Origin of life science's 5 main pressure points.

Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories
Casey Luskin 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This optimistic picture began to change in the late 1970s, when it became increasingly clear that the early atmosphere was probably volcanic in origin and composition, composed largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen rather than the mixture of reducing gases assumed by the Miller-Urey model. Carbon dioxide does not support the rich array of synthetic pathways leading to possible monomers...3
Likewise, an article in the journal Science stated: "Miller and Urey relied on a 'reducing' atmosphere, a condition in which molecules are fat with hydrogen atoms. As Miller showed later, he could not make organics in an 'oxidizing' atmosphere."4 The article put it bluntly: "the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey situation."5 Consistent with this, geological studies have not uncovered evidence that a primordial soup once existed.6
There are good reasons why the Earth's early atmosphere did not contain high concentrations of methane, ammonia, or other reducing gasses. The Earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been produced by outgassing from volcanoes, and the composition of those volcanic gasses is related to the chemical properties of the Earth's inner mantle. Geochemical studies have found that the chemical properties of the Earth's mantle would have been the same in the past as they are today.7 But today, volcanic gasses do not contain methane or ammonia, and are not reducing.

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

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

Problem 2: Forming Polymers Requires Dehydration Synthesis

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

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

Problem 3: RNA World Hypothesis Lacks Confirming Evidence

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

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

Even Miller throws up his hands at certain aspects of it. The first step, making the monomers, that's easy. We understand it pretty well. But then you have to make the first self-replicating polymers. That's very easy, he says, the sarcasm fairly dripping. Just like it's easy to make money in the stock market -- all you have to do is buy low and sell high. He laughs. Nobody knows how it's done.12
The most prominent hypothesis for the origin of the first life is called the "RNA world." In living cells, genetic information is carried by DNA, and most cellular functions are performed by proteins. However, RNA is capable of both carrying genetic information and catalyzing some biochemical reactions. As a result, some theorists postulate the first life might have used RNA alone to fulfill all these functions.
But there are many problems with this hypothesis.

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

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

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

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

The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. ... [The probability] is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.18
Fourth -- and most fundamentally -- the RNA world hypothesis can't explain the origin of the genetic code itself. In order to evolve into the DNA/protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines -- which themselves are encoded by genetic information.
All of this poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them.

Problem 4: Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code. 
To appreciate this problem, consider the origin of the first DVD and DVD player. DVDs are rich in information, but without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: a goal-directed process -- intelligent design -- is required to produce both the player and the disk.

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

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

It's nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes. ... [T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. ... How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.19
The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International:
The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical "hardware" capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message "receiver." But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein "workers" produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.20
Problem 5: No Workable Model for the Origin of Life

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

The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea.21
Many other authors have made similar comments. Massimo Pigliucci states: "[I]t has to be true that we really don't have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means."22 Or as science writer Gregg Easterbrook wrote in Wired, "What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn't given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time."23
Likewise, the aforementioned article in Cell Biology International concludes: "New approaches to investigating the origin of the genetic code are required. The constraints of historical science are such that the origin of life may never be understood."24 That is, they may never be understood unless scientists are willing to consider goal-directed scientific explanations like intelligent design.

References:

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

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

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

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

[5.] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neo liberal v. libertarian.

The making of yet another anti-Darwinian bomb thrower.

Scientific Authority Becomes Scientific Authoritarianism: See Tom Bethell in Iconoclast Now
David Klinghoffer

Why the New World Translation?:The Watchtower Society's Commentary

Why Have We Produced the New World Translation?

For decades, Jehovah’s Witnesses used, printed, and distributed various versions of the Bible. But then we saw the need to produce a new translation that would better help people to learn the “accurate knowledge of truth,” which is God’s will for everyone. (1 Timothy 2:3, 4) Thus, in 1950 we began to release portions of our modern-language Bible, the New World Translation. This Bible has been faithfully and accurately translated into over 120 languages.

A Bible was needed that was easy to understand. Languages change over time, and many translations contain obscure or obsolete expressions that are difficult to understand. Also, ancient manuscripts that are more accurate and closer to the originals have been discovered, resulting in a better comprehension of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

A translation was needed that was loyal to God’s word. Rather than taking liberties with God’s inspired writings, Bible translators should be faithful to the original text. However, in most versions, the divine name, Jehovah, is not used in the Holy Scriptures.

