Minimalism with Chinese characteristics?

Tang ping (Chinese: 躺平; pinyin: tǎng píng; lit. 'lying flat') is a lifestyle choice and social protest movement in China by some young people in China who reject societal pressures for hard work or even overwork (such as the 996 working hour system, which is generally regarded as a rat race with ever diminishing returns), and instead choose to "lie down flat and get over the beatings" via a low-desire, more indifferent attitude towards life. Novelist Liao Zenghu described "lying flat" as a resistance movement, and The New York Times called it part of a nascent Chinese counterculture.

Unlike the hikikomori in Japan (who are socially withdrawn), these young Chinese people who subscribe to "lying flat" are not socially isolated, but merely choose to lower their ambitions and simplify their goals, still being fiscally productive for their own essential needs, and prioritize psychological health over materialism.

Wiliam Shakespeare: a brief history.

 William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

The most insulting aspect of the E.C.T lie.

Acts17:28KJV"For in him we live, and move, and have our being;..."

The doctrine of eternal conscious torment of the irreformably wicked has the necessary effect of making JEHOVAH God the main accessory to eternal corruption. 

As the quoted text shows there is no life(consciousness or motion) apart from God. Thus the eternal life that would make the eternal corruption suggested by this doctrine possible could only come from him. The scriptures assure us that JEHOVAH'S holiness precludes his perpetual enabling of sin. 

Indeed death is the end of sin.

James1:15KJV"Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. 16Do not err, my beloved brethren"

Note that death is the finish of sin. There is no sin after death. 

Romans6:7KJV"For he that is dead is freed from sin"

Thus there is no intermediate state between death and resurrection in which the wicked continue to sin. For the wicked to continue sinning perpetually JEHOVAH would need to resurrect them to perpetual life a promise only held out to the righteous.

Romans7,8KJV" them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: 8But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,

The purpose of God's divine wrath is to bring a permanent end to wrongdoing and wrong desires not to perpetually enable them.

John2:17KJV"And the world passeth away and the LUST thereof ;BUT he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." 

Note the contrast the wrong desires characteristic of the present civilisation are as transient as the present age itself ,but the one accepting JEHOVAH'S help in being transformed inwardly so as to become the sort fit for a place in his new world will exists perpetually.

Why the origin of evolution deconstructs Darwinism.

Oh-So-Close to Self-Replication

Granville Sewell

In my video “A Summary of the Evidence for Intelligent Design,” I claim that with all our advanced technology we are still not close to designing any type of self-replicating machine. Instead, that is still pure science fiction. When we add technology to such a machine, to bring it closer to the goal of reproduction, I said, we only move the goalposts, because now we have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So how could we imagine that such a machine could have arisen by pure chance? In “Why Evolution is Different,” I further invited viewers to imagine that we were somehow able to design, for example, self-replicating cars. The duplication errors that would inevitably arise as these cars reproduced themselves would surely result in rapid devolution, I claimed. Who could imagine that they could eventually accumulate into major advances in automobile evolution? 

A Very Different Question

In a post here (“The First ‘Simple’ Self-Replicator?”), I tried to explain why self-replicating machines are so far beyond current human technology, by imagining trying to design something as “simple” as a self-replicating cardboard box. Take an empty cardboard box, I said, and build a completely automated factory inside which can produce empty cardboard boxes. The factory would, I presume, at least need to have some metal parts to cut and fold the cardboard and a motor with a battery to power these parts. But since the box now only builds empty boxes, it is not a self-replicator. So we would need to add another factory that could automatically produce a box with an empty box-building factory inside, and that factory would be enormously more complicated. But this box is still not a self-replicator because the box it builds can only build empty boxes, so now we need to add more technology to build a factory that builds the empty box-building factory, and then…. All of this ignores, of course, the very difficult question of where the box gets the cardboard and metals and other raw materials needed to supply its factories.

A commenter at Stephen Meyer’s Facebook page said it was “not true” that we are not close to building a self-replicator, and pointed to this video of a device built at Cornell University that can produce copies of itself…as long as humans keep feeding it certain high-tech blocks. According to the Cornell news story:

One of the dreams of both science fiction writers and practical robot builders has been realized, at least on a simple level: Cornell University researchers have created a machine that can build copies of itself….. Their robots are made up of a series of modular cubes — called “molecubes” — each containing identical machinery and the complete computer program for replication. The cubes have electromagnets on their faces that allow them to selectively attach to and detach from one another, and a complete robot consists of several cubes linked together. 

