The next arms race?

For this next trick...

Wikipedia Erases Paleontologist Günter Bechly
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Günter Bechly is a distinguished paleontologist, specializing in fossil dragonflies, exquisitely preserved in amber for tens of millions of years. After revealing his support for the theory of intelligent design, he was pushed out as a curator at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. He subsequently joined Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture as a Senior Fellow. Now we learn that our colleague has suffered another act of censorship: he has been erased from Wikipedia, ostensibly for not being “notable” enough.

This is a big deal, and a reminder of a key dynamic in the debate about ID. What the public hears about that debate is often highly misleading. That’s for a number of reasons, including media distortion, dishonest attributions of “creationism” to ID proponents, and a refusal by most professional scientists who oppose ID to respond to the theory on its scientific merits.

The discussion of design evidence is affected as well by an absence of voices that, in a sensible world, would be in the thick of it. Those voices, a ghost chorus, belong to scholars sympathetic to ID who keep out of the controversy because they’re aware they will be punished if they speak up. We know many of them, and keep private channels of communication open. At Evolution News, we have documented a range of instances of censorship and intimidation. Rarely, though, do the censors reveal themselves as clearly as in the case of Wikipedia versus Bechly.

They don’t do so by name. Wikipedia editors typically employ pseudonyms. But  a discussion page records the deliberations of editors and others on the decision to delete Dr. Bechly’s Wiki entry. It makes for a fascinating and revealing read.

Enormously influential in forming opinion, Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors who may have zero experience in the areas that catch their attention. They’re a dedicated group, with, it often seems, huge amounts of free time on their hands to police changes to entries. The sociology is significant here. Do these unpaid editors have jobs? Spouses? Families? If you don’t think that being preoccupied by children or employment, too busy to obsess about Wikipedia, or not being too busy to do so, correlates with a person’s view of reality, you’re fooling yourself.

So when it comes to anything related to ID, Wiki editors have rigid and not altogether surprising biases. They are lightning fast at erasing corrections to pages they care about. Wikipedia’s coverage of ID, which they characterize as “a religious argument for the existence of God,” is hopelessly prejudiced and inaccurate.

So a pseudonymous editor recommended getting rid of Dr. Bechly’s page, and another, after making a show of weighing the case and soliciting opinions from others, agreed to it. In an eerie replay of his experience with the museum, which deleted his webpages, Bechly is now erased.

Prior to disappearing, his Wikipedia entry dispassionately recounted his education, employment, and accomplishments, including an impressive scientific publications list and a variety of species and taxa named for him. It devoted a short paragraph to his “Support for Intelligent Design.” The case for erasing him seems to have been carried by three individuals. If I’m interpreting the discussion’s welter of nerdy abbreviations and other lingo correctly, a person called “Trekker” nominated Bechly for deletion. This editor claims no bias against “creationism.”

Now, it maybe [sic] also appropriate to point out that I was not even aware that this person was some kind of creationist or whatever when I put this article up for deletion. I simply saw it a while ago by looking at someone elses [sic] edit it [sic] and decided to check the sources, which I do regularly, and saw that they were very lacking. I then checked the talkpage which had already brought up the issue of notability. I felt a [sic] AFD [Articles for deletion] was a good idea. That’s that.

Trekker, whose interests include “pro wrestling, literature, science fiction, fantasy and comic book[s],” is pressed by a pro-Bechly contributor, “Sam Tanner.” Trekker then throws a tantrum and exits the discussion — “If you are feel [sic] I’m being combative and condescending towards you that’s because I am.” Tanner replies that Trekker’s combativeness “does suggest that this is more than routine housekeeping.” Really? Do you think so?

Another active participant, “David Eppstein,” is apparently, and to his genuine credit, a real name. It belongs to a computer science professor at UC Irvine. He argues for deletion and maintains that Bechly’s “turn to fringe creationist views does not seem to be notable at all.” At one point Bechly himself enters the discussion, offering “dozens of more secondary sources from the print press, TV and radio” plus “three described new insect orders, more than 160 described species, and insect family Bechlyidae, a genus and 8 species named after me, 2 edited books and numerous book chapters, 1 book in German about me, and a ResearchGate score that is higher than 85% of ResearchGate members.”

Bechly wonders what Eppstein, with his own brief Wikipedia page, itself “semi-protected” from edits, can offer by way of comparison. I have written to Eppstein to ask this question; I am waiting to hear back. Being on the faculty on a University of California campus is no trivial accomplishment. But the system has 21,200 people on its faculty staff. To my eyes, Eppstein does not seem more notable than Bechly. The latter points out that on the atheist side, “intellectual nobodies like Richard Carrier and Matt Dillahunty” enjoy lavish and lengthy Wiki entries. Indeed they do, not skimping on personal details, either. For example, did you know that Carrier (whom I’d never heard of), a self-published author and blogger whose biography runs to 9,000+ words, has “revealed that he is polyamorous”? TMI, Wikipedia.

While much of the encyclopedia is useful, a lot of it is a comedy. Thus, you might wonder if the bio belonging to the editor who ultimately decided Dr. Bechly’s fate is real or a put on. I believe it’s all too real.