A Bible was needed that gives credit to its Author. (2 Samuel 23:2) In the New World Translation, Jehovah’s name has been restored where it appears some 7,000 times in the oldest Bible manuscripts as illustrated in the example below. (Psalm 83:18) The result of years of diligent research, this Bible is a pleasure to read, as it clearly conveys God’s thinking. Whether you have the New World Translation in your language or not, we encourage you to get into a good routine of reading Jehovah’s Word every day.—Joshua 1:8; Psalm 1:2, 3.

Piercing the fog?

Disregarding Fake News from Darwin Promoters, South Dakota Scientist Applauds Academic Freedom Bill
Evolution News & Views

Pierre, SD -- This year, South Dakota has an opportunity to encourage more scientific inquiry in the classroom. The state's legislature is considering an academic freedom bill, SB 55, introduced by Senator Jeff Monroe. noted here last week, the bill seeks to thwart censorship, yet ironically is opposed by the National Coalition Against Censorship. The group has misrepresented its contents, comparing mainstream exploration of weaknesses in Darwinian theory with Holocaust denial.

The text of SB 55 says just this:

No teacher may be prohibited from helping students understand, analyze, critique, or review in an objective scientific manner the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to § 13-3-48.

A prominent South Dakota scientist we heard from gets it, applauding the bill as a means to foster critical thinking. "SB 55, under consideration by the South Dakota legislature, is a promising step forward for South Dakota science education," said William S. Harris, PhD. Dr. Harris is the President of OmegaQuant Analytics, LLC (Sioux Falls, SD), and an NIH-funded biomedical researcher with over 300 scientific publications.

Under this legislation, students would have the opportunity learn more about scientific topics, practice critical thinking, and engage with scientific questions facing researchers today. One of those questions pertains to the origin of biodiversity.

Harris commented:

Scientific controversy over the ability of Darwin's version of evolution (i.e., natural selection acting blindly on random mutations) to explain the expanse of life on this planet continues to grow with each new revelation of the exceeding complexity of even the "simplest" life forms, not to mention humans. In my view, it is very important for today's students to understand the evidence for and against important scientific theories like Darwinism and to honestly consider challenges even to such long-held dogmas.

"South Dakota students can only benefit from such an approach -- and hopefully, legislators will seize this occasion to promote scientific inquiry," added Harris. If the bill is enacted, South Dakota would join Louisiana, Tennessee, and at least five other states with science standards or laws recognizing the role of teaching scientific strengths and weaknesses in the classroom.


The law has been a target for activists and journalists spreading misinformation about what SB 55 would permit. We have addressed false claims from Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Washington Post, which merit being described as fake news,   here and here .

Darwinism v. commonsense

A brief history of the Cuban missile crisis.

Negative to affirmative action on campus?

The fall of Rome II?

Through the looking glass?

South Dakota Science Education Controversy Gets Surreal as Anti-Censorship Group Demands Censorship

David Klinghoffer

We have patiently explained why the current academic freedom bill in South Dakota, SB 55, cannot possibly be construed in any reasonable manner as seeking to inject teaching intelligent design into public schools. As noted yesterday, that didn't stop a prominent lobbying group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, from working the phrase, "intelligent design," six times into a statement directed against the bill.

One of those instances was in a photo caption of an instructor in front of his class, "Teachers should not be given leeway to introduce intelligent design in science classes."

But with evolution proponents, such distortions are absolutely routine. It's bizarre. It's farcical. But this tops it. In a surreal move, a group called the National Coalition Against Censorship has plunged into the South Dakota situation to demand continued restraints on teachers and their academic freedom -- in other words, censorship.

They complain that SB 55 would "remov[e] accountability in science education." "Accountability" there would seem to mean instructors being vulnerable to career retaliation for teaching critical thinking skills to science students. These "anti-censorship" proponents advocate retaining the option of punishing biology teachers for going off message on Darwinism.

They go on: "Essentially, [the bill] removes the restraints on teachers that prevents them from straying from professionally-developed science standards adopted by state educators." The National Coalition Against Censorship favors keeping "restraints" on teachers firmly in place.

The bill, they say, "may encourage teachers who object to the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change to bring their opinions into the classroom," instead of sticking slavishly to a uniform Darwin-only script. The teachers should stick to their script.

