Rosh hashana a brief history.

 Rosh Hashana 

 

Encyclopedia Britannica

Rosh Hashana

Home

Philosophy & Religion

Religious Beliefs

Rosh Hashana

Judaism

Alternate titles: Day of Judgment, Day of Remembrance, Rosh Ha-shanah, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Ha-Zikkaron, Yom Teruah

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit History

Rosh Hashana, (Hebrew: “Beginning of the Year”) , Hashana also spelled Hashanah or Ha-shanah, also called Day of Judgment or Day of Remembrance, a major Jewish observance now accepted as inaugurating the religious New Year on Tishri 1 (September or October). Because the New Year ushers in a 10-day period of self-examination and penitence, Rosh Hashana is also called the annual Day of Judgment; during this period each Jew reviews his relationship with God, the Supreme Judge. A distinctive feature of the liturgy is the blowing of the ram’s horn (shofar) as prescribed in Numbers 29:1; the notes of the shofar call the Jewish people to a spiritual awakening associated with the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai. During the Additional Service in the synagogue, the shofar is sounded after the recital of each of three groups of prayers. Rosh Hashana is observed Monday, September 26, 2022. Rosh Hashana is also known as the Day of Remembrance, for on this day Jews commemorate the creation of the world, and the Jewish nation recalls its responsibilities as God’s chosen people. 

On the first night of Rosh Hashana a New Year’s custom dictates that delicacies be prepared as omens of good luck. On the following night bread and fruit, dipped in honey, are customarily eaten, and a special blessing is recited. Rosh Hashana is the only festival observed for two days in Israel. 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 

Yet more on the origin of life's antiDarwinian bias.

Origin of the First Self-Replicating Molecules 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the sixth entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here.   

In an undergraduate seminar taught by Stanley Miller that I (Casey Luskin) took as a student at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Miller taught us that “making compounds and making life are two different things.”1 Many variants of Stanley Miller’s experimental setup have been used in attempting to demonstrate the conversion of energy-rich, gaseous-phase chemicals into amino acids and other biomolecular monomers. But this is not nearly sufficient to generate life. Any origin-of-life explanation must include plausible biochemical paths from individual bio-building blocks like amino acids or nucleic acids to functional polymers such as proteins and DNA. The origin-of-life explanation must also include ways to speed up chemical reactions that are naturally slow. In living cells, long chains of amino acids fold up into 3-D structures that allow them to function as enzymes that greatly accelerate chemical reactions, as seen in the figure below. How could these arise before life existed? More importantly, any origin-of-life model must account for the very particular sequencing of the molecules — i.e., the ordering of amino acids in proteins and nucleotide bases in RNA and DNA that allows them to function properly. This means explaining a crucial aspect of life: the origin of its information, or what proponents of intelligent design (ID) call the “information sequence problem.” 

The Most Popular Proposal  

For some theorists, the origin of life is defined as the natural origin of a self-replicating system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.2 The most popular proposal for the first self-replicating molecule is RNA — where life was first based upon RNA carrying both genetic information (akin to modern DNA) and performing catalytic functions (akin to modern enyzmes), in what is termed the RNA world. Before we delve deeply into that, it is instructive to use the proceedings of a conference organized by the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986 to measure the progress that has been made in origin-of-life research from 1952-1986. 

I (Walter Bradley) attended this conference and watched one of the plenary sessions devoted to a spirited debate between scientists who believed that the first life was made of DNA (“DNA-first”) and those who believed that the first biomolecules were proteins (“protein-first”). Neither group had yet been able to synthesize under plausible conditions either protein or DNA. Proteins can act as a chemical catalyst. DNA is the repository of information that is used to make functional protein. One of the outcomes from the conference was the sense that neither protein-first nor DNA-first were promising pathways to explaining the origin of life. But the difficulty demonstrating a plausible biochemical pathway for the origin of life that went through DNA-first or protein-first created an openness to new alternative possibilities. In 1986, the RNA world was just emerging as a popular alternative to protein-first or DNA-first models.

At the concluding plenary session, leading origin-of-life researcher Robert Shapiro addressed the RNA world and traced citations in the biochemical literature of the synthesis of RNA molecules under conditions thought to represent the early Earth conditions. The results were shocking. He cited a 1986 paper indicating RNA synthesis under prebiotic conditions had been demonstrated repeatedly, citing a 1985 paper and alluding to others. But that 1985 paper did not present original work — rather, it cited a 1984 paper and went all the way back to 1968 without any original work cited. A close reading of the 1968 paper indicated that the authors thought that they might have synthesized RNA molecules under prebiotic conditions but had not actually found any.  

Five Huge Barriers 

Shapiro’s talk subsequently presented five huge barriers to this biochemical pathway from prebiotic chemistry to the first living systems. At the end of his dramatic presentation, the room of most of the world’s most active origin-of-life researchers fell silent. The chair of the session, who was also the editor of the premiere journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, repeatedly invited questions from the stunned audience. It was the only time in my (Walter Bradley) professional lifetime that I attended a plenary session of scientists and engineers where there were no questions. The chair closed the session without any questions offered, and he closed with the comment, “Robert, do you have to be so pessimistic?” Robert did not reply, but might have said he was letting the data do the talking, and the data told a very pessimistic story. 

History has confirmed Shapiro’s pessimism. Despite these difficulties, to this day, the RNA world remains the most popular model for the origin of life. But there are major problems with the RNA world hypothesis and claims that a self-replicating RNA molecule appeared by pure chance. 

First, RNA has not been shown to assemble in a laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Origin-of-life theorist Steven Benner explained that a major obstacle to the natural production of RNA is that “RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair” due to water’s “rapid and irreversible” corrosive effects upon RNA.3 In this “water paradox,” Benner explains that “life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g., RNA) necessary for life.”4

To overcome such difficulties, Benner and other chemists carefully designed experimental conditions that are favorable to the production of RNA. But Robert Shapiro explains that these experiments do not simulate natural conditions: “The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth.”5 Reviewing attempts to construct RNA in the lab, James Tour likewise found that “[t]he conditions they used were cleverly selected,” but in the natural world, “the controlled conditions required to generate” RNA are “painfully improbable.”6 Origin-of-life theorists Michael Robertson  and Gerald Joyce even called the natural origin of RNA a “Prebiotic Chemist’s Nightmare” because of “the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth.”7 In the end, these experiments demonstrate one thing: RNA can only form by intelligent design. 

