Remember that old saying about stuff that goes around?

Dawkins (Not) at Berkeley – The Best Irony
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

On the story about evolutionary atheist Richard Dawkins getting disinvited as an event speaker by a progressive Berkeley radio station (see  here and here), Discovery Institute chairman of the board Bruce Chapman points out the best irony. While Dawkins protests his “de-platforming” over past comments on Islam, in 2009 he helped get Ben Stein de-platformed as a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont over — you guessed it — Stein’s take on evolution and his role in the film  Expelled.

The New York Times talked with Dawkins and got this complaint from him.

“Many people are saying this is a freedom of speech issue, and of course it is,” he said. “But it’s actually more of a freedom of listening issue. People bought tickets because they wanted to hear me.”

They give the larger context:

In recent months, the cancellation of speeches on college campuses has stirred debates over balancing free speech and security concerns.

Berkeley has been a particular focus.

The Center for Inquiry, which includes the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, echoed Dawkins, saying it was “stunned and deeply dismayed.”

The public radio station, KPFA, explained that it withdrew the invitation to speak after realizing Dawkins had expressed controversial views about the Muslim religion. In the incident with Stein, the University of Vermont’s then-president Daniel Fogel explained that they got cold feet after realizing Stein had expressed controversial views about the theory of evolution.

From President Fogel’s statement in a  UVM press release:

As you may know, Mr. Stein delivered an excellent Kalkin lecture on our campus last year, focused primarily on economic issues, to which our students responded warmly and enthusiastically. It was on the basis of that experience that I extended him an invitation to be our Commencement speaker.

Mr. Stein has also expressed opinions on subjects unrelated to economics, most notably with respect to evolutionary theory, intelligent design, and the role of science in the Holocaust. Those views are highly controversial, to say the least. Following the announcement of Mr. Stein as Commencement speaker, profound concerns have been expressed to me by persons both internal and external to the University about his selection. Once I apprised Mr. Stein of these communications, he immediately and most graciously declined our Commencement invitation.

So they didn’t formally disinvite him, but Fogel obviously made clear that Stein wasn’t welcome. Speaking to the UVM student paper, he warmly singled out the influence of Dawkins: Apart from his own faculty, “I heard from very distinguished members of the scientific community like Richard Dawkins as well.”

Dawkins had sent an sent an email to Fogel, saying he was “dismayed” by the invitation to Stein (though apparently not “deeply dismayed”). He asked among other things, “Was anybody in the Biology Department consulted before you issued an invitation to a notoriously mendacious propagandist for creationism?”

Ben Stein himself was blunt in the Burlington Free Press:

Stein called the university’s response to the furor “chicken sh**, and you can quote me on that.”

“I like Dr. Fogel,” Stein wrote, “and feel sorry he is caught in the meat grinder of political correctness. My heart goes out to him. He’s a great guy trying to do his best in difficult circumstances.”

Eight years later, at the center of the row it’s a different university community and a different set of “highly controversial” opinions. Other than that, the parallel is perfect. The shoe is now on the other foot, an audience’s “freedom of listening” has been set aside in deference to political correctness, and Dawkins, suddenly in the role of the silenced rather than the silencer, finds that he doesn’t much like it.

A clash of Titans LVII

A clash of Titans LVI

The eyes of the global brotherhood of Jehovah's servants remain focused on our Russian brothers.

International Delegation of Brothers Shows Support for Russian Fellow Worshippers at Supreme Court Appeal Hearing

NEW YORK—The Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses arranged for a delegation of brothers from three continents to travel to Moscow to demonstrate the global support for the brothers and sisters in Russia.

When the delegation arrived, they were met by the happy faces of their Russian brothers and sisters, some of whom traveled to Moscow from as far away as Siberia. The delegates assured the Russian brothers and sisters of their intense concern for them and the heartfelt prayers of the worldwide brotherhood. One member of the delegation stated: “I was truly moved by the courageous attitude of my Russian brothers, especially as there was very little expectation of a reversal of the unjust decision to ban their activity.”

Despite the negative decision by the three-judge panel, an atmosphere of genuine love and unity pervaded the courtroom. There was deep sadness at hearing Jehovah’s name reproached in such a public setting and a sober awareness that a time of testing lies ahead for the Witnesses in Russia. Yet, the dignity and affection displayed by the brothers and sisters in the courtroom was sufficient evidence to refute the erroneous charge of “extremism” upheld by the appeal judges.

Mark Sanderson, a member of the Governing Body, led the delegation. He warmly encouraged the brothers to “be strong and courageous” in the days ahead. As the visiting brothers left the courtroom, the local Witnesses embraced them and expressed appreciation for their support on this historic occasion.

The delegation also visited 21 embassies in Moscow to provide accurate information about the negative effects of Russia’s attack on Jehovah’s Witnesses. These include cases of arson on homes of Witnesses, jobs lost, harassment of children at schools, and criminal charges for organizing Christian meetings against several elders, including Brother Dennis Christensen, who remains in pre-trial detention. A number of ambassadors were visibly moved by a two-minute video that summarized these events. The most common question asked by officials was, ‘Why Jehovah’s Witnesses?’ In answer, our brothers gave a powerful witness by explaining that members of our organization are politically neutral and our preaching activity has positively changed the lives of many Russians. One ambassador responded: “The Orthodox Church does not like you fishing in their waters.” More than ten embassies sent representatives to the court hearing and stayed for the entire 8-hour duration.

