Thursday, 2 February 2023

Another civil war?

"Gay clubs operating in seminaries " claims Pope Benedict from beyond the grave.

The late Pope Benedict XVI has launched a scathing attack on the state of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis – from beyond the grave.

In the book, which was written by Benedict with implicit instructions that it shouldn’t be published until after his death, he claims that there has been a “vast collapse” in priestly formation [training for ministry] under Francis’ tenure, with gay clubs operating in seminaries, particularly in the United States:

“In various seminaries homosexual clubs were formed which acted more or less openly and which clearly transformed the atmosphere in the seminaries.”

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Benedict grave pic two.JPGReuters

'Gay clubs operating in seminaries' claims Pope Benedict from beyond the grave

Tue Jan 24 2023by Donna Birrell

The late Pope Benedict XVI has launched a scathing attack on the state of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis – from beyond the grave.

“In various seminaries homosexual clubs were formed which acted more or less openly and which clearly transformed the atmosphere in the seminaries.”

The late Pope goes on to claim that a bishop had allowed seminarians to be shown pornographic films “presumably with the intention of enabling them to resist against behaviour contrary to the faith.”

He goes on to write about a seminary in southern Germany in which candidates for the priesthood and lay students lived together and ate together with married representatives, wives, children and in some cases girlfriends.

Benedict died in December at the age of 95 and is buried in the Vatican. His book, entitled ‘What Christianity Is’ is the latest work by recently deceased Vatican leaders to criticise Pope Francis.

Earlier this month it was revealed that former Vatican treasurer Cardinal George Pell had written an anonymous blog before he died in which he described the leadership of Pope Francis as a “catastrophe”.

The Vatican has not addressed the claims.

The culture war within the culture war?

I D is a science starter?

Socrates in the city :James Tour on nanotech

Evolution News

A new ID the Future episode features the first part of a conversation between James Tour and Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas on Tour’s astonishing work in nanotechnology and on the topic “How Did Life Come into Being?” Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice University. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading nano-scientists. This event took place at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas. Here in Part 1, Tour explains some of the inventions coming out of his Rice University lab, including molecular cars and astonishing graphene technologies, one of which restores full mobility in laboratory rats whose spines have been severed. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Civil war ?

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

On Darwin's blunder?

Darwin’s Category Errors and Their Consequences

Neil Thomas

After his return from the Beagle expedition in the later 1830s Charles Darwin spent some time putting together thoughts about evolution which were to result in a provisional, unpublished pencil sketch of 1842 and in another, informal essay of 1844 both of which, in expanded form, were to form the basis of his Origin of Species of 1859. It was because his eventual magnum opus was to remain under wraps for the best part of two decades that Darwin in this period might have appeared to be more active in the field of geological debate than he was in the biological sphere. Yet behind the scenes he was working on both fronts at the same time and his modus operandi in his geological work may be usefully compared with his methods in the biological sphere, all the more so since his approach to biological matters was so heavily influenced by methods used by Sir Charles Lyell, Britain’s premier geologist of the earlier Victorian era.

Thinking in Analogies

Darwin’s first public communication in this pre-Origin of Species period was on the subject of whether a Scottish loch had been of marine or fresh water provenance. The geological puzzle concerned some physical features in the Glen Roy area of the Highlands of Scotland, some twenty miles from Loch Ness, an area noted for the geological phenomenon of its three “roads,” as local folklore terms them. It is now known that the so-called parallel roads on a hillside in Glen Roy are in reality loch terraces or strand lines that formed along the shorelines of an ancient ice-dammed loch at the time of the last Ice Age. The ice had repeatedly melted and refrozen over geological time with the water levels coming to rest at slightly different set points each time. In 1839, in a paper read before the Royal Society, Darwin unwisely chanced his arm by seeking to explain these roads as having resulted from ancient, marine beaches; but premier Harvard academic Louis Agassiz and Scots geologists soon showed that this must have been an ancient freshwater lake once dammed up by ice (the Swiss-American Agassiz had ample experience of glaciers in the country of his birth).

What is instructive about Darwin’s swiftly disproved conjecture is that it was based on a misleading analogy he had come across in his voyaging years in South America. This he freely confessed in his autobiography when he wrote,

This paper was a great failure, and I am ashamed of it. Having been deeply impressed with what I had seen of elevation of the land in S. America, I attributed the parallel lines to the action of the sea; but I had to give up this view when Agassiz propounded his glacier-like theory.1

As Robert Shedinger has observed, Darwin advanced his theory despite the telling absence of any ancient marine residues such as seashells, adding that “when Darwin developed what he thought he felt was a compelling idea, he doggedly held to it even when faced with a lack of clear evidence.”2 This was a tendency readily observable in the biological sphere when he notoriously declined to recognize the true import of the absence of fossilized transitional forms as being detrimental to his theory of natural selection with its (claimed) capacity to leap-frog over the species barrier — that physiological barrier whose importance had been repeatedly underscored by such authorities as Cuvier and Richard Owen.

Argument from an inappropriate analogy was also to bedevil a second geological theory Darwin developed in 1842, this time in relation to the formation of coral reefs. During his travels in South America he had once observed what he took to be evidence that coral reefs emerged with the subsidence of surrounding land: as the land subsided, a coral reef or atoll would come to the fore. However, work by other geologists suggested that as often as not the reverse could be the case. That is, land underneath the sea would rise and bring towards the surface small organic forms congregating in reefs. Darwin’s theory could not then be one of general validity and his would-be universal theory could not in the end be substantiated. Crossing over to the biological sphere again one is reminded of Darwin’s wholly theoretical postulation of those hereditary entities he termed “gemmules,” a theory which failed to find acceptance since the postulation had no empirical back-up, as even Darwin conceded (it was definitively disproved by Mendelian genetics at the beginning of the 20th century).

