Saturday, 15 April 2023

The scientific case for the design inference?

From JEHOVAH'S thumb print as hypothesis to JEHOVAH'S thumb print as axiom?

Is a New Design-Based Paradigm of Biology Emerging?

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID The Future, host Dr. Casey Luskin sits down with Dr. Brian Miller to begin a thought-provoking conversation about design in biology. Miller is Research Coordinator at the Center for Science & Culture at Discovery Institute. He contributed a chapter to the recently published book Science and Faith in Dialogue titled “Engineering Principles Explain Biological Systems Better Than Evolutionary Theory.” Miller describes several lines of evidence in biology that collectively suggest that teleology, or purpose, is central to life. He also reports that optimality is becoming a powerful tool of prediction in biology, with more biologists returning to the use of design-based assumptions, tools, models, and language to study the natural world. This is Part 1 of an interview. Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Friday, 14 April 2023

Saving civil discourse?

Darwinism imperilled by yet another explosion?

Fossil Friday: The Abrupt Origin of Butterflies

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features a wonderful fossil of the nymphalid butterfly Prodryas persephone from the famous Eocene fossil locality of Florissant in Colorado. Even though the insect order Lepidoptera is represented by small caddisfly-like and moth-like taxa in Mesozoic sediments, there is no Mesozoic fossil record of real butterflies or any other “macrolepidopterans” (Sohn et al. 2012, 2015). They appear abruptly with modern families like Hesperiidae (Jong 2016), Pieridae, Papillionidae, and Nymphalidae in the Eocene, without any evidence for a gradual evolution of these modern butterfly families and totally contrary to evolutionist estimates, which placed their diversification in the Early Cretaceous (Wahlberg 2006, Heikkilä et al. 2012, Jong 2017). This phenomenon could rightfully be called a Tertiary Butterfly Explosion analogous to the Cambrian Explosion of animal phyla. It is yet another example of the general pattern of abrupt appearances of new biological groups in the fossil record that contradict any Darwinian expectations and better resonates with a design perspective.

The skilled trades just keeping making ever more sense (dollars?)

Pseudo-science is the mother of science?

On the borders of the unknown country?

So ,there is 'darwinism' and then there is 'Darwinism'?

Here is Why Steven Novella is Wrong About That Harvard Experiment

Cornelius G Hunter

Steven Novella, neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, has Commented on a recent Harvard University Experiment for visualizing bacterial adaptation to antibiotics. The Harvard researchers constructed a giant petri dish with spatially-varying antibiotics to watch how bacteria adapt over time and space (the researchers came up with a great name for the experiment: The microbial evolution and growth arena [MEGA]–plate). And adapt they did. Those adaptations, however, were instantly claimed as an example of evolution in action. The researchers wrote that the “MEGA-plate provides a versatile platform for studying microbial adaption and directly visualizing evolutionary dynamics.” And the press Release informed the public that the experiment provided “A powerful, unvarnished visualization of bacterial movement, death, and survival; evolution at work, visible to the naked eye.” Likewise, Novella called it “a nice demonstration of evolution at work in a limited context.” There’s only one problem: The experiment did not demonstrate evolution, it falsified evolution.

First off, Novella deserves some credit for acknowledging at least some limitations in the experiment’s results:

Of course, this one piece of evidence does not “prove” something as complex and far ranging as the evolution of life on Earth.

Novella also deserves credit for acknowledging that evolutionary change that requires a few mutations, rather than merely one, is a big problem. Novella has solutions which he believes resolve this problem (as we shall see below), but at least he acknowledges what too often is conveniently ignored.

What Novella does not acknowledge, however, is that bacteria adaptation research, over several decades now, has clearly shown non evolutionary change. For instance, bacterial adaptation has often been found to be rapid, and sensitive to the environmental challenge. In other words, when we look at the details, we do not find the evolutionary model of random variation slowly bringing about change, but rather environmentally directed or influenced variation.

That is not evolution.

And indeed, the Harvard experiment demonstrated, again, very rapid adaptation. In just 10 days the bacteria adapted to high doses of lethal antibiotic. As one of the researchers commented, “This is a stunning demonstration of how quickly microbes evolve.”

True, it is “stunning,” but “evolve” is not the correct term.

The microbes adapted.

The ability of organisms to adapt rapidly falls under the category of epigenetics, a term that encompasses a range of sophisticated mechanisms which promote adaptation which is sensitive to the environment. Given our knowledge of bacterial epigenetics, and how fast the bacteria responded in the Harvard experiment, it certainly is reasonable to think that epigenetics, of some sort, may have been at work.

Such epigenetic change is not a new facet of evolution, it contradicts evolution. Not only would such complex adaptation mechanisms be difficult to evolve via random mutations, they wouldn’t provide fitness improvement, and so would not be selected for, even if they did somehow arise from mutations.

Epigenetic mechanisms respond to future, unforeseen conditions. Their very existence contradicts evolution. So the Harvard experiment, rather than demonstrating evolution in action, is probably yet another example of epigenetic-based adaptation. If so, it would contradict evolution.

Another problem, that Michael Behe has pointed out, is that it appears that most of the mutations that occurred in the experiment served to shutdown genes. In other words, the mutations broke things, they did not build things. This is another way to see that this does not fit the evolutionary model. It’s devolution, not evolution. Novella begs to differ, and says Behe has made a big mistake:

Behe is wrong because there is no such thing as “devolution.” Evolution is simply heritable change, any change, and that change can create more complexity or more simplicity. Further, altering a protein does not “degrade” it – that notion is based on the false premise that there is a “correct” sequence of amino acids in any particular protein. Evolution just makes proteins different. Proteins perform “better” or “worse” only in so much that they contribute to the survival and reproduction of the individual. If it is better for the survival of the organism for an enzyme to be slower, then the slower enzyme is better for that organism.

