Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 62

At Quanta: Brain-Signal Proteins Evolved Before Animals Did

Some animal neuropeptides have been around longer than nervous systems.

Our human brains can seem like a crowning achievement of evolution, but the roots of that achievement run deep: The modern brain arose from hundreds of millions of years of incremental advances in complexity. Evolutionary biologists have traced that progress back through the branch of the animal family tree that includes all creatures with central nervous systems, the bilaterians, but it is clear that fundamental elements of the nervous system existed much earlier.

How much earlier has now been made dramatically clear by a recent discovery by a team of researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. They found that the chemical precursors of two important neurotransmitters, or signaling molecules used in nervous systems, appear in all the major animal groups that preceded creatures with central nervous systems.

Researchers found that, “choanoflagellates made protein precursors of two mature neuropeptides, phoenixin and nesfatin.”

Choanoflagellates, the microbes gathering into arrays in these false-color images, are the single-celled organisms most closely related to the animal kingdom. New work shows that their ancestors made proteins that were later repurposed by the nervous systems of the first animals.
Image: Thibaut Brunet

Their presence in choanoflagellates was a surprise because neuropeptides typically appear in the context of sender and receiver neurons. “In a unicellular organism, it’s more difficult to make sense of,” Yañez-Guerra said. “This shows that these neuronal molecules started evolving even before the need for this extensive communication between cell and cell. That’s why it was kind of shocking.”

The question that naturally arises is: What were those neuropeptide precursors doing in choanoflagellates, since it couldn’t have been neural signaling? There isn’t a definitive answer yet. Choanoflagellates do appear to produce the mature phoenixin neuropeptide, but not the mature nesfatin neuropeptide. It’s possible that choanoflagellates used their phoenixin neuropeptides to communicate with each other, for instance to coordinate the formation of choanoflagellate colonies.

 A variety of molecules very similar to neuropeptides are made by nearly all the early animal groups, including the ctenophores (comb jellies) and the cnidaria (jellyfish, corals and sea anemones). 

The neuropeptides aren’t the only thing that’s unique about ctenophore nervous systems: The structures of their neural networks are so unusual that researchers suspect they evolved independently of those seen in humans and other animals. Why ctenophores do things differently is a mystery, but it’s clear that nervous systems went through a period of tremendous experimentation and innovation early in their evolution — and that at least some of that experimentation began before animals even existed.

The first couple of sentences in this article make claims that exhibit such a wondrous lack of scientific clarity that they’re more like a political propaganda piece than an excerpt from a science article. “Incremental advances in complexity” that are far less demanding than anything leading to the modern human brain have been shown to lie outside of nature’s ability (see, for example, Douglas Axe’s book, Undeniable).

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At Sci-News: Chromatin First Evolved in Ancient Microbes 1-2 Billion Years Ago, New Research Suggests

Chromatin is the ensemble of genomic DNA and a large number of proteins. Despite its fundamental role in biology of eukaryotic cells, scientists lack a comprehensive understanding of chromatin evolution.

In almost every human cell, two meters-long DNA has to fit within a nucleus that is just 8 millionths of a meter wide. Like wool around a spool, the extreme space challenge requires DNA to wrap around structural proteins called histones. This coiled genetic architecture, known as chromatin, protects DNA from damage and has a key role in gene regulation.

Histones are present in both eukaryotes, living organisms that have specialized cellular machinery such as nuclei and microtubules, and archaea, another branch of the tree of life consisting of single-celled microbes that are prokaryotic, meaning they lack a nucleus.

In eukaryotic cells, histones are modified by enzymes, continuously shapeshifting the genomic landscape to regulate gene expression and other genomic processes. Despite this fundamental role, the exact origin of chromatin has been shrouded in mystery.

“Our results underscore that the structural and regulatory roles of chromatin are as old as eukaryotes themselves,” Dr. Grau-Bové said. “These functions are essential for eukaryotic life — since chromatin first appeared, it’s never been lost again in any life form.”

Chromatin, with its structural proteins (histones) apparently came into existence along with eukaryotic cells. Since the probability of forming even a single moderate protein by natural processes is too remote to be expected in our universe, the apparently simultaneous appearance of chromatin and eukaryotes is not consistent with an evolutionary explanation.