The international delegation of brothers left Russia with their faith strengthened, heartened by their Russian brothers’ determination to remain loyal and the opportunity to give an effective witness to officials

The Trinity-Is It Taught in the Bible?

"The Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. . . . So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not Three Gods, but One God."

IN THESE words the Athanasian Creed describes the central doctrine of Christendom—the Trinity. If you are a church member, Catholic or Protestant, you might be told that this is the most important teaching that you are to believe in. But can you explain the doctrine? Some of the best minds in Christendom have confessed their inability to understand the Trinity.

Why, then, do they believe it? Is it because the Bible teaches the doctrine? The late Anglican bishop John Robinson gave a thought-provoking answer to this question in his best-selling book Honest to God. He wrote: "In practice popular preaching and teaching presents a supranaturalistic view of Christ which cannot be substantiated from the New Testament. It says simply that Jesus was God, in such a way that the terms ‘Christ’ and ‘God’ are interchangeable. But nowhere in Biblical usage is this so. The New Testament says that Jesus was the Word of God, it says that God was in Christ, it says that Jesus is the Son of God; but it does not say that Jesus was God, simply like that."

John Robinson was a controversial figure in the Anglican Church. Nevertheless, was he correct in saying that the "New Testament" nowhere says that "Jesus was God, simply like that"?

What the Bible Does Say

Some may answer that question by quoting the verse that commences John’s Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1, King James Version) Does that not contradict what the Anglican bishop said? Not really. As John Robinson doubtless knew, some modem translators disagree with the King James Version’s rendering of that text. Why? Because in the expression "the Word was God" in the original Greek, the word for "God" does not have the definite article "the." In the earlier expression "the Word was with God," the word for "God" is definite, that is, it does have the definite article. This makes it unlikely that the two words have the same significance.

Hence, some translations bring out the qualitative aspect in their translations. For example, some render the expression "the Word was divine." (An American Translation, Schonfield) Moffatt renders it "the Logos was divine." However, indicating that "divine" would not be the most appropriate rendering here, John Robinson and the British textual critic Sir Frederick Kenyon both pointed out that if that was what John wanted to emphasize, he could have used the Greek word for "divine," the i’os. The New World Translation, correctly viewing the word "God" as indefinite, as well as bringing out the qualitative aspect indicated by the Greek structure, uses the indefinite article in English: "The Word was a god."

Professor C. H. Dodd, director of the New English Bible project, comments on this approach: "A possible translation. . . would be, ‘The Word was a god’. As a word-for-word translation it cannot be faulted." However, The New English Bible does not render the verse that way. Rather, John 1:1 in that version reads: "When all things began, the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was." Why did the translation committee not choose the simpler rendering? Professor Dodd answers: "The reason why it is unacceptable is that it runs counter to the current of Johannine thought, and indeed of Christian thought as a whole."— Technical Papers for the Bible Translator, Volume 28, January 1977.

The Plain Sense of Scripture

Would we say that the idea that Jesus was a god and not the same as God the Creator is contrary to Johannine (that is, the apostle John’s) thought, as well as Christian thought as a whole? Let us examine some Bible texts that refer to Jesus and to God, and we will see what some commentators who lived before the Athanasian Creed was formulated thought about those texts.

"I and the Father are one."—JOHN 10:30.

Novatian (c. 200-258 C.E.) commented: "Since He said ‘one’ thing,[] let the heretics understand that He did not say ‘one’ person. For one placed in the neuter, intimates the social concord, not the personal unity.. .. Moreover, that He says one, has reference to the agreement, and to the identity of judgment, and to the loving association itself, as reasonably the Father and Son are one in agreement, in love, and in affection. "— Treatise Concerning the Trinity, chapter 27.

"The Father is greater than I am."—JOHN 14:28.

Irenaeus (c. 130-200 C.E.): "We may learn through Him [Christ] that the Father is above all things. For ‘the Father,’ says He, ‘is greater than I.’ The Father, therefore, has been declared by our Lord to excel with respect to knowledge. "—Against Heresies, Book II, chapter 28.8.

"This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ." —JOHN 17:3.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215 C.E.): "To know the eternal God, the giver of what is eternal, and by knowledge and comprehension to possess God, who is first, and highest, and one, and good. . . . He then who would live the true life is enjoined first to know Him ‘whom no one knows, except the Son reveal (Him).’ (Matt. 11:27) Next is to be learned the greatness of the Saviour after Him."— Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? VII, VIII

"One God and Father of all persons, who is over all and through all and in all."—EPHESIANS 4:6.

Irenaeus: "And thus one God the Father is declared, who is above all, and through all, and in all. The Father is indeed above all, and He is the Head of Christ."— Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 18.2.

These early writers clearly understood these verses to describe the Father as supreme, over everything and everyone including Jesus Christ. Their comments give no hint that they believed in a Trinity.

The Holy Spirit Reveals All Truth

Jesus promised his disciples that after his death and resurrection, the holy spirit would be given to them as a helper. He promised: "When that one arrives, the spirit of the truth, he will guide you into all the truth,.., and he will declare to you the things coming."—John 14:16, 17; 15:26; 16:13.