First, Novella ignores the fact that many of the mutations introduced stop codons, and so did not merely slow an enzyme but rather shut it down altogether.

Secondly, it is not Behe here who is making the mistake, it is Novella. He says “Evolution is simply heritable change …”

But this is an equivocation.

On the one hand, evolutionists want to say that shutting down or slowing a gene is “evolution,” but on the other hand, evolutionists say that a fish turning into a giraffe is “evolution.”

Unfortunately evolutionists routinely make this equivocation. This is because they don’t think of it as an equivocation. In their adherence and promotion of the theory, the distinction is lost on them. All change just smears together in one big long process called evolution. You can see other examples of this Here and Here.

So the comments, press releases, and articles send a misleading message. Readers are told that the researchers have seen “evolution in action.” The message is clear: This is evolution, the evolution. But it isn’t. There is nothing in these findings that show us how a fish turns into a giraffe.

Multiple mutations

As mentioned above, Novella also believes that evolution coming up with designs requiring multiple mutations is not a problem. Novella’s reasoning is that while this would be a problem if most mutations are harmful, they aren’t. Most mutations are neutral, so evolutionary drift can introduce the many needed mutations, and once the set of required mutations are in place, then you have the new design.

This is a profound misunderstanding of the problem evolution faces. You can’t evolve a protein, for example, with drift. That most mutations are neutral does not suddenly resolve the curse of dimensionality and resolve this astronomical search problem. There just is no free lunch.

Similarly, Novella makes yet another profound mistake involving what he calls “the lottery fallacy.”

The first is basically the lottery fallacy – considering the odds of John Smith winning the lottery by chance alone and concluding it could not have happened by chance. Rather, you should consider the odds that anyone would win the lottery. This is actually pretty good. Behe looks at life on Earth and asks – what are the odds that this specific pathway or protein or whatever evolved by chance alone. He is failing to consider that there may have been billions of possible solutions or pathways down which that creature’s ancestors could have evolved. Species that failed to adapt either migrated to an environment in which they could survive, or they went extinct. In other words, Behe should not be asking what the odds are that this bit of complexity evolved, but rather what are the odds that any complexity evolved. It is difficult to know the number of potential complexities that never evolved – that number may dwarf the odds of any one bit evolving. Right there Behe’s entire premise is demolished …

This is a terribly flawed argument for several reasons. First, life needs proteins. All life that we know of needs proteins.

Thousands of proteins.

Yet proteins are far beyond evolution’s reach. It is true, per Novella’s point, that there are a whole lot of ways to make a given protein. There are many, many different amino acid sequences that give you a globin. But “many, many” is like a grain of sand compared to the astronomical amino acid sequence search space.

There just is no free lunch.

But Novella goes further than this, and this brings us to the second flaw. Novella is not merely arguing there are many different ways to construct life as we know it. He is pointing out that there are, or at least there could be, a whole bunch of different ways to make life, in the first place.

If you take them all together, you could have a pretty big set of possibilities. Perhaps it is astronomical. So what we got in this world—the life forms we observe, are not point designs in an otherwise lifeless design space. Rather, the design space could be chocked full of life forms. And hence, the evolution of life becomes likely, and “Right there Behe’s entire premise is demolished.”

What Novella is arguing for here is unobservable. He is going far beyond science, into an imaginary philosophical world of maybe’s.

Not only is Novella clearly appealing to the unobservable, but even that doesn’t work. At least for any common sense approach. There is no question that the design space is full of useless blobs of chemicals that do nothing. A speculative claim? No, that is what this thing called science has made abundantly clear to us. Even the simple case of a single protein reveals this. Only a relatively few mutations to most proteins rob them of their function. Protein function is known to dramatically reduce as different amino acids are swapped in.

Of course this is all obvious to anyone who understands how things work. Sure, Novella may be right that there are other, unknown, solutions to life. But that isn’t suddenly going to resolve evolution’s astronomical search problem. That problem was never contingent on the life we observe being the only possible life forms possible

Novella calls himself a skeptic. In fact, he is exactly the opposite.

The southern U.S megadrought?

Win win/lose lose.

2+2=5?

Thursday, 13 April 2023

On the propaganda industrial complex?

Urban farmer?

More red ink in the ledger re: Darwinism's simple beginning.

About That Genetic Code

Cornelius G Hunter

We Recently looked at the enormous problems that the DNA, or genetic, code pose for evolutionary theory. Here is a paper that seems to have come to the same conclusion. The authors argue that the underlying patterns of the genetic code are not likely to be due to “chance coupled with presumable evolutionary pathways,” (P-value < 10^-13), and conclude that they are “essentially irreducible to any natural origin.”

A common response from evolutionists, when presented with evidence such as this, is that we still don’t understand biology very well. This argument from ignorance goes all the way back to Darwin. He used it in Chapter 6 of Origins to discard the problem of evolving the electric organs in fish, such as the electric eel (which isn’t actually an eel). The Sage from Kent agreed that it is “impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs” evolved, but that was OK, because “we do not even know of what use they are.”

Setting aside the fact that Darwin’s argument from ignorance was a non-scientific fallacy, it also was a set up for failure. For now, a century and half later, we do know “what use they are.” And it has just gotten Worse for evolution.

Darwin’s argument has been demolished, once again demonstrating that arguments from ignorance, aside from being terrible arguments, are not good science.

The truth is, when evolutionists today claim that the many problems with their chance theory are due to a lack of knowledge, they are throwing up a smoke screen.

Yet more on when the thumb print of JEHOVAH is the logical conclusion.

Wednesday, 12 April 2023

What does "the science"say?

The Ascension of the eighth king?

UN Seeks Vast New Powers for Global Emergencies

Lawmakers and critics are sounding the alarm, but the White House supports the agenda

Alex Newman

The United Nations is seeking vast new powers and stronger “global governance” tools to deal with international emergencies such as pandemics and economic crises, a new U.N. policy brief has revealed, and the Biden administration appears to support the proposal.

