Darwinists try to shield a treasured icon.

The Recapitulation Myth
Jonathan M. June 29, 2010 12:06 PM


Casey Luskin recently posted two blogs showing that textbooks still misuse Haeckel's long-discredited embryo drawings when attempting to provide evidence for Darwinian evolution (see here and here). Luskin provided ample documentation to demonstrate that these drawings are still printed in some recent textbooks.

Over at The Panda's Thumb blog, apologists for Darwinian theory have defended (see here and here) Ernst Haeckel from the charge of fraud and have argued, albeit unconvincingly, that, in principle, the concept of recapitulation is a valid one.

According to Nick Matzke:
Haeckel didn't ignore the differences in embryos in the earliest period just after fertilization (differences which are visually significant but mostly fairly trivial, due to the different amounts of yolk in different vertebrate eggs).
Apparently Matzke missed some of the authorities cited by Luskin, which contradict Matzke's claims. All the necessary refutations of Matzke can be found in Luskin's original posts:

I. Post 1: Contrary to Matzke's claims, authorities acknowledge that Haeckel did "ignore the differences in embryos":

1. Stephen Jay Gould: "Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases -- in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent -- simply copied the same figure over and over again." [Stephen Jay Gould, "Abscheulich! (Atrocious!)," Natural History, Mar. 2000, at 42, 44--45.]

2. Michael Richardson: "It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology." [Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," 277 Science 1435, 1435 (1997).]

3. Richardson et al. 1997: "His drawings are also highly inaccurate, exaggerating the similarities among embryos, while failing to show the differences" [Michael K. Richardson et al., "There is No Highly Conserved Embryonic Stage in the Vertebrates: Implications for Current Theories of Evolution and Development," 196 Anatomy and Embryology, 91, 92--104 (1997).]

II. Post 2: The differences between vertebrate embryos at their earliest stages are not said to be, as Matzke puts it, "fairly trivial, due to the different amounts of yolk in different vertebrate eggs":

1. Collazo (2000): "Recent workers have shown that early development can vary quite extensively, even within closely related species, such as sea urchins, amphibians, and vertebrates in general. By early development, I refer to those stages from fertilization through neurolation (gastrulation for such taxa as sea urchins, which do not undergo neurulation). Elinson (1987) has shown how such early stages as initial cleavages and gastrula can vary quite extensively across vertebrates." [Andres Collazo, "Developmental Variation, Homology, and the Pharyngula Stage," 49 Systematic Biology 3, 9 (2000)]

2. Richardson et al: "...it is preceded by variation at earlier stages, including gastrulation and neurulation." [Michael K. Richardson et al., "There is No Highly Conserved Embryonic Stage in the Vertebrates: Implications for Current Theories of Evolution and Development," 196 Anatomy and Embryology, 91, 105 (1997)]

3. Later in embryo development, the differences at the supposedly conserved "pharyngular" stage are even greater. Richardson also writes, "We find that embryos at the tailbud stage -- thought to correspond to a conserved stage -- show variations in form due to allometry, heterochrony, and differences in body plan and somite number ... Contrary to recent claims that all vertebrate embryos pass through a stage when they are the same size, we find a greater than 10-fold variation in greatest length at the tailbud stage ... The wide variation in morphology among vertebrate embryos is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a phylogenetically conserved tailbud stage. ... Our survey, however, does not support the second claim, and instead reveals considerable variability -- and evolutionary lability -- of the tailbud stage, the purported phylotypic stage of vertebrates."

According to these authorities, it sure sounds like among early embryos there are more than "mostly fairly trivial" differences "due to the different amounts of yolk in different vertebrate eggs."

Recapitulating Recapitulation
While Matzke had the decency not to defend recapitulation theory, blogger Matt Young also responded. His approach, quite incredibly, was not to challenge Luskin's discussion of textbooks, but rather to defend a modified version of Haeckel's long-discredited ideas about recapitulation!

My colleague Paul Strode wrote a very clear and concise explanation of Ernst Haeckel's "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" law for our book Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails). In Chapter 11, Strode explains that Haeckel was wrong in thinking that embryos resemble the ancestral adult forms; rather, early embryos resemble the embryos of ancestral forms. In other words, Haeckel was on to something, but he didn't get it quite right. Strode explains further, "Recapitulation nevertheless provides helpful insight into evolutionary relationships and ancestry," and argues that von Baer's law is closer to the truth.
The base principle behind any variation of "recapitulation" is that higher taxa evolved by the addition of developmental stages to the end of the morphogenesis of lower taxa. Karl Ernst von Baer demonstrated that development is a process of progressive specialization towards the adult form. While early-stage embryos may well superficially resemble one another, this is because of their unspecialized form. The embryos progressively diverge as they become specialized. For example, von Baer could recognize, in the development of a chick, a stage at which it could be identified as a vertebrate, a later stage at which it could be identified as a bird, etc. Only later could it be identified as a particular type of bird. While there is a marked similarity among early vertebrate embryos, they are still distinctively vertebrate. They do not pass through a form at which it resembles an invertebrate.

I would ask the bloggers at Panda's Thumb to point to a single case in which evolutionary modifications of ontogeny have taken the form of addition of a new terminal phase to the previously terminal phase during ontogeny. It is all of the stages of ontogeny that are modified during the process of evolution. Indeed, many structures arise early in the development of higher taxa that are missing from the embryos of lower taxa. One example would be the placenta in mammals.

The matter becomes still more problematic when one considers instances of species that have similarities of adult form but radically differ in early forms. In order to account for this, one needs to postulate that the forms evolved in a convergent fashion. Then there are the tissues that arise in the opposite order from the sequence in which they are presumed to have evolved, one example being the development of teeth prior to the tongue (whereas the tongue is presumed to have evolved first).

As Jonathan Wells observes in Icons of Evolution:

If the implications of Darwin's theory for early vertebrate development were true, we would expect these five classes [bony fish, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal] to be most similar as fertilized eggs; slight differences would appear during cleavage, and the classes would diverge even more during gastrulation. What we actually observe, however, is that the eggs of the five classes start out noticeably different from each other; the cleavage patterns in four of the five classes show some general similarities, but the pattern in mammals is radically different. In the gastrulation stage, a fish is very different from an amphibian, and both are very different from reptiles, birds, and mammals, which are somewhat similar to each other. Whatever pattern can be discerned here, it is certainly not a pattern in which the earliest stages are the most similar and later stages are more different.

Sons of God by design.

Darwinism Vs. the real world. XXXIV

Central Command: The Brain's Role in Maintaining Balance
Howard Glicksman 

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

The brain is a very remarkable and versatile organ. It makes us conscious of our surroundings, controls our breathing and cardiovascular system, lets us swallow, controls our movements, and allows us to manipulate things. It also provides homeostasis of the body's internal environment by controlling such things as appetite, thirst, fluid balance, and core temperature.

The brain has several interconnected regions for emotions like fear, anger, love, and pleasure. It also has regions for higher functions such as thought, memory, language, calculation, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and judgment. Scientists know that these functions are accomplished by billions of nerve cells interacting with each other through chemical means. But knowing that, for example, the visual cortex receives millions of impulses from light entering the eyes, which are split up, overlapping, turned around, and upside down, does not explain how we can see. The same applies for everything else we experience. What within us takes these nerve impulses and actually does the seeing, the hearing, the feeling, the moving, and the thinking?

