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New study: apoptosis is unchanged from Cambrian fossils to modern humans

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Darwinian theory predicts that animals and animal subsystems all start of very small, and they get more and more complex as time passes, due to mutation and selection. That’s the theory. But is it true?

Here’s a striking article from Evolution News about a new PNAS peer-reviewed publication.

Excerpt:

Science progresses when investigators boldly question assumptions. Look at the assumption that a group of scientists questioned: Darwinian evolution. Eight scientists from San Diego State University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute published a bombshell in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The Precambrian explosion [they mean the Cambrian explosion] led to the rapid appearance of most major animal phyla alive today. It has been argued that the complexity of life has steadily increased since that event. Here we challenge this hypothesis through the characterization of apoptosis in reef-building corals, representatives of some of the earliest animals. Bioinformatic analysis reveals that all of the major components of the death receptor pathway are present in coral with high-predicted structural conservation with Homo sapiens. (Emphasis added.)

Apoptosis is “programmed cell death.” When a cell becomes unstable or diseased, genetic algorithms kill it in an orderly way, to prevent further harm to the organism. Specialized enzymes (especially the TNF superfamilies) switch on the program, setting locked-up destroyers called caspases loose in the cell.

[…]Corals have many of the same TNF enzymes that humans do. This got the team wondering:

The TNF receptor-ligand superfamilies (TNFRSF/TNFSF) are central mediators of the death receptor pathway, and the predicted proteome of Acropora digitifera contains more putative coral TNFRSF members than any organism described thus far, including humans. This high abundance of TNFRSF members, as well as the predicted structural conservation of other death receptor signaling proteins, led us to wonder what would happen if corals were exposed to a member of the human TNFSF (HuTNFα).

In a series of experiments, they inserted coral enzymes into human cells. The human cells died. Then they ran the reciprocal experiment, putting human TNF enzymes into coral, and its cells died too. Even the bleaching process was seen using human enzymes. The agents of death were perfectly interchangeable, despite 550 million years for evolution to have increased the complexity of the system.

[…]This is evidence against Darwinian evolution on both sides of the coin: it shows no evolutionary “progress” despite all that time, and it shows a complex system appearing abruptly right at the beginning of complex animal origins.

So you get the complexity right at the beginning, and it doesn’t change in 550 million years. It doesn’t fit with the Darwinian predictions.

News

IRS required BY LAW to store hard copies of all e-mails they claim to have lost

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From the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

The Internal Revenue Service is required by federal law to keep records of all agency emails and to print out hard copies of the emails to make sure they get saved in the event of a computer glitch.

The IRS recently claimed that it lost 24,000 of 67,000 emails that ex-official Lois Lerner sent between 2009 and 2011, due to a computer crash. The IRS, which agreed to turn over all of Lerner’s emails to the House Committee on Ways and Means, specifically lost emails Lerner sent to other Obama administration agencies and the White House. Lerner is a major figure in the targeting scandal that has hit the IRS.

[…]The IRS’s own definition of the Federal Records Act makes clear that emails must be saved and documented, according to an instructional page for employees on the IRS website.

“The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media,” according to the IRS. “Emails are records when they are: Created or received in the transaction of agency business; Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities; or Valuable because of the information they contain.”

“If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly,” according to the IRS. “The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy.”

“Please note that maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within the IRS email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of maintaining an official record,” the IRS stated. “Therefore, print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.”

Losing all evidence of agency emails, therefore, is a violation of federal law.

So if the e-mails are not found, then it’s a violation of federal law, and there will have to be an investigation, and charges will have to be laid against the guilty parties. Although you would never know it from the mainstream media, our beloved socialist government is acting more like on organized crime syndicate. It’s gangster government, as Michele Bachmann used to say.

 

 

 

News

Two new studies: fewer employers respond to resumes that mention religious affiliation

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The article about the studies appeared in Religion News Service.

Excerpt:

Recent college grads, take note: Mentioning a campus religion group on your resume — particularly a Muslim club — may lead to significantly fewer job opportunities.

Two new sociology studies find new graduates who included a religious mention on a resume were much less likely to hear back from potential employers.

The studies used fictitious resumes — with bland names that signaled no particular race or ethnicity. These were sent to employers who posted on the CareerBuilder website to fill entry-level job openings in sales, information technology and other fields suitable for first jobs out of college.

The researchers tested seven religious categories including: Roman Catholic, evangelical Christian, atheist, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, and one faith they just made up, “Wallonian,” to see what would happen compared to people who made no faith reference.

Fewer employers called back the “Wallonians,” as well as the others, reacting to “a fear of the unknown,” said University of Connecticut sociology professor Michael Wallace who led the studies.

In the South, where researchers sent 3,200 resumes, those with a religious mention got 29 percent fewer email responses and 33 percent fewer phone calls than otherwise identical resumes with no faith ties according to the study, released by the Southern Sociological Society on their Social Currents site.

Muslims faced the sharpest discrimination with 38 percent fewer emails and 54 percent fewer phone calls to the voice mailboxes set up by the researchers.

In New England, 6,400 applications were sent to 1,600 job postings by employers. But applications mentioning any religious tie were 24 percent less likely to get a phone call, according to the study published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.

Again, Muslims bore the brunt of discrimination, receiving 32 percent fewer emails and 48 percent fewer phone calls. Catholics were 29 percent less likely to get a call and pagans were 27 percent less likely — slightly better than the “Wallonian” applicants.

Fascinating. I think that there is something in American society that is frightened by people who have definite views on theological truths and moral truths. We don’t mind if you have these opinions as a personal preference, for your own life enhancement, but don’t bring it up in public as if it were real for everyone else.Why is that?

Well – I think it’s because people have these experience with religion being presented to them as children in non-cognitive ways. As a result of having it forced on them when they are young, they get uncomfortable with it. Once children get that perception that religion is a bunch of rules and regulations, they don’t have the same curiosity or tolerance for it. Some of them might even have had discusions with people who were all passion and no reason / evidence. People who would not give it a rest. Nobody wants to have a co-worker who has strong views about things, but cannot discuss it rationally when it’s appropriate to do so.