In the lion's den?

Online Seminar: Paul Nelson Will Discuss Ontogenetic Depth — in Depth! 
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

This Saturday, April 21, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Paul Nelson will give an online seminar about the controversial and widely-thought-to-be-debunked concept of “ontogenetic depth” (OD). Join us at 4 PM Eastern, which is 3 PM Central or 1 PM Pacific.  At the ordained hour, just go here.

OD has been proclaimed a “pseudoscientific idea” by no less an authority than Wikipedia, and Paul himself readily acknowledges OD is currently impossible to measure — so why on earth would he bother talking about OD live, while fielding questions?

Possible answers:

Paul is obviously crazy and has been for a long time.

Paul doesn’t know when to stop digging.

Never was there a more fitting acronym for a scientific idea than “OD.”

Paul has grown fond of “Paul Nelson Day” and doesn’t want our critics to forget it again next year (see Stockholm Syndrome).

OR, counter-intuitively — perhaps there is much more to OD than seems apparent.

We’ll go with the last and counter-intuitive answer, so tune in. Background reading on OD is here and here (2011 series) and here, here, and here (2015 series).

On one of natural history's other 'explosions'.

The Dinosaur “Explosion”
Cornelius Hunter

In the famed Cambrian explosion most of today’s animal phyla appeared abruptly in the geological strata. How could a process driven by blind, random mutations produce such a plethora of new species? Evolutionist Steve Jones, in his book Darwin’s Ghost (2000), has speculated that the Cambrian explosion was caused by some crucial change in DNA. “Might a great burst of genetic creativity have driven a Cambrian Genesis and given birth to the modern world?” (p. 206)

What explanations such as this do not address is the problem of how evolution overcame such astronomical entropic barriers. Rolling a dice, no matter how creatively, is not going to design a spaceship.

The Cambrian explosion is not the only example of the abrupt appearance of new forms in the fossil record, and the other examples are no less easy for evolution to explain. Nor has the old saw, that it’s the fossil record’s fault, fared well. There was once a time when evolutionists could appeal to gaps in the fossil record to explain why the species appear to arise abruptly, but no more. There has just been too much paleontology work, such as a new international study on dinosaurs published this week, confirming exactly what the strata have been showing all along: new forms really did arise abruptly.

The new study narrows the dating of the rise of dinosaurs in the fossil record. It confirms that many dinosaur species appeared in an “explosion” or what “we term the ‘dinosaur diversification event (DDE)’.” It was an “explosive increase in dinosaurian abundance in terrestrial ecosystems” (emphasis added). As the  press release explains:

First there were no dinosaur tracks, and then there were many. This marks the moment of their explosion, and the rock successions in the Dolomites are well dated. Comparison with rock successions in Argentina and Brazil, here the first extensive skeletons of dinosaurs occur, show the explosion happened at the same time there as well.

As lead author Dr. Massimo Bernardi at the University of Bristol explains, “it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.”

There just isn’t enough time, and it is another example of a failed prediction of the theory of evolution.

Geologists' rewrites make a mess of Darwinian storytelling re:the cambrian explosion.

Geologists Kick Out Props for Evolutionary Theories of the Cambrian Explosion

Evolution News & Views 

Reading the Darwinist explanations for the Cambrian explosion is like watching a game of "Who's Got the Button?" The biologists are sure the paleontologists have the reasons for this unprecedented appearance of animals in the fossil record. The paleontologists, in turn, point to the geologists for it. And the geologists rely on the opinion that the biologists have handfuls of explanatory buttons. When you inspect each one's hands, though, they come up empty.

It was the geologists' turn to show their empty hands. In the Geological Society of America Bulletin, two papers undermine popular assumptions used by the biologists and paleontologists to account for the explosion. Ask yourself if their work sounds like "settled science."

No Oxygen Rise Here, Mate

In the first paper by Sperling et al., geologists from Harvard and Queens College undermine the notion (commonly asserted by the biologists) that it was a rise in oxygen levels that triggered the explosion. Not that we ever found that explanation credible (#1, #2, #3, #4), but at least it gave the biologists a story with which to entertain the uninformed. No longer; these geologists found no evidence to support a global oxygen rise in the Ediacaran period that preceded the Cambrian.

The causes behind the appearance of abundant macroscopic body and trace fossils at the end of the Neoproterozoic Era remain debated. Iron geochemical data from fossiliferous Ediacaran successions in Newfoundland suggested that the first appearances correlated with an oxygenation event. A similar relationship was claimed to exist in the Mackenzie Mountains, Canada, although later stratigraphic studies indicated that the sections analyzed for geochemistry were incorrectly correlated with those hosting the fossils. To directly connect fossil occurrences with geochemistry in the Mackenzie Mountains, we conducted a multiproxy iron, carbon, sulfur, and trace-element geochemical analysis of stratigraphic sections hosting both the Cryogenian "Twitya discs" at Bluefish Creek as well as Ediacaran fossils and simple bilaterian traces at Sekwi Brook. There is no clear oxygenation event correlated with the appearance of macroscopic body fossils or simple bilaterian burrows; however, some change in environment -- a potential partial oxygenation -- is correlated with increasing burrow width higher in the Blueflower Formation. Data from Sekwi Brook suggest that these organisms were periodically colonizing apredominantly anoxic and ferruginous basin. This seemingly incongruent observation is accommodated through accounting for differing time scales between the characteristic response time of sedimentary redox proxies versus that for ecological change. Thus, hypotheses directly connecting ocean oxygenation with the appearance of macrofossils need not apply to all areas of a heterogeneous Ediacaran ocean, and stably oxygenated conditions on geological time scales were not required for the appearanceof these Avalon-assemblage Ediacaran organisms. At least in the Mackenzie Mountains, the appropriate facies for fossil preservation appears to be the strongest control on the stratigraphic distribution of macrofossils. [Emphasis added.]