The plan to create an “Emergency Platform,” which would involve a set of protocols activated during crises that could affect billions of people, has already drawn strong concern and criticism from U.S. policymakers and analysts.

Among those expressing concern is House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), whose committee oversees U.S. foreign policy and involvement in international organizations.

“We must be sure that any global protocol or platform operated by the U.N. respects U.S. national sovereignty and U.S. taxpayer dollars,” McCaul told The Epoch Times.

He also noted his concern that the proposed platform expands the authority and funding of the U.N. and the definitions of “emergency” and “crisis” to include, for instance, climate change.

U.N. documents and statements released in March by key leaders of the global organization make clear that climate change is a major piece of the U.N. emergencies agenda.

Other critics who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed concern about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) within the U.N., the global organization’s well-documented corruption problems, and its track record of dealing with previous emergencies.

“Allowing the U.N. to deal with this is the equivalent of putting the CCP in charge of global emergencies,” former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Kevin Moley told The Epoch Times.

In a policy brief dubbed “Our Common Agenda” headlined “Strengthening the International Response to Complex Shocks – An Emergency Platform,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres laid out his vision for empowering the global organization to deal with global crises.

“The challenges we face can only be addressed through stronger international cooperation,” Guterres declared, calling for “strengthening global governance” for current and future generations.

The policy brief builds on an earlier “Common Agenda” document and comes as U.N. leaders outline the plans for a “Summit of the Future” set to be held during the General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting in September.

If it gets a green light from member states, the global emergency protocols would be “triggered automatically” in case of a global crisis, “regardless of the type or nature of the crisis involved,” the U.N. chief said.

The protocols would bring all sorts of institutions together, including national governments, international institutions, and the private sector. Ultimately, all would have to recognize the “primary role of intergovernmental organs [such as U.N. agencies] in decision-making,” the document states.

“The Emergency Platform, once convened, would be a tool for the United Nations system to implement decisions taken by relevant organs,” according to the policy brief.

State Department Supportive

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department suggested that the Biden administration backs the plan.

“The administration has made clear its firm belief that U.S. national security is best served by engaging actively and comprehensively with the UN and other international organizations,” the spokesman told The Epoch Times in an e-mailed statement about the proposal.

“The U.N. is only as effective, transparent, and accountable as its membership demands, and the U.S. works tirelessly to ensure the U.N. meets those demands.”

The U.N. proposal was unveiled as multibillionaire Bill Gates, one of the most prominent voices during the COVID-19 crisis and a major financier of the World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccines, called for a global “fire department” to address international health emergencies.

Writing in The New York Times last month, Gates said a “Global Health Emergency Corps” could “spring into action at a moment’s notice when danger emerges.”

“The Global Health Emergency Corps will represent massive progress toward a pandemic-free future,” Gates wrote in the op-ed. “The ‌question ‌‌is whether we have the foresight to invest in that future now before it’s too late.”

UN Emergencies Protocol

Guterres, who is asking governments to approve his plan later this year, said risks are growing and becoming more complex.

“Enhanced international cooperation is the only way we can adequately respond to these shocks, and the United Nations is the only organization with the reach and legitimacy to convene at the highest level and galvanize global action,” he said. “We must keep strengthening the multilateral system so that it is fit to face the challenges of tomorrow.”

Exactly what would constitute an emergency that would trigger the U.N. emergency response wasn’t made clear.

However, the document states that crises without “global consequences” would “not necessarily” be categorized as an emergency requiring U.N. intervention. In other words, some crises that don’t have global consequences might trigger a U.N. response.

The report gives two examples of recent global crises that struck in the 21st century and that U.N. leaders believe support the case for coordinated global responses: the COVID-19 pandemic and the “cost of living crisis” of 2022.

Rather than offering specifics, the policy brief offers broad categories and types of emergencies that might activate the global protocols. These include climate or environmental events; environmental degradation; pandemics; accidental or deliberate release of biological agents; disruptions in the flow of goods, people, or finance; disruptions in cyberspace or “global digital connectivity;” a major event in “outer space;” and “unforeseen risks (‘black swan’ events).”

Frequently cited throughout the document is the global response to COVID-19. The U.N. chief, who famously led the Socialist International before taking his current post, said that a stronger and a more coordinated U.N. response would have resulted in more people receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.

WHO leaders’ ongoing efforts to strengthen the U.N. health agency with a new international pandemic treaty and changes to International Health Regulations are touted as key mechanisms for emergencies.

Upon activation of the emergency protocols, government leaders, U.N. agencies, international financial institutions, the private sector, civil society, and experts would all be convened by the U.N. to respond.

The U.N. secretary-general would decide when to activate the protocols. He would also identify all participants and oversee their contributions to the response, the policy brief explains. Contributions mentioned in the document include everything from providing money to changing government policy.

Agenda 2030 a Priority

Among the reasons for the urgency, the U.N. stated that international emergencies could undermine progress toward achieving the controversial Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, referred to by U.N. leaders as the “master plan for humanity.”

The 17 goals, which cover practically every area of life and have come under fire from critics, were signed by virtually all national governments in 2015, with strong support from the Obama administration and the CCP.

Although the U.S. Senate hasn’t ratified the global agreement as required for all treaties, it’s nonetheless being implemented worldwide, as policies in business and government are aligned with the agenda.

“Once a complex global shock occurs, a more timely, predictable, and effective international response could potentially mitigate some of the impacts on the Sustainable Development Goals and allow the process of recovery to start sooner,” the document states. “The proposal to agree on protocols to convene an Emergency Platform aims to achieve this.”

The impetus for the emergencies plan was a pledge by U.N. member states during the global organization’s 75th anniversary to strengthen “global governance.”

