Will it be the noble savage or savage noble who saves civilization?

 The Barbarian Within: Darwinism and the Secular Script for Masculinity

Nancy Pearcy

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a preview adapted from Nancy Pearcey’s forthcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity. The book will be published on June 27, but you can pre-order now!

Civilization has degenerated into a “mawkish sentimentality,” complained a writer in 1888. “In Heaven’s name, leave us a saving touch of honest, old-fashioned barbarism!” 

How did barbarism come to be seen as a positive trait for men — “a saving touch,” a remedy for Victorian sentimentality?…

A new concept of masculinity took hold after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). His evolutionary theory inspired the idea that, at the core, men are animals — and that to recover their authentic masculinity, men need to reconnect with their inner beast. For example, Zane Grey said that in his Westerns he was trying to recapture the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. “Nature developed man according to the biological facts of evolution,” he wrote. “Something of the wild and primitive should forever remain instinctive in the human race.” 

Male writers began to claim that civilization was merely a thin veneer over our animal nature. A book titled Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” A book titled The Caveman Within Us (1922) argued that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.” 

In fact, any man not primitive or barbarian enough risked being judged as a failure as a man. The most prominent psychologist of the age, G. Stanley Hall, remarked that “a teenage boy who is a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.” 

In this chapter, we will investigate the application of Darwinism to human behavior, which is called Social Darwinism. How has it shaped the public discourse on masculinity right up to our own day? How has it contributed to the secular script for the “Real” Man.

The “Blessings” of War

In the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and urbanization, a new word entered the English language: overcivilized. People began to worry that city boys were becoming soft and emasculated. They were no longer the strapping young men produced by harsh pioneer days or rugged farm life. The three principal institutions that dominate early childhood socialization — family, religion, and education — were increasingly staffed and run by women. Men began to cast about for ways to retrieve a sense of robust manhood.

Social Darwinism came in handy in several ways. Take militarism: If life evolved through the struggle for survival, then applying that principle to nations suggests that the way to produce strong, vigorous manhood is through warfare. 

“War is a blessing for humanity,” wrote a German anthropologist, “since it offers the only means to measure the strengths of one nation to another and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence.” A biologist agreed: 

According to Darwin’s theory, war has constantly been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human race, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally inferior or morally degenerate peoples must clear out and make room for the stronger and better developed. 

Theodore Roosevelt was a Social Darwinist and famously said in 1895, “The country needs a war.” He argued that the current generation of young men needed to test their mettle in battle: 

No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the courage of the statesman who has to meet storms which can only be quelled by soldierly virtue — this stands higher than any qualities called out merely in times of peace. 

G. Stanley Hall even cast militarism as a “manly protest” against the influence of women: “War is, in a sense, the acme of what some now call the manly protest. In peace, women have invaded nearly all the occupations of man, but in war, male virtues come to the fore, for woman cannot go ‘over the top.’” War was depicted not as a necessary evil but as a positive strategy for restoring virile manhood. 

Your Inner Barbarian 

Social Darwinism was also used to support a sports and fitness craze that swept over the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century. As middle-class Americans left behind the rigorous life on the farm to become a nation of sedentary office workers, they began to turn to sports and exercise to rebuild their physical health. The first tennis court in the United States was built in 1876, the first basketball court in 1891. 

Sports were touted not only as a way to get physically fit but also as a way for boys to reconnect with their evolutionary origins. In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, a devotee of Darwin, proposed a theory called recapitulation, claiming that each human embryo replays the entire history of evolution (from one-celled organism, to fish, to amphibian, to mammal, to human). Social Darwinists concluded that boys continue the process of evolution by “recapitulating” the history of the human race as they pass from childhood to adulthood. 

For example, William Forbush, a child development specialist, wrote a highly influential book titled The Boy Problem (1902) claiming that each boy repeats “the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Joseph Lee, a social reformer who founded a movement to build playgrounds in cities, said play arose from an earlier stage of human evolution — from the “barbaric and predatory society to which the boy naturally belongs.” A pioneer in the Boy Scout movement said athletics were reminiscent “of the struggle for survival, of the hunt, of the chase, of war.” 

The idea was that even as boys grew up to become refined Victorian gentlemen, they should always retain a core of wildness and savagery. When Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Boy Scouts of America, he said that his goal was to rekindle in boys “the power of the savage.”

Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation was eventually discredited. (He had supported the theory with falsified sketches of embryos; already in his own day, he was accused of fraud.) Yet the idea that humans arose from animal origins and are barbarians at heart was becoming part of the socially constructed definition of manhood. 

Darwinian Stories 

Darwinism was used to bolster the philosophy of naturalism, the claim that nature is all that exists. Among writers, it inspired a new genre called literary naturalism. Novelists portrayed humans as evolved organisms, governed by the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Émile Zola, a leading theorist of literary naturalism, said he wanted to portray characters as “human animals, nothing more.”

For example, Frank Norris wrote a short story (1893) about a bookish student named Lauth living in medieval France who gets caught up in a riot and ends up killing a man with a crossbow:

In an instant, a mighty flame of blood-lust thrilled up through Lauth’s body and mind. At the sight of blood shed by his own hands all the animal savagery latent in every human being woke within him — no more merciful scruples now. He could kill. In the twinkling of an eye the pale, highly cultivated scholar . . . sank back to the level of his savage Celtic ancestors. His eyes glittered . . . and his whole frame quivered with the eagerness and craving of a panther in sight of his prey.

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), often assigned in high school classes, is set during the Civil War. Early in the novel, the main character, Henry, flees from the field of battle. But later he “felt the daring spirit of a savage.” He redeems himself by fighting like a “barbarian, a beast,” a “war devil.” 

Jack London is best known for books like The Call of the Wild (1903). But what most people do not know is that, as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience” to radical naturalism by reading books about evolution. He even memorized passages from Darwin’s books and could quote them by heart, the way Christians memorize Scripture. 

Though London wrote about dogs, he intended them as metaphors for humans. In The Call of the Wild, the main character is a dog named Buck, a house pet captured and sold to an Alaskan expedition where he is thrown into a Darwinian struggle for survival. In the Nordic cold, he quickly learns that men and dogs “were savages all of them, who knew no law but the law of the club and fang.” 

Eventually, the last tie to civilization is broken and Buck returns to a pre-civilized existence. A literary critic writes, “Ideal manliness thrives in Buck only because he becomes less and less human, more and more wild.”

Theodore Dreiser, author of American classics such as Sister Carrie, likewise underwent a naturalistic rite of passage by reading books about evolution. He wrote that Darwinism blew him “intellectually to bits,” destroying the last vestiges of his Catholic upbringing. He intended his novels to show that all human “ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows, and joys” were nothing but products of chemical reactions in the brain. He called them “chemic compulsions.” The literary naturalists used fiction to promote a Darwinian worldview that reduced humans to products of evolutionary forces. 