For non-specialists, this basically means that the evidence connecting oxygenation (a geochemical condition) with Ediacaran and Cambrian fossils is equivocal at best. The geologists appear to be trying hard not to rule it out ("a potential partial oxygenation"), but throughout the paper, they reveal contradictions with the oxygen hypothesis. Some of the best fossils appear in non-oxygenated rocks, and other well-oxygenated rocks have no fossils. Moreover, earlier studies that seemed to find a correlation were flawed.

The first step in distinguishing coincidence from correlationis determining whether temporal linkages represent a global pattern, regional events, or simply the unrelated appearanceof organisms during a time interval characterized by broadly increasing oxygen levels. Neoproterozoic oxygenation, if present, is increasingly being recognized as regionally heterogeneous (Kah and Bartley, 2011). This is reflected in iron speciation data from the southern Canadian Cordillera showing an increased prevalence of anoxic conditions during the mid- Ediacaran (Canfield et al., 2008), in contrast to the Newfoundland data, and data from the Wernecke Mountains of northwestern Canada which show no change at all(Johnston et al., 2013). Other regions such as Namibia also show heterogeneous but generally anoxic and ferruginous conditions through the late Ediacaran (Wood et al., 2015).Analyzed collectively and statistically, a global database of Proterozoic and Paleozoic iron speciation data shows no overall change to the oxygenation state of marine environments between the Ediacaran and Cambrian (Sperling et al., 2015). These database analyses do not rule out an increase in oxygen through this time period, but they do limit the magnitude of such a change to much less than is normally depicted (e.g., Holland, 2006).

Their research in Canada also finds interesting geological evidence that contradicts the picture of slow, gradual deposition. For instance, some of the fossils are found in turbidites, which represent underwater landslides. Other fossils appear encased in strata that appear to have been formed in offshore storm surges. There are unconformities, slumps, and gaps.

In sum, the idea that biologists and paleontologists can expect to find a gradual increase in oxygen below the Cambrian boundary is mistaken. Figure 7 of the paper correlates outcrops from China, Africa, the U.S., and Canada. There's no pattern. "Redox change [i.e., change in reducing vs oxidizing conditions] may correspond to the appearance of megascopic fossils in some sections, but stable oxygenation on geologic time scales is not required." So if it's not oxygen, what is it? "The most obvious explanation is simply the distribution of beds capable of preserving fossils." Some places were suitable for preserving fossils, and some weren't. That's all.

Importantly, these data suggest that oxygenation of a basin is not required for the appearance of many Ediacaran taxa. To a first-order approximation, more so than oxygenation, the appearance of fossils of large eukaryotes throughout the entire Cryogenian and Ediacaran succession in NW Canada isdictated almost entirely by the appearance of event beds suitable for their preservation and presentation.

More on the second paper tomorrow.

More on why the search for a purely chemical cause for abiogenesis is a fool's errand

The American Chemical Society recently dedicated a whole issue of Accounts of Chemical Research to the puzzle of life's chemical origins. The issue does a thorough job of bringing together some of the latest theories and research in the field, and several of the articles address fundamental problems in certain models of origin-of-life research. For example, a paper by Benner et al. points out that the RNA-world model is unattractive because the chemical bonds involved are unstable and the reaction requirements are too specific and unlikely for an early Earth environment.

Another article addresses a possible solution to nature's preference for left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars (also known as homochirality).

A couple of papers try to explain why DNA is composed of the particular bases A, T, C, and G. Several others discuss self-replicating systems. Another paper discusses how proto-cells may have been formed from lipid micelles. And still others assume an "RNA-first" world, while a few prefer a "metabolism-first" world.

Indeed, this collection offers some of the latest research in the field. We will address a sampling of the research papers. If you want some background on origin-of-life research, see Casey Luskin's recent article "Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories."

Let's first address the editors' introduction, which makes use of some remarkably convoluted rhetoric.

The editors define chemical evolution as including "the capture, mutation, and propagation of molecular information and can be manifested as coordinated chemical networks that adapt to environmental change." In this type of system, one in which information-carrying molecules must be made and propagated, the editors concede that building life from the bottom up requires some aspect of molecular intelligence:

These diverse approaches to deconvolution and reintegration of the origins of the cell, projected in collaboration through the lens of chemical evolution, suggest a remarkable degree of intrinsic molecular intelligence that guide the bottom-up emergence of living matter.
The term "molecular intelligence" is not typically used in origin-of-life research, despite the authors' statement that it is not a new concept: in their view, Darwin's own theory of life beginning in a chemically rich "warm pond" is an example of molecular intelligence. While there are several ways to describe molecular behavior, from statistical mechanics to Brownian motion to self-assembly, making molecules the intelligent actor in the origin of life ascribes a property to molecules that we have yet to prove. They are information-carrying. They are self-replicating. But to say they have intelligence implies that molecules are capable assembling themselves into meaningful structures, something that usually requires knowledge of the end product. This is akin to saying a Lego model of the Millennium Falcon was built by the Legos themselves which (who?) are endowed with an intrinsic "construction intelligence." (Actually, this analogy would be more accurate if the Legos built a working model of the Millennium Falcon that can conduct self-repairs and can self-replicate.)
Let's try to unpack the final paragraph of the editors' introduction:

