No Jehovah,no Justice,no Peace here's why.

   The pseudo-religious bureaucracies of this age have given religion/worship a bad name.Likely many would agree with Indian statesman Jawarlal Nehru when he said that the spectacle of organised religion in India and elsewhere filled his mind with horror,and that it seems almost always to stand for superstition,ignorance,bigotry,exploitation,the vested interest of entrenched elites and the like.But long before Nehru now famous religious leader/teacher Jesus Christ had some choice words for the leaders of the dominant religion of his time and place: Matthew23:13KJV "But woe unto you scribes and pharisees,!For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men:For ye go in yourselves,neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.Woe unto you,scribes and pharisees,hypocrites!For ye devour widows houses,and for a pretence make long prayer:Therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

   Two things to note in Jesus censure 1)The hypocrisy of these religious leaders separated them from God 2)Their hypocrisy turned others away from the God's truth.How?The bible suggest two ways 1)Matthew23:15ESV "Woe to you, scribes and pharisees,hypocrites!For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte,and when he becomes a proselyte,you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves."

  2)2Peter2:2 "Many will follow their sensuality,and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed."

 On account of its bringing his name and kingdom into disrepute pseudo-religion in general and Christendom in particular is in the cross hairs of Jehovah's war machine.The bible tells us that soon pseudo-religion will pay a heavy price for its political meddling, greed and hypocrisy.Revelation19:2"because His judgments are trued and righteous,e

because He has judged the notorious prostitutef

who corrupted the earth with her sexual immorality;

and He has avenged the blood of His •slaves

that was on her hands.g"

There are of course those who urge an abandonment of the quest for the creator God.They claim that accepting a status of cosmic orphanhood and making new gods of chance,necessity,matter and self are the only way to free ourselves from the abuses of the past.To begin with militant atheist have been every bit as unsuccessful on liberating their flock from the racism,nationalism,militarism and greed that have always been the main triggers of conflict as theistic pseudo-religionists have.Additionally there are practical reasons that universal justice and peace are simply not possible apart from Jehovah's assertion of his rightful sovereignty over the globe

 1)Only Jehovah as creator can claim unimpeachable legitimacy as a global governor,there plain and simply is no man or group of men(or angels for that matter)that can be trusted with that kind of authority,apart from the fact that it is a universally accepted legal principle that the creator be recognised as legal owner of what he has produced.Jehovah is totally independent of his creation and is thus morally incorruptible,What could anyone possibly offer him as a bribe?A new luxury car?Tickets to the big game?A case of champagne perhaps?With him in charge mankind will finally have a ruler worthy of utter confidence and loyalty.

2)Jehovah is not learning on the job the very wisest among us human or superhuman is only just beginning to understand how to get the most out of Jehovah's creation Jehovah has been there and done that so to speak.No more guessing games with people's lives,health and prosperity.

3)Only Jehovah has the might/smarts to bring leviathan and his hordes to heal.There is a reason that the criminal and otherwise sociopathic elements of society always seem ahead of the agencies charged with countering them.Why instead they have consistently succeeding in corrupting the wider society.Some might be prepared to acknowledge behind the scenes influences on the human level.They might be less willing to acknowledge the Bible's warning that the corruption of the main institutions of our global civilisation extends to the realm of the superhuman see Ephesians6:12.Until our civilisation is rid of these malignant minds human and superhuman advances in technology will continue to be more of a curse than a blessing.

  4)Only Jehovah can guarantee infallible judgement.Not only is he first hand witness to all wrongdoing and right doing he can read hearts.This means that under his rule not only will we finally have a ruler worthy of our complete trust we will have fellow servants worthy of our complete trust.Picture a society with no need for

police,soldiers,spies,security personnel of any kind,courts,magistrates,judges,jails,locks,keys.Impossible you say?Certainly in the atheistic universe we could entertain no such hope.

 5)Justice delayed is Justice denied the saying goes.What about when justice never arrives?The number of unsolved crimes on the files of this world's law enforcement agencies is in the tens of thousands some of these are horrific indeed heartbreaking murders.What about those who have been erroneously convicted crimes they never committed What about past victims of state sponsored injustice.Jehovah is not only mankind's only hope of a just future he ALONE can counter the injustices of the past.

