Definitive standards.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is defined in each of:

Description of the ciphers.

AES is based on a design principle known as a substitution–permutation network, and is efficient in both software and hardware. Unlike its predecessor DES, AES does not use a Feistel network. AES is a variant of Rijndael, with a fixed block size of 128 bits, and a key size of 128, 192, or 256 bits. By contrast, Rijndael "per se" is specified with block and key sizes that may be any multiple of 32 bits, with a minimum of 128 and a maximum of 256 bits.  AES operates on a 4 × 4 column-major order array of bytes, termed the "state". Most AES calculations are done in a particular finite field.  For instance, 16 bytes, formula_1 are represented as this two-dimensional array:  The key size used for an AES cipher specifies the number of transformation rounds that convert the input, called the plaintext, into the final output, called the ciphertext. The number of rounds are as follows:  Each round consists of several processing steps, including one that depends on the encryption key itself. A set of reverse rounds are applied to transform ciphertext back into the original plaintext using the same encryption key.

The step.

In the step, each byte formula_3 in the "state" array is replaced with a formula_4 using an 8-bit substitution box. This operation provides the non-linearity in the cipher. The S-box used is derived from the multiplicative inverse over, known to have good non-linearity properties. To avoid attacks based on simple algebraic properties, the S-box is constructed by combining the inverse function with an invertible affine transformation. The S-box is also chosen to avoid any fixed points (and so is a derangement), i.e., formula_5, and also any opposite fixed points, i.e., formula_6. While performing the decryption, the step (the inverse of ) is used, which requires first taking the inverse of the affine transformation and then finding the multiplicative inverse.

The step.

The step operates on the rows of the state; it cyclically shifts the bytes in each row by a certain offset. For AES, the first row is left unchanged. Each byte of the second row is shifted one to the left. Similarly, the third and fourth rows are shifted by offsets of two and three respectively. In this way, each column of the output state of the step is composed of bytes from each column of the input state. The importance of this step is to avoid the columns being encrypted independently, in which case AES degenerates into four independent block ciphers.

The step.

In the step, the four bytes of each column of the state are combined using an invertible linear transformation. The function takes four bytes as input and outputs four bytes, where each input byte affects all four output bytes. Together with, provides diffusion in the cipher.  During this operation, each column is transformed using a fixed matrix (matrix left-multiplied by column gives new value of column in the state):  Matrix multiplication is composed of multiplication and addition of the entries. Entries are 8-bit bytes treated as coefficients of polynomial of order formula_8. Addition is simply XOR. Multiplication is modulo irreducible polynomial formula_9. If processed bit by bit, then, after shifting, a conditional XOR with 1B should be performed if the shifted value is larger than FF (overflow must be corrected by subtraction of generating polynomial). These are special cases of the usual multiplication in formula_10.  In more general sense, each column is treated as a polynomial over formula_10 and is then multiplied modulo formula_12 with a fixed polynomial formula_13. The coefficients are displayed in their hexadecimal equivalent of the binary representation of bit polynomials from formula_14. The step can also be viewed as a multiplication by the shown particular MDS matrix in the finite field formula_10. This process is described further in the article Rijndael MixColumns.

The step.

In the step, the subkey is combined with the state. For each round, a subkey is derived from the main key using Rijndael's key schedule; each subkey is the same size as the state. The subkey is added by combining each byte of the state with the corresponding byte of the subkey using bitwise XOR.

Optimization of the cipher.

On systems with 32-bit or larger words, it is possible to speed up execution of this cipher by combining the and steps with the step by transforming them into a sequence of table lookups. This requires four 256-entry 32-bit tables (together occupying 4096 bytes). A round can then be performed with 16 table lookup operations and 12 32-bit exclusive-or operations, followed by four 32-bit exclusive-or operations in the step. Alternatively, the table lookup operation can be performed with a single 256-entry 32-bit table (occupying 1024 bytes) followed by circular rotation operations.  Using a byte-oriented approach, it is possible to combine the,, and steps into a single round operation.

Security.

The National Security Agency (NSA) reviewed all the AES finalists, including Rijndael, and stated that all of them were secure enough for U.S. Government non-classified data. In June 2003, the U.S. Government announced that AES could be used to protect classified information: The design and strength of all key lengths of the AES algorithm (i.e., 128, 192 and 256) are sufficient to protect classified information up to the SECRET level. TOP SECRET information will require use of either the 192 or 256 key lengths. The implementation of AES in products intended to protect national security systems and/or information must be reviewed and certified by NSA prior to their acquisition and use.  AES has 10 rounds for 128-bit keys, 12 rounds for 192-bit keys, and 14 rounds for 256-bit keys.  By 2006, the best known attacks were on 7 rounds for 128-bit keys, 8 rounds for 192-bit keys, and 9 rounds for 256-bit keys.

