Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically

Creationism News – Sept 2013创造论新闻– 2013年9月 Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to make his excellent websites. The contents of this presentation were taken from David Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. Pray for his fast recovery from cancer surgery. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 1/4/2020 1

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • Induced pluripotent stem cells allow researchers to ethically create any cell type from an adult cell, raising hopes for regenerative medicine. Eyebrows started to raise recently, though, when labs grew brains with them and turned others into sperm and egg cells. • iPS brains: Austrian scientists have turned induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) into a “mini-brain” in a dish, comparable to a 9-week-old fetal brain, even showing neural activity. New Scientist described what happened when the stem cells were injected into a 3-D scaffold: 1/4/2020 2

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • In less than a month, the stem cells grew into brain-like “organoids” 3 to 4 millimetres across and containing structures that corresponded to most of the regions of the brain. For example, all the organoids they made appeared to contain parts of the cortex, about 70 per cent contained a choroid plexus – which produces spinal fluid – and about 10 per cent contained retinal tissue. • Live Science posted an Infographic on the experiment. The BBC News has a picture of the “cerebral organoids” that resulted. New Scientist attempted to placate any fears by claiming the mini-brain is not conscious: 1/4/2020 3

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • One thing the brains won’t be able to do though is become conscious. Knoblich says that although they provide a good structural model, the complex activities necessary for higher brain function cannot be reproduced. • That is, not now. But what of the future? The BBC article discussed how ethicists might worry about what could come next: 1/4/2020 4

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • The team in Vienna do not believe there are any ethical issues at this stage, but Dr Knoblich said he did not want to see much larger brains being developed as that would be “undesirable”. • Dr Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said he did not see ethical issues arising from the research so far. 1/4/2020 5

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • He told the BBC: “It’s a long way from conscience or awareness or responding to the outside world. There’s always the spectre of what the future might hold, but this is primitive territory.” • As usual, it begins with good intentions: studying the brain to understand developmental diseases. Somewhere, though, a science fiction writer is taking notes. 1/4/2020 6

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • Artificial sex: What happens when you take an iPS cell and turn it into an egg or sperm? What happens if they come together? Those are questions raised by developments in Japan. “In a technical tour de force, Japanese researchers created eggs and sperm in the laboratory,” begins an article by David Cyranoski in Nature News about experiments with mice: “Now, scientists have to determine how to use those cells safely — and ethically.” But can one trust the ethics of scientists intent on prizes and priority? 1/4/2020 7

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • In an embedded audio, Ewen Callaway discussed scenarios. Infertile couples desperate to have children may pounce on the opportunity—but so may same-sex couples. Those who worry are told that any ethical concerns are a long way off. It’s also unlikely that females, lacking the Y chromosome, will ever be able to make sperm. Callaway responds, though, that technical challenges may be overcome; then what? Who will put “oversight structures” in place? If America forbids it, will patients flood to other countries less conscientious about ethics? 1/4/2020 8

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • Katsuhiko Hayashi, the experimenter, has – once again – the best of intentions: to understand infertility. From mice, he is moving on to monkeys; but his lab and another are already beginning to tweak human cells. Ethically-questionable scenarios are already being thought about. Cyranoski writes, • Eventually, human embryos will need to be made and tested, a process that will be slowed by restrictions on creating embryos for research. New, non-invasive imaging techniques will enable doctors to sort good from bad embryos with a high degree of accuracy. Embryos that seem to be similar to normal IVF embryos could get the go-ahead for implantation into humans. This might happen with private funding or in countries with less-restrictive attitudes towards embryo research. 1/4/2020 9

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • When the technology is ready, even more provocative reproductive feats might be possible. For instance, cells from a man’s skin could theoretically be used to create eggs that are fertilized with a partner’s sperm, then nurtured in the womb of a surrogate. • Government restrictions, therefore – even if they materialize – can be sidestepped. No oversight is in place. The only roadblock, it appears, is the length of time it will take to advance the technology from mice to humans. 1/4/2020 10

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • Adult and iPS stem cell experiments continue to advance as before. iPSC’s can develop into cells that line blood vessels, Science Daily reported, offering hope to those with kidney disease dependent on heparin. Another Science Daily article showed that iPS cells are sufficient for regenerating heart muscle cells without the need for embryonic stem cells. 1/4/2020 11