Other components of this strengthening—policies that parallel much of the “Great Reset” announced in 2020 by Guterres and others, such as Klaus Schwab, at the World Economic Forum—include a renewed “social contract.” The WEF is a “strategic partner” of the U.N. in implementing Agenda 2030, especially in terms of getting the private sector onboard globally.

The U.N. emergency-response plan was released in tandem with another report on “Our Common Future” calling for a new “Special Envoy for Future Generations,” the creation of a “Futures Lab,” dramatic shifts in policy toward what the U.N. calls “sustainable development,” and more.

The report calls for enshrining policies that U.N. leaders say will preserve the planet for the future, “at the global level, where some of the most consequential decisions for humanity are taken.”

Critics Point to CCP, Corruption, and COVID

One major concern surrounding the crisis-response proposal among U.S. leaders is the strong influence of the CCP within the U.N.—influence that was felt clearly during the pandemic and that CCP critics say could be even more dangerous in future global emergencies.

Moley, who served in key roles at the international level during multiple U.S. administrations, rejected the U.N. plan.

“This U.N. plan flies in the face of the experience we just had with the latest pandemic, which shows why we should reiterate sovereignty, not give more away,” he told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.

Moley, who oversaw the U.S. relationship with international organizations during his time in the Trump administration, has long sounded the alarm about the CCP’s surging influence within the U.N., a process he says has been supported by both the Obama and Biden administrations. He called it an existential threat to the United States.

The powerful influence of the CCP and its mostly “authoritarian” and “crony democracy” allies over the U.N. system represents a major danger when it comes to proposals to grant the global outfit more power, Moley said.

“As long as the controlling interests of the U.N. are in the hands of the CCP and aided and abetted by the G77 [an alliance of 134 governments including the CCP], this cannot be allowed,” he said.

As a result of the CCP’s well-documented control over key U.N. agencies and even its powerful influence over most member states, approving the emergencies protocol plan would be tantamount to putting the communist regime in charge of global crises, according to Moley.

Considering that the CCP is a “criminal conspiracy” more than a government and the fact that its agents now dominate vast swaths of the U.N., this is a “recipe for disaster,” he said.

“We need to look at anything sponsored by the U.N. with great skepticism. But unfortunately, our State Department—especially now—does not look at it skeptically. Instead, they look at the United States skeptically.”

Rather than going along with the U.N. plan, Moley called for completely revamping the U.S. State Department.

“It needs to be taken down to the ground floor,” he said, pointing to obstruction from career bureaucrats throughout Trump’s tenure.

“As long as the State Department remains as currently constituted, we do not have diplomats speaking for America, but for [billionaire financier George] Soros [and his] Open Society foundations, globalism, and all that does to undermine American sovereignty,” he said.

Another critic, international lawyer and former U.N. internal investigator-turned-whistleblower Peter Gallo, noted the organization’s long history of corruption, politicization, and scandal, including cases in which humanitarian aid was diverted or even weaponized for political purposes.

More alarming, though, is what Gallo described as the “sexual exploitation and human trafficking of victims of such disasters.”

“U.N. personnel have an egregious record of involvement in that exploitation themselves—and the organization has a shameful record of covering up allegations of sexual misconduct rather than properly investigating them,” Gallo said.

Gallo and other former U.N. officials, using U.N. data, estimate that more than 60,000 women and children were raped and sexually abused by U.N. personnel during the decade-long tenure of Ban Ki-moon, the previous secretary-general. Gallo said he believes that is a “very conservative estimate.”

“There is no evidence of anything being any better under António Guterres,” Gallo added, citing impunity for perpetrators and attacks on the U.N. whistleblowers who have tried to stop it.

Considering all that, Gallo suggested that it’s a mistake for governments to consider trusting the U.N. with even more power to oversee emergency responses.

Disputed Claims

Investigative journalist and WHO expert James Roguski, meanwhile, blasted the U.N. and contested many of the claims made in its policy brief on emergency protocols.

For instance, Roguski ridiculed the implication that Africans suffered from not receiving enough COVID-19 vaccines from the West.

“In reality, 16 times as many deaths per capita were attributed to COVID in North and South America and Europe when compared to Africa,” he told The Epoch Times, citing WHO data while calling the U.N. claims a “blatant lie.” Roguski gained national prominence for his reporting on the WHO’s plans to consolidate power over global health matters.

“In my humble opinion, the globalist organizations have failed to learn a great number of very important lessons during the past three-plus years,” he said.

Pointing to COVID-19 policies championed by the WHO and other U.N. agencies that he said were detrimental and, in some cases, “undeniably harmful and deadly,” Roguski called for a different approach.

“They have failed to learn that centralized control performed far worse than individualized and creative health treatments that saved tens of thousands of lives,” he said.

“We the People need to push back against the relentless push for centralized, bureaucratic control that the globalists offer as the solution to the world’s problems. We need to stand up and speak up in support of individual freedoms and national sovereignty.”

U.N. Secretary-General Guterres and his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, didn’t respond by press time to a request from The Epoch Times for comment.

Immortality for sale?

On the rise of the Caesars

A complex beginning?

Breakthroughs Unveil Evidence of Foresight in Nature

Marcos Eberlin

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series of excerpts from chapters in the recent book, Science and Faith in Dialogue, edited by Frederik van Niekerk and Nico Vorster. You can download a full copy of the book for free by going Here.

Advances in multiple scientific disciplines have identified in nature evidence that a mind designed the laws of nature, our planetary system, and life. Nature demonstrates foresight where ingenious solutions were devised to confront problems and challenges related to sustaining and propagating life. Examples include the cell membrane, the genetic code, bacteria acting as ecosystem engineers, bird navigation, water and our planet. This evidence points not to life resulting from blind, undirected processes but to every aspect of nature being designed by an intelligent agent.

