And still yet more iconoclasm.

A.N. Wilson in The Times – Against Darwinist Absolutism
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer   

Tearing down historical statues, all the rage at the moment, is egregious vandalism and, I think, will be regretted down the road when it’s too late to restore irreplaceable monuments. But if you insist on knocking over tributes to figures of the past with painful legacies, why not Darwin?

The great man’s latest biographer, A.N. Wilson, wants to seriously upset how we think of his subject, and he demonstrates it again in an essay published by The Times of London, “Darwin’s greatness is founded on a myth.” Wilson’s book,  Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, of which the article looks to be a précis, will be out in Britain next week. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for it here until December. Other than commending him for his liberal politics and for being a “supremely observant and talented naturalist and collector of specimens,” Wilson finds little to praise in Darwin.

The article, presumably like the book, is not anti-evolution per se, and certainly not an expression of creationism (“indeed at variance with scientific truth”). Instead he castigates Darwin as ambitious, cagey if not dishonest in refusing to acknowledge the sources of his idea, unscientific, lending support to the racial and other prejudices of his time, and encouraging of much darker and more dangerous ideas. This is familiar material, but extremely well said.

He begins by observing of On the Origin of Species, “It is often spoken of as a work of science.” “Often spoken of,” but not really that?

Whatever you make of it, it is a strange book. Most of its central contentions, such as the idea that everything in nature always evolves gradually, are now disbelieved by scientists, and the science of genetics has made much of it seem merely quaint.

Of Darwin’s other famous book:

In his Descent of Man, he finally admitted how he thought humanity had evolved. It is an absurd, indeed embarrassing, book. I wonder sometimes how many Darwinians have actually read it to the end. It tells us that savages such as he met in Tierra del Fuego spoke largely in grunts and had almost no vocabulary. Yet missionaries visited the place not long after Darwin and compiled a dictionary of their language, finding they possessed a vocabulary of over 30,000 words.

On Darwin as a scientist, and the precious Galápagos finches:

A generation later, and the Darwinian faith had evolved the story of the master’s Damascene conversion to the theory of natural selection while he was a young man on HMS Beagle, sailing to the Galapagos Islands. We all know the story. Darwin noticed the different finches, from island to island, and how they had different-shaped beaks. It was here that he saw the phenomenon of descent by gradual modification happening before his very eyes.

What actually happened was this. Darwin sent back a vast number of specimens collected during the voyage of the Beagle. The notion is propounded that a revolution was taking place in his views on the immutability of species. As a matter of fact, Darwin failed to identify most of the finch specimens that he collected on the Galapagos as finches at all. Some he labelled blackbirds, others “gross beaks” and one a wren. He gave them to the Ornithological Society of London, who gave them to John Gould, an ornithological illustrator, to be identified. It was Gould, not Darwin, who recognised that they were all distinct species of finch.

It was Captain FitzRoy, not Darwin, who made collections of finches and labelled them correctly, and, as Harvard University’s Frank Sulloway demonstrated in 1982, it was FitzRoy’s identification of the differences between the finches which enabled Gould to make his remarkable observations.

Darwin never mentioned the differences between the finches in the Origin of Species, even though, during the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of publication, Gould’s drawings of the Galapagos finches were reproduced again and again as if they were Darwin’s “discovery”. Moreover, Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionary biologists from Princeton University, spent over 25 summers studying these birds, mainly on the island of Daphne Major. They revealed that the beak changes were reversible. This is hardly “evolution”.

On Darwin’s eugenic legacy and the problem, as he saw it, of brutes racing past civilized men like himself in populating the world:

Darwin made it clear that he thought something would have to be done to correct this troubling state of affairs. His cousin Francis Galton took up the suggestion and pioneered the “science” of eugenics, in which he openly advocated making it illegal for savages and the working classes to breed. We all know where that led in the time of the national socialists, but we sometimes blind ourselves to the source of Hitler’s ideas.

Historians may object that Wilson’s critiques are not original to him, but seem to be assembled from other sources. However, Wilson isn’t an academic historian or a specialized scholar and doesn’t claim to be. The subjects of his past historical books have ranged across centuries and continents, from ancient Palestine to Victorian and 20th-century England. He is a literary critic, novelist, and popular biographer. Assuming that he acknowledges his sources in the book, and that his facts are otherwise correct, I don’t see this as a devastating criticism at all.

Instead, this biography appears to be part of a larger rethink of evolution that is bubbling away in a variety of areas. The Royal Society meeting last November is part of it. (See our post from earlier this week, “Evolutionary Theorist Concedes: Evolution ‘Largely Avoids’ Biggest Questions of Biological Origins.”) Stephen Meyer in his books has documented the scientific problems with unguided evolution that, until recently, have been kept hidden in the professional literature. Jonathan Wells, Douglas Axe, David Berlinski, Tom Bethell, and others have contributed to unmasking the failure of Darwinian theory to account for biological novelties – what we think of as “evolution.”

A prominent atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, coming out as a Darwin skeptic is part of this phenomenon. Tom Wolfe’s Darwin-doubting book on the evolution of human communication, The Kingdom of Speech, is part of it. Yes, the steadily accumulating case for intelligent design, and demands for academic freedom in teaching about evolution in localities across the United States, are relevant too.

Whether Wilson, a master storyteller with a keen wit, is the man to finally topple Darwin’s idol is not really the point. I can’t say more without getting a chance to read the book, but the fact of its being written and published at all, and by Darwin’s own publisher (!), gives further evidence of a growing trend in the culture, both scientific and literary, against Darwinist absolutism. And that’s good news.

On Darwinism and racial demagoguery.

Evolution and the Alt-Right, Continued
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer  

The “alt-right,” like “alt-left,” functions in part as a designation for the boogeyman. They are people we don’t like, don’t understand, people who embarrass us or frighten us. Besides being a term of abuse, however, the “alt-right” also refers to a core of Americans and others who share fairly consistent beliefs.

