral infections but now scientists have found the code is still active

Now researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine have found that genetic material from a retrovirus called HERV-H is not only active, but is crucial in allowing a fertilised human egg to grow into an embryo.

…

“What’s really interesting is that these sequences are found only in primates, raising the possibility that their function may have contributed to unique characteristics that distinguish humans from other animals.

Let’s back up and be cautious here. For one thing, many primates are not particularly clever, so we need to be much more specific about why it worked (if it did) so well in the human, and not especially in the tarsier. And the way things have been going, the same sequence or a very similar one could turn up in the opossum, but no one has looked. Who knew the water bear shared so many genes with unrelated life forms?

“We’re starting to accumulate evidence that these viral sequences, which originally may have threatened the survival of our species, were co-opted by our genomes for their own benefit.” More.

But we don’t know that either, do we? HERV-H could once have been a useless or even useful parasite that somehow got incorporated into the system.

Question: What were fertilised human eggs doing, to grow into embryos, before HERV-H was available? Or are we to assume it always was available, for all humans? Stay tuned.

See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more


and This just in: One sixth of water bear’s genes are from microbes Researcher: More than 90 percent of these come from bacteria, but others come from archaea (a distinct group of microbes), fungi, and even plants. “The number of them is pretty staggering,” he says.

An unmistakable signature IV

Denying the Signature: More on Substance Dualism
Stephen C. Meyer November 25, 2015 4:43 AM

Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately report this central claim. However, a review by philosophers Robert Bishop and Robert O'Connor in Books & Culture was a welcome exception. In this 6-part series, adapted from Debating Darwin's Doubt, edited by ENV's David Klinghoffer, Dr. Meyer responds to their critiques. 

Though I don't need to justify substance dualism as a condition of making design inferences, it doesn't follow that there are not good justifications either for (a) presupposing some form of minimalist pre-theoretic form of dualism or (b) for the philosophical position of substance dualism itself.

In the first place, some form of dualism may well be a properly basic belief, justified by the universal human experience of being aware of ourselves as simple, conscious subjects or "I's" distinct from our physical bodies. Since we have a similar awareness of our mind's causal powers (and their ability to exercise "downward" causation on the physical world as opposed to being a mere epiphenomenon resting inertly atop a neurophysiological substrate) our pre-theoretic awareness of these powers may well implicitly constitute a dualist understanding of mind. Yet, it does not follow from this fact that our pre-theoretic conceptions of mind need explicit philosophical justification. Instead, assuming a (minimally dualistic) conception of mind may well be a properly basic belief.

Indeed, virtually everyone accepts the belief that their minds have causal powers, including powers that material objects and process do not. Moreover, even those few materialist scientists or philosophers who deny this belief in their explicit philosophical or scientific statements betray a commitment to it in many ways as they go about their daily lives. Materialists cannot live consistently with their own denial of the causal powers of their own minds. Instead, their actions betray their belief in those powers.

In addition, virtually no one gives arguments for -- or, more importantly, feels the need to give arguments for -- their belief in the causal powers of their own mind. And almost no one (save for a few ideologically-zealous physicalist philosophers) thinks there are defeaters for this belief. For all these reasons, it seems the common belief that our minds have causal powers, including causal powers that material objects and processes do not, seems to qualify as properly basic.

In any case, there are also good explicit scientific and philosophical arguments justifying substance dualism as a theory of mind-body interaction. See, for example, The Mysterious Matter of Mind, by Arthur Custance, which summarizes the many neurophysiological experiments that led neuro-scientists such as Wilder Penfield and Sir John Eccles to adopt a "dualist interactionist" view of mind and brain.1 See also Angus Menuge's Agents Under Fire for a good philosophical defense of substance dualism.2 Just as there are good philosophical arguments showing that a minimalist pre-theoretic form of dualism does not need justification (i.e., is properly basic), there are also good scientific and philosophical arguments justifying substance dualism as a good theory of mind-body interaction.

Nevertheless, Bishop and O'Connor think that because mind-body dualism requires a philosophical justification, intelligent design does not qualify as a scientific theory, but instead "looks more like philosophy than science." But that doesn't follow for several reasons already discussed: The case for intelligent design does not depend upon substance dualism; a more minimalist pre-theoretic form of dualism doesn't necessarily require any justification (and may be regarded as properly basic); and there are scientific, as well as philosophical, justifications for substance dualism (or the closely related position of dualist interactionism).