Biology is amid a gold rush of discovery. At my previous academic institution, the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, I ran the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory for 25 years. There, my team and I delved into many areas of chemistry, biochemistry, and medical science that until recently were still too new to have names — everything from proteomics, lipidomics, and mass spectrometry imaging to petroleomics and bacteria fingerprinting.

Breakthrough Technologies and Techniques

My research, along with my role as president of the Brazilian Mass Spectrometry Society and the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation, have brought me into contact with other leading researchers in Brazil and around the globe. And when we come together at conferences, the excitement is tremendous. Due to a cluster of breakthrough technologies and techniques, almost every week reveals some new wonder in the biological realm.

Some of these discoveries yield new medicines or medical techniques, such as the abundantly awarded cancer pen recently developed by my daughter, Livia Eberlin. Others give engineers new ideas for inventions in the burgeoning field of biomimetics. Still others have no immediate practical application; they are just revelations of beautiful biological ingenuity — scientific discovery for its own sake.

All of this new knowledge is exhilarating in its own right. At the same time, I am now convinced that many of these discoveries, taken together, point beyond themselves to something even more extraordinary. This new age of discovery is revealing a myriad of artful solutions to major engineering challenges, solutions that for all of us appear to require something that matter alone lacks. I will put this as plainly as I can: This rush of discovery seems to point beyond any purely blind evolutionary process to the workings of an attribute unique to minds — foresight!

And Yes, I Know

And yes, I know. We are told that it is out of bounds for science to go there. But regardless of where you ultimately land on the question of what conclusions science should or should not allow and whether or not you ultimately affirm that this gold rush of new evidence points to the workings of foresight, I urge you to inspect the evidence. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it has done wonders for the scientific enterprise.

The many and ingenious examples uncovered in recent years are so numerous they could fill many large volumes. The pages that follow highlight only a small fraction of the total. But that fraction is filled with marvels. We will look at the cell membrane, the genetic code, bacteria that act as ecosystem engineers, avian navigation, water and our planet.

Life thrives in our diverse planetary environment, due in no small part to the many ways Earth is fine-tuned for life. But Earth can also be extremely hostile to life. The oxygen molecule (O2) is, for instance, essential to life, but only a life form that can efficiently wrap and transport the “devil” O2 exactly to a place where it can be used as an energy source would benefit from its angelic side. Otherwise, O2 becomes life’s greatest enemy.

Rupture the membrane of a living cell, exposing it to the air, and you will see the great damage O2 and a myriad of other chemical invaders can do to a perforated cell. Death would be swift and sure. From an engineering standpoint, then, it was essential that a way be found to protect the cell, life’s most basic unit. The solution was clever: the cell was surrounded by a strong chemical shield from the very beginning.

Read the rest by downloading a free copy of Science and Faith in Dialogue Here

The band breaks up?

Social media is grim dark?

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

When the thumb print of JEHOVAH is the logical conclusion.

Debate About the God Hypothesis: An Overview with Stephen Meyer

Andrew McDiarmid

Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis is out now in paperback with a new epilogue by Dr. Meyer responding to critics. See the book’s website for more information and resources. For the occasion, we’re highlighting some of the best interviews Meyer has done about the book. In this episode of Great Minds with radio host Michael Medved, Dr. Meyer gives an overview of the debate and explains why he wrote the book.

On black America's academic history.

On separating Church from state.

Rise of the "Christian" Taliban?

Ps. There is also an equally radical "Christian" left on the march but it and its danger to civil liberty gets precious little mention from the left leaning mainstream media and its cohorts in academia.

The theory of devolution is on the march?

Even More Mammoth Devolution

Michael Behe

Last year I reported1 on a paper2 that showed 87 genes were broken in genomes of recovered extinct woolly mammoth remains, compared to their modern elephant relatives. The authors of the paper noted previous research had shown that “gene losses … can be adaptive” and thought that was the case for the mammoths they studied, too. I pointed out that, while such a process might indeed aid adaptation of a species to its changing environment, nonetheless it constitutes de-volution, not e-volution, in the sense that the species is losing genetic information, not gaining it.

A new paper strongly bolsters that conclusion.3 In “Genomics of adaptive evolution in the woolly mammoth” a large international team of researchers sequenced genomes from 23 woolly mammoth remains and examined genes for proteins that had the most “fixed” amino acid mutations (that is, mutations that occurred in all of the genomes that were sequenced, and so very probably were widely present in the mammoth population). They evaluated the mutations by something called an “aggregated SIFT score.” SIFT stands for “Sorting Intolerant From Tolerant.”4 In the paper, the higher the aggregated SIFT score, the more likely the amino acid mutations were to not be tolerated by the protein’s structure — that is, to disrupt the protein’s activity. Of the 31 most highly mutated genes (Table S5), the great majority had high aggregated SIFT scores for the number of mutations they carried, and 21 of the genes each contained one or more “high impact” mutations (very likely to disrupt structure). Only four genes had low aggregated SIFT scores. (Interestingly, one of those is the BRCA2 gene, whose mutation in humans can lead to breast cancer.)

Revisiting Darwin Devolves

This seems like a good time to reiterate what I wrote in Darwin Devolves in 2019:5

Thus, although these are difficult matters to test directly, and although the more widely two species are separated in time the harder it is to interpret changes, it seems very likely that degradative modification-of-function and loss-of-FCT mutations drove much of mammoth evolution. If so, then not only do beneficial-degrading changes explain modern evolution from bacteria to bears, but also the evolution of now-extinct species that arose millions of years in the past.

The blazingly obvious lesson from woolly mammoth studies and many other ones, too, is that it is much faster and easier to break or blunt a gene than to improve or make a new one. Thus, if a helpful effect can be had by degrading or destroying genetic information, the blind watchmaker will toss it out in an evolutionary instant, well before any constructive mutations meander onto the scene. That’s certainly not the kind of process that would be expected to build complex machinery in the first place.

