Russian authorities continue to frame mischief by law.

RUSSIA: Jehovah's Witnesses face possible liquidation
By Victoria Arnold, Forum 18

If prosecutors proceed with their threat to liquidate the Jehovah's Witness headquarters near St Petersburg, thousands of local congregations across Russia could also face prohibition of their activities and individuals could be vulnerable to criminal charges for expressing their beliefs, Forum 18 notes.

The Jehovah's Witnesses' principal body in Russia is under threat of dissolution as an "extremist" organisation after the deadline in an official warning from the General Prosecutor's Office expired on 10 May, Forum 18 notes. If prosecutors decide to pursue liquidation, thousands of local Jehovah's Witness congregations across Russia could also face prohibition of their activities and individuals could be vulnerable to criminal charges for expressing their beliefs.

If dissolution of the Administrative Centre is pursued, this would be the first instance of a registered, centralised religious organisation with active subdivisions being liquidated for "extremism", Forum 18 notes.

Lawyers have until 10 June to challenge the warning in court, the Administrative Centre told Forum 18 from St Petersburg. Lawyers for the Administrative Centre are planning to lodge a challenge at Tver District Court in Moscow, and told Forum 18 they still hope that the matter will be resolved in their favour.

Forum 18's questions to the General Prosecutor's Office – including whether liquidation of the Administrative Centre would amount to a prohibition on all Jehovah's Witness activity across Russia – had not been answered by the end of the working day in Moscow on 24 May (see below).

"Slanderous accusations"

Jehovah's Witnesses have strongly denied the accusations of extremism. "The slanderous accusations of ‘extremism' against us are simply being used to mask the true religious intolerance of those who disagree with our beliefs," Administrative Centre representative Vasiliy Kalin said on the jw.org website on 27 April. "We are not extremists."

"For Jehovah's Witnesses to be lumped together with extremist groups and for their literature to be listed with works of violent terrorists is an affront to decency and justice," New York-based General Counsel Philip Brumley added in the same article.

The use of "extremism" laws has been the biggest single threat to freedom of religion or belief in Russia for some years. Particular victims of this have been Muslims (including those who read the works of the late Turkish theologian Said Nursi) and Jehovah's Witnesses (see Forum 18's Russia "extremism" survey http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1724).

The Administrative Centre

The Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses of Russia, based on the outskirts of St Petersburg, has been registered as a "centralised religious organisation" since 1999. Jehovah's Witnesses were first officially registered under Soviet law in 1991, but have been present in Russia since the late 19th century.

"Engaging in extremist activity is not permitted"

On 10 March 2016, the Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses received the formal warning "that engaging in extremist activity is not permitted", dated 2 March, from Viktor Grin, Deputy General Prosecutor of the Russian Federation. The warning is explicitly predicated on the alleged "extremist" activities of the local communities (and their members) which the Centre oversees and supports.

The warning, seen by Forum 18, instructs the Centre to take "specific organisational and practical measures" within a period of two months in order to prevent further offences under the Extremism Law. It cautions that the Centre will be subject to dissolution if it does not eliminate existing violations or if new evidence of extremism is detected over the following twelve months.

The document does not elaborate on what such "organisational and practical measures" may be or how they will be monitored. Any subsequent extremism-related conviction of an individual or local community may provide grounds for prosecutors to pursue liquidation of the Administrative Centre.

Potential consequences

Forty-seven entities currently appear on the Justice Ministry's list of banned and/or liquidated terrorist and extremist organisations (which is dominated by extreme nationalist groups and includes some Ukrainian political organisations).

Seven of these are former registered religious organisations, which operated only on a local level (such as the Borovsk Muslim community in Tyumen and the Taganrog, Samara and Abinsk Jehovah's Witness congregations).

A further eleven are religious associations which were never officially registered, such as the Muslim missionary movement Tabligh Jamaat and "Nurdzhular", which Muslims in Russia deny even exists – nevertheless, Muslims who read the works of Said Nursi are regularly prosecuted for "continuing its activities" (see F18News 11 April 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2166).

In an article of 27 April on their international website, Jehovah's Witnesses point out that, if liquidated, the Administrative Centre will be closed, it will be added to the federal list of extremist organisations and its property will be turned over to the State.

"Because of their affiliation with the Centre, all religious associations of Jehovah's Witnesses - 406 local religious organizations (legal entities) and over 2,500 congregations – may also face liquidation," Jehovah's Witnesses complain. "As a result, Witnesses throughout Russia could lose their Kingdom Halls (houses of worship)." They also warn that "Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia could find themselves in a scenario in which they are free to believe as they wish but not free to practice their religion with others".

This would, the Office of the General Counsel fears, amount to a ban on all Jehovah's Witness activity in Russia. It told Forum 18 on 23 May that it believes that dissolution of the Administrative Centre would be grounds for liquidation of all registered Jehovah's Witness organisations in the country, although separate legal proceedings would have to be opened against each of them.

Article 9 of the Extremism Law states that "In the event of the rendering by a court of law of a decision on the grounds provided for by the given federal law on the liquidation of a public or a religious association, their regional and other structural subdivisions shall be also liquidated."

When a registered religious organisation is liquidated, it loses its status as a legal entity and concomitant rights such as the ability to own or rent property, employ staff and hold a bank account. Although an unregistered community should legally be able to continue to operate as a religious group, which does not require registration, and meet privately for worship and study, this carries the risk of criminal charges if their organisation was liquidated on grounds of extremism.

Sixteen Jehovah's Witnesses in Taganrog were convicted on 30 November 2015 of "continuing the activities of a banned extremist organisation" (see F18News 3 December 2015 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2128). Rostov Regional Court rejected their appeals on 17 March 2016 and the convictions have now come into force.

"The worst thing is that, after the elimination of a local religious organisation, believers face prosecution simply for reading the Bible," Jehovah's Witness spokesperson Kalin complained in a press release of 12 April.

Communities already under threat

The General Prosecutor's Office warning notes that several Jehovah's Witness communities have already been liquidated, have had liquidation suits opened against them, or have been warned of the possibility of liquidation, all for alleged "extremist" activity. The only specific form of such activity it mentions is the distribution of prohibited religious literature.

These moves – and the increase in prosecutions of Jehovah's Witnesses under Administrative Code Article 20.29 (distribution of extremist materials – see F18News 25 April 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2171) and Article 20.2 ("unapproved" public events – see F18News 18 May 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2179) mark a recent intensification of law enforcement efforts to curtail Jehovah's Witness activity, Forum 18 notes (see F18News 22 March 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2161).

Before 2014, only one Jehovah's Witness congregation (in Taganrog, Rostov Region, in 2009) had been dissolved on charges of "extremist" activity. In 2014, the Samara community was dissolved, followed by the Abinsk community (Krasnodar Region) in March 2015, Tyumen in October 2015, and Belgorod, Stariy Oskol (also in Belgorod Region), and Elista (Republic of Kalmykiya) in February 2016.

Proceedings against the Cherkessk Jehovah's Witnesses were initiated in May 2015 and have been delayed multiple times by other civil cases involving the congregation (see F18News 28 August 2015 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2095).

Prosecutors have also submitted liquidation suits against Jehovah's Witness communities of Arkhangelsk and Oryol on 8 April and 12 May 2016 respectively. No hearing dates have yet been set in Oryol. The next hearing at Arkhangelsk Regional Court is due on 2 June. This is despite the fact that Arkhangelsk Jehovah's Witness leader Aleksandr Parygin applied to the Justice Ministry in October 2015 to have the community dissolved at its own request (see F18News 22 March 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2161).

The Belgorod, Stariy Oskol, and Elista congregations are now awaiting the outcome of appeals to Russia's Supreme Court. Hearings in the first two cases are scheduled for 9 and 16 June respectively. The Elista community's appeal was registered on 22 April and the court has not yet given a hearing date.

