Plants v. Darwin (again).

Three Ways that Plants Defy Darwin’s Mechanism
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Plants have no brains and limited mobility, yet they have mechanisms to thrive in place. One mechanism involves the prevention of inbreeding. The trick defies Darwin’s theory. Darwin had already called the origin of flowering plants (angiosperms) an “abominable mystery.” If he had known what Austrian scientists found, it likely would have brought on more of his notorious stomach aches.

 News from Austria’s Institute of Science and Technology (IST) explains how flowering plants prevent inbreeding. As we know, inbreeding limits diversification and leads to genetic decay. When you think about it, a flower produces its own gametes: male pollen and female ova. Self-fertilization, though, would create all the associated problems of inbreeding for a plant species. People know better than to marry their relatives, but how can a blind flower, with no brain or eyes, recognize “self” so as to prevent fertilizing itself? It’s a trick that both gametes have to cooperate on. A mutation in the pollen that enables it to recognize self won’t help if the ovum doesn’t get a corresponding mutation. The Austrian IST researchers were curious about this and decided to take a look.

  

Plants “Evolved” a Solution?

In “Recognizing others but not yourself: new insights into the evolution of plant mating,” they assume that plants “evolved” a solution. But is evolution really the answer?

Self-fertilization is a problem, as it leads to inbreeding. Recognition systems that prevent self-fertilization have evolved to ensure that a plant mates only with a genetically different plant and not with itself. The recognition systems underlying self-incompatibility are found all around us in nature, and can be found in at least 100 plant families and 40% of species. Until now, however, researchers have not known how the astonishing diversity in these systems evolves. A team of researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) has made steps towards deciphering how new mating types evolve in non-self recognition self-incompatibility systems, leading to the incredible genetic diversity seen in nature. The results are published in this month’s edition of Genetics.

The paper in Genetics, “Evolutionary Pathways for the Generation of New Self-Incompatibility Haplotypes in a Nonself-Recognition System,” is pretty abstruse and burdened with technical jargon. The problem, though, is easy to understand:

Self-incompatibility (SI) is a genetically based recognition system that functions to prevent self-fertilization and mating among related plants. An enduring puzzle in SI is how the high diversity observed in nature arises and is maintained.

Some plants use “self-recognition” (SR) systems; others use “nonself-recognition” systems (NSR). Here’s a garden example of an SR system:

In plants such as snapdragons and Petunia, when the pollen lands on the stigma, it germinates and starts growing. The stigma, however, contains a toxin (an SRNase) that stops pollen growth. Pollen in turn has a team of genes (F-box genes) that produce antidotes to all toxins except for the toxin produced by the “self” stigma. Therefore, pollen can fertlize [sic] when it lands on stigma that does not belong to the same plant, but not when it lands on the plant’s own stigma. It may seem like a harsh system, but plants can use this toxin-antidote system to ensure that they only mate with a genetically different plant. This is important as self-fertilization leads to inbreeding, which is detrimental for the offspring.

Lock and Key

Do you see a problem for neo-Darwinism? The stigma basically has a lock that the “self” pollen cannot unlock. The pollen, though, has a key that only works on other flowers’ locks. How could such lock-and-key systems arise in a single plant that will work on unrelated plants? They not only have to evolve the toxin and the antidote, but ensure that the key doesn’t work locally — only with unrelated plants. And that’s not the only conundrum. NSR systems use a different trick. The authors puzzle over how this one evolved:

In non-self recognition systems, the male (pollen) and female (stigma) genes work together as a team to determine recognition, so that a particular variation of the male- and female-genes forms a mating type. Non-self recognition systems are found all around us in nature and have an astonishing diversity of mating types, so the big question in their evolution is: how do you evolve a new mating type when doing so requires a mutation in both sides? For example, when there is a change in the female side (stigma), it produces a new toxin for which no other pollen has an antidote – so mating can’t occur. Does this means [sic] that there needs to be a change in the male side (pollen) first, so that the antidote appears and then waits for a corresponding change in the stigma (female side)? But how does this co-evolution work when evolution is a random process? Is there a particular order of mutations that is more likely to create a new mating type?