A Second Problem 

Today, RNA is capable of carrying genetic information, but RNA world advocates claim that in the past, it also fulfilled the kinds of catalytic roles that enzymes perform today. A second problem with the RNA world is that RNA molecules do not exhibit many of the properties that allow proteins to serve as worker molecules in the cell. While RNA has been shown to perform a few roles, there is no evidence that it could perform all necessary cellular functions.8 As one paper put it, proteins are “one million times fitter than RNA as catalysts” and “[t]he catalytic repertoire of RNA is too limited.”9 

The Origin of Information 

The most fundamental problem with the RNA world hypothesis is its inability to explain the origin of information in the first self-replicating RNA molecule — which experts suggest would have had to be at least 100 nucleotides long, if not between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.10 How did the nucleotide bases in RNA become properly ordered to produce life? There are no known chemical or physical laws that can do this. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, origin-of-life theorists have no explanation other than blind chance. As noted, ID theorists call this obstacle the information sequence problem, but multiple mainstream theorists have also observed the great unlikelihood of naturally producing a precise RNA sequence required for replication. Shapiro puts the problem this way: 

A profound difficulty exists, however, with the idea of RNA, or any other replicator, at the start of life. Existing replicators can serve as templates for the synthesis of additional copies of themselves, but this device cannot be used for the preparation of the very first such molecule, which must arise spontaneously from an unorganized mixture. The formation of an information-bearing homo-polymer through undirected chemical synthesis appears very improbable.11 

Elsewhere, Shapiro notes, “The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable” with a probability that “is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.”12 A 2020 paper in Scientific Reports similarly notes, “Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life” because “the formation of such a long polymer having a correct nucleotide sequence by random reactions seems statistically unlikely.”13 Steven Benner refers to the “Information-Need Paradox,” where self-replicating RNA molecules would be “too long to have arisen spontaneously” from available building blocks.14 Benner raises an additional logical difficulty in that generating an RNA molecule capable of catalyzing its own replication is much less likely than generating RNA molecules that catalyze the destruction of RNA. This suggest a grave theoretical difficulty where RNA world theorists are faced with a “chemical theory that makes destruction, not biology, the natural outcome.”15 

An Intractable Problem 

The paper in Scientific Reports proposed a solution to these quandaries that showed just how intractable this problem is: It concluded that because the formation of a single self-replicating RNA molecule is prohibitively unlikely in the observable universe, and therefore the universe must be far larger than we observe — an “inflationary universe” that increases the probabilistic resources until such an unlikely event becomes likely. This is just like the materialist response to the fine-tuning of physics: When the observed specificity of nature appears to indicate design, they invent multiverses to overcome probabilistic difficulties. When RNA world theorists are appealing to the origin-of-life’s version of the multiverse to avoid falsification, it’s clear that their project has fatal problems.  

Notes 

1)Statements made by Stanley Miller at a talk given by him for a UCSD Origins of Life seminar class on January 19, 1999 (the talk was attended and notated by the author of this article).

2)Steven A. Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life,” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 44 (2014), 339-343.

3)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

4)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

5)Robert Shapiro, quoted in Richard Van Noorden, “RNA world easier to make,” Nature News (May 13, 2009), http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.471.html (accessed November 18, 2020).

6)James Tour, “Are Present Proposals on Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms Accurately Pointing Toward First Life?,” Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, eds. Edited by J.P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 165-191.

7)Michael P. Robertson and Gerald F. Joyce, “The Origins of the RNA World,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology 4 (May 2012), a003608.

8)See Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 304.

9)Harold S Bernhardt, “The RNA world hypothesis: the worst theory of the early evolution of life (except for all the others),” Biology Direct 7 (2012), 23.

10)Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel, and P. Luigi Luisi, “Synthesizing Life,” Nature, 409 (January 18, 2001), 387-390; 10)Tomonori Totani, “Emergence of life in an inflationary universe,” Scientific Reports 10 (2020), 1671.

11)Robert Shapiro, “A Replicator Was Not Involved in the Origin of Life,” IUBMB Life 49 (2000), 173-176.

12)Robert Shapiro, “A Simpler Origin for Life,” Scientific American (June 2007), 46-53.

13)Totani, “Emergence of life in an inflationary universe.”

14)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

15)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

 

Charles Darwin, back to the future?

 Listen: Darwin Returns from the Future 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

On a classic episode of ID the Future, hear the concluding episode of I, Charles Darwin, in which author Nickell John Romjue’s time-traveling Darwin returns to his family home and offers some final reflections on his eye-opening visit to the 21st century. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Part 1 of the audio series is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com 

What does the origin of life have to do with Darwinism?

It has become obvious to many, present company included, that Darwinism is less about explaining the origins of anything,and more about explaining away the technology manifest in living systems. That being the case the origin of life is very relevant . Being prebiotic, the origin of life is by definition pre Darwinian ,thus if the technology that Darwinists are attempting to explain away via their theory precedes Darwinian evolution that would certainly constitute a fail. 

Why no rise of the machines.

 New from Science Uprising — Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, and the Human Difference 

David Klinghoffer 

The latest Science Uprising episode is out and what it has to say is important. From the late Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, some of the smartest people on Earth have issued warnings about the looming danger posed by artificial intelligence. Not only is AI an amazing technology, they say, with the potential for uses both good and bad, but it threatens to replace and destroy humanity. The media love this particular concept and continually seek to scare us with it. Why?

The episode calls out the idea for what it is: applied materialism. Materialism is the denial of a spiritual reality. It animates Darwinian thinking, and it drives the panic about AI. After all, if humans are no more than “meat machines,” then a superior machine, equipped with AI, could well choose to do away with us. However, as four notable scholars explain here, AI runs on algorithms, which are essentially a recipe. AI does only what it’s programmed to do. Humans transcend algorithms. We do things that computers will never be able to accomplish: 

An Unexpected Gift 

Interviewed for the episode, Robert J. Marks, John Lennox, Jay Richards, and Selmer Bringsjord have profound things to teach. Dr. Marks, for example, is a renowned computer engineer at Baylor University who directs Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. He says that by its nature, AI is locked in a silo or box where it exercises its ability to run algorithms. Creativity, not mere copying or following commands, entails thinking “outside the box.” That’s how it can surprise us with genuine novelty. It’s why new ideas often come to us from out of the blue: not summoned but given as an unexpected gift.

This, too, may be why artists notoriously live disordered lives, and why totalitarian societies are typically poor in art (as distinct from kitsch or propaganda) and in creativity generally. The regimentation is not compatible with giving free rein to the human difference. It’s something to think about as rule by authoritarian experts becomes more and more the expectation in our own culture. Young people especially need to understand this. Watch the new Science Uprising now and share it

The OOL'S antiDarwinian bias continued.

 The “Clumping” Problem and the Origin of Life 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin 

 Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the fifth entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here. 

Assuming that prebiotic organic polymers could be created under some set of natural conditions, the origin of life still cannot occur unless the requisite molecules can be concentrated or “clumped” together in some protective container where necessary chemical reactions can take place. In living organisms, such environments are the basic unit of life — the cell. But could something like a cell membrane arise naturally before life existed? 

