When was Christ ever in Christmas?

The Origins of Christmas

The History of Christmas

I.     When was Jesus born?

A.     Popular myth puts his birth on December 25^th in the year 1 C.E.

B.     The New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth.  The earliest gospel – St. Mark’s, written about 65 CE – begins with the baptism of an adult Jesus.  This suggests that the earliest Christians lacked interest in or knowledge of Jesus’ birthdate.

C.     The year of Jesus birth was determined by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk, “abbot of a Roman monastery.  His calculation went as follows:

a.       In the Roman, pre-Christian era, years were counted from ab urbe condita (“the founding of the City” [Rome]).  Thus 1 AUC signifies the year Rome was founded, 5 AUC signifies the 5^th year of Rome’s reign, etc.

b.     Dionysius received a tradition that the Roman emperor Augustus reigned 43 years, and was followed by the emperor Tiberius.

c.       Luke 3:1,23 indicates that when Jesus turned 30 years old, it was the 15^th year of Tiberius reign.

d.      If Jesus was 30 years old in Tiberius’ reign, then he lived 15 years under Augustus (placing Jesus birth in Augustus’ 28^th year of reign).

e.       Augustus took power in 727 AUC.  Therefore, Dionysius put Jesus birth in 754 AUC.

f.        However, Luke 1:5 places Jesus’ birth in the days of Herod, and Herod died in 750 AUC – four years before the year in which Dionysius places Jesus birth.

D.     Joseph A. Fitzmyer – Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America, member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association – writing in the Catholic Church’s official commentary on the New Testament[1], writes about the date of Jesus’ birth, “Though the year [of Jesus birth is not reckoned with certainty, the birth did not occur in AD 1.  The Christian era, supposed to have its starting point in the year of Jesus birth, is based on a miscalculation introduced ca. 533 by Dionysius Exiguus.”

E.      The DePascha Computus, an anonymous document believed to have been written in North Africa around 243 CE, placed Jesus birth on March 28.  Clement, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), thought Jesus was born on November 18.  Based on historical records, Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE.

 

II.     How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?

A.    Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25.  During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration.  The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.”  Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week.  At the festival’s conclusion, December 25^th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.

B.    The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time.  In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).

C.    In the 4^th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it.  Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[2]

D.    The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25^th, to be Jesus’ birthday.

E.      Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia.  As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.”  The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.

F.      The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who  first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[3]  Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4]  However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.

G.    Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city.  An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators.  They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”[5]

H.     As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”[6]  On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country.  In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped.  Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.

 

III.     The Origins of Christmas Customs

A.     The Origin of Christmas Tree

Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”.[7]  Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.

B.     The Origin of Mistletoe

Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna.  Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[8]  The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[9]

C.     The Origin of Christmas Presents

In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January).  Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace.  The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[10]

D.     The Origin of Santa Claus

a.       Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra.  He died in 345 CE on December 6^th.  He was only named a saint in the 19^th century.

b.      Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament.  The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[11] who sentenced Jesus to death.

c.       In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy.  There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts.  The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult.  Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.

d.      The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans.  These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw.  Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn.  When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.

e.       In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25^th instead of December 6^th.

f.        In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History.  The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.

g.       Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…”  Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.

h.       The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus.  From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly.  Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock.  Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world.  All Santa was missing was his red outfit.

i.         In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa.  Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face.  The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red.  And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.

 

IV.     The Christmas Challenge

·        Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly.  For millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept away in the season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.

·       Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.”  It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.

·        Christmas is a lie.  There is no Christian church with a tradition that Jesus was really born on December 25^th.

·        December 25 is a day on which Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.

·        Many of the most popular Christmas customs – including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus – are modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals ever practiced on earth.

Many who are excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday’s real significance.  If they do know the history, they often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning.  “We are just having fun.”

Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 20 – as a holiday.  Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices.  Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.

Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday.  April 20^th arrived. They had long forgotten about Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen.  They had never heard of gas chambers or death marches.  They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to begin the party, when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’ agony.  Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.”  If you could travel forward in time and meet them; if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on Hitlerday?