The label is new, but there are now, and long have been, and probably always will be a fringe of hateful racial tribalists. One point about this narrow demographic that has gone largely unnoticed is the degree to which its thinking embraces evolution to justify dehumanizing people they don’t like. While the Confederate cause in the Civil War has been the subject of much chatter, the modern racial right owes far more to Charles Darwin than to Robert E. Lee.

That’s a takeaway from a pre-print study,“A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right,” by two social psychologists, Patrick S. Forscher and Nour S. Kteily of the University of Arkansas and Northwestern University respectively. Their news peg, predictably, is the 2016 presidential election. They report:

We surveyed 447 alt-right adherents on a battery of psychological measures, comparing their responses to those of 382 non-adherents. Alt-right adherents were much more distrustful of the mainstream media and government; expressed higher Dark Triad traits, social dominance orientation, and authoritarianism; reported high levels of aggression; and exhibited extreme levels of overt intergroup bias, including blatant dehumanization of racial minorities.

They paid alt-right members of their sample $3 to participate, while a comparison group got $2, “because we assumed [alt-right adherents] would be more difficult to recruit.” Much of what they found is no surprise, but the frankness of their questioning about evolution is refreshing (emphasis added):

Dehumanization scales. We measured blatant dehumanization of various groups using the ascent dehumanization measure (Kteily, Bruneau, Waytz, & Cotterill, 2015). This scale asks people to rate how ‘evolved’ they perceive people or groups to be using a diagram shown in Figure 1. This diagram depicts the purported biological and cultural evolution of humans from quadrupedal human ancestors. People use a 0-100 slider to decide where a person or group falls along the continuum established by the silhouettes in the image, with a score of 0 corresponding to the quadrupedal human ancestor and a score of 100 corresponding to a modern human. Higher scores therefore indicate humanization, lower scores dehumanization.

We assessed humanity attributions towards a broad array of targets. On the basis of exploratory factor analysis among the alt-right sample, we created three subscales corresponding to (1) the humanity attributed to targets favored by the alt-right (Americans, Europeans, Swedes, White people, Donald Trump, Republicans, Christians, men); (2) religious and ethnic groups targeted by the alt-right (Arabs, Muslims, Turks, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Blacks); and (3) political opposition groups (Hillary Clinton, Democrats, feminists, Republicans who refused to vote for Trump, journalists).

You won’t be startled to hear that alt-right believers were more inclined to dehumanize, in evolutionary terms, their disfavored racial and ethnic groups, rating “White people” as more “evolved” than, say, “Mexicans, Nigerians, and Blacks.” Or rather you won’t be startled if you’ve been paying attention to our reporting here on the role of evolutionary thinking among racist right-wingers. (The left has its own racialists, but that’s a different discussion.)

Before anyone was talking about the alt-right, the racialist right was enamored with Darwinian theory as a justification for its prejudices. Not unlike some more conventional conservatives, they were impressed by its academic prestige and the way that it seemed to give support to preferred opinions.

As of a couple of days ago, white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups were being  pulled offline by their web hosts. One of those groups is Stormfront.org. Back in 2009, in the wake of a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, I described Googling the phrase “natural selection” as it appeared among writings of the website’s users. The shooter, James von Brunn, had composed a manifesto, highlighting his idea that “Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool.” Such thinking, more or less sophisticated in how it presents itself, finds an audience on the less extreme right.

Even the most respectable conservatives have to be wary. In 2012, I wrote about how National Review had acted correctly in cleaning out two contributors with racialist or white nationalist ties. One was John Derbyshire, long known to us as a vitriolic critic of intelligent design. The other, Robert Weissberg, had spoken at an event that, I pointed out, was “heavy with evolutionary, Darwinian and eugenic themes, sponsored by a group [American Renaissance] with similar interests.” See“With Concerns about Darwinist Racialism in Mind, National Review Cleans House.”

In 2015, another white nationalist shooter, Dylann Roof, contributed his own manifesto, complete with a nod to pseudoscientific racism. Media reports tied Roof through a series of associations to activists who lean on scholarly sounding evolutionary racial theory. See“In Explaining Dylann Roof’s Inspiration, the Media Ignore Ties to Evolutionary Racism.”

In 2016, when the alt-right came to light under that now familiar name, I noted that, “Though this has escaped focused attention, the alternative right draws heavily on themes of evolution-based racism,” including eugenics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary “race realism,” and more. I pointed to alt-right leader Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal (also now shut down by its web host) as the “mother lode of pseudo-conservative, pseudo-scientific racism.” See “Evolution and the Alt-Right.”

Of Spencer and his journal, National Review noted the other day that “The Alt-Right Carries on Margaret Sanger’s Legacy of Eugenics.”The evolutionary backdrop to this is, though, typically missed. Darwin himself, of course, a kindly figure, was no proto-Nazi. However, Darwinian theory and Darwin’s own writings have fueled racial and eugenic thinking for more than a century and a half, including that of Margaret Sanger, as John West has detailed at The Stream (“The Line Running from Charles Darwin through Margaret Sanger to Planned Parenthood”) and as  we have noted here repeatedly.In his books, historian and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Richard Weikart meticulously describes the intellectual descent from Darwin to Hitler. Ranking the human races in relationship to gorillas is straight out of Darwin’s Descent of Man.

So the study by Forscher and Kteily really tells us little we didn’t already know. It merely provides empirical support for the observation that, whether styled as the alt-right, white nationalism, or however you like, evolutionary theorizing is a vital support for one brand of hate, with historical ties going back to the earliest modern evolutionary thinking. Take away Darwinism, and today’s racialists would hardly be recognizable.

Iconoclasm III

on higher education:a second opinion

Higher education:Pros and cons.

In Russia;A return to Bible burning?

Russia Declares the Bible “Extremist”

On August 17, 2017, the Vyborg City Court declared “extremist” the Russian version of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, a Bible published by Jehovah’s Witnesses in numerous languages. * This decision marks the first time that the Bible has been banned in a country where the majority of its citizens claim to be Christian.

