The first casualty/Collateral damage V

In Gaza, Hamas fighters are among civilians. There is nowhere else for them to go

Lines are blurred when a guerrilla war is fought in as dense a place as Gaza but the IDF's HQ is also surrounded by civilians

• • Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
  • The Guardian, Thursday 24 July 2014 20.55 BST

Israel's accusation that Hamas is using civilians as human shields has grown increasingly strident as the war in Gaza worsens.

The charge is laid relentlessly by political and military leaders and media commentators, repeated in conversations by members of the public and echoed in the comments of foreign politicians and diplomats. On the other side of the conflict, the accusation is vigorously denied by Hamas and others in Gaza.

The truth is lost amid the propaganda battle being waged alongside the shells, bombs, guns and rockets. What is certain is that the picture is more complicated than either side claims.

Deliberately placing non-combatants in and around targets to deter enemy attack – the definition of human shields – is illegal under international law.

The Geneva conventions state: "The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations."

International law also bans the use of medical units or prisoners of war to deter enemy attack.

However, even if Hamas were violating the law on this matter, it would not legally justify Israel's bombing of areas where civilians are known to be.

"Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures," the conventions say.

Israel claims Hamas routinely uses hospitals, mosques, schools and private homes to launch rockets at Israel, store weapons, hide command and control centres, shelter military personnel, and conceal tunnel shafts. This is their justification for targeting such places, despite the legal requirement to ensure its attacks are proportional, distinguish between military and civilian objects, and avoid civilian casualties.

Israel says it gives due notice of attack – by phone, text messages, leaflet drops and "warning missiles" – to give civilians the chance to leave.

A typical statement from the Israel Defence Forces, issued in the past few days, says: "While the IDF does everything that it can to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas deliberately puts Palestinian civilian lives in danger. Hamas hides weapons and missile launchers in densely populated areas. Instead of keeping its citizens out of harm's way, Hamas encourages and even forces Gazans to join its violent resistance against Israel. It sends men, women and children directly into the line of fire to be used as human shields for terrorists."

On Wednesday, the IDF released a series of maps purporting to show Hamas military sites close to – but not in – schools, hospitals, mosques and residential buildings. It also released video, which it said showed militants using an ambulance to flee after coming under attack by IDF troops, and said the grounds and vicinity of al-Wafa hospital in Gaza City had been "repeatedly utilised by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a command centre, rocket-launching site, and a post enabling terrorists to open fire at soldiers".

Israel has repeatedly targeted the rehabilitation hospital during the course of the conflict, finally destroying the heavily damaged and, by then, empty building on Wednesday.

But the hospital's director rejected the Israeli assertion that the hospital had been used for military purposes by Hamas or other militant groups. In a statement, Basman Alashi said: "Israel has targeted our hospital based on false and misleading claims. They are targeting medical facilities, the wounded, the sick and our children, all over the Gaza Strip. They want us to know that nowhere is safe."

He added: "I hope things calm down as soon as possible. It's painful to see what's happening and that the hospital has become a target for military attacks."

The UN's discovery of arms caches in two of its schools in the past week has given Israel's assertions credence. "UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestinian refugees] immediately informed all relevant parties and issued a statement strongly condemning the abuse of its premises," said a spokesman, Chris Gunness. The UN agency UNRWA's shelters have been shelled on four occasions in recent days, despite officials giving precise coordinates to the IDF.

Israel also claimed that Hamas had forced civilians to remain in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shujai'iya after the IDF warned them to evacuate ahead of its assault on Sunday. Civilians were being "held as hostages", said Peter Lerner, an IDF military spokesman.

These claims have not been backed up by independent reporting from international journalists covering the war from Gaza. Instead, dispatches from the ground have presented complex reasons why some residents did not evacuate from Shujai'iya and other areas targeted by the IDF. Many said nowhere in Gaza was safe, so they saw little point in abandoning their homes.

