Tuesday 16 May 2023
If you are loosing on every sale no amount of market share will help you.
Natural Selection Subtracts, It Doesn’t Add — And That Matters
In my previous post (“A New Look at Natural Selection”), I said that “natural selection” was Charles Darwin’s crowning intellectual achievement, for it created what appeared to be a naturalistic and mechanistic explanation for how organisms evolved. I also noted that evolution itself was already considered to have been well demonstrated in the fossil record by Lamarck and others some fifty years before Darwin.
In the 20th century, natural selection has been almost uniformly adopted by biologists as the explanatory agency for evolution. What appeals to naturalists is that it provides an explanation for the appearance of design in organisms, without an actual designer. Moreover, Darwin had invoked the presence of heritable changes between generations that provided the variety among organisms upon which natural selection could operate. Half a century later, genetics came into focus, seeming to provide the biochemical foundation for Darwin’s intuition as to the cause of heritable variance among species.
Real but Not as Envisioned
Natural selection, we saw, is indeed quite real, but by no means in the way that Darwin envisioned. There can be no doubt that the natural environment establishes severe constraints and requirements upon organisms. In the wild, all organisms must live within their niche. There are no wild polar bears in Arizona, and no iguanas in Alaska. To be sure, the single most incredible fact of the biosphere is the fastidiously precise formation of creatures whose physiology so exquisitely fits their environment. The wonder of this goes far beyond the fact that cetaceans do not breathe through their mouths. Their very existence depends on echolocation, but the funny thing is, it is difficult to hear underwater. Difficult, that is, unless you have a middle ear unique to cetaceans among mammals, making their underwater existence and communication possible. And it’s not just that penguins, who are birds, have bones of greater density than elephants, quite unlike their hollow-boned flying ancestors. They need those iron-dense bones in order to be able to dive for fish, because the rest of their body is composed of fat and feathers, both lighter than water, yet necessary for insulation.
I have further pointed out that the natural environment, which does passively exert selection on living creatures in all of the varying environments, was consciously designed, making the reality of the ecological niche possible.
In Keeping with the Times
History teaches that ideas and inventions comport with the times. Petroleum until 1900 was only used for kerosene, while gasoline was discarded. Now it is the reverse. We do not see any steam engine locomotives in operation anymore. We are actually on the precipice of eliminating internal combustion even for cars. In the same way, ideas from 150 years ago may have been suitable for their time, but very few scientific ideas last forever. When Darwin thought of natural selection, it seemed to make sense in an incredibly oversimplified version of how life actually operates. We are at least fifty years beyond that now. The examples I gave above about exquisite adaptability to unique environments for whales and penguins are utterly trivial compared to the intracellular and inter-organ physiology and biochemistry of every living thing. There really is no reasonable way to believe that all of those trillions and trillions of modifications occurred randomly and without a designer.
It has been said many times before but it is certainly worth repeating: Natural selection creates nothing. It only subtracts. The big question is, how does the uniqueness of form and function among organisms actually originate? That will be the subject of upcoming posts.
Why the search for Darwinism's simple beginning keeps getting more complex.
Could Blind Forces Build a Self-Replicating Molecule?
Photo: Greater blind mole rat, by GalinaGouz, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.
On a new episode of ID the Future, scientist and Stairway to life co-author Rob Stadler and host Eric Anderson examine a recent PNAS paper on the origin of life, “An RNA Polymerase Ribozyme that Synthesizes Its Own Ancestor.” A superficial look at the paper — and its title in particular — might give the impression that the laboratory findings here render the blind evolution of the first self-replicating biological system appreciably more plausible. Not so fast, says Stadler. He and Anderson highlight various ways the laboratory work in question is wildly unrealistic. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
File under "well said" XCII
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
G.K Chesterton.
Let's be grateful that Richard Dawkins et al did not design the human eye.
Is the Human Eye Really Evidence Against Intelligent Design?
Editor’s note: To celebrate the new course from DiscoveryU with biologist Jonathan Wells, equipping you to think critically about life’s origins, we are delighted to present some of our favorite past posts by Dr. Wells.
Some people argue that the human eye is flawed, proving that it was not intelligently designed but evolved by unguided processes.
Both vertebrates (animals with backbones, such as humans) and cephalopods (molluscs with tentacles growing from their heads, such as squids and octopuses) have camera eyes, which are roughly spherical organs with lenses that focus images on light-sensitive retinas. In vertebrate eyes, the light-sensing cells (c and f in the drawing below) point towards the back of the retina, and the nerve cells that transmit signals to the brain (b in the drawing) are between the light-sensing cells and the incoming light. By contrast, in cephalopod eyes the light-sensing cells point toward the incoming light and the nerve cells are at the back.
In 1986, Richard Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. In it, Dawkins used the vertebrate eye as evidence against design:
Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over the surface of the retina, to a point where it dives through a hole in the retina (the so-called “blind spot”) to join the optic nerve.
An Offense to Tidy-Mindedness?
Vertebrate eyes work reasonably well, Dawkins conceded, but “it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!”1
Six years later, evolutionary biologist George Williams wrote, “There would be no blind spot if the vertebrate eye were really intelligently designed. In fact it is stupidly designed,” while “the retina of a squid is right side up.”2
In 1994, biology professor Kenneth R. Miller argued similarly that the human eye — “that supposed paragon of intelligent design” — is badly designed. “Quite naturally,” he wrote, “you (and any other designer) would choose the orientation that produces the highest degree of visual quality. No one, for example, would suggest that the neural wiring connections should be placed on the side that faces the light, rather than on the side away from it. Incredibly, this is exactly how the human retina is constructed.” By contrast, a cephalopod retina is “wired right-side-out.”3
In 2005, Douglas Futuyma published a textbook about evolution claiming that “no intelligent engineer would be expected to design” the “functionally nonsensical arrangement” of cells in the human retina.4 The same year, geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote that the human eye is “certainly not the sort of eye an engineer would create from scratch.” Instead, “the whole system is like a car in which all the wires to the dashboard hang inside the driver’s compartment instead of being tucked safely out of sight.” Like Dawkins, Williams, Miller, and Futuyma, Coyne attributed this to unguided evolution, which “yields fitter types that often have flaws. These flaws violate reasonable principles of intelligent design.”5
A 2014 biology textbook by Kenneth Mason, Jonathan Losos, and Susan Singer informs students, “an excellent example of imperfect design is the eye of vertebrate animals, in which the photoreceptors face backward, toward the wall of the eye.” By contrast, the eyes of cephalopods “are more optimally designed.”6
Molecular biologist Nathan Lents wrote in 2015, “The photoreceptor cells of the retina appear to be placed backward, with the wiring facing the light and the photoreceptor facing inward…. This is not an optimal design for obvious reasons. The photons of light must travel around the bulk of the photoreceptor cell in order to hit the receiver tucked in the back. It’s as if you were speaking into the wrong end of a microphone.” According to Lents, “there are no working hypotheses about why the vertebrate retina is wired in backwards. It seems to have been a random development that then ‘stuck’ because a correction of that magnitude would be very difficult to pull off with random mutations…. During the evolution of the cephalopod eye, the retina took shape in a more logical way, with the photoreceptors facing outward toward the light. Vertebrates were not so lucky.”7
Evidence for Intelligent Design
So from the perspective of evolutionary theory, the human eye is evidence for unguided evolution and against intelligent design. But is the human eye really evidence against design?