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • Embryonic and fetal stem cells continue to be played with in some labs, though. UC Davis used them to produce myelin, Science Daily reported. Medical Xpress headlined, “Fetal tissue-derived stem cells may be ideal source for repairing tissues and organs,” claiming they are more effective than adult dermal cells. It isn’t clear from the article if the “small fetal skin biopsies” were obtained from babies in the womb brought to term, or from abortions. A related story, though, mentioned “The use of central nervous system fetal tissues derived from routine elective abortions to provide stem cells for transplantation procedures” as the source. 1/4/2020 12

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically合乎道德的干细胞可用于不道德 • Letting scientists police their own ethics is like expecting racers to put governors on their engines. If they can do it, they will. We’ve seen them play with human fetuses (babies) and embryos with reckless abandon, screaming when the government tries to set limits. Scientists enjoy such prestige these days, no one seems to have the chutzpah to stand in their way, and today’s ethicists are often materialists and Darwinists who don’t have a problem with “clumps of cells” in the first place. • What are now distant worries will some day become very real. That Hideous Strength, the nightmare scenario of C. S. Lewis, is coming to pass. We had better heed his warnings about science, scientism and a society unable to control its researchers. 1/4/2020 13

Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝 1/4/2020 14

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • The press and TV treat presumed scenarios like a “snowball Earth” as historic facts. A look at how the sausage is made, however, shows little empirical meat and mostly filler in a process characterized by tweaking, picking, and constant debate. • In a recent PNAS commentary, Boswell A. Wing of McGill University is glad that two geochemists appear to be buttressing the primary supporting evidence for a snowball earth (a presumed period of ice from poles to equator): a relationship between higher carbon dioxide levels and the end of the snowball. Careful reading of his commentary, though, shows a number of twists, turns, reversals, proposals and anomalies in the efforts to keep the narrative going. The following paragraph extracts out some of the hedging and fudging words that Wing used in efforts to support the snowball earth narrative: 1/4/2020 16

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • The proposal … creative solutions … the snowball debate … Whether the “original pillars” of the snowball hypothesis have survived this scrutiny is an active debate … elevated CO2 levels—is primarily inferred through the intricate veil … promised to lift this veil … what seemed to be direct evidence … This conclusion was recently turned on its head … inferred from the same evidence … conflicting interpretations … given a fixed atmospheric lifetime … estimated if an appropriate record … can be identified … 1/4/2020 17

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • This exercise requires two assumptions … must have remained close to modern estimates … the framework laid out above … originally seemed … hypothesized snowball state … not only a function of atmospheric CO2 levels … increased photosynthetic O2dilutes the isotopic anomaly … another potential control knob that could have amplified or suppressed … recently called upon to explain the large … anomalies … in an atmosphere not much more CO2–rich than today’s … A less-dilute signal would compensate for … Under the assumption of … this scenario is consistent with … very different from … that had originally been proposed … 1/4/2020 18

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • This dilemma has been neatly resolved with a unique mechanistic model … Relying on a clever calibration … to release the constraints of geochemical uniformitarianism … can produce … only if … recent bold extrapolation … is not applicable … seems … inference … dynamic … enabled a pair of unique constraints … two styles of snowball glaciations … delayed development … different timescale … leads to a pair … in South China … suggests … more likely … as might be expected … provocative hints … may eventually be overshadowed … can constrain … this approach should be applicable … holy grail … exploratory … consistent with a few previous quantitative estimates … may reflect a less pervasive process than the geologic record suggests … or perhaps … appears to have had … a quantitative narrative … the viability of this narrative .… 1/4/2020 19

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • These words vastly outnumber the actual appeals to empirical data, such as levels of oxygen-17 in ice cores or measurements of sulfide minerals. The empirical data, however, are useless without an interpretive framework. They could be interpreted various ways. In fact, Wing discussed a situation in which the very same data were “used” to produce opposite conclusions – one that suggested CO2 levels were much higher at the end of the snowball, and one that estimated they were the same as today. • Wing does produce one graph of “normalized gross biosphere production,” which only indirectly relates to the snowball earth hypothesis. It’s clear that someone must make assumptions to assess what the dozen or so data points mean. Since they cover 310 million assumed years, is there enough resolution to conclude anything? 1/4/2020 20

