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News

Nanotechnology expert Dr. James Tour assesses origin of life research

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What is involved in creating life from non-life?
What is involved in creating life from non-life?

Recently, I watched lectures from a recent Science and Faith Conference that occurred at Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. And I thought that Dr. James Tour’s talk on origin of life research was the best. So let’s see his bio, then we’ll take a look at his lecture.

Dr. James Tour:

James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Syracuse University, his Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue University, and postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University.

After spending 11 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in 1999 where he is presently the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering.

Tour’s scientific research areas include nanoelectronics, graphene electronics, silicon oxide electronics, carbon nanovectors for medical applications, green carbon research for enhanced oil recovery and environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction, graphene photovoltaics, carbon supercapacitors, lithium ion batteries, CO2 capture, water splitting to H2 and O2, water purification, carbon nanotube and graphene synthetic modifications, graphene oxide, carbon composites, hydrogen storage on nanoengineered carbon scaffolds, and synthesis of single-molecule nanomachines which includes molecular motors and nanocars.

[…]Tour has over 650 research publications and over 120 patents.

As he explains in the lecture, his research has frequently been used in the private sector to solve real world problems.

His lecture:

Evolution News had a short blurb of the lecture:

Rice University chemist James Tour almost defies description in a video now up of his amazing presentation at Discovery Institute’s 2019 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith.

At one point he asks for a show of hands of fellow synthetic chemists in the (large) audience. It turns out there are a couple and he demands that they stand up and call him a liar if anything he says isn’t true. His message is an alternatively scathing and hilarious indictment of claims from the origin-of-life studies community. Dr. Tour’s work in nanotechnology, an ulta-ultra-painstaking field, provides the backdrop for his demonstration that origins scientists don’t have the slightest idea how the first life was somehow naturally synthesized by blind, mindless forces.

The field hasn’t advanced an inch in 60-plus years. “Everyone’s clueless on this but no one wants to admit it.” Great scientists writing in the highest profile science journals are “lying to you” when they assert otherwise. “Show me the chemistry” of abiogenesis, he says. “It’s not there.”

Jim Tour is without parallel. Truly, I’d love to hear from our materialist critics how they would answer any of this.

At the conference, Tour’s lecture was accompanied by other great lectures on the origin of the universe and also the Cambrian explosion by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. Jay Richards spoke on fine-tuning and habitability. You can find the links to those lectures on the Discovery Institute YouTube channel.

What we liked about the lecture by Dr. James Tour was that he did not dumb down the content for a church audience. I was sending screen captures of his slides and short video clips to my best friend Dina while I watched it. I was very excited to see someone so accomplished in his research and entrepreneurship being honest with the laypeople in the church. And I loved the church for letting him speak like a scientist. I didn’t understand everything he was saying about the science, but I always understood the point he was trying to make.

Let this lecture encourage to raise your children to focus on science, math, engineering and technology, because you can clearly see the value that we have in Dr. James Tour. We need hundreds more scientists who go to the best schools and make a difference.

I really hope that some of the younger Christians will understand the importance of making scientific evidence for a Creator and Designer more widely known. Learn the areas of science where God’s existence can be detected, and put the time in learning how to make those arguments.

News

New York Times: LGBT youth have greater approval, but mental health is “significantly worse”

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A friend shared this article with me, and cleverly archived it so I could link to it from my blog. I had a whole bunch of wonderful stories to blog about, but this one is the best. Do you know how the secular left looks at the poor mental health of LGBT youth, and asserts (without evidence) that more acceptance would make those outcomes better? Turns out the exact opposite is true.

Here’s the left-wing extremist New York Times, dated June 3rd, 2023:

For L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers, high school is a much more accepting place than even a decade ago. They change their pronouns, go to school dances with people of the same gender, and are more likely than any previous generation to openly identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or otherwise queer.

[…]Yet there is a darker side. Even as they are increasingly welcomed by peers, their mental health is significantly worse than that of heterosexual young people.

[…]Their experiences highlight a “paradoxical finding,” as researchers have described it: Even as social inclusion for young L.G.B.T.Q. people has grown, large health disparities between them and their non-L.G.B.T.Q. peers have not shrunk.