A Committee to the Rescue

To solve this Darwinian puzzle, they created an interdisciplinary group of specialists in evolutionary genetics, game theory and applied mathematics — a committee. “This project shows how collaboration between scientists with very different backgrounds can combine biological insight with mathematical analysis, to shed some light on a fascinating evolutionary puzzle,” one of them said hopefully. With enough free parameters in your model, you can always come up with possibilities. Let’s think through their proposed solution:

Through theoretical analysis and simulation, the researchers investigated how new mating types can evolve in a non-self recognition system. They found that there are different pathways by which new types can evolve. In some cases this happens through an intermediate stage of being able to self-fertilize; but in other cases it happens by staying self-incompatible. They also found that new mating types only evolved when the cost of self-fertilization (through inbreeding) was high. Being incomplete – i.e., having missing F-box genes that produce antidotes to female toxins — was found to be important for the evolution of new mating types: complete mating types (with a full set of F-Box genes) stayed around for the longest time, as they have the highest number of mating partners. New mating types evolved more readily when there was [sic] less mating types in the population. Also, the demographics in a population affect the evolution of non-self recognition systems: population size and mutation rates all influence how this system evolves.

The analytical model worked in the committee, but does it work in the real world? In a model, you can assume that beneficial mutations will arise on cue. Nature, however, doesn’t work that way. Their model didn’t compare very well with real flowers:

So although it seems like having a full team of F-box pollen genes (and therefore antidotes) is the best way for new mating types to evolve, this system is complex and can change via a number of different pathways. Interestingly, while the researchers found that new mating types could evolve, the diversity of genes in their theoretical simulations were fewer compared to what is seen in nature. For Melinda Pickup, this observation is intriguing: “We have provided some understanding of the system, but there are still many more questions and the mystery of the high diversity in nature still exists.”

It was a fun exercise, in other words, but:

Back to the Drawing Board 

A similar difficult arises when asking how plants learned to cooperate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. In Science, László G. Nagy puzzles about why the nitrogen-fixing root nodule (NFN) “arose repeatedly during plant evolution” — an “age-old mystery.” This symbiotic relationship, so important to human agriculture, is only found in four unrelated plant groups. Nagy calls on “convergent evolution” to explain this “patchy” appearance that doesn’t follow Darwin’s branching tree pattern, offering promissory notes that someday evolutionists will figure it out.

Teasing apart the possible mechanisms behind convergently evolved traits remains a substantial challenge even in the era of genomics. It nevertheless appears that case studies and models are emerging to explain the pervasive occurrence of convergence across the tree of life.

Beating the Heat

Plants are cleverer than Darwinians. With summer upon us, RIKEN scientists investigated “how plants beat the heat.” The solution involves more than what the mutation/selection mechanism can handle:

We all know how uncomfortable it is to be stuck outside on a sweltering hot day. Now, imagine how bad it would be if you were a soybean or tomato plant without any chance of moving inside. Eventually your leaves might become bleached of color due to chloroplast membrane damage, and if you did not get any relief, you might die. Fortunately for plants, they do have a natural defense against this type of stress that involves modifying plant fats that make up chloroplast membranes. When heat causes chloroplast membranes to destabilize, polyunsaturated fatty acids are removed from the membrane lipids, which stabilizes the membranes. The team at RIKEN found the gene responsible for this process, and they did so rather quickly because of their innovative approach.

Sure, they found a candidate gene and ran controlled experiments to see whether it could help a lab plant last longer in heat — and it did. They did not speculate about how it might have evolved, at least in the news item.

A “Fundamental Failing”

But if evolutionists think neo-Darwinism could account for this beneficial trait, they need to remember what Douglas Axe says in his chapter in the new volume, Theistic Evolution. Axe again points out the “fundamental failing” with natural selection (as he did in his earlier book, Undeniable). It’s this: evolution is “clueless” about inventing things. Natural selection “shows up only after the hard work of invention has been done.”

The only inventions we know about by experience come from inventors. An invention is a “functional whole,” Axe says. The “hard work” of invention requires having a goal or plan, and then organizing components at multiple hierarchical levels to work together to fulfill that plan.

Self-recognition systems, mutual symbioses and heat stress prevention are amazing inventions. Why must we endure stories of how they “might have” evolved, when Darwinian mechanisms are already disqualified? Axe says that “the outcome of accidental causes is guaranteed to be a mess,” and so attributing the origin of functional wholes to accident is “completely out of the question.” Science should go with the cause we know is necessary and sufficient to account for inventions: intelligence.

Jehovah's folly defeats man's genius again.

