On "Stauros" according to the NWT

A Reply to: 
Jehovah Witnesses And The Symbol Of The Cross
The first step in understanding why this statement is made is to know that every where your Bible uses the word "cross," their Bible uses the word "stake." To confirm their position they will use partial quotes and references from scholars that seem to back up their claim that the Greek word stauros in the New Testament means "stake" or "pole" instead of its true meaning "cross." They also will say, "stauros" in both the classical Greek and Koine carries no thought of a "cross" made of two timbers, but instead it carries the notion of only an upright stake, a pale, pile, or pole.When the Greek lexicons are checked, however, one finds this is not the case.

Heinz: Are JW's using partial quotes? And do Greek Lexicons and dictionaries agree more with Mark's point of view? Let us take a look. "The Tau was the basis for what is now called the "cross" taken from the Latin "crux".  "The shape of the [two-beamed cross] had its origin in ancient Chaldea, and was used as the symbol of the god Tammuz (being in the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name) in that country and in adjacent lands, including Egypt. By the middle of the 3rd cent. A.D. the churches had either departed from, or had travestied, certain doctrines of the Christian faith. In order to increase the prestige of the apostate ecclesiastical system pagans were received into the churches apart from regeneration by faith, and were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols. Hence the Tau or T, in its most frequent form, with the cross-piece lowered, was adopted to stand for the cross of Christ."—An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words (London, 1962), W. E. Vine, p. 256. 
What is this? The Cross used among ancient pagan? Is there more? 
"It is strange, yet unquestionably a fact, that in ages long before the birth of Christ, and since then in lands untouched by the teaching of the Church, the Cross has been used as a sacred symbol. . . . The Greek Bacchus, the Tyrian Tammuz, the Chaldean Bel, and the Norse Odin, were all symbolized to their votaries by a cruciform device."—The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art (London, 1900), G. S. Tyack, p. 1.

The people of the ancient lands used the cross in worship, some, like the Egyptians used it in Phallus worship, or, worship of the male sex organ.  It was used as a symbol of fertility. "Various figures of crosses are found everywhere on Egyptian monuments and tombs, and are considered by many authorities as symbolical either of the phallus [a representation of the male sex organ] or of coition. . . . In Egyptian tombs the crux ansata [cross with a circle or handle on top] is found side by side with the phallus."—A Short History of Sex-Worship (London, 1940), H. Cutner, pp. 16, 17; see also The Non-Christian Cross, p. 183.

The Ancient Church by clergyman W.  D. Killen says, on page 316: "From the most remote antiquity the cross was venerated in Egypt and Syria; it was held in equal honour by the Buddhists of the East; and, what is still more extraordinary, when the Spaniards first visited America, the well-known sign was found among the objects of worship in the idol temples of Anahuac. It is also remarkable that, about the commencement of our era, the pagans were wont to make the sign of a cross upon the forehead in the celebration of some of their sacred mysteries."  The origin of the cross is indeed very pagan. 
So you see, the reason that JW's do not use the word bears heavily on its pagan origin. After all, "What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?" 2Cor 6:15 RSV

"They also will say, "stauros" in both the classical Greek and Koine carries no thought of a "cross" made of two timbers, but instead it carries the notion of only an upright stake, a pale, pile, or pole. 
When the Greek lexicons are checked, however, one finds this is not the case. "

We have already checked Vine's, but are there others? 
A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Original Greek Words with their Precise Meanings for English 
Readers states: "STAUROS . . . denotes, primarily, an upright pale or stake. On such 
malefactors were nailed for execution." Similarly, the book The Non-Christian Cross observes: 
"There is not a single sentence in any of the numerous writings forming the New Testament, 
which, in the original Greek, bears even indirect evidence to the effect that the stauros used in 
the case of Jesus was other than an ordinary stauros [pole or stake]; much less to the effect that 
it consisted, not of one piece of timber, but of two pieces nailed together in the form of a cross." 
Paul Wilhelm Schmidt, who was a professor at the University of Basel, in his work Die 
Geschichte Jesu (The History of Jesus), Vol. 2, Tübingen and Leipzig, 1904, pp. 386-394, made 
a detailed study of the Greek word stau·ros'. On p. 386 of his work he said: "staur¬V [stau·ros'] 
means every upright standing pale or tree trunk." 
New Bible Dictionary of 1985 under "Cross," page 253: "The Gk. word for 'cross' (stauros; verb 
stauroo . . . ) means primarily an upright stake or beam, and secondarily a stake used as an 
instrument for punishment and execution." 
W. E. Vine says on this subject: "STAUROS (staur¬V) denotes, primarily, an upright pale or 
stake. On such malefactors were nailed for execution. Both the noun and the verb stauroo, to 
fasten to a stake or pale, are originally to be distinguished from the ecclesiastical form of a two 
beamed cross." Greek scholar Vine then mentions the Chaldean origin of the two-piece cross 
and how it was adopted from the pagans by Christendom in the third century C.E. as a symbol of 
Christ's impalement.—Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 1981, Vol. 
1, p. 256. 
The Latin dictionary by Lewis and Short gives as the basic meaning of crux "a tree, frame, or 
other wooden instruments of execution, on which criminals were impaled or hanged." 
The book Dual Heritage—The Bible and the British Museum states: "It may come as a shock to 
know that there is no word such as 'cross' in the Greek of the New Testament. The word 
translated 'cross' is always the Greek word [stau·ros'] meaning a 'stake' or 'upright pale.' The 
cross was not originally a Christian symbol; it is derived from Egypt and Constantine." 
See also Strongs and Young's Analytical Concordance.

The Watchtower Society not only claims that Christ did not die on a cross, they further state that there is no evidence that a cross with a crossbeam was ever even used by Romans during the first century. They claim the stake was "the then customary usage of this means of execution in the Orient." They maintain, "The evidence is, therefore, completely lacking that Jesus Christ was crucified on two pieces of timber placed at right angles...The passing of time and further archaeological discoveries will be certain to prove its [torture stake] correctness.

To further elucidate those that see this rejection of a 2-beamed stauros are not WT-born are the follwing references: 
"THE sign of the cross has been a symbol of great antiquity, present in nearly every known 
culture. Its meaning has eluded anthropologists, though its use in funerary art could well point to 
a defense against evil. On the other hand, the famous crux ansata of Egypt, depicted coming 
from the mouth, must refer to life or breath. The universal use of the sign of the cross makes 
more poignant the striking lack of crosses in early Christian remains, especially any specific 
reference to the event on Golgotha. Most scholars now agree that the cross, as an artistic 
reference to the passion event, cannot be found prior to the time of Constantine."—Ante 
Pacem—Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine (1985), by Professor 
Graydon F. Snyder, page 27. 
"There was no use of the crucifix," says one historian of the early Christians, "and no material 
representation of the cross." History of the Christian Church, J. F. Hurst, Vol. I, p. 366.

