meditations of aservantofJEHOVAH: 6 Jun 2022

Monday, 6 June 2022

Could one man(not God-man) really save humanity from sin.

1Corinthians15:21ASV"For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. "

The first human sinner did not inherit his sinful state he chose it. Unlike his descendants he had a choice in the matter.

1Timothy2:14KJV"And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

Now what if humanity's founding father had made the moral choice. Would it not be the case that he would be our savior? So then that is all that is required to save mankind. A father who choses aright.

Can this tree be replanted? III

More Turbulence at the Base of the Tree of Life

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Here is a new open-access paper, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, that is instructive: “Eukaryogenesis: The Rise of an Emergent Superorganism.” Author Philip J. L. Bell begins:

Although it is widely taught that all modern life descended via modification from a last universal common ancestor (LUCA), this dominant paradigm is yet to provide a generally accepted explanation for the chasm in design between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Counter to this dominant paradigm, the viral eukaryogenesis (VE) hypothesis proposes that the eukaryotes originated as an emergent superorganism and thus did not evolve from LUCA via descent with incremental modification. [Emphasis added.]

The “chasm in design”? For a theory (i.e., the universal Tree of Life, rooted in LUCA — universal common descent, or UCD) whose empirical strength is so great that it cannot be doubted, UCD certainly is doubted a lot.

Doubted by biologists, in fact, with no known interest in intelligent design.

On the anternet.

Yes, Ants Think — Like Computers

Denyse O'Leary

Navigation expert Eric Cassell, whose recent book is Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts, offers some insights into how ants organize themselves by using what amount to algorithms, without any central command:

Ants are remarkably consistent in their lifestyle. All of the roughly 11,000 species of ants live in groups, large or small. There are no known solitary ants.

Living in groups, they have developed a social lifestyle that includes “agriculture, territorial wars, slavery, division of labor, castes, consensus-building, cities, and a symbolic language.” (p. 85) How is this managed by ants with very small brains (200,000 to 250,000 neurons) and very limited individuality?

For comparison, among mammals, the agouti has roughly 857 million neurons, the capybara has 1.60 billion, and the capuchin monkey, 3.690 billion. Humans have roughly 85 billion neurons. It seems that the ant is doing something that does not rely on individual problem-solving skills.

Cassell points out that the ants’ complex colony organization where one queen or several queens lay all the eggs and the other females do all the work is almost exclusively the domain of life forms with very small brains. The naked mole rat is the only mammal that follows this pattern. Incidentally, the naked mole rat has fewer neurons in a smaller brain than expected for its body size, relative to other rodents.

Such colonies are sometimes called “superorganisms” because the individual organisms work for the survival of the colony as a whole. Take these leafcutter ants in Brazil:

What Are Some of the Ant Colony’s Methods?

We don’t know exactly how the ant “algorithm” works out divisions of labor but one study found that young ants typically tend to the eggs, larvae, and pupae while older ants forage outside the nest. Foraging is a much more dangerous activity than tending the young, so if the older ants forage, fewer days of ant life are lost to the colony (pp. 89–90). Some ant species have castes of workers with specially shaped heads, best suited to specific purposes like attacking other ants or blocking a tunnel (pp. 95–96). In that case, they might naturally gravitate to the task without having to think about it. They just find it easier than the differently structured ants would.

Ants communicate mainly by pheromones, scents that provide information. In their book The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (2008), Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) identified 12 areas of communication mediated by pheromones, including “alarm, attraction, recruitment, grooming, feeding, exchange of fluids and solid particles, group effect, recognition of nestmates, caste determination, control of other individuals competing for reproduction, territoriality, and sexual communication” (p. 90).

What makes pheromones a complex communication system is that most emissions are of several pheromones mingled rather than only one. Some signals are recognized by all ants in the vicinity, others only by the ant’s own species, and others are specific to the ant’s colony.

One evolutionary biologist describes the processing of pheromones as equivalent to AND gates and STOP in a computer system. (p. 91). The ant is not so much deciding what to do as responding to an AI-like signal.

Computer programmers have adapted ant algorithms to the computer:

Welcome to the Anternet!

Stanford’s Deborah M. Gordon, a specialist in ant behavior, thinks of the complex algorithms ants use to communicate without personal understanding as the “anternet”:

Ant colonies use dynamic networks of brief interactions to adjust to changing conditions. No individual ant knows what’s going on. Each ant just keeps track of its recent experience meeting other ants, either in one-on-one encounters when ants touch antennae, or when an ant encounters a chemical deposited by another.

DEBORAH GORDON, “WHAT DO ANTS KNOW THAT WE DON’T?” AT WIRED

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Pseudoscience vs. actual science.

Listen: Mendel vs. Darwin

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic episode of ID the Future, geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, former research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, talks with host Casey Luskin about Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, how they clashed with the thinking of Charles Darwin, and how acceptance of Darwinism hindered acceptance of Mendel’s great insights. Listen in as Dr. Lönnig explains Mendel’s laws and why they’re still relevant for biology, and particularly genetics. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Can this forest be replanted?

Study: “Most of Our Evolutionary Trees Could Be Wrong”

Günter Bechly

From Phys.org:

Study suggests that most of our evolutionary trees could be wrong

New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study, published in Communications Biology, shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.