The scientists hypothesize that chromatin evolved in this microbe as a result of selective pressures in the primordial environment of Earth.

“Viruses and transposable elements are genome parasites that regularly attack DNA of single-celled organisms,” said Dr. Arnau Sebe-Pedrós, a researcher in the Centre for Genomic Regulation at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology. “This could have led to an evolutionary arms-race to protect the genome, resulting in the development of chromatin as a defensive mechanism in the cell that gave rise to all known eukaryotic life on Earth.”

“Later on, these mechanisms were co-opted into elaborate gene regulation, as we observe in modern eukaryotes, particularly multicellular organisms.”

The team’s paper was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Sci-News

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Nautilus: Gravitational Waves Continue to Astound

Physics Professor Sidney Perkowitz writes: “Seven years after their discovery, the ripples in spacetime have opened new windows on the universe’s deepest secrets.”

When Galileo Galilei first pointed a small telescope at the heavens in 1609, he began a revolution in astronomy. Today huge telescopes and radio dishes tell us about the universe. But they cannot directly probe those invisible sharply curved regions of spacetime called black holes or find those so far undiscovered invisible tunnels through spacetime called wormholes, theorized to offer instantaneous cosmic transport and possibly time travel.

Now, though, we have discovered gravitational waves, undulations in spacetime that can directly reveal black holes and wormholes by how they ripple the fabric of the universe. Rainer Weiss of MIT, who with Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech shared the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery, tells Nautilus that astronomical research in the wake of the initial observation “has produced so much science it’s unbelievable.”

4 MILLION SUNS: The supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, captured this year by a team of telescopes, has the mass of 4 million suns. The glowing ring is surrounding gas heated as the black hole pulls it in. 
Photo by NASA.

Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916 after developing general relativity, his theory of gravitation that does not treat gravitation as a force, but as arising from the curvature of spacetime. He showed that an accelerating mass would generate gravitational waves moving at the speed of light, analogous to but different from the electromagnetic waves produced by accelerating electric charges. Einstein himself was unsure if they would ever be discovered, but he fully understood their importance as potentially giving direct experimental evidence of his view of spacetime as the underlying cosmic fabric.

Einstein wondered about the discovery of gravitational waves because they are exceedingly weak, too weak to detect unless they come from massive bodies in rapid motion. Fortunately, these criteria are met by black holes when they collide. Gravitational waves were finally detected on Sept. 14, 2015, by two separate LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) installations in the United States.1 Each consists of two legs, both 4 kilometers long, that form an L-shape. Laser beams bouncing between mirrors traverse the legs and meet at the corner of the L, where their interference pattern responds to the tiny spatial changes as a gravitational wave sweeps by.

This first observation came from two black holes, 36 and 29 times as massive as our sun, when their mutual gravitational attraction sent them spiraling into each other, reaching half the speed of light just before collision. LIGO detected the resulting transient gravitational wave as a signal that accurately matched the prediction from general relativity. This direct evidence for gravitational waves also showed for the first time that two black holes can merge; in this case, into a black hole of 62 solar masses.

Note: The missing 3 solar masses after this merger was converted into the energy of a gravitational wave pulse generated in the final fraction of a second as the orbital velocity of the inspiraling black holes reached over half the speed of light. The luminosity of this pulse exceeded that of the entire visible universe by about 50 times. Spreading outward at the speed of light, this resounding tremor in spacetime reached Earth some 1.3 billion years later, just days after the LIGO gravitational wave detector came back online after an upgrade that made it sensitive enough to detect the far-flung ripples of this incredible shaking of the heavens. (E. Hedin)

LIGO displayed remarkable sensitivity in registering this event, responding to distortions in space that changed the 4 kilometer distance between mirrors by less than the diameter of a proton. This feat jump-started an astronomical program at LIGO under the auspices of Caltech and MIT and in collaboration with the Virgo gravitational wave observatory in Italy, with the KAGRA observatory in Japan joining in 2020. By 2021 the consortium had observed 90 gravitational wave events. Centuries of electromagnetic wave astronomy have produced catalogs of stars and galaxies that classify them by their fundamental properties. Now gravitational wave astronomy is doing the same for black holes and their cousins, neutron stars, the dense objects that can form on the way to the formation of a black hole.