In late July 2017, the Vyborg City Court resumed its hearing of the case, which had been adjourned since April 2016 to allow time for an “expert study” of the Bible. The judge had ruled in favor of a claim filed by the Leningrad-Finlyandskiy Transport Prosecutor to appoint an “expert study” of whether to declare the New World Translation to be “extremist.” After numerous delays, the study was completed and was submitted to the court on June 22, 2017. The study concluded that the Bible is “extremist” literature, following the same pattern as previous court-appointed studies of the Witnesses’ publications by so-called experts.

“Expert Study” Based on Theological Beliefs, Not Facts

To justify its conclusion, the study went so far as to claim that the New World Translation is “not a Bible.” By making this claim, the study attempts to circumvent the Law on Counteracting Extremist Activity, which forbids declaring extremist sacred texts such as the Bible. Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a representative for the European Association of Jehovah’s Christian Witnesses, stated: “For as often as Russian authorities have misapplied the law on extremism to our religious worship, now they are trying to bypass it—claiming that the New World Translation is not a Bible so that they can declare it extremist. It’s just another example of how far Russian authorities will go to malign Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

The main pretext that the study used to support its claim that the New World Translation is “not a Bible” is that it renders God’s personal name represented by the Tetragrammaton * as “Jehovah.” Lawyers representing Jehovah’s Witnesses presented evidence to challenge this reasoning. The lawyers introduced to the court ten other Russian Bibles that use the name Jehovah, as well as poetry by Tsvetaeva and Pushkin and books by Kuprin, Goncharov, and Dostoyevsky and excerpts from other classic Russian literature. They also pointed to the 19th-century Russian-language Makarios Bible, produced by Orthodox translators, in which the name Jehovah occurs more than 3,500 times.

Additionally, the court allowed two experts to present testimony that the New World Translation is a version of the Holy Bible. At the trial on August 9, Professor Anatoliy Baranov, * a respected linguist, testified that differences in wording between the New World Translation and the synodal Bible do not mean that the New World Translation is not a Bible. Such differences are expected between different translations. To evaluate the accuracy of a modern Bible translation objectively, it must be compared to the original-language texts (in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek) rather than to an older translation in the same language.

During the court session on August 16, Mikhail Odintsov, * a religious scholar, testified that the text of the New World Translation does not differ in substance from other Russian Bibles and that it conforms to the generally accepted Bible canon. Regarding the use of God’s name, Mr. Odintsov confirmed that “Jehovah” has been used by other Russian translators, including the translators of the synodal Bible, where the divine name occurs some ten times.

The study also claimed that the New World Translation is not a Bible because it does not expressly say that it is one. However, Mr. Odintsov explained that the words “Scriptures” and “Holy Scriptures” are quite appropriate to describe the Bible.

New World Translation Hearing—Another Injustice Targeting Jehovah’s Witnesses

The Vyborg City Court’s decision is not yet in force, and the New World Translation has not been added to the Federal List of Extremist Materials. The Witnesses will appeal the decision to the Leningrad Regional Court within 30 days.

The decision to ban the Bible that Jehovah’s Witnesses use in worship is just the latest injustice in a more than decade-long, government-orchestrated campaign of persecution against them. This campaign culminated on July 17, when  Russia’s Supreme Court confirmed its earlier ruling to criminalize the activity of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia. With this latest decision in the Vyborg City Court, Russia continues its unjust persecution of the Witnesses.

Truth in Translation

An earlier “expert study” that was used to refuse importation of the New World Translation into Russia said this: “To interpret sacred texts correctly one must have a thorough knowledge of the Sacred Tradition. The Orthodox Church is guided by a self-evident principle when explaining the meaning of God’s Word: The Holy Scriptures must be understood within the context of the Sacred Tradition.” According to this view, translation of the Holy Bible is subject to the primacy of church tradition.

In contrast, J. D. BeDuhn, Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Arizona University, evaluated the New World Translation (NW) with seven other modern Bible translations and concluded that “the NW emerges as the most accurate of the translations compared.” In explaining how Jehovah’s Witnesses came to produce what he regarded as the least biased of the translations, he remarked that the Jehovah’s Witnesses movement “really sought to re-invent Christianity from scratch.” He observed that this “resulted in the Jehovah’s Witnesses approaching the Bible with a kind of innocence, and building their system of belief and practice from the raw material of the Bible without predetermining what was to be found there. Some critics, of course, would say that the results of this process can be naive. But for Bible translation, at least, it has meant a fresh approach to the text, with far less presumption than that found in many Protestant translations.’”—See Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament, by Jason David BeDuhn, pages 161-165.

Why Jehovah’s Witnesses publish the New World Translation

It is an easy-to-understand, modern-language translation  from Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek

It is  accurate  and current with the latest scholarship in Bible translation

It is free and is available  in more than 120 languages, in formats such as print, audio, and sign-language video and at jw.org

Time Line of Russia’s Case Against the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

August 17, 2017

Vyborg City Court grants the prosecutor’s claim to declare the New World Translation “extremist material”

August 9, 2017

Vyborg City Court resumes hearing on the case examining the New World Translation

June 6, 2017

Report from Center of Sociocultural Expert Studies concludes that the New World Translation “is not a Bible” and is “extremist” literature

December 23, 2016

Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upholds lower court decisions to seize all Bibles confiscated in July 2015

April 26, 2016

Vyborg City Court orders the Center of Sociocultural Expert Studies to examine the New World Translation for signs of “extremism”

March 15, 2016

Based on a claim filed by the prosecutor, hearings begin in the Vyborg City Court to declare the New World Translation “extremist”

December 29, 2015

Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region denies Witnesses’ claim against illegal seizure of the Bibles

August 13, 2015

Vyborg Customs officials rule to seize all 2,016 Bibles in the July 13 shipment, claiming that they may contain signs of “extremism”

July 14, 2015

Vyborg Customs officials seize three copies of the Bible for an “expert study” to justify the seizure

July 13, 2015

Vyborg Customs officials stop a shipment containing only Russian-language copies of the New World Translation

A clash of Titans. LIX

 

On Darwinism's explanatory shortcomings from an evolutionist.