On December 25, 1941, Julius Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der Stuermer:

If one really wants to put an end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s son, root and branch.

It was an appropriate thought for the day.  This Christmas, how will we celebrate?

Ps.

1.  John Bugge (1975) Early Christians,” notes The World Book Encyclopedia, “considered the celebration of anyone’s birth to be a pagan custom.” The ancient Greeks, for instance, believed that each person had a protective spirit that attended the person’s birth and thereafter watched over him. That spirit “had a mystic relation with the god on whose birthday the individual was born,” says the book The Lore of Birthdays. Birthdays also have a long-standing and an intimate link with astrology and the horoscope. 11 Besides rejecting birthday customs on account of pagan and spiritistic roots, God’s servants of old likely rejected them on principle as well. Why? These were humble, modest men and women who did not view their arrival in the world as so important that it should be celebrated. (Micah 6:8; Luke 9:48) Rather, they glorified Jehovah and thanked him for the precious gift of life.—Psalm 8:3, 4; 36:9; Revelation 4:11. Virginitas: an essay in the history of a medieval ideal, Springer ISBN 9024716950, p. 69

Materialists go aspirational on A.I yet again.

Yes, "We've Been Wrong About Robots Before," and We Still Are

Erik J. Larson November 12, 2014 5:55 AM 

More hype on artificial intelligence, now from Bloomberg News ("Robot Brains Catch Humans in 25 Years, Then Speed Right On By") and promoted by Drudge:

We've been wrong about these robots before.

Soon after modern computers evolved in the 1940s, futurists started predicting that in just a few decades machines would be as smart as humans. Every year, the prediction seems to get pushed back another year. The consensus now is that it's going to happen in ... you guessed it, just a few more decades.

There's more reason to believe the predictions today. After research that's produced everything from self-driving cars to Jeopardy!-winning supercomputers, scientists have a much better understanding of what they're up against. And, perhaps, whatwe're up against.

Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, lays out the best predictions of the artificial intelligence (AI) research community in his new book, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies."

This sort of thing aggravates me to no end. I've read most of Bostrom's book. "Superintelligence" and the supposed "dangers" it poses to humanity are about where the global-warming scare was circa 2005. It seems like every decade or so media and academia have to whip up some pseudo-scientific issue to terrify the unknowing public, while also promising them that a few elite thinkers using money-making "science" can figure out our path forward.

Nothing has happened with IBM's "supercomputer" Watson(pictured above) other than the probabilistic scoring of questions to answers using Big Data, with minimal actual natural language understanding. No surprise there: language understanding frustrates computation and has embarrassed AI since its inception. Outside of playing Jeopardy -- in an extremely circumscribed only-the-game-of-Jeopardy fashion -- the IBM system is completely, perfectly worthless.

It's worthlessness as a model of human intelligence is obvious from the fact that we clearly don't have a "play Jeopardy" program running inside us, but rather a general intelligence giving us a qualitatively different facility for general language understanding. IBM, by the way, has a penchant for upping their market cap by coming out with a supercomputer that can perform a carefully circumscribed task with superfast computing techniques. Take Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess in 1997. Deep Blue, like Watson, is useless outside of the task it was designed for, and so it too told us nothing about human intelligence -- or, really, "intelligence" at all, in the sense of a scientific theory or an insight into general thinking

Self-driving cars are another source of confusion. Heralded as evidence of a coming human-like intelligence, they're actually made possible by brute-force data: full-scale replicas of street grids using massive volumes of location data. The roof-mounted laser (which costs $80,000 a unit, so don't expect self-driving cars on the market anytime soon) as well as onboard GPS and cameras fix the location of the vehicle on the "game" grid using the real-time GPS coordinates and images from the cameras. The car is then driven around in the physical world, and the navigation is improved by using (what else?) machine learning from data on prior runs until it can get around in the area Google has plotted for it.

Computers are fast and have large memory for Big Data. Got it. But, again, this has nothing to do with human-intelligence. The hallmark of human intelligence is general thinking about different tasks, not brute-force computation of circumscribed tasks. But even this observation gives too much away to superintelligence enthusiasts.