As new gravitational instruments are built, the result will be a group of gravitational wave observatories operating over different frequency ranges, much as conventional observatories examine electromagnetic waves of different frequencies from gamma rays to radio waves. That spectral breadth gives electromagnetic wave astronomy its wide window on the universe. Now seven years into the regime of gravitational wave astronomy, a wide gravitational window is opening to give a unique but complementary view of the cosmos. We can hardly imagine what wonders this dual vision will uncover. 

Read the rest of the article at Nautilus

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At Science: Did volcanic ‘glasses’ help spark early life?

In an artificially engineered experiment, researchers formed long strands of nucleoside triphosphates (the “letters” of RNA). Producing the necessary conditions naturally would be another story. Producing a biologically relevant strand of RNA by non-engineered processes remains fictional, since nature doesn’t contain the required information-rich template.

When life emerged, it did so quickly. Fossils suggest microbes were present 3.7 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the 4.5-billion-year-old planet had cooled enough to support biochemistry, and many researchers think the hereditary material for these first organisms was RNA. Although not as complex as DNA, RNA would still be difficult to forge into the long strands needed to convey genetic information, raising the question of how it could have spontaneously formed.

Now, researchers may have an answer. In lab experiments, they show how rocks called basaltic glasses help individual RNA letters, known as nucleoside triphosphates, link into strands up to 200 letters long. The glasses would have been abundant in the fire and brimstone of early Earth; they are created when lava is quenched in air or water or when the melted rock created in asteroid strikes cools off rapidly.

The result has divided top origin-of-life researchers. “This seems to be a wonderful story that finally explains how the nucleoside triphosphates react with each other to give RNA strands,” says Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. But Jack Szostak, an RNA expert at Harvard University, says he won’t believe the result until the research team better characterizes the RNA strands.

Origin-of-life researchers are fond of a primordial “RNA world” because the molecule can carry out two distinct processes vital for life. Like DNA, it’s made up of four chemical letters that can carry genetic information. And like proteins, RNA can also catalyze chemical reactions needed for life.

[image error]Volcanic glass, like that found near Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, can help knit RNA letters into long strands. SURANGA WEERATUNA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

But RNA also brings headaches. No one has found a set of plausible prebiotic conditions that would cause hundreds of RNA letters—each of them complex molecules—to link into strands long enough to support the complex chemistry needed to ignite evolution.

Stephen Mojzsis, a geologist at the Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, wondered whether basaltic glasses played a role. They are rich in metals such as magnesium and iron that promote many chemical reactions. And, he says, “Basaltic glass was everywhere on Earth at the time.”

He sent samples of five different basalt glasses to the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. There, Elisa Biondi, a molecular biologist, and her colleagues ground each sample into a fine powder, sterilized it, and mixed it with a solution of nucleoside triphosphates. Without a glass powder present, the RNA letters failed to link up. But when mixed with the glass powders, the molecules joined into long strands, some hundreds of letters long, the researchers report this week in Astrobiology. No heat or light was needed. “All we had to do was wait,” Biondi says. Small RNA strands formed after just a day, but strands kept growing for months. “The beauty of this model is its simplicity,” says Jan Špaček, a molecular biologist at Firebird Biomolecular Sciences. “Mix the ingredients, wait for a few days, and detect the RNA.”

Still, the results raise many questions. One is how the nucleoside triphosphates could have arisen in the first place. Biondi’s colleague Steven Benner says recent research shows how the same basaltic glasses could have promoted the formation and stabilization of the individual RNA letters.

A bigger issue, Szostak says, is the shape of the long RNA strands. In modern cells, enzymes ensure most RNAs grow into long linear chains. But RNA letters can also bind in complex branching patterns. Szostak wants the researchers to report the type of RNA the basaltic glasses created. “I find it very frustrating that the authors have made an interesting initial finding but then decided to go with the hype rather than the science,” Szostak says.

Biondi admits her team’s experiment almost certainly produces a small amount of RNA branching. However, she notes that some branched RNAs exist in organisms today, and related structures may have been present at life’s dawn. She also says other tests the group performed confirm the presence of long strands with connections that most likely mean they are linear. “It’s a healthy debate,” says Dieter Braun, an origin-of-life chemist at Ludwig Maximilian. “It will trigger the next round of experiments.”