Evolutionary Theorist Concedes: Evolution “Largely Avoids” Biggest Questions of Biological Origins
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC  

At this past November’s Royal Society meeting, “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology,” the distinguished Austrian evolutionary theorist Gerd B. Müller gave the first presentation. As we’ve noted before, it was a devastating one for anyone who wants to think that, on the great questions of biological origins, orthodox evolutionary theory has got it all figured out. Instead, Müller pointed to gaping “explanatory deficits” in the theory. Now the Royal Society’s journal Interface Focus offers a special issue  collecting articles based on talks from the conference.

Let’s see what Dr. Müller has to say in an article titled, “Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary.”A friend highlights the following paragraph.

As can be noted from the listed principles, current evolutionary theory is predominantly oriented towards a genetic explanation of variation, and, except for some minor semantic modifications, this has not changed over the past seven or eight decades. Whatever lip service is paid to taking into account other factors than those traditionally accepted, we find that the theory, as presented in extant writings, concentrates on a limited set of evolutionary explananda, excluding the majority of those mentioned among the explanatory goals above. The theory performs well with regard to the issues it concentrates on, providing testable and abundantly confirmed predictions on the dynamics of genetic variation in evolving populations, on the gradual variation and adaptation of phenotypic traits, and on certain genetic features of speciation. If the explanation would stop here, no controversy would exist. But it has become habitual in evolutionary biology to take population genetics as the privileged type of explanation of all evolutionary phenomena, thereby negating the fact that, on the one hand, not all of its predictions can be confirmed under all circumstances, and, on the other hand, a wealth of evolutionary phenomena remains excluded. For instance, the theory largely avoids the question of how the complex organizations of organismal structure, physiology, development or behavior — whose variation it describes — actually arise in evolution, and it also provides no adequate means for including factors that are not part of the population genetic framework, such as developmental, systems theoretical, ecological or cultural influences.

Uh, whoa. Or as our friend says, “BOOM.” Read that again. Müller says that “current evolutionary theory…largely avoids the question of how the complex organizations of organismal structure, physiology, development or behavior…actually arise in evolution.” But how stuff “actually arises” is precisely what most people think of when they think of “evolution.”­­­

Says our friend, see  Michael Behe in The Edge of Evolution, where Dr. Behe asks, “The big question, however, is not, ‘Who will survive, the more fit or the less fit?’ The big question is, ‘How do organisms become more fit?’” Müller concedes that conventional evolutionary thinking “largely avoids” this “big question.” Though expressed in anodyne terms, that is a damning indictment.

Here are some other gems from the paper.

A rising number of publications argue for a major revision or even a replacement of the standard theory of evolution [2–14], indicating that this cannot be dismissed as a minority view but rather is a widespread feeling among scientists and philosophers alike.

That could have appeared in a work from an intelligent design proponent. But wait, it gets even better:

Indeed, a growing number of challenges to the classical model of evolution have emerged over the past few years, such as from evolutionary developmental biology [16], epigenetics [17], physiology [18], genomics [19], ecology [20], plasticity research [21], population genetics [22], regulatory evolution [23], network approaches [14], novelty research [24], behavioural biology [12], microbiology [7] and systems biology [25], further supported by arguments from the cultural [26] and social sciences [27], as well as by philosophical treatments [28–31]. None of these contentions are unscientific, all rest firmly on evolutionary principles and all are backed by substantial empirical evidence.

“Challenges to the classical model” are “widespread” and “none…are unscientific.” Wow — file that one away for future reference.

More:

Sometimes these challenges are met with dogmatic hostility, decrying any criticism of the traditional theoretical edifice as fatuous [32], but more often the defenders of the traditional conception argue that ‘all is well’ with current evolutionary theory, which they see as having ‘co-evolved’ together with the methodological and empirical advances that already receive their due in current evolutionary biology [33]. But the repeatedly emphasized fact that innovative evolutionary mechanisms have been mentioned in certain earlier or more recent writings does not mean that the formal structure of evolutionary theory has been adjusted to them.

Orthodox Darwinists of the “All Is Well” school meet challenges with “dogmatic hostility”? Yep. We were aware.

Here he obliterates the notion, a truly fatuous extrapolation, that microevolutionary changes can explain macroevolutionary trends:

A subtler version of the this-has-been-said-before argument used to deflect any challenges to the received view is to pull the issue into the never ending micro-versus-macroevolution debate. Whereas ‘microevolution’ is regarded as the continuous change of allele frequencies within a species or population [109], the ill-defined macroevolution concept [36], amalgamates the issue of speciation and the origin of ‘higher taxa’ with so-called ‘major phenotypic change’ or new constructional types. Usually, a cursory acknowledgement of the problem of the origin of phenotypic characters quickly becomes a discussion of population genetic arguments about speciation, often linked to the maligned punctuated equilibria concept [9], in order to finally dismiss any necessity for theory change. The problem of phenotypic complexity thus becomes (in)elegantly bypassed. Inevitably, the conclusion is reached that microevolutionary mechanisms are consistent with macroevolutionary phenomena [36], even though this has very little to do with the structure and predictions of the EES. The real issue is that genetic evolution alone has been found insufficient for an adequate causal explanation of all forms of phenotypic complexity, not only of something vaguely termed ‘macroevolution’. Hence, the micro–macro distinction only serves to obscure the important issues that emerge from the current challenges to the standard theory. It should not be used in discussion of the EES, which rarely makes any allusions to macroevolution, although it is sometimes forced to do so.