Using our brain to try to figure out how our brain works is a mystery because, as Marcel Gabriel said, "a mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question." Neuroscience tells us that when the mind decides it wants to do something, it sets off a chain of brain-controlled neural events. Clinical experience teaches that for our earliest ancestors to have survived within the laws of nature, they would have had to have been able to perform well-coordinated movements to achieve these goal-directed activities. How does the brain do it?

To appreciate how your muscles work, now would be a good time to test them. Slowly move your eyes and eyelids, mouth and jaw, then your neck, all the joints of your upper and lower extremities, and then your back, in every possible direction. Then go back and try it again, except this time go as fast as you can and see which parts of the body you can move the fastest and with the most precision and control.

You probably noticed that your eyes and eyelids, mouth and jaw moved very quickly with precision and control. Your fingers moved much faster, and with more precision and control, than your toes, your wrists more than your ankles, your elbows more than your knees, your shoulders more than your hips, and your neck more than your upper and lower back.

Each skeletal muscle consists of numerous muscle fibers. When stimulated by a motor neuron, they contract and the bones to which they are attached move toward each other. The muscle fibers controlled by a given motor neuron is called a motor unit. The motor units of different muscles contain different numbers of muscle fibers in relation to their function. For the coarse strong movements of the back, the legs and the arms, there are usually hundreds to several thousand muscle fibers per motor unit. In contrast, for the fine and precise movements of the eyes and the fingers, there are as few as five to ten muscle fibers per motor unit. In addition, compared to the muscles of the back, the legs, and the arms, the muscles of the fingers and the eyes usually have many more muscle spindles to provide the central nervous system with more information on muscle length and the rate of change. This helps them perform intricate movements.

Since muscles only work by contraction, a given muscle can only move the eyeball or the bones of a joint in one direction. To move them back requires a complementary muscle which must also stay relaxed to allow the given muscle to do its job in the first place, and vice versa. For example, when the lateral rectus of the right eye contracts, the eye looks to the right. But to move it back to the left requires it's complementary muscle, the medial rectus, to contract. But the medial rectus must have stayed relaxed to allow the lateral rectus to have done its job in the first place, and vice versa. Similarly, the biceps contracts to flex the elbow, but the only way to straighten the elbow out again is for the triceps to contract. And the tricep must have remained totally relaxed for the biceps to do its job in the first place, and vice versa.

The main lesson to learn here is that to perform a well coordinated action, it is not only important for a given muscle to contract, but also that its counterpart relax. The muscle spindles within both muscles monitor the changing of each muscle's length and the joint angle. In this way, they notify the brain of what is happening and verify that the correct actions are taking place. Without nervous control of these complementary muscles, there would be a continuous tug of war that would make maintaining the body's position and performing well-coordinated, goal-directed actions impossible.

The regions of the brain responsible for the initiation and refinement of purposeful movement are primarily the motor areas of the cerebral cortex, the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum.

The motor cortex on one side of the brain controls the movement of the opposite side of the body. Messages from the motor cortex travel down the spinal cord to the motor neurons, telling them what to do. The motor cortex also sends signals to the basal ganglia and the cerebellum to inform them of what is happening. The motor cortex does not make decisions within a vacuum. It analyzes sensory input sent to it from other areas of the brain, which tell it about things like vision, touch, vibration, pressure, temperature, pain, balance, and the position and movements of the limbs. It also receives information from the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. It is this ongoing feedback from throughout the nervous system that allows the motor cortex to make adjustments in the force needed to achieve certain voluntary actions. Clinical experience shows that injuries and malfunction of the motor cortex on one side of the brain results in weakness and clumsiness of the muscles on the opposite side of the body.

The basal ganglia consist of several nerve-connecting centers that lie deep within the brain, just below the cerebral hemispheres. Due to their location, the basal ganglia have not been easily accessible to investigation, so our understanding of their function is somewhat limited. However, clinical experience from disturbances associated with injury to the basal ganglia indicates that they play a vital role in the body's goal-directed activities. The basal ganglia are connected with neural circuits that involve both sensory and motor impulses that give feedback to both the sensory and motor regions of the cerebral cortex. The messages from the basal ganglia can either turn on (excite) or turn off (inhibit) the neurons they contact. It is thought that the basal ganglia are responsible for the processing and integration of sensory data that is used to regulate motor function. It appears that the basal ganglia are involved in some basic movement programs that are initiated by the cerebral cortex and acted upon by other higher centers as goal-directed activities take place. Clinical experience shows that diseases of the basal ganglia usually cause a constellation of symptoms and signs known as movement disorders, of which Parkinson's Disease is the most common. This condition causes muscle rigidity, slow movements, and often a pill-rolling tremor at rest. All of these progress to weakness and marked debility over time.

The cerebellum (little brain), which lies under the occipital lobes and behind the brainstem, receives sensory information from the muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, and the receptors of the skin and joints. This means the cerebellum is aware of the status of the muscles and joints as they perform activities. The cerebellum also receives sensory data from the vestibular regions of the brainstem, so it's involved in balance as well. The cerebral cortex informs the cerebellum of what actions are being planned, which allows it to have a moment-to-moment knowledge of all of the activity within the neuromuscular system. The cerebellum analyzes and integrates all of this sensory data so that it can support and modify the messages being sent to the muscles by the motor cortex. The cerebellum is therefore able to make moment-to-moment adjustments to allow coordinated voluntary actions and maintain balance, posture, and position. Injuries or degeneration of the cerebellum can result in dizziness, imbalance, and loss of muscle control, causing clumsiness, an intention tremor, and slurred speech.


Clearly, for our earliest ancestors to have lived long enough to reproduce required them to not only have this irreducibly complex neuromuscular system, but also have a natural survival capacity to react fast enough and know what to do to survive. Evolutionary biologists believe that somehow or other chance and the laws of nature alone brought about this incredible masterpiece of precision that allows us to "live and move and have our being." All human experience says otherwise.

The real science stopper etc.

Intelligent Design and the Computer Analogy
David Klinghoffer

Imagine if computer science allowed researchers to consider the physical components of computers but not the "ideas" that drive them, imparted by their designers. Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, poses that instructive question in a brief video conversation.

Most of evolutionary biology is limited by just such a stricture: consider the physical aspect of living creatures without probing the ideas -- the purposeful, immaterial design -- that we embody in physical form. In biology, you may not weigh the evidence for design, otherwise you're damned as a creationist!

This isn't to say people or other animals are computers, or machines. We're much more, which makes the stricture against intelligent design all the more perverse.

Still, the computer analogy is helpful. A couple of nights ago my family and I were watching the 2015 biopic Steve Jobs, and I was struck by a line delivered at the end. Jobs, co-founder of Apple, is confronted by his daughter over a particular and hurtful moral failing of his that has been revealed to her. She's furious and demands to know why he did what he did. Reaching for his lifetime experience in designing computers, in which he enjoyed both success and failure, he answers, "I'm poorly made."

