The Offensive Christians podcast is back on iTunes with fresh content and a new address: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=286061787

The old shows should still be available on iTunes but the new epsiodes will be up on the iTunes search in the next few days.

Expect more ‘casts in the near future.

OC

Here is the long awaited interview with Dr. Jay Wile, PhD Nuclear Chemistry, of Apologia Ministries. The interview was conducted at the 2008 Home Educators Association of Virginia convention in Richmond. I was working with one microphone and my questions did not register so you’ll only hear Dr. Wile.

He discusses how he came to Christ, his educational ministry, and just how he became and email correspondent with “satanschick at yahoo dot com” among other topics. Listen till the end of this first installment to unravel the mystery of satanschick.

Click below to listen.

Offensive Christians Listen to Dr. Jay Wile Part 1

Please check out the 13 July message.  I’m interested in your comments: 

http://www.calvarychristianchurch.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=dspProducts

We’ve opened a webstore on CafePress. Let us know what you think.

Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!”    Proverbs 26:18-19

I think that’s my new life verse. I have this tendency to joke around by telling lies and then quickly repudiating them. It gets some laughs and is in keeping with a lot of the humour we see today - But is it biblical?  This verse shows me that it is not.  Henry commented about this verse:

Am not I in sport? He that sins in just must repent in earnest, or his sin will be his ruin. Truth is too valuable a thing to be sold for a jest, and so is the reputation of our neighbour. By lying and slandering in jest men learn themselves, and teach others, to lie and slander in earnest; and a false report, raised in mirth, may be spread in malice; besides, if a man may tell a lie to make himself merry, why not to make himself rich, and so truth quite perishes, and men teach their tongues to tell lies, Jer_9:5. (Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves committing iniquity) If men would consider that a lie comes from the devil, and brings to hell-fire, surely that would spoil the sport of it; it is casting arrows and death to themselves.
Whoa. That’s me playing with fire. What do you think? I think I need prayer to change this sinful habit. Any comments?

Offensive Christians will we be editing down the interviews with Jay Wile of Apologia Educational Ministries and Caleb from Apologetics Press that we got from the Home Educators of Virginia Convention early this month. Both interviews are packed with good information for Christians looking to be inspired.  Keep watching - They’ll be up soon.

Click Below to check out some great products from these fantastic resources

We found out too late to go this year… I’m not familiar with this organization. Does anybody know what they stand for? Has anybody been to a Creation Fest in the past? It seems like a fun time but I’ve never heard of any of the speakers on this year’s line-up - The bands, yes - Speakers no. It would be fun to take the kids to see some great Christian music and it looks like fun - But does anyone know if this event is edifying?

It runs until June 28th in Pennsylvania. If anybody reading this has been in the past or attended in 2008, I’d like to hear from you.

OC

Bacteria ‘evolving in the lab’?

‘A poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists’?

by Don Batten

Some bacteria cultured in a laboratory have gained the ability to use citrate as an energy source. We have had lots of queries about this matter, so this is our weekend feedback to all those who have asked.

A New Scientist article proclaims:

‘Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”’¹

The many comments posted on the New Scientist website shows just how excited the atheists are about this report. They are positively gloating.

The context

In 1988, Richard Lenski, Michigan State University, East Lansing, founded 12 cultures of E. coli and grew them in a laboratory, generation after generation, for twenty years (he deserves some marks for persistence!). The culture medium had a little glucose but lots more citrate, so once the microbes consumed the glucose, they would continue to grow only if they could evolve some way of using citrate. Lenski expected to see evolution in action. This was an appropriate expectation for one who believes in evolution, because bacteria reproduce quickly and can have huge populations, as in this case. They can also sustain higher mutation rates than organisms with much larger genomes, like vertebrates such as us.² All of this adds up, according to neo-Darwinism, to the almost certainty of seeing lots of evolution happen in real time (instead of imagining it all happening in the unobservable past). With the short generation times, in 20 years this has amounted to some 44,000 generations, equivalent to some million years of generations of a human population (but the evolutionary opportunities for humans would be far, far less, due to the small population numbers limiting the number of mutational possibilities; and the much larger genome, which cannot sustain a similar mutation rate without error catastrophe; i.e. extinction; and sexual reproduction means that there is 50% chance of failing to pass on a beneficial mutation ).

