The Chinese nationalist revolution: a brief history.

 Chinese Revolution, (1911–12), nationalist democratic revolt that overthrew the Qing (or Manchu) dynasty in 1912 and created a republic.

Ever since their conquest of China in the 17th century, most of the Manchu had lived in comparative idleness, supposedly a standing army of occupation but in reality inefficient pensionaries. All through the 19th century the dynasty had been declining, and, upon the death of the empress dowager Cixi (1908), it lost its last able leader. In 1911 the emperor Puyi was a child, and the regency was incompetent to guide the nation. The unsuccessful contests with foreign powers had shaken not only the dynasty but the entire machinery of government.The chain of events immediately leading to the revolution began when an agreement was signed (April 5, 1911) with a four-power group of foreign bankers for the construction of lines on the Hukwang (Huguang) Railway in central China. The Beijing government decided to take over from a local company a line in Sichuan, on which construction had been barely begun, and to apply part of the loan to its completion. The sum offered did not meet the demands of the stockholders, and in September 1911 the dissatisfaction boiled over into open revolt. On October 10, in consequence of the uncovering of a plot in Hankou (now [along with Wuchang] part of Wuhan) that had little or no connection with the Sichuan episode, a mutiny broke out among the troops in Wuchang, and this is regarded as the formal beginning of the revolution. The mutineers soon captured the Wuchang mint and arsenal, and city after city declared against the Qing government. The regent, panic-stricken, granted the assembly’s demand for the immediate adoption of a constitution and urged a former viceroy, Yuan Shikai, to come out of retirement and save the dynasty. In November he was made premier.

Had Yuan acted vigorously, he might have suppressed the uprising and so have delayed the inevitable. He dallied, however, and, by the end of the year, 14 provinces had declared against the Qing leadership. In several cities Manchu garrisons had been massacred, the regent had been forced out of office, a provisional republican government had been set up at Nanjing, and the archrevolutionist Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) had returned from abroad and had been elected provisional president.In December Yuan agreed to an armistice and entered upon negotiations with the republicans. On February 12, 1912, the boy emperor was made to abdicate the throne in a proclamation that transferred the government to the people’s representatives, declared that the constitution should thenceforth be republican, and gave Yuan Shikai full powers to organize a provisional government. The Nanjing authorities agreed that the emperor was to retain his title for life and receive a large pension. To unify the country, Sun Yat-sen resigned the presidency, and Yuan was chosen in his place. Li Yuanhong, who had come into prominence in Wuchang in the initial stages of the rebellion, was elected vice president. A provisional constitution was promulgated in March 1912 by the Nanjing parliament, and in April the government was transferred to Beijing.The republic, established with such startling rapidity and comparative ease, was destined in the succeeding decades to witness the progressive collapse of national unity and orderly government.

The Bolshevik revolution: a brief history.

 The October Revolution, officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution under the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Coup, the Bolshevik Revolution, the October Uprising, the October Coup or Red October, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was instrumental in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917–1923. It was the second revolutionary change of government in Russia in 1917. It took place through an armed insurrection in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) on 7 November 1917 [O.S. 25 October]. The rise of the Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik factions was the precipitating event of the Russian Civil War.

The October Revolution followed and capitalized on the February Revolution earlier in the year. Contrary to popular belief, Lenin did not overthrow the Tsar. The February Revolution had overthrown the Tsarist autocracy, resulting in a provisional government. The provisional government had taken power after being proclaimed by Grand Duke Michael, Tsar Nicholas II's younger brother, who declined to take power after the Tsar stepped down. During this time, urban workers began to organize into councils (soviets) wherein revolutionaries criticized the provisional government and its actions. The provisional government remained widely unpopular, especially because it was continuing to fight in World War I, and had ruled with an iron fist throughout the summer (including killing hundreds of protesters in the July Days).

Events came to a head in the fall as the Directorate, led by the left-wing Socialist Revolutionary Party, controlled the government. The left-wing Bolsheviks were deeply unhappy with the government, and began spreading calls for a military uprising. On 10 October 1917 (O.S.; 23 October, N.S.), the Petrograd Soviet, led by Trotsky, voted to back a military uprising. On 24 October (O.S.; 6 November, N.S.) the government shut down numerous newspapers and closed the city of Petrograd in an attempt to forestall the revolution; minor armed skirmishes broke out. The next day a full scale uprising erupted, as a fleet of Bolshevik sailors entered the harbor and tens of thousands of soldiers rose up in support of the Bolsheviks. Bolshevik Red Guards forces under the Military-Revolutionary Committee began the occupation of government buildings on 25 October (O.S.; 7 November, N.S.), 1917. The following day, the Winter Palace (the seat of the Provisional government located in Petrograd, then capital of Russia) was captured.