In any case, many scientific theories -- Einstein's theory of general relativity, Newton's theory of universal gravitation, and Darwin's theory of evolution, to cite just a few examples -- are, arguably, based upon deeper philosophical premises, presuppositions, and concepts, which either can be, or need to be, justified by philosophical lines of argument. Despite their background in the philosophy of science, Bishop and O'Connor seem to assume the ability to make strict demarcations between science and philosophy in a way that philosophers of science have now almost universally repudiated (for reasons that I explain in both my books). Besides, as I argue in both books, what matters is not how we classify a theory, but whether a theory is true or warranted by the evidence.

One final point is worth making. Though I'm not obligated to justify substance dualism as a theory of the mind, I would certainly concede that offering a robust philosophical and/or scientific justification for such a theory would enhance the philosophical importance of the case I make for intelligent design.

If mind cannot be adequately accounted for by reference to materialistic processes, then any evidence of mind acting in the history of life would pose a more explicit challenge to the philosophy of scientific materialism than I develop in my books. It would provide evidence of an immaterial agency acting in the history of life. If, in addition, there is strong evidence for the activity of a designing agent establishing the finely tuned conditions of the universe present from its beginning, as I believe there is, then the conjunctions of these considerations would provide strong grounds for theistic belief.

References:

(1) Arthur C. Custance, The Mysterious Matter of Mind (second online edition, 2001; originally published by Probe Ministries and Zondervan Publishing, 1980).


(2) Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004)

Google loves Lucy.

Honoring the 41st Anniversary of the Discovery of "Lucy," Google Offers a Misleading Doodle:
Evolution News & Views November 24, 2015 11:12 AM


Yes, it's the 41st anniversary of the discovery of "Lucy." Google has a cute Doodle in her honor:However, back in 2009, Casey Luskin made a pilgrimage to see the lady's bones, then on display at the Seattle Science Center. He wrote here at Evolution News:

The whole experience seeing Lucy was enlightening, though probably not in the way its creators intended. In short, I left the exhibit struck by the paucity of actual hard evidence for human evolution from ape-like species, and the amount of subjective, contradictory interpretation that goes into fossil hominid reconstructions.

"Lucy" was discovered by paleoanthropologist Donald Johansen and his team in Ethiopia in 1974. The first half (or more!) of the exhibit was actually quite fascinating as it told the cultural and political history of the Ethiopian people and the Aksumite Empire. This history seemed well-documented by facts and evidence, replete with coins, weapons, religious artifacts, and art, which inform us about this rich and beautiful culture. And when the evidence was thin, the exhibit acknowledged that there are aspects of the Aksumite people where we know very little. This high standard of evidential documentation and appropriate tentativeness disappeared, however, as soon as we entered the section of the exhibit dealing with human evolution.

Lucy in the Dirt with Rock Rubble

The first thing my friends and I noticed when seeing Lucy's bones was the incompleteness of her skeleton. Only 40 percent was found, and a significant percentage of the known bones are rib fragments. Very little useful material from Lucy's skull was recovered. (This seems to be common: many of the replica skulls of early hominids at the exhibit were clearly based upon extremely fragmentary pieces.) And yet, according to the exhibit, Lucy still represents the most complete pre-Homo known hominid skeleton to date.

Not only was I underwhelmed by the incompleteness of Lucy's skeleton, but I was also struck by admissions at the exhibit that, in my mind, cast serious doubt on whether we know for certain that Lucy's bones are from a single individual from a single species.

On the issue of whether Lucy walked upright, as the Google Doodle misleadingly implies:

As noted, the most interesting part of Lucy's skeleton is her half-pelvis and half-femur that were discovered, which are said to indicate that she walked upright. Thus, despite these nagging questions about the integrity of Lucy's skeleton, the exhibit boldly states that "Lucy's species walked bipedally, in much the same way as we do," at one point saying Lucy's skeleton "approximate[s] a chimpanzee-like head perched atop a human-like body." Of course, this is a gross oversimplification of the data and a poor reflection of the sharply contradicting opinions of many learned paleoanthropologists.

