The death of moral clarity?

Should EMTs Save a Human or a Dog First?
Wesley J. Smith

Bioethicists never cease to entertain — if some of the dangerous views pushed by this mainstream movement can be considered “entertaining.”

But this entry into the discourse sort of takes the cake. Over at  bioethics.net, “maintained by the editorial staff of The American Journal of Bioethics,” a DePaul University PhD named Craig Klugman worries that EMT responders won’t give pets mouth-to-mouth resuscitation out of fear that saving Fido could be considered practicing veterinary medicine without a license. (!!!)

Really? Well, if EMTs need liability protection when rescuing our pets, then by all means, grant them the protection.

Klugman then ponders a situation in which both a human and an animal need CPR. Which, he asks, should the EMT help first?

Before you read his answer below about flipping a coin and decision-making by “aesthetics,” realize that Klugman understands his readership. Many bioethicists would brand an automatic response, “the human,” to be “speciesism” — i.e., discrimination against animals  — which those who hold such misanthropic views deem akin to racism. (Ditto, animal-rights activists.)

Now, to Klugman. From “Snout to Mouth: The Age of PET CPR Requires Pet POLSTS” (my emphasis):

Having EMS able to give pet CPR does raise some intriguing bioethical issues. From a resource perspective, if an EMT arrives on scene where a human needs CPR and a dog needs CPR, which one should the EMT assist first (assuming that only one EMT is available)? Most people would probably respond, “the human, of course” because although we care deeply for our pets, our society still values human life over that of animals (rightly or wrongly).

If we viewed both lives as equal, then perhaps the EMT should flip a coin.

However, the ethics of aesthetics are probably at play in developing this prioritization since a headline that says “EMT saves human; dog dies” is less likely to be litigious than “EMT saves dog while not treating human.”

Yikes. Talk about not taking a stand!

And what if Fido doesn’t have a quality of life worth living? Advance directives!

Where first responders offer pet-CPR, it may be important to have POLST documents for Fluffy and Spot (though legally these may not be enforceable). You may want to add a DNR dogtag (yes these are meant for people, but are available and are not too large) as part of your dog’s tags.

That’s bioethics for you, folks! Good grief.

The OOL re:the design debate.

Why OOL apart from design is a non-starter.

A clash of Titans. LXVIII

The fossil record v. Darwin (again)

Bechly: The “Explosive” Pattern in the Fossil Record, and What It Means
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

“There’s no reasonable way to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.” So says notable German paleontologist Günter Bechly, for a variety of reasons. One reason he describes in really interesting detail in a new ID the Future episode is the puzzling pattern of explosive radiation events in life’s long history. Those include the Avalon explosion producing the bizarre Ediacaran biota, some 574 million years ago, the great Ordovician biodiversification event perhaps 470 million years ago, aka “life’s second Big Bang,” several abrupt appearances in the Triassic, from 251 to 240 million years ago, in which dinosaurs and proto-mammals enter the scene, and many more.

This is all apart from the granddaddy and most familiar of all life’s explosions, the enigmatic Cambrian event. The pattern is not at all what Charles Darwin expected from the fossil record.

Dr. Bechly talks with Sarah Chaffee about what the pattern means for the theory of unguided evolution, and the idea of universal common descent compared with a polyphyletic view. Can the two be reconciled? Bechly discusses his chapter co-written with Steve Meyer in the recent book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. And he describes fresh turns his thinking has taken more recently, since the book was completed. That’s right, the theory of intelligent design, in the hands of scientists like Bechly, is still a work in progress with intellectual ferment, twists and turns, ongoing as we write here. Unlike the more traditional evolutionary view, ID hasn’t assumed the shape of a living fossil from an antique age.


That’s one thing that makes conversations like this so fascinating.  Listen to the podcast or download it here.

On the historicity of the scriptures:The Watchtower society's commentary.

A “Pim” Testifies to the Bible’s Historicity

THE word “pim” occurs only once in the Bible. In the days of King Saul, the Israelites had to get their metal tools sharpened by Philistine smiths. “The price for sharpening proved to be a pim for the plowshares and for the mattocks and for the three-toothed instruments and for the axes and for fixing fast the oxgoad,” states the Bible.​—1 Samuel 13:21.

What was a pim? The answer to that question remained a mystery until 1907 C.E. when the first pim weight stone was excavated at the ancient city of Gezer. Bible translators of earlier dates had difficulty translating the word “pim.” The King James Version, for example, rendered 1 Samuel 13:21: “Yet they had a file for the mattocks, and for the coulters, and for the forks, and for the axes, and to sharpen the goads.”

Scholars today know that a pim was a weight measure averaging 7.82 grams, or approximately two thirds of a shekel, the basic Hebrew unit of weight. A pim measure of silver scrap was the price the Philistines charged the Israelites for sharpening their tools. The shekel weight system went out of use with the fall of the kingdom of Judah and its capital, Jerusalem, in 607 B.C.E. So how does the pim measure testify to the historicity of the Hebrew text?