The light-sensing cells in a vertebrate retina require lots of nutrients and vast amounts of energy. In mammals, they have the highest metabolic rate of any tissue in the body.8 About three-quarters of the blood supply to the eye flows through a dense network of capillaries called the “choriocapillaris,” which is situated behind the retina (e in the drawing).9,10 Oxygen and nutrients are transported from the choriocapillaris to the light-sensing cells by an intermediate layer of cells called the “retinal pigment epithelium” (RPE, d in the drawing).11
In addition to transporting oxygen and nutrients to the light-sensing cells, the RPE performs two other essential functions. First, the dark pigment in it absorbs scattered light, improving the optical quality of the eye. Second, it removes toxic chemicals that are generated in the process of detecting light. The light-sensing cells contain stacks of discs, and in 1967 Richard Young showed experimentally that a photoreceptor cell continually renews itself by shedding discs at the end closest to the RPE and replacing them with newly synthesized discs at the other end.12 The RPE then engulfs the shed discs and neutralizes the toxins.13
Blood is almost opaque, and the RPE absorbs light. If the light-sensing cells were to face the incoming light, the blood-filled choriocapillaris and the RPE would have to be in front of the retina, where they would block most or all of the light. By contrast, nerve cells (b in the drawing) are comparatively transparent, and they block very little of the incoming light. Because of the high metabolic requirements of the light-sensing cells and their need to regenerate themselves, the inverted retina is actually much better than the “tidy-minded” design imagined by evolutionary biologists.
Not a Serious Problem
The blind spot (a in the drawing) is not a serious problem, because the blind spot produced by the left eye is not in the same place as the blind spot produced by the right eye. This means that in humans with two good eyes, the field of vision of one eye covers for the blind spot of the other eye, and vice versa.
What about the claim that cephalopod eyes are better than vertebrate eyes? In 1984, a team of Italian biologists pointed out that cephalopod eyes are physiologically inferior to vertebrate eyes. In vertebrate eyes, the initial processing of visual images occurs in the retina, by nerve cells right next to the photoreceptor cells. In cephalopod eyes, nerve impulses from the photoreceptor cells must travel all the way to the brain to be processed. So a cephalopod eye “is just a ‘passive’ retina which is able to transmit only information, dot by dot, coded in a far less sophisticated fashion than in vertebrates.” The result is slower processing and fuzzier signals.14
All of the research cited above about the choriocapillaris and RPE, and the superiority of vertebrate eyes to cephalopod eyes, was published before Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker. But Dawkins and the other critics of intelligent design didn’t bother to check the scientific literature. They simply assumed that evolution is true and that they knew how an eye should be designed. Then they concluded that the human eye is badly designed, claimed it as evidence for evolution, and ignored the contrary evidence.
Good empirical science searches for explanations that fit the evidence. But another kind of “science” is committed to telling materialistic stories about unguided evolution, even when those stories don’t fit the evidence. The stories are empirically dead, but they keep coming anyway, like zombies. I recently published a book about such stories titled Zombie Science.15
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 93.
George C. Williams, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 73.
Kenneth R. Miller, “Life’s Grand Design,” Technology Review 97 (February-March, 1994): 24-32.
Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005), 49.
Jerry A. Coyne, “The faith that dare not speak its name: The case against intelligent design,” The New Republic (August 22 & 29, 2005): 21-33.
Kenneth A. Mason, Jonathan B. Losos, and Susan R. Singer, Raven and Johnson’s Biology, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014), 428-429.
Nathan H. Lents, “The poor design of the human eye,” Human Evolution Blog (January 12, 2015).
Sidney Futterman, “Metabolism and photochemistry in the retina,” pp. 406-419 in Adler’s Physiology of the Eye, ed. Robert A. Moses, 6th ed. (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1975), 406.
Albert Alm and Anders Bill, “Ocular and optic nerve blood flow at normal and increased intraocular pressures in monkeys (Macaca irus): A study with radioactively labeled microspheres including flow determinations in brain and some other tissues,” Experimental Eye Research 15 (1973): 15-29.
Paul Henkind, Richard I. Hansen, and Jeanne Szalay, “Ocular circulation,” pp. 98-155 in Physiology of the Human Eye and the Visual System, ed. Raymond E. Records (Hagerstown, MD: Harper & Row, 1979), 139-140.
Roy H. Steinberg, “Interactions between the retinal pigment epithelium and the neural retina,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 60 (1985).
Richard W. Young, “The renewal of photoreceptor cell outer segments,” Journal of Cell Biology 33 (1967): 61-72.
Richard W. Young and Dean Bok, “Participation of the retinal pigment epithelium in the rod outer segment renewal process,” Journal of Cell Biology 42 (1969).
Alberto Wirth, Giuliano Cavallacci, and Frederic Genovesi-Ebert, “The advantages of an inverted retina,” Developments in Ophthalmology 9 (1984): 20-28.
Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2017).
Monday 15 May 2023
ID and the Darwin delusion.
