Wednesday, 31 January 2024
Tuesday, 30 January 2024
ID has made Darwin Skepticism less unfashionable?
Dembski and Ruse Look Back on 20 Years of Debate — And a Special Anniversary
In 2004 Cambridge University Press published Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse, a brilliant landmark anthology showcasing the vibrancy of the debate between intelligent design and evolution. Contributors included Angus Menuge, Kenneth Miller, Elliott Sober, Robert Pennock, Stuart Kauffman, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, Richard Swinburne, Walter Bradley, and Stephen Meyer. In 2024, it seemed worthwhile to look back at the two intervening decades and see how the debate has developed. So with great pleasure I invited Dembski and Ruse for a conversation on my podcast: When Debating Design was published, an ambiguity hung over it. Was this the beginning of a new chapter for ID? Or was it a swansong? Critics believed there were good reasons to think ID would peter out. The New Atheism — new at the time, in the years immediately following 9/11 which called it into being — was on the rise, enjoying far more popularity than ID did. People read New Atheist books and came away feeling courageous and victorious. Yet the New Atheism has since turned passé. Nothing guaranteed that ID would not suffer the same fate.
Intelligent Design in Two Senses
Twenty years later, ID is still here. How did it persevere? The secret, I think, has to something to do with ID being the flipside of discontent with Darwinian orthodoxy. Design can be thought of in two senses: a strict one, and an expansive one. The strict sense is design as advocated by ID proponents. It is the positive case for ID. Most atheist-leaning scientists remain averse to this. The expansive sense is design as a critique of current evolutionary theory, with the latter’s difficulties in explaining features of biology. That explanatory weakness is not, per se, evidence of design, but it does cause one to wonder about the possibility of intelligent design. Many scientists acknowledge the shortcomings of current neo-Darwinian theory. These two senses of design were discernible in Debating Design.
Debating Design gathered essays arguing respectively for four different viewpoints: Darwinism, Complex Self-Organization, Theistic Evolution, and Intelligent Design. As presented in the book, the ID viewpoint argued forcefully for design in nature. It is also true that out of the four viewpoints represented, three recognized that Darwinism by itself was an insufficient explanation for the sublime complexities in life. Seen this way, design in its expansive sense, reflected in a mass of pointed, well-reasoned criticisms, dwarfs Darwinism. By leveraging design in its expansive sense, ID proper provided a platform for scientific discussion. ID then became a viable option by championing the strict sense of design. Critics of ID who are nonetheless skeptical of Darwinism can be read as agreeing with ID that in principle evolutionary theory is not the end-all explanation for biological complexity.
Growing Doubt About Darwin
Since 2004, doubts about neo-Darwinian mechanisms have only grown. In 2014, Laland, Uller, Feldman, et al.published in Nature an influential article calling for an urgent rethink of evolutionary theory. They wrote:
The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science. We contend that evolutionary biology needs revision if it is to benefit fully from these other disciplines. The data supporting our position gets stronger every day.
Yet the mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science. Some might fear that they will receive less funding and recognition if outsiders — such as physiologists or developmental biologists — flood into their field.
…This is no storm in an academic tearoom, it is a struggle for the very soul of the discipline.
LALAND, K., ULLER, T., FELDMAN, M. ET AL. DOES EVOLUTIONARY THEORY NEED A RETHINK? NATURE 514, 161–164 (2014)
The protest about the “spectre of intelligent design” was telling. When critics start talking that way, as if looking over their shoulder, you can’t help wondering if the ID program is onto something. Darwinian mechanisms, as they stand today, are widely recognized as out of tune with the latest scientific discoveries in a variety of fields. This lends credence to ID, in its expansive sense, as the passage above grudgingly let’s slip. The ID community can take it as a matter of pride that from the very beginning, it has consistently been pointing out the inadequacies of evolutionary thought. Contrast this with recent fledgling viewpoints popping up in the scientific community where weaknesses in the evolutionary narrative are belatedly recognized under the euphemistic terms of “puzzles” rather than “problems,” in need of “revisions” rather than a brand new perspective. It is this trend that has encouraged a certain conciliatory quality in the debate.
Eschewing Polarization
As I listened to Dembski and Ruse, what struck me most is how their views today eschew the bitter polarization that characterized earlier discussions of ID. In the conversation, Ruse acknowledged that contemporary science has not explained how molecules could have led to mind. The mind-body problem is a fundamental question that science cannot answer. Ruse also explicitly distanced himself from the crude materialism championed by Daniel Dennett, one of the New Atheism’s Four Horsemen. While crucial differences between them remain, as Dembski aptly highlighted, overall the discussion was characterized by amiable restraint, cordiality, and even chumminess. Moreover, Dembski is a Christian, Ruse is an agnostic, and I am a Muslim, and it is significant that all three of us can take ID seriously as a topic deserving of critical engagement rather than dismissive caricaturing. It can be hoped that ID will continue making inroads in the evolution debate. Grand victories are not needed. Slow-but-steady will be far more productive than a quick-dash attempt to the finish line.
Any biological theory that cannot adequately explain the “appearance” (as Richard Dawkins puts it) of design cannot adequately explain life. ID positions itself as explaining this appearance — seen as actual, not illusory — while allowing ample space for competing non-ID theories to air their dissatisfaction with Darwinian orthodoxy. The stricter sense of design can thus be defended as a more reasonable, and a more intuitively straight-forward option amongst this plurality of the dissatisfied. Using this strategy, the ID community can hope to bolster its credibility and contribute to a greater push for a paradigm shift in origins science.
The continuation of ID across two decades where New Atheism failed shows that ID is closer to the scientific enterprise than the New Atheism ever was. The debate is not over. But as of now, it is clear that ID is heading in the right direction. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous saying, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” has gradually evolved into “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of design.”
Why we wait in vain for the arrival of our AI overlords
Artificial General Intelligence: The Poverty of the Stimulus
In this series so far at Evolution News about Artificial General Intelligence, my references to AGI worshippers and idolaters will be off-putting to those who think the claim that AGI will someday arrive, whatever its ultimate ETA, is an intellectually credible and compelling position. Accordingly, I’m just being insulting by using pejorative religious language to describe AGI’s supporters, to say nothing of being a Luddite for not cheering on AGI’s ultimate triumph. I want therefore to spend some space here indicating why AGI does not deserve to be taken seriously
Let’s begin with a point on which the linguist Noam Chomsky built his career, which may be encapsulated in the phrase “the poverty of the stimulus.” His point with this phrase was that humans learn language with a minimum of input, and thus must be endowed with an in-built capacity (“hardwired”) to acquire and use language. Infants see and hear adults talk and pick up language easily and naturally. It doesn’t matter if the caregivers pay special attention to the infant and provide extra stimulation so that their child can be a “baby Einstein.” It doesn’t matter if the caregivers are neglectful or even abusive. It doesn’t even matter if the child is blind, deaf, or both. Barring developmental disorders (such as some forms of autism), the child can learn language.
But It’s Not Just the Ability to Learn Language
“The poverty of the stimulus” underscores that humans do so much more with so much less than would be expected unless humans have an innate ability to learn language with minimal inputs. And it’s not just that we learn language. We gain knowledge of the world, which we express through language. Our language is especially geared to express knowledge about an external reality. This “aboutness” of the propositions we express with language is remarkable, especially on the materialist and mechanistic grounds so widely accepted by AGI’s supporters.
