Category Archives: News

Information Enigma: 21-minute video explains intelligent design

The video is here:

I have read and listened and watched a lot of material on intelligent design, but I have never seen so much value packed into such a short lecture. I really hope you’ll watch this and that it’s helpful to you.

Summary:

  • the big question when discussing the origin of life: where did the information in living systems come from?
  • Until 530 million years ago, the oceans were largely devoid of life
  • In a 10 million year period, many new forms of animal life emerged
  • New biological forms of life require new information
  • the discovery of DNA shows that living systems work because cells have information that allows them to build the components of molecular machines: cell types, proteins, etc.
  • can random mutation and natural selection create new functional information?
  • normally, random mutations tend to degrade the functionality of information, e.g. – randomly changing symbols in an applications code does not usually introduce useful new functions, it usually renders what is there non-functional
  • the majority of possible sequences will NOT have functions, so random mutations will more likely give you non-functional code, rather than functional code
  • example: a bicycle lock  with 4 numbers has many possible sequences for the 4 numbers, and only one of them has unlock functionality, the rest have no functionality
  • if you have lots of time, then you might be able to guess the combination, but if the lock as has 10 billion numbers, and only one combination that unlocks, you can spend your whole life trying to unlock it and won’t succeed
  • how likely is it to arrive at a functional protein or gene by chance? Is it more like the 4-dial lock (can be done with lots of time) or the 10 billion dial lock (amount of time required exceeds the time available)?
  • the probability is LOW because there is only one sequence of numbers that has unlock function
  • consider a short protein of 150 amino acids has 10 to the 195th power possible sequences
  • if many of these sequences of amino acides had biological function, then it might be easier to get to one by random mutation and selection than it is with a lock that only unlocks for ONE sequence
  • how many of the possible sequences have biological function?
  • Thanks to research done by Douglas Axe, we now know that the number of functional amino acid sequences for even a short protein is incredibly small…
  • Axe found that the odds of getting a functional sequence of amino acids that will fold and have biological function is 1 in 10 to the 77th power
  • Is that number too improbable to reach by chance? well, there are 10 to 65th atoms in the entire Milky Way galaxy… so yes, this is a very improbable outcome
  • can random genetic mutations search through all the sequences in order to find the one in 10 to the 77th power one that has biological function? It depends on how much guessers we have and how many guesses we get in the time available
  • even with the entire 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth, only about 10 to the 40th organisms have ever lived, which far smaller fraction of the 10 to the 77th total sequences
  • even with a very fast mutation rate, you would not be able to reach a functional protein even with all that time, and even with all those organisms

I was once having a discussion with a woman about the research that Axe did at the Cambridge University lab. He published four articles in the Journal of Molecular Biology. I held out one of the papers to her and showed her the numbers. She said over and over “I hate the Discovery Institute! I hate the Discovery Institute!” Well, yeah, but you can’t make the Journal of Molecular Biology go away with hating the Discovery Institute. JMB is peer-reviewed, and this was experimental evidence – not a theory, not a hypothesis.

We have been blessed by the Creator and Designer of the universe in this time and place with overwhelming evidence – an abundance of riches. For those who have an open mind, this is what you’ve been waiting for to make your decision. For the naturalists who struggle so mightily to block out the progress of experimental science, they’ll need to shout louder and shut their eyes tighter and push harder to block their ears. Maybe if they keep screaming “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” over and over to themselves, they will be able to ignore the real science a little longer.

Progressive magazine explains how leftist elites worked to “fortify” e1ection

Joy Pullmann wrote something about the recently published Time magazine article, which explained how powerful elites joined together to “fortify” the e1ection so that B1den would win.

The Federalist:

Corporate media has spent the last year arguing that Donald Trump’s claims about 2020 e1ection integrity amount to “seditious” consp1racy theories. While maintaining that narrative despite the cognitive dissonance, Time magazine’s Feb. 15 cover story pulls back the curtain on a “consp1racy” among a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” in an “an extraordinary shadow effort” that successfully pushed Trump from office.

“In a way, Trump was right,” writes Time national political correspondent Mo11y Ba11. “There was a consp1racy unfolding behind the scenes.” She later describes this “consp1racy” as something that “sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

[…]The consp1racy’s “work touched every aspect of the e1ection,” Ba11 writes. “They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off v0ter-suppression 1awsuits, recruited armies of po11 workers and got millions of people to v0te by mail for the first time.”

This, she and the “dozens” of consp1racists she interviewed claim, is evidence of their efforts to “protect the e1ection.”

[…]For example, mail-in ballots are known as an unreliable voting method, even without its potential assistance to criminal fraud such as ballot-stuffing, because they create margins of error well within the margin of actual v0tes in a close e1ection. That’s why labor unions, Jeff Bezos, and many foreign countries refuse to use them.

Therefore, in a mail-in e1ection such as 2020, in which half of the total v0tes and most of the B1den v0tes were mail-in, one can control the outcome simply by controlling the po11-watchers and v0te-counters. Even if they are honest, their unconscious bias or the simple mayhem of unreadable handwriting and signatures creates the conditions for untrustworthy results.