We have strong Biblical basis for assuming a cross beam: 
NAS John 20:25 The other disciples therefore were saying to him, "We have seen the Lord!" But he said to them, "Unless I shall see in His hands the imprint of the nails [plural], and put my finger into the place of the nails [plural], and put my hand into His side, I will not believe. 
You will notice in this passage the word "nails," this is in the plural suggesting each hand was nailed seperately to a cross beam. You might also notice in JW literature images of Jesus hanging on a cross with one (singular) nail through his wrist/hands.

The Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, by M'Clintock and Strong, comments: 
'Much time and trouble have been wasted in disputing as to whether three or four nails were used in fastening the Lord. Nonnus affirms that three only were used, in which he is followed by Gregory Nazianzen. The more general belief gives four nails, an opinion which is supported at much length and by curious arguments by Curtius. Others have carried the number of nails as high as fourteen.'-Volume II, page 580. 
Accounts of Jesus impalement/crucifixion like Matthew 27:35 give little evidence of the methods used. After Jesus' resurrection, Thomas said: "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and stick my finger into the print of the nails and stick my hand into his side, I will certainly not believe." (John 20:25) Because of this some have also concluded from John 20:25 that two nails were used, one through each hand. But does Thomas' use of the plural *nails* have to be understood that Jesus' hands were pierced by a separate nail? 
In Luke 24:39 the resurrected Jesus said: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself." This suggests that Christ's feet also were nailed. Since Thomas made no mention of nailprints in Jesus' feet, his use of the plural "nails" could have been a general reference to multiple nails used in piercing Jesus. 
Debate over such an insignificant detail should not be permitted to becloud the all-important truth that "we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son."-Romans 5:10. RSV

We must also remember too that the Cross was adopted as a "Christian" symbol (312 C.E.)  after it was adopted by Emperor Constantine, who continued to be a Sun-worshipper, and the cross was the symbol of the sun-god, Sol. 
January 13, 313 C.E. Constantine as pagan Pontifex Maximus publishes his famous edict of toleration in favor of the professed Christians and they are made eligible to public office. 
321 C.E. Sunday Dies Solis, the day of the sun-god, Sol, whose symbol is the cross, is made a day exempt from being judicial and its observance made a legal duty. 
325 C.E. Constantine becomes head of the eastern and western sections of the Roman Empire. He calls a religious council for settling the controversy over the Greek characters or "trinity," which threatens the unity of his empire. As pagan Pontifex Maximus, not yet baptized as a Christian, Constantine presides over the council...and the rest is the history of Christendom. 
 I think what JW's are driving at is the adoration of a symbol. I think you will agree that many use the figure of a cross a object of worship, and where that happens we are no better than the pagans who did the very same thing. The cross is a symbol of Christ's humiliation, but we are saved through his BLOOD that was shed that day. Let us envision it this way. If our Saviour was killed by a gun, would we be hanging that around our necks. It is too macabre to sprinkle blood on our shirts to commemorate this important event, and using the cross as a symbol of our affection in the Lord Jesus Christ is not necessary. After all, we are walking by faith, not by sight.



Addendum: Here is an interesting note from a recently released Bible:

"The Greek term signifies an upright stake on which criminal were executed, with no suggestion of a cross-beam. In the Latin versions the term 'crux' was used, but according to Livy of the 1st century B.C., the word meant no more than an upright stake; it was only later that crux came to mean a cross. Josephus relates how 2,000 were crucified at one time ('Antiquities' book 17; 10:10) hardly practicable if crosses had to be made for each one. There are Greek words which denote a cross, but none of these appear in the in any of the four gospel accounts of Jesus' execution. At Galatians 3:13 Paul refers to the instrument as 'a timber' (A.V. a tree) a reference to the upright stake on which bodies of criminals were hanged under the Mosaic Law (Deut 21:22), and which Jesus fulfilled by his death. 
Some have contended that the Romans did use crosses for execution at that time although Livy refutes this. Even if this were so, the Romans were also careful to observe local customs as fas as possible to avoid unnecessarily upsetting the populace, and so likely would have modified their method to conform to the Jewish practice. A rough upright stake would be in any case less trouble to produce than a hewn cross with a joint strong enough to bear the weight of a man. 
Christians are sometimes disturbed to learn that the cross, considered for centuries as a Christian symbol, had its origin long before Christ and was actually used in pagan mythology.It was the symbol of the god Tammuz, and Bacchus, and the Egyptian Osiris. It was worshipped by the Celtic druids and worn on necklaces by the Vestal Virgins of Rome...As the Greek text shows, Christ was not executed on a Cross, that symbol can be regarded for what it is, a pagan corruption of Christian worship introduced in the early centuries of our common era. Thus in harmony with 2 Cor 6:15 although long cherished, it is something that Christians should shun."
21st Century NT appendix 
Although (A.E. Knoch) uses "cross" in the text of the Concordant Literal Version, in the 
Keyword Concordance under "cross" he says, "an upright stake or pale, without any crosspiece, now, popularly, cross".  Under "crucify" he adds, "Drive a stake into the ground, fasten on a stake, impale, now popular usage, crucify, though there was no crosspiece".

On irreducibe complexity

The winged swarms v.Darwin.

Collective Motion Multiplies Design Requirements

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

A memorable sequence from Illustra Media’s documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds examines the phenomenon of starling murmurations (see it  here)

When you consider the training required for six fighter pilots to fly in formation, it becomes all the more remarkable to watch half a million birds perform split-second maneuvers in close proximity to one another.

In the film, European scientists sought to understand the birds’ collective motion by plotting the positions over time of individuals and small groups of birds within the flock. Now in a new paper in PLOS ONE

, four UK scientists try a different approach. They monitored a flock of “citizen scientists” who volunteered to record observations of starling murmurations over a two-year period. Some 3,000 volunteers from 23 countries participated. The large data set, mostly gathered within the UK, allowed the researchers to address little-understood questions about this spectacular example of collective motion, such as seasonal activity, dependence on temperature, and whether or not predators affect the size or length of a murmuration. Here’s a quick summary of the findings:

Flock sizes increased from October to February, then declined.

Average duration was 26 minutes; longest ones were at the beginning of the season.

Cool temperatures weakly increased murmuration durations, but day length was more significant.

Predators were observed in only about 30 percent of the murmurations.