A Major Category Error

In addition to resistance to such questionable analogies in Darwin’s thinking, there also arose the profounder objection lodged by Sir Charles Lyell to the effect that biology and geology ought not properly to be even mentioned in the same breath. In Lyell’s view the implicit analogy invoked by Darwin between the two domains was impermissible. It was of course only natural, given that Darwin’s earliest publications were in the field of geology, that he took Sir Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of the mid-Victorian era, as guide. Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology (1830-3), which worked on and developed geological principles first enunciated by James Hutton in his Theory of the Earth (1788), was to furnish an important intellectual springboard for the Origin of Species, as Darwin himself readily acknowledged. Lyell had described the crust of the earth by reference to natural forces alone without reference to such phenomena as the Biblical Flood (which he dismissed as “Mosaic geology”). Since Lyell had removed the hand of God from geological history, why then retain it to explain natural history in terms of separate special creations? If there was a story of natural evolution in the geological record, so too surely there must be a similar story to tell in the study of sentient beings, Darwin reasoned.

Yet although biological gradualism-cum-natural selection inspired by the idea of geological “uniformitarianism”3 seemed an uncontroversial form of intellectual progression to Darwin, Lyell thought that Darwin carried over his early formation as a geologist into the biological realm too indiscriminately and without attending to the appropriate modifications of analysis required. In short, Darwin’s ambition to apply Lyell’s uniformitarian approach to biology represented for Lyell a wrong-headed determination to postulate an ontological equivalence between organic and inorganic spheres. Discounting Darwin’s implied equivalence between geology and biology, Lyell as late as 1872 (and despite numerous appeals by Darwin himself) declared the basic problem of creation/evolution to be as inscrutable as it had been in the earlier Victorian period when it was candidly termed “the mystery of mysteries.” In Lyell’s opinion, Darwin’s intervention had solved nothing since it had been flawed from the start by some fundamentally misconceived philosophical reasoning.

One can easily see the force of Lyell’s objection. There seem to be limited grounds for comparing the wholly material and inorganic substratum of Earth with its living superstructure. One would not, for instance, think it appropriate to compare rocks and cliffs with human consciousness and view those entities as lying only slightly distant from each other on the same sliding scale. There is a great difference between planet Earth as a geological formation, which shares its history and mode of formation with the rest of the outer cosmos, and the later, superposed realm of terrestrial life and sentience, that superstructure of life forms of unknown etiology thought to have developed on our once barren planet only some five million years ago — which in geological terms of course counts as fairly recently. That ancient geological segment of our planet is self-evidently different in kind to the animate sphere, being quite simple in texture when compared with the quite unsearchable complexities and subtleties of the organic world.4 As Barry Gale once pointed out,

Mountains might decay and new mountains be thrust up again, but these new mountains were not considered to be more complex or very different from previous ones. For Lyell, there were no basic changes in the forms of natural phenomena.5

Lyell denied any development in non-organic phenomena which simply underwent slow, non-directional change over the eons. Although the earth was in a state of constant flux, it was not moving in any particular direction. Darwin on the other hand claimed that, in the organic world, there was a progression of forms with movement over time from the very simple to the exceptionally complex. Such was the grand narrative of evolution which Darwin inherited and extended from the work of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Yet since nothing of this sort was observable in Lyell’s inorganic world of arbitrary forces it is hardly surprising that Lyell thought the two domains incommensurable.

A Category Error Repeated?

The living part of our planet then has no identifiable counterpart in the external universe — despite unceasing attempts by space explorers to somehow conjure life from what appears to be the irredeemable barrenness found on Mars and other bodies in the external universe. There are now conspicuously fewer alien-hunters about than there were in the era of Frank Drake and Carl Sagan in the 1970s and ’80s6 since modern space science tends to confirm Lyell’s view of the radical dissimilarity of organic and inorganic worlds. The sheer exceptionalism of the terrestrial biosphere stands in sharp contrast both to the life-denying deadness of the outer cosmos and even to 90 percent of the world we inhabit. Viewed quantitatively, the areas of our planet amenable to human habitation represent a relatively small area of the earth for, as Michael Marshall has recently noted, our ambient atmosphere above a certain height will kill us (a fact all too well-known to mountain climbers, let alone astronauts) and so would the ever-burning furnace at the earth’s core were we to descend so far. Only about 10 percent of our world is human friendly (to this degree or that) with many terrestrial extremities remaining “egregiously hostile to life.”7 Our much-bruited “Goldilocks zone” is all the more to be treasured for being such a very narrow band of habitability. Life on earth represents an absolute cosmic singularity (pace the alien-hunters) and, being such a singularity, is by definition not amenable to comparison with anything else at all.

It is the way in which critical parts of our planet represent an albeit flawed paradise whereas some terrestrial extremities together with all known outer parts of the universe remain a life-averse hellscape which requires pondering, comments Marshall. This decidedly nontrivial distinction has indeed been pondered, particularly in the last half century in debates stemming from our somewhat belated recognition of the exceptionalism of Planet Earth. This has led to a considerable shift in what might be termed many persons’ cosmographic imagination. In no few cases it has resulted in a very sharp reversal of the once very influential cosmological Weltanschauung typical of philosopher Bertrand Russell’s generation in the first half of the 20th century.

The Cosmographic Paradigm Shift

Where once Russell (to whom Richard Dawkins likes to acknowledge his philosophic debt) famously described Planet Earth as an accident in a cosmic backwater, the recently revealed bio-friendliness of our planet would appear to stand in implicit opposition to that older conception of Earth as an unconsidered cosmic orphan. Crucially, Russell was writing in the first decades of the 20th century, well before the discovery of what astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973 dubbed the “anthropic principle” — meaning the way in which planet Earth appears to be fine-tuned to generate and sustain animal and human life.8 Indeed, so complete is the discontinuity between Earth and the extraterrestrial dead zone revealed by modern findings that it seems to make nonsense of the centuries-old “Copernican principle” whose general acceptance ousted the earth from the centrality it had enjoyed in the medieval world picture. Michael Denton has even gone so far as to suggest that the openly anthropocentric view held by our medieval forbears — that our world represented the geographic center of the universe — should now be rehabilitated under revision. To be sure, planet Earth is clearly not central in the spatial sense but it certainly is so in the far more important symbolic and moral sense that we are the unique beneficiaries of a planet on which all available meaning centers — a recognition that has proved little less than revolutionary in changing hearts and minds.