As G. K. Chesterton noted in his book Orthodoxy, we have on materialist grounds no right “to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” Matter has no way to guarantee that when matter thinks (if it can think), it will tell us true things about matter. On Darwinian materialist grounds, all we need is differential reproduction and survival. A good delusion that gets us to survive and reproduce is enough. Knowledge of truth is unnecessary and perhaps even undesirable.
The philosopher Willard Quine, who was a materialist, made essentially the same point in what he called “the indeterminacy of translation.” Quine’s thesis was that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate, implying that there are always valid alternative translations of a given sentence. Quine presented a thought experiment to illustrate this indeterminacy. In it, a linguist tries to determine the meaning of the word “gavagai,” uttered by a speaker of a yet-unknown language, in response to a rabbit running by. Is the speaker referring to the rabbit, the rabbit running, some rabbit part, or something unrelated to the rabbit? All of these are legitimate possibilities according to Quine and render language fundamentally indeterministic.
Yet such arguments about linguistic indeterminacy are always self-referentially incoherent. When Quine writes of indeterminacy of translation in Word and Object (1960), and thus also embraces the inscrutability of reference, he is assuming that what he is writing on these topics is properly understood one way and not another. And just to be clear, everybody is at some point in the position of a linguist because, in learning our mother tongue, we all start with a yet-unknown language. So Quine is tacitly making Chomsky’s point, which is that with minimal input — which is to say with input that underdetermines how it might be interpreted — we nevertheless have a knack for finding the right interpretation and gaining real knowledge about the world.
Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus is regarded as controversial by some because an argument can be made that the stimuli that lead to learning, especially language learning, may in fact be adequate without having to assume a massive contribution of innate capabilities. Chomsky came up with this notion in the debate over behaviorism, which needed to characterize all human capacities as a result of stimulus-response learning. Language, according to the behaviorists, was thus characterized as verbal behavior elicited through various reinforcement schedules of rewarded and discouraged behaviors. In fact, Chomsky made a name for himself in the 1950s by reviewing B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. That review is justly famous for demolishing behaviorist approaches to language (the field never recovered after Chomsky’s demolition).
If Chomsky Is Right
But suppose we admit that the controversy about whether the stimuli by which humans learn language has yet to be fully resolved. If Chomsky is right, those stimuli are in some sense impoverished. If his critics are right, they are adequate without needing to invoke extraordinary innate capacities. Yet if we leave aside the debate between Chomsky’s nativism and Skinner’s behaviorism, it’s nonetheless the case that such stimuli are vastly smaller in number than what artificial neural nets need to achieve human-level competence.
Consider LLMs, large language models, which are currently the rage, and of which ChatGPT is the best known and most widely used. ChatGPT4 uses 1.76 trillion parameters and its training set is based on hundreds of billions of words (perhaps a lot more, but that was the best lower-bound estimate I was able to find). Obviously, individual humans gain their language facility with nowhere near this scale of inputs. If a human child were able to process 200 words per minute and did so continuously, then by the age of ten the child would have processed 200 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 10, or roughly a billion, words. Of course, this is a vast overestimate of the child’s language exposure, ignoring sleep, repetitions, and lulls in conversation.
Or consider Tesla, which since 2015 has been promising fully autonomous vehicles as just on the horizon. Full autonomy keeps eluding the grasp of Tesla engineers, though the word on the street is that self-driving is getting better and better (as with a reported self-driving taxi in San Francisco, albeit by Waymo rather than Tesla). But consider: To aid in developing autonomous driving, Tesla processes 160 billion video frames each day from the cameras on its vehicles. This massive amount of data, used to train the neural network to achieve full self-driving, is obviously many orders of magnitude beyond what humans require to learn to drive effectively.
Erik Larson’s book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (Harvard, 2021) is appropriately subtitled Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do. Whatever machines are doing when they exhibit intelligence comparable to humans, they are doing it in ways vastly different from what humans are doing. In particular, the neural networks in the news today require huge amounts of computing power and huge amounts of input data (generated, no less, from human intelligent behavior). It’s no accident that artificial intelligence’s major strides in recent years fall under Big Tech and Big Data. The “Big” here is far bigger than anything available to individual humans.
Domain Specificity
The sheer scale of efforts needed to make artificial intelligence impressive suggests human intelligence is fundamentally different from machine intelligence. But reasons to think the two are different don’t stop there. Domain specificity should raise additional doubts about the two being the same. When Elon Musk, for instance, strives to bring about fully autonomous (level 5) driving, it is by building neural nets that every week must sort through a trillion images taken from Tesla automobiles driving in real traffic under human control. Not only is the amount of data to be analyzed staggering, but it is also domain specific, focused entirely on developing self-driving automobiles.
Indeed, no one thinks that the image data being collected from Tesla automobiles and then analyzed by neural nets to facilitate full self-driving is also going to be used for automatically piloting a helicopter or helping a robot navigate a ski slope, to say nothing of playing chess or composing music. All our efforts in artificial intelligence are highly domain specific. What makes LLMs, and ChatGPT in particular, so impressive is that language is such a general instrument for expressing human intelligence. And yet, even the ability to use language in contextually relevant way based on huge troves of humanly generated data is still domain specific.
The French philosopher René Descartes, even though he saw animal bodies, including human bodies, as machines, nonetheless thought that the human mind was non-mechanical. Hence, he posited a substance dualism in which a non-material mind interacted with a material body, at the pineal gland no less. How a non-material mind could interact with a material/mechanical body Descartes left unanswered (invoking the pineal gland did nothing to resolve that problem). And yet, Descartes regarded the mind as irreducible to matter/mechanism. As he noted in his Discourse on Method (1637, pt. 5, my translation):
Although machines can do many things as well as or even better than us, they fail in other ways, thereby revealing that they do not act from knowledge but solely from the arrangement of their parts. Intelligence is a universal instrument that can meet all contingencies. Machines, on the other hand, need a specific arrangement for every specific action. In consequence, it’s impossible for machines to exhibit the diversity needed to act effectively in all the contingencies of life as our intelligence enables us to act.
Descartes was here making exactly the point of domain specificity. We can get machines to do specific things — to be wildly successful in a given, well-defined domain. Chess playing is an outstanding example, with computer chess now vastly stronger than human chess (though, interestingly, having such strong chess programs has also vastly improved the quality of human play). But chess programs play chess. They don’t also play Minecraft or Polytopia. Sure, we could create additional artificial intelligence programs that also play Minecraft and Polytopia, and then we could kludge them together with a chess playing program so that we have a single program that plays all three games. But such a kludge offers no insight into how to create an AGI that can learn to play all games, to say nothing of being a general-purpose learner, or what Descartes called “a universal instrument that can meet all contingencies.” Descartes was describing AGI. Yet artificial intelligence in its present form, even given the latest developments, is not even close.
Elon Musk Appreciates the Problem
He therefore is building Optimus, also known as the Tesla Bot. The goals is for it to become a conceptual general-purpose robotic humanoid. By having to be fully interactive with the same environments and sensory inputs as humans, such a robot could serve as a proof of concept for Descartes’s universal instrument and thus AGI. What if such a robot could understand and speak English, drive a car safely, not just play chess but learn other board games, have facial features capable of expressing what in humans would be appropriate affect, play musical instruments, create sculptures and paintings, do plumbing and electrical work, etc. That would be impressive and take us a long way toward AGI. And yet, Optimus is for now far more modest. For now, the robot is intended to be capable of performing tasks that are “unsafe, repetitive, or boring.” That is a far cry from AGI.