When predators were present, the birds tended to descend en masse to their roosts rather than disperse.

Based on the data, the authors believe that predator avoidance (the “safer together” hypothesis) is probably more in play than temperature (the “warmer together” hypothesis):

[O]ur findings suggest that the collective behaviour observed in starling murmurations is primarily an anti-predator adaptation rather than a way of attracting larger numbers of individuals to a roost for warmth. Suitable roosting sites attract large numbers of birds who would be vulnerable flying to the roost individually. Murmurating above the roosting site provides multiple advantages in terms of the dilution effect, increased vigilance leading to the detection effect and predator confusion. This model of murmuration relies on having a critical mass of birds arriving at more-or-less the same time to initiate the murmuration and further study of the behaviour of starlings at the start of the murmuration (and indeed, just before the start of the murmuration) would be valuable in unravelling how this behaviour develops from a relatively few number of individuals into a spectacular collective behaviour comprising potentially tens of thousands of individuals.

Discovering one reason for a behavior, however, does not negate other possibilities. Perhaps the birds sleep better after an energetic exercise program. Or, maybe it gives them pleasure somehow. Predator avoidance may just be a side benefit, since predators were not observed during most of the events. It seems overly costly to evolve this kind of elaborate flight behavior for predator avoidance when simpler options could do, such as camouflage or scattering. And why didn’t the predators evolve counter-measures, like engaging in attack murmurations of their own, dive-bombing the flock en masse in their roosts? Have hawks been fooled by the starlings’ trick for millions of years? For these and other reasons, evolutionary explanations fall short. The authors don’t even mention evolution or speculate about how the behavior arose.

One thing we can be sure of: performing split-second decisions in tight formation in 3-D without colliding doesn’t just happen. To do what these birds do takes precision flight hardware and software. We appreciate the effort of the researchers and the citizen scientists to gather all this data. It does provide new insight into a marvelous natural wonder. The most important questions, though, remain unanswered by those who restrict their explanations to methodological naturalism.

Collective behavior is seen throughout the animal kingdom: in swarming insects, shoaling fish, stampeding mammals, and flocking birds. The phenomenon is so interesting to the Human Frontiers Science Programme (supported by 15 countries including the United States) that it recently awarded $1 million to a team led by Dr. Alex Thornton to study it. News from the University of Exeter 

says, “The riddle of how these often vast numbers of individuals synchronize their movements so flawlessly as to behave almost as a single being has only recently begun to be unravelled.”

Thornton is particularly interested in how individual characteristics affect the group, since no two individuals are exactly alike. Even human “flocks” cross the divide between individual and group behavior, as seen in traffic flow and crowd dynamics (for example, doing “the wave” at a baseball game). For the next three years, Thornton’s team will study intelligent members of the crow family, jackdaws and rooks, which often flock together.

Dr Thornton added: “Although people may not realise it, the familiar sight of flocks of jackdaws and rooks that darken our winter skies is amongst the most complex aggregations of animals on Earth. By studying the movements of individual birds within flocks, and their interactions with one another, we will help to reveal how complex societies remain cohesive and make collective decisions.”

Large aquariums delight visitors with their displays that often include swarms of anchovies swimming like one giant organism, all turning on cue. A new paper in Science Advances

 (an open-access journal of the AAAS) seeks to understand “the effects of external cues on individual and collective behavior of shoaling fish.” What happens when you scare a school of fish, or attract them with food?

To date, experimental work has focused on collective behavior within a single, stable context. We examine the individual and collective behavior of a schooling fish species, the x-ray tetra (Pristella maxillaris), identifying their response to changes in context produced by food cues or conspecific alarm cues. Fish exposed to alarm cues show pronounced, broad-ranging changes of behavior, including reducing speed and predictability in their movements. Alarmed fish also alter their responses to other group members, including enacting a smaller zone of repulsion and increasing their frequency of observation of, and responsiveness to, near neighbors. Fish subject to food cues increased speed as a function of neighbor positions and reduced encounter frequency with near neighbors. Overall, changes in individual behavior and the interactions among individuals in response to external cues coincide with changes in group-level patterns, providing insight into the adaptability of behavior to changes in context and interrelationship between local interactions and global patterns in collective behavior.

Those reactions don’t sound surprising, since we humans can probably relate to watching our neighbors more closely when alarmed, or rushing past them to get free stuff. So again, while one appreciates the graphs and charts of relative speeds of the fish when they are subjected to external cues, the paper leaves the most interesting questions unaddressed: how could evolution equip fish with the hardware and software to respond quickly in coordinated fashion while swimming millimeters apart?

The authors mention “rules of interaction,” but who made the rules, and who enforces them? How did the fish learn the exceptions, when the rules become “context-dependent”? If every individual did not know the rules, frightened fish might make like the Midianites in the story from the Book of Judges, killing each other off in the confusion of the moment. Starlings appear to follow simple rules, but without reliable programming in each individual, the murmuration could turn into a demolition derby.

Fighter pilots mastering formation flight require many hours of sophisticated training in intelligently designed aircraft. From this fact, we can deduce that intelligence was involved in the origin of collective behavior in animals. Tellingly, this paper, like the other one, doesn’t get into evolution. It makes you wonder about that claim that nothing in biology makes sense without it.

Is OOL Science's road to LUCA really another bridge to nowhere?

Origin-of-Life Researcher Admits, It’s “A Long, Long Way to LUCA”
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

As David Klinghoffer noted briefly here already, a recent paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry, “Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning,” opens with a striking admission. In the article, British biochemist John Sutherland concedes the lack of progress in explaining a naturalistic origin of life. Let’s look at this in some more detail. Sutherland writes:

Understanding how life on Earth might have originated is the major goal of origins of life chemistry. To proceed from simple feedstock molecules and energy sources to a living system requires extensive synthesis and coordinated assembly to occur over numerous steps, which are governed only by environmental factors and inherent chemical reactivity. Demonstrating such a process in the laboratory would show how life can start from the inanimate. If the starting materials were irrefutably primordial and the end result happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to extant biology — for what turned out to be purely chemical reasons, albeit elegantly subtle ones — then it could be a recapitulation of the way that natural life originated. We are not yet close to achieving this end, but recent results suggest that we may have nearly finished the first phase: the beginning. [Emphasis added.]

(John D. Sutherland, “Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning,” Nature Reviews Chemistry, Vol. 1:12 (2017))

Here, Sutherland admits, as others have done, that scientists are nowhere near figuring out how life arose naturally. Later on in the paper he elaborates on just how far away they really are. More on this in a moment, but let’s quickly examine his claim that scientists are “nearly finished” explaining “the first phase” of the origin of life.