It's a powerful, poignant scene, and what an interesting answer. Doesn't every parent dread the moment when our children realize how "poorly made" we are? Jobs wasn't speaking in a physical sense, of course, but rather a spiritual one. He was a brilliant but difficult and egotistic person.

Our bodies are wonderfully designed but all too transient and easily abused. So too, in their different way, are our spirits -- capable of soaring to sublime heights, but also congenitally flawed and frail. What joins body and soul is the mysterious design.

The film describes the agonies that went into the design of Apple computers -- the physical design and the software, but focuses -- this is where the drama lies, obviously -- on the intentions of their creators, mainly Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Now imagine if the narrative were totally reworked with an exclusive focus on Apple computers as a series of physical artifacts of increasing sophistication, arising spontaneously, as if neither the design nor the designers existed.


Crazy! The story would be flat, boring -- and false. Yet this in a nutshell is the field of evolutionary biology.

On global money and markets.

A few trillion of our closest friends.

Yet more inconvenient truths from pre darwinian design.

There's Quality Control Even in the Cell's Trash Pickup
Evolution News & Views

Construction workers get more respect than cleanup crews, but both are equally important. Imagine if all the debris from building your house never got hauled away. You could probably not walk anywhere without stepping over piles of junk. Cells, too, have masterful architects, busily constructing proteins and other molecules from ingredients imported through the cell membrane. The waste products, though, could quickly crowd out the productive workers. Worse, some of the waste is toxic, requiring specially trained haz-mat teams to deal with it.

Several recent papers show how cleanup crews play essential roles in the cell's quality control systems. Here's what three scientists in Germany say about "In vivo aspects of protein folding and quality control" in Science Magazine:

Proteins are synthesized on ribosomes as linear chains of amino acids and must fold into unique three-dimensional structures to fulfill their biological functions. Protein folding is intrinsically error-prone, and how it is accomplished efficiently represents a problem of great biological and medical importance. During folding, the nascent polypeptide must navigate a complex energy landscape. As a result, misfolded molecules may accumulate that expose hydrophobic amino acid residues and thus are in danger of forming potentially toxic aggregates. To ensure efficient folding and prevent aggregation, cells in all domains of life express various classes of proteins called molecular chaperones. These proteins receive the nascent polypeptide chain emerging from the ribosome and guide it along a productive folding pathway. Because proteins are structurally dynamic, constant surveillance of the proteome by an integrated network of chaperones and protein degradation machineries, the proteostasis network (PN), is required to maintain protein homeostasis in a range of external and endogenous stress conditions. [Emphasis added.]
We see here that the cleanup crews work right alongside the construction crews and surveillance crews. "Chaperones are a kind of Technical Inspection Authority for cells," Phys.org explains. "They are proteins that inspect other proteins for quality defects before they are allowed to leave the cell." When molecular chaperones cannot fold a protein properly in time, the surveillance crew must make a go/no-go decision, because some amino acids might clump into toxic aggregates. Figures in the Science paper illustrate the "Proteostasis Network" involving cleanup crews like the proteasome system, autophagy, and the lysosome system.

Similar findings were announced in PLOS ONE:

Protein chaperones are molecular machines which function both during homeostasis and stress conditions in all living organisms. Depending on their specific function, molecular chaperones are involved in a plethora of cellular processes by playing key roles in nascent protein chain folding, transport and quality control. Among stress protein families -- molecules expressed during adverse conditions, infection, and diseases -- chaperones are highly abundant. Their molecular functions range from stabilizing stress-susceptible molecules and membranes to assisting the refolding of stress-damaged proteins, thereby acting as protective barriers against cellular damage.
Another German website describes how the "protein degradation pathway" works to achieve "successful recycling." Aberrant proteins are tagged with ubiquitin, a small protein, by two independent surveillance crews. A shredding machine called the proteasome recognizes the tags and provides docking points for them. These quality-control measures ensure that only the bad proteins are degraded.

A large number of different proteins in a cell have to be degraded -- some 30 percent of all cellular protein structures formed by folding of amino acid chains are faulty. The problem for the cells is that these incorrectly folded proteins do not have a uniform structure, making it difficult to identify all of them correctly. If breakdown of these "useless" proteins goes wrong, they are deposited in the cell and disturb its homeostasis. This can lead to death of the cell and trigger a number of diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
It's been a while since we talked about the proteasome. More has been learned in the past four and a half years. A cell needs just the right number of these trash recyclers. Consequently, their numbers also are regulated for quality control. Nature tells how complicated this molecular machine is.

The proteasome is composed of 33 subunits assembled in two sub-complexes, the 20S core particle (CP), flanked at one or both ends by the 19S regulatory particle (RP) to form the 26S proteasome. Proteasome assembly requires the assistance of proteasome assembly chaperones. Four evolutionarily conserved 19S RACs [regulatory particle assembly chaperones]: Nas2, Nas6, Hsm3 and Rpn14 in yeast, and p27 (also known as PSMD9), p28 (also known as PSMD10), S5b (also known as PSMD5) and Rpn14 (also known as PAAF1) in mammals are needed for regulatory particle assembly. In addition, yeast cells have Adc17, a stress-inducible RAC, which is vital for cells to survive conditions, such as accumulation of misfolded proteins, which overwhelm the proteasome. This suggests that cells have evolved adaptive signalling pathways to adjust proteasome assembly to arising needs, but how this is achieved is unknown.
You get the picture. The proteasome is complex! (We won't concern ourselves with how cells "have evolved" these systems.)

What happens when the trash system itself gets trashy? Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have been figuring out "proteasome dysfunction" and its health consequences. Even little bitty worms in the soil know about how bad that can be. They monitor their trash cans!

Maintaining appropriate levels of proteins within cells largely relies on a cellular component called the proteasome, which degrades unneeded or defective proteins to recycle the components for the eventual assembly of new proteins. Deficient proteasome function can lead to a buildup of unneeded and potentially toxic proteins, so cells usually respond to proteasome dysfunction by increasing production of its component parts. Now two Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have identified key molecules in the pathway by which cells in the C. elegans roundworm sense proteasome dysfunction, findings that may have application to treatment of several human diseases.
When the trash system goes wrong, the cell goes wrong. Cancer and neurodegenerative diseases can result.

Autophagy ("self-eating") is another important cleanup pathway that degrades and recycles waste. It can act on just parts of the cell or the whole cell. Researchers from the University of Missouri found an unexpected place where autophagy plays a vital role. You may have heard that mitochondrial genes are inherited from the mother. After an egg cell is fertilized, the sperm cell's mitochondria need to be digested to prevent a condition called heteroplasmy. The paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how two cleanup crews work together to prevent this condition:

Maternal inheritance of mitochondria and mitochondrial genes is a major developmental paradigm in mammals. Propagation of paternal, sperm-contributed mitochondrial genes, resulting in heteroplasmy, is seldom observed in mammals, due to postfertilization targeting and degradation of sperm mitochondria, referred to as "sperm mitophagy." Our and others' recent results suggest that postfertilization sperm mitophagy is mediated by the ubiquitin-proteasome system, the major protein-turnover pathway that degrades proteins and the autophagic pathway.... Our findings provide the mechanisms guiding sperm mitochondrion recognition and disposal during preimplantation embryo development, which prevents a potentially detrimental effect of heteroplasmy.