It is not insignificant that, five years after the promulgation of the anthropic principle, eminent biologist William H. Thorpe encouraged a return to ideas of intelligent design first proposed by William Paley in his famous Natural Theology (1802):

The Argument from Design has been brought back to a central position in our thought from which it was banished by the theory of evolution by natural selection more than a century ago. There seems now to be justification for assuming that from its first moment the universe was “ordered” or programmed — was in fact Cosmos not Chaos.9

Leading astronomers such as Paul Davies have endorsed that sentiment by stressing how such benign cosmic arrangements as we enjoy could hardly have arisen by chance. Davies points out that it is a merely semantic point as to whether you conceive of the shaping force behind this providential arrangement as the Christian God or some other unseen power.10 The essential point remains that it is logically impossible to conceive of our planet as an arbitrary and accidental collocation of atoms, objects, and life-forms (as both ancient Lucretianism11 and Lucretianism’s modern legatee, present-day evolutionary orthodoxy, insist in the teeth of universal evidence to the contrary).

And even if we are obliged to concede that the ultimate seat of authority cannot be apprehended by our common, anthropomorphic categories of understanding, a basic respect for the balance of probabilities should dictate that the existence of such an agent be taken seriously in our current conversations. It is of course well enough known that some cosmologists have, for purely doctrinaire reasons, tried to evade the theistic implications of the available evidence by appealing to a wholly imaginary “multiverse.” They have wished to conclude that planet Earth’s unique good fortune is due to a kind of cosmic roulette wheel which decreed that somewhere had to be the winner from an infinity of parallel universes. Lyell’s fine distinctions have apparently been lost sight of in the rather wholesale views of those who, like Darwin, would indiscriminately lump together organic and inorganic spheres — a grand category error whose origin Lyell would have diagnosed as a lack of clarity in philosophic reasoning — the same kind of contra-logical reasoning that is determined to believe that human consciousness will have arisen as an accidental “epiphenomenon” of purely material factors.

Why the multiverse is no match for JEHOVAH

Four Reasons the Multiverse Fails as Science

David Klinghoffer

Writing in Salvo Magazine, our colleague Andrew McDiarmid neatly summarizes four reasons the multiverse fails as a scientific explanation of cosmic origins. He cites Stephen Meyer and the method of “adductive reasoning,” outlined in Return of the God hypothesis

From,"Multiverse or God":

In his book Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer weighs the explanatory power of the multiverse and provides at least four reasons to be skeptical. The first difficulty with such many-layered theories is that they violate the law of parsimony, known as Ockham’s razor. This well-known practice, commonly applied in science and philosophy, states that when formulating educated guesses to explain things, one should avoid suggesting multiple explanatory entities without necessity. To subscribe to the multiverse, one would also need to subscribe to a host of other notions, including other universes, inflaton fields, tiny strings of energy, hidden spatial dimensions, gravitons, gravitinos, and more. In the end, our observations and experience of the world suggest that the hypothesis rooted in elegant simplicity has a better chance of being correct.

Another problem with multiverse proposals is that they are purely hypothetical. There is no way to observe them first-hand. Although unobservability is a hallmark of historical sciences, theorists must be careful not to give too much credit to numbers and laws themselves. Math can’t produce phenomena — it can only describe things already in existence. As Stephen Hawking wrote in his book A Brief History of Time, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”

A third reason Meyer doubts the explanatory power of multiverse ideas is that they end up pushing the origin problem further back. The universe generating mechanisms of the multiverse would themselves require prior unexplained fine tuning. Plus, the multiverse requires an even greater initial surge of energy than the standard Big Bang model. That means more disorder (entropy) and an even greater order required at the beginning. More fine-tuning means more that the multiverse must explain. Fourthly, key predictions of inflationary multiverse models have failed to materialize, as has evidence of the “supersymmetry” proposed by string theory. This has brought about more contrived variations on the models, leading to what some philosophers of science call bloated theories.

The multiverse theory has been embraced as a defense against what Meyer calls the God Hypothesis, the idea that an intelligent agent, not a cosmic lottery, lies behind the existence of our universe. The defense, though, is a weak one, for scientific rather than religious reasons. Andrew McDiarmid is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute.

New Engineering Ideas from Biology

David Coppedge

The 2023 Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, organized by the CSC’s Engineering Research Group, is set for June 1-3 in Denton, Texas. (More info and an application is here) New engineering ideas from biology? That’s right. Engineers won’t run out of inspiration any time soon if they look at the living world. From cell to ecosystem, life knows how to solve problems — how to engineer solutions, it’s not unfair to say. Here are some new illustrations.

Click Like a Beetle

Robot designers face a show-stopper when their invention falls over. Solution? Design like a click beetle. When this insect gets turned upside down, it launches itself with a rapid click, using elastic energy stored in its exoskeleton. Biologists at the University of Illinois were intrigued. News from the U of I says, with pun intended, “Researchers have made a significant leap forward in developing insect-sized jumping robots capable of performing tasks in the small spaces often found in mechanical, agricultural and search-and-rescue settings.”

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University have studied click beetle anatomy, mechanics and evolution over the past decade. A 2020 study found that snap buckling — the rapid release of elastic energy — of a coiled muscle within a click beetle’s thorax is triggered to allow them to propel themselves in the air many times their body length, as a means of righting themselves if flipped onto their backs.

A 12-second demonstration of their invention is shown in the article. “This process, called a dynamic buckling cascade, is simple compared to the anatomy of a click beetle,” admitted Samek Tawfick, a mechanical science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois. Obviously, their gadget can’t make babies.

Control Heat Like a Camel

Firefighters depend on their special suits for protection from the flames but leave the lifesaving heroes soaked in sweat. New Scientist reports, “Fabric inspired by camel’s hump could protect firefighters from heat.” How is that? Camels have had to face heat challenges ever since the first ancient peoples learned to ride them across the desert on trade routes. They were pre-designed for prolonged exposure to the sun’s fiery rays.

