NewsWatch

A Nation of Nevadas?

WNG.org, 12/22/22, “A Nation of Nevadas?” [Excerpts]: “What are the odds of our existence?” asks a gambling commercial for FanDuel Sportsbook. “The odds of a cosmic explosion, into life forming, into evolution?” The commercial then speculates about the odds of the viewer’s parents meeting, of the viewer being born….

“So what is life but chance, and every moment in it a bet?” the announcer asks before promising that betting on NFL games through FanDuel will “make every moment more.”

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have now approved sports betting, and the gambling industry has responded with an explosion of growth in advertising to new populations of potential gamblers. But legislators in some states are starting to express concern about gambling ads.

“You can’t turn on the radio or can’t turn on any sporting event without being inundated with offers of free bets,” New York state Sen. Pete Harckham told The New York Times. A 2019 study reported in ScienceDirect even found gambling commercials during children’s programming.

http://bit.ly/3W6wzwi

Marine Invertebrate Antibiotic

ICR.org, 12/19/22, “Marine Invertebrate Antibiotic” [Excerpts]: Erythromycin is an antibiotic that has been prescribed to many of us that may have experienced skin or upper respiratory tract infections. It was discovered in 1949 in a soil sample from the Philippines. The drug is even used in fishcare as a broad-spectrum treatment of bacterial outbreaks in fish populations.

Recently, researchers from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS), have been working with the Asiatic hard clam, Meretrix petechialis, which lives in a mud flat environment. These intertidal environments are rich with a wide variety of bacteria, some of which are disease-causing. Even without an adaptive, lymphocyte-based immune system clams (and other invertebrates) proliferate.

Although lacking an adaptive immune system and often living in habitats with dense and diverse bacterial populations, marine invertebrates thrive in the presence of potentially challenging microbial pathogens. However, the mechanisms underlying this resistance remain largely unexplored and promise to reveal novel strategies of microbial resistance.

Progress in answering this question is seen in the fact that the Asiatic hard clam “can synthesize, store, and secrete the antibiotic erythromycin.” The prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stated, “This potent macrolide antimicrobial [erythromycin], thought to be synthesized only by microorganisms, is produced by specific mucus-rich cells beneath the clam’s mantle epithelium, which interfaces directly with the bacteria-rich environment. The antibacterial activity was confirmed by bacteriostatic assay.”

Creationists are not surprised at this discovery. In order to survive, there must be a way marine invertebrates have been designed by the Creator to avoid bacterial infections.

But evolutionists must posit a naturalistic explanation regarding the origin of this antibiotic… “However, our results suggested that the erythromycin-producing genes in M. petechialis have an origin in animal lineages and represent convergent evolution with bacteria,” said Prof. Liu Baozhong from the IOCAS.

http://bit.ly/3CIVe3h

Striking Down Racial Preferences

IntellectualTakeout.org, 11/3/22, “Supreme Court Poised to Strike Down Racial Preferences” [Excerpts]: Lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are exposing the crude and dehumanizing racial sorting that goes on in the admissions offices at elite universities.

The application form asks young people to check a box identifying themselves as either “(1) Asian, (2) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, (3) Hispanic, (4) White, (5) African American or (6) Native American.”

Applicants who mark Hispanic or African American win acceptance with test scores and grades far below what whites or Asians, on average, need to get in, according to data presented to the court.

Broad categories are appropriate for sorting zoo animals—reptiles over here, mammals over there—but it’s no way to recognize the humanity and individual merit of college applicants.

http://bit.ly/3k0UrnB