The article talks about the strongest reasons why young people embrace LGBT:

  1. there are pro-LGBT TV shows, movies, music.
  2. famous pro athletes identify as LGBT
  3. the Supreme Court overturned legislation passed by elected legislators
  4. “everyone knows someone who is LGBT”
  5. social media supports LGBT
  6. big corporations support LGBT

Growing up in the situation I was in – poverty, different skin color, two working parents, public schools run by secular leftists – I wasn’t much interested in feeling good in the moment. I wanted an accurate view of the battlefield so I could make good decisions, and get out of the mess I was born into. I read the Bible, Shakespeare and my parents’ textbooks from their night classes at the local universities.

My approach was very different from the secular left. They don’t care about truth, or making good decisions to get good results. They care about living in the moment. They want to give in to their desires now, and point fingers later. They want to borrow money and run up expenses now, and pass the bill to someone else later. They are reckless and irresponsible. And they feel entitled to the life outcomes of those detestable Christians later. But they can’t be bothered to behave like those detestable Christians right now.

People who are LGBT are not facing little to no disagreement or disapproval:

A recent survey by The New York Times and Morning Consult of 1,574 young adults found that people ages 18 to 28 — who mostly graduated from high school since 2013 — were significantly more likely to know L.G.B.T.Q. students in school than those a decade older, who were teenagers in the 2000s.

The younger group was twice as likely to report knowing at least one transgender student, and three times as likely to have known three or more. Four in 10 said they knew numerous gay, lesbian or bisexual people in high school, compared with a quarter of the older group.

And while both groups reported hearing the words “gay” and “queer” used negatively at similar rates — a data point reflected in interviews with teenagers, who say they still hear “that’s so gay” in school hallways — the younger graduates were significantly more likely to hear those words used in a positive light, too. They were also more likely to have a gay-straight alliance or similar club at their school.

This reflects other data that has found that verbal harassment of L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers declined during the 2010s, while support for same-sex marriage became the norm among young people.

And finally:

“You’re at the point among young adults where almost all these measures of acceptance are in the high 80s, low 90s,” said Jeff Jones, a senior editor who oversees research at Gallup. “It’s basically getting toward a consensus.”

Sounds wonderful for the secular left. They got the morality of the Bible removed from society. Young people today don’t even know what the Bible teaches are dating, relationships, marriage, sexuality, etc. All they know is TV shows, celebrities, entertainers, athletes, and what their public school teachers tell them.

Just one little problem. Secular leftists don’t get to determine what is objectively right and wrong. In a God-designed universe, God decides what works, and what doesn’t work. And no amount of community, peer-approval, propaganda, etc. is going to overrule God’s design for his creatures.

More:

As acceptance has grown, though, the mental health of queer youth has continued to suffer. Reported rates of mental health problems among all young people have been rising for the last decade, but non-heterosexual students face far higher rates than straight students.

About 70 percent of high school students who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual reported persistent sadness, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, twice the rate of their heterosexual peers. One in five attempted suicide in the past year, nearly four times the rate of straight young people. (The C.D.C. does not track the mental health of transgender youth, but other data shows that roughly half had considered suicide in the past year.)

The New York Times tries to blame these numbers on being in a minority group. But Bible-believing Christians who embrace chastity, marriage, parenting and homeschooling are also a “minority group”. We don’t run the show any more. In fact, we’re the only minority that is still able to be targeted for ridicule and persecution, even by the police and government. But we also don’t have mental illnesses like the poor young people who believed the lies of the secular left, either. I wonder why that is. Could it be that chastity, marriage, parenting and homeschooling are morally right, whether anyone thinks it is or not? Could it be that these activities are self-evidently moral, and therefore just doing them makes the approval and celebration of other people completely unnecessary? For some behaviors, having an audience of One is enough.

News

Meet four heroes of the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6th, 1944

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I thought it might be a good idea to write up something about D-Day in order to help people understand some of our military history, and to put the spotlight on some real heroes. I don’t regard artists, athletes, dancers, singers, actors, or other celebrities as heroes. It really alarms me that so many people know more about these fake heroes than they do about real ones.

Weakness emboldens aggressors

For one thing, many people don’t understand how British and American libertarian isolationism made World War 2 into a much bigger mess than it needed to be. As historian Victor Davis Hanson explains in the lecture I linked below, the Allied nations were much stronger and better equipped than the Axis nations before the war started. The Axis nations developed better weapons after the war started. But Germany and Japan didn’t think that the Allied nations would do anything if they were aggressive. We know this from their writings and correspondence. They thought that British and Americans were just too scared of war to stop them.

