On Russia's war on religious liberty III:The Watchtower Society's commentary.

International Experts Discredit Russia’s “Expert Analysis” in Identifying “Extremism”

This is Part 3 of a three-part series based on exclusive interviews with noted scholars of religion, politics, and sociology, as well as experts in Soviet and post-Soviet studies.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—Jehovah’s Witnesses and their literature have been subject to court-appointed analysis by the Center for Sociocultural Expert Studies in Moscow. One study was completed in August 2015 and was used as the basis for an ongoing case against the Witnesses’ New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, while another study is pending.
  
Highly regarded experts inside and outside of Russia debunk these studies. One such scholar, Dr. Mark R. Elliott, founding editor of the East-West Church and Ministry Report, observes: “State-approved ‘expert’ witnesses on religious questions, including those who disapproved Jehovah’s Witnesses’ scriptures, typically lack expertise and credibility as they issue ill-founded ‘opinions’ on matters of faith.”
   
  Specifically addressing the Center for Sociocultural Expert Studies, Dr. Roman Lunkin, head of the Center for Religion and Society at the Institute of Europe, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, notes that “not one of the experts has a degree in religious studies and they are not even familiar with the writings of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their analysis included quotes that were taken from information provided by the Irenaeus of Lyon Centre, a radical Orthodox anti-cult organization known for opposing Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as many other religions and denominations.”

  “Unfortunately, I would have to agree with Dr. Lunkin,” states Dr. Ekaterina Elbakyan, professor of sociology and management of social processes at the Moscow Academy of Labor and Social Relations. “It is true that in Russia today religious expert studies are often performed by people who are not specialists, and are made-to-order, so to speak, where an expert is not free to state his true findings.”

 Dr. Elbakyan, who participated in two trials in Taganrog and was present as a specialist-expert in the appellate court in Rostov-on-Don, further explains: “I saw with my own eyes the video material on the basis of which Jehovah’s Witnesses were charged with extremism. Twice I gave a detailed commentary in court explaining that this was a typical Christian religious service and had nothing to do with extremism, but the court did not take the expert opinion into consideration. It is impossible not to see this as a clear and systematic trend toward religious discrimination. As long as this trend continues, there are, of course, no guarantees that believers will cease to be classified as ‘extremists’ because of their beliefs.”

  International: David A. Semonian, Office of Public Information, 1-718-560-5000

Russia: Yaroslav Sivulskiy, 7-812-702-2691

Sub-optimal design or sub-optimal analysis?

Shoddy Engineering or Intelligent Design? Case of the Mouse's Eye

Richard Sternberg

We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better -- so they tell us.

The problem with this story of supposed unintelligent design is that it is long on anthropomorphisms and short on evidence. Consider nocturnal mammals. Night vision for, say, a mouse is no small feat. Light intensities during night can be a million times less than those of the day, so the rod cells must be optimized -- yes, optimized -- to capture even the few stray photons that strike them. Given the backwards organization of the mouse's retina, how is this scavenging of light accomplished? Part of the solution is that the ganglion and bipolar cell layers are thinner in mammals that are nocturnal. But other optimizations must also occur. Enter the cell nucleus and "junk" DNA.

Only around 1.5 percent of mammalian DNA encodes proteins. Since it has become lore to equate protein-coding regions of the genome with "genes" and "information," the remaining approximately 98.5 percent of DNA has been dismissed as junk. Yet, for what is purported to be mere genetic gibberish, it is strikingly ordered along the length of the chromosome. Like the barcodes on consumer items that we are all familiar with, each chromosome has a particular banding pattern. This pattern reflects how different types of DNA sequences are linearly distributed. The "core" of a mammalian chromosome, the centromere, and the genomic segments that frame it largely consist of long tracks of species-specific repetitive elements -- these areas give rise to "C-bands" after a chemical stain has been applied. Then, alternating along the chromosome arms are two other kinds of bands that appear after different staining procedures. One called "R-bands" is rich in protein-coding genes and a particular class of retrotransposon called SINEs (for Short Interspersed Nuclear Elements). SINE sequence families are restricted to certain taxonomic groups. The other is termed "G-bands" and it has a high concentration of another class of retrotransposon called LINEs (for Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements), that can also be used to distinguish between species. Finally, the ends of the chromosome, telomeres, are comprised of a completely different set of repetitive DNA sequences.

