Doing well by doing good.

Witnesses Win Major Awards for Green Building Design and Construction

NEW YORK—Jehovah’s Witnesses, well-known for their global Bible education work, are receiving recognition for excellence in environmentally sustainable building design and construction.



The Green Building Initiative (GBI) awarded certifications for two new buildings at the Witnesses’ United States branch facilities in Wallkill, New York: the Watchtower Farms F Residence, completed in late 2012, and the Watchtower Wallkill Office Building, completed in 2014. Both of the buildings received the highest award of Four Green Globes.


Watchtower Wallkill Office Building


Shaina Sullivan, Marketing Director for GBI, notes: “Worldwide, less than 4 percent of all buildings assessed under the program have achieved this top certification of Four Green Globes.” Ms. Sullivan added that the Watchtower Wallkill Office Building “is the first nonresidential project in New York State to earn this rating.” Jenna Middaugh, Project Manager for GBI, commented: “Of the 23 buildings [in the United States] that have been certified with Four Green
 Globes since 2006, the Watchtower Wallkill Office Building achieved the highest point score with 94 percent.”


Watchtower Farms F Residence

GBI administers Green Globes as a commercial rating system and certification program that utilizes a third-party on-site assessment of sustainable design and construction. Achieving a Green Globes rating requires environmentally sensitive site design that focuses on water management, minimization of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, minimizing the impact on natural resources by selection of appropriate materials, and creating a healthful indoor environment.


Photovoltaic panels provide at least 10 percent of the electrical energy needs for the Watchtower Wallkill Office Building, a feature of the building’s award-winning sustainable design.

David Bean, sustainable design coordinator for the Witnesses’ facilities in the United States, says: “The achievement of these awards attests to the high standard of design and construction work that we set for all of our projects. We are also pursuing Green Globes certification in the design and construction of our new world headquarters in Warwick, New York.”


Installation of a green roof, one of the sustainable features of the Witnesses’ new world headquarters in Warwick, New York.

Zeny St. Jean, who coordinates global building projects for Jehovah’s Witnesses from their world headquarters, states: “While our primary focus is the advancement of Bible education, we appreciate these awards as professional recognition of the environmentally conscientious building design and construction that we strive to implement at our facilities around the world.”

Media Contact(s):


International: J. R. Brown, Office of Public Information, tel. +1 718 560 5000

Phone call for Dr.Moreau!

"The Link," or Science Fiction Double Feature: Dr. X Builds a Creature...
Richard Sternberg 

(Cue music.) Or, rather, a lemur. Almost every TV channel it seems ran a commercial announcing a documentary about the fossil find of the century, The Link, which will be encored on the History Channel tonight. "Ida," as the female holotype of Darwinius masillae has been playfully dubbed, is the prehistoric prosimian that is the focus of attention. The story of her discovery is the stuff of every good science-fiction B-movie from the 1950s : A "secret study" conducted by an "international team of scientists," has led to earth-shattering results that can only now be revealed to the world. Think Creature from the Black Lagoon (because of the fossil find) meets When Worlds Collide (because of the impact that will be felt on your everyday life) and you'll be close to the stated importance of the program. All that's missing are some Tesla coils, a hidden lair in a dead volcano, the fallout from an atomic explosion, and a UFO landing on the National Mall. Presumably such extra features, along with more specifics about the significance of her all too brief life -- "a child when she died, but she'll change history forever" -- can be gathered from the just-released book, The Link.

It's just a jump to the left...

Of the cladogram, I mean. There is one clade of primates called the Strepsirrhini ("wet noses") that includes the lemurs, the dwarf and mouse-lemurs, the Aye-aye, the lorisids, and the galagos. Ida falls within this suborder according to one hypothesis.

With your hands on your hips...

You will kindly note the other clade of primates termed the Haplorrhini, the sister group of the strepsirrhines. This taxon of the "dry noses" contains the apes, monkeys, and tarsiers. An alternative phylogenetic hypothesis would place Darwinius at the base of this assemblage.

