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How does one select the key issue in the design debate. I would say that it is the one most likely to force the opposition to play defense. From that standpoint OOL science, in my humble opinion, is hard to beat. Darwinism is the opposition's opening salvo against the notion of actual design being a necessary explanation for the technology evident in nature. The claim is that some combination of chance and necessity is a better explanation for this technology and thus any perception of intelligent design was illusory,a kind of pareidolia. Well if you say so mr. materialist, but in as much as science is about objectively testing truth claims how are we to test this particular claim. Well,if Darwinian evolution is the source of the (apparent) design in biology we should surely be able to observe some co-relation between the amount of Darwinian evolution and the amount of Design in the history of life. Hence the need for a simple beginning to life.
It simply will not do for there to exist any of the design that Darwinism is supposed to have successfully explained away prior to any Darwinian processes. So how's that search for a simple lifeform going?
In Francis Bacon’s day, it was easy to oversimplify nature. Elizabethan scientists began to conceive of a world that ran like a machine. Robert Boyle was a strong proponent of the mechanical philosophy. Soon, Isaac Newton’s clockwork heavens reinforced the notion that all the Creator had to do was wind it up, and let it run all by itself. From Boyle to Babbage, the Newtonian revolution showed the way for scientific progress: just uncover the natural laws that make the universe run.
By the late 18th century and into Victorian times, mechanical philosophy was sufficient unto itself. An original Designer could be conceived of, perhaps, but as science progressed, the Prime Mover had less and less to do. Some argued that it was an insult to the Watchmaker to suggest he needed to intervene and fix the watch.
Then molecular biology arrived, and we found out the clocks are real. Literal machines made of molecules make life run. Simultaneously, the computer age dawned and we learned a bit about programming. Now, robotics is here. We’re going to need a new philosophy: one that can handle realities the Elizabethans and Victorians could never have imagined.
It’s important to note that we’re not speaking of mechanistic or reductionist philosophy. See Jay Richards’s clarification. We seek an explanation for how natural machinery can operate without continuous intervention.
Paley’s “watch on a heath” was only an analogy in 1805. Now, we can see real biological clocks of amazing design and precision in the cells of life. Current Biology talks about “unexpected biochemical cogs” in a cyanobacterium, freely using the word “clock” as well as “oscillator,” “regulator,” and “switch.” The circadian clock runs on a much slower schedule than most cellular reactions. It’s calibrated to the 24-hour day-night cycle, and keeps constant time even when the temperature changes. It would have been astonishing to Paley or Bacon to learn that a three-protein oscillating machine is found in such a tiny organism. In higher vertebrates, biological clocks are even more elaborate.
Is this the little engine that could? Penn State News finds that “little engines” of kinesin (see our animation) can do more than thought on their microtubule tracks. These little walking robots, one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, not only walk the tracks but help them grow. When kinesin-5 pauses at the end of a microtubule, it “generates pushing forces, which slide the microtubules apart and essentially allow the motor to grow the microtubules.” [Emphasis added.]
The Salk Institute calls chloroplasts “solar panels” and reveals how the cell monitors them with a “quality control check” that can “recycle” the parts of damaged chloroplasts. Notice the mechanical word: they uncovered “how plants thrive using a natural mechanism to recycle chloroplasts.”
Another “fundamental biological mechanism” is described by bioscientists at the University of Heidelberg. In a common lab plant, they found that proteins are “further adapted” after they are manufactured “for their specific jobs.” In one case they studied, chemical tags regulate the stress response to drought by closing the stomata and lengthening the primary root.
Scientists at Virginia Tech found that, during development, “timing is indeed everything.” They use music as an analogy:
Everyone who has played in a band or orchestra knows that playing in time creates music, while playing out of time creates cacophony. In an orchestra, each player may be out of tune when warming up, but eventually, all players must reach the same pitch, rhythm, and timing to produce a viable piece of music.
They found something similar in dividing cells. Just as live musicians can compensate for other players’ changes in tempo, “cells modulate the exact timing of when crucial cellular eventshappen, slowing down or speeding everything up to make sure everything is playing its proper part at the right time.” They were “astonished to see how greatly the starting conditions for each cell could differ and still lead to the same outcome,” the article says.
Is it just an analogy to call a ribosome a “protein-making factory“? Ask the researchers at Rockefeller University, who think “factory” is an appropriate description:
Ribosomes, the molecular factories that produce all the proteins a cell needs to grow and function, are themselves made up of many different proteins and four RNAs. And just as an assembly line must be built before it can manufacture cars, these tiny factoriesmust be constructed before they can put proteins together.
Rockefeller is not alone in using the word factory — only the one they found escaped detection till now. “Salk Scientists Discover Protein Factories Hidden in Human Jumping Genes,” a news item from Salk Institute says. Researchers found a third Open Reading Frame (ORF0) in certain jumping genes known as LINE-1 elements.
“Jumping genes with ORF0 are basically protein factories with wheels,” they said. The fact that they consider “evolution” to be the driver of the bus does not negate the fact that they are real machines that must function properly, otherwise it could cause disease. And there are 3,500 of these “factories with wheels” in the human genome.
The nuclear membrane gained new respect from scientists at the University of Southern California when they found that it’s a lot more than “just a protective bubble” around the nuclear material. A team at USC has documented “how broken strands of a portion of DNA known as heterochromatin are dragged to the nuclear membrane for repair.” At the inner wall of the nuclear membrane, “a trio of proteins mends the break in a safe environment, where it cannot accidentally get tangled up with incorrect chromosomes.” (The discovery was made in fruit flies.)
As for heterochromatin, this “mysterious part of the genome” composed of repetitive elements has been promoted from “junk DNA” to superhero (watch the word “mechanism”):
The reason why we don’t experience thousands of cancers every day in our body is because we have incredibly efficient molecular mechanisms that repair the frequent damages occurring in our DNA. But those that work in heterochromatin are quite extraordinary.