Jian Fang at Soochow University in China and his colleagues have developed an insulating fabric that uses pockets of aerogel, in which the liquid component of a gel is replaced with gas. It is sandwiched between two layers of heat resistant plastic polymer. This is said to mimic the fat stores in a camel’s hump.

Camel hair wicks water from the animal’s sweat glands to the outside air. Material that mimics the fat and hair in camels can not only exceed the specifications of today’s firefighting uniforms, but also keep the first responders more comfortable as they work.

The aerogel pockets are produced using ultrasonic welding, where sound is used to melt the two layers of plastic together at various points. This process also creates micropores in the fabric that can wick away moisture. “We created many pore structures, like the camel’s sweat glands, that can guide liquid from inside to outside, helping you when you get sweaty,” says Fang.

When the researchers exposed the fabric to temperatures of about 80°C (176°F) for about 20 minutes, they found that a thermostatic plate covered by it stayed around 20°C cooler than one covered by conventional firefighter uniform fabric. And when it was exposed to a 1000°C flame for 10 seconds, the camel-hump fabric also suffered far less burning and damage.

The engineered “biomimicking” fabric also traps 13 percent less moisture, is cheap, and easy to make. It looks promising.

Echo Like a Bat

How bats navigate through foliage after their target prey presents a difficult challenge. “Foliage echoes in some cases can help bats gather information about the environment,” says a new paper in PLOS ONE , “whereas in others may generate clutter that can mask prey echoes during foraging.” Hongxiao Zhu from the University of Virginia and colleagues from the UK and Japan had already built a “foliage echo simulator” they could use with a “biomimetic sonar head” to investigate how the bat sorts the useful echoes from the clutter.

In this work, we improve the existing simulator by allowing more flexible experimental setups and enabling a closer match with the experiments. Specifically, we add additional features into the simulator including separate directivity patterns for emitter and receiver, the ability to place emitter and receiver at distinct locations, and multiple options to orient the foliage to mimic natural conditions like strong wind. To study how accurately the simulator can replicate the real echo-generating process, we compare simulated echoes with experimental echoes measured by ensonifying a single leaf across four different species of trees. We further extend the prior work on estimating foliage parameters to estimating a map of the environment.

Bats can make mental maps of their surroundings with sound; that’s remarkable. The research team’s approach — which is engineering all the way down — reveals the complexity of the problem that the bat solves so well: discriminating information from noise in a field of clutter. No mention of evolution was found in the paper. The authors begin their publication with this amazing factoid:

Many bat species rely on echolocation — they emit short ultrasonic pulses and listen for the returning echoes to support navigation and prey hunting. The dominant frequency in bat biosonar pulses can reach up to 212 kHz with thresholds for object detection as low as 0.05 mm — smaller than the thickness of human hair. The extremely capable sonar sensing system coupled with low energy requirements makes bats an excellent biological model for the study of smart sonar systems.

Heal Like a Fungus

Materials scientists have long been biomimetics fans, imitating spider web silk, nacre in oysters, and superhydrophobic leaves of water lilies. In a paper in Nature Materials , researchers from the Netherlands and Switzerland began their paper with praise for the qualities of living materials, particularly fungi. Why mimic them when you can partner with them?

Biological living materials, such as animal bones and plant stems, are able to self-heal, regenerate, adapt and make decisions under environmental pressures. Despite recent successful efforts to imbue synthetic materials with some of these remarkable functionalities, many emerging properties of complex adaptive systems found in biology remain unexplored in engineered living materials. Here, we describe a three-dimensional printing approach that harnesses the emerging properties of fungal mycelia to create living complex materials that self-repair, regenerate and adapt to the environment while fulfilling an engineering function.

This is the 21st-century version of putting a harness on an ox or horse. It took a long time to build an “iron horse” (locomotive) that could exceed the power of an animal. Even so, the engineered copy lacked some of the advantages of the biological inspiration, such as ability to eat grass, make copies of itself and not pollute. If these researchers can harness fungi for clean, self-healing, adaptive “green” technologies, that’s a solution engineers will aspire to.

Smell Like a Dog

A headline from CORDIS asks, “Why can’t we replace sniffer dogs with electronic noses?” Olfaction seems simple in concept; absorb volatile organic compounds (VOC), classify them and identify them according to a lookup table or memory. The reality is much more complicated. Accompanying a photo of a smart-looking German shepherd with nose to the wind, this article gives a status report on progress with “e-nose” technology. The “future is bright” the technology, but after 40 years of work, dogs are still ahead by a nose. Why?

“While it should be possible to train e-noses to smell most things that dogs can smell, dogs retain certain advantages. Their sense of smell is extremely sensitive and can identify VOCs at very low concentrations. Sensors also have shorter lifespans than dogs and are more vulnerable to humidity and temperature,” remarks Roque [a biomechanical engineer in Portugal].

Nose engineers find it difficult to miniaturize the sensors and computers into an autonomous robot, “given the processing power required and the large number of validation samples that the sensors have to accommodate.” So far, e-noses only work for specific types of odorants. Engineers have a long way to go to match the broad talent in dogs that can sniff out everything from squirrels to drugs to cancer cells. Dogs can also detect minute traces of VOCs and chase them along a gradient. Human engineers may need another 40 years.

Evolution Is Like Engineering?

The click-beetle scientist, Sameh Tawfik, repeated a worn-out evolutionary canard that claims evolution is like engineering. He said, “this study plants a seed in the evolution of this technology — a process similar to biologic evolution.” Darwin notoriously compared blind natural selection to goal-oriented artificial selection. In doing so, he created an industry in academia that commits this logical fallacy routinely. Once the magical thinking gets extricated from press offices as the parasitic meme it is, bio-inspired engineering can leap forward with credit going where it belongs — to intelligent design.