Intelligent Design Passes the Dawkins Test
Richard Dawkins is famed as an evolutionary biologist and as an aggressive advocate for atheism. He has made some strong statements about the nonexistence of a designer behind life, including in his bestselling book The God Delusion. In light of his position, here is a question someone ought to put to him. Scientists often work by making predictions. As evidence comes in, the prediction can be shown to be true or false. This may have serious consequences. For his part, Dawkins has repeatedly described a test that at the time he thought proved evolution. Now, however, taking into account accumulating scientific evidence, the same test demands a conclusion of intelligent design (ID). Will he accept that conclusion and come out as an ID proponent?
The test that Dawkins has formulated goes this way: He says that if Darwinian evolution is correct, every gene in a group of organisms will give “approximately the same tree of life.” If ID is correct, on the other hand, the designer could have “picked and chosen” the “best proteins for the job” in each organism. In that case, he says, genes would not all give the same tree of genetic resemblances.
Dawkins offered this test in his 2009 book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. He described it as “extremely powerful evidence for evolution.” At the time, he apparently believed that each gene really did give approximately the same tree. He wrote:
Comparative DNA (or protein) evidence can be used to decide — on the evolutionary assumption — which pairs of animals are closer cousins than which others. What turns this into extremely powerful evidence for evolution is that you can construct a tree of genetic resemblances separately for each gene in turn. And the important result is that every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life. Once again, this is exactly what you would expect if you were dealing with a true family tree. It is not what you would expect if a designer had surveyed the whole animal kingdom and picked and chosen — or “borrowed” — the best proteins for the job, wherever in the animal kingdom they might be found.
He’s Said It Other Times
That’s not the only time Dawkins has made this prediction. He said it in an Interview given in 2009:
The single most convincing fact or observation you could point to would be the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the genes … of any pair of animals you like … and then plot out the resemblances and they form a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. And the only alternative to it being a family tree is that the intelligent designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhanded and devious manner.
He said it again in a 2010 Interview:
The single most convincing fact or observation you could point to would be the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the genes … of any pair of animals you like … and then plot out the resemblances and they form a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. And the only alternative to it being a family tree is that the intelligent designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhanded and devious manner.
It’s a simple test. Dawkins sets up two competing predictions: one for evolution and one for intelligent design. He claims that evolution predicts “perfect” congruency among different representations of the tree of life — evidence that is so “powerful” he believes it “proves that evolution is true.” On the other hand, he gives incongruency or conflicts among different gene-based trees as a prediction of the “alternative” to evolution, namely intelligent design.
What Do the Data Show?
Now, years later, scientists have sequenced a great number of whole genomes. And as a consequence, they know that Dawkins was wrong. Every gene does not deliver “approximately the same tree of life.”
This is an issue that I and others have written about before (see Here, for example), but I thought of it again recently when I watched the inaugural lecture of a professor of evolutionary genomics at Queen Mary University of London. The lecture is intriguingly titled “Trees of life : Do They Exist?”
The professor, Dr. Richard Buggs, mentions that scientists doing phylogenetic studies normally assume the existence of the Darwinian tree of life. It is quite rare in the literature to find someone actually seeking to prove its existence. He points to Dawkins’s statements in The Greatest Show on Earth as one of these rare examples, along with a Nature paper published in 1982 that Dawkins references. In the lecture, Buggs quotes Dawkins, who says “every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life.” Buggs then comments:
Many of you who work, like me, with sequence data every day, probably winced a little bit when you heard me read that out because, you know, it is actually not the case.
Indeed, Buggs’s own research led to a paper he co-authored in Nature Ecology & Evolution — “Convergent molecular evolution among ash species resistant to the emerald ash borer” — where different genes led to widely different gene trees among closely related species of ash trees. In his lecture he notes that yes, the paper produced a “consensus” tree, but that doesn’t mean the genes gave the same tree. Instead, it was “the best tree that we could get out of all the very, very divergent gene trees.”
That example might be dismissed by Dawkins because it is looking only at species within a genus, and the species might still be capable of crossing with each other. But Buggs points out that different genes are found to give different trees even when the species being studied are very different. He gives the example of a paper that studied the relationships of eudicots (a group of flowering plants that have two seed leaves). This is penetrating deep into the tree of life. He shows a diagram from the paper revealing the “discordance” of various gene-based trees:
Dr. Buggs then comments:
So according to Richard Dawkins’s test of the Darwinian Tree of Life, we don’t have much support for it, do we? It looks more like the hypothesis that he set up for an intelligent designer.
On its own terms, the Dawkins test for evolution has come up for ID.
So where does Richard Dawkins now stand on this issue? Does he still think that this is a powerful test for ID versus Darwinian evolution? Will he abandon the test, or is he now persuaded by ID? Or has he now changed his mind about how evolution works?
Many Other Recent Papers
It isn’t just Dr. Buggs who is saying this. There are many other examples from other recently published papers showing incongruence among trees of life (all emphases added):
Dominik Schrempf and Gergely Szöllősi (2020). The Sources of Phylogenetic Conflicts. In Scornavacca, C., Delsuc, F., and Galtier, N., editors, Phylogenetics in the Genomic Era, chapter No. 3.1, pp. 3.1:103.1:23 (2021).
This paper finds that a “conflicting phylogenetic signal between genes is commonplace.”
Richard H. Adams, Todd A. Castoe, and Michael DeGiorgio, “PhyloWGA: chromosome-aware phylogenetic interrogation of whole genome alignments,” Bioinformatics, 37(13), 1923–1925 (2021).
Says this paper: “An immediate challenge is to address the pervasive phylogenetic conflict observed in whole genome data.”
Caroline Parins-Fukuchia, Gregory W. Stull, and Stephen A. Smith, “Phylogenomic conflict coincides with rapid morphological innovation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 118, No. 19: e2023058118 (2021).
This paper notes that, “Phylogenomic conflict, where gene trees disagree about species tree resolution, is common across genomes and throughout the Tree of Life.”
Gonzalo Giribet, “Genomics and the animal tree of life: conflicts and future prospects,” Zoologica Scripta, 45: s1, pp 14-21 (2016).
Similarly, this paper states: “A ‘new kid on the block’, phylogenomics, is adding another type of controversy never seen before in molecular phylogenetics: highly supported contradictory results.”
Nosenko et al., “Deep metazoan phylogeny: When different genes tell different stories,” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 67: 223-233 (2013).