The Supreme Court has already overturned the liquidation order with respect to the Tyumen Jehovah's Witnesses. It ruled on 15 April that the evidence presented and the small size of the community "do not give reason to believe that the activities of Jehovah's Witnesses in Tyumen has led to the need to choose the exceptional measure of liquidation of the organisation", based principally on the fact that "The liquidation of a social or religious association or other organisation is an exceptional measure which should be proportionate to the violations permitted by the legal entity and the consequences they provoke. Repeated violation of the law in itself cannot form the basis for a court decision on the liquidation of a legal entity."

According to the written verdict, seen by Forum 18, the Supreme Court also accepted that the Tyumen community had expelled a member found guilty under Administrative Code Article 20.29 and had repeatedly shown its members a list of publications included on the Federal List and acquainted them with the requirements of the Extremism Law.

At least nine more Jehovah's Witness communities have received warnings of "the inadmissibility of extremist activity" from prosecutor's offices since spring 2015, Forum 18 has found. Three of these – Tikhoretsk (Krasnodar), Chapayevsk (Samara), and Shakhty (Rostov) – are in regions which have already seen the liquidation of Jehovah's Witness congregations on grounds of "extremism" (in Abinsk, Samara, and Taganrog respectively).

The other six are in Kaluga, Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Region, Vilyuchinsk on the Far Eastern Kamchatka peninsula, Teykovo in Ivanovo Region, Stavropol, and Prokhladny in the Republic of Kabardino-Balkariya. Four communities (Tikhoretsk, Teykovo, Chapayevsk, Prokhladny) are so far known to have gone to court to have the warnings recognised as unlawful, all unsuccessfully.

If communities or their members are convicted again (usually within 12 months) under Administrative Code Article 20.29 ("Production or mass distribution of extremist materials"), they risk liquidation proceedings.

The warning sent to the Administrative Centre claims that warnings about extremist activity have also been issued to Jehovah's Witness communities in the Kemerovo and Novosibirsk Regions and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District in Tyumen Region.

Jehovah's Witness literature banned

Over 80 Jehovah's Witness texts, as well as the international jw.org website (in addition to numerous Muslim, several Falun Gong and one Catholic book), have been declared "extremist" and placed on the Justice Ministry's Federal List of Extremist Materials.

Possession of an item on the Federal List carries the risk of a fine or imprisonment for up to 15 days, and confiscation of the banned literature. Jehovah's Witnesses described the inclusion of their publications on the Federal List as a "miscarriage of justice" in a press statement of 12 April.

The Federal List now runs to over 3,500 items, often does not include full bibliographical details, and is irregularly updated. Checking whether a particular item is on the List can be difficult or even impossible (see F18News 27 July 2015 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2084).

Prosecutions under Administrative Code Article 20.29 ("Production or mass distribution of extremist materials") have increased (see F18News 25 April 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2171). The import into Russia of Jehovah's Witness literature (not deemed "extremist") is routinely blocked (see F18News 14 December 2015 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2133). A court in Vyborg is currently considering a request by prosecutors to outlaw the Jehovah's Witness edition of the Bible as an "extremist" text (see F18News 5 May 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2174).

All community dissolutions have followed a similar path, Forum 18 notes. They have involved the discovery of "extremist" literature, charges under Article 20.29, prosecutors' warnings, and allegations of repeat offences, leading to prosecutors seeking liquidation through the courts.

On 15 February 2016, Jehovah's Witnesses stated on their website jw.org that Russia's law enforcement agencies "have increasingly resorted to fabricating evidence to justify charges of extremism against Jehovah's Witnesses", claiming that the "extremist" materials found in their homes and Kingdom Halls are in fact planted by the police (see F18News 2 March 2016 http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2154).

General Prosecutor's Office response

On 28 March, the General Prosecutor's Office rejected the Jehovah's Witnesses' request for a meeting to discuss the warning. Since then, the Administrative Centre has received no further communication from prosecutors, spokesperson Ivan Belenko told Forum 18. He added that they complained directly to the General Prosecutor Yury Chaika on 29 April, but have had no reply. Jehovah's Witnesses have also approached the Presidential Administration.

Forum 18 sent a fax to the General Prosecutor's Office in the afternoon of the Moscow working day of 19 May, asking the following questions: 

1. What "concrete organisational and practical measures" should the Administrative Centre take to prevent further violations?

2. Could any violation by a local community or member of a community be grounds for the liquidation of the Administrative Centre in the twelve-month period after the warning was issued?

3. If the Administrative Centre is liquidated, will all local religious organisations of Jehovah's Witnesses also be automatically dissolved, or would separate court proceedings be necessary?

4. Would the liquidation of the Administrative Centre amount to a prohibition on all Jehovah's Witness activity on the territory of the Russian Federation?


Forum 18 had received no reply as of the end of the Moscow working day of 24 May. (END)

Psalm94)1O Jehovah, thou God to whom vengeance belongeth, Thou God to whom vengeance belongeth, shine forth.

2Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth: Render to the proud their desert.

3Jehovah, how long shall the wicked, How long shall the wicked triumph?

4They prate, they speak arrogantly: All the workers of iniquity boast themselves.

5They break in pieces thy people, O Jehovah, And afflict thy heritage.

6They slay the widow and the sojourner, And murder the fatherless.

7And they say, Jehovah will not see, Neither will the God of Jacob consider.

8Consider, ye brutish among the people; And ye fools, when will ye be wise?

9He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?

10He that chastiseth the nations, shall not he correct, Even he that teacheth man knowledge?

11Jehovah knoweth the thoughts of man, That they are vanity.

12Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O Jehovah, And teachest out of thy law;

13That thou mayest give him rest from the days of adversity, Until the pit be digged for the wicked.

14For Jehovah will not cast off his people, Neither will he forsake his inheritance.

15For judgment shall return unto righteousness; And all the upright in heart shall follow it.

16Who will rise up for me against the evil-doers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?

17Unless Jehovah had been my help, My soul had soon dwelt in silence.

18When I said, My foot slippeth; Thy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, held me up.

19In the multitude of my thoughts within me Thy comforts delight my soul.

20Shall the throne of wickedness have fellowship with thee, Which frameth mischief by statute?

21They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, And condemn the innocent blood.

22But Jehovah hath been my high tower, And my God the rock of my refuge.


23And he hath brought upon them their own iniquity, And will cut them off in their own wickedness; Jehovah our God will cut them off.

The end of the world:A commentary by the Watchtower Society.

When Will the World End?

The Bible’s answer

To know when the end of the world will happen, it is necessary to understand how the Bible uses the term “world.” The Greek word koʹsmos, usually translated “world,” most often refers to the world of humankind, especially the part that is out of harmony with God and his will. (John 15:18, 19; 2 Peter 2:5) At times, koʹsmos refers to the framework of human society.—1 Corinthians 7:31; 1 John 2:15, 16. *

What is “the end of the world”?

The phrase “the end of the world,” which appears in many Bible translations, can also be rendered as “the conclusion of the system of things,” or “the close of the age.” (Matthew 24:3; English Standard Version) It refers, not to the destruction of the earth or of all humanity, but to the end of the framework of human society.—1 John 2:17.

The Bible teaches that “evil men will be done away with” so that good people can enjoy life on earth. (Psalm 37:9-11) This destruction will happen at the “great tribulation,” which culminates in the war of Armageddon.—Matthew 24:21, 22; Revelation 16:14, 16.

When will the world end?

Jesus said: “Concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36, 42) He added that the timing of the end would be unexpected, “at an hour that you do not think to be it.”—Matthew 24:44.

Even though we cannot know the exact day and hour, Jesus did provide a composite “sign,” or group of events, that would identify the time period leading up to the end of the world. (Matthew 24:3, 7-14) The Bible refers to this period as “the time of the end,” “the end times,” and “the last days.”—Daniel 12:4; God’s Word Bible; 2 Timothy 3:1-5.