In other words: often anatomical similarities are not based on common descent and different lines of evidence (anatomy versus genetics) conflict and thus do not converge on one true tree of life! This refutes one of the favorite talking points of popularizers of Darwinism like Richard Dawkins.

Darwinists continue to invoke I.D to refute I.D.

Rosenhouse’s Blunder: Another Nonsensical Mathematical Argument Against Intelligent Design

Michael Egnor

Darwinist mathematician Jason Rosenhouse is back. He has a recently published book from Cambridge University Press, The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, and an article in Skeptical Inquirer in which he claims to debunk mathematical arguments that point to intelligent design in biology. A core argument for ID is that living things contain molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and physiological processes displaying complex and specified information, which rules out the possibility that they “evolved” via unintelligent processes. The presence of a language code in DNA, the astonishing nanotechnology underlying every cellular process, the elegant integration of cellular activity into tissues and organs, and the orchestration of these countless highly specified processes into a living organism is so far beyond the capacity of dumb “chance and necessity” that it is fair to call Darwinian explanations ludicrous fairytales posing as science. Intelligence is undeniable — it permeates living things.

Despite this massive evidence for design, Darwinists like Rosenhouse cling to their ideological myth — atheism’s creation myth — rather than acknowledge the irrefutable scientific evidence of design in nature and particularly the evidence for design that permeates all life.

Self-Refuting Arguments

The Darwinist arguments against design are all self-refuting, because all arguments against design in biology depend on formal and teleological (i.e., designed) causes in life. Darwinists necessarily invoke highly specific physical laws (e.g., quantum mechanics) and undeniable purposes (e.g., a purpose of DNA is to encode protein structure), and the only known source of a specific law or purpose is a mind. In other words, Darwinist arguments against intelligent design always invoke design — there are no Darwinist arguments from mere chaos and there cannot be such arguments (because even chaos presupposes order against which chaos is defined).

ID scientists point out that the specified complexity of protein structure necessary for life precludes spontaneous “evolution” without intelligent agency. Proteins may be hundreds of amino acids long, and the correct and precise placement of amino acids (not to mention the as-yet unexplained precision of protein-folding, the organization of innumerable proteins into complex enzymatic pathways, etc.) is inexplicable except as a consequence of a guiding Intelligence.

No Intelligence Needed?

Rosenhouse denies that intelligence is needed to explain the remarkably precise and specific structure of proteins — he asserts that the Darwinian process of mindless random heritable mutations and survival of survivors (i.e., “natural selection”) explains it all. He uses the analogy of a coin toss to defend the Darwinian explanation:

However, this [design] argument is premised on the notion that genes and proteins evolve through a process analogous to tossing a coin multiple times. This is untrue because there is nothing analogous to natural selection when you are tossing coins. Natural selection is a non-random process, and this fundamentally affects the probability of evolving a particular gene.

To see why, suppose we toss 100 coins in the hopes of obtaining 100 heads. One approach is to throw all 100 coins at once, repeatedly, until all 100 happen to land heads at the same time. Of course, this is exceedingly unlikely to occur. An alternative approach is to flip all 100 coins, leave the ones that landed heads as they are, and then toss again only those that landed tails. We continue in this manner until all 100 coins show heads, which, under this procedure, will happen before too long. The creationist argument assumes that evolution must proceed in a manner comparable to the first approach, when really it has far more in common with the second.

Everything in Rosenhouse’s coin-toss analogy to natural selection manifests intelligent design. The coin is intelligently designed, the person who tosses the coin is intelligent, and the choice by the coin-tosser to re-toss only the coins that land on tails is intelligent selection.

For Rosenhouse’s analogy to point to unintelligent causes — to Darwinian natural selection — he would have to invoke the analogy that we leave a block of silver on a table by itself and wait for it to (by erosion and wind) sculpt itself into 100 coins, each of which would then spontaneously fall off the table, and the coins that landed tails up would then spontaneously (perhaps by earthquakes!) jump back up onto the table and spontaneously fall again, with this mindless but amazingly specific cycle repeating itself until all 100 coins lay heads-up on the floor (and the floor would first have to assemble itself!). This is a fine model of Darwinian natural selection — i.e., a preposterous fairytale.

A Deeper Design in Nature

And of course, Rosenhouse misses the even deeper design in nature that forms the framework for the coin-toss analogy. The physical constants and forces that make silver and coins and gravity and space and time all point to intelligent agency (cf. Aquinas’ Fifth Way). Even Darwinian jumping coins need the law of gravitation and laws of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics and innumerable finely tuned physical constants to self-construct and spontaneously jump off the table and self-sort. Design is everywhere in nature.

Darwinian “chance” and “natural selection” exist in an ocean of design — from space-time to physical laws and fine-tuned constants to complex specified biochemical and physiological processes to intelligent observers who flip coins and make hypotheses about evolution. Rosenhouse’s risible analogy of coin-tossing is akin to Berra’s Blunder — a similarly self-refuting analogy proposed by Darwinist biologist Tim Berra, who explained that mindless Darwinian evolution is like designs in automobiles that change with time (notwithstanding that cars are intelligently designed).

Even Darwinist arguments for natural selection in biology depend on intelligent design. All scientific evidence in cosmology, physics, and biology points to a Mind as the source and the continuing basis of the natural world.

H/t Jerry Coyne.

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