The thumb print of JEHOVAH: cosmic edition.

A Miraculous Existence 

Marvin Olasky 

In A Big Bang in a Little Room, Zeeya Merali describes the consensus among science’s biggest brains: “The notion that a god made our universe is several rungs on the wackiness ladder above the idea that it was made by aliens.” Nevertheless, Merali describes herself as a believer in God. She’s also the holder of an Ivy League PhD in theoretical physics. So she asks a good question: If God desired to send us a message, how would He do it?

Published in 1985, Carl Sagan’s novel Contact included speculation about finding a code in the digits of pi, which starts out 3.14159 and keeps going forever — but no one’s found it. Others said God might encode a message within the human genome — but that would be useful only for creatures on this planet. Merali suggests a message embedded in background radiation, so any sufficiently advanced creatures anywhere in the universe could perceive it. (Astronomers learn about distant galaxies and galaxy clusters by mapping tiny radiation wrinkles.)

The Moment of Creation 

The time to engrave such a message in the sky would be at the moment of creation, Merali writes: “Think of it like drawing a smiley face in marker on a balloon straight out of the package. Blow up the balloon and the picture stretches with the rubber. In the same way, as the cosmos rapidly inflated, its creator’s message would shine out across the whole sky.” She says no one has found such a message thus far, thus disappointing those who believe in God.

No such message? With respect for Merali, who writes charmingly, I think she’s wrong, for three reasons. 

First, we live on a Goldilocks “just right” planet within a Goldilocks universe. More than one thousand features of the universe and Earth must fall within narrow ranges to allow for the possibility of life, and then for advanced life. For example: We need a particular composition of the earth’s core and atmosphere, a particular Earth axis tilt and rotation speed, particular capillary action and surface tension, and so on.We exist because of things most of us know nothing about: cosmic ray protons, intergalactic hydrogen gas clouds, molecular hydrogen formed by supernova eruptions, etc. If one loose definition of a miracle is “a highly improbable or extraordinary event,” look at the likelihood of simple bacteria being able to survive anywhere in the universe apart from divine action: One chance in 10 followed by 556 zeros. What about the likelihood of advanced life? One chance in 10 followed by 1,054 zeros. 

In the memorable 2017 Super Bowl, the New England Patriots trailed by 25 points with 17 minutes and seven seconds left in the game. They managed to tie the game and win it in overtime: Headlines proclaimed “a miracle comeback.” But what if the Patriots had trailed by 8,216 points and needed to score one touchdown (plus two extra points) in every one of those 1,027 seconds left in the game? That gives us a sense of the unlikeliness of our existence purely through material causes — and we’d have to multiply that physical improbability/impossibility by about a trillion. (That’s why some atheistic scientists grab on to the wacky multiverse theory.)

Flipping the Surmise 

A second piece of evidence for God’s existence: the history of the 20th century. Decisions by three atheists — Mao, Stalin, and Hitler — led to one hundred million deaths. Some people say that shows a merciful God does not exist, but we should flip the surmise: Atheism kills, and we’ve seen since the 1930s what happens when we worship human gods. God warns us throughout the Bible that sin has consequences: Should we consider Him a liar because He tells the truth?

Why don’t we wake up every morning and realize our existence is miraculous? Maybe because so much noise surrounds us. But here’s a third reason to believe in God: I’ve met some men in their twenties whose thinking as teens was so destructive that it looked like they would soon be dead, imprisoned, or traitorous. I was one of them. But “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end” — and the Bible tells me so. 

God has sent a message, not in background radiation but in our existence, our history, and in what should be our daily reading.

 

Yet another attempt to school JEHOVAH goes off the rails.

 The Supposed Bad Design of the Human Pharynx 

Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt adapted from Your Designed Body, the new book by engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman. 

In our book, Your Designed Body, we apply a five-part test for evaluating ostensible instances of bad design. This test can help determine whether we’re looking at a bad design, or simply a bad argument. Let’s consider the example of the human pharynx. Is it poorly engineered?

The figure below shows that the pharynx is the common entry for both the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts. Whatever is ingested can potentially go down the airway and cause obstruction, which can result in death by choking.

Some insist that the pharynx is therefore miserably designed, something no wise designer would engineer, but that evolution, with its trial-and-error messiness, very well might. “The biggest danger in the human throat’s design is choking,” writes Nathan Lents. “If we had separate openings for air and food, this would never happen. Swallowing is a good example of the limits of Darwinian evolution. The human throat is simply too complex for a random mutation — the basic mechanism of evolution — to undo its fundamental defects. We have to resign ourselves to the absurdity of taking in air and food through the same pipe.”1

Abby Hafer, in her pointedly titled book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not, sounds a similar note. “A better designed system would keep the tubes for air and food separate to avoid unnecessary fatalities,” she writes. “If we were designed why did the Designer do this job so badly? Or is it that the Creator likes other animals better? There are creatures in which the air passages and food passages are entirely separate. The whale’s respiratory system is separate from its digestive system. This means that a whale, unlike a human, can’t choke on its food by inhaling it. If the Creator could do that for the whales, I don’t know why he couldn’t do it for us?”2

These arguments are riddled with problems. To see why, we need to take a closer look at the human pharynx.

How It Works 

In addition to the structures identified in the figure above, fifty different pairs of muscles, connected by six different nerves, are needed to swallow. After food in the mouth has been formed into a small ball (bolus), the tongue voluntarily moves it to the pharynx, which automatically triggers the involuntary swallow reflex.

As the bolus enters, the pharynx sends sensory information to the swallow center in the brainstem, which immediately turns off respiration so that air is not breathed in during swallowing. This prevents the lungs from drawing food into the airway. The brainstem also sends precisely ordered signals telling the various muscles to contract and move the bolus downward into the esophagus, bypassing the airway. This takes about a second.

As swallowing begins, several muscles contract to move the bolus into the pharynx, while moving the back of the palate and the upper pharynx close together to close off the path to the nose. 

Next comes the tricky part. The bolus has been blocked from going up into the nose, and muscular contraction is hurtling it down towards the airway and the esophagus. Three separate actions take place to protect the airway. First, muscles contract to close the larynx, which is the gateway to the lungs. Second, other muscles move the larynx up and forward (which you can feel in the front of your neck while swallowing) to hide it under the floor of the mouth and the base of the tongue while being protected by the epiglottis. Third, this action, combined with other muscular activity, opens the upper esophagus to allow the bolus to enter.3The timing and coordination are remarkable. The swallow center must send the right signals via the right nerves to the right muscles, with the exact right split-second timing. Since all this is triggered by the bolus entering the pharynx, the signals from throat to brainstem and back to the many muscles involved (with their reaction times) must be fast enough to prevent choking.

While critics seem to miss the amazing design of this system, it should give the reader pause. Somehow, swallowing happens, usually without incident, a thousand times a day. 

Where did the information come from that specifies the size, shape, position, and range of movement of the pharynx, each of its nearby structures, and the fifty pairs of muscles involved in swallowing? How could such a system come about gradually, by accident? 

Where did the information come from to make the swallow center in the brainstem and the logic it uses to control safe swallowing? Where is the repository for the information needed to orchestrate the precisely ordered, well-coordinated contraction sequence of fifty pairs of muscles?