This brief survey of cell cleanup provides glimpses into a wondrous array of networks of complex molecular machines that know just what to do to keep cells humming. When evolution is mentioned at all, the main thing said is that the machines are "evolutionarily conserved." In other words, they have not evolved. It's important that we look at the details inside the cell occasionally. That's where the evidence for design often shines the brightest.

Darwinism Vs. the real world. XXXIII

How the Body Deals with Gravity
Howard Glicksman 





Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.


Our muscles, under the control of our nerves, allow us to breathe, swallow, move around and handle things. The peripheral nerves send sensory information about what is going on outside and inside the body to the spinal cord and the brain and from them send back motor instructions to the muscles to tell them what to do. In a previous article in this series, I described some of the sensors that as transducers convert phenomena into information the body can use. Pressure is detected by sensors in the skin; body motion, particularly of the head, is detected by the vestibular apparatus within the inner ear; and the proprioceptors provide information on the status of the muscles, tendons, and joints.

My last article described some of the reflexes (involuntary pre-programmed automatic motor responses without conscious direction from the brain) the body uses to avoid serious injury and maintain its position. Now let's look at how the body deals with the law of gravity and what it takes to keep its balance. Remember that when evolutionary biologists tell us about life and the mechanism by which it must have come about, they only deal with how it looks and not how it must actually work within the laws of nature. Ask yourself which is a more plausible explanation for how life arose: chance and the laws of nature alone, or intelligent design?

An object's center of gravity is a theoretical point about which its weight is evenly distributed. For an object that has a uniform density with a regular and symmetrical shape, such as a square piece of solid wood, the center of gravity is at its geometric center. Place a square solid wooden block on a table and push it more and more off the edge. It will fall to the ground when its center of gravity is no longer on the table.

The human body is made of muscles, organs, fat, and bone, each with a different density. Although the physical outline of the body is symmetrical from side to side, its shape is very irregular. The center of gravity for most people while standing or lying with their arms at their sides is in the midline, near their belly button (umbilicus). To stay standing, the body's center of gravity must remain between its two feet, both from side to side and back to front, otherwise it falls. Movement of the arms or legs away from the body or bending the spine in any direction changes the body's center of gravity. Carrying an object, especially at a distance from the body, will also change its center of gravity. For our earliest ancestors to survive within the laws of nature, they not only had to stay balanced while standing, but also walking, with only one foot, and running, with neither foot, in contact with the ground. In other words, the human body is an inherently unstable object that needs to take control to stay balanced.

The neuromuscular system keeps the body in position while balancing itself in relation to gravity. Although the spinal cord provides reflexes that help it maintain its posture, it is largely the brain (particularly the brainstem and the cerebellum) that provides the coordinated motor patterns needed to maintain balance. To make ongoing adjustments, the brain receives sensory data from mainly four different sources: the pressure receptors in the feet, the proprioceptors (particularly of the neck and the rest of the spinal column), the vestibular apparatus within the inner ear, and vision.

The pressure sensors in the feet inform the brain of the body's weight distribution relative to its center of gravity. Stand up and lean from side to side, and back and forth. Notice the difference in the pressure sensations felt from each foot with these movements, the feeling of imbalance, and the immediate adjustments that must be made to stay standing.

The proprioceptors of the neck and the rest of the spinal column provide the brain with information about the relative position of the head and the rest of the body. Bend your neck forward and backward and then bend from your waist in any direction. Wherever your neck and spinal column go so goes your head and the rest of your body. Notice the feeling of imbalance as your center of gravity moves away from being between your feet and how you quickly have to adjust to avoid falling.

The vestibular apparatus contributes sensory information about the speed and direction of head and neck angular motion and linear and vertical body movement. In addition, it helps to stabilize the retinal image. Look in a mirror, focusing on your eyes, and move your head slowly up and down and from side to side. Notice that your eyes automatically move in the opposite direction, allowing them to remain in focus. You are seeing the effects of the vestibulo-ocular reflex.

Now, continue to focus on your eyes and move your head up and down and from side to side as fast as you can. You cannot consciously control your eyes fast enough to compensate for these movements. It takes place automatically because of your decision to focus on your eyes (or any other object) while your head and body are in motion. Notice also how you felt a bit dizzy and off balance. This is caused by the strong alternating nerve impulses being sent from the vestibular apparatus on each side of the head to the brain due to the speed of your head movements.

The eyes provide the brain with an image of the environment in which the body is located. Clinical experience teaches that with concentration, training, and slow movement, vision can often help maintain the body's equilibrium without information from the pressure sensors, the proprioceptors, and the vestibular apparatus. Close your eyes and begin to walk, progressively increasing your speed. Notice how difficult it is to maintain your balance. Closing your eyes makes you totally dependent on the pressure sensors in the feet, the proprioceptors of the spine and limbs, and the vestibular apparatus, throwing you slightly off balance. Now do this exercise again, but this time with your eyes open. It is apparent that visual cues greatly contribute to being able to maintain your balance.

One of the first indications that a person may have a problem with their balance is when they inadvertently fall in the shower. While taking a shower, most people close their eyes to shampoo their hair and then quickly turn their head and neck, and often their whole body, to rinse it off. Moving this way with their eyes closed means their brain can no longer use visual cues to maintain their balance. If a person has condition like a sensory neuropathy (common in diabetics), which limits the reception of the sensory data from the feet, or Multiple Sclerosis, which slows the nerve impulse velocity in the brainstem, or degeneration of the cerebellum, which causes poor coordination, then they will come to realize how important their vision is. Without it, it becomes difficult or impossible for them to maintain balance.

All clinical experience teaches that for our earliest ancestors (and the theoretical intermediate organisms that led up to them) to maintain their balance, they would have needed to have an irreducibly complex system with a natural survival capacity similar to our own. This would have had to include different sensors located in strategic places to provide information on the body's position in space and relationship with gravity, a central nervous system to receive and analyze it, and the ability to access automatic motor reflexes and send voluntary motor messages fast enough to prevent a fall. For the force of gravity waits for no man and is an equal opportunity leveller, of sorts.


Just because similar organisms have similar mechanisms to maintain their balance does not, in and of itself, explain where those mechanisms and their ability to react properly and quickly came from in the first place. Evolutionary biology, as I said, is very good at describing how life looks, but has no capacity to explain how it must work within the laws of nature to survive. My next article will look at how we are able to accomplish purposeful movements and perform goal-directed activities. As everything else in this series has shown, it's not as simple as evolutionary biologists would have us believe.

Broken genes?Says who?