Most theorists think that the origin of life will ultimately be explained as a series of steps, including:

The creation of monomers via prebiotic synthesis

The formation of polymers from those monomers

The formation of a self-replicating molecule

The formation of cells to encapsulate those self-replicating molecules

Of course, there are many other steps along the way, but these are the main ones involved. The first two are thought to have involved pure chemistry — what one might call “necessity,” or things bound to happen given the deterministic laws of nature.

The last two steps are considered to be more a matter of contingency. That is, they things that did not have to happen and may have simply occurred due to lucky happenstance. This is because, as we’ll see, forming complex polymers (like RNA) — which scientists are still nowhere near explaining — provides no guarantee that you’ll generate the right sequences of nucleotides in those RNAs to yield a self-replicating molecule.

So what Sutherland claims we’re close to explaining is merely the first step: forming simple organic monomers via chemical reactions that were bound to happen under chemical processes on the early earth. Or were they?

We’ve reviewed Sutherland’s work here at Evolution News in the past. He and his team have focused on how to explain the origin of nucleotides under natural chemical conditions. His research produced some nucleotides. Whether it mimicked plausible conditions that might have existed naturally on the early earth is an entirely different question.

For example, in 2009 he co-authored a paper in Nature purporting to produce activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides under “prebiotically plausible conditions.” An evaluation of his paper showed the conditions weren’t so prebiotically plausible after all. After the New York Times praised Sutherland’s paper, Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer wrote a response noting that it “fail[s] to address the fundamental issue that has generated the longstanding impasse in the field: the problem of the origin of biological information.” Later, Meyer observed that “not only does this study not address the problem of getting nucleotide bases to arrange themselves into functionally specified sequences, but the extent to which it does succeed in producing biologically relevant chemical constituents of RNA actually illustrates the indispensable role of intelligence in generating such chemistry.”

In a subsequent post, Casey Luskin asked various pro-ID chemists to review Sutherland’s research. They concluded that Sutherland’s reactions required substantial intelligent intervention and would certainly never occur under blind and unguided natural conditions:

“The starting materials are ‘plausibly’ obtainable by abiotic means, but need to be kept isolated from one another until the right step, as Sutherland admits. One of the starting materials is a single mirror image for which there is no plausible way to get it that way abiotically. Then Sutherland ran these reactions as any organic chemist would, with pure materials under carefully controlled conditions. In general, he purified the desired products after each step, and adjusted the conditions (pH, temperature, etc.) to maximum advantage along the way. Not at all what one would expect from a lagoon of organic soup. He recognized that making of a lot of biologically problematic side products was inevitable, but found that UV light applied at the right time and for the right duration could destroy much (?) of the junk without too much damage to the desired material. Meaning, of course, that without great care little of the desired chemistry would plausibly occur. But it is more than enough for true believers in OOL to rejoice over, and, predictably, to way overstate in the press.”

“They used pH manipulation, phosphate buffers, and irradiation all at the correct times and amounts to achieve their goal, which was to produce ‘activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides.’ Indeed, they could have shortened their title by chopping off the last four words and sent the paper to the Journal of Organic Synthesis and had a good chance of getting it accepted as a novel synthetic route with full credit to themselves for their clever manipulations. Certainly the fingerprints of several intelligent chemists are all over this pathway if not their rather ham-fisted signatures.”

Senior origin-of-life researcher Robert Shapiro chimed in and criticized Sutherland’s work, saying: “Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever….The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely.” Meanwhile, a peer-reviewed paper in Accounts of Chemical Research took Sutherland and his team to task for using unrealistic, implausible pathways to generate the nucleotides:

Notwithstanding is merits, Sutherland’s approach is discounted by many in the bio-origins community. It is perhaps easy to see why. In their attempt to avoid the “water problem” for the glycosidic bond, Sutherland et al. drive themselves back into the “asphalt problem.” Their alternative synthesis requires human addition (at the right times) of high concentrations of two carbohydrates, glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde. These carbohydrates are too reactive to accumulate prebiotically, even with borate.

Reviewing Sutherland’s proposed route, Shapiro noted that it resembled a golfer, having played an 18 hole course, claiming that he had shown that the golf ball could have, through some combination of wind, rain, heating, cooling, dehydration, and ultraviolet irradiation played itself around the course without the golfer’s presence.

Perhaps recognizing this, Sutherland and his co-workers wrote, “Although the issue of temporally separated supplies of glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde remains a problem, a number of situations could have arisen that would result in the conditions of heating and progressive dehydration followed by cooling, rehydration and ultraviolet irradiation. Comparative assessment of these models is beyond the scope of this work.”

In Shapiro’s view, the need for “temporally separated supplies of glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde” is more than “a problem…beyond the scope” of this work. It is a fatal flaw.

(Stephen Benner, Hyo-Joong Kim, and Matthew A. Carrigan, “Asphalt, Water, and the Prebiotic Synthesis of Ribose, Ribonucleosides, and RNA,” Accounts of Chemical Research, Vol. 45:2025-2034 (2012))

Then, in 2015 Sutherland co-published a paper in Nature Chemistry purporting to create the precursors of pyrimidine nucleotides in a manner that also produced precursors to amino acids (which build proteins) and lipids. This led the journal Science to excitedly proclaim, “Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum.” But the research had the same problems as before. Again Casey Luskin asked an ID-friendly biochemist to weigh in:

I read the article by Patel et al (2015) that appeared in Nature Chemistry. While it is full of fascinating chemistry, given all of the manipulation of pH, precursor mixes, temperature, metal co-ions, etc., it is beyond the pale to pretend that anything in this paper represents undirected pre-biotic chemistry. The only way this paper represents a solution to origin-of-life issues is for Patel et al. to be time travelers who manipulated the pre-biotic environment to produce the building blocks of life….To claim that the whole suite of “precursors of ribonucleotides, amino acids and lipids can all be derived by the reductive homologation of hydrogen cyanide and some of its derivatives” rests on how one defines what are plausible early Earth conditions. By admitting that the products vary depending upon reaction conditions and metallic co-ions, the idea of a one-pot synthesis is not viable in this scenario. They also stretch the concept of “plausibility” to a new extreme. While it is easy to imagine a series of pools of the appropriate conditions and with the appropriate precursor compounds all feeding into a single pool, it would be wrong to conclude that what we can imagine is science.