This paper reviews studies examining the relationships of animals and finds many examples of conflicts:
To unravel the causes for the patterns of extreme inconsistencies at the base of the metazoan tree of life, we constructed a novel supermatrix containing 122 genes, enriched with non-bilaterian taxa. … Different gene matrices tell different stories … The lack of resolution for the deep nodes in this tree reflects major conflicts between the previously published metazoan phylogenies … the best-fitting model left the relative positions of the Bilateria, Coelenterata, and Placozoa–Porifera clades unresolved. … The multiple conflicting metazoan phylogenies presented here and in previous publications have one feature in common: they have long terminal and short internal branches. … To summarize, this study generated three incongruent, yet strongly supported tree topologies…
Reddy et al., “Why Do Phylogenomic Data Sets Yield Conflicting Trees? Data Type Influences the Avian Tree of Life more than Taxon Sampling,” Systematic Biology, 66(4): 857-879 (2017).
This paper also notes that scientists hoped that by sampling large amounts of data, they would resolve conflicts among trees. But the hope was dashed, especially within the class of birds:
Phylogenomics, the use of large-scale data matrices in phylogenetic analyses, has been viewed as the ultimate solution to the problem of resolving difficult nodes in the tree of life. However, it has become clear that analyses of these large genomic data sets can also result in conflict in estimates of phylogeny. … [P]hylogenomics seemed poised to fulfill this promise to resolve the tree of life. However, analyses of large data matrices have sometimes yielded incongruent topologies, emphasizing that data collection alone is not sufficient to reach this goal.
Cédric Blais and John M. Archibald, “The past, present and future of the tree of life,” Current Biology, 31: R311-R329 (2021).
This review of the debate between proponents and critics of the “tree of life” hypothesis acknowledges how frequently gene-based trees can conflict, though it postulates that some vertical signal of descent is still present even if it is obscured by processes such as horizontal gene transfer:
Some twenty years ago, the foundations of the tree of life were shaken by the realization that prokaryotic genomes are comprised of genes with different evolutionary histories. … The subsequent explosion of whole-genome sequencing in the late 1990s and the rise of comparative genomics was expected to validate and solidify Woese’s tree. These hopes were short-lived. Phylogenetics soon showed that different genes within the same genome could yield very different tree topologies, and even closely related organisms were found to differ substantially in gene content. A new evolutionary force was invoked: lateral gene transfer, the exchange of genetic material between different species. …
[…]
Resolving a statistical tree of life that unites all extant species may still be possible, contrary to the expectation that only localized tree patterns would survive pervasive lateral gene transfer. But it no longer corresponds to a complete, all-encompassing representation of the genetic history of organisms, as it does not follow any single gene’s history. If the tree of life still stands, it does so in a qualified sense. …The continued use of the tree of life for classification is thus as much a reflection of its practical convenience and historical and cultural inertia as it is a commitment to natural classification.
Extracting phylogenetic signal from genomic data can be difficult, and much of the evidence for ancient relationships is inconclusive at best. Phylogenetic methods designed to build a tree will do so whether it is the best fit with the underlying data or not. Networks, on the other hand, capture incongruences in genomic data without imposing an interpretation.
Juli Berwald, “Why evolution is not a tree of life but a fuzzy network,” Aeon (2022).
This article quotes geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of UC Berkeley: “That whole abstraction of evolution as being a tree, we always knew was a little inadequate … But now we know it’s really inadequate.”
Nielsen continued: “‘I think that process of splitting up and merging back together again, and getting a bit of DNA from here to there, that’s happening all the time, in all of the tree of life,’ Nielsen said. ‘And it’s really changing how we’re thinking about it, that it really is a network of life, not a tree of life.’”
The article thus describes the history of life as a reticulated pattern rather than a tree: “The hypothesis of reticulate evolution is that species are not as isolated from each other as Haeckel’s branching trees propose. Instead, species both diverge and merge together. The tree of life doesn’t look like a tree so much as the reticulated pattern of a python’s skin.”
This phenomenon of genes appearing in locations not expected by traditional vertical common descent is found very frequently, for “Roving genes have been found in every branch of the tree of life where geneticists have looked.” The article asks “If species don’t rest neatly on the ends of tree branches, what does that mean for Haeckel’s model of the evolutionary tree? Should we throw it out?”
A paper examined studies of fish relationships and found: “For a long time, geneticists studying this large group puzzled over its evolutionary history, with different studies finding different relationships that seemed to conflict with each other.”
The article closes by explaining that nice, neat evolutionary trees are not accurate: “I imagine having the chance to speak to my students again. I would place Haeckel’s tree on the screen and tell them that it is an anachronism.”
Testing the Test
I can’t conclude before remarking on the validity of Dawkins’s test of intelligent design. In some ways it is dubious, but in other ways it makes some sense. He’s probably right that “perfect” congruency among trees is not best explained by intelligent design. But ID as a scientific theory does not claim that everything must be the result of design. After all, the most that perfect phylogenetic congruency would demonstrate is common ancestry — an idea that’s accepted by some proponents of intelligent design because the original design could have been located in the common ancestor!
Also, Dawkins would be wrong to claim that any degree of treelike distribution of genes refutes intelligent design. This is because designed structures are loaded with functions, and functional components often depend upon and interact with other functional components in logical, functionally necessary ways. This can lead to non-random correlations and hierarchical distributions of traits — i.e., design can give you some treelike structure in a dataset!
For example, when you find buttons on a shirt, you’re also going to find buttonholes. When you find a wheel on a vehicle, you’re almost always going to find an axle, too. These correlations can lead to a treelike distribution of traits. Physicist Brian Miller explains this concept in a recent Volume, Science and Faith in Dialogue:
Design architectures often fall into a hierarchical pattern. All transportation vehicles have certain common features such as allocated space for cargo and or passengers, propulsion system and steering. Cars possess all these features plus such components as wheels, breaks, coolants, lubricants and axles. Toyota Camry models possess all these features plus additional specialised components. The similarities in transportation vehicles would likely fit into a constructed tree at least as well as different groups of species.