Scoring the Pharynx-Is-Poorly-Designed Argument 

With that primer on the pharynx and the swallowing system of which it’s a part, let’s now score the argument that the pharynx is badly designed and therefore not intentionally designed. 

1. Not Understanding the Design of the Pharynx 

The pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language, and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing. The percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx, are absolutely required for the nuanced communication that’s essential to the human experience. So the pharynx has at least three major functional design objectives. If you were asked to design a system with these capabilities, how would you approach it? How would your design make the trade-offs needed to do all this with a single system? If you used separate systems, as advocated by the critics above, how would you achieve the right kinds of functions, and how would this affect how these functions are packaged into the body as a whole? The critics ignore these questions, apparently because they haven’t bothered to understand the design of the system, as a system — either its core objectives or the orchestration of its many parts. 

2. Not Considering Trade-Offs when Criticizing the Pharynx 

Clearly, the pharynx’s main three functions cause design conflicts that must be solved. We could use two or maybe even three separate systems to achieve these vastly different goals. However, since all three functions need similar components, two or possibly three copies of many of these structures would be necessary. If, as the critics recommend, we were structured to use the mouth only for swallowing food and water, and not for breathing, thereby precluding speech and language as we know it, the nasal passageways would need to be much larger to bring in enough oxygen during high levels of activity. 

To keep all three functions, duplication of parts may be an option. We’d need two mouths, one for eating and another for breathing and speaking, and we’d need two large pipes, one for air and the other for food. We’d need two tongues, one for manipulating food in the eating mouth, and another for speaking in the breathing/speaking mouth. For making the hard-consonant sounds in speech, we’d need something like teeth in the breathing/speaking mouth, but we’d also need teeth for chopping up food in the eating mouth. For making complex tonal sounds, the nasal cavities would need to be attached to the breathing/speaking mouth. But we’d also need the nose’s smell sensors in the eating mouth in order to fully experience the taste of our food. We could go on, but you get the idea.In the end, the anatomical changes for either scenario, precluding or preserving speech and language as we know it, would require a complete reconfiguration of the head and neck and possibly also some parts of the lungs and stomach in the body’s core. At a minimum, an increase in the size of the nasal passageways would require the head and face to be much wider. But to house duplicate systems, the volume of the head and neck would need to roughly double, and depending on the positioning of the two mouths, the passageways to the lungs and stomach would likely need to be rearranged too.

Maybe if our bodies were shaped more like a whale, this would work better, but of course this might make it harder to climb mountains. Or even to turn our heads quickly.

Building these different functions into a single set of components, with the programming and orchestration to make them work properly, is another example of elegant invention. The obvious trade-off is that it’s possible to choke, never mind how well-designed the system that’s in place to avoid this problem. Of course, the critics also neglect to consider whether it would be easier or harder to choke in a system with two mouths, as the risk of this happening would be their relative positions to each other. 

The marvel is that the system combines these three separate functions in such a compact space, and the whole works so well at all three of its core functions.  

3. Not Acknowledging Pharynx Degradation over Time 

How and why do humans die from choking? One common cause of swallowing problems is neuromuscular injury or degeneration related to aging or disease. Since swallowing requires precisely orchestrated contractions of many different muscles, any condition that compromises nerve or muscle function can lead to difficulties in swallowing. Common conditions include stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis (MS), each of which puts the person at risk for aspirating food into their lungs and choking to death. These represent about half of the annual deaths by choking. One could argue that the body’s inability to fight off Parkinson’s or MS is also a design flaw, but these are also instances of degradation. Complex systems always degrade over time and generations, so it’s unrealistic to think this should never happen to the human body if it were well designed.

Another common cause of choking is user abuse. When a healthy adult takes in too large a piece of food, or doesn’t chew sufficiently, or a child takes in a foreign object like a small toy, these objects can get stuck in the airway and choking results. One could insist that the design should have been foolproof against such abuses, but this merely takes us back to the question of trade-offs. 

To even hope to make the system abuse-proof, the three functions of the pharynx would have to be divided out into two or three separate systems, and we’ve already seen all the problems that attend that strategy. Moreover, no matter how carefully an engineer designs a product, it’s always at risk of being misused and, due to wear and tear, its functional capacity lessening over time.

4. Jumping from Poor Design of the Pharynx to No Intentional Design 

Even if we were to grant for the sake of argument that the pharynx is a case of shoddy engineering, it wouldn’t follow from this alone that it wasn’t intentionally designed (as the Yugo car and Tacoma Narrows bridge aptly illustrate). The evolutionists who reach this unsound conclusion perhaps get there by embracing the false premise that poorly designed things must be unintentionally designed things, and combining it with the equally mistaken view that the pharynx is a botched design. But perhaps the error is a bit subtler. 

In logic, one of the formal fallacies is known as affirming the consequent. That logical fallacy runs like this:

Major Premise: If A is true, then B is true.

Minor Premise: B is true.

Conclusion: Therefore, A is true.

That’s an invalid syllogism. For it to be valid, the major premise would need to be “If B is true, then A is true.” As it is, the conclusion simply doesn’t follow. This is affirming the consequent, or put more generally, it’s a non sequitur. This may be how the evolutionists above have reached their invalid conclusion, thus: 

Major Premise: If A (something came about without intention), then B (it is poorly constructed).

Minor Premise: B is the case: the human pharynx is poorly constructed.

Conclusion: A is true: the pharynx came about without intention.

Even if we granted both premises, the conclusion wouldn’t follow, since it’s an invalid syllogism guilty of affirming the consequent. 

It’s not clear that this is exactly how evolutionists are reasoning, but it well may be close to the mark based on their statements.

But wait, there’s more. Professor Lents asserts that “if we had separate openings for air and food, [choking] would never happen.” But in any system that requires breathing air into the body, the opening for the air can become blocked — no matter where you put it on the body or how it’s configured. How will these critics’ “improved” system prevent choking from ever happening? 

Even a design that is truly suboptimal in one respect cannot demonstrate that it’s a poor design, since the “suboptimal” feature may simply be the natural outcome of a perfectly reasonable design trade-off. (And as noted, even if a suboptimal feature were a true design blunder, this would not be sufficient warrant to claim that it wasn’t intentionally designed.)

Another error in reasoning: “The human throat is simply too complex for a random mutation — the basic mechanism of evolution — to undo its fundamental defects,”4 Lents insists. But if the human throat is too complex for a random mutation to undo a “design defect,” how could random mutations have built such a complex feature in the first place? And if it works and the species thrives, can it be called a defect? 

Or recall this argument from Hafer: “If the Creator could [separate the respiratory from the digestive systems] for the whales, I don’t know why he couldn’t do it for us?”5 Being capable of doing something doesn’t make it a good idea. We could design an iPhone with tires, but this may not be helpful to that device’s purpose. Whales are also able to live their whole lives in the ocean. Why couldn’t the Creator give humans that ability, too? It would certainly cut down on skateboard injuries and fatal traffic accidents. Maybe it just wasn’t the plan.

While the above are likely intended as arguments to poor design, in the end they come across as logical “rubbish,” to borrow a phrase from our British colleagues.