Some scholars argue that the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, including the book of First Samuel, date to the Hellenistic-Roman era, even as late as from the second to the first century B.C.E. It is claimed, therefore, that “they are . . . ‘unhistorical,’ of little or no value for reconstructing a ‘biblical’ or an ‘ancient Israel,’ both of which are simply modern Jewish and Christian literary constructs.”

Referring to the pim measure mentioned at 1 Samuel 13:21, however, William G. Dever, professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology, says: “[It] cannot possibly have been ‘invented’ by writers living in the Hellenistic-Roman period several centuries after these weights had disappeared and had been forgotten. In fact, this bit of biblical text . . . would not be understood until the early 20th century A.D., when the first actual archaeological examples turned up, reading pîm in Hebrew.” The professor continues: “If the biblical stories are all ‘literary inventions’ of the Hellenistic-Roman era, how did this particular story come to be in the Hebrew Bible? One may object, of course, that the pîm incident is ‘only a detail.’ To be sure; but as is well known, ‘history is in the details.’”

On Samson's Naziriteship:The Watchtower society's commentary.

How could Samson touch dead bodies that he had slain and still remain a Nazirite?

In ancient Israel, an individual could voluntarily make a vow and become a Nazirite for a certain length of time.* One of the restrictions resting upon the one making this vow stipulated: “All the days of his keeping separate to Jehovah he may not come toward any dead soul. Not even for his father or his mother or his brother or his sister may he defile himself when they die.” What if someone “should die quite suddenly alongside him”? Such an accidental touching of a dead body would defile his Naziriteship. Thus, it was stated: “The former days will go uncounted.” He would need to go through a purification ceremony and start the Nazirite period over again.​—Numbers 6:6-12.

Samson, though, was a Nazirite in a different sense. Before Samson’s birth, Jehovah’s angel told his mother: “Look! you will be pregnant, and you will certainly give birth to a son, and no razor should come upon his head, because a Nazirite of God is what the child will become on leaving the belly; and he it is who will take the lead in saving Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.” (Judges 13:5) Samson took no vow of Naziriteship. He was a Nazirite by divine appointment, and his Naziriteship was for life. The restriction against touching a corpse could not apply in his case. If it did and he accidentally touched a dead body, how could he start over a lifelong Naziriteship that began with his birth? Evidently, then, the requirements for lifetime Nazirites differed in some ways from those for voluntary Nazirites.

Consider Jehovah’s commandments to the three lifelong Nazirites​—Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptizer—​mentioned in the Bible. As noted earlier, Samson was required not to cut the hair of his head. Concerning her yet to be conceived child​—Samuel—​Hannah made the vow: “I will give him to Jehovah all the days of his life, and no razor will come upon his head.” (1 Samuel 1:11) In the case of John the Baptizer, Jehovah’s angel said: “He must drink no wine and strong drink at all.” (Luke 1:15) Moreover, “John had his clothing of camel’s hair and a leather girdle around his loins; his food too was insect locusts and wild honey.” (Matthew 3:4) None of these three individuals were commanded not to come near a dead soul.

Though a Nazirite, Samson was among the judges whom Jehovah raised up to save the Israelites out of the hand of their pillagers. (Judges 2:16) And in fulfilling this assignment, he came in contact with dead bodies. On one occasion, Samson struck down 30 Philistines and stripped off their outfits. Later, he went smiting the enemy, “piling legs upon thighs with a great slaughter.” He also took a moist jawbone of an ass and killed a thousand men with it. (Judges 14:19; 15:8, 15) Samson did all of this with Jehovah’s favor and backing. The Scriptures refer to him as a man of exemplary faith.​—Hebrews 11:32; 12:1.

Does the statement that Samson ripped apart a lion “just as someone tears a male kid in two” suggest that the tearing apart of young goats was a common practice in his day?

There is no evidence that in the time of Israel’s Judges, it was common for people to tear apart young goats. Judges 14:6 states: “Jehovah’s spirit became operative upon [Samson], so that he tore it [a maned young lion] in two, just as someone tears a male kid in two, and there was nothing at all in his hand.” This comment likely is an illustration.

The expression “he tore it in two” could have two meanings. Samson either tore apart the jaws of the lion or tore the lion limb from limb in some way. If the former is meant, then doing the same thing to a young goat is conceivably within human power. In this case, the parallel illustrates that conquering a lion with his bare hands was no more difficult for Samson than had the lion been a mere male kid. However, what if Samson killed the lion by tearing it limb from limb? The comment then can hardly be taken as anything more than a simile. The point of the simile would be that Jehovah’s spirit empowered Samson to perform a task that required extraordinary physical strength. In either case, the comparison drawn at Judges 14:6 illustrates that with Jehovah’s help, a powerful lion proved to be no more ferocious to Samson than a male kid would be to the average person.

