Scientism's brave new world continues to draw ever closer?

What Does Gene-Editing with CRISPR Portend for Bioethics?
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, Sarah Chaffee talks with bioethicist Wesley Smith about the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. Smith describes it briefly and discusses its larger implication for bioethics.

In an expansive conversation, Smith describes a range of consequences of viewing human beings as resources to be manipulated and exploited.  Listen to the podcast here, and break out your copy of Brave New World.

Human rights a wrong fit for the middle kingdom?:Pros and cons.

File under "well said" LVI

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. 
Booker T Washington

A clash of Titans.LXIV

The Dragon re-awakens

When Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a senator was he being ahead of his time?

Elephants Sue for Habeas Corpus
Wesley J. Smith

Here we go again. Having failed to get courts to declare chimpanzees “persons,” lawyer and animal-rights fanatic Steven Wise is suing as an attorney for elephants seeking a writ of habeas corpus. From the Washington Post story:

Minnie, Beulah and Karen are elephants who for decades have belonged to a family-owned, traveling zoo in Connecticut. Over the years, they’ve also been hired out for appearances in advertisements, movies and weddings.

And on Monday, they got a lawyer, though they did not ask for one. The prominent animal rights attorney Steven Wise filed a writ of habeas corpus petition on behalf of the elephants, arguing that they are “legal persons” with a right to bodily liberty and asking the Connecticut Superior Court to order their release to a sanctuary.

The point here isn’t to prevent abuse, if it exists. We have animal-welfare laws for that, and if pertinent, they should be invoked. In fact, Wise doesn’t contend that the elephants are being abused

Wise emphasized that his arguments are about animal rights, not about animal welfare, and the petition does not dwell on the elephants’ living conditions.

Rather, Wise wants to prevent some animals now — chimps, elephants, dolphins — and eventually all animals from being the property of humans:

If the court granted a writ, it would be allowing the elephants to challenge the legality of their detention and acknowledging their “personhood.” That could usher in profound changes in legal status for animals, which are considered property in the eyes of the law.

You see, the “animal rights” movement isn’t the same thing as defending animal welfare. True animal-rightists disdain the welfare approach precisely because the latter accepts human exceptionalism, which rightists bitterly deny.

Indeed, true animal-rights ideologues believe in moral equality between humans and animals. They consider anything done to an animal to be the same as if done to a human. In this view, cattle ranching, for example, is as odious as slavery. Hence PETA’s odious “Holocaust on Your Plate”  campaign.

Wise is trying to use the law to steal other people’s property and cost the elephant owners a lot of money in legal fees and costs. Worse, he intends to “break the species barrier,” in animal-rights-movement parlance, with profoundly destructive consequences — including smashing our thriving from animals and animal products, and diluting the meaning of “rights” in the way wild inflation destroys the value of currency.

Before you laugh this off, remember the radical court-imposed culture and legal changes of the last 50 years. It only takes one judge.

These suits will continue until judges start slapping Wise, PETA, and their ilk with substantial financial penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits. It’s more than past time for this subversion to end.

The Darwinian narrative gets some new punctuation?

Punctuated Equilibria Is Back, but Still Magical
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

It’s amazing what you can do with advanced mathematics to explain rabbits coming out of hats without magicians. Make a few assumptions, define some new terms, employ some distribution models, and presto! Adaptive evolution, all done with random processes. You can dazzle the audience with incomprehensible equations, draw stunning graphs, and use them to make outlandish claims. Is this not the case with a new paper by Michael Landis and Joshua Schraiber in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences?  The paper, “Pulsed evolution shaped modern vertebrate body sizes,” purports to do just that.

The diversity of forms found among animals on Earth is striking. Despite decades of study, it has been difficult to reconcile the patterns of diversity seen between closely related species with those observed when studying single species on ecological timescales. We propose a set of models, called Lévy processes, to attempt to reconcile rapid evolution between species with the relatively stable distributions of phenotypes seen within species. These models, which have been successfully used to model stock market data, allow for long periods of stasis followed by bursts of rapid change. We find that many vertebrate groups are well fitted by Lévy models compared with models for which traits evolve toward a stationary optimum or evolve in an incremental and wandering manner.

We note that the editor of the paper is Dr. “Your Inner Fish” Neil Shubin of Tiktaalik fame. Landis, from Yale, and Schraiber, from Temple University, are masters of obfuscation in this paper. Astute readers will already know that rabbits do not emerge from hats without intelligent design. Few readers, however, may be able to figure out the trick, if misdirected by the abracadabra called “Lévy processes.” If it’s a process, it must be a law of nature, right? Have they hit upon a law of nature that produces rabbits? Only if you consider chance a “process.”

We developed a maximum-likelihood method for fitting Lévy processes to phylogenetic comparative data using restricted maximum-likelihood estimation (REML), by analyzing the phylogenetically independent contrasts… The Lévy processes we apply in this work consist of two components: a Brownian motion and a pure jump process….. Note that this model does not couple pulses of evolution to cladogenesis, as in the classical theory of punctuated equilibrium. Instead, pulses may occur at any time, sometimes known as “punctuated anagenesis.”

Both Lévy processes with jumps and pure Brownian motion accumulate variance proportionally to time, leading to speculation that it is impossible to distinguish between pulsed and certain incremental models from comparative data. For simulations with moderately sized clades (>100 taxa), we had sufficient power to differentiate pulsed evolution from other Simpsonian modes of evolution. This is due to the impact of rare, large jumps resulting in a heavy-tailed distribution of trait change. Moreover, we saw low false positive rates for identifying pulsed evolution, even in the presence of phylogenetic error (4% for clades with ∼100 taxa, 7% for clades with ∼300 taxa.)