5. Aesthetic Considerations in Evaluating the Pharynx 

The two critics above, at least in the quotations above, do not level aesthetic objections against the design of the pharynx. The irony is that if the designer of the human body had taken their advice and used the vastly clunkier and less elegant approach of creating two or three separate systems for breathing, eating/drinking, and communicating in order to minimize choking, the anti-design critics might have lodged an aesthetic argument against such a choice, namely that no properly ingenious “tidy-minded engineer” would have failed to elegantly combine the three primary functions into a single clever system. 

Engineers know this game — damned if you do and damned if you don’t, with critics ignoring the question of trade-offs. Engineers develop thicker skins as a natural coping mechanism. (Which, come to think of it, is another clever adaptive design feature of the human body!)

Ingenious Design 

Most people swallow a thousand times a day without incident, all the while breathing in enough air, swallowing enough food and water, verbally communicating with nuance, and sometimes even singing. Thus, the rare possibility of choking to death provides little actual evidence of incompetent design. Rather, the human pharynx is more accurately viewed as a clever, elegant solution to a complicated set of competing design objectives, with justifiable choices regarding design trade-offs, within rigid constraints. Further, the solution is profoundly well packaged and even provides a way to equalize the air pressure in the middle ear. This is ingenious design. 

HR had a word with Jerry Coyne?

Jerry Coyne — An Evolutionist and His Ideology 

Robert Shedinger 

Evolutionist Jerry Coyne habitually charges others with ignoring scientific evidence to advance a religious or other non-scientific viewpoint. With this in mind, it’s never out of place to remind readers of an episode from Coyne’s own past in which he was influenced in his scientific work by larger ideological battles.

The iconic image of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is of course a staple in biology textbooks, meant to convince students that natural selection is real and can be observed on human time scales. But the reality is far more complex, as Jonathan Wells has shown in Icons of Evolution. The experiments done in the 1950s by Bernard Kettlewell, widely hailed as demonstrating industrial melanism to be an example of natural selection in action, were horribly flawed, flaws meticulously documented by Michael Majerus in his 1998 book Melanism: Evolution in Action.

Where Coyne Comes In

This is where Jerry Coyne comes in. In a review of Majerus’s book appearing in Nature in 1998, Coyne confessed to not knowing anything about the flaws in Kettlewell’s experiments until reading about them in Majerus’s book, even though these flaws had been well documented in the literature since the 1960s. Coyne registered his dismay at realizing he had been incorrectly teaching the example of the peppered moth as tantamount to learning that Santa Claus is the one who brings presents on Christmas Eve, not his father. This forced Coyne to conclude: 

for the time being we must discard Biston as a well-understood example of natural selection in action, although it is clearly a case of evolution.1 

Coyne’s review quickly came to the attention of Darwin skeptics who were only too happy to trumpet the words of a noted evolutionary biologist now discarding one of the most iconic pieces of evidence for natural selection. I imagine Coyne caught real blow-back from his fellow evolutionists for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I’m sure he wanted a chance to redeem himself. 

He Did Not Have to Wait Long 

Four years later (2002), science writer Judith Hooper published Of Moths and Men, a more popular criticism of the peppered moth story. Coyne jumped at the opportunity to review Hooper’s book, also in the pages of Nature. He was far more critical of Hooper than he had been of Majerus, concluding: 

The dramatic rise and fall of the frequency of melanism in Biston betularia, occurring in parallel on two continents, is a compelling case of evolution by natural selection.2 

So in just four short years, industrial melanism in the peppered moth had gone from something needing to be discarded as an example of natural selection in action to becoming once again a compelling case of natural selection in action, and without any new evidence coming to light. What drove this change?

We need not speculate, for Coyne tells us later in the review: 

This issue matters, at least in the United States, because creationists have promoted the problems with Biston as a refutation of evolution itself. Even my own brief critique of the story (Nature 396, 35-36, 1998) has become grist for the creationist’s mill.3 

It was Coyne’s fear of being seen as advancing a “creationist” cause that led him to reverse his position on the status of industrial melanism in the peppered moth. But this is not the end of the story. 

Another Opportunity to Weigh In 

In 2009, Coyne published Why Evolution Is True, a book for general readers designed to put the nail in the coffin of intelligent design approaches. In marshalling evidence for evolution to convince a skeptical public, Coyne had another opportunity to weigh in on industrial melanism in the peppered moth. After discussing the action of natural selection in laboratory experiments with bacteria, Coyne writes: 

But perhaps it would be even more convincing to see the whole process in action in nature — without human intervention. That is, we want to see a natural population meet a natural challenge, we want to know what that challenge is, and we want to see the population evolve to meet it before our eyes.4 

If Coyne believed his 2002 endorsement of industrial melanism as “a compelling case of evolution by natural selection,” this would be the perfect place to introduce it. What better example of natural selection happening before our very eyes? But Coyne does not employ the peppered moth here or anywhere else in his book. There is not a single mention of the peppered moth, industrial melanism, or Bernard Kettlewell anywhere in this book designed to argue for the truth of evolution! Given the opportunity to make the case for evolution in action, Coyne simply punts.

Instead, he follows up with: 

We can’t expect this circumstance to be common. For one thing, natural selection in the wild is incredibly slow.5 

It is pretty clear that Coyne’s feelings about industrial melanism are the one’s he announced in 1998 — the peppered moth should be discarded as an example of natural selection in action. (See my The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms, pp. 117-128, for more on the ideological nature of the peppered moth story.) He reversed his position in 2002, it seems, because he feared losing credibility with his scientific colleagues. Instead of courageously standing for what he believed to be scientifically true, he backed down in the face of pressure to conform. 

At least some others have the courage to stand for what they believe even in the face of potential criticism. Before Jerry Coyne criticizes them for being motivated more by ideology than science, he might want to first look in the mirror. Isn’t there something about people who live in glass houses not casting stones? 

Notes 

1)Jerry Coyne, “Not Black or White,” Nature 396 (1998): 35.

2)Jerry Coyne, “Evolution under Pressure,” Nature 418 (2002): 20.

3)Coyne, “Evolution under Pressure,” 20.

4)Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (Penguin 2009), 132.

5)Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 132.    

 

Plato's republic: a brief history

 By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 

The Republic, one of the most important dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, renowned for its detailed expositions of political and ethical justice and its account of the organization of the ideal state (or city-state)—hence the traditional title of the work. As do other dialogues from Plato’s middle period, and unlike his early or Socratic dialogues, the Republic reflects the positive views of Plato himself rather than the generally skeptical stance of the historical Socrates, who had been Plato’s teacher. (“Socrates” is the main character in most of Plato’s dialogues.) The middle dialogues are literary as well as philosophical masterpieces, containing sensitive portrayals of characters and their interactions, dazzling displays of rhetoric, and striking and memorable tropes and myths, all designed to set off their leisurely explorations of philosophy.

In the Republic, Plato undertakes to show what justice is and why it is in each person’s best interest to be just. Although the dialogue starts from the question “Why should I be just?,” Socrates proposes that this inquiry can be advanced by examining justice “writ large” in an ideal state. Thus, the political discussion is undertaken to aid the ethical one. According to Plato, the ideal state comprises three social classes: rulers, guardians (or soldiers), and producers (e.g., farmers and craftsmen). The rulers, who are philosophers, pursue the good of the entire state on the basis of their knowledge of the form of the Good and the form of the Just—both being abstract essences, knowable only by the mind, through which things or individuals in the sensible world are, to varying degrees, good or just, respectively. Political justice, then, is the condition of a state in which each social class performs its role properly, including by not attempting to perform the role of any other class.