As the Revolution was not universally recognized, the country descended into civil war, which would last until 1923 and ultimately lead to the creation of the Soviet Union in late 1922. The historiography of the event has varied. The victorious Soviet Union viewed it as a validation of their ideology, and the triumph of the worker over capitalism. During Soviet times, revolution day was made a national holiday, marking its importance in the country's founding story. On the other hand, the Western Allies saw it as a violent coup, which used the democratic Soviet councils only until they were no longer useful. The event inspired many cultural works, and ignited communist movements across Europe and globally. Many Marxist–Leninist parties around the world still celebrate revolution day. Contemporary Russia now distances itself from its Soviet past by removing the October Revolution as a national holiday.

On Darwinists' pseudoscience re:pseudogenes.

 

Pseudogenes Aren’t Nonfunctional Relics that Refute Intelligent Design

Casey Luskin

We’ve been discussing a video in which Richard Dawkins claims that the evidence for common ancestry refutes intelligent design (see here, here, and here). We first saw that contrary to Dawkins, the genetic data does not yield “a perfect hierarchy” or “perfect family tree.” Then we saw that a treelike data structure does not necessarily refute intelligent design. But Dawkins isn’t done. At the end of his answer in the video, Dawkins raises the issue of “pseudogenes,” which he claims “don’t do anything but are vestigial relicts of genes that once did something.” Dawkins says elsewhere that pseudogenes “are never transcribed or translated. They might as well not exist, as far as the animal’s welfare is concerned.” These claims represent a classic but false “junk DNA” argument against intelligent design. 

Functions of Pseudogenes 

Pseudogenes can yield functional RNA transcripts, functional proteins, or perform a function without producing any transcript. A 2012 paper in Science Signaling noted that although “pseudogenes have long been dismissed as junk DNA,” recent advances have established that “the DNA of a pseudogene, the RNA transcribed from a pseudogene, or the protein translated from a pseudogene can have multiple, diverse functions and that these functions can affect not only their parental genes but also unrelated genes.” The paper concludes that “pseudogenes have emerged as a previously unappreciated class of sophisticated modulators of gene expression.” 

A 2011 paper in the journal RNA concurs:

Pseudogenes have long been labeled as ‘junk’ DNA, failed copies of genes that arise during the evolution of genomes. However, recent results are challenging this moniker; indeed, some pseudogenes appear to harbor the potential to regulate their protein-coding cousins. 

Likewise, a 2012 paper in RNA Biology states that “pseudogenes were long considered as junk genomic DNA” but “pseudogene regulation is widespread in eukaryotes.” Because pseudogenes may only function in specific tissues and/or only during particular stages of development, their true functions may be difficult to detect. The RNA Biology paper concludes that “the study of functional pseudogenes is just at the beginning” and predicts “more and more functional pseudogenes will be discovered as novel biological technologies are developed in the future.” 

When we do carefully study pseudogenes, we often find function. One paper in Annual Review of Genetics observed: “pseudogenes that have been suitably investigated often exhibit functional roles.” A 2020 paper in Nature Reviews Genetics cautioned that pseudogene function is “Prematurely Dismissed” due to “dogma.” The paper cautions that there are many instances where DNA that was dismissed as pseudogene junk was later found to be functional: “with a growing number of instances of pseudogene-annotated regions later found to exhibit biological function, there is an emerging risk that these regions of the genome are prematurely dismissed as pseudogenic and therefore regarded as void of function.” Indeed, the literature is full of papers reporting function in what have been wrongly labeled “pseudogenes.” 

Fingers in Ears?