The Thin Veneer of Civilization 

The literary naturalists treated the wilderness as an arena where men could reaffirm their masculinity. As one historian explains, the wilderness was seen “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery — qualities that defined fitness in Darwinian terms.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs set his immensely popular Tarzan series (1912) in the African jungle. Because of Tarzan’s wild upbringing, he avoids the debilitating forces of civilization, possessing the power and strength of primitive manhood. Even after mastering European customs and languages, he prefers to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization” (as Burroughs puts it) and dress in a loincloth of animal hide, eating raw meat that he has killed himself. In Tarzan of the Apes, he tells Jane, “I am still a wild beast at heart.” 

The message of the Tarzan books, says sociologist Michael Kimmel, is that “descending the evolutionary ladder is the only mechanism to retrieve manhood.”

This is a severely stunted, shrunken, truncated view of human nature. From the time of the classical Greeks and Romans, virtue had been defined as the restraint of the “lower” passions by the “higher” faculties of reason, spirit, and moral will. But Darwinism was taken to mean that humans had triumphed over the other species not by reason and moral restraint but by the fierce, fighting urges. In a stunning reversal, the animal passions and instincts were held up as the authentic self. 

The secular script for manhood was redefined as crude and combative, governed by the biological instincts for lust and power. 

Many of the literary naturalists created rollicking adventure stories that are great fun to read. One of our sons devoured the Tarzan books. But Christians should always read with their worldview antennae poised to pick up the story’s underlying message. A Darwinian worldview furthered secular ideas of what it means to be a man. 

The earlier ideal of the Christian gentleman had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature — to compete in the ruthless struggle for dominance and power. The “Real” Man was being defined in increasingly toxic term

s. 

Philosophy: the Yin to science's Yang?

Human not ape-man?

 Scientists Are Skeptical that Intelligence in Homo naledi “Erases Human Exceptionalism”

Casey Lusken

major science news story is making the rounds right now about how the hominid species Homo naledi may have had high intelligence, buried its dead, used fire, and even carved markings into a cave wall. All this is unexpected since Homo naledi’s brain size is not much different from that of a chimp. 

Given the extensive media attention (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Newspeak, ABC News, Associated Press , New York Times , to name a few), you might think this is some completely new proposal that just got published in a major scientific journal. That inference would be wrong. At least when it comes to burial of the dead and use of fire, these are old claims about Homo naledi that have been controversial for years but are now being reinvigorated based upon new evidence presented in a series of three preprint papers (Here, Here, and Here). The papers were uploaded at bioRxiv, which, of course, is a preprint server, not a scientific journal. Newsweek thus observes, “The papers are still in preprint, however, so they are yet to be published officially in a peer-reviewed journal.” The Associated Press Notes, “The research has not been peer-reviewed yet and some outside scientists think more evidence is needed to challenge what we know about how humans evolved their complex thinking.” 

             Someone must have a good PR team at work to generate such a large batch of news stories about mostly old claims based entirely upon preprints! Phys.org is even running a story about the project’s lead scientist, Lee Berger, heralding “South Africa’s Lee Berger, Palaeontology action hero”!

Scientists Are Skeptical

Peer-reviewed or not, and hyped or not, the data exists and it’s worth discussing. And apparently quite a few scientists are skeptical. The New York Times notes:

But a number of experts on ancient engravings and burials said that the evidence did not yet support these extraordinary conclusions about Homo naledi. The cave evidence found so far could have a range of other explanations, they said. The skeletons might have been merely left on the cave floor, for example. And the charcoal and engravings found in the cave might have been left by modern humans who entered long after Homo naledi became extinct.

“It seems that the narrative is more important than the facts,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia.

An article at The Conversation authored by a quartet of four archaeologists, based in Australia, Kenya, Spain, and Germany, shows that some prominent scientists aren’t convinced. The article, titled “Major new research claims smaller-brained Homo naledi made rock art and buried the dead. But the evidence is lacking,” covers the three main claims: use of fire, burial of the dead, and the presence of cave art.

Let’s take a look at each of these.

Torching Fire Use by Homo naledi?

The skeptical quartet note that the investigators have not published any evidence that demonstrates Homo naledi used fire in the cave:

In public lectures and on social media they clarify they have found new evidence for hearths, including charcoal, ash, discoloured clay and burned animal bones. Yet none of the scientific research needed to confirm the use of fire has been carried out. Or if it has, it hasn’t been published.

Previously acquired radiocarbon dates obtained by the site investigators on the apparent hearth material provided very late dates that distanced the hearths from the remains of Homo naledi by several hundred thousand years.

These are pretty strong criticisms. The quartet says the investigators are making assertions that have simply not been backed up by evidence presented to the public. In that case, claims of Homo naledi’s fire use seem totally unestablished. 

Burying Claims of Burial of the Dead

As for burial of the dead, the skeptical quartet note that there are “rigorous criteria agreed upon by the scientific community for identifying intentional human burial.” But, they argue, the Homo naledi evidence does not meet this standard:

[I]s there actually evidence for funerary behaviour at Rising Star Cave? According to standards set by the palaeoanthropology community, the evidence presented so far indicates no.

They continue:

[N]ot one of the burials provides compelling evidence of a deliberately excavated pit. Indeed, the shallow cavities may not be dug pits at all, but natural depressions where the bodies accumulated and were later disturbed by trampling, or partial cave collapse.

The alleged burials also fail to meet another fundamental criteria for deliberate burials: anatomical alignment of the body and articulation of skeletal remains.

In a deliberate burial, the body is generally intact and any minimal displacement can be explained by decomposition. That’s because burial involves immediately covering the body with soil, which protects the anatomical integrity of the skeleton.

Rising Star Cave so far hasn’t produced evidence for anything other than the general spatial association of some skeletal elements. At most, it provides evidence for the in-situ decomposition of particular body parts, such as an ankle, and partial hand and foot articulations.

Moreover, confirming intentional burial in the past has required the presentation of human remains in an arrangement that can’t have been achieved by chance. However, the scattered distribution of the remains at Rising Star prevents reconstruction of their original positions.

Other claimed evidence for funerary behaviour is equally uncompelling. A stone artefact supposedly included in the burial as a “grave good” is said to have scratches and edge serrations from use. But this so-called artefact’s shape suggests it may be natural. It’s still encased in sediment and has only been studied through synchrotron X-ray.

But perhaps the biggest barrier to confirming the status of the findings is that so far none of the alleged burials have been fully excavated. It’s therefore impossible to assess the completeness of the bodies, their original position, and the limits of the purported pits.

The New York Times elaborates:

But María Martinón-Torres, the director of Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution, said that such speculations were premature based on the evidence presented so far. “Hypotheses need to be built on what we have, not what we guess,” she said.

