After the supermarket shooting in Buffalo, NY, a woke church in my
neighborhood quickly posted on its marquee sign, “WHITE SUPREMACY:
AMERICA’S ORIGINAL SIN.” According to some, white supremacy is of
pandemic proportions in the U.S. It takes surprising shapes — even
people of color can be white supremacists, we’re told. It is not only widespread, but growing rapidly. Evangelical Christianity is tainted by it. Political conservatives “enable” it, or worse. Apparently it’s so on the march as to be a “harsh reality” in, of all places, our politically correct neighbor Canada.
President Biden this week said
it is “running through our body politic.” If so, it’s strange that I’m
not sure I’ve ever met a genuine white supremacist. But we know they are
out there. Even if in reality they are only a minuscule minority, one
mentally ill young man with such ideas in his mind can perform an act of
shocking evil, as happened last weekend in Buffalo. It’s worth
understanding why, not simply assuming that we know.
Reading the Manifesto
Historian Richard Weikart is among the few analysts who have troubled
themselves to read the gunman’s manifesto. When he did, Weikart found
that the mental profile of this shooter, like others before him, defies
almost every stereotype about white supremacy currently being
circulated. The accused killer, while upholding the vilest racism and
anti-Semitism, disdains Christianity and conservatism. In the
individual’s own telling, he took inspiration from what Professor
Weikart in his recent book calls Darwinian Racism. The killer explains that he is only following the science — the very best evolutionary science.
[H]e continually claims that he is
a man of reason and logic, and he tries to demonstrate that his racist
views are actually scientific, not based on religion or emotion.
He
also appeals to science to explain why races are unequal. According to
this young man — and most white nationalists today — races arose through
biological evolution. He argues that races are subspecies that have
diverged, not only in physical traits, but also in their mental and
moral characteristics. He believes that the white race has evolved to
have higher intelligence and that blacks have evolved with greater
biological tendencies to crime, rape, and other immoral behavior.
Built
upon this Darwinian framework, he became obsessed with what he
considers the on-going competition between races in the struggle for
existence. To be sure, he does not actually use the term “struggle for
existence,” but he does use the term “struggle” a number of times. He
also describes the Darwinian struggle for existence, which is
competition between organisms to out-reproduce other organisms. Darwin
stated that this struggle was most intense within a species, and he also
proclaimed in The Descent of Man that some indigenous races were being
driven to extinction by other races (primarily the Europeans) in the
human struggle for existence.
White supremacists, including the
Buffalo mass murderer, are obsessed with the differential reproductive
rates between the races, believing that this will result in the defeat
of the white race in the Darwinian struggle. Their “replacement theory”
is intended as a warning that the white race will be replaced by other
races.
In His Own Words
This fits a pattern with recent mass killers, as political scientist John West has
also noted. You would need to peer into the shooter’s soul really to
understand the origins of his madness and hatred. No one can do that.
All we have to go on are his own words. For all the denunciations of
opponents from political partisans, cynically using this terrible crime
to tar competing views, isn’t it strange that so few media folks or
politicians appear to be interested in the young man’s own account of
himself.
On a new episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson sits down with Australian biologist and MD Michael Denton to discuss his new book, The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence.
As Denton notes, throughout the Middle Ages, humans were viewed as
central to the cosmic scheme of things. But this anthropocentric view
began to fall out of favor in the 16th century, and few if any
scientific discoveries in the subsequent two centuries offered any
apparent aid or comfort to the view.
That, however, isn’t the end of the story. According to Denton, even
as Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection
seemed to be draining from the idea what little life remained in it,
discoveries in chemistry, physiology, and physics were emerging. Playing
on the title of Stephen Meyer’s recent book, it was the return of the man hypothesis — revitalizing the outlook that placed man at the center of the cosmos, not in a physical way, as before, but in a far more important metaphysical sense.
Denton says that the case that nature is fine tuned for intelligent
creatures such as ourselves — land-going, air-breathing bipeds capable
of controlling fire and developing new technologies — is today stronger
than ever, and getting stronger. The Miracle of Man brings together the key lines of evidence as never before. Find the book, and advance praise for this capstone work, here. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Summary: Our planet’s atmosphere provides a
beautiful example of the parsimony and elegance of nature’s fine-tuning
for aerobic life. This extraordinarily improbable degree of
environmental fitness was woven in the order of things.
In my book The Miracle of Man,
I review a stunning range of coincidences in nature that should inspire
both awe and wonder. One striking illustration may be found in our
planet’s atmosphere, which provides compelling evidence of a very
special fitness for the generation of oxygen for oxygen-hungry beings
such as ourselves.
For photosynthesis to proceed on a planet like Earth, sunlight
(visual light) must penetrate the atmosphere all the way to the ground,
and part of the sun’s infrared radiation needs to be absorbed by the
atmosphere so as to warm the planet into the ambient temperature range,
where the chemistry of life, including the chemistry of photosynthesis,
can work its magic.
Happily, our atmosphere obliges. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a
significant fraction of the infrared radiation — warming the atmosphere
into the ambient range — and lets through nearly all of the radiation in
the visual region to empower the process of photosynthesis.
Some infrared radiation does reach the Earth’s surface, felt as
warmth on the skin, and some penetrates a little way into water, as is
commonly experienced in a swimming pool. But there are several major
atmospheric absorption bands in the near infrared region that capture
and retain the sun’s heat, raising our planet’s surface temperature by
33°C over what it would be without them, a chilly −18°C.
If our atmosphere didn’t absorb at least a significant fraction of
the infrared radiation when the sun was shining, the atmosphere would be
intolerably hot during the day, and when night fell the temperature
would plunge below zero. We would experience wild temperature swings
like those on the moon. There temperatures spike in the daytime to more
than 100°C (the boiling point of water at sea level) and plunge
to −178°C at night, a temperature far, far colder than any experienced
on Earth today. This wide variation is because the moon has no
atmosphere to retain heat at night or prevent the surface from getting
so hot during the day. No type of carbon-based plant life based in a
water matrix could survive such massive temperature fluctuations.