At the end of the video, Dawkins says: “I find it extremely hard to imagine how any creationist who actually bothered to listen to that could possibly doubt the fact of evolution. But they don’t listen…they simply stick their fingers in their ear and say la la la.” It’s safe to say that Dawkins was wrong about many things in this video, but I’m not here to make any accusations about fingers and ears. I will say that the best resolution to these kinds of questions is to listen to the data, keep an open mind, and to think critically. When we’re wiling to do this, a lot of exciting new scientific possibilities open up — ones that don’t necessarily include traditional neo-Darwinian views of common ancestry or a “perfect hierarchy” in the tree of life, and ones that readily point toward intelligent design. 

Jarwarhlal Nehru: a brief history.

 Jawaharlal Nehru was an Indian independence activist and, subsequently, the first Prime Minister of India. Considered as one of the greatest statesmen of India and of the twentieth century , he was a central figure in Indian politics both before and after independence. He emerged as an eminent leader of the Indian independence movement, serving India as Prime Minister from its establishment in 1947 as an independent nation, until his death in 1964. He was also known as Pandit Nehru due to his roots with the Kashmiri Pandit community, while Indian children knew him better as Chacha Nehru (Hindi: Uncle Nehru).

The son of Swarup Rani and Motilal Nehru, a prominent lawyer and nationalist statesman, Nehru was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and the Inner Temple, where he trained to be a barrister. Upon his return to India, he enrolled at the Allahabad High Court and took an interest in national politics, which eventually replaced his legal practice. A committed nationalist since his teenage years, he became a rising figure in Indian politics during the upheavals of the 1910s. He became the prominent leader of the left-wing factions of the Indian National Congress during the 1920s, and eventually of the entire Congress, with the tacit approval of his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi. As Congress President in 1929, Nehru called for complete independence from the British Raj and instigated the Congress's decisive shift towards the left.

Nehru and the Congress dominated Indian politics during the 1930s as the country moved towards independence. His idea of a secular nation-state was seemingly validated when the Congress swept the 1937 provincial elections and formed the government in several provinces; on the other hand, the separatist Muslim League fared much poorer. However, these achievements were severely compromised in the aftermath of the Quit India Movement in 1942, which saw the British effectively crush the Congress as a political organisation. Nehru, who had reluctantly heeded Gandhi's call for immediate independence, for he had desired to support the Allied war effort during World War II, came out of a lengthy prison term to a much altered political landscape. The Muslim League under his old Congress colleague and now opponent, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had come to dominate Muslim politics in India. Negotiations between Congress and Muslim League for power sharing failed and gave way to the independence and bloody partition of India in 1947.

Nehru was elected by the Congress to assume office as independent India's first Prime Minister, although the question of leadership had been settled as far back as 1941, when Gandhi acknowledged Nehru as his political heir and successor. As Prime Minister, he set out to realise his vision of India. The Constitution of India was enacted in 1950, after which he embarked on an ambitious program of economic, social and political reforms. Chiefly, he oversaw India's transition from a colony to a republic, while nurturing a plural, multi-party system. In foreign policy, he took a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement while projecting India as a regional hegemon in South Asia.

Under Nehru's leadership, the Congress emerged as a catch-all party, dominating national and state-level politics and winning consecutive elections in 1951, 1957, and 1962. He remained popular with the people of India in spite of political troubles in his final years and failure of leadership during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. In India, his birthday is celebrated as Children's Day.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

  One thing that has become clear to me is that one cannot be an atheist and an optimist with regard to the future of our race and civilisation, at least an atheist would be completely unable to justify his optimism.The atheist universe is inherently amoral,how can a moral person possibly remain an optimist in a universe that does not acknowledge/reward virtue or condemn/punish vice as a matter of principle or for that matter a universe that had no objective basis for morality.

  The atheist universe will always be a place where ego-obsessed sociopaths get away with injustice until we all go extinct that's the best any atheist can realistically expect.There of course will always be people who strive for those virtues to which the moral instinct embedded in us all beckon,but without an objective justification for those virtues the temptation to adopt the logic of nihilism,hedonism,egoism and like pathologies will only get stronger and that minority committed to the pursuit of instinctive morality(with which our civilisation maintains a parasitic relationship) will keep getting smaller.

 So one can either be an atheist or be optimist about the future of our race and civilisation but not both at least not if one wishes to be intellectually consistent.

On John5:18.