In short, from the prebiotic perspective, Sutherland’s research up to now has been implausible. This brings us to his new article in Nature Reviews Chemistry. He candidly discusses the gap between prebiotic chemistry, which happens without enzyme catalysts, and biological chemistry, which uses all kinds of biomolecules to regulate biochemistry:

Biology almost always relies on chemistry that does not proceed efficiently in the absence of catalysis, because this allows chemistry to be regulated by dialling various catalysts up or down. However, most prebiotic chemistry must proceed of its own accord, and this surely suggests that it must generally be different from the underlying chemistry used in biology….Nevertheless, despite the inevitable widespread differences between their individual reactions, prebiotic reaction networks ultimately have to transition into biochemical networks; hence, there must be some similarities between the two, if only at the level that practitioners of synthesis would view as strategic.

Sutherland thus views similarities between biological chemistry and blind, nonbiological (and possibly prebiotic) chemistry as hinting at how biological chemistry arose. As in his 2015 paper, in the 2017 review he outlines a scenario for generating the precursors of nucleotides, amino acids, and lipids. He seems aware that this scenario, requiring a long series of steps and the addition of chemical species at just the right stages, might not be convincing. He sums up his explanation as follows:

Remarkably, when these few reduction reactions are combined with several addition reactions and a dry-state phosphorylation (conditions for which were discovered nearly half a century ago but are still being rediscovered), a reaction network leading from hydrogen cyanide 2 (and a few of its derivatives) to the pyrimidine nucleotides, and to precursors to a dozen amino acids and glycerol phosphate lipids, can be defined. The reactions are all high yielding and lead to little else besides biomolecules or their precursors. It is not definitive proof that the building blocks of biology arose in this way, but it is compelling and indicates that the requirements for these reactions to take place should be used to constrain geochemical scenarios on the early Earth. A requirement for ultraviolet irradiation to generate hydrated electrons would rule out deep sea environments. This, along with strong bioenergetic and structural arguments, suggests that the idea that life originated at vents should, like the vents themselves, remain “In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” The chemistry places certain demands on the environment of the early Earth: for example, the high concentrations of certain species through evaporation of solutions. Supporters welcome these demands as constraints that help refine primitive Earth scenarios. Detractors view them as unacceptable but must surely then demonstrate that other scenarios can be equally productive.

Aside from the fact that Sutherland’s model refutes the ever-popular “hydrothermal vent” hypothesis for the origin of life, don’t miss the last sentence where he commits the “burden of proof” logical fallacy. This basically says that if you view his scenario as “unacceptable” then you can’t dismiss it unless you can produce a scenario that’s better or “equally productive.” This is obviously fallacious: the merits of his hypothesis do not fall or rise on the ability of a given critic to provide a more “productive” explanation. After all, what if the entire project — the attempt to produce biomolecules in the absence of living organisms under natural earthlike conditions — is impossible? If that’s the case, then all explanations of prebiotic synthesis are ultimately doomed to fail, including our “best” attempts. Perhaps the fact that he ends on this note hints that he knows his case isn’t really all that strong.

Indeed, he reassures skeptics, saying: “The resemblance to modern biochemistry might not be obvious to the non-chemist at first, but it is to those with chemical acuity.” That’s another logical fallacy for you — the “genetic fallacy,” which attacks people personally, in this instance for being “non-chemists,” rather than their arguments.

In any case, the scenario of prebiotic synthesis he outlines once again suffers from the problems that his earlier work did. As Robert Shapiro put it, it is “highly unlikely” that “blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA.”

Sutherland’s reference in his paper’s title to “the end of the beginning” means he thinks we’re near the end of explaining how simple biological monomers might have arisen on the early earth in the absence of living organisms. That is step (1) (“the beginning”) in the list above. However, if Shapiro and other critics are correct, then Sutherland is probably still pretty far from the end of the beginning. And even if Sutherland were correct, he admits just how far a full-fledged explanation for step (1) is from explaining the origin of life:

[T]he prebiotic synthesis of building blocks — to which we have devoted so much of our time — only corresponds to a small increase in the complexity of the system and to no increase in its aliveness (a humbling thought).

Figure 3 in his review paper illustrates the distance that origin-of-life theorists must traverse to explain the chemical origin of life and the origin of LUCA — the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms:

Note the box indicating “The current state of the field.” It’s pretty far down the road of things needing to be explained. Thus, even in Sutherland’s overly optimistic view, they haven’t begun to explain how these prebiotic monomers could combine to form larger polymers such as RNA and then begin to explore sequence-space. This is, in his own words,  “A long, long way to LUCA.”

But what if somehow Sutherland et al. could solve all of these problems and could thus produce RNAs via unguided chemical reactions? Benner et al. 2012 (quoted above) point out why this would likely be a dead end for origin-of-life research:

[C]urrent experiments suggest that RNA molecules that catalyze the degradation of RNA are more likely to emerge from a library of random RNA molecules than RNA molecules that catalyze the template-directed synthesis of RNA, especially given cofactors (e.g., Mg2+). This could, of course, be a serious (and possibly fatal) flaw to the RNA-first hypothesis for bio-origins.

That’s a major issue. Even if you can produce random RNA molecules, you’re much more likely to produce RNAs that degrade other RNAs than those that can replicate new ones. This goes back to Stephen Meyer’s original criticism of Sutherland’s work: without intelligence to generate information and properly order nucleotides, you are exceedingly unlikely to get the needed sequences to produce a living, self-replicating organism. Or to put it in Sutherland’s language, only input from an intelligence can allow you to cross the necessity-contingency boundary and produce something that approaches “aliveness,” much less something that is “fully alive.”

In fact, Sutherland seems aware that this is a problem for naturalistic models. As he writes:

However, this synthesis is necessary to put the system on the right path, and knowing the steps that have been taken can give some hints as to the nature of the steps that follow, at least up to a point: the necessity-contingency boundary when the synthesis of macromolecules from multiple monomers reaches the stage in which only a fraction of all possible sequence variants can be sampled owing to the number of possible permutations exceeding the number of molecules.

In other words, even if we explain how to generate lots of RNAs, how do we get the very unlikely sequences that yield living organisms? The answer is staring him and other origin-of-life theorists in the face, but most aren’t willing to see it: In all of our experience with the origin of complex and specified information, only intelligent design can generate the sequence-specific digital information necessary to cross the necessity-contingency boundary and generate a self-replicating living organism.

Proto life and the case for design

Can physics determine whether time had a beginning?

How did the Universe begin?

Is there an origin to time itself, and if so, what did it look like?

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams

It’s only human to ask the most fundamental of all questions: where did all this come from? And we like to think we know the answer; it all came from the beginning.But if you think about it for a little while, that simplistic answer — an answer that at first glance, might appear to be a tautology — presumes something very important about our Universe: that it had a beginning!