AGI is going to require a revolution in current artificial intelligence research, showing how to overcome domain specificity so that machines can learn novel skills and tasks for which they were not explicitly programed. And just to be clear, reinforcement learning doesn’t meet this challenge. Take AlphaZero, a program developed by DeepMind to play chess, shogi, and Go, which improved its game by playing millions of games against itself using reinforcement learning (which is to say, it rewarded winning and penalized losing). This approach allows the program to learn and improve without ongoing human intervention, leading to significant advances in computer game playing ability. But it depends on the game being neatly represented in the state of a computer, along with clear metrics for what constitutes good and bad play.
The really challenging work of current artificial intelligence research is taking the messy real world and representing it in domain-specific ways so that the artificial intelligence created can emulate humans at particular tasks. The promise of AGI is somehow to put all these disparate artificial intelligence efforts together, coming up with a unified solution to computationalize all human tasks and capacities in one fell swoop. We have not done this, are nowhere close to doing this, and have no idea of how to approach doing this.
JEHOVAH'S Favorite type of prayer?
In your brother servant's very fallible an unauthoritative opinion:
2chronicles Ch.1:11,12NIV"God said to Solomon, “Since this is your heart’s desire and you have not asked for wealth, possessions or honor, nor for the death of your enemies, and since you have not asked for a long life but for wisdom and knowledge to govern my people over whom I have made you king, 12therefore wisdom and knowledge will be given you. And I will also give you wealth, possessions and honor, such as no king who was before you ever had and none after you will have.”"
Proverbs Ch.2:3NIV"indeed, if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
4and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
5then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find the knowledge of God."
Take it from one who knows.
James ch.1:5,6NIV"If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind."
Monday, 29 January 2024
Substitutionary atonement falsifies unconditional immortality and thus eternal conscious torment
Isaiah ch.53:5NKJV"But He was wounded[k] for our transgressions,
He was [l]bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes[m] we are healed."
John ch.1:29NJV"The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
The animal sacrifices under law which set the principle for the mechanism of Christ own ransom were clearly of a substitutionary sort. That is why we read.
Leviticus ch.17:11NIV"For the life(lit.soul) of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life(lit.soul). c"
The blood of these animals can serve as a token of their conscious existence because their conscious existence (or even subconscious existence is dependent on blood) so God was willing to accept the offering of this innocent creature's lifeblood as a substitute to the truly repentant worshipper's life. The meaning of the whole transaction was an acknowledgement that JEHOVAH Does not owe the gift of life ,let alone life as a Son of God to anyone. But if our personhood is not dependent on blood as would be the case if we are unconditionally immortal or a spirit being then the substitutionary nature of the transaction is falsified.
Christ's blood is called a superior offering to that of animal sacrifices under her law because like the first Adam before the fall he was utterly sinless and hence entitled to perpetual and perfect human life. His blood could only be token this if his life/personhood was dependent on same. If as leviticus ch.17:10,11 says of the typical victims that their souls were in their blood,so to speak, was true of him also.
Matthew Ch.20:28NIV"just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give(not lend)his life(lit.soul) as a ransom for many.”"
Isaiah ch.53:12NIV"Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life(lit.soul)unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors."
The fact that an offering of perfect sinless flesh and blood was deemed as a worthy ransom sufficient to restore us to same sinless state possessed by our founders. Indicates that perfect human flesh and blood can sustain a sinless and perfect human life indefinitely. And that a perpetual future existence is not dependent on the possession of any immortal soul distinct from the body.
Jesus surrender of his superfluous physical form for parts of three days would not be a substitution for the eternal suffering of such an immortal spirit soul or the immortal body that would accompany it in its eternal suffering.
So we can have the offering of Jesus' sinless flesh and blood i.e his human perfection as a true substitutionary ransom or we can have unconditional immortality and eternal conscious torment but not both.
Matthew Henry's commentary on Michael the great prince.
"Michael signifies, Who is like God, and his name, with the title of the great Prince, points out the Divine Saviour. Christ stood for the children of our people in their stead as a sacrifice, bore the curse for them, to bear it from them. He stands for them in pleading for them at the throne of grace. And after the destruction of antichrist, the Lord Jesus shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and He shall appear for the complete redemption of all his people."
Matthew Henry
:https://biblehub.com/commentaries/mhc/daniel/12.htm
(As tends to be the case) The slippery slope gets the last laugh.
Now Doctors to Help Younger People Commit Suicide by Self-Starvation
The euthanasia movement not only promotes lethal injection and assisted suicide but what is known in the death crowd’s parlance as VSED, which stands for “voluntary stop eating and drinking.” Because starving and dehydrating oneself produces agony, VSED usually requires a doctor’s palliative assistance to ameliorate what would be otherwise unbearable suffering that would lead the despairing person to give up the attempt.
VSED is pushed here for the elderly by groups like Compassion & Choices. Now, in the Netherlands, younger people are to be granted help in starving themselves to death. From the Dutch News story:
Doctors’ federation KNMG has scrapped the age limit for care for people who have chosen to end their lives by refusing to eat and drink.
Some 700 people a year die by this method in the Netherlands. Under the new guideline, meant for doctors and other caregivers, people younger than 60 can now also apply for end of life care, for instance from a hospice.
Hospice, properly understood, provides palliative and other medical and social services to people who are terminally ill. But now, apparently Dutch hospices will do that for people who would not be dying but for starving and dehydrating themselves.
The Theory of Harm Reduction
In the usual Dutch manner, experts opine that rather than seek to prevent awful occurrences, it must be accommodated — the theory of harm reduction:
De Graeff, who works as a doctor at the Demeter hospice, said space must be made for younger people wishing to die by refusing food and drink. “If a patient has made the considered choice to do this, we can all think what we like,” he said. “But if that is what they want then it is better to do it in an environment where they can be supported than on their own.”
NO. Doctors and hospices can — and should — refuse to participate in any patient’s suicide. That doesn’t mean refusing to help the suicidal person. Of course, prevention efforts should be engaged. But it does mean refusing to be complicit.
Of course, we in the U.S. have our own such issues, even beyond pernicious VSED advocacy. After all, Terri Schiavo — who would not otherwise have been dying but for the medically unnecessary removal of her feeding tube — spent her last years in a hospice. And her agony wasn’t even palliated. Due to the demands of her husband, her family wasn’t even allowed to soothe her drying and cracking lips with ice chips. What a vile travesty.
It’s almost like the West has developed a death cult. Or maybe, not “almost.”
Sunday, 28 January 2024
There is a time to punish: The Watchtower Society's Commentary
When Is There a Basis for Taking Offense?
AT ECCLESIASTES 7:9, the Bible states: “The taking of offense is what rests in the bosom of the stupid ones.” This verse shows that we should not be overly sensitive when someone offends us; rather, we should be forgiving.
However, is Ecclesiastes 7:9 saying that we should never be offended by anything or anyone, that we are to forgive all offenses regardless of how severe or how frequent they are and not do anything about them? Should we be unconcerned about our giving offense by word or action because we know that the one offended should be forgiving? This cannot be the case.
JEHOVAH God is the epitome of love, mercy, forgiveness, and long-suffering. Yet, in the Bible, he is many times spoken of as being offended. When the offense was severe, he took action against the offenders. Consider some examples.