Then there's this. Look again at the  language of the bill. It's very brief:

No teacher may be prohibited from helping students understand, analyze, critique, or review in an objective scientific manner the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to § 13-3-48.

That is another way of saying no teacher may be censored for challenging students with balanced information from objective science sources. Notice that the language concludes by saying that the "strengths and weaknesses" approach may be extended only to "scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards" already established.

Because intelligent design isn't part of those content standards, the law extends no protection for teaching about ID. Because the content standards are already defined, instruction that's not "aligned" with them, in other words that "stray[s] from professionally-developed science standards adopted by state educators," would also not be protected.

But interestingly, if you read the statement from the "anti-censorship" group, their quotation from the bill cuts off before getting to the part about how instruction must be "aligned with the content standards." The whole proposed law is just a sentence long, but they truncate it a little more than half way through, perhaps to keep the reader from realizing that their dire prediction of teachers "straying" is undercut by the clear language of SB 55 itself. The anti-censorship activists are engaging in censorship right there in the middle of their own statement.

They conclude by comparing exploring mainstream debate about evolutionary theory with, yes, denying the Holocaust. And that is where they transition from absurdity to obscenity.

Good gravy. These complaints, whether from Americans United or from the horrifically misnamed National Coalition Against Censorship, are totally detached from a straightforward reading of the law they wish to attack. They are mere scaremongering, and frankly, contemptible.

In this, though, they're not much worse than supposedly objective news outlets like the Washington Post or ProPublica. When it comes to defending evolutionary orthodoxy, journalism and propaganda merge seamlessly.

Fake news alert (again)

Activist Group Spreads Falsehoods About South Dakota Science Education Bill
Evolution News & Views

Pierre, SD -- Dogmatic activists are trying to derail a proposed science education bill in South Dakota. The language of the bill is aimed at supporting critical thinking by allowing students to learn how scientists debate scientific issues, according to John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture.

South Dakota legislators are currently considering SB 55, "An Act to protect the teaching of certain scientific information." Since the bill was introduced, Darwin-only lobbyists with the national group Americans United for Separation of Church and State have been attacking SB 55 and circulating misinformation about it. Notably, they falsely claim that SB 55 would authorize the teaching of "intelligent design."

"Americans United is so worried about what's between the words of the bill, they aren't paying attention to what the words in the bill actually say," said Dr. West in reference to a blog post  this week from the group.

"Contrary to what Americans United says, SB 55 explicitly limits authorization to 'scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards,'" said Sarah Chaffee, Program Officer in Public Policy and Education at Discovery Institute.

Chaffee points out that South Dakota's current science content standards do not include intelligent design, and thus the bill does not protect the teaching of ID (which is different from creationism). The bill only pertains to topics already in the standards. Yet the post from Americans United mentions intelligent design six times.


"The academic freedom bill does not require teachers to teach anything differently," said Chaffee. "Scientific topics will still be taught as required by state law. But it also gives teachers academic freedom to choose to teach about both "the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information" in the standards -- such as evidence for and against the neo-Darwinian "consensus."

Scientism's brave new world Just keeps getting closer.

Scientists Want to Genetically Engineer Humans

Wesley J. Smith

I first got involved deeply in the debates over biotechnology during the great embryonic stem cell controversy. During that time, I watched in stunned and appalled amazement as scientists lied to legislators and hyped the imminent likelihood of CURES! CURES! CURES! in order to win a political fight and gain federal research grants.

With that experience, I concluded that many in the biotech sector have what amounts to an arrogant "we decide" attitude as to what should and should not be done in science -- rather than society as a whole determining proper parameters through democratic processes -- and moreover, that some have an essentially "anything goes" mentality at odds with the views of the rest of society.

Further, these advocates pretend to be willing to accept reasonable limitations. But a close look reveals these restraints are primarily over things they cannot yet do. Then, after a controversial technology becomes doable, the once "unthinkable" is suddenly moved into the "full speed ahead!" file.

Now, that pattern holds with human genetic engineering. From  From the New York Times story:

An influential science advisory group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine on Tuesday lent its support to a once unthinkable proposition: the modification of human embryos to create genetic traits that can be passed down to future generations.

