Trivial pursuit?

Smaller Voles: "Evolution in Action" Is Rare, Trivial
David Klinghoffer 

News from the  University of Zurich  is notable both for how underwhelming it is and for a "rare" admission. Researchers documented that as winter came earlier, snow voles got smaller. That seemed counterintuitive since, as the title of the publication in PLOS Biology asks rhetorically, "Bigger Is Fitter?"

Well, isn't it? Not so in this case, apparently. Why?

In principle, larger snow voles are fitter: They have better capabilities to survive and reproduce. Despite this positive correlation at the phenotypic level, however, a converse causal relationship was evident on the genotypic level. "The voles whose genetic make-up led to a lower body weight were the fittest, especially in years when the first winter snow fell earlier than usual," explains the biologist. This may be because lighter young are more likely to reach their final size before the weather deteriorates and winter comes.

Fine. Maybe so. But notice the welcome candor in announcing this result. Observing this cute mouse-like rodent getting a bit smaller seems to be pulled straight from the voluminous files of unimpressive evidence for Darwinian evolution's grand claims. Evolution is supposed to explain how fantastic novelties arise, not merely why a little animal gets a bit smaller (or bigger). Even such an instance, though, they say repeatedly, is "extremely rare."

Researchers from the University of Zurich have succeeded in documenting an extremely rare case of evolutionary adaptation "in action" among wild snow voles near Chur.

...

Although this process is well understood in breeding conditions and in the lab, it is still largely unclear how often and how rapidly it takes place under natural conditions. Examples of contemporary adaptive evolution remain extremely rare.

...

If the scientists had restricted their observations solely to phenotypic traits, such as body size and weight, this rare example of "evolution in action" in the wild would have remained hidden. [Emphasis added.]

And again, from the Abstract:

In natural populations, quantitative trait dynamics often do not appear to follow evolutionary predictions. Despite abundant examples of natural selection acting on heritable traits, conclusive evidence for contemporary adaptive evolution remains rare for wild vertebrate populations, and phenotypic stasis seems to be the norm.


So stasis is the "norm," and seeing "evolution in action" in the wild is "extremely rare." And where found, as it was here, one might add that it is pretty trivial. Perhaps they thought were weren't listening.

Third way=no way?

Munchausen Syndrome: Perry Marshall Debates Stephen Meyer on the "Third Way" of Evolution
Evolution News & Views 

Justin Brierly of the radio program Unbelievable? out of the U.K. is a gem of an interviewer, regularly bringing together advocates of competing views on biological origins for startlingly rich, serious, and civil discussion.

He's done that again now with  a program featuring our colleague Stephen Meyer and Perry Marshall, author of the book  Evolution 2.0. Meyer and Marshall were both present for November's  Royal Society meeting  and they debate whether the Third Way of Evolution folks, who organized the meeting, are hot on the trail of a replacement theory for failed neo-Darwinism.

Dr. Meyer, while respecting Third Way critiques of orthodox evolutionary thinking, argues that a more fundamental paradigm shift is called for by the scientific evidence -- namely an inference to intelligent design. Marshall promotes the Third Way view, and his slogan is "Darwinists underestimate nature, and Creationists underestimate God." (He puts ID "in that same camp," the "creationist" one, but we're not going to argue with him about that right now.) An electrical engineer with a background in marketing and sales, he explains his approach in terms of "market share."

I take the position I take, because if I take the old school Neo-Darwinist position I will lose market share every year as more and more things turn out to be orderly instead of random.
If I take the creationist or Intelligent Design/Discovery Institute position, I will lose ground every year as they explain more and more evolutionary steps with observable processes.

But if I take the Third Way view, my market share will grow and grow because the explanatory power of an integrationist, non-reductionist paradigm which also considers consciousness.

That may sound a bit crass. Meyer counters that science is about getting at the truth, not pursuing a "market."

I think a lot of what's driving Perry is what he was talking about with "market share." How do you position a more theistically oriented way of looking at the natural world to get people who are atheist or agnostic to take you seriously?
I think at the end of the day you have to set those things aside and say what is nature telling us, and then develop an understanding of both the origin and development of life that is consistent with the evidence.

The issue comes down to whether the information at the heart of biology can be accounted for without reference to a designing agent operating in the course of life's long history. As Marshal prefers to say, was this information required for biological innovation front-loaded in the first bacterial cells so that it comes from within the animal, not from a source without? Talking about the research of leading Third Way figure James Shapiro at the University of Chicago, Meyer identifies two key issues:

I also think Shapiro's work is extremely interesting, and it's certainly cutting some new ground in biology. What Shapiro is talking about -- and I discuss Shapiro's work and five of the other Third Way mechanisms that have been proposed, these non-neo-Darwinian mechanisms of evolutionary change -- in Darwin's Doubt in two of the key chapters of the book.
What I show there is invariably what is going on is these new mechanisms either presuppose unexplained sources of information, or they simply don't explain the origin of necessary information to get real anatomical novelty. In other words, there are limits on what these mechanisms can produce.

Take Shapiro's work. He's describing ways in which organisms respond in real time to environmental stresses. Then they produce a response in the way that either they express pre-existing genetic information, or the way they ramp up the mutation rate in very specific parts of the genome to explore possibilities that are already latent in the genetic information.