All the brouhaha thus boils down to whether Ida had a wet nose or a dry nose that -- given her status as a transitional form -- was occasionally runny. The theme of The Link is that the latter is a sure bet. For myself, regarding these two alternative evolutionary scenarios, I say...Let's do the Time Warp again...

Anyhow, there I sat yesterday evening, with voyeuristic intention no less, my gin and tonic prepared and my lit cigarette firmly affixed in its black holder, shivering with antici......pation. For, indeed, I wanted to go up to the lab in order to see what's on that slab. But it wasn't the rain that was to blame for my later symptoms of underwhelment. No. It was that after all the commercial hoopla, I expected to hear a speech close to that given by the indefatigable Dr. Furter (Tim Curry) just prior to the dramatic vivification of his creature. That is, my expectation was to see and listen to a pronouncement much like this:

Tonight my conventional unconventionalists, you are to witness a new breakthrough in phylogenetic research and career paradise...is to be mine!

It was strange the way it happened. Suddenly you get a break...All the pieces seem to fit into place. What a sucker you've been...what a fool. The answer was there all the time [on the fossil market, that is]. It took a small accident to find it...an accident! And that's how I discovered the secret, that elusive ingredient, that spark...that is The Link. Yes. I have that knowledge. I hold the secret...to evolution itself!

My interest of course did not concern who actually said it. Or that he would be wearing a tee shirt and jeans as opposed to a green surgical smock over a corset and fishnets (and adorned with oversized pearls). Not at all. What I instead wanted to view was a program where the could-be's and perhapses, the equivocations and qualifications, the oh so many "well, on the one hand...but, then again, on the other" semantic hedges, that are de rigueur in documentaries about evolution, had been dropped with an unabashed flair.

Is it not The Link? Does it not change everything? I asked.

Obviously, as no doubt anyone of you could have told me, my expectations were misplaced. Part of me also desired to see an animation of Ida throw a bone into the air and then have the scene immediately segue to that of a futuristic Pan Am spacejet on its way to an orbiting station called "Darwin 9000," set to the opening strains of Johann Strauss II's "On the Beautiful Blue Danube." I was mentally blending genres in my hopes, true, but in my defense the commercial had promised so very much.

Alas, the disappointment that soon arose in me after the documentary stemmed from the vagueness of it all...that The Link is actually a kind of, sort of, nth cousin mth removed of the side lineage that some hypothesize possibly gave rise to the distant ancestors of what quite conceivably became the hominid branch of the Darwinian tree. And to think that I could have been watching reruns of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or the cult classic, The Phantom of the Paradise.

To be certain, the authors of the PLoS One paper were appropriately circumspect in their paper, so one should not misconstrue my peeve as really being about the finer details of basal primate taxonomy. As far as I'm concerned, Ida may well be the transitional taxon linking the Strepsirrhini and Haplorrhini. Fine. Who is going to get strung out -- to again borrow a phrase from the illustrious Dr. Furter -- if the Notharctidae and Cercamoniinae are rendered by implication paraphyletic, wastebasket taxonomic groupings? Who? Nor is there a limit to such theoretical gratuity...should someone even want to posit that each and every genus in the Cercamoniinae, from Anchomomys to Darwinius to Pronycticebus, is in its own right a missing link -- the same way, you know, that everyone's special -- no complaint will be uttered from this quarter. Not so much as a peep.

Irksome, though, was the way in which an old story was sold as something profoundly novel. While watching it, I could almost hear the creator of this work of science fiction (defined by that definitive fount of knowledge Wikipedia as "science-based depictions of phenomena that aren't necessarily accepted by mainstream science," emphases mine) singing as the fossil was presented: In just seven days...I can make you a humaaaannnnnn. (My sincerest apologies to Richard O'Brien of the Rocky Horror Picture ShowR for the way I have twisted his lines and songs from the film.) But the issue is that a familiar feeling emerged while watching the piece, the one we have all had in the theater. It arises the moment you realize that you know the plot, the narrative. The only difference is that the characters and the actors playing them have changed, along with the music and the CGI effects. Eight years ago it was the Urwhale. Last year it was the Ursalamander. Last night it was the Urmonkey. Still, the same story...