This a major concession on the part of a major figure in the world of evolution theory. It’s a huge black eye to the “All Is Well” crowd. Who will tell the media? Who will tell the Darwin enforcers? Who will tell the biology students, in high school or college, kept in the dark by rigid Darwinist pedagogy?

Evolution has only “strengths” and no “weaknesses,” you say? Darwinian theory is as firmly established as “gravity, heliocentrism, and the round shape of the earth“? Really? How can anyone possibly maintain as much given this clear statement, not from any ID advocate or Darwin skeptic, not from a so-called “creationist,” but from a central figure in evolutionary research, writing in a journal published by the august scientific society once presided over by Isaac Newton, for crying out loud?

To maintain at this point that “All Is Well” with evolution you have to be in a state of serious denial.

Too tough for Darwinism?

Inside the Bizarre Genome of the World’s Toughest Animal
Tardigrades are sponges for foreign genes. Does that explain why they are famously indestructible?

The toughest animals in the world aren't bulky elephants, or cold-tolerant penguins, or even the famously durable cockroach. Instead, the champions of durability are endearing microscopic creatures called tardigrades, or water bears.

They live everywhere, from the tallest mountains to the deepest oceans, and from hot springs to Antarctic ice. They can even tolerate New York. They cope with these inhospitable environments by transforming into a nigh-indestructible state. Their adorable shuffling gaits cease. Their eight legs curl inwards. Their rotund bodies shrivel up, expelling almost all of their water and becoming a dried barrel called a “tun.” Their metabolism dwindles to near-nothingness—they are practically dead. And in skirting the edge of death, they become incredibly hard to kill.

In the tun state, tardigrades don't need food or water. They can shrug off temperatures close to absolute zero and as high as 151 degrees Celsius. They can withstand the intense pressures of the deep ocean, doses of radiation that would kill other animals, and baths of toxic solvents. And they are, to date, the only animals that have been exposed to the naked vacuum of space and lived to tell the tale—or, at least, lay viable eggs. (Their only weakness, as a researcher once told me, is “vulnerability to mechanical damage;” in other words, you can squish ‘em.)Scientists have known for centuries about the tardigrades’ ability to dry themselves out. But a new study suggests that this ability might have contributed to their superlative endurance in a strange and roundabout way. It makes them uniquely suited to absorbing foreign genes from bacteria and other organisms—genes that now pepper their genomes to a degree unheard of for animals.

Thomas Boothby from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made this discovery after sequencing the first ever tardigrade genome, to better understand how they have evolved. Of the 700 species, his team focused on Hypsibius dujardini, one of the few tardigrades that’s easy to grow and breed in a lab.

At first, Boothby thought his team had done a poor job of assembling the tardigrade’s genome. The resulting data was full of genes that seemed to belong to bacteria and other organisms, not animals. “All of us thought that these were contaminants,” he says. Perhaps microbes had snuck into the samples and their DNA was intermingled with the tardigrade’s own.

But the team soon realized that these sequences are bona fide parts of the tardigrade’s genome.
By expelling their water, tardigrades have ironically become a sponge for foreign genes.
That wouldn't be unusual for bacteria, which can trade genes with each other as easily as humans might swap emails. But these “horizontal gene transfers” (HGT) are supposedly rare among animals. For the longest time, scientists believed that they didn't happen at all, and reported cases of HGT were met with extreme skepticism.


Recently, more and more examples have emerged. Ticks have antibiotic-making genes that came from bacteria. Aphids stole color genes from fungi. Wasps have turned virus genes into biological weapons. Mealybugs use genes from many different microbes to supplement their diets. A beetle kills coffee plants with a borrowed bacterial gene. Some fruit flies have entire bacterial genomes embedded in their own. And one group of genes, evocatively called Space Invaders, has repeatedly jumped between lizards, frogs, rodents, and more. But in all of these cases, it's usually one or two genes that have jumped across. At most, the immigrants make up 1 percent or so of their new native genome.

But Boothby found that foreign genes make up 17.5 percent of the tardigrade's genome—a full sixth. More than 90 percent of these come from bacteria, but others come from archaea (a distinct group of microbes), fungi, and even plants. “The number of them is pretty staggering,” he says.

Claims like these have been debunked before, so the team took extra care to confirm that the sequences did indeed come from outside sources.

For a start, they re-sequenced the genome using PacBio—a system that decodes single unbroken strands of DNA without first breaking them into smaller fragments. This revealed that the foreign genes are physically linked to the tardigrade’s native ones. They are all part of the same DNA strands, which means they couldn't have come from other contaminating microbes. They have also gained several features that are characteristic of animal genes, like an animal gloss over their fundamental bacterial character. John Logsdon from the University of Iowa, who studies genome evolution, is certainly convinced. “It’s a very interesting and technically robust paper,” he says.

So, how did these genes get into the tardigrade's genome in the first place? Boothby thinks that the answer lies in three quirks of tardigrade biology. First, they can dry themselves out, a process that naturally splits their DNA into small pieces. Second, they can stir back to life by rehydrating, during which their cells become leaky and able to take in molecules from the environment—including DNA. Finally, they are extremely good at repairing their DNA, sealing the damage that occurs when they dry out.

“So we think tardigrades are drying out, and their DNA is fragmenting along with the DNA of bacteria and organisms in the environment,” explains Boothby. “That gets into their cells when they rehydrate. And when they stitch their own genomes together, they may accidentally put in a bacterial gene.” By expelling their water, tardigrades have ironically become a sponge for foreign genes.

Do these genes do anything? So far, the team have found that the tardigrades switch on several of their borrowed genes, which, in other organisms, are involved in coping with stressful environments. That's pretty tantalizing: It suggests that these animals might owe at least part of their legendary durability to genetic donations from bacteria.

Boothby imagines something like this: Ancient tardigrades could dry themselves out to an extent, which allowed some foreign genes to enter their genome. If some of these genes made them more tolerant to drying, the animals would have become even more susceptible to horizontal gene transfers. “This positive feedback loop builds up over time,” says Boothby. “That’s speculation on our part.”

