Sons of the original firemaker?

Early Humans Were More Sophisticated than We Thought 

Denyse O'Leary 

Recent findings suggest that some things we take for granted in human civilizations are much older than thought. Now, these findings are provisional but they are worth looking at.

Some owl stones from 5,500 and 4,750 years ago may be children’s art 

But new research suggests the palm-sized plaques decorated in geometric patterns and with two engraved circles at the top might be the work of children.

Numbering in the thousands and made from slate, the owl-like objects — previously dated the stone objects to be between 5,500 and 4,750 years old — may be “the archaeological trace of playful and learning activities carried out by youngsters,” according to the team of Spanish researchers behind the new study…

They suggest kids would have been able to easily engrave slate using pointed tools made of flint, quartz, or copper, creating ‘body’ patterns that emulate the streaked plumage of owls, and the circles for eyes are unmistakably owl-like, casting an unwavering stare straight at the observer.

The “owliness” of the designs is comparable to the drawing skills of modern school children who depict owls in much the same way. 

CLARE WATSON, “THOUSANDS OF MYSTERIOUS ‘OWL’ STONES MAY BE THE WORK OF ANCIENT CHILDREN” AT SCIENCE ALERT (DECEMBER 7, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

The fact that the owl stones might have been made by children does not, the researchers suggest, rule out the possibility that they might have had a ritual significance. Evolutionary biologist Juan Negro and colleagues suggest, “young people might have paid homage to their elders by leaving objects they had made together as tributes to the deceased.” (Science Alert) 

So CrayolaTM didn’t invent the idea of children’s creativity.

Now, About Cooking … 70,000 Years Ago

Neanderthals were not just downing raw hunks of meat 70,000 years ago, as many of us have assumed:Researchers analyzed charred food remains at two locations — the Shanidar Cave in Iraq’s Zagros Mountains and the Franchthi Cave in Greece — to gain insight into how Neanderthals and early modern humans prepared food. They found evidence of cooking involving a variety of ingredients, processes and deliberate decisions…

The researchers’ analysis suggests that early modern humans and Neanderthals weren’t just consuming protein from animals; they had complex diets that consisted of a wide selection of plants and varied depending on location. They also used “a range of tricks to make their food more palatable” such as soaking and pounding, per a statement from the University of Liverpool… For example, wild nuts and grasses were often combined with pulses, like lentils, and wild mustard.” 

JACQUELYNE GERMAIN, “NEANDERTHALS COOKED SURPRISINGLY COMPLEX MEALS” AT SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 30, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

Let’s just say, the Neanderthals have gotten smarter as we have gotten to know them better.

Homo Naledi Used Fire, Say Researchers

Now let’s go waaay back to Homo naledi — first unearthed in 2015 in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. The remains of the 15 individuals date to between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. It turns out that they may have lit fires in their caves: 

Researchers have found remnants of small fireplaces and sooty wall and ceiling smudges in passages and chambers throughout South Africa’s Rising Star cave complex, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger announced in a December 1 lecture hosted by the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C.

“Signs of fire use are everywhere in this cave system,” said Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg…

Such behavior has not been attributed to H. naledi before, largely because of its small brain. But it’s now clear that a brain roughly one-third the size of human brains today still enabled H. naledi to achieve control of fire, Berger contends…

Meanwhile, expedition codirector and Wits paleoanthropologist Keneiloe Molopyane led excavations of a nearby cave chamber. There, the researchers uncovered two small fireplaces containing charred bits of wood, and burned bones of antelopes and other animals. Remains of a fireplace and nearby burned animal bones were then discovered in a more remote cave chamber where H. naledi fossils have been found, Berger said. 

BRUCE BOWER, “HOMO NALEDI MAY HAVE LIT FIRES IN UNDERGROUND CAVES AT LEAST 236,000 YEARS AGO” AT SCIENCE NEWS (DECEMBER 2, 2022) HERE’S THE LECTURE ANNOUNCEMENT. 

One hitch is that the charred wood, bones, etc. have yet to be dated, to see if they come from the same layers as the Homo naledi fossils. But there are currently no other known groups that could have made the fires. 

It’s interesting to note that the basics of human culture seem to undergo much less development than we think. The culture may appear at about the same time as the humans.