So what he's talking about is a kind of pre-programmed adaptive capacity which he says is under "algorithmic control."

That's all extremely cool. It is very elegant the way organisms can do that, but the question that Shapiro doesn't address is: where does the pre-programming come from? Where does that algorithm come from? There's a higher level of informational programming at work that's presupposed in this whole process that he doesn't attempt to explain.

My concern about using this as an explanation for the whole of what we see in biological evolution is two-fold. First, you can't really propose that all this information is already in all these different organisms, and every organism has its own preprogramming to respond in different ways according to its organismal needs.

I don't think it's plausible to say that all this information could have been front-loaded in the circular chromosome of the bacterial cell at the point of the origin of life. Clearly you're going to need additional information at discrete points along the biological timeline.

Just getting from prokaryotes to eukaryotes requires an extensive reworking of the whole system of storage of genetic information. But secondly, and I think this is really a key thing, this is one of the key problems, it is the problem of epigenetic information.

Not all the information to build a body plan is in DNA. DNA codes for building proteins, but proteins have to be organized into bio-synthetic pathways that would characterize different kinds of cells and cell types.

Different cell types have to be organized into different tissues. Different tissues have to reorganize into different organs.

And organs and tissues have to be organized into whole body plans. The information for doing that is not solely in the DNA. Higher levels of information stored elsewhere are required to organize all those different levels of the biological hierarchy.

Shapiro is focusing on Natural Genetic Engineering, and has said he might get novel proteins out of this, but he's not going to explain the origin of a body plan. And that's the really crucial question biologically. Where did that higher-level innovation come from?

Both the Third Way crowd and their advocate Mr. Marshall position themselves as offering an alternative to Darwinism and ID. Marshall thinks Darwinists and ID theorists alike are missing what he plainly can see -- that evolution is real and a beautiful thing because it comes from within the organism, within the universe, itself.

On his website, Marshall has  helpfully transcribed the whole program, adding annotations of his own. He writes:

It's the biggest untold story in the history of science and the Neo-Darwinists have completely missed it. The creationists and the Discovery Institute have completely missed it as well. You would never know from reading a Richard Dawkins book or a Stephen Meyer book that you can get a completely new species in two years, and maybe even two days, from symbiogenesis or hybridization. Or that you can witness a radical innovation from a single cell in just 12 hours.
Neo-Darwinism is about miracles of randomness which can never be quantified or demonstrated. It's the biggest mistake in the history of science. And despite Meyer's insistence to the contrary,   Intelligent Design is still God of the gaps. The two are symmetrical. Neither offers you a mechanism that qualifies as empirical science. Neither helps the scientist do his real job, which is to explain every evolutionary step in reproducible detail.

And neither is telling you the REAL story -- that organisms possess tools of Natural Genetic Engineering and freedom to evolve on their own. It's the purpose of my book Evolution 2.0 to tell that story.

He refers to symbiogenesis  and hybridization. But how much of those processes are an organism simply activating pre-programmed information? This is not macroevolution in action. Where does that pre-programmed information come from? It cannot be from the organism itself, as Marshall suggests.

Why? On the issue of pre-programming or front-loading information, our new colleague, the paleontologist and now Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellow  Günter Bechly, notes three problems. He writes:

One of the problems with Marshall's approach is that we have brains: according to Marshall the intelligent design in the genome is not to be explained with the infusion of information from outside the system, but with the organisms (including bacterial cells!) themselves being the intelligent agents of their own design. Given the lack of any physical basis for such intelligence on the level of simple organisms like bacteria, this intelligence must be based on an immaterial mind.
This is clearly documented by Marshall's explicit endorsement of Robert Lanza's "Biocentrism," which is one of the many popular varieties of "monistic idealism meets quantum mysticism." However, if even bacteria can achieve incredible intelligence and information processing abilities without a material brain, why is intelligent behavior in animals positively correlated with the complexity of their neural system? Why do we need brains at all?

A second problem is that it is not the organism that is said to evolve but populations, which would even imply a kind of hive mind to make sense of Marshall's approach.

Finally, there is the Munchausen problem that intelligent agents cannot be their own designers, because they have to come into existence before they can design anything.

In the end the crucial question is: What makes more sense when you already have come to the conclusion that biological design is caused by immaterial intelligent agency: that bacteria and worms are intelligent minds and brilliant genetic engineers, or that the intelligent designer is the omniscient and omnipotent immaterial mind (God), in which Marshall believes anyway for different reasons?


That Munchausen reference is to the satirical story of Baron Munchausen lifting and thus rescuing himself and his horse, stuck in a mire, by pulling upward on his own hair. That's not going to work. It's an apt image for what's wrong not only with Marshall's argument but with the Third Way approach in general.

Origin of life science's 5 main pressure points.

Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories
Casey Luskin 

Last summer I published a list of the "Top Ten Problems with Darwinian Evolution." Since that time, some readers have requested a list of major problems with theories seeking to explain the chemical origin of life. There are numerous problems, but here's my list of the top 5:

Problem 1: No Viable Mechanism to Generate a Primordial Soup.

According to conventional thinking among origin-of-life theorists, life arose via unguided chemical reactions on the early Earth some 3 to 4 billion years ago. Most theorists believe that there were many steps involved in the origin of life, but the very first step would have involved the production of a primordial soup -- a water-based sea of simple organic molecules -- out of which life arose. While the existence of this "soup" has been accepted as unquestioned fact for decades, this first step in most origin-of-life theories faces numerous scientific difficulties.