We see “mechanism” also used to describe a “new class of DNA repair enzyme” found by researchers at Vanderbilt University. This adds to the same work that earned a Nobel Prize earlier this year. This enzyme has some “remarkable properties,” they said, such as the ability to find damage indirectly without actually contacting the lesion, and the ability to fix bulkier lesions than other repair mechanisms can.
“Our discovery shows that we still have a lot to learn about DNA repair, and that there may be alternative repair pathways yet to be discovered. It certainly shows us that a much broader range of DNA damage can be removed in ways that we didn’t think were possible,” said Eichman. “Bacteria are using this to their advantage to protect themselves against the antibacterial agents they produce. Humans may even have DNA-repair enzymes that operate in a similar fashion to remove complex types of DNA damage.
Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is described in Nature Reviews: Molecular Cell Biology as “an intricate machinery that shapes transcriptomes.” The abstract mentions “intricate steps” in this process, “cellular quality control,” and the ability of NMD to “dynamically adjust their transcriptomes and their proteomes to varying physiological conditions.”
A grad student at MIT is studying how cells pack two meters’ worth of DNA into a cell nucleus. It’s like “trying to fit 24 miles of string into a tennis ball,” Abe Weintraub says. He’s intrigued by the fact that “DNA gets packed tightly in organized loops, rather than being haphazardly crammed into cell nuclei.” The specific 3-D organization appears to affect its functionality, because mistakes cause cancer and other diseases.
Those are a few recent examples of the “machine talk” pouring out of labs around the world. This is not just metaphorical language for “nature” like the Victorians used. It’s observation and description of realities the early mechanical philosophers could not have imagined. And it’s everywhere. Machine talk is driving an explosion of discovery in science.
The old mechanical philosophy is hopelessly inadequate for these realities. The reason? We know from our experience that unguided natural law does not produce machinery, factories, and quality control. Something else is required: information.
The Santa Fe Institute identifies this critical part of the new 21st-century philosophy. A working group met to discuss the question, “What physical principles predict life?” They put the question into stark perspective:
We are immersed in life here on Earth, but life isn’t found on the Moon. Nor has it arisen, so far as we know, anywhere else in the solar system. Why do some physical environments precipitate life, and why don’t others?
It’s not enough to say that the moon has no water:
If the Earth really does use sunlight to convert a disorderly lump of mass and energy into organized living things, why can’t the Moon, Earth’s nearest neighbor, do something similar using different mechanisms?
This implies that “natural laws” alone are insufficient to account for the difference. David Wolpert was on hand to share an important suggestion:
One part of the answer, Wolpert says, might lie in information theory. In addition to being central to modern biologists’ understanding of evolution, information theory overlaps heavily with thermodynamics, the area of physics concerned with how the different kinds of internal energy of a system (such as heat and stored chemical energy) might be affected by the outside world.
In a video clip Wolpert elaborates on this theme. Apparently many others in the working group felt it was a promising avenue of thought.
“In many talks and discussions, the nature of information flow between different scales of organization emerged as an important theme and open question,” says O’Dwyer. “We look forward to future collaboration on each of these ideas.”
Willaim Dembski’s book Being as Communion would serve as a fine discussion starter. Wolpert comes so close, but is still so far from explaining what he set out to explain: why the moon differs from the earth. He talks about information flow through the system, but the moon gets exactly the same sunlight the earth does. And he never defines what information is, or where it comes from. Here is where intelligent design can offer real, substantive insight.
Information is the key to a “mechanical” philosophy for the 21st century. We know, because we have a great deal of experience producing information and imposing it on matter. We build computers. We make robots. We make clocks and trucks and factories. Indeed, we can even make machines that make other machines, and robots that increasingly look and act like us.
Our machines can run like clockwork, not because we shined sunlight on a “disorderly lump” and waited for natural laws to take their unguided course, but because we infused the lumps with information. And since we know that intelligence was the true cause that resulted in those lumps of raw material becoming Steinway pianos, Toyota robotic assembly lines, and New Horizons spacecraft, it’s a fair inference that intelligence is the true cause behind atoms that become kinesins, ribosomes, and circadian clock proteins.
This article was originally published in 2015.
A few months ago, I fell and dislocated my left shoulder. My upper arm bone was put back in its socket the same day, but then I spent months in physical therapy to regain full function. In the process, I have learned a lot about an amazing joint that I previously took for granted.
The drawing below shows only part of the human shoulder’s anatomy. Not shown is the large deltoid muscle, which overlies the shoulder joint and connects the upper arm bone (humerus) to the collarbone (clavicle) and the shoulder blade (scapula). Also not shown is the trapezius muscle across the back, which connects the left and right scapulas. Both the deltoid and the trapezius play important roles in stabilizing the joint.
In the drawing, yellow indicates bone, red indicates muscle, blue indicates tendon, and purple indicates bursa (a fluid-filled cushion). The dashed black lines indicate the hidden ball-and-socket joint between the humerus and the scapula. Unlike the hip joint, in which the ball is deeper in the socket, the shoulder joint is more open. This means the shoulder joint is less stable than the hip joint, but it is also much more flexible. In fact, it is the most flexible joint in the human body.
The biceps muscle at the lower left gets its name from the fact that it has two heads. One attaches, through a tendon and a small bursa, near the top of the humerus. The other head attaches to the coracoid process, an extension of the scapula. The lower end of the biceps muscle is attached to the forearm. Although it is primarily involved in moving the forearm, its divided head helps to stabilize the shoulder joint.
Both the flexibility and stability of the shoulder joint are due primarily to the muscles of the “rotator cuff,” listed on the left side of the drawing. All four of the listed muscles stretch across the scapula and attach to the top of the humerus. For a 10-minute tutorial on the rotator cuff, see here. For a longer (20-minute) tutorial on the movements, bones, and muscles of the shoulder, see here.