What is a hominid?

 Fossil Friday: To Be or Not to Be Homo

Gunter Bechly

The fossil hominin Homo habilis was described 1964 by famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his colleagues from the 1.9 million year old Olduvai Gorge locality in Tanzania (Leakey et al. 1964). Even though this taxon is only known from a small and highly incomplete collection of isolated bone fragments, it has become the crucial hominid species that supposedly bridges the gap between the ape-like australopithecines and our human genus Homo. Because of the association of the bones with stone tools it has been named Homo habilis, which means “handy man.” However, its alleged position as transitional form is quite controversial (also see Gibbons 2011, Luskin 2007, 2015), and even the validity of the species has been questioned because it seems to be “a wastebasket taxon, little more than a convenient recipient for a motley assortment of hominin fossils” (Tattersall 1992). Homo habilis certainly was not the ancestor of later Homo species, because he is too recent and coexisted with early Homo ergaster, thus leaving a distinct gap between australopithecines and the genus Homo (Hawks et al. 2000).

A Dubious Attribution?

Since its small brain volume falls within the range of australopithecines, several scientists very early doubted the attribution of H. habilis to the genus Homo. Also the hand and feet are more ape-like and exhibit clear adaptations for climbing. Walker & Shipman (1996: 132) said that H. habilis is even more ape-like than Lucy, and Spoor et al. (1994) even remarked in their comparative study of hominid labyrinthine morphology that “The specimen Stw 53 provisionally attributed to H. habilis, differs from all other hominids … [and] shows greatest similarities to the pattern observed for large cercopithecoids …[which] suggest that Stw53 relied less on bipedal behaviour than the australopithecines”. Holly Smith (1994) concluded from the comparative study hominid patterns of dental development that gracile australopithecines and H. habilis remain classified with African apes. Wood & Collard (1999a, 1999b, 2001), Collard & Wood (2007, 2015) could show that in none of the crucial character H. habilis is closer to Homo than to Australopithecus.

An Assignment Rejected

Therefore, they suggested that H. habilis should be transferred to the genus Australopithecus, which was also supported by Hartwig-Scherer (1999) and Schwartz & Tattersall (2015). This assignment was rejected by Harcourt-Smith (2007) based on postcranial characters, while Berger et al. (2015) agreed that “postcranial remains of H. habilis appear to reflect an australopith-like body plan”. Spoor et al. (2015) found that the mandible of H. habilis is remarkably primitive and more similar to Australopithecus afarensis. They also reconstructed a slightly larger brain volume for the holotype and clarified the definition of the taxon Homo habilis, but cautioned that the results raise questions about its phylogenetic relationships. It is also very much contradicting Darwinian expectations, that the oldest specimens of Homo habilis, such as the 2.3 million year old specimen no. AL 666-1, possess more advanced characters than the younger holotype specimen OH 7, which lived more than a half million years later. One of the most striking contradictions is the fact that the bones of Homo habilis and many other animals were found in the context of so-called “butchering sites” together with stone tools, and in the neighbourhood of rock circles that very much look like the stone huts still used by modern nomadic tribes of the region (Leakey 1972: 24).

These rock circles and huts demonstrably originated at the same time as Homo habilis, which obviously suggests that this ape-like creature was rather the animal prey of contemporary human hunters than a human ancestor and producer of stone tools. Otherwise, we would have to believe highly implausible hypothesis that an ape-like creature with an ape-sized brain and climbing adaptations built stone huts like modern humans. Anyway, the majority of evolutionists of course ignored all such doubts among the experts and blindly embraced Homo habilis as a cherished “missing link” without asking inconvenient and potentially career-threatening questions.

Reference

Berger LR, Hawks J, de Ruiter DJ et al. 2015. Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa. eLife 4:e09560, 1–35. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09560

Collard M & Wood B 2007. Defining the Genus Homo. pp. 1575–1610 in: Henke W & Tattersall I (eds). Handbook of Paleoanthropology. 3 vols. Springer, Berlin, 2069 pp.