Let’s unscramble this jargon. First of all, we have a new term, punctuated anagenesis (or “progressive evolution”) instead of punctuated equilibrium. This is a distinction without a difference. Both terms refer to stasis (which Landis and Schraiber acknowledge is common in the fossil record) and sudden evolutionary change. The only difference is that the new version includes more little jumps more often.

More importantly, the components of “Lévy processes” are both random! Brownian motion, like the jiggling of particles under a microscope, is random. So too are the “jumps” they add to their model. Think of popcorn kernels on a hot plate jiggling in an earthquake. If some pop and land a little farther away than the unpopped kernels, they’re still not going anywhere. Yet from this kind of “model,” these evolutionists expect to account for all the complexity of the human body from bacteria, given enough time.

We found that different kinds of jump processes, representing different modes of rapid evolution (constant rapid adaptation vs. long periods of stasis broken up by jumps between adaptive zones), leave faint, but unique, signatures in phylogenetic data. By integrating these models into fossil sequences, we suspect that further fine-scale details of macroevolution can be elucidated. Moreover, in quantitative finance, where the “fossil record” of stock prices through time is perfectly kept, fine-scale dynamics of jump processes can be inferred, suggesting that such power exists for suitably densely sampled fossil sequences. Our approach, which uses only modern data but integrates them into a phylogenetic framework, represents an important step toward a fully integrative analysis of macroevolutionary processes.

Has anyone told them that stock prices are different from fossils in significant ways (using their assumption of evolution of fossils), one of which is intelligent processes?

The math in this paper is impressive, but meaningless if the premise is wrong. Landis and Schraiber are trying to account for rapid adaptive evolution by chance, using two unguided processes: Brownian motion and random jumps. Even a kid without calculus knows that chance plus chance equals chance. You’re not going to get rabbits out of hats, or out of assumed pre-rabbit ancestors (like reptiles), by unguided processes.

Here’s what’s going on. These two evolutionists know that the fossil record shows stasis and abrupt appearance, just like Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould knew when they proposed punctuated equilibria back in 1972. Remember when Gould called the absence of transitional forms the “trade secret of paleontology”? Whether in 1972 or in 2017, evolutionists dare not employ teleology in any of their theorizing. Having ruled out design by fiat, all they have are chance and natural law.

As we have seen, Lévy processes are not natural laws. They don’t say which way actions will wiggle or jump. You can calculate distributions of particles under these effects, and imagine that some pieces of popcorn may land on a fitness peak once in a theoretical construct. But to connect that to the real world, where organisms suddenly appear in the fossil record with multiple irreducibly complex systems, is to indulge in fantasy.

Real World Examples

We can appreciate the problem with trying to explain the origin of a system like the origin of the gut.  Science Daily deals with it on a trivial level, hoping that a mislabeled bit of tissue in a sea anemone might represent the first inklings of a mesoderm. But there’s so much more to a digestive system than a tissue layer! You have to account for tubes and enzymes and absorption processes, with muscles and nerves to move things along, to say nothing of genes to control them all. In a paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Darwinists from the University of Vienna get excited about re-labeling tissues to get three layers out of what was previously assumed to be two layers, as if some “gut-like ectodermal tissue in a sea anemone” will lead to all the complexities of the human GI tract (given enough time) by unguided processes. The best part of this paper is that it “challenges germ layer homology.”

Another article, this one on Phys.org, tries to declare Dickinsonia a true animal. This air-mattress-lookalike, known from the Ediacaran fossil record, is not considered an ancestor to the true bilaterian animals that came later in the Cambrian explosion, as we’ve  discussed previously. Nothing in the new data changes that. The authors of a paper in the  Proceedings of the Royal Society B just have more vivid imaginations. All they re-imagined is the way new units were added to this gutless wonder.

A third example of hoping against hope that randomness could jump into complexity is also found on Phys.org. Researchers digging through fossils of the Khesen formation in Mongolia found lots of tiny microfossils dating from the late Ediacaran. Finding “embryo-like microfossils” is not a surprise, as Paul Chien noted in the film Darwin’s Dilemma. In fact, they create more of a problem than a help for Darwinians. They indicate that animal ancestors could have been preserved in Precambrian strata, had they existed.

“Understanding how and when animals evolved has proved very difficult for paleontologists. The discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil assemblage with animal embryo-like fossils gives us a new window onto a critical transition in life’s history,” said Yale graduate student Ross Anderson, first author of a study in the journal Geology….

The discovery may help scientists confirm a much earlier date for the existence of Earth ecosystems with animals, rather than just microbes. For two decades, researchers have debated the findings at the Doushantuo Formation, with no resolution. If confirmed as animals, these microfossils would represent the oldest animals to be preserved in the geological record.

Did you catch the big if in that statement? These are not confirmed animals. And even if they were, they still appear abruptly in the record, just earlier than thought. What genetic mutations conspired to create an animal by Brownian motions and unguided jumps?

Whether you call it punctuated equilibria or punctuated anagenesis, it’s a snow job. It tries to smother the empirical evidence for abrupt appearance of complex systems by inventing new phrases for unguided processes. You can call it Brownian Lévy Jumping, or whatever, but it boils down to chance. Chance is not an explanation. It’s the absence of explanation.

On the reprivileging of our home planet.

Exoplanet Census Suggests Earth Is Special after All:

  A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe—most vastly different from Earth

By Shannon Hall 

More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been further degraded, revealing the cold truth that our species is the smallest of specks on a speck of a planet, cosmologically speaking. A new calculation of exoplanets suggests that Earth is just one out of a likely 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the entire observable universe. But the average age of these planets—well above Earth’s age—and their typical locations—in galaxies vastly unlike the Milky Way—just might turn the Copernican principle on its head.