Subject to Interpretation

So I stand corrected: although human engineers are still not able to design self-replicating machines, we are oh-so-close. All that is left is to add a factory to the Cornell device so it can produce for itself the molecubes that humans keep building and feeding them. Well, of course then we would have to add a factory that could produce this molecube-producing factory. And then…

The Cornell story goes on to argue that “self-replication” is a term subject to different interpretations, and that the Cornell device is at least a “proof-of-concept.” Well, although the definition in the Wikipedia article linked above says it must “use raw materials found in the environment,” maybe it is possible to water down the definition of self-replication to where this device could be said to be close to self-replication. But it certainly has no relevance whatever to how the first life formed…unless of course origin-of-life researchers find evidence that the early Earth was rich in high-tech blocks. 

Chiang kai chek: a brief history.

 Chiang Kai-shek, Wade-Giles romanization Chiang Chieh-shih, official name Chiang Chung-cheng, (born October 31, 1887, Fenghua, Zhejiang province, China—died April 5, 1975, Taipei, Taiwan), soldier and statesman, head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949 and subsequently head of the Chinese Nationalist government in exile on Taiwan.

Chiang was born into a moderately prosperous merchant and farmer family in the coastal province of Zhejiang. He prepared for a military career first (1906) at the Baoding Military Academy in North China and subsequently (1907–11) in Japan. From 1909 to 1911 he served in the Japanese army, whose Spartan ideals he admired and adopted. More influential were the youthful compatriots he met in Tokyo; plotting to rid China of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, they converted Chiang to republicanism and made him a revolutionary.

In 1911, upon hearing of revolutionary outbreaks in China, Chiang returned home and helped in the sporadic fighting that led to the overthrow of the Manchus. He then participated in the struggles of China’s republican and other revolutionaries in 1913–16 against China’s new president and would-be emperor, Yuan Shikai.

After these excursions into public life, Chiang lapsed into obscurity. For two years (1916–17) he lived in Shanghai, where he apparently belonged to the Green Gang (Qing Bang), a secret society involved in financial manipulations. In 1918 he reentered public life by joining Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. Thus began the close association with Sun on which Chiang was to build his power. Sun’s chief concern was to reunify China, which the downfall of Yuan had left divided among warring military satraps. Having wrested power from the Qing, the revolutionists had lost it to indigenous warlords; unless they could defeat these warlords, they would have struggled for nothing.

Shortly after Sun Yat-sen had begun to reorganize the Nationalist Party along Soviet lines, Chiang visited the Soviet Union in 1923 to study Soviet institutions, especially the Red Army. Back in China after four months, he became commandant of a military academy, established on the Soviet model, at Whampoa, near Guangzhou. Soviet advisers poured into Guangzhou, and at this time the Chinese communists were admitted into the Nationalist Party. The Chinese communists quickly gained strength, especially after Sun’s death in 1925, and tensions developed between them and the more conservative elements among the Nationalists. Chiang, who, with the Whampoa army behind him, was the strongest of Sun’s heirs, met this threat with consummate shrewdness. By alternate shows of force and of leniency, he attempted to stem the communists’ growing influence without losing Soviet support. Moscow supported him until 1927, when, in a bloody coup of his own, he finally broke with the communists, expelling them from the Nationalist Party and suppressing the labour unions they had organized

Meanwhile, Chiang had gone far toward reunifying the country. Commander in chief of the revolutionary army since 1925, he had launched a massive Nationalist campaign against the northern warlords in the following year. This drive ended only in 1928, when his forces entered Beijing, the capital. A new central government under the Nationalists, with Chiang at its head, was then established at Nanjing, farther south. In October 1930 Chiang became Christian, apparently at the instance of the powerful Westernized Soong family, whose youngest daughter, Mei-ling, had become his second wife. As head of the new Nationalist government, Chiang stood committed to a program of social reform, but most of it remained on paper, partly because his control of the country remained precarious. In the first place, the provincial warlords, whom he had neutralized rather than crushed, still disputed his authority. The communists posed another threat, having withdrawn to rural strongholds and formed their own army and government. In addition, Chiang faced certain war with Japan, which, after seizing Manchuria (Northeast Provinces) in 1931, showed designs upon China proper. Chiang decided not to resist the coming Japanese invasion until after he had crushed the communists—a decision that aroused many protests, especially since a complete victory over the communists continued to elude him. To give the nation more moral cohesion, Chiang revived the state cult of Confucius and in 1934 launched a campaign, the so-called New Life Movement, to inculcate Confucian morals.