  Depending on whom one asks this verse is supposed to be a defeater for Christians who accept the God and Father of Jesus Christ as the one true God:

Braggadocio or substance?Well let's have a look:John5:18NASB"For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God."
The first thing you'll notice about those who misuse this verse to promote trinitarian or modalist notions is that they invariably focus on the second charge and not the first thus bringing their competence if not their sincerity into question.Manifestly both charges are from the same source and the fact that they are parallelled indicates that they are  both either equally improper or proper depending on ones argument.
 Usually our trinitarian or modalist friends would insists that charge no.2 is John's opinion if we accept this line of logic we are compelled to further conclude that charge number one is also John's opinion.So did the apostle John really opine that his master failed to practice what he preached in breaking the Sabbath see Matthew5:19 or that claiming Jehovah as Father was blasphemous,An opinion that would render John himself guilty of blasphemy 1John3:1,2 later on at John8:41 the Jews also claim Jehovah God as their father were they thus making themselves equal to God.
  Obviously it was the Jewish religious leaders in their zeal for legalism who falsely concluded that Jesus kindly healing of this son of Abraham on the most appropriate day for such charity amounted to a violation of the sabbath and it was the same group who with equally faulty reasoning concluded that Jesus acknowledgment of almighty God as the source of the power manifested through him and that God would not have made such power available to him if he was not favored by him as a Father would favor a son meant that he was trying to steal God's thunder so to speak.
  While we are on the subject of opinions what was Jesus' opinion on the matter,we need not speculate he makes it quite clear in the following verse "Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner." Clearly Jesus was not of the opinion that his being God's son made him equal to God.

The Haitian revolution: a brief history.

 The Haitian Revolution was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolt began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It involved blacks, mulattoes, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants—with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti's most charismatic hero. The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labour ), and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.

Its effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms they won, and, with the collaboration of free people of color, their independence from white Europeans. The revolution represented the largest slave uprising since Spartacus' unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier, and challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about slaves' ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.

Missing the forest for the trees?

 

Phylogenetic Conflict Is Common and the “Hierarchy” Is Far from “Perfect”

Casey Luskin

As I discussed earlier, we were recently asked to comment on a video at FORA.tv. In the video, Richard Dawkins argues that the best way to refute “creationists” is to show them that genetic data forms “a perfectly hierarchy — a perfect family tree.” Let’s review again just how strongly he emphasizes this point in the video:

Compare the genes of any pair of animals you like — pair of animals, pair of plants — and then plot out the resemblances and they fall on a perfectly hierarchy — a perfect family tree.

It’s simply false for Dawkins to claim that when you compare genes of different animals, they “fall on a perfectly hierarchy — a perfect family tree.” The scientific literature is replete with conflicts among evolutionary trees, where phylogenetic analysis of different genes in the same group of plants, animals, or other organisms generate conflicting family trees. It also abounds with examples of where analyzing gene similarities in a group of organisms generates a tree that conflicts with the tree generated by analyzing similar anatomical characters in the same group of plants or animals in the fossil record. One paper in the journal Genome Research put it plainly, that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].” 

Meyer Reviews the Literature

Stephen Meyer documents these sorts of papers and much more in Chapter 6 of Darwin’s Doubt, where he writes:

Just as the molecular data do not point unequivocally to a single date for the last common ancestor of all the Cambrian animals (the point of deep divergence), they do not point unequivocally to a single coherent tree depicting the evolution of animals in the Precambrian. Numerous papers have noted the prevalence of contradictory trees based on evidence from molecular genetics. A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that “evolutionary trees from different genes often have conflicting branching patterns.” Likewise, a 2012 paper in Biological Reviews acknowledges that “phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception.” Echoing these views, a January 2009 cover story and review article in New Scientist observed that today the tree-of-life project “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” As the article explains, “Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” because the evidence suggests that “the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like.”

The New Scientist article cited a study by Michael Syvanen, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, who studied the relationships among several phyla that first arose in the Cambrian. Syvanen’s study compared two thousand genes in six animals spanning phyla as diverse as chordates, echinoderms, arthropods, and nematodes. His analysis yielded no consistent tree-like pattern. As the New Scientist reported, “In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. He failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories.” Syvanen himself summarized the results in the bluntest of terms: “We’ve just annihilated the tree of life. It’s not a tree anymore, it’s a different topology [pattern of history] entirely. What would Darwin have made of that?” 