Astronomer Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University and his colleagues created a cosmic compendium of all the terrestrial exoplanets likely to exist throughout the observable universe, based on the rocky worlds astronomers have found so far. In a powerful computer simulation, they first created their own mini universe containing models of the earliest galaxies. Then they unleashed the laws of physics—as close as scientists understand them—that describe how galaxies grow, how stars evolve and how planets come to be. Finally, they fast-forwarded through 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. Their results, published to the preprint server arXiv (pdf) and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, provide a tantalizing trove of probable exoplanet statistics that helps astronomers understand our place in the universe. “It's kind of mind-boggling that we're actually at a point where we can begin to do this,” says co-author Andrew Benson from the Carnegie Observatories in California. Until recently, he says, so few exoplanets were known that reasonable extrapolations to the rest of the universe were impossible. Still, his team’s findings are a preliminary guess at what the cosmos might hold. “It's certainly the case that there are a lot of uncertainties in a calculation like this. Our knowledge of all of these pieces is imperfect,” he adds.

Take exoplanets as an example. NASA’s Kepler space telescope is arguably one of the world’s best planet hunters, but it uses a method so challenging that it is often compared with looking across thousands of kilometers to see a firefly buzzing around a brilliant searchlight. Because the telescope looks for subtle dimming in a star’s light from planets crossing in front of it, Kepler has an easier time spotting massive planets orbiting close to their stars. Thus, the catalogue of planets Kepler has found lean heavily toward these types, and smaller, farther-out planets are underrepresented, leaving our knowledge of planetary systems incomplete. Astronomers do use other techniques to search for smaller planets orbiting at farther distances, but these methods are still relatively new and have not yet found nearly as many worlds as Kepler. In addition, “everything we know about exoplanets is from a very small patch in our galaxy,” Zackrisson says, within which most stars are pretty similar to one another in terms of how many heavy elements they contain and other characteristics. The team had to extrapolate in order to guess how planets might form around stars with fewer heavy elements, such as those found in small galaxies or the early universe.

The scientists also have similar concerns about the galactic and cosmological inputs of their model but nonetheless they suspect that their final numbers are accurate to within an order of magnitude. With the estimated errors taken into account, the researchers conclude that Earth stands as a mild violation of the Copernican principle. Our pale blue dot might just be special after all. “It's not too much of a fluke that we could arise in a galaxy like the Milky Way, but nevertheless, it's just enough to make you think twice about it,” says Jay Olson from Boise State University, who was not involved in the study. Both he and Zackrisson think the Copernican principle could be saved by some unknown caveat to the findings. “Whenever you find something that sticks out…” Zackrisson says, “…that means that either we are the result of a very improbable lottery draw or we don’t understand how the lottery works.”

But Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also was not part of the research, thinks Earth is a colossal violation of the Copernican principle—not because of its location but because of its young age. “If you have these civilizations that had a 3.5-billion-year head start on us, why haven't they colonized our galaxy?” asks Tegmark. “To me, the most likely explanation is that if the planets are a dime a dozen, then highly intelligent life evolves only rarely.” So should we feel insignificant? Should we be reduced to near nothingness? Not at all, he says. “It might be that one day in the distant future much of our universe will be teeming with life because of what we did here.”

Is Darwinism big enough for both God and Darwin?

The Need for Clear Thinking about Evolution: Three Questions for Stephen Barr

John G. West 

ne of the most unfortunate aspects of the debate over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design is that so much of it is based on misunderstandings, caricatures, and an unwillingness to engage in genuine dialogue. Sadly, even those who claim to be for open dialogueoften aren't. Thus, Stephen Barr's willingness to engage in a serious exchange of views on evolution, theism, and intelligent design is commendable--and refreshing. Even if we do not persuade each other about our respective positions, we may help illuminate the real points at issue, and that is certainly a positive result.

After Barr's latest salvo, I can say that we agree on at least one thing: The need for "clear thought" when it comes to Darwinian evolution. Alas, we seem to differ on what clear thought entails. In an effort to promote the clarity we both desire, I'd like to pose three questions to Dr. Barr:

1. Since you reject the Darwinian idea that evolution is undirected, why not make that disagreement perfectly clear and call your version of evolution "teleological evolution" or "directed evolution," rather than trying to conflate your view with the terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinian evolution," which only adds confusion to the discussion?

Barr in the original version of his latest response acknowledged that "very many and even perhaps the great majority of evolutionary biologists are atheists who do believe that the randomness of the genetic mutations that fuel evolution contradicts the idea that evolution is guided by God. But in my view, the fact that many people think that A implies B does not require that we believe it." (This passage has since been deleted by Barr.)

Barr misstated my position. I am not claiming that because evolutionary biologists believe evolution is undirected that we must believe evolution is undirected. I am saying that modern evolutionary biologists define evolution as blind and undirected (just like Darwin himself did), therefore it would lead to greater clarity if those who have a different definition of evolution didn't try to conflate their view with "Darwinism." Barr's conflation promotes confusion, not clarity. By the way, as I have pointed out previously, it isn't just atheistic evolutionists who define evolution as undirected, even though that seems to be how Barr wants to portray things. It's also mainstream theistic evolutionists like Ken Miller and George Coyne who think evolution is undirected.

Barr thinks it relevant to point out that I am not a scientist. Well, okay. But neither is Barr an evolutionary biologist; and unlike Barr, I am willing to let evolutionary biologists define their own theory. It seems to me presumptuous to think that one can single-handedly redefine Darwinism to mean something it doesn't. Barr thinks it is unscientific for biologists to define Darwinian evolution as an undirected process because he thinks "random" need not mean undirected. Fine. But that is how Darwin's theory has been defined from the very start. Rather than offering a new idiosyncratic definition of Darwinism, wouldn't it be better for Barr to simply state that Darwinian (undirected) evolution is unscientific? Why is Barr so insistent on trying to present his view as compatible with "Darwinism" when it's not? Barr's muddying of the meaning of Darwinism promotes the very type of confusion and lack of clear thinking that he says he wishes to avoid.