You may also wish to read: Why is Neanderthal art considered controversial? It makes sense that whenever humans started to wonder about life, we started to create art that helps us think about it. Science writer Michael Marshall reports that some researchers are accused of banning others from taking samples that would prove a Neanderthal was the artist.

 

Darwinism's flag has fallen?

 “Crazy Stuff’? Dave Farina on the Waiting Time Problem 

Günter Bechly 

I now conclude my lengthy response to YouTuber “Professor Dave” aka Dave Farina, who published a video (Farina 2022) attacking Stephen Meyer and intelligent design. I have responded minute by minute, tracking my comments with timecodes in square brackets. I regret the length of this series, which is justified only by the fact that Farina is a popular would-be science educator. The video is tedious and grating, and thus I am glad to be done with it. This is the seventh and final post in this series. Find the rest here, here, here, here, here, and here.

[TC 1:05:55] Last but not least, we definitely have to address another mathematical argument I currently happen to work and publish about (Hössjer et al. 2018, 2021, Bechly et al. in prep.), which is the waiting time problem that Farina calls “crazy stuff.”

The formulation “crazy stuff” of course implicitly suggests that this is a pseudo-problem invented by evil and stupid creationists. Farina mostly relies on a silly and embarrassingly incompetent “debunking” video by another YouTuber, who has not even understood the problem. Both chaps seem to be totally unaware that the waiting time problem has a long history and has been much discussed in mainstream science (especially population genetics) and even plays an important role in cancer research. 

Farina would have done better if he had talked with Harvard professor Martin Nowak, who is an evolutionary biologist and expert on the waiting time problem. Here are just a few references of renowned scientists publishing about this “crazy stuff”: Bodmer (1970), Karlin (1973), Christiansen et al. (1998), Schweinsberg (2008), Durrett et al. (2009), Behrens et al. (2012), and Chatterjee et al. (2014). It was not before Behe & Snoke (2004, 2005) and Behe (2007) that the waiting time problem was recognized as an argument for intelligent design. Durrett & Schmidt (2008) attempted to refute Behe but arrived at a prohibitive waiting time of 216 million years for a single coordinated mutation in human evolution, while only about 6 million years are available since the origin of the human lineage from a common ancestor with chimps. Behe arrived at 1015 years for such a mutation in humans (Behe 2007: 61) by translating empirical data of an actual waiting time for a coordinated mutation that conveyed chloroquine drug resistance in Malaria. He simply applied these empirical findings to humans, considering their much lower population size and much longer generation time. Durrett & Schmidt’s result was based on a mathematical model, which of course must make certain simplifications that can introduce errors. When such model calculations conflict with hard empirical data, we should trust the empirical data as pointing closer to the truth. Anyway, both numbers are prohibitive and refute the feasibility of a Darwinian mechanism of macroevolution. 

Four Alleged Problems 

[TC 1:07:23] Farina raises four alleged problems as objections against the waiting time argument:

First, he raises the dreadful objection that boils down to the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” by saying that nature does not go for specific mutations as a target but is totally random. This argument fails because it presupposes the existence of many targets, which is contradicted by the rarity of function in the search space for proteins (see the work of Douglas Axe) and by the common phenomenon of convergence. The argument also fails to recognize that life cannot allow for periods of maladaptation only to descend a local peak of the fitness landscape to explore other ones. Instead, life has to further adapt to its local fitness peak, which requires specific solutions for specific problems. It’s not like any beneficial mutation will do. A stem whale would have no use for a mutation that would be beneficial for a stem bird, such as improving skeletal pneumaticity.

Second, he totally fails to grasp the concept of coordinated mutations by calling it meaningless. He thinks that every individual mutation can be selected for, which shows he didn’t get the point that in coordinated mutations each individual mutation is neutral and thus in principle cannot be selected for.

Third, he claims that the waiting time problem implies that mutations occur in a specific sequence, which is simply false.