Others cited worries about not knowing the identities of people who would be their new neighbours; they could be evacuating a familiar neighbourhood for one that was a militant stronghold and others were simply too terrified to go out on the streets. Many media reports said there was no evidence of coercion by Hamas.

In fact, tens of thousands of people have fled their homes for what they hope is a safer place. UNRWA reports that more than 140,000 people have sought shelter in its properties; churches and mosques have been overwhelmed by displaced civilians; the grounds of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City have begun to resemble a makeshift refugee camp. These families are in fear of their lives, but they overwhelmingly cite Israeli bombing and shelling as the cause, rather than threats from Hamas.

Gaza is one of the most overcrowded places on earth. Almost two million people are crammed into a strip of land just 25 miles long and between three and a half and seven miles wide – roughly the same size as the Isle of Wight. In general there are few opportunities to leave; and in the midst of a conflict such as this, there is no exit.

The current war is not being fought on a conventional battlefield. Israel is pounding Gaza from the air, and its troops are increasingly fighting battles against a guerrilla army in densely populated urban areas – which constitute much of the Gaza Strip. As Israeli tanks and troops push further into the towns and cities, it is increasingly likely that Hamas will launch attacks from positions close to civilian buildings.

The separation between "civilian" and "military" in Gaza is much more blurred than with a conventional army – both physically and in the Gazan psyche. Hamas and other militants are embedded in the population. Their fighters are not quartered in military barracks, but sleep at night in their family homes. While it is not difficult to find antipathy to Hamas on the streets of Gaza in quiet times, most people defend their "right to resist" – and under such sustained military attack, support for Hamas rises.

Israel, meanwhile, does not have an unblemished record in the use of human shields. In 2010, two soldiers were convicted in an IDF military court of using an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield in its 2008-09 operation in Gaza. The pair ordered the child to search bags they suspected of being booby-trapped.

It was the first conviction of what is known within the IDF as the "neighbour procedure" – forcing civilians to assist troops in military operations. Investigations by news organisations and human rights groups have suggested the IDF has used Palestinians as human shields in operations in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Meanwhile, in response to Israel's assertions that Hamas situates its military centres in civilian areas, some have pointed out that the IDF's headquarters, the Kiriya, is in central Tel Aviv, surrounded by a hospital, blocks of flats, shopping centres and offices.

The invincible scroll.

The Bible—A Remarkable Story of Survival

 

 

THE Bible is the most widely distributed book in history—an estimated 4.8 billion copies have already been circulated. In 2007 alone, more than 64,600,000 copies were produced. To put that into perspective, consider that the best-selling work of fiction that year had an initial printing of 12 million copies in the United States.

On its way to becoming the world’s most published book, the Bible survived many hazards. Down through history, it has been banned and burned, and those who would translate it have been oppressed and killed. Yet, one of the greatest threats to the continued existence of the Bible was, not the sudden heat of persecution, but the slow process of decay. Why so?

The Bible is a compilation of 66 smaller books, the oldest of which were written or compiled over 3,000 years ago by members of the nation of Israel. The original writers and those who copied the texts recorded the inspired messages on perishable materials, such as papyrus and leather. None of the original writings have yet been discovered. But thousands of ancient copies of small and large sections of the books of the Bible have been unearthed. A fragment of one of these books, the Gospel of John, dates to within just a few decades of the original document written by the apostle John.

“The transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible [Old Testament] is of extraordinary exactitude, without parallel in Greek and Latin classical literature.”—Professor Julio Trebolle Barrera

Why is it remarkable that any copies of the Bible have survived? And how accurately do modern Bibles reflect the messages recorded by the original writers?

What Happened to Other Ancient Documents?

The survival of the Bible is extraordinary, considering what happened to the writings of nations contemporary with the Israelites. The Phoenicians, for instance, were neighbors of the Israelites during the first millennium B.C.E. These sea traders spread their alphabetic writing system throughout the Mediterranean area. They also profited from an extensive papyrus trade with Egypt and the Greek world. Even so, the National Geographic magazine observes regarding the Phoenicians: “Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity.”