While our objective is to decipher the evolutionary rules that directed the transition from inanimate matter to life, we recognize that the march of molecular history likely had many pathways.
One of the fundamental research problems in chemical evolution is the transition from non-life to life. This requires more than having the component parts present. In order for this bottom-up, parts-to-whole approach to work, there is some threshold that must be crossed that sets in motion the operations of a cell (or a proto-cell) such that it has the characteristics of a self-sustaining, living organism. That threshold remains a mystery in chemical evolution research.
Accordingly, this issue circumscribes the functional concepts, leveraging Nature's platforms for molecular information, using its existing chemical inventory or libraries, and, with selective and judicious tinkering along the way, elaborates the basic rules of bottom-up self-assembly guided by both digital and analog molecular recognition systems.
This appears to mean that rather than re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, this issue of the journal will focus on deducing the rules for constructing an organism from the bottom-up. The authors will do this by using what we already know about DNA and RNA to construct system using known chemicals and enlisting the help of chemists to guide the reactions where they see fit to do so. But this calls into question just what is meant by "self"-assembly. In materials science, self-assembly is usually regarded as repeated, ordered patterns of specific molecules under the right environmental conditions. The setup for making even a simple self-assembled system (e.g. a self-assembled monolayer) requires quite a bit of forethought and planning on the part of the chemist.
In addition, the diversity in approaches to understanding and employing chemical evolution is as important as the diversity in chemical composition required to promulgate evolution itself and suggests that collaboration among these diverse approaches to gaining insights into chemical evolution and working toward the interfaces among them will be extraordinarily rich with opportunities.
In origin-of-life research, there are, broadly speaking, two camps: The RNA-first world, and the metabolism-first world. There are several nuances to each position, but for brevity's sake, we can think of the RNA-first camp as those who believe the first biomolecules were nucleotides (adenine, uracil, cytosine, and guanine), while the metabolism-first camp believes the first biomolecules were amino acids (e.g., glycine, alanine, thiamine). The RNA-first camp assumes that ribozymes were key players in the formation of the first genetic code. The metabolism-first camp relies on the self-assembly of biomolecules to form the first protein or the first metabolic pathway. (See here for more information on the RNA-world hypothesis.)
These are two fundamentally different approaches to the origin of life. Both have strengths and both have problems. The editors say that there were "multiple pathways" to the origin of life and so perhaps both are right. They assume that collaboration between the camps will lead to greater understanding, but this seems unjustifiably optimistic.

Proposing compromise may seem like a commendable thing -- it's generally a safe way of making yourself appear to be taking the moral high ground. But in this case, the respective approaches have completely different starting assumptions. Each begins with a different set of building blocks, not to mention a different synthetic process. It is also strange to assume that there were many paths to the origin of life yet that somehow these disparate paths came together to form early organisms. How, exactly? More on this later.

On the problem with the extrapolation to macroevolution

Suggested Readings on the Problem of Animal Macroevolution
Evolution News & Views February 25, 2016 3:47 AM

An email correspondent asks:

Given the saltations seen in the fossil record (as well as molecular data), it seems that the gradual ratcheting of "point mutation by point mutation" evolution has little efficacy in explaining the diversity of life. Doug Axe has done work on this. Are there other clear demonstrations of the improbability of getting from one adaptive peak to another via this model?

Yes, an enormous literature exists within evolutionary biology about the implausibility of point-mutation-by-point-mutation transitions between adaptive peaks. The following list, which focuses only on animal macroevolution, runs only to 2011. Many more recent papers have been published.

These papers represent a sample of biological thinking about the problem of animal macroevolution, or macroevolution generally, over the past three decades. The authors agree that some amendment, perhaps radical, is needed to fix "textbook" (standard) neo-Darwinian theory, in order to solve the open question of how animal form and complexity arose via an undirected evolutionary process.

They do not, however, agree on the solution, and may disagree strongly among themselves, for instance, on the question of whether animal embryos will tolerate deep changes to their essential developmental control networks. The authors come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, such as genetics, developmental biology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy. None is an advocate of intelligent design, and none would see his ideas as supporting intelligent design.

A recommendation: While all the articles are thoughtful, if the reader is pressed for time, Thomson's 1992 article is the shortest and most accessible, while Miklos's 1993 article, although the longest, is the most wide-reaching and vigorously argued.

1. John F. McDonald, "The Molecular Basis of Adaptation: A Critical Review of Relevant Ideas and Observations," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 14 (1983):77-102.