After Jesus’ death, that promise was fulfilled. The Bible records how new doctrines were revealed or clarified to the Christian congregation through the help of the holy spirit. These new teachings were written down in the books that later became the second part of the Bible, the Christian Greek Scriptures, or "New Testament." In this flood of new light, is there ever any revelation of the existence of a Trinity? No. The holy spirit reveals something very different about God and Jesus.

For example, at Pentecost 33 C.E., after holy spirit came upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem, the apostle Peter witnessed to the crowd outside about Jesus. Did he speak about a Trinity? Consider some of his statements, and judge for yourself: "Jesus... , a man publicly shown by God to you through powerful works and portents and signs that God did through him in your midst." "This Jesus God resurrected, of which fact we are all witnesses." "God made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you impaled." (Acts 2:22, 32, 36) Far from teaching a Trinity, these expressions by the spirit-filled Peter highlight Jesus’ subordination to his Father, that he is an instrument for the fulfillment of God’s will.

Soon after, another faithful Christian spoke about Jesus. Stephen was brought before the Sanhedrin to answer accusations. Instead, Stephen turned the situation around, charging that his accusers were like their rebellious ancestors. Finally, the record says: "He, being full of holy spirit, gazed into heaven and caught sight of God’s glory and of Jesus standing at God’s right hand, and he said: ‘Look! I behold the heavens opened up and the Son of man standing at God’s right hand."’ (Acts 7:55, 56) Why did the holy spirit reveal Jesus to be simply the "Son of man" standing at God’s right hand and not part of a godhead equal with his Father? Clearly, Stephen had no concept of a Trinity.

When Peter carried the good news about Jesus to Cornelius, there was a further opportunity to reveal the Trinity doctrine. What happened? Peter explained that Jesus is "Lord of all." But he went on to explain that this lordship came from a higher source. Jesus was "the One decreed by God to be judge of the living and the dead." After Jesus’ resurrection, his Father "granted him [gave him permission] to become manifest" to his followers. And the holy spirit? It does appear in this conversation but not as the third person of a Trinity.

Rather, "God anointed [Jesus] with holy spirit and power." Thus, the holy spirit, far from being a person, is shown to be something impersonal, like the "power" also mentioned in that verse. (Acts 10:36, 38, 40, 42) Check the Bible carefully, and you will find further evidence that the holy spirit is not a personality but an active force that can fill people, impel them, cause them to be aglow, and be poured out upon them.

Finally, the apostle Paul had a fine opportunity to explain the Trinity—if it had been true doctrine—when he was preaching to the Athenians. In his talk, he referred to their altar "To an Unknown God" and said: "What you are unknowingly giving godly devotion to, this I am publishing to you." Did he publish a Trinity? No. He described the "God that made the world and all the things in it, being, as this One is, Lord of heaven and earth." But what of Jesus? "[God] has set a day in which he purposes to judge the inhabited earth in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed." (Acts 17:23, 24, 31) No hint of a Trinity there!

In fact, Paul explained something about God’s purposes that makes it impossible that Jesus and his Father are equal parts of a Trinity. I-fe wrote: "God ‘subjected all things under his [Jesus’] feet.’ But when he says that ‘all things have been subjected,’ it is evident that it is with the exception of the one who subjected all things to him. But when all things will have been subjected to him, then the Son himself will also subject himself to the One who subjected all things to him, that God may be all things to everyone." (1 Corinthians 15:27, 28) Thus, God will still be over all, including Jesus.

Is the Trinity taught in the Bible, then? No. John Robinson was right. It is not in the Bible, nor is it a part of "Christian thought." Do you view this as important to your worship? You should. Jesus said: "This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ." (John 17:3) If we take our worship of God seriously, it is vital that we know him as he really is, as he has revealed himself to us. Only then can we truly say that we are among the "true worshipers" who "worship the Father with spirit and truth." —John 4:23.

Yet more on the undeniability of the role of information in biology.

As Undeniable Debuts in Paperback, Frontiers in Biology Demonstrate Axe’s “Functional Coherence”
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Three brand new avenues of scientific discovery appear to need nothing from Darwinism. Instead they display in life what protein chemist Douglas Axe calls “functional coherence.” As Dr. Axe writes in his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed — now out in paperback! — this quality represents “the hierarchical arrangement of parts needed for anything to produce a high-level function — each part contributing in a coordinated way to the whole.”

He writes there:

No high-level function is ever accomplished without someone thinking up a special arrangement of things and circumstances for that very purpose and then putting those thoughts into action. The hallmark of all these special arrangements is high-level functional coherence, which we now know comes only by insight — never by coincidence.

This is just what we see at the leading edges of biology.

What Is Circular DNA?

Writing in the journal Science, Elizabeth Pennisi quips, “Circular DNA throws biologists for a loop.” There’s something old and new about these closed loops of DNA that range in length from 300 to 16,000 base pairs. As she explains:

Are geneticists ready for the circulome? For decades biologists have known of mysterious rings of DNA in the nuclei of some human cells, interspersed among the linear chromosomes. Now, what were once curiosities are increasingly looking like key players in health and disease. The circulome, a term introduced at the Biology of Genomes meeting here, may turn out to be a new frontier in genetics. 