Dr. Martinón-Torres considered funerary caching more likely than burials, pointing out that the oval depressions did not contain full skeletons in complete alignment. If Homo naledi brought the bodies into the cave and left them on the cave floor, the bones could have become separated as the bodies decomposed. “Still, I think the possibility of having funerary caching with this antiquity is already stunning,” she said.

“I’m highly optimistic that they have burials, but the jury is still out,” said Michael Petraglia, the director of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution. Dr. Petraglia wanted to see more detailed analysis of the sediment and other kinds of evidence before judging whether the ovals were burials. “The problem is that they’re ahead of the science,” he said.

And Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, said it was possible that Homo naledi did not bring the bodies in, either for caching or burying. The bodies might have washed in. “I’m not convinced that the team have demonstrated that this was deliberate burial,” he said.

Likewise the UK’s Natural History Museum quotes a scientist who is not buying it:

Dr Silvia Bello is an expert on the evolution of human behaviour at the Museum, and was not involved in the study.

‘It sounds ridiculous because we’re used to burials, but they are not the easiest of things to define or recognise,’ explains Silvia. ‘If you have a body that is completely buried, when it decomposes the bone collapses in a certain way and in a certain order. So, this could give an indication that the body was buried whole, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you that it was a burial. The researchers call what they have found a “feature”, which I thought was very generic.’

‘There are two things at play. One is the burial, and one is the funerary behaviour: you can have a funerary behaviour without a burial.’

Science News also has a story quoting critics of claims that this new evidence establishes burial of the dead:

Some researchers consider the new evidence inadequate to confirm that H. naledi interred its own in cave graves. …

“I think that deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi is clear, although it is unlikely that the evidence so far presented will satisfy all scholars,” says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who is not part of Berger’s team.

One objection comes from paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres, director of the Spanish National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos. She suspects that disconnected skeletal parts described in the new papers accumulated either after bodies of the dead that had been placed in cave shafts later fell through or had been left at the back of underground caves. Trampling or other H. naledi activities in caves could eventually have produced fragmentary sets of fossils uncovered by Berger’s group, says Martinón-Torres, who along with Petraglia studied the oldest known H. sapiens burial in Africa.

It’s possible that periodic water seepage into the underground caves helped to move partial or complete H. naledi corpses down sloping cave floors until they came to rest in natural depressions that Berger’s team suggests are intentional burial sites, says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England.

Presumably, if other hominids entered the cave later, then they could also be responsible for the markings on the cave wall.

Is the Writing on the Wall?

As for the markings on the cave wall, these are clearly artificial — that much seems obvious. But it’s quite another task to demonstrate that they were produced by the species Homo naledi. The problem is that the markings are at this point totally undated and thus it’s difficult to say whether they were made by Homo naledi or some later species — perhaps even by humans — who entered the cave and scraped up the wall. This point is reiterated by multiple stories:

Science News notes: “[T]here is no way to determine whether H. naledi or perhaps later H. sapiens visitors to the underground caves — part of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave System, about 40 kilometers west of Johannesburg — created the undated engravings found by Berger’s group. … But the underground cave engravings remain undated. There is no way to know whether people reached the cave chambers within the past few thousand years and carved those wall patterns, Pettitt says.” 

In an Associated Press story, Rick Potts of the Smithsonian makes a similar point: “Scientists haven’t yet been able to identify how old the engravings are. So Potts said the current evidence can’t say for sure whether H. naledi was truly the one to create the symbols, or if some other creature — maybe even H. sapiens — made its way down there at some point.”

The New York Times likewise states: “As for the engravings and the fires, experts said it wasn’t clear that Homo naledi was responsible for them. It was possible they were the work of modern humans who came into the cave thousands of years later. ‘The whole thing is unconvincing, to say the least,’ said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona.”

The quartet of skeptical archaeologists writing at The Conversation also note: “The problem with the rock art at Rising Star Cave is that it’s undated. To imply any link with Homo naledi requires firm dates. This could be achieved through using dating techniques on associated residues or natural deposits covering the art, or by studying materials from excavated and dated archaeological layers that can be linked to the art (for instance, if they contain engraving tools or engraved rock fall fragments). …In the absence of dating, it’s simply spurious to claim the engravings were made by Homo naledi, rather than by another species (and potentially at a much later date).”

Incidentally, the cave markings look very similar to markings made by Neanderthals — whom we already know were highly intelligent. As John Hawks told the Wall Street Journal:

Similar ancient hashtags have been documented at a Neanderthal site in Gibraltar that is just tens of thousands of years old. “They are uncannily similar, and they are 8,000 kilometers apart, you know, it is just crazy,” Hawks said.

Neanderthal fossils aren’t known from southern Africa, but any similarly smart hominid (like Homo sapiens) could have made these marks.

“Erases the Idea of Human Exceptionalism”

The possibility that some later species made the cave markings is not even considered by many news outlets, including ABC News, which is completely credulous about claims that these markings were made by the precise individuals who “laid to rest” the bones that are found in the cave:

The researchers began to hypothesize that Homo naledi buried its dead during continued excavations in 2018 and in July 2022, those hunches were not only proven but amplified once Berger and his team found skeletal remains of Homo naledi and then carvings on the wall above them to mark those laid to rest there.

The symbols included triangles, squares and a sort-of “hashtag” sign, as in two cross-hatching equal signs, Berger said. However, it is unclear what these carvings meant, and researchers will be delving into whether there is a “random chance” that Homo naledi used the same symbols as humans or if they were obtained from some sort of shared ancestry.

Why do so many folks seem so eager to accept unsubstantiated claims about Homo naledi? ABC News spells out what the investigators want to accomplish with this research:

The finding was “striking” and “shocking” and erases the idea of human exceptionalism — that humans are different than animals and special due to their big brains. Homo naledi had brains about the size of a chimpanzee, and yet practiced ritual burials, a behavior previously assumed was only done by humans, Berger said.

They get points for candor, at least. The purpose of these stretched and unverified claims of high intelligence in a small-brained hominid is apparently to “erase the idea” that human beings are “special” and “exceptional.”

Keep in mind that Berger et al.’s previous claims about Homo naledi’s intelligence have been highly disputed and their initial claims that the species lived 2-3 million years ago turned out to be exaggerated by a factor of 10. Time will tell if these latest Homo naledi claims from Berger’s team stand up. I’m skeptical, to say the least.

Some more truth and reconciliation?

 To Restore Faith in Public Health, We Need Truth Commissions

Wesley J Smith 

Two blazing political controversies are destroying our trust in the integrity of medicine. One is, thankfully, mostly in the past — the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. The second is ongoing and growing increasingly bitter: How to best care for children who “feel” that they aren’t the sex they were born.

These are different debates, but they share certain commonalities. Both issues involve the suspicion that officially preferred policies are more ideological than scientific. Both involve intense efforts by the establishment institutions to squelch heterodox opinions. Both have seen the erosion of the scientific method through the suppression of dissenting points of view. Both controversies have become so mired in partisan politics and culture war argumentation that it’s difficult to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of propaganda.