[Footnote]

The length of time for Naziriteship was left up to the individual making the vow. According to Jewish tradition, however, the minimum length for the vow was 30 days. It was thought that anything less would make the vow commonplace.

The thumb print of Jehovah under the microscope.

Why the sun god cannot save Darwinism.

Steven F.Hayward V. Settled Science.

On the circus that is human origins theory.

Adam and the Genome and Hominid Fossils
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

In his book Adam and the Genome, which we’ve been considering here, biologist Dennis Venema attempts to show that a traditional Adam and Eve did not exist. Instead, humans evolved, like any other species:

The evidence thus suggests that our lineage over the past 4 million years passed through an Ardipithecine-like species, on to an Australopithecine-like species, and then through various shades of Homo until our species is first preserved in the fossil record 200,000 years ago.

(Adam and the Genome, p. 59)

But in Science and Human Origins, Casey Luskin reviewed the fossil evidence including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus and showed:

Hominin fossils generally fall into one of two groups: ape-like species and human-like species, with a large, unbridged gap between them. Despite the hype promoted by many evolutionary paleoanthropologists, the fragmented hominin fossil record does not document the evolution of humans from ape-like precursors.

(Science and Human Origins, p. 45)

Adducing numerous authorities, the book showed that hominid fossils

…fall into two basic categories: ape-like fossils, and Homo-like fossils. This discontinuity between fossil types is well-known. Nonetheless, the hominin fossils have been interpreted as historical, physical evidence of our common ancestry with apes. Ernst Mayr, a well-known evolutionary biologist, acknowledged both the gap and the story-telling in his book What Makes Biology Unique:

“The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative.”

(Science and Human Origins, p. 17)

As for Ardipithecus, a fossil noted by Venema, Luskin cites authorities pointing out that this fossil was highly fragmented. This condition makes it difficult to establish whether it walked upright like humans, and, indeed, quite a few authorities believe it was not on the line that led to humans. Moreover, Luskin lists many differences between the australopithecines and our genus Homo, and he cites many authorities who have recognized this gap. Our old friend Casey documented all this and more in a range of articles online:

Ardipithecus as an unlikely human ancestor:

• “The Fragmented Fossil Record of Early Hominins”
• “Another Scientific Paper Challenges Ardi’s Place as a Bipedal Human Ancestor”
• “Nature Publishes Paper Critical of Ardi’s Status as Human Evolutionary Ancestor”
• “Is ‘Ardi’ All Washed Up? (Updated)”

For problems with citing the australopithecines as human ancestors or intermediates:

• “Later Hominins: The Australopithecine Gap”
• “My Pilgrimage to Lucy’s Holy Relics Fails to Inspire Faith in Darwinism”

The abrupt appearance of humans:

• “A Big Bang Theory of Homo”
• “Professor Who Indoctrinates Students on Human Evolution Pushes Them Away from Science”

Casey Luskin has a more extensive treatment of this subject in a chapter, “Missing Transitions: Human Origins and the Fossil Record,” in the recent book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. 

There, he writes:

The standard evolutionary view of human origins — generally accepted by theistic evolutionists — holds that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved from apelike species through apparently unguided evolutionary processes like natural selection and random mutation. Theistic evolutionists and other evolutionary scientists often claim the fossil evidence for this Darwinian evolution of humans from ape-like creatures is incontrovertible. But their viewpoint is not supported by the fossil evidence. Hominin fossils generally fall into one of two groups: ape-like species and human-like species, with a large, unbridged gap between them. Virtually the entire hominin fossil record is marked by fragmented fossils, especially the early hominins, which do not document precursors to humans. Around 3 to 4 million years ago, the australopithecines appear, but they were generally ape-like and also appear in an abrupt manner. When our genus Homo appears, it also does so in an abrupt fashion, without clear evidence of a transition from previous ape-like hominins. Major members of Homo are very similar to modern humans, and their differences amount to small-scale microevolutionary changes. The archaeological record also shows an “explosion” of human creativity about thirty to forty thousand years ago. Despite the claims of evolutionary paleoanthropologists and the media hype surrounding many hominin fossils, the fragmented hominin fossil record does not document the evolution of humans from ape-like precursors, and the appearance of humans in the fossil record is anything but a gradual Darwinian evolutionary process. … [T]wo top paleoanthropologists have admitted that “the evolutionary sequence for the majority of hominin lineages is unknown.” With the fossil evidence for human evolution so weak, why should our theistic evolutionist brothers and sisters insist that the church must adopt their viewpoint?

So, despite Dennis Venema’s statements to the contrary, there is no clear-cut lineage of fossils leading from ape-like hominids to modern humans. Want to learn more? A good place to start is here: “Human Origins and the Fossil Record: What Does the Evidence Say?”

Something fishy about Darwin splainin'?