In general, C-bands and G-bands are complexed with proteins and RNAs to give a more compact organization called heterochromatin, whereas R-bands have a more open conformation referred to as euchromatin.

Why bother with such details? Well, each of these chromosome bands has a preferred location in the cell nucleus. Open any good textbook on mammalian anatomy and you will note that cell types can often be distinguished by the shape and size of the nucleus, as well as the positions of euchromatin and heterochromatin in that organelle. Nevertheless, most cell nuclei follow a general rule where euchromatin is located in the interior, in various compartments that are dense with transcription factories, RNA processing machinery, and many other components. Heterochromatin, on the other hand, is found mainly around the periphery of the nucleus. A striking exception to this principle is found in the nuclei of rod cells in nocturnal mammals.

Reporting in the journal Cell, Irina Solovei and coworkers have just discovered that, in contrast to the nucleus organization seen in ganglion and bipolar cells of the retina, a remarkable inversion of chromosome band localities occurs in the rod photoreceptors of mammals with night vision (Solovei I, Kreysing M, Lanctôt C, Kösem S, Peichl L, Cremer T, Guck J, Joffe B. 2009. "Nuclear Architecture of Rod Photoreceptor Cells Adapts to Vision in Mammalian Evolution." Cell 137(2): 356-368). First, the C-bands of all the chromosomes including the centromere coalesce in the center of the nucleus to produce a dense chromocenter. Keep in mind that the DNA backbone of this chromocenter in different mammals is repetitive and highly species-specific. Second, a shell of LINE-rich G-band sequences surrounds the C-bands. Finally, the R-bands including all examined protein-coding genes are placed next to the nuclear envelope. The nucleus of this cell type is also smaller so as to make the pattern more compact. This ordered movement of billions of basepairs according to their "barcode status" begins in the rod photoreceptor cells at birth, at least in the mouse, and continues for weeks and months.

Why the elaborate repositioning of so much "junk" DNA in the rod cells of nocturnal mammals? The answer is optics. A central cluster of chromocenters surrounded by a layer of LINE-dense heterochromatin enables the nucleus to be a converging lens for photons, so that the latter can pass without hindrance to the rod outer segments that sense light. In other words, the genome regions with the highest refractive index -- undoubtedly enhanced by the proteins bound to the repetitive DNA -- are concentrated in the interior, followed by the sequences with the next highest level of refractivity, to prevent against the scattering of light. The nuclear genome is thus transformed into an optical device that is designed to assist in the capturing of photons. This chromatin-based convex (focusing) lens is so well constructed that it still works when lattices of rod cells are made to be disordered. Normal cell nuclei actually scatter light.

So the next time someone tells you that it "strains credulity" to think that more than a few pieces of "junk DNA" could be functional in the cell -- that the data only point to the lack of design and suboptimality -- remind them of the rod cell nuclei of the humble mouse.

Trying to reduce the irreducible?

Refuting Behe's Critics, Meyer Gives Four Reasons the Flagellum Predates the Type III Secretory System

David Klinghoffer 

Michael Behe's signature argument in Darwin's Black Box 

 would be seriously bruised if it turned out the bacterial flagellar motor had a simpler evolutionary antecedent. Critics of intelligent design thought they had identified such a precursor in the form of the Type III Secretory System, found in some bacteria.

Behe and others have since shown why it's far likelier that the flagellum is the precursor, thus leaving Dr. Behe's argument intact. In response, the critics either simply repeat their claim as if it hadn't been refuted, or they go silent -- an implicit admission they were wrong, and Behe was right.

How exactly do we know the flagellum came first? In a 12-minute video discussion, Stephen Meyer explains that we know this for four good and independent reasons. Watch for yourself, and if you're still not convinced, let me know why not. (Reach me by clicking on the orange EMAIL US button at the top of this page.)

