News

New study: function found for beta-globin pseudogene that was labeled “junk” during Dover trial

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Casey Luskin tells us about a new study in Evolution News.

Excerpt:

A new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution argues that the famous beta-globin pseudogene is functional. Why is this pseudogene famous?

Well, it’s been Exhibit A — literally, offered as evidence in a court case — for critics of intelligent design who argue that our genome is full of useless, functionless junk, and therefore can’t be a product of design. Near the beginning of his testimony on the very first day of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller testified to the court that the beta-globin pseudogene is “broken, and it has a series of molecular errors that render the gene non-functional.” (Day 1 AM, p. 79.) He further told the court:

And the fact that all three of these species have matching mistakes leads us to just one conclusion, and that’s the same conclusion that Charles Darwin predicted almost a century and a half ago, and that is that these three species share a common ancestor. Matching mistakes are evidence of common ancestry. (Day 1 AM, p. 81)

In his 2008 book Only a Theory, Miller is even more explicit in asserting that this pseudogene refutes intelligent design. He writes that “A detailed analysis of the beta-globin pseudogene shows a series of mutations have rendered it nonfunctional” (p. 102). In Miller’s view, that takes care of ID:

The gorilla and chimpanzee pseudogenes have exactly the same set of molecular errors [in their beta-globin pseudogene] … There’s no escaping the implication of these matching mistakes, and there’s no point in arguing that six identical mistakes could have turned up independently in three unrelated species. The only sensible interpretation is that the original errors developed at random in a single common ancestor of these three species. In a court of genetic copyright law, any motion that a designer could claim originality for the human genome would be tossed out in a flash. (pp. 102-103)

Now a new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, “Evolutionary Constraints in the β-Globin Cluster: The Signature of Purifying Selection at the δ-Globin (HBD) Locus and Its Role in Developmental Gene Regulation, argues that the beta-globin pseudogene is not broken, but in fact performs an important function in regulating gene expression.

Remember, Darwinists are still reeling from the ENCODE study that found that the non-coding DNA that they said was 100% junk was actually 80% functional. The trouble is that they are always letting their philosophy of naturalism get in the way of their science. They assume that nature is all there is. They assumed that everything is not designed. Then they are quick to say that things that aren’t junk are junk, in order to confirm their assumption. Problems occur later when good science comes along and proves their philosophical assumption of naturalism wrong. Do they then give up the philosophical assumption? Heck no – that’s their religion! But they ought to give it up if they were honest, and stick with the science instead. Too much bad religion among the Darwinists – that’s the problem.

Commentary

How marital affairs can lead to divorce, which harms children

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Dina tweeted this article from the UK Daily Mail about affairs and the harm they cause.

Excerpt:

Jean Duncombe, a sociologist who has conducted extensive research on the subject, says: ‘I’m puritanical when someone tells me they’re having an affair — because of the work we’ve done on the impact of divorce on the children.

‘If people say to me that the children don’t know, I say: “Are you sure?” or “Think about what you’re doing to the children” — and I never would have said that 20 years ago.’

For parents who have affairs are not only lying to their partners, they are often deceiving themselves about the impact their infidelity can have on their offspring.

‘The children are too young to understand what’s happening,’ they reason. ‘In any case, it doesn’t concern them. And children are resilient.’

All of the evidence points to the contrary. People don’t just betray their partners when they shatter family life with a serious affair — the sad truth is that their children grow up believing their parents have been unfaithful to them, too.

There is substantial research on the short and long-term effects of divorce if it isn’t handled well.

For children, these include low self-esteem, a sense of being abandoned, poor performance at school, anti-social behaviour and the heartbreak of simply missing the absent parent.

Separations provoked by an affair tend to be the most acrimonious. Each parent shoves the blame for the split on to the other, sometimes forcing the children to take sides by supporting his or her version of events.

By tearing a child’s loyalty in two, parents can inflict profound damage. To make matters worse, research has shown that around half of all fathers lose contact with their offspring within two years of the separation.

An acrimonious divorce, according to research, doesn’t simply hurt children at the time; it can also store up problems for their future.

So, even if their parents separated when they were small, they won’t necessarily suffer the full effects until they become adults themselves.

It can contribute to their own marital problems — including affairs of their own — or hamper their ability to form lasting relationships.

[…] When an affair is discovered, both parents are so anxious, angry and even traumatised that they have limited resources for dealing with more stress from their children, who are likely to be more demanding than usual.

In some families, sons and daughters are sucked into the emotional vortex. In others, they are given little by way of explanation other than: ‘Mummy and Daddy aren’t getting on very well at the moment.’

Lily says her adult children find it hard to trust and respect their father because he lied to them as children and still denies he had an affair with the woman to whom he’s now married.