In 1983, geneticist John McDonald (at the time, at the University of Georgia) surveyed the evidence bearing on the role of genetic variation in macroevolutionary change. He argued that "naturally segregating" variation -- that is, of the character or magnitude normally seen in animal populations -- appeared to play a limited role, if any, in "macroevolutionary events" (p. 92). So striking was this pattern that McDonald dubbed it "a great Darwinian paradox" (p. 93), placing the following points in italics for emphasis:

Those loci that are obviously variable within natural populations do not seem to lie at the basis of many major adaptive changes, while those loci that seemingly do constitute the foundation of many, if not most, major adaptive changes apparently are not variable within natural populations. [p. 93]

2. Keith Stewart Thomson, "Macroevolution: The Morphological Problem," American Zoologist 32 (1992):106-112.

Keith Thomson is a vertebrate paleontologist and anatomist who taught at Yale and Oxford; at the time this paper was published, he was president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Throughout his career, Thomson has been concerned with the explanatory adequacy of neo-Darwinism. "The basic article of faith of a gradualist [neo-Darwinian] approach," he writes in this paper,

is that major morphological innovations can be produced without some sort of saltation. But the dilemma of the New Synthesis [textbook theory] is that no one has satisfactorily demonstrated a mechanism at the population genetic level by which innumerable very small phenotypic changes could accumulate rapidly to produce large changes: a process for the origin of the magnificently improbable from the ineffably trivial.

3. George L.G. Miklos, "Emergence of organizational complexities during metazoan evolution: perspectives from molecular biology, palaeontology, and neo-Darwinism." Memoirs of the Association of Australasian Palaeontologists 15 (1993):7-41.

George Miklos is an Australian geneticist (who, when this paper was published, worked at the Australian National University in Canberra). His 1993 paper, the longest in this collection of articles, is an often vehement manifesto attacking the explanatory claims of neo-Darwinian theory, largely on the grounds that textbook theory completely ignores the relevant level of mechanistic detail where macroevolutionary change is concerned. From the Abstract:

The popular theory of evolution is the modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism) based on changes in populations underpinned by the mathematics of allelic variation and driven by natural selection. It accounts more for adaptive changes in the colouration of moths, than in explaining why there are moths at all. This theory does not predict why there were only 50 or so modal body plans, nor does provide a basis for rapid, large-scale innovations. It lacks significant connection with embryogenesis and hence there is no nexus to the evolution of form. It fails to address the question of why the anatomical gaps between phyla are no wider today than they were at their Cambrian appearance....I believe that the search for the Holy Grail (evolution of complex morphologies and nervous systems) has been conducted in the wrong place and at the wrong levels by evolutionary biologists. [p. 7]

4. Robert L. Carroll, "Toward a new evolutionary synthesis," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15 (2000):27-32.

Robert Carroll is a vertebrate paleontologist and professor emeritus at McGill University in Montreal. In this article, he argues:

Research in many disciplines over the past 40 years has demonstrated that the patterns, processes and forces of evolution are far more diverse than hypothesized by Darwin and the framers of the evolutionary synthesis...Increasing knowledge of the fossil record and the capacity for accurate geological dating demonstrate that large-scale patterns and rates of evolution are not comparable with those hypothesized by Darwin on the basis of extrapolation from modern populations and species. [p. 27]

5. Scott F. Gilbert, John M. Opitz, and Rudolf A. Raff, "Resynthizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology," Developmental Biology 173 (1996):357-72.

The authors are developmental biologists (Gilbert at Swarthmore College and Raff at Indiana University) and a medical geneticist specializing in developmental anomalies (Opitz at the University of Utah). In this paper, published during a period of rapid growth for the young field of "evo-devo" (evolutionary developmental biology), the authors argue that, despite its merits with smaller-scale phenomena, "the Modern Synthesis" (textbook neo-Darwinism) fails to explain macroevolution. They write:

Starting in the 1970s, many biologists began questioning its adequacy in explaining evolution. Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. As Goodwin (1995) points out, "the origin of species -- Darwin's problem -- remains unsolved."

6. Douglas Erwin, "Evolutionary uniformitarianism," Developmental Biology 357 (2011):27-34.

Douglas Erwin is an invertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and a leading expert on the origin of animal body plans. He collaborates frequently with developmental biologist Eric Davidson (see reading 7, below) on macroevolutionary questions. In this paper, Erwin argues that the manifold discontinuities among the animal groups -- what he calls "the clumpy distribution of morphologies" (p. 27) -- is not an artifact of sampling, but the real signal of history. Neo-Darwinism, he continues, "attempted to rescue [its] uniformitarian explanations by 'explaining away' this empirical pattern as a result of various biases" (p. 33). In Erwin's view, however, the processes of evolution have changed fundamentally over time, and evolutionary events possible in the Cambrian, such as the origin of the animal phyla, were unique occurrences.

7. Eric Davidson, "Evolutionary biology as regulatory systems biology," Developmental Biology 357 (2011):35-40.

Eric Davidson was a developmental biologist at Caltech who pioneered the study of the purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) as a model system. In his books and articles, he strongly attacked the explanatory shortcomings of neo-Darwinism, arguing that the theory focuses attention at the wrong level (small-scale variation), neglecting the genuine mechanisms of body plan construction. This paper gives a good overview of Davidson's recent thinking, starting with his critique of neo-Darwinian theory:

Of [neo-Darwinism], I shall have nothing to say, as mechanistic developmental biology has shown that its fundamental concepts are largely irrelevant to the process by which the body plan is formed in ontogeny. In addition it gives rise to lethal errors in respect to evolutionary process. Neo-Darwinian evolution is uniformitarian in that it assumes that all process works the same way, so that evolution of enzymes or flower colors can be used as current proxies for study of evolution of the body plan. It erroneously assumes that change in protein coding sequence is the basic cause of change in developmental program; and it erroneously assumes that evolutionary change in body plan morphology occurs by a continuous process. All of these assumptions are basically counterfactual. This cannot be surprising, since the neo-Darwinian synthesis from which these ideas stem was a pre-molecular biology concoction focused on population genetics and adaptation natural history, neither of which have any direct mechanistic import for the genomic regulatory systems that drive embryonic development of the body plan. [pp. 35-36]

8. Andreas Wagner, "The molecular origins of evolutionary innovations," Trends in Genetics 27 (2011):397-410.

Andreas Wagner is a theoretical biologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Zurich. His research focuses on how complex systems function, respond to perturbation, and are modified by evolutionary processes. Recently, he has been addressing the problem of innovation, or the origin of complex novelties in organisms, the sine qua non of any evolutionary theory: How did new structures -- body plans, organ systems, etc. -- come to be, where they did not exist before? In this paper, Wagner begins by expressing his dissatisfaction with standard (neo-Darwinian) theory:

We know many examples of innovations, each a fascinating piece of natural history. However, we know few of the principles that explain the ability of living things to innovate through a combination of natural selection and random genetic change. Random change by itself is not sufficient, because it does not necessarily bring forth beneficial phenotypes. For example, random change might not be suitable to improve most man-made, technological systems. Similarly, natural selection alone is not sufficient: As the geneticist Hugo de Vries already noted in 1905, "natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest." Any principle of innovation needs to explain how novel, beneficial phenotypes can originate. [p. 397]


These brief summaries are intended to orient the reader who may be unfamiliar with the authors or the disputes, but cannot substitute for a careful reading of the papers themselves. These papers are only a tiny sample, of course, of a very much larger scientific literature addressing the problem of macroevolution.

What's this,the human brain is extremely sophisticated?(Who knew?)

Brain connections “more sophisticated than thought” (straight face here)

Hello, base, do we have a connection? The human brain is said by many to be the most sophisticated known item in the universe.

Never mind, from ScienceDaily::


Inhibitory connections between neurons act as the brain’s brakes, preventing it from becoming overexcited. Researchers thought inhibitory connections were less sophisticated than their excitatory counterparts because relatively few proteins were known to exist at these structures. But a new study overturns that assumption, uncovering 140 proteins that have never been mapped to inhibitory synapses. Some of the proteins have already been implicated in autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy, suggesting new treatment avenues. – Akiyoshi Uezu, Daniel J. Kanak, Tyler W.A. Bradshaw, Erik J. Soderblom, Christina M. Catavero, Alain C. Burette, Richard J. Weinberg, and Scott H. Soderling. Identification of an Elaborate Complex Mediating Postsynaptic Inhibition. Science, September 2016 DOI: 10.1126/science.aag0821 Paper. (paywall) More.

Memo to the new atheists from one of their own:don't open the champagne just yet.

Atheism is doomed: the contraceptive Pill is secularism's cyanide tablet

 
 
 The 1960s counterculture slogan “make love, not war” could have been invented for the Hutterites, a conservative, pacifist Anabaptist community in the US and Canada. Numbering 400 at the end of the 19th century, when they moved to Dakota on the point of extinction, there are almost 50,000 Hutterites today, despite conversion being extremely rare (they speak an archaic form of High German and live in the middle of nowhere, which makes it unlikely they’ll turn up at your doorstep with a funny grin).

They are not alone. The Mormons continue to grow by 40 per cent every decade, largely thanks to a high birth rate, so much so that by 2080 there will be anywhere between 63 and 267 million Mormons, depending on whether that figure falls to 30 per cent or 50 per cent.

And Evangelical Christians now account for two thirds of white American Protestants, while the ultra-Orthodox account for 17 per cent of British Jewry, but 75 per cent of children.

Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered. That, anyway, is the thesis of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a fascinating new book by Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck University, which is published later this month. It may well be one of the most significant books of our era.

It used to be taken for granted that, just as liberal democracy meant the end of history, so it also meant the end of religion. Once people became rich, educated and sexually liberated, they left irrational beliefs and other such nonsense behind.

Christianity declined steadily from the mid-19th century but it wasn’t until the 1960s that European societies were able to fully abandon the emotional baggage of their civilisation’s infancy, and especially its repressive attitude to sex.

But if what Kaufmann is saying is true – and the demographic data suggests it is – then the contraceptive Pill was not so much secular Europe’s liberation as its cyanide tablet.

The good news is that Europe will not become Islamicised (although Kaufmann’s estimate of 20 or 25 per cent is Islamic enough). The bad news (for some) is that it will become Evangelical Protestant instead. This will at least be encouraging for Israel, although whether it will be the same progressive, secular Israel where gays can serve in the military is another matter, as by the second half of the century the ultra-Orthodox will be the majority.

New Atheists comfort themselves with the idea that religious people will continue to drift their way, like rustics to the city, but the figures do not bear this out. It is true that liberal religious people continue to embrace atheism at a rate that alarms the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist Churches, and Reform synagogues. Once religions start to accept secularism and rationality, their young people usually reach the logical conclusion of doubt – unbelief.

More conservative religions do not have that problem. Only 5 per cent of the more traditional Amish leave the faith, and when a community’s birth rate outstrips the national average by 200 or 300 per cent they can easily afford to lose one in 20 of the flock.