In 1953, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Stanley Miller, along with his faculty advisor Harold Urey, performed experiments hoping to produce the building blocks of life under natural conditions on the early Earth.1 These "Miller-Urey experiments" intended to simulate lightning striking the gasses in the early Earth's atmosphere. After running the experiments and letting the chemical products sit for a period of time, Miller discovered that amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- had been produced.

For decades, these experiments have been hailed as a demonstration that the "building blocks" of life could have arisen under natural, realistic Earthlike conditions,2 corroborating the primordial soup hypothesis. However, it has also been known for decades that the Earth's early atmosphere was fundamentally different from the gasses used by Miller and Urey.

The atmosphere used in the Miller-Urey experiments was primarily composed of reducing gasses like methane, ammonia, and high levels of hydrogen. Geochemists now believe that the atmosphere of the early Earth did not contain appreciable amounts of these components. UC Santa Cruz origin-of-life theorist David Deamer explains in the journal Microbiology & Molecular Biology Reviews:

This optimistic picture began to change in the late 1970s, when it became increasingly clear that the early atmosphere was probably volcanic in origin and composition, composed largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen rather than the mixture of reducing gases assumed by the Miller-Urey model. Carbon dioxide does not support the rich array of synthetic pathways leading to possible monomers...3
Likewise, an article in the journal Science stated: "Miller and Urey relied on a 'reducing' atmosphere, a condition in which molecules are fat with hydrogen atoms. As Miller showed later, he could not make organics in an 'oxidizing' atmosphere."4 The article put it bluntly: "the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey situation."5 Consistent with this, geological studies have not uncovered evidence that a primordial soup once existed.6
There are good reasons why the Earth's early atmosphere did not contain high concentrations of methane, ammonia, or other reducing gasses. The Earth's early atmosphere is thought to have been produced by outgassing from volcanoes, and the composition of those volcanic gasses is related to the chemical properties of the Earth's inner mantle. Geochemical studies have found that the chemical properties of the Earth's mantle would have been the same in the past as they are today.7 But today, volcanic gasses do not contain methane or ammonia, and are not reducing.

A paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters found that the chemical properties of the Earth's interior have been essentially constant over Earth's history, leading to the conclusion that "Life may have found its origins in other environments or by other mechanisms."8 So strong is the evidence against pre-biotic synthesis of life's building blocks that in 1990 the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council recommended that origin-of-life investigators undertake a "reexamination of biological monomer synthesis under primitive Earthlike environments, as revealed in current models of the early Earth."9

Because of these difficulties, some leading theorists have abandoned the Miller-Urey experiment and the "primordial soup" theory. In 2010, University College London biochemist Nick Lane stated that the primordial soup theory "doesn't hold water" and is "past its expiration date."10 Instead, he proposes that life arose in undersea hydrothermal vents. But both the hydrothermal vent and primordial soup hypotheses face another major problem.

Problem 2: Forming Polymers Requires Dehydration Synthesis

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

Chemically speaking, however, the last place you'd want to link amino acids into chains would be a vast water-based environment like the "primordial soup" or underwater near a hydrothermal vent. As the National Academy of Sciences acknowledges, "Two amino acids do not spontaneously join in water. Rather, the opposite reaction is thermodynamically favored."11 In other words, water breaks down protein chains into amino acids (or other constituents), making it very difficult to produce proteins (or other polymers) in the primordial soup.

Problem 3: RNA World Hypothesis Lacks Confirming Evidence

Let's assume, again, that a primordial sea filled with life's building blocks did exist on the early Earth, and somehow it formed proteins and other complex organic molecules. Origin-of-life theorists believe that the next step in the origin of life is that -- entirely by chance -- more and more complex molecules formed until some began to self-replicate. From there, they believe Darwinian natural selection took over, favoring those molecules which were better able to make copies. Eventually, they assume, it became inevitable that these molecules would evolve complex machinery -- like that used in today's genetic code -- to survive and reproduce.

Have modern theorists explained how this crucial bridge from inert nonliving chemicals to self-replicating molecular systems took place? Not at all. In fact, even Stanley Miller readily admitted the difficulty of explaining this in Discover Magazine:

Even Miller throws up his hands at certain aspects of it. The first step, making the monomers, that's easy. We understand it pretty well. But then you have to make the first self-replicating polymers. That's very easy, he says, the sarcasm fairly dripping. Just like it's easy to make money in the stock market -- all you have to do is buy low and sell high. He laughs. Nobody knows how it's done.12
The most prominent hypothesis for the origin of the first life is called the "RNA world." In living cells, genetic information is carried by DNA, and most cellular functions are performed by proteins. However, RNA is capable of both carrying genetic information and catalyzing some biochemical reactions. As a result, some theorists postulate the first life might have used RNA alone to fulfill all these functions.
But there are many problems with this hypothesis.

For one, the first RNA molecules would have to arise by unguided, non-biological chemical processes. But RNA is not known to assemble without the help of a skilled laboratory chemist intelligently guiding the process. New York University chemist Robert Shapiro critiqued the efforts of those who tried to make RNA in the lab, stating: "The flaw is in the logic -- that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth."13

Second, while RNA has been shown to perform many roles in the cell, there is no evidence that it could perform all the necessary cellular functions currently carried out by proteins.14

Third, the RNA world hypothesis can't explain the origin of genetic information.