For many commonsense "tasks" remain black boxes to computation, using Google's Big Data or not. Interestingly, where brute computation and big data fail is in surprisingly routine situations that give humans no difficulty at all. Take this statement, originally from computer scientist Hector Levesque (it also appears in Nicholas Carr's 2014 book about the dangers of automation, The Glass Cage):

The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam. What was made of Styrofoam, the large ball or the table?

Watson would not perform well in answering this question, nor would Deep Blue. In fact there are no extant AI systems that have a shot at getting the right answer here, because it requires a tiny slice of knowledge about the actual world. Not "data" about word frequencies in languages or GPS coordinates or probability scoring of next-best chess moves or canned questions to canned answers in Jeopardy. It requires what AI researches call "world knowledge" or "common sense knowledge."

The problem of commonsense knowledge -- having actual, not "simulated" knowledge about the real world -- is a thorny issue that has relegated dreams of true, real AI to the stone ages so far.

When we look closely at real intelligence, things get even gloomier (or more embarrassing) for superintelligence enthusiasts, trumpeting endlessly these days about the coming rise of smart robots. It is, indeed, much like the way scientists, politicians, and celebrities reached a fever pitch about imminent global catastrophe from climate change a decade ago.

(Admittedly the analogy falls short in one respect. Superintelligence enthusiasts like Bostrom warn us about smart robots, while others such as Ray Kurzweil assure us about the coming Golden Age. Take your pick -- it's either the Apocalypse as robots outsmart and eliminate humans like pests, or we merge with them and create a new heaven on Earth.)

The commonsense knowledge problem, too, is letting superintelligence enthusiasts off easy, as the task of picking out relevant pieces of world knowledge is even trickier. Having real knowledge about the world and bringing it to bear on our everyday cognitive problems is the hallmark of human intelligence, but it's a mystery to AI scientists, and has been for decades.

The issue here is not one of degree, where the problem of general intelligence is slowly yielding to increased knowledge about machine intelligence, but rather one of kind. General human intelligence -- as opposed to automated techniques for circumscribed tasks -- is of a qualitatively different sort. There aren't any engineered systems that understand basic language, from Google or IBM or anyone else. The prospect isn't imminent either. There aren't even any good theories pointing in promising directions. It's simply one of life's mysteries, and perhaps a fundamental limitation of the underlying theory -- the theory of computation, the theory of Turing machines, that is. Depressingly, too, the current fad touting a coming superintelligence is in fact obscuring this mystery, rather than illuminating it as good science should.

Can an alligator run a steeplechase? As Levesque has pointed out, Big Data can't "crack" the answer here, because the syntactic terms "alligator" and "steeplechase" aren't likely to occur together anywhere else or with enough frequency to exploit shallow techniques.

Given that minds produce language, and that there are effectively infinite things we can say and talk about and do with language, our robots will seem very, very stupid about commonsense things for a very long time. Maybe forever.

File under "Really?"

From the Annals of Science: Chimp Cultures Are Less Complex than Human Cultures

David Klinghoffer November 13, 2014 12:46 PM 

Who would have thought? It turns out that chimp tribes have cultures but these are less complex and diverse than human cultures. Why? Because chimps are less inclined to learn from each other. It's a matter of preference, not anything exceptional on the part of human beings.

Live Science reports on the new research in Biology Letters ("Human children rely more on social information than chimpanzees do"):

"This study is new in showing a species difference in readiness to incorporate social information into one's own repertoire," study researcher Edwin van Leeuwen, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, told Live Science.

Cultured chimps?

Chimpanzees live in small groups, often near other chimp "tribes." These different groups do seem to have their own cultural traditions. For example, a 2012 study in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, found that three groups of chimps used different techniques for cracking nuts. These chimp groups interbred and intermingled, so the different tactics weren't genetic. Rather, they were likely passed down through social learning -- the definition of culture.

Still, a different technique for cracking nuts is not as dramatic as completely different languages, religions, styles of dress, social mores or traditions. Humans seem unique in the ability to splinter from one another, and it's not clear why, van Leeuwen said.