Offenses Against JEHOVAH
The account at 1 Kings 15:30 speaks of the sins of Jeroboam “with which he caused Israel to sin and by his offensiveness with which he offended Jehovah.” At 2 Chronicles 28:25, the Bible says regarding King Ahaz of Judah: “He made high places for making sacrificial smoke to other gods, so that he offended Jehovah the God of his forefathers.” Another example is found at Judges 2:11-14: “Israel fell to doing what was bad in the eyes of Jehovah and serving the Baals . . . , so that they offended Jehovah. . . . At this Jehovah’s anger blazed against Israel, so that he gave them into the hands of the pillagers.”
There are other things that offended Jehovah and that called for strong action. For example, at Exodus 22:18-20, we read: “You must not preserve a sorceress alive. Anyone lying down with a beast is positively to be put to death. One who sacrifices to any gods but Jehovah alone is to be devoted to destruction.”
Jehovah did not continually forgive the major offenses of ancient Israel when they kept offending him and did not show true repentance. Where there was no true repentance and no actions to indicate that there was a turning around to obey Jehovah, God eventually gave the perpetrators up to destruction. This happened on a national scale in 607 B.C.E., at the hands of the Babylonians, and again in 70 C.E., at the hands of the Romans.
Yes, Jehovah takes offense at the bad things that people say and do, and he even executes unrepentant offenders whose sins are gross. But does this put him in the category of those of whom Ecclesiastes 7:9 speaks? Not at all. He is justified in taking offense at gross sins and always judges fairly. The Bible says of Jehovah: “Perfect is his activity, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness, with whom there is no injustice; righteous and upright is he.”—Deuteronomy 32:4.
Major Offenses Against Individuals
Under the Law that God gave to ancient Israel, there were serious consequences for major offenses against individuals. For instance, if a thief came into a house at night and the householder killed him, there was no bloodguilt on the part of the householder. He was an innocent victim of a major crime. Hence, we read: “If a thief should be found in the act of breaking in and he does get struck and die, there is no bloodguilt for [the householder].”—Exodus 22:2.
A woman who has been raped has a right to be highly offended, as this is a major crime in God’s eyes. Under the Mosaic Law, a man who raped a woman was to die “just as when a man rises up against his fellowman and indeed murders him.” (Deuteronomy 22:25, 26) While we are no longer under that Law, it gives us insight into how Jehovah feels about rape—a horrible wrong.
In our time, rape is also a major crime with severe penalties. The victim has EVERY RIGHT to report the matter to the police. In this way the proper authorities can punish the offender. And if the victim is a minor, the parents may want to initiate these actions.(italics mine)
Lesser Offenses
However, not all offenses require action by the authorities. Thus, we should not want to take undue offense at the relatively minor mistakes that others make, but we should be forgiving. How often should we forgive? The apostle Peter asked Jesus: “Lord, how many times is my brother to sin against me and am I to forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered: “I say to you, not, Up to seven times, but, Up to seventy-seven times.”—Matthew 18:21, 22.
On the other hand, there is a continuing need for us to work on our Christian personality to try to minimize giving offense. For instance, when you deal with others, are you at times blunt, tactless, insulting? Such ways are likely to offend. Rather than blaming the victim for taking offense and feeling that the burden of forgiveness is on him, the offender needs to realize that he is the reason that the person took offense. The offender needs to work on controlling his actions and speech so as not to give offense in the first place. This effort will reduce the number of times we hurt the feelings of others. The Bible reminds us: “There exists the one speaking thoughtlessly as with the stabs of a sword, but the tongue of the wise ones is a healing.” (Proverbs 12:18) When we offend others, even if we did not intend to do so, our making an apology goes a long way toward remedying the situation.
God’s Word shows that we should “pursue the things making for peace and the things that are upbuilding to one another.” (Romans 14:19) When we are tactful and kind, the proverb applies: “As apples of gold in silver carvings is a word spoken at the right time for it.” (Proverbs 25:11) What a pleasant and delightful impression that leaves! Mild, tactful speech can even change the rigid attitudes of others: “A mild tongue itself can break a bone.”—Proverbs 25:15.
Hence, God’s Word counsels us: “Let your utterance be always with graciousness, seasoned with salt, so as to know how you ought to give an answer to each one.” (Colossians 4:6) “Seasoned with salt” means that we make our expressions tasteful to others, thereby reducing the possibility of giving offense. In both word and deed, Christians strive to apply the Bible’s admonition: “Seek peace and pursue it.”—1 Peter 3:11.
Thus, Ecclesiastes 7:9 must mean that we should refrain from taking offense at the relatively minor sins of others. These may be the result of human imperfection or may even be deliberate yet not gross. But when an offense is a major sin, it is understandable that the victim may be offended and may choose to initiate appropriate action.—Matthew 18:15-17.
Saturday, 27 January 2024
Yet more re:the God hypothesis.
Andrew Klavan and Stephen Meyer Talk God and Science
On a classic episode of ID the Future, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen C. Meyer sits down with talk show host and bestselling novelist Andrew Klavan to discuss Meyer’s Return of the God hypothesis. In this fast-paced conversation the pair touch on the Judeo-Christian roots of science, how fine-tuning in physics and cosmology point to intelligent design, and how a great many scientists held out hope that the universe was eternal and therefore did not require a creator, until the evidence for a cosmic beginning mounted. What about the multiverse hypothesis as an escape for atheists wishing to explain away the evidence for a cosmic designer? Meyer explains why it fails the test of Occam’s razor. Finally, Meyer and Klavan discuss a noted atheist philosopher who frankly admits that he doesn’t want theism to be true and yet also admits that modern Darwinism has failed and that the evidence for design in various scientific fields is too powerful to be ignored.
Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Friday, 26 January 2024
The rise of the machines is a thing?
Artificial General Intelligence: An Idol for Destruction
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, if it is ever achieved, would be a computing machine that matches and then exceeds all human cognitive ability. To those like Ray Kurzweil, who are convinced that humans in their essence are computing machines, humans will soon achieve AGI by creating such machines. Then for a time, humans will become cyborgs, merging with machines. But ultimately, humans will dispense with their bodies, uploading themselves without remainder onto machines. In this way, they will achieve digital immortality.
This vision, which I will be considering in a series at Evolution News, has captured the imagination of many, though not always with the optimism of Kurzweil. Worries about a dystopian AGI future in the vein of Skynet (The Terminator), Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey), or the Matrix (The Matrix) are widespread. Elon Musk, for instance, sees the coming of AGI as a greater threat to humanity than nuclear weapons, and thus warns about placing safeguards on artificial intelligence, as it currently is being developed, so that as AGI emerges, it doesn’t run amuck and kill us all. Musk’s worry loses some urgency because AGI does not appear to be imminent. Even with the recent impressive advances in artificial intelligence, the improvements have been domain specific (text generation, automatic driving, game playing) rather than all encompassing, as they must be for a true AGI.
Even so, many notable intellectuals and influencers are now convinced that AGI is in our near future. Some, like Kurzweil, think this will be the best thing ever to happen to humanity. Others, like Musk, see grave dangers. But even Musk feels the siren call to play a part in bringing about AGI. Take his Neuralink initiative, which is to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.” The Neuralink brain interface is invasive, requiring electrodes to be implanted into the brain. It’s one thing for technology to unlock human potential by acting as a servant that minimizes tedious chores so that we can focus on creative work. But it’s another thing to merge our brains/minds with machines, as with neural implants. To the degree that this merger is successful, the mental will give way to the mechanical and render AGI all the more plausible and appealing.
