Commentary

Does sex before marriage have any effect on your future relationships?

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Is it OK to tell women they are wrong?
Do young people understand the long-term impact of premarital sex?

I’ve posted before about how premarital sex affects the stability of marriages by making divorce more likely. But there has been more research published since. Let’s take a look.

Here a good study on relationship tempo and relationship quality.

Abstract:

Rapid sexual involvement may have adverse long-term implications for relationship quality. This study examined the tempo of sexual intimacy and subsequent relationship quality in a sample of married and cohabiting men and women. Data come from the Marital and Relationship Survey, which provides information on nearly 600 low- to moderate-income couples living with minor children. Over one third of respondents became sexually involved within the first month of the relationship. Bivariate results suggested that delaying sexual involvement was associated with higher relationship quality across several dimensions. The multivariate results indicated that the speed of entry into sexual relationships was negatively associated with marital quality, but only among women. The association between relationship tempo and relationship quality was largely driven by cohabitation. Cohabiting may result in poorer quality relationship because rapid sexual involvement early in the romantic relationship is associated with entrance into shared living.

The authors are from Cornell University and University of Wisconsin – Madison. Prestigious schools, and very far to the left.

Here’s another recent study that shows that if a woman has more partners than just her husband as a premarital sex partner, the risk of divorce increases.

Conclusion:

Using nationally representative data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, I estimate the association between intimate premarital relationships (premarital sex and premarital cohabitation) and subsequent marital dissolution. I extend previous research by considering relationship histories pertaining to both premarital sex and premarital cohabitation. I find that premarital sex or premarital cohabitation that is limited to a woman’s husband is not associated with an elevated risk of marital disruption. However, women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship have an increased risk of marital dissolution.

Here’s another study that makes it even more clear.

Findings:

Data from the 1988 US National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were utilized to assess the impact of premarital sexual activity on subsequent marital stability. Among white NSFG subjects first married in 1965-85, virgin brides were significantly less to have become separated or divorced (25%) than women who had not been virgins at marriage (35%).

[…]The lower risk of divorce on the part of white women with no premarital sexual experience persisted even after numerous intervening and background variables were controlled.

And I am going to save the best study for last. This marvelous PDF is from August 2014, and is put out by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. It is comprehensive, and links to many papers from decades ago to the state of the art today. It seems like people are really rushing into sex these days, without much thought. They want to have fun, feel accepted, be like their friends, conform to the culture. But sometimes, it’s better to be practical than to be governed by the desire for fun and thrills. If you want to do something, look at the research and find out what the consequences are before you do it. That’s what a sensible person does.

When it comes to discussing the Bible’s rules on sex, evidence is very important. Evidence is what convinces even non-Chrsitian people to take the Bible seriously when it comes to putting sex in its proper place. That’s why we need to know what the Bible says, and we need to augment that with real-world evidence so that it is applied to our own decision-making, and so that we can be persuasive when discussing it with others.

News

Planned Parenthood executive admits abortion victim is a baby in fourth video

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Planned Parenthood's Dr. Savita Yeshawant Ginde says:
Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Yeshawant Ginde says: “it’s a baby”

WARNING: The following video contains mature subject matter. Viewer discretion is advised.

The fourth Planned Parenthood sting video is out, and it’s the most serious one yet.

Anika Smith writes about it at The Stream:

For the second time in a week, the Center for Medical Progress has a new video up featuring undercover footage inside Planned Parenthood.

[…]The setup is a meeting with Dr. Ginde, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ Vice President and Medical Director. Her Planned Parenthood affiliate does over 10,000 abortions a year and has a contract to supply fetal body parts to Colorado State University.

[…]The smoking gun in this video is this statement by Ginde:

Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact.

“Delivers before” means these children are potentially born-alive infants. According to the Center for Medical Progress:

Since PPRM does not use digoxin or other feticide in its 2nd trimester procedures, any intact deliveries before an abortion are potentially born-alive infants under federal law (1 USC 8).