In the 1970s, biochemist Sidney Fox and colleagues believed they had uncovered primitive cell membrane-like structures called protenoid microspheres.1 Other structures called coacervates were proposed, first by Oparin, as potential precursors to modern cell membranes.2 Because these structures lack any metabolism and the ability to self-reproduce,3they clearly could not constitute life. But even if these structures could do those things, they are unable to perform the most basic protective function of cell membranes: discriminate among nutrients, waste products, and toxic chemicals. 

Campbell’s Biology, a prominent college-level biology textbook, explains this requirement: 

One of the earliest episodes in the evolution of life may have been the formation of a membrane that enclosed a solution different from the surrounding solution while still permitting the uptake of nutrients and elimination of waste products. The ability of the cell to discriminate in its chemical exchanges with its environment is fundamental to life, and it is the plasma membrane and its component molecules that make this selectivity possible.4 

A Smart, Active Gatekeeper 

Undoubtedly the textbook is correct: Without this extremely important protective barrier, the earliest forms of life would be unable to obtain food and be vulnerable to harmful molecules and chemical reactions in the outside environment, such as oxidation. The membrane also keeps the cell’s components together to allow for necessary cellular processes to take place. But the “lipid bilayer” of modern cells is no mere passive wall — it’s a smart, active gatekeeper capable of allowing water and nutrients in, and letting waste products out. Specialized machines embedded in this smart membrane discriminate between helpful and harmful substances through a variety of biochemical pathways and molecular pumps. Hence the problem for origin-of-life theorists — as synthetic chemist James Tour of Rice University explains, no origin-of-life experiments have ever created “the required passive transport sites and active pumps for the passage of ions and molecules through bilayer membranes.”5 

Daunting Complexity 

Tour elaborates on the daunting complexity of cell membranes that remains unexplained by origin-of-life theorists:

Researchers have identified thousands of different lipid structures in modern cell membranes. These include glycerolipids, sphingolipids, sterols, prenols, saccharolipids, and polyketides. For this reason, selecting the bilayer composition for our synthetic membrane target is far from straightforward. When making synthetic vesicles — synthetic lipid bilayer membranes — mixtures of lipids can, it should be noted, destabilize the system.

Lipid bilayers surround subcellular organelles, such as nuclei and mitochondria, which are themselves nanosystems and microsystems. Each of these has their own lipid composition.

Lipids have a nonsymmetric distribution. The outer and inner faces of the lipid bilayer are chemically inequivalent and cannot be interchanged.6

Despite modest progress with the synthetic production of microspheres, coacervates, and similar structures, the lack of any discrimination ability means the clumping step in the origin of life has not been explained. 

Notes 

1)sidney W. Fox, John R. Jungck, and Tadayoshi Nakashima, “From Protenoic Microsphere to Contemporary Cell: Formation of Internucleotide and Peptide Bonds by Protenoid Particles,” Origins of Life 5 (1974), 227-237. 

2)Emanuele Astoricchio, Caterina Alfano, Lawrence Rajendran, Piero Andrea Temussi, and Annalisa Pastore, “The Wide World of Coacervates: From the Sea to Neurodegeneration,” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 45 (August 2020), 706-717.

3)Zhu Hua, “On the Origin of Life: A Possible Way from Fox’s Microspheres into Primitive Life,” Symbiosis 4 (2018), 1-7.

4)Jane B. Reece, Lisa A. Urry, Michael L. Cain, Steven A. Wasserman, Peter V. Minorsky, and Robert B. Jackson, Cambell’s Biology, 9th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2011), 125.

5)James Tour, “An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Inference Review: International Review of Science 3 (2017), 2.

6)Tour, “An Open Letter to My Colleagues.”

Science is catching up with God?

Meyer: Webb Telescope Confirms a Cosmic Beginning

David Klinghoffer 

One of the three pillars of Stephen Meyer’s “God Hypothesis” argument is the fact that the universe had a beginning a finite time ago. Or is it a fact? A physics researcher, Eric Lerner, won himself some big media time recently with the claim that images from the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were casting serious doubt on the Big Bang. The images showed far too many fully formed galaxies too soon after the universe began, according to the Big Bang theory. Did this hint that the universe, in fact, had no beginning, at least as we understand that?

Writing at The Daily Wire, Dr. Meyer examines Lerner’s case and explains what’s wrong with it. The question has to do with red-shifted (i.e., stretched out) radiation and so-called “tired light.” 

If the JWST were to detect “uber” red shifted radiation coming from extremely ancient, distant galaxies, that would provide additional confirmation that the universe has expanded as much as the Big Bang theory predicts. 

So has the JWST detected such radiation? It has. In fact, there would be no extremely distant galaxies to analyze had the JWST not detected long wavelength infrared radiation coming from them. Remember the JWST was specifically designed to detect such infrared radiation. Thus, the fact that it has been able to produce images of extremely distant galaxies shows that it has collected the kind of radiation astronomers would expect if the universe is expanding as the Big Bang theory affirms. 

Lerner mentions none of this. Instead, he highlights surprising discoveries about how many galaxies had formed in those remote periods in cosmic history. He argues that, given current theory, we should not expect to see so many galaxies so early. 

Perhaps. But the evidence he cites challenges models of galaxy formation, not an expanding universe or the Big Bang. 

Interestingly, Lerner acknowledges that the JWST has detected extremely red-shifted radiation. But he explains this away with something called the “tired-light hypothesis.” He acknowledges that wavelengths increase with distance but denies the expansion of space produces that elongation. Instead, he asserts light stretches out as it loses energy in transit. 

Yet the tired-light hypothesis has been discredited. No known mechanism degrades the energy of a photon of light without changing its direction and momentum. But any such change would cause images of the object emitting the photon to blur. That blurring has not been observed. 

Lerner’s arguments have also been rejected because of other astronomical evidence — the observed abundance of light elements and the famed “Cosmic Background ” — that the Big Bang model explains uniquely well. 

“In the Beginning…”

In Return of the Hypothesis, Meyer recounts why scientists, even Einstein, resisted the Big Bang as it was formulated initially by Georges Lemaître. The philosophical stakes were just too enormous. Materialism could not accept so massive a confirmation of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning…”

Because of this, even as Lerner’s bid for publicity will be a thing of the past soon enough, you can be sure that an atmosphere of nervousness about cosmology and what it teaches will persist. Just in the past month, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder asked, “Did the Big Bang happen?” (Her answer: We can’t know how the universe originated, if it did.) And Scientific American proclaimed, without a mention of Lerner, “JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology.” These are challenges that are NOT going away. 

 

Yet another rant against post millenialism

 Luke18:8KJV"I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"  

A balanced consideration of this text would certainly not leave a fair minded truthseeker with the impression that our Lord expected to find (true) Christianity having gained universal(or even widespread)  acceptance upon his return.