Notes

1.https://evolutionnews.org/2022/08/mammoth-support-for-devolution/

2.Van der Valk, Tom, et al. 2022. Evolutionary consequences of genomic deletions and insertions in the woolly mammoth genome. iScience 25, 104826.

3.Díez-del-Molino, D. et al. 2023. Genomics of adaptive evolution in the woolly mammoth. Current Biology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.084.

4.Ng, P.C. and Henikoff, S. 2003. SIFT: predicting amino acid changes that affect protein function. Nucleic Acids Research 31: 3812–3814.

5.Behe, M. J. 2019. Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA that Challenges Evolution. New York, NY, HarperOne, p. 196.

The second horseman's ride along the banks of the Nile.

Super no more?

Buyer's remorse?

Monday, 10 April 2023

One more tradeoff?

In search of the bright line between artificial and natural selection.

There Was Berra’s Blunder; Now Lieberman’s Lapse

David Coppedge

Ohio State biologist Tim Berra thought evolutionary progress was like the diversification seen in Corvette models. Now, another evolutionist makes an analogy for extinction. But can the “extinction” of the steam locomotive really bring understanding to Darwinian theory?

Back in 1997, Phillip Johnson had fun with Tim Berra’s notion that biological evolution was like Corvette evolution (see his quips recounted by Casey Luskin Here , and later instances of similar blunders Here and Here). He called it “Berra’s Blunder” because, like Darwin, Berra had confused intelligently directed processes with natural selection — Darwin, with animal breeding; Berra, with engineering. This is not to accuse either man of being completely unaware of the differences, but of trying to score points for natural selection theory with obviously flawed analogies.

Today’s “inverted Berra blunder” concerns extinction. Is the analogy just as flawed, or does it lead to increased understanding of the ebb and flow of biological life? The fact of extinction is empirically verified by fossils. It is not controversial in the way Darwinian progress up the tree of life is. What if the new claim overturns a Darwinian assumption about the extinction of species? Can the analogy be embraced by ID supporters?

Lieberman’s Lapse

Bruce Lieberman, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and a curator of the school’s Natural History Museum, was featured in news from KU about his epiphany. Perhaps it was triggered by a song.

When the Kinks’ Ray Davies penned the tune “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,” the vanishing locomotives stood as nostalgic symbols of a simpler English life. But for a paleontologist at the University of Kansas, the replacement of steam-powered trains with diesel and electric engines, as well as cars and trucks, might be a model of how some species in the fossil record died out.

Lieberman thought about how diesel and electric engines rendered the old steam locomotives obsolete. A simple understanding of the history might lead one to conclude that the newer engines outcompeted the steam engine, and that’s why steam engines went extinct. Except for a few remaining antiques operated for railroad museums and vacation rides in the mountains, steam locomotives are rarely seen today. They just can’t compete with the faster, cleaner, cheaper, more powerful modern engines. Lieberman thought and he thought, and the light bulb went on: This could be a way to test the popular theory called “competitive exclusion” used by evolutionists to explain the extinction of biological species.

“There’s always been a bias to assume in the scientific community that competition is sort of the fundamental force that drives evolution and plays the biggest role on extinction,” Lieberman said. “That idea comes from a lot of different areas of research, including on the fossil record. But we, as paleontologists, have to dive down deeper into the data and analyze them.”

It Seems an Honorable Quest

Don’t scientists want to debunk poor assumptions, overcome biases, and understand why things happen? Is competition a different kind of force when it comes to extinction than it is when Darwinists offer it up to explain innovation?

“I’d always been fascinated by steam engines because they’re the technological equivalent of dinosaurs,” Lieberman said. “They’re gigantic. We infer dinosaurs made a lot of noise. We know that steam locomotives made a lot of noise, but they’re no longer with us.”

Now that comparison sounds stretched, but let’s hear him out. Searching through a steam train database for examples, Lieberman and colleague Luke Strotz found evidence against the competitive exclusion model. Sure, there was competition at first. It looked like the newer engines were robbing steam locomotives of their ecological niche. A closer look, though, showed that competition only excludes an older technology when there is direct overlap for the same space.

“For a time when there’s no competitors to steam-locomotive technology, we see them almost diversify and diffuse into no particular direction,” Lieberman said. “But when these new locomotives appear, we see a profound shift to really active natural selection and adaptation of the steam locomotive. Often, it’s thought that adaptation is a good sign for a group. But what we would argue is, in fact, when things start to adapt and shift directionally — traditionally in evolution that’s not a good time for a group. We’d argue it’s a sign the group may be experiencing duress or pressure from other things.”

There’s the first sign of trouble with the analogy: Lieberman and Strotz are comparing the fates of engineered technologies with natural selection. Can they transfer the analogy to biology? In their paper, they make three comparisons of steam engine history with biological extinction.

In some cases, the idea that competitive exclusion was at play has been debunked; in other examples, evidence of competitive exclusion falls far short compared with the meticulous data available on the demise of steam engines.

“One of the classic examples involved mammals and non-flying dinosaurs, where the traditional view was, ‘Hey, the mammals were smarter and quicker and they dropped these dinosaurs to extinction,’” he said. “Now we know that it was a giant rock that fell out of the sky that caused this tremendous environmental damage, and bigger things are more likely to be susceptible to that.

This point, too, seems stretched and factually incorrect. Not all dinosaurs were big, but they all perished, while frogs and butterflies survived.

A Major Insight into Evolution?

In their paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Lieberman and Strotz list four criteria for a locomotive to be competitive in the transportation market. Then they justify the analogy for biological evolution, with some caveats. For example, they know that steam locomotives (SLs) are not truly extinct; there are a few still operating in various locations. But even with their caveats, they are adamant that they have hit on a major insight into the process of biological evolution.