Giraffe Weekend: The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Continuing our classic ID the Future series on the long-necked giraffe, that evolutionary icon, we confront a sort of sub-icon, a commonly cited support to arguments for dysteleology, or “poor design.” It’s the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

As Wikipedia explains:

The extreme detour of the recurrent laryngeal nerves, about 4.6 metres (15 ft) in the case of giraffes,[26]:74–75 is cited as evidence of evolution, as opposed to Intelligent Design. The nerve’s route would have been direct in the fish-like ancestors of modern tetrapods, traveling from the brain, past the heart, to the gills (as it does in modern fish). Over the course of evolution, as the neck extended and the heart became lower in the body, the laryngeal nerve was caught on the wrong side of the heart. Natural selection gradually lengthened the nerve by tiny increments to accommodate, resulting in the circuitous route now observed.[27]:360–362

Darwinists including Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have called it one of “nature’s worst designs,” “obviously a ridiculous detour,” asserting that “no engineer would ever make a mistake like that.” Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig returns for a discussion on this point, emphasizing that it’s not a “ridiculous detour” or a “mistake” at all

 Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Occam's razor v. Darwin.

New Paper by Winston Ewert Demonstrates Superiority of Design Model
Cornelius Hunter

Did you know Mars is going backwards? For the past few weeks, and for several weeks to come, Mars is in its retrograde motion phase. If you chart its position each night against the background stars, you will see it pause, reverse direction, pause again, and then get going again in its normal direction.

And did you further know that retrograde motion helped to cause a revolution? Two millennia ago, Aristotelian physics dictated that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Aristarchus’ heliocentric model, which put the Sun at the center, fell out of favor. But what Aristotle’s geocentrism failed to explain was retrograde motion. If the planets are revolving about the Earth, then why do they sometimes pause, and reverse direction? That problem fell to Ptolemy, and the lessons learned are still important today.

Ptolemy explained anomalies such as retrograde motion with additional mechanisms, such as epicycles, while maintaining the circular motion that, as everyone knew, must be the basis of all motion in the cosmos. With less than a hundred epicycles, he was able to model, and predict accurately the motions of the cosmos. But that accuracy came at a cost — a highly complicated model.

A Better Model

In the Middle Ages, William of Occam pointed out that scientific theories ought to strive for simplicity, or parsimony. This may have been one of the factors that drove Copernicus to resurrect Aristarchus’ heliocentric model. Copernicus preserved the required circular motion, but by switching to a sun-centered model, he was able to reduce greatly the number of additional mechanisms, such as epicycles.

Both Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’ models accurately forecast celestial motion. But Copernicus was more parsimonious. A better model had been found.

Kepler proposed ellipses, and showed that the heliocentric model could become even simpler. It was not well accepted, though, because as everyone knew, celestial bodies travel in circles. How foolish to think they would travel along elliptical paths. That next step toward greater parsimony would have to wait for the likes of Newton, who showed that Kepler’s ellipses were dictated by his new, highly parsimonious, physics. Newton described a simple, universal, gravitational law. Newton’s gravitational force would produce an acceleration, which could maintain orbital motion in the cosmos.

But was there really a gravitational force? It was proportional to the mass of the object which was then cancelled out to compute the acceleration. Why not have gravity cause an acceleration straightaway?

Centuries later Einstein reported on a man in Berlin who fell out of a window. The man didn’t feel anything until he hit the ground! Einstein removed the gravitational force and made the physics even simpler yet.

Accuracy and Parsimony

The point here is that the accuracy of a scientific theory, by itself, means very little. It must be considered along with parsimony. This lesson is important today in this age of Big Data. Analysts know that a model can always be made more accurate by adding more terms. But are those additional terms meaningful, or are they merely epicycles? It looks good to drive the modeling error down to zero by adding terms, but when used to make future forecasts, such models perform worse.

There is a very real penalty for adding terms and violating Occam’s Razor, and today advanced algorithms are available for weighing the tradeoff between model accuracy and model parsimony.

This brings us to common descent, a popular theory for modeling relationships among the species. As we have discussed many times, common descent fails to model the species, and a great many additional mechanisms — biological epicycles — are required to fit the data.And just as cosmology has seen a stream of ever improving models, the biological models can also improve. This week a very important model has been proposed in a new paper, noted already by Brian Miller. It is authored by Winston Ewert, in the journal BIO-Complexity.

Three Types of Data

Inspired by computer software, Ewert’s approach models the species as sharing modules which are related by a dependency graph. This useful model in computer science also works well in modeling the species. To evaluate this hypothesis, Ewert uses three types of data, and evaluates how probable they are (accounting for parsimony as well as fit accuracy) using three models.