Will there be anything left after the end of the world?

Yes. The earth will still be here, for the Bible says that “it will not be moved from its place forever and ever.” (Psalm 104:5) And the earth will be filled with people, just as the Bible promises: “The righteous will possess the earth, and they will live forever on it.” (Psalm 37:29) God will bring about the conditions that he originally purposed:

Paradise.—Isaiah 35:1; Luke 23:43.
Security and prosperity.—Micah 4:4.
Meaningful and satisfying work for all.—Isaiah 65:21-23.

Freedom from disease and aging.—Job 33:25; Isaiah 33:24.

On second thoughts about dark matter

Cosmologists should be more skeptical of dark matter
Stuart Clark is an astronomy journalist and the author of several books about space, both non-fiction and fiction, including The Unknown Universe (2008). He writes the blog Across the Universe for the Guardian. 




To get computer models to look similar to the Universe around us, cosmologists have assumed that around 96 per cent of matter and energy are in forms that we cannot directly detect. You might think that this would make cosmologists wary of relying on such hypothetical substances. Yet for the majority working today, dark matter and dark energy are every bit as real as the stars and galaxies that we can see.

Such corporate belief might work for business, but it has no place in science. Back in 1620, Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum (The New Method). In his description of how to investigate nature, he cautioned would-be scientists about four ‘idols of the mind’. Namely:

Idola tribus (idols of the tribe) – which occur when people try to feed new facts into their preconceived ideas. ‘The human understanding is like a false mirror,’ Bacon wrote, ‘which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.’

Idola specus (idols of the cave): ‘Everyone… has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature,’ writes Bacon. These individual likes and dislikes cloud judgment.

Idola fori (idols of the marketplace): in the exchange of ideas, Bacon writes, ‘the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding’.

Idola theatri (idols of the theatre): the final idol comes about by blindly following academic dogma and not asking enough real questions about the world. Why theatre? ‘In my judgment,’ writes Bacon, ‘all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.’

Cosmology could well be falling foul of these idols. In the case of dark matter, the unquestioning belief is puzzling because the direct searches for these particles are coming up effectively empty‑handed. Yet observations are routinely interpreted as being the result of dark matter. No other avenues of approach are taken by the vast majority of researchers.

In reality, there are other possible solutions that at least warrant examination and comparison. In certain circumstances they fit the observations better than dark matter can. They usually involve a different approach, which is to alter how the force of gravity works or to relax an assumption about the way we think the Universe works, rather than add new constituents to the Universe.

An alternative to dark matter was offered in 1981, by the physicist Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He postulated that gravity pulls a little more strongly than Newton’s laws predict at extremely weak levels.

A different approach to dark energy, which is thought to power an acceleration of the Universe, is to dismiss the assumption that matter is distributed evenly throughout space. Then the Universe will naturally change the rate at which it expands.

Yet these ideas are generally sidelined in favour of the status quo. Why?

Cosmology has become too conservative, too unwilling to step outside of the mainstream in the search for answers. While some might see this piece as an attack, it is simply the adoption of a position that I believe is truly scientific. One in which skepticism rules, and prevailing ideas are questioned.

The true gold standard for science is constant self-questioning, constant re‑evaluation, and constant open-mindedness in the search for better explanations. Theories are never ‘true’, even if they fit all known facts. They are merely hypotheses that have been shown to be useful. And they could fall at any moment if new observations come to light that do not fit.


The sobering fact is that either 96 per cent of the Universe is unknown to us or we are completely wrong about the way we think the Universe works. Either way, cosmology is far from finished: we have a lot to work out.

Nature's wireless communicators for design

For Bees, Static Electricity Is Information
Evolution News & Views

Three years ago, we reported on the "shocking" discovery that flowers decorate their petals with negative charges that bumblebees can detect. The patterns of charge are species-specific, as if to tell the positively charged insects to come on in for a treat. At the time, the methods bees use to detect the charges were unknown, but the news created quite a buzz in the media (see National Geographic). Now, the organs of electrical sensing in insects are coming to light.

In a recent open-access paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Sutton et al. locate the sensing in the tiny hairs, called filiform hairs, that cover the bumblebee's body. It was known that the hairs respond to motion and sound, and that they are innervated at the base for transmission of information to the brain. The new findings add another function to these multipurpose sensors:

Electroreception in terrestrial animals is poorly understood. In bumblebees, the mechanical response of filiform hairs in the presence of electric fields provides key evidence for electrosensitivity to ecologically relevant electric fields. Mechanosensory hairs in arthropods have been shown to function as fluid flow or sound particle velocity receivers. The present work provides direct evidence for additional, nonexclusive functionality involving electrical Coulomb-force coupling between distant charged objects and mechanosensory hairs. Thus, the sensory mechanism is proposed to rely on electromechanical coupling, whereby many light thin hairs serve the detection of the electrical field surrounding a bumblebee approaching a flower. [Emphasis added.]
The "electromechanical coupling" means that the hairs respond to the presence of static electricity by moving toward or away from one another. That motion among "many light thin hairs" creates patterns in the nerve endings that the bee can use for information on the nectar quality in the flower. Apparently the antennae are less sensitive to electrical movement than the body hairs, for bumblebees at least. Honeybees may make more use of antennal deflections.

If another positively charged pollinator visited recently, the flower will have fewer negative ions due to charge cancellation. It will take a few minutes for the flower to recharge itself. In the meantime, the pollinator can move on to better sources, not wasting time where the nectar has already been taken.

Commenting on this discovery in PNAS, Harold H. Zakon finds it intriguing that insects get information from static "noise." We humans feel static electricity (also called triboelectricity) primarily when we touch a doorknob after scuffing our shoes on the carpet; otherwise we are not aware of it (unless it gets strong enough to make our hair stand on end). That brief shock on the fingertip is noise to us, not information. It's just an epiphenomenon to us, Zakon says. Imagine, though, if sensors on our body hairs detected patterns of charge in a candy store, leading us directly to the best-advertised treats? What if our friends could read and interpret our electrical charge patterns without our having to say a word about where we have been?

Whatever differences may exist between honeybees and bumblebees, Zakon says, "the bigger take-home message of all of these studies is that insects have a triboelectric sense mediated by mechanoreceptors." Note, however, that having hairs that deflect in the presence of static electricity is not enough. The nerves have to know the difference between electrically-induced motions and wind or sound motions. The brain has to be able to interpret the patterns of sensations coming in. Then, the brain has to activate instinctive responses, with muscles and nerves, to make use of the information. Unless the whole system works together, static electricity is useless as a signal.

Most of us have watched bees pollinating flowers all our lives without knowing there's a hidden communication system going on between plant and insect using invisible forces. That's fascinating enough, but the case of bumblebees hints at widespread electrical signaling in the biosphere. Sutton et al. remark, "This finding prompts the possibility that other terrestrial animals use such sensory hairs to detect and respond to electric fields."

What other animals might use static information? Zakon offers some possibilities.

Is there a triboeletric sense in other insects? If accumulation of charge on an insect's body is as widespread as appears likely, is it an epiphenomenon or even a nuisance in some species -- perhaps even suppressed centrally as noise -- but used in others? Have other insect pollinators -- such as wasps, moths, butterflies, flies, and beetles -- also evolved to interact electrically with their flowers? It has been known for over 100 y that charge is held on the hair of mammals and feathers of birds. Similar to bees, pollen may be electrostatically attracted to approaching hummingbirds. Might hummingbirds and other nectarivorous pollinating birds, or perhaps some pollinating mammals such as bats, have evolved a similar triboelectric sense?
We're used to hearing that all kinds of complex systems "have evolved." But how sensible is that when a triboelectric sense requires detectors, nerves, brains, and muscles to utilize an information source? How much less sensible to say they "have evolved" multiple times in unrelated animals as diverse as birds, butterflies, and fish? How did members of the plant kingdom get involved?

