The thumb print of JEHOVAH in the cell

 

The king of titans is a human engine?

 

Grok on open theism.

 Open theism, also known as open theology or free will theism, is a theological framework that emphasizes God’s relational nature and the openness of the future. It holds that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent but chooses to limit His foreknowledge or control over human decisions to allow for genuine free will. Key points:

Open theism, also known as open theology or free will theism, is a theological framework that emphasizes God’s relational nature and the openness of the future. It holds that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent but chooses to limit His foreknowledge or control over human decisions to allow for genuine free will. Key points:

God’s Knowledge and the Future: Open theism posits that the future is not entirely fixed or exhaustively known by God. Instead, God knows all possibilities and probabilities but leaves room for human free choices, making the future partly "open" or undetermined.

Divine-Human Relationship: God interacts dynamically with creation, responding to human actions in real-time rather than following a predetermined script. This makes prayer, decisions, and actions meaningful, as they can influence outcomes.

Biblical Basis: Proponents cite scriptures where God appears to change His mind (e.g., Exodus 32:14), expresses surprise (e.g., Jeremiah 3:7), or tests people to discover their choices (e.g., Genesis 22:12), suggesting a relational rather than deterministic view.Critiques: Critics, often from classical theism (e.g., Calvinism), argue it undermines God’s sovereignty or omniscience, claiming an all-knowing God must know the future exhaustively. Open theists counter that God’s omniscience includes all that is knowable, but an open future is inherently unknowable in detail.

Key Figures: Theologians like Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and Gregory Boyd have been influential in developing and defending open theism.It’s a minority view within Christianity, often debated for its implications on divine providence, prophecy, and human responsibility. If you want a deeper dive into specific arguments, biblical texts, or criticisms, let me know!

On evolution and the design debate.

The greenest tech of all vs. Darwinism

 

No intelligence allowed?

 

Darwinism does not have enough time to find this needle in this haystack?

 

File under "well said" CXIX

"The end of Life is to become like God,and the Soul following God will become like him."

Socrates.

Grok on the history of EVs

 The earliest electric vehicles (EVs) date back to the 19th century, predating modern gasoline cars. Here’s a concise overview:1830s: Robert Anderson, a Scottish inventor, is credited with creating one of the first crude electric carriages around 1832–1839, powered by non-rechargeable primary cells.

1840s–1880s: Inventors like Thomas Davenport and Gustave Trouvé developed early electric motors and vehicles. In 1881, Trouvé showcased an electric tricycle in Paris.

1880s–1890s: Rechargeable lead-acid batteries spurred EV development. In 1884, Thomas Parker built an electric car in England. By the late 1880s, companies like the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company in the U.S. produced electric taxis.

1890s–1900s: EVs peaked in popularity, especially in urban areas, due to their quiet operation and ease of use compared to steam or gasoline vehicles. In 1900, about 28% of U.S. cars were electric, with manufacturers like Studebaker and Columbia producing models.

Decline: By the 1910s, EVs waned due to limited battery range (20–40 miles), high costs, and the rise of affordable gasoline cars like the Ford Model T, coupled with improved road infrastructure favoring longer-range vehicles.

EVs saw a revival in the late 20th century with models like GM’s EV1 (1996), but the modern era began with the Tesla Roadster (2008) and Nissan Leaf (2010), driven by advancements in lithium-ion batteries.

Steven Meyer on the debacle in which Origin of Life science finds itself and the case for desgn.

 

ID triumps despite the scopes trial

 Despite Scopes Effect, Intelligent Design Flourishes

Andrew McDiarmid

The Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925 has cast a long shadow over the evolution debate in the last century, thanks in large part to the Hollywood film Inherit the Wind, which caricatured the trial and promoted stereotypes that still persist today. On a new episode of ID the Future, I continue a conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin about the long history of the Scopes effect in science and how intelligent design has managed to flourish in spite of it.

In Part 2, Dr. Luskin explains that even as Scopes stereotypes were crystallizing in the public consciousness, skepticism about the power of Darwin’s selection/mutation mechanism continued to mount, and not just in intelligent design circles. Prominent evolutionary biologists were also voicing concern about the adequacy of the modern synthesis of Darwin’s theory. And as those concerns grew louder, so did the desperate response from committed Darwinists. Luskin talks about a surge of persecutions that have been leveled against any scientist who dares to question neo-Darwinism. 

But, as Luskin notes, the intelligent design research project has gone from strength to strength in the last three decades. Much progress has been made in building a strong, cumulative case for intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin and development of life on Earth. So as the Scopes centennial gets marked with fanfare in 2025, do ID scientists get a seat at the table? Or is the spirit of Scopes still hampering scientific progress and academic freedom today? Luskin has answers. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

The state religion?