The engineering perspective in biology, as exemplified magnificently in Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann (one of the leaders behind CELS) and Howard Glicksman, offers twin advantages over Darwinism. The first and immediate benefit is practical: ushering in a golden age of new technologies that can bring convenience, safety, and health to everyone. The second — even more significant — is philosophical. It can replace the storytelling of Darwinism that denigrates biology as a heap of junk arrived at by multitudes of accidents, and instead exalt biology with the awe it deserves for solving environmental problems with elegant solutions. This could generate superior understanding of life processes (as engineers attempt to mimic them), imbue life sciences with purpose, and make biology class exciting again.

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

Stone henge redux?

Founding Fathers of the modern I D movement?

Intelligent Design’s Founding Father

David Klinghoffer

Well, that headline is a little misleading since, as I pointed out last week, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton had already endorsed intelligent design – by that name – in 1940. Other Nobel laureates would join him in decades to come. But chemist Charles Thaxton, co-author (with engineer Walter Bradley and geologist Roger Olsen) of The mystery of Life's origin, was arguably modern ID theory’s founding father, or one of the three. Writing at The Federalist, Emily Nordhagen Sandico describes the origins of Thaxton’s book, published in 1984, which had such a profound influence on Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Phillip Johnson, and others.

An Interdisciplinary Nature

I wrote the historical introduction to the recent Expanded edition of the mystery of life's origin, but a lot of this I did not know. Much is drawn from Thaxton’s new memoir A Leg to Stand On. As Sandico writes, the interdisciplinary nature of the book was key to its importance.

From, How a chemist ,an engineer and a geologist

destroyed Darwin's warm pond theory.

Thaxton recounts a session with about 25 professors and graduate students during which scientists in different disciplines objected to his critique, each by calling upon another scientist in another field. As each man in turn unexpectedly affirmed the correctness of Thaxton’s points, it became clear that the scientists had relied on what they believed to be true outside of their own areas of expertise to shore up their own theories, where they recognized weaknesses. These scientists needed an interdisciplinary view of evolutionary theory to see its true state.

Thaxton was the man for that job. In 1976 he was asked to review a manuscript about the origin of life by Walter Bradley, an engineer, and Roger Olsen, a geologist. Thaxton saw the value in what he read, and he knew what was missing: more chemistry! “You’re the chemist,” said the others.

So after years of research and collaboration, in 1984, Bradley, Olsen, and Thaxton published a rigorous interdisciplinary critique of origin-of-life research: “The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories.” (The book was republished in 2020 with several new chapters by leading experts.) In it they delved deeply into, among other things, the geochemistry of the early Earth, the role of thermodynamics in ordered systems, and the need for information, not just energy, to accomplish the order that we see in life.

Their work was persuasive. The book garnered unexpectedly positive responses from fellow scientists, many of whom accepted their critique on its merits, and even welcomed it as an accurate and much-needed evaluation of the state of the field. Thaxton, et al. had withheld their alternative hypothesis — that an intelligent cause was behind the origin of life — until the end of the book, allowing materialist readers to consider the evidence against chemical evolution on their own terms before being invited to make the paradigm-shifting concession that the evidence warrants a nonmaterial conclusion.

Sandico notes that, after obtaining a chemistry PhD at Iowa State, Thaxton himself had been influenced by chemist Michael Polanyi:

Thaxton’s interest turned specifically toward chemical evolution and the origin of life after he read Michael Polanyi’s 1967 article “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry” in Chemical and Engineering News. Polanyi, a physical chemist, argued that life is not reducible to mere chemistry and physics. Thaxton may have forgotten the paper had he not, soon after reading it, happened to hear an analysis of it by Francis Schaeffer, who called Polanyi’s assertion “one of the most outstanding propositions of the twentieth century.” Thaxton was intrigued. He began to examine the state of the origin-of-life field, and found it… well, let’s say unproductive.

It’s a helpful and very interesting intellectual lineage. Read the rest at The Federalist

Thomas Sowell on the modern day fall of Rome.

On the struggle for the Empire of God on earth

Monday, 30 January 2023

One more time

Everything that is true of the one true God MUST be true of any person identical to/ identified as the one true God.

If then Jesus Christ is the one true God. Then everything that is true of the one true God MUST also be true Jesus Christ.

Including : acts ch.3:13 NIV "The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus..."

Jesus must of necessity be his own Lord.

John ch.8:54 NIV"Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. "

Jesus Christ must of necessity be his own Father

And if as trinitarians insist the one God is the trinity. Then Jesus must be the trinity .

If this strikes you as illogical (first good for you)

Hopefully you will at least understand why it strikes me as illogical.

The privileged galaxy?

New Study: The Milky Way Is Exceptional

Guillermo Gonzales

The Copernican Principle is said to be a guiding narrative in modern cosmology. We are told that the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus started us on a series of demotions with his removal of the Earth from the center of the Solar System. Later, astronomers discovered that we aren’t even at the center of the Milky Way and that the Milky Way is just one of many billions of galaxies in the observable universe. These discoveries proved that our place in the universe is not special, and when we do cosmology we must assume we are typical observers.

Much of this narrative is false, as Jay Richards and I explain in The Privileged Planet and as Michael Keas further elaborates in Unbelievable. We now know that our planetary home, our Solar System, and our location in the Milky Way are not typical. What about the larger scales? Is the Milky Way typical? What about its place in the local universe?

Not a Typical Galaxy

Astronomers have known for several decades that the Milky Way is not a typical galaxy. It is among the approximately 1 percent of most luminous galaxies in the nearby universe. In addition, the SAGA (Satellites Around Galactic Analogs) survey revealed that the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way exhibit A lower rate of star formation than those around Milky Way analogs. The researchers also found that the Milky Way satellites are more centrally concentrated than those around other galaxies like ours.

A just-published study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (see Here and Here) reveals the Milky Way to be very atypical in another way. Based on large-scale simulations of the local universe, the researchers found that the Milky Way is more massive than most galaxies imbedded in cold (low velocity dispersion) “walls” similar to ours.

Not Arranged Randomly

Over the last 40 years, surveys of the “nearby” universe have revealed that galaxies are not arranged randomly in space. Rather, they are mostly arranged in a foam-like structure with mostly empty “voids” outlined by “filaments” and “walls” or “sheets.” These structures have been reproduced with massive computer simulations that include ordinary and dark matter.