There are undoubtedly many analogous correlations between biological traits —which lead to some treelike structure to a dataset. For example, genes for noses in mammals will probably also be found with genes for nose hairs. And genes for toes in terrestrial tetrapods often correlate with genes for toenails! But intelligent agents are not compelled to distribute traits as a rule according to a nested hierarchy. Thus, as Dr. Miller explains, finding some treelike structure but also lots of non-treelike distribution of traits is a reasonable expectation of design:
While many features in human products fit into a hierarchical tree-like pattern, many break that pattern. A police car and an airplane both have two-way radios while two-way radios are absent in most other cars. In addition, the same circuitry is implemented in a wide variety of vehicles to meet similar goals. This pattern reflects how engineers often create modules that can be used in diverse contexts. The modules must be designed with the explicit intent of operating in different products, and the products that use the modules must be designed to properly incorporate them into their operations. The same pattern and constraints are observed in life.
A further note: In the 2009 interview, Dawkins’s refers to “genes that are no longer functional,” aka so-called pseudogenes. He argues that this refutes intelligent design because no designer would put identical non-functional genes in the same locations of the genomes of different species. But this is a weak argument given that so many pseudogenes are now known to have function. Shared pseudogenes that truly are nonfunctional are probably better explained by common ancestry than by common design. That said, even if they are nonfunctional today, it’s possible that such pseudogenes were originally designed to be functional but their functions degraded over time so that they are “no longer functional.”
This is again where design and common ancestry could intersect: shared pseudogenes — if truly nonfunctional — may have been originally designed as functional, but they would most likely have been designed in the common ancestor rather than designed in species separately. Dawkins’s point about pseudogenes is not a test of design on the grand scale but only a test of separate yet common design as compared with common ancestry (which could still potentially involve design).
What Will Richard Dawkins Say Now?
In any case, it’s true that the papers and articles I cited above were not written to support intelligent design. However, they affirm that there are frequent conflicts between phylogenetic trees, and they affirm non-treelike data among different genes and different species. This conclusion doesn’t come only from old papers or papers studying the tips of the tree of life, but from recent studies looking at key aspects of that tree, such as fundamental animal or plant or microorganismal relationships. And this frequent incongruity and discordance between phylogenetic trees is exactly what Dawkins says is predicted by intelligent design.
Dawkins has set up a test for Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design. He needs to live with his own repeated statements. Will he admit that his prediction has failed for evolution but succeeded for intelligent design?
In the fossil record explosions continue to be the rule rather than the exception.
Fossil Friday: The Devonian Nekton Revolution
This Fossil Friday features the acanthodian “shark” Diplacanthus striatus from the Lower Devonian of Scotland. It illustrates yet another “explosion” in the history of life.
Klug et al. (2010) described a previously overlooked radical change in the composition of the marine fauna of the Early Devonian, which they called the Devonian Nekton Revolution. Prior to this abrupt event, the marine ecosystems were dominated by organisms that lived either close to the seafloor (demersal) or passively drifting as plankton. Between 410-400 million years ago, a very sudden and enormous expansion of actively swimming (nektonic) animals occurred in the Devonian era, when groups such as ammonoid cephalopods and jawed fish made their first appearance. Within just 10 million years such active swimmers increased from only 5 percent to about 75 percent of the marine faunal biodiversity (see the chart below).
The authors commented in a later paper that “this macroecological event corresponds to an explosive trend from planktonic and demersal marine animals toward true nekton as represented by the great diversification of jawed fish and ammonoids, reflecting a selection for swimming capabilities. It coincided with macroevolutionary transformations among various mollusc groups” (Monnet et al. 2011) and “is strongly linked with the rise of predatory jawed vertebrates, which also became more active swimmers in the same interval” (Klug et al. 2017, also see Anderson et al. 2011).
Accepted and Included
The Devonian Nekton Revolution became widely accepted and included in modern textbooks on paleobiology (e.g., Benton & Harper 2020). Of course, evolutionary biology would not be evolutionary biology without a dissenting position, which denies the whole phenomenon. Whalen & Briggs (2018) published a study that disputed the concept of the Devonian Nekton Revolution and claimed that “new data indicate that the metazoan colonization of the water column was considerably more complex and gradual than previously understood.” The popular science media triumphantly reported “Ancient Swimming Revolution May Not Have Happened” (Gramling 2018) and “New evidence suggests the Devonian Nekton Revolution never occurred” (Yirka 2018).
Since Christian Klug is an old university friend of mine, I asked him about this new study. He told me (Klug pers. comm., May 29, 2021) that he is currently working on other questions, but that he is still getting a lot of positive feedback and confirmation by colleagues on the Devonian Nekton Revolution, including new views on ecological factors that give even more weight to this revolution such as the vertical transport of oxygen and nutrients. He was not impressed at all by these “Yalies’ attempt to shoot down [his] paper” and thinks that the Whalen & Briggs study lost itself so much in details that the larger pattern was made invisible. I would add that getting rid of inconvenient facts like explosive events in the history of life may have played a significant role as well. The truth is that such explosions and revolutions dominate the history of life, which was rather a series of abrupt saltations than the gradual change predicted by Darwinism.
References
Anderson PSL, Friedman M, Brazeau MD & Rayflield EJ 2011. Initial radiation of jaws demonstrated stability despite faunal and environmental change. Nature 476, 206–209. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10207
Benton MJ & Harper DAT 2020. Introduction to Palaeobiology and the Fossil Record. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken (NJ), 656 pp.
Gramling C 2018. Ancient Swimming Revolution May Not Have Happened. RealClearScience July 18, 2018. https://www.realclearscience.com/2018/07/18/ancient_swimming_revolution_may_not_have_happened_282051.html
Klug C, Kröger B, Kiessling W, Mullins GL, Servais T, Frýda J, Korn D & Turner S 2010. The Devonian nekton revolution. Lethaia 43, 465–477. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1502-3931.2009.00206.x
Klug C, Frey L, Pohle A, De Baets K & Korn D 2017. Palaeozoic evolution of animal mouthparts. Bulletin of Geosciences 92(4), 511–524. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3140/bull.geosci.1648
Monnet C, De Baets K & Klug C 2011. Parallel evolution controlled by adaptation and covariation in ammonoid cephalopods. BMC Evolutionary Biology 11:115, 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-11-115
Whalen CD & Briggs DEG 2018. The Palaeozoic colonization of the water column and the rise of global nekton. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285(1883):20180883, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0883
Yirka B 2018. New evidence suggests the Devonian Nekton Revolution never occurred. Phys.org July 18, 2018. https://phys.org/news/2018-07-evidence-devonian-nekton-revolution.html
Sunday 14 May 2023
Trinitarians vs. the Trinity.