The Argument of This Series
I will argue in this series that AGI is an idol and so, like all idols, that AGI is a fraud. Idols are always frauds because they substitute a lesser for a greater, demanding reverence for the lesser at the expense of the greater. Granted, we misappraise things all the time. But with idolatry, the stakes are as high as they can be because idolatry misappraises things of ultimate value. The AGI idol is a call to worship technology at the expense of our humanity (and ultimately of God). Humans, as creators of technology, are clearly the greater in relation to technology, and yet AGI would reverse this natural order. The AGI idol demeans our humanity, reducing us to mere mechanism. Because of the inherent fraud in idols, there’s only one legitimate response to them, namely, to destroy them. This series attempts a demolition of the AGI idol.
An obvious question now arises: What if AGI eventually is realized and clearly exceeds every human capability? Will it then cease to be an idol and instead become a widely accepted fact to which we must reconcile ourselves if we are to maintain intellectual credibility — or just be functioning citizens in an increasingly technological world? We might equally ask whether a SETI cult that worships advanced alien intelligences would still be idolaters if aliens superior to us in every way finally did clearly and unmistakably land on Earth. Such counterfactuals, whether for AGI or SETI, raise intriguing possibilities, but for now they are only that. As we will see, the evidence for taking them seriously is lacking.
There are sound reasons to think that AGI is inherently unattainable — that the human mind is not a mechanical device and that artificial intelligence can never bootstrap itself to full human functioning (to say nothing of achieving a human’s full inner life, such as consciousness, emotions, and sensations). I will offer such an argument in this series. But the real point at issue with the AGI idol is the delusional effect it has on its worshippers. For thinking AGI a live possibility, AGI worshippers reduce humans to machines and thereby denigrate our humanity. In this, AGI worshippers are merely following the logic of their beliefs. The key feature of belief is its power to govern our actions and thoughts irrespective of the actual truth of what we believe.
Not every anticipated scientific or technological advance is an idol. It becomes an idol when the prospect of that advance degenerates into religious zealotry aimed at dethroning God. Kurzweil displayed such zeal when he wrote a 2005 book titled The Singularity Is Near and then, without apparent irony, followed it up with a 2024 book titled The Singularity is Nearer. It’s like the old cartoon of a man wearing a sandwich sign with the words “The world ends today!” A cop stops him and says, “Okay, but don’t let me see you wearing that sign tomorrow.” I’m eager for Kurzweil to release The Singularity is Here.
An Even More Intense Zeal
Though Kurzweil’s zeal for AGI may seem hard to beat, we find an even more intense zeal for AGI at OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has put artificial intelligence front and center in the public consciousness. OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever is reported “to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company,” such as the refrain “”Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” We even find OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman now the subject of articles with titles such as “Sam Altman Seems to Imply That OpenAI Is Building God.” Altman describes AGI as a “magic intelligence in the sky” and foresees that AGI will become an omnipotent superintelligence. Likewise, the Church of AI teaches that “at some point AI will have God-like powers.” If this is not idolatry, what is a more apt description?
Before we go further, let me emphasize that this series is not religious in nature. Granted, I will be using religious terminology and themes to illuminate AGI and its destructive role in misshaping our view of the world and of ourselves. But this series is principally a philosophical and scientific critique of AGI. Religious themes provide a particularly effective lens for understanding the challenges raised by AGI. Worshippers of the AGI idol agree that AGI has yet to be realized but they see its arrival not only as imminent but also as a messianic coming. Whereas artificial intelligence is a legitimate field of study, artificial general intelligence, as its apotheosis, is a religious ideology. AGI worshippers are like those apocalyptic sects that are forever predicting a new order of things and constantly rationalizing why it has yet to arrive, scapegoating those who resist their vision.
The Problem with Idolatry Historically
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of AGI, I want to say more about idolatry and why historically it has been regarded as a problem — indeed, a pernicious evil. Traditionally speaking, an idol attempts to usurp the role of God, putting itself in place of God even though it is not God or anywhere close to God. By analogy, it is an “Antichrist” vying to take the place of the true Christ. The Greek preposition “anti,” when appearing in modern English, is usually translated as “against.” But “anti” in the Greek actually means “instead of.” The Antichrist falsely assumes the role of the true Christ. Idols are always “anti” in this sense to whatever has, up to now, been regarded as of ultimate value (which traditionally has always been God).
In the Old Testament of the Bible, idolatry is universally condemned. The first two of the Ten Commandments are explicitly against it: Don’t have any other gods (except God) and don’t make any graven image of any gods (even of God). It can be argued that the last of the Ten Commandments is also against idolatry, namely, the prohibition against coveting. In the New Testament Epistle to the Colossians, the apostle Paul warns against covetousness, which he explicitly identifies with idolatry (Col. 3:5). But what is covetousness except an inordinate desire for something to advance one’s selfish interests at the expense of others and ultimately of God? It is placing a created thing above God as well as above creatures made in the image of God (namely, other humans). In his Four-Hundred Chapters on Love (I.5 and I.7), the seventh-century Christian saint Maximus the Confessor elaborated on this connection between covetousness and idolatry:
If all things have been made by God and for his sake, then God is better than what has been made by him. The one who forsakes the better and is engrossed in inferior things shows that he prefers the things made by God to God himself… If the soul is better than the body and God incomparably better than the world which he created, the one who prefers the body to the soul and the world to the God who created it is no different from idolaters.
Idols are inherently ideational. An image carved into wood is just an image, but it becomes an idol depending on the ideas we attach to it and the reverence we give those ideas. What’s important about idols is their perceived, not their actual, connection to reality. Consequently, AGI’s power as an idol does not reside in its attainability but in the faith that it is attainable. Idols can be given physical form, as the idols of old. But they can be purely ideational. The great movements of mass murder in the 20th century were governed by ideas that captured people’s imaginations and produced a collective insanity. These idols of the mind are arguably more pernicious than the physical idols created by ancient cultures, which can be reverenced without understanding. But an idol of the mind created out of ideas must, by its nature, be understood to be reverenced.
Prohibitions against idolatry abound in the Old Testament. Yet most of those prohibitions do not explain what exactly is wrong with idolatry. In the worldview of the Old Testament, idolatry was so obviously wrong that its condemnation was typically enough, requiring no further justification. The uncreated God who resides in heaven surpasses any humanly created idol — end of story. But Isaiah 44:9-20 examines the problem of idolatry more deeply. The idol maker who fells a tree uses part of it for basic needs like warmth and cooking, and from the remainder crafts an idol. This idol, despite being the handiwork of the idol maker, thereby becomes an object of worship and devotion.
Isaiah’s critical insight is to explain the idol’s deceptive power. The craftsman, blinded by his own creativity, fails to recognize the idol as merely his creation, and so becomes entrapped in worshiping a delusion: “A deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?’” (Isaiah 44:20, NIV) Unlike other Old Testament passages that emphasize the uselessness of idols, Isaiah points out a more insidious danger: the temptation to craft gods according to our own desires and specifications and then to delude ourselves into thinking that these mere creations are worthy of our highest regard, which is to say worthy of our worship. When we worship something that is not worthy of our worship, we degrade ourselves. (This and the previous paragraph are drawn from Leslie Zeigler’s talk at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1994 titled “Christianity or Feminism?”)