The more I have learned about the shoulder joint, the more I have been impressed by its specified complexity, which points to intelligent design. Imagine my surprise when I came across a six-and-a-half-minute video claiming that the human shoulder is a “design disaster.” The video was made by Cheddar News, which describes itself as “the only news network focused on the next generation of innovators and decision-makers[.] Cheddar News is where forward thinkers go to learn about the people, ideas and innovations that are driving change and creating what’s next.”
I am confident that a rigorous argument can be made for the intelligent design of the human shoulder. But that is not what I present here. In what follows, I examine the claims against design that are made in the Cheddar News video.
The video’s producer is Natalia Ryzak, who has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. At the beginning, Ryzak explains that “human shoulder blades tilt down and outwards, whereas chimps tilt up. Small variations like this are the reason humans have awful shoulders. And chimps, with whom we share nearly 99% of our DNA, don’t.” For that, Ryzak continues, “we can thank evolution — or more specifically, how we are outpacing it.”
But the tilt difference does not explain why the human shoulder is “awful.” If we spent most of our time swinging from tree branches, it might; but we don’t. And the claimed 99% similarity between human and chimp DNA has no bearing on the issue.
Ryzak goes on (from 0:47 to 0:59) to say:
Side effects of a human shoulder may include dislocation, separation, rotator cuff tears, bursitis, tendonitis, tendonosis, impingement syndrome, instability, arthritis, adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder), and fracture.
But these are not “side effects,” any more than getting a flat tire is a “side effect” of making an automobile. Or having a roof torn off by a tornado is a “side effect” of building a house. And these problems are not unique to humans: Chimps can also suffer from arthritis and fractures, among other things.
Enter Nathan Lents, professor of biology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. In 2015, Lents argued on his blog that the human eye is badly designed, primarily because “the vertebrate retina is wired in backwards.” Like Richard Dawkins and others before him, Lents based his claim on the fact that the light-sensing cells face away from the incoming light. But evidence published from the 1960s onward — and reported in standard textbooks — shows that this arrangement is far better than the one Lents favors.
Back to the video on “Why the Human Shoulder is a Design Disaster.” Lents says (at 1:30) that the shoulder is “more of a floating joint than any other joint in the body.” Ryzak explains that the outer layer of muscles (consisting of the deltoid and trapezius) is stronger than the inner layer (the rotator cuff). Then Lents continues (from 1:59), “Having such an overlapping meshwork of muscles, what you’re inviting is pinching, and tearing, as the orientation can shift.” Lents compares the shoulder joint to the hip joint, in which “the relationship of the hip to the leg is fairly fixed in place.”
So far, the video has summarized the structure of the shoulder and its difference from the hip. The shoulder is more flexible than the hip. Good thing, too, or we wouldn’t be able to perform many of the actions we do. Just watch an acrobat performing on the parallel bars. Or a baseball player pitching a fastball. Or an athlete swimming the butterfly.
But journalist Ryzak confidently concludes ex cathedra (starting at 2:19) that “we’ve proven to you just how cr*ppy our shoulders are.” How so? Ryzak doesn’t say. Instead she simply suggests going “back into the evolution part.”
According to Lents (starting at 2:28), “In our quadrupedal ancestors, in our deep past, really we had four legs, they weren’t really arms, to speak of. When you think of a dog and a cat, they don’t have arms, they have legs. But they still have a shoulder joint, as we can think of it.”
Then Ryzak says, “Our shoulders evolved for a life in the trees, swinging and hanging out. Then we left the trees behind and began to stand upright. This freed our arms up for other purposes, like hunting and gathering.” So from four-legged animals that walked and ran on the ground, we get animals that spend some of their time on the ground but mostly swing from branches to branches in the trees. Then those animals “evolved” into animals that stood upright and used their arms for other purposes. This is the standard Darwinian narrative. But how, exactly, did four-legged animals on the ground evolve into two-armed animals that swung on tree branches, which then evolved into two-armed animals that stood upright on the ground? The video offers no explanation; only an imaginative story.
Lents continues (starting at 2:54), “We are partially adapted for throwing, which is… no other animal in our group of animals throws anything.” This is not true: Chimps can throw, though not as far or as accurately as humans. Indeed, they are infamous for flinging feces at visitors to zoos.
But that’s a minor detail. Lents goes on to say, “So we believe that throwing was a very strong evolutionary pressure as we began to hunt — throwing spears, thrusting as well, so thrusting and throwing are very specific kinds of motion. And that required that floating nature to our shoulder.” But “evolutionary pressure” just means that throwing favored the survival of early humans. It does not account for the origin of the human shoulder. As Darwinian biologists wrote in 1996, adaptations “concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.”
So the claim that “we left the trees behind and began to stand upright” does not explain the remarkable anatomy of the human shoulder. After all, chimps leave the trees on a regular basis (though they don’t stand upright). Yet their shoulder anatomy has not changed.
According to Lents (at 3:57), “Part of the problem in present-day humans is not so much a bad shoulder design but a mismatch between what our shoulder is designed to do and how we use it on a daily basis.” Of course, Lents doesn’t think the shoulder was intelligently designed. As a Darwinist, he believes that the shoulder evolved through accidental variations and survival of the fittest. And in our immediate ancestors, the shoulder was adapted (“designed”) to swing through trees.
Most of our modern activities are very different. Ryzak adds (starting at 4:16),
It might surprise you, but simply sitting at your desk is a major contributor to shoulder problems. When we hunch forward for days, hours, months, years on end, we end up causing unnecessary pulls and strains on our rotator cuff muscles. That can lead to injuries.
