Friday 10 March 2023

scams as WMD?

A paper fortress falls?

Transcending biology?

Canadian masters athletics ratifies first national record by a trans female.

Running Magazine Canada

In February 2022, at an indoor meet at Toronto’s York University, Tiffany Newell of Welland, Ont., ran 18:02.30 over 5,000m, breaking the Canadian W45-49 record by six seconds. That record was recently ratified by Canadian Masters Athletics (CMA), under the rules and regulations of World Masters Athletics (WMA); it’s the first time a Canadian record was set on the track by a trans woman.

Newell, a former soccer player and triathlete, began her transition in 2017, but did not begin competing until she completed her transition in 2020 and her testosterone levels matched World Athletics’ current transgender athlete’s policies (WMA follows the rules of the sport set by its worldwide governing body, World Athletics).

The World Athletics policy states that to be eligible for female competition, transgender athletes must follow three guidelines:

1) provide a written and signed declaration, in a form satisfactory to WA Medical Manager, confirming their gender identity is now female; however, athletes need not have sought or obtained legal recognition of their gender identity or changed the sex marker on official identification (i.e. passports or drivers license).

2) demonstrate to the satisfaction of WA officials “on the balance of probabilities” that the concentration of testosterone in their blood serum has been less than 5 mol/L continuously for a period of at least 12 months (WA’s average range for serum testosterone in males is 7.7-29.4 mol/L; the average for females is 0.2-1.68 mol/L).

3) transgender athletes must keep their serum testosterone concentration below 5 mol/L to maintain eligibility and compete in the female category.

Newell has had some success in her past two seasons. She won a silver medal at the 2021 Canadian XC Championships in the masters 8K and finished second at the 2022 Hamilton Marathon (2:55:57).

Athletics Ontario and Athletics Canada currently offer two gender choices on their annual membership application (male or female), and they do not check the selection unless there is a national record application involved. The member lines up and competes in the gender category that they select.

The inclusion of transgender athletes in sports became a public debate when U.S. collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas began to break NCAA records. Thomas competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team from 2017 to 2020 and the women’s swim team from 2021 to 2022. In March 2022, she became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport, winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle event.

As a result of Thomas’ success, swimming’s world governing body World Aquatics (known as FINA), voted to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in elite women’s competitions and is working to establish an ‘open’ category in some events as part of its new policy.

World Athletics announced shortly after FINA’s decision that it would review its transgender eligibility policies after swimming passed new rules that restrict transgender participation in women’s events in June 2022.

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said to Insider that when it comes to transgender athletes, he believes in prioritizing fairness over inclusion. “If you pushed me and said I had to choose between fairness or inclusion, I will always lean towards fairness, because that’s what sports have to be based on.”

Newell thinks there are pros and cons to the open category: “The policy makes sense for non-binary athletes, but I don’t feel comfortable racing against men. It categorizes me in the sex I am not identified as. I am a woman, and I feel most comfortable racing against women or other transgender women. I believe an open category can work if athletes can continue to race against athletes of the same gender.”

Waiting for Darwinism?

Fossil Friday: A Waiting Time Problem for Feathers

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features a beautiful fossil feather from the Lower Cretaceous Crato limestones of northeast Brazil, which are about 115 million years old. I photographed this fossil at a German trader collection in July 2008. The feather with preserved color pattern could have belonged to a primitive bird or a feathered theropod dinosaur, which coexisted at this time in Earth history. Actually, the origin of pennaceous feathers represents another striking example of the waiting time problem as an obstacle to neo-Darwinian evolution. The rich fossil record of the dinosaur-bird transition shows that there are only a few million years available for the transformation of hair-like dino-fuzz into real bird feathers. This window of time corresponds to only about the average longevity of a single species, but has to accommodate the origin and fixation of multiple coordinated mutations to allow for the formation of vaned feathers, which are considered the most complex integumental structures in the animal kingdom.

Mathematical calculations based on mainstream population genetics strongly suggest that this time interval is much too short for such a transition to be plausibly explained with a blind process of natural selection acting on random mutations. Birds may well have descended from small bipedal dinosaurs, but this transition arguably required the input of very specific new genetic information that had to come from somewhere. Wherever you look in the history of life you stumble upon overwhelming evidence for design.