After many decades of discussing/debating the trinity doctrine with supposedly qualified expositors,I can't help but notice that I am yet to hear a defense of any particular concept of the trinity that worked on its own terms i.e that wasn't a non sequitur.
Indeed as I keep trying to explain to my interlocutors the trinity doctrine's main counter is the defense mounted by its adherents.
Trinitarians are able get away with the logical fallacies inherent in the most popular defenses of their doctrine due to lazy thinking both on their own part and those who they are able to persuade. First let's take a popular/mainstream concept of the trinity :Trinity, in Christian doctrine, the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead.: So an attempted defense of this notion should ,using premises held in common,reason consistently to the conclusion that the most high God is in fact a council of three eternal persons. Not that any of the non-triune persons in the council is the most high God or is considered God in some unspecified/unspecifiable way or is divine, trinitarians must demonstrate from scripture that the most high God consists of three co eternal persons. They however invariably end up making claims that are either tritheistic or modalistic in their defenses of their dogma.
By way of a few examples:
John ch.1:1NIV"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Note that the text plainly states that the logos was with the God and not with the father thus there is no logical way to get to a Trinitarian conclusion from this premise Bi-Theism is possible with a stretch , but trinitarianism is not even in the frame.
Romans ch.9:5"Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! " Some Trinitarian translators have rather shortsightedly promoted the above rendering of the text thus handing Modalists ammunition ,for which they are likely quite grateful. Of course if Jesus is the most high God then obviously the most high God is not triune,because by common consent Jesus Christ is not triune so either a monarchy of the so called second person of the trinity over his Father or some kind of Sabellianism is in play, but certainly no trinitarianism.
John ch.14:9"Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? " By common consent neither Jesus nor his Father is triune, for trinitarians this would disqualify either from consideration as the most high God who/which(?) is triune, so there really is no logical way to make this verse even appear to support a triune deity whether seeing the Father(who is not the triune God) is to be taken literally ,as that would be an invoking of modalism ,or Jesus is claiming equality with his Father ,who is not the triune God, for that would mean that Jesus is a distinct God like his Father who is a distinct God see John ch.1:1 So once again it's Bi-Theism or sabellianism certainly not trinitarianism.
John ch.5:18NIV"For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling (The)God his own Father, making himself equal with (the)God."
Thus the Jewish religious leaders accused of making himself EQUAL to The mutually agreed upon lone God not of claiming to be the one God. So the only way that our Lord could concur with this accusation is to abandon monotheism and claim the existence of a second and equal deity i.e himself.
So while my main issue is the fact that the interpretive logic underpinning the premises and conclusions of Trinitarian arguments cannot be consistently applied in exegesis as even trinitarians are forced to admit when confronted ,the fact that even given the premises there is no logical way to any necessarily Trinitarian conclusion doubles the problem for trinitarians in my humble opinion.
From the selfish gene to kinship in one easy lesson?
Evolutionists: We Now Have Empirical Evidence For the Evolution of Kin Recognition
In a new Study out of the University of Liverpool evolutionists now say they have found empirical evidence that a genetic complex, involving dozens of protein-coding genes related to altruism, can evolve. Such a finding would be truly ground-breaking given that, at least up until now, the evolution of even a single protein has been found to be scientifically unlikely. It would be astonishing if now evolutionists have overturned a substantial body of work establishing molecular evolution to be effectively impossible. But of course evolutionists have done no such thing. There was no finding of molecular evolution, no new proteins or genes, no empirical evidence, nothing. Just another ridiculous claim made by evolutionists. It’s the same old pattern—evolutionists look at profoundly complicated biological structures, assume they evolved, and then claim they have found evidence of evolution.
Altruistic behavior creates many problems for evolution. One problem is the starting point: kin recognition, evolutionists unsuccessfully tried to explain altruism using the concept of kin selection, and while that creates many scientific problems, you can’t even get to kin selection without kin recognition. How do animal siblings or cousins recognize each other.
The new study out of the University of Liverpool has found a genetic basis for kin recognition. It is a genetic complex of a couple dozen protein-coding genes and the problems with this are several.
First, it means that kin selection hinges on several proteins working together. Evolving a single protein is, from a scientific perspective, so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. But here evolution needs several proteins. Evolve just one protein and you still don’t have kin recognition. You would have to evolve several others, so the problem is even more difficult.
Second, the genetic cluster is species-specific. Apparently there is no common kin recognition mechanism across the vertebrates as evolutionists had assumed. Of course evolutionists had assumed this, for to have different mechanisms, particular to species or groups of species, would make their theory even more absurdly improbable. Kin recognition would have to re-evolve, in various ways, over and over. Well that is exactly what this new finding is suggesting. As usual, biology shows specific, particular, solutions that are unique to one or a few species, rather than falling into the expected common descent pattern.
Once again, common descent fails to serve as a useful guide. And once again evolutionists, in spite of the science, claim more proof for their theory.
Saturday 13 May 2023
Social Trinitarianism: a brief history.
Social Trinitarianism: a brief history.
The social trinitarianism is a Christian interpretation of the Trinity as consisting of three persons in a loving relationship, which reflects a model for human relationships.[1]
The teaching emphasizes that God is an inherently social being.[2] Human unity approaches conformity to the image of God's unity through self-giving, empathy, adoration for one another, etc. Such love is a fitting ethical likeness to God, but is in stark contrast to God's unity of being.[3]
Those who are often associated with this term include Jürgen Moltmann,[4] Miroslav Volf,[5] Elizabeth A. Johnson,[6] Leonardo Boff,[7] and John Zizioulas.[8]
Orthodox Christian theology asserts that the one God is manifest in three 'persons' (this term was generally used in the Latin West).[9] Social trinitarian thought argues that the three persons are each distinct realities--this was generally presented in the East with the Greek term 'hypostasis' from the First Council of Nicaea onward. Hypostasis was here employed to denote a specific individual instance of being. So, the Trinity is composed of three distinct 'persons' or 'hypostases' which are in integral relation with one another. The Cappadocian Fathers outlined the traditional set of doctrines describing the relational character of the Trinity: the Father is the Father by virtue of begetting the Son; likewise the Son is the Son precisely by being begotten. These two hypostases do not have their identity first as individual entities that then relate; rather, they are what they are precisely due to their relations. John Zizioulas is perhaps the best-known contemporary proponent of this emphasis in trinitarian theology, which he labels relational ontology.[10]
Many proponents of the social trinitarianism, including John Zizioulas, criticize modern individualism by mapping human relationships onto this relational ontology as well. This suggests that the individual is not constituted over and against other persons. On the contrary, say these proponents, a person's identity and self are deeply constituted by their relationships, such that a person could not be the same person were it not for the relationship - the relationship, in some sense at least, precedes (ontologically, though not necessarily temporally) the person rather than the person preceding the relationship.[11]
Two theological keys to the idea of person found in the social trinitarianism are the trinitarian concept of perichoresis ("interpenetration"--associated most strongly with Saint John of Damascus), and the Christological doctrine of two wills in one person (which was central to Maximus the Confessor's defense of orthodoxy). The doctrine of the two wills of Christ stems from the Council of Chalcedon where the Church affirmed that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, without division and yet without mixing. Thus Jesus is one person, yet with two natures, which two natures yield two wills.[citation needed] This was intended to combat both Nestorius' two-persons approach and the monophysite doctrine of Jesus as being so divine that his humanity was overwhelmed. This allowed the Church to affirm that Jesus was truly one person who both participated in the divine Trinitarian "economy" as well as in the human sphere of material being.
