I am not going to try to describe this comprehensive devastating article. Read it for youreselves: https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/gpt-5-is-by-far-the-best-ai-system
Added August 13: sand this one also
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Thursday, July 17, 2025
Excellent description of the logic of inferring design
How Did the Designer Do It?
https://evolutionnews.org/2025/07/how-did-the-designer-do-it/
n 1852, several years before On the Origin of Species came out, the famed biologist Herbert Spencer defended the theory of evolution and made a broadside attack against the idea of “special creation” in his essay “The Developmental Hypothesis.” He wrote:
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all… If they have formed a definite conception of the process, let them tell us how a new species is constructed, and how it makes its appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do its limbs and viscera rush together from all the points of the compass? or must we receive the old Hebrew idea, that God takes clay and moulds a new creature?
This argument has had considerable staying power. Skip ahead to 2015, and we find biochemist Larry Moran asking intelligent design advocate Stephen Meyers some very similar questions:
Did the gods nudge some of the species toward being arthropods in the first million years but waited until the last few years to create the information required to make chordates and vertebrates? What kind of information did they insert? What did they insert it into? Do we have any evidence of new god-created genes that sprang into existence during this period of time? If so, which ones?
And how old are these gods, anyway? Did the same ones stick around for the entire 10 million years to see if their experiment worked or were there several generations of gods?Why were the gods so active in the Cambrian? Why didn’t they create all this new information 100 million years earlier or 100 million years later? Have they created any new information since then or did they front-load everything into genome during the Cambrian then turned their attention to some planets in other galaxies? These are all legitimate questions that deserve answers. They’re just like the questions you ask of scientists when you demand detailed evolutionary explanations.
It seems the debate has not progressed much in a century and a half. Clearly, these evolutionary theorists think they have an unanswerable line of attack here. And, admittedly, there is a certain superficial reasonableness to their demands. If we expect evolutionary theorists to explain how unguided evolution created life, shouldn’t design theorists be expected to explain how the designer created life?
Stonehenge and Smartphones
But if you mull the argument over, you begin to find it strangely unsatisfying. This may have something to do with the fact that, setting the more controversial subjects aside, there are many cases in which everyone agrees design occurreddespite not knowing the means by which it occurred. The Easter Island heads and Stonehenge are good examples. Scholars might debate exactly how ancient people managed set those massive stones in place without the aid of modern technology, but no one doubts that they did so. So clearly, there are instances where design can be inferred without precise knowledge of the methods of construction.
The analogy becomes even more applicable to the case at hand if we flip it around, and imagine that instead of analyzing artifacts constructed by more primitive societies, we are trying to analyze something more complex and sophisticated than anything we have ever dreamed of making. Imagine, for example, that you are a hunter-gatherer in a stone-age society who is suddenly taken out of the Amazon and brought to New York City. Could you provide even a sketch of the means of construction for a smartphone, a skyscraper, or an airplane? Absolutely not. You wouldn’t even know where to begin. But would that detract from your ability to infer design at work? No, it wouldn’t.
That is exactly where we stand in regard to biological life. Compared to a living organism, our best technology is like stone spears. We have no notion of how to make even the most basic cell. But we would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of design on that account.
Somewhat perplexingly, perhaps, the same does not seem to hold true for explaining something by natural processes alone. When someone tries to do that, we always expect hard details. If someone insisted that the Easter Island heads could be explained by unguided natural processes, you would certainly expect them to give you a clear explanation of how, or why such improbable shapes were demanded by the laws of nature. And you probably wouldn’t be much moved if they started complaining along the lines of Spencer and Moran that you weren’t being fair because you hadn’t explained how your beloved designers created the heads either: “Did they carve them with iron picks, or stone hammers? Were the carvers men, or women? Or little children, perhaps? Why did they make a few dozen heads, not one or several thousand? And where are they now? Did they quit making heads, or perhaps just move on to other islands…?”
In a fresh context, it’s obvious that this argument is not worth anything. So all that remains is to determine why the argument is not worth anything. And the answer is simply that it rests on a false equivalence: different types of explanation impose different burdens of evidence on their proponents. There are evidentiary burdens that lie on design theorists alone, and there are evidentiary burdens that lie on Darwinists alone.