Other studies trying to clarify the evolutionary history and phylogenetic relationships of the animal phyla have encountered similar difficulties. Vanderbilt University molecular systematist Antonis Rokas is a leader among biologists using molecular data to study animal phylogenetic relationships. Nevertheless, he concedes that a century and a half after The Origin of Species, “a complete and accurate tree of life remains an elusive goal.” In 2005, during the course of an authoritative study he eventually co-published in Science, Rokas was confronted with this stark reality. The study had sought to determine the evolutionary history of the animal phyla by analyzing fifty genes across seventeen taxa. He hoped that a single dominant phylogenetic tree would emerge. Rokas and his team reported that “a 50- gene data matrix does not resolve relationships among most metazoan phyla” because it generated numerous conflicting phylogenies and historical signals. Their conclusion was candid: “Despite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most metazoan phyla remained unresolved.” 

In a paper published the following year, Rokas and University of Wisconsin at Madison biologist Sean B. Carroll went so far as to assert that “certain critical parts of the TOL [tree of life] may be difficult to resolve, regardless of the quantity of conventional data available.” This problem applies specifically to the relationships of the animal phyla, where “[m]any recent studies have reported support for many alternative conflicting phylogenies.” Investigators studying the animal tree found that “a large fraction of single genes produce phylogenies of poor quality” such that in one case, a study “omitted 35% of single genes from their data matrix, because those genes produced phylogenies at odds with conventional wisdom.” Rokas and Carroll tried to explain the many contradictory trees by proposing that the animal phyla might have evolved too quickly for the genes to record some signal of phylogenetic relationships into the respective genomes. In their view, if the evolutionary process responsible for anatomical novelty works quickly enough, there would not be sufficient time for differences to accumulate in key molecular markers, in particular those used to infer evolutionary relationships in different animal phyla. Then, given enough time, whatever signal did exist might become lost. Thus, when groups of organisms branch rapidly and then evolve separately for long periods of time, this “can overwhelm the true historical signal” — leading to the inability to determine evolutionary relationships. 

DARWIN’S DOUBT, PP. 120-121

“Phylogenomic Conflict”

Such conflicts in the grand tree of life have continued to mount. Recently I participated in a journal club discussion of a 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled “Phylogenomic conflict coincides with rapid morphological innovation.” The paper explores the abrupt appearance of new types of organisms — or as they put it, “episodes of rapid phenotypic innovation that underlie the emergence of major lineages.” The paper observes that rapid appearance of new types of organisms often coincides with “conflicts” among trees based upon different types of genes:

One insight gleaned from phylogenomics is that gene-tree conflict, frequently caused by population-level processes, is often rampant during the origin of major lineages. … Regions of high conflict often coincide with the emergence of major clades, such as mammals, angiosperms, and metazoa. … We demonstrate that instances of high gene-tree conflict (discordance in phylogenetic signal across genes) in mammals, birds, and several major plant clades correspond to rate increases in morphological innovation.

Conflicts that Should Not Exist

It is precisely these types of “conflicts” among gene-based trees that Dawkins says aren’t supposed to exist in the “perfect” (Dawkins’s word) tree of life. The PNAS paper goes on to make the intriguing observation that researchers often ignore conflicts between these trees as noise in the data, when in reality these conflicts may be telling us something very important about life’s history:

Most large-scale phylogenetic and phylogenomic studies meant to resolve species relationships have treated gene-tree discordance as an analytical nuisance to be filtered or accommodated. However, since phylogenomic conflict often represents the imprint of past population genetic processes on the genome, studying its correlation with other macroevolutionary patterns may shed light on the microevolutionary processes underlying major transitions across the Tree of Life.

Researchers have long recognized that rates of morphological evolution vary across the Tree of Life, with pronounced bursts in morphological change interspersed with periods of relative stasis. … Phylogenomic conflict often appears to coincide with important episodes of morphological differentiation among major lineages. For example, the major differences in life history and body plan that distinguish mammalian orders emerged rapidly among ancestral taxa following the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction. … The early avian radiation has proved similarly challenging and is notable for the rapid establishment of phenotypically and ecologically disparate lineages. Several large-scale studies using massive genomic datasets have revealed extensive conflict among phylogenetic branches coinciding with the early radiation of crown Aves. Since the origin of land plants, there have been numerous major phases of morphological and ecological innovation, ranging from the initial appearance of vascular plant body plans in the late Silurian to distinct phases of angiosperm radiation from the Cretaceous to the present. As with the vertebrate lineages, the origins of many major plant clades show elevated levels of phylogenomic conflict… 

Eliminate Unreliable Data?