Not to be confused with bacterial chromosomes, which are often circular, nor with circular RNA transcripts, these circular DNA loops, formally called “extrachromosomal circular DNA” or eccDNA, are just now coming to the attention of molecular biologists. “That they exist in normal cells with such huge complexity is amazing,” one said. Another commented, “It basically opens a new field and a new way of thinking about DNA and about how dynamic the genome is.” The approach proposed by Axe and other design proponents, approaching a problem with the assumption that parts of a working system must be playing important roles, seems best suited to find out what eccDNA is doing.

How Can We Crack the Sugar Code?

The DNA code was the first to be elucidated. The protein code, with its more complex alphabet, is still being deciphered. But coming up in the challenge of biological forensics is the sugar code. In Nature, Esther Landhuis looks ahead to “sweet success” with new tools for making progress in glycobiology, or glycoscience.

What makes this area in molecular biology so challenging is the “crazy complexity” in the glycome. Proteins and genes, for all their complexities, can be boiled down to linear sequences of building blocks. Sugars, by contrast, branch out in all kinds of directions. Landhuis explains why cracking this code is so hard:

Researchers generally study biomolecules such as DNA and peptides by synthesizing them in the lab and then probing how they react to different circumstances. But DNA and peptides are linear molecules with no branches, and tools for analysing them took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Sugars, however, have numerous branching points and each of those linkages can exhibit left- or right-handed asymmetrical forms depending on the orientation of the attached molecule. They also have exponentially more potential configurations than do DNA or proteins, and that makes them much harder to synthesize in the lab, says Peter Seeberger, a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Munich, Germany. DNA is made up of four nucleotides (G, A, T and C), so there are theoretically 4,096 possible ways to build a string of six elements, or a 6-mer. Proteins have more building blocks (20 amino acids) and can potentially assemble into 64 million different 6-mers. But 6-mer carbohydrates can adopt 193 billion possible configurations. As a result, tools for synthesizing sugars are about 35 years behind those for DNA and peptides, Seeberger says.

Despite these challenges, Landhuis says that new tools are becoming available to analyze and classify sugars and detect their roles in cells. One new technique allows researchers to detect which “glycans” (sugars that stud the surfaces of cell membranes) bind to proteins. This can accelerate functional studies, cutting through years of difficult work. With an eye out for functional coherence, the sky is the limit for discovering roles of sugars in biology.

How Does a Cell Become an Organism?

Ever since John Sulston began to map the fate of every cell in the lab roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a dream of biologists has been to follow the pathways of cells in complex organisms, including human beings, from zygote to adult. In Nature, Ewen Callaway calls this project “The trickiest family tree in biology.”

The effort is attracting not just developmental biologists, but also geneticists and technology developers, who are convinced that understanding a cell’s history — where it came from and even what has happened to it — is one of biology’s next great frontiers. The results so far serve up some tantalizing clues to how humans are put together. Individual cells from an organ such as the brain could be related more closely to cells in other organs than to their surrounding tissue, for example. And unlike the undeviating developmental dance of C. elegans, more-complex organisms invoke quite a bit of improvisation and chance, which will undoubtedly complicate efforts to unpick the choreography.

Sulston and two colleagues went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for their work on the humble roundworm. In a video from Discovery Institute, “How to Build a Worm,” Paul Nelson explains the implications for intelligent design. Each cell division begins a descent down a decision tree, he shows, leading to specializations and irreversible fates as different genes get switched on or off, and organs develop.

Sulston set the “gold standard” with his work. Following the development of more complex animals, like mammals or birds, will be extraordinarily more challenging. “But even incomplete cellular ancestries could be informative,” Callaway says hopefully. With new tools like CRISPR-Cas9 and recombinases, some of the problems are becoming tractable. Here’s one brief look into this frontier:

The trees they produced show that a small number of early-forming embryonic lineages give rise to the majority of cells in a given organ. More than 98% of one fish’s blood cells, for instance, came from just 5 of the more than 1,000 cell lineages that the team traced. And although these five contributed to other tissues, they did so in much lower proportions. They were almost entirely absent from the muscle cells in the heart, for example, which was mostly built from its own small number of precursors. “It was profoundly surprising to me,” says Shendure. His colleague Schier says he is still trying to make sense of the data.

Many questions arise in this field: Is there more than one way to build a heart? How comparable are the developmental stages in different individuals? Callaway ends with images of the great voyages of discovery:

It is that vast unknown that could make such work transformative, says Elowitz: “It would change the kinds of questions you could ask.” Sulston’s map led biologists into uncharted territory, says Schier, and this could do the same. “We can’t tell you what exactly we’re going to find, but there is a sense that we’re going to find some new continents out there.”

Opportunities for Design Science

These three frontiers show how much work remains in biology. The shallow science of Darwinism seems ill-prepared for it; indeed, none of the three articles talks about evolution at all. When poised at the dock of a great voyage of discovery, the time may be ripe for new heads and new ideas.

The recent failings of Darwinism with ENCODE, junk DNA and other fallen predictions are fresh in scientists’ minds. Books we published in 2016 and 2017 by  Michael Denton, Tom Bethell, and Jonathan Wells  document Darwinism’s theory in crisis, a tottering house of cards, reliant on zombie icons that only serve to delay the inevitable. They make the negative case against Darwin compellingly.