A Vexing Question

But how to reverse course and restore societal comity is a vexing question. How do we find accord in an atmosphere of intense factionalism when even the most basic facts can’t be agreed upon?

On the COVID front, a group of medical notables known as the Norfolk Group — which includes two co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, along with others — have issued a public call for the creation of a national commission to dispassionately investigate the nation’s response to the pandemic. Importantly, the Norfolk Group isn’t calling for a stacked deck inquiry that’s primarily about pointing fingers, but rather, an objective fact-finding process to learn what was done right during COVID, what was mistaken, and how to best prepare policies to deploy next time. Among the questions they want explored are:

“What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?”

“Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity,” aka “natural immunity,” by government officials and some prominent scientists?

Why were schools closed despite early data showing that they weren’t “major sources of spread and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children”?

“Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health,” such as cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, and mental health?

“How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?”

“Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints?”

“Why was the United States slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity?”

“Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them?”

Were Mandates Ever Justified?

These are important questions worthy of public exploration. Nor do they represent a complete list of issues that should be explored. For example, here’s one I want to know: Since we know that vaccination doesn’t prevent COVID transmission, were mandates ever justified?

Organizing a formal inquiry into official responses to COVID will take heavy lifting. It will require lawmakers to create the panel and craft its parameters: Not easy in this age of partisan distrust. It should grant the committee subpoena power to ensure that recalcitrant witnesses can’t just refuse to cooperate. And then the President will have to sign off. It will also have to be created in such a way that fairness and transparency rather than score-settling are controlling.

As one of the Great Barrington Declaration authors and Norfolk Group member Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told me in a recent podcast interview for Humanize, “The only way you get trust back is asking these questions, answering them honestly, and just essentially saying mea culpa in areas where we need reform so that we don’t have this problem again.”

Heterodoxy Suppressed

The same approach could be deployed to explore the efficacy of “gender-affirming care” because trust in the orthodox one-size fits all, “go for it” policy currently pushed by the medical establishment, politicians, liberal journalists, on social media, and among heavyweight LGBT advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, hasn’t been earned. Indeed, just as we saw during the darkest days of COVID, heterodox views on how to best care for gender dysphoric children are being actively suppressed as argumentation against vaccine and mask mandates were during the pandemic. Worse, those expressing substantial concerns about transitioning adolescents are accused of “transphobic” bigotry and intentional harm-causing. That’s hardly a path to achieving consensus.

Moreover, the argument that “the science is settled” about the propriety of gender-affirming care is hard to believe when the mass numbers of young people — particularly girls — deciding they’re transgender, non-binary, or some other non-conforming gender identification is unprecedented. Moreover, public health officials in other countries are reviewing the same available data as U.S. medical experts and coming to opposite conclusions.

If we’re going to fully understand what’s going on — is this a case of moral panic, or people feeling more free in a less judgmental age to reveal their true selves? — and determine a trustworthy methodology for treating underage patients, an honest and dispassionate investigation is essential. Here are just a few of the questions such a public inquiry should pose:

Why do organizations such as the American Association of Pediatrics and World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) claim that it’s science denialism to oppose gender-affirming care when public health officials in the UK, Norway, Sweden, France, and Finland have concluded that scientific evidence doesn’t demonstrate that the benefits of medical affirmation are real or worth the attendant risks of physical and emotional harm?

Is the risk of suicide higher for children with gender dysphoria if they don’t receive social and medical affirmation, or is that an ideological scare tactic?

Why are so many young people who have previous histories of mental illness being diagnosed as trans?

Why provide body-altering medical affirmation to underaged patients when the data appears to indicate that transgender ideation in the young is often transitory?

How many transgender patients “de-transition,” i.e., return to identifying as their own sex?

Do the parents of children receiving gender-affirming care receive sufficient information to fully give their informed consent to transitioning their children?

To Earn Our Trust

Trust can’t be imposed. It must be earned. The formal investigation the Norfolk Group proposes around COVID and the less formal investigation that I’m suggesting about gender dysphoria in youth could achieve that end. But they will have to be scientifically, rather than ideologically, oriented. Their aim should be to learn, explore, debate, and share data, not dictate, punish, castigate, or exclude heterodox thought.

We’d better get to it. Another pandemic could threaten us at any time. Children’s bodies are daily being impacted in potentially catastrophic ways. Only dispassionate inquiries can forge a consensus that will allow us to find commonality in these contentious arenas of health policy conflict.

How do I know that JEHOVAH is the only true God?

 Exodus ch.33:11ASV"And Moses besought JEHOVAH his God, and said, JEHOVAH, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, that thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?"  

Exodus ch.8:19ASV"Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the finger of God: and Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as JEHOVAH had spoken." 

Daniel ch.2:27,28ASV"Daniel answered before the king, and said, The secret which the king hath demanded can neither wise men, enchanters, magicians, nor soothsayers, show unto the king; 28but there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets, and he hath made known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days. Thy dream, and the visions of thy head upon thy bed, are these: "

In bible times the Lord JEHOVAH demonstrated his superiority over the so called Gods of the nations with majestic displays of wisdom and power that humiliated them and their priests. 

In these end times JEHOVAH continues to distinguish himself from the 'competition'

through the accomplishment of wonders predicted centuries in advance. For instance :

Micah ch.4:3,4ASV"3and he will judge between many peoples, and will decide concerning strong nations afar off: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

4But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of JEHOVAH of hosts hath spoken it. 

John ch.17:22ASV"And the glory which thou hast given me I have given unto them; that they may be one, even as we are one;" 

The facts of history reveal that only JEHOVAH of all professing Gods has been able to fulfill these prophecies which (given the fallen nature of humanity) are as amazing as any miracle reported in scripture. Christendom's nameless three headed God and her false Christ have failed spectacularly in this regard, and we need not go to the pages of history for examples. 

JEHOVAH'S people have kept this peace with JEHOVAH and each other despite official opposition from the elites of the present age.

Revelation ch.6:10,11ASV"and they cried with a great voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? 11And there was given them to each one a white robe; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little time, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, who should be killed even as they were, should have fulfilled their course ." 

So contrary to the false gospel of post millenialists the state will remain in an adversarial relationship with the true church until the the true kingdom of JEHOVAH asserts its lawful claim over the earth. Note true Christians do not retaliate or pursue political power over their religious rivals unlike the fake churches of Christendom. They rest as commanded until the highest bench in the universe takes up their cause. How could imperfect men retain such patience and fidelity to divine law under such intense and unrelenting trial. Only by power of the one true God JEHOVAH through his only true Christ.

John ch.17:33NIV"“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”" 

The same God that raised our Lord from the dead enables us to resist every attempt to get us to compromise with this dying world individually and collectively. 

Indeed the Lord JEHOVAH continues to exalt himself as the one true God via signs and wonders.

From contenders to counterparts?