So, cracking nuts isn't as "dramatic" a cultural expression as creating diverse languages, faiths, arts, and the like. And it's "not clear" why human groups create separate cultures reflecting their deep traditions and beliefs, whereas chimp do not.

Anyone who follows our colleague Wesley Smith's reporting on challenges to human exceptionalism will know what comes next: some attempt to minimize the gaping chasm that separates humans from other creatures. Ah, here it is.

Perhaps, van Leeuwen and his colleagues thought, the difference between humans and chimps is not in capability, but in motivation.

The difference between us and chimps isn't one of "capability" but "motivation." How was this confirmed? By comparing chimps and human children with a test involving the subject getting the opportunity to lift a cup from a row of cups under which the researchers concealed a treat.

The children watched and learned from other children's mistakes or successes. Chimps, not so much.

While chimps picked cups at random even after seeing another chimp find a reward, human children were more likely to search in a location where they saw another kid score a treat.

The conclusion?

The findings suggest that chimpanzees are less motivated by social information than humans, he said. This, in turn, could explain chimps' relative lack of culture; they just aren't as interested in learning from others.

It's not that humans have any special ability to create cultures above that of chimps, just that the chimps don't care enough to go that extra mile. Couldn't be bothered.

Understand? This is why for enlightenment we always need to turn to the scientists.

It's so hard to find good help these days.

Uncooperative Fruit Flies Refuse to Speciate in Laboratory Experiments

Casey Luskin January 28, 2012 7:00 AM

The TalkOrigins Speciation FAQ spends a lot of space citing papers trying to document speciation through laboratory experiments with fruit flies. Its section on "The Fruit Fly Literature" is the single longest section of alleged examples of speciation in the FAQ.

As we saw in a recent article, to establish speciation, these scientists simply wish to establish a completely reproductive isolated population. While some limited degrees of reproductive isolation were sometimes produced, complete reproductive isolation -- i.e. speciation -- was never observed in any of the examples analyzed inmy response to the FAQ.

More importantly, none of the examples in the FAQ documented significant biological change. As the notable evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1972) admits, "Reproductive isolation evidently can arise with little or no morphological differentiation."¹

A few examples below tell some of these stories with regards to fruit fly studies cited by the FAQ:

Case 1: "Drosophila paulistorum"

Fruit fly breeding experiments published by Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky in 1971 showed that if you start with "semispecies" within a fruit fly species which are "indistinguishable morphologically," and then subject the strains to artificial breeding experiments, then "in none" of the experiments "has anything like complete isolation been achieved."² These results led a later reviewer to list this study among various studies where "none has succeeded in establishing complete sexual isolation."³

Moreover, there was no suggestion that the populations were no longer "indistinguishable morphologically" after the experiments. In fact, after reviewing this example, Dobzhansky concludes that sometimes "reproductive isolation and speciation precede differential adaptedness,"⁴ suggesting they had not diversified. At best, only a "new race or incipient species"⁵ was created; some authorities have challenged even the partial isolation, claiming the results "may have been due to contamination of cultures by other subspecies."⁶

Case 2: "Selection on Courtship Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster"

This experiment took two pre-existing strains of fruit flies from within the same species --Drosophila melanogaster -- and sought to determine whether changes in mating preferences could be induced. This included artificially killing hybrids between the strains (a process that does not necessarily mimic nature).

Incomplete reproductive isolation was established. One paper cited by the FAQ (Knight et al. 1956) called only "[p]artial sexual isolation,"⁷ another paper in the FAQ (Halliburton and Gall, 1981) lists this study among various studies where "none has succeeded in establishing complete sexual isolation."⁸

The most biological change that this example documented was small-scale behavioral differences pertaining to courtship, specifically changes in the amount of "licking" that males do to females to initiate mating. One paper cited by the FAQ (Crossley, 1974) showed just how unimpressive the sort of change observed in this experiment was:

Quantitative analysis of male and female behavior revealed the underlying causes of changed mating preferences and faster mating. In the LS experiment male courtship became more stimulating because percentage licking of both males and percentage licking plus vibration of e males increased.⁹

All that was observed were changes in the courtship initiation behaviors (licking and vibrations) changed between the strains. The two strains were "similar" before the experiments, and apart from slight changes in mating behaviors, remained very similar after the experiments.