On the other hand, if our atmosphere absorbed too much in the
infrared region, that too would be disastrous. And this highlights
another intriguing element of fitness in the absorption pattern of
electromagnetic radiation in the infrared region. The windows between
the absorption peaks are as crucial as the peaks. Why? Because without
some spectral windows, all the infrared radiation would be absorbed by
the atmosphere, none could be radiated back out into space, and Earth
would suffer a runaway greenhouse effect, ending up a hellish hothouse
like Venus.
A Sizable Absorption Window
In this context an intriguing feature of our atmosphere’s absorption
spectrum is a sizable absorption window between eight and fourteen
microns. It’s intriguing because the sun is not the only body that emits
infrared radiation. The Earth also does, since all bodies at a given
temperature emit radiation with a characteristic range of wavelengths.
In Earth’s case, the emission peak is in the infrared region near 10
microns. And our atmosphere’s absorption gap allows a significant
fraction of Earth’s infrared emission to escape into space through the
eight-to-fourteen micron window. Around a fourth of the outgoing
infrared emission from Earth escapes through this window, which
consequently plays a major role in preventing our planet from going the
way of Venus. If all radiation in the infrared between 0.80 and 100
microns had been absorbed by the atmospheric gases, if there were no
windows, a runaway greenhouse would have been inevitable. The Earth
would be a hot, Venus-like planet. Upon these windows, including the
eight-to-fourteen-micron window, all advanced life on the surface of the
Earth, including of course Homo sapiens, depends.
It is no exaggeration to say even with all the other elements of
fitness that make possible our existence, without this eight-to-fourteen
micron window — but one small detail in the atmosphere’s overall
absorption spectrum — we wouldn’t exist. This represents yet another
stunning instance of the biocentric fine tuning of nature.
Some Additional Fortuities
Before turning to the role of specific atmospheric gases in the
fine-tuning of our atmosphere for advanced terrestrial life, a few quick
notes on some additional fortuities regarding Earth’s relationship to
light.
The light that passes through our atmosphere must penetrate water,
not just to gift the sun’s energy to aquatic plants but because water is
the matrix of life, and to reach the chloroplasts in any green plant,
aquatic or terrestrial light must traverse the water in the cell. Again
nature obliges as water is transparent to radiation in the visual
band as a liquid, as a vapor in the atmosphere, and as ice. If liquid
water or water vapor in the atmosphere absorbed visual light — the right
light for photosynthesis — then photosynthesis would not be possible,
and Earth would be devoid of aerobic life forms.
Also fortuitous is the transparency of our atmosphere to visible
light, which made important scientific advances possible, as Carl Sagan
underscored in his 1980 book Cosmos. There he asked us to
imagine intelligent life evolving on a cloud-covered planet such as
Venus. “Would it then invent science?” he asked. “The development of
science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the
regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely
cloud-covered… nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if
you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the sun would be
invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over
the whole sky — just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping
radiance beneath the sea.”
Finally, it is not just that our atmosphere lets through the right
light. It also strongly absorbs radiation from the dangerous or
potentially dangerous regions of the electromagnetic spectrum on either
side of the visual and near infrared regions.
The Atmospheric Gases
Another remarkable aspect of the absorption characteristics of
Earth’s atmosphere is that it arises from the combined absorption
spectra of the atmospheric gases, five of which — nitrogen (N2), oxygen (O2), ozone (O3), carbon dioxide (CO2), and water vapor (H2O)
— are bound to be present in the atmosphere of any planet hosting
complex carbon-based biological life. It is their combined absorption
characteristics which lets through just the right light for
photosynthesis while at the same time absorbing just the right amount of
heat, as well as most of the harmful radiation outside of the visual
and infrared regions.
Oxygen
Oxygen (O2) is indispensable to complex organisms such as ourselves. We need a lot of it (250 ml every minute,even
at rest). Indeed, the metabolic rates needed to sustain the most
advanced biological life depend on taking oxygen directly from an
atmosphere. Atmospheres sustaining complex aerobic life will inevitably
contain substantial quantities of oxygen.
Ozone
Where there is O2 in an atmosphere there is bound also to be ozone (O3),
since it’s formed in the stratosphere by the reaction of individual
oxygen atoms with molecules of dioxygen, catalyzed by the action of UV
light.
O2 + O = O3
Ozone is important to life because it absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Carbon Dioxide
Breathing involves taking in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide (CO2),
which is a major product of aerobic metabolism (the process which
provides us with 90 percent of our energy needs). Consequently CO2 will
be found in the atmosphere of any planet where organisms use the
oxidation of reduced carbon to generate energy. Carbon dioxide is also
essential to plants, which require it for photosynthesis. Moreover, CO2 is the only feasible carrier of the carbon atom to all parts of any carbon-based biosphere.
CO2 is also delivered to the atmosphere on Earth by volcanic activity and is recycled via silicate weathering.
Water Vapor
Atmospheric water vapor will be found in the atmosphere of any planet
harboring abundant carbon-based life because water is the essential
physical matrix of all carbon-based cells and it is the necessary medium
of the circulatory system in all complex multicellular organisms. Only
worlds that possess water can harbor carbon-based life, hence the NASA
adage “follow the water” in searching for extraterrestrial life. And
since water evaporates at temperatures fit for biochemistry, some water
vapor is bound to be present in the atmosphere of any world bearing
carbon-based life.
Nitrogen
Atmospheric nitrogen provides most of the nitrogen atoms incorporated
into organic compounds by life on Earth. It’s one of the four core
atoms of organic chemistry alongside carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. It
provides necessary density to the atmosphere, keeps our oceans from
evaporating, and serves as a fire retardant, slowing the speed that fire
spreads, rendering it controllable. Nitrogen is the only viable
candidate for these roles and thus appears to be an essential ingredient
in the atmosphere of any planet hosting carbon-based life.