Ewert’s three types of data are: (i) sample computer software, (ii) simulated species data generated from evolutionary/common descent computer algorithms, and (iii) actual, real species data.

Ewert’s three models are: (i) a null model which entails no relationships between

any species, (ii) an evolutionary/common descent model, and (iii) a dependency graph model.

Ewert’s results are a Copernican Revolution moment. First, for the sample computer software data, not surprisingly the null model performed poorly. Computer software is highly organized, and there are relationships between different computer programs, and how they draw from foundational software libraries. But comparing the common descent and dependency graph models, the latter performs far better at modeling the software “species.” In other words, the design and development of computer software is far better described and modeled by a dependency graph than by a common descent tree.

Second, for the simulated species data generated with a common descent algorithm, it is not surprising that the common descent model was far superior to the dependency graph. That would be true by definition, and serves to validate Ewert’s approach. Common descent is the best model for the data generated by a common descent process.

Third, for the actual, real species data, the dependency graph model is astronomically superior compared to the common descent model.

Where It Counts

Let me repeat that in case the point did not sink in. Where it counted, common descent failed compared to the dependency graph model. The other data types served as useful checks, but for the data that mattered — the actual, real, biological species data — the results were unambiguous.

Ewert amassed a total of nine massive genetic databases. In every single one, without exception, the dependency graph model surpassed common descent.

Darwin could never have even dreamt of a test on such a massive scale. Darwin also could never have dreamt of the sheer magnitude of the failure of his theory. Because you see, Ewert’s results do not reveal two competitive models with one model edging out the other.

We are not talking about a few decimal points difference. For one of the data sets (HomoloGene), the dependency graph model was superior to common descent by a factor of 10,064. The comparison of the two models yielded a preference for the dependency graph model of greater than ten thousand.

Ten thousand is a big number. But it gets worse, much worse.

Ewert used Bayesian model selection which compares the probability of the data set given the hypothetical models. In other words, given the model (dependency graph or common descent), what is the probability of this particular data set? Bayesian model selection compares the two models by dividing these two conditional probabilities. The so-called Bayes factor is the quotient yielded by this division.

The problem is that the common descent model is so incredibly inferior to the dependency graph model that the Bayes factor cannot be typed out. In other words, the probability of the data set, given the dependency graph model, is so much greater than the probability of the data set given the common descent model, that we cannot type the quotient of their division.

Instead, Ewert reports the logarithm of the number. Remember logarithms? Remember how 2 really means 100, 3 means 1,000, and so forth?

Unbelievably, the 10,064 value is the logarithm (base value of 2) of the quotient! In other words, the probability of the data on the dependency graph model is so much greater than that given the common descent model, we need logarithms even to type it out. If you tried to type out the plain number, you would have to type a 1 followed by more than 3,000 zeros. That’s the ratio of how probable the data are on these two models!

By using a base value of 2 in the logarithm we express the Bayes factor in bits. So the conditional probability for the dependency graph model has a 10,064 advantage over that of common descent.

10,064 bits is far, far from the range in which one might actually consider the lesser model. See, for example, the Bayes factor  Wikipedia page,  which explains that a Bayes factor of 3.3 bits provides “substantial” evidence for a model, 5.0 bits provides “strong” evidence, and 6.6 bits provides “decisive” evidence.

This is ridiculous. 6.6 bits is considered to provide “decisive” evidence, and when the dependency graph model case is compared to comment descent case, we get 10,064 bits.

But It Gets Worse

The problem with all of this is that the Bayes factor of 10,064 bits for the HomoloGene data set is the very best case for common descent. For the other eight data sets, the Bayes factors range from 40,967 to 515,450.

In other words, while 6.6 bits would be considered to provide “decisive” evidence for the dependency graph model, the actual, real, biological data provide Bayes factors of 10,064 on up to 515,450.

We have known for a long time that common descent has failed hard. In Ewert’s new paper, we now have detailed, quantitative results demonstrating this. And Ewert provides a new model, with a far superior fit to the data.

It is except when it isn't?