What about the writings of the ancient Egyptians? The hieroglyphics they carved or painted on temple walls and elsewhere are well-known. The Egyptians are also famous for developing papyrus as a writing material. However, regarding Egyptian records written on papyrus, Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen says: “It has been estimated that some 99 percent of all papyri written from circa 3000 down to the advent of Greco-Roman times have perished completely.”

 What about Roman records that were written on papyrus? Consider this example. According to the book Roman Military Records on Papyrus, Roman soldiers were apparently paid three times a year, and a record of the pay was made on papyrus pay vouchers. It is estimated that during the 300 years from Augustus (27 B.C.E.–14 C.E.) to Diocletian (284-305 C.E), there were 225,000,000 individual pay records. How many have survived? Only two have been found that are legible.

Why have so few ancient documents written on papyrus survived? Perishable materials, such as papyrus and another common writing material, leather, decay quickly in damp climates. The Anchor Bible Dictionary says: “Because of the climate, papyrus documents from this period [the first millennium B.C.E.] are likely to be preserved only if they are in a dry desert and in a cave or shelter.”

What About the Bible Texts?

The original Bible books were evidently written on material as fragile as that used by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Romans. Why, then, did the material contained in the Bible survive to become the world’s most published book? Professor James L. Kugel provides one reason. He says that the original writings were copied “many, many times even within the biblical period itself.”

How do modern translations of the Bible compare with ancient manuscripts? Professor Julio Trebolle Barrera, a member of the team of experts charged with studying and publishing the ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, says: “The transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible is of extraordinary exactitude, without parallel in Greek and Latin classical literature.” Respected Bible scholar F. F. Bruce says: “The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning.” He continues: “If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.” Certainly, the Bible is a remarkable book. Do you make time to read it each day?—1 Peter 1:24, 25.

Still in existence today are some 6,000 handwritten copies of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, and some 5,000 copies of the Greek Scriptures, or New Testament

 

Deconstructing Modern alchemy.

Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories

Casey Luskin December 12, 2012 5:01 PM

Last summer I published a list of the "Top Ten Problems with Darwinian Evolution." Since that time, some readers have requested a list of major problems with theories seeking to explain the chemical origin of life. There are numerous problems, but here's my list of the top 5:

Problem 1: No Viable Mechanism to Generate a Primordial Soup.

According to conventional thinking among origin-of-life theorists, life arose via unguided chemical reactions on the early Earth some 3 to 4 billion years ago. Most theorists believe that there were many steps involved in the origin of life, but the very first step would have involved the production of a primordial soup -- a water-based sea of simple organic molecules -- out of which life arose. While the existence of this "soup" has been accepted as unquestioned fact for decades, this first step in most origin-of-life theories faces numerous scientific difficulties.

In 1953, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Stanley Miller, along with his faculty advisor Harold Urey, performed experiments hoping to produce the building blocks of life under natural conditions on the early Earth.¹ These "Miller-Urey experiments" intended to simulate lightning striking the gasses in the early Earth's atmosphere. After running the experiments and letting the chemical products sit for a period of time, Miller discovered that amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- had been produced.

For decades, these experiments have been hailed as a demonstration that the "building blocks" of life could have arisen under natural, realistic Earthlike conditions,² corroborating the primordial soup hypothesis. However, it has also been known for decades that the Earth's early atmosphere was fundamentally different from the gasses used by Miller and Urey.