“Will” vs. “Chance and Necessity”
The important distinction lies in the difference between agents and natural laws. Designers are free agents, by definition, and can do whatever they want. In fact, that’s where the explanatory power of design lies. Natural processes, by contrast, can only do the same predictable things. That is why humans constantly invoke designers to explain things that we would be at a loss to explain by the laws of nature alone — everything from ant hills to cave paintings. But because the explanatory power of free agents is produced by the very thing that makes them hard to predict, it’s no use demanding to know exactly how a free agent went about doing something. Unless you were there, you can’t know. It’s different with natural processes, which are uniform and therefore predictable.
The question that follows from this is, when are we allowed to invoke a free agent as an explanation? Famously, the principle of parsimony, or “Occam’s razor,” says that you shouldn’t invoke unnecessary entities as part of your explanation. When we invoke an intelligent designer to explain a phenomenon, we are invoking a new entity. Darwinian evolution, to its credit, does not propose any new entities — it tries to explain life using only matter and the observed laws of nature. According to Occam’s razor, however, there is a reason to invoke a new entity: if the entities you already have can’t explain the phenomenon. Of course this is so — otherwise, we would never be able to discover any new entities at all, and would be stuck with only believing in the first thing the first human baby happened to notice. Anyway, that is why intelligent design theorists spend so much time arguing against Darwin’s theory. It’s not that design and evolution are incompatible or that we think disproving evolution automatically proves design; it’s that there’s no need to invoke a new entity such as a designer if the laws of nature that we already know about can explain everything that exists. So to avoid violating Occam’s razor, intelligent design advocates need to show that the laws of nature cannot produce everything that exists. That is the evidentiary burden that lies on design theorists only; evolutionists, by contrast, do not need to somehow demonstrate that intelligent designers are incapable of creating life.
Conversely, Darwinists argue that there is no need to invoke a designer or any other new entities, because the entities we already know about (matter, chance, and the laws of nature) are a sufficient explanation for every observed phenomenon. So they must be able to show how the phenomena that do not seem like they could be produced by natural processes actually can be produced by natural processes. That is the evidentiary burden that lies on Darwinists alone; design theorists, by contrast, do not need to prove that the proposed designer is capable of producing life. The designer is capable by definition, because the designer was proposed specifically to fill in the explanatory gap left by the insufficiency of matter, chance, and the laws of nature alone.
A Case in Point: The Discovery of Helium
This may all become clearer if we consider an analogous case. The element helium was first discovered by an astronomer, not a chemist, because its existence was inferred from observations of sunlight before it was actually found on earth. The astronomer, Norman Lockyer, noticed that there was a wavelength of light produced by the sun that was not produced by any element yet discovered. He inferred that there must therefore be an undiscovered element in the sun. This was a perfectly legitimate inference, Occam’s razor notwithstanding, because no already-known entity could produce that wavelength of light. And it made no difference that no one knew exactly how or why different elements produced different wavelengths of light. If any chemist had insisted that there was not a new element in the sun, he or she would have needed to show that you actually can get that wavelength using only the already-known elements. In fact, the English chemist Edward Franklin attempted to do this by putting hydrogen under extreme heat and pressure, but was unsuccessful.
The same goes for evolution. The evolution of highly complex biological systems has never been observed, and there are certain theoretical arguments that purport to show that it is essentially impossible (statistically speaking) for random variation, natural selection, and the laws of nature alone to produce those systems. So any scientist who wants to argue that the already-known entities in nature could produce all of biology needs to show how this could occur, in spite of the theoretical hurdles. If they can’t do this, then we are perfectly justified in proposing a new entity, such as a designer.
One final objection must be answered. If we don’t know exactly how the designer crafted life, then how do we even know that a designer is the right explanation? Couldn’t it just as easily be something else?