In December 1936 Chiang was seized by one of his generals who believed that Chinese forces should concentrate on fighting the Japanese instead of the communists. Chiang was held captive for some two weeks, and the Sian (Xian) Incident, as it became known, ended after he agreed to form an alliance with the communists against the Japanese invaders. In 1937 the mounting conflict between the two countries erupted into war (see Sino-Japanese War). For more than four years China fought alone until it was joined by the Allies, who with the exception of the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in 1941. China’s reward was an honoured place among the victors as one of the Big Four. But internally Chiang’s government showed signs of decay, which multiplied as it resumed the struggle against the communists after the Japanese surrendered to the United States in 1945. Civil war recommenced in 1946; by 1949 Chiang had lost continental China to the communists, and the People’s Republic of China was established. Chiang moved to Taiwan with the remnants of his Nationalist forces, established a relatively benign dictatorship over the island with other Nationalist leaders, and attempted to harass the communists across the Formosa Strait. The chastened Chiang reformed the ranks of the once-corrupt Nationalist Party, and with the help of generous American aid he succeeded in the next two decades in setting Taiwan on the road to modern economic development. In 1955 the United States signed an agreement with Chiang’s Nationalist government on Taiwan guaranteeing its defense. Beginning in 1972, however, the value of this agreement and the future of Chiang’s government were seriously called in question by the growing rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Chiang did not live to see the United States finally break diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979 in order to establish full relations with the People’s Republic of China. After his death in 1975 he was succeeded temporarily by Yen Chia-kan (C.K. Yen), who was in 1978 replaced by Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-kuo.

Among the reasons for Chiang’s overthrow by the communists, one frequently cited is the corruption that he countenanced in his government; another was his loss of flexibility in dealing with changing conditions. Growing more rigid in his leadership over the years, he became less responsive to popular sentiment and to new ideas. He came to prize loyalty more than competence and to rely more on personal ties than on ties of organization. His dependence on a trusted clique also showed in his army, in which he favoured narrow traditionalists over many abler officers. Chiang initially maintained his position as republican China’s paramount leader by shrewdly playing off provincial warlords and possible Nationalist rivals against each other and later by his adroit cultivation of American military, diplomatic, and financial support for his regime. His overthrow by the communists can perhaps be traced to his strategy during World War II; he generally refused to use his U.S.-equipped armies to actively resist China’s Japanese occupiers and counted instead on the United States to eventually defeat Japan on its own. He chose rather to preserve his military machine until the time came to unleash it on the communists at the war’s end and then crush them once and for all. But by that point Chiang’s strategy had backfired; his passive stance against the Japanese had lost him the prestige and support among the Chinese populace that the communists ultimately gained by their fierce anti-Japanese resistance. The morale and effectiveness of his armies had decayed during their enforced passivity in southwestern China, while the communists had built up large, battle-hardened armies on the strength of their appeal to Chinese nationalist sentiment. Finally, it can be said that Chiang “lost China” because he had no higher vision or coherent plan for making the deep social and economic changes needed to bring Chinese society into the 20th century. From his purge of the Nationalists’ communist partners in 1927 and his subsequent alliance with the landowning and mercantile classes, Chiang inexorably followed an increasingly conservative path that virtually ignored the plight of China’s oppressed and impoverished peasantry. The peasants formed almost 90 percent of China’s population, though, and it was their support, as demonstrated by the communist victory, which proved crucial in once more establishing a strong central government that could achieve the modern unification of China.

Technology without a technologist?

 

Can New Proteins Evolve?

Douglas Axe@DougAxe

Editor’s note: This excerpt is from a chapter by Douglas Axe  in the newly released book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. 

What enables a long chain of linked amino acids to perform highly specific molecular functions with machine-like precision? The answer is machine-like structure. Figure 2 shows one example (among thousands) of these remarkable structures. The multipart machine depicted is an ATP synthase — an assembly of 22 protein molecules that produces the energy molecule ATP. Biochemists refer to this as an enzyme because it accomplishes a chemical conversion (making ATP from ADP). But it’s no exaggeration to call it a molecular machine as well. Operating as a sophisticated nano-generator, the ATP synthase has a rotor (consisting of the parts labeled c-ring, y, and E) that spins at 8,000 rpm!