Lents explains (starting at 5:20) that you can minimize shoulder problems by “changing the way you eat, changing the ways you use your body.” And, Ryzak adds (from 5:34 to 5:52), “pay attention to basic posture.” So after all the talk about bad design and evolutionary mismatch, the solution to our “design disaster” is for us to pay attention to diet, exercise, and posture.
I think I could have figured that out without all the anti-design rhetoric and Darwinian storytelling. Oh, and I would add: Be careful not to fall in such a way as to dislocate your shoulder.
The question of the sanctity of human life(specifically at what point should human life be regarded as "sacred") has returned to the public square in big way recently. Much of the discussion has been about what the sciences of medicine and biology have to say as to when any human offspring should be considered a person.
Some maintain that as long as the infant is biologically attached to its mother it ought not to be considered a person and its life ought not to be accorded the same value as a person. This post is addressed primarily to those who are interested in what the bible has to say about the matter,there are individuals on both sides of the issue who are citing scriptures as an authority. I would like to lay out what scriptures and reasonings thereon inform the position of my brothers and me.
Genesis1:27KJV"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. "
All life is the property of God Almighty, human life has a peculiarly sacred quality because Man is a living representation of the supreme divinity. Therefore the destruction of any human life apart from due process is sure to incur divine wrath.
Genesis9:5,6ASV"And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, will I require; At the hand of every beast will I require it. And at the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man.
6Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: For in the image of God made he man."
Does this include life in the womb? Consider.
Psalms139:15KJV"My frame was not hidden from thee, When I was made in secret, And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance; And in thy book they were all written, Even the days that were ordained for me , When as yet there was none of them."
The Psalmist was certain that the Lord JEHOVAH loved him from the very beginning,because He knew that there was latent potential to reflect His glory in a unique way in this nascent being. Thus even before this potential was known to any other it was being keenly and sympathetically observed by its source.
Liluke1:42KJV"And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. 43And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? " No dedicated servant of JEHOVAH worthy of that designation could ever say "my body my choice". when we made our dedication we handed over all that we are and possess to their rightful owner i.e the God and Father of Jesus Christ. For all of JEHOVAH'S servants the fruit of the womb is JEHOVAH'S we are merely custodians of what is our Lord's the above quoted text further confirms his interest in the potential in the impregnated womb.
1Corinthians6:20NIV"you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies."
"One strength of Arius’s position was that it appeared to safeguard a strict monotheism while offering an interpretation of the language of the New Testament—notably, the word Son—that conformed to general usage and meaning. The weakness of his view was that, precisely because Jesus was capable of suffering as a human, it was difficult to understand how he could be fully divine and thus effect the redemption of humankind."
The above quote is taken from the encylopedia brittanica's article on the arian controversy you can read article here ,it is a perfect example of the sort question begging stupidity we have come to expect from trinitarians. JEHOVAH'S priest needed to be divine in order to make an acceptable offering? Says who?
1Corinthians15:21KJV"For since by man(not God-man) came death, by man(not God-man) came also the resurrection of the dead. "
Our brother Paul under inspiration begs to differ.
Open the Books is a nonprofit government watchdog organization dedicated to investigating and disclosing the many ways in which government spends — and wastes — our money.
It has a new report out that should raise eyebrows. According to information garnered from Freedom of Information Act Requests, between 2009-2014, both Anthony Fauci and former NIH director Francis Collins received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies. This may present a conflict of interest since they had a great deal of influence in deciding what research the government funds. From the report:
Last year, the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s employer – doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. That largess of taxpayer money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific, research, and healthcare industries.
However, in our breaking investigation, we found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way. These are royalty payments from third-party payers (think pharmaceutical companies) back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists.
We estimate that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH scientists – who are credited as co-inventors.
Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure.
When bench scientists’ research leads to monetized benefit in the private sector, I suppose royalties are in order. And certainly, government funding should reap benefits for the government when that investments leads to the development of profitable products.
But Collins and Fauci, as far as I know, were administrators, not researchers. Yet OTB found that they received royalties from drug companies:
Since the NIH documents are heavily redacted, we can only see how many payments each scientist received, and, separately, the aggregate dollars per NIH agency. This is a gatekeeping at odds with the spirit and perhaps the letter of open-records laws.
We found agency leadership and top scientists at NIH receiving royalty payments. Well-known scientists receiving payments during the period included:
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the highest-paid federal bureaucrat, received 23 royalty payments. (Fauci’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $456,028).
Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009-2021, received 14 payments. (Collins’ 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $203,500)
Clifford Lane, Fauci’s deputy at NIAID, received 8 payments. (Lane’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $325,287)
In the above examples, although we know the number of payments to each scientist, we still don’t know how much money was paid – because the dollar figure was deleted (redacted) from the disclosures.
It’s been a struggle to get any useful information out of the agency on its royalty payments. NIH is acting like royalty payments are a state secret. (They’re not, or shouldn’t be!)
Did Collins and Fauci earn these royalties from work performed before their government service or as bench researchers? Are they partial patent owners? If so, what did they contribute to the product’s development? If they were rewarded for acting as administrators and not researchers, is it akin to a kickback?
Unfortunately, the NIH is keeping the matter as opaque as they can:
Consider how NIH is using taxpayer money to try and keep taxpayers ignorant and in the dark:
1. NIH defied the federal Freedom of Information Act law and refused to even acknowledge our open records request for the royalty payments. We filed our FOIA last September.
2. NIH used expensive taxpayer-funded litigation to slow-walk royalty disclosures (releasing the oldest royalties first). Although the agency admits to holding 3,000 pages, it will take ten months to produce them (300 pages per month). With Judicial Watch as our lawyers, we sued NIH in federal court last October.
3. NIH is heavily redacting key information on the royalty payments. For example, the agency erased 1. the payment amount, and, 2. who paid it! This makes the court-mandated production virtually worthless, despite our use of the latest forensic auditing tools.