That said, I would not have been so underwhelmed had someone just blurted out in the first few minutes -- like the inimitable Charles Gray does at the end of Rocky Horror -- the central theme of the documentary, that "crawling...on the planet's face...some insects called the human race. Lost in time...lost in space...and meaning."


R(Rated R) -- For mature audiences only.

On the grandfather of I.D.

Michael Behe on the Legacy of Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
David Klinghoffer









Ever wonder what major and highly original scientific advocates of intelligent design think of each other's work? In a brief video conversation, Michael Behe comments on the impact and significance of Michael Denton's books Evolution: A Theory in Crisis  and Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis , culminating in the typological understanding of life's structures and the fundamental challenge to Darwinian theory that poses.


Dr. Behe's case for ID, first advanced in Darwin's Black Box twenty years ago, is the subject of the new hour-long documentary  Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines, written and directed by John West. Get your copy of Revolutionary, on DVD or Blu-ray, today.

Rich gene,poor gene?

Prince or Pauper? Researchers Find Functional Pseudogene in Fruit Fly
Evolution News & Views 

Suppose we introduced you to a friend and said he works as a pseudoscientist. You would be immediately suspicious of his white lab coat and apparent command of scientific language in subsequent conversation. After all, he just pretends to be a scientist. He's fake. He's false. He is bogus, sham, phony, mock, ersatz, quasi-, spurious, deceptive, misleading, assumed, contrived, affected, insincere, and all the other negative synonyms we associate with the prefix pseudo.

But then suppose we corrected the description and said that, actually, he is a "pseudo-pseudoscientist." The double negative suddenly opens the possibility that he really is a scientist. He's faking his fakery, contriving his contrivance, mocking insincerity for some reason. Maybe he's a psychologist studying the effects of perceived pretentiousness, using you as his lab rat. Maybe he's a real MD playing a doctor on a fictional TV show, leading us to believe he is "just an actor." Think of the guards in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper who quickly escort the shabbily dressed prince off the palace grounds without noticing the royal seal in his pocket. Have scientists too quickly dismissed pseudogenes as broken genes, worthless transcripts of DNA without function? Could at least some of them be "pseudo-pseudogenes"?

A surprising paper in Nature actually uses that term: "Olfactory receptor pseudo-pseudogenes." Researchers in Switzerland found a case in a species of fruit fly that defies the pseudogene paradigm. Pseudogenes are often suspected of being broken genes when a premature termination codon (PTC) is found in the DNA sequence. Obviously, such a gene could not be translated into a functional protein, right? Translation would stop before the messenger RNA is complete. Often, that is the case. What good is that?

These scientists found something interesting about an olfactory receptor gene in Drosophila sechellia, "an insect endemic to the Seychelles that feeds almost exclusively on the ripe fruit of Morinda citrifolia." They looked at its Ir75a locus, a gene that encodes an olfactory receptor for acetic acid in its more famous cousin D. melanogaster, Finding a PTC in this species' Ir75a gene, they initially thought it was a broken gene -- a pseudogene. The abstract begins with the usual evolutionary rhetoric about pseudogenes:

Pseudogenes are generally considered to be non-functional DNA sequences that arise through nonsense or frame-shift mutations of protein-coding genes. Although certain pseudogene-derived RNAs have regulatory roles, and some pseudogene fragments are translated, no clear functions for pseudogene-derived proteins are known. Olfactory receptor families contain many pseudogenes, which reflect low selection pressures on loci no longer relevant to the fitness of a species. [Emphasis added.]
That's their setup for the surprise announcement. This pseudogene might just be a "pseudo-pseudogene"! It might be a prince masquerading as a pauper.

What started them on their paradigm-breaking find was noticing that this apparent pseudogene is fixed in the population, suggesting it has a function. Taking a closer look, they found that the translation machinery is able to "read through" the premature stop codon, the PTC. How? They're not sure, but they found something else interesting: the read-though operation works efficiently only in neurons, not other types of cells. That opens up a whole new way of looking at pseudogenes: some of them might be tissue-specific regulators.