This type of human gene editing has long been seen as an ethical minefield. Researchers fear that the techniques used to prevent genetic diseases might also be used to enhance intelligence, for example, or to create people physically suited to particular tasks, like serving as soldiers...

Just over a year ago, an international group of scientists said it would be "irresponsible to proceed" with making heritable changes to the human genome until risks could be better assessed and there was "broad societal consensus about the appropriateness" of any proposed change. No one is pretending that such a consensus now exists.

But in the year that the committee was deliberating, [bioethicist] Ms. [Alta] Charo said, the techniques required to perform this sort of gene editing have passed crucial milestones.

See what I mean?


It starts with health and that justification is deployed to sway the public and regulators. But soon, these technologies will move to promoting enhancement and eugenic design, already seen in currently deployed reproductive technologies. Know this.

Waiting in vain?

Eye Evolution: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
Brian Miller 

Without calling it a series, I've written several articles recently that followed a logical path. In the first, I described the distinction between   incremental innovation and radical innovation. I also outlined the commonalities and differences between intelligent design and theistic evolution (TE) as approaches to biology. In a follow-up, I applied the concepts from the first article to the  proposed evolution of the vertebrate eye, demonstrating that it could not have occurred without intelligent direction. That's mainly because the majority of steps required for the addition of a lens are disadvantageous in isolation, so selective pressures would have operated in opposition to the evolutionary process.

Let's now consider the challenge of waiting times -- the minimum time required for hypothesized evolutionary transformations, such as the development of the camera eye, to occur through undirected processes. Even if the selective pressures were favorable, the required timescales are far longer for sufficient numbers of coordinated mutations to accumulate than the maximum time available, as determined by the fossil record. Of special interest is the proposed cooption of crystallin proteins, which give the lens its refractive properties. Seemingly, one of the easiest evolutionary steps should be producing these proteins in the lens, for some of them are already used for other purposes. The main hurdle would simply be altering the regulatory regions of the first borrowed crystallin gene and other related genes, so they bind to the correct set of transcription factors (TFs). The lens protein could then be overexpressed in the fiber cells in sufficient quantities at the right time in development.

However, the cooption process is far more challenging than it might at first appear. It requires specific regulatory regions to bind to well over four new transcription factors. This alteration would involve numerous mutations creating over four corresponding DNA binding sites known as transcription factor binding sites (TFBS). As I mentioned in the previous article, the earliest lens should have closely resembled lenses of vertebrates today, so this lower estimate is almost certainly accurate.

A typical binding site involved in lens construction consists of a DNA sequence ranging from roughly 6 (e.g., SOX2) to 15 (e.g., Pax6) base pairs, so four TFBS would likely correspond to over 30 base pairs. One could think of these DNA sequences like the launch codes to a missile; they must be correct before the protein can be properly manufactured. The lower bound of 30 base pairs can be divided by a factor of 3 to compensate for sequence redundancies, flexibility in where in the DNA sequences start, and the fact that roughly one quarter of the bases would be correct purely by chance. This extremely conservative estimate indicates that over 10 mutations would be required to generate a proper sequence. All but the final mutation would be neutral.

We can now calculate the likelihood of sufficient mutations occurring in 10 million generations. The mutation rate for a specific base par is typically estimated for complex animals to correspond to a probability around 1 in 100 million. The chance of a mutation occurring in 10 million generations is then 1 in 10. Therefore, the chance of 10 coordinated mutations appearing on the same DNA strand works out to much less than 1 in 10 billion. No potential precursor to a vertebrate with a lens would have had an effective population large enough to acquire the needed mutations. For comparison, the effective population size estimate used for Drosophila melanogaster can be in the low millions. If the generation time were even as low as one year, a crystallin could not be coopted even in 10 million years, which is the time required for the appearance of most known phyla in the Cambrian explosion.

Moreover, this step is only one of hundreds required to produce a lens. Researchers have identified numerous TFs essential to lens development in vertebrates, and each has its own set of TFBS, which integrate into a complex developmental regulatory gene network. If only one connection were wired incorrectly, the eye in the vast majority of cases would not form properly, resulting in impaired vision. In addition, the lens is only one component of the eye, which is only one part of the visual system. The obvious conclusion is that, in the timeframe allowed by the fossil record, the reengineering to produce the vertebrate visual system would require foresight and deliberate coordination. Those are the hallmarks of design.