The lead author, Miguel Aragón, said, “You might have to travel a half a billion light years from the Milky Way, past many, many galaxies, to find another cosmological wall with a galaxy like ours.” They found that only about one in a million galaxies in the simulation are as special as the Milky Way in this way.

They note that the local wall environment can influence the angular momentum and spin alignment of its member galaxies. They suggest that galaxies in our local wall environment may have experienced fewer mergers. We do not yet know why the Milky Way is special in this way. Is this rare condition needed to make the Milky Way more habitable? Does it give us a privileged place to make cosmological observations from? Answers to these questions will have to await further research.

Why the Russian Church remains fuel for JEHOVAH'S wrath.

Religious Repression in Putin’s Russia

Antonio Graceffo

While religion was formally abolished under the USSR, under Putin it has been repressed. Consequently, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom identified Russia as one of the world’s worst violators of religious freedom.

In December 2021, just two months before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s supreme Court dissolved the non-governmental agency (NGO) Memorial, which is the oldest and most respected human rights organization in Russia and an outspoken supporter of religious freedom. Among other activities, the group was compiling a list of those imprisoned for alleged offenses related to religion. The dissolution of Memorial was seen as a warning to other activists, that they too could be prosecuted for speaking out against Putin’s government.

Under the Russian Constitution, though citizens are guaranteed religious freedom, authorities may suspend religious activity in the name of national security. Although the constitution specifically cites extremism as a cause for the suspension of religious freedom, it does not provide a robust definition of which activities could be considered “extremism.”

Additionally, Russia has strict laws on the registration of clergy and places of worship in addition to staunch prohibitions against missionary work. The term “missionary work” is broadly applied to “preaching, praying, disseminating religious materials, and answering questions about religion outside of officially designated sites.” Furthermore, the country has blasphemy laws and has the third-highest blasphemy prosecution rate in the world. Blasphemy is often used as a pretext to suppress the activities of religions other than the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian law technically recognizes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism as the four “traditional” religions. But, only the Russian Orthodox Church is elevated to the role of representing the ideals and faith of Russia, passed down across untold generations . Officially acknowledging the Orthodox Church as being part of the country’s cultural and genetic heritage is significant because not only does it subordinate other religions, but it also subordinates Russia’s non-Slavic ethnic minorities.

Among the 200 ethnic groups living in the Russian Federation. Russian Slavs comprise 77.7% of the population while the remainder is comprised of smaller minorities like Tatars, Ukrainians, and Mari (Volga Finnic ethnic group in the republic of Mari El). Other ethnic groups in the Russian Far East and bordering on Central Asia include Khakas, Yakut, Chechens, Mongolic, and Turkic peoples. Many minority groups are adherents of religions not afforded the protection of “traditional” religions such as Christianity. About 63% of Russia’s population are Orthodox Christian, 7% are Muslim, and 26% identify as agnostic. Buddhists, Jews, other Christians, and animists each comprise about 1% or less of the population.

Religious groups and NGOs have reported ongoing abuses committed by the authorities. Members of groups designated “extremist”, “terrorist”, or “undesirable” have been subjected to investigation, detainment, imprisonment, torture, physical abuse, and/or seizure of property.

Among the groups suffering this type of repression are Islamic groups Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tablighi Jamaat, and followers of Muslim theologian Said Nursi. The Church of Scientology was closed on the grounds of posing a threat to national security. The Falun Gong spiritual movement was banned for extremism and terrorism. Multiple evangelical Protestant groups have been persecuted with Protestant Christians often being fined for “illegal missionary activity.”

Indigenous religions practiced by some small minorities, such as those in the Russian Far East, are not identified under the law as “traditional religions.” As such, they have suffered a great deal with even less recourse. Vandalism and desecration of sacred sites have been inflicted on the Mari religion and the indigenous Khakas religion (Siberian shamanism and Christianity) while a Yakut shaman who said she would exorcise Vladimir Putin was confined to a mental institution.

Religious Repression in Putin’s Russia

By Antonio Graceffo on January 11, 2023

read5 min

After the Russian invasion of and annexation of Crimea in 2014, religious groups previously legal in Ukraine were subjected to Russian law. Consequently, the Islamic Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars became a banned faith. Even the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in Crimea is being persecuted and this has resulted in the confiscation of property belonging to the Cathedral of St. Vladimir and Olga. The Kremlin’s actions against Ukrainian Christians prompted the United States Congress to introduce the Ukraine Religious Freedom Support Act (H.R. 496).

The Russian high court ruled to ban Jehovah’s Witness in 2017, ushering in a period of harassment. To date, there have been more than 1,274 raids of homes belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses with property confiscated and, in many instances, adherents being arrested. As of 2021, 52 Jehovah’s Witnesses were serving prison sentences. In June 2021, a Russian court sentenced four Jehovah’s Witnesses to 3-5 years in prison citing the Russian government felt that the presence of Jehovah’s Witness threatened the nation’s “civil peace and accord.”

Russia’s Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox denomination which split from the main church in 1666, have called on the Russian government to end its religious persecution of minorities, citing repression of non-Orthodox Christians in Tsarist Russia. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2022 that Russia’s ban of the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith was unlawful.

In 2020, the Russian government discussed religious legislation that would require all clergy who studied abroad to retrain in a Russian college where classes in Russian history and spirituality would be mandatory. This is particularly troubling for Russia’s Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist associations which have depended heavily on overseas educated clergy since the collapse of the USSR. The Catholic church reported that many of their foreign priests and nuns already faced difficulty obtaining work permits and that this new requirement for retraining would most likely force the closure of numerous dioceses.

Another form of religious discrimination has been seen in Putin’s call for conscripts which largely come from the ethnic and religious minority populations since the invasion of Ukraine began. Mongols from Buryatia, many of whom practice Shamanism, were particularly singled out for conscription. The regions that have suffered the highest casualties are Buryatia and the Republic of Dagestan, home to Turkic Muslims and Buryatia. Other predominantly minority regions suffering heavy casualties are the Krasnodar Krai, Bashkortostan, and Volgograd Oblast. As many as 40% of the casualties have been non-Slavic according to some accounts.