A Tendentious Appeal for Methodological Naturalism
Paul Nelson

From “The naturalism of the sciences,” by Gregory W. Dawes and Tiddy Smith, writing in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A:

The sciences are characterized by what is sometimes called a “methodological naturalism,” which disregards talk of divine agency. In response to those who argue that this reflects a dogmatic materialism, a number of philosophers have offered a pragmatic defense. The naturalism of the sciences, they argue, is provisional and defeasible: it is justified by the fact that unsuccessful theistic explanations have been superseded by successful natural ones. But this defense is inconsistent with the history of the sciences. The sciences have always exhibited what we call a domain naturalism. They have never invoked divine agency, but have always focused on the causal structure of the natural world. It is not the case, therefore, that the sciences once employed theistic explanations and then abandoned them. The naturalism of the sciences is as old as science itself.

From a quick scan, this is an interesting article — but their historiography looks more than a tad tendentious. Dawes and Smith say they’re simply describing (as a “matter of fact”) the history of science. But they’ve also carefully built escape or exception clauses into their history, so that any counterexample does not count against their thesis. As they write on page 28, opening the gate so that the exceptions can wander away, leaving only the obedient sheep in the pen:

 The naturalism of the sciences is a norm of scientific inquiry and norms represent both how a community regularly behaves and how its members think one ought to behave (Pettit, 1990, p. 728). So the existence of a norm is consistent with its occasional violation. 

Well — how convenient, as the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live used to say.


I grabbed a 19th-century science textbook from my office shelves: James Dana’s Manual of Geology (1871). Dana was professor of geology at Yale and by any dispassionate description fully a “scientist.” Here is how Dana ends his discussion of the topic “The Progress of Life” (paleontological trends — a summary of the signal from the fossil record):

Geology appears to bring us directly before the Creator; and while opening to us the methods through which the forces of nature have accomplished His purpose, — while proving that there has been a plan glorious in its scheme and perfect in its system, progressing through unmeasured ages and looking ever towards Man and a spiritual end, — it leads to no other solution of the great problem of creation, whether of kinds of matter or of species of life, than this: — DEUS FECIT.  (p. 602)

Deus fecit — Latin for “God created.”

This was a widely used geology textbook: “science” by any description. But this counterexample (one of hundreds possible) won’t count, because it’s “an occasional violation” of an otherwise universal norm.  Universal generalizations sleep undisturbed when the contrary evidence isn’t allowed anywhere near the doorbell.

Moreover, the relentless late 19th-century campaign by T.H. Huxley and others against scientific explanation by divine action and for fully naturalistic or materialistic explanation should not have been necessary, if Dawes and Smith are correct in their history.

But — check the article, it’s open access — Dawes and Smith tip their hand in their concluding paragraph. Any flexing of the methodological naturalism (MN) rule will fracture science along religious lines, they say, and that’s bad. So the provisional atheism of science should continue, because that’s what science since the Greeks has always done…


…Except when it hasn’t — but we’re not counting the many exceptions.

A bit of stretch?

Giraffe Weekend: “You Cannot Simply Stretch out the Neck”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

For your weekend enjoyment, we’re delighted to offer the classic three-part ID the Future series on the evolutionary enigma of the long-necked giraffe. It’s an interview with geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig on the occasion of the publication of his book  The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe.

As Dr. Lönnig concludes:

You cannot, as was suggested by Richard Dawkins, simply stretch out the neck during an embryonic deviation, and then have a long-necked giraffe. You have a system of co-adaptive, coordinated parts which all must work together to allow a giraffe to survive and live in the wild. And the question is, of course, can mutations produce over millions of years these differences between a short-necked and a long-necked giraffe?

Spoiler alert: The answer is no. The giraffe is one of those all-star icons of evolution, familiar from textbook covers, that falls apart on closer inspection. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Big data friend or foe?:Pros and cons.

From doubt to dilemma re:the Cambrian explosion.

Newly Identified Banded Iron Formation Puts Origins Theories on Horns of a Dilemma
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

If you follow the attempts to stave off the design implications of what Stephen Meyer calls Darwin’s Doubt, you’re likely to be familiar with the oxygen theory of the Cambrian explosion. See here, here, and here for discussion of this and other competing proposals. The idea is that the explosion of new animal forms in the enigmatic Cambrian event could not have taken place earlier because the Earth’s oxygen levels were too low to allow it.

When the oxygen rose, this permitted animal life, thus authoring the biological information needed to fuel the design of trilobites and all the remarkable menagerie of new animal life from minimal (or seemingly non-existent) ancestral forms.

The Obvious Rebuttal

Even to state the idea clearly is to understand how ridiculous it is. The obvious rebuttal is that oxygen doesn’t design body plans. But a new study undercuts the oxygen theory at another level, and with a twist.