Collard M & Wood B 2015. Defining the Genus Homo. pp. 2107–2144 in: Henke W & Tattersall I (eds). Handbook of Paleoanthropology. 3 vols. Springer, Berlin, xliii+2624 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39979-4_51

Gibbons A 2011. Who Was Homo habilis—And Was It Really Homo? Science 332(6036), 1370–1371. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.332.6036.1370

Harcourt-Smith WEH 2007. The Origins of Bipedal Locomotion. pp. 1483–1518 in: Henke W, Tattersall I (eds). Handbook of Paleoanthropology. 3 vols. Springer, Berlin, 2069 pp.

Hartwig-Scherer S 1999. “Homo” habilis ab jetzt kein Mensch mehr. Studium Integrale Journal 6(2), 85–87. http://www.si-journal.de/index2.php?artikel=jg6/heft2/sij62-5.html

Hawks J, Hunley K, Lee S-H & Wolpoff M 2000. Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution. Molecular Biology and Evolution 17(1), 2–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a026233

Holly Smith B 1994. Patterns of Dental Development in Homo, Australopithecus, Pan, and Gorilla. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94(3), 307–325. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330940303

Leakey MD 1972. Olduvai Gorge: Volume 3, Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960-1963. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), xix+306 pp.

Leakey LSB, Tobias PV & Napier JR 1964. A new species of the genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge. Nature 202(4927), 7–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/202007a0

Luskin C 2007. Paleoanthropologists Disown Homo habilis from Our Direct Family Tree. Evolution News August 9, 2007. https://evolutionnews.org/2007/08/paleoanthropologists_disown_ho/

Luskin C 2015. As a Taxonomic Group, “Homo habilis” Is Challenged in the Journal Science. Evolution News September 9, 2015. https://evolutionnews.org/2015/09/as_a_taxonomic_/

Schwartz JH & Tattersall I 2015. Defining the genus Homo. Science 349(6251), 931–932. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac6182

Spoor F, Wood B & Zonneveld F 1994. Implications of early hominid labyrinthine morphology for the evolution of human bipedal locomotion. Nature 369(6482), 645–648. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/369645a0

Spoor F, Gunz P, Neubauer S, Stelzer S, Scott N, Kwekason A & Dean MC 2015. Reconstructed Homo habilis type OH 7 suggests deep-rooted species diversity in early Homo. Nature 519(7541), 83–86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14224

Tattersall T 1992. The Many Faces of Homo habilis. Evolutionary Anthropology 1(1), 33–37.

Walker A & Shipman P 1996. The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins. Knopf, New York (NY), 368 pp.

Wood B & Collard M 1999a. The Human Genus. Science 284(5411), 65–71. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.284.5411.65

Wood B & Collard M 1999b. The changing face of genus Homo. Evolutionary Anthropology 8(6), 195–207. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1999)8:6<195::AID-EVAN1>3.0.CO;2-2

Wood B & Collard M 2001. The meaning of Homo. Ludus Vitalis 9(15), 63–74. http://profmarkcollard.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Wood-and-Collard-2001.pdf

Natural antifreeze vs. Darwin.

 Blood Viscosity and Freezing Temperatures — A Titanic Problem

Emily Reeves

Editor’s note: With the RMS Titanic tragically back in the news this week, we thought of this article from last year by biochemist Emily Reeves. She notes a question about the character Jack in the movie Titanic, and addresses a fascinating problem in marine biology.

Dr. Gregory Sloop is a Montana physician who knows a thing or two about the cardiovascular system. He has an article in the journal BIO-Complexity highlighting the sleek design of the Antarctic icefish that allows it to live in super-cold waters without freezing to death.

Icefish, aka the family Channichthydiae, survive at 0oC in the Southern Ocean by maintaining blood viscosity at the set point of 3.27 centipoise — a level nearly identical to human blood. They do this without hemoglobin, which is the primary determinant of human and other red-blooded animals’ blood viscosity.