Barr's attempted redefinition of Darwinian evolution is somewhat like a person insisting that Marxism--properly defined--need not be in tension with Christianity. Yes, the person might say, most Marxists think atheism is central to their philosophy, but we know that they are wrong to think this. Voila! Marxism and Christianity are now compatible. Most people would understand the hollowness of such a "solution" to the tension between Marxism and Christianity. If you excise the materialism from Marxism, you no longer have Marxism, but something else. One might add that the result of convincing Christians that Marxism isn't antithetical to Christianity is not to make Marxism safe for Christianity; it is to lull Christians into believing (wrongly) that Marxism is not a threat to their worldview. Another result is to open the door to strange debasements of Christianity such as the "liberation theology" popular during the 1980s. Wouldn't a far better approach be to admit that Marxism is in tension with belief in God, but to go on to say that there are other forms of socialism that aren't?

Similarly, wouldn't it promote greater clarity if the proponents of theistic evolution who believe that evolution is guided came up with another term rather than trying to offer an idiosyncratic redefinition of Darwinism that most leading practitioners of evolutionary biology would reject? Again, what purpose is served by trying to conflate views that are in reality contradictory? Surely not Barr's stated purpose of clear thinking. For someone who rejects the core idea of Darwinism (that evolution is unguided), Barr seems to go to great lengths to avoid any appearance of disagreement with Darwinian evolution. Why?

2. Since you indicate that you affirm that God knows and directs the outcomes of evolution, why don't you and Francis Collins clearly repudiate the views of mainstream theistic evolution proponents like Ken Miller and George Coyne who do promote undirected evolution?

It is interesting that in his responses to me, Barr says nary a word about the mainstream theistic evolutionists I criticized such as biologist Kenneth Miller and former Vatican astronomer George Coyne who claim that God does not direct or know the specific outcomes of evolution. Why not? Barr and Francis Collins both publicly criticize proponents of intelligent design because they disagree with them. Why aren't they equally forthright in criticizing mainstream theistic evolutionists who claim that God does not know or plan the specific results of evolution? Far from criticizing theistic evolutionists who hold this view, Francis Collins has praised the work of Kenneth Miller and delivered a keynote address to a conference of "open theists" who explicitly claim that God does not know the future. Barr criticizes me for finding equivocation in Collins where he thinks there is none, but it seems to me that Collins has made it quite easy to misunderstand his position. If Collins embraces the exact same view as Barr (i.e., that God knows and specifies all the outcomes of evolution), why is Collins going out of his way to associate himself with and praise those who argue otherwise? For the sake of clarity, why don't Barr and Collins both publicly disclaim the position ofthese theistic evolution proponents?

Near the end of his recent blog post, Barr tries to diminish the role of design in the Christian theological tradition by offering an unduly constricted reading of the Apostle Paul's statement that God can be known "by the things that are made." (Romans 1:20) Barr suggests that Paul is echoing a passage from the book of Wisdom, which explicitly references God's design in the heavens. However, Paul (unlike the author of Wisdom) does not reference the stars or planets, and it is a questionable interpretive strategy to base one's reading of a passage on something the author did not say. Taken on its own terms, Paul is clearly offering a general statement of principle that applies to all sorts of created things, not just those in the heavens. Interestingly, even the passage from the book of Wisdom doesn't really sustain Barr's point. The author of that book goes on to make a general statement that "from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen." Here the author offers a general point that presumably applies not only to the heavens but to created things as a class. Unless Barr is somehow trying to argue that living things are not "created things" in the same way as planets and stars (an untenable proposition from the standpoint of traditional Christian theology), Barr's effort to restrict the design argument to areas outside biology fails.

Even if Barr's constricted readings of Paul and the book of Wisdom were to be accepted, they would not cancel out Jesus' citation of the lilies of the field as evidence of God's care and provision for the world, nor would they cancel out the consistent writings of the early church fathers, which repeatedly reference evidence for design in biology. Frankly, Barr's effort to keep the design argument outside of biology seems to be dictated more by a desire to achieve peace at all costs with Darwinism than a fair rendering of historic Christian teaching.

Having said this, I agree with Barr that "[t]o say that there is evidence of design in the world does not mean that every single thing one sees in the world, taken by itself, standing alone, constitutes persuasive evidence of that design." Who claims otherwise? But Darwinism doesn't just exclude one or two things from providing evidence for design. It purports to explain the entire development of complex life, including the development of human beings, as the product of a blind and undirected process. That seems to be a pretty frontal assault on the idea that God has revealed Himself throughout nature. Barr seems satisfied that if we can still talk about design in physics and cosmology, we don't need to bother about it in biology. But surely from the standpoint of historic Christian theology, living things--including human beings--do not show less evidence of design than stars or planets! Indeed, if human beings are the crown of creation, one would think they might show a lot more evidence of design than, say, the planet Uranus.

The sad thing is that Barr's redacted version of historic Christian theology seems to be driven by an unbounded--and unwarranted--faith in the claims of Neo-Darwinism. The idea that natural selection acting on random mutations can produce the sort of finely-tuned complexity we see in biology is simply not supported by the scientific evidence. At best, the Darwinian mechanism seems capable of producing trivial changes. Those who doubt this should read Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution, or look at some of the debates inspired by that bookhere and here.