Mike Behe's case for ID from irreducible complexity has stood the test of fire by scientists and others whose picture of reality depends on denying that biology bears evidence of design. We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Darwin's Black Box with a new hour-long documentary written and directed by John West, Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines

 . Get your copy of Revolutionary, on DVD or Blu-ray, today.

Crossing the floor?

Peppered Moth: How Evolution's Poster Child Became the Rebuttal

Cornelius Hunter

It has been called one of the best examples of evolution observed in the wild -- light colored peppered moths (Biston betularia) became dark colored in response to 19th century industrial pollution darkening the birch trees in their environment. Evolving a darker color helped camouflage the moths, and keep them hidden from predatory birds. And more recently, air pollution reductions lightened the environment and with it, the moths also began to revert to their lighter color.

Proof of evolution, case closed, right? From popular presentations and museum exhibits, to textbooks and scientific papers, evolutionists have relentlessly pounded home the peppered moth as an undeniable confirmation of Darwin's theory in action. There's only one problem: All of this ignores the science.

There are two main problems with peppered moths story. First, changing colors is hardly a pathway leading to the kinds of massive biological change evolution requires. It is not as though a change in the peppered moth coloration is any kind of evidence for how the moths evolved, or how any other species, for that matter, could have evolved.

In fact changing the color of a moth not only fails to show how species could evolve, it also fails to show how any biological design could evolve. The peppered moth case doesn't show how metabolism, the central nervous system, bones, red blood cells, or any other biological wonder could have arisen by evolution's random mutations coupled with natural selection.

The moths were already there. Their wings were already there. Different colors were already there. The changing of color in moth populations, while certainly a good thing for the moths, is hardly an example of evolution.

Second, research strongly suggests that the cause of the darkening, at the molecular level, is an enormous genetic insertion. In other words, rather than a nucleotide, in a gene, mutating to one of the other three nucleotides, as you learned in your high school biology class, instead what has been found is an insertion of a stretch of more than 20,000 nucleotides. That long inserted segment consists of a shorter segment (about 9,000 nucleotides) repeated about two and one-third times.

Also, the insertion point is not in a DNA coding sequence, but in an intervening region (intron), which have been considered to be "junk DNA" in the past.

This observed mutation (the insertion of a long sequence of DNA into an intron), is much more complicated than a single point mutation. First, there is no change in the gene's protein product. The mutating of the protein sequence was the whole idea behind evolution: DNA mutations which lead to changes in a protein can lead to a phenotype change with fitness improvement, and there would be subject to natural selection.

That is not what we are seeing in the much celebrated peppered moth example. The DNA mutation is much more complicated (~20,000 nucleotides inserted), and the fact it was inserted into an intron suggests that additional molecular and cellular mechanisms are required for the coloration change to occur.

None of this fits evolutionary theory.

For example, evolutionary theory requires that the needed random DNA mutational change is reasonably likely to occur. Given the moth's effective population size, the moth's generation time period, and the complexity of the mutation, the needed mutation is not likely to occur. Evolution would have to be inserting segments of DNA with (i) different sequences, at (ii) different locations, within the moth genome. This is an enormous space of mutational possibilities to search through.

It doesn't add up. Evolution does not have the resources in terms of time and effective population size to come anywhere close to searching this astronomical mutational space. It's not going to happen.

A much more likely explanation, and one that has been found to be true in so many other cases of adaptation (in spite of evolutionary pushback), is that the peppered moth coloration change was directed. The environmental change and challenge somehow caused the peppered moth to modify its color. This suggests there are preprogrammed, directed adaptation mechanisms, already in place that are ready to respond to future, potential, environmental changes, which might never occur.

Far from an evidence for evolution, this is evidence against evolution.

So there are at least two major problems with what is celebrated as a key evidence for evolution in action. First, it comes nowhere close to the type of change evolution needs, and the details of the change demonstrate that it is not evolutionary to begin with.