BioLogos, Broken Genes, and Urate Oxidase
The Bigger They Come, The Harder They Fall

Arguments for evolution, the theory that the biological world arose strictly by chance and natural law, are at a high level. The details of how microbes, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and the rest actually were created by random mutations are hard to come by. But, evolutionists explain, the species look like they evolved. Don’t the comparisons of their anatomy, geographical locations, and so forth, make evolution the obvious explanation for their origin? One of the strongest such evidences, according to evolutionists such as Dennis Venema, are the so-called shared-errors. Meaningless or, better yet, harmful mutations found in allied species seem to be obvious signs of a common ancestor. For we would never expect such harmful mutations to have arisen independently. They must derive from a common ancestor. This argument has many problems and seems to be another example of how the stronger that an argument is for evolution, the more deeply it is flawed.

One of the problems with this argument is that it contains two suspicious, unspoken, assumptions.

First, the argument assumes that these mutations are meaningless or harmful. That assumption may well be true but, as any historian of evolutionary thought knows, it is a dangerous. The history of evolutionary thought is full of claims of bad, inefficient, useless designs which, upon further research were found to be, in fact, quite useful.

Second, the argument assumes that these mutations are random. In other words, it assumes there cannot be any common mechanisms, properly operating or otherwise, which could tend toward certain designs and mutations.

In fact convergence is ubiquitous and rampant in biology. Repeated designs appear in species so distant that, according to evolutionary theory, their common ancestor could not have had that design. So even evolutionists must agree that common designs must have arisen independently. And this must have occurred many times over, at both the morphological and molecular levels.

In other instances, such “convergence” must have occurred even in allied species. In fact this is true even for the so-called harmful mutations. For instance, evolutionists believe the urate oxidase enzyme, which catalyzes the oxidation of uric acid, was inactivated in humans and the great apes by harmful random mutations. But the different versions of the gene, in the different species, do not easily align with the expected evolutionary pattern. In fact, even evolutionists have to agree that several of the various inferred mutations, in these similar species, could not have arisen from a common ancestor. Instead, they must have arisen independently:

One exceptional change is a duplicated segment of GGGATGCC in intron 4 which is shared by the gorilla and the orangutan. However, because this change is phylogenetically incompatible with any of the three possible sister-relationships among the closely related trio of the human, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, it might result from two independent duplications. Alternatively, though less likely, a single duplication occurred in the ancestral species of the great apes and had been polymorphic for a sufficiently long time to permit fixation of the duplicated form in the orangutan and the gorilla on one hand and loss in the human and the chimpanzee on the other hand.

The nonsense mutation (TGA) at codon 107 is, however, more complicated than others. It occurs in the gorilla, the orangutan, and the gibbon, and therefore requires multiple origins of this nonsense mutation.

In contrast, the exon 3 mutation is not shared by H. syndactylus but by the gorilla and the orangutan. The origin of this mutation is therefore multiple and relatively recent in the gibbon lineage.

In other words, when common mutations found in different species cannot easily be explained by common descent, evolutionists do not hesitate to explain them as a consequent of multiple, independent events. This means that, even according evolutionists, similar mutations in allied species do not imply or require common descent. This contradicts the shared-error argument that is supposed to be one of the most powerful evidences for evolution. Unfortunately evolutionists do not include this information in their presentations of the shared-error argument.

The stronger that an argument is for evolution, the more deeply it is flawed.

h/t: DC

Posted by Cornelius Hunter 

Trying to eat their cake and yet have it.

The Supposed Dual (Double) Nature of Christ

Was Jesus a Spirit or Wasn't He?

by Hal Flemings 

In their zeal to discredit Jehovah’s Witnesses, many writers inadvertently create irreconcilable difficulties for themselves.

Mainstream Trinitarians believe that when Jesus Christ was on the earth in the First Century of our Common Era that he was totally man and totally god. Everyone seems to agree with Jesus at John 4:24 where he stated, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (King James Version) Because God is a spirit and Trinitarians are certain that Jesus is God, they argue that while on earth Jesus was God incarnate, that is, a spirit being enclosed with flesh. Because Jehovah's Witnesses reject this view, literally volumes of books, magazines, tracts, cassette tapes, etc., have been produced to challenge them on the doctrine of the Trinity and the nature of Christ.

....


This paper is not concerned with defending the Witness stand on the nature of Christ at his resurrection or the question of Christ being the Almighty God or not; those matters have been effectively addressed elsewhere.What we are considering here is a serious contradiction.

That contradiction is as follows: these antagonists go to great lengths to establish that while on earth Jesus was God incarnate - a spirit clothed in flesh - but then deny that he was a spirit at all at his resurrection. Either he was a spirit or he was not a spirit. If he was God in the flesh - experiencing two natures simultaneously - then he was a spirit at his resurrection since God is a spirit. On the other hand, if indeed he was, in reality, not a spirit but a "glorified body", then he was not a God-man in the sense Trinitarians understand it, since a God-man is a spirit clothed in flesh. They cannot have it both ways. One of the attacks on the Witnesses has to be abandoned.

Darwinism:It's his story and he's sticking to it.

Professor B Supports Evolution

In this age of specialization we look to the experts to tell us what to think. And when it comes to origins, the experts tell us that life evolved. Random mutations, surprisingly enough, are sufficient to create the species. As if we needed another example of this, we now have “Professor B,” who wishes to remain anonymous but can’t help to explain that skeptics of this modern day Epicureanism are “almost certainly wrong” to doubt that proteins can spontaneously arise because it would require something like 10^74 attempts. After all, that figure was “based on a very small sample.” Small sample? If the professor understood statistics he would know small sample sizes do not invalidate results—not to the level he requires. In fact, as we have discussed many times, several studies have arrived at this type of astronomical figure.

When presented with that inconvenient fact, our Professor B switched strategies. Now, it seems that, according to the professor, “a very large number of different amino acid sequences were capable of performing the same biological function.” Therefore it is not a big problem for evolution to create these incredible molecular machines.

That is an absurd misrepresentation of molecular biology. While it certainly is true that a large number of different sequences can perform the same function, we are nowhere close to 10^74. “Very large” in this context is astronomically smaller than 10^74.

As if sensing a problem, Professor B switched to yet another tactic, claiming that evolution is capable of creating astronomical numbers of proteins anyway. It seems, according to the professor, that evolution can rip through 10^42 different proteins in search of what works.

Not that this helps much, as 10^42 is still dozens of orders of magnitude smaller than the needed 10^74. But even the estimate of 10^42 is, itself, absurd. It comes from a paper that assumes the pre existence of bacteria and, yes, proteins. In fact, the evolutionists assumed the earth was covered with bacteria, and each bacteria was full of proteins. That of course is not an appropriate assumption for the question of how proteins could have evolved in the first place. In fact, it is circular. Good thing the professor remained anonymous.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter

Was Adam Smith wrong?:Pros and cons.

Watchtower society's commentary on the earth's place in the divine agenda

EARTH:

The fifth-largest planet of the solar system and the third in order of position from the sun. It is an oblate spheroid, being slightly flattened at the poles. Satellite observations have indicated other slight irregularities in the shape of the earth. Its mass is approximately 5.98 × 1024 kg (13.18 × 1024 lb). Its area is about 510,000,000 sq km (197,000,000 sq mi). Earth’s measurements are (approximately): circumference at the equator, just over 40,000 km (24,900 mi); diameter at the equator, 12,750 km (7,920 mi). Oceans and seas cover approximately 71 percent of its surface, leaving about 149,000,000 sq km (57,500,000 sq mi) of land surface.