Figure 2: Structure of a bacteria l ATP synthase. (A) Schematic diagram showing the protein parts. (B) Images of the ATP synthase, from different angles. obtained with a method called cryogenic electron microscopy. (C) Molecular details (not of concern here). This figure is token from H. Guo. T Suzuki. J.L. Rubinstein (2019) ‘Structure of a bacterial ATP synthase.’ eLife 2029:8:e43128. https://elifesciences.org/articles/43128/tfigl (accessed August 24, 2020), under CC BY 4.0 license.

But how do long chains of linked amino acids form stable parts to make machines like this? The short answer is that it’s possible for the different amino acids to be arranged along the chain in such a way that the whole thing locks into a specific three-dimensional form. The process is called protein folding, with the term fold referring to the overall form. Figure 3 illustrates the basics.

I emphasized the word possible there for a reason. A random gene would specify a random sequence of amino acids, which would flop around without folding. Chains like that are rapidly broken back down into amino acids to keep them from interfering with cellular processes. Very special amino acid sequences are needed for protein chains to fold into stable structures. 

Measuring the Remarkable

It’s possible to measure just how special these sequences must be. Because random genes are hopeless, the best way to do this is to start with a natural gene that specifies a selectable trait by producing a protein that imparts this trait. Laboratory methods exist for introducing random mutations into the chosen gene. This can be done in a controlled way by restricting how many changes occur or by confining the mutations to a small portion of the gene. By starting with a gene that specifies a working protein and by controlling in this way the extent to which the gene is mutated, experimenters can produce large numbers of mutant versions of the gene, some of which will almost certainly still work.

Building on earlier work of this kind, I applied the method to a natural gene that enables bacteria to inactivate penicillin-like antibiotics. The trait in this case is antibiotic resistance, which is very easy to select for in the lab. First, one simply puts the bacteria on petri dishes with a small amount of penicillin. Cells carrying a mutant version of the gene specifying an enzyme that’s still able to break penicillin will form visible colonies on the petri dishes, whereas cells with inactive genes will die. I chose four clusters of amino acids, ten each, for my experiments. In each experiment, I heavily mutated the gene locations for one cluster, resulting in many mutant genes, each of which specified a mutant version of the enzyme with a jumble of amino acids in those ten locations. Of roughly 100,000 mutant genes tested per cluster, some were found to work in three of the clusters. None in the fourth. Testing more mutants presumably would have turned up some that worked in that fourth cluster. In any case, I was able to estimate from these results a fraction of mutants that work for each cluster, though this fraction is really an upper-bound estimate for the fourth cluster. 

Figure 3: The construction of proteins from amino acid s. Amino acids are linked one by one in the precise sequence specified by a gene, to form a long, flexible chainlike molecule (upper right). The amino-acid sequences specified by most natural genes have the highly special property of causing the who le chain to fold into a well-defined three-dimensional structure. an example of which is shown in the lower left. Scientists use simplified representations to make it easier to see the features of these folded protein structures. the most common one being the “ribbon” diagram. shown for the same protein (called beta-lactamase) in the lower right. Each coil in a ribbon diagram represents an element of structure called an alpha helix, and each arrow represent s a beta strand. These two elements make up most of the structures of all proteins. with the connections between the elements called turns or loops. Although the loops look floppy, like spaghetti. they usually have a firmly fixed structure just like the rest of the protein. (Reprinted from Undeniable, with permission.)

From these experimentally based estimates, I calculated the fraction of mutants that would be expected to work if the entire gene had been mutated in a similar way. This fraction is closely related to another fraction that carries a great deal of significance for protein evolution. But before we talk about what this important fraction turned out to be, let’s take some time to understand evolutionary thinking well enough to put this fraction in its proper context…..

Back to Proteins

Returning now to proteins, what do they add to the picture? The answer is that they exemplify the commonsensical principles by which we rightly reject purpose-free accounts of life. We can fully grasp and affirm these principles without turning to the subject of proteins (or any other technical subject), but in proteins we find elegant confirmation.