A phenomenon is not a "signal" unless it is detected by a creature looking for it, equipped with an appropriate receiver. A signal is not "information" unless a creature can use it for a function. Mars has static electricity, but the only ones who care are humans who sent intelligently designed rovers there to measure it when dust devils passed by. The moon has static electricity, too; it was a nuisance to Apollo astronauts when it made dust cling to everything. It only became "information" when scientists investigated its properties to gain insight into the origin of the lunar regolith, partly to plan for dealing with it in case a lunar base is ever built.

We've pointed to other invisible sources of information used by animals, including the earth's magnetic field. Earlier this month we reported how deer are magnetically equipped; now we can add another mammal: the wart hog. No kidding; scientists from Uppsala University reporting in Mammal Review now say that "wild boars and wart hogs may have an internal compass."

"The fascinating findings add on to a well growing body of evidence for a magnetic sense in mammals. The interesting questions that arise now are how they are able to sense the magnetic field and whether they really use it for navigation" said Dr. Pascal Malkemper, senior author of the Mammal Review study.
In Living Waters, Illustra Media showed sea turtles using the magnetic field for information, salmon using odor molecules for information, and dolphins using sound for information. In each case, the animals are equipped with extremely sophisticated machines to detect, transmit, interpret, and utilize the information. In each case, furthermore, the mechanisms appear irreducibly complex -- incapable of explanation by blind, unguided processes.


Now we can add static electricity to the growing list of information sources utilized by living things. Without well-designed receivers and interpreters, static electricity is a mere epiphenomenon of no functional consequence. In short, it's noise. Only intelligence knows how to extract signal out of noise and use it to get things done.

Darwinism Vs.The real world XXXV

The Challenge of Adaptational Packages
William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells

Editor's note: William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, leading figures in the intelligent design movement, are co-authors of The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems. Originally published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, this path-breaking work explores some of the most important arguments for intelligent design in biology. To celebrate the launch of Foundation for Foundation for Thought & Ethics Books  as an imprint of Discovery Institute Press, we will be publishing excerpts from the book here at Evolution News. Through July 8, we will also be making the book available for only $10 -- that's more than a 70 percent discount, and it includes both the full-color hardcover and an accompanying CD with additional materials. If you haven't read this classic book, now is your chance!  Order now, because this special discount won't last long.



To determine what sorts of genetic changes macroevolution requires, one first needs to be clear on what key feature of biological organisms macroevolution must explain. A biological organism is more than the sum of its individual structures. In discussions of biological evolution, this point is often missed because evolution is thought to proceed by cumulating advantages. But organisms are not just bundles of accumulated advantages. An organism's ability to function successfully requires an entire adaptational package, that is, a set of structures that are carefully coordinated with one another to help the organism make a living. The challenge for macroevolution is to bring about such adapational packages.

An excellent example of an adaptational package is the giraffe. What impresses people most about the giraffe is its long neck. Darwin himself drew attention to the giraffe's neck. In the Origin of Species he wrote:

The giraffe, by its lofty stature, much elongated neck, forelegs, head and tongue, has its whole frame beautifully adapted for browsing on the higher branches of trees. It can thus obtain food beyond the reach of the other Ungulata or hoofed animals inhabiting the same country and this must be a great advantage to it....1

The advantage of the giraffe's long neck for "browsing on the higher branches of trees" is, however, not nearly as obvious as Darwin makes out. Consider that the neck of the female giraffe is two feet shorter, on average, than that of the male. If a longer neck were needed solely to reach above the existing forage line, then the females would have soon starved to death and the giraffe would have become extinct.

Darwin was correct when he called the giraffe "beautifully adapted," but he did not have enough information to appreciate the full extent and refinement of the adaptations. Observe some giraffes eating and drinking in the zoo and you will notice that they don't just raise their heads to eat leaves high up in trees but also bend their heads to the ground to eat grass and drink water. Given their long legs, giraffes could be said to need a long neck less to reach up into the trees (which are not the only source of vegetation in many terrains) than to reach the ground to drink water.

The giraffe is an integrated adaptational package whose parts are carefully coordinated with one another. To fit successfully into its environmental niche, the giraffe presumably needed long legs. But in possessing long legs, it also needed a long neck. And to use its long neck, further adaptations were necessary. When a giraffe stands in its normal upright posture, the blood pressure in the neck arteries will be highest at the base of the neck and lowest in the head. The blood pressure generated by the heart must be extremely high to pump blood to the head. This, in turn, requires a very strong heart. But when the giraffe bends its head to the ground it encounters a potentially dangerous situation. By lowering its head between its front legs, it puts a great strain on the blood vessels of the neck and head. The blood pressure together with the weight of the blood in the neck could produce so much pressure in the head that, without safeguards, the blood vessels would burst.

Such safeguards, however, are in place. The giraffe's adaptational package includes a coordinated system of blood pressure control. Pressure sensors along the neck's arteries monitor the blood pressure and can signal activation of other mechanisms to counter any increase in pressure as the giraffe drinks or grazes. Contraction of the artery walls, the ability to shunt arterial blood flow bypassing the brain, and a web of small blood vessels between the arteries and the brain (the rete mirabile, or "marvelous net") all control the blood pressure in the giraffe's head. The giraffe's adaptations do not occur in isolation but presuppose other adaptations that all must be carefully coordinated into a single, highly specialized organism.

In short, the giraffe represents not a mere collection of isolated traits but a package of interrelated traits. It exhibits a top-down design that integrates all its parts into a single functional system. How did such an adaptational package arise? According to neo-Darwinian theory, the giraffe evolved to its present form by the accumulation of individual, random genetic changes that were sifted and preserved piecemeal by natural selection. But how could such a piecemeal process, in which mutation and selection act on the spur of the moment with no view to the future benefit of the organism, bring about an adaptational package, especially when the parts that make up the package are useless, or even detrimental, until the whole package is in place? That's the trouble with integrated packages -- they are package deals that offer no benefit until the entire package is in place.

To be sure, random genetic changes might adequately explain changes in a relatively isolated trait, such as an organism's color. But major changes, such as the evolution of a giraffe from an animal with short legs and short neck, would require an extensive suite of coordinated adaptations. The complex circulatory system of the giraffe must appear at the same time as its long neck or the animal will not survive. If the various elements of the circulatory system appear before the long neck, they are useless or even detrimental. This interdependence of structures strongly suggests a top-down design that is capable of anticipating the total engineering requirements of organisms like the giraffe.

The biological literature is filled with examples of adaptational packages. Some organisms, such as arthropods (a group that includes modern crabs and lobsters), even appeared with their adaptational packages intact during the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion marks the sudden appearance in the fossil record of numerous multicellular animals exhibiting diverse body plans. For most of these animals, evidence of fossil ancestors is completely lacking (with but one or two exceptions, there are no known Precambrian precursors). And yet these organisms arrive fully formed in the fossil record as integrated adaptational packages.

As always, microevolution is not the issue here. Moth populations that over generations shift in color from light to dark or mosquitoes that exhibit resistance to DDT are often cited as examples of evolution by natural selection. But such examples only illustrate small changes in the gene frequency of populations. A shift in the dominant moth coloring requires no new genetic information because the alleles (variant genes) are already present in the population. In contrast, major changes require major coordinated adaptations, which in turn require impressive amounts of new functional and genetic information. When we fully appreciate the informational requirements for the origin of even a modest new biological structure, much less the origin of a major adaptational package, we can see what a tall order it is for blind mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection to account for them.

According to E.J. Ambrose, selection pressure from the environment is too general for the demands of evolution: "The sort of message which the physical or biological environment can transmit to the organism in the way of new information is an extremely simple one, of the yes or no type such as 'Can I find food higher up the hill or not?'"2 Simple information like this, however, even when cumulated over time, is not the tightly integrated information needed to coordinate the numerous changes that must occur to build novel complex biological structures and body types. To evolve novel adaptational packages, populations face an information hurdle.