The highest cliffs in natural history's fitness landscape?

New book: New proteins evolve very easily.

Cornelius G Hunter

We have seen that a new evolution book co-authored by evolutionist Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight is influenced by the mythical Warfare Thesis (here and here) and makes erroneous arguments that the fossils, echolocation, and pseudogenes support evolution (here, here and here). We now move on to another topic: protein evolution. Proteins are composed of a linear string of amino acids, often hundreds in length, and perform all sorts of important tasks in the cell. They could not have evolved by any stretch of the imagination, and so pose a rather difficult problem for evolutionists. Our new book on evolution attempts to resolve this problem with a claim that has long since been understood to be false. In fact, the claim, properly understood, provides yet more scientific evidence against evolution.

The problem of protein evolution

For evolution to work biology must be chocked full of structures that can arise via long, gradual evolutionary pathways. Mutations must be able to slowly accumulate, gradually improving the structure. In other words, the “fitness landscape” must be smooth and gradual, not rugged or precipitous.

That evolutionary expectation has been found to be false many times, and proteins are no exception. It is now clear that for a given protein, only a few changes to its amino acid sequence can be sustained before the protein function is all but eliminated. Here is how one paper explained it:

The accepted paradigm that proteins can tolerate nearly any amino acid substitution has been replaced by the view that the deleterious effects of mutations, and especially their tendency to undermine the thermodynamic and kinetic stability of protein, is a major constraint on protein evolvability—the ability of proteins to acquire changes in sequence and function

In other words, protein function precipitously drops off with only a tiny fraction of its amino acids altered. It is not a gradual fitness landscape. Another paper described the protein fitness landscape as rugged.

Therefore it is not surprising that various studies on evolving proteins have failed to show a viable mechanism. One study concluded that 10^63 attempts would be required to evolve a relatively short protein. And a similar result (10^65 attempts required) was obtained by comparing protein sequences. Another study found that 10^64 to 10^77 attempts are required, and another study concluded that 10^70 attempts would be required.

So something like 10^70 attempts are required yet evolutionists estimate that only 10^43 attempts are possible. In other words, there is a shortfall of 27 orders of magnitude.

But it gets worse. The estimate that 10^43 attempts are possible is utterly unrealistic. For it assumes billions of years are available, and that for that entire time the Earth is covered with bacteria, constantly churning out mutations and new protein experiments. Aside from the fact that these assumptions are entirely unrealistic, the estimate also suffers from the rather inconvenient fact that those bacteria are, err, full of proteins. In other word, for evolution to evolve proteins, they must already exist in the first place.

This is absurd. And yet, even with these overly optimistic assumptions, evolution falls short by 27 orders of magnitude.

The numbers don’t add up. Proteins reveal scientific problems for evolution. What is interesting is how evolutionists react to these problems.

The “solution” to protein evolution

A common solution cited by evolutionists for the problem of protein evolution is the case of nylonases—enzymes that rapidly arose in bacteria, in the last century, and are able to breakdown byproducts of the nylon manufacturing process. The idea here is that these byproducts of the nylon manufacturing process were present in the bacteria’s environment for the first time. The bacteria had never been exposed to such chemicals, and yet in an evolutionary blink of an eye, were able to produce proteins to metabolize the new chemicals. Does this not demonstrate that the chance origin of a protein-coding genes is not a problem? Proteins could have evolved with no problem, after all, we just witnessed it occur with the origin of nylonases. As the new book explains, protein evolution “appears to be trivial for evolution to achieve.” [86]

Unfortunately this icon of evolution is an enormous misrepresentation of the science.

The science

The evolutionary claim that the nylonases demonstrate how easy protein evolution is non scientific for several reasons. Indicators of this include that fact that the nylonases evolved so rapidly—in an entirely unrealistic time frame under evolution, and that they arose in bacteria with thousands of preexisting proteins. Again, this evolutionary claim of how proteins evolve is circular, it requires the preexistence of proteins.