 How Faith Can Improve Rigor and Creativity in Scientific Research

Evolution News 

On a new episode of ID the Future, plant geneticist Richard Buggs speaks to the hosts of the Table Talk podcast about the long-standing claim that science and religion are at odds. Buggs is a professor and Senior Research Leader at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, one of the UK’s largest plant science research institutes. He is also Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London. Contrary to the prevailing view, Buggs says his Christian faith motivates his research, giving him the ability not only to think with different perspectives but also better understand the people groups stewarding natural resources around the world as well as more adequately explain certain processes he studies in nature. Buggs explains why the term “evolution” can vary between scientists and the public, and he reminds listeners of the current debate among evolutionary biologists themselves about the sufficiency of the current Darwinian mechanism to account for the origin and diversity of life. Along the way, Buggs points out the unconscious bias within his field that favors atheistic assumptions, noting that more cognitive diversity would improve the scientific landscape and bring more rigor and creativity to the scientific process. For their kind permission to post this informative exchange, we thank Table Talk hosts Jack Timpany and Graeme Johnstone. Download the podcast or listen to it Here.

Postimpressionism : a brief history.

How is the resurrection at revelation ch.20 the first.

 Revelation ch.20:4,5NASB "Then I saw thrones,and they sat on them,and judgment wad given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God,and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image,and had not received the mark on their forehead or on their hands;and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection."  

Now if the mere temporary restoring of the imperfect human life that we currently endure counts as a resurrection in the sense being employed in the book of revelation, this certainly cannot be called the first resurrection. There being a number of such resurrections previously see John ch.11:43,44 Hebrews ch.11:35. Thus in the book of revelation sense a resurrection must mean(at least) a restoration of the life our father Adam lost. For it is only in this sense that the resurrection mentioned at revelation ch.20:4,5 could possibly be the first. And if this resurrection is truly the first of such resurrections is expecting that one of like manner (say, the one mentioned as following the millennium ch.5b) unreasonable? 

Granville's(not so sharp,) rule and trinitarian's lack of self awareness.

 In an attempt to prove the trinity doctrine, Granville Sharp made up a rule in 1798. It is often called “Sharp’s Rule” by trinitarians. It says, in effect, that when two or more words (nouns) are joined by the word “and” they all refer to the same PERSON if the word “the” (the article) comes before the first noun and not before the other noun(s): “THE king AND _master of the castle.” 

That trinitarians ,even presently , imagine that this "rule", even if we grant that it is not suspect, could possibly be of any use as evidence of their doctrine says volumes about their total lack of self awareness. All of the creeds go to great lengths to state that no person of the trinity is numerically identical to any other person of the trinity. Thus at best ,Sharp's "rule" can be used to make a weak case for modalism which is denounced as the blackest heresy by Trinitarians.

An uprising in physics?

Clement of Rome on the supremacy of the Father.

    

Clement of Rome (AD 45-101) : "The apostles received the gospel for us from Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was sent from God. So Christ is from God, and the apostles are from Christ: thus both came in proper order by the will of God."[4] Also, "Let all the heathen know that thou [the Father] art God alone, and that Jesus Christ is thy Servant..."[5] 

What about when midway is the cursed earth?

 Will This Proposal “Fix Science”?

Rob Sheldon 

Cory Clark and Philip Tetlock, both at the University of Pennsylvania, explain, “In Bed with the Enemy: How to Fix Science.” They advocate “adversarial collaborations.”

Adversarial collaborations (henceforth, adcollab), is a methodological procedure in which disagreeing scholars work with each other rather than against each other to resolve their empirical dispute.

First, adversaries must articulate their disagreement in terms that both sides find accurate. This eliminates the use of wishy-washy disagreement language that scholars use to make big claims with little accountability. This also prevents scholars from only confronting the strawman version of their opponent’s perspective. In our experience, these initial conversations often cause adversaries to retreat from the bailey to their motte, to realize that their opponent’s views are much more nuanced than they previously thought, and consequently, to discover that the disagreement is much smaller than previously thought.

Second, adversaries must mutually design methods that both sides consider a fair and unbiased test of their competing hypotheses. This eliminates cherry-picking of methodological procedures designed to confirm preferred hypotheses. And this eliminates the ability for scholars to design methods that can only confirm preferred hypotheses while writing off failed tests as studies that simply did not “work”. Scholars must commit a priori to the diagnosticity of the study and agree that contradictory findings would at least cast some doubt on their preferred hypothesis. In our experience, this step leads scholars to develop far more rigorous methods as each side vetoes the blatantly rigged procedures that their opponents prefer. And this leads to more efficient tests because the results are informative no matter how they turn out.

Third, adversaries must mutually write and publish the results. This eliminates the possibility of excessively broad claims. Each adversary serves as a check on their opponent to make sure the claims are duly circumspect. Such reports will be less likely to forward unwarranted promises that lead other scholars, policymakers, and interventionists down expensive dead ends.

There are many, many ways that science has stopped functioning. Certainly, one of them is that it incentivizes the wrong things. But after reading this article, and considering their proposal, ask yourself if any Darwinist would co-write an article with an ID person. In fact, in our woke culture, ask yourself whether merely talking politely to an adversary would not taint one’s career. I have seen events cancelled because the speaker knew somebody who knew somebody on the black list. 

The reasons they give for “adcollabs” apply to people with a few scientific disagreements, but an overall philosophical agreement. Once the gulf gets too wide, I’m afraid that diplomacy doesn’t work too well. Right now, ID is the disenfranchised minority, and for a mainstream Darwinist to submit to an “adcollab” would damage their career while enhancing the ID proponent’s career. Until that perception is removed, until ID has enough clout, until ID isn’t culturally despised, diplomacy will never occur. 

David Berlinski tries to teach an old dog a new trick(i.e self-awareness)

 Science After Babel: An Exercise in Self-Criticism

David Berlinski 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Science After Babel, the latest book from mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. This article is adapted from the book’s Introduction.

The scientific revolution began in the 16th century, and it began in Europe. No one knows why it happened nor why it happened where it happened, but when it happened, everything changed. 

Until the day before yesterday, the imperial architects of the scientific revolution were well satisfied and sleek as seals. An immense tower was going up before their very eyes. The physicists imagined that shortly it would reach the sky; the biologists were satisfied that it had left the ground; and only the theologians were heard to observe that it would soon collapse. 

The Tower is still there. It is, in fact, larger than ever. But it has neither reached the sky nor left the ground. It resembles Bruegel’s Tower of Babel far more than the Chrysler Building, and if it suggests anything at all, it suggests that its original plans have somehow been lost. Some parts of the Tower are sound and sturdy; but, my goodness, the balustrade devoted to the multiverse — what were they thinking?

Who Knows? 

