'Junk DNA' is bunk! Why the human genome argues for intelligent design



In my quest to learn the ins and outs of the orthodoxy of evolutionary theory (and therefore bring to light its deficiencies), I discovered geologist and lawyer Dr. Casey Luskin, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.

A proponent, researcher, and advocate for intelligent design, Dr. Luskin has been defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for ID for nearly 20 years.

Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy. How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?

I’ve written about it here before, but I shared with Dr. Luskin my personal skepticism concerning the religion of evolution. As a layman (relative to him), it seemed to me as if Evolution™ had an “invisible hand of God” problem that’s never been seriously addressed.

Meet me in the middle

The mythology of Evolution™ seems to have a beginning (the Big Bang), an end (modern Homo sapiens), but no middle. And as I came to understand from my conversation with Dr. Luskin, much of the evidence for evolutionary theory amounts to flimsy, tenuously linked assumptions on the verge of being disproved in various fields.

We began by discussing one of the more popular arguments against intelligent design: the concept of “junk DNA."

The argument goes something like this: If everything is intelligently designed, then why does the vast majority of our DNA seem to serve no purpose?

As Dr. Luskin explained, the idea originated in the early 1960s, when scientists mapped out the molecular protein production process: DNA encodes RNA, which then carries that information to ribosomes, which in turn use it to assemble chains of amino acids into proteins.

Because so much of the DNA that had been studied up to that point did not seem tobe doing that, it was tossed in the proverbial junk bin, hence the name.

Selfish genes

The idea really took off with the publications of Japanese geneticist Susumu Ohno’s “So Much Junk DNA in Our Genome” in 1972 and Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene" in 1976.

Ohno famously asserted that 90% of our DNA was total nonsense. Dawkins piggybacked off that and gave the junk DNA a “purpose,” saying that the only true function of the gene was to replicate itself. Whether or not the gene helps you is of non-substance.

Luskin was one of the first to push back against this idea. As an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand how the "junk DNA" theory was used to dismiss the burgeoning ID movement.

Luskin would argue with his professors and peers that it was still premature to conclude that most of our DNA could be classified as “junk,” citing the unfinished-at-the-time Human Genome Project as evidence for the lack of evidence.

Luskin seems to have been onto something. In the past few years, the “junk DNA” theory has slowly unraveled.

God don't make no 'junk'

This is in large part thanks to a groundbreaking series of papers entitled the ENCODE Project, published by biologists studying “non-coding” DNA — the goal being to uncover the mysteries of the human genome.

Since the ENCODE Project began in 2010, it has found that at least 80% of the genome has shown evidence of biochemical functionality. In other words — contrary to junk DNA theory — this DNA is transcribing information into the RNA.

And as for the other 20%?

The lead researchers of the ENCODE Project say that many of these non-coding elements of DNA occur within very specific cell types or circumstances, so to catch them in action doing what they’re supposed to be doing is simply very difficult. But they predict that as they study more and more cell types, that that 80% figure will most certainly jump up to 100%.

All this is to say that applying a Darwinian paradigm to discoveries about gene function has led to erroneous conclusions about "junk DNA" — which then, in turn, has been used to justify the same Darwinian theory that spawned it.

Information, please

Meanwhile, Intelligent Design's predictions that we would find function for that junk DNA have been borne out.

As Luskin pointed out, the origin of life is the origin of information. Life, on its face, is a very strange arrangement of matter.

It’s very easy to find things that are high entropy-high energy (think tornadoes or explosions) or low entropy-low energy (snowflakes, crystals). But life is different. Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy.

How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?

Machinery.

Jedi mind trick?

Our cells are full of molecular machines that process and encode information to be used as applicable instructions. That is what our DNA, RNA, and ribosomes are all there for. They’re machines that process information.

Imagine you wanted to watch "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" on DVD. Would you be able to watch it without the DVD player? No.

Imagine if the instructions for building the world’s first ever DVD player were on a DVD. Could you build the DVD player just with the DVD? No.

The information and the information-processing machine are inseparable.

The question then becomes: How did these machines come into being?

Did they build themselves? No, we just showed how that can’t be the case.

The only plausible answer is — intelligence. There needed to be an intelligent designer to create both the machinery and the instructions.

Despite the initial mockery greeting Intelligent Design, the theory is gaining ground as a reliable model and explanation for the origin of life and genes. And that’s simply because the evidence is getting to be a bit undeniable.

Make sure to follow Dr. Casey Luskin’s work here.

Why evolution is fake



In the beginning, there was ... a big explosion.

Which came from ... nothing?

Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses.

In order for evolution to make sense, we must accept its explanation for the genesis of all life.

Magical thinking

So let's start there: Everything that has ever supposedly existed came from this gigantic explosion from a single subatomic point of origin.