All this suggests that oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide,
as well as ozone are bound to be present in the atmosphere of any world
inhabited by oxygen-utilizing, advanced carbon-based life, for reasons
over and above their life-friendly atmospheric transparency for the
right kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
The Right Proportions
Our atmosphere not only has the right components for complex aerobic
life, it also has them in the right proportions. Only an oxygen
concentration of about 20 percent, at a partial pressure of more than 80
mm Hg, provides the requisite oxygen for the active metabolism of
organisms like ourselves. If the concentration were substantially
higher, fires would be a far greater danger. In the case of nitrogen,
only a considerable quantity of nitrogen provides the density and
pressure needed to keep fires from raging uncontrollably in oxygen-rich
atmospheres such as Earth’s, and to prevent the oceans from evaporating.
CO2 levels have varied throughout geological time,
although over the past 400 million years — since advanced life colonized
the land — they have almost certainly never reached levels ten times
those of today and probably never more than about four to five times
present levels. A recent study provided evidence of this. It found that
raising CO2 levels in controlled atmospheres up to four times
present levels diminished cognitive function in human subjects. This
gives some indication of a CO2 ceiling, beyond which advanced life may no longer viable.
The Greenhouse Gases
Diatomic molecules with the same two atoms, such as O2 or N2,
do not absorb infrared radiation. This is quite fortunate for life on
Earth, since if either of these two gases, which make up most of our
atmosphere, were strong absorbers of infrared radiation, Earth likely
would have become a boiling cauldron like Venus, with temperatures hot
enough to melt lead.
Also fortuitous: the major greenhouse gases CO2 and H2O are both stable in the presence of O2.
This is enormously important. If they were unstable in the presence of
oxygen, the whole atmospheric system and global heat balance would
collapse. Aerobic life, our sort of life, would be impossible. However,
in keeping with nature’s profound fitness for advanced life as it exists
on Earth, H2O and CO2 are fully oxidized and
stable in the presence of oxygen. Nitrogen, the major component of the
atmosphere, is also stable in the presence of oxygen, because the
nitrogen atoms in N2 bond strongly with each other and resist
combining with oxygen. The stability of water, carbon dioxide, and
nitrogen in the presence of oxygen is a point worth underscoring, since
most other substances (apart from the noble gases) react strongly with
oxygen — in some cases, explosively.
A fascinating further teleological aspect to all this concerns the
quantity of ozone in the atmosphere. Because of the vast amounts of O2 in the atmosphere, inevitably there will also be some ozone (O3).
Although ozone is indispensable for blocking harmful ultraviolet
radiation, it is also a powerful greenhouse gas that absorbs strongly in
the infrared region — one thousand times more strongly than CO2.
Because of this, anything beyond trace amounts of ozone would
contribute dangerously to the greenhouse effect. This means that its
life-giving fitness in absorbing the dangerous ultraviolet radiation
between 0.20 and 0.30 micronswould be negated entirely if
more than trace amounts were necessary for that vital task, or if it
were produced in excess amounts by the action of ultraviolet radiation
on O2 in the stratosphere. Happily, only trace amounts are
needed to effectively block harmful ultraviolet radiation, and the rate
of breakdown of ozone in the stratosphere almost equals its rate of
synthesis, guaranteeing that it is indeed only present in trace amounts.
Finally, an intriguing aspect of ozone’s synthesis in the atmosphere is that ozone (O3) and diatomic oxygen (O2)
indirectly promote their own formation by absorbing dangerous
ultraviolet radiation and thereby protecting plant life, both aquatic
and terrestrial, which synthesize the oxygen from which ozone is formed.
This is yet another beautiful example of the parsimony and elegance of
nature’s stunning fitness for aerobic life.
Vital Coincidences
The absorption properties of our atmosphere are not vital for all
carbon-based life on Earth, but particularly for plants and
energy-hungry aerobes like ourselves. Our atmosphere’s fortuitous mix of
gases enables photosynthesis and the manufacture of oxygen, warms Earth
into the ambient temperature range, and shields life from harmful
radiation. Even slight differences in our atmospheric gases’ absorption
properties, or in their relative concentration, and Earth would be
uninhabitable, particularly for aerobic life. And note, these gases
exist in our atmosphere, and in the proportions they do, because of
factors quite distinct from the life-essential absorption properties
described above.
There is a final twist to this teleology: Three of the key
atmospheric gases whose physical absorption properties are indispensable
to the process of photosynthesis are also central players in the
process of photosynthesis itself.
6CO2 + 6H2O +light +heat —> C6H12O6 + 6O2
Indeed, they are the major reactants in the process. It is as if CO2, H2O, and O2 were deliberately colluding to incorporate themselves into the stuff of living matter.
Light and Air
Let’s review. The laws of nature, which determine the absorption
properties of the atmospheric gases, have no logically necessary
connection with their chemical properties or the chemical properties of
their constituent atoms, which are of such utility to life. This is a
striking fortuity in the nature of things.
Similarly, there is no connection between the laws of nature which
determine the tiny size of the biologically useful region in the
electromagnetic spectrum, and those laws which determine the radiant
output of the sun. And there is no connection between the radiant output
of the sun and the laws determining the absorption properties of the
atmospheric gases and liquid water.
So here we have several coincidences on which the existence of
oxygen-hungry aerobic organisms like ourselves depends. In the 15th
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the article
entitled “Electromagnetic Radiation,” the authors comment, “Considering
the importance of visible sunlight for all aspects of terrestrial life,
one cannot help being awed by the dramatically narrow window in the
atmospheric absorption… and in the absorption spectrum of water.”
Coincidences — the narrow windows in the EM spectrum that facilitate photosynthesis.
And it isn’t just the “dramatically narrow window.” We should be in
awe of the entire ensemble of prior environmental fitness, an ensemble
that enables photosynthesis and, by extension, our own existence as
oxygen-hungry “light-eaters.”