From a report at Science Daily, “Scientists discover Earth’s youngest banded iron formation in western China”:

The banded iron formation, located in western China, has been conclusively dated as Cambrian in age. Approximately 527 million years old, this formation is young by comparison to the majority of discoveries to date. The deposition of banded iron formations, which began approximately 3.8 billion years ago, had long been thought to terminate before the beginning of the Cambrian Period at 540 million years ago….

The Early Cambrian is known for the rise of animals, so the level of oxygen in seawater should have been closer to near modern levels. “This is important as the availability of oxygen has long been thought to be a handbrake on the evolution of complex life, and one that should have been alleviated by the Early Cambrian,” says Leslie Robbins, a [University of Alberta] PhD candidate in [Kurt] Konhauser’s lab and a co-author on the paper.

Remove the “handbrake” and we’re all set for the debut of animals. Their paper is published in Scientific Reports. What’s it all about? 

Banded iron formations (BIFs) are much more common prior to about 2 billion years ago. The standard theory — that these “distinctive units of sedimentary rock…are almost always of Precambrian age,” according to Wikipeida 

 says that the Earth’s early oceans were rich in iron, and BIFs are supposed to indicate that the atmosphere had low oxygen content. That’s because they show oxygen was reacting with iron and precipitating out in ocean sediments instead of building up in the atmosphere. So this find of a Cambrian-, not Precambrian-aged BIF in China is very significant for at least two reasons. Together they land proponents of the oxygen theory, and advocates of materialist theories of the origin of life, on the horns of a painful dilemma.

So Much for the Oxygen Theory

As noted, many claim the Cambrian explosion was triggered by a sudden global increase in oxygen levels. We’ve discussed this many times, observing over and over that oxygen doesn’t generate new genetic information. But such information had to be the proximal cause of the Cambrian explosion. If we take the standard theory about BIFs seriously, then this new evidence ought to indicate that oxygen was LOW in the Cambrian, not high. This Chinese BIF contradicts all claims that there was high atmospheric oxygen in the Cambrian. So much for the oxygen theory.

On the Other Hand

Alternatively, however, maybe oxygen was HIGH in the Cambrian in which case BIFs don’t necessarily indicate low oxygen in the atmosphere. But if that is the case, origin-of-life theorists lose one of their favorite arguments that the Earth’s early atmosphere lacked oxygen in the Archean Eon. 

A lack of oxygen in the Archaean atmosphere is important to generating prebiotic organics on the early Earth. If oxygen was present, then there is no viable mechanism for prebiotic synthesis. One of the main arguments for a lack of oxygen in the Earth’s early atmosphere is the presence of BIFs in the geological record of the Archean Eon and the Paleoproterozoic Era, or prior to about 2 billion years ago. But if BIFs can coexist with a high oxygen atmosphere, that argument falls to pieces.

Take your pick. A paradigm open to intelligent design can accommodate either option. For materialists, though, it’s a “Heads you win, tails I lose” situation.

Irreconcilable differences? II

OOL Science v. The real world

A rare victory for religious liberty.

Righting a Wrong for Conscientious Objectors: Long-Awaited Ruling by South Korea Constitutional Court

For some 65 years, young Christian men in South Korea have faced the certain prospect of imprisonment for their conscientious objection to military service. On Thursday, June 28, 2018, a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court changed that prospect by declaring Article 5, paragraph 1, of the Military Service Act unconstitutional because the government makes no provision for alternative service.The nine-judge panel, headed by Chief Justice Lee Jin-sung, announced the 6-3 decision, which moves the country more in line with international norms and recognizes freedoms of conscience, thought, and belief.

South Korea has annually imprisoned more conscientious objectors than all other countries combined. At one point, an average of 500 to 600 of our brothers went to prison every year. Upon their release, all conscientious objectors carried with them a lifelong stigma due to their criminal record, which among other challenges limited their employment opportunities.

Starting in 2011, however, some brothers filed complaints with the Constitutional Court because the law provided no option other than imprisonment for their stand of conscience. Likewise, since 2012, even some judges who were troubled by the practice of punishing sincere objectors decided to refer their cases to the Constitutional Court for review of the Military Service Act.The role of the Constitutional Court is to determine if a law harmonizes with Korea’s Constitution or not. After having twice ruled (in 2004 and 2011) to uphold the Military Service Act, the Constitutional Court has finally agreed that change is needed. The Court ordered the government of South Korea to rewrite the law to include an alternative service option by the end of 2019. Alternative types of service that they may implement could include hospital work and other non-military social services that contribute to the betterment of the community.