[…]One of the core problems with the 2020 e1ection is that many states did not follow their voting laws, suspending them with the excuse of COVID (which the Centers for Disease Control said the day before the e1ection, after most v0tes were already cast, was not necessary). States were pressured or forced to do so, not by what Ba11 hilariously calls Trump’s “henchmen,” but by lawyered-up leftist pressure groups that strategically undermined e1ection protections with pre-emptive 1awsuits while courts rolled over for them.

These leftist lawyers were unquestionably the aggressors in this situation, as Hans van Spakovsky and others have documented, filing as many as four times the number of 1awsuits Trump or Republicans filed. Their efforts caused the very “e1ection confusion” Ba11 claims her vaunted “consp1racy” was trying to avoid. What do you call people who do one thing while claiming to do the opposite? Idiots or liars. And I don’t think these people are idiots.

[…]This “consp1racy” also rigged the e1ection by pre-emptively controlling the information v0ters were able to receive about the candidates. They did this by colluding with big tech companies to hide information that made Joe B1den look bad. Post-e1ection research found that just the consp1racy’s successful information control on Hunter B1den’s alleged corruption and its potential links to his father would have been enough to tip the e1ection.

[…]The Time article bears close and repeated reading. One last area of observation here concerns its discussion of the alliance between big business and big labor.

[…]Amid the big business-big labor discussion, Ba11’s interviewees admit the leftist rioters who terrorized America throughout 2020 did so with the tacit permission of higher-ups, who can turn the riots on and off at will.

New CBO report: Biden’s minimum wage hike would cost 1.4 million jobs

The first principle of being a competent human is to not destroy yourself with your own bad decisions.

Daily Wire reports:

In a report released Monday, the Congressional Budget Office said that hiking the minimum wage to $15 might reduce poverty, but at the cost of 1.4 million jobs and by adding billions to the federal deficit.

President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have both pledged to back legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $15 — what both the president and the socialist Senator call a “living wage.”

[…]The plan, CNN notes, would help some people, increasing “worker pay by $333 billion, giving a boost to some 17 million workers whose wages would otherwise be below $15, as well as many of the 10 million workers whose wages would otherwise be slightly above that level.”

People will lose their jobs:

The jump would “cut employment by 1.4 million workers and increase the federal deficit by $54 billion over a decade,” the outlet notes. And while federal spending on things like supplemental food aid programs might decrease, “spending on Medicaid and unemployment benefits would increase because of higher enrollment by those who lose their jobs.” Prices on goods and services would also rise, The Wall Street Journal adds.

Prices of goods and services would go up:

“Higher wages would increase the cost of producing goods and services, and businesses would pass some of those increased costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, resulting in reduced demand, the CBO said,” per the WSJ. “From 2021 to 2031, the plan would increase payments to workers by a net $333 billion, after accounting for wage increases and job losses, the study found. That would allow low-income workers to spend more but would increase labor costs for businesses and raise prices, especially at restaurants. The loss of jobs would cause a modest negative overall impact on economic growth.”

We’ve already seen tens of thousands of small businesses shut down as a result of Wuhan virus regulations. Raising the minimum wage would make many of more small businesses shut down. We don’t even need studies to predict the future to prove this. We can look at what happened in the past, in cities that raised the minimum wage.

But does it work?

Here’s an example of how this works in reality, from San Francisco, a Democrat-run city.

ABC News reports:

San Francisco’s minimum wage is currently $11.05 an hour. By July of 2018, the minimum wage in San Francisco will be $15 an hour. That increase is forcing Borderlands Bookstore to write its last chapter now.

[…]Borderlands was turning a small profit, about $3,000 last year. Then voters approved a hike in the minimum wage, a gradual rise from $10.75 up to $15 an hour.

“And by 2018 we’ll be losing about $25,000 a year,” he said.

It’s an unexpected plot twist for loyal customers.

“You know, I voted for the measure as well, the minimum wage measure,” customer Edward Vallecillo said. “It’s not something that I thought would affect certain specific small businesses. I feel sad.”

Consider this story about Seattle, another Democrat-run city.

Excerpt:

Restaurants Unlimited, a Seattle-based chain with restaurant locations in 47 US cities, announced on Sunday it was seeking Chapter 11 protection, citing “progressive” wage laws.

The company, which has operated since the Lyndon Johnson Administration, said rising labor costs—part of a national trend of government-mandated minimum increases—were part of its decision.

“Over the past three years, the company’s profitability has been significantly impacted by progressive wage laws along the Pacific coast that have increased the minimum wage,” Chief Restructuring Officer David Bagley said in court filings, The Seattle Times reports. “As a large employer in the Seattle metro market, for instance, the company was one of the first in the market to be forced to institute wage hikes.”

[…]BLS data show that New York City experienced its sharpest decline in restaurant jobs since 9/11 following its passage of a $15 minimum wage law. In California, a local newspaper recently detailed how an entire business district virtually disappeared following the city’s aggressive minimum wage push.

It sounds like such a good idea to give poor people a raise, but you have to ask about how this policy affects the job creator who PAYS the wages. Minimum wage laws produce bad results. We as a nation have to decide whether we are going to vote based on feelings and peer approval, or vote based on achieving good results.