A Smell Test for Design v. Evolutionary Explanations
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

If you’ve ever experienced sharing your home or kitchen with cockroaches, you know that these unpleasant critters seem to multiply faster than your can of Raid will spray, and they get into everything. Nevertheless, it’s good to report that some scientists have seen the value of trying to understand them and figure out why they are so successful. What they found is quite astonishing — and a good test case for comparing Darwinian with design explanations. The researchers published their work in Current Biology under the title, “Spatial Receptive Fields for Odor Localization.”

One of the reasons cockroaches are so successful is their keen sense of smell. Like many insects, including the more pleasing butterflies we all love, roaches smell with their antennae. We saw some micrographs of a butterfly antenna in  Metamorphosis — an intriguing structure, to be sure, but loaded with more complexity than apparent even at that level. The cockroach antenna is called a flagellum, which just means any whip-like thing. But this is no ordinary whip. It is loaded with complex specified information in the form of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). The authors focused, on just one odorant, a molecule that is one ingredient of the roach sex pheromone odor cocktail. Male roaches need to follow the “odor plume” of periplanone-B to find a female, even in the dark. They come well equipped. The authors estimate there are some 36,000 OSNs for this odorant on the antenna.

Animals rely on olfaction to navigate through complex olfactory landscapes, but the mechanisms that allow an animal to encode the spatial structure of an odorous environment remain unclear. To acquire information about the spatial distribution of an odorant, animals may rely on bilateral olfactory organs and compare side differences of odor intensity and timing or may perform spatial and temporal signal integration of subsequent samplings. 

In other words, having 36,000 sensors is not enough. A male roach will be out of luck if he hangs around where the odor plume used to be. To track his beloved’s perfume, he needs to localize its source as she is moving. Previous studies had shown that the male tends to navigate to the edge of the plume rather than race to the center of highest concentration, a strategy that may serve to amplify spatio-temporal changes. But that strategy is not going to work without having a battery of high-tech instruments and software to interpret it. Again, the roach olfactory system comes well equipped.

PNs’ terminals are broadly distributed in the MB, a neuropil involved in processes such as multimodal sensory integration and associative learning. Here, we have shown that S-PNs’ terminals display a stereotyped distribution, suggesting that the spatial information encoded in the MG can be relayed to the MB….

Whoa, what? That’s the trouble with reading papers on olfaction. The jargon tends to be specialized and dense. So rather than try to define projection neuron, Kenyon cell, mushroom body and other unfamiliar terms, let’s keep it simple. Even the mouthful “macroglomerulus” comes from Latin meaning “big ball of twine.” Let’s give ordinary names to the important parts, based on analogies with familiar things (that’s what the original name-inventors did, anyway; “mushroom body” looks like a mushroom but doesn’t taste like one. Scholars can wade through the open-access paper with its specialized jargon to their heart’s content). We can call the macroglomerulus the string ball. It receives twangs from the triggers on the whip (flagellum, that is), carried on waves by strings. What we want to follow is the process, not the nomenclature. That’s where the real fascination is.

So we discover 36,000 strings plucked by the pheromone, reaching out to the string ball, carrying waves of “encoded information” (they do use that term) from up and down the whip. Let’s add some more complexity now. The whip looks like a guitar neck with frets along its length. Just as a guitarist changes the pitch by position, the information coming from the whip encodes spatial information: the strings at the tip “sound” different from those at the base. And just as the strings each have their own character, the scientists found 12 different kinds of strings responding to this one odorant molecule.

It’s like having a 12-string guitar, but there’s more. There are thick strings and thin strings. All of them plug into the string ball at very specific points. It might be best to shift analogies here, and compare the string ball to a mixing console with lots of plug-in inputs. The scientists found that the thin strings plug into distinct layers around one another in the mixing console, and the thick strings plug into overlapping inputs. The thick strings “sound” pretty much the same from along the guitar neck, but the thin strings have more specificity. In fact, the thin strings can even inhibit the twangs, something like a guitarist performing a “stop” action to produce overtones. They apparently do this to maximize resolution. The scientists found that this gives the thin strings a response area to plucking as fine as 1 millimeter.

As any sound engineer knows, the point where you plug in an input is very important. Also important is how you send the sounds down the line to submixes and mains, to get the proper blend of sounds. The scientists wanted to know if this spatial information was maintained in the next devices in the chain. Sure enough, the submixes found in the mixing board also are identifiable in the mushroom body, which we can call the program console. We’ve all seen the control rooms at TV stations where dozens of consoles line the wall. The program engineer selects between these inputs with split-second decisions to present a unified TV show to the viewer. In the case of olfaction, something similar happens. The brain can’t afford to get swamped by TMI (too much information) when what it is interested in is whether to follow the female this way or that. And remember, the program engineer is not just monitoring this one screen about this one pheromone signal. He’s got thousands of other inputs responding to other odors. It’s like having thousands of other instruments each sending their strings of information in real time down to their own mixing boards and on to the program manager’s console.