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • It appears that having a narrative is the real motivator here. The proposal of a scenario – even if mythical – provides jobs: • The proposal of a “snowball” Earth, covered in ice from poles to equator, occupies a special place in the hall of fame of Earth science hypotheses. Spectacular geological evidence for an icy Earth, creative solutions for the initiation and escape from a snowball state, a multitude of directly testable consequences and potential links to the origin of animals all speak to the fundamentally integrative nature of the proposal. This integrative nature allows for a broad range of scientific specializations—from astrophysics to molecular biology—to contribute to the snowball debate, but has also brought the hypothesis under continuous critical scrutiny. Whether the “original pillars” of the snowball hypothesis have survived this scrutiny is an active debate.… 1/4/2020 21

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • Wing briefly mentions “spectacular geological evidence for an icy Earth,” but within two sentences questions whether the “original pillars” of the hypothesis have survived scrutiny, saying they are still actively debated. From there he discusses how those pillars are not seen, but rather inferred, through an “intricate veil” of oceanic carbonate chemistry. Then it was on to conflicting interpretations of the same evidence and other problems that a new paper might resolve, Wing hopes. 1/4/2020 22

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • His last paragraph stresses the value of the narrative. While he asserts that the authors of a new paper provide a “quantitive footing,” it implies that everything prior has been qualitative. That’s a lot of faith to put on one paper. Even if the footing is solid, it means that scientists are only at the doorstep: • Despite its clear importance to extreme Earth-system events like the end-Permian and the Marinoan snowball Earth, examination of the initial arbiter of geologic trends in atmospheric CO2 and O2—global biospheric productivity—has remained mostly qualitative, inspired inferences from the fossil record notwithstanding. The paper by Cao and Bao places these examinations on quantitative footing and opens the door for new understanding of the coevolution of life and Earth. 1/4/2020 23

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • If one is only at the door of understanding, in other words, he does not yet have that understanding. The pursuit of understanding is worthwhile, but when the understanding is always beyond the threshold of a door, one could ask if the right door has been chosen. 1/4/2020 24

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • This is no different than giving idle scriptwriters a new plot to play with. One stands up and says, “What if the earth were once like a big snowball?” The others pipe in, “Cool idea! I love snowballs. I like it, man. What can we do with it?” The others start thinking of ideas: “Once upon a time, ice covered the whole earth!” When? “Uh, let’s say 635 million years ago… that doesn’t hurt the dinosaur script.” Someone asks, “But how did the snowball start?” They furrow their brows for a few minutes on that one, then somebody offers a “Maybe this” type of clever solution. Another asks, “How did it end?” More furrowed brows for a few minutes as they realize how difficult it is to get a frozen earth to melt again. “Maybe elevated carbon dioxide did it. You know, like global warming.” Everyone thinks that’s great. “We can even tie this in with Darwinian evolution, claiming that melting ice created an explosion of new life!” Cheers go up. “We have a script!” 1/4/2020 25

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • The fact-checkers report back with numerous problems. Data are hard to come by, and require interpretations that experts disagree on. The scriptwriters, eager to maintain their plot line, come up with “clever calibrations” and “creative solutions” for each impossibility or conflict. One of them says that they could “release the constraints of geochemical uniformitarianism” just this one time for the sake of the project. Stretching timescales, special pleading, and ad hoc scenarios are liberally sprinkled into the plot to keep the narrative going. They run to the press, touting, “Snowball Earth is a Fact!” The artists and animators go to work. Snowball Earth enters the public consciousness as a Fact of Science, while behind the scenes, the scriptwriters continue an “active debate” about it to look busy. 1/4/2020 26

Snowball Earth: Manufacturing a Narrative冰雪地球：制造的叙事 • Meanwhile, the sulfides and ice cores just sit there, silently, meaning only what some human being interprets them to mean. • Anyone taught to respect science for its presumed “Scientific Method” that supposedly guarantees Truth about the natural world should be appalled at what “historical science” has become. It’s job security for storytellers. The game is to become ensconced as a member of the accepted consensus, swear allegiance to Naturalism, then whale away. The media will love you for keeping them gainfully employed. As scientists parade by in triumph, only perceptive outsiders regret that Truth gets trampled in the streets under the chariot wheels of Imagination. 1/4/2020 27

