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Florida governor Ron DeSantis is stacking up achievements ahead of 2024 announcement

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I’ve been blogging about DeSantis’ achievements for some time, but a whole bunch of new ones just happened. I want to make sure that people have a good grasp on everything that he’s is accomplishing. How else would you choose a candidate for president, except by looking at what battles he’s fought and won? DeSantis has just visited Iowa and New Hampshire, and I’ll cover that too.

So, here come the stories.

High tourism and low unemployment:

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office celebrated that Florida witnessed a record 37.9 million visitors in the first quarter of 2023, the highest ever recorded in a quarter.

That tally includes 34.6 million domestic visitors and 1.8 million international.

[…]Florida’s unemployment rate also held at a low 2.6% for April, which the governor’s office bragged is the lowest “among the top 10 largest states.”

Florida’s new six-week abortion ban:

In a recent interview, Trump said that the six-week abortion ban recently signed into law by DeSantis may be “too harsh” in the eyes of “many people within the pro-life movement.”

[…]“What are your thoughts on that?” DeSantis was asked.

[…]“As a Florida resident, you know, he didn’t give an answer about, ‘would you have signed the heartbeat bill that Florida did?’” he continued. “That had all the exceptions that people talk about the legislature put it in.”

[…]“I signed the bill. I was proud to do it. He won’t answer whether he would sign it or not.”

No sex-reassignment surgeries on kids:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill to ban sex reassignment surgeries and medications for minors Wednesday.

[…]State funds are prohibited from being used for these treatments. This includes state counties, municipalities, districts and commissions.

Physicians are required to receive written informed consent from adults receiving the surgeries or prescriptions.

The governor said it also gives the Florida courts temporary jurisdiction to intervene and halt procedures for out-of-state children.

“You have actually some states in this country that want to be a haven for these types of procedures, and even welcome minors without their parents consent,” DeSantis said. “We’re obviously doing the opposite here.”

No pronouns required in Florida schools:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law Wednesday that will prohibit a school from requiring students and teachers to use preferred pronouns and adds guidelines for books that citizens wish to challenge in schools.

“We’re not doing the pronoun olympics in Florida. It’s not happening here,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis said the law, HB 1069, makes sure that Florida students and teachers will “never be forced to declare pronouns in school, or be forced to use pronouns not based on biological sex.”

“There’s a lot of nonsense that gets floated around and what we’ve said in Florida is, we are going to remain a refuge of sanity, and a citadel of normalcy, and kids should have an upbringing that reflects that,” DeSantis said.

No kids at drag queen shows:

 Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law to penalize businesses and people who admit children into “adult live performances.”

[…]The law authorizes Florida to fine, suspend, or revoke the license of any public establishment that admits a child to “adult live performances” that depict or simulate nudity, sexual conduct, or lewd exposure.

Pre-game prayer is allowed:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation to protect youth sports in Florida on Wednesday, which will also allow high school teams to pray before games.

[…]“You have a right to free expression of religion. If government is denying your right to say a prayer before the game, they are infringing your speech, you’re not violating anything, but by doing that, and so for them to do it is discriminatory,” DeSantis said.

Add these actions to the list of previous DeSantis actions:

Finally, let’s see where DeSantis has been traveling to ahead of the 2024 GOP primaries.

Iowa:

“Governing is not about entertaining. Governing is not about building a brand or talking on social media and virtue signaling,’” said DeSantis at a fundraising event in Sioux Center. “It’s ultimately about winning and producing results.”

The Florida governor has emerged as the most formidable threat to Donald Trump’s securing the GOP nomination.

He’s presented himself to voters as a staunch conservative without Trump’s distinctive abrasiveness.

Trump was scheduled to host his own Iowa event Saturday in Des Moines, but canceled the event due to a tornado warning.

While Trump and his campaign have raged against DeSantis, the governor has been hesitant to criticize the ex-president who endorsed his gubernatorial campaign in 2018.

DeSantis told voters that in order for conservatives to secure victories in the upcoming elections, they need to remain focused on the issues and “reject the culture of losing,” appearing to reference Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.

“We must reject the culture of losing that has impacted our party in recent years. The time for excuses is over,” DeSantis told prospective voters.

“If we get distracted, if we focus the election on the past or on other side issues, then I think the Democrats are going to beat us again.”

And New Hampshire:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis traveled to New Hampshire late this week where he met with voters, state lawmakers, and the state’s governor just days ahead of his anticipated announcement that he will be running for president in 2024.

DeSantis met with voters at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester where he was very well received by many who thanked him for what he has accomplished in Florida.