Once again, the story of helium is illuminating. Helium and intelligent design are both parsimonious explanations regarding the broad type of cause, yet non-parsimonious regarding the specific entity. Lockyer proposed an element, rather than something else (e.g., a new law of nature), because it was already known that elements can produce light. But he proposed a new element, because it was known that none of the old elements could produce that particular wavelength of light. Likewise, ID theorists propose a designer to explain the specified complexity of life because it is already known that designers (i.e., minds) can produce specified complexity. But we must propose a new designer, because none of the old designers (ourselves, beavers, etc.) are capable of having created the systems in question.
By now it should be clear why it is the height of silliness to demand proof that the designer could create life, or to expect detailed explanations of how it could be done. If chance and necessity are insufficient to produce life, then we must conclude that something beyond chance and necessity was involved. The proof of that entity’s capability is simply the fact that life exists.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
The great lie - 2% difference between human and chimp genes
Fact Check: New “Complete” Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome
May 21,
2025, 6:20 AM
https://evolutionnews.org/2025/05/fact-check-new-complete-chimp-genome-shows-14-9-percent-difference-from-human-genome/
A
groundbreaking paper in Nature reports the “Complete sequencing
of ape genomes,” including the genomes for chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas,
Bornean orangutans, Sumatran orangutans, and siamangs. I noted this in an article
here yesterday, reporting that an evolutionary icon — the famous “1 percent
difference” between the human and chimp genomes, touted across the breadth of
popular and other scientific writing and teaching — has fallen. The
researchers, for whatever reason — I’m not a mind reader — chose to bury that
remarkable finding in technical jargon in their Supplementary Data section. Now
for more on the scientific details.
You might
be thinking, “Hey, weren’t these genomes sequenced long ago?” The answer is yes
but also no. Yes, we had sequenced genomes from these species in the past, but,
as the paper explains, “owing to the repetitive nature of ape genomes, complete
assemblies have not been achieved. Current references lack sequence resolution
of some of the most dynamic genomic regions, including regions corresponding to
lineage-specific gene families.”
Or, as an
accompanying explainer
article puts it:
In the
past, scientists had deciphered segments of non-human apes’ genomes, but they
had never managed to assemble a complete sequence for any species. In the
current study, however, [Kateryna] Makova and her collaborators used advanced
sequencing techniques and algorithms that allowed them to read long segments of
DNA and assemble them into a sequence that stretched from one end of each
chromosome to the other, without any gaps. “This has never been done before,”
says Makova.
In other
words, the complete ape genomes were never fully sequenced. And they used the
human genome as a reference sequence, which made the ape genomes look more
human-like than they actually were.
You Don’t
Believe Me?
From the
technical paper:
Most
previous genome-wide comparative studies of apes have been limited by the
mapping of inferior assemblies to a higher quality human genome. Consequently,
human reference biases were introduced.
This is
consistent with what the National Center for Biotechnology Information said
in 2007 about an early draft of the chimp genome:
Contigs
were assembled using the human genome as a guide, and are therefore “humanized”
in their construction. This is an important distinction, as some sequences,
such as insertions, deletions, and gene duplications, may not be accurately
represented by the current chimpanzee assembly.
Thus, up
until now, most versions of the chimp and other ape genomes were effectively
“humanized” because they were “assembled using the human genome as a guide.”
This effectively makes them appear more similar to the human genome than they
truly are. Can these new drafts of ape genomes help fix the problem?
Problem
Solved?
Another explainer article
in Nature seems to suggest that these “complete” drafts of
the ape genomes will prove that they are less similar to the human genome than
has been claimed:
Shortly
after the first human genome sequence was finalized in 2003, a chimpanzee
assembly was released. This was followed by assemblies for other great apes,
such as the gorilla, Sumatran orangutan and bonobo, and small apes that are
less closely related to humans than are great apes. These genomes offered a
valuable opportunity to catalogue the genetic differences that have accumulated
during the evolution of apes, including changes that are unique to humans. But,
because these initial releases were incomplete drafts, comparisons could be
made only between properly resolved portions of the genome. These studies
therefore focused only on relatively small differences, and excluded extremely
repetitive sequences and large-scale structural differences, such as inversions
and duplications of genomic sequences. [Emphasis added.]
