Covenant Persuasion Lead to Constitutionalism – Neither Was Invented

Constitutionalism is a conviction shared by people that a government must act in compliance with a dominant charter. So is covenantal persuasion. The covenant reflects statutes and traditions etched in a living covenantal practice. The practice cannot exist without the persuasion and the persuasion cannot exist without the practice. Elazar was one of the most prolific scholars of the covenantal model. There is one point were the paper diverges from Elazar. The paper discusses a mathematical model and other studies of the covenant practice demonstrating that such a practice involves a multitude of simultaneous vital conditions. That led to the understanding that the covenantal practice cannot be invented. Therefore all covenant practices and covenantal faiths evolved from a living parent covenantal practice. Constitutionalism followed the same path. American Constitutionalism evolved from the covenant practice of Puritan New England. The Constitution of “We the People” can limit the government because the faith of people that its words have the power to do so. The first covenant society was pre-monarchic Israel. Semi-nomads in the desert brought into the Holy Land their conviction that words and not kings shall govern. Miraculously, their practice included all the essential ingredients of a viable covenantal practice. Waldensians, Gascony’s vesiau, Romanian obște and obviously Pilgrims and Puritans inherited their viable practices from one another. All of them have a common ancestor: Early Christianity

Analysis of the genetic phylogeny of multifocal prostate cancer identifies multiple independent clonal expansions in neoplastic and morphologically normal prostate tissue.

Genome-wide DNA sequencing was used to decrypt the phylogeny of multiple samples from distinct areas of cancer and morphologically normal tissue taken from the prostates of three men. Mutations were present at high levels in morphologically normal tissue distant from the cancer, reflecting clonal expansions, and the underlying mutational processes at work in morphologically normal tissue were also at work in cancer. Our observations demonstrate the existence of ongoing abnormal mutational processes, consistent with field effects, underlying carcinogenesis. This mechanism gives rise to extensive branching evolution and cancer clone mixing, as exemplified by the coexistence of multiple cancer lineages harboring distinct ERG fusions within a single cancer nodule. Subsets of mutations were shared either by morphologically normal and malignant tissues or between different ERG lineages, indicating earlier or separate clonal cell expansions. Our observations inform on the origin of multifocal disease and have implications for prostate cancer therapy in individual cases

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Cultural Evolution of an Institution: The Sabbath

According to the biblical account the Sabbath has been commanded at Mount Sinai during the Exodus. Reasonably, there can be no archaeological evidence to confirm that. However, the archaeological evidence points to a rankless society in pre-monarchic Israel. Lack of social layers in settled societies does raise questions about controlling the lawlessness. Livni and Stone mathematically established that the Sabbath could keep unruliness under control and that later, starting with the Second Temple, it did so. This multi-disciplinary report portrays the history of the Sabbath in terms of socio-cultural evolution combining analyses of anthropologists, archaeologists, biblical scholars and computation methods. The report shows that the Sabbath is at least 3000 years old

Cultural Evolution of an Institution: The Sabbath

According to the biblical account the Sabbath has been commanded at Mount Sinai during the Exodus. Reasonably, there can be no archaeological evidence to confirm that. However, the archaeological evidence points to a rankless society in pre-monarchic Israel. Lack of social layers in settled societies does raise questions about controlling the lawlessness. Livni and Stone mathematically established that the Sabbath could keep unruliness under control and that later, starting with the Second Temple, it did so. This multi-disciplinary report portrays the history of the Sabbath in terms of socio-cultural evolution combining analyses of anthropologists, archaeologists, biblical scholars and computation methods. The report shows that the Sabbath is at least 3000 years old.