Putting the decision in perspective, Brother Hong Dae-il, a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Korea, states: “The Constitutional Court, which is the ultimate stronghold for protecting human rights, has provided a foundation for resolving this issue. Our brothers look forward to serving their community by means of alternative civilian service that does not conflict with their conscience and is in line with international standards.”

Other important issues await settlement, including the status of the 192 Witness objectors currently imprisoned and some 900 criminal cases pending in various levels of the courts.

The historic decision of the Constitutional Court provides a firmer basis for the Supreme Court to rule favorably in cases of individual objectors. A full bench ruling of the Supreme Court will influence how these individual criminal cases should be handled.

The Supreme Court is expected to hold a public hearing on August 30, 2018, and will issue a ruling some time thereafter. It will be the first time in 14 years that the Supreme Court’s full bench will review the issue of conscientious objection.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly, Korea’s legislature, is already working on revisions to the Military Service Act.

Brother Mark Sanderson of the Governing Body states: “We keenly anticipate the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing. Our Korean brothers willingly sacrificed their freedom, knowing that ‘it is agreeable when someone endures hardship and suffers unjustly because of conscience toward God.’ (1 Peter 2:19) We rejoice with them that the injustice they endured has finally been recognized, along with their courageous stand of conscience.”

Jehovah's swag appears to be a problem for purveyors of scientism

Psychologists Say "Awe" in the Face of Nature Is a Problem for Science
David Klinghoffer

This almost seems like a parody, but it's not. Researchers at Claremont McKenna, Yale, and Berkeley sound an alarm about the peril in experiencing awe when we're confronted with nature and its wonders. They warn in particular that this should be "disconcerting to those interested in promoting an accurate understanding of evolution."

 Abstract from the journal Emotion, where the research appears, summarizes:

Past research has established a relationship between awe and explanatory frameworks, such as religion. We extend this work, showing (a) the effects of awe on a separate source of explanation: attitudes toward science, and (b) how the effects of awe on attitudes toward scientific explanations depend on individual differences in theism. Across 3 studies, we find consistent support that awe decreases the perceived explanatory power of science for the theistic (Study 1 and 2) and mixed support that awe affects attitudes toward scientific explanations for the nontheistic (Study 3).

You mean all those splendid David Attenborough nature documentaries actually undermine a Darwinian view rather than, as intended, reinforcing it?

Dr. Douglas Axe, protein scientist and author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, hits the nail on the head over at The Stream:

All those jaw-dropping nature documentaries have been messing with our minds.

Most wildlife shows are packaged with the usual Darwinian narrative, spoken in an authoritative tone that isn't supposed to be questioned. But it seems that wildlife itself, in stunning visual display, is conveying a different message -- more powerfully, in fact.

Everyone is awed by life, and experiences that accentuate this awe seem to affect us, whether or not we believe in God. The new study suggests that these experiences affirm a sense of faith in theists and a sense of purpose-like natural order in atheists and agnostics, both of which cause problems for instructors wanting to churn out good Darwinists.

An Awful Blind Spot

Maybe "good" isn't the right word there. I mean, if something as obviously good for science as awe works against a "scientific" idea, wouldn't that suggest this idea isn't really so good or scientific in first place? How good can a way of viewing life be if excitement about life undermines it?

Common sense provides the clearest take-home message here. Since awe and wonder have always drawn people to scientific exploration, any form of teaching that calls for policing those emotions can't possibly be in the best interest of science.

As clear as that seems, the people who did the study don't see it that way. This is a perfect case of academic researchers being so constrained by their materialistic worldview -- so convinced that the physical world is all there is -- that they can't see the implications of their own work clearly.

Read the rest.

If we could take a pill that dulled the sense of wonder, would these psychology professors recommend it? If awe is a problem that stands in the way of science -- meaning atheism -- it's hard to see why not. Perhaps, to put an end to that deplorable intelligent design nonsense once and for all, let's prescribe it for kids along with their Ritalin.

In case you missed it:Evolution is a fact.

Here, Evidently, Is How They Teach Evolution at Louisiana State University
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

If you want a taste of how and by whom evolutionary biology is being taught to college students, check this out. Prosanta Chakrabarty is an ichthyologist at Louisiana State University, and says of himself that he teaches “one of the largest evolutionary biology classes in the U.S.” Good for him, and I don’t doubt that’s true.