The editor, “Jo-Jo Eumerus,” also goes by “Septimus Heap,” after the popular fantasy series for juvenile readers. He is “a currently 23-year old male from Switzerland” who “distinctly prefer[s] to be referred to by the attributes of my avatar on the forums (that is, usually as ‘boy’).” Jo-Jo, or rather “boy” (??), includes a graphic of himself as a wizard, “from a time 500 years ago.” He indicates he has been “diagnosed with Asperger syndrome” and “sometimes [has] problems with society due to this.”

On the Bechly matter, Jo-Jo solemnly rules that “‘notability’ does not necessarily indicate ‘notability’” in Wikipedia’s sense. With a straight face: “Accusations of anti-creationism bias are not germane to the purpose of AfD [Articles for deletion], and we don’t consider the stances of an article subject on a contentious topic in judging notability.”

The most prominent dissenting voice, Sam Tanner, provides ample illustrations of Bechly’s “notability” in any sane, realistic sense of that word, with links to mainstream scientific and popular coverage of his work. That includes discoveries of some pretty horrific insects from 100 or more million years ago.

But once they’ve got you falsely tagged as a “creationist,” none of it matters. One editor pushing for deletion candidly admits:

[D]etermining notability, especially in borderline cases, can definitely be subjective. If it weren’t, discussions like this wouldn’t be necessary.

Well, obviously so. This isn’t a “borderline case,” but clearly, the editors trying to erase Dr. Bechly’s record do not have some sort of knockdown, objective algorithmic case against him. It’s a mad world, a funhouse world, where the notability of a paleontologist of Günter Bechly’s stature is uncontested one day but, following his admission of finding ID persuasive, suddenly and furiously contested, to be ruled upon by a 23-year-old “boy” and 500-year-old wizard called “Jo-Jo.” Such is the alternative reality of Wikipedia.

What’s there to be done? Fight the editors on their own pages? No, that’s a waste of time. We’ve tried. But do share this with friends, as widely as possible, so that perhaps readers will take the online encyclopedia with a pinch of skepticism next time. Also please be sure to share the new documentary Revolutionary in which Dr. Bechly gets to tell a little bit of his own story.

Choosing life has become controversial?

Controversial! HHS to Define Life in Line with Embryology Textbooks
Wesley J. Smith

The Department of Health and Human Services has published a draft strategic plan for 2018-2022 that includes some, shall we say, controversial language. See if you can spot it:

Mission Statement

The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to enhance the health and well-being of Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.

Organizational Structure

HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception…

Whoa. Life “beginning at conception,” or perhaps better stated, at the conclusion of fertilization, is a fact of basic biological science – as embryology textbooks attest.

Still, despite the scientific accuracy, expect the usual suspects to be furious about the proposal. Indeed, that sound you hear is the  yelling already beginning.

The proposed mission statement would also  seem to set the department against assisted suicide:

A core component of the HHS mission is our dedication to serve all Americans from conception to natural death, but especially those individuals and populations facing or at high risk for economic and social well-being challenges, through effective human services. [Emphasis added.]

Good. We can use all the help stopping the death agenda that we can get.

Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany:a timeline.

Jehovah's Witnesses in the Holocaust: Chronology of Events 1933-1945

1933 - About 25,000 Jehovah's Witnesses are active in Germany. March, first concentration camp, Dachau, established. April 1, all religious literature printed by Jehovah's Witnesses is banned from circulation in Germany. In June, Prussian State Police ban the work and organization of Jehovah's Witnesses. Some Witnesses sentenced to terms in labor and concentration camps. Watch Tower office in Magdeburg raided and closed. August 16, first mention of existence of concentration camps in the Golden Age magazine (now Awake!), published internationally by Jehovah's Witnesses.

1934 - October 7, telegrams of protest sent to Hitler by Jehovah's Witnesses in 50 countries, including Germany.

1935 - April 1, Jehovah's Witnesses banned from all civil service jobs and arrested throughout Germany. Pension and employment benefits confiscated. Marriage to one of Jehovah's Witnesses becomes legal grounds for divorce. Children of Jehovah's Witnesses banned from attending school. Some children taken from parents to be raised in Nazi homes and reform schools.

1936 - Mass arrests of Jehovah's Witnesses. Several thousand are sent to concentration camps and some remain there until 1945. December 12, Jehovah's Witnesses throughout Germany secretly distribute 200,000 copies of the Lucerne Resolution, a protest of Nazi atrocities, in one hour.

1937 - Buchenwald concentration camp established. Here is first known use of the purple triangle as a symbol for camp inmates who are Jehovah's Witnesses. April 22, Gestapo order directs that all of Jehovah's Witnesses released from prison be taken directly to concentration camps. June 20, Jehovah's Witnesses throughout Germany secretly distribute the "Open Letter," which supplies detailed accounts of Nazi atrocities.

1938 - October 2, Watch Tower Society President J. F. Rutherford, speaking over a network of 60 radio stations, denounces Nazi persecution of the Jews. November 9 and 10, Jews experience a nationwide attack in a pogrom called Krystallnacht (night of Broken Glass). About 25,000 Jewish men deported to concentration camps. On November 15, all Jewish children expelled from school.

1939 - September 15, August Dickman, one of Jehovah's Witnesses and the first conscientious objector of the war to be executed, dies by firing squad at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

1942 - January 20, Wannasee Conference of Nazi officials formalizes plans for the so-called Final Solution, the extermination of European Jewry.