In looking at the Tower, if we are moved to admire its size, we are also bound to acknowledge its faults. The algorithm and the calculus are the two great ideas of the scientific revolution. They are radically different. Algorithms belong to the world of things. The creation of numbers, Thierry of Chartres observed, was the creation of things. In the theory of recursive functions, some part of thinginess has been brought under rational control. 

It is the continuum, on the other hand, that is essential to the calculus. If an algorithm is a part of the world of things, in war, Lewis Fry Richardson once remarked, thinginess fails. In quantum field theory, too. A quantum field is not a thing. The true continuum, René Thom once remarked to me, has no points: it reflects at a distance Freud’s oceanic feeling — what Meister Eckhardt described as pure formlessness. And these, too, are ideas deep in human experience. In the calculus, and mathematical analysis generally, some part of the continuum has been brought under rational control. 

Mathematical analysis and the theory of recursive functions are great achievements, but they are different; they answer to different imperatives; they are the work of different architects.

No wonder the Tower looks as it does. It is a miracle that it remains standing.

The result has been a popular culture littered with ideological detritus: atheism, of course, or naturalism, or materialism, or physicalism, or scientism, or even, God help us, transhumanism. These are not very precise terms, nor do they denote very precise ideas. Naturalists can rarely say of naturalism anything beyond that it is natural. 

“I come from a scientific background,” David Chalmers modestly remarked. “I want everything to be natural,” he added at once, “reduced to the simplest possible set of laws and entities.”1

A Foundation for Belief

On this view, it is hard to see why stuff happens should not be considered a foundation for belief, the declaration requiring only two words and one substance. 

Materialism has just a bit more by way of oomph. From a material base, as Marxists might say ominously, everything. Within contemporary physics, the deduction of everything from something is by no means complete and remains in that empyrean of assurances of which your check is in the mail is a notable example. Nor is the requisite something persuasively a material object. On current physical theories, that material base is occupied by various quantum fields, where, like so many electric eels, they occupy themselves in quivering with energy. Leptons and bosons emerge as field excitations, and so does everything else. 

The great merit of materialism has always been its apparent sobriety. A world of matter? Look around! Bang the table, if necessary. Quantum fields do not encourage a look-around. There is no banging them beyond banging on about them. And for the most obvious of reasons. “Quantum field theory,” Lisa Randall writes, “the tool with which we study particles, is based upon eternal, omnipresent objects that can create and destroy those particles.”2

This is an account that suggests the dominion of Vishnu as much as metaphysical materialism, a point not lost on Indian physicists. And it may well change, that account, those infernal quantum fields vanishing tomorrow in favor of otherwise unexpected entelechies. 

What Everyone Accepts

There remains the curious fact that no one much likes what everyone accepts. What everyone accepts is something like the scientific system of belief. It is to this system that every knee must bend, with trust the science functioning both as an inducement and an admonition. If contemporary scientists are not voyaging strange seas alone, to recall Wordsworth’s epitaph for Isaac Newton, they are yet determined to put as much distance as possible between themselves and dry land. That quantum mechanics makes no sense is widely celebrated as one of its virtues. Not a day passes in which its weirdness is not extolled. As much might be said of the Eucharist, but with this considerable difference: scientific weirdness tends inexorably toward a kind of bleakness. “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” Pascal remarked3; and had he been acquainted with contemporary cosmologies in which the universe is destined to gutter out into something barren, formless, flaccid, lightless, and large, his anxieties may well have been proportionally increased.

Implacable and Unavoidable

The scientific system of belief remains what it was: implacable and unavoidable. There is no getting around it and so no getting out of it. The notes, incidental remarks, essays, and reviews that comprise this book represent an inside job, and it is in the nature of inside jobs that the inside jobber cannot expect outside help. It is an irony of any imperial enterprise, whether political, social, or intellectual, that it determines the conditions under which it may be criticized. 

For this reason, what I have written in this book is an exercise in self-criticism as much as anything else. I often wish that things were otherwise. “The Shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a Native of the Rocks.”4 No one quite gets what he wants — not in life, nor in love, nor, as it happens, in writing critical essays. 

Notes

David Chalmers, “Is the Soul Immortal?,” interview by Robert Kuhn, Closer to the Truth, YouTube, May 4, 2021, video, 9:06, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bejm1mYsr5s&t=34s.

Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 158.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670).

Samuel Johnson to Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope), February 7, 1755,

JEHOVAH has made the truth easily available

  Luke ch.10:21 "At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do." 

If we would simply allow JEHOVAH'S word to speak for itself. The truth would fairly leap off the page and command our allegiance.

John ch.1:18Douay Version "No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the Bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." 

First the text does not say that no man has seen the Father. Mainly because it does not need to. This being prior to the confusion introduced by Christendom it was common knowledge that the Father was the God. As it was that God was immutably invisible. 

Romans ch.1:20NIV"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made(including the Son of Man), so that people are without excuse." 

From the creation onward the Lord JEHOVAH has been continuously invisible to Man. His virtues could be discerned however through his creation, especially his first and foremost creation his Logos.

My 2 cents re:reductive materialism.

 Here's my beef with reductive materialists ,as they themselves doubtless know, matter itself is not reducible to matter. A quantum(i.e an atom) of matter does not consists of matter.

Likely you recall enough of your secondary (high) school chemistry to know that atoms are composed of immaterial subatomic "particles" in reality tiny packets of energy ,in other words wraiths. That's right matter which has weight and occupies space consists of ghosts which neither have weight nor occupy space. Also the cause of physical matter must doubtless be super physical if we are being logically consistent.

So the premise of reductive materialists i.e that there is no evidence of a superphysical reality that can affect physical matter is demonstrably false.

Everyone's favourite contrarian is at it again.

 New! Philosopher and Mathematician David Berlinski on “Science After Babel”

Evolution News 

Polymath and raconteur David Berlinski is at it again, challenging the shibboleths of contemporary science with his inimitable blend of deep learning, close reasoning, and rapier wit. His new book, Science After Babel, reflects on everything from Newton, Einstein, and Gödel to catastrophe theory, information theory, and the morass that is modern Darwinism. The scientific enterprise is unarguably impressive, but it shows no sign of reaching the empyrean heights it seemed to promise a century ago. “It resembles Bruegel’s Tower of Babel,” Berlinski says, “and if it suggests anything at all, it suggests that its original plans have somehow been lost.” Science endures. Scientism, it would seem, is guttering out.

We will be featuring excepts, commentary, and conversations with Dr. Berlinski in days to the come. Order your copy now. And enjoy some of the advance praise the book is already receiving!

Advance Praise

Many will read this book for the close, elegant reasoning, the astonishing erudition, or the mordant analysis. I confess I read it for the prose. “Vast sections of our experience might be so very rich in information” — I quote here from the discussion of our limited ability to define complexity — “that they stay forever outside the scope of theory and remain simply what they are: unique, ineffable, insubsumable, irreducible.” See what I mean? Nobody but David Berlinski has ever employed such sweet, gorgeous prose in writing about science.