 More on Disguised Religion

David Klinghoffer

Not in science or in any other context does one faith get to impose its terms on others. That sounds like common sense. But a concern about being scientifically or politically acceptable often causes us to feel intimidated into accepting disguised religious terms that are not our own, when we’re really under no obligation to do so. With that in mind, I want to highlight a post here from earlier today, “Methodological Naturalism as religion in Disguise.” 

The key point: “If the observable data points to outcomes that natural causes cannot adequately explain, then ruling out supernatural causes from the outset is not scientific humility — it’s dogma.”

A Random Example

Religion in disguise is more common than you might think. As a random example, the other day on our Seattle NPR station I was listening to an interview with a local trans activist. The activist, Danni Askini, was saying that trans identity is not a medical practice but a spiritual one. As the activist candidly said, it is a religion where the essential activity is not going to church but going to the doctor (whether for surgery or medication). I don’t think that Askini, who goes by “they/she,” had fully thought through the implications. If trans is a religion, then you don’t have the right to tell others to accept your preferred religious language, and call you “she” rather than the more biologically accurate “he,” or to adhere to your preferred framing of reality at all.

That is a scientific context, since biology is a science, but in the philosophical scientific context of methodological naturalism (MN), adherents of the dogma, whether atheists or theistic evolutionists, don’t get to dictate to others that they must accept the framing where only natural, never supernatural, causation is scientifically acceptable. We outside the walls of MN always have to bear that in mind. Mutual respect is one thing. Dictating terms is another.

The future of the net?

 

Homeostasis vs. Darwin

 Homeostasis Is More than Treading Water

David Coppedge

If you were to watch a person treading water in a murky lake, you might assume she is standing on a shallow bottom. She might look calm and be talking to you, but below the surface a lot of kicking and stroking going on. That’s a bit like homeostasis, a broad term for maintaining internal stability in a dynamic environment. Here we will look at recent discoveries showing the complexity of systems required to keep organisms functioning while the surroundings are changing.

Frog Breath

Consider the case of a frog maintaining its breathing reflex while the temperature is dropping. Like us, it must keep the oxygen coming in and the CO2 going out, but without endothermy, breathing might drop to a standstill in the cold or accelerate too quickly when the temperature rises. What keeps the frog happily breathing?

In Current Biology, Tara A. Janes and Richard Kinkead review a study by Cannon and Santin also in Current Biology. The researchers identified specific neurons, signals and receptors involved in maintaining the rhythm. Janes and Kinkead comment that breath homeostasis is anything but boring:

Respiratory networks, like most networks, aim to maintain relative stability in their activity level over time. Traditionally, this has been described in terms of activity-dependent mechanisms where neurons respond to their own level of activity. At the cellular level, this often involves responses to intracellular calcium signallingthat occur proportional to activity. Neurons can also stabilise network function by fine-tuning ion channel density, synaptic strengths, and intrinsic excitability. 

Before Cannon and Santin’s work, they say, much of what was known about homeostatic networks came from studies on rodents which benefit from endothermy. How do frogs keep up their autonomic breathing rhythm without that luxury? Even more challenging, how do they maintain oxygen intake when undergoing metamorphosis from tadpole to adult?

A fundamental principle is that as body temperature goes down, so does metabolism and drive to breathe. Remarkably, frogs survive and thrive in the face of these environmental fluctuations by maintaining activity in the respiratory rhythm-generating networks for air-breathing. So how do they do it?

By altering temperatures in brainstem-spinal cord preparations from bullfrogs which can survive in vitro for a day, Cannon and Santin in “a clever set of experiments” found “a novel, environment-driven mechanism regulating network activity that is capable of driving compensatory changes in respiratory function in response to cold exposure.”

First, they determined that temperature alone acts as a trigger for certain changes at the cellular level. At 10°C motor activity ceased, but became hyper-excited as the temperature returned to 22°C. “This suggests that cold exposure elicits increased network excitability in an attempt to restore respiratory motor output,” the commentators say. But much more is involved: production of norepinephrine in the locus coeruleus (LC), “a compact and highly homogeneous group of neurons located rostral to the respiratory networks,” which triggers changes in calcium ion channels. 