The atmosphere used in the Miller-Urey experiments was primarily composed of reducing gasses like methane, ammonia, and high levels of hydrogen. Geochemists now believe that the atmosphere of the early Earth did not contain appreciable amounts of these components. UC Santa Cruz origin-of-life theorist David Deamer explains in the journal Microbiology & Molecular Biology Reviews:

This optimistic picture began to change in the late 1970s, when it became increasingly clear that the early atmosphere was probably volcanic in origin and composition, composed largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen rather than the mixture of reducing gases assumed by the Miller-Urey model. Carbon dioxide does not support the rich array of synthetic pathways leading to possible monomers...³

Likewise, an article in the journal Science stated: "Miller and Urey relied on a 'reducing' atmosphere, a condition in which molecules are fat with hydrogen atoms. As Miller showed later, he could not make organics in an 'oxidizing' atmosphere."⁴ The article put it bluntly: "the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey situation."⁵ Consistent with this, geological studies have not uncovered evidence that a primordial soup once existed.⁶

There are good reasons why the Earth's early atmosphere did not contain high concentrations of methane, ammonia, or other reducing gasses. The Earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been produced by outgassing from volcanoes, and the composition of those volcanic gasses is related to the chemical properties of the Earth's inner mantle. Geochemical studies have found that the chemical properties of the Earth's mantle would have been the same in the past as they are today.⁷ But today, volcanic gasses do not contain methane or ammonia, and are not reducing.

A paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters found that the chemical properties of the Earth's interior have been essentially constant over Earth's history, leading to the conclusion that "Life may have found its origins in other environments or by other mechanisms."⁸ So strong is the evidence against pre-biotic synthesis of life's building blocks that in 1990 the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council recommended that origin-of-life investigators undertake a "reexamination of biological monomer synthesis under primitive Earthlike environments, as revealed in current models of the early Earth."⁹

Because of these difficulties, some leading theorists have abandoned the Miller-Urey experiment and the "primordial soup" theory. In 2010, University College London biochemist Nick Lane stated that the primordial soup theory "doesn't hold water" and is "past its expiration date."¹⁰ Instead, he proposes that life arose in undersea hydrothermal vents. But both the hydrothermal vent and primordial soup hypotheses face another major problem.

Problem 2: Forming Polymers Requires Dehydration Synthesis

Assume for a moment that there was some way to produce simple organic molecules on the early Earth. Perhaps they did form a "primordial soup," or perhaps these molecules arose near some hydrothermal vent. Either way, origin-of-life theorists must then explain how amino acids or other key organic molecules linked up to form long chains (polymers) like proteins (or RNA).

Chemically speaking, however, the last place you'd want to link amino acids into chains would be a vast water-based environment like the "primordial soup" or underwater near a hydrothermal vent. As the National Academy of Sciences acknowledges, "Two amino acids do not spontaneously join in water. Rather, the opposite reaction is thermodynamically favored."¹¹ In other words, water breaks down protein chains into amino acids (or other constituents), making it very difficult to produce proteins (or other polymers) in the primordial soup.

Problem 3: RNA World Hypothesis Lacks Confirming Evidence

Let's assume, again, that a primordial sea filled with life's building blocks did exist on the early Earth, and somehow it formed proteins and other complex organic molecules. Origin-of-life theorists believe that the next step in the origin of life is that -- entirely by chance -- more and more complex molecules formed until some began to self-replicate. From there, they believe Darwinian natural selection took over, favoring those molecules which were better able to make copies. Eventually, they assume, it became inevitable that these molecules would evolve complex machinery -- like that used in today's genetic code -- to survive and reproduce.

Have modern theorists explained how this crucial bridge from inert nonliving chemicals to self-replicating molecular systems took place? Not at all. In fact, even Stanley Miller readily admitted the difficulty of explaining this in Discover Magazine:

Even Miller throws up his hands at certain aspects of it. The first step, making the monomers, that's easy. We understand it pretty well. But then you have to make the first self-replicating polymers. That's very easy, he says, the sarcasm fairly dripping. Just like it's easy to make money in the stock market -- all you have to do is buy low and sell high. He laughs. Nobody knows how it's done.¹²

The most prominent hypothesis for the origin of the first life is called the "RNA world." In living cells, genetic information is carried by DNA, and most cellular functions are performed by proteins. However, RNA is capable of both carrying genetic information and catalyzing some biochemical reactions. As a result, some theorists postulate the first life might have used RNA alone to fulfill all these functions.