Revelation3:9KJV"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. " 

So rather than being rendered impotent during the church's time on earth , Satan retains rulership over the Government's of this age . This fact test the ( true) church "10 days" i.e the entirety of the end times. Doesn't sound very post millenialist to me. 

Revelation16:8,9KJV"8And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. 9And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory." 

Again our Lord puts true Christians on notice that in this present age there will never be any heeding of the warning that JEHOVAH is giving through his loyalists, bible truth and those promulgating it will continue to be treated with contempt until the Lord JEHOVAH reasserts his rightful sovereignty over this planet. 

Michael Behe's defense of the design argument continues.

 Michael Behe Answers More Reasonable Objections to Intelligent Design 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

Michael Behe Answers More Reasonable Objections to Intelligent Design

A new ID the Future episode continues A Mousetrap for Darwin author Michael Behe’s conversation with philosopher Pat Flynn, focused on some of the more substantive objections to Behe’s case for intelligent design in biology. In this segment the pair discuss the bacterial flagellum, the cilium, and the blood clotting cascade, and tackle critiques from Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Russell Doolittle, Kenneth Miller, and others. Download the podcast or listen to it here. e.

And still even yet more on the OOL'S anti-Darwinian bias

Forming Polymers: A Problem for the Origin of Life 

Walter Bradley 

Casey Luskin 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the fourth entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here. 

Assume for a moment that there was some way to produce simple organic molecules on the early Earth. Perhaps these molecules did form a primordial soup, or perhaps they arose near some high-energy hydrothermal vent. Either way, origin-of-life theorists must then explain how amino acids or other key organic molecules linked up to form long chains (polymers), thereby forming proteins or RNA through a process called polymerization. 

A Popular Model 

A problem for the primordial soup version of this model is that it would be at chemical equilibrium, without any free energy for organic monomers to react further.1 Indeed, chemically speaking, the last place you would want to link amino acids or other monomers into chains would be a vast, water-based environment like the primordial soup or in the ocean near a hydrothermal vent. As the U.S. National Academy of Sciences acknowledges, “Two amino acids do not spontaneously join in water. Rather, the opposite reaction is thermodynamically favored.”2 Origin-of-life theorists Stanley Miller and Jeffrey Bada similarly acknowledged that the polymerization of amino acids into peptides “is unfavorable in the presence of liquid water at all temperatures.”3 In other words, water breaks protein chains of monomers back down into amino acids (or other constituents), making it very difficult to produce proteins (or other polymers like RNA) in the primordial soup or underwater near a hydrothermal vent. 

The hydrothermal vent model is popular among origin-of-life theorists because it represents a high-energy environment, but this model faces additional problems. Hydrothermal vents tend to be short-lived, lasting perhaps only hundreds of years4 — timescales so short that the origin of life at undersea vents has been said to be “essentially akin to spontaneous generation.”5 It is also difficult to envision how prebiotic chemicals could become concentrated in such a chaotic, unbounded oceanic environment.6 

The Biggest Obstacle 

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to the origin of life at hydrothermal vents is implied in their name: extremely high temperatures. According to Scientific American, experiments by Miller and Bada on the durability of prebiotic compounds near vents showed that the superheated water would “destroy rather than create complex organic compounds.”7

In the view of Miller and Bada, “organic synthesis would not occur in hydrothermal vent waters,” indicating that vents are not an option for the origin of life because “[a]ny origin-of-life theory that proposes conditions of temperature and time inconsistent with the stability of the compounds involved can be dismissed solely on that basis.”8 Some might reply that certain alkaline thermal vents have lower temperatures,9 but the high pH present near alkaline vents tend to precipitate carbon into carbonate minerals, with very little carbon remaining in the seawater for prebiotic chemical reactions,10 and such a high pH is highly destructive to RNA.11 As one paper put it, “the evolution of RNA is unlikely to have occurred in the vicinity of an alkaline deep-sea hydrothermal vent.”12 

Notes 

1)Nick Lane, John F. Allen, and William Martin, “How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the origin of life,” BioEssays 2 (2010), 271-280.

2)Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, National Research Council, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2007), 60.

3)Stanley Miller and Jeffrey Bada, “Submarine hot springs and the origin of life,” Nature 334 (August 18, 1988), 609-611.

4)John Horgan, “In the Beginning,” Scientific American 264 (February 1991), 116-125. Horgan is discussing the research of Miller and Bada in Miller and Bada, “Submarine hot springs and the origin of life.” 

5)Jeffrey L. Bada, “New insights into prebiotic chemistry from Stanley Miller’s spark discharge experiments,” Chemical Society Review 42 (2013), 2186-2196.

6)Koichiro Matsuno and Eiichi Imai, “Hydrothermal Vent Origin of Life Models,” Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, eds. Gargaud M. et al. (Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2015), 1162-1166.

7)Horgan, “In the Beginning.”

8)Miller and Bada, “Submarine hot springs and the origin of life.” See also Stanley L. Miller and Antonio Lazcano, “The Origin of Life Did It Occur at High Temperatures?,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 41 (1995), 689-692.

9)Matsuno and Imai, “Hydrothermal Vent Origin of Life Models”; Deborah S. Kelley et al., “An off-axis hydrothermal vent field near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at 30°N,” Nature 412 (July 12, 2001), 145-149; Deborah S. Kelley et al., “A Serpentinite-Hosted Ecosystem: The Lost City Hydrothermal Field,” Science 307 (March 4, 2005), 1428-1434.

10)Norio Kitadai and Shigenori Maruyama, “Origins of building blocks of life: A review,” Geoscience Frontiers 9 (2018), 1117-1153.

11)Harold S. Bernhardt and Warren P. Tate, “Primordial soup or vinaigrette: did the RNA world evolve at acidic pH?,” Biology Direct 7 (2012), 4.

12)Bernhardt and Tate, “Primordial soup or vinaigrette?” 

 

The Manhattan project a brief history.

Manhattan Project, U.S. government research project (1942–45) that produced the first atomic bombs.

American scientists, many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe, took steps in 1939 to organize a project to exploit the newly recognized fission process for military purposes. The first contact with the government was made by G.B. Pegram of Columbia University, who arranged a conference between Enrico Fermi and the Navy Department in March 1939. In the summer of 1939, Albert Einstein was persuaded by his fellow scientists to use his influence and present the military potential of an uncontrolled fission chain reaction to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. In February 1940, $6,000 was made available to start research under the supervision of a committee headed by L.J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards (later National Institute of Standards and Technology). On December 6, 1941, the project was put under the direction of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush. 