‘My son went through a very bad time as a teenager, drinking too much and running away,’ she says.

‘Both children mind to this day that my ex has never come clean about what really happened.

‘My daughter hasn’t settled down with anyone yet — she doesn’t trust that it could last.

‘My son, who’s married, once asked me if I thought infidelity might be in his genes because of the fact his father was serially unfaithful.

‘He seriously considered not getting married at all because he didn’t want to risk hurting his girlfriend in the way that he’d been hurt.’

Very interesting read about what it is like to be a child in an environment like that. I think it’s worth it for us to read articles like this so that we take the problem seriously and make plans to avoid it. If we know how hard it is for children to go through something like this, then not only will we be more careful ourselves, but we’ll be more confident when telling other people who ask for our advice on these things. Sometimes, knowing the details of the harm that can be caused helps us to avoid behaviors that lead up to the harm. We have to know the harm, and we have to know the causes of the harm. Affairs cause divorces, and divorces harm children.

So let’s be careful when we choose who to marry. Has this person shown that they can be faithful? Can they control themselves sexually? Are they good at providing for our needs so that we won’t be tempted to have an affair? Are we good at providing for their needs so that they won’t be tempted to have an affair? How serious are they about religion and morality – do they care about moral obligations when they go against their self-interest? How accustomed are they to limiting their own conduct for the good of others, especially children and animals? Those are the questions we should be asking before getting married.

News

How the UK government penalizes stay-at-home moms and pushes kids into daycare

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Dina sent me this must-read article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

For years, parents like me who believe that the best place for a young child is at home with a loving parent have been ignored or mocked as smothering, over-protective mothers. Go back to work and put your child in nursery where he can socialise, we were told by ‘experts’ and feminists. Don’t feel guilty.

Unfortunately, the politicians listened — and state-subsidised childcare grew as a result. Between 1995 and 2010, mostly under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for children under five years old it grew by 36.4 per cent. It’s been an unmonitored social experiment on a huge scale.

[…][T]he tragic irony is that the plethora of unruly children ill-fitted to school coming out of our nurseries is a direct result of successive governments’ tunnel vision childcare policy.

It’s a policy which, through tax advantages and financial incentives, encourages mothers to go out to work, leaving young children in nurseries.

Under Labour, working mothers were championed and childcare was considered best left to state-subsidised nurseries. It was taboo even to suggest that stay-at-home mothers were performing an equally valid role.

The tragedy is that the Coalition seems to be continuing in the same vein.

[…]The most comprehensive research studies have shown that daycare nurseries breed bad behaviour.

A study in the U.S., which followed 1,000 children from birth to 15, found that those children who spent long hours in early daycare were more aggressive than those who had been cared for at home.

This is because young children are not designed to socialise in large groups of their peers. It may promote a quasi independence — but of the wrong kind.

It leads to children bullying or being bullied for social survival. ‘We let them fight it out,’ is how one helper describe her nursery’s approach.

[…]As a result of writing about childcare and bringing up children, I hear frequently from mothers who are distraught that they have had to return to work, leaving their children in daycare, because the Government has made it financially impossible for them to remain at home.

Not only has it withdrawn child benefit from households where a single breadwinner earns £60,000, while families in which both parents work and pull in a combined income of up to £98,000 will keep every penny, more recently it announced that families with two working parents will get tax breaks worth £2,000 a year.

The message is loud and clear: neither Cameron nor Clegg genuinely value the role of stay-at-home parents.

Their policies are cruel to mothers and to children, and they don’t bode well for the mental health or resilience of future generations.

Cameron and Clegg should create, at the very least, a neutral tax system that does not penalise mothers for staying at home.

And they should stop ignoring what all studies, mothers’ instincts and millennia of evolution have told us: that the best place for a very young child is with their mother or  father.

I have some pretty strong feelings against daycare, unless it’s a last resort. I think this article is helpful because a lot of people who vote for Democrats are women who one day hope to marry and be stay-at-home moms. They believe that socialism is somehow compatible with a strong marriage, a man who provides for the family, and a mother who focuses on the needs of her toddlers as they grow up. But socialism isn’t compatible with that, because socialism is wed to feminism. Feminism is the idea that women need to act like men in order to be equal to men. And the way that social engineers on the left achieve that goal is by creating taxes and incentives to push women out of the home. A stay-at-home mom has no value to the government because she isn’t paying taxes for the government to spend, too. They want her to work, both for ideological reasons and for financial reasons. People on the left think that society is more “equal” when parents are separated from their children and the children are raised communally by strangers. That’s “equal”. Some of the women in the UK who are complaining now undoubtedly voted for these policies. Maybe they had no choice since the Conservatives are the least bad option. But we have choices here, and we need to think carefully when we have the opportunity to vote.