Effusive Praise and Hushed Awe
Just to be clear, I understand that to the modern secular mind, the language of idolatry and worship will seem out of place and off-putting. But given the effusive praise and hushed awe with which the advent of AGI is being greeted, this language is hardly a stretch. The secular prophets who are promising AGI, who are earnestly striving to be at the forefront of ushering it in, see themselves as creating the greatest thing humans have ever created, which they advertise as a giant leap forward in our evolution. Even if AGI were to turn against them and the rest of humanity, killing all of us, they would view AGI as the pinnacle of human achievement and take satisfaction in whatever role they might play in its creation.
If idolatry is so gross an evil, what should be done about it? In the Old Testament, idols were embodied in physical things (golden calves, fertility images, carvings of Baal), and so the obvious answer to idolatry was the physical destruction of the idols. But the problem with idolatry is not ultimately with an idol’s physical embodiment but with what’s in the heart of the idolaters that turns them away from the true God to lesser realities. That’s why, in both the Old and New Testaments, the call is not just to destroy physical idols but more importantly to change one’s heart so that it is directed toward God and away from the idols. Without that, people will simply keep returning to the idols (as with the constant refrain in the Book of Judges that the Israelites yet again did evil in the sight of the Lord by worshipping idols). In the Old Testament, God’s people are called to turn (Hebrew shuv) from evil and return to a right relationship with God. In the New Testament, the same concept takes the form of redirecting one’s mind (Greek metanoia), and is typically translated as repentance.
How then to get people to turn or repent from idolatry? Ultimately, overturning idolatry requires humility, realizing that we and our creations are not God, and that only God is God. The eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann saw the problem clearly: “It is not the immorality of the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his ‘positive ideal’ — religious or secular — and his satisfaction with this ideal.” For AGI worshippers, AGI is as positive an ideal as exists. The answer to it is humility, realizing that AGI will never rival God and thus also never rival the creatures made in God’s image, namely, ourselves. In particular, we do not get to create God.
The closest thing to AGI in the Bible is the Tower of Babel. The conceit of those building the tower was that its “top may reach unto heaven.” (Genesis 11:4) Seriously?! Shouldn’t it have been obvious to all concerned that however high the tower might be built, there would always be higher to go? Even with primitive cosmologies describing the “vault” or “arch” of heaven, it should have been clear that heaven would continually elude these builders’ best efforts. Indeed, there was no way the tower would ever reach heaven. And yet the builders deluded themselves into thinking that this was possible. Interestingly, God’s answer to the tower was not to destroy it but to confuse its builders by disrupting their communications so that they simply discontinued building it. AGI’s ultimate fate, whatever its precise form, is to run aground on the hubris of its builders.
Thursday, 25 January 2024
On the ingenious design of trees.
Paper Digest: Are Trees Well Designed?
Editor’s note: Evolution News is delighted to continue an occasional series, “Paper Digest,” looking back at past publications in peer-reviewed journals of interest in the debate about intelligent design.
Back in 2004 in the Journal of Engineering Design, Stuart Burgess, a longtime proponent of intelligent design theory, and D. Pasini Published on the physics and design principles of trees. Specifically, the study looks at the mass-efficiency of the structural shapes and forms found in trees. Burgess and Pasini explain that their purpose is “to understand how high levels of mass-efficiency are achieved [in trees] and to identify lessons for engineering designers.”
Consistent with Burgess’s general research strategy — using the assumption of good design in nature to guide investigation, further scientific knowledge, and better elucidate how natural systems work — this paper is an excellent example of how ID research can be applied in a scientific discipline.
A Key Step in Reverse Engineering.
To classify the function of structural features of a tree, Burgess and Pasini use a methodology called a function-means tree. This is just a graphical way of identifying a hierarchy of functions, beginning with the highest and then depicting how these are fulfilled by lower-level functions. Building this hierarchy of objectives is a very important step in reverse engineering because it helps one to understand the functional reasons for structures observed in nature.
Major Sources of Load
To appreciate the design of a tree, Burgess and Pasini explain that it is important to understand the major sources of loading or forces that a tree must endure. These loads come from the wind and the weight of the tree itself. Using their engineering toolset, Burgess and Pasini offer equations to estimate the aerodynamic force due to the wind, the bending of the trunk, and the maximum stress the tree endures. From these equations, they discover the engineering importance of a tree’s structural design features, such as a tapered trunk and the structural hierarchy of little branches being supported by bigger branches. They also discover fun facts like large trees don’t have greater bending stress than small ones, but taller trees might have greater bending stress due to higher wind speeds further up from the ground. They authors are also able to determine some of the fail points and they note that for storms with winds of greater than 100 mph, trunks and branches are very vulnerable to breaking.
Next, Burgess and Pasini discuss the self-weight of the tree trunk and note that the compressive stress is not significant even for large trees because of their structure. Since trees grow straight up and then have branches emerging from all sides, much of the bending stress is alleviated through this excellent design of counterbalance.
Burgess and Pasini mention that one of the most important things about the overall structure of the tree is its structural hierarchy. There is first the trunk, then the main branches, then the secondary branches, and finally the tertiary branches and leaves. This hierarchy provides several advantages. First, it allows the surface area of the tree’s canopy to be linked to its source efficiently. The hierarchy also allows a relatively direct load path from the canopy to the trunk. Finally, the hierarchy mediates the ability for gradual growth. Through their expertise and with the help of a design lens, the authors can reverse engineer and understand the structural design of trees
Structural Features of the Trunk and Main Branches
Key structural features in the trunk include tapering and residual stresses. Tapering is the effect of the top of the trunk having a smaller diameter than the bottom of the trunk. Burgess and Pasini explain that this is a good design because the maximum bending varies the least at the bottom and the most at the top. It also reduces the amount of biomass that the tree must produce. The design of the trunk to bend also enables pre-stressing. This helps to improve the tree’s strength by relieving stress a little at a time instead of all at once in a devastating snap. They explain
When the tree is subjected to aerodynamic loading, bending stresses are superimposed on the residual tensile stresses. Pre-stressing is a beneficial structural feature because when the trunk is subjected to bending moments, the net compressive stresses are less than the net tensile stresses. Since the compressive strength of wood is lower than the tensile strength, the preloading significantly improves the strength of the tree.
Major branches connect the smaller branches to the trunk of the tree, which means they are subject to large loads because of the number of small branches and leaves attached. Burgess and Pasini note that, to compensate, the main branches, just like the trunk, are tapered — with the greatest diameter near the trunk, and tapering to a point. With major branches, the diameter of the branch changes from circular to rectangular, and the depth, especially at the connection point, is increased to support increased load bearing as the branch supports more and more weight.
How Leaves Minimize Aerodynamic Loading
Burgess and Pasini explain that in engineering, designs are often optimized around either strength or stiffness. When optimizing a design for strength, more flexibility is possible because stiffness is not a strict requirement. The authors observe that trees seem to be structurally designed more for strength. This is especially clear when we look at the smaller branches of a tree and its leaves, which readily deform in the wind, thereby minimizing aerodynamic loading. Despite their extreme flexibility, the design of the leaves still keeps them stable enough to provide a flat surface for light collection. In engineering, this is called high bending stiffness but low torsional stiffness.