RNA world advocates suggest that if the first self-replicating life was based upon RNA, it would have required a molecule between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.15 However, there are no known chemical or physical laws that dictate the order of those nucleotides.16 To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, materialists must rely on sheer chance. But the odds of specifying, say, 250 nucleotides in an RNA molecule by chance is about 1 in 10150 -- below the "universal probability bound," a term characterizing events whose occurrence is at least remotely possible within the history of the universe.17 Shapiro puts the problem this way:

The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. ... [The probability] is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.18
Fourth -- and most fundamentally -- the RNA world hypothesis can't explain the origin of the genetic code itself. In order to evolve into the DNA/protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines -- which themselves are encoded by genetic information.
All of this poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them.

Problem 4: Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code. 
To appreciate this problem, consider the origin of the first DVD and DVD player. DVDs are rich in information, but without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: a goal-directed process -- intelligent design -- is required to produce both the player and the disk.

In living cells, information-carrying molecules (such as DNA or RNA) are like the DVD, and the cellular machinery that reads that information and converts it into proteins is like the DVD player. As in the DVD analogy, genetic information can never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet in cells, the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules -- they perform and direct the very task that builds them.

This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. Not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered, biologist Frank Salisbury explained the problem in a paper in American Biology Teacher:

It's nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes. ... [T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. ... How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.19
The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International:
The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical "hardware" capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message "receiver." But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein "workers" produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.20
Problem 5: No Workable Model for the Origin of Life

Despite decades of work, origin-of-life theorists are at a loss to explain how this system arose. In 2007, Harvard chemist George Whitesides was given the Priestley Medal, the highest award of the American Chemical Society. During his acceptance speech, he offered this stark analysis, reprinted in the respected journal Chemical and Engineering News:

The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea.21
Many other authors have made similar comments. Massimo Pigliucci states: "[I]t has to be true that we really don't have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means."22 Or as science writer Gregg Easterbrook wrote in Wired, "What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn't given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time."23
Likewise, the aforementioned article in Cell Biology International concludes: "New approaches to investigating the origin of the genetic code are required. The constraints of historical science are such that the origin of life may never be understood."24 That is, they may never be understood unless scientists are willing to consider goal-directed scientific explanations like intelligent design.

References:

[1.] See Stanley L. Miller, "A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions," Science, 117: 528-529 (May 15, 1953).

[2.] See Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong, (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2000); Casey Luskin, "Not Making the Grade: An Evaluation of 19 Recent Biology Textbooks and Their Use of Selected Icons of Evolution," Discovery Institute (September 26, 2011).

[3.] David W. Deamer, "The First Living Systems: a Bioenergetic Perspective," Microbiology & Molecular Biology Reviews, 61:239 (1997).

[4.] Jon Cohen, "Novel Center Seeks to Add Spark to Origins of Life," Science, 270: 1925-1926 (December 22, 1995).

[5.] Ibid.

[6.] Antonio C. Lasaga, H. D. Holland, and Michael J. Dwyer, "Primordial Oil Slick," Science, 174: 53-55 (October 1, 1971).

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

[8.] Dante Canil, "Vanadian in peridotites, mantle redox and tectonic environments: Archean to present," Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 195:75-90 (2002) (internal citations removed).

[9.] National Research Council Space Studies Board, The Search for Life's Origins (National Academy Press, 1990).

[10.] Deborah Kelley, "Is It Time To Throw Out 'Primordial Soup' Theory?," NPR (February 7, 2010).

[11.] Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, National Research Council, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 60 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2007).

[12.] Stanley Miller quoted in Peter Radetsky, "How Did Life Start?" Discover Magazine (Nov., 1992).

[13.] Richard Van Noorden, "RNA world easier to make," Nature News (May 13, 2009).

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

[15.] Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel, and P. Luigi Luisi, "Synthesizing Life," Nature, 409: 387-390 (January 18, 2001).

[16.] Michael Polanyi, "Life's Irreducible Structure," Science, 160 (3834): 1308-1312 (June 21, 1968).

[17.] See William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[18.] Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, pp. 46-53 (June, 2007).

[19.] Frank B. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," American Biology Teacher, 33: 335-338 (September, 1971).

[20.] J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, "Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life," Cell Biology International, 28: 729-739 (2004).

[21.] George M. Whitesides, "Revolutions In Chemistry: Priestley Medalist George M. Whitesides' Address," Chemical and Engineering News, 85: 12-17 (March 26, 2007).

[22.] Massimo Pigliucci, "Where Do We Come From? A Humbling Look at the Biology of Life's Origin," in Darwin Design and Public Education, eds. John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003), p. 196.

[23.] Gregg Easterbrook, "Where did life come from?," Wired, p. 108 (February, 2007).

[24.] J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, "Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life," Cell Biology International, 28: 729-739 (2004).

Neo liberal v. libertarian.

The making of yet another anti-Darwinian bomb thrower.

Scientific Authority Becomes Scientific Authoritarianism: See Tom Bethell in Iconoclast Now
David Klinghoffer

Why the New World Translation?:The Watchtower Society's Commentary

Why Have We Produced the New World Translation?