It certainly bolsters his case that another microscopic animal—a rotifer—can also dry itself out during tough times, and also shows signs of extensive horizontal gene transfer. Almost 10 percent of its genes came from foreign sources. Boothby’s team now wants to check for similar genetic infiltrations in other animals that tolerate desiccation, including some nematode worms, fish, and insects. They are also planning to gradually inactivate the tardigrade’s borrowed genes to see if that compromises its fabled invincibility.

Ralph Schill from the University of Stuttgart also points out that Hypsibius dujardini is something of a wuss among tardigrades, and isn't actually very good at surviving desiccation. Perhaps the genomes of its hardier relatives—the ones that shrug off extreme cold, extreme heat, and open vacuums—will yield even bigger surprises.

Reports of I.D's demise have proved premature.

Ten Myths About Dover: #10, The Intelligent Design Movement Died After the Dover Decision
Sarah Chaffee December 11, 2015 11:20 AM

Editor's note: The Kitzmiller v. Dover decision has been the subject of much media attention and many misinterpretations from pro-Darwin lobby groups. With the tenth anniversary of Kitzmiller approaching on December 20, Evolution News offers a series of ten articles debunking common myths about the case.




In December 2005, Judge John E. Jones ruled that intelligent design is not science, but religion. Critics predicted this would mean the end of the ID movement.

Expert witness Kevin Padian and Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education, for example, wrote:

It's over for the Discovery Institute. Turn out the lights. The fat lady has sung. The emperor of ID has no clothes. The bluff is over. Oh sure, they'll continue to pump out the blather. They'll find more funding, at least for a while, from some committed ideologue or another. But no one with any objectivity will take them seriously any longer as scientists.

Similarly, Matzke told Nature that "Intelligent design as a strategy is probably toast."

Barry Lynn, Executive Director of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, predicted in September 2005, "I believe that we will be successful in the Dover case as far as it goes in the federal court system, and that it will prove to be the death knell for intelligent design as a serious issue confronting American school boards, period. I think this will be the last case."

But in December 2015, the ID movement is not only still alive -- it's thriving. This holds true across the board, in education, science, and the public dialogue.

Over the past decade, academic freedom and objective education on evolution have advanced, reflecting the growth of scientific research and scholarship critical of neo-Darwinian theory and supportive of intelligent design.

Currently, ten states have science standards, laws, or other provisions that support the rights of teachers and/or students to critically analyze evolution: Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas. Louisiana passed its academic freedom policy, the Louisiana Science Education Act, in 2008. Tennessee followed in 2012. Neither of these policies has been challenged in court.

In Texas, students are required to examine "all sides of scientific evidence" for explanations and to "analyze and evaluate" scientific evidence regarding evolution. South Carolina expects students to "Summarize ways that scientists use data from a variety of sources to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory."

The cause of academic freedom has also seen significant victories. In one case, as we reported here, "[T]he University of Kentucky paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit by astronomer Martin Gaskell who was wrongfully denied employment because he was perceived to be skeptical towards Darwinian evolution." Two other Darwin skeptics received settlements for discrimination. Applied Mathematics Letters retracted mathematician Granville Sewell's article critical of neo-Darwinism; a lawsuit followed, leading to a public apology and $10,000 payment to Sewell. After the California Science Center (CSC) cancelled the showing of an intelligent design film, Darwin's Dilemma, the American Freedom Alliance sued. The CSC paid $110,000 to avoid going to trial over the evidence that they discriminated. And the film Expelled drew over 1.1 million viewers to movie theaters to learn about discrimination against scientific dissenters from Darwinism.

Public outreach on intelligent design is also doing very well post-Dover. In 2009, Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell, which received praise from famed atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who named it "Book of the Year" in the respected Times Literary Supplement of London.

In 2013, Meyer published Darwin's Doubt which made the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. That book was endorsed by scientists including Harvard geneticist George Church and Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin. UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall gave Darwin's Doubt a serious review in the top journal Science and participated in a radio debate with Meyer.

Illustra Media has released a slew of excellent video documentaries since Dover, including their Design of Life series: Metamorphosis, Flight, and Living Waters. Discovery Institute has produced a series of science videos, which have collectively received over half a million views on YouTube, including molecular machine animations of ATP Synthase and Kinesin, along with Journey Inside the Cell. Our latest video, Information Enigma, was released this fall.

The ruling sure hasn't stopped young people from getting excited about ID. Since Dover, over three hundred students -- many of them graduate students who are pursuing careers in the sciences -- have attended Discovery Institute's Summer Seminar on ID. Intelligent design is making an impact on the rising generation of scientists, which means far from being over, ID has excellent prospects for the future.

Finally and most importantly, science supporting ID continues to move forward. Several areas of research have seen groundbreaking progress, including work by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (using computer models to test Darwinian evolution) and Biologic Institute (exploring evidence for ID in biology). To date, there are more than eighty peer-reviewed articles supportive of intelligent design, with over fifty of them published post-Dover. Casey Luskin has documented much of this work:

[T]he ID research community has published dozens of pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific papers advancing the scientific case for ID since Dover. This includes experimental research demonstrating the unevolvability of new proteins, as well as theoretical papers refuting alleged computer simulations of evolution, showing that intelligence is needed to produce new information.

This research is being presented at scientific conferences, such as a major ID research conference held at Cornell University in 2011, which led to the publication of the volume Biological Information: New Perspectives through World Scientific, a major mainstream scientific publishing house.

Even non-ID researchers have unwittingly and decisively confirmed ID predictions since Dover. In 2012, an international consortium of researchers published the ENCODE project, supporting the longstanding ID prediction that "junk DNA" would turn out to have function. Likewise, the burgeoning field of epigenetics has validated ID's claim that we will find new layers of information, code, and complex regulatory mechanisms within biology.