Science

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At Evolution News: Zinc and the Miracle of Man

David Coppedge draws our attention to zinc and its essential role in maintaining our health. The hierarchy of interdependent systems that contribute to zinc’s availability and use highlights again evidence for design.

Zinc is element 30 in the periodic table, and the most abundant metal in the body after iron. Even so, we only carry about three grams of zinc by weight. That trace amount should not be disparaged: it is vital for 10 percent of the proteins and enzymes in our cells. In his earlier book The Miracle of the Cell (2020), Denton devoted two pages to zinc, listing the varieties of some 300 enzymes that rely on its unique properties. Last year, in an article about metals in proteins, Casey Luskin mentioned several important functions that zinc enzymes perform. 

One important zinc enzyme Denton focuses on is carbonic anhydrase. It converts CO2 in our cells to bicarbonate, and then reverses the reaction in the lungs. As a result, the end product of oxidative metabolism — carbon dioxide — gets safely breathed out into the air for plants to take in. And that’s not all:

Carbonic anhydrase also aids in the regulation of fluid and pH balance and is involved in producing essential stomach acid. The enzyme also plays a role in vision. When it is defective, fluid can build up and cause glaucoma. The enzyme is one of the fastest known, catalyzing up to one million reactions per second. [Emphasis added.]

Clearly, we could not live without those three grams of zinc. But how does a metal as ideal as this get into the food chain? 

Getting Zinc from Crust to Soil

First, it must be available in crustal rock. Zinc is not rare, but a kilogram of rock on average only has 70 milligrams of zinc (JLab Science Education), demoting it to the 23rd most abundant element in the crust (USGS). Hydrothermal vents and volcanoes transport zinc to the surface most often as sphalerite (Geology.com), a compound with iron and sulfur, which is mined throughout the world. While zinc has many applications for industry, our interest here is how it becomes available to living things. Sphalerite has cleavage planes and a relatively low hardness that make it easy to fragment, but it would never reach plant roots without help from the Earth’s amazing water cycle.

Photo: Zinc, by Alchemist-hp (talk) (www.pse-mendelejew.de), FAL, via Wikimedia Commons.Getting Zinc from Soil to Cell

The “zinc cycle” continues with zinc transported by water to soil. Clay minerals, Denton notes, have a thousand-fold more surface area than sand. Because of their layered structure and electrical charges, clays attract water molecules and can hold them much longer, defying the gravity that would drain soil dry quickly. Roots from plants that penetrate soil’s sands and clays, however, depend on microbes able to take up minerals such as zinc and deliver them to the root hairs. 

Getting Zinc from Leaf to Human

Herbivores and carnivores benefit from the zinc in the leaves, fruits, and seeds of plants. Harvard Nutrition Source says that the trace amount of zinc in our bodies “is a major player in the creation of DNA, growth of cells, building proteins, healing damaged tissue, and supporting a healthy immune system.” And when sperm meets egg, zinc puts on a fireworks show!

Good plant sources of zinc include legumes, whole grains, and nuts. Meats, poultry, and seafood are rich animal sources of zinc. While zinc deficiency is rare in developed countries, it can cause loss of smell and taste, diarrhea, and other issues. Excess zinc can also be unhealthy, but the body normally regulates zinc homeostasis, maintaining the three-gram optimum.

That leads us finally to the news: a paper last month in Cell by Weiss et al. announced, “Zn-regulated GTPase metalloprotein activator 1 modulates vertebrate zinc homeostasis.” The prevention of zinc deficiency or overdose is regulated by a newly identified metalloprotein family, named ZNG1, that flies into action in situations of zinc starvation.

Erik Skaar of Vanderbilt University says:

We think that when the body is starved for zinc, ZNG1 ensures that zinc gets delivered to the most important zinc-containing proteins,” Skaar said. “This opens up an exciting new area of biology, where we have these regulatory factors controlling a number of different physiological processes through metal insertion.

This short venture into the zinc cycle illustrates once again that the closer you look at intelligently designed biological systems, the more specified complexity you find.