NIH is essentially telling you, the taxpayer, to pay up and shut up. They’ll run things.
To say the least, congressional oversight is warranted over these questions. It’s time for Fauci and Collins to answer some pointed questions in open hearings.
Cross-posted at The Corner.
A new episode of ID the Future spotlights the groundbreaking new book The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence, with author and biologist Michael Denton reading excerpts from the work. Here Denton, who is also an MD, marvels at the engineering sophistication of the human heart and hands. Then he dives into the heart of his new book, with just a small sampling of the many ways nature appears fine tuned for bipedal, intelligent, technology-developing creatures such as ourselves. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
One or two such examples are interesting. But where the argument gains dramatic force is in the accumulation of many examples, stretching from physics and the characteristics of our sun to chemistry and the ensemble of unique characteristics of planet Earth, water, carbon, and the transition metals. To appreciate the full force of Denton’s prior fitness argument, pick up his newly released book here, where you can also check out the ringing endorsements from other scientists such as Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe and Henry Schaefer III, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia.
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Athanasian Creed, also called Quicumque Vult (from the opening words in Latin), a Christian profession of faith in about 40 verses. It is regarded as authoritative in the Roman Catholic and some Protestant churches. It has two sections, one dealing with the Trinity and the other with the Incarnation; and it begins and ends with stern warnings that unswerving adherence to such truths is indispensable to salvation. The virulence of these damnatory clauses has led some critics, especially in the Anglican churches, to secure restriction or abandonment of the use of the creed.
A Latin document composed in the Western Church, the creed was unknown to the Eastern Church until the 12th century. Since the 17th century, scholars have generally agreed that the Athanasian Creed was not written by Athanasius (died 373) but was probably composed in southern France during the 5th century. Many authors have been suggested, but no definite conclusions have been reached. In 1940 the lost Excerpta of Vincent of Lérins (flourished 440) was discovered, and this work contains much of the language of the creed. Thus, either Vincent or an admirer of his has been considered the possible author.The earliest known copy of the creed was included as a prefix to a collection of homilies by Caesarius of Arles (died 542). The creed’s influence seems to have been primarily in southern France and Spain in the 6th and 7th centuries. It was used in the liturgy of the church in Germany in the 9th century and somewhat later in Rome.
Apostles’ Creed, also called Apostolicum, a statement of faith used in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and many Protestant churches. It is not officially recognized in the Eastern Orthodox churches. According to tradition, it was composed by the 12 Apostles, but it actually developed from early interrogations of catechumens (persons receiving instructions in order to be baptized) by the bishop. An example of such interrogations used in Rome about 200 has been preserved in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus. The bishop would ask, “Dost thou believe in God the Father almighty?” and so forth through the major Christian beliefs. Stated affirmatively, these statements became a creed; such creeds were known as baptismal creeds.
The present text of the Apostles’ Creed is similar to the baptismal creed used in the church in Rome in the 3rd and 4th centuries. It reached its final form in southwestern France in the late 6th or early 7th century. Gradually it replaced other baptismal creeds and was acknowledged as the official statement of faith of the entire Catholic church in the West by the time that Innocent III was pope (1198–1216). All creedal Protestant churches accept the Apostles’ Creed and use it in worship, but some (e.g., the United Methodist Church) delete the line “He descended to the dead.”
The accepted Latin version reads as follows:
Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem; Creatorem caeli et terrae. Et in Jesum Christum, Filium ejus unicum, Dominum nostrum; qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine; passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus; descendit ad inferna; tertia die resurrexit a mortuis; ascendit ad caelos; sedet ad dexteram Dei Patris omnipotentis; inde venturus (est) judicare vivos et mortuos. Credo in Spiritum Sanctum; sanctam ecclesiam catholicam; sanctorum communionem; remissionem peccatorum; carnis resurrectionem; vitam aeternam. Amen.
A modern English version (as used in the Roman Catholic church) is the following:
I [We] believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I [We] believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son,
our Lord.
He was conceived by the power
of the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the
Father.
He will come again to judge the living and
the dead.
I [We] believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
Nicene Creed, also called Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, a Christian statement of faith that is the only ecumenical creed because it is accepted as authoritative by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and major Protestant churches. The Apostles’ and Athanasian creeds are accepted by some but not all of these churches.
Until the early 20th century, it was universally assumed that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (the more accurate term) was an enlarged version of the Creed of Nicaea, which was promulgated at the Council of Nicaea (325). It was further assumed that this enlargement had been carried out at the Council of Constantinople (381) with the object of bringing the Creed of Nicaea up to date in regard to heresies about the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit that had arisen since the Council of Nicaea.
Additional discoveries of documents in the 20th century, however, indicated that the situation was more complex, and the actual development of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed has been the subject of scholarly dispute. Most likely it was issued by the Council of Constantinople, even though this fact was first explicitly stated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. It was probably based on a baptismal creed already in existence, but it was an independent document and not an enlargement of the Creed of Nicaea.
The so-called Filioque clause (Latin filioque, “and the son”), inserted after the words “the Holy Spirit,…who proceeds from the Father,” was gradually introduced as part of the creed in the Western church, beginning in the 6th century. It was probably finally accepted by the papacy in the 11th century. It has been retained by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant churches. The Eastern churches have always rejected it because they consider it a theological error and an unauthorized addition to a venerable document.
The Nicene Creed was originally written in Greek. Its principal liturgical use is in the context of the Eucharist in the West and in the context of both baptism and the Eucharist in the East. A modern English version of the text is as follows, with the Filioque clause in brackets:
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son],
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Thermophiles are bacteria and archaea that live in hot water. Some of these “extremophiles” thrive at temperatures right up to the boiling point. Ever since thermophiles gained attention decades ago, scientists have been intrigued at their specializations for surviving conditions that would kill most organisms. Because heat can quickly degrade biomolecules, those in thermophiles must be equipped with special survival gear.