The earth rotates on its axis, bringing about day and night. (Ge 1:4, 5) A solar day or an apparent day is a period of 24 hours, the time taken for an observer at any one point on the earth to be again in the same position relative to the sun. The tropical year, which concerns the return of the seasons, the interval between two consecutive returns of the sun to the vernal equinox, is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, on the average. This figure is the one used in solar-year calendar reckoning, and its fractional nature has caused much difficulty in accurate calendar making.

The axis of the earth tilts 23° 27ʹ away from a perpendicular to the earth’s orbit. The gyroscopic effect of rotation holds the earth’s axis in basically the same direction relative to the stars regardless of its location in its orbit around the sun. This tilt of the axis brings about the seasons.

The earth’s atmosphere, composed principally of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and other gases, extends over 960 km (600 mi) above the earth’s surface. Beyond this is what is termed “outer space.”

Bible Terms and Significance. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word used for earth as a planet is ʼeʹrets. ʼEʹrets refers to (1) earth, as opposed to heaven, or sky (Ge 1:2); (2) land, country, territory (Ge 10:10); (3) ground, surface of the ground (Ge 1:26); (4) people of all the globe (Ge 18:25).

The word ʼadha·mahʹ is translated “ground,” “soil,” or “land.” ʼAdha·mahʹ refers to (1) ground as tilled, yielding sustenance (Ge 3:23); (2) piece of ground, landed property (Ge 47:18); (3) earth as material substance, soil, dirt (Jer 14:4; 1Sa 4:12); (4) ground as earth’s visible surface (Ge 1:25); (5) land, territory, country (Le 20:24); (6) whole earth, inhabited earth (Ge 12:3). ʼAdha·mahʹ seems to be related etymologically to the word ʼa·dhamʹ, the first man Adam having been made from the dust of the ground.—Ge 2:7.

In the Greek Scriptures, ge denotes earth as arable land or soil. (Mt 13:5, 8) It is used to designate the material from which Adam was made, the earth (1Co 15:47); the earthly globe (Mt 5:18, 35; 6:19); earth as a habitation for human creatures and animals (Lu 21:35; Ac 1:8; 8:33; 10:12; 11:6; 17:26); land, country, territory (Lu 4:25; Joh 3:22); ground (Mt 10:29; Mr 4:26); land, shore, as contrasted with seas or waters. (Joh 21:8, 9, 11; Mr 4:1).

Oi·kou·meʹne, translated “world” in the King James Version, denotes “inhabited earth.”—Mt 24:14; Lu 2:1; Ac 17:6; Re 12:9.

In each case of all the above senses in which these words are used, the form of the word in the original language, and more particularly the setting or context, determine which sense is meant.

The Hebrews divided the earth into four quarters or regions corresponding to the four points of the compass. In the Hebrew Scriptures the words “before” and “in front of” designate and are translated “east” (Ge 12:8); “behind” may mean “west” (Isa 9:12); “the right side” may denote “south” (1Sa 23:24); and “the left” may be translated “north” (Job 23:8, 9; compare Ro). East was also (in Heb.) sometimes called the sunrising, as for example, at Joshua 4:19. West (in Heb.) was the setting of the sun. (2Ch 32:30) Also, physical characteristics were used. Being almost the total western boundary of Palestine, the “Sea” (the Mediterranean) was sometimes used for west.—Nu 34:6.

Creation. The planet’s coming into existence is recounted in the Bible with the simple statement: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Ge 1:1) Just how long ago the starry heavens and the earth were created is not stated in the Bible. Therefore, there is no basis for Bible scholars to take issue with scientific calculations of the age of the planet. Scientists estimate the age of some rocks as being three and a half billion years, and the earth itself as being about four to four and a half billion or more years.

As to time, the Scriptures are more definite about the six creative days of the Genesis account. These days have to do, not with the creation of earth’s matter or material, but with the arranging and preparing of it for man’s habitation.

The Bible does not reveal whether God created life on any of the other planets in the universe. However, astronomers today have not found proof that life exists on any of these planets and, in fact, know of no planet besides the earth that is at present capable of supporting the life of fleshly creatures.

Purpose. Like all other created things, the earth was brought into existence because of Jehovah’s will (“pleasure,” KJ). (Re 4:11) It was created to remain forever. (Ps 78:69; 104:5; 119:90; Ec 1:4) God speaks of himself as a God of purpose and declares that his purposes are certain to come to fruition. (Isa 46:10; 55:11) He made his purpose for the earth very clear when he said to the first human pair: “Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is moving upon the earth.” (Ge 1:28) There were no flaws in earth or the things on it. Having created all necessary things, Jehovah saw that they were “very good” and “proceeded to rest” or desist from other earthly creative works.—Ge 1:31–2:2.

Man’s habitation on earth is also permanent. When God gave man the law regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, he implied that man could live on earth forever. (Ge 2:17) We are assured by Jehovah’s own words that “all the days the earth continues, seed sowing and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, will never cease” (Ge 8:22) and that he will never destroy all flesh again by a flood. (Ge 9:12-16) Jehovah says that he did not make the earth for nothing but, rather, that he has given it to men as a home and that death will eventually be done away with. God’s purpose, therefore, is for the earth to be the habitation of man in perfection and happiness with eternal life.—Ps 37:11; 115:16; Isa 45:18; Re 21:3, 4.

That this is the purpose of Jehovah God, sacred to him and not to be thwarted, is indicated when the Bible says: “And by the seventh day God came to the completion of his work that he had made . . . And God proceeded to bless the seventh day and make it sacred, because on it he has been resting from all his work that God has created for the purpose of making.” (Ge 2:2, 3) The seventh, or rest, day is not shown in the Genesis account as ending, as in the case of the other six days. The apostle Paul explained that the rest day of God had been continuous right through Israelite history down to his own time and had not yet ended. (Heb 3:7-11; 4:3-9) God says the seventh day was set aside as sacred to him. He would carry out his purpose toward the earth; it would be fully accomplished during that day, with no necessity of further creative works toward the earth during that time.

The Bible’s Harmony With Scientific Facts. The Bible, at Job 26:7, speaks of God as “hanging the earth upon nothing.” Science says that the earth remains in its orbit in space primarily because of the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force. These forces, of course, are invisible. Therefore the earth, like other heavenly bodies, is suspended in space as if hanging on nothing. Speaking from Jehovah’s viewpoint, the prophet Isaiah wrote under inspiration: “There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers.” (Isa 40:22) The Bible says: “He [God] has described a circle upon the face of the waters.” (Job 26:10) The waters are limited by his decree to their proper place. They do not come up and inundate the land; neither do they fly off into space. (Job 38:8-11) From the viewpoint of Jehovah, the earth’s face, or the surface of the waters, would, of course, have a circular form, just as the edge of the moon presents a circular appearance to us. Before land surfaces appeared, the surface of the entire globe was one circular (spherical) mass of surging waters.—Ge 1:2.