For a long time, scientifically, it didn’t appear that we knew whether that was true or not. The Universe could have had a beginning, before which nothing existed (or, at the very least, nothing as we understand it to be), or it could have existed eternally, like an infinite line extending in both directions, or it could have been cyclic like the circumference of a circle, repeating over and over again infinitely.Multiple competing ideas were, for a time, all consistent with the observations. Most prominent among them were the Big Bang (which favored a finite past) and the Steady-State (which favored an infinite past) models, but there was no surefire way to confirm or refute them for a time.

But then, everything changed in the 1960s, when a low-level of microwave radiation was found emanating from all directions in the sky.

This radiation was the same magnitude everywhere, the same in all directions, and just a few degrees above absolute zero. As better data came in, we learned that it followed a blackbody spectrum, and was not only consistent with being the leftover glow from the Big Bang, but was inconsistent with all other alternative explanations. It started to look like there was a beginning after all.Here’s why.According to the Big Bang, the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and smaller in the past, and only looks the way it does today because it’s been expanding, cooling, and experiencing gravitation (and gravitational collapse on scales small and large) for so long.Back in the early stages, it was once so hot that even neutral atoms couldn’t form without being blasted apart. Even earlier than that, because radiation’s wavelength stretches as the Universe expands, today’s microwave radiation was so short-wavelength that photons were more energetic than even matter was in the young Universe.And at still earlier times, it was too energetic to form atomic nuclei, or even bound protons and neutrons.

And if we continue extrapolating all the way back, we’d arrive at the beginning, where not only was all of space contracted down to a point, but where we encountered a singularity. At first glance, it appears that it doesn’t even matter what dominates the Universe; a singularity appears inevitable!

Singularities are incredibly interesting, because they’re where the overriding law of gravitation in the Universe — Einstein’s General Relativity — breaks down, and becomes mathematical nonsense. Relativity, remember, is the theory that describes space and time. But at singularities, not only do spatial dimensions cease to exist, but so does time. In other words, asking questions like “what came before this” is as nonsensical as asking “where are we” if you take away space, or “what’s north of the north pole?”

Indeed, this is the argument that Paul Davies — Australia’s Carl Sagan — makes when he claims that there is no “before” the Big Bang, because the Big Bang is where time began. But as interesting as this argument is, we know that the Big Bang isn’t where time began anymore. Because ever since we’ve made modern, detailed measurements of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — in the Big Bang’s leftover glow — we’ve learned that this extrapolation to a singularity is wrong.You see, these patterns of fluctuations can tell us a number of things about the properties of the Universe when it was very young: how much matter was present in protons, neutrons and electrons, what its spatial curvature is, how much dark matter/dark energy there is, how many hot neutrino species there are, etc. But they can also tell us whether there was a maximum temperature the Universe reached back in its early hot, dense, expanding state.According to the data that’s been in since WMAP (and Planck has confirmed it), the Universe “only” ever achieved a maximum temperature of around 10^29 Kelvin. You might think this number is huge, and I’ll grant you that it is pretty big. But it’s still about a factor of 1,000 too small to get the Universe into a state that could possibly become a singularity.

In fact, the particulars of this tell us that not only did time not begin at the Big Bang, but that we know what happened before the Big Bang: there was a period of cosmic inflation, where a tremendous amount of energy intrinsic to space itself dominated the Universe, and it expanded exponentially quickly at a fantastically large rate!But there’s something else that inflation — our best scientific theory as to what preceded the Big Bang (now, possibly, with extra evidence) — tells us about where this all came from that is, perhaps, very surprising. Let’s zoom into that graph I generated earlier of how the Universe grows when it’s dominated by different types of energy.It tells us that rather than a singularity at “t=0”, or where the Big Bang occurred, it tells us that the Universe existed in an inflationary state, or a state where it was exponentially expanding, for an indeterminately long amount of time.Now, there are a wonderful number of new questions that arise with this knowledge:

First, was the inflationary state a constant one? As in, was the Universe inflating at the same rate everywhere and for long periods of time? Or was it inflating in ways that changed very quickly and varied from location-to-location?

Second, did the inflationary state last forever going backwards? Inflation has the potential to be eternal, and in fact we have good reason to believe that — in the majority of parts of the Universe — it is eternal to the future. But what about to the past? Was it always inflating in some form or other, or was there a non-inflationary state preceding it that gave rise to inflation?

Third, we can look at dark energy, today, as form of exponential expansion. Are these two inflationary stages related, and will our dark energy expansion ever give rise to a truly inflation-like stage again, rejuvenating it in some sort of cycle?Observationally, we don’t know the answer to any of this. The Universe we can observe only contains information remaining from the final ~10^-34 seconds (give or take a few orders of magnitude) of inflation; whatever occurred prior to that is wiped out by the nature of inflation. And theoretically, we don’t fare much better. There is a theorem that tells us that an inflationary Universe is past-timelike incomplete: that an ever-expanding Universe must have began from a singularity.

But whether that means an inflating Universe couldn’t have lasted forever or whether that means our current rules of physics are not applicable to figuring out whether it lasted forever, had a beginning or is cyclical are unknown. It’s even possible that time is cyclical, and that the cycles change with each iteration!But even though we can trace back our cosmic history all the way to the moment of the Hot Big Bang, and even before that (a little bit) to the epoch of cosmic inflation, that’s where our knowledge ends.

So thousands of years later, we’re right back to where we started.

Did time have a beginning? We not only don’t have the answer, we don’t have the prospect of observations that could tell us, and our current theories only tell us where our predictive power breaks down, not what the answer is. So we have the same three possibilities that philosophers and theologans have pondered for as long as history has been recorded: time is finite, time is infinite, or time is cyclical. The only thing we know is that if there was a singularity in the past, it didn’t have anything to do with our Hot Big Bang that every particle of matter-and-energy in our observable Universe is traceable to.

And unless we figure out a new way to gain information about what happened before the Universe observable to us existed in any meaningful sense, the answer may forever be beyond the reach of what is knowable.

It's the science stupid.

A bed sheet of cobweb?

Only Humans Understand “Significance”
Wesley J. Smith

Materialists believe that, in the end, we are only so many carbon molecules, signifying nothing. Hence, most deny human exceptionalism, arguing essentiallty that we are just another species in the forest — when they aren’t castigating us as the enemy of the Earth.

Comes now materialist philosopher Nick Hughes of University College Dublin — a self-declared “disenchanted” free-thinking atheist — to declare while it is true from the Universe’s perspective that humanity is utterly insignificant — never mind that a materialistic Universe has no perspective — that doesn’t mean we should despair. From “Do We Matter in the Cosmos?”  published in Aeon.