It is not yet clear how the D. sechellia Ir75a PTC is read through. It cannot be because of insertion of the alternative amino acid selenocysteine (which is incorporated at UGA18). Moreover, no suppressor tRNAs are known in D. melanogaster and ribosomal frame-shifting is also unlikely because there is no change in the reading frame after the PTC. We suggest that read-through is due to PTC recognition by a near-cognate tRNA that allows insertion of an amino acid instead of translation termination. Although the trans-acting factors regulating read-through are unclear, the neuronal specificity of this process is reminiscent of RNA editing and micro-exon splicing, in which key responsible regulatory proteins are neuronally enriched. We therefore speculate that tissue-specific expression differences in tRNA populations underlie neuron-specific read-through.
We might be tempted to dismiss this as a rare case of evolutionary tinkering. The gene broke, but natural selection found a way to tinker with it and get it to work. Perhaps. But further experimentation with D. melanogaster suggests that "pseudogenization" has a logical function: it works to tune odor sensitivity. The part of the gene downstream from the PTC apparently affects the type of receptor produced. What's more, this kind of regulation might not be rare.

Read-through is detected only in neurons and is independent of the type of termination codon, but depends on the sequence downstream of the PTC. Furthermore, although the intact Drosophila melanogaster Ir75a orthologue detects acetic acid -- a chemical cue important for locating fermenting food found only at trace levels in Morinda fruit -- D. sechellia Ir75a has evolved distinct odour-tuning properties through amino-acid changes in its ligand-binding domain. We identify functional PTC-containing loci within different olfactory receptor repertoires and species, suggesting that such 'pseudo-pseudogenes' could represent a widespread phenomenon.
Experiments showed that the Ir75a 'pseudo-pseudogene' actually yields a functional odor receptor, but not for acetic acid as in D. melanogaster. Instead, it makes a receptor tuned for similar acidic odorants unique to food sources available on the Seychelles. The tissue-specific read-through capabilities of this gene provide the fly with a way to detect food sources it needs in its environment.

Perhaps nothing beyond chance mutation or neutral drift is needed to explain this. On the other hand, the research team may have stumbled onto an important function for pseudogenes.

Our efforts to understand the molecular basis of the loss of olfactory sensitivity to acetic acid in D. sechellia led us to discover a notable and, to our knowledge, unprecedented evolutionary trajectory of a presumed pseudogene. Efficient read-through of a PTC in D. sechellia Ir75a permits production of a full-length receptor protein, in which reduction in acetic acid sensitivity and gain of responses to other acids is due to lineage-specific amino acid substitutions in the LBD pocket. The PTC does not noticeably influence the activity of D. sechellia Ir75a, suggesting that it is selectively neutral from an evolutionary standpoint. We propose that it became fixed through genetic drift, given D. sechellia's persistent low effective population size.
They can call it an "evolutionary trajectory" if they wish. Another way of looking at this is a design feature. The premature stop codon, or PTC, may be more elegant than a stop sign. It may be a switch, telling the translation machinery to pay attention to the downstream code if -- and only if -- translation is taking place inside neuronal cell. In non-neuronal cells, the PTC might indeed say "stop," delivering the transcript to the trash. In neurons, though, environmental cues may trigger pre-existing routines to fine-tune the sensitivity to odorants available in food sources.

A design perspective could accelerate discoveries along this line. We've seen the tendency to dismiss things as evolutionary castoffs when their functions were not understood, only to find higher levels of organization at work. Introns are spliced out of messenger RNAs; they must be junk. Methyl groups interfere with translation; they must be mistakes. Retrotransposons must be parasites. Pseudogenes must be broken genes. Maybe not. If scientists had expected design, maybe they would have hit upon today's paradigms about epigenetics, alternative splicing and gene regulation sooner.


Intelligent design theory doesn't require everything to be designed. It does, however, prevent a "premature stop" to dismissing things as not designed.