As noted elsewhere (see ‘Giving up on reality’), Lenski seemed to have given up on ‘evolution in the lab’ and resorted to computer modelling of ‘evolution’ with a program called Avida (see evaluation by Dr Royal Truman, Part 1 and Part 2, which are technical papers). Indeed, Lenski had good reason to abandon hope. He had calculated¹ that all possible simple mutations must have occurred several times over but without any addition of even a simple adaptive trait.

Lenski and co-workers now claim that they have finally observed his hoped for evolution in the lab.

The science: what did they find?

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Lenski and co-workers describe how one of 12 culture lines of their bacteria has developed the capacity for metabolizing citrate as an energy source under aerobic conditions.³

This happened by the 31,500^th generation. Using frozen samples of bacteria from previous generations they showed that something happened at about the 20,000^th generation that paved the way for only this culture line to be able to change to citrate metabolism. They surmised, quite reasonably, that this could have been a mutation that paved the way for a further mutation that enabled citrate utilization.

This is close to what Michael Behe calls ‘The Edge of Evolution’—the limit of what ‘evolution’ (non-intelligent natural processes) can do. For example, an adaptive change needing one mutation might occur every so often just by chance. This is why the malaria parasite can adapt to most antimalarial drugs; but chloroquine resistance took much longer to develop because two specific mutations needed to occur together in the one gene. Even this tiny change is beyond the reach of organisms like humans with much longer generation times.⁴ With bacteria, there might be a chance for even three coordinated mutations, but it’s doubtful that Lenski’s E. coli have achieved any more than two mutations, so have not even reached Behe’s edge, let alone progressed on the path to elephants or crocodiles.

Now the popularist treatments of this research (e.g. in New Scientist) give the impression that the E. coli developed the ability to metabolize citrate, whereas it supposedly could not do so before. However, this is clearly not the case, because the citric acid, tricarboxcylic acid (TCA), or Krebs, cycle (all names for the same thing) generates and utilizes citrate in its normal oxidative metabolism of glucose and other carbohydrates.⁵

Furthermore, E. coli is normally capable of utilizing citrate as an energy source under anaerobic conditions, with a whole suite of genes involved in its fermentation. This includes a citrate transporter gene that codes for a transporter protein embedded in the cell wall that takes citrate into the cell.⁶ This suite of genes (operon) is normally only activated under anaerobic conditions.

So what happened? It is not yet clear from the published information, but a likely scenario is that mutations jammed the regulation of this operon so that the bacteria produce citrate transporter regardless of the oxidative state of the bacterium’s environment (that is, it is permanently switched on). This can be likened to having a light that switches on when the sun goes down—a sensor detects the lack of light and turns the light on. A fault in the sensor could result in the light being on all the time. That is the sort of change we are talking about.

Another possibility is that an existing transporter gene, such as the one that normally takes up tartrate,³ which does not normally transport citrate, mutated such that it lost specificity and could then transport citrate into the cell. Such a loss of specificity is also an expected outcome of random mutations. A loss of specificity equals a loss of information, but evolution is supposed to account for the creation of new information; information that specifies the enzymes and cofactors in new biochemical pathways, how to make feathers and bone, nerves, or the components and assembly of complex motors such as ATP synthase, for example.

However, mutations are good at destroying things, not creating them. Sometimes destroying things can be helpful (adaptive),⁷ but that does not account for the creation of the staggering amount of information in the DNA of all living things. Behe (in The Edge of Evolution) likened the role of mutations in antibiotic resistance and pathogen resistance, for example, to trench warfare, whereby mutations destroy some of the functionality of the target or host to overcome susceptibility. It’s like putting chewing gum in a mechanical watch; it’s not the way the watch could have been created.