For the disenchanted, it is hard to deny that our causal powers are insignificant from the point of view of the entire Universe. But should we be troubled by this? Should it lead us to nihilism and despair? I don’t think so. To see why, we need to go back to the issue of value and draw another distinction.

Some of the things that we care about – happiness and human flourishing, for example – are intrinsically valuable to us.

I think Hughes misses a big point. Even if we are merely thinking carbon, our existence itself is inherently valuable. Indeed, only we have the capacity in the known universe to understand — much less contemplate — the concept and importance of “significance.” That is one of the things that makes life worth living.

To put it another way, we are the only true moral beings (again, in the known universe). That — which also implies our unique rationality — is one of the distinctly human attributes that make our existence itself exceptional.

But Hughes can’t see that. He just gives readers an empathetic pat on the back, telling us not to despair because, well, we’ll always have art:

Whether or not they are objectively valuable, the ends that matter to us, the things that we care about most – our relationships, our projects and goals, our shared experiences, social justice, the pursuit of knowledge, the creation and appreciation of art, music and literature, and the future and fate of ours and other species – do not depend to any considerable extent on our having control over a vast but largely irrelevant Universe.

We might be distinctly lacking in power from the cosmic perspective, and so, in a sense, insignificant. But having such power and such significance wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway.

To lament its lack and respond with despair and nihilism is merely a form of narcissism. Most of what matters to us is right here on Earth.

No. It’s not about power. It’s not about cosmic perspectives. Only we understand there is such a thing as the cosmos.

It’s also not what we can do, the art we can create — creativity is another uniquely human attribute — but about who we are inherently. We think, therefore we are. We contemplate meaning, therefore the universe itself comes to have meaning because a species exists that can find it.

Hughes bemoans the authoritarianism that sometimes befouls our thriving. But authoritarianism can only exist when human exceptionalism – our unique and equal individual value, coupled with our duties to each other (among others) — is denied. That’s when those with power feel free to exploit and oppress those they falsely denigrate as being without it.

In his proud disenchantment, Hughes tells us not to despair because there are aspects of life to enjoy until we are snuffed into non-thinking carbon.

That’s a dangerously nihilistic view no matter how much Hughes strives to whistle past the graveyard.

On OOL Science's continuing quest for a free lunch.

Materialist Origin-of-Life Solutions All Depend on a “Free Lunch”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

This from Nature Reviews Chemistry caught our eye – an unexpectedly candid admission of how far origin-of-life research is from shedding real light on its subject. From “Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning,” by John D. Sutherland of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England:

Understanding how life on Earth might have originated is the major goal of origins of life chemistry. To proceed from simple feedstock molecules and energy sources to a living system requires extensive synthesis and coordinated assembly to occur over numerous steps, which are governed only by environmental factors and inherent chemical reactivity. Demonstrating such a process in the laboratory would show how life can start from the inanimate. If the starting materials were irrefutably primordial and the end result happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to extant biology — for what turned out to be purely chemical reasons, albeit elegantly subtle ones — then it could be a recapitulation of the way that natural life originated. We are not yet close to achieving this end, but recent results suggest that we may have nearly finished the first phase: the beginning. [Emphasis added.]

In other words, they’re nowhere near a solution, if purely materialistic processes are taken for granted as the only possible means toward life’s beginning.

And no wonder. As Center for Science & Culture research director Brian Miller explains in a new ID the Future episode with Sarah Chaffee, all the available solutions depend on expectations of a “free lunch.” As we know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

It sounds like that is why, 65 years after the Miller–Urey experiment (see Zombie Science, pp. 50-56), the search for answers is not even past the “beginning” stage. It remains the case that the only known source of the information needed for abiogenesis is intelligence.

In an admirably clear discussion, Dr. Miller debunks some common misunderstandings surrounding the topic. Listen to the podcast here, or download it here.

The kind of extremism this world needs more of II:Irony of ironies.

On the Rube Goldberg approach to design.

Oracle Soup – Dialogue with a Theistic Evolutionist, Continued
Douglas Axe | @DougAxe

This is the third part of my discussion with theistic evolutionist Hans Vodder about my book, Undeniable. I describe the background in the  first post, and I end the  second post by asking Hans to clarify what he means when he says that conditions on the early Earth may have been conducive to biological evolution. Here is his reply:

I used “conditions” as a catch-all term for any physical circumstances relevant to life’s emergence. When I suggested circumstances may have been “conducive to biological evolution,” yes, I roughly meant they may have been sufficient to cause biological evolution. So, I guess I’ve conflated two separate issues here: a) the question of abiogenesis and b) the question of evolutionary development — sorry!

However, I don’t wish to dogmatize. Even though I’m no biologist, I realize that “origin of life” questions have not been settled definitively (as Stephen Meyer has argued in Signature in the Cell). So, I won’t say such conditions actually were conducive to abiogenesis.

My point is far more modest. It is this: even if a completely naturalistic account of life’s origin and development turns out to be true — and I’ve been arguing we can’t rule that out on probabilistic grounds alone — design doesn’t automatically disappear. As Antony Flew put it in his book God and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (p. 71):

“It is…useless to try to dispose finally of the [design] argument with a reference to the achievement of Darwin… [T]he regularities discovered and explained with the help of the theory of evolution by natural selection, like all other regularities in nature, can be just so much more grist to the mill.”

So, even if neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory coupled with some theory of abiogenesis turns out to be completely spot on, that doesn’t obviously remove design (let alone God) from the equation. A universe capable of permitting the evolution of life from non-life would arguably be a remarkable indication of cosmic fine-tuning. So, I don’t think the stakes in the “evolution/design” debate are necessarily as high for theism as is commonly thought.

But the way we think about the divine action across natural/supernatural divide in these contexts is also important. Perhaps we can discuss the Collins quotation to explore these issues further?

Thanks again for clarifying, Hans — very helpful!

You nicely summarized our main point of disagreement by saying you think we can’t rule out a completely naturalistic account of the origin of living things on probabilistic grounds alone. Since I think we can, and this is a major theme of Undeniable, I’d like to unpack this more before we move on.

In my first reply, I used the example of searching blindly for a diamond in the Sahara to show why improbabilities can’t be erased by invoking “conditions” to narrow the search. Briefly: fortuitous conditions that narrow the search so helpfully as to ensure success are themselves improbable. So, invoking these helpful conditions is the explanatory equivalent of the shell game — it only pretends to make the improbability disappear.

We agree on this point, Hans, which is a very good start!