DeSantis, 44, focused on talking to voters in the Granite State about economic and family issues like school choice, tax cuts, crime, and inflation, The New York Times reported.

[…]DeSantis has been busy racking up large lists of endorsements in recent days, including 37 state lawmakers in Iowa, approximately 50 state lawmakers in New Hampshire, and 99 out of 113 Republicans in the Florida state legislature.

[…]“These fights are not easy,” DeSantis said. “I think when you look, there’s a reason why things have gotten crazy in this country, because there’s a lot of powerful people that want it to be, a lot of institutions push that direction. When you kind of step out and you speak truth, you get a lot of blowback for that, but I think what I found in Florida is no governor ever received more incoming, I would say in modern history, than me, during my first term, particularly with COVID, but it really went on after that, a lot of narratives generated.”

Interesting that he mentioned COVID, as Donald Trump recently criticized DeSantis for opening up his state, comparing him unfavorably to NEW YORK GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO. Yes, really. And you might remember that Trump issued commendations to “Operation Warp Speed” members, including Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci. Something to think about.

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Stephen C. Meyer lectures on intelligent design and the origin of life

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A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“. One of my favorite 6 arguments for a Creator and Designer is the origin of the simplest replicating living system. When you look into the cell, what you’ll find is carefully sequenced components that for complex structures, like proteins. In this lecture, you’ll learn all about this “biological information”.

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

  • intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
  • Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
  • Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
  • but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
  • even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
  • can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
  • there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
  • overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
  • the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of bases that code for proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
  • meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
  • it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
  • although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
  • similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
  • the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
  • so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
  • however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
  • there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
  • but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
  • the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
  • the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
  • the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
  • if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
  • the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
  • the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
  • we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
  • the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

A sequence of amino acids forming a protein
A sequence of amino acids forming a protein

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone
Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

Here is an article that gives a general overview of how intelligent design challenges. If you want to read something more detailed about the material that he is covering in the lecture above related to the origin of life, there is a pretty good article here.

There is a good breakdown of some of the slides with helpful flow charts here on Uncommon Descent.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

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Does peer-reviewed research support a naturalistic origin of life?

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So, on Friday night, there was a debate between Dr. James Tour and Professor Dave, an atheist with a bachelors degree who makes YouTube videos. The atheist spent his entire opening speech attacking Tour’s character. When Tour asked him to show him origin of life chemistry, he refused. The atheist shuffled through papers he apparently found by Googling, and read the titles. When asked what was in them, he said that he couldn’t remember.

But I was trying to decide who won the debate. There was one place where the atheist claimed that the early Earth had no molecular oxygen. He needs that to be true, in order for the chemistry that creates the building blocks of life to work. So I thought I would talk about a paper that refutes that. After my argument, I’ll talk about another mistake that the atheist made in the debate. Based on those two mistakes, I concluded that the atheist was speaking errors either intentionally or unintentionally, and therefore lost the debate.

Here’s a paper published in the prestigious peer-reviewed science journal Nature, entitled “The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere”.

Evolution News explains what the paper is about.

Excerpt:

A recent Nature publication reports a new technique for measuring the oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere some 4.4 billion years ago. The authors found that by studying cerium oxidation states in zircon, a compound formed from volcanic magma, they could ascertain the oxidation levels in the early earth. Their findings suggest that the early Earth’s oxygen levels were very close to current levels.

[…]Miller and Urey conducted experiments to show that under certain atmospheric conditions and with the right kind of electrical charge, several amino acids could form from inorganic compounds such as methane, ammonia, and water. Several experiments have been done using various inorganic starting materials, all yielding a few amino acids; however, one key aspect of all of these experiments was the lack of oxygen.

If the atmosphere has oxygen (or other oxidants) in it, then it is an oxidizing atmosphere. If the atmosphere lacks oxygen, then it is either inert or a reducing atmosphere. Think of a metal that has been left outside, maybe a piece of iron. That metal will eventually rust. Rusting is the result of the metal being oxidized. With organic reactions, such as the ones that produce amino acids, it is very important that no oxygen be present, or it will quench the reaction. Scientists, therefore, concluded that the early Earth must have been a reducing environment when life first formed (or the building blocks of life first formed) because that was the best environment for producing amino acids. The atmosphere eventually accumulated oxygen, but life did not form in an oxidative environment.

The problem with this hypothesis is that it is based on the assumption that organic life must have formed from inorganic materials. That is why the early Earth must have been a reducing atmosphere. Research has been accumulating for more than thirty years, however, suggesting that the early Earth likely did have oxygen present.