But this has got to be one of the dopiest, most simple-minded presentations of the subject that I’ve seen. 

“It’s a Fact”

Professor Chakrabarty informs us:

[W]e’re taught to say “the theory of evolution.” There are actually many theories, and just like the process itself, the ones that best fit the data are the ones that survive to this day. The one we know best is Darwinian natural selection. That’s the process by which organisms that best fit an environment survive and get to reproduce, while those that are less fit slowly die off. And that’s it. Evolution is as simple as that, and it’s a fact. Evolution is a fact as much as the “theory of gravity.” You can prove it just as easily. You just need to look at your belly button that you share with other placental mammals, or your backbone that you share with other vertebrates, or your DNA that you share with all other life on earth. Those traits didn’t pop up in humans. They were passed down from different ancestors to all their descendants, not just us.

The sufficiency of Darwin’s theory of natural selection for explaining the history of life is “as simple as” the observation that animals that can’t survive in their environment, don’t survive. “It’s a fact” because you have a belly button, in common with other placental mammals. 

By the same token, my car has four wheels, two axles, and runs on gasoline, like other gas-powered cars stretching back well over a century. Car models that no one wants to buy ultimately cease to be manufactured. It must be that the Ford Model T and the Volvo S70 and everything in between all “evolved” by unguided natural selection from a common ancestor. Remember, it’s a fact. Only the foolish religious fundamentalist would consider that engineering had anything to do with it.

A Long History

The comparison of evolution with gravity also has a long history, about as long as the history of automobiles. Maybe it evolved, too. See Granville Sewell, “Why Evolution is More Certain than Gravity.” Also, “I Believe in the Evolution of Life and the Evolution of Automobiles.”

Professor Chakrabarty speaks with what I take to be a weary, ill-concealed contempt for those don’t understand these matters. He teaches in the same state where the Louisiana Science Education Act was passed a little over ten years ago,and remains the law. If this is how evolution is taught to college students at LSU, imagine how it’s taught to many high school students.

Do you wonder, then, that educators, parents, and other residents of the state sought, under the LSEA, protection from retaliatory action for teachers who wish to add a bit of depth, some critical weighing of the evidence, to their instruction?

Darwinism and the search for the master race.

Evolutionary Psychology Grapples with Racism and Anti-Semitism
Richard Weikart

When I published my book From From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004), I had no idea that white nationalism and neo-Nazism would become more fashionable in the coming years. At that time white nationalism was a fringe movement that one heard very little about, and the term “alt-right” had not even been coined yet.

Some of my critics informed me that the historical links I drew between Darwinism and racism or Darwinism and Nazism were misguided, because most Darwinian biologists today are firmly anti-racist and anti-Nazi. I never quite understood why the views of current Darwinian biologists were relevant to my argument, however, because I was not arguing that Darwinism inevitably produces Nazism. I was making a more modest and less assailable historical point: Nazis embraced Darwinism and used it as a foundational principle of their worldview. (I proved this in even greater detail in Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress.)

Recycling Racial Ideas

However, ironically, the recent upsurge of white nationalism and the alt-right has actually made my historical case more plausible. Not only do many of the leading figures in this movement, such as Richard Spencer, embrace Darwinism with alacrity, but they recycle many of the racial ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I discuss in From Darwin to Hitler.

They argue that races are unequal, because they have evolved differently. Of course, conveniently they have discovered that their own ancestors — white Europeans — have evolved greater intellectual capacities than other races.

These racist ideas are still taboo in mainstream academe — as they should be. When the Nobel Prize-winning biologist James Watson suggested in 2007 that some racial groups, such as black Africans, had lower intelligence because of their evolutionary history, he faced outrage and sustained criticism.

Worrying Signs

However, some worrying signs are emerging that the taboo may be cracking. The journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, which has eminent evolutionary psychologists, such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker, on its editorial board, recently carried an article defending the anti-Semitic, racist views of Kevin MacDonald, a white supremacist and emeritus professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach.

MacDonald’s views are eerily similar to those of scientists I examine in my historical scholarship: racial groups are in a human struggle for existence, behavioral traits are biologically innate, and stereotypical Jewish traits are evolutionary strategies for beating other races in racial competition. MacDonald claims that anti-Semitism is a defensive strategy to help white Europeans and their descendants triumph over the Jews.

Darwin and many early Darwinists saw racism and human inequality as part and parcel of their theory. MacDonald is trying to resurrect this troubling legacy of Darwinian theory.