By the end of his post, Barr appears to recognize that completely repudiating design in biology is unsustainable, and so he suggests that when all is said and done there may be evidence of design in biology after all:

The fact that I would criticize certain biological design arguments as shaky or simplistic doesn't mean that I think all biological design arguments are. I think good biological design arguments can be made, but it is a challenging task to formulate them in a way that will be persuasive to knowledgeable people today

If Barr truly believes that "good biological design arguments can be made," then I would consider him an intelligent design proponent. However, Barr also says that "not all design arguments based on biology are of the kind made by the Intelligent Design movement, and not all of them presuppose that Darwinian evolution is false."

I am not exactly sure what arguments in biology Barr thinks the intelligent design movement is making. There are in fact a variety of arguments made by design proponents, and not all design proponents agree on all arguments. What design proponents do share is an openness to the detectability of design throughout nature based on evidence and arguments that do not depend on the Bible or other sacred teachings. If Barr shares this commitment, then he would seem to agree with the scientists and philosophers in the "intelligent design movement."

Nevertheless, I am confused by his statement that "not all design arguments based on biology... presuppose that Darwinian evolution is false." The design arguments in biology I know about do not "presuppose" that Darwinism is false. Instead, they make an argument based on evidence that the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutations cannot produce what it claims; then they go on to explain that intentional design is a better explanation. But perhaps Barr merely intended to claim that there are biological design arguments that are consistent with Darwinian evolution. If that is Barr's claim, then I wish he would say more about the kinds of arguments he is thinking about, because he might find that we agree.

If Barr merely means that design arguments in biology need not challenge Darwin's theory of common ancestry (as opposed to Darwin's undirected mechanism of selection and random variations), he is surely right. Design arguments in biology need not challenge common ancestry. Of course, this is a point that has been made time and again by intelligent design proponents for the past decade, and it is a point I emphasized in my book Darwin's Conservatives.

Similarly, if Barr means that there are design arguments about the origin of the first life that need not conflict with Darwinism because Darwinism assumes the existence of the first self-replicating organism, then I also would agree--as would the leading proponents of the "intelligent design movement." Stephen Meyer, in fact, has just come out with a book,Signature in the Cell, which provides a compelling argument for design based on the origin of the first life. Meyer explicitly acknowledges that Darwin's theory does not address the origin of the first life.

However, if Barr means that there are design arguments based on the development of biological complexity after the first life that do not conflict with Darwinism, then that claim seems hard to sustain. Even in Barr's redefinition of Darwinism, the development of life is supposedly driven by "random" mutations. As I understand it, Barr defines "random" as meaning that from a human standpoint that an event displays no discernible pattern and cannot lead to any predictions. Yet if evolution is driven by "random" events in this sense, it is difficult to see how the development of complex life can provide any evidence of design. It's one thing to claim that "random" mutations are somehow known or planned by God even though from our standpoint they show no discernible pattern. It's quite another thing to claim that such "random" events provide us with evidence of design.

This leads to my final question for Dr. Barr:

3. If Darwinism is true and the development of life really is driven by random mutations that display no discernible pattern and cannot lead to predictions, then in what sense do you think biology provides evidence of intelligent design?

The Watchtower Society's commentary on glossolalia

Tongues, Speaking in

Definition: A special ability given through the holy spirit to some disciples in the early Christian congregation that enabled them to preach or otherwise glorify God in a language other than their own.

Does the Bible say that all who would have God’s spirit would “speak in tongues”?

1 Cor. 12:13, 30: “Truly by one spirit we were all baptized into one body . . . Not all have gifts of healings, do they? Not all speak in tongues, do they?” (Also 1 Corinthians 14:26)

1 Cor. 14:5: “Now I would like for all of you to speak in tongues, but I prefer that you prophesy. Indeed, he that prophesies is greater than he that speaks in tongues, unless, in fact, he translates, that the congregation may receive upbuilding.”

Does ecstatic speech in a language that a person never learned prove that he has holy spirit?

Can the ability to “speak in tongues” come from a source other than the true God?

1 John 4:1: “Beloved ones, do not believe every inspired expression [“every spirit,” KJ, RS], but test the inspired expressions to see whether they originate with God.” (See also Matthew 7:21-23; 2 Corinthians 11:14, 15.)

Among those ‘speaking in tongues’ today are Pentecostals and Baptists, also Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Jesus said that the holy spirit would ‘guide his disciples into all the truth.’ (John 16:13) Do the members of each of these religions believe that the others who also “speak in tongues” have been guided into “all the truth”? How could that be, since they are not all in agreement? What spirit is making it possible for them to “speak in tongues”?

A joint statement by the Fountain Trust and the Church of England Evangelical Council admitted: “We are also aware that a similar phenomenon can occur under occult/demonic influence.” (Gospel and Spirit, April 1977, published by the Fountain Trust and the Church of England Evangelical Council, p. 12) The book Religious Movements in Contemporary America (edited by Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone, quoting L. P. Gerlach) reports that in Haiti ‘speaking in tongues’ is characteristic of both Pentecostal and Voodoo religions.—(Princeton, N.J.; 1974), p. 693; see also 2 Thessalonians 2:9, 10.

Is the ‘speaking in tongues’ that is done today the same as that done by first-century Christians?

In the first century, the miraculous gifts of the spirit, including the ability to “speak in tongues,” verified that God’s favor had shifted from the Jewish system of worship to the newly established Christian congregation. (Heb. 2:2-4) Since that objective was accomplished in the first century, is it necessary to prove the same thing again and again in our day?

In the first century, the ability to “speak in tongues” gave impetus to the international work of witnessing that Jesus had commissioned his followers to do. (Acts 1:8; 2:1-11; Matt. 28:19) Is that how those who “speak in tongues” use that ability today?