Simply put, our existence, inhabiting the surface of a planet like
Earth, deriving energy generated by the oxidation of the reduced carbon
compounds manufactured during the process of photosynthesis, depends on
what can only be described as an extraordinarily improbable degree of
environmental fitness in the order of things. Note, too, that
the improbable coincidences reviewed above, and much more fully treated
in The Miracle of Man,
are largely irrelevant to the other major domain of carbon-based life
on our planet — the great biomass of “rock-eating” anaerobic denizens of
the dark. Nature’s awe-inspiring fitness for photosynthesis is a
fitness for our type of life, for life in the light, for life on a
planetary surface, for creatures such as ourselves.
A new episode of ID the Future continues physicist Brian Miller’s exploration of a recent report from
the University of Tokyo claiming a big breakthrough in origin-of-life
research. As Miller and host Eric Anderson make clear, the university’s
laboratory work on RNA, detailed in a recent Nature Communications article,
involved the intelligent interference of the lab scientists and,
despite this intelligent interference, the devolution of RNA rather than
the evolution of increasing RNA sophistication.
Miller says that it’s ironic that Steven Novella, a scientist
committed to puncturing science hype, seems to have fallen for the hype
surrounding this laboratory work. Miller and Anderson go on to discuss
critiques of origin-of-life tall-tale claims, critiques coming from
Robert Shapiro, James Tour, and others. Life, Miller says, requires
organizational blueprints and design logics already in place to battle
against nature’s relentless tendency toward entropy. Without those
sophisticated organizational blueprints already instantiated in living
cells and sophisticated molecular machinery, natural forces appear
utterly powerless to pull off the kind of creative design work required
to move from non-life to life. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
At the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Discovery
Institute physicist Brian Miller gave a great talk on the convergence of
biology and engineering. It’s up now on YouTube and eminently worthy of
being shared. Miller’s theme is that “you see the same engineering
principles in human engineering as you see in life.” Funny that that
should be the case when you consider engineering is obviously all
intelligent design.
The point about engineering is not merely Dr. Miller’s personal view —
it’s the insight behind an emerging scientific field, systems biology,
that analyzes how living systems work with their “very clear design
logic,” including “pre-programmed or pre-engineered responses” to the
environment. Systems biology is quickly displacing impatient dismissals
of supposed “poor design” in life — “how cr*ppy our shoulders are,” for
example, in the phrase of one journalist who took instruction from biologist Nathan Lents. (See Jonathan Wells’s post on that here.)
Miller examines a number of interesting specific illustrations
including the celebrated eyeless cavefish, which he “used to think was
an absolute win for microevolution.” He refers at the end to a famous
paper by physicist Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of
Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Brian would like to write a
follow-up, he quips, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Engineering in
the Biological Sciences.” Watch the whole lecture now:
After the horrific Buffalo, NY, shooting of last weekend,
“replacement theory” is suddenly on everyone’s lips. Unlike agitators in
the media and politics, John West actually took the time to read the shooter’s manifesto to
see what drove him. West found that the latter’s racism derived from
online study of mainstream evolutionary theory. What the cynical
manipulators don’t tell you is that “the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary
racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from
evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters
in recent years.” But recognizing this reality would do nothing to
advance political agendas, so the partisans ignore it.
Now a new podcast by Hank Hanegraaff with historian Richard Weikart
provides some very relevant historical background, drawing on Weikart’s
recent book Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.
The interview was conducted before the event in Buffalo unfolded,
though Weikart and Hanegraaff discuss a similar crime, a 2019 shooting
at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, also fueled by the killer’s reading about evolution.
What I found particularly interesting is that Darwinism and eugenics,
going back to the 19th century, were haunted by ideas of “replacement.”
Darwin in The Descent of Man predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace
throughout the world the savage races” (emphasis added). But
replacement could work in the reverse direction: Francis Galton,
Darwin’s cousin who first advanced the idea of eugenic theory, worried
that people of what he regarded as inferior stock would “swamp”
(Weikart’s word) their betters by out-reproducing them. The question of
who would replace or swamp whom has been a preoccupation of
pseudo-scientific racists ever since. Listen to the excellent conversation here.
How does one select the key issue in the design debate. I would say that it is the one most likely to force the opposition to play defense. From that standpoint OOL science, in my humble opinion, is hard to beat. Darwinism is the opposition's opening salvo against the notion of actual design being a necessary explanation for the technology evident in nature. The claim is that some combination of chance and necessity is a better explanation for this technology and thus any perception of intelligent design was illusory,a kind of pareidolia. Well if you say so mr. materialist, but in as much as science is about objectively testing truth claims how are we to test this particular claim. Well,if Darwinian evolution is the source of the (apparent) design in biology we should surely be able to observe some co-relation between the amount of Darwinian evolution and the amount of Design in the history of life. Hence the need for a simple beginning to life.
It simply will not do for there to exist any of the design that Darwinism is supposed to have successfully explained away prior to any Darwinian processes. So how's that search for a simple lifeform going?
In Francis Bacon’s day, it was easy to oversimplify nature.
Elizabethan scientists began to conceive of a world that ran like a
machine. Robert Boyle was a strong proponent of the mechanical
philosophy. Soon, Isaac Newton’s clockwork heavens reinforced the notion
that all the Creator had to do was wind it up, and let it run all by
itself. From Boyle to Babbage, the Newtonian revolution showed the way
for scientific progress: just uncover the natural laws that make the
universe run.
By the late 18th century and into Victorian times, mechanical
philosophy was sufficient unto itself. An original Designer could be
conceived of, perhaps, but as science progressed, the Prime Mover had
less and less to do. Some argued that it was an insult to the Watchmaker
to suggest he needed to intervene and fix the watch.
Then molecular biology arrived, and we found out the clocks are real.
Literal machines made of molecules make life run. Simultaneously, the
computer age dawned and we learned a bit about programming. Now,
robotics is here. We’re going to need a new philosophy: one that can
handle realities the Elizabethans and Victorians could never have
imagined.
It’s important to note that we’re not speaking of mechanistic or reductionist philosophy. See Jay Richards’s clarification. We seek an explanation for how natural machinery can operate without continuous intervention.