While the likes of Richard Dawkins aim their bile at traditional Christianity, fundamentalists are largely immune to their attacks, and become only stronger as the more committed members of the established churches head their way. Those religions that survive will become more conservative.

God alone knows what will happen to the Church of England this century, but we can safely say that the Catholic Church will become smaller but more committed. It will continue to exist at the margins of an atheist-dominated Europe ruled by an increasingly intolerant secular Left.

Widespread anti-religious feeling will only get more intense as the coming demographic changes outlined by Kaufmann appear to ring true, and as Evangelical Christians start to become more significant in, for example, the British Conservative Party.

But that smaller, more orthodox Catholic Church will have a huge inbuilt advantage – what French Canadian Catholics used to call “revenge of the cradle”. Many orthodox Catholics I know have 3 or 4 children – that’s not a recklessly high number, but in a society where the atheist fertility rate is around 1 child per woman, that advantage will show over a few decades, especially since orthodox Catholics have a far smaller drop-off rate than their liberal brethren.

Much as this will anger the New Atheists, which is a plus, Kaufmann’s thesis is disturbing. Personally I prefer Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and Anglican civilisation to some of the wackier strains of Evangelical Christianity. As for fundamentalist Islam…

It’s happened before: Kaufmann believes that Christianity’s rise from 40 followers to 6 million within three centuries had less to do with conversions that with higher birth rates, since the Christians rejected such pagan practises as polygamy and infanticide.

Today we view the ancient world’s attitude to infanticide as barbaric and incomprehensible, but perhaps future generations will look at our attitudes to abortion in the same way – that's not because pro-lifers would have won the argument, simply that (in addition to the effect of the Pill) abortion is killing the atheists of tomorrow.

Why chirality remains a problem for origin of life science.

Tagish Lake Meteorite Does Not Solve the Homochirality Problem
Evolution News & Views


Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, share a puzzling feature. All amino acids used in making proteins are "left-handed" amino acids.

In chemistry, we call molecules "left-handed" or "right-handed" based on how things attach to a carbon atom. Imagine the palm of your hand is a carbon atom, and your fingers are different molecules attached to the carbon (e.g., a hydrogen, an amine, a carboxylic acid). Notice that both of your hands have the same "things" attached to it, but in a different order such that your hands are mirror images of each other. My right and left hands both have a pinky finger, a thumb, and an index finger, but the arrangement is different. The same thing happens to carbon atoms that have different things attached to it; you can get molecules that are mirror images of each other. These mirror images are mostly chemically equivalent. (See here and here for more on homochirality.)

The interesting part of this is, when we try to make amino acids in the lab, we always end up with a 50/50 mixture of right- and left-handed amino acids. But when scientists try to construct proteins from this 50/50 mixture, the proteins do not function properly. Right-handed amino acids do not work. So the big question is: How did nature make only left-handed amino acids? Or was there a 50/50 mixture and nature somehow isolated only the left-handed ones to make proteins?

Scientists from the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory believe their recent studies on a Tagish Lake (British Columbia) meteorite sample may provide an answer to this question. (See here for the press release. The research paper is still in press). They found that the Tagish Lake sample has an excess of left-handed aspartic acid, one of the 20 amino acids used in protein construction. They also noted, however, that the sample contains only a slight left-handed excess (8% greater) of alanine, another one of those 20 amino acids. They, therefore, conclude that the amino acids on the meteorite sample are not from biological contamination from Earth, but were formed in space. Furthermore, the excess left-handed aspartic acid must have formed and been isolated somehow inside the meteorite, as opposed to being exposed to certain types of radiation that may cause a slight excess of one hand of amino acids over another.

The Tagish Lake meteorite has many unique properties that have made its classification difficult. It has been a subject of interest since January 2000 when it landed. For a look at some of the unique features of the Tagish Lake meteorite, see here. Importantly, the meteorite contained many more organic compounds than just amino acids.

The Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory researchers conclude that the amino acids must have formed within the meteorite, and the left-handed excess of aspartic acid is likely due to crystallization that occurs in the presence of water. Alanine, on the other hand, does not crystallize in the same way. This is why there was only a left-handed excess of aspartic acid but a minimal excess of alanine. They speculate that perhaps the early Earth formed left-handed amino acids in a similar way -- by forming crystals in the presence of water.

The fact that a particular handedness can be isolated through crystallization is not news. Chemists do this in the lab when they want to isolate a left- or right-handed molecule. This only works if the molecule can form crystals that only contain one hand. Not all molecules form crystals and not all molecules form crystals that are purely left- or purely right-handed. Alanine is not a good candidate for isolating one form using crystallization because alanine crystals form from combinations of left- and right-handed molecules, giving the chemist crystals that are 50/50 left- and right-handed.

So what makes this finding so interesting? The researchers reason that because they have found a left-handed excess of aspartic acid that formed naturally, they speculate that nature could do this on Earth or perhaps the early Earth was seeded from amino acids that traveled on a meteorite similar to this one.

Unfortunately, this does not quite solve the left-handed (or "homochirality") problem. You see, in order to form left-handed crystals of aspartic acid, there needs to be a slight abundance of left-handed molecules in the first place. In other words, crystals do not form from a true 50/50 mixture. There must be a slight excess of left-handed molecules to form pure left-handed crystals. Given the alanine observation (an 8% excess of left-handed molecules), we might conclude that something caused a slight excess, such as polarized light interacting with the amino acids. This is a possibility, but of the amino acids found on the meteorite, only aspartic acid and alanine are mentioned, meaning that whatever caused the slight excess did not affect all of the amino acids.