None of this is feasible given the problems of protein evolution discussed above. The scientific inference would be that the bacteria developed the nylonases because those chemicals they metabolize were present in the environment. In other words, directed adaptation.

Indeed, this is precisely what researchers in the field have concluded. They hypothesize that the new metabolism capability is a stress response, an adaptation to a challenging environment. In other words, the environment influenced the adaptation. This is not a case of evolutionary change. The nylonase enzymes did not arise from a random search over sequence space until the right enzymes were luckily found and could be selected for. That would have required eons of time, and is far beyond evolution’s capability, as we have seen. Instead, cellular structures rapidly formed new enzymes, due to the environmental change.

Indeed, such adaptation to nylon manufacture byproducts has been repeated in laboratory experiments. In a matter of months bacteria acquire the ability to digest the unforeseen chemical. Researchers speculate that mechanisms responding to environmental stress are involved in inducing adaptive mutations.

This does not demonstrate protein evolution. In fact it refutes evolution. Evolution does not have the resources to have created directed adaptation mechanisms. And even if it did, such mechanisms would not have been selected for because they provide no immediate fitness improvement.

This is not evidence that protein-coding genes can evolve by chance. A new gene, arising within a modern cell responding to an environmental challenge, is not analogous to chance origin. Unfortunately evolutionists have a long history of inappropriately claiming otherwise (for example, see here and here).

We have seen that this new evolution book makes erroneous arguments that the fossils, echolocation, and pseudogenes support evolution. We now see another erroneous argument for protein evolution.

All these arguments and evidences are typical. They are icons of evolution, and it is astonishing how durable they are in the evolution literature given their complete failure.

If evolution was indicated by the science I would be the first to sign up. But in fact it is an age-old religious idea that makes no sense on the science. And likewise this new book is an utter disaster. The confection immediately crumbles under even a little probing.

From savage 'wolf' to civilised 'wolf'?

When Darwinian Racism Came to Africa, and to the West

Evolution News

A new episode of ID the Future features another reading from scholar Olufemi Oluniyi’s new book, Darwin comes to Africa. In this excerpt we learn how Darwin himself laid much of the groundwork for social Darwinist ideas, primarily in his book The Descent of Man, and how those ideas were energetically developed in the ensuing decades by various mainstream scientists. Oluniyi further details how their work fueled pseudo-scientific racism against Africans and other indigenous peoples outside the West. Download the podcast or listen to it here. To learn more about this neglected corner of modern Western history, and for the good news that the flow of evidence has turned against Darwinism and, with it, social Darwinist principles, pick up Oluniyi’s book here.

Dr. Frankenstein's Children?

Mice Born with No Mother, Two Fathers: What Next?

Wesley Smith

Biotechnologists keep pushing the borders of what is possible in procreation. Mice pups have now been born with no mother and two fathers.

It was done, apparently, by transforming skin cells from male mice into pluripotent stem cells and thence into egg cells with XX chromosomes. From the Guardian story:

Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes.

“The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome,” said Hayashi. “We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome.”

Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilised with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups.

Why Do Such a Thing?

Ostensibly the purpose would be to help with rare forms of infertility in women. But these are dual-edged technologies. This, I believe, is the real aim behind such experiments:

“Purely in terms of technology, it will be possible [in humans] even in 10 years,” he said, adding that he personally would be in favour of the technology being used clinically to allow two men to have a baby if it were shown to be safe.

Why? What is the urgency in that?

And What About the Baby?

There is no assurance that the baby would not be harmed by such biological manipulation. Or, is that a secondary concern to the great contemporary maw of “I want”?

But Wesley, what if it really is “safe”? How would we know without unethical human experimentation? Humans are much more complex organisms than mice. The only way such procreative manipulation could “be shown to be safe” in humans would require repeated experiments — that would almost surely involve repeated abortions, stillbirths, or babies born with birth defects — to perfect techniques. It would also require surrogate mothers or artificial gestation chambers to bring the babies to term, which would pose other ethical issues.

Because we might be able to figure out how to twist nature into a knot doesn’t mean that we should. The time is long past due to legally regulate human experiments in this field of biotechnology before it is too late.

The sausage factory?

meditations of aservantofJEHOVAH

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