At the same time, Darwinian arguments have suffered. Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller's main argument at the Dover trial was that a stretch of DNA called the beta-globin pseudogene was "non-functional" junk, supposedly demonstrating our common ancestry with apes. In 2013, however, a paper in Genome Biology showed the "pseudogene" was functional, refuting his argument.

Likewise, in 2014 a favorite argument against pro-ID biochemist Michael Behe was overturned as chloroquine-resistance turned out to be a multimutation feature that is difficult to evolve.

Meanwhile, the past 10 years have seen a flood of peer-reviewed scientific papers critiquing core tenets of neo-Darwinian theory, and concessions from influential evolutionists that neo-Darwinism faces serious scientific criticisms. Couple this with major admissions from leading atheists like philosopher Thomas Nagel that ID arguments have merit and should be taken seriously, and the anti-ID intelligentsia is not happy.

What all this shows is that Michael Behe was correct when he said of Judge Jones's decision:

[It] does not impact the realities of biology, which are not amenable to adjudication. On the day after the judge's opinion, December 21, 2005, as before, the cell is run by amazingly complex, functional machinery that in any other context would immediately be recognized as designed. On December 21, 2005, as before, there are no non-design explanations for the molecular machinery of life, only wishful speculations and Just-So stories.

Given how quickly ID scholarship is moving forward in so many areas -- science, public policy, and culture -- we can only anticipate how much stronger ID will be twenty years after Dover.

On the NWT's rendering of Matthew 24:3

New World Translation - Parousia ("Presence") (Mt. 24:3)

Some New Testament Greek words, like modern English words, can have more than one meaning. When translating those words one must carefully determine as best as possible which meaning was intended by studying the context. It may still be impossible, at times, to be absolutely certain which meaning was intended. In cases like this it is to be expected that the translators' own understanding and interpretation will decide which meaning to use.

Many translator's understanding and interpretation of Mt. 24:3 is that when speaking of Christ's parousia, the Bible writers meant his visible, physical coming to earth. Therefore, most "orthodox" members of Christendom, want parousia to mean "coming" in all such instances. This does not make it so!

It is readily admitted by all NT Greek scholars that parousia "lit[erally means] a presence, para, with, and ousia, being" - W. E. Vine, p. 201, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. No one disputes this literal meaning of parousia. Even Young's Analytical Concordance gives this as the literal meaning (" a being alongside, presence" - p. 188.)

As J. B. Rotherham (noted Bible scholar and translator of The Emphasized Bible) wrote in the appendix of his translation:

"in this edition the word parousia is uniformly rendered `presence' (`coming,' as a representative of this word, being set aside). .... The sense of `presence' is so plainly shewn by the contrast with `absence' (implied in 2 Co. x.10, and expressed in Ph. ii. 12) that the question naturally arises, - Why not always so render it? The more so, inasmuch as there is in [2 Peter 1:16] also, a peculiar fitness in our English word `presence.' This passage, it will be remembered, relates to our Lord's transformation upon the Mount. The wonderful manifestation there made was a display and sample of "presence" rather than of "coming." The Lord was already there; and being there he was transformed (cp. Mt. xvii. 2)" - p. 271. [Also cf. 2 Pet. 1:16, Young's Literal Translation; and Lattimore's translation]

In other words, context clearly demands "presence" in some instances. And, although context would allow either "presence" or "coming" in other instances, why should a translator insist on "coming" when the word in question does not even mean that in the first place? Rotherham's answer to this question was to render all uses of parousia into "presence" in his translation.

So it is the meaning "coming" that demands a clear need from context to establish its use instead of the more literal "presence"! If context clearly shows that "presence" cannot be properly used, then, and only then, we may properly consider a different meaning. (For more on this subject see The Watchtower, 15 August 1996, pp. 9-14 and Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 2, article entitled "Presence" - also compare pp. 201 and 1271, W. E. Vine. Also compare the Ref Bible ('84) Appendix 5B on "parousia".)

Posted by Elijah Daniels 

Darwinism's apologists are yet to get the memo re:free lunches.

Evolutionary Computing: The Invisible Hand of Intelligence

Evolution News & Views 

Darwinian evolution is characterized by an utter lack of guidance; it is the "blind watchmaker" of Dawkins. It doesn't know where it's going. It doesn't know it is building a watch. It doesn't know what a watch is. There is no goal, no plan, and no target in "natural evolution." Mutations bounce around against environmental constraints, and whatever happens, happens.

William Dembski and Robert Marks have shown that no evolutionary algorithm is superior to blind search -- unless information is added from an intelligent cause, which means it is not, in the Darwinian sense, an evolutionary algorithm after all. This mathematically proven law, based on the accepted No Free Lunch Theorems, seems to be lost on the champions of evolutionary computing. Researchers keep confusing an evolutionary algorithm (a form of artificial selection) with "natural evolution."

A recent example is seen in a Review paper in Nature by Agoston Eiben and Jim Smith, "From evolutionary computation to the evolution of things," where they claim:

Analogous to natural evolution, an evolutionary algorithm can be thought of as working on two levels. At the higher level (the original problem context), phenotypes (candidate solutions) have their fitness measured. Selection mechanisms then use this measure to choose a pool of parents for each generation, anddecide which parents and offspring go forward to the next generation. At the lower level, genotypes are objects that represent phenotypes in a form that can be manipulated to produce variations (Box 1). Genotype-phenotype mapping bridges the two levels. At the genotypic level, variation operators generate new individuals (offspring) from selected parents. Mutationoperators are based on one parent (asexual reproduction) and randomly change some values. Recombination operators create offspring by combining values from the genotypes of two (or more) parents. Finally, an execution manager controls the overall functioning of the algorithm. It regulates the initialization of the first population, the execution of the selection-variation cycles, and the termination of the algorithm. It also manages the population size (typically kept constant) and other parameters affecting selection and variation. For instance, it determines the number of parents per generation, and whether mutation, recombination or both produce the offspring for a given set of parents. [Emphasis added.]