PETER ROBINSON, MURDOCH DISTINGUISHED POLICY FELLOW AT THE HOOVER INSTITUTION AND FORMER SPEECHWRITER TO PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

Whether deconstructing the latest theory of everything or dishing on scientists and mathematicians he has known, whatever David Berlinski writes is delightful and profitable to read!

MICHAEL BEHE, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, LEHIGH UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF DARWIN’S BLACK BOX, THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION, AND DARWIN DEVOLVES

If I were picking two books to be required reading for every college student in the United States, Science After Babel would be one. A striking and beautiful and absolutely necessary book. David Berlinski at his spectacular best.

DAVID GELERNTER, PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, YALE UNIVERSITY

Science After Babel is a literary triumph. In it, David Berlinski masterfully exposes the hubris of scientific pretensions with a wit that dances deftly between the lines, unveiling profound insights with a refreshing candor. This book testifies to the author’s penetrating intellect, inviting readers to reconsider the limits of scientific authority and reject facile invocations of science that demand assent at the expense of compelling evidence and rigorous thought.

WILLIAM DEMBSKI, MATHEMATICIAN, PHILOSOPHER, AND FORMER HEAD OF THE MICHAEL POLANYI CENTER AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF MULTIPLE GROUNDBREAKING WORKS ON THE THEORY OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN, INCLUDING THE DESIGN INFERENCE (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998)

Berlinski speaks wittingly as an insider to the sciences and their recent history. As a historian-philosopher of science, I recognize numerous valuable insights in this collection of arguments and memories. He captures the wonder of scientific inquiry without misplaced worship of speculative pronouncements made in its name. Berlinski is the most enjoyable antidote to scientism I know.

MICHAEL KEAS, LECTURER IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, BIOLA UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF UNBELIEVABLE: 7 MYTHS ABOUT THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Dr. Berlinski explores everything from the complicated spawning behavior of salmon and the problems with the RNA World hypothesis to various acute challenges to modern evolutionary theory, including the Cambrian explosion, molecular machines, and the failure of punctuated equilibrium. As he shows, trouble is brewing for Darwin on other fronts as well — population genetics, taxonomy, behavioral psychology, and the philosophy of biology, to name just a few. In total, Science After Babel is a lively mix of deep scientific knowledge, literary skill, and humor. The work reveals why scientism’s contemporary tower of babel has failed to reach the heavens. I highly recommend the book and hope it is widely read.

OLA HÖSSJER, PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS, STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

In Science After Babel David Berlinski takes critical scholarly aim at many current day “scientific truths” — more properly shibboleths — including Darwinism, reductionism, the Standard Model of particle physics, and “talking” chimpanzees; and he shows how much nonsense often passes as secure scientific knowledge. Neo-Darwinism he describes as “empty,” and in discussing the Standard Model he comments wryly, “Theories come and go.” He also takes aim at a vast constellation of recent authors, including cosmologists Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss, biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse.

The book is a delightful read delivered with great wit and erudition. We are treated to unique recollections — of his drinking coffee in Paris with René Thom, the founder of catastrophe theory; of the insane driving, also in Paris, of his friend, the mathematician, polymath, and leading French anti-Darwinist Marcel Schützenberger; and of a conversation with Noam Chomsky. Altogether the book represents an extraordinary and absolutely fascinating tour de force touching on topics as diverse as medieval Islamic astronomy and the great twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann’s reflections on the role of chance in evolution. The text is interspersed throughout with some beautiful descriptive writing — Mount Rainer’s snow glimpsed flying out of SeaTac was “silent, sweeping, silvery, still, serene.”

The book is a stunning intellectual achievement. Few authors could have written such a far-reaching, in-depth critique of so many current philosophical and scientific beliefs. Science After Babel is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a critical assessment of much current scientific thinking. No other recent publication comes close, and unquestionably this brilliant book establishes David Berlinski as one of the leading intellectuals of our time.

MICHAEL DENTON, PHD, MD, FORMER SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW IN THE BIOCHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO IN DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND, AUTHOR OF EVOLUTION: A THEORY IN CRISIS, NATURE’S DESTINY, AND THE MIRACLE OF MAN

Mathematically evaluating technology?

 Intelligence Metrics: Measuring the Degree of Intelligence in Design

William A Dembski 

A terrific conference just took place in Denton, Texas (June 1-3, 2023): the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, or CELS. Its aim was to inspire cross-disciplinary research between biology and engineering by bringing together biologists, engineers, and some fellow travelers like me (a mathematician). I had the privilege of speaking on intelligence metrics. Here are my Slides. I hope soon to develop this talk into a proper peer-reviewed paper.

I want to thank Steve Laufmann and Eric Anderson especially for helping to make this conference happen.

On settling for not so free speech II

On settling for not so free speech.

Time for an extended extended synthesis?

Hopeful monsters of the deep vs. Darwinism.

 Okeanos Explorer Searches The Deep Sea

            Cornelius G Hunter

There is a reason why explorers have always gone forth—they are rewarded. And so not surprisingly there have been many rewards for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Okeanos Explorer which is exploring the ocean floor, several miles beneath the surface, near the Marianas Trench. In this far away land the mission has found all manner of strange life forms never before seen. You can watch the Video live and, as one report put it, “The video makes for strangely addicting viewing. There's a constant cliffhanger: What will they find next?”

What they have found is an array of incredible, and lowly (pun intended), creatures. Surely Ralph Cudworth and John Ray would have, by this point, doubled down on their infra-dignitatem argument that such creatures are beneath the Creator’s dignity. There must have been an intermediate creative force to account for the muck and its inhabitants, not to mention those bungles and errors we find in creation.

Isn't it amazing what those random mutations will come up with? (And no, natural selection doesn’t help).

On pronouns: the view from the radical center.

The amazing Randi on academia

 A word on PhDs

On the classic architecture of the American diner

Molecular biology vs. Darwinism again.

On confirmation bias re: genetic evidence for Darwinism

 BioLogos and Vitellogenin Genes

Cornelius G Hunter

Recently I have been responding to several articles by evolutionist Dennis Venema. Venema has made various arguments about how genetic evidences strongly support evolution and I have provided rebuttals to those claims. For instance, I explained Here that while Venema discusses evidences that are consistent with evolutionary expectations, he does not list or mention the substantial body of scientific findings that are inconsistent with evolution. This is a problem with the evolution literature: the scientific evidence is too often selectively presented. In fact, I have often seen evolutionists claim that there are no contrary evidences, and that the science fully backs evolution. This sort of confirmation bias presents a roadblock to meaningful discourse on the topic of origins.

Next Venema focused his claim on the specific case of human evolution, and the similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. Again, Venema made high claims about the evidence. He concluded: “These observations strongly support the hypothesis that our species arose through an evolutionary process.”