For decades, Jehovah’s Witnesses used, printed, and distributed various versions of the Bible. But then we saw the need to produce a new translation that would better help people to learn the “accurate knowledge of truth,” which is God’s will for everyone. (1 Timothy 2:3, 4) Thus, in 1950 we began to release portions of our modern-language Bible, the New World Translation. This Bible has been faithfully and accurately translated into over 120 languages.

A Bible was needed that was easy to understand. Languages change over time, and many translations contain obscure or obsolete expressions that are difficult to understand. Also, ancient manuscripts that are more accurate and closer to the originals have been discovered, resulting in a better comprehension of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

A translation was needed that was loyal to God’s word. Rather than taking liberties with God’s inspired writings, Bible translators should be faithful to the original text. However, in most versions, the divine name, Jehovah, is not used in the Holy Scriptures.

A Bible was needed that gives credit to its Author. (2 Samuel 23:2) In the New World Translation, Jehovah’s name has been restored where it appears some 7,000 times in the oldest Bible manuscripts as illustrated in the example below. (Psalm 83:18) The result of years of diligent research, this Bible is a pleasure to read, as it clearly conveys God’s thinking. Whether you have the New World Translation in your language or not, we encourage you to get into a good routine of reading Jehovah’s Word every day.—Joshua 1:8; Psalm 1:2, 3.

Piercing the fog?

Disregarding Fake News from Darwin Promoters, South Dakota Scientist Applauds Academic Freedom Bill
Evolution News & Views

Pierre, SD -- This year, South Dakota has an opportunity to encourage more scientific inquiry in the classroom. The state's legislature is considering an academic freedom bill, SB 55, introduced by Senator Jeff Monroe. noted here last week, the bill seeks to thwart censorship, yet ironically is opposed by the National Coalition Against Censorship. The group has misrepresented its contents, comparing mainstream exploration of weaknesses in Darwinian theory with Holocaust denial.

The text of SB 55 says just this:

No teacher may be prohibited from helping students understand, analyze, critique, or review in an objective scientific manner the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to § 13-3-48.

A prominent South Dakota scientist we heard from gets it, applauding the bill as a means to foster critical thinking. "SB 55, under consideration by the South Dakota legislature, is a promising step forward for South Dakota science education," said William S. Harris, PhD. Dr. Harris is the President of OmegaQuant Analytics, LLC (Sioux Falls, SD), and an NIH-funded biomedical researcher with over 300 scientific publications.

Under this legislation, students would have the opportunity learn more about scientific topics, practice critical thinking, and engage with scientific questions facing researchers today. One of those questions pertains to the origin of biodiversity.

Harris commented:

Scientific controversy over the ability of Darwin's version of evolution (i.e., natural selection acting blindly on random mutations) to explain the expanse of life on this planet continues to grow with each new revelation of the exceeding complexity of even the "simplest" life forms, not to mention humans. In my view, it is very important for today's students to understand the evidence for and against important scientific theories like Darwinism and to honestly consider challenges even to such long-held dogmas.

"South Dakota students can only benefit from such an approach -- and hopefully, legislators will seize this occasion to promote scientific inquiry," added Harris. If the bill is enacted, South Dakota would join Louisiana, Tennessee, and at least five other states with science standards or laws recognizing the role of teaching scientific strengths and weaknesses in the classroom.


The law has been a target for activists and journalists spreading misinformation about what SB 55 would permit. We have addressed false claims from Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Washington Post, which merit being described as fake news,   here and here .

Darwinism v. commonsense

A brief history of the Cuban missile crisis.

Negative to affirmative action on campus?

The fall of Rome II?

Through the looking glass?

South Dakota Science Education Controversy Gets Surreal as Anti-Censorship Group Demands Censorship

David Klinghoffer

We have patiently explained why the current academic freedom bill in South Dakota, SB 55, cannot possibly be construed in any reasonable manner as seeking to inject teaching intelligent design into public schools. As noted yesterday, that didn't stop a prominent lobbying group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, from working the phrase, "intelligent design," six times into a statement directed against the bill.

One of those instances was in a photo caption of an instructor in front of his class, "Teachers should not be given leeway to introduce intelligent design in science classes."

But with evolution proponents, such distortions are absolutely routine. It's bizarre. It's farcical. But this tops it. In a surreal move, a group called the National Coalition Against Censorship has plunged into the South Dakota situation to demand continued restraints on teachers and their academic freedom -- in other words, censorship.

They complain that SB 55 would "remov[e] accountability in science education." "Accountability" there would seem to mean instructors being vulnerable to career retaliation for teaching critical thinking skills to science students. These "anti-censorship" proponents advocate retaining the option of punishing biology teachers for going off message on Darwinism.

They go on: "Essentially, [the bill] removes the restraints on teachers that prevents them from straying from professionally-developed science standards adopted by state educators." The National Coalition Against Censorship favors keeping "restraints" on teachers firmly in place.

The bill, they say, "may encourage teachers who object to the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change to bring their opinions into the classroom," instead of sticking slavishly to a uniform Darwin-only script. The teachers should stick to their script.

Then there's this. Look again at the  language of the bill. It's very brief:

No teacher may be prohibited from helping students understand, analyze, critique, or review in an objective scientific manner the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to § 13-3-48.