And over time, this entropic inertia of particles from the explosion eventually somehow created stars and planets.

Now, most planets are barren wastelands of nothingness. But ours? Ours is different. We are teeming with life.

But how did life come into existence here on this tiny, blue planet? Well, according to our brightest minds, we don’t exactly know. But from what we can gather, after hundreds of millions of years of particles sloshing around in this primordial soup of water, nitrogen, carbon, and some other random elements, the first protein was magically created!

And from there, it was only a matter of time before a protein magically became a single-cell organism, which eventually magically turned into a more complex organism, and so on and so forth.

Fast forward to now. Trees and animals everywhere.

Then you have us. The most complex life forms in the known universe. We have bones, muscles, organs (each with its own specific function), eyes, ears, noses, and brains.

It’s kind of funny how all of this life came to be so incredibly complex, multilayered, and perfectly symbiotic in its structure.

But there’s obviously no way any of this could have been purposely designed by an intelligent designer, because we know that this all happened by a random and chaotic process of particles smashing into each other over millions of years until they eventually began building themselves into fully functioning organisms.

OK, that’s the end of my sarcastic rant. Time to get serious.

Theory or guesswork?

My general thoughts on evolutionary theory?

To put it simply, it’s too broad, general, and discombobulated of a theory for it to be considered a serious historical account of our universe.

The process of simply recording human history is one that involves making sense of specific moments in time involving specific historical figures with the hope of compiling a coherent story of humanity.

This consists of finding primary evidence, like documents and artifacts, of those moments in time. And then it takes teams of scholars to interpret what the evidence means; to connect the dots.

And that process is never 100% accurate. It is, much of the time, guesswork. It is excruciatingly hard — in fact, damn near impossible — to know to a full extent the full scope of detail for a single moment in history. And that’s only for a single moment.

Evolutionary theory asserts an assumption that is applied to the entirety of history. That life has uniformly and unquestionably progressed to this point in time according to its rules.

The problem with that is that it attempts to cover way too many data points across time and space and yet has no real way of doing so. We’re not talking about a team of scholars debating the political motivations of Napoleon during one of his military campaigns; we’re talking about the development of all life everywhere throughout all time.

It is the epitome of theory having no evidence to back it up.

Seeds of doubt

Personally, I think our ideas on evolutionary theory need an update. We need to see it through a new lens.

Evolution asserts that nature selects the set of genetic traits that are to be passed on to the next generation of organisms. But what we have to understand is the role the thinking man plays within the evolutionary model.

As conscious beings, we humans have gotten to the point where we have direct influence on what and who gets chosen to live on. We have the power and the conscious will to change the genes of an unborn child or abort the baby before it ever gets to be born.

On a simpler scale, we plant flowers and trees in a garden in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. We hold the power of life and death in our hands, and, therefore, we essentially construct and shape our world.

A few questions arise from this. How does evolutionary theory account for this journey of “biological construction” man has been able to embark on for quite some time? How much weight can it really hold if it does not?

My initial impulse is to be skeptical of the supposed immovable object that is evolutionary theory, only because it seemingly does not possess an historical account, and therefore predictive analysis, of the times when ecosystems have been and continue to be constructed by man.

What I mean by this is simple. Take the invention of agriculture for example. Every time people fashion a wooded forest or an empty plot of land into a farm of crops, a new ecosystem is born.

This would not have happened naturally. The forest cannot evolve into a garden. It can only happen through human intervention. It needed to be constructed. Keep in mind, I'm not saying the evolutionary traits that have been passed down to every species of plant and tree don't remain, which is why hedges need to be trimmed and branches need to be pruned or else it would grow wild.

But that's also exactly my point. The farmer must intervene and choose how this ecosystem operates. He chooses what plants stay, what plants get uprooted, and what the arrangement of the crop looks like. He decides what things get to live on and what things must go.

Similarly, on a larger scale, man has waged war with man and with nature. He has erased entire genetic pools from the face of the earth. Now, is that evolution? I thought “the survival of the fittest” was a random and automatic process, one that was out of our control? How is it possible then for man to logically and consciously choose to initiate a "random" process of genetic elimination?

It would make sense if he were merely an animal, for animals aren’t conscious beings with agency. Animals are in bondage to their instincts.

(If this were the case, if man were merely a cog in the evolutionary process, then genetic elimination via anthropogenic climate change should be considered one of the forces of natural selection, but that's a discussion for another time.)

Obviously, man also can be a slave to animalistic instincts. But he has the ability to overcome them and be a freely thinking man. And this thinking man is what shatters the paradigm of the routine-like progression model of evolution. Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses. In this very manner and for this very reason, I am arguing that evolutionary theory is deficient.