More From Britannica Plato: Happiness and virtue

Corresponding to the three social classes are the three parts of the individual soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—each of which has a particular object or desire. Thus, reason desires truth and the good of the whole individual, spirit is preoccupied with honour and competitive values, and appetite has the traditional low tastes for food, drink, and sex. Justice in the individual, or ethical justice, is a condition analogous to that of political justice—a state of psychic harmony in which each part of the soul performs its role properly. Thus, reason understands the form of the Good and desires the actual good of the individual, and the other two parts of the soul desire what it is good for them to desire, so that spirit and appetite are activated by things that are healthy and proper.

The middle books of the Republic contain a sketch of Plato’s views on knowledge and reality and feature the famous figures of the Sun and the Cave, among others. The position occupied by the form of the Good in the intelligible world is the same as that occupied by the Sun in the visible world: thus, the Good is responsible for the being and intelligibility of the objects of thought. The usual cognitive condition of human beings is likened to that of prisoners chained in an underground cave, with a great fire behind them and a raised wall in between. The prisoners are chained in position and so are able to see only shadows cast on the facing wall by statues moved along the wall behind them. They take these shadows to be reality. The account of the progress that they would achieve if they were to go aboveground and see the real world in the light of the Sun features the notion of knowledge as enlightenment. Plato proposes a concrete sequence of mathematical studies, ending with harmonics, that would prepare future rulers to engage in dialectic, whose task is to say of each thing what it is—i.e., to specify its nature by giving a real, rather than merely lexical, definition. The dialogue concludes with a myth concerning the fate of souls after death. See also Political philosophy: Plato.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

Allan Bloom

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Philosophy & Religion

Philosophers

Allan Bloom

American philosopher and author

Alternate titles: Allan David Bloom

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Edit History

Allan Bloom, in full Allan David Bloom, (born Sept. 14, 1930, Indianapolis, Ind., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1992, Chicago, Ill.), American philosopher and writer best remembered for his provocative best-seller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987). He was also known for his scholarly volumes of interpretive essays and translations of works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Plato.

Born: September 14, 1930 Indianapolis Indiana

Died: October 7, 1992 (aged 62) Chicago Illinois

Notable Works: “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”

Subjects Of Study: higher education

Bloom received a Ph.D. in 1955 from the University of Chicago, where, under the tutelage of the German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss, he became a devotee of the Western classics and a proponent of the philosophical tenet of “transcultural truth.” He taught at the University of Chicago (1955–60) and Yale (1962–63) and Cornell (1963–70) universities and was on the faculties of several foreign universities. He published such well-received works as Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), a collection of essays, and a translation of Plato’s Republic (1968).

Britannica Quiz Philosophy 101

In 1969 a group of students took control of Cornell’s administration building and demanded that certain mandatory classes be dropped in favour of those deemed more “relevant” to them. After the university yielded to their demands, Bloom tendered his resignation, and in 1979 he returned to the University of Chicago. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom argued that universities no longer taught students how to think and that students, especially those attending the top schools, were unconcerned about the lessons of the past or about examining ideas in a historical context. His blistering critique, which offered no solutions to the crisis in education, blamed misguided curricula, rock music, television, and academic elitism for the spiritual impoverishment of students. A later collection of essays, Giants and Dwarfs, was published in 1990. Bloom’s Love and Friendship (1993) and Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (2000) appeared posthumously.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.

In the Republic, Plato undertakes to show what justice is and why it is in each person’s best interest to be just. Although the dialogue starts from the question “Why should I be just?,” Socrates proposes that this inquiry can be advanced by examining justice “writ large” in an ideal state. Thus, the political discussion is undertaken to aid the ethical one. According to Plato, the ideal state comprises three social classes: rulers, guardians (or soldiers), and producers (e.g., farmers and craftsmen). The rulers, who are philosophers, pursue the good of the entire state on the basis of their knowledge of the form of the Good and the form of the Just—both being abstract essences, knowable only by the mind, through which things or individuals in the sensible world are, to varying degrees, good or just, respectively. Political justice, then, is the condition of a state in which each social class performs its role properly, including by not attempting to perform the role of any other class. 

Corresponding to the three social classes are the three parts of the individual soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—each of which has a particular object or desire. Thus, reason desires truth and the good of the whole individual, spirit is preoccupied with honour and competitive values, and appetite has the traditional low tastes for food, drink, and sex. Justice in the individual, or ethical justice, is a condition analogous to that of political justice—a state of psychic harmony in which each part of the soul performs its role properly. Thus, reason understands the form of the Good and desires the actual good of the individual, and the other two parts of the soul desire what it is good for them to desire, so that spirit and appetite are activated by things that are healthy and proper.

The middle books of the Republic contain a sketch of Plato’s views on knowledge and reality and feature the famous figures of the Sun and the Cave, among others. The position occupied by the form of the Good in the intelligible world is the same as that occupied by the Sun in the visible world: thus, the Good is responsible for the being and intelligibility of the objects of thought. The usual cognitive condition of human beings is likened to that of prisoners chained in an underground cave, with a great fire behind them and a raised wall in between. The prisoners are chained in position and so are able to see only shadows cast on the facing wall by statues moved along the wall behind them. They take these shadows to be reality. The account of the progress that they would achieve if they were to go aboveground and see the real world in the light of the Sun features the notion of knowledge as enlightenment. Plato proposes a concrete sequence of mathematical studies, ending with harmonics, that would prepare future rulers to engage in dialectic, whose task is to say of each thing what it is—i.e., to specify its nature by giving a real, rather than merely lexical, definition. The dialogue concludes with a myth concerning the fate of souls after death. See also Political philosophy: Plato.

The ministry of truth is real?

 How Media and the Medical Establishment Suppressed COVID Heterodoxy

Peter Biles 

Last month, the peer-reviewed journal Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning, and Policy published an important article on COVID-related censorship. I’ve written about it already here. The researchers introduced their article by defining some terms, recalling certain COVID controversies, and noting how multiple respected medical professionals were hurt in the fallout of the pandemic controversy. 

They went on to describe the specific experiences of their study participants, including 13 established doctors, scientists, and medical professionals who were censored, suppressed, or otherwise punished for expressing dissent with regard to the prevailing COVID-19 orthodoxy. All those who participated have either an MD or PhD in their respective fields, and four have both. These are not, then, conspiracy types or Internet trolls. They are reputable minds who simply transgressed against the “consensus” view, which, as I said in my earlier article, has changed drastically since March 2020. 

Standing and Credibility 

The researchers kept these participants anonymous to protect them, but emphasized their standing and credibility. In interviews, they gathered firsthand quotes to show just how harsh and brazen the censorship was in some cases, listing the tactics the medical establishment and media used against them. They reported: 

Tactics of censorship and suppression described by our respondents include exclusion, derogatory labelling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication. 