One way to see this hurdle is in the phenomenon of phylogenetic inertia. Phylogenetic inertia denotes the tendency of populations to maintain an average morphology as well as a limited degree of variability around the population average. How can mutations overcome phylogenetic inertia to evolve new adaptational packages? It's not clear that they can. Chromosome mutation may exchange parts of gene sequences. But there is no evidence that such "new" genes can provide the steady accumulation of novel traits (to say nothing of their coordination) that natural selection needs for Darwinian evolution to be effective. Chromosome mutation merely reshuffles existing genes.

The only known way to introduce genuinely new genetic information into the gene pool is by mutations that alter the nucleotide bases of individual genes. This is different from chromosome mutation, in which sections of DNA are duplicated, inverted, lost, or moved to another place in the DNA molecule. Point mutations do not merely rearrange but fundamentally alter the structure of existing genes. Such mutations typically result from random copying errors of DNA and are intensified through exposure to heat, chemicals, or radiation.

Could chromosome and point mutations working in tandem provide the raw material for macroevolutionary change? As the primary source of evolutionary novelty in the neo-Darwinian theory, mutations have been studied intensively for the past half-century. The fruit fly is a case in point. Its genome is easily manipulated and its short lifespan and reproductive cycle allows scientists to observe and track many generations. As a result, it has been the subject of numerous experiments. By bombarding it with radiation to increase the rate of mutations, scientists now have a pretty clear idea what kind of mutations can occur.

There is no evidence of mutations in fruit flies creating new structures. Mutations merely alter existing structures. For instance, mutations have produced crumpled, oversized, and undersized wings. They have produced double sets of wings (one set of which doesn't work and thus is deleterious to the organism). But they have not created a new kind of wing. Mutations have also created monstrosities, like fruit flies with legs growing where they should have antennae (a condition known as Antennapedia). But even such monstrosities merely rearrange existing structures, albeit in bizarre ways. Nor have mutations transformed the fruit fly into a new kind of insect. Experiments have simply produced variations of fruit flies.

In conclusion, to generate an adaptational package requires not piecemeal change but integrated, systematic change. Moreover, the source of such change must impart massive amounts of new functional information into an organism. Such information, however, gives no evidence of resulting from the interplay of mutation and selection. Indeed, it gives no evidence of being reducible to matter and energy at all.

As Norbert Wiener, one of the founders of information theory, remarked: "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day."3 Just as the information on a book's printed page is distinct from the ink and paper that make up the page, so the information in biological systems is distinct from its material constituents. What is the source of the information needed to build adaptational packages? As with the information in written messages and engineered systems, the only source known to be capable of generating information such as we see in biological systems is intelligence.

References:

(1) Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th edition, Ch. 7.

(2) E.J. Ambrose, Nature and Origin of the Biological World, 140-41.


(3) Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1961), 132.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away There was no one?

Fancy Math Can’t Make Aliens Real
An astrophysicist says extraterrestrial civilizations “almost certainly” existed at one time or another. Here’s what’s wrong with his argument.

ROSS ANDERSEN 

Last week, The New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Yes, There Have Been Aliens.” As its headline suggests, the piece makes an extraordinary claim. “While we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy,” its author writes, “we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history.”

That we could know such a thing is not inconceivable. For decades now, a small group of “interstellar archaeologists” has pored over star surveys, looking for evidence of long-dead civilizations, in the form of enormous technological structures. Reading that headline in the Times, I wondered: had one of these astronomers seen something extraordinary?

Alas, I was disappointed.


Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, wrote the essay that appeared in the Times. Frank is a gifted scientist, and a thoughtful science writer. He begins the op-ed with an enthusiastic update on the ongoing exoplanet revolution. I must confess I share his enthusiasm. I suspect that future historians of science will wonder what it was like to live in this moment. A little more than two decades ago, we weren’t sure whether there were any planets outside our solar system. Now we have reason to believe that nearly all stars host planets, and that many of them are rocky and wet like our own. No generation of humans has ever gazed up at night skies so pregnant with possibility.It is precisely this profusion of planets that gives Frank confidence that ours is not the first intelligent civilization. “Given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets,” he tells us, “the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.” Most of us have heard a version of this argument, late at night, around a campfire: Look at all the stars in the night sky. Is it really possible that all of their planets are sterile, and all of their predecessors, too?

These arguments have their appeal, but it is an appeal to intuition. The simple fact is that no matter how much we wish to live in a universe that teems with life—and many of us wish quite fervently—we haven’t the slightest clue how often it evolves. Indeed, we aren’t even sure how life arose on this planet. We have our just-so stories about lightning strikes and volcanic vents, but no one has come close to duplicating abiogenesis in a lab. Nor do we know whether basic organisms reliably evolve into beings like us.

We can’t extrapolate from our experience on this planet, because it’s only one data point. We could be the only intelligent beings in the universe, or we could be one among trillions, and either way Earth’s natural history would look the exact same. Even if we could draw some crude inferences, the takeaways might not be so reassuring. It took two billion years for simple, single-celled life to spawn our primordial lineage, the eukaryotes. And so far as we can tell, it only happened once. It took another billion years for eukaryotes to bootstrap into complex animal life, and hundreds of millions of years more for the development of language and sophisticated tool-making. And unlike the eye, or bodies with legs—adaptations that have arisen independently on many branches of life’s tree—intelligence of the spaceship-making sort has only emerged once, in all of Earth’s history. It just doesn’t seem like one of evolution’s go-to solutions.Frank compresses each of these important, billions-of-years-in-the-making leaps in evolution into a single “biotechnical” probability, which is meant to capture the likelihood of the whole sequence. For all we know, each step could be a highly contingent cosmic lottery win. Perhaps eukaryotes “usually” take tens of billions of years to evolve, and we lucked into an early outlier on the distribution curve. Perhaps we have been fortunate at every step of the way. Frank’s argument skips over these probabilities. Or rather, it bundles them up into a single, tidy unknown, that he can hammer with a big italicized number:   

“What our calculation revealed is that even if this probability [that technological civilization evolves] is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.”
Absent a clear account of how often we can expect planets to spawn technological civilizations, we don’t have any way to evaluate that “10 billion trillion” number. We certainly don’t have grounds to say that the “odds are high” that some civilization preceded ours, or enough evidence to suggest that skepticism about the possibility “borders on the irrational.”



    

Remedial arithmetic re:Darwinism

Carnivorous Plants, and Why 0 Really Is Not Equal to 1
Granville Sewell 

There is a little mathematics game that people sometimes play. You start with x=0, do some long, complicated algebraic manipulations, and end up with x=1. Since 0 is not equal to 1, you know there must be errors somewhere in the algebra, even before you find them, and before you even look at the mathematics. The game is to find the errors, which are hidden as well as possible.

I have frequently tried to make the point that to not believe in intelligent design, you have to believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles on Earth into computers, jet airplanes, science texts, and Apple iPhones, sometimes relating this to the more general statements of the second law of thermodynamics.

Materialists have theories as to how unintelligent forces alone could, over a long period of time, construct Apple iPhones, but there seems to me to be nothing in all of science that is more clear and more obvious than that unintelligent forces cannot construct iPhones. So we can be sure there are errors in their theories, before even looking at the details.

But I have been disappointed to discover that only other mathematicians seem to be impressed by such simple arguments. Mathematicians are trained to value simplicity. When we analyze a complicated problem, we often try to find another perspective from which things are much simpler and clearer. But, understandably, few in the biological sciences seem to accept that it is possible to draw any important conclusions about evolutionary theory without looking at the details of the theory. Most seem to be interested only in more complicated arguments, which require more knowledge of biology and biochemistry to understand.