In the first century, when Christians ‘spoke in tongues,’ what they said had meaning to people who knew those languages. (Acts 2:4, 8) Today, is it not true that ‘speaking in tongues’ usually involves an ecstatic outburst of unintelligible sounds?

In the first century, the Bible shows, congregations were to limit the ‘speaking in tongues’ to two or three persons who might do that at any given meeting; they were to do it “each in turn,” and if there was no interpreter present they were to keep silent. (1 Cor. 14:27, 28, RS) Is that what is being done today?

See also pages 381, 382, under the heading “Spirit.”

Might the holy spirit be directing charismatics into practices that reach beyond what is found in the Scriptures?

2 Tim. 3:16, 17: “All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness, that the man of God may be fully competent, completely equipped for every good work.” (If someone claims to have an inspired message that conflicts with revelations made by God’s spirit through Jesus and his apostles, could it possibly be from the same source?)

Gal. 1:8: “Even if we or an angel out of heaven were to declare to you as good news something beyond [“at variance with,” NE] what we declared to you as good news, let him be accursed.”

Does the way of life of members of organizations that look with favor on ‘speaking in tongues’ give evidence that they have God’s spirit?

As a group do they outstandingly manifest such fruits of the spirit as mildness and self-control? Are these qualities readily evident to persons who attend their meetings for worship?—Gal. 5:22, 23.

Are they truly “no part of the world”? Because of this do they give full devotion to the Kingdom of God or are they involved in the world’s political affairs? Have they remained clean of bloodguilt during wartime? As a group do they have a fine reputation because of avoiding the world’s immoral conduct?—John 17:16; Isa. 2:4; 1 Thess. 4:3-8.

Are true Christians today identified by the ability to “speak in tongues”?

John 13:35: “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love among yourselves.”

1 Cor. 13:1, 8: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a sounding piece of brass or a clashing cymbal. Love never fails. But whether there are gifts of prophesying, they will be done away with; whether there are tongues, they will cease.”

Jesus said that holy spirit would come upon his followers and that they would be witnesses of him to the most distant part of the earth. (Acts 1:8) He instructed them to “make disciples of people of all the nations.” (Matt. 28:19) He also foretold that ‘this good news of the kingdom would be preached in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all nations.’ (Matt. 24:14) Who today, both as a group and individually, are doing this work? In harmony with what Jesus said, should we not look for this as an evidence that a group has holy spirit?

Is ‘speaking in tongues’ to continue until that which is “perfect” comes?

At 1 Corinthians 13:8 reference is made to several miraculous gifts—prophecy, tongues, and knowledge. Verse 9 again refers to two of these gifts—knowledge and prophecy—saying: “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.” (KJ) Or, as RS reads: “For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect.” Then verse 10 states: “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” (KJ) The word “perfect” is translated from the Greek teʹlei·on, which conveys the thought of being full grown, complete, or perfect. Ro, By, and NW here render it “complete.” Notice that it is not the gift of tongues that is said to be “imperfect,” “in part,” or partial. That is said of “prophecy” and “knowledge.” In other words, even with those miraculous gifts, the early Christians had only an imperfect or partial understanding of God’s purpose. But when the prophecies would come to fulfillment, when God’s purpose would be accomplished, then “that which is perfect,” or complete, would come. So, this is obviously not discussing how long the ‘gift of tongues’ would continue.

However, the Bible does indicate how long the ‘gift of tongues’ would be a part of Christian experience. According to the record, this gift and the other gifts of the spirit were always conveyed to persons by the laying on of hands of the apostles of Jesus Christ or in their presence. (Acts 2:4, 14, 17; 10:44-46; 19:6; see also Acts 8:14-18.) Thus, after their death and when the individuals who in that way had received the gifts died, the miraculous gifts resulting from the operation of God’s spirit must have come to their end. Such a view agrees with the purpose of those gifts as stated at Hebrews 2:2-4.

Does not Mark 16:17, 18 (KJ) show that the ability to “speak with new tongues” would be a sign identifying believers?

It should be noted that these verses refer not only to ‘speaking with new tongues’ but also to handling serpents and drinking deadly poison. Are all who “speak in tongues” also encouraging these practices?

For comments on the reasons why these verses are not accepted by all Bible scholars, see pages 158, 159, under the heading “Healing.”

(Does not Mark 16:17, 18 show that ability to heal the sick would be a sign identifying believers?

Mark 16:17, 18, KJ: “These signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

These verses appear in certain Bible manuscripts and versions of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. But they do not appear in the older Greek manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and Vatican MS. 1209 of the fourth century. Dr. B. F. Westcott, an authority on Bible manuscripts, said that “the verses . . . are no part of the original narrative but an appendage.” (An Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, London, 1881, p. 338) Bible translator Jerome, in the fifth century, said that “almost all the Greek codices [are] without this passage.” (The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark, London, 1871, J. W. Burgon, p. 53) The New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967) says: “Its vocabulary and style differ so radically from the rest of the Gospel that it hardly seems possible Mark himself composed it [that is, verses 9-20].” (Vol. IX, p. 240) There is no record that early Christians either drank poison or handled serpents to prove they were believers.)

On figuring out why E.T hasn't called

Cosmic Archaeology: Taking the Sting Out of the Drake Equation

David Klinghoffer

Here's a clever way of taking the sting out the Drake equation. Frank Drake's work has previously been a stumbling block for materialist understandings of the cosmos. As Tom Bethell has explained ("The Anxious Search for Extraterrestrials"):

Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer, took it upon himself to demonstrate that life arising by chance was highly probable. By 1959, scientists could listen for signals from aliens using radio telescopes and a listening post was set up in West Virginia. Drake cobbled together what became known as the Drake Equation. It estimates the probability that intelligent beings are out there somewhere.