But the frontiers described above are just a few that help open up a fresh, new, positive case. They offer the opportunity to prove the value of the integrated “systems biology” approach that Steve Laufmann talked about in a recent pair of ID the Future podcasts (see here and here ). He described how biologists with an engineer’s perspective are able to detect patterns of function, making sense of the welter of data, showing that “this makes sense because” it fits into the big picture.

Doug Axe’s concept of “functional coherence” can be a guiding light in the unknown waters of these voyages of discovery. Needless to say, the potential benefits of successful design-theoretic biology at the cutting edge are enormous: new approaches to cancer treatment, improvements to agriculture, or insights into biomimetic applications. This is our chance to redeem science from a veritable dark age of materialistic reductionism — stepping boldly forward into a new era where the design everyone admits is intuitive becomes design that is transformative.

Yet more on Darwinism and the deprivileging of human life.

Jerry Coyne, Infanticide, and the Evolution of Morality
Richard Weikart

In a recent blog post, already noted by Michael Egnor and Wesley Smith, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne not only argued  that infanticide and assisted suicide should be permitted, but he insisted that our increasing acceptance of these deeds is a sign of moral improvement in our society. He stated, “This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide [i.e., legalization in some states and countries] are [sic] the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world.”

In his book Faith Versus Fact, Coyne made a similar proclamation: “Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most ‘religious’ morality.” (p. 261)

Earlier in Faith Versus Fact, Coyne argued that morality was the product of evolutionary forces, as well as cultural changes.  He denied that morality is fixed and objective and decreed that it is malleable. He even makes a big deal out of this argument, claiming that it disproves the existence of God.

It seems to me that Coyne is talking out of both sides of his mouth. There can be no “increasing morality” and no “superior” morality unless there is some objective moral standard, a point that Coyne rejects. Evolution, we are told again and again, has no goal, so any morality it produces has no objective reality. (That’s why the famous evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson and philosopher of science Michael Ruse called morality “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes.”)

Of course, one of the other major problems with Coyne’s analysis of morality is that many people see the policies he favors, such as infanticide, as evidence of our moral decline.

So, how does Coyne justify his claim that infanticide and assisted suicide are morally praiseworthy?  He relies on arguments that are based on his understanding of evolutionary biology. He claims humans are not a special or unique species, a point he bases on Darwinism. After thus undermining the sanctity-of-life ethic, he states in his blog: “After all, we euthanize our dogs and cats when to prolong their lives would be torture, so why not extend that to humans?”

Does Coyne really believe that we should treat humans like dogs and cats? Given his desire to see the United States embrace progressive public policies similar to those in Scandinavia, I rather doubt it. But let’s test and see.

I have a modest proposal for Coyne to consider. Picture this: Round up all the homeless people in Chicago, sterilize them, and then incarcerate them until someone comes to provide them a home. If no one is willing to take them in after a few weeks, then we can euthanize them. The problem of homelessness would be solved.

I’m confident Coyne will be outraged by this proposal — as he should be. However, this is exactly how we treat dogs. Apparently, Coyne does not think humans should be treated like dogs. Apparently, he recognizes that some things are objectively immoral.

Coyne, like many secular intellectuals, sees morality as non-objective, because he thinks it is produced by random mutations, natural selection, and also changing cultural factors. He uses this moral relativism as a sledgehammer against morality (and religion) that he doesn’t like. But then he turns around to promote a different “progressive” morality and tries to impose that on everyone. This morality, we are assured, is better and more advanced — hence the term “progressive.” It thus claims to be moving toward an objective moral standard.  You cannot have it both ways, Dr. Coyne.

For further analysis of Coyne, see pp. 84-87 of my book The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life.

On that(perennially missing)missing link

The Human-Ape Missing Link — Still Missing
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Here is a long, substantive, and interesting article from the BBC —  “We still have not found the missing link between us and apes.”  It is interesting for two reasons.

It admits that we haven’t found anything that resembles the last common ancestor (LCA) between humans and apes, what author Colin Barras calls the “missing link.”

It admits that it’s hard to even agree on what the LCA might have looked like.

What it doesn’t do is admit the even bigger problem: that  we don’t even have transitional forms between Australopithecus and Homo.  This is a major omission.

That having been said, Barras raises a lot of interesting issues relevant to problem (2) above. Scientists can’t agree on what the LCA looked like because humans share different similarities with different primates. It’s hard to decide which primate we’re most closely related to. This shows that the phylogenetic tree of primates isn’t as clear-cut as we’re often told — humans share similarities and differences with many primates in a pattern that doesn’t makes a nice, clear-cut tree.

The article does a good job of discussing this. It states, for example:

Primates in general (particularly monkeys) are often relatively small-bodied, and they scamper around in forest canopies by running along branches. But apes are unusual primates. Most have big bodies with extraordinarily long arms. They often get around by swinging below branches rather than running along the top of them – a form of locomotion called “brachiation”.

According to many of these early researchers, the LCA was a large-bodied, long-armed, brachiating ape.

By the late 1960s, researchers were fleshing out the LCA even further. An anthropologist called Sherwood Washburn pointed out that chimpanzees, and particularly gorillas, actually spend significant amounts of time moving around on all fours on the forest floor.