Show me the fossils

The current model of evolution is a reductive approach that meagerly attempts to “predict the past” per se by observing biological subjects in an atomistic fashion. It doesn’t attempt to take into account an organism’s past and present relationships with its ecosystem.

What’s meant by that is that the way an organism behaves in the present day (genetic traits and all) is obviously a product of a complex history of events through generations. And what evolutionary theory lacks is an exhaustive account of generational history relating to its subjects of study.

What this means in simple terms is that there is not enough evidence to justify the acceptance of the evolution model. The biggest red flag in the evidence department is the absence of transitional fossils.

You see, evolutionary theory traditionally holds that species undergo evolutionary change via a process called phyletic gradualism, wherein species branch off into different species gradually over time. And if this were to be the case, there should have been thousands, if not millions, of fossils showing this transition.

The problem is just that. There’s a gaping hole in the transitional fossil record. Some of the most famous evolutionary theory proponents, like Darwin and Dawkins, even admit the glaring absence of this evidence. The evidence is so severely lacking that some scholars have had to come up with entirely new models of evolution to explain the phenomenon.

Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, contrasting phyletic gradualism, came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein he asserts that speciation actually occurs in short bursts in between long periods of evolutionary stability.

This new model should be able to help verify the validity of evolution, in theory. It should at least narrow the timeframes for genetic mutation down to specific time periods. Suddenly, data now theoretically does not have to be gathered from all time periods in all of history and all locations in all the world.

Needle in the hay

However, it also puts the pressure on evolution advocates precisely because it narrows down the field of view. In a weird paradoxical way, it has broadened and complicated the quest to validate evolution.

Now, not only is there a search for evolutionary change in specific times and locations (a proverbial needle in the haystack), there must also be some account for and definition of what exactly “evolutionary stability” looks like to appropriately contrast the short bursts of change.

By abandoning the search for transitional fossils, evolution advocates have doubled their work. They must be able to explain the properties of the long-term routine the biosphere experiences as well as the drastic short-term chaos that intervenes in order to produce such kinds of changes.

There’s that word again: intervene. It seems as though genetic change can only occur when there are specific instances of intervention.

And who is the only variable in the biosphere?

Mankind.

Random rules?

Make no mistake, only mankind is capable of consciously exerting its authority over nature enough to change nature itself. Because as tempting as it is to gloss over generations of history with a single doctrine like “survival of the fittest,” we ultimately don’t have any transitional fossils of ancient plants, fish, or kangaroo, but we do know about the one conscious agent who had the ability to deliberately intervene in nature’s business.

The point is that evolution implies this sort of random process whereby species unpredictably vie for survival, but what it misses is how conscious will intervenes in this process. And there’s no shortage of this human intervention.

We construct our world today in too many ways to count. Look around you. Most things didn’t evolve to be there. They were fashioned. Crafted. Placed.

The more interesting question to me is, what exactly emerges when we deliberately choose which genetic traits to proliferate and which traits to leave out?

Make no mistake, issues like the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate serve as examples of our struggle with evolution and eugenics.

We are currently shaping a new evolutionary pathway because of our tendency to intervene, whether we know it or not. Who's to say what the effects of these practices will be?

Evolution: A fairy tale for progressives



When I was a child and I was being indoctrinated in school with the evolution meme, my teacher (who was actually pretty based) asked the class a question: "So which is it? God or evolution?"

I raised my hand and gave an answer: "Why couldn't God have simply created evolution?"

I got some praise from some classmates (especially the supposedly smart ones), but my teacher treated that answer as a cop-out and wasn't satisfied.

Looking back on that moment as a full-grown adult, I realize just how childish my answer was and just how childish I was for believing in evolution.

God, the Logos, the unmoved mover, can't create a nonsensical, chaotic process that magically transforms inanimate, microscopic particles into living, breathing, fully fleshed-out organisms.

For intelligent design to come from random chaos is ridiculous and impossible and would have no trace of God's fingerprints. My answer truly wasn't thought through and was, in fact, a cop-out. (I was in seventh grade.) The truth is that you do have to choose one or the other.

To my seventh-grade brain, evolution made sense.

"Animals just changed over time!" I thought. "The monkeys look kind of like us. We must have just come from them millions of years ago."

In retrospect, I think I and many others in my generation were subliminally psyoped by the liberal notion of "progress" that pervaded every aspect of our culture in the 1990s and 2000s. Clearly, we were more socially enlightened and technologically advanced than any other civilization in history. We as the human race were living proof that "progress" was real.

So why wouldn't that apply to biology as well? We must have "progressed" from tiny specks of dust to fish, to monkeys, to humans.

But if we think about this with just a modicum of rigor, we began to detect traces of absurdity. Take so-called transitional fossils — fossils of species that would link modern species and ancient species. We've found very few, if any, so few that evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould had to come up with an entirely new model (punctuated equilibrium) to make evolution make sense.