This spatial information has to be preserved, but it’s constantly changing. Each mixing board is updating its signal constantly. If you watched the “Pacific Salmon’s sense of smell” animation in Living Waters, it’s like that, and even more complex than shown. The proof of its effectiveness is the behavior: the salmon loses the scent on one tributary, and turns around to follow it up the adjacent one. The roach loses the odor plume in one direction, so it continually adjusts its steps to adjust to the constantly changing signal. The reason the roach follows the edge of the odor plume is because that’s where the concentration gradient and the dynamical information is likely to be greatest, giving the strings more nuance These animals respond faster than a program engineer does for TV. It’s amazing. Are you getting a little more respect for those household pests?

At the risk of overkill, let’s pile on more design by mentioning that all this complexity is constructed during development from a single egg. Furthermore, it has to be upgraded and improved, without breaking anything, during the 11 molts the cockroach goes through on its way to adulthood.

Let’s miniaturize it some more. News from the University of California, Riverside describes olfaction in fruit flies and mosquitoes, which are much tinier than cockroaches, yet just as responsive to odors. Here’s all you need to hear:

Odor receptors are proteins that festoon the antennae and sensory appendages on the heads of fruit flies. Odorant molecules plug into them like a key into a lock, activating the odor-detecting machinery in the fly brain to trigger behaviors such as homing in on ripe fruit. Deciphering the odor-detecting machinery has been incredibly difficult, said Ray, because the fly has more than 100 different odor receptor proteins, which feed into an even more complex odor-processing circuitry in the brain.

If you’re getting the idea that olfaction is a challenge to evolution, you’re right. That’s why Illustra took time to show it in Living Waters. That’s why it was (and still is) one of the most difficult senses to figure out. Even with our simplified analogies, the half is not being told. It remains an active area of research, and attempts to build “electronic noses” have been about as minimally successful as artificial intelligence. One thing we know is that every time we see a functioning system with similar complexity, we know it came from an intelligent cause.

So now, for our grand finale: let’s hear the evolutionary explanation! How will they tackle the following observations:

The use of highly specialized sub-compartment of the cockroach olfactory circuit as a model system has been instrumental in revealing a fine mechanism for the acquisition of spatial information on the olfactory surroundings. The direct correspondence of the antennal surface with a stereotyped antennotopic structure within the brain, coupled with continuous active sensing of the surrounding air space, provides the neuroanatomical means to generate an internal representation of the pheromone distribution.

The Darwin spokesperson steps up to the microphone to explain how this originated. Get ready: get set…

The distribution of [specialized neurons] within the macroglomerulus have [sic] evolved through hundreds of millions of years of selective pressure to efficiently localize the sexual mate and increase individual fitness.

All of this simply…“evolved.” That’s it? That’s it? Yes, that’s it. Simple as that.

On Darwinian trickery.

Evolution a Creative Trickster? Heretic Bioengineer Says No
Jonathan Witt

headline at Science Daily announces, “Evolution Plays Many Tricks against Large-Scale Bioproduction.”The headline paints evolution as a creative wunderkind, a mischievous Br’er Rabbit brilliantly outsmarting the Br’er Bear of industrial bioproduction.

There is mischief here, but it’s the vandal kind, not the creative sort.

“Ultra-deep DNA sequencing of thousands of cells uncovers many competing mechanisms of evolution as a threat to efficient scale-up of biobased chemicals production,” the article reports. “Evolution plays an underestimated role in bioprocesses and limits yields much more than previously anticipated.”

I passed this along to my Heretic co-author, distinguished Finnish bio-engineer Matti Leisola. When he wrote back, he said the instability of bio-engineered strains in such cases is a well-known problem. He encountered it years ago at Cultor, an international bio-engineering company where he served for several years as a research director before returning to academic life. He said:

We had in Cultor two 350 cubic meter (17 m high) and ten 50 cubic meter reactors. We were at that time the largest producer of glucose isomerase enzyme used by ADM to produce high-fructose corn syrup. The bacterial strain we used had over 100 copies of the needed gene but lost the extra copies during the fermentation process almost completely, and we had to start every new production process with an original freeze-dried engineered strain.

Leisola was underwhelmed by the Science Daily article’s talk of evolution in action:

The story is actually really funny. The word evolution is used to mean degeneration, as is so often done. This is how they describe it: “We discovered that a wide diversity of genetic disruptions turned producing cells into non-producing when we deep-sequenced thousands of production organisms over time.”

That’s a crucial point. Modern evolutionary theory purports to explain how fundamentally new biological machines and other forms originated. But many of the oft-cited examples of evolution in action involve devolution. In each such case, an organism or molecular machine devolves in a way that gives it a niche advantage, but at the cost of overall fitness.