The Structural Role of Roots
Hold-down bolts in concrete, connecting a building to its foundation, are comparable to sinker roots, a type of root that grows deep into the soil. Unlike hold-down bolts, though, roots are multifunctional, providing not only structural support but also water uptake. Burgess and Pasini explain that the lateral roots extend perpendicular to the sinker roots and provide an anchoring system through the creation of a plate of soil to which the tree structure is bound. For some trees with high growth rates, buttresses provide additional support as the underground root systems develop more slowly than canopy growth.
The Amazing Design of Wood’s
Microstructure
Burgess and Pasini briefly discuss the incredible design of wood’s microstructure, which is that of hollow cells with a hexagonal shape. They explain that being hollow reduces the overall density of wood, which reduces the load needed to be borne by the trunk and branches. They also derive an equation for a performance factor, demonstrating how the hexagonal microstructure strengthens the structure significantly.
Inspiration for Engineers
In this publication, Burgess and Pasini describe how trees are incredibly well-designed to withstand the forces of their own weight and the wind. Trees have smart structural design features like a multilayered hierarchy, counterbalance of loads, tapering to preserve resources, flexibility for minimal aerodynamic loading, and an appropriate microstructure. The authors note the structural efficiency of the tree is essential to its survival and ability to fulfill its roles in the ecosystem. Interestingly, engineers use nearly all the structural aspects of trees, but trees still have more multifunctionality than is commonly seen in human engineering. Burgess and Pasini conclude by looking forward, with the expectation that trees still offer additional sources of inspiration for engineers, especially when it comes to “multi-functioning structures with smart, adaptable behavior.”
On the role of the "Logos/prototokos" in the originating of the creation.
John Ch.1:3NIV"Through(dia) him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made."
Colossians Ch.1:15,16KJV"Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: 16For by (en)him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by(dia) him, and for him: "
Proverbs Ch.8:22NAB"The LORD begot me, the first-born of his ways, the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago;"
Proverbs Ch.8:30NAB"Then was I beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day, Playing before him all the while,"
The Holy scriptures NEVER use prepositions like "en" and "dia" in connection with JEHOVAH'S Role in the originating of the creation. Instead we read statements like this .
Acts Ch.4:24NIV"When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them."
Genesis Ch.14:19NIV"and he blessed Abram, saying, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth."
Revelation Ch.10:6NIV"And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, “There will be no more delay!"
Revelation Ch.4:11NIV"Thou art worthy, O LORD, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created."
Note nary an "en" or a "dia" in sight,note also that it is ONLY of the God and Father of Jesus the Lord JEHOVAH are such statements EVER Made. That is because the prepositions "en" and " dia" indicate instrumentality or an intermediary role. Thus the one referred to by these prepositions would not be the source of the authority or resources that made the creation possible but merely the instrument of this source.
E.g Matthew Ch.7:13NIV"“Enter through(dia) the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through(dia) it."
it is not the gate that is doing the entering it is instrument by which the entering is accomplished.
Hebrews Ch.1:1NIV"In the past God spoke to our ancestors through(en) the prophets at many times and in various ways, "
Thus it was JEHOVAH who was revealing his will but the prophets were his instruments.
Likewise at John Ch.1:3 and colossians 1:16 it is the God and Father of the Logos/Prototokos who is accomplishing the originating of his creation. His Logos/prototokos is his instrument.
Wednesday, 24 January 2024
Why Origin of Life research struggles to be taken seriously.
Sunlight on the Puzzle of Prebiotic RNA?
In two previous articles for Evolution News (here and here) I have argued against the plausibility of generating biologically relevant polymers (proteins, RNA, and DNA) in a prebiotic world. Much of this argument was based on the requirement for homochirality of the building blocks and the precise chemical bonds necessary to achieve nucleotides for RNA and DNA. Admittedly, some scientists have proposed schemes that are more palatable to skeptics of origin of life (OOL) research. Therefore, here I will explain the positive steps that have recently been taken to solve the enigma of how RNA and DNA may conceivably arise in an abiotic world.
In my earlier article, discussing the discovery of uracil recovered from samples taken from an asteroid, I made clear that formation of RNA (or DNA) building blocks through linking ring-structured nucleobases (uracil, thymine, cytosine, adenine, guanine) to the ring-constrained back bone sugar ribose (or deoxyribose for DNA) is a hopeless abiotic endeavor. The chemistry needed to complete formation of the needed building blocks in high yield without the use of energetically charged substrates and enzymes (as living systems use) is untenable. Several OOL scientists have recognized this drawback. They have chosen a different path, considered below, to propose how biologically relevant nucleotides might have been produced chemically, using only starting compounds believed to be present prebiotically.
Facile Synthesis of Pyrimidine Nucleosides (Cytidine and Uridine)
The chemical scheme envisaged employs a mechanism to build pyrimidine ring structures ab initio on ribose, rather than attempting to link them to this sugar. The entire synthetic process is as follows:
Disparate reaction conditions in the multi-step syntheses (conditions are in bold text):
Step 1) Ribose + cyanamide / 0.2 M sodium carbonate (pH ~10), 55o C -> RAO
Step 2) RAO + cyanoacetylene / hydrosulfide in aqueous formamide, UV light -> Intermediates A
Step 3) Intermediates A / phosphate, anhydrous formamide, heat -> alpha & beta-ribopyrimidines (pyrimidine ribonucleosides completed)
Step 4) Intermediates A + 8-mercaptoadenine / dry state in magnesium chloride, 150o C -> Intermediates B
Step 5) Intermediates B / bisulfate in phosphate (pH 7), 60o C or sulfite in phosphate (pH 8-10), heat, UV light -> Intermediates C
Step 6) Intermediates C / nitrous acid (pH 4) -> adenine and inosine products (purine ribo- and deoxyribonucleosides completed)
The first step uses cyanamide, a compound likely present on the early Earth, to react with ribose in a two-step process that traps the 5-carbon sugar into the required furanose ring conformation.1 This putative RNA precursor, called ribo-aminooxazoline (RAO), now has the first three atoms destined to form the pyrimidine ring already attached to the appropriate carbon of ribose. It is noteworthy that ribose, competing against the other three possible 5-carbon sugars, is the preferential substrate in this reaction. From this point synthesis continues2 via step 2 in the table, using another simple abiotic prospect, cyanoacetylene, resulting in an intermediate that is readily converted to ribocytidine. Thus, in just three steps using simple reactants, the first nucleoside is nearly complete in fairly high yield. This product, however, needs to be in the beta configuration. But this is easily managed by exposure to UV light with a conversion rate as high as 74 percent. UV light also facilitates oxidation of cytosine to uracil (at much lower yield) completing the recipe for production of both pyrimidine nucleosides. The authors in the publication cited above describe an alternative route to uridine, offering some advantages in yield by performing the reaction with cyanoacetylene in the presence of hydrosulfide.
Facile Synthesis of Purine [Deoxy]Nucleosides ([Deoxy]Adenosine and [Deoxy]Inosine)
To tackle the production of purine nucleotides, another putative chemical precursor feasibly present in an abiotic setting (step 4) is reacted in the presence of bisulfate with an intermediate in the alpha-ribocytidine pathway.3 Two isomers of beta-deoxyadenine (dA) result upon UV irradiation where the biologically relevant isomer exhibits yields close to 50 percent. Treatment of dA with nitrous acid gives partial conversion to beta-deoxyinosine (dI). Subsequent research by this group demonstrated the feasibility of producing the corresponding purine ribonucleosides (A and I) by carrying out the first reaction in alkaline sodium sulfite instead of bisulfate.4 The yields of the desired products are appreciably lower than those found for the pyrimidine products (10-40 percent vs 40-50 percent). In summary, these chemical synthetic studies under hypothetical prebiotic conditions have demonstrated respectable yields for the beta versions of ribo pyrimidines and purines as well as for beta versions of deoxyribo purines, representing the canonical building blocks used in biology.