So that would be infanticide then, not mere abortion.

Don’t “get caught” doing this:

[…]Ginde also suggests ways for Planned Parenthood to cover up its sale of aborted body parts. “Putting it under ‘research’ gives us a little bit of an overhang over the whole thing,” Ginde remarks. “If you have someone in a really anti state who’s going to be doing this for you, they’re probably going to get caught.”

With a good lawyer, you won’t get caught:

At one point Ginde seems to suggest that PPRM’s lawyer, Kevin Paul, is helping the affiliate skirt the fetal tissue law: “He’s got it figured out that he knows that even if, because we talked to him in the beginning, you know, we were like, ‘We don’t want to get called on,’ you know, ‘selling fetal parts across states.’” The buyers ask, “And you feel confident that they’re building those layers?” to which Ginde replies, “I’m confident that our Legal will make sure we’re not put in that situation.”

It’s a baby?

The video also features footage inside the lab. It is hard to watch, and many readers will find it disturbing. At one point, there’s a cracking sound of an aborted fetus’s skull, and Dr. Ginde says, “It’s a baby,” as she points out the heart and kidneys and explains that a per-item pricing system is best for them.

It’s a baby boy:

Dr. Ginde and her medical assistants pull out tiny eyeballs, heart, kidneys, stomach and identify the child at the end as “another boy!”

Hmmm. I thought that the Planned Parenthood story we were being told was that this was just “medical tissue”. It’s just a clump of cells, that’s what the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media tell me. But that’s not what I see in this video. I see people saying “it’s a baby” and “another boy”.

It was a baby boy, and he had a life ahead of him. Maybe he would have gone to school and studied computer science, like me. Maybe he would have cared for his siblings. Maybe he would have met a girl and got married and provided for her. Maybe he would have become a father himself. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s never going to happen now, because he’s dead. They killed him. They took away his whole future so that they could have more money for themselves in their present. No one was there to protect him. Not even his own mother wanted to protect him.

Rachel Alexander has a list of “admissions of guilt” in the video in an article up at The Stream. If you are trying to make sense of what this video means, you should read this post.

She concludes:

This fourth video alone provides more than enough evidence that Planned Parenthood is selling fetal body parts not merely to cover costs but for profit, a violation of 42 U.S. Code 289g. It also reveals that when Planned Parenthood  calls their organ harvesting work “research,” this is at least sometimes mere pretense.

Its defenders and friends in the media dutifully repeat those words whenever anyone objects to funding Planned Parenthood. This video will make this ruse much harder to pull off.

If you want to read a good article that summarizes everything that happened this week with these videos, then check out this article from The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway.

Her list:

  1. Injunction On Release Of Potential Upcoming Video
  2. Crisis Communications Firm Helping Planned Parenthood
  3. Planned Parenthood Claims Web Site Attacked, But Was It?
  4. Media Very Interested In Cecil The Lion, But Not Cecile The President Of Planned Parenthood
  5. Hillary Clinton Says Videos Are ‘Disturbing’
  6. Planned Parenthood Poll Mocked
  7. Planned Parenthood Fails To Show Up To Texas Hearing
  8. Trouble for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood
  9. #UnplannedParenthood hashtag
  10. Planned Parenthood Mammogram Falsehood Resurrected

One last thing. You’ll recall that our glorious President Barack Obama voted multiple times against a bill that would require doctors to care for babies who were born alive during abortions. So where do you think he stands on “intact” fetuses? And this is the man who so many “pro-life” voters voted for twice in a row. When you meet someone who votes Democrat, you are look at someone who supports everything you see Planned Parenthood doing in these videos. I have been talking to some Democrats about this, and they cannot even look me in the eyes. Make sure you know what you are doing when you cast your vote in elections. You will have to answer for it on that day.

Polemics

New software calculates the probability of generating functional proteins by chance

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Apologetics and the progress of science
Apologetics and the progress of science

Here’s an article sent to me by JoeCoder about a new computer program written by Kirk Durston.