Michael Behe describes some examples in The  The Edge of Evolution (e.g., antibiotic and malaria resistance). And in this ID the Future conversation, he discusses another example, polar bears. David Klinghoffer summarizes the podcast as a conversation “about evolution’s dark secret: When we can show it at work, in the lab or in the wild, evolution is very often engaged in breaking things, not building them.”

Leisola said there is ample evidence that in competing environments microbes tend to lose unnecessary genes that are only an extra load for them. In a 2014 Bioscience article,“For Microbes, Devolution is Evolution,”writer Marcia Stone describes some of that evidence, and quotes J. Jeffrey Morris, a member of Richard Lenski’s famed Michigan State University lab. “Species are in a ‘race to the bottom,’” Morris said, “deleting the genes for as many costly functions as they can get away with.”

Even when evolution has a small, step-by-step path to a modest complexity advance, that pathway may be foreclosed by a more attractive devolutionary path. Matti and I discuss this in  Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design:

It is generally assumed that a multi-step mutational evolutionary path is possible if all the intermediary steps are functional and can each be reached by a single mutation. The activity produced in this way may, however, be so weak that the cell must over-express the hypothetical newly formed enzyme — in other words, produce too much of the enzyme, causing a huge strain on the cell because it has to use extra synthetic capacity for this. Therefore it is likely that the cell would shed such a weak side-activity. The modest benefit wouldn’t be worth the strain caused by the overproduction.

 Ann Gauger and her colleagues studied what happened in such a case under laboratory conditions. They introduced a mutation that partially interfered with a bacterial cell’s gene for the synthesis of the amino acid tryptophan. Then they introduced a second mutation into the gene that completely abolished the ability to synthesize tryptophan. Cells with the double mutant could, theoretically, regain weak tryptophan synthesizing ability with only one back-mutation. Given more time, cells with the one back-mutation might then undergo one more back-mutation to regain full tryptophan-synthesizing ability. This might demonstrate how a cell could gain a new function with just two mutations. But this did not happen. Instead, cells consistently acquired mutations that reduced expression of the doubly mutated gene. The experiment suggests that even if the cell could acquire a weak new activity by gene mutation, it would get rid of it because weakly performing functions of this sort exact too heavy an energy burden.

The beginning re:John1:1

Was" and "Beginning" in John 1:1


"in beginning was the word, and the word was with the god, and godwas the word."

ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. 


In an on-line discussion I discussed "was" and "beginning" as used in John 1:1 with a young trinitarian scholar (YTS). She claimed that the author of 'The Johannine Prologue' speaks of the ETERNALWord, but the only relevant evidence she showed for this that I found was in her interpretation of the words "in the beginning" and "was." ('Poetic structure' and the alleged significant contrast between "was" and "became" are extremely weak arguments indeed and far from being anything more than wishful thinking.)

"Beginning" (arkhe or arche) means a certain point in time, and despite all the terminology, verbose speculation, and wishful thinking, it still remains a set point in time. It does not indicate eternal (for which the scripture writers had adequate terms when they wished to use them). "In the beginning" can refer to numerous things, but it never means that thing existed before. 

For example:

"In the beginning, John was afraid to jump out the airplane door." This has nothing to do with eternity. It is a single point in time when John first attempted to jump from an airplane.

"In the beginning" at John 1:1 may refer to the point in time, before the angels were created. Or more likely, it refers to the point in time when the universe (or the earth) was created. In any case, the Word could have existed for some time prior to that time, but would not necessarily have existed eternally!

Yes, if John had wished to mean 'eternal' he would have said "frometernity the Word was" or its equivalent.

The young trinitarian student (YTS) showed the connection between Proverbs 8 and Wisdom/Word. Proverbs 8:22 is quoted by her as: 

"Proverbs 8:22-23 says of Wisdom, 'The Lord created me at thebeginning . . . from of old I was poured forth, at first, before the earth was created.' Thus, while, unlike the Word, Wisdom was created, it existed at the beginning before the creation of the world."

But Wisdom here (according to even many trinitarian scholars and most - if not all - early Christian writers of the first 3 centuries) is supposed to be an important element for John's understanding of the Word! So to deny the creation of the Word and accept thecreation of the Wisdom of God at the 'beginning' is not reasonable. - See "Wisdom" and Christ in the BWF study.

Jesus was called the Wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), which we see being created at the beginning in Prov. 8.


Jesus is called the "beginning of God's creation" (Rev. 3:14).

Jesus is called "the Firstborn of Creation" (Col. 1:15). "Firstborn" means that there are others "born" or created after him. The firstborn of (not 'over') creation means he was the first to be created by God (the beginning) and then through him came the rest of creation. - See Firstborn (Prototokos) in the BWF study.