That last
sentence seems to hint that previous comparisons between human and ape genomes
“only focused on relatively small differences” and “excluded” the sections that
entail “large-scale structural differences.” The explainer article notes that
this study has “fully sequenced the genomes of six living ape species, enabling
long-awaited comparisons of hard-to-assemble genomic regions.” Thus, one could
expect that these newly “complete” ape genomes would reveal much greater
differences compared to the human genome.
The New
Ape Genomes and the Human Genome
What’s
odd is that as one reads the technical paper, a direct comparison between the
ape and the human genomes is hard to find. This passage seems to be as close as
it gets:
Overall,
sequence comparisons among the complete ape genomes revealed greater divergence
than previously estimated (Supplementary Notes III–IV). Indeed, 12.5–27.3% of
an ape genome failed to align or was inconsistent with a simple one-to-one
alignment, thereby introducing gaps.
What
exactly does this mean? Well, first they admit that “sequence comparisons among
the complete ape genomes revealed greater divergence than previously
estimated.” But the technical Nature paper considers human
beings to be an “ape,” so implicit in this statement is their belief that
comparing “ape genomes” includes comparisons between human and ape (i.e.,
non-human hominoid)
genomes. So for the rest of this article, I’ll call humans “humans” and I’ll
refer to non-human hominoids as “apes,” just like most normal people
do.
Interestingly,
two preprints of the paper (v1 and v2)
published last year on BioRxiv (which are presumably the
versions of the manuscript submitted to Nature initially and
after one round of revisions) preface this result with these two sentences:
The
oft-quoted statistic of ∼99% sequence identity between
chimpanzee and human holds for most of the genome when considering
single-nucleotide variants (SNVs). However, comparisons of T2T genomes suggest
a much more nuanced estimate.
T2T means
examining “telomere to telomere” — i.e., examining the entire chromosomes
throughout the genome. These sentences were evidently removed during revisions
for the published version in Nature — an interesting editorial
decision. So what is the paper saying about the difference between humans and
chimpanzees?
As we’ll
see, the statement above — that “sequence comparisons among the complete ape
genomes revealed greater divergence than previously estimated” — is true. But
it doesn’t reveal the extent of the differences between human and ape genomes
that this study uncovered. So let me cut to the chase:
Look back
at those numbers, “12.5–27.3%.” The same numbers show up again buried deep in
the Supplemental
Data where they compare various ape to human genomes. They’re findable
if you know where to look, but should I say “buried” — or “hidden”? From what I
can tell, the Supplemental Data reports that the ape genome that is most
similar to the human genome is the chimpanzee genome. And it shows a 12.5
percent “gap-divergence” — i.e., difference — from the human genome! And when
you look at the “gap divergence” where the human genome is the target and the
chimp is the query, the difference is 13.3 percent. Let me be clear: According
to this study, the human and chimp genomes aren’t 98.8 percent the same (or 1.2
percent different) — as, for instance, the Smithsonian Institution’s National
Museum of Natural History claims (see my “Visitor’s
Guide” for more). In fact, they are no more than 87.5 percent similar —
i.e., the human and chimp genomes are at least 12.5 percent different if not
13.3 percent different! In fact, the 13.3 percent difference is more relevant
since this reflects how similar the whole human assembly is to the chimp
genome.
What
Exactly is the “Gap Divergence”
Before we
go further, I want to explore exactly what the authors mean by “gap divergence”
or “gap difference.” The paper defines the “gap divergence” as follows:
Gap
divergence is defined as the fraction of positions in the target haplotype that
are not aligned to the other haplotype, which could be due to biological
processes (e.g., gene loss/gain and insertions/deletions), missing data, or
technical problems (e.g., alignment failure due to SVs, repetitive elements,
etc.).