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • Talk about power plants: did you know plants use electricity? Some fish, also, can navigate or stun their prey using electrical organs. • Power plants: Nature discussed how electrical signals are propagated in plants. The Venus flytrap and “sensitive plant” come to mind as spectacular examples of non-muscular leaf movement triggered by electricity, but there’s more: 1/4/2020 30

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • The mammalian nervous system can relay electrical signals at speeds approaching 100 metres per second. Plants live at a slower pace. Although they lack a nervous system, some plants, such as the mimosa (Mimosa pudica) and the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), use electrical signals to trigger rapid leaf movements. Signal propagation in these plants occurs at a rate of 3 centimetres per second — comparable to that observed in the nervous system of mussels. On page 422 of this issue, Mousavi et al. address the fascinating yet elusive issue of how plants generate and propagate electrical signals. The authors identify two glutamate-receptor-like proteins as crucial components in the induction of an electrical wave that is initiated by leaf wounding and that spreads to neighbouring organs, prompting them to mount defence responses to a potential herbivore attack. 1/4/2020 31

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • Who would have thought that cutting a leaf would send an electrical alarm? Experiments on common thale cress showed no response when a larva walked on a leaf, but an electrical signal spreading at 9 cm per minute when eaten. “The relay of the electrical signal was most efficient for leaves directly above or below the wounded leaf,” the article said. “These leaves are well connected by the plant vasculature, which conducts water and organic compounds, and is a good candidate for the transmission of signals over long distances.” Receipt of the signal turned on gene expression for defense compounds. “These fascinating observations clearly demonstrate that electrical signal generation and propagation have a crucial role in the initiation of defence responses at remote sites upon herbivore attack.” 1/4/2020 32

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • The authors of the original paper did not discuss evolution, other than to speculate that “a deeply conserved function for these genes might be to link damage perception to distal protective responses.” If so, this function must have “existed before the divergence of animals and plants.” 1/4/2020 33

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • Wired fish: Two more electric fish species have been found in the Amazon basin, but they appear to be wired differently. One is biphasic or “AC” like most others, but another is monophasic like “DC”. The article on Science Daily looked for evolutionary reasons why this might be so, but the interesting thing is that “these weakly fishes produce pulses of only a few hundred millivolts from an organ under the body that extends out onto a filamentous tail.” Too weak to stun prey like the jolts from the famous electric eel, the pulses are read by other members of the species, and by the opposite sex, for communication. The fish also use them “to ‘electrolocate’ through their complex aquatic environment at night.” As for evolution, the two fish are so similar as to be classified as the same species except for the differences in electrical phase of their signals. 1/4/2020 34

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • So many ways of receiving input from the world: touch, sight, sound, smell, taste, and now electricity. The living world is a marvel of interactions between organism and environment. Each sense is exquisitely designed and useful to the organism. Elegant systems are not the result of blind, unguided processes. We believe that viewing them as designed systems would energize research, both to seek understanding of superior design, and to desire to imitate it for improved engineering. The real science stopper is to assume, “Oh, it just evolved. It evolved because it evolved”– a soporific response possessing a dormitive virtue (cartoon and 5/25/05 commentary) 1/4/2020 35

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • 154 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolutionists say they still do not understand the origin of species. In addition, they’ve lost most of whatever data they had. • An article on Science Daily says evolutionists still haven’t left: • Darwin referred to the origin of species as “that mystery of mysteries,” and even today, more than 150 years later, evolutionary biologists cannot fully explain how new animals and plants arise. • Maybe they can take refuge in that phrase, “cannot fully explain” the answer. Maybe they can partly or mostly explain it. The article does not allow that reprieve. It’s even worse than not knowing: things they thought they knew are not true: 1/4/2020 38

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • For decades, nearly all research in the field has been based on the assumption that the main cause of the emergence of new species, a process called speciation, is the formation of barriers to reproduction between populations…. • But now a University of Michigan biologist and a colleague are questioning the long-held assumption that genetic reproductive barriers, also known as reproductive isolation, are a driving force behind speciation. • Rabosky and Matute were “surprised” by the results of their study. Looking at two-thirds of bird species and 9 fruit fly species, they expected to see a correlation between speciation rates and genetic markers of reproductive isolation. 1/4/2020 39