The three persons of the Trinity must not be confused as three distinct gods, an error that the name 'Trinity' itself was developed to combat: Tri-unity (as first outlined by Tertullian). All three persons/hypostases have one divine nature: their essence ("ousia" in Greek). It was in the development of the Trinity that the Greek terms ousia and hypostasis were fully separated; before the First Council of Nicaea, they had often been used interchangeably[citation needed]. Social Trinitarian thought argues that this one essence can be thought of as the loving relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. This relationship can be analogized to human loving relationships; however, as mentioned above, it is a complete unity--it does not arise from the three hypostases but is intimately involved in their very ontological constitution. The idea of perichoresis of the persons of the trinity has been cited to provide at least part of this greater unity.[1]
It is important to note that though the Cappadocians, for example, tended to begin with the three persons and from there develop the sense of unity, while Augustine of Hippo more or less began, drawing from the Latin tradition of Tertullian, with the unity and then developed the three distinct persons (along a psychological metaphor), neither the Eastern nor the Western traditions actually see either the 3 or the 1 as ontologically prior to the other: the three are always united in and constituted by the one; the one is always expressed in the three.[12]
Notes
Karen Kilby, Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with the Social Doctrine of the Trinity, First Published in New Blackfriars October 2000, URL accessed 12 January 2007.
Theology for the Community of God, pg 76, Stanley J. Grenz, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-8028-4755-2: "At the heart of Christian understanding is the declaration that God is triune - Father Son and Spirit. This means that in his eternal essence the one God is a social reality, the social Trinity. Because God is the social Trinity, a plurality in unity"
Against Eunomius, esp. 2.12, Gregory of Nyssa, at CCEL
Moltmann, Jürgen (1981). The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1-4514-1206-2.
Volf, Miroslav (1998). After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-4440-8.
Johnson, Elizabeth A. (2017). She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. Crossroad Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8245-2207-0.
Boff, Leonardo (1988). Trinity and Society. Orbis Books. ISBN 978-0-88344-622-5.
Zizioulas, John (1985). Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. ISBN 978-0-88141-029-7.
McGrath, Alister E. (2011) [1994], Christian Theology: An Introduction (5th ed.), Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 9781444335149, LCCN 93018797, OCLC 637037336[page needed]
John Zizioulas. Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Press, 1985.
Patricia Fox, God as Communion, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 2001. Fox outlines how Zizioulas', Rahner's, and Elizabeth Johnson's thought can inform a robust understanding of the term 'person'.
Catherine LaCugna. God For us, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991
Ps. Note please the utter lack of so much as a reference to (not to mention a quote from) the Holy Scriptures.
Seeking straight answers re:predestinated salvation.
Romans11:22KJV"Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off."
If our brother Paul did indeed opine that the salvation of all who accepted Christ was a done deal(so to speak) how are we to square this circle?
The thumb print of JEHOVAH :Quantum edition.
Thank God for Quantum Mechanics
Nature, it turns out upon close examination, is quantized. Nobody noticed this until about the beginning of the 1900s, but this unexpected aspect of reality has profound implications for making our universe livable. The relative unobservability of quantum effects in our normal experience of life is due to their realm of manifestation, which appears at the atomic level of size. This underlying reality of nature rests upon a foundation that speaks of the importance of information, mind, and intention.
Physicist Max Planck first invoked quantization of radiated energy from a so-called blackbody object (in common vernacular, a lump of coal). Normally, a lump of coal, even if heated, is not particularly dangerous, but without quantization, classical physics predicted an infinite emissivity (energy density of its emissions) at the short wavelength end of the radiation spectrum. This potential problem was termed the ultraviolet catastrophe. But, thanks to quantum effects, the emissivity of a lump of coal is actually tame, and a backyard summer barbeque doesn’t incinerate the neighborhood.
From 1913-1915, Danish physicist Niels Bohr applied the new concept of quantization to achieve a stable model of the hydrogen atom. Earlier experimental investigations of the structure of the atom, conducted by Ernst Rutherford, gave rise to the familiar planetary model with electrons orbiting a nucleus. However, classical electrodynamic theory pointed out that the acceleration of the electron in its orbit would cause it to emit electromagnetic radiation, stealing energy from the electron’s orbital motion and causing it to spiral into the nucleus in roughly one nanosecond. Without quantum effects, there would be no atoms, no chemistry, and no life.
How Quantum Mechanics Does It
How does quantum mechanics save us from the precipitous self-destruction of atoms? Bohr boldly hypothesized that the orbital angular momentum of the electron must be restricted to a multiple of Planck’s constant (h=6.626×10-34 Joule-sec) divided by 2Ï€. These restricted, or quantized, values provide stationary states for the electron’s orbit, preventing the implosion of the atom. Bohr’s hypothesis bore fruit when his theory quantitatively predicted the hydrogen atom energy levels, matching earlier data from spectroscopy. So, the existence of matter as we know it, made up of atoms with electrons in stable orbits, is made possible as a benefit of quantum effects.