Lucy did have a small, chimp-like head, but as Mark Collard and Leslie Aiello observe in Nature, much of the rest of the body of Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was also "quite ape-like" with respect to its "relatively long and curved fingers, relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest." (Nature, Vol 404:339-340, 3-23-00.)

Collard and Aiello's article also reports that we now have "good evidence" that A. afarensis (including Lucy) "'knuckle-walked,' as chimps and gorillas do today." Due to their evolutionary preconception that Lucy was a bipedal precursor to our genus Homo, they call this plain evidence that Lucy knuckled-walked "counterintuitive." They suggest the possibility that "the locomotor repertoire of A. afarensis included forms of bipedalism, climbing and knuckle-walking." This is a tenuous proposal, however, as knuckle-walking is obviously very different from bipedal locomotion. Collard and Aiello suggest avoiding the "counterintuitive" evidence that Lucy climbed and knuckle-walked by discarding it as unused "primitive retentions" from her ancestors.

By ignoring the skeletal evidence that Lucy didn't walk "bipedally, in much the same way as we do," I'm sure these Darwinists are pleased that Lucy can retain her prized position as our alleged bipedal ape-like ancestor.

Read the rest. As a monument to human evolution, clarifying the mystery of our origins, Lucy falls well short.

Aristotle Vs.Dualism

Aristotelian Anti-Dualism:
Aristotle, thus, opposes Platonic or Cartesian dualism. Body and soul together make up one substance. A major problem that Aristotle and Aquinas see with dualism is that it cannot explain why the soul, if it essentially different from and superior to the body, should be united to the body. For Aristotle and Aquinas, however, it is for the good of the soul (or rather, it is for the good of the composite which has its vital activities in virtue of its soul) that the soul is united to the body; a body is necessary for a soul to exercise all vital capacities, since (almost) all vital functions are the functions of body and soul together. The sensitive soul requires a body, since the acts of sensation, of seeing, for example, require bodily organs. Similarly, the act of intellection, which is proper to humans alone, requires sensation, and sensation in turn requires a body. Thus, if human beings are to exercise their proper functions, they necessarily must have a body.

Aquinas, interestingly, appeals to personal experience in his claim that a person is not his soul, or his intellect, alone, as Plato and Descartes claim. A man cannot be merely a mind without a body

because it is one and the same man who is conscious both that he understands and that he senses. But one cannot sense without a body, and therefore the body must be some part of man.(Summa Theologiae Ia 76, 1).

If a man were just a mind, essentially unrelated to the body, he would not directly experience things that happen to the body, as he clearly does when he senses. Therefore, the human soul is in essence the substantial form of a human body, and body and soul together make up one substance.

The favored place:The Watchtower Society's Commentary

BOSOM POSITION:
In an illustration, Jesus spoke of a beggar named Lazarus who was carried at his death to “the bosom position of Abraham,” and John refers to Jesus as being in “the bosom position with the Father.” (Lu 16:22, 23; Joh 1:18) The expression “bosom position” alludes to one’s reclining in front of another person on the same couch at a meal.

Guests reclined on their left side with a pillow supporting their left elbow, leaving the right arm free. Usually three persons occupied each couch, but there could be as many as five. The head of each one would be on or near the breast, or bosom, as it were, of the person behind him. The person with no one at his back was considered in the highest position and the one next to him in the second place of honor. In view of the nearness of the guests to one another, it was the custom that friend be placed next to friend, which made it rather easy to engage in confidential conversation if desired. To be in such a bosom position of another at a banquet was indeed to occupy a special place of favor with that one. So the apostle John, whom Jesus dearly loved, “was reclining in front of Jesus’ bosom,” and in such a position he “leaned back upon the breast of Jesus” and privately asked him a question at the celebration of the last Passover.—Joh 13:23, 25; 21:20.


For these reasons John, in describing the very special position of favor enjoyed by Jesus, said that he was in “the bosom position” of his Father Jehovah. Likewise, in Jesus’ illustration, Lazarus was carried to “the bosom position” of Abraham, denoting that this beggar finally came into a position of special favor with one who was his superior.