That is another way of saying no teacher may be censored for challenging students with balanced information from objective science sources. Notice that the language concludes by saying that the "strengths and weaknesses" approach may be extended only to "scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards" already established.

Because intelligent design isn't part of those content standards, the law extends no protection for teaching about ID. Because the content standards are already defined, instruction that's not "aligned" with them, in other words that "stray[s] from professionally-developed science standards adopted by state educators," would also not be protected.

But interestingly, if you read the statement from the "anti-censorship" group, their quotation from the bill cuts off before getting to the part about how instruction must be "aligned with the content standards." The whole proposed law is just a sentence long, but they truncate it a little more than half way through, perhaps to keep the reader from realizing that their dire prediction of teachers "straying" is undercut by the clear language of SB 55 itself. The anti-censorship activists are engaging in censorship right there in the middle of their own statement.

They conclude by comparing exploring mainstream debate about evolutionary theory with, yes, denying the Holocaust. And that is where they transition from absurdity to obscenity.

Good gravy. These complaints, whether from Americans United or from the horrifically misnamed National Coalition Against Censorship, are totally detached from a straightforward reading of the law they wish to attack. They are mere scaremongering, and frankly, contemptible.

In this, though, they're not much worse than supposedly objective news outlets like the Washington Post or ProPublica. When it comes to defending evolutionary orthodoxy, journalism and propaganda merge seamlessly.

Fake news alert (again)

Activist Group Spreads Falsehoods About South Dakota Science Education Bill
Evolution News & Views

Pierre, SD -- Dogmatic activists are trying to derail a proposed science education bill in South Dakota. The language of the bill is aimed at supporting critical thinking by allowing students to learn how scientists debate scientific issues, according to John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture.

South Dakota legislators are currently considering SB 55, "An Act to protect the teaching of certain scientific information." Since the bill was introduced, Darwin-only lobbyists with the national group Americans United for Separation of Church and State have been attacking SB 55 and circulating misinformation about it. Notably, they falsely claim that SB 55 would authorize the teaching of "intelligent design."

"Americans United is so worried about what's between the words of the bill, they aren't paying attention to what the words in the bill actually say," said Dr. West in reference to a blog post  this week from the group.

"Contrary to what Americans United says, SB 55 explicitly limits authorization to 'scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards,'" said Sarah Chaffee, Program Officer in Public Policy and Education at Discovery Institute.

Chaffee points out that South Dakota's current science content standards do not include intelligent design, and thus the bill does not protect the teaching of ID (which is different from creationism). The bill only pertains to topics already in the standards. Yet the post from Americans United mentions intelligent design six times.


"The academic freedom bill does not require teachers to teach anything differently," said Chaffee. "Scientific topics will still be taught as required by state law. But it also gives teachers academic freedom to choose to teach about both "the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information" in the standards -- such as evidence for and against the neo-Darwinian "consensus."

Scientism's brave new world Just keeps getting closer.

Scientists Want to Genetically Engineer Humans

Wesley J. Smith

I first got involved deeply in the debates over biotechnology during the great embryonic stem cell controversy. During that time, I watched in stunned and appalled amazement as scientists lied to legislators and hyped the imminent likelihood of CURES! CURES! CURES! in order to win a political fight and gain federal research grants.

With that experience, I concluded that many in the biotech sector have what amounts to an arrogant "we decide" attitude as to what should and should not be done in science -- rather than society as a whole determining proper parameters through democratic processes -- and moreover, that some have an essentially "anything goes" mentality at odds with the views of the rest of society.

Further, these advocates pretend to be willing to accept reasonable limitations. But a close look reveals these restraints are primarily over things they cannot yet do. Then, after a controversial technology becomes doable, the once "unthinkable" is suddenly moved into the "full speed ahead!" file.

Now, that pattern holds with human genetic engineering. From  From the New York Times story:

An influential science advisory group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine on Tuesday lent its support to a once unthinkable proposition: the modification of human embryos to create genetic traits that can be passed down to future generations.

This type of human gene editing has long been seen as an ethical minefield. Researchers fear that the techniques used to prevent genetic diseases might also be used to enhance intelligence, for example, or to create people physically suited to particular tasks, like serving as soldiers...

Just over a year ago, an international group of scientists said it would be "irresponsible to proceed" with making heritable changes to the human genome until risks could be better assessed and there was "broad societal consensus about the appropriateness" of any proposed change. No one is pretending that such a consensus now exists.

But in the year that the committee was deliberating, [bioethicist] Ms. [Alta] Charo said, the techniques required to perform this sort of gene editing have passed crucial milestones.

See what I mean?


It starts with health and that justification is deployed to sway the public and regulators. But soon, these technologies will move to promoting enhancement and eugenic design, already seen in currently deployed reproductive technologies. Know this.

Waiting in vain?

Eye Evolution: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
Brian Miller 

Without calling it a series, I've written several articles recently that followed a logical path. In the first, I described the distinction between   incremental innovation and radical innovation. I also outlined the commonalities and differences between intelligent design and theistic evolution (TE) as approaches to biology. In a follow-up, I applied the concepts from the first article to the  proposed evolution of the vertebrate eye, demonstrating that it could not have occurred without intelligent direction. That's mainly because the majority of steps required for the addition of a lens are disadvantageous in isolation, so selective pressures would have operated in opposition to the evolutionary process.