But there are many problems with this hypothesis.

For one, the first RNA molecules would have to arise by unguided, non-biological chemical processes. But RNA is not known to assemble without the help of a skilled laboratory chemist intelligently guiding the process. New York University chemist Robert Shapiro critiqued the efforts of those who tried to make RNA in the lab, stating: "The flaw is in the logic -- that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth."¹³

Second, while RNA has been shown to perform many roles in the cell, there is no evidence that it could perform all the necessary cellular functions currently carried out by proteins.¹⁴

Third, the RNA world hypothesis can't explain the origin of genetic information.

RNA world advocates suggest that if the first self-replicating life was based upon RNA, it would have required a molecule between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.¹⁵ However, there are no known chemical or physical laws that dictate the order of those nucleotides.¹⁶ To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, materialists must rely on sheer chance. But the odds of specifying, say, 250 nucleotides in an RNA molecule by chance is about 1 in 10¹⁵⁰ -- below the "universal probability bound," a term characterizing events whose occurrence is at least remotely possible within the history of the universe.¹⁷ Shapiro puts the problem this way:

The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. ... [The probability] is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.¹⁸

Fourth -- and most fundamentally -- the RNA world hypothesis can't explain the origin of the genetic code itself. In order to evolve into the DNA/protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines -- which themselves are encoded by genetic information.

All of this poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them.

Problem 4: Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code. 

To appreciate this problem, consider the origin of the first DVD and DVD player. DVDs are rich in information, but without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: a goal-directed process -- intelligent design -- is required to produce both the player and the disk.

In living cells, information-carrying molecules (such as DNA or RNA) are like the DVD, and the cellular machinery that reads that information and converts it into proteins is like the DVD player. As in the DVD analogy, genetic information can never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet in cells, the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules -- they perform and direct the very task that builds them.

This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. Not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered, biologist Frank Salisbury explained the problem in a paper in American Biology Teacher:

It's nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes. ... [T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. ... How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.¹⁹

The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International:

The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical "hardware" capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message "receiver." But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein "workers" produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.²⁰

Problem 5: No Workable Model for the Origin of Life

Despite decades of work, origin-of-life theorists are at a loss to explain how this system arose. In 2007, Harvard chemist George Whitesides was given the Priestley Medal, the highest award of the American Chemical Society. During his acceptance speech, he offered this stark analysis, reprinted in the respected journal Chemical and Engineering News:

The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea.²¹

Many other authors have made similar comments. Massimo Pigliucci states: "[I]t has to be true that we really don't have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means."²² Or as science writer Gregg Easterbrook wrote in Wired, "What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn't given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time."²³

Likewise, the aforementioned article in Cell Biology International concludes: "New approaches to investigating the origin of the genetic code are required. The constraints of historical science are such that the origin of life may never be understood."²⁴ That is, they may never be understood unless scientists are willing to consider goal-directed scientific explanations like intelligent design.

References:

[1.] See Stanley L. Miller, "A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions," Science, 117: 528-529 (May 15, 1953).

[2.] See Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong, (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2000); Casey Luskin, "Not Making the Grade: An Evaluation of 19 Recent Biology Textbooks and Their Use of Selected Icons of Evolution," Discovery Institute (September 26, 2011).

[3.] David W. Deamer, "The First Living Systems: a Bioenergetic Perspective," Microbiology & Molecular Biology Reviews, 61:239 (1997).

[4.] Jon Cohen, "Novel Center Seeks to Add Spark to Origins of Life," Science, 270: 1925-1926 (December 22, 1995).

[5.] Ibid.

[6.] Antonio C. Lasaga, H. D. Holland, and Michael J. Dwyer, "Primordial Oil Slick," Science, 174: 53-55 (October 1, 1971).