So how do
they determine the gap divergence? From what I can tell, it’s based upon
dividing the target genome within the genome alignment into 1 million base pair
(1 Mbp) segments and seeing how many of the bases within each 1 Mbp segment
have no aligning base within the query genome that has been aligned to it. If
the entire 1 Mbp segment has no alignment by the target genome, it has gap
divergence of 100 percent. If 10,000 bp have no alignment, it has gap
divergence of 1 percent; if 1,000 bp have no alignment, it has gap divergence
of 0.1 percent, etc. According to the study’s results, the mean gap divergence
in each 1 Mbp segment of the human genome (as target) aligned to the chimp
genome (as query) is 12.5 percent. Thus, 12.5 percent of bases in the human
genome have no aligning base in the chimpanzee genome within the whole
genome-alignment.
The
figure below — created for illustrative purposes and not from the study — helps
show the differences between “SNVs” and “Gaps” between the two genomes:
As you
can see, the Gaps represent nucleotides or segments of nucleotides that simply
don’t exist in one genome or the other, while the SNVs represent nucleotides
that do exist but are different. The two types of differences can be added up
to calculate the total difference between the genomes.
An Upper
Estimate
And why
is there a range of 12.5 percent to 27.3 percent in the main text? That’s
because the upper estimate of the non-alignability between the gorilla genome
and human genome is a whopping 27.3 percent. In fact, if we look at the
Supplementary Figure III.12, we find the following percentages of
“gap-divergence” between various ape genomes when compared to the human genome
(non-sex chromosomes):
- Sumatran orangutan (Pongo
abelii) vs human: 15.4 percent and 16.5 percent “gap-divergence”
(i.e., minimum difference)
- Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla)
vs human: 17.9 percent and 27.3 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum
difference)
- Bonobo (Pan paniscus) vs
human: 12.5 percent and 14.4 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum
difference)
- Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)
vs human: 12.5 percent and 13.3 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum
difference)
Do you
see how easy it is to summarize that data? These are huge findings for both
science and the wider culture, yet the technical Nature paper,
and the two Nature explainer articles, failed to clearly bring
out these points. They buried them in technical jargon and a lack of clarity
deep in the Supplemental Data, and the sentence about “The oft-quoted statistic
of ~99% sequence identity” was removed in the revisions of the paper. Nature,
I feel confident in assuring you, is not a haphazardly edited journal. These
were deliberate choices by someone during the editing process. The lack of
clarity is simply incredible.
The
Technical Details
Deep in
the Supplementary Data we find Figure III.12 which explains the gap divergence
between different species:
The
caption reads: “Plots show 1 Mbp segments binned by gap divergence for each
pairwise alignment,” where a pairwise alignment is an attempt to align two
sequences to determine their degree of similarity or difference. Thus, we’re
looking at a direct measure of the minimum degree of difference between
the two genomes.
Adding in
the Single Nucleotide Variation (SNV)
But
there’s another type of variation between genomes also identified in the paper
— single nucleotide differences (called “single nucleotide variations” or
sometimes “short nucleotide variations” or SNVs). Again, buried in the
Supplemental Data we find Figure III.11 which shows the percentage of SNVs
between human and various ape genomes reported in this study. Here’s what they
found:
- Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo
abelii) vs Human: ~3.6 percent different
- Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla)
vs Human: 1.9 percent – 2.0 percent different
- Bonobo (Pan paniscus) vs
Human: 1.5 percent – 1.6 percent different
- Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)
vs Human: 1.5 percent – 1.6 percent different
If we add
the gap divergence to the SNV differences, we end up with these total degrees
of difference between human and ape genomes:
- Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo
abelii) vs Human: ~19 percent – 20.1 percent different
- Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla)
vs Human: ~19.8 percent – 29.3 percent different
- Bonobo (Pan paniscus) vs
Human: ~14.0 percent – 16.0 percent different
- Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)
(target) vs. Human: ~14.0 percent different
- Human (target) vs. Chimpanzee (Pan
troglodytes): ~14.9 percent different
So now
what we’re seeing is that there is about a 14.9 percent total difference
between the human genome and the chimp genome. That represents a much greater
degree of difference than the often-claimed statistic that we are only 1
percent genetically different from chimpanzees!
Is This
the Final Word?
Undoubtedly
more analysis is needed to determine the extent to which nucleotides exhibit
“one-to-one exact matches” between the human and chimp genomes, even in the
regions that could be more easily aligned. So I suspect that the degree of
difference between human and chimp genomes may go up in the future.