1945 - May 7, Germany surrenders and the war in Europe ends. The Nuremberg war crimes trials begin in November. September 30, verdicts of the war crimes trials announced in Nuremberg on the same day that Jehovah's Witnesses hold public convention at the Zeppelinwiese, formerly used for Nazi Party rallies.

The science of Happiness?

A clash of Titans. LXI

Belated recognition for the rights of Jehovah's servants in Germany.

Germany Grants Highest Legal Status to Jehovah’s Witnesses

After more than 26 years of legal proceedings, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany obtained the same legal status as that granted to major religions in the country. On January 27, 2017, North Rhine-Westphalia was the last state of the 16 German states to grant public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses. The decision is significant for the Witnesses because even though they have been present in Germany for well over 100 years, their national headquarters and the thousands of congregations in the country were considered independent religious associations. Now that the Witnesses have finally been granted public law status in all German states, they are viewed as a single religious entity and enjoy the benefits that this status provides.

The Long Struggle to Obtain Public Law Status

In 1921, Jehovah’s Witnesses were first registered in Germany under private law. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Witnesses applied for public law status because of the benefits available to religious organizations that have it.

In order for a religious association to be registered throughout the country as a public law corporation, the law requires that it first obtain public law status in the German state where it is based. It may then apply for this status in the 15 other German states. In 1990, the religious association Jehovas Zeugen in Deutschland (Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany) first applied to the state of Berlin, where it maintains its legal address. Although most religious organizations seeking public law status obtain it within a short period of time, perhaps within a year or two, the Berlin government refused to grant public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses for many years. One reason the government cited was that the Witnesses refrain from voting in national elections. However, this argument is not valid, since the law does not require German citizens to vote; to do so is entirely voluntary.

This issue eventually came before the courts. On March 24, 2005, the Higher Administrative Court in Berlin ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany must be acknowledged as a “corporation of public law.” Over a year later, the state of Berlin relented and granted public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses, ending a 16-year legal struggle with the Berlin government.

Next, the Witnesses applied for public law status in the remaining 15 German states. In 2009, 11 states granted public law status; another 3 states followed in subsequent years; and the last state, North Rhine-Westphalia, granted public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses on January 27, 2017. The persistent efforts of Jehovah’s Witnesses to obtain the same legal status as that granted to major religions in Germany finally ended after 26 years of legal proceedings.

The Benefits of Having Public Law Status

The national headquarters and the more than 2,000 congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany now function under a single corporate structure. In the past, because each association representing at least one congregation was viewed as an independent religious association, it was subject to state laws requiring the submission of annual reports and tax returns. Adjustments in an association’s structure resulting from an appointment of new elders, purchase of property, or the renaming or merging of congregations had to be reported to the government. In the past these reporting requirements required much effort and time on the part of congregation elders, but now they can focus more fully on the pastoral care of congregation members. The lack of public law status also required congregations to pay fees for the processing of reports. A longtime elder in one congregation commented: “Now we have greater freedom to use donated funds to support the public ministry of congregation members.”

Without the superior legal status of public law, Jehovah’s Witnesses were not viewed as a mainstream religion, even though some 274,000 Witnesses and their associates were attending their meetings in Germany. Armin Pikl, an attorney for the national headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany, observed: “During the more than 26 years of legal efforts to obtain the status as a corporation of public law, the media published hundreds of untrue and defamatory statements about our religion, sometimes almost weekly. Now the flood of untrue and defamatory statements has subsided.” Werner Rudtke, a longtime Witness, stated: “Since a religious association that wants to become a public law corporation must be law-abiding in every way, many false allegations against the Witnesses can be refuted.” Another Witness, named Petra, mentioned the past challenges facing schoolchildren. She said: “This kind of recognition is very helpful for children in school. Until now it has been the tendency of teachers to discriminate against Witness students as a result of the false allegation that they belonged to a ‘sect’ rather than to a religion.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany are grateful that their sincere religious activity has been recognized by the government as qualifying for public law status. They hope that such recognition will alleviate some of their past challenges and will benefit them as individuals and as a religious community.

File under "Well said" LV

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
JOHN ADAMS

Reports of Adam and Eve's demise greatly exaggerated?

Does Science Rule Out a First Human Pair? Geneticist Richard Buggs Says No
Ann Gauger

Dennis Venema, associate professor of biology at Trinity Western University, and Scot McKnight, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, have written a book,  Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, that addresses the question of human origins. Venema defends the standard scientific narrative on neo-Darwinism and human origins, while McKnight attempts to reconcile Christian theology with the science. Because the book argues that science disproves the existence of a historical Adam and Eve, it is worth responding to in some detail.

One of the claims Venema makes in his book is that the effective population size of our last common ancestor with chimps has never been fewer than 10,000. In fact, he equates the certainty of that statement with our certainty about heliocentrism. That is an extreme claim that needs justification. Assuming no bottlenecks, this would exclude the possibility of an original human pair as the progenitors of the human race.

Effective population size is very hard to determine. In fact, in some situations the effective population size cannot be determined (On the Meaning and Existence of an  effective population size P. Sjödin, I. Kaj, S. Krone, M. Lascoux and M. Nordborg (2005) Genetics 169: 1061–1070). So any estimates concerning effective population size should be taken a bit skeptically.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Richard Buggs, a British biologist who has published over thirty articles on genetics in journals such as Nature, Current Biology, Evolution, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, wrote to Venema to lay out his concerns in May of this year. Venema failed to respond to Buggs’s email so Buggs  posted it online last week, and tweeted a link to it here. In his letter he comments on effective population size estimates:

As I am sure you know, effective population size is a measure of a population’s susceptibility to drift, rather than an attempt to measure census population size. I would be very hesitant to rely too heavily on any estimate of past effective population size.