Real Clocks
Paley’s “watch on a heath” was only an analogy in 1805. Now, we can see real biological clocks of amazing design and precision in the cells of life. Current Biology talks
about “unexpected biochemical cogs” in a cyanobacterium, freely using
the word “clock” as well as “oscillator,” “regulator,” and “switch.” The
circadian clock runs on a much slower schedule than most cellular
reactions. It’s calibrated to the 24-hour day-night cycle, and keeps
constant time even when the temperature changes. It would have been
astonishing to Paley or Bacon to learn that a three-protein oscillating
machine is found in such a tiny organism. In higher vertebrates,
biological clocks are even more elaborate.
Real Engines
Is this the little engine that could? Penn State News finds that “little engines” of kinesin (see our animation)
can do more than thought on their microtubule tracks. These little
walking robots, one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, not
only walk the tracks but help them grow. When kinesin-5 pauses at the
end of a microtubule, it “generates pushing forces, which slide the microtubules apart and essentially allow the motor to grow the microtubules.” [Emphasis added.]
Real Solar Panels, Quality Control, and Recycling
The Salk Institute calls
chloroplasts “solar panels” and reveals how the cell monitors them with
a “quality control check” that can “recycle” the parts of damaged
chloroplasts. Notice the mechanical word: they uncovered “how plants
thrive using a natural mechanism to recycle chloroplasts.”
Real Stress Management
Another “fundamental biological mechanism” is described by bioscientists at the University of Heidelberg. In a common lab plant, they found that proteins are “further adapted” after they are manufactured “for their specific jobs.”
In one case they studied, chemical tags regulate the stress response to
drought by closing the stomata and lengthening the primary root.
Real Coordinated Timing and Assembly
Scientists at Virginia Tech found that, during development, “timing is indeed everything.” They use music as an analogy:
Everyone who has played in a band or orchestra knows that playing in time creates music, while playing out of time creates cacophony. In an orchestra, each player may be out of tune when warming up, but eventually, all players must reach the same pitch, rhythm, and timing to produce a viable piece of music.
They found something similar in dividing cells. Just as live
musicians can compensate for other players’ changes in tempo, “cells
modulate the exact timing of when crucial cellular eventshappen, slowing down or speeding everything up to make sure everything is playing its proper part at the right time.” They were “astonished to see how greatly the starting conditions for each cell could differ and still lead to the same outcome,” the article says.
Is it just an analogy to call a ribosome a “protein-making factory“? Ask the researchers at Rockefeller University, who think “factory” is an appropriate description:
Ribosomes, the molecular factories that produce all the proteins a cell needs to grow and function, are themselves made up of many different proteins and four RNAs. And just as an assembly line must be built before it can manufacture cars, these tiny factoriesmust be constructed before they can put proteins together.
Real Mobile Factories
Rockefeller is not alone in using the word factory — only the one
they found escaped detection till now. “Salk Scientists Discover Protein Factories Hidden in Human Jumping Genes,” a news item from Salk Institute says. Researchers found a third Open Reading Frame (ORF0) in certain jumping genes known as LINE-1 elements.
“Jumping genes with ORF0 are basically protein factories with wheels,”
they said. The fact that they consider “evolution” to be the driver of
the bus does not negate the fact that they are real machines that must
function properly, otherwise it could cause disease. And there are 3,500
of these “factories with wheels” in the human genome.
Real Repair Stations
The nuclear membrane gained new respect from scientists at the University of Southern California when
they found that it’s a lot more than “just a protective bubble” around
the nuclear material. A team at USC has documented “how broken strands
of a portion of DNA known as heterochromatin are dragged to the nuclear membrane for repair.” At the inner wall of the nuclear membrane, “a trio of proteins mends the break in a safe environment, where it cannot accidentally get tangled up with incorrect chromosomes.” (The discovery was made in fruit flies.)
As for heterochromatin, this “mysterious part of the genome” composed
of repetitive elements has been promoted from “junk DNA” to superhero
(watch the word “mechanism”):
The reason why we don’t experience thousands of cancers every day in our body is because we have incredibly efficient molecular mechanisms that repair the frequent damages occurring in our DNA. But those that work in heterochromatin are quite extraordinary.
Real Repair Machines
We see “mechanism” also used to describe a “new class of DNA repair enzyme” found by researchers at Vanderbilt University. This adds to the same work that earned a Nobel Prize earlier this year. This enzyme has some “remarkable properties,”
they said, such as the ability to find damage indirectly without
actually contacting the lesion, and the ability to fix bulkier lesions
than other repair mechanisms can.
“Our discovery shows that we still have a lot to learn about DNA repair, and that there may be alternative repair pathways yet to be discovered. It certainly shows us that a much broader range of DNA damage can be removed in ways that we didn’t think were possible,” said Eichman. “Bacteria are using this to their advantage to protect themselves against the antibacterial agents they produce. Humans may even have DNA-repair enzymes that operate in a similar fashion to remove complex types of DNA damage.
Real Shaping Machinery
Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is described in Nature Reviews: Molecular Cell Biology as “an intricate machinery that shapes transcriptomes.” The abstract mentions “intricate steps” in this process, “cellular quality control,” and the ability of NMD to “dynamically adjust their transcriptomes and their proteomes to varying physiological conditions.”
Real Packaging
A grad student at MIT is
studying how cells pack two meters’ worth of DNA into a cell nucleus.
It’s like “trying to fit 24 miles of string into a tennis ball,” Abe
Weintraub says. He’s intrigued by the fact that “DNA gets packed tightly in organized loops,
rather than being haphazardly crammed into cell nuclei.” The specific
3-D organization appears to affect its functionality, because mistakes
cause cancer and other diseases.
Philosophical Implications
Those are a few recent examples of the “machine talk” pouring out of
labs around the world. This is not just metaphorical language for
“nature” like the Victorians used. It’s observation and description of
realities the early mechanical philosophers could not have imagined. And
it’s everywhere. Machine talk is driving an explosion of discovery in
science.
The old mechanical philosophy is hopelessly inadequate for these
realities. The reason? We know from our experience that unguided natural
law does not produce machinery, factories, and quality control.