The study respondents noted that publications that formerly endorsed and published them began excluding their work and refusing to publish or interview them. One participant said,  

Neither X nor Y [two major newspapers in the respondent’s country] wanted to publish my articles. Without a proper explanation. …It was quite blatant, that they stopped accepting articles expressing a different opinion from that of the Ministry of Health (MOH). The number of journalists who can really be talked to, who are willing to listen to another opinion, to publish, has been greatly reduced, and most health reporters today are very biased towards the MOH. 

Beyond mere exclusion from publication privileges, respondents also experienced outright denigration. News headlines called them out for their criticisms, defaming them, harming their reputations, and distorting their views. One participant said, “I have been vilified…I’ve been called a quack…, an anti-vaxxer and a COVID denier, a conspiracy theorist.” Facing ridicule of that sort, other likeminded medical professionals understandably kept silent. So, the silencing tactic may have suppressed many more medical professionals, as the researchers note in their introduction.  

Not the Only Casualties 

The study also showed how reputations weren’t the only casualties. Whole careers were destroyed. Another respondent reported: 

I lost my job…, I was working for the last 20 years in X [the institution’s name]… And so, the media started coming to X… there was a concerted effort to… ruin my reputation, even though, this is unbelievable, they had the lowest death rate basically in the world, and the doctor who brought it to them, gets vilified and slandered. So, I left on my own…  

Other respondents described being censored by social media. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, removed heterodox posts, and in some cases, suspended the respondent’s account. That Twitter blacklisted and “shadow-banned” prominent medical experts like Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has since been confirmed. One study participant said: 

I’ve always had videos, just my teaching material I’ve been putting up on YouTube…, but I also started to put up materials around this, just sort of talking through some of the research… looking at the vaccine efficacy data… YouTube started taking it down. And so now…, I cannot post, I can’t even mention vaccines, because within seconds, as soon as I’m actually trying to upload the video, YouTube will say this video goes against our guidelines… 

No Explanation or Due Process 

Beyond media censorship, the medical establishment suppressed research and viewpoint diversity. Academic institutions, peer-reviewed journals, and scientific committees played a hand in excluding certain respondents and refusing to give their voices a fair hearing. One respondent said he was “stripped” from a committee and editorial position with no explanation or due process. The respondent had been on this particular committee for decades, but still was cut off without a word. In addition, the researchers noted that some respondents “recounted how their research had been retracted by the journal after publication.” During the pandemic, it became increasingly difficult for some of the respondents to publish in journals where their work had been formerly welcomed. 

The study went on to document how the participants initially responded to these tactics of suppression, and the tactics they used to fight back. I’ll cover that in my next and final post in this series.

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XIII

Darwinism's Predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter

The only figure in Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species, showed how he envisioned species branching off of one another. Similar species have a relatively recent common ancestor and have had limited time to diverge from each other. This means that their genes should be similar. Entirely new genes, for instance, would not have enough time to evolve. As François Jacob explained in an influential paper from 1977, “The probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero.” (Jacob) Any newly created gene would have to arise from a duplication and modification of a pre-existing gene. (Zhou et. al.; Ohno) But such a new gene would retain significant similarity to its progenitor gene. Indeed, for decades evolutionists have cited minor genetic differences between similar species as a confirmation of this important prediction. (Berra, 20; Futuyma, 50; Johnson and Raven, 287; Jukes, 120; Mayr, 35)

 

But this prediction has been falsified as many unexpected genetic differences have been discovered amongst a wide range of allied species. (Pilcher) As much as a third of the genes in a given species may be unique, and even different variants within the same species have large numbers of genes unique to each variant. Different variants of the Escherichia coli bacteria, for instance, each have hundreds of unique genes. (Daubin and Ochman)

Significant genetic differences were also found between different fruit fly species. Thousands of genes showed up missing in many of the species, and some genes showed up in only a single species. (Levine et. al.) As one science writer put it, “an astonishing 12 per cent of recently evolved genes in fruit flies appear to have evolved from scratch.” (Le Page) These novel genes must have evolved over a few million years, a time period previously considered to allow only for minor genetic changes. (Begun et. al.; Chen et. al., 2007)

 

Initially some evolutionists thought these surprising results would be resolved when more genomes were analyzed. They predicted that similar copies of these genes would be found in other species. But instead each new genome has revealed yet more novel genes. (Curtis et. al.; Marsden et. al.; Pilcher)

 

Next evolutionists thought that these rapidly-evolving unique genes must not code for functional or important proteins. But again, many of the unique proteins were in fact found to play essential roles. (Chen, Zhang and Long 1010; Daubin and Ochman; Pilcher) As one researcher explained, “This goes against the textbooks, which say the genes encoding essential functions were created in ancient times.” (Pilcher)

References 

Begun, D., H. Lindfors, A. Kern, C. Jones. 2007. “Evidence for de novo evolution of testis-expressed genes in the Drosophila yakuba/Drosophila erecta clade.” Genetics 176:1131-1137.

 

Berra, Tim. 1990. Evolution and the Myth of Creationism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 

Chen, S., H. Cheng, D. Barbash, H. Yang. 2007. “Evolution of hydra, a recently evolved testis-expressed gene with nine alternative first exons in Drosophila melanogaster.” PLoS Genetics 3.

 

Chen, S., Y. Zhang, M. Long. 2010. “New Genes in Drosophila Quickly Become Essential.” Science 330:1682-1685.

 

Curtis, B., et. al. 2012. “Algal genomes reveal evolutionary mosaicism and the fate of nucleomorphs.” Nature 492:59-65.

 

Daubin, V., H. Ochman. 2004. “Bacterial genomes as new gene homes: The genealogy of ORFans in E. coli.” Genome Research 14:1036-1042.

 

Futuyma, Douglas. 1982. Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution. New York: Pantheon Books.

 

Jacob, François. 1977. “Evolution and tinkering.” Science 196:1161-1166.

 

Johnson, G., P. Raven. 2004. Biology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

 

Jukes, Thomas. 1983. “Molecular evidence for evolution” in: Scientists Confront Creationism, ed. Laurie Godfrey. New York: W. W. Norton.

 

Le Page, M. 2008. “Recipes for life: How genes evolve.” New Scientist, November 24.

 

Levine, M., C. Jones, A. Kern, H. Lindfors, D. Begun. 2006. “Novel genes derived from noncoding DNA in Drosophila melanogaster are frequently X-linked and exhibit testis-biased expression.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103: 9935-9939.

 

Marsden, R. et. al. 2006. “Comprehensive genome analysis of 203 genomes provides structural genomics with new insights into protein family space.” Nucleic Acids Research 34:1066-1080.

 

Mayr, Ernst. 2001. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books.

 

Ohno, Susumu. 1970. Evolution by Gene Duplication. Heidelberg: Springer.

 

Pilcher, Helen. 2013. “All Alone.” NewScientist January 19.

Zhou, Q., G. Zhang, Y. Zhang, et. al. 2008. “On the origin of new genes in Drosophila.” Genome Research 18:1446-1455.

The God hypothesis;a danger to real science?

Joana Xavier, Skepticism About Design, and a Fable About a Gray Parrot with an iPad 

Paul Nelson 

For years, co-workers and I have exchanged, and encouraged others to consult, this outstanding review article on systems biology and defining minimal cells. Read it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. In light of the article’s excellence, we began to follow the publications of the first author, Joana Xavier of University College London, a young origin-of-life researcher who has steadily pursued questions of central importance. 