For now,
we can safely say that this latest study shows that the human and chimp genomes
are at least 14.9 percent different. This means that the human and chimp
genomes are at least a full order of magnitude more dissimilar
than the public is typically told.
Of course
we’re talking here about the 44 non-sex chromosomes in the human genome. It’s
also worth noting that compared to chimps, the human Y chromosome has a
whopping 56.6 percent gap divergence (and 3.9 percent SNV divergence), and the
human X chromosome has 4.4 percent gap divergence (and 1.1 percent SNV
divergence). But that too is all buried in the Supplemental Data.
These are
all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would
not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using
jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s
important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like
sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually
represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors
were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a
paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to
state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why
didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall
where they may?
I suspect
that this radical finding has implications — not just for science, but also for
human exceptionalism, for the reliability of heavily marketed talking points,
and more — that people will be discussing for a long time. And perhaps for some
in the worlds of science and science reporting, especially those who touted the
now discredited figure about a mere 1 percent difference from chimps, those
conversations may not be welcome.
Photo by
Nathan Jacobson, © Discovery Institute (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Associate
Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Casey
Luskin is a geologist and an attorney with graduate degrees in science and law,
giving him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate
over evolution. He earned his PhD in Geology from the University of
Johannesburg, and BS and MS degrees in Earth Sciences from the University of
California, San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively at both the
graduate and undergraduate levels. His law degree is from the University of San
Diego, where he focused his studies on First Amendment law, education law, and
environmental law.
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know by Sara Rigler
Bs”d
What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know
Archeology screams the truth about Jerusalem
and Israel
Some twenty
years ago I was walking from my home in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old
City to pray at the Kotel (the Western Wall), Judaism’s second holiest site,
second only to the Temple Mount itself that towers above it. On the steps to
the Kotel Plaza, I passed an Arab tour guide speaking in English to a large
group of European tourists. Pointing toward the Golden Dome and the Al Aqsa
Mosque on the Temple Mount, he said, “The Jews claim that their two temples
stood on this spot, but there is no proof whatsoever to that claim.”
I was
stunned. No proof? The gigantic, distinctive “Herodian stones” of the Western
Wall itself, the remnant of the retaining wall King Herod built around the
mountain when he enlarged the Second Temple, starting in 20 BCE, were
incontrovertible proof. And what about the numerous contemporary historical
descriptions of the Temple, including historian Josephus Flavius’s eye-witness
account of the Temple, written in the first century CE? Although an inveterate
debater, I stood there unable to utter a word of rebuttal because I was shocked
speechless by the boldfaced lie. It was as if an acknowledged scientist was
telling his students that the world is flat.
Only
recently, when reading Doron Spielman’s new book, When the Stones Speak, did
I become aware that that Arab tour guide was just a small part of a widespread,
carefully calculated campaign to deny the Jewish People’s historical claim to
Jerusalem and the land of Israel.
The
invective, “Colonialists!” being shouted against the Jewish State on university
campuses and in European capitals is based on the allegation that European Jews
came to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th century
as foreign occupiers. In the wake of the Holocaust, according to this view, the
United Nations voted for a Jewish state, alongside an Arab state, in the small
piece of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in order to
assuage their guilt. The implication of “colonialists” is that Jews have no
more rights to that patch of land than the British had to India.
An
inconvenient contradiction of that narrative is the Bible, which chronicles
over a thousand years of Jews (then called “Israelites”) living in that patch
of land. “The Bible should be put aside,” claimed Palestinian archaeologist,
Hani Nur el-Din, professor of archaeology at Al-Quds University. “It’s not a
history book.”
This
statement, writes Doron Spielman, “was part of the broader, long-standing trend
of denying Jewish history in Jerusalem that had persisted for decades.” In When
the Stones Speak, he provides hair-raising evidence of this campaign.
(Even the
name “Palestine” was an effort by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, after the Jewish
revolt of 132-135 CE, to sever the historical identification between the Jews
and their land, which had been called “Judea” for centuries. The term
“Palestina” derives from the Philistines, one of the ancient Sea Peoples who
had lived along the coast of Judea and disappeared from history with the
Babylonian conquest seven centuries before the Romans exiled the Jews.)