Another glaring problem is, while crystallization may be an explanation for how some left-handed amino acids were isolated in nature, it does not explain all of the amino acids. Not all of the amino acids form homochiral crystals. So were there two different mechanisms that happened to isolate only left-handed versions of all 20 of the predominant amino acids? This seems to be a bit of a stretch, and does not solve the mystery of why nature prefers left-handed amino acids.

The NASA report ends, as much origin-of-life research ends, with more speculation and storytelling than actual findings or viable conclusions:

This process only amplifies a small excess that already exists. Perhaps a tiny initial left-hand excess was created by conditions in the solar nebula. For example, polarized ultraviolet light or other types of radiation from nearby stars might favor the creation of left-handed amino acids or the destruction of right-handed ones, according to the team. This initial left-hand excess could then get amplified in asteroids by processes like crystallization. Impacts from asteroids and meteorites could deliver this material to Earth, and left-handed amino acids might have been incorporated into emerging life due to their greater abundance, according to the team. Also, similar enrichments of left-handed amino acids by crystallization could have occurred on Earth in ancient sediments that had water flowing through them, such as the bottoms of rivers, lakes, or seas, according to the team." [emphasis added]
All of these statements are speculative and do not necessarily follow from the actual findings in the meteorite. The meteorite shows that aspartic acid, which we already know forms homochiral crystals, formed homochiral crystals while alanine, which we know forms crystals with a 50/50 composition, had a slight left-handed excess. This says nothing about how these amino acids could have formed on the early Earth.

Furthermore, the Tagish Lake sample contained multiple organic compounds, not just amino acids, so if these meteorites provide a naturalistic example of possible origin-of-life mechanisms, we need to consider the presence of other compounds that nature apparently did not "choose" to employ. These findings, therefore, do not help us understand why nature builds proteins from 20 particular organic compounds that are specifically left-handed or where those 20 amino acids came from.

Christendom's theologians are finding that commonsense is a bit more resilient than they previously thought.

New Poll Finds Evangelicals’ Favorite Heresies
Kevin P. Emmert




Jesus, Almost as Good as His Father?
Almost all evangelicals say they believe in the Trinity (96%) and that Jesus is fully human and fully divine (88%).

But nearly a quarter (22%) said God the Father is more divine than Jesus, and 9 percent weren’t sure. Further, 16 percent say Jesus was the first creature created by God, while 11 percent were unsure.

No doubt, phrases like “only begotten Son” (John 3:16) and “firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15) have led others in history to hold these views, too. In the fourth century, a priest from Libya named Arius (c.250–336) announced, “If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning. … There was a time when the Son was not.” The idea, known as Arianism, gained wide appeal, even among clergy. But it did not go unopposed. Theologians Alexander and Athanasius of Alexandria, Egypt, argued that Arius denied Christ’s true divinity. Christ is not of similar substance to God, they explained, but of the same substance.

Believing the debate could split the Roman Empire, Emperor Constantine convened the first ecumenical church council in Nicaea in A.D. 325. The council, comprising over 300 bishops, rejected Arianism as heresy and maintained that Jesus shares the same eternal substance with the Father. Orthodoxy struggled to gain popular approval, however, and several heresies revolving around Jesus continued to spread. At the second ecumenical council in Constantinople in 381, church leaders reiterated their condemnation of Arianism and enlarged the Nicene Creed to describe Jesus as “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.”


In other words, the Son is not a created being, nor can he be less divine than the Father.

The Holy Spirit: May the Force Be with You?
But if evangelicals sometime misunderstand doctrines about Jesus, the third member of the Trinity has it much worse. More than half (51%) said the Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being. Seven percent weren’t sure, while only 42 percent affirmed that the Spirit is a person.

And 9 percent said the Holy Spirit is less divine than God the Father and Jesus. The same percentage answered “not sure.”


Like Arianism, confusion over the nature and identity of the Spirit dates to the early church. During the latter half of the fourth century, sects like Semi-Arians and Pneumatomachi (Greek for “Spirit fighters”) believed “in the Holy Spirit”—as the First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) taught—but said the Spirit was of a different essence from the Father and the Son. Some said the Spirit was a creature, and others understood the Spirit to be a force or power, not a person of the Trinity.

More on Darwinism and racism.

Human Zoos, Award-Winning Documentary, Will Premiere in Houston on April 18

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Eugenics and racist pseudoscience are not safely confined to history. They’re very much with us today, as Steve Fuller, among others, has pointed out.

To understand the present situation, however, you need to understand the past. That includes shameful times in our own country, not so very long ago, that have been swept under the memory carpet. John West’s new documentary, Human Zoos, is a reminder of a particularly vicious episode in U.S. history: the display of an African pygmy, Ota Benga, at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. That much was known to me, but not that many others — thousands! — were similarly displayed as “missing links” connecting apes to more “advanced” humans, per Darwinian theory. This is amazing stuff.