But why does nature exhibit quantization? That is a profound question, and one worth asking. Here, we can give a partial answer by considering another physics hypothesis, stated by Louis de Broglie in his doctoral thesis at the University of Paris in 1924. His hypothesis, stated as an equation, reads simply, λ = h/p, where h is Planck’s constant and p is a particle’s momentum. The ratio of h/p gives the wavelength of a wave associated with the particle, a phenomenon completely without counterpart in classical physics. Experiments in electron scattering confirmed de Broglie’s hypothesis within a year of his proposal, and additional experiments have conclusively affirmed that particles of matter have a wavelike nature.
A Depth of Meaning
simple equation expressing de Broglie’s hypothesis exhibits a depth of meaning that is brilliant. Developing its ramifications has led to the entire physics of quantum mechanics, in which the wave function of a particle is described by the Schrödinger equation. Solutions to this equation revolutionized our understanding of the atomic scale of matter, based on the wave properties of particles, as originally proposed by de Broglie.
Another example of how quantum effects permit life as we know it operates in the nuclear furnace of the Sun. Stars like our Sun produce their energy deep down in their cores by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium, a process that also converts a small amount of mass into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2. The fusion of hydrogen into helium requires bringing protons (hydrogen nuclei) close enough together to allow the strong nuclear force to bind them together, eventually resulting in a helium nucleus of four nucleons. I describe the contribution of quantum effects to nuclear fusion in my Book, Canceled Science (p. 96):
As is often the case, the story gets more interesting with a closer look. The range of the strong nuclear force is so short (about one quadrillionth of a meter) that the repulsive force between the positive charges of the protons makes it almost impossible for them to get close enough to fuse at the Sun’s core temperature. And yet fusion does occur there. A remarkable work-around exists involving the quantum mechanical wave function of the proton, in which its essence is extended several hundred times further than it would be otherwise. This allows the life-giving fusion process to occur in the Sun. Without the quantum wave function extending the proton’s reach, the Sun’s temperature would have to be more than a hundred times hotter to be able to produce energy by fusion. Our Sun’s mass is much too small for gravity to produce enough compression to make its core that hot, so no fusion would occur without the additional quantum effects. Sunshine is an amazing thing, and without this coordination of several properties of nature, the Sun wouldn’t shine and we wouldn’t be here.
Quantum Effects, Information, and Mind
Returning to the question posed earlier, asking why nature exhibits quantum effects, the famous American physicist John Wheeler drew a connection between quantum effects, information, and mind. Wheeler famously asked, “How come the quantum?”1 His understanding of the quantum nature of reality led him to the conclusion that reality is, at its most basic, the answer to a yes-or-no question.
Wheeler coined the aphorism “It from bit” to describe his conviction, born of the many discoveries in particle physics and cosmology in the twentieth century, that information (characterized by the computer storage term “bit”) preceded and produced everything else (“it”).
CANCELED SCIENCE, P. 209
209
Quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, in reviewing Wheeler’s contributions regarding quantum phenomena, notes this same connection between the discoveries of modern physics and what he terms “old knowledge.” As Zeilinger states (quoted in my book):
In conclusion it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows. Then the question why nature appears quantized is simply a consequence of the fact that information itself is quantized by necessity. It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of the gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.”2
CANCELED SCIENCE, P. 210
Physics thus arrives at the conclusion that nature is fundamentally derived from information, a surprising outcome that biblical tradition anticipated two millennia earlier. The quantum nature of our universe further includes observer participation for the formation of reality. The biblical account of creation in Genesis emphasizes the action of God in observing what was made: “And God saw.” It may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that God’s seeing the created order brought about his intended outcome, “it was very good.”
Friday 12 May 2023
Guilty until proven otherwise?
New hate speech laws kick up a storm in Ireland
Donald Trump Jr has even taken aim at the proposed legislation labelling it "insane".
New laws aimed at curbing hate speech have sparked controversy in Ireland.
The updated legislation will create landmark laws to deal with hate crimes, make it an offence to deny or trivialise genocide and expand protections to include gender identity and disability.
Opponents of the Criminal Justice Bill have raised concerns the changes go too far and will stifle free speech.
However, defenders say Ireland's current legislation has been outstripped by the internet and contains significant blind spots.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, who first published the bill currently making its way through the country's Parliament (Oireachtas), hit back at claims speech would be restricted.
Hate speech and freedom of speech are two separate things, with the former designed to shut people up and "make them afraid".
“We are all horrified when we hear of homophobic, racist, and other hateful incidents in our country," she said in October.
"While these repulsive acts of violence and abuse against innocent people have been extensively reported on, we know that some people go about their lives constantly in fear of abuse simply because of who they are."
The new law will introduce specific legislation to tackle hate crimes, which it considers intentional or reckless communication and behaviour that is likely to incite violence or hatred, establishing penalties of up to five years in prison.
Victims of hate crimes are targeted due to prejudice against their age, ability, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or gender.
It will also make it much easier to secure convictions for hate crimes by allowing prosecutors to rely on the use of hostile slurs, gestures or symbols.
Critics fear the changes could lead to politically incorrect views being censored, such as those around trans rights.
Some public figures have waded into the debate with Donald Trump Jr calling the new law “insane” and Twitter boss Elon Musk branding it "a massive attack on the freedom of speech".
The legislation is long-awaited.
Ireland currently does not have specific laws to deal with hate crimes, while its laws on hate speech are widely seen as archaic.
Existing hate speech laws date back to 1989, with the Prohibition of Incite to Hatred Act.
This makes it an offence to communicate threatening, abusive or insulting material that is likely to "stir up" hatred against a group of people.
However, under this law, a person can defend themselves against charges by proving they did not intend to spread hatred.
Their defence can be based on not knowing the content of the materials or lacking a reason to suspect that it was threatening, abusive or insulting.
The new law changes this, making one liable for a hate crime even if they did claim they did not intend it.
Others were cautious about the bill.
"In general we support those changes as they are designed to make the law more effective and protect vulnerable groups from attack," said the Irish Council for Civil Liberties in a statement sent to Euronews.
"However, we have been advocating to strengthen and make more explicit freedom of expression defences in the Bill and we are advocating against the inclusion of an offence that would criminalise the possession and preparation of material that would incite hatred."
They suggested "other forms of hate speech, which might cause deep offence but do not reach a criminal threshold, should be combated by other means, including education and monitoring".
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