[7.] Kevin Zahnle, Laura Schaefer, and Bruce Fegley, "Earth's Earliest Atmospheres," Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, 2(10): a004895 (October, 2010) ("Geochemical evidence in Earth's oldest igneous rocks indicates that the redox state of the Earth's mantle has not changed over the past 3.8 Gyr"); Dante Canil, "Vanadian in peridotites, mantle redox and tectonic environments: Archean to present," Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 195:75-90 (2002).

[8.] Dante Canil, "Vanadian in peridotites, mantle redox and tectonic environments: Archean to present," Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 195:75-90 (2002) (internal citations removed).

[9.] National Research Council Space Studies Board, The Search for Life's Origins (National Academy Press, 1990).

[10.] Deborah Kelley, "Is It Time To Throw Out 'Primordial Soup' Theory?," NPR (February 7, 2010).

[11.] Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, National Research Council, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 60 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2007).

[12.] Stanley Miller quoted in Peter Radetsky, "How Did Life Start?" Discover Magazine (Nov., 1992).

[13.] Richard Van Noorden, "RNA world easier to make," Nature News (May 13, 2009).

[14.] See Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, p. 304 (New York: HarperOne, 2009).

[15.] Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel, and P. Luigi Luisi, "Synthesizing Life," Nature, 409: 387-390 (January 18, 2001).

[16.] Michael Polanyi, "Life's Irreducible Structure," Science, 160 (3834): 1308-1312 (June 21, 1968).

[17.] See William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[18.] Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, pp. 46-53 (June, 2007).

[19.] Frank B. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," American Biology Teacher, 33: 335-338 (September, 1971).

[20.] J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, "Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life," Cell Biology International, 28: 729-739 (2004).

[21.] George M. Whitesides, "Revolutions In Chemistry: Priestley Medalist George M. Whitesides' Address," Chemical and Engineering News, 85: 12-17 (March 26, 2007).

[22.] Massimo Pigliucci, "Where Do We Come From? A Humbling Look at the Biology of Life's Origin," in Darwin Design and Public Education, eds. John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003), p. 196.

[23.] Gregg Easterbrook, "Where did life come from?," Wired, p. 108 (February, 2007).

[24.] J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, "Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life," Cell Biology International, 28: 729-739 (2004).

Every bit as "sapien" as his brothers.

A Deep and Abiding Need for Neanderthals to Be Stupid. Why?

Denyse O'Leary July 21, 2014 5:10 AM 

When Neanderthal man was first classified, he satisfied a felt need for a separate, intellectually inferior human species, fleshing out (so to speak) the Ascent of Man. But there has been a significant change in his status in recent years, as researchers began separating what we see from what we think ought to be or must be true.

The editors of the British newspaper The Guardian, for example, recently reappraised Neanderthals' intelligence in the light of evidence of their use of pigments and decorative shells. (They used red ochre pigment 250,000 years ago.) Some apparently used feathers as decorations and others built houses from mammoth bones, featuring carvings and pigments.

They chipped tools for various jobs as well, to be sure (and made string), and organized their living spaces by task. Curiously, when one research group meticulously reproduced both Neanderthal and early modern human tools, according to Stone Age methods, and then used them for customary tasks of the day, they found that, contrary to sixty years of textbook orthodoxy, "early stone tool technologies developed by modern humans were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals." Neanderthals tended to have bigger hands, which may have created the impression of comparative clumsiness. At any rate, their leather working tools were like those in use today. They also reworked their tools, perhaps to avoid wasted effort. Some argue that they learned such skills from homo sapiens (current humans), but, if so, they had to grasp the underlying concepts in order to do so.

Neanderthals were also a seafaring people. One paleoanthropologist found their distinctive stone tools on the island of Crete in 2008. They were omnivores like ourselves, probably ate fish, and apparently used medicinal plants as well.

More significantly, Neanderthal paintings of seals havebeen found (an "academic bombshell"). Also, perhaps inevitably, jewelry and makeup. As one researcher puts it, "The findings show that our long-lost cousins were cognitively advanced from the get-go, long before modern humans appeared in Europe."