The 55-minute film will receive its premiere in Houston, TX, on April 18. Please join us for this FREE event! More information is here, and don’t forget to REGISTER to reserve your space. See the trailer here:

Yes, this was the consensus science, the prestige science of its day. It was taught to young people, and the smart set in academia and the media readily endorsed it. To adopt today’s favored terminology, speaking out against eugenic dogma or Darwinian racism would have made you a crank and a science-denier. Yet some did speak out:

Human Zoos tells the shocking story of how thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Often touted as “missing links” between man and apes, these native peoples were harassed, demeaned, and jeered at.

Their public display was arranged with the enthusiastic support of the most elite members of the scientific community, and it was promoted uncritically by America’s leading newspapers. This award-winning documentary explores the heartbreaking story of what happened, shows how African-American ministers and other people of faith tried to push back, and reveals how some people today are still drawing on Social Darwinism in order to dehumanize others. The film also explores the tragic story of eugenics in America, the effort to breed humans beings based on Darwinian principles.

Congratulations to our colleagues John West and Rachel Adams for their outstanding work on Human Zoos, which has already accumulated a range of awards and recognitions including: “Best in Show” (Cinema Worldfest Award), “Best Editing” (Oregon Documentary Film Festival), and “Awards of Excellence” (Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards, Impact DOCS Awards).

Dr. West will answer questions from the audience afterward via Skype. Other regional premieres are upcoming. See you in Houston!

More on the re-privileging of our home world.

New Geochemical Discoveries Reaffirm Earth as a Privileged Planet (Updated)

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Each gas component in our atmosphere has a “partial pressure.” The partial pressure of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is represented as pCO2. You could think of it as the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to the total amount of gas.

If you believe that pCO2 has a major influence on Earth’s surface temperature, then a new PNAS paper has revealed a significant new fine-tuning parameter for Earth. The paper argues that although CO2 is released into the atmosphere through outgassing (volcanos), thereby increasing Earth’s surface temperature, chemical weathering of continental and seafloor rock into the oceans (where carbon is precipitated out as carbonate rock) serves as a natural sink of CO2. That is, the oceans remove CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby decreasing temperature. All of this serves to keep Earth’s temperature stable:

Continental and seafloor weathering buffer Archean surface temperatures to 0–50 °C. This result holds for a broad range of assumptions about the evolution of internal heat flow, crustal production, spreading rates, and the biotic enhancement of continental weathering.

Many origin-of-life theorists hope that the early Earth’s atmosphere was rich in methane so that organic molecules could be produced. But this new fine-tuning parameter removes an argument that methane must have been present on the early Earth to keep the climate warmer:

The seafloor weathering feedback is important, but less dominant than previously assumed. Consequently, the early Earth would not have been in a snowball state due to pCO2 drawdown from seafloor weathering. In principle, little to no methane is required to maintain a habitable surface climate, although methane should be expected in the anoxic Archean atmosphere once methanogenesis evolved.

What’s really interesting is that they say this fine-tuning parameter is not just for Earth but for any rocky planet located within the circumstellar habitable zone. If they’re right, we’re not looking at Earth being a “privileged planet” but Earth living in a “privileged universe.”

The latter extrapolation deserves some serious skepticism, however. Most likely this is just a “privileged planet” argument. Why?

Their model uses so many particulars of Earth (e.g., Earth’s mantle composition, ocean composition, continental crustal composition, oceanic crustal composition, weathering patterns, and carbonate deposition patterns) that it’s highly premature to conclude that any rocky planet in the habitable zone would be so privileged to enjoy this same temperature-buffering mechanism. For example, Earth seems peculiar due to its high water content — something that geology still struggles to explain.

Would other rocky planets enjoy the same? Nobody knows. Until we discover rocky planets out there in the habitable zone that are very, very, very Earthlike, the extrapolation is unwarranted.

Indeed, another article, out today, reports that Earth is so unique in its high phosphorous content that it may be unlikely that extraterrestrial life exists anywhere else in the universe:

Amid efforts to find alien life, scientists have not yet confirmed the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Findings of a new study suggest this has something do with the element phosphorus lacking in the cosmos. … Astronomers have been hunting for phosphorus in the universe because of the role it plays in life on Earth. If the element is lacking in other parts of the cosmos, it could be difficult for alien life to exist.

A new study presented at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science meeting now suggests that life as we know it is more unusual than previously thought because the universe substantially lacks phosphorus.

Despite this general lack of phosphorous in the universe, it is the 11th most abundant element on Earth, and it’s vital for life. Remember CHONPS — the acronym you learned in high school to remember the elements most important for life? In case you forgot, the “P” stands for phosphorus, which is vital for the construction of DNA and RNA in every life form, and is also an indispensable component of the energy-carrying molecule in all living things, ATP. Phosphorylation, the addition of a phosphoryl group (PO32-), is also necessary for the function of most enzymes, as well as numerous other biomolecules. Yet our home planet is strangely and almost inexplicably rich in phosphorous.

The study proposes that Earth got its phosphorus due to its proximity to a supernova explosion. Perhaps, but although phosphorous is common on Earth (making up 0.07 percent of our planet), it’s only a trace element in the solar system   as a whole. If Earth was close to that supernova explosion, so was the rest of our solar system, and you’d expect it to be rich in phosphorus as well. But it isn’t. Earth is special even within our solar system for its high phosphorus content, and this richness in life-giving phosphorus is very difficult to explain.

As we’ve said many times before, Earth is a indeed  privileged planet.