Could we have begun with a population of 10,000 and then had a bottleneck of two? Obviously this estimate is relevant for human origins, since a bottleneck of two would indicate some sort of unique beginning. Venema says a bottleneck of two is impossible based on the levels of human genetic diversity present today.

If a species were formed through such an event [by a single ancestral breeding pair] or if a species were reduced in numbers to a single breeding pair at some point in its history, it would leave a telltale mark on its genome that would persist for hundreds of thousands of years — a severe reduction in genetic variability for the species as a whole.

Buggs responds:

It is easy to have misleading intuitions about the population genetic effects of a short, sudden bottleneck. For example, Ernst Mayr suggested that many species had passed through extreme bottlenecks in founder events. He argued that extreme loss of diversity in such events would promote evolutionary change. His intuition about loss of diversity in bottlenecks was wrong, though, and his argument lost much of its force when population geneticists (M. Nei, T. Maruyama and R. Chakraborty 1975 Evolution, 29(1):1-10) showed that even a bottleneck of a single pair would not lead to massive decreases in genetic diversity, if followed by rapid population growth. When two individuals are taken at random from an existing large population, they will on average carry 75% of its heterozygosity (M. Slatkin and L. Excoffier 2012 Genetics 191:171–181). From a bottleneck of a single fertilised female, if population size doubles every generation, after many generations the population will have over half of the heterozygosity of the population before the bottleneck (Barton and Charlesworth 1984, Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 15:133-64). If population growth is faster than this, the proportion of heterozygosity maintained will be higher.

This means that a single pair of individuals can carry a great deal of  heterozygosity  with them through a bottleneck, provided they come from an ancestral population with high diversity and undergo rapid population growth after the bottleneck. They will pass most of that diversity on to the population they found, so long as population grows rapidly.

Buggs goes on to discuss the relative genetic diversity of chimpanzees at 5.7 million SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and humans at 3.1 million (Prado-Martinez et al 2013 Nature). He makes the point that if a pair of chimpanzees were moved to an isolated region where rapid population growth was possible, the new population would have similar levels of genetic variability to modern humans.

He explains:

I am not stating these figures because existing populations of chimpanzee gave rise to modern humans, but simply to show that it is hard to see how overall levels of SNP diversity and heterozygosity in modern humans could exclude the possibility of a past bottleneck of two individuals.

On top of this, we need to add in the fact that explosive population growth in humans has allowed many new mutations to rapidly accumulate in human populations, accounting for many SNPs with low minor allele frequencies (A. Keinan and A. G. Clark (2012) Science 336 (6082): 740-743).

PSMC (pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent) analysis is a method used by population geneticists to try to recover the history of human populations. Venema discusses it in his book. Unfortunately he cannot use it to prove that a sudden, short bottleneck never happened. In the original Li and Durbin 2011 paper describing PSMC analysis, the authors note that an instantaneous reduction in population size was not detected as such, but was instead “spread over several preceding tens of thousands of years in the PSMC reconstruction.” Continued work in  Beth Shapiro’s lab also indicates that the PSMC method cannot accurately reconstruct sharp bottlenecks.

Buggs sums up his problems with Venema’s analysis:

In general, I am concerned that the studies you cite did not set out to test the hypothesis that humans have passed through a single-couple bottleneck. They are simply trying to reconstruct the most probable past effective population sizes of humans given the standard assumptions of population genetic models. I personally would feel ill at ease claiming that they prove that a short sudden bottleneck is impossible.

 scientists have argued have argued against Venema’s position by disputing key assumptions, including the idea of common descent. Buggs’s argument is valid, though, whether or not common descent is true. In fact, he has told me he is assuming common ancestry, but arguing that we can still have come from a single couple as ancestors.

What is needed is a model that does not rely on the standard assumptions of population genetics. Recently Hössjer, Gauger, and Reeves have proposed such an alternative model. The model, when programmed, will be available for use by anyone to test the effects of various starting conditions, like population size, the degree of gene flow, recombination and mutation rates, mate choice effects, and ultimately the effects of selection. The outcomes of various scenarios can be tested and compared to summary statistics from modern populations, in order to determine which scenarios best explain current populations.

Finally, given Buggs’s critique, Venema’s claims that our starting population was at least 10,000, and that we could not have come from just two, seem unjustified. Certainly Venema cannot claim these are facts as sure as heliocentrism. He should at least acknowledge the facts above, and soften his claims. Further revision may be necessary following the results from Hössjer, Gauger, and Reeves’s model. We shall see.

College not the only game in town.

College not the only game in town II

College not the only game in town III

College not the only game in town IV

The Watchtower Society's commentary on the 'lake of fire'

LAKE OF FIRE:


This expression occurs only in the book of Revelation and is clearly symbolic. The Bible gives its own explanation and definition of the symbol by stating: “This means the second death, the lake of fire.”—Re 20:14; 21:8.

