The blog Memoirs of a Godless Heathen is reporting on a rumor that the Watchtower Society may be poised to issue a new mandate against secular education:

The rumor states that if an elder allows his children to attend college or university, then he will lose his appointment.

If true, this would be yet another interesting development in the Watchtower’s information control tactics. While they have discouraged young followers from pursuing college education in the past, this would be the first time they’ve required disciplinary action against parents who allow a child to attend a school of higher learning.

In recent years, the organization has ramped-up it’s efforts to reign in it’s followers from obtaining information from ‘unofficial’ sources, especially the Internet. The September 2007 Our Kingdom Ministry even included a question box condemning all independent Bible research outside of the Watchtower’s own publications.

NewScientist is running a story on an exciting new development in evolutionary biology. In short, scientists have watched a new, complex evolutionary trait develop in the lab. This mutation occurred in a population of Escherichia coli bacteria that has been in isolated development for 20 years. The evolution of these bacteria has been observed for over 44,000 generations, and has suddenly acquired the ability metabolize citrate.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago notes: “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.”