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News

Study: the early Earth’s atmosphere contained oxygen

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

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”. This paper is significant because it undermines naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life.

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.

So here’s where we stand. If you are a materialist, then you need a reducing environment on the early Earth in order to get organic building blocks (amino acids) from inorganic materials. However, the production of these organic building blocks (amino acids) requires that the early Earth atmosphere be oxygen-free. And the problem with this new research, which confirms previous research, is that the early Earth contained huge amounts of oxygen – the same amount of oxygen as we have today. This is lethal to naturalistic scenarios for creating the building blocks of life on the Earth’s surface.

Other problems

If you would like to read a helpful overview of the problems with a naturalistic scenario for the origin of life, check out this article by Casey Luskin.

Excerpt:

The “origin of life” (OOL) is best described as the chemical and physical processes that brought into existence the first self-replicating molecule. It differs from the “evolution of life” because Darwinian evolution employs mutation and natural selection to change organisms, which requires reproduction. Since there was no reproduction before the first life, no “mutation – selection” mechanism was operating to build complexity. Hence, OOL theories cannot rely upon natural selection to increase complexity and must create the first life using only the laws of chemistry and physics.

There are so many problems with purely natural explanations for the chemical origin of life on earth that many scientists have already abandoned all hopes that life had a natural origin on earth. Skeptical scientists include Francis Crick (solved the 3-dimensional structure of DNA) and Fred Hoyle (famous British cosmologist and mathematician), who, in an attempt to retain their atheistic worldviews, then propose outrageously untestable cosmological models or easily falsifiable extra-terrestrial-origin-of-life / panspermia scenarios which still do not account for the natural origin of life. So drastic is the evidence that Scientific American editor John Horgan wrote, “[i]f I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolution … and focus instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology.”3

The article goes over the standard problems with naturalistic scenarios of the origin of life: wrong atmosphere, harmful UV radiation, interfering cross-reactions, oxygen levels, meteorite impacts, chirality, etc.

Most people who are talking about intelligent design at the origin of life talk about the information problem – how do you get the amino acids to form proteins and how do you get nucleotide bases to code for amino acids? But the starting point for solving the sequencing problem is the construction of the amino acids – there has to be a plausible naturalistic scenario to form them.

News

Boys underperform at school because feminists block attempts to help them

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College graduation rates for men and women
College graduation rates for men and women (Source: Brookings Institute)

Britain is a country that is absolutely dominated by radical feminists. And it affects everything from their collectivist views on economic policy, to their pro-criminal views in the justice system, to their open-borders views on immigration, their preference for government-run healthcare, their hatred of self-defense, and so on. So, I wouldn’t expect to see an article about the plight of boys in a feminist society published in a British newspaper.

Nevertheless, here is an article from the UK Telegraph that explains how the public schools are handling the problem of underperforming boys.

It says:

Britain’s education system is failing to tackle the “astonishing” underperformance of boys as feminists have made the topic “taboo”, the former head of the university admissions service has warned.

Mary Curnock Cook, who was chief executive of Ucas until last year, said the fact that boys are falling behind in education is a national scandal – yet it is such an “unfashionable” topic to discuss that it has become “normalised”.

Girls outperform boys in all aspects of education, from primary school to GCSEs and A-level results. Last year, 57 per cent of women went to university compared to 43 per cent of men, a gap that has widened significantly over the last decade.

[…]Ms Curnock Cook said that the debate about gender equality tends to be dominated by issues such as the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling.

“But those are work issues, not education issues,” she said. “Quite often initiatives to support men do meet derision from feminists.”

When attempts are made to address men’s issues, they are ridiculed and are met with the “wrath” of feminist and gender equality groups, she said.

Last month the only university in the UK with a men’s officer scrapped the role after the candidate withdrew due to “harassment”.

But, it’s happening in America as well.

An article from 2013 appeared in the far-left The Atlantic. It explains how the school system punishes boys and favors girls – from kindergarten to the workplace, where women receive affirmative action preferences.

Excerpt:

Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to have high academic aspirations. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree (13 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls). By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. During the same period, the gap between girls and boys earning mostly A’s nearly doubled—from three to five percentage points.

This gap in education engagement has dire economic consequences for boys. A 2011 Brookings Institution report quantifies the economic decline of the median male: For men ages 25 to 64 with no high school diploma, median annual earnings have declined 66 percent since 1969; for men with only a high school diploma, wages declined by 47 percent. Millions of male workers, say the Brookings authors, have been “unhitched from the engine of growth.”  The College Board delivered this disturbing message in a 2011 report about Hispanic and African-American boys and young adults: “Nearly half of young men of color age 15 to 24 who graduate from high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead.” Working-class white boys are faring only slightly better. When economist Andrew Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University examined gender disparities in the Boston Public Schools, they found that for the class of 2007, among blacks and Hispanics, there were 186 females for every 100 males attending a four-year college or university. For white students: 153 females to every 100 males.