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • “We found no evidence that these things are related. The rate at which genetic reproductive barriers arise does not predict the rate at which new species form in nature,” Rabosky said. “If these results are true more generally — which we would not yet claim but do suspect — it would imply that our understanding of species formation is extremely incomplete because we’ve spent so long studying the wrong things, due to this erroneous assumption that the main cause of species formation is the formation of barriers to reproduction.” 1/4/2020 40

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • They said evolutionists’ “understanding” is not just incomplete, but “extremely incomplete.” Another example cited on Evolution News & Views shows that foraminifera do not fit the reproductive-isolation–speciation pattern. Since speciation and reproductive isolation appear uncorrelated, a “broader definition” of speciation is needed, they said. In addition, so-called ‘speciation genes’ “speciation genes probably play a minimal role in the formation of species,” they said. • All they could do was speculate that maybe most species, after splitting, go extinct, leaving no evidence in the fossil record. The press release from University of Michigan is entitled, “Long-held assumption about emergence of new species questioned.” 1/4/2020 41

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Whoops, We Lost Our Evidence • Meanwhile, Darwin’s tree has other problems, Science Daily said: holes. Large portions of work on the “tree of life” have been lost, a paper in PLoS Biology reported, because of lack of data accessibility. “Given that reproducibility is a pillar of scientific research, the preservation of scientific knowledge (underlying data) is of paramount importance,” the authors began, warning that lack of reproducibility and evidential support for the Tree of Life project threatens to label it as “soft science,” putting trust in the word of scientists instead of the actual data: 1/4/2020 42

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Perhaps more importantly, we call for a shift in thinking among all evolutionary biologists who rely on the power of phylogenetics to test hypotheses and make inferences. It is crucial for this broad discipline to consider the alignments and phylogenies themselves as key data that require appropriate storage for study reproducibility and data integration.… The biological community has lost most of the alignments and trees underlying the numerous phylogenetic analyses conducted over the past several decades—we should strive to do much better in the years ahead. 1/4/2020 43

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Science Daily says that most of the data has been “lost forever” from publications that referred to the data but did not store it so that it could be cross-checked. “There are ambiguities with the alignments, you have to make certain judgment calls, and so an alignment that I do is not going to be the same as an alignment that somebody else does,” lead author Bryan Drew said, based on a study of over 7,000 papers that found “about 70 percent of published genetic sequence comparisons are not publicly accessible, leaving researchers worldwide unable to get to critical data they may need” for their own comparisons. 1/4/2020 44

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Can you think of a more pitiful example in the history of science of a majority of eminent scientists believing things that prove not to be true, teaching falsehoods for over a century, and then carelessly losing most of the data that supposedly supports its core beliefs? What a sham that shaman Charlie started. He wrote a book on “the origin of species” but 154 years later, his disciples are still behind Square One! It would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that textbook makers, documentary producers, and educators worship at Charlie’s shrine. 1/4/2020 45

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • The law require that this monstrous “mystery” religion (with its long-standing “mystery of mysteries,” the “origin of species by means of natural selection”), with its racist implications (“the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life”) be taught as fact, fact, FACT in public schools—no alternatives allowed. 1/4/2020 46

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Not only do they keep going bankrupt and landing in jail on their own Monopoly board, they won’t let anyone else play; whoever tries is persecuted and expelled. If you aren’t yet angry at the damage done by the Charlietans for 154 years, you need to take a refresher course in righteous indignation. One thing you can do about it is spread the outreach of Creation-Evolution Headlines, where we expose these frauds with their own words. They don’t have a data storage problem; they have an integrity problem. Time for regime change. 1/4/2020 47

Scientists’ Letter Challenges PZ Myers’ Revisionism科学家们的信挑战PZ Myers的修正主义 • In a letter to Nature, three scientists set the record straight about theology and science, after atheist P.Z. Myers got off with only a mild rebuke in a previous book review. • Glenn Branch gave a fairly genteel review of The Happy Atheist by PZ Myers last month in Nature (Aug. 8). In response, Robert White (U of Cambridge), George Ellis (U of Cape Town; see mention in ENV) and Denis Alexander (Faraday Institute; see mention in ENV, an evolution defender, ENV) – no friends of creationism or intelligent design – decided to write Nature and list a few of the “religious believers” who founded modern science. 1/4/2020 50

Ethical Stem Cells Can Be Used Unethically