Sunday 3 September 2017
Hear us in our own words
AUGUST 1, 2014 | GLOBAL NEWS
Witnesses Campaign to Advertise World’s Most Translated Website, JW.ORG
NEW YORK—On August 1, 2014, Jehovah’s Witnesses will begin a month-long global distribution of a new tract entitled Where Can We Find Answers to Life’s Big Questions? to
raise awareness of their official website, jw.org. Accessible in about
500 languages, with publications available for download in almost 700
languages, jw.org is the world’s most translated website.
Over one million unique visitors go to jw.org each day. The
site features articles and videos offering practical advice to people
of all ages, backgrounds, and circumstances. One of these videos,
entitledWhy Study the Bible?,
will be linked to a QR code found on the new tract. This video merges
live-action elements and animation to illustrate the practical benefits
of studying the Bible. It is currently available in over 450 languages
and has been downloaded nearly 4 million times since it was released on
November 18, 2013.
J. R. Brown,
a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses at their world headquarters in
Brooklyn, New York, explains: “We are excited about this campaign. There
are some eight million of Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world, and all
of us will be speaking to our neighbors about this website. This may be
the most extensive campaign that we have ever organized.”
Geoffrey
Jackson, a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses, states:
“Since its launch two years ago, people all over the world have found
jw.org to be an invaluable resource. On this site, you can watch videos that can help your children, consult articles that can help your family, and even read the Bible online. We want as many as possible to benefit from jw.org, and that’s why we initiated this special campaign.”
Media Contact(s):
International: J. R. Brown, Office of Public Information, tel. +1 718 560 5000
Saturday 2 September 2017
On the limits of natural selection.
Listen: Lee Spetner on What Natural Selection Can Do — And What It Can’t
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC
On a new episode of ID the Future, Ira Berkowitz interviews Lee Spetner in Jerusalem. Together they explore key arguments from Dr. Spetner’s books Not by Chance and The Evolution Revolution .
Spetner, a PhD from MIT, takes on natural selection, discussing what it can and cannot do. He also explores aspects of population genetics and the constraints the Earth’s history imposes on evolving new species.
Download the podcast here, or listen to it here.
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC
On a new episode of ID the Future, Ira Berkowitz interviews Lee Spetner in Jerusalem. Together they explore key arguments from Dr. Spetner’s books Not by Chance and The Evolution Revolution .
Spetner, a PhD from MIT, takes on natural selection, discussing what it can and cannot do. He also explores aspects of population genetics and the constraints the Earth’s history imposes on evolving new species.
Download the podcast here, or listen to it here.
The watchtower Society's commentary on John 1:1
Is Jesus God?
MANY people view the Trinity as “the central doctrine of the Christian religion.” According to this teaching, the Father, Son, and holy spirit are three persons in one God. Cardinal John O’Connor stated about the Trinity: “We know that it is a very profound mystery, which we don’t begin to understand.” Why is the Trinity so difficult to understand?
The Illustrated Bible Dictionary gives one reason. Speaking of the Trinity, this publication admits: “It is not a biblical doctrine in the sense that any formulation of it can be found in the Bible.” Because the Trinity is “not a biblical doctrine,” Trinitarians have been desperately looking for Bible texts—even twisting them—to find support for their teaching.
A Text That Teaches the Trinity?
One example of a Bible verse that is often misused is John 1:1. In the King James Version, that verse reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God [Greek, ton the·onʹ], and the Word was God [the·osʹ].” This verse contains two forms of the Greek noun the·osʹ (god). The first is preceded by ton (the), a form of the Greek definite article, and in this case the word the·onʹ refers to Almighty God. In the second instance, however, the·osʹ has no definite article. Was the article mistakenly left out?
The Gospel of John was written in Koine, or common Greek, which has specific rules regarding the use of the definite article. Bible scholar A. T. Robertson recognizes that if both subject and predicate have articles, “both are definite, treated as identical, one and the same, and interchangeable.” Robertson considers as an example Matthew 13:38, which reads: “The field [Greek, ho a·grosʹ] is the world [Greek, ho koʹsmos].” The grammar enables us to understand that the world is also the field.
What, though, if the subject has a definite article but the predicate does not, as in John 1:1? Citing that verse as an example, scholar James Allen Hewett emphasizes: “In such a construction the subject and predicate are not the same, equal, identical, or anything of the sort.”
To illustrate, Hewett uses 1 John 1:5, which says: “God is light.” In Greek, “God” is ho the·osʹ and therefore has a definite article. But phos for “light” is not preceded by any article. Hewett points out: “One can always . . . say of God He is characterized by light; one cannot always say of light that it is God.” Similar examples are found at John 4:24, “God is a Spirit,” and at 1 John 4:16, “God is love.” In both of these verses, the subjects have definite articles but the predicates, “Spirit” and “love,” do not. So the subjects and predicates are not interchangeable. These verses cannot mean that “Spirit is God” or “love is God.”
Identity of “the Word”?
Many Greek scholars and Bible translators acknowledge that John 1:1 highlights, not the identity, but a quality of “the Word.” Says Bible translator William Barclay: “Because [the apostle John] has no definite article in front of theos it becomes a description . . . John is not here identifying the Word with God. To put it very simply, he does not say that Jesus was God.” Scholar Jason David BeDuhn likewise says: “In Greek, if you leave off the article from theos in a sentence like the one in John 1:1c, then your readers will assume you mean ‘a god.’ . . . Its absence makes theos quite different than the definite ho theos, as different as ‘a god’ is from ‘God’ in English.” BeDuhn adds: “In John 1:1, the Word is not the one-and-only God, but is a god, or divine being.” Or to put it in the words of Joseph Henry Thayer, a scholar who worked on the American Standard Version: “The Logos [or, Word] was divine, not the divine Being himself.”
Does the identity of God have to be “a very profound mystery”? It did not seem so to Jesus. In his prayer to his Father, Jesus made a clear distinction between him and his Father when he said: “This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ.” (John 17:3) If we believe Jesus and understand the plain teaching of the Bible, we will respect him as the divine Son of God that he is. We will also worship Jehovah as “the only true God.”
Friday 1 September 2017
And still yet more iconoclasm.
A.N. Wilson in The Times – Against Darwinist Absolutism
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer
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
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.
Thursday 31 August 2017
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 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
Wednesday 30 August 2017
On Darwinism's explanatory shortcomings from an evolutionist.
Evolutionary Theorist Concedes: Evolution “Largely Avoids” Biggest Questions of Biological Origins
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC
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.
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.
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