Much ado about nothing (again)

Behe is quite right; this is nothing here that is beyond ‘the edge of evolution’, which means it has no relevance to the origin of enzymes and catalytic pathways that evolution is supposed to explain.⁸

Related articles

• Gain-of-function mutations: at a loss to explain molecules-to-man evolution
• World record enzymes
• Weasel, a flexible program for invest. deterministic computer ‘demonstrations’ of evolution

Further reading

• Mutations Questions and Answers
• Information Theory Questions and Answers

Related resources

Refuting Evolution

by Jonathan Sarfati

Refuting Evolution is a hard-hitting critique of the most up-to-date arguments for evolution, to challenge educators, students and parents. It is a powerful, yet concise summary of the arguments against evolution and for creation. It will stimulate much discussion and help students and teachers think more critically about origins. This top-selling book has over 450,000 copies in print. (High School–Adult) 144 pages.

Not by Chance

by Dr Lee Spetner

Dr Spetner’s book aims a death-blow at the heart of the whole neo-Darwinism story. The crucial battleground has always been the origin of information. Spetner shows that time and chance cannot produce new (more) genetic information. This book is a must for everyone who desires to defend the Bible in this increasingly “educated” society. Softcover. (College–Adult) 272 pages.

References

1. Holmes, Bob, Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab, NewScientist.com news service, 09 June 2008. Return to text.
2. This is explained in Weasel, a flexible program for investigating deterministic computer demonstrations of evolution—see the section headed ‘Error catastrophe’. A mutation rate of one per million bases per generation generates 1 or 2 new mutations per cell for a typical bacterium, with the chance of some missing out on harmful mutations, but the same mutation rate with a human would create more than a 1,000 new ones per individual and every individual would acquire multiple harmful mutations. Return to text.
3. Blount, Z.D., Borland, C.Z. and Lenski, R.E., Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli, PNAS 105: 7899–7906; published online on June 4, 2008, 10.1073/pnas.0803151105. This is Lenski’s inaugural paper as a newly inducted member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA—yet another died-in-the-wool atheistic evolutionist in that august body (see: National Academy of Science is godless to the core Nature survey). Return to text.
4. See Batten, D., Clarity and confusion, a review of The Edge of Evolution by Michael Behe, Journal of Creation 22(1):28–32, April 2008. Return to text.
5. The existence of the TCA cycle in all free-living things is another huge obstacle for evolutionists to explain: a complex cycle involving a dozen different enzymes and cofactors that is necessary for a huge part of a cell’s biochemistry. Return to text.
6. Pos, K.M., Dimroth, P. and Bott, M., The Escherichia coli Citrate Carrier CitT: a Member of a Novel Eubacterial Transporter Family Related to the 2-Oxoglutarate/Malate Translocator from Spinach Chloroplasts, J. Bacteriol. 180(16):4160–4165, 1998; <www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=107412>. Return to text.
7. See, for example, Beetle Bloopers (defects can be an advantage sometimes). Return to text.
8. Michael Behe’s Amazon Blog, 6 June 2008. Return to text.

Please go to the Creation Ministries International site

Just another quick post to promote the first Offensive Christians Blog Contest. Please see the post below for details. The winner will receive books no Offensive Christian™ should be without.

I’m offering up Evidence that Demands a Verdict Volumes 1 and 2 from my personal library to the winner of the first Offensive Christians Web Contest.

I ask that you post on your own blog/site an article about your position on apologetics  Link the article to this post. I will print up the linking URLS and have my children randomly select a winner who will receive Evidence that Demands a Verdict Volume 1 and Evidence that Demands a Verdict Volume 2.

Josh McDowell started these books while attempting to disprove Christianity. He ended up becoming converted and is one of our foremost living apologists. These books are an excellent front-line defense of Christianity and they use both bibilical and historical data to support their conclusions.  Be ready to get some ammunition for yourself or the Offensive Christian™ in your life.

Contest Details:

• Contest runs until July 8th 2008
• You may enter as many times as you like but you must have an original, contextual article pertaining to the topic for each link and therefore each entry
• Post a comment to this article so I know to verify your link
• Winner will be notified by July 10th via a reply to their article on their blog/site and will be announced on OffensiveChristians.com
• If you win, I’ll ship the books to you and even give you some official Offensive Christians™ stuff to boot!

The above links are to other great Josh McDowell resources and are not the books you will receive.