This is no analogue to natural evolution. Indicators of intelligently guided information saturate this paragraph. We see decisions, operations, choices, management, and regulation. Don't the authors recognize their error?

They know that the two processes (evolutionary computing and natural evolution) are only analogous. They produced a table that compares and contrasts the two (see Table 1, "Main differences between natural evolution and evolutionary algorithms").

It's apparent that they recognize some serious differences between computer evolution and natural evolution. For one thing, evolutionary computation is vastly simpler than the "highly complex biochemical and developmental process" that they know characterizes life. For another, the definitions of fitness, selection, mapping, and other key words in evolutionary computing are so different from those in Darwinian theory that you wonder how the comparisons convey any meaning at all.

What is entirely lost on Eiben and Smith is the most important distinction: intelligent intervention. Everything from hardware to software has been intelligently designed -- including the definition of a problem, the choice of processes and their parameters, and their recognition of what constitutes a solution. To really compare what they do with natural evolution, they would have to stand by a sterile volcano or hot spring with their hands over their eyes, ears, and mouth, and just let things happen. Then, when something happens, say, "Who cares?" That would be Darwinian evolution.

There's no question that intelligently guided "evolutionary computing" has been very successful at solving problems. Marks and Dembski can testify to that from work in their own Evolutionary Informatics Lab. It can be as successful as artificial selection in breeding. Even when random variation is involved, a little intelligent guidance can go a long way. The authors' blindness to this is evident:

Evolution has provided a source of inspiration for algorithm designers since the birth of computers. The resulting field, evolutionary computation, has been successful in solving engineering tasks ranging in outlook from the molecular to the astronomical. Today, the field is entering a new phase as evolutionary algorithms that take place in hardware aredeveloped, opening up new avenues towards autonomousmachines that can adapt to their environment. We discuss how evolutionary computation compares with natural evolution and what its benefits are relative to other computing approaches, and we introduce the emerging area of artificial evolution in physical systems.

By contrast, Marks and Dembski account for the invisible hand required in evolutionary computing. The Lab's website states, "The principal theme of the lab's research is teasing apart the respective roles of internally generated and externally applied information in the performance of evolutionary systems." So yes, systems can evolve, but when they appear to solve a problem (such as generating complex specified information or reaching a sufficiently narrow predefined target), intelligence can be shown to be active. Any internally generated information is conserved or degraded by the law of Conservation of Information.

But is such an idea too "spooky" and thus outside the bounds of science? The website answers that objection:

Simply put, intelligent design, when applied to biology, seems to invoke 'spooky' forms of causation that have no place in science. Evolutionary informatics eliminates this difficulty associated with intelligent design. By looking to information theory, a well-established branch of the engineering and mathematical sciences, evolutionary informatics shows that patterns we ordinarily ascribe to intelligence, when arising from anevolutionary process, must be referred to sources of information external to that process.

What is spooky is failing to see the obvious, believing that information-rich patterns can emerge without intelligence. What is unscientific is explaining an effect without a necessary and sufficient cause, thinking you can get something from nothing.

What Marks and Dembski prove is as scientifically valid and relevant as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics. You can't prove a system of mathematics from within the system, and you can't derive an information-rich pattern from within the pattern. The information in a book, for instance, cannot be derived from the paper and ink used to print it. It's impossible to bootstrap a book from the bare ingredients.

Eiben and Smith, in contrast, see humans as pulling themselves up out of their own evolutionary bootstraps and taking control of evolution:

From a historical perspective, humans have had two roles in evolution. Just like any other species, humans are the product of, and are subject to, evolution. But for millennia (in fact, for about twice as long as we have used wheels) people have also actively influenced the course of evolution in other species -- by choosingwhich plants or animals should survive or mate. Thus humans have successfully exploited evolution to create improved food sources or more useful animals, even though the mechanisms involved in the transmission of traits from one generation to the next were not understood.

Question: Did humans influence, choose, exploit, create, and improve things by intelligent design? Think about that as they continue:

Historically, the scope of human influence in evolution was very limited, being restricted to interfering with selection for survival and reproduction. Influencing other components, such as thedesign of genotypes, or mutation and recombination mechanisms, was far beyond our reach. This changed with theinvention of the computer, which provided the possibility ofcreating digital worlds that are very flexible and much morecontrollable than the physical reality we live in. Together with the increased understanding of the genetic mechanisms behind evolution, this brought about the opportunity to become active masters of evolutionary processes that are fully designed and executed by human experimenters 'from above'.

So ask: Did humans interfere, influence, design, influence, create, control, understand, and take mastery of these things as an intelligent cause?

It could be argued that evolutionary algorithms are not faithful models of natural evolution (Table 1). However, they certainly are a form of evolution. As Dennett said "If you have variation, heredity, and selection, then you must get evolution".

There you go -- a proof by assertion and argument from authority. But can they really dismiss critics so easily? Artificial selection is "a form of evolution," too. What's the difference between that and natural evolution? Intelligence. The breeder makes use of natural processes to obtain the outcome that his designing mind sought. Without intelligent interference, no evolutionary algorithm would be superior to blind search.

In the early days of intelligent design, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen recognized the fallacy at work here: the problem of "investigator interference." In their milestone book The Mystery of Life's Origin (1984), they showed the many ways that investigators in the origin-of-life field "played a highly significant but illegitimate role in experimental success." At the end of Chapter 6, they concluded with a quote by Brooks and Shaw:

These experiments... claim abiotic synthesis for what has in fact been produced and designed by highly intelligent and very much biotic man. (p. 110)

The results would never have occurred without the investigators' help. Like puppet masters, they guide outcomes even if some randomness is thrown in. The same applies to evolutionary computing. Eiben and Smith fail to see that the "invisible hands" running the show are their own. And unless they are willing to claim their hands are unguided by any intelligence, they don't establish Darwinian evolution; they confirm intelligent design.