Since icefish don’t have hemoglobin, how do they maintain blood viscosity? Also, how do they breathe? Turns out they maintain viscosity at freezing temperatures primarily by using a special type of glycoprotein: the antifreeze protein. And because oxygen has a higher solubility at lower temperatures, icefish don’t need an oxygen transport molecule like hemoglobin. 

Why Jack Froze

In case you were wondering, blood viscosity is the technical reason why Jack (Rose’s buddy aboard the Titanic) froze in less than 23 minutes, but icefish can survive for 15 years in water of a freezing temperature. Viscosity increases at lower temperatures, and at 0oC human blood reaches a viscosity that is not compatible with life. This is because hemoglobin as a protein is not able to keep viscosity low enough at freezing temperatures. But the antifreeze protein can (think: custom design).

While a viscosity too high is incompatible with life, a low viscosity is also unsuitable for sustaining life. This is because a properly functioning cardiovascular system must have optimized laminar flow and low vascular resistance, which can be achieved only through coordinated control of blood viscosity and specification of vascular geometry.

Stop Criticizing Icefish

Dr. Sloop says icefish have been criticized for expending nearly 22 percent of their basal metabolic rate pumping their hemoglobinless blood compared to at most 5 percent in temperate fish. But he reminds his readers that’s just the cost of doing business in the chilly — well technically, freezing — waters of the Southern Ocean.

Sloop also emphasizes that everything about the icefish is like a custom-fitted suit — appropriate for niche needs. Features included for dealing with the extreme cold are a high-output, low resistance vasculature where the diameter of muscle capillaries is 2-3 times larger than those of other fish.

These fish also have a heavy heart which delivers a larger stroke and therefore higher volume. Together these features enable a high-output, high-velocity, low-pressure, and low-resistance circulation.

Truly, every part of these incredible creatures is optimized for cold. Could all these custom changes be the result of random mutation? Dr. Sloop thinks that is very unlikely. What do you say?

Continuing to rethink the unthinkable

Yet another shot at explaining black holes

Comb Jelly's have never been a "simple lifeform"

Earliest Comb Jellies Wore Armor — “Remarkable,” Say Researchers

David Coppedge 

What does it take to wear armor? An animal has to be able to make the material and put it where it belongs. To be functional, the armor cannot interfere with the animal’s movement. And the animal cannot simply glue sand particles on its exterior in a haphazard way. The appropriate materials, directed by genetic instructions, must be manufactured and placed holistically so that the finished armor provides a beneficial function. It would be surprising, under an evolutionary view, to find such a complex system in the earliest animal fossils. But that’s what Chinese paleontologists discovered in their country’s early Cambrian rocks.

Phylum Ctenophora (cilia-bearing) has about 150 living representatives. While most of them have tentacles, none have hard parts. Varying in size from a few millimeters to over a meter, they resemble jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria) in being gelatinous and transparent, but are distinct in having eight-fold radial symmetry with comb-like rows of fused cilia that propel them around. Some living comb jellies give stunning light shows as their comb rows reflect light in rainbows of iridescent colors, making them resemble alien spacecraft.

Though not bilaterians, they have complex body plans with a buoyancy organ called a statolith, muscles, a nervous system, an alimentary canal, and the ability to control the direction of their locomotion. The phylum made its appearance in the earliest Cambrian layers, dated 520 million years ago. That takes us to the Chengjiang biota in China, one of the finest exposures of early Cambrian fossils in the world.

A Surprise for Fossil Hunters

Seven Chinese researchers found beautifully preserved comb jellies in lower Cambrian strata — three new species and three reclassified species — all with armor. Their open-access paper in Science Advances, “A vanished history of skeletonization in Cambrian comb jellies,” shows the photographs of the fossils along with diagrams of how they probably looked. Armored struts and plates are arranged in complex shapes along the animals’ exterior, following the eight-fold symmetry and making up complex curves. One of the species has spines along its outer struts. The fossil hunters were quite surprised:

They share a basic body plan characterized by a tentacleless and octaradial body with an oral-aboral axis, eight rigid struts (termed here “spokes”) radiating from the aboral end and arched to converge to the oral end, eight soft-bodied flaps or lobes supported by the spokes, eight pairs of ctene rows, a conspicuous apical (or aboral) organ walled by eight rigid plates and housing a spheroidal or ellipsoidal statolith, and an oral region surrounded by eight apiculate lappets…

The eight arcuate spokes [in one species] bear robust spines (Fig. 2, L to N, and figs. S4 to S6) and retain their structural integrity even when disarticulated, suggesting a remarkable degree of sclerotization.