Xavier’s strong track record, therefore, had us marching straight over to YouTube to watch her discussion with the maverick theoretician Perry Marshall ­— where she said this about Steve Meyer’s first book, Signature in the Cell (2009):

But about intelligent design. Let me tell you, Perry, I read Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer…And I must tell you, I found it one of the best books I’ve read, in terms of really putting the finger on the questions. 

That was her positive assessment, which she repeated a few moments later in the interview. But her take on ID itself? 

What I didn’t like was the final answer, of course…I think that we must have a more naturalistic answer to these processes. There must be. Otherwise, I’ll be out of a job.

An understandable response, which invites a closer look. 

Responding to Xavier’s Skepticism About Design 

Think in terms of tradeoffs. If design turns out to be true — let’s say, for the origin of life — then accepting the ID hypothesis as the best supported among the competitors does require one to stop chasing after other hypotheses, by definition naturalistic, which do not appeal to design. That’s the straight-up logic.

But if, like Dr. Xavier, one conceives of scientific explanation as employing only non-intelligent causes, grounded ultimately in undirected physics, design may look like a poor tradeoff at best, where the whole point of science is being surrendered for little or nothing in return. Not much of a deal.

Consider a fable, however, which I’ve told to co-workers and students over the past few years. The fable implicitly acknowledges that, for most scientists since Darwin’s time — especially for biologists — inferences to design may appear fantastically impossible, departing science proper for the wastelands of metaphysics or theology, surrendering the established goals of scientific inquiry in exchange for a self-administered job termination pink slip.

We need to think more deeply. Here’s the fable.

How Does the Strip Mall Financial Guy Do It? 

One day, on a hunch, you give five thousand dollars to a local investment advisor, whose modest office sits in a nearby strip mall. You tell him that 2 to 3 percent yields annually on your initial deposit would be fine.

But the return on your portfolio, year after year, is astonishing. You consistently beat the market by several percentage points, and the gains are bona fide. Real money. Despite unimpressive appearances, this strip mall financial advisor knows exactly where to put your cash.

Finally, your curiosity gets the better of you. You stop into the office, and insist that the advisor tell you his investment strategy.

Sheepishly, he agrees — but makes you promise not to tell anyone. “They won’t believe you,” he says, “and I’ll be ruined. This works, but God only knows why.”

The advisor leads you into a back room. There, perched opposite an iPad (showing equity and bond offerings), is a large gray parrot. From time to time, the parrot pecks at the iPad, and a server records the hits. “There,” says the advisor, “that’s how we do it.”

Then the parrot looks at you from his perch. Then the parrot looks at you from his perch.

“Now that you know the secret,” says the parrot, “are you going to give the money back?”

The Moral of the Fable 

Of course, parrots don’t make investment picks. But neither do little red hens harvest wheat and make bread,or tortoises and hares run foot races. The gray parrot and his iPad are a fable, after all. As such, the fable does have a point.

For most biologists, explaining by design isn’t so much wrong as it is a category error. With design, normal scientific theory evaluation criteria, such as testing by observation, seem to have disappeared altogether. For these biologists, without the familiar methods, it isn’t simply difficult to say if design is true or false, in any given case — it’s impossible. As my undergraduate philosophy of science teacher Carl Hempel used to say, the venture seems as hopeless as trying to take the square root of Abraham Lincoln.

In short, design inferences look impossible in a scientific context because the cause being invoked by design — a transcendent intelligence, irreducible to physics — is not, in principle, accessible to direct observation. Getting design to be scientifically fruitful, therefore, looks as unlikely as a gray parrot giving investment advice.

But direct observation is not the only path to empirical content. Philosopher of science Philip Kitcher, whom no one would mistake for a friend of ID, expressed this clearly forty years ago, in relation to what he called “creationism”: 

Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more unscientific than postulating unobserved particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended.

PHILIP KITCHER, ABUSING SCIENCE: THE CASE AGAINST CREATION (CAMBRIDGE MA: MIT PRESS, 1982), P. 125 

This outlook focuses on design as hypothesis formation, leading to novel consequences — not on using design as (for instance) a proof of God’s existence. 

Novel consequences that hold up under scrutiny represent scientific money in the bank. The ongoing ID 3.0 research effort, which continues to expand into new areas, intends to provide just that “money in the bank.” Unfortunately, to protect the (mostly younger) scientists, who are pursuing ID 3.0 projects, from career-destroying attacks by ID critics, the most interesting research needs to be kept, at least for the time being, under wraps. 

A Sizable Measure of Courage 

In that respect, using the gray parrot fable to respond to skepticism of design, such as expressed by Joana Xavier, requires at the moment a sizable measure of courage: namely, that the fruitful novel consequences — the money in the bank — will be forthcoming. In a sense strongly parallel to financial investment, risk is involved.

“But you guys haven’t proved God’s existence!”

Shrug. If that’s your worry, you’ll never get over it. If you have married yourself to naturalism, there is nothing anyone can do about that.

But be brave, and try a design hypothesis. William Harvey did. And no one is going to give back the reality that blood circulates. It’s money in the bank.

 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XII

 Darwinism's predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

Evolution expects the species to fall into a common descent pattern. Therefore a particular lineage should not have highly differentiated, unique and complex designs, when compared to neighboring species. But this has been increasingly found to be the case, so much so that this pattern now has its own name—lineage-specific biology.

 

For example, transcription factors are proteins that bind to DNA and regulate which genes are expressed. Yet despite the importance of these proteins, their DNA binding sites vary dramatically across different species. As one report explained, “It was widely assumed that, like the sequences of the genes themselves, these transcription factor binding sites would be highly conserved throughout evolution. However, this turns out not to be the case in mammals.” (Rewiring of gene regulation across 300 million years of evolution) Evolutionists were surprised when transcription factor binding sites were found to be not conserved between mice and men, (Kunarso et. al.) between various other vertebrates, and even between different species of yeast. So now evolution is believed to have performed a massive, lineage-specific “rewiring” of cellular regulatory networks. (Pennacchio and Visel) 

There are many more such examples of lineage-specific biology. Although flowers have four basic parts: sepals, petals, stamens and carpels, the daffodil’s trumpet is fundamentally different and must be an evolutionary “novelty.” (Oxford scientists say trumpets in daffodils are ‘new organ’) Out of the thousands of cockroach species, Saltoblattella montistabularis from South Africa is the only one that leaps. With its spring-loaded hind legs it accelerates at 23 g’s and out jumps even grass hoppers. (Picker, Colville and Burrows) An important immune system component, which is highly conserved across the vertebrates, is mysteriously absent in the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua. (Star, et. al.) The brown algae, Ectocarpus siliculosus, has unique enzymes for biosynthesis and other tasks. (Cock) And the algae Bigelowiella natans has ten thousand unique genes and highly complex gene splicing machinery never before seen in a unicellular organism. It is, as one evolutionist explained, “unprecedented and truly remarkable for a unicellular organism.” (Tiny algae shed light on photosynthesis as a dynamic property)

 

Another fascinating example of lineage-specific biology are the many peculiar morphological and molecular novelties found in disparate, unrelated unicellular protists. As one study concluded, “Both euglenozoans and alveolates have a reputation for ‘doing things their own way,’ which is to say that they have developed seemingly unique ways to build important cellular structures or carry out molecular tasks critical for their survival. Why such hotspots for the evolution of novel solutions to problems should exist in the tree of life is not entirely clear.” (Lukes, Leander and Keeling, 2009a) Or as one evolutionist exclaimed, “this is totally crazy.” (Lukes, Leander and Keeling, 2009b)

References 

Cock, J., et al. 2010. “The Ectocarpus genome and the independent evolution of multicellularity in brown algae.” Nature 465:617-621.