After the U.S. entry into World War II, the War Department was given joint responsibility for the project, because by mid-1942 it was obvious that a vast array of pilot plants, laboratories, and manufacturing facilities would have to be constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so that the assembled scientists could carry out their mission. In June 1942 the Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan District was initially assigned management of the construction work (because much of the early research had been performed at Columbia University, in Manhattan), and in September 1942 Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves was placed in charge of all Army activities (chiefly engineering activities) relating to the project. “Manhattan Project” became the code name for research work that would extend across the country. It was known in 1940 that German scientists were working on a similar project and that the British were also exploring the problem. In the fall of 1941 Harold C. Urey and Pegram visited England to attempt to set up a cooperative effort, and by 1943 a combined policy committee with Great Britain and Canada was established. In that year a number of scientists of those countries moved to the United States to join the project there.

If the project were to achieve success quickly, several lines of research and development had to be carried on simultaneously before it was certain whether any might succeed. The explosive materials then had to be produced and be made suitable for use in an actual weapon. 

Uranium-235, the essential fissionable component of the postulated bomb, cannot be separated from its natural companion, the much more abundant uranium-238, by chemical means; the atoms of these respective isotopes must rather be separated from each other by physical means. Several physical methods to do this were intensively explored, and two were chosen—the electromagnetic process developed at the University of California, Berkeley, under Ernest Orlando Lawrence and the diffusion process developed under Urey at Columbia University. Both of these processes, and particularly the diffusion method, required large, complex facilities and huge amounts of electric power to produce even small amounts of separated uranium-235. Philip Hauge Abelson developed a third method called thermal diffusion, which was also used for a time to effect a preliminary separation. These methods were put into production at a 70-square-mile (180-square-km) tract near Knoxville, Tennessee, originally known as the Clinton Engineer Works, later as Oak Ridge 

Only one method was available for the production of the fissionable material plutonium-239. It was developed at the metallurgical laboratory of the University of Chicago under the direction of Arthur Holly Compton and involved the transmutation in a reactor pile of uranium-238. In December 1942 Fermi finally succeeded in producing and controlling a fission chain reaction in this reactor pile at Chicago. 

Quantity production of plutonium-239 required the construction of a reactor of great size and power that would release about 25,000 kilowatt-hours of heat for each gram of plutonium produced. It involved the development of chemical extraction procedures that would work under conditions never before encountered. An intermediate step in putting this method into production was taken with the construction of a medium-size reactor at Oak Ridge. The large-scale production reactors were built on an isolated 1,000-square-mile (2,600-square-km) tract on the Columbia River north of Pasco, Washington—the Hanford Engineer Works. 

Before 1943, work on the design and functioning of the bomb itself was largely theoretical, based on fundamental experiments carried out at a number of different locations. In that year a laboratory directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer was created on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 34 miles (55 km) north of Santa Fe. This laboratory had to develop methods of reducing the fissionable products of the production plants to pure metal and fabricating the metal to required shapes. Methods of rapidly bringing together amounts of fissionable material to achieve a supercritical mass (and thus a nuclear explosion) had to be devised, along with the actual construction of a deliverable weapon that would be dropped from a plane and fused to detonate at the proper moment in the air above the target. Most of these problems had to be solved before any appreciable amount of fissionable material could be produced, so that the first adequate amounts could be used at the fighting front with minimum delay. 

By the summer of 1945, amounts of plutonium-239 sufficient to produce a nuclear explosion had become available from the Hanford Works, and weapon development and design were sufficiently far advanced so that an actual field test of a nuclear explosive could be scheduled. Such a test was no simple affair. Elaborate and complex equipment had to be assembled so that a complete diagnosis of success or failure could be had. By this time the original $6,000 authorized for the Manhattan Project had grown to $2 billion. 

The first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, at a site on the Alamogordo air base 120 miles (193 km) south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was detonated on top of a steel tower surrounded by scientific equipment, with remote monitoring taking place in bunkers occupied by scientists and a few dignitaries 10,000 yards (9 km) away. The explosion came as an intense light flash, a sudden wave of heat, and later a tremendous roar as the shock wave passed and echoed in the valley. A ball of fire rose rapidly, followed by a mushroom cloud extending to 40,000 feet (12,200 metres). The bomb generated an explosive power equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT); the tower was completely vaporized and the surrounding desert surface fused to glass for a radius of 800 yards (730 metres). The following month, two other atomic bombs produced by the project, the first using uranium-235 and the second using plutonium, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica •

Is this soup past its 'sell by'date.

A Mystery: Prebiotic Synthesis of Simple Organic Monomers 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the third entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here. 

The Miller-Urey experiments were conducted in 1952–19531 and were celebrated as a great breakthrough in the search for a chemical pathway from gases assumed to be present in the early Earth’s atmosphere to chemical reactions that produced amino acids, the building blocks for protein molecules. This experiment (see the apparatus depicted below), and other similar experiments, have produced additional simple monomers — certain building blocks of life.  

 Critiques of Miller-Urey 

Subsequently, careful critiques of the Miller-Urey experiments and similar experiments created great doubt about their significance, though they are still taught in some high school textbooks as if they were scientifically sound. The atmosphere used in their experiments assumed a very energy-rich primordial atmosphere of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, none of which would have been chemically stable in an early-Earth atmosphere. Studies of the early Earth’s atmosphere by NASA during the 1980s confirmed that the mix of atmospheric gases used in the groundbreaking Miller-Urey experiments was wrong. The journal Science summed up the discoveries in 1980 by noting, “No geological or geochemical evidence collected in the last thirty years favors an energy rich, strongly reducing primitive atmosphere (i.e., hydrogen, ammonia, methane, with no oxygen). Only the success of the Miller laboratory experiments recommends it.”2 Later articles put it equally bluntly — in 1995, Science stated that “the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey situation.”3 Again in 2008, an article in Science reported, “Geoscientists today doubt that the primitive atmosphere had the highly reducing composition Miller used.”4 

Atmosphere of the Early Earth 

There are good reasons to understand why the Earth’s early atmosphere did not contain high concentrations of methane, ammonia, or other reducing gases. Earth’s early atmosphere is thought to have been produced by outgassing from volcanoes, and the composition of those volcanic gases is related to the chemical properties of the Earth’s inner mantle and core. Geochemical studies have found that the chemical properties of the Earth’s interior would have been very similar in the past as they are today.5 But today, volcanic gases do not contain methane or ammonia, and are not generally reducing. Instead, an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide is preferred, but this poses a problem for prebiotic synthesis experiments, as prominent origin of life theorist David Deamer observed: “Carbon dioxide does not support the rich array of synthetic pathways leading to possible monomers, so the question arose again: what was the primary source of organic carbon compounds?”6

Another problem with Miller-Urey type prebiotic synthesis experiments is that when amino acids are synthesized from energy-rich gases, a racemic mixture of amino acids is created with 50 percent L-amino acids and 50 percent D-amino acids, sometimes called left-handed and right-handed. Proteins molecules created in living systems must have 100 percent L-amino acids. If there are any D-amino acids in the chain, it would prevent the chain of amino acids from folding up into the proper three-dimensional protein structures associated with this amino acid string, preventing it from performing its function. 