The symbolic quality of the lake of fire is further evident from the context of references to it in the book of Revelation. Death is said to be hurled into this lake of fire. (Re 19:20; 20:14) Death obviously cannot be literally burned. Moreover, the Devil, an invisible spirit creature, is thrown into the lake. Being spirit, he cannot be hurt by literal fire.—Re 20:10; compare Ex 3:2 and Jg 13:20.

Since the lake of fire represents “the second death” and since Revelation 20:14 says that both “death and Hades” are to be cast into it, it is evident that the lake cannot represent the death man has inherited from Adam (Ro 5:12), nor does it refer to Hades (Sheol). It must, therefore, be symbolic of another kind of death, one that is without reversal, for the record nowhere speaks of the “lake” as giving up those in it, as do Adamic death and Hades (Sheol). (Re 20:13) Thus, those not found written in “the book of life,” unrepentant opposers of God’s sovereignty, are hurled into the lake of fire, meaning eternal destruction, or the second death.—Re 20:15.

While the foregoing texts make evident the symbolic quality of the lake of fire, it has been used by some persons to support belief in a literal place of fire and torment. Revelation 20:10 has been appealed to, because it speaks of the Devil, the wild beast, and the false prophet as being “tormented day and night forever and ever” in the lake of fire. However, this cannot refer to actual conscious torment. Those thrown into the lake of fire undergo “the second death.” (Re 20:14) In death there is no consciousness and, hence, no feeling of pain or suffering.—Ec 9:5.

In the Scriptures fiery torment is associated with destruction and death. For example, in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures the word for torment (baʹsa·nos) is several times used with reference to punishment by death. (Eze 3:20; 32:24, 30) Similarly, concerning Babylon the Great, the book of Revelation says, “the kings of the earth . . . will weep and beat themselves in grief over her, when they look at the smoke from the burning of her, while they stand at a distance because of their fear of her torment [Gr., ba·sa·ni·smouʹ].” (Re 18:9, 10) As to the meaning of the torment, an angel later explains: “Thus with a swift pitch will Babylon the great city be hurled down, and she will never be found again.” (Re 18:21) So, fiery torment here is parallel with destruction, and in the case of Babylon the Great, it is everlasting destruction.—Compare Re 17:16; 18:8, 15-17, 19.

Therefore, those who are ‘tormented forever’ (from Gr., ba·sa·niʹzo) in the lake of fire undergo “second death” from which there is no resurrection. The related Greek word ba·sa·ni·stesʹ is translated ‘jailer’ in Matthew 18:34. (RS, NW, ED; compare vs 30.) Thus those hurled into the lake of fire will be held under restraint, or “jailed,” in death throughout eternity.—

On the transalantic slave trade.

Less is more II

Bloodsport IV

If your science is settled you're doing it wrong?

On Darwinists' plans to deprogram the next generation of its innate design recognition instinct.

Story Time: Psychologists Show How to "Suppress" Children's Intuition of Design in Nature

David Klinghoffer 

I don't know whether this is outrageous, hilarious or simply very telling. Probably all three. The Wall Street Journal salutes the research of Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen. She has discovered that it's possible with Darwinian storytelling to suppress common sense in children of the kind that leads them to recognize artifacts of intelligent design in nature.

The Journal notes that quite apart from religious instruction, kids are primed to see life as reflecting "intentional design." It's intuitive. The corrective is to catch them at an early age and train them to see things in a Darwinian light.

By elementary-school age, children start to invoke an ultimate God-like designer to explain the complexity of the world around them -- even children brought up as atheists. Kids aged 6 to 10 have developed their own coherent "folk biological" theories. ...

Dr. Kelemen and her colleagues thought that they might be able to get young children to understand the mechanism of natural selection before the alternative intentional-design theory had become too entrenched. They gave 5- to 8-year-olds 10-page picture books that illustrated an example of natural selection. The "pilosas," for example, are fictional mammals who eat insects. Some of them had thick trunks, and some had thin ones. A sudden change in the climate drove the insects into narrow underground tunnels. The thin-trunked pilosas could still eat the insects, but the ones with thick trunks died. So the next generation all had thin trunks.

Before the children heard the story, the experimenters asked them to explain why a different group of fictional animals had a particular trait. Most of the children gave explanations based on intentional design. But after the children heard the story, they answered similar questions very differently: They had genuinely begun to understand evolution by natural selection. That understanding persisted when the experimenters went back three months later.

One picture book, of course, won't solve all the problems of science education. But these results do suggest that simple story books like these could be powerful intellectual tools. The secret may be to reach children with the right theory before the wrong one is too firmly in place.

There are a number of interesting points here. First, that the example of natural selection is fictional. The mammalian order Pilosa (anteaters and sloths) is real, but "pilosas" are not. Second, it is decidedly in the micro-evolutionary realm -- a kind of evolution that no one disputes, certainly not advocates of the theory of intelligent design. There's no reason to think that the "pilosas" are on their way to true speciation, of the kind that evolutionary theory is really challenged to account for, any more than Darwin's finches. The extrapolation from such a trivial thing into the origin of all species and all biological complexity by unguided natural processes is a cheat.

Most enlightening is that Dr. Kelemen and her colleagues would, to begin with, seek to talk children out of their intuitive response. Among ID researchers, the approach would be to test that intuition, objectively weighing the empirical evidence without preconceptions. Dr. Kelemen would "suppress" it: her own word!