Donetsk and Luhansk, two regions of Ukraine with a high concentration of ethnic Russians, have had a long history of violence perpetrated against Christians and non-Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox communities. Now that these regions are occupied by Russia, religious repression is expected to increase.

Since the days of Tsarist Russia, through the Soviet era, and now, in the Russian Federation, under Vladimir Putin, Jews, Muslims, animists, Shamanists, and Christians who did not follow the Russian Orthodox faith have been oppressed. The fact that faith remains and that these believers have not given up the struggle to practice their religion is, in itself a miracle. The religious beliefs of the Russian people have outlived the Russian Empire and the USSR, and they will outlive Vladimir Putin.

Ps. Revelation 18:24NIV "And in her was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who were slain on the earth.”"

What breaking some eggs looks like?

Modern day gold rush in the wild east.

The Spectre of Lamarckism looms again?

Blindness in Cave Fish is Due to Epigenetics

Cornelius G Hunter

A recent Paper out of Brant Weinstein’s and William Jeffery’s laboratories on eye development, or the lack thereof, in blind cave fish has important implications for evolutionary theory (paper discussed Here). The study finds that the loss of eyes in fish living in dark Mexican caves is not due to genetic mutations, as evolutionists have vigorously argued for many years, but due to genetic regulation. Specifically, methylation of key development genes represses their expression and with it eye development in this venerable icon of evolution. But the finding is causing yet more problems for evolutionary theory.

Darwin appealed to the blind cave fish in his one long argument for evolution. It is a curious argument in many ways, and the first sign of problems was in Darwin’s presentation where he flipped between two different explanations. At one point he explained the loss of vision in the cave fish as an example of evolutionary change not due to his key mechanism, natural selection. Instead, the Sage of Kent resorted to using the Lamarckian mechanism or law of “use and disuse.” Privately Darwin despised and harshly criticized Lamarck, but when needed he occasionally employed his French forerunner’s ideas.

Elsewhere Darwin hit upon a natural selection-based mechanism for the blind cave fish, explaining that elimination of the costly and unneeded vision system would surely raise the fitness of the hapless creatures.

This latter explanation would become a staple amongst latter day evolutionary apologists, convinced that it mandates the fact of evolution. Anyone who has discussed or debated evolutionary theory with today’s Epicureans has likely encountered this curious argument that because blind cave fish lost their eyes, therefore the world must have arisen by itself.

Huh?

To understand the evolutionary logic, or lack thereof, one must understand the history of ideas, and in particular the idea of fixity, or immutability, of species. According to evolutionists, species are either absolutely fixed in their designs, or otherwise there are no limits to their evolutionary changes and the biological world, and everything else for that matter, spontaneously originated.

Any evidence, for any kind of change, no matter how minor, is immediately yet another proof text for evolution, in all that the word implies.

Of course, from a scientific perspective, the evidence provides precisely zero evidence for evolution. Evolution requires the spontaneous (i.e., by natural processes without external input) creation of an unending parade of profound designs. The cave fish evidence shows the removal, not creation, of such a design.

The celebration of such evidence and argument by Darwin and his disciples reveals more about evolutionists than evolution. That they would find this argument persuasive reveals their underlying metaphysics and the heavy lifting it performs. It is all about religion.

We are reminded of all this with the news of Weinstein’s new study. But we also see something new: The insertion, yet again, of Lamarck into the story. The irony is that the epigenetics, now revealed as the cause of repressed eye development in the cave fish, hearkens back to Lamarck.

Darwin despised Lamarck and later evolutionists made him the third rail in biology. Likewise they have pushed back hard against the scientific findings of epigenetics and their implications.

The environment must not drive biological change.

False.

Well such biological change must not be transgenerational.

False.

Well such inheritance must not be long lasting, or otherwise robust.

False again.

This last failure is revealed yet again in the new blind cave fish findings.

False predictions count. A theory that is repeatedly wrong, over and over, in all of its fundamental expectations, will eventually be seen for what it is.

The rise of epigenetics is yet another such major failure. Evolutionists pushed back against it because it makes no sense on the theory, and that means it cannot now be easily accommodated.

One problem is that epigenetics is complex. The levels of coordination and intricacy of mechanism are far beyond evolution’s meager resources.

It’s not going to happen.

Another problem is the implied serendipity. For instance, one epigenetic mechanism involves the molecular tags places on the tails of the DNA packing proteins called histones. While barcoding often seems to be an apt metaphor for epigenetics, the tagging of histone tails can influence the histone three dimensional structures. It is not merely an information-bearing barcode. Like the tiny rudder causing the huge ship to change course, the tiny molecular tag can cause the much larger packing proteins to undergo conformational change, resulting in important changes in gene accessibility and expression.

This is all possible because of the special, peculiar, structure and properties of the histone protein and its interaction with DNA. With evolution we must believe this just happened to evolve for no reason, and thus fortuitously enabled the rise of epigenetics.

Another problem with epigenetics is that it is worthless, in evolutionary terms that is. The various mechanisms that sense environmental shifts and challenges, attach or remove one of the many different molecular tags to one of the many different DNA or histone locations, propagate these messages across generations, and so forth, do not produce the much needed fitness gain upon which natural selection operates.

The incredible epigenetics mechanisms are helpful only at some yet to be announced future epoch when the associated environmental challenge presents itself. In the meantime, selection is powerless and according to evolution the incredible system of epigenetics, that somehow just happened to arise from a long, long series or random mutations, would wither away with evolution none the wiser.

These are the general problems with epigenetics. In the case of the blind cave fish, however, there is possible explanation. It is a longshot, but since this case specifically involves the loss of a stage of the embryonic development, evolutionists can say that genetic mutations caused changes in the methylating proteins, causing them to be overactive.