Once again, not only was significant biological change not observed, but complete reproductive isolation (e.g. speciation) was not established.

Case 3: "Isolation Produced as an Incidental Effect of Selection on several Drosophila species"

In another section, the FAQ cited three studies on fruit flies which reported "slight" or "incipient" and "not complete" sexual reproductive isolation. None showed complete reproductive isolation or speciation, and none showed significant morphological change.

In one example, the FAQ discusses a paper (del Solar, 1966) which reported experiments that artificially selected for certain behavioral traits but produced only "slight" sexual isolation, or "incipient reproductive isolation," due to "changes in sexual behavior."¹⁰ The paper thus reports that complete reproductive isolation was not found:

Whether selection for geotaxis and phototaxis always and necessarily produces a change in the sexual behavior, and whether continued selection may carry the sexual divergence anywhere near complete isolation, can only be decided by further experiments.¹¹

Not only was "anywhere near complete isolation" not achieved, but significant biological change was also not achieved. As the paper reports: "The geotactically and phototactically positive and negative strains appear to be indistinguishable in external morphology."¹²

Another example discussed by the FAQ in this section pertains to Dodd (1989) which reported experiments on populations of the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura. Schluter and Nagel (1995) described Dodd (1989)'s findings by stating that only "some premating isolation evolved," and "Reproductive isolation between divergent lines was not complete."¹³ Speciation was also not said to have occurred. Aside from mating and food preferences, there were no claims of biological change between the populations. Again, we see that not only has reproductive isolation not been demonstrated, but significant biological change did not evolve.

Despite the aforementioned underwhelming results, the FAQ then discusses another paper which it admits reported "Less dramatic results." According to the paper cited by the FAQ (de Oliveira and Cordeiro, 1980), the experiment only produced "incipient isolation"¹⁴ -- not complete reproductive isolation. As for the degree of morphological change, aside from a preference for a certain pH level in food, no biological change was reported. In fact, the paper notes that among three long-standing natural races of D. willistoni, "These flies are morphologically indistinguishable." This study certainly did not change that observation: Once again we have not seen complete reproductive isolation, nor have we seen significant biological change.

Many other examples from the FAQ discuss fruit fly selection and breeding experiments, and all have essentially the same results: complete reproductive isolation is not established, and significant morphological change is not observed.

For additional details, please see the full response to the TalkOrigins Speciation FAQ.

References Cited:

[1.] Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Species of Drosophila," Science, Vol. 177 (4050):664-669 (August 25, 1972).

[2.] Theodosius Dobzhansky and Olga Pavlovsky, "Experimentally Created Incipient Species of Drosophila," Nature, Vol. 230:289-292 (April 2, 1971).

[3.] Richard Halliburton and G. A. E. Gall, "Disruptive Selection and Assortative Mating in Tribolium castaneum," Evolution, Vol. 35 (5):829-843 (September, 1981).

[4.] Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Species of Drosophila," Science, Vol. 177 (4050):664-669 (August 25, 1972).

[5.] Quoted in Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, p. 56 (Regnery, 2006).

[6.] Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr quoted in Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, p. 56 (Regnery, 2006).

[7.] G. R. Knight, Alan Robertson, and C. H. Waddington, "Selection for Sexual Isolation Within a Species," Evolution, Vol. 10 (1): 14-22 (March, 1956).

[8.] Richard Halliburton and G. A. E. Gall, "Disruptive Selection and Assortative Mating in Tribolium castaneum," Evolution, Vol. 35 (5):829-843 (September, 1981).

[9.] Stella A. Crossley, "Changes in Mating Behavior Produced by Selection for Ethological Isolation Between Ebony and Vestigial Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster," Evolution, Vol. 28 (4): 631-647 (December, 1974).