 

Kunarso G., et. al. 2010. “Transposable elements have rewired the core regulatory network of human embryonic stem cells.” Nature Genetics 42:631-634.

 

Lukes, J., B. Leander, P. Keeling. 2009. “Cascades of convergent evolution: the corresponding evolutionary histories of euglenozoans and dinoflagellates.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 Suppl 1:9963-9970.

 

Lukes, J., B. Leander, P. Keeling. 2009. “The corresponding evolutionary histories of euglenozoans and dinoflagellates: cascades of convergent evolution or accumulation of oddities?.” The National Academies. http://sackler.nasmediaonline.org/2009/darwin/julius_lukes/julius_lukes.html

 

“Oxford scientists say trumpets in daffodils are ‘new organ’.” 2011. BBC News February 28. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-12598054

 

Pennacchio, L., A. Visel. 2010. “Limits of sequence and functional conservation.” Nature Genetics 42:557-558.

 

Picker, M., J. Colville, M. Burrows. 2012. “A cockroach that jumps.” Biology Letters 8:390-392.

 

“Rewiring of gene regulation across 300 million years of evolution.” 2010. ScienceDaily April 12. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100409093211.htm

 

Star, B., et. al. 2011. “The genome sequence of Atlantic cod reveals a unique immune system.” Nature 477:207–210.

“Tiny algae shed light on photosynthesis as a dynamic property.” 2012. ScienceDaily November 28. http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2012/11/121128132253.htm

File under "well said." LXXXVII

 "Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go." 

Henry Austin Dobson.

The quest for straight answers rolls on.

Romans 10:9KJV"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that (the)God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." 

Who/what is THE God (grk.ho theos)who/which raised the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead?

 

Sons of the original firemaker?

Early Humans Were More Sophisticated than We Thought 

Denyse O'Leary 

Recent findings suggest that some things we take for granted in human civilizations are much older than thought. Now, these findings are provisional but they are worth looking at.

Some owl stones from 5,500 and 4,750 years ago may be children’s art 

But new research suggests the palm-sized plaques decorated in geometric patterns and with two engraved circles at the top might be the work of children.

Numbering in the thousands and made from slate, the owl-like objects — previously dated the stone objects to be between 5,500 and 4,750 years old — may be “the archaeological trace of playful and learning activities carried out by youngsters,” according to the team of Spanish researchers behind the new study…

They suggest kids would have been able to easily engrave slate using pointed tools made of flint, quartz, or copper, creating ‘body’ patterns that emulate the streaked plumage of owls, and the circles for eyes are unmistakably owl-like, casting an unwavering stare straight at the observer.

The “owliness” of the designs is comparable to the drawing skills of modern school children who depict owls in much the same way. 

CLARE WATSON, “THOUSANDS OF MYSTERIOUS ‘OWL’ STONES MAY BE THE WORK OF ANCIENT CHILDREN” AT SCIENCE ALERT (DECEMBER 7, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

The fact that the owl stones might have been made by children does not, the researchers suggest, rule out the possibility that they might have had a ritual significance. Evolutionary biologist Juan Negro and colleagues suggest, “young people might have paid homage to their elders by leaving objects they had made together as tributes to the deceased.” (Science Alert) 

So CrayolaTM didn’t invent the idea of children’s creativity.

Now, About Cooking … 70,000 Years Ago

Neanderthals were not just downing raw hunks of meat 70,000 years ago, as many of us have assumed:Researchers analyzed charred food remains at two locations — the Shanidar Cave in Iraq’s Zagros Mountains and the Franchthi Cave in Greece — to gain insight into how Neanderthals and early modern humans prepared food. They found evidence of cooking involving a variety of ingredients, processes and deliberate decisions…

The researchers’ analysis suggests that early modern humans and Neanderthals weren’t just consuming protein from animals; they had complex diets that consisted of a wide selection of plants and varied depending on location. They also used “a range of tricks to make their food more palatable” such as soaking and pounding, per a statement from the University of Liverpool… For example, wild nuts and grasses were often combined with pulses, like lentils, and wild mustard.” 

JACQUELYNE GERMAIN, “NEANDERTHALS COOKED SURPRISINGLY COMPLEX MEALS” AT SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 30, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

Let’s just say, the Neanderthals have gotten smarter as we have gotten to know them better.

Homo Naledi Used Fire, Say Researchers

Now let’s go waaay back to Homo naledi — first unearthed in 2015 in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. The remains of the 15 individuals date to between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. It turns out that they may have lit fires in their caves: 

Researchers have found remnants of small fireplaces and sooty wall and ceiling smudges in passages and chambers throughout South Africa’s Rising Star cave complex, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger announced in a December 1 lecture hosted by the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C.

“Signs of fire use are everywhere in this cave system,” said Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg…

Such behavior has not been attributed to H. naledi before, largely because of its small brain. But it’s now clear that a brain roughly one-third the size of human brains today still enabled H. naledi to achieve control of fire, Berger contends…

Meanwhile, expedition codirector and Wits paleoanthropologist Keneiloe Molopyane led excavations of a nearby cave chamber. There, the researchers uncovered two small fireplaces containing charred bits of wood, and burned bones of antelopes and other animals. Remains of a fireplace and nearby burned animal bones were then discovered in a more remote cave chamber where H. naledi fossils have been found, Berger said. 

BRUCE BOWER, “HOMO NALEDI MAY HAVE LIT FIRES IN UNDERGROUND CAVES AT LEAST 236,000 YEARS AGO” AT SCIENCE NEWS (DECEMBER 2, 2022) HERE’S THE LECTURE ANNOUNCEMENT. 

One hitch is that the charred wood, bones, etc. have yet to be dated, to see if they come from the same layers as the Homo naledi fossils. But there are currently no other known groups that could have made the fires. 

It’s interesting to note that the basics of human culture seem to undergo much less development than we think. The culture may appear at about the same time as the humans.

You may also wish to read: Why is Neanderthal art considered controversial? It makes sense that whenever humans started to wonder about life, we started to create art that helps us think about it. Science writer Michael Marshall reports that some researchers are accused of banning others from taking samples that would prove a Neanderthal was the artist.

 

Darwinism's flag has fallen?

 “Crazy Stuff’? Dave Farina on the Waiting Time Problem 

Günter Bechly 

I now conclude my lengthy response to YouTuber “Professor Dave” aka Dave Farina, who published a video (Farina 2022) attacking Stephen Meyer and intelligent design. I have responded minute by minute, tracking my comments with timecodes in square brackets. I regret the length of this series, which is justified only by the fact that Farina is a popular would-be science educator. The video is tedious and grating, and thus I am glad to be done with it. This is the seventh and final post in this series. Find the rest here, here, here, here, here, and here.