If you
can’t trust the Bible to legitimate the Jewish people’s historical claim to the
land, then perhaps archeological discoveries in the City of David, the original
Jerusalem which lies to the south of the walled Old City, can provide proof
that Jews lived there in antiquity. When the Stones Speak is the
riveting story of those archeological digs and what they revealed, as well as
the opposition that tried to stop them.
THE CRUSADE
TO DENY HISTORY
Excavating the City of David faced massive pushback from the
Palestinian leadership and the European NGOs that support them. Sheikh Ikrima
Sabri, the Mufti of the Temple Mount and one of the founders of Al Quds
University, told a reporter for the German Die Welt in 2001, “There is
not the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place
in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating
Jewish history…. It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world.”
Walid Awad, a Palestinian scholar in charge of publications
for the Palestinian Ministry of Information, asserted in 1996: “The fact of the
matter is that almost thirty years of excavations did not reveal anything
Jewish. ... Jerusalem is not a Jewish city, despite the biblical myth implanted
in some minds.”
Even as recently as May, 2023, Mahmoud Abbas, the President
of the Palestinian Authority, addressing the United Nations, claimed that there
was no proof whatsoever of Jewish ties to the al-Aqsa compound [the Temple
Mount]. He stated that Israel “dug under al-Aqsa. They dug everywhere and they
could not find anything.”
When the Stones Speak tells of astonishing finds in
the City of David that disprove the Palestinian lies. Dr. Eilat Mazar, a
courageous and independent archeologist, using the Bible as her guide,
discovered a monumental building, with walls twenty feet thick, which she
maintained was the palace of King David and subsequent kings of Judea. She
dated pottery she found within the ruins to the tenth century BCE, the time of
King David.
Archeologists from Tel Aviv University, who had made a
career of denying the Bible, jumped on Dr. Mazar and questioned the dating of
her pottery shards. They argued that the massive building, clearly belonging to
a ruler, was from two centuries before King David or three centuries after. In
those years, only organic matter could be conclusively dated. An olive pit
found deep in the structure was sent to the laboratories of Oxford University
for Carbon-14 dating. After weeks of tumulteous debate in the media about Dr.
Mazar's discovery, the results came back: the olive pit was from 1000 BCE, the
period of King David.
Even more electrifying was her discovery of a clay seal that
bore the name, written in paleo-Hebrew, of “Yehuchal the son of Shelemiah.” The
Bible relates that the prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the 6th century BCE,
prophesized that the mistreatment of orphans and widows would bring Divine
judgment against the kingdom. Four of King Zedekiah’s officers told the king
that Jeremiah was fomenting panic in Jerusalem. The Bible records the name of
one of those officers: Yehuchal the son of Shelemiah.
THE
PILGRIMAGE ROAD
Even more gripping is the story of discovering and
excavating “the Pilgrimage Road,” a 700-meter series of expertly chisselled
limestone steps that led from the Siloam Pool, a giant ritual bath discovered
at the southern tip of the City of David, directly to the Temple Mount. As Doron Spielman writes:
The road we had discovered wasn’t
just a Pilgrimage Road; it was the Hag Pilgrimage Road used by the ancient
Israelites who came to Jeusalem more than sixteen hundred years before Islam
was founded.
This
historical fact should have posed no challenge to Islam were it not for the
Palestinian leadership. But they had been teaching an entire generation of
their people the falsehood that there never was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, and that the site was
first sanctified by Muhammed.
…
With the discovery of King David’s
Palace and the Pilgrimage Road, the City of David was transformed from a small
backwater excavation into a leading archaeological site.
And
with that transfomation came threats of violence against Israelis in general
and against our workers, and even an attempted assassination.
I never expected a book on archeology to be a page-turner,
but Doron Spielman is a master story-teller. As Vice-president of the City of
David for twenty years, he provides an eye-witness account of the drama and
suspence of using archeology to prove that the Jews are the indigenous people
of the tract of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterrean Sea. With a
cast of colorful characters from Elie Weisel to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik,
this is a must-read story.