You take the number of stars and multiply by the fraction that have planets, times the number of planets per star, times the fraction within a habitable zone, times the likelihood of life evolving, times the probability of it reaching a level where critters can build radio transmitters -- and so on.

But as Michael Crichton pointed out there was no data to work with. So enthusiasts were free to plug in their own numbers. That's how Sagan came up with his "one million" civilizations. "Physics and chemistry are so constructed as to make the origin of life easy," he assured us.

If our habitable planet is common currency and life evolves so easily, with intelligent life and civilization following readily in its wake, then why do we record no evidence of such life out there -- no contact from ETs, not a peep? Could it be that life is so unlikely as to require a designer's guidance for it to come into existence? Hence the anxiety.

Ah, but you see, it's because all the previous alien civilizations have gone extinct! Just as -- so fashionable opinion never tires of telling us -- our own threatens to do.

Reporting in the journal Astrobiology ("A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe"), Adam Frank at University of Rochester and Woodruff Sullivan at the University of Washington gave the matter a rethink, and played with the variables.

"Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask 'Are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?" said Sullivan. "This shifted focus eliminates the uncertainty of the civilization lifetime question and allows us to address what we call the 'cosmic archaeological question' -- how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?"

Whether Earth's intelligent life has or had parallels elsewhere all depends on how readily previously dead matter evolves such an astonishing pattern. If it does so relatively easily, then many other inhabited planets like Earth have probably gone before us:

Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question -- summed up in the famous Drake equation -- has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science.

But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.

And it shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe's first technological, or advanced, civilization.

The news item from the University of Rochester includes an opportunity to plug in your own variables and see the results. If you select the Milky Way as your area of interest and then a likelihood of evolving intelligent life at 1 in 10,000 (10^-4), then the result is some 6 million civilizations, past or present. If you choose 10^-24, then "We are the first advanced civilization." There are, and have been, no others.

Why the uncertainty? "We didn't know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbor life, how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings, and how long any civilizations might last before becoming extinct," admits Dr. Frank. That's a lot not to know.

On the other hand, we do know that evolving a civilization involves hurdles downstream from a far more basic problem -- getting a functional protein. No building blocks of life means, inescapably, no life. ETs don't need to be designed precisely as we are for this to be true. Biologist Ann Gauger puts it simply:

Research indicates that sequences that fold into a particular functional shape are rare. Only about 1 in 10^77 possible sequences will adopt a functional fold 150 amino acids in length.

...

Proteins exhibit exquisite design, with extraordinary specified complexity embedded in their sequences. Too much to be the result of random processes.

This is the issue on which Richard Dawkins's recent dispute with Stephen Meyer turned ("Dawkins's Dilemma: Misrepresent the Mechanism...or Face the Math"). To speak of intelligent life developing, putting odds on that, seems beyond calculation.

But reckoning on civilizations having extinguished themselves is an ingenious move and grants evolutionists a tenuous handhold. How can anyone prove there aren't scads of dead Earths out there? It also fits well with the ethos of the moment, an apocalyptic one that sees civilization and technology's advance, human flourishing itself, as an exercise in self-destruction.

The thumb print of Jehovah.

Another oversimplification demystified

Frederick W. Franz and Biblical Hebrew

A number of critical websites make assertions to the effect that Frederick W. Franz, a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses until his death in 1992, was unable to translate a simple verse from Hebrew into English, when asked to do so during a court case in Scotland in 1954.

When one man wrote to me about the above assertion, I challenged him to prove it. He replied by sending me a copy of Robert Hommel's article on the subject. Hommel, however, concedes that Franz was not asked to translate from Hebrew into English, but from English into Hebrew. A number of other sources, however, continue to misrepresent the facts._[1]

  Franz was not asked to translate from Hebrew into English, but from English into Hebrew - a different matter altogether. 

Now, as the court record shows, Franz refused to translate a Bible verse from English into Hebrew. First of all, we must agree with Stafford_[2]  that the fact that Franz refused to do so, saying "No, I won't attempt to do that," doesn't mean that he couldn't do it. After all, his knowledge of Hebrew or Greek was not in the slightest relevant to the subject of the court case at hand, which was whether Jehovah's Witnesses have the right to ordain ministers of religion . A court is not a circus and Franz certainly wasn't obliged to go along with some lawyer's dubious tactics. Franz stood up for himself and refused to play along.

At this point it is worth asking what the attorney's point was. It should go without saying that if you have a sentence in language A and you translate it into language B and then someone else translates it back into language A again, you won't necessarily end up with the sentence you started with. Hence, asking someone to translate a text from language B back into language A and then compare the result with the original text really proves nothing. If that was the lawyer's intention, he was either extremely naive regarding how language and translation work, or he was being disingenuous. And yet, someone ignorant of how translation works could easily be fooled into thinking that the rendering was defective, simply because it was not identical with the original text. (Presumably this is what Millard means by his observation, 'but, of course, we have the Hebrew text of Genesis'.) So the lawyer's question either revealed a lamentable lack of understanding of translation principles on his part - or else it was a trap. Under those circumstances, Franz had nothing to gain by attempting to translate.

Note, also, how Hommel tries to put words into Millard's mouth. All Millard said was that he 'saw no great problem' in rendering the verse into Hebrew, but according to Hommel, Millard confirms that "there is no good reason for Franz to have  refused to perform an English-to-Hebrew translation". This is not what Millard said and, as we have seen, leaves out other likely reasons for Franz' refusal.