The Homochirality Challenge
None of the studies indicated above differentiate between the two stereoisomers of ribose. Certainly, L-ribose should have been equally present with D-ribose in a prebiotic world, so RAO precursors would likewise be a racemic mixture. Another laboratory explored an innovative approach taking advantage of the fact that chiral molecules can align with a magnetic field due to spin states of all their electrons.5 Enantiomeric pairs of a compound will exhibit spin states aligning with opposing magnetic polarity. This principle is known as chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS). Because magnetite is expected to be abundant in the sediment of bodies of water on the primordial Earth, it was hypothesized that Earth’s magnetic field would serve to magnetize the iron-containing sediment, providing a means to preferentially adsorb RAO enantiomers in different zones based on their CISS. The referenced experiments were performed in Petri dishes simulating this design, placing a magnet underneath the insoluble magnetite. The first round of selection eventually led to RAO crystallization on the magnetite surface, demonstrating a significant enrichment in either D- or L-RAO depending on magnetic polarity.
After collecting the crystals, redissolving them in buffer, and repeating the magnetite-induced selection, the second round of crystallization resulted in optically pure RAO. From experiments like these it was proposed that homochirality of RAO could have been achieved on the prebiotic Earth where a small enantiomeric imbalance is induced within zones to retain preferentially one of the two RAO stereoisomers. With this occurring near shore, water flow redissolves the RAO crystals, followed by a subsequent dry phase when the shoreline recedes. When the water rises to this level again, RAO recrystallizes to a greater enantiomeric excess. That is since the magnetite had been conditionally enhanced magnetically in the previous round through the CISS effect.6 It was suggested that this repeated cycle of adsorption, crystallization, and spin-alignment on the magnetite surface may serve as a positive feedback loop, leading to the ultimate prize of crystalizing homochiral RAO.
Feasibility of This Chemistry Was Demonstrated, but Is It Plausible Under Prebiotic Conditions?
Considering first the proposal to attain homochirality of RAO, weak assumptions are required to accept this achievement. The authors noted that timing of crystallization is important. That is because if crystals are allowed to grow for too long a period of time, enantiomeric excess decreases and thus the chiral spin state training of magnetite is reduced or jeopardized. It would take a string of good fortune to have that cycle spontaneously repeated at the right length of time. It would also be expected that different zones along the shore would each select their own enantiomer of RAO.6 Despite having individual homochiral crystals, over larger areas the opposite stereoisomers are also crystallized. So how do they remain separated before and after undergoing subsequent reactions, leading to nucleoside synthesis? This can be readily accomplished in the laboratory, keeping crystals and their down-stream products isolated. But there is no guarantee they will remain isolated under abiotic situations.
Regarding the synthesis of nucleosides from RAO, several concerns come into play: 1) Multi-step syntheses diminish the yields of final products and increase probabilities of generating by-products that might compete for incorporation into RNA building blocks. The yields of purine nucleosides, in particular, suffer from the requirement for additional steps needed in their synthesis. 2) Most reactions require disparate conditions. How do the reactants in an abiotic environment become sequentially incorporated under these different reaction conditions (Steps 1-6)? In the laboratory this is self-explanatory, but it is not a trivial matter when chemistry is left to stochastic events. 3) Predictions of the chemical repertoire of a prebiotic Earth are largely unsubstantiated. Support for such predictions could potentially come from analyzing samples from other extraterrestrial bodies as was done with the asteroid Ryugu. Retrieval of samples from Mars would be a particularly exciting venue to explore. Without this type of confirmatory data our suppositions of prebiotic chemistry could simply be shooting in the dark. 4) The role of UV light is likely critical to the formation of these RNA building blocks. This can be a double-edged sword as UV light can also damage purines and pyrimidines by several means. 5) A prebiotic synthetic scheme leading to guanine has still not been elaborated. Instead, they propose that inosine, which is included in the schemes presented here, can substitute for guanine since it is able to base pair with cytosine (as guanine does). Inosine, however, is more akin to being a wildcard as it also base pairs with uracil and thymine. Such promiscuous base pairing will undoubtedly limit the functional gamut of RNA/DNA polymers and alter the structural dynamics that we now know are important for the biological roles of many RNAs.
Truly an Extraordinary Solution
I appreciate the quality of work that went into devising chemical schemes to synthesize purine and pyrimidine nucleobases, achieving the mandatory stereo and chemical specificity of furanosyl ribose established in living systems. This is truly an extraordinary solution using alleged prebiotic conditions. In my opinion, other attempts to meet this challenge have not come close to attaining such a level of accuracy. Unfortunately, the most significant problem is how this can be completed without a guided mechanism to direct each successive reaction and maintain respectable yields along the entire process.
Beyond the initial synthesis of nucleic acid building blocks, there are more highly significant concerns once nucleotide chains have been assembled. Adjacent pyrimidines are very prone to form several types of chemical lesions elicited by UV light. Without a series of enzymes to repair such lesions, the repercussions for the damaged RNA/DNA molecule are poor. In current biological systems they result in mutations because of replication errors. Of course, in a prebiotic world repair enzymes would not exist. These concluding remarks shine light (pardon the pun) on future considerations of RNA/DNA polymers in a prebiotic world. If one wonders why origin-of-life science has its skeptics, unpretentious complications like those here reveal concerns and doubts that arise as we contemplate the field.
References
Springsteen G, Joyce GF. Selective derivatization and sequestration of ribose from a prebiotic mix. J Am Chem Soc 2004;126(31):9578-83 doi 10.1021/ja0483692.
Xu J, Tsanakopoulou M, Magnani CJ, Szabla R, Sponer JE, Sponer J, et al. A prebiotically plausible synthesis of pyrimidine beta-ribonucleosides and their phosphate derivatives involving photoanomerization. Nat Chem 2017;9(4):303-9 doi 10.1038/nchem.2664.
Xu J, Chmela V, Green NJ, Russell DA, Janicki MJ, Gora RW, et al. Selective prebiotic formation of RNA pyrimidine and DNA purine nucleosides. Nature 2020;582(7810):60-6 doi 10.1038/s41586-020-2330-9.
Xu J, Green NJ, Russell DA, Liu Z, Sutherland JD. Prebiotic Photochemical Coproduction of Purine Ribo- and Deoxyribonucleosides. J Am Chem Soc 2021;143(36):14482-6 doi 10.1021/jacs.1c07403.
Ozturk SF, Liu Z, Sutherland JD, Sasselov DD. Origin of biological homochirality by crystallization of an RNA precursor on a magnetic surface. Sci Adv 2023;9(23):eadg8274 doi 10.1126/sciadv.adg8274.
Ozturk SF, Bhowmick DK, Kapon Y, Sang Y, Kumar A, Paltiel Y, et al. Chirality-induced avalanche magnetization of magnetite by an RNA precursor. Nat Commun 2023;14(1):6351 doi 10.1038/s41467-023-42130-8.
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