Just like in the UK, American feminists oppose doing anything to help boys:

In the U.S., a powerful network of women’s groups works ceaselessly to protect and promote what it sees as female interest. But there is no counterpart working for boys—they are on their own.

Previously, I blogged about a study showing that female teachers grade boys lower than girls.

It’s important for parents to understand that the problem of boys underperforming in school and work is not caused by boys. It’s not with video games, it’s not with sports, or anything else that anti-male people might blame. The problem with boys not learning and boys not working is caused by an education system dominated by anti-male feminists who systematically discriminate against boys, making it harder for them to learn the skills they need to find work.

The problem isn’t going to be fixed by airhead feminist pastors and other male “leaders” telling boys to “man up”. The problem is going to be fixed when parents realize that radical feminism is hostile to boys, and that institutions that are dominated by radical feminism are damaging to boys. I have a Jewish friend named Ari who homeschools all his children. He spends a lot of time and effort on this. He told me that sending boys to public schools is child abuse. I used to laugh at him when he said that. What a funny exaggeration, I thought. Now I’m not so sure he was joking.

News

38-year-old single mother of seven, pregnant with twins, demands better government housing

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38-year-old single mother with 7 kids, 2 more on the way
38-year-old single mother with 7 kids, 2 more on the way

I saw this article about an unmarried woman, pregnant with twins, who already has 7 children from a variety of men. She is currently living in a 4-bedroom house paid for by taxpayers. She is angry because the government isn’t giving her enough money to pay for her lifestyle choices.

This article comes from the UK Daily Mail:

A 38-year-old mother-of-seven who is pregnant with twins is begging to be rehoused from her ‘hellish’ four-bedroom council flat which she says isn’t good enough for her.

[…]The single mother said: ‘My relationship with some of my children is at breaking point, we can’t keep living like this.

[…]’I just want to get out of this hell. I’d rather live anywhere else, as long as it is not in here. It has been really tough.

‘I’m feeling down every night and sometimes you just feel like giving up. But I just have to keep going for the sake of the kids.’

She can fix everything that’s gone wrong with a little more taxpayer money. That will make it unnecessary for her to choose men who commit before sex, and let her have the freedom to choose the “best” men for relationships.

More:

After spending a month in various hotels, West Lothian Council found them the flat in Bathgate and they moved in on September 20.

But after moving into her new Bathgate property, Ms Burns complained that the flat did not come with a television…

She wasn’t even provided with a taxpayer-funded telly! How else to people get televisions except from welfare programs?

Anyway, how did this happen? Well, it happens because women are increasingly choosing men who are not willing to marry first, and using premarital sex and cohabitation to land them. Something that the previous generation of married women from 50 years ago would never have done.

The Daily Caller explains:

Unmarried couples are having roughly 40 percent of all births in the U.S., marking a trend that may be detrimental to the upbringing of those children.

For the first time in U.S. history, out-of-wedlock births in America are largely a result of cohabitation, according to the United Nations Population Fund 2018 State of World report released Wednesday. Single mothers had nearly 90 percent of out-of-wedlock births in 1968, but that number decreased to 53 percent in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Compared to children of married parents, those with cohabiting parents are more likely to experience the breakup of their families, be exposed to ‘complex’ family forms, live in poverty, suffer abuse, and have negative psychological and educational outcomes,” according to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS).

[…]Children with single parents have the highest rates of poverty followed by children living with unmarried, cohabiting parents, the IFS reported.

Between 2006 and 2010, 23 percent of births to married women were unintended while 51 percent of births to unmarried cohabiting women were unintended. That number rose to 67 percent for unmarried women not cohabiting.

Two-thirds of cohabiting parents split up before their child reaches age 12, while only a quarter of married parents divorce, according to an April 2017 Brookings Institution report.

The problem of fatherless children is getting worse. And taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for it – that’s what the story of the 38-year-old woman shows. Productive people have to pay when women are not persuaded to make better decisions about which men to have relationships with, and when to have sex.

My experience

I know three young women who are cohabitating right now. I have had a few conversations with them about what they are studying, what jobs they want to get, and what their plans for the future are.

All three of these women have never married, and are in their early 20s and attractive. Two of them have children. The live-in boyfriends are getting sex without having to commit first. The boyfriends (judging from photos) seem to have been chosen purely for looks. Tall, muscles, beards, tattoos, piercings, etc. Obviously, none of them is a Christian. There just isn’t anything in society telling young women that a Christian worldview matters in a relationship. And none of the men has a STEM degree, a career or savings -they’re too young to have those things to prove their ability to provide. But they’re still co-habitating, and get all the benefits of a wife without having to have proven themselves capable of the responsibilities, expectations and obligations of a husband.

Each of these women is spending the young and attractive period of her life in unstable relationships with men who think of sex as recreational, rather than something that is saved for inside the marriage covenant. If their past relationships fail, they will have a much harder time finding a good man. They will have sexual baggage. They will probably have children from another man. They will have bitterness and mistrust towards men. They will be selfish and unwilling to give to a future husband. The same women who will complain that no one will marry them at age 35 are the ones who could easily have had a marriage-ready man at age 25.