Did Neanderthals speak? Some say yes, and thus attempt to argue that language involves no great leap in human cognition; language is all just more Darwinian gradualism (as in half a noun or three quarters of a verb?). Others say yes for a different reason; Neanderthals were mostly right-handed and "No animals other than humans show such a bias toward right-handedness." While it is reasonable to assume that they could speak, given their other cultural activities, the "right-handedness" thesis doesn't sound like the surest evidence.

Neanderthals are also said by some to have had "a deep-seated sense of compassion" There is some evidence that they cared for invalids. One 500,000-year-old Homo heidelbergensis fossil (a group now generally classed with Neanderthals) was of an individual too old to hunt, probably a hunchback who needed a cane for support. At about 45, he was the most elderly ancient human found at the time, and the evidence suggests that, in an unsparing environment, others must have cared for him. Less believably, some have tried to psychoanalyze Neanderthal man, claiming, for example, that he couldn't have told a "walks-into-a-bar" joke. But how would we know?

Generally, we only know what we find that early peoples actually did; we can't know what they might have done or been unable to do under counterfactual circumstances. But one commentator, science writer Michael Shermer, offers a defense of a standard Darwinian view:

... there is almost no evidence that Neanderthals would have ever "advanced" beyond where they were when they disappeared 30,000 years ago. Even though paleoanthropologists disagree about a great many things, there is near total agreement in the literature that Neanderthals were not on their way to becoming "us."¹

Shermer repeated his views on Neanderthals last week in a debate with Stephen Meyer on the Michael Medved Show. Their tools and culture did not change, he informs us, for more than 200,000 years. That, says paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, is "a technological stasis that seems to deny the workings of the fully human mind."²

Does it? Prehistoric and non-literate cultures in general are static compared to modern ones. There is a good reason for that. When life depends almost entirely on unpredictable natural events, static culture feels like an insurance policy: "Our ancestors always did things this way, and they survived!" Aid workers from technologically advanced societies struggle with this attitude in poor remote communities to this day. Yet no one supposes that the struggling peoples who cling to such a view do not have a "fully human mind." What they don't have is psychological room for error.

Shermer insists that such advances as Neanderthals made were the result of contact with current humans. As for burying their dead in a fetal position, strewn with flowers, he cites authorities who suggest that graves "may have been dug simply to remove corpses from habitation areas" and that the choice of the fetal position was merely a "desire to dig the smallest possible burial trench" (and not because the mourners thought that the dead might be reborn).

The clincher, in his view, is that we have not yet found a Neanderthal site where "grave goods" (food, jewelry, etc.) were left with the departed. No, but some researchers have noted that, curiously, child burials featured "generally more elaborate graves than older individuals." This points to some sort of belief, though we may never know what it was.

One must ask, given all the things we have discovered recently about Neanderthals, what if we do find the sort of grave goods he specifies? Would that change his view? Possibly not. He feels that we, the "glorious contingency," won out over the Neanderthals, because we are smarter:

Had Neanderthals won and we lost, there is every reason to believe that they would still be living in a stone-age culture of hunting, fishing, and gathering, roaming the hinterlands of Europe in small bands of a couple of dozen individuals, surviving in a world without towns and cities, without music and art, without science and technology ... a world so different from our own that it is almost inconceivable.

In fact, quite apart from the fact that Neanderthals appear to have been part of our own families, they have persistently failed to be as stupid as Shermer's account needs. Increasing numbers of finds are breaking down the supposed differences between them and other early humans. As one paleontologist puts it, "The historical downgrading of our Neanderthal cousins has gone well beyond the scientific."

It's not clear, however, that "the scientific" was driving the need to downgrade Neanderthal man so much as a Darwinian anthropology that is at odds with the archaeology.

Editor's note: Here are links to the whole "Science Fictions: Human Evolution" series to date.

References Cited:

(1) Michael Shermer, quoted in Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011), p. 452.

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