Evolution News

Zinc’s unassuming but crucial role for our health begins with prior astronomical processes that deliver sufficient zinc to the Earth’s crust. Further processes consistent with intelligent design involve Earth’s volcanically active geology and continue with Earth’s amazing water cycle, soil formation ecology, the “benevolent job of microbes in the ecological nutrient cycle,” and the atomic properties of zinc that facilitate the homeostasis of the ideal amount of zinc within our bodies for optimal health.

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At Quanta: Astronomers Reimagine the Making of the Planets

Observations of faraway planets have forced a near-total rewrite of the story of how our solar system came to be.

Start at the center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story.

Newborn star systems imaged by the ALMA telescope, featuring protoplanetary disks with rings, arcs, filaments and spirals, are among the observations changing the theory of how planets are made. ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next come Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another wee world, one that, unlike Mercury, never lost layers; it just stopped growing. Following Mars, we have a wide ring of leftover rocks, and then things shift. Suddenly there is Jupiter, so big it’s practically a half-baked sun, containing the vast majority of the material left over from our star’s creation. Past that are three more enormous worlds — Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — forged of gas and ice. The four gas giants have almost nothing in common with the four rocky planets, despite forming at roughly the same time, from the same stuff, around the same star. The solar system’s eight planets present a puzzle: Why these?

Now look out past the sun, way beyond. Most of the stars harbor planets of their own. Astronomers have spotted thousands of these distant star-and-planet systems. But strangely, they have so far found none that remotely resemble ours. So the puzzle has grown harder: Why these, and why those?

The swelling catalog of extrasolar planets, along with observations of distant, dusty planet nurseries and even new data from our own solar system, no longer matches classic theories about how planets are made. Planetary scientists, forced to abandon decades-old models, now realize there may not be a grand unified theory of world-making — no single story that explains every planet around every star, or even the wildly divergent orbs orbiting our sun. “The laws of physics are the same everywhere, but the process of building planets is sufficiently complicated that the system becomes chaotic,” said Alessandro Morbidelli, a leading figure in planetary formation and migration theories and an astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France.

Still, the findings are animating new research. Amid the chaos of world-building, patterns have emerged, leading astronomers toward powerful new ideas. Teams of researchers are working out the rules of dust and pebble assembly and how planets move once they coalesce. Fierce debate rages over the timing of each step, and over which factors determine a budding planet’s destiny. At the nexus of these debates are some of the oldest questions humans have asked ourselves: How did we get here? Is there anywhere else like here?

Indeed, we come from a diffuse cloud of gas and dust. Four and a half billion years ago, probably nudged by a passing star or by the shock wave of a supernova, the cloud collapsed under its own gravity to form a new star. It’s how things went down afterward that we don’t really understand.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is designed to detect light from cool, millimeter-size objects, such as dust grains around newborn stars. Starting in 2013, ALMA captured stunning images of neatly sculpted infant star systems, with putative planets embedded in the hazy disks around the new stars.

Astronomers previously imagined these disks as smooth halos that grew more diffuse as they extended outward, away from the star. But ALMA showed disks with deep, dark gaps, like the rings of Saturn; others with arcs and filaments; and some containing spirals, like miniature galaxies. “ALMA changed the field completely,” said David Nesvorny, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Quanta

A key point made here is that after cataloging thousands of extrasolar planets, astronomers still have found “none that remotely resemble ours.” Earth’s status as The Privileged Planet continues to be upheld with ongoing research.

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Ryugu asteroid samples contain clues to origin of life, Japan scientists say

Dust from an asteroid collected by a Japanese space probe contains clues to the origin of life, suggesting it was formed in space, scientists reported Friday.

Constituent minerals of the Ryugu sample. (JAXA Press Release)

Japan’s Hayabusa2 space mission dropped samples from the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in the Australian outback in December 2020. It was then moved to Japan to be studied for insights into the origins of the solar system and life on Earth.

Scientists most recently announced the finding included nearly two dozen types of amino acids in the sample, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA ) said.

Finding amino acids is a big deal, because they make proteins and are necessary to support life. This is also the first time they’ve been found on an asteroid, the Japan Times reported.

USA Today

In considering the significance of this report, it is important to realize that finding naturally occurring amino acids does not amount to showing how life could form naturally. As discussed in my book, Canceled Science, “Amino acids, such as can sometimes form naturally, do not remotely approach the molecular complexity of even the simplest living cell. Believing otherwise is like finding a few brick-shaped rocks up on a hillside and concluding from this that buildings and whole cities arose by nothing more than the same blind forces that formed those rocks.”