But even supposing for the sake of argument (not conceding) that Franz was unable to translate Genesis 2:4 from English into Hebrew, would that affect this qualifications as a Bible translator? Is translating from English into Hebrew the same as translating from Hebrew into English? An important principle in translation work is this: you work from the foreign language into your mother tongue. Contradicting Hommel's view that this is a "detail", something "of little significance in determining Franz's skill in Biblical Hebrew", The Translator's Handbook by Morry Sofer points out:

"A distinction must be made between the languages one translates from and into. Generally speaking, one translates from another language into one's own native language. This is because one is usually intimately familiar with one's own language, while even years of study and experience do not necessarily enable one to be completely at home with an acquired language. The exceptions to this rule are usually those people who have lived in more than one culture, and have spoken more than one language on a regular basis. Those may be able to translate in both directions. There are also rare gifted individuals who have mastered another language to such a degree that they can go both ways. They are indeed extremely rare. Given all of this, one should allow for the fact that while the ability of the accomplished translator to write and speak in the target language (i.e., one's native tongue) may be flawless, that person may not necessarily be able to write excellent prose or give great speeches in the source language (i.e., the language from which one translates). Then again, it is not necessary to be able to write and speak well in the language one translates from, while it is to be expected that a good translator is also a good writer and speaker in his or her native language."_[4]

What the Translator's Handbook says here is self-evident to most people working in translation.._[5]  Many people work as competent translators without being able speak or write the source language well. That is not to say that they can't speak it at all, but they can't speak it flawlessly. Translating, on the other hand, which implies understanding the text in the source language and rendering it into the target language, is a different matter altogether. F. W. Franz certainly knew the difference. He had just told the court: "I do not speak Hebrew." So, obviously, the fact that Franz decided not to translate the verse certainly does not prove that he was incompetent to translate Hebrew into English and is even less relevant to the question of whether he could translate Greek into English.

  It is not necessary to be able to write and speak well in the language that one translates from 

The Translator's Handbook

In any case, as Stafford - who does know Hebrew - points out in his book, the verse in question (Genesis 2:4) isn't all that easy to translate. He says: "It should not be overlooked that this verse is actually somewhat complicated. It has no finite verb but one Niphal infinitive construct, with suffix, and one Qal infinitive construct"_[6] Even Hommel's own star witness, Millard, recognises that there is "uncertainty over the passage."!

Indeed, Rolf Furuli relates his own experiment with two professors of Hebrew:

"I asked two of my colleagues who teach Hebrew at the University of Oslo, to translate the passage. Both had problems with the translation from English to Hebrew, even though they both are experienced teachers, and their results were very different."_[7]

In fact, all Bible translators, not just the NWT translators, make generous use of lexicons, grammars, commentaries and other translation aids. Few, if any, of them approach their work so casually as to attempt to translate without recourse to all the printed scholarship that is available. It is simply not expected of a translator that he or she should be able to work without all these aids. As The Translator's Handbook puts it:

No translator, no matter how accomplished or well versed in both the source and target languages, can do without dictionaries and reference literature._[8]

  Two of my colleagues who teach Hebrew at the University of Oslo ... had problems with the translation [of Genesis 2:4] from English to Hebrew 

Rolf Furuli

So, translation involves careful study of a wide variety of resources. Furthermore, translation is a synergistic group effort, in which a number of different translators contribute their expertise and talents. Additionally, there is no reason why the New World Translation Committee could not have sought the input and comments of a number of authorities on Bible languages, both inside and outside the Jehovah's Witnesses organization.

Finally, Millard observes that 'there is a difference between translating into a language and freely composing in it'. He doesn't state what the difference is, but we would submit that translating into a language is actually more difficult. When expressing your own thoughts in a foreign language, if you have difficulty with a certain sentence construction, grammatical detail or vocabulary item, you have the option of stating matters differently. You have the right to express your thoughts in your own words. But when you're translating, the thoughts aren't yours. You have the additional responsibility to faithfully represent the original. So you are working under tighter constraints. Translation is therefore more difficult than freely composing in a language. And, of course, translating verbally before an audience, without preparation and under psychological pressure, is more difficult still.

So, leaving aside for a moment the unresolved question of whether Franz was even on the NWT translation committee, my correspondent's original assertion, namely that Franz was unable to translate a simple verse from Hebrew into English has been demonstrated to be incorrect in all its details.

(1) Franz was asked to translate into Hebrew not from Hebrew into English.

(2) It can't be proved that Franz couldn't translate the verse, only that he didn't want to, and there are perfectly reasonable alternative explanations for that.  

(3) It is not a simple verse, as two teachers of Hebrew at University level had difficulty in translating it and even Hommel's own source says that there is 'uncertainty over the passage'.

A quick Google search shows that there are quite a few sites still perpetuating this calumny. That should raise a red flag for cautious readers, some of whom might like to try an experiment: write to one or two of them and suggesting that they correct the error? There is more than enough evidence for them to do so. If it is just an oversight rather than a deliberate attempt to smear Franz, then surely they'll be happy to make a correction and issue an apology. If, on the other hand, what they're really up to is character assassination, then the best you can hope for is that they'll ignore you.

The real truth is this: Witness critics don't like Franz because he was a Jehovah's Witness. They have deliberately misrepresented the facts about this whole matter, slinging as much dirt as they can in Franz' direction, hoping that some of it will stick. These are the worst kind of gutter tactics and pretty much what we have come to expect from many critics of the Watch Tower. Even if we do not agree with every rendering in the New World Translation, it is time for critics to admit that it is not some sort of evil propaganda but rather it's what James Parkinson calls it: "A relatively accurate translation from another theological perspective." So how about it? If Benjamin Kedar - quoted in the article Hommel and the New World Translation - can admit the accuracy of the New World Translation without becoming a Jehovah's Witness, so can they!