More Problems with Miller-Urey 

There are many additional problems with Miller-Urey-type research that seeks to identify plausible chemical pathways for the synthesis of proteins, DNA, and RNA molecules — the molecules of life. So drastic is the evidence against prebiotic synthesis of life’s building blocks that in 1990, the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council recommended a “reexamination of biological monomer synthesis under primitive Earthlike environments, as revealed in current models of the early Earth.”7 Because of these difficulties, many leading theorists have abandoned the Miller-Urey experiment and the “primordial soup” model it is claimed to support. In 2010, University College London biochemist Nick Lane stated the primordial soup theory “doesn’t hold water” and is “past its expiration date.”8 Instead, he proposes that life arose in undersea hydrothermal vents where water circulates through hot volcanic rock at the bottom of the ocean. But both the hydrothermal vent and primordial soup hypotheses face another major problem. 

Notes 

1)Stanley L. Miller, “A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,” Science 117 (May 15, 1953), 528-529.

2)Richard A. Kerr, “Origin of Life: New Ingredients Suggested,” Science 210 (October 3, 1980), 42-43

3)Jon Cohen, “Novel Center Seeks to Add Spark to Origins of Life,” Science 270: 1925-1926 (December 22, 1995)

4)Adam P. Johnson, “The Miller Volcanic Spark Discharge Experiment,” Science 322 (October 17, 2008), 404

5)Kevin Zahnle, Laura Schaefer, and Bruce Fegley, “Earth’s Earliest Atmospheres,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology 2(10), a004895 (October 2010) (“Geochemical evidence in Earth’s oldest igneous rocks indicates that the redox state of the Earth’s mantle has not changed over the past 3.8 Gyr”); Dante Canil, “Vanadian in peridotites, mantle redox and tectonic environments: Archean to present,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 195:75-90 (2002)

6)David W. Deamer, “The First Living Systems: a Bioenergetic Perspective,” Microbiology & Molecular Biology Reviews 61:239 (1997)

7)National Research Council Space Studies Board, The Search for Life’s Origins (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1990)

8)Deborah Kelley, “Is It Time to Throw Out ‘Primordial Soup’ Theory?,” NPR (February 7, 2010). ...... 2010).

Matthew ch.5 KJV

Matthew5KJV:"And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

21 Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee;

24 Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

26 Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

31 It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement:

32 But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.

33 Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths:

34 But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne:

35 Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.

36 Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.

37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust

46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the sam

47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans s

48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

By its fruit the tree is known.

 The ongoing war in Europe represents yet another failure by Christendom to live up to her claims of being Christian. It's not simply the fact that she has once again provided ammunition to the haters of Christ and his God by indulging in yet another industrial scale bloodbath. But that the leaders of the churches, rather than exerting any moderating influence, have been pouring fuel on the flames. By way of a reminder here is the kind of fruit that our Lord indicated ought to be expected of any tree planted by his God and Father John14:35KJV"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" in other words the opposite of what has historically been(and indeed presently is)  the case with Christendom. Now, for the sincere truth seeker, there is a global community of Christian who have by JEHOVAH'S grace have been able to resist relentless pressure from the world's political establishment to take sides nationalistic and revolutionary wars of the present age and thus fulfill our Lord's prophecy to the glory of his God and Father .

I don't expect that my words will meet with universal agreement, indeed our Lord warn us that as was the case with him ,few will see the obvious blessing of the Lord JEHOVAH upon his people. 

John15:20NIV"Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.'" but hopefully you would at least understand why I don't find the claim that Satan could succeed in teaching his servants to live in peace while God has consistently failed to do so impressive.

Darwinists continue to not see the forest for the trees.

 Gene Sharing Is More Widespread than Thought, with Implications for Darwinism 

David Coppedge. 

Evidence is growing that organisms share existing genetic information horizontally, not just vertically. This has immense implications for neo-Darwinian theory that are not yet fully recognized. If traits can be shared across species, genera and even phyla, they are not being inherited from common ancestors. The findings might also cast stories about convergence and co-evolution in a completely different light. Let’s look at some of the news on this front. 

Introgression 

Last month, Current Biology posted a Primer on Introgression by four authors. Introgression refers to “lasting transfer of DNA from one of the species into the genome of the other” by means of hybridization and backcrossing. Basically, it describes “the incorporation of the DNA from one species into another.” 

Over the last few decades, advances in genomics have transformed our understanding of the frequency of gene flow between species and with it our ideas about reproductive isolation in nature. These advances have uncovered a rich and often complicated history of genetic exchange between species — demonstrating that such genetic introgression is an important evolutionary process widespread across the tree of life 

Figure 1 in this open-access paper shows nine photos of creatures where “gene flow” has been inferred. They include vastly different organisms, from bacteria to birds, fish, and mammals — including humans. The authors strive to maintain Darwinism in their explanation, but this realization undermines what previously was explained by convergence or by independent origins of traits: 

Instead of waiting for a beneficial mutation to arise, gene flow can instead introduce variation that has been ‘pre-tested’ by selection, allowing species to evolve rapidly. For instance, alleles causing brown winter coat color in snowshoe hares (Figure 1E), early flowering time in sunflowers or serpentine soil tolerance in Arabidopsis have introgressed from closely related species, which has facilitated adaptation to new environments. 

The authors do not speculate at this time how common adaptive introgression might be.  

Kleptomania 

In news from the Florida Museum of Natural History, biologists discussed how a new genome for ferns reveals “a history of DNA hoarding and kleptomania.” The article is classified under “Evolution” but what is Darwinian about it? 

The “hoarding” part refers to ferns having 720 pairs of chromosomes “crammed into each of its nuclei” for unknown evolutionary reasons. Whole-gene duplication is not uncommon in plants and animals, but most species slim down their genomes over time. Why has this not happened in ferns? Geneticists are still trying “to figure out the evolutionary process underlying this paradox,” the article says. 

The “kleptomania” claim refers to “the surprise discovery that ferns stole the genes for several of their anti-herbivory toxins from bacteria.” 

Rather than evolving this toxin on its own, Ceratopteris appears to have obtained it directly from bacteriathrough a process called horizontal gene transfer. And given that there were multiple copies of the gene spread out among three separate chromosomes, it’s likely this happened more than once. 

The article references a 2014 study that showed another instance of kleptomania. Ferns seem to have inherited genes for thriving in shade from distantly related plants, but “exactly how organisms separated by millions of years of evolution are able to swap fully functional genes remains unclear.”  