[10.] Eduardo del Solar, "Sexual Isolation Caused by Selection for Positive and Negative Phototaxis and Geotaxis in Drosophila Pseudoobscura," Genetics, Vol. 56:484-487 (1966).

[11.] Eduardo del Solar, "Sexual Isolation Caused by Selection for Positive and Negative Phototaxis and Geotaxis in Drosophila Pseudoobscura," Genetics, Vol. 56:484-487 (1966) (emphasis added).

[12.] Eduardo del Solar, "Sexual Isolation Caused by Selection for Positive and Negative Phototaxis and Geotaxis in Drosophila Pseudoobscura," Genetics, Vol. 56:484-487 (1966) (emphasis added).

[13.] Dolph Schluter and Laura M. Nagel, "Parallel Speciation by Natural Selection," The American Naturalist, Vol. 146 (2):292-301 (August, 1995).

[14.] Alice Kalisz de Oliveira and Antonio Cordeiro, "Adaptation of Drosophila willistoni experimental populations to extreme pH medium," Heredity, Vol. 44 (1): 123-130 (1980).

Counting on chance and necessity

BIO-Complexity Paper: Why Chaitin's Mathematical "Proof" of Darwinian Evolution Fails

Casey Luskin April 7, 2014 5:08 AM

 

A new peer-reviewed paper in BIO-Complexity, "Active Information in Metabiology," reports on the further investigations of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab into the ability of unguided evolutionary mechanisms to produce new information. This time, authors Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks show that the budding field of metabiology only produces creative outputs through active information -- i.e., informational inputs donated by an intelligent source -- and does not truly demonstrate that unguided processes can produce new information.What is "metabiology"? According to the paper, it's "a fascinating intellectual romp in the surreal world of the mathematics of algorithmic information theory" where "halting oracles hunt for busy beaver numbers and busy beaver numbers unearth Chaitin's number, knowledge of which in turn allows resolution of numerous unsolved mathematical problems, many of whose solutions would earn large cash bounties." That description may not help most of us very much. The field of "metabiology" was developed by the Argentine-American computer scientist and mathematician Gregory Chaitin. In his 2013 book Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical, Chaitin describes metabiology as an "answer" to David Berlinski's "stinging critique of Darwinism" in The Devil's Delusion. "Metabiology" is Chaitin's attempt to use mathematics and (hypothetical) computer simulations to formally prove that Darwinian theory can create new information. It relies on an inherently gene-centered view of evolution, where a simulated "genetic code" (i.e., a computer program) can be "mutated," and when the program "halts" or stops running, it outputs a number that correlates with the program's "fitness." If the number goes up as the evolutionary simulation proceeds, Chaitin thinks he's shown Darwinian processes can increase fitness over time.

There are many reasons why Chaitin's model does not accurately reflect how Darwinian evolution works, if it does work, in the real world of biology (some of which are summarized nicely over at Theory, Evolution, and Games Group). Not the least of such problems is the fact that the simulation basically grants itself infinite probabilistic resources (actually, computing resources, but that's analogous to probabilistic resources in biology).

As Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

Because metabiology programs have unbounded length and can run for an unbounded amount of time, the unboundedness essentially undermines the creativity required to solve the large-number problem. With unbounded resources and unbounded time, one can do most anything.

In the real world, probabilistic resources are limited. Time is finite, and populations have finite sizes, and this imposes limits on what traits can evolve especially (as Stephen Meyer shows in Darwin's Doubt) when traits require multiple mutations before providing some advantage. Metabiology uses a population of one single "digital organism," which then "evolves" over time, but it grants itself essentially infinite computing resources to do this. With such a generous endowment, sure, anything can eventually evolve. But we don't live in an unlimited world, which is precisely why Darwinian evolution faces major theoretical problems. They thus write:

Although elegant in conception, metabiology departs from reality because it pays no attention to resource limitations. Metabiology's math obscures the huge amounts of time required for the evolutionary process. The programs can run for any arbitrarily large number of steps. Additionally, programs can be of any length with no penalty imposed for longer programs.

Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain that Chaitin's program uses a halting oracle as a source of "active information." A halting oracle is a hypothetical meta-program that can tell you if a given program will ever stop running. As they explain, such an oracle could be useful in disproving certain mathematical conjectures, such as Goldbach's conjecture, "which hypothesizes that all even numbers greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes." They discuss how a halting oracle could determine if the conjecture was false:

Suppose a program X can be written to test each even number sequentially to see if it were the sum of two primes. If a counterexample is found, the program stops and declares "I have a counterexample!" Otherwise, the next even number is tested. If Goldbach's conjecture is true, the program will run forever. If a halting oracle existed, we could feed it X. If the halting oracle says "this program halts," Goldbach's conjecture is disproved. A counterexample exists. If the halting oracle says, "This program never halts," then Goldbach's conjecture is proven! There exists no counterexample.

The difficulty for Chaitin is he admits that for metabiology, "[The halting oracle] is where all the creativity is really coming from in our program," but also admits that such an oracle is "mathematical fantasy." Ewert, Dembski, and Marks thus aptly observe, "A computer tool proven not to exist is admittedly at the outset an obvious major strike against a theory purporting to demonstrate reality."

Now at this point, one might reasonably ask, "If a halting oracle is a hypothetical fantasy, how can Chaitin claim to use one in metabiology?" The answer is that Chaitin isn't actually creating a computer program. He's seeking a mathematical proof of the Darwinian model, where he's allowed to indulge thought experiments that invoke hypothetical entities. All he needs to be able to do is to prove what might happen if he theoretically had a halting oracle. But it doesn't help that one could never exist.

That problem aside, they explain that the "halting oracle" used by Chaitin's program has three different options of how to find a search target: "

• Exhaustive Search (poor)
• Random Evolution (good)
• Intelligent Design (better)

Metabiology uses "random evolution" but not in a manner that is biologically realistic. The program is capable of systematically simulating all possible programs, which in effect allows it to totally rewrite itself instantly -- something that simply doesn't happen in biology -- and thereby grants unrealistic access to the equivalent of unlimited resources in an organism's developmental process. This unrealistically guarantees the program could never get stuck on a local fitness peak because it can keep trying out entirely new "genetic codes" indefinitely until a better one is found.

Which, again, is nothing like how the real world of biology, where an organism is forced to rely on the genome it receives, which at best will have just a few small mutational differences from its parents. Darwinian evolution in real biology requires a grueling ascent of mount improbable, but Chaitin's program can fly wherever it wants at any time. To put it another way, metabiology cheats by giving a digital organism unrealistic access to any program at any time which will lead to a higher fitness state. As Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

As any computer programmer will tell you, landscapes of computer program fitness are the opposite of smooth. We would therefore not expect Darwinian evolution to fare well. Chaitin notes this when he writes [3], "The fitness landscape has to be very special for Darwinian evolution to work." The environment for evolution to occur, therefore, has to be carefully designed. Indeed, in the paradigm of conservation of information, smooth landscapes can be source of significant active information [14]. Metabiology's construction of smooth landscapes is accomplished by running all viable programs, a computationally expensive approach that is only possible because there are no resource limitations.

Chaitin also presents a different model that uses what he calls "intelligent design" to find a search target. This obviously doesn't help show what unguided evolutionary processes can accomplish. The author of the blog "Theory, Evolution and Games Group" critiques Chaitin's model, writing that metabiology uses "a teleological model -- a biologist's nightmare." Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

Like AVIDA and ev, metabiology makes use of external information sources to assist in the search. Like the simple Hamming oracle, the halting oracle can be mined for information with various degrees of sophistication. Evolution thus requires external sources of knowledge to work. The degree to which this knowledge is used can be assessed using the idea of active information.

They conclude: "In order for evolution to occur in these models, external knowledge must be imposed on the process to guide it. Metabiology thus appears to be another example where its designer makes an evolutionary model work. ... Consistent with the laws of conservation of information, natural selection can only work using the guidance of active information, which can be provided only by a designer." Properly understood, in other words, these programs demonstrate that evolution requires intelligent design.