[…]Their findings not only showed that oxygen was present in the early Earth atmosphere, something that has been shown in other studies, but that oxygen was present as early as 4.4 billion years ago. This takes the window of time available for life to have begun, by an origin-of-life scenario like the RNA-first world, and reduces it to an incredibly short amount of time. Several factors need to coincide in order for nucleotides or amino acids to form from purely naturalistic circumstances (chance and chemistry). The specific conditions required already made purely naturalist origin-of-life scenarios highly unlikely. Drastically reducing the amount of time available, adding that to the other conditions needing to be fulfilled, makes the RNA world hypothesis or a Miller-Urey-like synthesis of amino acids simply impossible.

If you read the paper’s abstract, it finds that molecular oxygen would have been present by the end of the Hadean era. The earliest signs of life we have are from just after the end of the Hadean era. So, its undeniable that molecular oxygen was present. Did professor Dave lie, or was he just ignorant? One thing for sure, he pronounced that there was no oxygen in the same confident, insulting voice that he used for the rest of his presentation.

OK, so with that out of the way, Professor Dave also cited a paper in the journal Science. And there is an article on Creation.com by Johnathan Sarfati, who has a PhD in chemistry, about that very paper.

His post says:

It’s likely that the media reports you mention were referring to the paper in Science journal by Tracey Lincoln and Gerald Joyce.1 Quite often, the media hype just doesn’t match what was actually discovered. To be fair, Joyce, a well known chemical evolutionist, made it clear that he and his Ph.D. student Lincoln had not produced life, despite the headlines.2 Much earlier, Joyce admitted:

“The most reasonable assumption is that life did not start with RNA … . The transition to an RNA world, like the origins of life in general, is fraught with uncertainty and is plagued by a lack of experimental data.”3

Joyce and Lincoln started off with a fairly long RNA molecule. Given that nothing like RNA appears in Miller–Urey experiments, this already shows unjustified interference from an intelligent investigator. In fact, not even the building blocks, ribonucleotides, appear in such experiments, and they do not spontaneously form RNA. In fact, there are numerous chemical difficulties with obtaining RNA by blind undirected chemistry, the only sort allowed on the hypothetical primordial earth, as chemical evolutionist A.G. Cairns-Smith points out in his book Genetic Takeover4 (see extract at Cairns Smith: Detailed criticisms of the RNA world hypothesis). And it’s a huge step from RNA to the genetic code, its major use today.

Furthermore, this paper didn’t demonstrate replication but ligation—joining two small RNA pieces, previously designed to be a match to the longer strand. So this research already assumed not just one but three RNA strands. For this to be relevant to chemical evolution, the two pieces just by chance had to have pretty close to the complementary base pairs of the first piece—natural selection could not be invoked before reproduction.

Furthermore, since polymerization is unfavorable, the RNA pieces must be chemically activated in some way. Note that a catalyst merely accelerates the approach to equilibrium; it doesn’t change it (see diagram and explanation in Dino proteins and blood vessels: are they a big deal?). The paper states that one of the two joining RNA strands has a triphosphate group on the end. This is very reactive, so would be an unlikely component of a primordial soup, and would not last long even if it appeared. So a supply of matching activated RNA pieces likewise shows unacceptable investigator interference.

See also Does ribozyme research prove Darwinian evolution? for a critique of an earlier Joyce paper on alleged ribozyme evolution, as well as Self-replicating peptides? which has many similarities to the recent Joyce claim.

Now Tour seemed to let this problem drop in the debate. It just seems that Professor Dave was assuming from the titles of the papers that they were relevant to the problem of life. Well, scientists always sound optimistic in their papers. I know, I had to write one for my masters degree thesis, and it was published. That’s why you have to look at the data and be skeptical. Sadly Dave wasn’t able to be skeptical. He wanted something to be true, so he just didn’t bother to interact with challenges to his view. The whole problem with the origin of life is that there are many counter-factual conditions, experimenter interferences, etc. that have to be done to make things work at all. Dave reads the titles of papers, but he just isn’t aware of how the experimenters have adjusted the experiments in ways that are not true to the conditions on the early Earth.

Dr. Tour lost his temper and shouted a lot during the debate, so I don’t think the debate is worth watching. However, if you want to watch a good debate on the origin of life, try this one between Dr. Fazale Rana vs Dr. Michael Ruse. And if you want to see a good explanation of the sequencing problem, check out this lecture by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. (who has also debated atheists who didn’t lie, shout or insult him – and they even had doctoral degrees)