The important fraction I referred to above is the likelihood that a random chain of amino acids would have the special physical properties needed to fold into a stable structure that’s suitable for a particular function. Putting that in evolutionary terms, assuming a particular new capability that can be achieved with a new protein fold would benefit an organism, and that a genetic mistake in that organism has produced a gene sequence that differs substantially from what existed before, this fraction is the probability that the new gene happens to encode a new protein that performs the desirable new function. Using the results of my experiments on the penicillin-resistance enzyme, I estimated this probability to be in the ballpark of:

1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,00

Mao Zedong: a brief history.

 Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), also known as Chairman Mao and popularly rendered as Mao Tse-tung, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.

Mao was the son of a prosperous peasant in Shaoshan, Hunan. He supported Chinese nationalism and had an anti-imperialist outlook early in his life, and was particularly influenced by the events of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and May Fourth Movement of 1919. He later adopted Marxism–Leninism while working at Peking University, and became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. During the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CCP, Mao helped to found the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, led the Jiangxi Soviet's radical land policies, and ultimately became head of the CCP during the Long March. Although the CCP temporarily allied with the KMT under the Second United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), China's civil war resumed after Japan's surrender, and Mao's forces defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan in 1949.

On October 1, 1949, Mao proclaimed the foundation of the PRC, a Marxist–Leninist single-party state controlled by the CCP. In the following years he solidified his control through the Chinese Land Reform against landlords, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the "Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns", and through a psychological victory in the Korean War, which altogether resulted in the deaths of several million Chinese. From 1953 to 1958, Mao played an important role in enforcing planned economy in China, constructing the first Constitution of the PRC, launching the industrialisation program, and initiating the "Two Bombs, One Satellite" project. In 1955–1957, Mao launched the Sufan movement and the Anti-Rightist Campaign, with at least 550,000 people persecuted in the latter, most of whom were intellectuals and dissidents. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward that aimed to rapidly transform China's economy from agrarian to industrial, which led to the deadliest famine in history and the deaths of 15–55 million people between 1958 and 1962. In 1963, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement, and in 1966 he initiated the Cultural Revolution, a program to remove "counter-revolutionary" elements in Chinese society which lasted 10 years and was marked by violent class struggle, widespread destruction of cultural artifacts, and an unprecedented elevation of Mao's cult of personality. Tens of millions of people were persecuted during the Revolution, while the estimated number of deaths ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions, including Liu Shaoqi, the 2nd Chairman of the PRC. After years of ill health, Mao suffered a series of heart attacks in 1976 and died at the age of 82. During Mao's era, China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million while the government did not strictly enforce its family planning policy.

A controversial figure, Mao is regarded as one of the most important individuals in the twentieth century. He is also known as a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, and poet. During Mao's era, China was involved in the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet split, the Vietnam War, and the rise of Khmer Rouge. He ruled China as an autocratic and totalitarian regime responsible for mass repression as well as destruction of religious and cultural artifacts and sites. The government was responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims through starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions. Supporters of Mao have credited him with transforming China from a semicolony to a powerful sovereign state, with increased literacy and life expectancy.

A stake through heart for the junk DNA zombie?

Oxford Journal: “The Days of ‘Junk DNA’ Are Over ”

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

Thanks to a friend for passing along a new article at the Oxford University Press journal Genome Biology & Evolution (GBE), by several authors (from German and French universities), which opened its discussion section with the sentence “The days of junk DNA are over.” 

That by itself would be significant. Equally noteworthy, however, is the fact that GBE social media editor Casey McGrath — an evolutionary biologist employed by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), the academic sponsor of GBE and its sister journal Molecular Biology and Evolution — wrote a Highlight article calling attention to the observation that “Junk DNA” is “No More.” McGrath’s article, “‘Junk DNA’ No More: Repetitive Elements as Vital Sources of Flatworm Variation,” is open access.

None of this is accidental. Since project ENCODE provoked outrage among evolutionary biologists such as Dan Graur over a decade ago, there has been a concerted campaign to defend the notion of junk DNA, often explicitly in the context of anti-intelligent design sentiments. Graur, at the University of Houston, famously argued in 2013, in a major speech in Chicago to the SMBE, that “if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong.” 

Younger evolutionary biologists such as Casey McGrath are watching all this. We should not assume McGrath has any ID sympathies; almost certainly, she does not. But questions about the possible functional roles of apparent “junk” DNA are just too interesting to allow oneself to be intimidated into silence by academic bullies such as Graur.