Finally, he claims that the waiting time problem ignores recombination, which according to Farina “baselessly discounts the profound evolutionary benefit” and is “dramatically accelerating the accumulation of beneficial mutations.” This shows how unaware Farina is of the actual technical literature, because the influence of recombination on the waiting time problem has been studied by Christiansen et al. (1998), who have shown that: “Recombination lowers the waiting time until a new genotypic combination first appears, but the effect is SMALL [my emphasis] compared to that of the mutation rate and population size.”

[TC 1:08:25] Farina finally wonders how papers by ID proponents on the waiting time problem could somehow make it into peer-reviewed journals and shows our paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (Hössjer et al. 2021). Well, that’s easy: because it is good peer-reviewed science, which something Farina has never achieved. 

Confused about Intelligent Design 

[TC 1:08:48] Farina briefly elaborates on mechanisms of speciation and mentions observed speciation events like the marbled crayfish as “another dirty secret that many creationists don’t like to acknowledge.” Of course, such evidence for speciation is completely irrelevant, because neither intelligent design proponents nor even young earth creationists dispute speciation. Nobody doubts that, say, a founder species of Darwin finches could potentially speciate into more than a dozen relatively similar species (or semi-species) on the Galápagos Islands. So what? Farina obviously is very much confused about ID theory.

[TC 1:09:32] Farina then implies that speciation (microevolution) extrapolated over long periods of time can explain the origin of biological novelty (macroevolution). This is not only contradicted by the waiting time problem, but also by another problem that I recently introduced with the so-called “species pair challenge” (Bechly 2022g, 2022h). There clearly are limits to what neo-Darwinian evolution can achieve. Thus, Darwinism is not wrong per se, but has a much narrower realm of applicability than has been thought.

[TC 1:10:14] Farina lists examples of genes that are conserved and shared by different clades of organisms as evidence for an evolutionary scenario rather than design. Again, he confuses evidence for common descent, which is happily granted, with evidence for an unguided process of transformation, which is virtually non-existent. He simply does not get it. 

[TC 1:11:13] Farina ends with the claim that the “concept of genetic information” as Meyer applies it “is so vague that it’s unusable” and that “there are no metrics for determining how much information any given sequence of DNA has.” This is nonsense. Very precise scientific measures for the information content of DNA have indeed been suggested already by Gatlin (1966) and by many other later studies (e.g., Rao et al. 1979, Schneider 1997, Dix et al. 2006, and Wills 2016).

[TC 1:12:03] Farina triumphantly concludes that he debunked Meyer’s two main arguments:

“1) Some lies about the Cambrian explosion means intelligent design is true.”

“2) I don’t understand genetics even a little bit so intelligent design is true.”

According to Farina, Meyer’s only strategy is: 

“Premise: a lie about science”

“Conclusion: God did it!”

That’s not a joke or an exaggeration. Go to his video and check that he literally makes these ridiculous claims. Of course, Meyer’s argumentation isn’t anything remotely similar to this ludicrous caricature nor did Farina successfully debunk anything. Also, Meyer explicitly and thoroughly rejects a “God of the gaps” argument from ignorance (Klinghoffer 2018 and this video), which is by far the most trite stereotype against ID that Farina could bring up [TC 1:13:15]. Luskin (2014) carefully goes through Meyer’s argument for design as presented in Darwin’s Doubt and shows precisely why it is not a “gaps”-based argument. Instead of debunking Meyer, Farina only showed that he is not shy about using the crudest of crude propaganda tactics.

There is one last point. Farina predicts that ID proponents will desperately respond to his hit piece that he is just an “unqualified uncredentialled loser.” He said it, I didn’t. But who am I to disagree? However, the fact that Farina lacks formal credentials is not his problem. I know tons of non-PhDs who can speak authoritatively on scientific issues. Farina isn’t one of them, and his rudeness does not add to his authority, as he seems to think. He rightfully deserves to be called out for his behavior as well as his sloppy work. He is not just an off-putting communicator but also bad at appreciating scientific controversies, an unfortunate combo for someone who wants to teach science to young people. 

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Chickens coming home to roost?

 Ukraine considers ban on Russian affiliated churches

Milton Quintanilla 

Ukrainian authorities recently called for a ban on churches within its borders that are affiliated with Russia.

As reported by Reuters, Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council asked the government to make a law banning churches that are possibly taking orders from Russia.