Let's now consider the challenge of waiting times -- the minimum time required for hypothesized evolutionary transformations, such as the development of the camera eye, to occur through undirected processes. Even if the selective pressures were favorable, the required timescales are far longer for sufficient numbers of coordinated mutations to accumulate than the maximum time available, as determined by the fossil record. Of special interest is the proposed cooption of crystallin proteins, which give the lens its refractive properties. Seemingly, one of the easiest evolutionary steps should be producing these proteins in the lens, for some of them are already used for other purposes. The main hurdle would simply be altering the regulatory regions of the first borrowed crystallin gene and other related genes, so they bind to the correct set of transcription factors (TFs). The lens protein could then be overexpressed in the fiber cells in sufficient quantities at the right time in development.

However, the cooption process is far more challenging than it might at first appear. It requires specific regulatory regions to bind to well over four new transcription factors. This alteration would involve numerous mutations creating over four corresponding DNA binding sites known as transcription factor binding sites (TFBS). As I mentioned in the previous article, the earliest lens should have closely resembled lenses of vertebrates today, so this lower estimate is almost certainly accurate.

A typical binding site involved in lens construction consists of a DNA sequence ranging from roughly 6 (e.g., SOX2) to 15 (e.g., Pax6) base pairs, so four TFBS would likely correspond to over 30 base pairs. One could think of these DNA sequences like the launch codes to a missile; they must be correct before the protein can be properly manufactured. The lower bound of 30 base pairs can be divided by a factor of 3 to compensate for sequence redundancies, flexibility in where in the DNA sequences start, and the fact that roughly one quarter of the bases would be correct purely by chance. This extremely conservative estimate indicates that over 10 mutations would be required to generate a proper sequence. All but the final mutation would be neutral.

We can now calculate the likelihood of sufficient mutations occurring in 10 million generations. The mutation rate for a specific base par is typically estimated for complex animals to correspond to a probability around 1 in 100 million. The chance of a mutation occurring in 10 million generations is then 1 in 10. Therefore, the chance of 10 coordinated mutations appearing on the same DNA strand works out to much less than 1 in 10 billion. No potential precursor to a vertebrate with a lens would have had an effective population large enough to acquire the needed mutations. For comparison, the effective population size estimate used for Drosophila melanogaster can be in the low millions. If the generation time were even as low as one year, a crystallin could not be coopted even in 10 million years, which is the time required for the appearance of most known phyla in the Cambrian explosion.

Moreover, this step is only one of hundreds required to produce a lens. Researchers have identified numerous TFs essential to lens development in vertebrates, and each has its own set of TFBS, which integrate into a complex developmental regulatory gene network. If only one connection were wired incorrectly, the eye in the vast majority of cases would not form properly, resulting in impaired vision. In addition, the lens is only one component of the eye, which is only one part of the visual system. The obvious conclusion is that, in the timeframe allowed by the fossil record, the reengineering to produce the vertebrate visual system would require foresight and deliberate coordination. Those are the hallmarks of design.

Biologists have claimed to produce viable scenarios for the evolution of several other complex systems. What all these stories share is that they ignore crucial details and lack careful analysis of feasibility. When we examine these issues in detail, the stories collapse for the same reasons that the one about the eye does: First, the selective pressures oppose transitions between key proposed stages. Second, the required timescales are vastly longer than what is available.

For biologists, rigorously evaluating evolutionary narratives has become fully possible only in the past several decades due to advances in molecular and developmental biology. Meanwhile, with breakthroughs in computer engineering, information theory, and nanotechnology, parallels between biological and human engineered systems are increasingly evident. These developments are making the intelligent design framework essential for scientific advancement. They also create new opportunities for ID proponents and theistic evolutionists to collaborate.

Proponents of TE want to push materialistic explanations for biological systems as far as possible, as science demands. ID advocates would not disagree with them on that. No one wants to trigger the design filter prematurely. So theistic evolutionists should join us in considering what the modern evolutionary synthesis with its auxiliary hypotheses, such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance, can explain. We should all continue to examine how insights from evolution may benefit research on cancer, in epidemiology, and other fields.

ID researchers, meanwhile, can examine the limits of purely materialistic processes, and we invite theistic evolutionists to do likewise These combined efforts will help to define in greater detail what Michael Behe calls the edge of evolution. This understanding would also help advance research on cancer treatments, antibiotic protocols, and more. At the same time, ID proponents can help identify how principles and insights from engineering may advance biological research and related applications.

Many theistic evolutionists recognize that the appearance of design is real (but then, so does Richard Dawkins). This insight, at least, should inform their research. In contrast, anti-theistic evolutionists are biased against recognizing the benefits of design thinking. As a result, in studying life they have stumbled upon close parallels to human engineering, which, however, they recognized only begrudgingly. On the other hand, ID expects these parallel and is unsurprised to find them. A classic example is how researchers, misled by evolutionary thinking, dismissed a large portion of the human genome as "junk" DNA instead of anticipating that it would function as a  genomic operating system.


TE researchers do not need to immediately agree with ID researchers on whether any particular feature of life is the result of primary design or secondary causes. They can still work together to best serve the cause of genuine science, and I hope they will do so more in the future.