Bible writers often speak from the standpoint of the observer on the earth, or from his particular position geographically, as we often naturally do today. For example, the Bible mentions “the sunrising.” (Nu 2:3; 34:15) Some have seized upon this as an opportunity to discredit the Bible as scientifically inaccurate, claiming that the Hebrews viewed earth as the center of things, with the sun revolving around it. But the Bible writers nowhere expressed such a belief. These same critics overlook the fact that they themselves use the identical expression and that it is in all of their almanacs. It is common to hear someone say, ‘it is sunrise,’ or ‘the sun has set,’ or ‘the sun traveled across the sky.’ The Bible also speaks of “the extremity of the earth” (Ps 46:9), “the ends of the earth” (Ps 22:27), “the four extremities of the earth” (Isa 11:12), “the four corners of the earth,” and “the four winds of the earth” (Re 7:1). These expressions cannot be taken to prove that the Hebrews understood the earth to be square. The number four is often used to denote that which is fully rounded out, as it were, just as we have four directions and sometimes employ the expressions “to the ends of the earth,” “to the four corners of the earth,” in the sense of embracing all the earth.—Compare Eze 1:15-17; Lu 13:29.

Figurative and Symbolic Expressions. The earth is spoken of figuratively in several instances. It is likened to a building, at Job 38:4-6, when Jehovah asks Job questions concerning earth’s creation and Jehovah’s management of it that Job obviously cannot answer. Jehovah also uses a figurative expression describing the result of earth’s rotation. He says: “[The earth] transforms itself like clay under a seal.” (Job 38:14) In Bible times some seals for “signing” documents were in the form of a roller engraved with the writer’s emblem. It was rolled over the soft clay document or clay envelope, leaving behind it an impression in the clay. In similar manner, at the arrival of dawn, the portion of the earth coming from the blackness of night begins to show itself to have form and color as the sunlight moves progressively across its face. The heavens, the location of Jehovah’s throne, being higher than the earth, the earth is, figuratively, his footstool. (Ps 103:11; Isa 55:9; 66:1; Mt 5:35; Ac 7:49) Those who are in Sheol, or Hades, the common grave of mankind, are regarded as being under the earth.—Re 5:3.

The apostle Peter compares the literal heavens and earth (2Pe 3:5) with the symbolic heavens and earth (2Pe 3:7). “The heavens” of verse 7 do not mean Jehovah’s own dwelling place, the place of his throne in the heavens. Jehovah’s heavens cannot be shaken. Neither is “the earth” in the same verse the literal planet earth, for Jehovah says that he has established the earth firmly. (Ps 78:69; 119:90) Yet, God says that he will shake both the heavens and the earth (Hag 2:21; Heb 12:26), that the heavens and earth will flee away before him, and that new heavens and a new earth will be established. (2Pe 3:13; Re 20:11; 21:1) It is evident that “heavens” is symbolic and that “earth” here has symbolic reference to a society of people living on the earth, just as at Psalm 96:1.—See HEAVEN (New heavens and new earth).

Earth is also symbolically used to denote the firmer, more stable elements of mankind. The restless, unstable elements of mankind are illustrated by the characteristic restlessness of the sea.—Isa 57:20; Jas 1:6; Jude 13; compare Re 12:16; 20:11; 21:1.

John 3:31 contrasts one that comes from above as being higher than one who comes from the earth (ge). The Greek word e·piʹgei·os, “earthly,” is used to denote earthly, physical things, especially as contrasted with heavenly things, and as being lower and of coarser material. Man is made of earth’s material. (2Co 5:1; compare 1Co 15:46-49.) Nevertheless, he can please God by living a “spiritual” life, a life directed by God’s Word and spirit. (1Co 2:12, 15, 16; Heb 12:9) Because of mankind’s fall into sin and their tendency toward material things to the neglect or exclusion of spiritual things (Ge 8:21; 1Co 2:14), “earthly” can have an undesirable connotation, meaning “corrupt,” or “in opposition to the spirit.”—Php 3:19; Jas 3:15.

Slaves of Christ.

Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christians?

Yes. We are Christians for the following reasons:

We try to follow closely the teachings and behavior of Jesus Christ.—1 Peter 2:21.
We believe that Jesus is the key to salvation, that “there is not another name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must get saved.”—Acts 4:12.
When people become Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are baptized in the name of Jesus.—Matthew 28:18, 19.
We offer our prayers in Jesus’ name.—John 15:16.
We believe that Jesus is the Head, or the one appointed to have authority, over every man.—1 Corinthians 11:3.

However, in a number of ways, we are different from other religious groups that are called Christian. For example, we believe that the Bible teaches that Jesus is the Son of God, not part of a Trinity. (Mark 12:29) We do not believe that the soul is immortal, that there is any basis in Scripture for saying that God tortures people in an everlasting hell, or that those who take the lead in religious activities should have titles that elevate them above others.—Ecclesiastes 9:5; Ezekiel 18:4; Matthew 23:8-10.

The mark of the beast.

Forced Reeducation for MDs Who Don't Want to Kill
Wesley J. Smith 

Yesterday I commented on a bioethics "Consensus Statement" published by Oxford University that advocates eviscerating medical conscience rights of doctors with religious or moral objections to procedures such as abortion and euthanasia.

Looking more closely at the authoritarian document, I see that the bioethicists would require dissenting doctors to perform community service for their thought crime and to attend reeducation classes about the harm their beliefs cause.

From the "Consensus Statement" (my emphasis):

Healthcare practitioners who are exempted from performing certain medical procedures on conscientious grounds should be required to compensate society and the health system for their failure to fulfill their professional obligations by providing public-benefitting services.

Medical students should not be exempted from learning how to perform basic medical procedures they consider to be morally wrong. Even if they become conscientious objectors, they will still be required to perform the procedure to which they object in emergency situations or when referral is not possible or poses too great a burden on patients or on the healthcare system...

Healthcare practitioners should also be educated to reflect on the influence of cognitive bias in their objections.


Bottom line: Refuse to commit or be complicit in what your religion considers a terrible sin, or your conscience believes to be a terrible wrong, and you will be made to pay! If you are pro-life and want to become an MD, forget about it: You are not welcome in the healthcare professions.

Revelation13:17NIV "so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name."

Why I.D is not a science stopper

A zombie argument struck down (again).

This Sounds Familiar: Theistic Evolutionist Recycles Anti-ID Argument Refuted Years Ago
Evolution News & Views

In a post for the theistic evolutionary group BioLogos, Canadian biology professor Dennis Venema writes affectionately, with only a mild touch of disdain, about the intelligent design movement. Their (meaning our) hearts are in the right place, he tells readers. Like him, advocates of ID want to build an "apologetic" against materialism. They're just going about it in the wrong way. And their science is wrong.

Venema readily concedes that living cells use "highly intricate" processes to manage genetic information. However, is it really "information"? And is the genetic code really a "code"? The quote marks in both cases are Venema's. He uses them in the evident hope of weakening the commonly held intuition that both must be designed. If there is a natural pathway to the genetic code, he argues, then it only looks like a code in hindsight. It only looks like information after evolution improved it.