The family of 20 canonical transfer RNAs (tRNAs) comprises the essential carrier of genetic information between DNA and protein. When charged by corresponding members of the family of aminoacyl-tRNA-synthetases (which know both the genetic code and the protein code), tRNAs connect amino acids together in the sequence specified by the messenger RNA. This takes place in the ribosome, the translation factory of the cell. That’s the simple story, but there’s more. Numerous modifications to tRNAs have been found in all cells — eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea.
Writing in Nature, Ohira et al. from the University of Tokyo investigated how transfer RNAs in thermophiles beat the heat.
Thus far, about 150 types of RNA modification have been reported in various RNA molecules from all domains of life. In particular, tRNAs contain the widest variety and largest number of modified nucleosides, with 80% of RNA modifications identified in tRNA molecules. [Emphasis added.]
In their open-access paper, “Reversible RNA phosphorylation stabilizes tRNA for cellular thermotolerance,” the authors found a unique modification that stabilizes tRNAs in archaea. And it’s reversible. After reviewing some of the RNA modifications that were previously known, they announced their discovery:
Here we report the identification of 2′-phosphouridine (Up) in tRNAs, which, to our knowledge, is the first known instance of internal RNA phosphorylation. Biochemical, structural and genetic studies showed that Up47 is a reversible RNA modification and confers thermal stability to tRNA, thereby contributing to cellular thermotolerance.
This modification (we can call it a “mod” like the trendy word for add-ons in devices) is an unusual kind of kinase — an enzyme that spends ATP to attach a phosphate group to a substrate. Up47 acts in an unusual spot on the tRNA; it “protrudes from the tRNA core and prevents backbone rotation during thermal denaturation.” Without this mod, the tRNA for valine would “melt” (fall apart) at around 65°C (149 °F); with it, the tRNA remained stable at 70°C (154 °F). “These observations clearly demonstrate that a single Up47 modification increases the thermal stability of tRNAVal3 by 6.6 °C.” In fact, it did not melt until 85 °C (185 °F).
Also of interest, this mod comes complete with a “writer” and “eraser” for adding and removing the stabilizer as needed. With this toolkit, the cell can fine-tune its adaptation to heat.
If Up47 is a reversible modification, it is expected that tRNA function and stability are dynamically regulated by a writer and eraser, raising the possibility of epitranscriptomic regulation of tRNAs in translation. The mechanism closely resembles post-translational modification of proteins. Phosphorylation and dephosphorylation rapidly and dynamically control protein function. Because tRNA is a stable molecule with a low turnover rate and long lifetime in the cell, it would be reasonable for tRNA function to be regulated by Up47 modification.
The team identified the writer and eraser for this gadget named Up47.
In addition, we identified the arkI gene, which encodes an archaeal RNA kinase responsible for Up47 formation. Structural studies showed that ArkI has a non-canonical kinase motif surrounded by a positively charged patch for tRNA binding. A knockout strain of arkI grew slowly at high temperatures and exhibited a synthetic growth defect when a second tRNA-modifying enzyme was depleted. We also identified an archaeal homologue of KptA as an eraser that efficiently dephosphorylates Up47 in vitro and in vivo. Taken together, our findings show that Up47 is a reversible RNA modification mediated by ArkI and KptA that fine-tunes the structural rigidity of tRNAs under extreme environmental conditions.
What does Up47 look like? It stands for “2′-phosphouridine (Up) at position 47 of tRNAs.” While phosphouridine is a fairly common biomolecule (a uracil nucleotide with a phosphate group attached; see diagram and info on PubChem), its specific targeting to spot 47 on the tRNA is essential to prevent thermal disruption. At that specific locus, it prevents the backbone from rotating, and stabilizes the correct angle of “puckering” in the ribose sugar.
Furthermore, no benefit would be incurred without the writer and eraser present in the correct quantities. How do they know when to act? The paper does not say when they become active. Presumably the stabilizer must be removed during translation or at other operational moments, but those times must be brief to prevent thermal damage.
Whether or not evolutionists can come up with a story of how this phosphouridine was recruited for its stabilizing role on tRNA, the specificity of its position and writer/eraser combo is remarkable. And it’s not the only required player the thermophile needs to survive in hot water. Another “mod” is found at position 54 in the T-loop of tRNAs. More are found in the anticodon loop at positions 34 and 37. Additional specialized “mods” have been found in other species. These authors are adding just one more to a pool of essential players in these thermophiles.
Did these essential players evolve? At only one point do the authors mention evolution. Discussing mods to the V-loop in tRNAs, they say, “It is interesting that similar functions are evolutionarily conserved in different V-loop modifications across the domains of life.” That’s a statement about stasis, not evolution. As usual, evolution-talk is inversely proportional to the amount of detail presented about cellular workings.
To make matters worse, some evolutionists argue that thermophiles were the first organisms at the origin of life. One popular approach surmises that simple metabolic cycles began at hydrothermal vents, and then somehow became incorporated within primitive membranes. This compounds their hassles, because additional “gear” for thermal stabilization would have been needed right at the time they imagine primitive cells were trying to emerge. It also tosses the difficult problem of the origin of genetic coding to someone else to figure out.
Visitors by the millions walk by the hot springs of Yellowstone, unaware of the complex systems at work in the colorful runoff channels where these thermophiles live. Even if readers of Evolution News don’t wish to memorize the details in this article, it’s good for the soul to gain an appreciation for the real specified complexity at work in even the most “primitive” of life forms. It encourages awe of nature, which psychologists recognize as a healthy attitude (see video by Science with Sam). So don’t worry about remembering Up47. If your awe rose a few degrees while reading this, it was worth it.