Germany and Japan tested their hypothesis out by re-arming and annexing territory from their neighbors. Britain and America were led by libertarian isolationists, so they didn’t fight back. The aggressors correctly understood that libertarian isolationists didn’t have the will to oppose them, even if they were weaker than the Allies. But the more they re-armed and annexed territory, the stronger they became. The Allied nations waited too long to confront them. And that’s why World War 2 was much harder to win than it needed to be.

Here’s a very good lecture about the causes of World War 2 by an actual military historian, Victor Davis Hanson:

So, that’s the first point I wanted to make: libertarian isolationism causes wars. Although libertarians claim to oppose war, they actually cause war, due to their weakness in the face of evil. So who stops wars? People who favor a strong defense, and show a willingness to fight back against aggression are the ones who REALLY oppose wars. This is called “peace through strength”, and you can see it in action in the Cold War, where Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union by making their aggression costly.

Heroes of D-Day

My second concern was to promote the real heroes of D-Day, over the fictional heroes of movies, fiction, music, dancing, sports, and other entertainment nonsense.

Here are the four heroes I chose:

  • Major John Howard
  • Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort
  • Brigadier General Norman Cota
  • Major Richard Winters

Let’s take a look at each of them.

John Howard

Major John Howard led elements of the British 6th Airborne Division to take two vital bridges southeast of Sword beach. He did this in order to prevent German socialist counterattacks coming from the east. After they took the bridges, they had to repulse German tanks with nothing more than their useless PIAT (Projector Infantry Anti-Tank) grenade launchers. The PIAT was nothing more than a grenade launcher powered by a coiled spring. It was very inaccurate, and only effective to 50 yards. But that’s all the British paratroops had to stop tanks, and they made it work. You can read about him in this book by Stephen E. Ambrose, entitled: “Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944“. This New York Times article tells the story in brief. He also is played by Richard Todd in the famous movie “The Longest Day“.

Benjamin Vandervoort

Lt. Col. Ben Vandervoort served with the 82nd Airborne Division. I read about how he lead an infantry attack against German Tiger tanks (!) and infantry in Stephen E. Ambrose’s book “Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany“.  Ben Vandervoort broke his ankle during the D-Day landing, but he insisted that the medic just “lace it up tight” so that he could supervise the attacking and holding of Ste. Mere Eglise, southwest of Utah beach, against a vastly superior enemy force.  This article tells about how he defended against elite German SS infantry and heavy Tiger tanks at Trois-Ponts, during the Battle of the Bulge. He was outgunned and outnumbered 20 to 1, and had just a few lightly-armed soldiers, two weak 57mm anti-tank guns and some bazookas. He is portrayed by John Wayne in the famous movie “The Longest Day“.

Norman Cota

Brig. General Norman Cota is my favorite person in World War 2. At 51 years old, he nevertheless landed at  D-Day, and rallied terrified Army Rangers to follow him up the bluff, by telling them that Rangers ought to lead the way. “Rangers Lead The Way” later became the motto of the Army Rangers. He always led from the front, demonstrating how to attack a German machine gun position in a farmhouse to a group of American soldiers who were pinned down. He actually grabbed a bunch of grenades and led the assault team against a heavy machine gun! You can read about him in this short article and in Stephen E. Ambrose’s “D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II“. He is portrayed by Robert Mitchum in the famous movie “The Longest Day“.

Richard Winters

Major Richard Winters served in the 101st Airborne Division. Winters led an assault against a superior force of heavy machine guns and 105mm field guns. His tactics were so brilliant that they are still studied at West Point today. You can see Richard Winters and Carwood Lipton in the HBO “Band of Brothers” series, or read this book by Stephen E. Ambrose entitled “Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest“, which is the basis for that series.

I hope this convinces you that military heroes are far more important than the “heroes” of fiction and entertainment. It’s alarming to me that people invest more and have more respect for characters in Hollywood science fiction movies, and other such make-believe nonsense. We need to be rooted in reality. In reality, men who fight and die fighting evil to protect your freedoms are the real heroes. People who take military history seriously are able to give respect and gratitude where it is due – a very important part of being a mature, moral human being.