"The BAGD, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature by Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt (Translator), F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker (Editor), has been revised as the BDAG. On page 138, the interpretation of Rev 3:14 that '[arche] of creation' means that Christ was createdhas been upgraded from poss. [possible] to prob. [probable]


"BDAG states that the meaning 'beginning = first created' for ARXH [arkhe]  in Rev 3:14 'is linguistically probable.'  The sense 'origin'  or 'source' hardly seems to fit the context of Rev 3:14. This meaning of the word does not seem to figure in biblical usages here or elsewhere. See Job 40:19." - quoted from a NT Greek theology group on Yahoo. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/greektheology/message/11097 


So, at some point in all eternity, there was a beginning ofsomething (probably the creation of our universe) and at thatpoint the Word existed. He could have come into existence at that point, but since he created all other created things, he probably was begotten/created some time before so that he could be the master workman through whom God created the universe.
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As for the word "was" (considered to be in the imperfect tense), it can be seen simply by examining the many other uses of "was" (ἦν   - looks like nv in Greek characters and when using the Symbol font is represented with the 'hn' keystrokes.) in the writings of John that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with eternity. This examination YTS refused to do.

She was presented with evidence from grammar texts that certain forms of the imperfect have a starting point, a beginning:

- See Dana and Mantey, pp. 190-191 ("Inceptive Imperfect") andMoule, p. 9 (Inceptive Imperfect is "frequent in the N.T.").

In the introduction of the NASB it says: “Greek Tenses: 1. A careful distinction has been made in the treatment of the Greek aorist tense (usually translated as the English past. “He did”) and the Greek imperfect tense (rendered either as English past progressive, “He was doing”; or if inceptive, as “He began to do” or “He started to do”); …. “Began” is italicized [in the NASB] if it renders an imperfect tense, in order to distinguish it from the Greek verb for “begin.” - The Lockman Foundation, 1971.

We also can find this readily-found concept in Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics by Daniel B. Wallace (1996) which also says of the "Ingresssive (Inchoative, Inceptive) Imperfect": 

"1. Definition - The imperfect is often used to stress thebeginning of an action, with the implication that it continued for some time. 2. Clarification and Amplification - The difference between the ingressive imperfect and the ingressive aorist is that the imperfect stresses beginning, but implies that the action continues, while the aorist stresses beginning, but does not imply that action continues." - p. 544. Wallace, by the way, certainly doesn't mind frequently quoting from and referring to A.T. Robertson's classic Grammar (in spite of YTS' firm rejection of it).


http://www.wmcarey.edu/crockett/greek-syntax-summary.pdf 

"GREEK SYNTAX SUMMARY
"James A. Brooks and Carlton L. Winbery, Syntax of New Testament Greek.
Lanham: University Press of America, 1979.


"Imperfect Tense - Linear, progressive action (in past time)
"1. descriptive imperfect (progressive, most common)
2. durative imperfect (continual action that is completed)
3. iterative imperfect (repetition of action, custom)
4. tendential imperfect (attempted but not completed)
5. voluntative imperfect (expression of desire)
6. inceptive [aoristic] imperfect (emphasis on the beginning of the action)"

A Greek Grammar for Colleges, Smyth, p.426, #1900:

“Inchoative Imperfect - The imperfect may denote the beginning of an action or of a series of actions ….” http://books.google.com/books?id=TK9MAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA723&dq=smyth,+greek+grammar&as_brr=1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false 


Here's what YTS was presented with in my previous posts (which she refused to address):


Let's look at a few examples in the writings of John (since we are investigating John's intended meaning here):

John 9:8 - "they that saw him aforetime, that he was [ἦν] a beggar" - ASV.

These people knew that the blind man had continued to be a beggar for a long time. .... And yet we certainly shouldn't try to put an "eternal" (or even a future 'continuing') meaning on it. The blind man certainly was not a beggar for all eternity. He was not a beggar before he was born on earth. He probably was not a beggar as a newborn infant. He probably became a beggar as a young man or youth. So en ("was") here still indicates something that had abeginning and then continued [up until the time the Jews said or thought it and probably did not continue after that]. 


John 9:16 - "there was [ἦν] a division among them" - ASV.

The division was over whether the one who had just cured the blind man was from God or not. Since the blind man had JUST been healed, it is obvious that this particular "division" actually BEGAN("was") at this time. It obviously means, "At this time there began to be [or 'came to be'] a division among them." 

John 10:22 (or 23) - "it was [ἦν] winter" - ASV.

Whether it is called an imperfect tense or not, it is still very clear that it hadn't been winter for all eternity. It either means "winter had just begun at this time" or "winter had begun a short time [months at most] ago." But there can be absolutely no doubt that it had recently come into existence. 

John 12:6 - "he was [ἦν] a thief" - ASV.

I hope no one insists that Judas was really a thief from all eternity! However, if they do, it is no more unreasonable to insist that Jesus was "with God" from all eternity in the same sense that Judas "existed as a thief from all eternity."