The fine print.

What Darwinists Don't Tell You: Valentine's Day Edition
David Klinghoffer

Darwinism is replete with salesmanship, some of it thoroughly deceptive. Pushing the false dichotomy of evolution versus Young Earth Creationism, as if there were no alternative to these two, is one way that evolutionists bully and mislead non-scientists. Sadly, they are joined in this by some creationists.

Tom Bethell, author of  Darwin's House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, points out that from Darwin himself on up to today, advocates of the theory have habitually  played down the conflict between their materialism, on one hand, and religious belief on the other.

One doesn't hear much about the materialism of Darwin and Darwinism, likely because there has been a longstanding effort to ignore and suppress it. Many of today's theistic Darwinists play this game, but they are hardly the first.
Similarly, only the most perilously candid evolutionists are in your face about another straightforward inference from materialism: the denial of free will. Bethell again:

The materialist philosophy puts its advocates at odds with the great majority of mankind, alerting the rest of us to the implausibility of what we are expected to believe. Being told that "evolution is a fact" can be intimidating because many laymen won't know how to respond. But to be told, "Your will is not free, even though you think it is," or "You're an automaton and you don't even know it," is likely to get people's backs up.
This bleak vision, the human being as meat machine, is on vivid display, though mixed with a clumsy childlike enthusiasm, in the writing of emeritus University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. On Darwin Day, for instance, he chided me for the hope that evidence of design will overcome Darwinian censorship: "I'm sorry to say that, I think, Klinghoffer will go to his Maker (disassociated molecules) before a teleological view of life permeates evolutionary biology."

Imagine trying to sell "disassociated molecules" to the public, with their human intuitions, fears, and longings. Darwinists like Coyne or Dawkins, Bethell observes, are their own worst enemies.

To these thoughts, add our colleague Jonathan Witt's observation for Valentine's Day over at The Stream. From Darwinian materialism, he notes, a denial of the reality of love must follow:

Evolutionist Daniel Dennett  called  Darwinism a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept ... dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding."
Dissolve those things and there's no room for romantic love to be anything very exalted.

Biologist E.O. Wilson is   just as blunt. When Darwinian science conquers all, we will view the human brain as just the "product of genetic evolution by natural selection." And the mind "will be more precisely explained as an epiphenomenon of the neuronal machinery of the brain."

But surely we can rescue things like art, religion and poetry, right? No, Wilson insists. Evolution teaches us that all of it was "produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues."

Evolving Away Love

So what becomes of Valentine's Day, of all of those romantic longings and pledges to love, honor and protect, maybe even till death do us part? Yes, glands and instincts are involved. Only a gnostic would deny that, and Christianity threw Gnosticism out on its ear at the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

But Darwinian science goes further. It insists the stuff of Valentine's Day is all glands and instincts, and beneath those, all brain chemistry -- a soulless concoction of matter and energy stirred up in the alchemist's lab we call evolution.

Of course, it would have to be that way. A materialist understanding of evolution robs us of virtually everything that makes life rich and worth living, if we're honest about it with ourselves. What, really, is left? Eating? Animal rutting? Pursuing status or dominance in a manner hardly different from the way chimps and chickens do?

But Darwinists, devoted salesmen that they are, often seem freaked out about the implications of their theory, and so try to take those back, sometimes in the space between one paragraph and the next. Dennett, for one, preaches the illusion of consciousness. But just as we know that love is real and not only a matter of glands in action, and as we know that are our will is ultimately free, we also have a strong sense that our inner lives are genuine.

So here is neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga giving a reverent review to Dennett's new book, From  From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, in the Wall Street Journal  and getting tangled up in the consciousness question. On one hand, says Gazzaniga:

[Dennett's] early writings insisted on the idea that consciousness was an illusion, a trick that the multifaceted brain pulled to give us that cozy feeling of an interior experience, with all its fullness -- the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the euphoria of love.
But most Wall Street Journal readers are going to have a hard time with the idea of their "interior experience" as a trick their brain pulls on them. The notion is thus walked back by Dr. Gazzaniga in the very next paragraph:

This suggestion is quite profound and complicated and has often been misunderstood. In response to Mr. Dennett's early landmark book, "Consciousness Explained" (1991), the cognitive-science cognoscenti quipped that the title should have been "Consciousness Explained Away." That was obviously not Mr. Dennett's point. It was thought by many distinguished philosophers, such as John Searle and Thomas Nagel, that Mr. Dennett was abandoning the first-person experience of consciousness, the personal nature of it, the qualia. He wasn't at all. He never doubted consciousness itself.
Consciousness for Dennett is "an illusion," yet "He never doubted consciousness itself." He never doubted an illusion? I haven't read the book, but the review of it makes no sense.

Darwinism asks us to doubt, to deny, our own intuitions and experiences. Intelligent design cheerfully affirms them. The former, says Jonathan Witt, overwhelms resistance "by endlessly recycling evidence long discredited even by scientists in [Darwinists'] own ranks" (referring to the "icons of evolution" made famous by Jonathan Wells).


Meanwhile, intelligent design is not permitted to make its own scientific case. Or when it does so, ID scientists are put down by censors  or drowned out by media spokesmen with endless chants of "creationist, creationist, creationist." What a mad world!