So in Section 5.3 of my book In the Beginning: And Other Essays on Intelligent Design, I tried to point out some of the problems in the details of the Darwinists' proof that 0 really is equal to 1:

Consider, for example, the aquatic bladderwort, described in Plants and Environment (Daubenmire 1947):
"The aquatic bladderworts are delicate herbs that bear bladder-like traps 5mm or less in diameter. These traps have trigger hairs attached to a valve-like door which normally keeps the trap tightly closed. The sides of the trap are compressed under tension, but when a small form of animal life touches one of the trigger hairs the valve opens, the bladder suddenly expands, and the animal is sucked into the trap. The door closes at once, and in about 20 minutes the trap is set ready for another victim.
In a Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences article on carnivorous plants, authors Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig and Heinz-Albert Becker acknowledge that "it appears to be hard to even imagine a clear-cut selective advantage for all the thousands of postulated intermediate steps in a gradual scenario...for the origin of the complex carnivorous plant structures examined above."

The development of any major new feature presents similar problems, and according to Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who describes several spectacular examples in detail in Darwin's Black Box, the world of microbiology is especially loaded with such examples of "irreducible complexity."

It seems that until the trigger hair, the door, and the pressurized chamber were all in place, and the ability to digest small animals, and to reset the trap to be able to catch more than one animal, had been developed, none of the individual components of this carnivorous trap would have been of any use. What is the selective advantage of an incomplete vacuum chamber? To the casual observer, it might seem that none of the components of this trap would have been of any use whatever until the trap was almost perfect, but of course a good Darwinist will imagine two or three far-fetched intermediate useful stages, and consider the problem solved. I believe you would need to find thousands of intermediate stages before this example of irreducible complexity has been reduced to steps small enough to be bridged by single random mutations -- a lot of things have to happen behind the scenes and at the microscopic level before this trap could catch and digest animals. But I don't know how to prove this.

I am further sure that even if you could imagine a long chain of useful intermediate stages, each would present such a negligible selective advantage that nothing as clever as this carnivorous trap could ever be produced, but I can't prove that either. Finally, that natural selection seems even remotely plausible depends on the fact that while species are awaiting further improvements, their current complex structure is "locked in," and passed on perfectly through many generations (in fact, errors are constantly corrected and damage is constantly repaired). This phenomenon is observed, but inexplicable -- I don't see any reason why all living organisms do not constantly decay into simpler components -- as, in fact, they do as soon as they die.

When you look at the individual steps in the development of life, Darwin's explanation is difficult to disprove, because some selective advantage can be imagined for almost anything. Like many other schemes designed to violate the second law, it is only when you step back and look at the net result that it becomes obvious it won't work.


For more, see my recent article at Evolution News, "Why Should Evolutionary Biology Be So Different?" -- an excerpt from my new book, Christianity for Doubters.

Immortality on the cheap?

Your Mind into a Computer Would Not Be You
Wesley J. Smith 

The transhumanist fantasy about becoming immortal through uploading your mind to a computer is nonsense -- even if such a thing could be done.

Here's the goal. From the Express story:

Mr Itskov has been subject to a BBC documentary titled The Immortalist, in which he said: "Within the next 30 years, I am going to make sure that we can all live forever.

"I'm 100 per cent confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it."

The 2045 Initiative hopes to have functioning 'avatars' by 2020 where a human will be able to control a robot via their brain. Five years later, the team will create another form of avatar which will be able to host a human brain that will have been transferred after the person has died.

By 2035, the network of scientists aim to have an avatar with an artificial brain which can possess a human personality. The team hope to have completed the trans-human beings by 2045 when they plan to have a hologram-like avatar.

Ray Kurzweil is into this.

But here's the point. That program -- whatever it consisted of and no matter how much it mimicked your likely responses -- would not be "you."

"You" would be dead. "You" wouldn't be conscious. "You" wouldn't be anywhere, at least not in the corporeal realm.


To put it another way, the replica would just be a very sophisticated Siri. That some of the world's supposedly smartest people buy into this immortality-in-a-computer jazz is puzzling.

Universal common ancestry in the hot seat VIII

Common Descent: An Obituary
Lee M. Spetner

Common Descent (CD) has been offered as a scientific theory and must therefore be judged as such. Its status as a scientific theory, however, has never been properly established. Without a theory showing that speciation is reasonably probable in the available time, all the circumstantial evidence proffered for CD by its advocates is for naught, and the evidence of proteins such as vitellogenin (the subject of some discussion here lately) is no more than circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence can support a conclusion only when there is a theory to connect the evidence with the conclusion.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Darwin's suggestion for the variation on which he meant for natural selection to act was rejected because it turned out to be nonheritable. In the first third of the 20th century several replacement suggestions for the variation were offered only to be later rejected. In 1941 a project was launched to establish the theory of evolution on a sound basis by bringing together facts and methods from all branches of science, and a decade later was considered fully established. The modern synthesis (MS) embraced natural selection and took the variation to be mutations and recombinations in the chromosomes, although exactly what these were was not clearly understood at the time.

The discovery of the structure of the DNA in the mid 20th century was thought to solidify the MS. The random mutations were identified with random changes in the DNA sequence attributed to DNA-copying errors and genetic recombination. The variation was no longer a vague genetic effect that it had been: it was now an understood random process.

With a known random mechanism now available for the variation on which natural selection could operate, the randomness became subject to mathematical investigation. Mutation rates could be measured and in principle the probability of an evolutionary event could be calculated. For the first time it became possible to check if Darwin's celebrated mechanism of random variation and natural selection could really account for CD. But the advocates of CD never picked up the challenge to publish any probability calculations. Some who questioned CD, however, did calculate and found the probabilities of speciation under random mutation and natural selection in the available time to be negligibly small and essentially zero. These results were never competently rebutted. The conclusion is inescapable that CD has no theoretical backing, has been refuted, and is not a valid scientific theory.

The discovery of the structure of DNA followed closely on Claude Shannon's discovery that information was quantifiable. It was quickly grasped that the order of the nucleotides in the DNA molecule was the defining information of the organism. The DNA base pairs played the role of symbols carrying information and the base-pair sequence was immediately assumed to carry a program that controlled the development and functioning of the organism. Evolution was soon recognized as a process whose job it was to build this information.

Toward the end of the 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st, new phenomena of genetic change were discovered to have important implications for evolution. Epigenetic effects were found to produce phenotypic change, but without changing the base sequence of the DNA. Transposable elements (TE's) were found to produce phenotypic change and did change the base sequence. A movement is currently underway among evolutionists to extend (or replace) the MS to include these effects but there is so far no consensus on just how to do it. TE activity in the genome is known to lead to microevolutionary phenotypic effects. But the activity is not random: it is under cellular control. This is nonrandom evolution driven by environmental change. In my book Not by Chance (1996), I suggested what I called the Nonrandom Evolutionary Hypothesis(NREH) and elaborated on it in a later book, The Evolution Revolution (2014). Environmental stress induces activation of TE's, which in turn produce an adaptive phenotypic response in individuals. TE's are activated both in somatic cells and in the germline and are therefore heritable.

TE activity can be the basis of a theory of evolution -- but one that does not include CD. It cannot include CD because the mechanism for TE activation is endogenous in the organism. There is no way presently known to explain how that mechanism might have evolved. Its evolution could not be explained by random mutations for the reasons explained above.


CD must therefore be abandoned as a failed theory. All the evidence given for CD -- fossils, molecular similarities, junk DNA, pseudogenes, vestigial organs, and vestigial molecules -- is circumstantial, for which there may be explanations better than the invalid theory of CD. In many cases of vestigial organs, vestigial proteins, pseudogenes, and "junk" DNA, better explanations have been found. There is reason to suppose that better explanations for remaining "evidence" for CD will be forthcoming. In the meantime, bringing "evidence" for CD is a futile endeavor.

New neighbours?

Solar System may hold ten planets or more, say scientists 

by  Sarah Knapton, 



The Solar System may hold 10 or 11 planets, scientists have predicted after running new computer models on the data which led to the announcement of Planet Nine.