This explanation relies on the preexistence of the various epigenetic mechanisms, so does not help to resolve the question of how they could have evolved. What the explanation does provide is a way for evolutionists to dodge the bullet presented by the specter of the cave fish intelligently responding to an environmental shift.

Such teleology in the natural world is not allowed.

So the evolutionary prediction is that these proteins will be found to have particular random changes causing an increase in their methylation function, in particular at key locations in key genes (i.e., the genes associated eye development).

That’s a long shot, and an incredible violation of Occam’s Razor.

My predictions are that (i) this evolutionary prediction will fail just as the hundreds that came before, and (ii) as with those earlier failures, this failure will do nothing to open the evolutionist’s eyes.

Alt-science?

Welcome to Alt-Science

Cornelius G Hunter

Sometimes it’s obvious, as in the case of the scientific research paper that was rejected after it was accepted. While the paper was well accepted and given positive comments from peer reviewers, certain members of the editorial board of a seemingly scientific journal noticed that the results had negative implications for evolution. And so months after the editor had told the authors he was happy “to proceed with publication,” the paper suddenly was, “on further reflection and discussion,” summarily rejected.

And what exactly was the “discussion” about? That “the unspoken implication of the article is that, probabilistically, random undirected evolution is impossible.”

And that, dear scientists, is not allowed.

Random undirected evolution is, by definition, a fact. Break that ground rule, and pay the price. This isn’t about science or truth. This is the alt-science that seeks to control everything from publications and textbooks to careers and funding.

Sunday, 29 January 2023

The thumb print of JEHOVAH: OOL Edition.

On the Darwin delusion.

Mama Bear Apologetics Takes on Richard Dawkins

Evolution News

A new episode of ID the Future puts atheist Richard Dawkins’s book Outgrowing God under the microscope and reveals multiple ways his argument smashes up against contrary scientific evidence. Walking us through the critique are author and Mama Bear Apologetics founder Hillary Morgan Ferrer and her co-host, Amy Davison.

Dawkins invokes the beautiful order evident in the murmuration of bird flocks as evidence that complexity can evolve from simple algorithmic rules. But Ferrer explains why the phenomenon of bird murmuration doesn’t even begin to approach what we find when sophisticated engineering order emerges in the growth of embryos. Ferrer also considers the challenges of re-engineering sperm thermoregulation to move from how it works in marine life to how it works in land animals. For a blind process to traverse this evolutionary pathway while maintaining viability at every stage would require — to adapt a line from Alice in Wonderland — six hundred impossible things before breakfast. What about evolving something simpler, such as the bilayer cell membrane, essential for cellular life? No, Ferrer argues. It’s also far too sophisticated to have evolved through a blind evolutionary process. What is needed is the foresight that comes with intelligent design. Tune in to hear Ferrer and Davison rebut these and other pro-evolution arguments from Richard Dawkins.

Download the podcast or listen to it here. To read more from Ferrer and some of her Mama Bear colleagues, pick up their bestselling book Mama Bear Apologetics: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies.

David Berlinski re: human nature.

Man playing God again ,what could go wrong?

Yet more on serendipity's key role in Darwinism.

Protein Mutations Are Highly Coupled

Cornelius G Hunter

A new Study from Michael Harms’ laboratory at the University of Oregon finds that potential amino acid substitutions in protein sequences are highly coupled. That is, if one residue mutates to a new amino acid, the swap impacts the other possible substitutions—they now have a different impact on the protein tertiary structure. As the paper explains:

Proteins exist as ensembles of similar conformations. The effect of a mutation depends on the relative probabilities of conformations in the ensemble, which in turn, depend on the exact amino acid sequence of the protein. Accumulating substitutions alter the relative probabilities of conformations, thereby changing the effects of future mutations. This manifests itself as subtle but pervasive high-order epistasis. Uncertainty in the effect of each mutation accumulates and undermines prediction. Because conformational ensembles are an inevitable feature of proteins, this is likely universal.

This coupling leads to a “profound unpredictability in evolution,” and the authors conclude that “detailed evolutionary predictions are not possible given the chemistry of macromolecules.”

This finding seems to confirm what many evolutionists have said for decades—that evolution is a contingent, not law-like, process:

These [macro]evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible.” – Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1957.

Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques” for explaining evolutionary events and processes. – Ernst Mayr

What science needs are “plausible scenarios for a fully material universe, even if those scenarios cannot be currently tested.” – Victor Stenger, 2004

any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken. – Stephen Jay Gould

All of this is in direct contradiction to the science, which reveals undeniable patterns in biology that have been repeated over and over. From the pervasive instances of convergence, recurrence, and all kinds of other “ence’s”, to the non adaptive patterns discussed by Michael Denton, the biological is anything but haphazard or random. Clearly, the same solution, for whatever reason, is used repeatedly across a wide range of species, in various patterns.

This is a clear falsification of an evolutionary expectation expressed across many years, and widely held by a consensus of experts.

But there is another problem with these protein findings. In addition to confirming the complexity and coupling of protein folding, the findings also seem to corroborate what theoretical and experimental studies have shown for years, that the fitness landscape of macromolecules in general, and proteins in particular, is rugged.

The problem of evolving a protein is difficult for several reasons. First, protein function drops off rapidly with only a few mutations. Very quickly a protein loses its function as you move away from the native sequence.

Second, random or starting sequences are stuck in a flat and rugged fitness landscape. There is little sign of a the kind of smooth and gradually increasing fitness landscape that would aid evolution’s enormous task of figuring out how proteins could evolve.

These problems are just getting worse, and this new finding a good example of that trend.

Saturday, 28 January 2023

JEHOVAH God: friend of science?

Michael Keas Debunks Science-Faith Warfare Myth

Michael Keas

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid talks with science historian Michael Keas about Keas’s revealing work from ISI Books, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion. “Scientists do love a good story,” says Keas. “Turns out there are plenty of stories we shouldn’t believe, myths about science and Christianity supposedly at war with each other.” He also discusses a future-oriented ET myth that functions as a substitute for traditional religion. Learn more about Keas’s fascinating and informative book. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

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