While we provide evidence that SLs adhere to our four criteria, we do not propose that a technological entity can be considered truly homologous with a macroevolutionary unit. For instance, SLs cannot be considered monophyletic and they are incapable of speciation. We do consider them strongly analogous, however, as they do experience both ‘birth’ and ‘death’, and are subject to processes that fall within the purview of macroecology. In this sense, technological entities can be considered parallel to higher biological units, such as genera and above. Although the functional lifespan of the SL is several orders of magnitude shorter than typical macroevolutionary units, the rapid generation time of new locomotive forms (measured on a scale of months/years) means SLs can be considered comparable to a ‘temporally condensed’ macroevolutionary unit.

Just as Bad as Berra’s Blunder

I’m sure most of our readers do not need an explanation of why this analogy is just as bad as Berra’s Blunder, so the summary here can be brief. Locomotives are designed by engineers with minds and knowledge of physics! Trains don’t have babies! They neither “emerge” by blind processes of nature, nor do they go extinct without reasoned decisions made by the intelligent minds of businessmen. This is crazy.

If it weren’t for the sad reality that Darwinism lives in university echo chambers without critical thinkers to object, Lieberman’s Lapse would have gone extinct itself before getting published. And extinct it would have gone not by natural blind processes nor by competitive exclusion, but by reasoned debate among thinking people who understand the difference between what minds can do and what chance does. This isolation from critique fosters loco motives for fantasizing.

Lieberman’s Lapse is actually worse than Berra’s Blunder, because Lieberman and Strotz think their “insight” has broad application to all of evolution, including macroevolution. We’ll let their own words provide the evidence that this was an exercise in futility on their part, ending with the customary Darwinian promissory notes for some “understanding” that never arrives at the dock.

It should also be noted that the relevant data needed to conduct a full assessment of both the frequency of our proposed model in the fossil record and the relative import of clade replacement in macroevolutionary dynamics is currently lacking, as the necessary functional trait data associated with putative examples of competition-driven extinction has not yet been compiled. The fossil record does, however, contain a plethora of suitable options from which such data could be obtained.

Our results thus cannot, at this time, resolve what role, if any, competition plays in driving extinction at the macroevolutionary scale. They do, however, provide a path forward that may serve to resolve the issue by addressing the existing impasse in identifying causal relationships in fossil time series. There is no doubt that the SL was derailed by its competitors; however, it still remains to be established if biological clades are frequently similarly sidetracked.

Sidetracked? This analogy has derailed and flipped over, spilling toxic chemicals in fantasyland.

False messiahs ?

Red team vs. Blue team post game?

My two cents on the JEHOVAH must be be triune to be perfect argument

A union of three imperfect divinities cannot constitute a perfect trinity. Therefore each member of our perfect trinity must himself be a trinity if we are to take this reasoning to its logical conclusion ,and of course each member of the perfect trinities constituting the perfect trinity must themselves be perfect trinities and so on ad nauseum .

We are all X-Men?

A Single Mutation Makes Humans

Cornelius G Hunter

When evolutionists found out that the chimp and human genomes were practically identical they went ape, claiming the evidence all but proved our shared lineage, with the chimp, to a small, primitive, ancestral primate. There was only one problem: With so few random genetic changes, how would such dramatic and complex changes come about? Far from a confirmation, our similar genes posed a dilemma for evolution. For how could so little genetic change cause so much significant evolutionary distance be traversed? And if the answer is, as it always seems to be, that those rare and random genetic changes were able to achieve such monumental results because the requisite parts and pieces that would be used were, fortuitously, already in place (because they just happened to have evolved for some other reason), then we have entered the realm of just-so stories. For the theory then amounts to the claim that “the fix was in.” The various key ingredients to making a human were all there, lying around, perhaps in disguise, or perhaps doing some other job. And then they were systematically recruited, coming into their own by virtue of a few, rare, mutations finally occurring and enabling the puzzle pieces to come together. It would be like a supersonic jet aircraft just happening to come together because its various parts just luckily were lying around. That is serendipity on steroids.

Well it just gets worse. More recently evolutionists were forced to conclude that most of the mutations affecting protein-coding genes led to “neutral and slightly deleterious alleles.” So not only are evolution’s random mutation resources meager, but even worse, those mutations mostly led to “neutral and slightly deleterious alleles.”

In fact the beneficial mutations in protein-coding genes, which presumably would be important in evolving the human from a small, primitive ape, literally number only in the hundreds. It would be astonishing if the human could be evolved from so few mutations.

But again, it just gets worse. For now evolutionists must conclude that not only are there few random mutations that must somehow create Newton and Einstein (to name just a couple of humans), and not only are most of those mutations neutral or slightly deleterious, and not only would evolution probably have only a few hundred genes undergoing selection, but that a monumental part of that evolutionary change, so important in creating humans, must have arisen from, yes, a single mutation. To wit:

What distinguishes humans from monkeys and apes? The gene ARHGAP11B is probably among the things that make humans special: This gene is only present in humans and contributes to the amplification of brain stem cells. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden have now made a spectacular finding: It is a single base pair substitution in the ARHGAP11B gene that ultimately is responsible for the ability of the ARHGAP11B protein to amplify brain stem cells, a process thought to underlie the expansion of the neocortex in modern humans.

Spectacular indeed. As one of the researchers explained:

This change is tiny on a genomic scale but substantial in its functional and evolutionary consequences – it’s a single base substitution that likely drove brain size evolution and that may have set the stage for what makes humans special.

A single mutation? Here we have evolution reductio ad absurdum. A single mutation essentially worked the magic to create humans. How lucky we are.

Of course such absurdity entails the idea that an army of molecular components were serendipitously in place, ready and waiting for the single mutation to unleash their creative powers.

Sunday, 9 April 2023

When your only tool is an eraser?