But, in fact, as I explainqed Here, there are several significant problems with this claim. For example, the chimpanzee and human genomes have differing patterns that do not fit evolutionary expectations. There is also a big difference between viruses in the genomes of humans and the other primates. Again, these differences do not fit the expected evolutionary pattern. Furthermore, the chimp-human genome beneficial differences are few and appeals to alternate splicing differences (another big difference between the genomes of humans and the other primates) to evolve humans lead to astronomically improbable pathways.

As always, I explained that the point is not that evolutionary explanations are not possible. Speculative explanations are always possible. Perhaps evolution did this, perhaps it did that. But that does not change the fact that the primate genomes do not “strongly support the hypothesis that our species arose through an evolutionary process,” as Venema and the evolutionists claim.

Next Venema focused even more narrowly on a particular genetic detail: human chromosome two, which he presented as a powerful example of an evolutionary confirmation. And yet as I explained here, not only did Venema not mention several scientific problems with his claim but the claim, even if true, would not demonstrate evolution as evolutionists claim. There is no evolutionary relationship revealed. Even if evolution were true, these data would give us no evidence for it. What was disturbing about this example was Venema’s recounting of a deceptive lecturing strategy he uses in presenting this topic in his class.

Next Venema presented pseudogenes which Venema argued are powerful and compelling evidences for common descent. It is, explained Venema, “one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of common ancestry between humans and chimpanzees (and other organisms).” And again, I explained, here and here, that there are several, fundamental, problems with this evolutionary claim.

In this case, however, Venema discussed his underlying religious belief that this evidence is a problem for creationism type theories. Venema was highlighting one of the important beliefs at the foundation of evolutionary thought. This belief, if true, does indeed require evolution to be true. But of course it is not falsifiable.

Vitellogenin genes

Now we move on to Venema’s next Topic , the vitellogenins. Vitellogenin genes are found in a wide range of species and, like most genes, perform multiple functions including helping to provide the nutrients in egg yolks. Also like most genes, the pattern they form amongst the species does not always correspond very well to the expected evolutionary pattern. Of course there are always explanations, and evolutionists draw upon a variety of mechanisms, including lineage-specific events, to explain the vitellogenin genes.

For example, this paper focuses on mosquito vitellogenin genes. It concludes that the genes arose by a series of duplication events, and that the pattern of duplication was different in each mosquito genus. The Paper also uses purifying selection, gene conversion, unequal crossover, and concerted evolution to explain the observed pattern of the mosquito vitellogenin genes, and concludes that these mechanisms must have also worked, independently, in other invertebrate species, and vertebrate organisms as well.

Similarly, this Paper examines the evolution of vertebrate vitellogenins and also draws upon a variety of events and lineage-specific mechanisms. As I have discussed many times, while the basic idea of evolution is that the species share common designs as a consequence of common ancestry, in fact biology is loaded with unique, one-off designs for which evolutionists need to appeal to “lineage-specific” evolution. Consequently evolution can explain a wide variety of observations and patterns, and this applies equally well to the vitellogenins.

Clearly evolutionary theory is fine with a range of patterns when it comes to the vitellogenins. Of course this is true for molecular, and morphological, designs in general, as we have seen many times. Designs can fall into an evolutionary common descent pattern, or not.

The advantage of this flexibility is that evolutionary theory can explain a wide range of observables. The disadvantages, however, are many. The theory becomes less parsimonious. It becomes more resistant to falsification. And it loses its evidential arguments. If a theory can explain A, and B, and C, … and so forth, then the finding of A is hardly compelling evidence for the theory.

Yet this is what Venema argues. The vitellogenin genes in chickens share a weak similarity with corresponding genetic segments in humans. Evolutionists view the human segments as pseudogenes—broken versions of vitellogenin genes inherited from their egg-laying ancestors. Given this vitellogenin similarity between humans and chickens, for example, evolutionists such as Venema incredibly conclude that, therefore, humans and chickens evolved by random mutations from a common ancestor. Not only does that not follow, but it takes Venema to the unlikely solution of random mutations creating humans and chickens, and of course all the other species.

Venema also argues that the similarity of the vitellogenin genes between humans and chickens extends to, and is all the more confirmed by, their positioning within their respective genomes. But this argument from synteny is no different from what we saw above. When there is a loss of synteny evolution is not harmed, and the theory has another set of explanatory mechanisms available for just about any outcome. If the vitellogenin genes had been in a different order, evolution could have explained it just fine.

Affirming the consequent 

In spite of these problems with his argument, Venema is enthusiastic about this evidence. In fact his enthusiasm leads to the fallacy of affirming the consequent, as he equates shared synteny (genes with similar positioning in the genomes of different species) with common descent 

This evidence increases our confidence that we are indeed looking at regions with shared synteny: in other words, a region in two present-day species that was once a region in the genome of their common ancestral population. 

That is a fallacy. Ignoring the problems discussed above for the moment, even if evolution did make a hard prediction of shared synteny, and even if it was universally observed, that would not prove evolution. In that case, you would have a confirmed prediction. That is good, but it is not equivalent to a finding of evolution. Venema violates this scientific fundamental when he defines shared synteny as “a region in two present-day species that was once a region in the genome of their common ancestral population.” Unfortunately, affirming the consequent is not uncommon in the evolution literature.

Primeval tech continues to troll Darwinism.

 Engineering and Evolution in the Microbial World

Evolution News 

This year’s Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS) is going on right now, exploring design principles at work in living things. In case you couldn’t be there, we pulled this classic ID the Future episode from the archive. Host Jonathan Witt gives us a behind-the-scenes interview with Dustin Van Hofwegen, a biology professor at Azusa Pacific University in California. The occasion was a previous Conference on Engineering in Living Systems. The two discuss the event, which brought together biologists and engineers to study how engineering principles and a design perspective can and are being applied to biology — to plants and animals but also to Van Hofwegen’s area of focus, the realm of microbial biology. The two move into a conversation about Van Hofwegen’s article in the Journal of Bacteriology, co-authored with Carolyn Hovde and Scott Minnich, based on research they did at the University of Idaho.

As Van Hofwegen explains, the research focused on one of the most ballyhooed evolutionary changes to come out of Richard Lenski’s long-term evolution experiment, a decades-long study of many thousands of generations of E. coli bacteria. Perhaps the biggest evolutionary development in the course of the experiment involved some bacteria beginning to feed on citric acid. Interesting, to be sure, but as Van Hofwegen explains, E. coli already has this capacity; it’s just a matter of switching it on. Van Hofwegen, Hovde, and Minnich demonstrated this through do-or-die experiments with E. coli, which led to the bacteria developing the capacity not in years or decades, as in the Lenski experiment, but in 14 days, that is, in as little as 100 generations. Van Hofwegen explains why this is an embarrassing result for neo-Darwinism. The pair conclude with a discussion of another study on antibiotic resistance with a similar result, that the resistance observed came not by evolving anything new but by tweaking something already present. Download the podcast or listen to it Here