Biologists have claimed to produce viable scenarios for the evolution of several other complex systems. What all these stories share is that they ignore crucial details and lack careful analysis of feasibility. When we examine these issues in detail, the stories collapse for the same reasons that the one about the eye does: First, the selective pressures oppose transitions between key proposed stages. Second, the required timescales are vastly longer than what is available.

For biologists, rigorously evaluating evolutionary narratives has become fully possible only in the past several decades due to advances in molecular and developmental biology. Meanwhile, with breakthroughs in computer engineering, information theory, and nanotechnology, parallels between biological and human engineered systems are increasingly evident. These developments are making the intelligent design framework essential for scientific advancement. They also create new opportunities for ID proponents and theistic evolutionists to collaborate.

Proponents of TE want to push materialistic explanations for biological systems as far as possible, as science demands. ID advocates would not disagree with them on that. No one wants to trigger the design filter prematurely. So theistic evolutionists should join us in considering what the modern evolutionary synthesis with its auxiliary hypotheses, such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance, can explain. We should all continue to examine how insights from evolution may benefit research on cancer, in epidemiology, and other fields.

ID researchers, meanwhile, can examine the limits of purely materialistic processes, and we invite theistic evolutionists to do likewise These combined efforts will help to define in greater detail what Michael Behe calls the edge of evolution. This understanding would also help advance research on cancer treatments, antibiotic protocols, and more. At the same time, ID proponents can help identify how principles and insights from engineering may advance biological research and related applications.

Many theistic evolutionists recognize that the appearance of design is real (but then, so does Richard Dawkins). This insight, at least, should inform their research. In contrast, anti-theistic evolutionists are biased against recognizing the benefits of design thinking. As a result, in studying life they have stumbled upon close parallels to human engineering, which, however, they recognized only begrudgingly. On the other hand, ID expects these parallel and is unsurprised to find them. A classic example is how researchers, misled by evolutionary thinking, dismissed a large portion of the human genome as "junk" DNA instead of anticipating that it would function as a  genomic operating system.


TE researchers do not need to immediately agree with ID researchers on whether any particular feature of life is the result of primary design or secondary causes. They can still work together to best serve the cause of genuine science, and I hope they will do so more in the future.

The fine print.

What Darwinists Don't Tell You: Valentine's Day Edition
David Klinghoffer

Darwinism is replete with salesmanship, some of it thoroughly deceptive. Pushing the false dichotomy of evolution versus Young Earth Creationism, as if there were no alternative to these two, is one way that evolutionists bully and mislead non-scientists. Sadly, they are joined in this by some creationists.

Tom Bethell, author of  Darwin's House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, points out that from Darwin himself on up to today, advocates of the theory have habitually  played down the conflict between their materialism, on one hand, and religious belief on the other.

One doesn't hear much about the materialism of Darwin and Darwinism, likely because there has been a longstanding effort to ignore and suppress it. Many of today's theistic Darwinists play this game, but they are hardly the first.
Similarly, only the most perilously candid evolutionists are in your face about another straightforward inference from materialism: the denial of free will. Bethell again:

The materialist philosophy puts its advocates at odds with the great majority of mankind, alerting the rest of us to the implausibility of what we are expected to believe. Being told that "evolution is a fact" can be intimidating because many laymen won't know how to respond. But to be told, "Your will is not free, even though you think it is," or "You're an automaton and you don't even know it," is likely to get people's backs up.
This bleak vision, the human being as meat machine, is on vivid display, though mixed with a clumsy childlike enthusiasm, in the writing of emeritus University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. On Darwin Day, for instance, he chided me for the hope that evidence of design will overcome Darwinian censorship: "I'm sorry to say that, I think, Klinghoffer will go to his Maker (disassociated molecules) before a teleological view of life permeates evolutionary biology."

Imagine trying to sell "disassociated molecules" to the public, with their human intuitions, fears, and longings. Darwinists like Coyne or Dawkins, Bethell observes, are their own worst enemies.

To these thoughts, add our colleague Jonathan Witt's observation for Valentine's Day over at The Stream. From Darwinian materialism, he notes, a denial of the reality of love must follow:

Evolutionist Daniel Dennett  called  Darwinism a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept ... dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding."
Dissolve those things and there's no room for romantic love to be anything very exalted.