“The mechanisms behind horizontal gene transfer remain one of the least investigated areas of land plant evolution,” Doug Soltis explained. “Over evolutionary timescales, it’s a bit like winning the lottery. Any time a plant is wounded, its interior is susceptible to invasion from microbes, but for their DNA to be incorporated into the genome seems amazing.” 

These examples illustrate a sea change in thinking about horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which was formerly thought to be restricted to microbes. 

Library Books 

A related preprint by Haimlich et al. on bioRxiv investigated “Widespread horizontal gene transfer between plants and their microbiota.” Finding 180 genes that indicated “prevalent horizontal gene transfer,” they concluded, 

Our results suggest that horizontal gene transfer between hosts and their microbiota is a significant and active evolutionary mechanism that contributed new traits to plants and their commensal microbiota. 

Crediting evolution seems stretched, though. Information shared is not the same as information innovated, nor is borrowing a book as difficult as writing one. 

Another preprint on bioRxiv reported introgression between “highly divergent sea squirt genomes” that were brought into contact by humans. The paper suggests that hybridization of these “incompletely isolated” species offered “an adaptive breakthrough” for the organisms. What other cases of assumed allopatric speciation convergence might turn out to be cases of introgression or HGT? Can life share library books of genes across distant species? 

From Division of Labor to Expertise Sharing 

Speaking of bacteria, Duke University proclaims that “Microbial Communities Stay Healthy by Swapping Knowledge.” How and why microbes do this prompted a metaphor that portrays intelligent action: 

Put another way, a construction crew could be extremely resilient to electricians quitting if the plumbers on site also knew how to wire a building. But the same crew would be even more resilient if the remaining electricians could simply transfer their expertise to anyone on the job when needed, no matter their profession. 

Dr. Lingchong You at Duke considers HGT a “dynamic division of labor” by which bacteria maintain their health in nature. 

Human Sharing 

With these reassessments of heredity in mind, how much of assumed “human evolution” could be explained by gene sharing instead of by the neo-Darwinian mutation-selection model? Have human beings been sharing library books or downloading each other’s software apps instead of writing them from scratch?

News from the University of Tübingen says that paleoanthropologists are considering the degree to which genetic hybridization affected the human skeleton and skull shape. 

Many people living today have a small component of Neanderthal DNA in their genes, suggesting an important role for admixture with archaic human lineages in the evolution of our species. Paleogenetic evidence indicates that hybridization with Neanderthals and other ancient groups occurred multiple times, with our species‘ history resembling more a network or braided stream than a tree. Clearly the origin of humankind was more complex than previously thought. 

It’s not the percentage of Neanderthal DNA that affects the phenotype, the researchers are finding, but “the presence of particular genetic variants” instead. 

Similar conclusions are being reached at North Carolina State University where a news item says that “Ancient DNA caused a revolution in how we think about human evolution.” Out is the old single-file march of progress from ape to man. In is the “a series of streams that converge and diverge at multiple points.” The “exploratory study” going on at NC State is changing the view that evolution is driven by external environmental factors, such as climate, and toward the view that internal gene flow causes the variations in human anatomy. 

Gene Flow Everywhere 

The Tübingen story notes that evolutionary innovation by hybridization is being found everywhere:  

In other organisms — from plants to large mammals — hybridization is known to produce evolutionary innovation, including outcomes that are both novel and diverse. “It is estimated that about 10 percent of animal species produce hybrids, including, for example, bovids, bears, cats and canids,” Ackermann says. Hybrids are also known in primates, our close relatives, such as baboons, she says. “Because hybridization introduces new variation, and creates new combinations of variation, this can facilitate particularly rapid evolution, especially when facing new or changing environmental conditions.” 

A question arises whether these variations and combinations of variations are random when introduced by gene flow instead of mutation. If the latter, then old-school Darwinians might argue that they are merely additional manifestations of neo-Darwinism’s unguided process of random variation and selection. 

But if these shared genes are instead modular pieces of functional information that are pre-adapted to join up in certain ways, then biologists will need to consider whether the source of that information requires an intelligent cause. The case for intelligent design in instances of gene flow can be further strengthened by observing whether newly incorporated genes are epigenetically regulated, targeted to functional loci, and responsive to signals from the environment. If so, organisms have been equipped with mechanisms to ensure robustness to changing conditions. That implies Foresight.

Yet more on why we make a big deal about the Name.

 Exodus 14:4ASV"4And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and he shall follow after them; and I will get me honor upon Pharaoh, and upon all his host: and the Egyptians shall know that I am Jehovah. And they did so."

11For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name'shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense'shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name'shall be great among the Gentiles, saith Jehovah of hosts. 

 The Lord JEHOVAH is determined to have his name exalted above the names of the false gods ,as his loyalists we are simply responding to the current of his Spirit. The great enemy of God and his loyalists is ,of course ,bent on the erasure of the divine name, ,doubtless as retaliation for the erasure of his own name. The title 'Satan' (meaning enemy)by which he is referred to in scripture is not a self designation but the sentence pronounced upon him by the Lord JEHOVAH. So it's no surprise that in the present civilisation,of which Satan is architect and ruler, there is widespread Animus toward the divine name. For instance I have never seen a bible translation with the names of false gods like Zeus and Marduk substituted by titles, but the same translators have no problem disrespectfully removing JEHOVAH'S name from his own book.

So then whose will are they fulfilling? That loyal servant of JEHOVAH who declared :John17:26KJV"26And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them." 

Or the the enemy of the Lord JEHOVAH and his loyalists.

And yet even more on why the OOL Remains the keystone of the design argument.

 All Living Systems Must Process Energy, Store and Utilize Information, and Replicate 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the second entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here.  

Aristotle posited the idea of spontaneous generation of life from nonliving matter, or abiogenesis, that held sway for two millennia. But in 1859, Louis Pasteur showed persuasively — with a clever set of experiments — that what appeared to be life springing forth from nonliving matter was actually life emerging from exceedingly small living organisms, not lifeless matter. Pasteur’s experiments were widely seen as having settled the question of whether life could only come from preexisting living matter, a process called biogenesis. In 1864, Pasteur triumphantly predicted to the science faculty at the Sorbonne in Paris, “Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.”1 Pasteur’s view remained dominant for almost a century. 