That's just one example. The deeper you dig, the dumber and more childish it gets.

As adults, we must learn to put childish things away. That means using critical reasoning skills instead of slurping up the slop we slurped up as a child. The superstition that we all came from monkeys is a good place to start.

Transhumanism is coming to destroy the human soul



Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on.

The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica.

This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change.

In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.”

Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds.

This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable.

This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day.

Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives.

Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian.

In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.”

Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will.

This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save.

C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.”

He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.”

Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago.

The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross are perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate.

The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression.

Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them.

A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post.

The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed.

EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facilityyoutu.be

Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense.

The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed.

G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps.

This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it.

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis.

The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.

Atheist Richard Dawkins now labels himself a 'cultural Christian': Here's why



Famous atheist Richard Dawkins has spent years criticizing religion, but in a recent interview, Dawkins told Rachel Johnson of LBC, “I count myself a cultural Christian.”

“I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins continued.

He explained his reason being that Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion” while “Islam is not.”

When questioned on this belief, he responded that the Quran is fundamentally hostile to women and gays, and he likes “to live in a culturally Christian country,” although he doesn’t “believe a single word of the Christian faith.”

Pat Gray is shocked.

“That seems like a shift in his ethos, if you will,” he says.

“I will say, cultural Christianity from Richard Dawkins [is] pretty interesting. You know why? Because he has seen the decay of society and civilization, that’s why. He sees our very civilization crumbling around us and what keeps it together,” Gray adds.

America was founded on Christian values, and Dawkins is recognizing what happens when the masses reject those values.

“Once you’ve built your foundation on those principles and then people start taking a jackhammer to it, something bad is going to happen. And he understands that now,” Gray says.


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FACT CHECK: Does This Photo Show The Future Of Human Evolution?

The claim is inaccurate

FASCINATING: Does the right need MORE atheism? Here’s one evolutionary biologist’s compelling argument



One of the biggest debates of our current day revolves around gender. What is gender? How is it different from biological sex? Do feelings determine truth?

Allie Beth Stuckey invites evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright on the show to discuss these highly inflammatory topics.

Surprisingly, Allie and Dr. Wright agree on a number of these controversies despite the fact that Dr. Wright is an atheist while Allie is a Christian.

“Men who are naturally very feminine – this doesn't mean they're born in the wrong body; this doesn't mean they have a gender identity of a female,” says Dr. Wright, adding that it’s entirely possible and even normal for someone to be “gender non-conforming.”

“Sex atypicality is a thing; this shouldn’t be shunned,” but how someone chooses to express themselves should not affect “sports and changing rooms [and] what prisons you go to,” he tells Allie.

Where the two differ is on the subject of the origins of truth. While Allie sees God as the ultimate arbiter of truth, Dr. Wright looks to science.

But does this ultimately matter when they arrive at the same conclusion? Both agree biological sex is fixed and that someone’s feelings do not change that, even if they arrived at that conclusion via different ideologies.

Dr. Wright even says that despite his “evolutionary perspective,” he connects better with Christians than the woke crowd because Christians and atheists both “acknowledge the reality of biological sex,” while progressives “think their reality is constructed through language.”

And since this gender debate has grown even more intense and divisive, Dr. Wright thinks Republicans would be wise to embrace more atheists.

In a recent interview between Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson, Tucker said that he finds atheism – the complete rejection of divinity – “childish” and “hilarious.”

To this, Dr. Wright responded with “the right needs more atheism.”

“What I don't mean is that I think the people on the right who are Christians need to convert to atheism and denounce their God,” he clarifies.

“I think that there are a lot of atheists who are disaffected from the left,” he explains, adding that many prominent figures in the atheist community are “opposed to the woke takeover.”

“A lot of us feel politically homeless,” he explains, “and we feel more affinity to the values that we see that are over on the right that are shared by many Christians, even though we're not Christian ourselves.”

Dr. Wright thinks that the right needs to focus on “shared values” rather than “where these values came from” and in doing so grow the number of people fighting to save objective truth.

“Some core principle values related to free speech … [and] the limits of certain governments – you know, these are the things that I think matter most in terms of morality and connecting with people” rather than “was this the result of evolution or was this … done by a divine creator,” he tells Allie.

To hear their full conversation, watch the video below.


Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Commentary: Transhumanism seeks to dismember mankind to fit Procrustes' bed when we should be fitting ourselves to the cross of Christ



Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on.

The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica.

In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.”

Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds.

This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable.

This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day.

Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives.

Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian.

In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.”

Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will.

This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save.

C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.”

He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.”

Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago.

The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross lies perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate.

The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression.

Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them.

A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post.

The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed.

EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility youtu.be

Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense.

The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed.

G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps.

This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it.

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis.

The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.

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