As the author writes: “Grab almost any Israeli off the
streets in Israel today and they will likely tell you: We are here. We have
always been here. And we’re not going anywhere else.”
With the revelations narrated in this book, every Jew in the
world should be able to vouch: The Jews have always been in the land of
Israel. We are the indigenous people between the river and the sea.
To buy the book, click here:
https://www.amazon.com/When-Stones-Speak-Remarkable-Discovery/dp/1546009256
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Friday, April 18, 2025
what happens to a flatworm when it is immersed in barium
ChatGPT said:
When a flatworm is immersed in barium, the outcome depends on the form of barium used. Barium in general is toxic to living organisms, but here's a breakdown:
1. Barium Ions (e.g., Barium Chloride - BaCl₂)
Toxicity: Highly toxic to flatworms and other invertebrates.
Effect: Disrupts normal nerve and muscle function by blocking potassium channels, which are crucial for nerve impulse transmission.
Result: The flatworm may experience:
Loss of movement or erratic movement
Muscle spasms or paralysis
Death, depending on concentration and exposure time
2. Barium Sulfate (BaSO₄)
Insoluble & Inert: Commonly used in medical imaging (e.g., X-rays) because it doesn't dissolve in water.
Effect on Flatworms: Minimal, unless impurities are present—generally non-toxic due to poor solubility.
Summary
Soluble barium salts (like barium chloride): Harmful or lethal to flatworms.
Insoluble barium compounds (like barium sulfate): Generally harmless.
Do you know which form of barium you're referring to? I can give you more detailed effects if you do!
You said:
there is a report of the death of the head leaving the tail which revgererates a new head immune to barium poining in Seymour Garte, Perry Marshall, and Stuart Kauffman have published an article in the journal Entropy titled “The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences.”
ChatGPT said:
Yes, the phenomenon you've described has been documented in scientific research. When planarian flatworms are exposed to barium chloride (BaCl₂), a potent potassium channel blocker, their head tissues degenerate within approximately 72 hours. Remarkably, if these worms remain in the BaCl₂ environment, they can regenerate new heads that are resistant to the toxic effects of barium. PubMed+3PMC+3ResearchGate+3
This adaptation suggests that planarians possess a form of physiological plasticity, allowing them to modify their regenerative processes in response to environmental stressors. The regenerated heads not only restore normal morphology but also exhibit insensitivity to BaCl₂, indicating a successful adaptation to the previously harmful conditions.PMC
This case exemplifies how biological systems can sometimes defy straightforward mathematical modeling, as discussed in the article "The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences" by Seymour Garte, Perry Marshall, and Stuart Kauffman. The authors argue that the complexity and adaptability of living organisms often challenge the predictive power of mathematical frameworks traditionally used in the physical sciences.
ChatGPT said:
The phenomenon of planarian flatworms regenerating barium-insensitive heads after exposure to barium chloride (BaCl₂) has been documented in scientific literature. A key study titled "Regenerative Adaptation to Electrochemical Perturbation in Planaria: A Molecular Analysis of Physiological Plasticity" reports that exposure to BaCl₂ causes degeneration of the planarian head, but continued exposure leads to the regeneration of a new head that is insensitive to BaCl₂. ResearchGate+2PubMed+2PMC+2
This study provides a detailed analysis of the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying this adaptation, including changes in ion channel expression and the role of specific molecular pathways. The findings suggest that planarians can adapt to electrochemical stress by altering their physiology during regeneration.
While this study is a primary source documenting this specific phenomenon, other research has explored related aspects of planarian regeneration and physiological adaptation. For example, studies have investigated the role of ion transport and membrane voltage in planarian head regeneration, highlighting the importance of bioelectric signals in regenerative processes. PMC+2Cell+2PubMed+2
These studies collectively contribute to our understanding of the remarkable regenerative capabilities of planarians and their ability to adapt to environmental stressors.
PubMed
מרכז המידע ביוטכנולוגי הלאומי
BioMed Central
SpringerLink
ResearchGate
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