The plates have “considerable rigidity,” they noticed, retaining their integrity even when separated. Some of the hard parts protrude into different layers of sediments. It’s not clear what the armor is made of, but the authors presume it is chitin, the same protein that makes up the exoskeleton of arthropods. “The spokes and apical plates of scleroctenophores were likely cuticular or chitinous in composition, but the presence of minerals in their skeletons cannot be completely ruled out, given that the epidermis of extant ctenophores can produce Mg-Ca carbonates that partially form the statolith,” they say. The statoliths of some fossil specimens even preserve some organic carbon.

Evolutionary Speculations

The authors are not sure about the function of the armor, but indulge in some evolutionary speculation. The typical evolutionary explanation is to imagine an “arms race” that forced the animals to defend themselves against a new class of predators. It seems obvious, though, that nothing about predation can cause a brainless animal to build a suit of armor. It could more easily just go extinct. 

What’s even more remarkable (a word they use themselves) is that the ctenophores are not alone in being armored compared to living counterparts. They use this observation to support a view from the late Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is highly unpredictable:

The occurrence of sclerotized and armored skeletons in Cambrian representatives of several animal groups — including entoprocts, phoronids, lobopods, scalidophorans, and now ctenophores that are exclusively soft-bodied among modern survivors — is a remarkable phenomenon. The independent skeletonization among these diverse Cambrian animals provides indirect evidence for an intensified level of ecological interactions (for example, arms race) and also highlights the importance of paleontological data in illuminating the evolutionary legacy that would be otherwise inaccessible by studying living animals alone. The widespread occurrence of skeletonization echoes Stephen Jay Gould’s view of the striking morphological disparity of many animal phyla during their Cambrian debut, and the contrasting evolutionary trajectories of skeletonized cnidarians and ctenophores also elucidate the contingent fate of evolutionary innovations such as skeletonization.

Protection from Evidence

This kind of explanation serves only to protect Darwinian evolution from the evidence. If animals are similar, they evolved. If animals are different, they evolved. But the authors noticed that the “morphological disparity” in the Cambrian explosion exists not only between phyla, but between species within phyla. Earlier, they referred to the explosion:

Here, we report several sclerotized and armored ctenophore species, based on new material and reinterpretation of previously published material from the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota (ca. 520 Ma). Along with armored Cambrian entoprocts, phoronids, lobopods, and scalidophorans, the new fossils suggest a vanished Cambrian history of skeletonization in multiple animal groups, imply the ecological importance of skeletonization in the Cambrian explosion, and highlight the remarkable morphological disparity in certain Cambrian animal clades relative to their modern survivors.

A “vanished Cambrian history of skeletonization in multiple animal groups” is inconsistent with Darwinian evolution. “Ecological importance” is incapable of producing genetic programming for an armored skeleton. “Morphological disparity” at the earliest onset of complex animals is the opposite of Darwin’s image of a branching tree gradually separating into more and more complex types.

Designers, by contrast, know how to apply a common solution in different applications. That’s why it’s unsurprising to see complex armor in disparate groups from the beginning. 

Stephen Meyer did not go into detail about ctenophores in Darwin’s Doubt, other than to note they are among the phyla that suddenly appeared in the Cambrian explosion (p. 32). But this revelation that ctenophores are more complex than originally realized, possessing elaborate armor, certainly reinforces his contention that “the best explanation for the explosion of information necessary for the Cambrian animals… remains intelligent design” (see the Epilogue in the paperback edition, p. 448).

Time to end fractional banking?