In January, astronomers Professor Konstantin Batygin and Professor Mike Brown from California Institute of Technology predicted the existence of a ninth planet after discovering that 13 objects in the Kuiper Belt – an area beyond Neptune – were all moving together as if ‘lassooed’ by the gravity of a huge object.

Now scientists from Cambridge University and Spain have discovered that the paths of the dwarf planets are not as stable as they thought, meaning they could be falling under the influence of more planets further out.

Sverre Aarseth from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, two freelance Spanish astronomers, said that the orbit of Planet Nine would have to change to allow the dwarf planet to maintain stability for a long time.

Otherwise more planets would need to be involved.


“We believe that in addition to a Planet Nine, there could also be a Planet Ten and even more,” said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos.The new study, which is published in the journal ‘Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society’ is one of several to have addressed the question of Planet Nine in recent months.

Researcher Alexander Mustill from Lund University, Sweden , said the new planet may have come from outside the Solar System, and so could be an exoplanet.

His hypothesis is that around 4.5 billion years ago, our then young Sun “stole” this planet from a neighbouring star.

‘Planet Nine’ is believed to be 10 times the mass of Earth and takes between 10,000 and 20,000 years to orbit the Sun. It is so big that researchers have branded it ‘the most planety planet of the solar system.’

Astronomers are eagerly searching the skies for Planet Nine. Only the planet’s rough orbit is known, not the precise location of the planet on that elliptical path. If the planet happens to be close to its perihelion - the closest point it gets to the Sun - astronomers should be able to spot it in images captured by previous surveys.

If it is in the most distant part of its orbit, the world’s largest telescopes, such as the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Subaru Telescope, all on Maunakea in Hawaii will be needed to see it.

If, however, Planet Nine is now located anywhere in between, many telescopes have a shot at finding it. Pluto used to be regarded as the ninth planet but was downgraded in 2006 to a dwarf-planet or ‘plutoid’ and is now known unceremoniously as ‘asteroid number 134340.’

Butterflies for design

Defects on Purpose Make Butterfly Wings Shine
Evolution News & Views

Illustra Media's film Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies showcased many dazzling butterfly wings, but didn't have time to discuss the secrets behind those colors. Scientists have long identified the source of the colors as not coming from pigments, but from light interference patterns at the nanoscale. A regularly repeating 3-D structure called a "photonic crystal" reinforces some colors and interferes with others. That's how the dazzling blue of a Morpho butterfly is produced: crystals in the scales of the wings play tricks with light. Grind up the scales and you won't get a pile of blue dust, just brown or gray material. It's the highly-organized nanostructure that generates the brilliant blue of the living insect flapping in the sunlight.

But how does a butterfly grow those crystals? Something has to guide them into position as the wing develops in the chrysalis. Metamorphosis showed the wings taking shape but only touched on the complexity involved. Now, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have shined some X-ray light onto the process. In a paper in the AAAS open-access journal Science Advances, they used X-ray diffraction to examine the properties of individual scales.

Many organisms in nature have evolved sophisticated cellular mechanisms to produce photonic nanostructures and, in recent years, diverse crystalline symmetries have been identified and related to macroscopic optical properties. However, because we know little about the distributions of domain sizes, the orientations of photonic crystals, and the nature of defects in these structures, we are unable to make the connection between the nanostructure and its development and functionality. [Emphasis added.]
As Illustra showed with electron micrographs, the wings are composed of scales that overlap like shingles on a roof. The scales, made of the protein chitin, begin as individual cells. The cells must manufacture chitin and place it in the right orientation. The scientists found that the crystals of chitin are strongly oriented normal to the plane of the scale (i.e., perpendicular). The crystals apparently grow from the edges of the cell toward the middle, where they meet at domain boundaries.

We report on nondestructive studies of the morphology of chitinous photonic crystals in butterfly wing scales. Using spatially and angularly resolved x-ray diffraction, we find that the domains are highly oriented with respect to the whole scale, indicating growth from scale boundaries. X-ray coherent diffractive imaging reveals two types of crystalline domain interfaces: abrupt changes between domains emerging from distinct nucleation sites and smooth transitions with edge dislocations presumably resulting from internal stresses during nanostructure development. Our study of the scale structure reveals new aspects of photonic crystal growth in butterfly wings and shows their similarity to block copolymer materials. It opens new avenues to exploration of fundamental processes underlying the growth of biological photonic nanostructures in a variety of species.
The domain boundaries, they found, are randomly oriented, yet each crystal is highly organized within each domain. "The photonic crystal is reminiscent of a thin polycrystalline film, with the domains being highly oriented in the direction normal to the scale boundary, which suggests a layer-by-layer crystal growth process starting at the cell membrane," the paper says. The boundaries, furthermore, are "extremely sharp," on the order of one unit cell. "The preferred orientation of the domains, normal to the scale plane, is quite remarkable and is consistent with crystal nucleation at the scale boundary and crystal growth outward." This gives the researchers some ideas about how to manufacture artificial photonic crystals. Again, it's remarkable as well as intriguing:

The discovery of the edge dislocations in the biological photonic crystals is particularly remarkable because artificially manufactured topological defects in photonic crystals lead to interesting optical properties such as Anderson localization of light. Two intriguing questions are whether nature-engineered defects for a particular purpose and whether mimicking similar growth conditions allows for controlled manufacturing of defects in artificial photonic structures.
"Nature-engineered defects for a particular purpose"? Can it be that defects have a function? Indeed they can. The press release from UCSD describes why scientists sometimes "engineer" defects to improve their strength and function:

These crystal dislocations or defects occur, the researchers say, when an otherwise perfectly periodic crystal lattice slips by one row of atoms. "Defects may have a negative connotation, but they are actually very useful in improving materials," explains Singer. "For example, blacksmiths have learned over centuries how to purposefully induce defects into metals to make them stronger. 'Defect engineering' is also a focus for many research teams and companies working in the semiconductor field. In photonic crystals, defects can enhance light-scattering properties through an effect called light localization."
The bug is a feature. Defects consisting of random domain boundaries in the butterfly scale actually enhance the light-scattering properties. Post-doc Adrej Singer describes "tiny crystal irregularities that may enhance light-scattering properties, making the butterfly wings appear brighter."

It looks like we will have to add "defect engineering" to our list of intelligent design sciences in action. How strange that the butterfly figured this out before mankind did:

"In the evolution of butterfly wings," he adds, "it appears nature learned how to engineer these defects on purpose."

We can dismiss the references to evolution. Nature does not learn to engineer things for a purpose. Organisms do not evolve sophisticated cellular mechanisms in order to produce optical properties. Minds do that. If our best optical engineers look to butterflies for inspiration to improve their manufacturing, what does that tell you? It implies that engineers do not employ unguided, aimless Darwinian processes of chance. They use intelligent design. By arguing from lesser to greater, we explain what goes on in the "black box" of the chrysalis, where "remarkable" and "sophisticated" engineering generates structure, function, and beauty.

Nature's navigators for design

Oh, Deer: Mammals Use Magnetic Navigation, Too
Evolution News & Views

You're in a herd of deer when a mountain lion is seen approaching. What's your safest retreat? Is it to run directly away? Is it to scatter in all directions? Or is it to run according to a predetermined orientation?

Scientists in Europe were intrigued that roe deer seem to orient in a north-south direction when grazing and when startled, so they decided to investigate. What they uncovered was a novel case of magnetic navigation in the animal kingdom. A Springer news item says:

Why do deer in a group, when startled, suddenly bolt away together and never collide with each other? It's because these deer have an inner compass that allows them to follow a certain direction in order to make their escape. Their getaway is almost always along a north-south axis, thanks to their ability to sense the magnetic field, says Petr Obleser of the Czech University of Life Sciences in the Czech Republic. He and Hynek Burda of the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany, are lead authors of a study in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. [Emphasis added.]
This is a first for large mammals. Illustra Media has shown in Metamorphosis how butterflies use the magnetic field to get to Mexico. They showed in Flight how Arctic Terns navigate from pole to pole, and in Living Waters how salmon and sea turtles use magnetosensing in their long-distance migrations. Suggestions of magnetosensing had been reported for bats and mole rats, but large mammals like deer -- who would have thought they use an inner compass for everyday safety?