If you look at the original research, reported in the journal Psychological Science, the language is revealing ("Young Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using a Picture-Storybook Intervention"). From the Abstract:

In a novel approach, we explored 5- to 8-year-olds' capacities to learn a basic but theoretically coherent mechanistic explanation of adaptation through a custom storybook intervention. Experiment 1 showed that children understood the population-based logic of natural selection and also generalized it. Furthermore, learning endured 3 months later. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed that children understood and applied an even more nuanced mechanistic causal explanation. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, basic natural selection is teachable in early childhood. Theory-driven interventions using picture storybooks with rich explanatory structure are beneficial. [Emphasis added.]

The initiative to program children is repeatedly referred to as "intervention," a term used in psychological counseling to refer to an attempt to thwart counterproductive, dangerous thoughts or behavior. The intuitive response of human beings, seeing design in nature, is implicitly compared to destructive patterns of abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, and the like!

Given that bizarre premise, suppressing design thoughts becomes the preferred solution. It worked better with slightly older kids, as Kelemen and her colleagues are remarkably candid in saying:

Both age groups learned a great deal, but as might be expected given their enhanced linguistic and processing capacities, 7- to 8-year-olds showed especially robust abilities to suppress any emergent competing commonsense ideas and master task demands, such that they could abstract and transfer the mechanism to markedly different species.

More:

Repeated, spaced instruction on gradually scaled-up versions of the logic of natural selection could ultimately place students in a better position to suppress competing intuitive theoretical explanations.

"Suppressing common sense," "intervening" to throttle natural intuitions -- I could hardly have put it any more directly myself.

The defense of Darwinian theory already centered on an avoidance strategy, dodging a direct confrontation with genuinely challenging critiques, while dishonestly conflating scientific alternatives (intelligent design) with non-scientific ones (creationism) to confuse people. That wasn't good enough, evidently. Even adults raised from childhood to see the universe as void of purpose may have a lingering suspicion that natural selection alone can't explain the panoply of life around us.

It becomes necessary, then, to choke off the illness at its origin, somewhere in early childhood. The more obvious and responsible alternative of answering arguments for intelligent design is, of course, not thinkable.

Out of Africa V

Darwinism;Where success is an orphan?

A Billion Genes and Not One Beneficial Mutation.
Evolution News & Views


Natural selection cannot invent things. That's a fact that Douglas Axe establishes clearly in his new book Undeniable. All improvements must come from random mutations. Think of all the progress from the first microbe to a human body. Every single instance of innovation -- large or small -- had to originate in what amounts to "blind search" for something good that natural selection could preserve at a moment in time and place. The inability of blind search to locate any benefit in a sufficiently large search space is a topic Dr. Axe discusses at length.

Evolutionists often speak in generalities about beneficial mutations. They may be rare, we are assured, but they happen. And when they do, "natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life" (Darwin, Origin of Species). All right, we have some data to look at. We can put a number to the frequency of beneficial mutations in a large sample. The number is zero.

Genome sequencing technology has progressed very rapidly in only the last few years. Nature just published results of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), the largest survey of human genes to date. (An "exome" is the portion of the genome that codes for proteins.) The exomes from 60,706 individuals from a variety of ethnic groups have been collected and analyzed. If we multiply 60,000 people by the 20,000 genes in the human genome (the lowest estimate), we get a minimum of 1.2 billion genes that have been examined by ExAC for variants. That sounds like a pretty good sample size for scrutinizing some of those beneficial variations that Darwin said his law of natural selection could add up and preserve.

Large-scale reference data sets of human genetic variation are critical for the medical and functional interpretation of DNA sequence changes. Here we describe the aggregation and analysis of high-quality exome (protein-coding region) DNA sequence data for 60,706 individuals of diverse ancestries generated as part of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC). This catalogue of human genetic diversity contains an average of one variant every eight bases of the exome, and provides direct evidence for the presence of widespread mutational recurrence. We have used this catalogue to calculate objective metrics of pathogenicity for sequence variants, and to identify genes subject to strong selection against various classes of mutation; identifying 3,230 genes with near-complete depletion of predicted protein-truncating variants, with 72% of these genes having no currently established human disease phenotype. Finally, we demonstrate that these data can be used for the efficient filtering of candidate disease-causing variants, and for the discovery of human 'knockout' variants in protein-coding genes. [Emphasis added.]
Out of this high ratio of variants (one in eight basis shows variation, they said), there should be some proportion, even if small, that improves fitness. But we search the paper in vain for any mention of beneficial mutations. There's plenty of talk about disease. The authors only mention "neutral" variants twice. But there are no mentions of beneficial mutations. You can't find one instance of any of these words: benefit, beneficial, fitness, advantage (in terms of mutation), improvement, innovation, invention, or positive selection.

They mention all kinds of harmful effects from most variants: missense and nonsense variants, frameshift mutations, proteins that get truncated on translation, and a multitude of insertions and deletions. Quite a few are known to cause diseases. There are probably many more mutations that never survive to birth. As for natural selection, the authors do speak of "negative selection" and "purifying selection" weeding out the harmful mutations, but nowhere do they mention anything worthwhile that positive selection appears to be preserving.

Jay Shendure had participated in an earlier exome sequencing project on just 12 individuals. That was only seven years ago -- an indication of the rapidity of progress in sequencing technology. In Nature, he shares his thoughts on the significance of ExAC, which is 5,000 times larger than his team's effort was. He mentions "fitness." Watch for it!