Ensuing pharmacological experiments showed that in response to acute temperature changes, inhibition of the electrogenic Na+ pump serves as a critical transduction step, which then activates network compensation via β-adrenergic receptor signalling

And  so to keep breathing when it’s cold, a frog depends on the coordinated responses of temperature sensors, hormones, LC neurons, neural circuits, sodium pumps, receptors, calcium ions and muscles. The research does not explain everything, but

the authors propose novel ideas that are certainly worthy of further exploration. One that caught our attention is the suggestion that central respiratory circuits switch from CO2/pH-sensing to temperature-sensing as an important source of drive to breathe at cool temperatures. In this way, temperature sensitivity allows the network to restore activity under conditions where it might be needed, while maintaining the ability of the network to fall silent when it is adaptive to do so.

Speaking as air-breathers themselves, Janes and Kinkead conclude, “Despite our respiratory bias, we humbly acknowledge that neural circuits regulate other important physiological processes beyond breathing.”

Synapse Traffic Control

In my  2024 article on the synapse, I shared my bewilderment at how those nanoscopic signal transducers work and perform rapidly and reliably despite multiple transitions in information-bearing media. A new paper adds to my bewilderment by claiming that synapses bring order out of randomness. (For more on how life brings order out of chaos, see this article.)

Krisha Aghi et al., writing in Current Biology about fruit flies, find that “spatial distribution of facilitating and depressing synapses is random” and yet the neurons maintain stable transmission anyway. How?

Synaptic strength can vary greatly between synapses. Optical quantal analysis at Drosophila glutamatergic motor neuron synapses shows that short-term plasticity also varies greatly between synapses, even those made by an individual motor neuron. Strong and weak synapses are randomly distributed in the motor neuron nerve terminal, as are facilitating and depressing synapses. Although synapses exhibit highly heterogeneous basal strength at low-action potential firing frequency and undergo varied plasticity when firing frequency increases, the overall distribution of strength across synapses remains remarkably constant due to a balance between the number of synapses that facilitate versus depress and to their degree of plasticity and basal synaptic weight.Constancy in transmitter release can ensure robustness across changing behavioral conditions.

The  robustness of the transmitted signal despite individual variations in synaptic plasticity allows fruit flies to fly, but this method also enables us to live and move. How this “method in madness” mechanism is able to work automatically in the nervous system from infant in the womb to athlete to senior citizen must cause us all to stand in awe.

Clearing Up Clock Confusion

Imagine having to follow two clocks that run at different rates. It would be like trying to play drum or trumpet in Symphony No. 4 by Charles Ives, who in one movement called for two conductors waving their batons at different tempos.

Because we have minds and large brains, we humans can track lunar cycles, solar cycles, and orbital cycles simultaneously with the help of experience, language, charts, and computers. But how does a crustacean do it? Here’s a case of life cycle homeostasis. If a crustacean gets out of rhythm, it might become desiccated on rocks or fail to reproduce.

How marine species cope with both diurnal and tidal cycles is unclear. A new study in crustaceans identifies distinct brain cells that exhibit either 24- or 12.4-hour rhythms of gene expression, thus providing a mechanism for tracking multiple environmental cycles.

So begin Victoria Lewis and Patrick Emery in a Dispatch within the same issue of Current Biology. They say that the circadian clock (day/night cycle) is fairly well understood:

The nuclear accumulation and subsequent degradation of the repressor complex are dependent on kinases and phosphatases that adjust the period of the circadian pacemaker to ∼24 hours (h). The circadian clock is primarily entrained by the light–dark (LD) cycle, but also responds to the temperature cycle and other relevant cues. With the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying circadian clocks comes a key question: are similar mechanisms implicated in other biological rhythms?

Indeed they are. They comment on research reported in the same issue by Oliphant et al. who “present evidence supporting the idea that the circadian clock machinery is retooled to allow marine organisms to cope with tidal cycles through dedicated brain cells.” 

The new study helps narrow down three hypotheses about how marine crustaceans can keep up with two tempos: the circadian rhythm and the circatidal rhythm. But how do the resulting proteins interact when regulated by different brain cells? “The extent of the mechanistic overlap between the two clocks,” they remark, “still needs to be determined.” Indeed, “considerable work is still needed to understand how circatidal rhythms are entrained and generated.” Yet the humble sand flea gets along without a thought.

Much More to Homeostasis

These three studies illustrate the complexity of homeostasis, but there are many thousands more that could be drawn from. Other recent examples in my pile include, in brief:

A “mitochondrial contact site and cristae organizing system” that keeps the membranes intact in these cellular powerhouses (Current Biology).

A system to prevent crowding in epithelial tissues which otherwise might cause cell damage and loss (Northwestern University Medicine).

Spatiotemporal control of mitosis by cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) to keep order during the many rapid changes across the cell (Nature).

A relationship between the cell cycle, circadian clock, and sense of taste that can cause food to taste differently at different times of day (PNAS)

A new organelle in the cell, dubbed the hemifusome, that “could fundamentally reshape our understanding of how cells recycle their contents and sort and direct intracellular cargo” (University of Virginia School of Medicine).