Something else is required: information.
The Santa Fe Institute identifies
this critical part of the new 21st-century philosophy. A working group
met to discuss the question, “What physical principles predict life?”
They put the question into stark perspective:
We are immersed in life here on Earth, but life isn’t found on the Moon. Nor has it arisen, so far as we know, anywhere else in the solar system. Why do some physical environments precipitate life, and why don’t others?
It’s not enough to say that the moon has no water:
If the Earth really does use sunlight to convert a disorderly lump of mass and energy into organized living things, why can’t the Moon, Earth’s nearest neighbor, do something similar using different mechanisms?
This implies that “natural laws” alone are insufficient to account
for the difference. David Wolpert was on hand to share an important
suggestion:
One part of the answer, Wolpert says, might lie in information theory. In addition to being central to modern biologists’ understanding of evolution, information theory overlaps heavily with thermodynamics,
the area of physics concerned with how the different kinds of internal
energy of a system (such as heat and stored chemical energy) might be
affected by the outside world.
In a video clip Wolpert elaborates on this theme. Apparently many others in the working group felt it was a promising avenue of thought.
“In many talks and discussions, the nature of information flow between different scales of organization emerged as an important theme and open question,” says O’Dwyer. “We look forward to future collaboration on each of these ideas.”
Willaim Dembski’s book Being as Communion
would serve as a fine discussion starter. Wolpert comes so close, but
is still so far from explaining what he set out to explain: why the moon
differs from the earth. He talks about information flow through
the system, but the moon gets exactly the same sunlight the earth does.
And he never defines what information is, or where it comes from. Here
is where intelligent design can offer real, substantive insight.
Information is the key to a “mechanical” philosophy for the 21st
century. We know, because we have a great deal of experience producing
information and imposing it on matter. We build computers. We make
robots. We make clocks and trucks and factories. Indeed, we can even
make machines that make other machines, and robots that increasingly
look and act like us.
Our machines can run like clockwork, not because we shined sunlight
on a “disorderly lump” and waited for natural laws to take their
unguided course, but because we infused the lumps with information. And
since we know that intelligence was the true cause that resulted in
those lumps of raw material becoming Steinway pianos, Toyota robotic
assembly lines, and New Horizons spacecraft, it’s a fair inference that
intelligence is the true cause behind atoms that become kinesins,
ribosomes, and circadian clock proteins.
A few months ago, I fell and dislocated my left shoulder. My upper
arm bone was put back in its socket the same day, but then I spent
months in physical therapy to regain full function. In the process, I
have learned a lot about an amazing joint that I previously took for
granted.
The drawing below shows only part of the human shoulder’s anatomy. Not shown
is the large deltoid muscle, which overlies the shoulder joint and
connects the upper arm bone (humerus) to the collarbone (clavicle) and
the shoulder blade (scapula). Also not shown is the trapezius muscle
across the back, which connects the left and right scapulas. Both the
deltoid and the trapezius play important roles in stabilizing the
joint.
Image
source: National Institute Of Arthritis And Musculoskeletal And Skin
Diseases (NIAMS); SVG version by Angelito7, Public domain, via Wikimedia
Commons.
Anatomy of the Shoulder Joint
In the drawing, yellow indicates bone, red indicates muscle, blue
indicates tendon, and purple indicates bursa (a fluid-filled cushion).
The dashed black lines indicate the hidden ball-and-socket joint between
the humerus and the scapula. Unlike the hip joint, in which the ball is
deeper in the socket, the shoulder joint is more open. This means the
shoulder joint is less stable than the hip joint, but it is also much
more flexible. In fact, it is the most flexible joint in the human
body.
The biceps muscle at the lower left gets its name from the fact that
it has two heads. One attaches, through a tendon and a small bursa, near
the top of the humerus. The other head attaches to the coracoid
process, an extension of the scapula. The lower end of the biceps muscle
is attached to the forearm. Although it is primarily involved in moving
the forearm, its divided head helps to stabilize the shoulder joint.
Both the flexibility and stability of the shoulder joint are due
primarily to the muscles of the “rotator cuff,” listed on the left side
of the drawing. All four of the listed muscles stretch across the
scapula and attach to the top of the humerus. For a 10-minute tutorial
on the rotator cuff, see here. For a longer (20-minute) tutorial on the movements, bones, and muscles of the shoulder, see here.
The more I have learned about the shoulder joint, the more I have been impressed by its specified complexity, which points to intelligent design.
Imagine my surprise when I came across a six-and-a-half-minute video
claiming that the human shoulder is a “design disaster.” The video was made by Cheddar News,
which describes itself as “the only news network focused on the next
generation of innovators and decision-makers[.] Cheddar News is where
forward thinkers go to learn about the people, ideas and innovations
that are driving change and creating what’s next.”
I am confident that a rigorous argument can be made for the
intelligent design of the human shoulder. But that is not what I present
here. In what follows, I examine the claims against design that are made in the Cheddar News video.
Proof that the Human Shoulder Is a Design Disaster?
The video’s producer is Natalia Ryzak, who has a master’s degree in
journalism from Columbia University. At the beginning, Ryzak explains
that “human shoulder blades tilt down and outwards, whereas chimps tilt
up. Small variations like this are the reason humans have awful
shoulders. And chimps, with whom we share nearly 99% of our DNA, don’t.”
For that, Ryzak continues, “we can thank evolution — or more
specifically, how we are outpacing it.”
But the tilt difference does not explain why the human shoulder is
“awful.” If we spent most of our time swinging from tree branches, it
might; but we don’t. And the claimed 99% similarity between human and
chimp DNA has no bearing on the issue.
Ryzak goes on (from 0:47 to 0:59) to say:
Side effects of a human shoulder
may include dislocation, separation, rotator cuff tears, bursitis,
tendonitis, tendonosis, impingement syndrome, instability, arthritis,
adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder), and fracture.
But these are not “side effects,” any more than getting a flat tire
is a “side effect” of making an automobile. Or having a roof torn off by
a tornado is a “side effect” of building a house. And these problems
are not unique to humans: Chimps can also suffer from arthritis and fractures, among other things.