More than half of the approximately 7.5 million variants found by ExAC are seen only once. But collectively, they occur at a remarkably high density -- at one out of every eight sites in the exome. For each gene, the authors contrasted the expected and observed numbers of variants that cause the production of truncated proteins, to search for regions containing lower-than-predicted levels of protein-truncating variants. This allowed them to identify several thousand genes that are highly sensitive to such variants -- that is, unable to function normally after loss of one copy of the gene, even if the other copy is intact. Most of these genes have not yet been associated with disease, but mutation probably leads to embryonic death or strongly affects fitness in some other way. These genes are also intolerant of variants in regulatory DNA sequences that markedly alter levels of RNA synthesis from the gene, and are more likely than other genes to be implicated in genome-wide association studies of common disease.
Does he know of any variant that "strongly effects fitness in some other way" than embryonic death? If so, he would have listed it. Instead, all both papers talk about are disease, death, and intolerance to change. The amount of variability is indeed quite high, and the people who donated their genes to the project were alive in spite of their variants. But they sure don't appear to be improving in any measurable way. Natural selection has plenty of bad variation to reject, but not much to add up and preserve.

Darwinians could argue that ExAC is not a large enough sample. We would need millions of exomes, or preferably whole genomes, to find the elusive beneficial mutations. That could be. As technology improves rapidly, perhaps we'll find out before long. However, Doug Axe shows why this is unlikely.

Axe discusses sample sizes. His lab experience with protein folds leads him to the empirically supported conclusion that the sequence space for proteins (and the genes that encode them) is so fantastically large that blind search is hopelessly inadequate to find the good variants. And since natural selection cannot invent things, that's all it has to work with. Remember, mutations are random. Finding good mutations is far less probable in a blind search than throwing a dart blindfolded from space and hitting a pre-specified target one millimeter in diameter. When the search space is "fantastically large," adding more darts won't help. You run into physical limits of time and energy cost.

For those who complain that Axe relies on intuition with his subtitle "How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed," rest assured that he does not (as he explains in a video here). The book is loaded with scientific evidence supporting design. He just shows that the "universal design intuition" common to humans from earliest childhood is scientifically correct in this case: when we see things that take knowledge to build, we know intuitively that someone had to have that knowledge. The news from ExAC provides additional empirical support for his contention that genes, proteins, and life are not fortuitous consequences of blind searches for good things. They look designed because they are designed.

Is the grass really greener?

A new study from medical researchers at Harvard and Northwestern shows that 18- to 25-year-olds who smoke marijuana—even just recreationally!—had marked abnormalities in areas of their brains that regulate emotion and motivation

For those young people — and their parents — who think that smoking pot in moderation isn’t harmful, it’s time to think again.

A study released this week by researchers from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School has found that 18- to 25-year-olds who smoke marijuana only recreationally showed significant abnormalities in the brain.

“There is this general perspective out there that using marijuana recreationally is not a problem — that it is a safe drug,” says Anne Blood, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the co-senior author of the study, which is being published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “We are seeing that this is not the case.”

The scientists say theirs is the first study to examine the relationship between casual use of marijuana in young people and pot’s effects on two parts of the brain that regulate emotion and motivation. As such, it is sure to challenge many people’s assumptions that smoking a joint or two on the weekends is no big deal.

It has certainly challenged mine. In a piece earlier this year, based on other research from Northwestern on the effects of heavy marijuana use, I suggested that young people should hold off on smoking pot as long as possible because their brains are still developing and the earlier the drug is taken up, the worse the effects. That remains good advice. Yet the truth is, I’ve not only been telling my own 16-year-old son to hold off, I’ve also been counseling him that should he ever decide to use pot, he should do so with temperance.

This “everything in moderation” mantra has always struck me as more realistic than preaching total abstinence. Baked into my message, meanwhile, has been the implicit belief that smoking a little weed on the weekends is no worse than having a few beers — a notion that many Americans apparently share.

A nationwide NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month found that only 8% of adults think that marijuana is the most harmful substance to a person’s overall health when lined up against tobacco, alcohol and sugar. In contrast, 49% of those surveyed rated tobacco as the most harmful on the list, while 24% mentioned alcohol. Notably, even sugar — at 15% — was considered more harmful than pot.

The new Northwestern-Harvard study punches a hole in this conventional wisdom. Through three different methods of neuroimaging analysis, the scientists examined the brains of 40 young adult students from Boston-area colleges: 20 who smoked marijuana casually — four times a week on average — and 20 who didn’t use pot at all.

Each group consisted of nine males and 11 females. The pot users underwent a psychiatric interview to confirm that they were not heavy or dependent marijuana users.

“We looked specifically at people who have no adverse impacts from marijuana — no problems with work, school, the law, relationships, no addiction issues,” says Hans Breiter, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School and co–senior author of the study.

The scientists examined two key parts of the brain — the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala, which together help control whether people judge things to be rewarding or aversive and, in turn, whether they experience pleasure or pain from them. It is the development of these regions of the brain, Breiter says, that allows young people to expand their horizons, helping them appreciate and enjoy new foods, music, books and relationships.

“This is a part of the brain that you absolutely never ever want to touch,” Breiter asserts. “I don’t want to say that these are magical parts of the brain — they are all important. But these are fundamental in terms of what people find pleasurable in the world and assessing that against the bad things.”