Venema's argument rests on two premises, one empirical and one philosophical. The empirical premise is that a natural pathway to the genetic code is known, though admittedly many questions remain. The philosophical premise is that finding a "natural" explanation is superior to "interventionism" (the approach of looking for "supernatural" acts of God requiring "miracles"). We should learn from history, he says, and prefer the natural pathway:

As an aside, as a Christian biologist I would be perfectly fine with the answer being either "natural" or "supernatural". Both natural and supernatural means are part of the providence of God, and the distinction is not a biblical one in any case. Perhaps God set up the cosmos in a way to allow for abiogenesis to take place. Perhaps he created the first life directly -- though, as we will see, there are lines of evidence that I think are suggestive of the former rather than the latter. Similarly, I would have been fine with God supernaturally sustaining the flames of the sun for our benefit, as English apologist John Edwards claimed long ago. I do happen to think that solar fusion is an elegant way to "solve" this problem, and as a person of faith I think it evinces a deeper, more satisfying design than some sort of miraculous interventionist approach for keeping the sun going. I recognize, however, that seeing design in the natural process of solar fusion -- or abiogenesis -- is not the sort of argument that some Christian apologists are looking for. [Emphasis added.]
What's notable is the language of faith. Who is making a religious argument here? In this one paragraph, Venema uses the words God, supernatural, providence, biblical, faith, miraculous, and Christian. Such language is tellingly absent from most intelligent design literature, which as a matter of science and of principle avoids questions about the identity of the designer, instead ascribing effects to causes that can be demonstrated scientifically to be necessary and sufficient. The design argument is a purely scientific one, as Michael Behe states in Unlocking the Mystery of Life: "It might have religious implications, but it does not depend on religious premises."

Indeed, ID emphatically isn't an "apologetic" strategy. It is a scientific theory of origins, which may be right or wrong, yet must be judged as science and only as science.

From there, Venema addresses biological matters. In particular, he attempts to refute Stephen Meyer's contention that the genetic code is arbitrary, therefore designed. Well before Stephen Meyer wrote Signature in the Cell (2009), Venema argues, Meyer should have known of the work of Michael Yarus, who as far back as the 1980s was showing that chemical affinities between RNA and amino acids could have led to the genetic code naturally. From simple beginnings -- entirely natural -- today's complex interactions between messenger RNA (mRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA) could have evolved by a process of "Direct RNA Templating," or DRT:

I recall reading Meyer's argument for an arbitrary code when Signature first came out in 2009, and being surprised by it. The reason for my surprise was simple: in 2009 there was already a detailed body of scientific work that demonstrated exactly what Meyer claimed had never been shown.[1] Though Meyer claimed that "molecular biologists have failed to find any significant chemical interaction between the codons on mRNA (or the anticodons on tRNA) and the amino acids on the acceptor arm of tRNA to which the codons correspond" this was simply not the case.
Overall, Venema's tone is respectful and non-confrontational. That's good. But now it is our turn to be surprised, because another "detailed body of scientific work" has already rebutted his argument. In fact, Dr. Meyer, along with Paul Nelson, addressed DRT in a paper in BIO-Complexity in August 2011, responding specifically to the claims of Michael Yarus (see Ann Gauger's summary here at Evolution News). Not only that, Meyer responded to Venema directly when he brought up the same argument in his critical view of Signature in December 2010 (PDF here; see Meyer's rebuttal and Venema's response).

Other authors have responded to DRT in our pages: Jonathan M. (August 2011), Evolution News (September 2011), and Casey Luskin (December 2011). That's at least six who have replied to Venema's sole empirical support for his argument. In each case, they did so with scientific evidence, not religious arguments or appeals to "apologetic" concerns. Why, then, is Dr. Venema resurrecting DRT as if it is something new? In his article there is not a single reference to any of our post-Signature writings, including the direct dialogue he had with Meyer in 2011 on this very point. How curious. That seems a missed opportunity for engagement.

His omission is doubly regrettable when you consider that the DRT argument fails to address the very issue Venema claims it does: the origin of the genetic code. Chemical affinity is the wrong kind of process to explain biological information. Real information (without the scare quotes) is characterized by aperiodic sequences of building blocks, not the regular, repetitive sequences produced by chemical attraction. That's clear from this sentence, as from Venema's own writing. It's clear from DNA itself. His sole empirical support, therefore, falls away.

The fact that several amino acids do in fact bind their codons or anticodons is strong evidence that at least part of the code was formed through chemical interactions -- and, contra Meyer, is not an arbitrary code. The code we have -- or at least for those amino acids for which direct binding was possible -- was indeed a chemically favored code. And if it was chemically favored, then it is quite likely that it had a chemical origin, even if we do not yet understand all the details of how it came to be.
The reader can decide what is "strong evidence" or "quite likely." Are we to conclude that the English language emerged by unguided natural processes because "crisps" and "chips" can refer to the same thing, as he argues? In DNA, the sequence AUG leads to adding methionine to a protein, not because of any chemical attraction, but because it has meaning in a code. It refers to a separate entity that a programmed system knows how to decode. Some amino acids can be coded by multiple DNA triplets (serine has six), but this is another design feature (see Casey Luskin's article here).

What motivates this desire to prefer natural causes? Certainly a fear of "God-of-the-gaps" looms large. Venema adduces "what science will learn some day":

As such, building an apologetic on the presumed future failings of abiogenesis research, when current research already undercuts one's thesis, seems to me as problematic for Meyer in 2009 as it did for Edwards in 1696. Do unanswered questions remain? Of course. Should we bank on them never being answered? Or would it be more wise to frame our apologetics on what we know, rather than what we don't know?
But that's the point. ID argues that we should infer intelligent causes -- when justified through the Design Filter -- because of what we do know, not what we don't know. We do know of a cause that can build information-rich structures with meaning and reference. We do know of a cause that can encode, decode, and translate things into functional hierarchies. That cause is intelligence. We never see natural processes building such things.

Is this "interventionist" thinking? The real appeal to miracles is hoping for unguided natural processes to accomplish, at some unspecified future date, what is demonstrably physically impossible (see Douglas Axe's book Undeniable for the math on that). John Edwards did not use the Design Filter. He speculated, and used theological arguments in so doing. There is no comparison. The real "gaps" argument lies in hoping that science will someday find a natural chemical affinity leading to the genetic code. That is like expecting that someday scientists will find that the molecules in a DVD can organize themselves into a movie that will play in a DVD player. The best explanation appeals to causes known to be in operation that can account for the phenomenon under study: for DVDs and for the genetic code that far surpasses DVDs in functional information. In our universal experience, intelligence is not only the best explanation; it is the only explanation.


Venema promises more posts in a series rebutting Meyer's claim that "evolution is incapable of generating significant amounts of new information." Of course, he is welcome to his own opinion, but not to his own science. To ignore a large body of past dialogue on the very issue under consideration does a disservice to his readers and misinforms them about our position, as if we were the ones unaware of the science. Dr. Venema is warmly encouraged to try again: start with a literature search, provide references, and address an opponent's position as it is, not a caricature of it.

On religion and war.

File under "well said" XXXIV

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. 
Winston Churchill

A clash of Titans. XXVII