Both apes use their arms in an idiosyncratic way when they walk: they flex their fingers so that their weight bears down on the knuckles. To Washburn it made sense that the LCA “knuckle-walked” too. The behaviour could even be seen as a stepping-stone on the way to walking upright on two legs, he wrote.

But it would be wrong to think that everyone was on board with these ideas of a brachiating, knuckle-walking, chimp-like LCA. In fact, almost from the moment that Huxley first put pen to paper, a minority of scientists were arguing that the earliest human ancestors — and the LCA — was decidedly not chimp-like.

For instance, just a decade after Huxley’s book, biologist St George Mivart argued that humans shared many features in common with monkeys or even lemurs. Meanwhile, from 1918 onwards an anatomist called Frederic Wood Jones argued that humans had a lot more in common with tarsiers than with chimpanzees or gorillas.

… [H]uman arms, hands, legs and feet are not as highly specialised as we might assume.

“In these characters man finds his counterparts not in anthropoid apes [gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans] but in animals that are clearly regarded… as more primitive,” wrote [anatomist William] Straus.

What Straus and a few others were really getting at is that humans show none of the specialised features that allow other apes to swing through the trees. It made sense to at least consider the possibility that humans split apart from other primates before the apes evolved brachiation, or knuckle-walking for that matter. Straus could not say exactly which species should be recognised as our sister. But the LCA could well have been a relatively small-bodied primate that ran along branches rather than swinging beneath them.

This disagreement continued for several more decades, says Nathan Young at the University of California in San Francisco. In fact, even into the 1980s it was not clear from anatomical features alone exactly where humans slotted into the primate evolutionary tree.

So what made them finally ditch the idea that humans are most closely related to “lower” primates in favor of believing that humanity’s closest relative is the chimp? As the article explains, human DNA turned out to be most similar to chimp DNA. So the drift of opinion turned to chimps as our closest cousin.

The kicker, however, is this: We’re constantly told that both our genes and our morphology are very similar to chimps. But as this article concedes, some major aspects of our morphology are more like other primates than they are like chimps. So our morphology isn’t necessarily entirely chimp-like.

Thus, we get this really interesting passage in the article:

The story should end there, but it does not. Surprisingly, the last 15 years have actually seen popular opinion begin to swing away from the idea of a chimp-like LCA, and towards a model closer to that argued by people like Straus in the 1940s.

There are several factors that explain the recent rethink. A more thorough understanding of chimp and gorilla anatomy helped.

There had been murmurings for some time that gorillas and chimpanzees (and bonobos) might not knuckle-walk in quite the same way. In 1999, Mike Dainton and Gabriele Macho at the University of Liverpool, UK, looked at the idea more formally. From subtle differences in the way gorilla and chimpanzee wrist bones change as the apes grow from juveniles to adults, Dainton and Macho concluded that the two may have evolved knuckle-walking independently.

Over the following decade, other researchers reported similar findings. By 2009, Tracy Kivell — now at the University of Kent, UK — and Daniel Schmitt at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, were arguing that humans did not evolve from a knuckle-walking LCA.

Strikingly, the article even notes that molecular biologists are willing to question whether the LCA links humans most closely to chimps:

Of course, only if and when fossils of the LCA itself come to light will the debate finally draw to a close. But the search for those crucial fossils is no longer quite as straightforward as it once seemed. In the last five years, some geneticists have begun to question whether the molecular clocks they use to estimate when the LCA lived are being read correctly. It is possible, they say, that the LCA might actually have lived 13 — not seven — million years ago.

The author notes other skeptics of the molecular data linking us to chimps:

There are also a few researchers who take a completely different view.

For instance, [University of Pittsburgh’s Jeffrey] Schwartz is adamant that it is orangutans, not chimpanzees, that are our sister species. It is an idea he first developed in the 1980s — before, he says, anthropologists “caved in” and conceded that molecules and not anatomy were the ultimate arbiters of the shape of the ape family tree.

Schwartz thinks DNA is not the infallible witness on evolution many assume it to be, and that there are many anatomical and behavioural similarities between humans and orangutans that should not simply be ignored.

For instance, both have thick layers of enamel on their teeth, and female orangutans (like women) do not “advertise” to males when they are most fertile — something biologists call oestrus. “Orangs are the only other mammal I know of that don’t have oestrus,” says Schwartz.

To be clear, few researchers agree with Schwartz. But even putting his ideas to one side, it is clear that there is not yet universal agreement on the LCA.

The article promotes Ardi as a possible candidate for LCA. But it notes why this proposal is not widely accepted:

[T]he Ardi analysis was not uncontroversial. One of the implications of their interpretations was that all sorts of anatomical features shared by gibbons, orangutans, chimps and gorillas must have evolved independently in each of these apes.

“I think they took it a little too far,” says Kivell. “Their model means that there is a lot of parallel evolution across all apes. I still think comparative studies with chimps and other African apes can provide a lot of insight into our own evolution.”

In the end, it’s clear that the entire field is a mess:

It is true that, today, some researchers have a well-thought-through idea of what the LCA looked like and how it behaved. The trouble is that other researchers have equally well-reasoned models that suggest an LCA that looked and behaved in a completely different way. And that puts the research community in a bit of a quandary.

In short, there are so many morphological similarities and differences between humans and other primates that it’s very difficult to draw a phylogenetic tree showing how these species are related. This makes it very difficult to infer what the common ancestor of humans and apes might have looked like.