Biologist E.O. Wilson is   just as blunt. When Darwinian science conquers all, we will view the human brain as just the "product of genetic evolution by natural selection." And the mind "will be more precisely explained as an epiphenomenon of the neuronal machinery of the brain."

But surely we can rescue things like art, religion and poetry, right? No, Wilson insists. Evolution teaches us that all of it was "produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues."

Evolving Away Love

So what becomes of Valentine's Day, of all of those romantic longings and pledges to love, honor and protect, maybe even till death do us part? Yes, glands and instincts are involved. Only a gnostic would deny that, and Christianity threw Gnosticism out on its ear at the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

But Darwinian science goes further. It insists the stuff of Valentine's Day is all glands and instincts, and beneath those, all brain chemistry -- a soulless concoction of matter and energy stirred up in the alchemist's lab we call evolution.

Of course, it would have to be that way. A materialist understanding of evolution robs us of virtually everything that makes life rich and worth living, if we're honest about it with ourselves. What, really, is left? Eating? Animal rutting? Pursuing status or dominance in a manner hardly different from the way chimps and chickens do?

But Darwinists, devoted salesmen that they are, often seem freaked out about the implications of their theory, and so try to take those back, sometimes in the space between one paragraph and the next. Dennett, for one, preaches the illusion of consciousness. But just as we know that love is real and not only a matter of glands in action, and as we know that are our will is ultimately free, we also have a strong sense that our inner lives are genuine.

So here is neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga giving a reverent review to Dennett's new book, From  From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, in the Wall Street Journal  and getting tangled up in the consciousness question. On one hand, says Gazzaniga:

[Dennett's] early writings insisted on the idea that consciousness was an illusion, a trick that the multifaceted brain pulled to give us that cozy feeling of an interior experience, with all its fullness -- the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the euphoria of love.
But most Wall Street Journal readers are going to have a hard time with the idea of their "interior experience" as a trick their brain pulls on them. The notion is thus walked back by Dr. Gazzaniga in the very next paragraph:

This suggestion is quite profound and complicated and has often been misunderstood. In response to Mr. Dennett's early landmark book, "Consciousness Explained" (1991), the cognitive-science cognoscenti quipped that the title should have been "Consciousness Explained Away." That was obviously not Mr. Dennett's point. It was thought by many distinguished philosophers, such as John Searle and Thomas Nagel, that Mr. Dennett was abandoning the first-person experience of consciousness, the personal nature of it, the qualia. He wasn't at all. He never doubted consciousness itself.
Consciousness for Dennett is "an illusion," yet "He never doubted consciousness itself." He never doubted an illusion? I haven't read the book, but the review of it makes no sense.

Darwinism asks us to doubt, to deny, our own intuitions and experiences. Intelligent design cheerfully affirms them. The former, says Jonathan Witt, overwhelms resistance "by endlessly recycling evidence long discredited even by scientists in [Darwinists'] own ranks" (referring to the "icons of evolution" made famous by Jonathan Wells).


Meanwhile, intelligent design is not permitted to make its own scientific case. Or when it does so, ID scientists are put down by censors  or drowned out by media spokesmen with endless chants of "creationist, creationist, creationist." What a mad world!

A trump administration may not mean The end of the republic?:Pros and cons.

The Bard and the art of insult.

On Kafka and the kafkaesque.

Taking an axe to Darwinism's tree of life

When genome mapper Craig Venter made clear he doubted universal common descent…
Posted by News under Evolution, Genomics, Origin Of Life, Tree of life

We’d heard about  Craig Venter’s dissent  before but you should read the whole story: From  Tom Bethell  in  Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates,

This was publicized in a science forum held at Arizona State University in February 2011, a little over a year after Dawkins’s Greatest Show

was published. The physicist Paul Davies and others, including two Nobel Prize winners, participated in the event, which was videotaped. Richard Dawkins himself was on the panel. The forum addressed the question, “What is life?”Most of the panelists accepted that all organisms on Earth represent a single kind of life because they believed that the genetic code is universal. The NASA scientist and panelist Chris McKay made the case that this single form of life—a “sample of one”—should encourage us to further explore Mars and other planets for signs of life.