[TC 1:05:55] Last but not least, we definitely have to address another mathematical argument I currently happen to work and publish about (Hössjer et al. 2018, 2021, Bechly et al. in prep.), which is the waiting time problem that Farina calls “crazy stuff.”

The formulation “crazy stuff” of course implicitly suggests that this is a pseudo-problem invented by evil and stupid creationists. Farina mostly relies on a silly and embarrassingly incompetent “debunking” video by another YouTuber, who has not even understood the problem. Both chaps seem to be totally unaware that the waiting time problem has a long history and has been much discussed in mainstream science (especially population genetics) and even plays an important role in cancer research. 

Farina would have done better if he had talked with Harvard professor Martin Nowak, who is an evolutionary biologist and expert on the waiting time problem. Here are just a few references of renowned scientists publishing about this “crazy stuff”: Bodmer (1970), Karlin (1973), Christiansen et al. (1998), Schweinsberg (2008), Durrett et al. (2009), Behrens et al. (2012), and Chatterjee et al. (2014). It was not before Behe & Snoke (2004, 2005) and Behe (2007) that the waiting time problem was recognized as an argument for intelligent design. Durrett & Schmidt (2008) attempted to refute Behe but arrived at a prohibitive waiting time of 216 million years for a single coordinated mutation in human evolution, while only about 6 million years are available since the origin of the human lineage from a common ancestor with chimps. Behe arrived at 1015 years for such a mutation in humans (Behe 2007: 61) by translating empirical data of an actual waiting time for a coordinated mutation that conveyed chloroquine drug resistance in Malaria. He simply applied these empirical findings to humans, considering their much lower population size and much longer generation time. Durrett & Schmidt’s result was based on a mathematical model, which of course must make certain simplifications that can introduce errors. When such model calculations conflict with hard empirical data, we should trust the empirical data as pointing closer to the truth. Anyway, both numbers are prohibitive and refute the feasibility of a Darwinian mechanism of macroevolution. 

Four Alleged Problems 

[TC 1:07:23] Farina raises four alleged problems as objections against the waiting time argument:

First, he raises the dreadful objection that boils down to the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” by saying that nature does not go for specific mutations as a target but is totally random. This argument fails because it presupposes the existence of many targets, which is contradicted by the rarity of function in the search space for proteins (see the work of Douglas Axe) and by the common phenomenon of convergence. The argument also fails to recognize that life cannot allow for periods of maladaptation only to descend a local peak of the fitness landscape to explore other ones. Instead, life has to further adapt to its local fitness peak, which requires specific solutions for specific problems. It’s not like any beneficial mutation will do. A stem whale would have no use for a mutation that would be beneficial for a stem bird, such as improving skeletal pneumaticity.

Second, he totally fails to grasp the concept of coordinated mutations by calling it meaningless. He thinks that every individual mutation can be selected for, which shows he didn’t get the point that in coordinated mutations each individual mutation is neutral and thus in principle cannot be selected for.

Third, he claims that the waiting time problem implies that mutations occur in a specific sequence, which is simply false.

Finally, he claims that the waiting time problem ignores recombination, which according to Farina “baselessly discounts the profound evolutionary benefit” and is “dramatically accelerating the accumulation of beneficial mutations.” This shows how unaware Farina is of the actual technical literature, because the influence of recombination on the waiting time problem has been studied by Christiansen et al. (1998), who have shown that: “Recombination lowers the waiting time until a new genotypic combination first appears, but the effect is SMALL [my emphasis] compared to that of the mutation rate and population size.”

[TC 1:08:25] Farina finally wonders how papers by ID proponents on the waiting time problem could somehow make it into peer-reviewed journals and shows our paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (Hössjer et al. 2021). Well, that’s easy: because it is good peer-reviewed science, which something Farina has never achieved. 

Confused about Intelligent Design 

[TC 1:08:48] Farina briefly elaborates on mechanisms of speciation and mentions observed speciation events like the marbled crayfish as “another dirty secret that many creationists don’t like to acknowledge.” Of course, such evidence for speciation is completely irrelevant, because neither intelligent design proponents nor even young earth creationists dispute speciation. Nobody doubts that, say, a founder species of Darwin finches could potentially speciate into more than a dozen relatively similar species (or semi-species) on the Galápagos Islands. So what? Farina obviously is very much confused about ID theory.

[TC 1:09:32] Farina then implies that speciation (microevolution) extrapolated over long periods of time can explain the origin of biological novelty (macroevolution). This is not only contradicted by the waiting time problem, but also by another problem that I recently introduced with the so-called “species pair challenge” (Bechly 2022g, 2022h). There clearly are limits to what neo-Darwinian evolution can achieve. Thus, Darwinism is not wrong per se, but has a much narrower realm of applicability than has been thought.

[TC 1:10:14] Farina lists examples of genes that are conserved and shared by different clades of organisms as evidence for an evolutionary scenario rather than design. Again, he confuses evidence for common descent, which is happily granted, with evidence for an unguided process of transformation, which is virtually non-existent. He simply does not get it. 

[TC 1:11:13] Farina ends with the claim that the “concept of genetic information” as Meyer applies it “is so vague that it’s unusable” and that “there are no metrics for determining how much information any given sequence of DNA has.” This is nonsense. Very precise scientific measures for the information content of DNA have indeed been suggested already by Gatlin (1966) and by many other later studies (e.g., Rao et al. 1979, Schneider 1997, Dix et al. 2006, and Wills 2016).

[TC 1:12:03] Farina triumphantly concludes that he debunked Meyer’s two main arguments:

“1) Some lies about the Cambrian explosion means intelligent design is true.”

“2) I don’t understand genetics even a little bit so intelligent design is true.”

According to Farina, Meyer’s only strategy is: 

“Premise: a lie about science”

“Conclusion: God did it!”

That’s not a joke or an exaggeration. Go to his video and check that he literally makes these ridiculous claims. Of course, Meyer’s argumentation isn’t anything remotely similar to this ludicrous caricature nor did Farina successfully debunk anything. Also, Meyer explicitly and thoroughly rejects a “God of the gaps” argument from ignorance (Klinghoffer 2018 and this video), which is by far the most trite stereotype against ID that Farina could bring up [TC 1:13:15]. Luskin (2014) carefully goes through Meyer’s argument for design as presented in Darwin’s Doubt and shows precisely why it is not a “gaps”-based argument. Instead of debunking Meyer, Farina only showed that he is not shy about using the crudest of crude propaganda tactics.

There is one last point. Farina predicts that ID proponents will desperately respond to his hit piece that he is just an “unqualified uncredentialled loser.” He said it, I didn’t. But who am I to disagree? However, the fact that Farina lacks formal credentials is not his problem. I know tons of non-PhDs who can speak authoritatively on scientific issues. Farina isn’t one of them, and his rudeness does not add to his authority, as he seems to think. He rightfully deserves to be called out for his behavior as well as his sloppy work. He is not just an off-putting communicator but also bad at appreciating scientific controversies, an unfortunate combo for someone who wants to teach science to young people. 

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