Homeostasis is a tremendously varied and complex field ripe for discoveries from a design perspective. It adds an essential time dimension to irreducible complexity, revealing the interactions of multiple IC components working in cooperation to keep an organism stable in a changing environment. And so while admiring the smiling swimmer’s face above water, we must not be unaware of the vigorously beating legs and arms under the surface that are keeping her afloat.

Grok on :the Arian emperor?

Yes, Constantine the Great's son, Constantius II, was a supporter of Arianism, a theological position that differed from Nicene Christianity. Arianism, based on the teachings of Arius, held that Jesus Christ was distinct from and subordinate to God the Father, rather than being co-equal and consubstantial as defined by the Nicene Creed.Constantius II (reigned 337–361 CE) actively promoted Arian or semi-Arian doctrines during his rule, favoring bishops and policies aligned with Arianism over those adhering to the Nicene orthodoxy established at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), which his father Constantine had supported. This stance led to tensions with Nicene Christians and influenced ecclesiastical appointments and councils during his reign, such as the Synod of Antioch (341 CE) and the Council of Serdica (343 CE), where Arian-leaning positions were often favored.

However, it’s worth noting that Constantine’s other sons, Constantine II and Constans, leaned more toward Nicene Christianity, though their reigns were shorter and less impactful on this issue. Constantius II’s support for Arianism was the most pronounced among Constantine’s heirs.If you want more details on specific events or sources, let me know!

GROK on the baptism of roman emperor constantine.

Yes, historical evidence suggests that Roman Emperor Constantine the Great was likely baptized by an Arian-leaning clergyman, Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, on his deathbed in 337 CE. Eusebius was a known supporter of Arianism, a theological position that viewed Jesus as subordinate to God the Father, which was deemed heretical at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, where Constantine had supported the orthodox Trinitarian view.However, the exact circumstances are debated. Some sources, like the 5th-century historian Socrates Scholasticus, confirm Eusebius of Nicomedia performed the baptism. Others, like Eusebius of Caesarea, a key biographer of

Constantine, are vague about the officiant’s identity. The choice of Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arian, may reflect political or personal ties rather than Constantine’s theological stance, as he had previously backed the Nicene Creed but also sought to reconcile Arians and orthodox Christians for imperial unity.There’s no definitive evidence Constantine himself adopted Arian beliefs at the time of his baptism, but the involvement of an Arian-leaning bishop has fueled speculation about his late-life theological leanings.

On the scopes monkey trial

 A Century Later, the Spirit of Scopes Is Alive and Well

David Klinghoffer/Casey Luskin

The Scopes “Monkey” Trial turns 100 this month. According to secularist legend, the Scopes trial represented a great showdown between ignorant, fundamentalist religion and enlightened, scientific progress. But what really went down in 1925? And a hundred years later, is science still suffering from the Scopes effect? On a new episode of ID the Future, Dr. Casey Luskin begins a conversation with me about the famous trial, the play and movie based on it that reinforced unrealistic stereotypes, and some of the flashpoints in science since the trial that have fanned the flames of the debate over evolution.

         Dr. Luskin first takes us back to 1925 to remind us of the basics. That year, the Tennessee state legislature passed a law that made it a misdemeanor crime to teach human evolution. An incredibly misguided move, of course — the teaching of science should never be criminalized. But that’s what they did. The ACLU recruited a public school teacher, John T. Scopes, to teach evolution so they could test the law. He was then accused of teaching human evolution and convicted of the crime. Ultimately, it went up to the Tennessee State Supreme Court, which upheld the law and found that it was not unconstitutional. 

 How Did the Trial Capture the Nation?

, this was the 1920s, when radio had first come on the scene. So the Scopes trial itself was broadcast around the United States through radio. A whole media circus descended upon the little town of Dayton, Tennessee, and the whole nation was invited to tune in. The event was framed and postured as if it was the old outdated forces of fundamentalism versus the new forces of modernism, technology, and science.

The trial itself came and went, explains Dr. Luskin, but in 1960, the stereotypes espoused by the trial would get amplified and crystallized for generations by a play and movie loosely based on the trial called Inherit the Wind. Luskin discusses how the stereotypes from Inherit the Wind became deeply embedded in the cultural psyche, setting the stage for waves of suppression and cancellation of Darwin skeptics throughout the last half century. But even as questioners of Darwin’s theory were marginalized and often silenced, real doubts in the scientific community about the power of Darwin’s selection/mutation mechanism were mounting.

Download the podcast or listen to it here