Craig Venter then disputed the premise. He challenged the claim “that there’s only one life form on this planet.” We have “a lot of different types of metabolism, different organisms,” he said. He turned to Paul Davies and added: “I wouldn’t call you the same life form as the one we have that lives in pH 12 base. That would dissolve your skin if we dropped you in it.” (pp. 53–54)

Venter went on to doubt that there is a single “tree of life” and evolutionary bioinformatics specialist W. Ford Doolittle noted that “the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree.”

Guy to watch. In a world where so many people are defending themselves from shadows and rumours, he wants to look at reality. He should be banished from pop science coverage as a bad influence.

What if it turns out that there are multiple streams of life arising from a single era? How would that change the picture of the origin of life?

Undeniably designed.

A Son Realizes the Irrepressible Truth
Howard Glicksman

Recently while seeing a new hospice patient with severe heart failure, I encountered the man's son, who happens to work in manufacturing. The younger man sought to better understand his father's medical condition and with it the relevant treatment options. So, beginning with the anatomy of the heart and its role within the cardiovascular system, we quickly moved on to what happens when the heart fails and how this had manifested in his father.

The son proved to be an astute interlocutor, as each answer engendered another probing question. Soon I had to explain how water is either inside or outside the cell, and if outside, either in the circulation or around the cells. We discussed the effects of hydrostatic and osmotic pressure on water movement in and out of the capillary. In the midst of this, as he gazed away rapt in thought, I assumed he was now content with what I had explained. But then a quizzical look came over his face and he asked, "But what happens to the water that doesn't make it back to the veins?"

I responded, "Ah, have you ever heard of the lymphatics?" and went on to describe this microscopic drainage system. He quickly smiled, tapped the heel of his palm to his forehead, gave out a yell, and exclaimed "What a beautiful design!" As I mentioned, he works in manufacturing and so knows a thing or two about design.

I had just witnessed in action what Douglas Axe describes in his book Undeniable  as the design intuition. It was much more than just an intellectual assent to the truth. It animated the son's whole body as he expressed with joy, despite the painful circumstances of his father's health, the recognition of his own body's design.


It was a natural human response to the facts set before him. Yet in the wake of yesterday's marking of Darwin Day, aka Academic Freedom Day, it's sobering to consider that if he had done this in many a public or private university setting, he likely would have been belittled, criticized, or depending on his position, censured.

No way back for Junk DNA?

With Fresh Funding, ENCODE Team Continues Demolition of "Junk DNA" Myth
Evolution News & Views


Is there treasure in the DNA's so-called "junk" pile? Well, as the first half of a popular saying goes, money talks. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) just funded five centers to explore what the "dark matter genome" (the non-protein-coding part) is doing. Two of the centers will be at the University of California, San Francisco, which describes the new project:

"The Human Genome Project mapped the letters of the human genome, but it didn't tell us anything about the grammar: where the punctuation is, where the starts and ends are," said NIH Program Director Elise Feingold, PhD. "That's what ENCODE is trying to do." [Emphasis added.]
Grammar -- there's an ID-friendly analogy for you. Language students and their teachers don't look for grammar and punctuation in gibberish. The statement implies purpose: functional information that has a beginning and end. Rules that organize information for communication. Genes without grammar are like words without sentences.

Launched in 2003 after the Human Genome Project found that only 2 percent of DNA codes for proteins, ENCODE was tasked "to find all the functional regions of the human genome, whether they form genes or not." Initial results were spectacular, showing that at least 80 percent of DNA is transcribed. This made the #1 spot in our top ten evolution-related stories for 2012 an "easy pick," as Casey Luskin wrote at the time, since it "buries" the "junk DNA" dogma -- the idea that evolution left our genome littered with useless leftovers of mutation and natural selection.

Darwinians don't give up easily, though, as we have often noted. Transcription is not proof of function, they argue. But why use costly resources to transcribe junk for no purpose? In the intervening years, more and more functions have come to light.

The initiative revealed that millions of these noncoding letter sequences perform essential regulatory actions, like turning genes on or off in different types of cells. However, while scientists have established that these regulatory sequences have important functions, they do not know what function each sequence performs, nor do they know which gene each one affects. That is because the sequences are often located far from their target genes -- in some cases millions of letters away. What's more, many of the sequences have different effects in different types of cells.
The new grants from NHGRI [National Human Genome Research Institute] will allow the five new centers to work to define the functions and gene targets of these regulatory sequences.