By my understanding of our discussion, here’s where we still disagree: you think the “rigging” needed for the universe to have produced things like fireflies and horses and humans can fit within the regularities described by science, whereas I don’t.

Think of oracle soup — the imaginary version of alphabet soup I describe in the second chapter of my book. As the story goes, you boil this soup in a covered pot, and then, after allowing it to cool, you lift the lid to reveal written instructions for building something that’s very clever — “worthy of a patent.”

Now, we have no trouble rattling off any number of “conditions” that are relevant to the process of boiling alphabet soup: the broth’s viscosity, density, surface tension, and boiling point, the sizes, shapes, and consistencies of the pasta letters, the thickness and conductivity of the pot material, etc., etc. The point is that it’s manifestly inconceivable for any combination of these mere conditions to provide a satisfactory explanation for how instructions appeared on the soup’s surface.

Think of it this way. If we imagine a pot of oracle soup actually working, all of us would recognize this as something astonishing to the point of spookiness, and none of us should be content with an explanation in terms of mundane properties like viscosity and conductivity. Why? Because it’s the startling coincidence that must be explained, and none of those ho-hum parameters diminish this coincidence at all.

As for what’s at stake here, I think it has to do with the fact that life seems to compel everyone to acknowledge a Designer from an early age, whereas arguments about the fine-tuning of the physical universe have been accessible only to relatively few people relatively recently.

The kind of extremism this world needs more of.

Officials in Russia Honor Jehovah’s Witnesses, Including Jailed Danish Citizen, for Outstanding Community Service

NEW YORK—On June 2, 2017, officials in the Russian city of Oryol gave special recognition to the local congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, expressing gratitude for their participation in the city’s annual cleanup efforts on April 22, 2017. There were 70 Witnesses who volunteered to spend the day removing trash from the streets of Oryol and from the Orlik River that winds through the city. As a token of their appreciation, city officials presented the Witnesses with a small gift and a handwritten note stating, in part: “In gratitude for a good deed for the community and for the environment.”

  

However, one month after the cleanup, and one week before being formally thanked by city officials, one of the Witness volunteers, Dennis Christensen (pictured in above inset), was arrested for so-called extremist activity while attending a peaceful religious meeting on May 25. Russian authorities have been using the claim of extremist activity to target Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout the country.

“It is no surprise to those who know Jehovah’s Witnesses that Dennis, and the other members of the congregation, would voluntarily participate in the cleanup of their city. They have been performing this service for many years, continuing even after their legal entity was liquidated in 2016,” states David A. Semonian, a spokesman at the Witnesses’ world headquarters. “Jehovah’s Witnesses in Oryol and in other cities around the world are known for being model citizens. That is why it is ironic that Dennis, a diligent, law-abiding Christian, would be treated like a criminal shortly after making a positive contribution to his community that was recognized as honorable by officials in Oryol. We believe that Dennis should be released immediately and be allowed to continue his peaceful worship and positive community service in association with his fellow worshippers.”

The arrest of Mr. Christensen took place almost a year after the local legal entity used by the Witnesses in Oryol was liquidated on June 14, 2016. The charges leveled against Mr. Christensen also came on the heels of the April 20, 2017,   decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to liquidate the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, near St. Petersburg. Mr. Christensen is still being held in pretrial detention by authorities in Oryol.

Media Contact:

David A. Semonian, Office of Public Information, +1-845-524-3000

Man's best friend v. Darwin.

No, Your Dog Is Not a Barking Exemplar of Macroevolution
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Dogs are yet another evolutionary icon that  Jonathan Wells, perhaps in his next book, could handily leash and take for a walk. The idea expressed by Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others is that the descent from a common ancestor with wolves demonstrates not only the power of artificial selection, but by extension that of natural selection to sculpt brand new animals. In other words, your pooch is a barking exemplar of macroevolution.

One problem with this, among others, is that the virtue we value most in our dogs – the ability to form relationships with humans – appears to be no product of their evolution. At least it did not evolve from scratch. Dogs have it, but so, in their way, do wolves.

Here’s the tentative conclusion of research published in Royal Society Open Science, based on a limited sample of ten wolf cubs raised and cared for by humans as we would dogs, complete with “daily walks on leashes, cuddling, grooming, etc.”:

[W]e demonstrated that human-raised wolves can develop an individualized relationship with their human raisers which may not include attachment to and dependency on this person but which, at least before the sexual maturation of the animals, is characterized with a higher level of affiliation with the foster parent than with other closely familiar humans. Finally, we confirmed that intensive socialization and hand rearing result in general affinity towards humans.

This “affinity” may be more developed in dogs, which is to be expected, but it sounds like the seed is present in wolves. That would suggest it characterized the wild common ancestor of both dogs and wolves that existed 15,000 years ago.

From the story about this at Gizmodo:

[S]cientists have also documented some behavioral similarities between dogs and wolves. When greeting each other, for instance, wolves like to lick each others’ faces—a trait that’s all too familiar to dog owners. Wolves are also capable of following a person’s gaze into space, and they understand gestures like finger pointing (not even chimps can do this).

Given these similarities, [researcher Dorottya] Ujfalussy sought to learn more about the kinds of relationship that wolves, when socialized to humans, can have with their human caretakers. A primary aim of the study was to figure out what makes dogs so unique in their relationship with humans, and where their traits may have originated. Ultimately, Ujfalussy was trying to learn if dog behaviors were already present in ancestral wolves, or if they’re a product of domestication and artificial selection. This new research suggests the former may be true. [Emphasis added.]

The wolves were not found to be dependent on humans, as dogs are. But this is unsurprising. As geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig has described, the “evolution” of dogs from wolves “represents no increase in [biological] information but rather a decrease or loss of function on the genetic and anatomical levels” (as we reported here at Evolution News, see “The Dog Delusion”). Meaning no disrespect to them and certainly no lack of affection, but dogs are dependent because they are, in a sense, “degenerate” wolves.

A wolf is an apex predator, at home in a wild environment where your typical dog could not survive long or at all. In evolutionary terms, it’s a long step down. This explains, if you follow the interesting neighborhood-based social networking app Nextdoor, the constant refrain of panicked dog owners notifying everyone to be on the lookout for their lost pets. Even in a sheltered suburban context, dogs aren’t safe on their own.

In short, what’s most precious about them was likely there in the pre-dog ancestor. The rest was bred through loss of fitness. All of which is the opposite of what people typically mean when they talk about evolution.

I know, I know – some of this sounds unkind to them. But we love dogs just the same. They are our best friend. What they are not is a legitimate mascot for evolutionary advocates.