Part of the difficulty, as well, is that we’re not as chimplike as we’re often told. The article doesn’t put it in exactly those terms, but that’s what’s going on. And now you understand.

How new words acquire respectability.

Yet More shifting of the goalposts by Darwinists.

Darwinists in a Muddle: Do Lenski's Microbes Show "Why Evolution Is True," or Not?
David Klinghoffer


Jerry Coyne is ticked off that readers are attributing significance in the wider evolution debate to Michael Behe's current paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology, explicating the results of viral and bacterial evolution studies -- notably the famous long-term study of Richard Lenski:

As I predicted, the IDers completely ignore the limitations of this paper (see my analyses here and here), and assert, wrongly, that Behe has made a powerful statement about evolution in nature.
What Coyne "completely ignores" is that Darwinists have accustomed themselves to waving Lenski as a banner that makes "a powerful statement about evolution in nature." In The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins devoted an ecstatic and detailed discussion to Lenski's work, enthusing:
Creationists hate it. Not only does it show evolution in action; not only does it show new information entering genomes without the intervention of a designer, which is something they have all been told to deny is possible ("told to" because most of them don't understand what "information" means); not only does it demonstrate the power of natural selection to put together combinations of genes that, by the naïve calculations so beloved of creationists, should be tantamount to impossible; it also undermines their central dogma of "irreducible complexity." So it is no wonder they are disconcerted by the Lenski research, and eager to find fault with it.
Coyne himself in his book Why Evolution Is True adduces the evidence of Richard Lenski, showing us "genuine evolutionary change."
So which is it, gentlemen? Is Lenski relevant to the broader debate, or not?

Remember how Darwinists assured us that there was no link Between Darwin and Hitler?Really?

Darwinian Biologist Endorses Killing Handicapped Babies Who “Suffer”
Michael Egnor

This odious stuff never ends. Darwinist biologist Jerry Coyne  endorses euthanasia for severely handicapped infants. Here are Coyne’s arguments, with my replies.

The question of whether one should be able to euthanize newborns who have horrible conditions or deformities, or are doomed to a life that cannot by any reasonable light afford happiness, has sparked heated debate.  Philosopher  Peter Singer has argued that euthanasia is the merciful action in such cases, and I agree with him. If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born?  I see no substantive difference that would make the former act moral and the latter immoral.

I agree with Coyne that there is no moral difference between aborting a handicapped fetus and killing a handicapped baby. I believe that both are profoundly immoral. Coyne condones such killing.

After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties).

Many people aren’t “aware of death” — normal infants and toddlers, people with severe traumatic brain damage, people with Alzheimer’s disease. Heck, people who are sleeping aren’t aware of death at the moment. How does that justify killing them? A severely handicapped newborn wouldn’t be aware of rape either.

Just how is it that “unawareness” of an evil act justifies the act? If anything, unawareness makes the victim more vulnerable, and ought to spur those of us who are aware to offer innocents greater protection, not less protection.

It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state. After all, doctors and parents face no legal penalty for simply withdrawing care from such newborns, like turning off a respirator, but Singer suggests that we should be allowed, with the parents’ and doctors’ consent, to painlessly end their life with an injection. I agree.

There are situations in which continuation of heroic medical treatment (surgery, respirators, antibiotics, etc.) merely prolongs the process of dying, and in which it is ethical to withdraw such heroic care. I have done it many times (I’m a pediatric neurosurgeon). But the purpose of the withdrawal is not to cause death, but to cease interfering with the natural course of a disease, when no good can come of heroic treatment. That is a very different thing, morally and legally, from deliberately killing a child by injecting him with a lethal dose of potassium or a barbiturate.

The Doctors Trial

Coyne goes on to recount the uproar over Singer’s endorsement of the Groningen protocol, which is a legal innovation employed in Holland for killing handicapped infants.

For these views Singer has been demonized by disability rights advocates, who have called for his firing and disrupted his talks (see my post about that here). All for just raising a reasonable ethical question that should be considered and discussed!

Most of the “disability rights advocates” who have protested Singer’s endorsement of killing handicapped infants are handicapped adults who, as infants, were the very people Singer proposes killing. Disrupting a talk is rude, but if there’s ever a justification for it, it would seem that disrupting the talk of a highly regarded philosopher who advocates killing you as a baby might count as justified.

One imagines that Coyne and Singer would not sit with equanimity through a lecture in which the speaker advocated killing atheist biologists and philosophers in the crib.

After all, fifty years ago the same kind of opprobrium would have been leveled at those calling for voluntary euthanasia (assisted suicide) of terminally ill adults, but now that’s legal in several places in the world; as Wikipedia notes, “As of June 2016, human euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Colombia, and Luxembourg. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Canada, and in the US states of Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, Montana, Washington DC, and California.”

It’s true that many of the euthanasia policies that are becoming more accepted today were verboten fifty years ago. I use “verboten” deliberately, as one prominent example of disapproval of euthanasia in that era was the decision by the judges in the Nazi Doctors Trial in 1946. Sixteen doctors were convicted of crimes against humanity, and seven were hanged. Some of those convictions were for euthanizing handicapped children.