Enter Nathan Lents, professor of biology at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York City. In 2015, Lents argued on his blog that
the human eye is badly designed, primarily because “the vertebrate
retina is wired in backwards.” Like Richard Dawkins and others before
him, Lents based his claim on the fact that the light-sensing cells face
away from the incoming light. But evidence published from the 1960s onward — and reported in standard textbooks — shows that this arrangement is far better than the one Lents favors.
Back to the video on “Why the Human Shoulder is a Design Disaster.”
Lents says (at 1:30) that the shoulder is “more of a floating joint than
any other joint in the body.” Ryzak explains that the outer layer of
muscles (consisting of the deltoid and trapezius) is stronger than the
inner layer (the rotator cuff). Then Lents continues (from
1:59), “Having such an overlapping meshwork of muscles, what you’re
inviting is pinching, and tearing, as the orientation can shift.” Lents
compares the shoulder joint to the hip joint, in which “the relationship
of the hip to the leg is fairly fixed in place.”
So far, the video has summarized the structure of the shoulder and
its difference from the hip. The shoulder is more flexible than the hip.
Good thing, too, or we wouldn’t be able to perform many of the actions
we do. Just watch an acrobat performing on the parallel bars. Or a
baseball player pitching a fastball. Or an athlete swimming the
butterfly.
But journalist Ryzak confidently concludes ex cathedra (starting
at 2:19) that “we’ve proven to you just how cr*ppy our shoulders are.”
How so? Ryzak doesn’t say. Instead she simply suggests going “back into
the evolution part.”
Does Evolution Explain It All?
According to Lents (starting at 2:28), “In our quadrupedal ancestors,
in our deep past, really we had four legs, they weren’t really arms, to
speak of. When you think of a dog and a cat, they don’t have arms, they
have legs. But they still have a shoulder joint, as we can think of
it.”
Then Ryzak says, “Our shoulders evolved for a life in the trees,
swinging and hanging out. Then we left the trees behind and began to
stand upright. This freed our arms up for other purposes, like hunting
and gathering.” So from four-legged animals that walked and ran on the
ground, we get animals that spend some of their time on the ground but
mostly swing from branches to branches in the trees. Then those animals
“evolved” into animals that stood upright and used their arms for other
purposes. This is the standard Darwinian narrative. But how, exactly,
did four-legged animals on the ground evolve into two-armed animals that
swung on tree branches, which then evolved into two-armed animals that
stood upright on the ground? The video offers no explanation; only an
imaginative story.
Lents continues (starting at 2:54), “We are partially adapted for
throwing, which is… no other animal in our group of animals throws
anything.” This is not true: Chimps can throw, though not as far or as accurately as humans. Indeed, they are infamous for flinging feces at visitors to zoos.
But that’s a minor detail. Lents goes on to say, “So we believe that
throwing was a very strong evolutionary pressure as we began to hunt —
throwing spears, thrusting as well, so thrusting and throwing are very
specific kinds of motion. And that required that floating nature to our
shoulder.” But “evolutionary pressure” just means that throwing favored
the survival of early humans. It does not account for the origin of the
human shoulder. As Darwinian biologists wrote in 1996, adaptations “concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.”
So the claim that “we left the trees behind and began to stand
upright” does not explain the remarkable anatomy of the human shoulder.
After all, chimps leave the trees on a regular basis (though they don’t
stand upright). Yet their shoulder anatomy has not changed.
The Problem and Its Solution
According to Lents (at 3:57), “Part of the problem in present-day
humans is not so much a bad shoulder design but a mismatch between what
our shoulder is designed to do and how we use it on a daily basis.” Of
course, Lents doesn’t think the shoulder was intelligently designed. As a
Darwinist, he believes that the shoulder evolved through accidental
variations and survival of the fittest. And in our immediate ancestors,
the shoulder was adapted (“designed”) to swing through trees.
Most of our modern activities are very different. Ryzak adds (starting at 4:16),
It might surprise you, but simply
sitting at your desk is a major contributor to shoulder problems. When
we hunch forward for days, hours, months, years on end, we end up
causing unnecessary pulls and strains on our rotator cuff muscles. That
can lead to injuries.
Lents explains (starting at 5:20) that you can minimize shoulder
problems by “changing the way you eat, changing the ways you use your
body.” And, Ryzak adds (from 5:34 to 5:52), “pay attention to basic
posture.” So after all the talk about bad design and evolutionary
mismatch, the solution to our “design disaster” is for us to pay
attention to diet, exercise, and posture.
I think I could have figured that out without all the anti-design
rhetoric and Darwinian storytelling. Oh, and I would add: Be careful not
to fall in such a way as to dislocate your shoulder.
The question of the sanctity of human life(specifically at what point should human life be regarded as "sacred") has returned to the public square in big way recently. Much of the discussion has been about what the sciences of medicine and biology have to say as to when any human offspring should be considered a person.
Some maintain that as long as the infant is biologically attached to its mother it ought not to be considered a person and its life ought not to be accorded the same value as a person. This post is addressed primarily to those who are interested in what the bible has to say about the matter,there are individuals on both sides of the issue who are citing scriptures as an authority. I would like to lay out what scriptures and reasonings thereon inform the position of my brothers and me.
Genesis1:27KJV"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. "
All life is the property of God Almighty, human life has a peculiarly sacred quality because Man is a living representation of the supreme divinity. Therefore the destruction of any human life apart from due process is sure to incur divine wrath.
Genesis9:5,6ASV"And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, will I
require; At the hand of every beast will I require it. And at the hand
of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life
of man.
6Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: For in the image of God made he man."
Does this include life in the womb? Consider.
Psalms139:15KJV"My frame was not hidden from thee, When I was made in secret, And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16Thine
eyes did see mine unformed substance; And in thy book they were all
written, Even the days that were ordained for me , When as yet there was
none of them."