Similarly a 2016 paper in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution warns that many evolutionary systematists ignore phylogenetic conflicts, seeing them as a “nuisance,” rather than a signal that is telling us something important about biological origins:

Biologists should therefore be more aware that “phylogenetic incongruence [is] a signal, rather than a problem” (Nakhleh, 2013) and treat it accordingly. In the case of the tree shrew, and many other lineages in vertebrate phylogenetics, different algorithms may yield different trees because of the mosaic nature of the data (Kumar et al., 2013) and the inability of a bifurcating tree to explain the patterns.

In a presentation, my friend and colleague Paul Nelson recently quoted a chapter from a textbook, Molecular Systematics, which contains a section heading titled “Eliminate Unreliable Data,” justifying the practice because the authors reassure themselves “It is unrealistic to think that subjectivity in a molecular systematic study can be entirely avoided.” That seems like a most unreassuringly way to reassure oneself. The chapter goes on to say that “the benefits of excluding clearly unreliable regions” — i.e., genes which yield trees that don’t fit the standard hierarchy — “however subjectively determined—outweigh the dangers.” To summarize, what you’re seeing here are admissions that conflicts among evolutionary trees are common (admissions that themselves are actually quite common), coupled with rarer admissions that data is sometimes eliminated or ignored simply because it doesn’t fit the standard tree.

My Vantage as a Skeptic

Returning to the 2021 PNAS paper, it finds a correlation between periods of rapid innovation and the degree of conflict in gene-based trees. From my vantage point, as a skeptic of universal common ancestry, conflicts between genes that seem to have appeared during periods of morphological innovation indicate that common ancestry is not what generates new types of organisms. The paper, of course, does not question common ancestry. Instead it invokes various ad hoc explanations for the conflicts, attributing these conflicts to population processes such a “changes in population size, rapid speciation, and incomplete lineage sorting.” 

Regardless of whether universal common ancestry is right or wrong, the point here is that conflict in phylogenetic trees is very common, and the genetic data is far from producing a “perfect hierarchy,” as Dawkins put it. In fact, phylogenetic conflict seems to be greatest precisely in genes associated with the appearance of new types of organisms in the history of life. Dawkins got this point wrong, and he got it wrong precisely because this sort of conflicting phylogenetic data is not what a standard neo-Darwinian model would lead one to expect!

The 'Christian' right.

 The Christian right (known as the religious right in the United States) is the name for right-wing Christian political and social movements. They also exist in other countries, such as Canada. However, the term is most often used in the United States.^[1] These groups have a strong support of conservative social and political ideas. Usually, this comes from a belief that the United States was founded on a strong belief in God. It also come from a belief that American laws and policies should be based on what is in the Bible. Members of the Christian right can be from any branch of Christianity, including Catholicism. However, the religious right is most often used with Evangelical Christians, Fundamentalists (such as Born-agains) and Mormons. About 15% of Americans say they are part of the Christian or religious right.

People who have been conservative due to their religion have been in the United States for hundreds of years. For example, the people who put John Scopes on trial would later be called members of the religious right. However, the term first came into use in the 1970s. Jerry Falwell was one of the first people to use it. He and others felt that the country and its institutions (such as schools and colleges) were run by left-wing intellectuals who did not believe in God. They thought that in reality most people believed in God and did not care for left-wing intellectuals. The fight between left-wing intellectuals and the religious right is often called the "culture wars".

Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump were elected in part due to support from the religious right.

As well as the Christian right, there is something called the Christian left. However, it is not as well-known or powerful.

The 'Christian' left: a brief history.

The Christian left is a range of center-left and left-wing Christian political and social movements that largely embrace social justice viewpoints and uphold a social gospel.

Given the inherent diversity in international political thought, the term Christian left can have different meanings and applications in different countries. While there is much overlap, the Christian left is distinct from liberal Christianity, meaning not all Christian leftists are liberal Christians and vice versa. Christian anarchism, Christian communism and Christian socialism are subsects of the socialist Christian left, although it also includes more moderate Christian left-liberal and social-democratic viewpoints.