We anticipate future spectacular discoveries will continue to come from ENCODE. And now researchers have new lights to shine: including faster DNA barcoding and the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool.

The project's aim is for scientists to use the latest technology, such as genome editing, to gain insights into human biology that could one day lead to treatments for complex genetic diseases.
In addition to the two centers at UCSF, others will be set up at labs including Cornell, Stanford, and Lawrence Berkeley. The National Center for Human Genome Research explains the goals, in which it will invest an initial outlay of $31.5 million for 2017:

At its core, ENCODE is about enabling the scientific community to make discoveries by using basic science approaches to understand genomes at the most fundamental level. Its catalog of genomic information can be used for a variety of research projects -- for example, generating hypotheses about what goes wrong in specific diseases or understanding the processes that determine how the same genome sequence is used in different parts of the body to make cells with specialized functions. More than 1,600 scientific publications by the research community have used ENCODE data or tools.
Other Junk-Busting Research

Meanwhile, labs all over are finding treasure in the formerly dismissed junk. It has become something of a scientific sport these days to get the function ball downfield ahead of other labs.

Enhancer RNAs. Last month, Penn Medicine News threw this touchdown, "'Mysterious' Non-protein-coding RNAs Play Important Roles in Gene Expression." Realizing that transcribing junk didn't make sense, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania suspected that there must be more going on. They asked, Why do body cells turn out so different when they all have the same genome? Seeking function, they learned about the role of enhancer RNAs that regulate which genes get expressed in different types of cells.

DNA repeats. It looks so boring, repetitive DNA. It must be unimportant, right? Not so, found two researchers from Rockefeller University. Writing in PNAS, they discovered that three proteins carefully protect those repeats around centromeres -- the locations on chromosomes where the spindle attaches during cell division. "Our study reveals the existence of a centromere-specific mechanism to organize the repetitive structure and prevent human centromeres from suffering illegitimate rearrangements." Some could lead to cancer and aging. Doesn't the converse, legitimate arrangements, imply complex specified information?

Disordered proteins. Most proteins fold into compact shapes. What are disordered proteins doing, flailing like air dancers in the wind? Canadian researchers publishing in PNAS found one that has a signaling function. It's not alone; intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are "widespread" and have "diverse functions," they say. Since they are maintained by "stabilizing selection," they must be doing something important. Oddly, the function remains the same even when the underlying amino acid sequence changes. In one instance in yeast, they found evidence for "selection maintaining this quantitative molecular trait despite underlying genotypic divergence." This could be a major paradigm change, since 40 percent of proteins are predicted to contain "disordered" regions. The one they studied appears to have a signaling function. Now, the hunt is on to find other functions in "disorder" (synonymous with junk).

Accordion genomes. Protein-making is not the only function of DNA. Some of it, we know, provides structural support or anchor points. Researchers at the University of Utah are exploring another mystery: why genomes grow and shrink. By studying the genomes of birds and mammals (including flying mammals, the bats), they speculate that shedding DNA can streamline a bird or bat for flight, but allow other creatures to grow their supply. The stretching and squeezing of genomes they liken to an accordion mechanism. It would seem that extra scaffolding could be jettisoned without harm. Whatever is going on, it doesn't match the old dogmas of neo-Darwinism. "Evolution is often thought of as a gradual remodeling of the genome, the genetic blueprints for building an organism," this article begins. "In some instances it might be more appropriate to call it an overhaul." Since overhauling a genome non-gradually would likely be catastrophic, we suspect scientists will find this process is under careful regulation. "I didn't expect this at all," the lead author remarked. "The dynamic nature of these genomes had remained hidden because of the remarkable balance between gain and loss." Watch this space.


The research strategy of looking for function continues to prove fruitful. It's an attitude that says, If it's there, it's probably doing something important. True, just because some things are designed doesn't imply that everything is designed. But science was hindered for decades by the junk-DNA myth and the vestigial-organs myth, which we now know are being discarded. Science is playing catch-up after years of lazy thinking that reasoned, If it's not doing something I understand right now, it must be junk. It's time now to assume function, until the case is shown to be otherwise. As Paul Nelson says, "If something works, it's not happening by accident."