Note to Dr. Coyne: When your rationalizations for killing handicapped children were used by defense counsel in the Nazi Doctors Trial, it’s time to rethink your ethics.

This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide are [sic] the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world…

What? Reintroducing medical practices for which Nazi doctors were hanged is “a tide of increasing morality in our world”? Goodness gracious.

It’s time to add to the discussion the euthanasia of newborns, who have no ability or faculties to decide whether to end their lives. Although discussing the topic seems verboten now, I believe some day the practice will be widespread, and it will be for the better.

I too suspect that killing handicapped people will become more widespread. This will not be “for the better.”

 After all, we euthanize our dogs and cats when to prolong their lives would be torture, so why not extend that to humans? Dogs and cats, like newborns, can’t make such a decision, and so their caregivers take the responsibility. (I have done this myself to a pet, as have many of you, and firmly believe it’s the right thing to do. Our pain at making such a decision is lessened knowing that dogs and cats, like newborns, don’t know about death and thus don’t fear it.)

We do all sorts of things to pets — we euthanize them, we cage them, we buy and sell them, we neuter and spay them, we breed them. If Coyne’s analogy to animals allows killing of handicapped children just like we kill sick pets, why wouldn’t the analogy justify caging, buying and selling, neutering and breeding children as well?

The reason we don’t allow euthanasia of newborns is because humans are seen as special, and I think this comes from religion — in particular, the view that humans, unlike animals, are endowed with a soul.

Both humans and animals have souls. Humans have spiritual souls, created in God’s image, which distinguishes them from animals. Coyne dismisses theology and philosophy, of which he is ignorant.

It’s the same mindset that, in many places, won’t allow abortion of fetuses that have severe deformities. When religion vanishes, as it will, so will much of the opposition to both adult and newborn euthanasia.

The world is replete with dead ideologies that died waiting for religion to “vanish.”

Just the Beginning

Certainly, Christian morality is on the wane in the West (it is surging in Africa and Asia). The waning of Christian morality, and Christian respect for life in its sanctity, will have horrendous consequences, of which killing handicapped children is just the beginning.

My view, then, aligns with Singer’s: a child falling in any of the classes above should be considered as a subject for euthanasia, and it should be legal if the doctors and parents concur. As for the “slippery slope” argument — that this will lead to Nazi-like eugenics — well, this hasn’t come to pass in places where assisted suicide or euthanasia of adults is legal. Since the newborn can’t decide, it’s up to the parents, with advice (and maybe consent) of the doctors.

Killing handicapped children because their lives are unworthy of life  won’t lead to Nazi medical practice. It is Nazi medical practice.

The pain of these newborns, and of making these decisions, is evident in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times’ “The Stone” section (a philosophy column), provocatively called “You should not have let your baby die.” (What the author means is that “you should have killed your baby.”) It describes the situation of parents whose baby was born with “trisomy 18”: three rather than the normal two copies of chromosome 18. Trisomy 21, three copies of the smaller 21st chromosome, is what produces Down Syndrome. But unlike the Down case, trisomy 18, involving imbalance of a larger chromosome, produces a severe condition, with most children dying horrible deaths soon after birth. A few, though, can live into their 20s and 30s.

Therein lies the dilemma. Should you take that chance? The child described by author Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State University, was in dire shape, forced to breathe on a respirator and unable to survive without one. The odds that that child could live in a decent state were nil. After agonizing over what to do, the parents decided to take the legal course of withdrawing care: removing the respirator. The child slowly suffocates.

The notion that handicapped children intractably suffer is a lie. I’ve treated thousands of these kids. Most of the conditions that cause severe neurological impairment aren’t painful and don’t inherently cause physical suffering. Spina bifida, holoprosencephaly, various trisomies and anencephaly don’t “hurt,” and in fact the children afflicted are often quite content babies. They are loved by their families, and they can enjoy life in accordance with their physical limitations.

Most people with spina bifida go to school, get a job, and many get married and have families. More severely disabled children (such as those with anencephaly) can live for several years, and can be quite happy. Anencephaly does not mean “brain death” — these kids have profound developmental limitations, but they clearly can feel things and experience emotions.

I cared for a little girl with anencephaly for several years. Her mother brought her to my office for regular check-ups. The child was content, loved to be held and fed by her mother (who always dressed her beautifully), and her mother loved her dearly. She died at 4 years of age from an infection, but she didn’t suffer particularly. If anything, her life seemed happier than most, from her perspective.

Encroaching Materialism and Darwinism

Some people with severe handicaps at birth can achieve quite a bit in life. My friend Karin Muraszko was born with spina bifida and needed extensive surgery and a brain shunt as a child. I met her when I was a medical student. She wasn’t a patient — she was a resident in neurosurgery, and I followed her on rounds and learned from her. She is now Professor and Chairman of Neurological Surgery at the University of Michigan, and she has professorships in pediatrics, communicable diseases, and plastic surgery. She has served on the American Board of Neurological Surgery, and is one of the most respected clinicians and researchers in my field.

She is married and has two kids, and she is director of the Shunt Project, which is an organization devoted to providing medical care for children (like her) with severe neurological handicaps in poor countries.

To propose, as Dr. Coyne does, that she should have been killed at birth because of her “suffering” is a particularly odious example of the encroachment of materialist and Darwinist philosophy on our culture. It should be resisted, with every bit of our strength.