Anecdote in closing: it was through the study of thermophiles in Yellowstone hot springs that biochemists discovered the enzyme “taq polymerase.” Subsequent study of this enzyme revealed that it can amplify DNA at high temperatures. This led to the lab technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method that made possible the rapid amplification of biomolecules for research and essentially started the biotechnology revolution. PCR was even essential during the development of vaccines and therapeutics for COVID-19. For the awe-inspiring story, see an article at USGS.
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At the heart of the abortion debate are two sets of questions: scientific questions and moral questions. They are both important, and much of the rancor and division in the abortion debate stems, I think, from conflation of scientific and moral issues. They are not the same. Properly formed moral views depend on correct scientific understanding. If we don’t know what a fetus is, scientifically, we are hampered in making sound moral judgments about its protection.
A recent post by biologist Jerry Coyne exemplifies this confusion. Coyne asks:
Where, I ask, is the evidence (beyond that asserted by religious authorities) that abortion is identical to murder, even in its very early stages? There is clearly a developmental continuum in a fetus, with an abrupt break when the baby is born, and so drawing a line for when a fetus becomes equivalent to a person with rights, including freedom from “murder”, is purely arbitrary. Many Catholics, though, draw the line at a rationally insupportable stage: fertilization. A “person” is not created at fertilization: we have a zygote that now will go on to continue development. That zygote is an undifferentiated ball of cells without mentation or the ability to feel pain. And there’s no evidence it has a soul or anything differentiating it from the embryos of any number of vertebrate species.
Coyne profoundly misunderstands the biology of human development, and in doing so he reaches moral conclusions that even he — if he were to have a clear view of the science — would be hard-pressed to defend. How is it that a leading professor of biology could fundamentally misunderstand the biology of human development?
Let us restrict our question about the nature of the fetus to the science of human development in the womb, which has been understood reasonably well since the mid 19th century. The question at issue is this: When does human life begin? Note that we are not asking moral questions or even metaphysical questions per se. We’re asking about biology: when, from a biological perspective, does an individual human being first exist?
We all agree that life begins at or after union of the sperm and egg. Fertilization marks the earliest moment in human development that human life might begin. Many other times after fertilization have been proposed — the first appearance of nervous tissue, or heartbeat, or brain waves, or quickening, or the ability to feel pain, or viability outside of the womb, or birth, or rationality, etc. At first, it seems a hopeless conundrum: there seem to be so many possible moments at which life begins that science is stymied. Perhaps science can’t tell us when life begins. But science most certainly can tell us, and does tell us.
Every living cell or group of cells is either an individual member of a species or a part of an individual member of a species. There are no unclassified living things. And we all agree (tautologically) that whenever human life begins, each human life after that point is a member of the species Homo sapiens. But of course that entails a corresponding and critical question: What is the tissue (zygote, embryo, fetus, or neonate) before it is an individual human being?
So the critical scientific issue at the heart of the question “when does human life begin” is: What scientific description of the tissue (let’s call it the “fetus” for brevity) before human life begins makes sense biologically? Consider the options:
Consider the scientific implications of each option:
1) The fetus is a part of the mother’s body. if the fetus is a part of the mother’s body, then all pregnant women are chromosomal mosaics. That is, they are organisms that have two sets of genomes. Chromosome mosaicism is a rare disorder and is not synonymous with pregnancy. There is no such thing as “transient chromosomal mosaicism.” Furthermore, if the fetus is a part of the mother’s body, then half of pregnant women are hermaphrodites — i.e., they contain both male and female tissues. Needless to say, “transient gestational hermaphroditism” is not a recognized medical disorder.
Furthermore, if a new human life begins by a piece of the mother’s body becoming a new organism, then human beings reproduce by budding. Budding is a form of asexual reproduction used by some species of worms, sponges, corals, and microorganisms, but it is not a means of human reproduction.
There is no biological sense to be made of the claim that “the fetus is part of the mother’s body.” The claim leads to scientific implications that are nonsense.
2) The fetus is not part of the mother’s body but is an individual of another species. If the fetus is an individual member of another species, then pregnancy is by far the most common parasitic disease among humans. What’s more, the transition in each pregnancy from a non-human parasite to a new human being is speciation — the evolution of a new species, “Homo fetus” to Homo sapiens — occurring with each pregnancy. This is, of course, scientific nonsense.
3) The fetus is not any kind of living thing — it’s just a clump of biological molecules undergoing chemical reactions. If the fetus is not really living at all, then each pregnancy is a new origin-of-life event. This is also scientific nonsense.
So the biological answer to the question “When does human life begin?” is easy to answer from a scientific perspective: human life begins at the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. This is not merely common sense and the claim of pro-life advocates, it is clear and straightforward science, as settled as heliocentrism and the existence of atoms.
All cogent moral reasoning about abortion must begin with the understanding that human life begins at fertilization. There are no other scientific options. And here you can see where Coyne and other abortion proponents — even abortion proponents who are scientists — go awry. They don’t understand the simplest biological fact about human development — that human life begins at fertilization.
So Coyne’s assertion…
A “person” is not created at fertilization: we have a zygote that now will go on to continue development. That zygote is an undifferentiated ball of cells without mentation or the ability to feel pain. And there’s no evidence it has a soul or anything differentiating it from the embryos of any number of vertebrate species.
…is nonsensical because it confuses scientific misunderstanding with moral reasoning.
There is a simple scientific answer to the basic question at the heart of the abortion debate. Whatever a “person” is, a human zygote is most certainly a human being.
The term “person” is a moral and legal category,
not a scientific category, and it is a category open to moral
discussion and debate. But “human being” is a scientific term, and it is
not open to debate. The science is settled. Human life begins at
fertilization, and cogent moral reasoning about abortion must begin with
that scientific fact.
Summary: Even as the scientific vision of humankind as an accidental by-product of the cosmos became ascendant, the first seeds of a new scientific revolution were sprouting, one revealing the fine-tuning of nature for human existence.