In 1924, after sixty years of virtual silence since Pasteur’s experiments, the Russian biochemist Alexander Ivanovich Oparin proposed that the complex molecular arrangements and associated functions of living systems evolved from simpler molecules that preexisted on the lifeless, primitive Earth. With this bold speculation, a recognizably modern hypothesis of how life might have arisen, Oparin reopened the discussion of abiogenesis.2 

A Rationalist Biologist 

In 1929, the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane published a paper in the Rationalist Annual speculating on what initial conditions might be most favorable for a naturalistic origin of life.3 He imagined an early Earth atmosphere rich in gases that was acted upon by lightning that caused chemical reactions to produce various building blocks for life — such as sugars and simple amino acids. In Haldane’s view, these molecules might become sufficiently concentrated in oceans, or more likely in lakes and ponds, such that they could chemically react to form long polymer chains that today we know are the key components in living cells (i.e., protein, DNA, and RNA).4 In 1944, the noted quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger observed that living systems are characterized by highly ordered, aperiodic structures that survive by continually utilizing (chemical or radiant) energy from their surroundings.5 In 1952, Harold C. Urey proposed that the Earth’s early atmosphere was rich in hydrogen, ammonia, and methane—chemicals that both provided the elemental building blocks and the energy to facilitate the chemical reactions necessary to make primary biopolymers, the chemical building blocks of life.6 

Many Additional Steps 

The review above outlines early theories about generating the building blocks of life on Earth. But many additional steps would be needed for the origin of life to occur, which are sketched in the figure below.7 In our next post in this series, these various steps in a hypothetical origin-of-life scenario will be reviewed so that you can judge for yourself whether current theories are plausible. 

 

Figure: Major steps involved in the origin of life. All prebiotic evolutionary scenarios contain many hypothetical steps. Credit: Casey Luskin, modified with permission after Committee for Integrity in Science Education, Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy: A View from the American Scientific Affiliation (Ipswich, MA: American Scientific Affiliation, 1986), 31.  

 First, though, it is vital to define the problem. As noted already, all living systems (1) process energy, (2) store information, and (3) replicate. In nature, these processes are performed primarily by molecules from three families of large biopolymers: proteins, DNA, and RNA. The mystery of how life began is essentially the mystery of how these three types of biopolymers formed and congregated within a cell with a barrier made of lipids as a self-replicating system. 

Notes 

1)R. L. Devonshire, The Life of Pasteur, translated R. Vallery-Radot (New York: Doubleday, 1920), 109.

2)Alexander I. Oparin, Proiskhozhdenie Zhizni (Moscow, Russia: Izd. Moskovski Rabochii, 1924), translated as Origin of Life by S. Morgulis (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

3)J. B. S. Haldane, “Origin of Life,” Rationalist Annual 148 (1929), 3-10. For a discussion of Haldane’s views, see Stéphane Tirard, “J.B.S. Haldane and the origin of life,” Journal of Genetics 96 (November 2017), 735-739.

4)Y. D. Bernal, “The Physical Basis of Life,” paper presented before British Physical Society in 1949, found in The Physical Basis of Life (London, UK: Routledge, 1951).

5)Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1944).

6)Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952).

And yet more on why the OOL remains the keystone of the design argument.

Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means? 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the first entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here.

Major scientific magazines and journals often feature articles on the “Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Science”1 — and the origin of life is almost always on that list, sometimes as the number one mystery.2 In this and coming posts we will explore key challenges to a natural, chemical origin of life. We’ll examine the formation of the essential functional polymers of life — proteins, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and RNA (ribonucleic acid). How might these extraordinarily complex molecules have formed in oceans, lakes, or ponds from simple, naturally occurring molecular building blocks like sugars and amino acids? What is life? How does it operate? Could life originate by strictly natural means? 

Three Scientific Discoveries 

Darwin’s theory of evolution and the development of the second law of thermodynamics by Boltzmann and Gibbs are two of the three major scientific discoveries of the 19th century. Maxwell’s field equations for electricity and magnetism are the third. The second law of thermodynamics has had a unifying effect in the physical sciences much like the theory of evolution has had in the life sciences. What is intriguing is that the predictions of one seem to contradict the predictions of the other. The grand story of evolution teaches that living systems have generally moved from simpler to more complex over time.3 The second law of thermodynamics teaches just the opposite, a progression from order to disorder, from complexity to simplicity in the physical universe. Your garden and your house, left to themselves, go from order to disorder. But you can restore the order if you do the necessary work. In the winter, when it is cold, the interior of your house will gradually drop in temperature toward the outside temperature. But a gas heater can reverse this process by converting the chemical energy in natural gas into thermal energy in the house.  

True Everywhere in Life 

This simple analogy illustrates what is true of all living systems: they can only live by having access to energy and a means of converting this energy into the alternative forms of energy or work required to oppose the pull toward thermodynamic equilibrium, from complexity to simplicity. Living systems are much more complex than nonliving systems. Like a lawnmower with gasoline as a source of energy and an engine to convert that energy into movement of a blade to cut the grass, living systems must have access to sources of energy and systems to convert the energy into the needs of plants and animals. Nonliving objects in nature exist without any complex functional systems or any energy flow requirements. They are generally made of simple crystalline or amorphous materials. A picture of my (Walter Bradley’s) backyard (at the top of this article) shows a region in the foreground that is completely shaded by a large oak tree; it receives no sunlight, and consequently, has no grass. Adjacent to this shadowy, bare section is a region where sunlight is present about 50 percent of the daytime and consequently has a beautiful, grassy cover. The second law of thermodynamics is a law of nature (like gravity, everyone is subject to it). Living plants and animals can survive only with energy flowing through their systems. Nonliving objects such as mountains, rocks, sand, rivers, and soil have no need for energy flow, nor do they have the complexity to utilize energy toward some goal.  

To Utilize and Store Energy 

To summarize, plants can utilize solar energy to levitate above thermodynamic equilibrium. Nonliving objects such as mountains, oceans, rocks, sand, and soil have no need for such complexity; they do not store chemical energy like plants do; nor can they process solar or other forms of energy. Living matter is much more complex (e.g., RNA, DNA, protein, etc.), needing as it does to be able to utilize and store available energy from the sun or from the consumption of plants and animals.  

Notes 

1)See for example Ronak Gupta, “The 7 biggest unsolved mysteries in science,” Digit (May 26, 2015), https://www.digit.in/features/general/7-greatest-unsolved-problems-in-science-26132.html (accessed November 18, 2020).

2)See for example Philip Ball, “10 Unsolved Mysteries in Chemistry,” Scientific American (October 2011), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-unsolved-mysteries/ (accessed November 18, 2020).

3)Technically the official line from neo-Darwinian evolutionists is that evolution knows nothing of “progress” and does not necessarily move from “simple to more complex.” Nonetheless, it is also true that the grand arc of the evolutionary story moves from simpler organisms toward more complex ones. In this evolutionary story, biological and organic systems began with a single self-replicating molecule and ended up at us. Evolutionary theorists sometimes try to trivialize this clear progression by calling it “bouncing off the lower wall of complexity,” but it cannot be denied that their story entails a march towards greater complexity. See for example Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Three Rivers, 1996).