Breiter and his colleagues found that among all 20 casual marijuana smokers in their study — even the seven who smoked just one joint per week — the nucleus accumbens and amygdala showed changes in density, volume and shape. The scientists also discovered that the more pot the young people smoked, the greater the abnormalities.

The researchers acknowledge that their sample size was small and their study preliminary. More work, they say, needs to be done to understand the relationship between the changes to the brain they found and their impact on the day-to-day lives of young people who smoke marijuana casually.

“The next important step is to investigate how structural abnormalities relate to functional outcomes,” says Jodi Gilman, an instructor at Harvard Medical School who collaborated on the study.

This is especially important, she and her colleagues add, in light of the growing push to legalize recreational marijuana use across America. “People think a little marijuana shouldn’t cause a problem if someone is doing O.K. with work or school,” Breiter says. “Our data directly says this is not so.”

Marijuana may affect fertility in young men

"If you’re a cannabis user and you’re trying for a baby ... stop."

This advice comes from Dr. Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and lead author of a new study that suggests using marijuana could increase a man's risk of fertility problems.

The study, published in the journal Human Reproduction, looked at how a man's lifestyle affects his sperm morphology: the size and shape of sperm. Researchers collected data from 1,970 men who provided semen as part of a fertility assessment.

All of the lifestyle information was self-reported, and researchers made no attempt to confirm accuracy. Of those men, 318 produced abnormal sperm, where less than 4% of it was the correct size and shape (as defined by the World Health Organization). The remaining men's sperm had a higher percentage at a "normal" size and shape.

"Cannabis smoking was more common in those men who had sperm morphology less than 4%," Pacey said. "Cannabis affects one of the processes involved in determining size and shape. And we also know that the way cannabis is metabolized is different in fertile and infertile men."

The study found that men who had less than 4% normal sperm were typically under 30 years old, had used marijuana within three months of giving their sample and were twice as likely to have provided their sample during the summer.

Any of those factors could have influenced sperm morphology, but Pacey said "the only thing we found that was a risk that a man can do something about was cannabis."

The researchers did not set out to study cannabis; they were simply collecting data about men’s lifestyles to identify risks to fertility. They looked at a number of possibilities, including cigarettes, alcohol, recreational drug use, employment history, BMI, medical history and the type of underwear the men wore. The researchers concluded that none of these were factors.

A third of all infertility cases are linked to the male partner, according to theAmerican Society for Reproductive Medicine (PDF). The society says marijuana is associated with impaired sperm function and should not be used by men trying to conceive.

Society President Rebecca Sokol says the study confirms previous studies that found a possible but not proven link between abnormal semen and sperm function and the use of cannabis. But she warns that the study does not have enough cases to draw definite conclusions.

"The take-home lesson of the article is that clinicians should counsel their patients on the possible relationships between lifestyle factors, abnormal semen parameters and fertility outcomes," Sokol said. "This should include a discussion that the data are often inconclusive, but the motto 'everything in moderation' is a wise approach for the couple who is planning a pregnancy."

Another paper on the health consequences of cannabis was published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and a team of the institute's researchers prepared a paper detailing the risks based on the strongest scientific evidence currently available. According to the paper, they wanted to dispel "the popular notion that marijuana is a harmless pleasure" and does not need to be regulated.

The paper details what the research shows are the adverse effects of recreational use, including the risks of addiction. Approximately 9% of those who try marijuana will become addicted; one in six of those who start as teenagers and 25% to 50% of those who smoke daily become addicted.

The researchers also wrote about the harmful effects of cannabis use on brain development, especially in kids and teenagers. Preliminary research shows that adolescents who are early-onset smokers are slower at tasks, have lower IQs later in life and have an increased incidence of psychotic disorders.

Other problems associated with marijuana use, according to the paper, include impaired short-term memory and motor coordination, altered judgment, effects on school performance, a higher risk of motor-vehicle accidents and higher risk of cancer and other health issues like heart disease and stroke.

"There is a widespread and growing perception among not only youth, but the public in general, that marijuana is a relatively harmless drug, and it has been difficult marshaling science to correct this perception," Volkov said. "The science of marijuana is far from settled, and this has allowed advocates of various positions to cherry-pick evidence to support their particular stance."

The review also lists some of the potential therapeutic benefits of cannabis. Conditions and symptoms that may be helped by marijuana treatment include glaucoma, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, nausea, inflammation and AIDS-related anorexia and wasting syndrome, according to the report.

Volkow and her fellow researchers fear that as governments begin to modify marijuana policy toward legalization, recreational use will increase, as will a host of negative health problems.

However, Mason Tvert, communications director at the Marijuana Policy Project, says the report by the National Institute on Drug abuse researchers is not an objective review of current scientific evidence.

The Marijuana Policy Project has worked to reform marijuana policies and laws since 1995 at both the federal and state level. It lobbies for legislation that would replace marijuana prohibition in favor of legal regulation. It provided much of the staff and funding in the push to legalize and regulate marijuana for adults 21 and older in Colorado in 2012, and its goal is to pass, by 2017, at least 10 more laws that would regulate cannabis like alcohol.

"NIDA has long been criticized for prioritizing politics over science," Tvert said. "They fail to acknowledge any of the well-known research that refutes, and in some cases completely debunks, their conclusions. This more closely resembles a poorly written college essay ... than it does an objective, evidence-based journal article. Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it poses far less harm than alcohol to the consumer and to society."