Editor’s note: This week sees the release of biologist Michael Denton’s new book The Miracle of Man: The Fine-Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. This essay is adapted from the opening chapter of Denton’s new book.
With the acceptance of Darwinism by the biological mainstream, Western civilization took the final step back to the atomism, materialism, and many-worlds doctrine of Democritus and other pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. As the Darwinian paradigm tightened its grip on mainstream biology and science, all vestiges of the old teleological-organismic universe, all notions which placed humankind or life on Earth in any special or privileged place in the order of things, were banished from mainstream academic debate.
The implications of the final Darwinian unraveling for mainstream evolutionary biologists was memorably captured by French biochemist Jacques Monod in his materialist manifesto Chance and Necessity. “The thesis I shall present in this book is that the biosphere does not contain a predictable class of objects or of events,” he wrote, “but constitutes a particular occurrence, compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles and therefore essentially unpredictable… unpredictable for the same reason — neither more nor less — that the particular configuration of atoms constituting this pebble I have in my hand is unpredictable.”
According to Monod the human race was adrift in an uncaring cosmos which knew nothing of its becoming or fate, an infinite universe said to manifest not the slightest evidence of anthropocentric bias. Instead, as Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, we are merely “the embodiment of contingency,” our species but “a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree… we are a detail, not a purpose… in a vast universe, a wildly improbable evolutionary event.” Or as astronomer Carl Sagan framed the matter, “one voice in the cosmic fugue.”
Thus was humanity demoted to a mere epiphenomenon, to one un-purposed by-product among many, from the imago Dei as understood in the medieval vision of humanity — that of a being made in the image of God and pre-ordained from the beginning — to a meaningless contingency, something less than a cosmic afterthought.
This modern secular vision of nature is as far removed from the anthropocentric cosmos of the medieval scholastic philosophers as could be imagined, representing one of the most dramatic intellectual transformations in the history of human thought.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century.
Even as the scientific vision of humankind as an accidental by-product of the cosmos consolidated its position of ascendancy in Western thought, the first seeds of a new scientific anthropocentricism were sprouting, in the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s. The multivolume work included such contributions as William Whewell’s discussion of the striking fitness of water for life and William Prout’s discussion of the special properties of the carbon atom for life, revealed by the development of organic chemistry in the first quarter of the 19th century. And ironically it was during the decades following the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), during the very period when Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that “nihilism stands at the door,” when fresh scientific evidence began to accumulate suggesting that life on Earth might after all be a special phenomenon “built into” the natural order and very far from the accident of deep time and chance that the Darwinian materialist zeitgeist assumed.
These discoveries, and particularly the unique chemistry of carbon, were explored in World of Life by none less than the co-discover with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. In that 1911 work, Wallace showed that the natural environment gave various compelling indications of having been pre-arranged for carbon-based life as it occurs on Earth.
Two years later, in 1913, Lawrence Henderson published his classic The Fitness of the Environment, whichpresented basically the same argument but in much more scholarly detail. Henderson not only argued that the natural environment was peculiarly fit for carbon-based life but also in certain intriguing ways for beings of our physiological design. He refers to two of the thermal properties of water, its specific heat and the cooling effect of evaporation, as well as the gaseous nature of CO2 as special elements of environmental fitness in nature for beings of our biological design.
Building on the evidence alluded to by Wallace and Henderson, other more recent scholars, including George Wald and Harold Morowitz, have further defended the fitness paradigm during the 20th century. Wald argued for the unique environmental fitness of nature for carbon chemistry and photosynthesis. Morowitz argued for the unique fitness of water for cellular energetics.
These discoveries signal a sea change. In my new book, The Miracle of Man, I provide what is to my knowledge the most comprehensive review in print of nature’s unique fitness for human biology by describing a stunning set of ensembles of prior environmental fitness, many clearly written into the laws of nature from the moment of creation, enabling the actualization of key defining attributes of our biology. The evidence puts to bed the notions of Gould, Monod, and Sagan that humankind is a mere contingent outcome of blind, purposeless, natural processes.
I agree that to claim that the findings of modern science support a contemporary take on the traditional anthropocentric worldview is highly controversial and will seem outrageous to many commentators and critics. Here a distinction may prove useful. While my conclusions are controversial, the evidences upon which they are based are not in the least controversial. In virtually every case they are so firmly established in the relevant scientific disciplines as to now be considered wholly uncontroversial conventional wisdom. In other words, the extraordinary ensembles of natural environmental fitness described in my book, ensembles vital for our existence and upon which my defense of the anthropocentric conception of nature is based, are thoroughly documented scientific facts. What is unique here is the comprehensive integration of so many disparate, if overlapping, ensembles of fitness. And when we step back from these individual groves and take in the proverbial forest in all its grandeur, the panorama, I would go so far as to say, is overwhelming.
In The Miracle of the Cell I showed that the properties of many of the atoms of the periodic table (about twenty) manifest a unique prior fitness to serve highly specific and vital biochemical roles in the familiar carbon-based cell, the basic unit of all life on Earth. And as I stressed, it was the prior fitness of these atoms for specific biochemical functions which enabled the actualization of the first carbon-based cell irrespective of whatever cause or causes were responsible for its initial assembly. Now the focus turns to beings of our physiological and anatomical design and the numerous ensembles of environmental prior fitness necessary for our existence. This is a prior fitness that existed long before our species first appeared on planet Earth, a fitness that led the distinguished astrophysicist Freeman Dyson to famously confess, “I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”
And it is not only our biological design which was mysteriously foreseen in the fabric of nature. As The Miracle of Man shows, nature was also strikingly prearranged, as it were, for our unique technological journey from fire making, to metallurgy, to the advanced technology of our current civilization. Long before man made the first fire, long before the first metal was smelted from its ore, nature was already prepared and fit for our technological journey from the Stone Age to the present.