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Eureka! Researchers discover the Gollum effect in academia

See, after Gollum crawled out from under the rubble of Mt. Doom, he had enough smarts to seek a career in academia:

It is well established that many academics feel precious about their research fields, but now there is a name for how some go a step further and try to wreck colleagues’ attempts to encroach on their areas of expertise – the “Gollum effect”.

Scholars who examined “research opportunity guarding” – how some professors have lied, threatened and sought to sabotage the careers of those seeking to move into their topic – liken the behaviour to that of the maniacally possessive guardian of the Ring of Power from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth chronicles.

“Like the greedy Gollum, many researchers believe they have the sole right to particular aspects of research,” explained Jose Valdez, a postgraduate researcher at German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig, who has studied the phenomenon with the University of Newcastle’s John Gould.

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the pair describe how an animal science researcher had contacted an expert to ask advice on using their methodology to study a different species. When the expert claimed that he was considering doing that same experiment, the researcher desisted, but the research was never undertaken.

Jack Grove, “My precious! How academia’s Gollums guard their research fields” at Times Higher Education (June 9, 2022)

The paper is open access.

That is over and above stuff like Darwin policing.

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What would Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas say about Adam and Eve and paleontology?

Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274) was instrumental in organizing Christian theology along Aristotelian lines. Here, a priest who is familiar with his thought, offers some comments:

Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? w/ Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P. (Aquinas 101)

In this episode of Aquinas 101: Science and Faith, join Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., a Dominican friar from the Province of St. Joseph, as he presents how we can reconcile Genesis with scientific theories of human history.

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At Mind Matters News: Transhumanism: Human, computer, animal — all just a choice now…

AI and Big Biotech spawn the hope (in some) of merging with a computer or with a bat, maybe:

—

In a recent Living in the Solution podcast with otolaryngologist and broadcaster Elaina George at Liberty Talk radio, Wesley J. Smith, lawyer and host of the Humanize podcast at Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism tackled the question of “Can You be a Christian and Believe in Transhumanism?” (June 4, 2022). Transhumanism or H+, as it is sometimes called, is a movement to create immortality through new biotechnology or merger with artificial intelligence (AI).

Dr. Elaina George: I think transhumanism seems to be the next wave of things that are hip and now … As a Christian, is it something that we should even consider?

The idea is that they want to make themselves extraordinary without doing anything, with no effort. In other words, if we could tweak a gene or use a brain implant or find some means of changing our physicality — so I’d have the strength of Superman or the eyesight of a hawk — I could recreate myself into the image that I want. It’s a totally solipsistic idea.

Often what transhumanists want is to improve intelligence, because to transhumanists, many of them, intelligence is the highest human value. I always respond by saying, “Wait a second. I think love is the highest human value.” In fact, you rarely hear or see transhumanists talk about love, except perhaps in the carnal sense.

It is about this kind of self-obsession to make oneself better, but not actually doing the work that might have to build character, to exercise or whatever it might be to improve yourself. And, of course, the idea that if I want to grow a tail, I can grow a tail. I can become part man, part bat — whatever it might be — is incredibly solipsistic and basically almost a denial of community.

Dr. Elaina George: I think that’s a great synopsis of it, an overview. It lacks soul. It lacks depth.

News, “Transhumanism: Human, computer, animal — all just a choice now…” at Mind Matters News

—

Takehome: Wesley Smith talks with Dr. Elaina George about the new secular religion of Transhumanism or H+ — immortality without tears for atheists — if it’s even possible.

You may also wish to read: The impossibility of Christian transhumanism. Transhumanists seek the right not only to manipulate their own bodies but also those of their children, including mind clones, monoparent children, or benevolent AI. One cannot be a “Christian transhumanist.” Transhumanism has become a religion and the two religions simply cannot occupy the same space. (Wesley J. Smith)

and

A Great Reset historian muses on what to do with “useless” people. Transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari, a key advisor to the World Economic Forum, thinks free will is “dangerous” and a “myth.” It’s not clear that, given his intense, dramatic focus on “useless,” “meaningless,” and “worthless” people, Harari is far off from totalitarianism.

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