About Kirk:

Kirk Durston is a scientist, a philosopher, and a clergyman with a Ph.D. in Biophysics, an M.A. in Philosophy, a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, and a B.Sc. in Physics. His work involves a significant amount of time thinking, writing and speaking about the interaction of science, theology and philosophy within the context of authentic Christianity. He has been married for 34 years to Patti and they have six children and three grandchildren. He enjoys landscape photography, antiques of various types, wilderness canoeing and camping, fly fishing, amateur astronomy, reading, music, playing the saxophone (alto), and enjoying family and friends.

Kirk grew up on a cattle and grain farm in central Manitoba, Canada, where he spent countless hours wandering around on his own in the forest as a young boy, fascinated with the plants and animals that are native to that region of the province. Throughout his teen years he spent six days a week in the summer working as a farm hand with cattle and grain. He left his father’s farm at the age of 19 to go to university.

Canada? Can anything good come out of Canada? Oh well, at least he’s not from Scotland. Anyway, on to the research, that’s what we care about. Code!

Summary of the article:

  • Biological life requires proteins
  • Proteins are sequences of amino acids, chained together
  • the order of amino acids determines whether the sequence has biological function
  • sequences that have biological function are rare, compared to the total number of possible sequences
  • Durston wrote a program to calculate the number of the probability of getting a functional sequence by random chance
  • The probability for getting a functional protein by chance is incredibly low

With that said, we can understand what he wrote:

This program can compute an upper limit for the probability of obtaining a protein family from a wealth of actual data contained in the Pfam database. The first step computes the lower limit for the functional complexity or functional information required to code for a particular protein family, using a method published by Durston et al. This value for I(Ex) can then be plugged into an equation published by Hazen et al. in order to solve the probability M(Ex)/N of ‘finding’ a functional sequence in a single trial.

I downloaded 3,751 aligned sequences for the Ribosomal S7 domain, part of a universal protein essential for all life. When the data was run through the program, it revealed that the lower limit for the amount of functional information required to code for this domain is 332 Fits (Functional Bits). The extreme upper limit for the number of sequences that might be functional for this domain is around 10^92. In a single trial, the probability of obtaining a sequence that would be functional for the Ribosomal S7 domain is 1 chance in 10^100 … and this is only for a 148 amino acid structural domain, much smaller than an average protein.

For another example, I downloaded 4,986 aligned sequences for the ABC-3 family of proteins and ran it through the program. The results indicate that the probability of obtaining, in a single trial, a functional ABC-3 sequence is around 1 chance in 10^128. This method ignores pairwise and higher order relationships within the sequence that would vastly limit the number of functional sequences by many orders of magnitude, reducing the probability even further by many orders of magnitude – so this gives us a best-case estimate.

There are only about 10^80 particles in the entire physical universe – 10^85 at the most. These are long odds. But maybe if we expand the probabilistic resources by buying more slot machines, and we pull the slot machine lever at much faster rate… can we win the jackpot then?

Nope:

What are the implications of these results, obtained from actual data, for the fundamental prediction of neo-Darwinian theory mentioned above? If we assume 10^30 life forms with a fast replication rate of 30 minutes and a huge genome with a very high mutation rate over a period of 10 billion years, an extreme upper limit for the total number of mutations for all of life’s history would be around 10^43. Unfortunately, a protein domain such as Ribosomal S7 would require a minimum average of 10^100 trials, about 10^57 trials more than the entire theoretical history of life could provide – and this is only for one domain. Forget about ‘finding’ an average sized protein, not to mention thousands.

So even if you have lots of probabilistic resources, and lots of time, you’re still not going to get your protein.

Compare these numbers with the 1 in 10^77 number that I posted about yesterday from Doug Axe. There is just no way to account for proteins if there is no intelligent agent to place the amino acids in sequence. When it comes to writing code, writing blog posts, writing music, or placing Scrabble letters, you need an intelligence. Sequencing amino acids into proteins? You need an intelligence.