The Psalmist was certain that the Lord JEHOVAH loved him from the very beginning,because He knew that there was latent potential to reflect His glory in a unique way in this nascent being. Thus even before this potential was known to any other it was being keenly and sympathetically observed by its source.
Liluke1:42KJV"And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
43And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
" No dedicated servant of JEHOVAH worthy of that designation could ever say "my body my choice". when we made our dedication we handed over all that we are and possess to their rightful owner i.e the God and Father of Jesus Christ. For all of JEHOVAH'S servants the fruit of the womb is JEHOVAH'S we are merely custodians of what is our Lord's the above quoted text further confirms his interest in the potential in the impregnated womb.
1Corinthians6:20NIV"you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies."
"One strength of Arius’s position was that it appeared to safeguard
a strict monotheism while offering an interpretation of the language of
the New Testament—notably, the word Son—that conformed to general usage
and meaning. The weakness of his view was that, precisely because Jesus
was capable of suffering as a human, it was difficult to understand how
he could be fully divine and thus effect the redemption of humankind."
The above quote is taken from the encylopedia brittanica's article on the arian controversy you can read article here,it is a perfect example of the sort question begging stupidity we have come to expect from trinitarians. JEHOVAH'S priest needed to be divine in order to make an acceptable offering? Says who?
1Corinthians15:21KJV"For since by man(not God-man) came death, by man(not God-man) came also the resurrection of the dead. "
Our brother Paul under inspiration begs to differ.
Open the Books is
a nonprofit government watchdog organization dedicated to investigating
and disclosing the many ways in which government spends — and wastes —
our money.
It has a new report out that should raise eyebrows. According to
information garnered from Freedom of Information Act Requests, between
2009-2014, both Anthony Fauci and former NIH director Francis Collins
received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies. This may
present a conflict of interest since they had a great deal of influence
in deciding what research the government funds. From the report:
Last year, the National Institutes
of Health – Anthony Fauci’s employer – doled out $30 billion in
government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. That largess of taxpayer
money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific, research,
and healthcare industries.
However, in our breaking investigation,
we found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the
other way. These are royalty payments from third-party payers (think
pharmaceutical companies) back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists.
We
estimate that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350
million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH
scientists – who are credited as co-inventors.
Because those
payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty
payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure.
When bench scientists’ research leads to monetized benefit in the
private sector, I suppose royalties are in order. And certainly,
government funding should reap benefits for the government when that
investments leads to the development of profitable products.
Administrators, Not Researchers
But Collins and Fauci, as far as I know, were administrators, not
researchers. Yet OTB found that they received royalties from drug
companies:
Since the NIH documents are
heavily redacted, we can only see how many payments each scientist
received, and, separately, the aggregate dollars per NIH agency. This is
a gatekeeping at odds with the spirit and perhaps the letter of
open-records laws.
We found agency leadership and top scientists
at NIH receiving royalty payments. Well-known scientists receiving
payments during the period included:
Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) and the highest-paid federal bureaucrat, received 23 royalty
payments. (Fauci’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $456,028).
Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009-2021, received 14 payments. (Collins’ 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $203,500)
Clifford Lane, Fauci’s deputy at NIAID, received 8 payments. (Lane’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $325,287)
In
the above examples, although we know the number of payments to each
scientist, we still don’t know how much money was paid – because the
dollar figure was deleted (redacted) from the disclosures.
It’s
been a struggle to get any useful information out of the agency on its
royalty payments. NIH is acting like royalty payments are a state
secret. (They’re not, or shouldn’t be!)
Did Collins and Fauci earn these royalties from work performed before
their government service or as bench researchers? Are they partial
patent owners? If so, what did they contribute to the product’s
development? If they were rewarded for acting as administrators and not
researchers, is it akin to a kickback?
As Opaque as Possible
Unfortunately, the NIH is keeping the matter as opaque as they can:
Consider how NIH is using taxpayer money to try and keep taxpayers ignorant and in the dark:
1.
NIH defied the federal Freedom of Information Act law and refused to
even acknowledge our open records request for the royalty payments. We
filed our FOIA last September.
2. NIH used expensive
taxpayer-funded litigation to slow-walk royalty disclosures (releasing
the oldest royalties first). Although the agency admits to holding 3,000
pages, it will take ten months to produce them (300 pages per month).
With Judicial Watch as our lawyers, we sued NIH in federal court last
October.
3. NIH is heavily redacting key information on the
royalty payments. For example, the agency erased 1. the payment amount,
and, 2. who paid it! This makes the court-mandated production virtually
worthless, despite our use of the latest forensic auditing tools.
NIH is essentially telling you, the taxpayer, to pay up and shut up. They’ll run things.
To say the least, congressional oversight is warranted over these
questions. It’s time for Fauci and Collins to answer some pointed
questions in open hearings.
A new episode of ID the Future spotlights the groundbreaking new book The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence, with
author and biologist Michael Denton reading excerpts from the work.
Here Denton, who is also an MD, marvels at the engineering
sophistication of the human heart and hands. Then he dives into the
heart of his new book, with just a small sampling of the many ways
nature appears fine tuned for bipedal, intelligent,
technology-developing creatures such as ourselves. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
One or two such examples are interesting. But where the argument
gains dramatic force is in the accumulation of many examples, stretching
from physics and the characteristics of our sun to chemistry and the
ensemble of unique characteristics of planet Earth, water, carbon, and
the transition metals. To appreciate the full force of Denton’s prior
fitness argument, pick up his newly released book here,
where you can also check out the ringing endorsements from other
scientists such as Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe and Henry
Schaefer III, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the
Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia.
Athanasian Creed, also called Quicumque Vult (from the opening words in Latin), a Christian profession of faith in about 40 verses. It is regarded as authoritative in the Roman Catholic and some Protestant churches. It has two sections, one dealing with the Trinity and the other with the Incarnation; and it begins and ends with stern warnings that unswerving adherence
to such truths is indispensable to salvation. The virulence of these
damnatory clauses has led some critics, especially in the Anglican
churches, to secure restriction or abandonment of the use of the creed.