One of the authors of the new paper, Dr. Hynek Burda of University of Duisburg-Essen, had contributed to a 2008 study published in PNAS that used Google Earth to find cattle and deer preferentially orienting on a north-south axis. BBC News commented on this finding, saying that this phenomenon "has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years." At the time, the function of this orientation was unknown. One biologist remarked, "We need to think about some really fundamental things that this sensory ability provides in animals."

Since then, Obleser and Burda monitored roe deer from April to August 2014. This species of deer tends to congregate in flat areas on agricultural land, making them easy to observe with binoculars. From 60 locations, they recorded data on the deer's orientation at rest and when startled, monitoring 188 escape behaviors under a variety of conditions.

It was found that roe deer tend to align their bodies along the north-south axis when grazing. When startled, the animals generally fled away from observers. They did not merely make their getaway in the direction directly opposite to the approaching threat, but consistently did so north- or southwards. In fact, they seemed to actively avoid escaping westwards and eastwards, says Obleser. Wind direction or the position of the sun had no influence on the direction of their escape route.
The authors took note of the time of day, odor, wind and other factors; the magnetic orientation still prevailed. If a forest shelter was nearby, however, the herd could override the magnetic tendency and escape directly toward the shelter.

Is there a reason for this behavior? The north-south escape strategy was especially pronounced when the deer were congregated in groups. The authors feel the strategy helps the deer avoid collisions that would be more likely to occur if each animal took off in a random direction. Other possible functions include keeping group cohesion, guiding the deer get back to the previous grazing spot after the danger has subsided, and helping a mother find its fawn it left hiding in the grass.

For the strategy to work, an animal needs hardware and software programmed into its body and brain.

The researchers believe that the tendency of deer to align their bodies with respect to a north-south magnetic field line confirm that they are magnetosensitive and magnetoreceptive. This assists the animals to "read" and comprehend the mental maps they hold of the landscapes they occupy.
The authors did not speculate about the predator. What if it has a compass, too? What if it knows the strategy? Just speculating, it would seem the deer still have an advantage. The lion can't run north and south at the same time, and would have no way of knowing in advance which direction the deer will choose to run. If they split directions, the deer in both groups would still have some safety in numbers. Most of the advantages would appear to accrue to the prey; the wide angle of 180 degrees "would maximize the distance between the animal and the danger," the authors say.

The authors feel this pioneering study points to magnetosensing being common in mammals. It might even reside in us humans!

This is the first study of escape behavior in animals which considers also the role of absolute compass direction. Our findings confirm existence of magnetic alignment and thus magnetosensitivity in the roe deer and provide first evidence for its role as the so-called direction indicator in control of escape behavior in roe deer in particular and in mammals in general. Our results make the speculations more plausible that the magnetic alignment helps to organize and read the mental (cognitive) map of space. (In analogy, humans are more efficient in reading and commenting the map, if it is held in an accustomed direction: with north pointing upwards and if the person aligns with the map and with the visible landmarks.)
Many of us can probably relate to that: facing north and holding a map to try to find our way around when vacationing in an unfamiliar city. It's just by "analogy" the authors say we might also have directional sensing. That deserves further study. Could a latent human ability for magnetosensing be trained? Could it augment orienteering by the sun and the stars? Fascinating thought. Maybe it will put compass makers out of business.

In the new open-access paper, the authors make no use of evolutionary theory to explain the coordinated escape strategy of roe deer with its requirements for magnetosensing equipment. There's no mention of natural selection, fitness or phylogeny. Why would that be, if nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution?

As design theorists, we can identify prerequisites for magnetically-based escape strategy in roe deer and other mammals:

Construction of crystals of iron or protein that respond to the earth's magnetic field.

Neurons that can sense the response of the crystals.

Brain receptors that can process the neural inputs and interpret them.

Mental maps to place the interpretations in a regional context.

Brain regions that can coordinate the magnetic data with other sensory data.

Stored instincts to activate body systems to respond appropriately.

Genes to encode the construction of all the above.

Epigenetic systems to guide the development of the genetic information.

That's a bigger parts list than in the classic mousetrap model of irreducible complexity. In fact, each item on the list could itself be called irreducibly complex.

Needless to say, magnetosensation presupposes a planet with a strong magnetic field. Of the rocky planets in our solar system, the Earth is unique in that regard; Mercury's magnetic field is too weak, Venus has none, and Mars has only patches of magnetism. Many regard a strong magnetic field as a requirement for habitability, to act as a shield from stellar and cosmic radiation. It's one of at least twenty improbable factors listed in The Privileged Planet that point to fine-tuning for habitability.


Intelligence is the only cause we know that is capable of arranging multiple independent factors for a function. The design inference strengthens with the improbability or specified complexity of each factor. With Darwinian evolution apparently of no use in explaining why roe deer know how to escape along a north-south axis, an inference to intelligent design beckons.

Transhumanism's brave new world.

When Atheists Meet Creationism, You Get Creatheism
Brendan Dixon 

Creathiest: It is not a word that rolls easily off the tongue. But I am at a loss for one that better describes the atheists Daniel Jackson describes in a condescending post at The Spectator ("Atheists are embracing Gods and creationism").

No bleak darkness for these disbelievers. No existential angst enters their minds. No despair over the vast emptiness in which Earth floats, seemingly alone with life. Creathiests have the comforts of religion without the commitment of a creed. Post-humanity will bring an end to all ills. Eternal life arrives when we can upload ourselves into a machine. And Elon Musk admitted to a Creator when, a couple of weeks ago, he suggested that the odds of our living in a simulation to be "a billion to one."

Jackson writes:

Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and entrepreneur, the twenty-first century's answer to Howard Hughes, believes we are living in a computer simulation.

...

His argument -- that, given the increasing pace of progress in computer technology, we will eventually be able to synthesise reality and consciousness -- is an abbreviated version of a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy Professor at Oxford.

The paper suggests that if we aren't living in a simulation, civilisation will end before we are able to reach the 'posthuman' age. The detail and the terminology isn't important; the idea is bunkum, the sort of thing that's fun to think about on psilocybin, but not much use otherwise.

What's interesting is the way in which atheists are embracing the idea -- or at least the possibility -- of creationism. If we are living in a simulation, someone or something had to create it.

It brings a kind of pleasure to watch someone apparently without religion call attention to the religiosity of the supposedly irreligious devoted to demolishing religion. It is, truly, ironic.

After all, only the religiously devoted would shut down rational discussion over their creation myth: evolution by means of random change and natural selection. Why else would otherwise very smart, well-read, articulate people fall for and promote the silly, unfounded "just so" stories with which evolutionary research is generously stocked? What else can explain the consistent misrepresentation of alternative views and the refusal to engage counterarguments? Only because it serves creathiests as their creation myth is evolution held with such irrational passion against the evidence of design.

The same fervor promotes the ungrounded faith in a coming Singularity, when computers will transcend us, perhaps leading to our demise. It is not a logical result drawn from the data. It is a wild extrapolation that fails to admit the vast amount we don't know and the limits of our technological successes. It is not a short leap from a pattern-matching, game-playing machine -- such as Google's AlphaGo -- to awe-inspiring AI super-intelligence. It is a blind leap of religious faith.


For everyone engaged in the evolution debate, a calm, rational discussion would be best. Religious devotion, no matter how sincere, cannot alter the evidence or up-end the challenge. Let's leave our a priori commitments behind and look closely at what we're seeing, following the evidence wherever it leads.