John 8:44 tells us of Satan: "that (one) man-killer [or 'manslayer,' Strong's Concordance; NAS Concordance; Thayer; etc.] was [ἦν] from the beginning." 

According to the same reasoning of some concerning the "eternal" [ἦν] ("was") "in the beginning" of Jesus at Jn 1:1, Satan himself must be "eternal," and by this specious reasoning must, therefore, be God Himself! Either was" [ἦν] in this scripture doesnot mean an eternal existence, or, if it does, then Jesus can certainly be just as "eternal" as Satan himself and still not be God! (Of course, Satan had a beginning and will have an end!)
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Added later:

The word [ἦν], like the other "be" verbs, simply shows existence. It obviously does not indicate the length of that existence. Even the very early Christian scholar, Tertullian [ca. 200 A.D.], who many trinitarians claim was one of the founders of the Trinity Doctrine, said the same!

Tertullian wrote concerning the word 'was' [en, Septuagint] at Gen. 1:1, 2: "But you [the heretic Hermogenes] ... say: 'There is the 'was,' looking as if it pointed to an eternal existence, - making its subject, of course, unbegotten and unmade....' Well now, for my own part, I [Tertullian] shall resort to no affected protestation, but simply reply that 'was' [ἦν] may be predicated of everything - even a thing which has been created, which was born, which once was not .... For of everything which has being, from whatever source it has it, whether it has it by a beginning or without a beginning, the word 'was' will be predicated from the very fact that it exists." - 'Against Hermogenes,' Ch. xxvii, as translated on p. 492, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. III, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993 printing.

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Also examine the following uses of the imperfect 'was' (ἦν) and the equally imperfect 'were': John 1:10; Jn 1:39; Jn 2:1; Jn 2:23; Jn 3:26; Jn 4:6 (hour); Jn 5:1; Jn 5:9 (sabbath); 5:35; Jn 6:4; Jn7:42; Jn 18:1 (garden); Jn 18:13 (2); Jn 19:14 (2); Jn 19:31(preparation); plural form: John 20:26; Rev. 4:11 "theywere"; Rev. 17:8: "the beast you saw was (ἦν), but is not," 2 Peter 3:5 there were heavens long ago [which God had created "in the beginning" according to Genesis 1:1].

For example: John 1:10 - "He was [ἦν] in the world that had come into being [egeneto] through him, and the world did not recognise him." - NJB. 

YTS:  "However, the writer of the Johannine Prologue by design deliberately contrasts the imperfect ἦν (was) with the aoristegeneto (he/it came to be) in this context to contrast the logosWord/word) to be seen as extant in linear aspect, having no beginning nor ending, with the 'all things' that egeneto ("came to be") at a definitive point in time (John 1:3) and, especially, again with the use of the self-same egeneto ("came to be"), over against John the Baptist who 'came to be' at a point in time (John 1:6)."

So, to paraphrase YTS above: 

"However, the writer of the Johannine Prologue by design deliberately contrasts the imperfect  hn [ἦν] ("was") of John 1:10with the aorist egeneto (he/it came to be) in this context to contrast the logos (Word/word) to be seen as extant in linear aspect, having no beginning nor ending 'in the world,' with the world that egeneto ('came to be') at a definitive point in time". 

Or, in other words, The writer of this verse is 'deliberately contrasting' the Word's eternal time existing in the world with the point in time when the world began!

This is clearly nonsense! Obviously the verb 'was' (ἦν) here in the Prologue itself cannot mean eternal or "having no beginning nor ending"! The Word could not have been eternally "in the world"before the world even began!!


John 7:42 - "... Bethlehem, the village where David was [ἦν]." -NJB.

Bethlehem was the city of David's ancestors. Most of his life was not spent there. Therefore, in spite of the imperfect 'was' [hn, ἦν], David was certainly not eternally there (before, during, or after his life). Instead he had his beginning ("in the beginning") there!!


Rev. 4:11 - "Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for thou [the one seated on the throne, the Father - see Rev. 5:6, 7] didst create all things, and because of thy will they were [hsan - inceptive imperfect], and were created." - ASV. 

You will find that many Bibles even translate the imperfect "were" [hsan], here as "they came into existence," e.g., NAB; ISV NT; GodsWord; Weymouth NT; C.B. Williams. 


Rev. 17:8 - "The beast that you saw was [ἦν], and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss" - NASB. 

Surely no one would say that the beast had existed for all eternity making it equal to God!

There are many more such uses of "was" which clearly show that the word seldom - if ever - denotes eternal existence, but are clearly shown to be describing a point in time or a period of time which had a beginning.

Therefore, the appeal to the meanings of "in the beginning" and "was" in John 1:1 as somehow showing that the Word had an eternal existence is totally specious.

File under "well said" LIX

“You must not mistreat a foreigner. You know how it feels to be a foreigner. You were foreigners in Egypt." :Exodus:23:9International children's bible.

King of the planets?