In an address last Thursday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy argued that pro-Russian influences are trying to "weaken Ukraine from within" as war rages on between Ukraine and Russia.

"We have to create conditions where no actors dependent on the aggressor state [Russia] will have an opportunity to manipulate Ukrainians and weaken Ukraine from within," Zelenskyy said. "We will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul."

The security council also called for an investigation into alleged "subversive activities of Russian special services in the religious environment of Ukraine" and a call for sanctions against unspecified individuals.

Meanwhile, last Friday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) raided at least five parishes belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had previously been linked to the Russian Orthodox Church.

A former diocese head was also served a notice of suspicion by authorities. The former leader is suspected of organizing a Pro-Moscow campaign with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Metropolitan Kliment, a spokesperson for the church, says his organization "has always acted within the framework of Ukrainian law."

"Therefore, the state of Ukraine does not have any legal grounds to put pressure on or repress our believers," he added.

According to The Christian Post, last month, authorities conducted searches at the Ivano-Frankivsk Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate and the Pochaiv Theological Seminary in Ternopil Oblast. The SBU claimed that pro-Russian materials were found in both locations.

In a message via Telegram, Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called authorities in Kyiv "Satanists" and "enemies of Christ and the Orthodox faith."

"This is how the whole Christian world should treat them," he continued.

Photo courtesy: Andriyko Podilnyk/Unsplash

Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. He is also the co-hosts of the For Your Soul podcast, which seeks to equip the church with biblical truth and sound doctrine. Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.

Revelation17:16KJV"And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire."

Death and taxes indeed.

Bioethics: In Canada, Medically Assisted Death Is a Solution for Poverty

Wesley J. Smith 

Death is increasingly seen as the answer to a variety of woes in Canada, with its euthanasia libertinism running truly amuck. This includes veterans being offered euthanasia for PTSD and a nursing home patient lethally injected because she did not want to be isolated during a COVID lockdown. There are also cases in which people ask to die because they can’t access prompt medical care from Canada’s socialized healthcare system, and one in which death was offered to a disabled woman rather than a stairs chair lift. 

A Culture of Abandonment

Now, a disabled man wants to die because he is afraid of falling into poverty. And at least one doctor has said yes. From the Daily Mail story: 

A Canadian pensioner seeking euthanasia because he fears homelessness has received approval from a doctor despite admitting poverty is a major factor in the decision to end his own life.

Les Landry, 65, told assessors for the procedure he ‘doesn’t want to die’ but has applied for medical assistance in dying (MAID) because he can’t afford to live comfortably.

Astonishingly, a doctor has given one of the two signatures required for Landry to end his own life, despite knowing that financial hardship — not illness — is a leading reason for the profound decision. 

Landry plans to go doctor-shopping to obtain the second MD approval:

 Landry is awaiting the decision of a second doctor who has assessed his eligibility. If that doctor rejects the application, Landry says he will simply ‘shop’ around for another who’s prepared to sign off on his death — something that’s allowed under Canada‘s assisted dying laws. 

Suicide by Zoom Call 

Note that this is allowed in U.S. assisted-suicide laws too. In fact, many assisted suicides are facilitated by doctors who have not treated the patient and only met them briefly for the purpose of obtaining the lethal prescription. These days, assisted suicide can even be obtained in a Zoom call.

The problem for Landry is that Canada won’t assist him to live with dignity. 

Landry uses a wheelchair and has several other disabilities that mean he is eligible for MAID, including epilepsy and diabetes. But until recently, he was able to live comfortably, sharing his modest home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his service dog.

Changes to his state benefits when he turned 65 in May meant his income was cut and he’s now left with around $120 per month after paying for medical bills and essentials.

Landry is also braced for a rent hike in January that could mean his benefits no longer cover the cost of essentials, placing him on the brink of homelessness.

In a series of interviews with DailyMail.com, he detailed his spiral into hardship and decision to pursue the ‘bizarre’ MAID application process that’s made ‘state-sanctioned suicide’ a viable solution to his struggles. 

I’m glad the media and many commentators are finally paying attention to the crass culture of abandonment to which assisted suicide and its advocacy logically leads. I just don’t know whether that increasingly clear consequence of “death with dignity” laws matters much anymore.