The religiopolitical right makes another bid for the lead in the race to the bottom with the religiopolitical left .

Darwin of the gaps?

Current Biology: RNA-Only Life Coming Soon

Cornelius G Hunter

Here is a trade secret: Evolutionists acknowledge scientific problems only after they find solutions. We have seen this repeatedly. Evolutionists evade the science, and ridicule their critics, only later to confess readily that the problem was real. The difference is they have found what they think is a solution to the problem they once so steadfastly denied. To wit, our latest example comes from Michael Gross’s recent article in Current Biology on the RNA world praising the progress made in developing the on-again / off-again RNA World hypothesis. Gross is sufficiently confident that the hypothesis is “on-again” that he can now agree with critics that the origin of life was once a big problem:

Just how the transition from non-life to life may have happened was indeed a gaping hole in our understanding of evolution in the 20th century, which a few inspired experiments like Stanley Miller’s famous 1952 primordial soup kitchen couldn’t quite bridge.

Indeed a gaping hole? Couldn’t quite bridge?

You would never know this from the evolutionist’s rosy assessments, and ridicule of anyone suggesting the science indicated otherwise. As Carl Zimmer wrote more than 15 years ago, scientists “have found compelling evidence that life could have evolved into a DNA-based microbe in a series of steps.” Perhaps he had read the National Academy of Science’s 1999 claim that

For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no longer whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become which of many pathways might have been followed to produce the first cells? [1]

Of course for the Mother of all such absurd, non scientific, statements we can go back to Alexander Oparin’s 1924 prediction that origin of life research would be solved “very, very soon.”

But now, almost a century after Oparin’s slightly premature forecast, the evolutionists feel they have finally arrived. And so now Gross can admit to what we have been inconveniently pointing out all along: There has been “a gaping hole in our understanding of evolution.”

Evolutionists can finally admit to this because they are rather confident that they are on the cusp of a profound break-through: A compelling demonstration of the feasibility of the origin and operation of RNA-based life. That is, the RNA World hypothesis:

it appears conceivable that a working model of RNA-only life could be synthesized soon.

At least Gross did not say “very, very soon.” Nonetheless, we think evolutionists are, yet again, speaking a bit prematurely.

That, however, is neither here nor there. For our purposes what is important about Gross’ article is not his proclamation of imminent success—which until it actually happens carries no more weight than the boatload of other failed evolutionary expectations—but rather the delayed admission of “a gaping hole in our understanding of evolution.”

Now that we have that cleared up, we can apparently all agree that until the RNA World, or some other miracle breakthrough, is demonstrated, evolutionary theory has “a gaping hole.” That’s progress.

Saturday, 8 April 2023

What cosmic speed limit?

Complications re:Darwinism's "simple beginning"

James Tour on Origin-of-Life Dealbreakers

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, distinguished synthetic organic chemist James Tour of Rice University explains why the goal of synthesizing life from non-life in conditions similar to those of the early Earth appears further away than ever. It’s not an illusion, he explains. The illusion was how close OOL researchers thought they were 50-70 years ago. They were never close, and the more we learn about how mind-bogglingly sophisticated even the simplest cells are, and how the complexity is essential for biological life, the more we realize just how far we are from constructing a plausible scenario for the mindless origin of the first life.

Tour points out that even granting a great deal of intelligent design in the form of the highly skilled and interventionist work of the origin-of-life researchers in the lab, they still can’t engineer into existence all the key building blocks of a living cell. What if you handed them all the building blocks in the right proportions? They’re still nowhere near being able to intelligently design those ingredients into a living cell, Tour says. It has to do with what’s termed the interactome — that is, all the interdependent molecular interactions in a particular cell, many of which may initially appear unimportant but turn out to be crucial.

Tour doesn’t argue that researchers will never be able to design a cell from non-living matter. He does say that if it is achieved, it will be well into the future. What will such an achievement underscore? As host Casey Luskin emphasizes, it will highlight the creative power of intelligent agency.

Download the podcast or listen to it Here. The occasion for Dr. Tour’s conversation with Dr. Luskin is Tour’s essay in a new Book now available for free download, Science and Faith in Dialogue. For more from Dr. Tour, check out his Website and his YouTube Channel.

Friday, 7 April 2023

Yet one more rant on the utter absurdity of Christendom's Trinity dogma.

Imagine a book with three Chapters,the subject of each chapter is a complete up to the moment understanding Chemistry. That's right if one diligently studies any of the three chapters of our hypothetical book he would become an expert on the subject of chemistry. Also having studied any of the three chapters none of the remaining chapters could contribute any further understanding of the aforesaid subject to our reader .

Let's say that this book alone contained this up to the moment understanding of chemistry.

If all of these premises be accepted as true, how could the claim that that any particular chapter of this book is necessary re: a complete understanding of chemistry be taken seriously?

Would this book in its entirety be any more valuable re: an up to the moment knowledge of chemistry than any of its chapters?

Would any worthwhile refutation be possible of the observation that this book is a couple of chapters too long?

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Saturday, 15 April 2023

Is a New Design-Based Paradigm of Biology Emerging?

Friday, 14 April 2023

Fossil Friday: The Abrupt Origin of Butterflies

Here is Why Steven Novella is Wrong About That Harvard Experiment

Thursday, 13 April 2023

About That Genetic Code

Wednesday, 12 April 2023

UN Seeks Vast New Powers for Global Emergencies

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Tuesday, 11 April 2023

Debate About the God Hypothesis: An Overview with Stephen Meyer

Even More Mammoth Devolution

Monday, 10 April 2023

There Was Berra’s Blunder; Now Lieberman’s Lapse

A Single Mutation Makes Humans

Sunday, 9 April 2023

Current Biology: RNA-Only Life Coming Soon

Saturday, 8 April 2023

James Tour on Origin-of-Life Dealbreakers

Friday, 7 April 2023

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