Known attacks.

For cryptographers, a cryptographic "break" is anything faster than a brute-force attack – i.e., performing one trial decryption for each possible key in sequence (see Cryptanalysis). A break can thus include results that are infeasible with current technology. Despite being impractical, theoretical breaks can sometimes provide insight into vulnerability patterns. The largest successful publicly known brute-force attack against a widely implemented block-cipher encryption algorithm was against a 64-bit RC5 key by distributed.net in 2006.  The key space increases by a factor of 2 for each additional bit of key length, and if every possible value of the key is equiprobable, this translates into a doubling of the average brute-force key search time. This implies that the effort of a brute-force search increases exponentially with key length. Key length in itself does not imply security against attacks, since there are ciphers with very long keys that have been found to be vulnerable.  AES has a fairly simple algebraic framework. In 2002, a theoretical attack, named the "XSL attack", was announced by Nicolas Courtois and Josef Pieprzyk, purporting to show a weakness in the AES algorithm, partially due to the low complexity of its nonlinear components. Since then, other papers have shown that the attack, as originally presented, is unworkable; see XSL attack on block ciphers.  During the AES selection process, developers of competing algorithms wrote of Rijndael's algorithm "we are concerned about [its] use... in security-critical applications." In October 2000, however, at the end of the AES selection process, Bruce Schneier, a developer of the competing algorithm Twofish, wrote that while he thought successful academic attacks on Rijndael would be developed someday, he "did not believe that anyone will ever discover an attack that will allow someone to read Rijndael traffic."  Until May 2009, the only successful published attacks against the full AES were side-channel attacks on some specific implementations. In 2009, a new related-key attack was discovered that exploits the simplicity of AES's key schedule and has a complexity of 2. In December 2009 it was improved to 2. This is a follow-up to an attack discovered earlier in 2009 by Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Ivica Nikolić, with a complexity of 2 for one out of every 2 keys. However, related-key attacks are not of concern in any properly designed cryptographic protocol, as a properly designed protocol (i.e., implementational software) will take care not to allow related keys, essentially by constraining an attacker's means of selecting keys for relatedness.  Another attack was blogged by Bruce Schneier on July 30, 2009, and released as a preprint on August 3, 2009. This new attack, by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Adi Shamir, is against AES-256 that uses only two related keys and 2 time to recover the complete 256-bit key of a 9-round version, or 2 time for a 10-round version with a stronger type of related subkey attack, or 2 time for an 11-round version. 256-bit AES uses 14 rounds, so these attacks are not effective against full AES.  The practicality of these attacks with stronger related keys has been criticized, for instance, by the paper on chosen-key-relations-in-the-middle attacks on AES-128 authored by Vincent Rijmen in 2010.  In November 2009, the first known-key distinguishing attack against a reduced 8-round version of AES-128 was released as a preprint. This known-key distinguishing attack is an improvement of the rebound, or the start-from-the-middle attack, against AES-like permutations, which view two consecutive rounds of permutation as the application of a so-called Super-S-box. It works on the 8-round version of AES-128, with a time complexity of 2, and a memory complexity of 2. 128-bit AES uses 10 rounds, so this attack is not effective against full AES-128.  The first key-recovery attacks on full AES were by Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger, and were published in 2011. The attack is a biclique attack and is faster than brute force by a factor of about four. It requires 2 operations to recover an AES-128 key. For AES-192 and AES-256, 2 and 2 operations are needed, respectively. This result has been further improved to 2 for AES-128, 2 for AES-192 and 2 for AES-256, which are the current best results in key recovery attack against AES.  This is a very small gain, as a 126-bit key (instead of 128-bits) would still take billions of years to brute force on current and foreseeable hardware. Also, the authors calculate the best attack using their technique on AES with a 128-bit key requires storing 2 bits of data. That works out to about 38 trillion terabytes of data, which is more than all the data stored on all the computers on the planet in 2016. As such, there are no practical implications on AES security. The space complexity has later been improved to 2 bits, which is 9007 terabytes.  According to the Snowden documents, the NSA is doing research on whether a cryptographic attack based on tau statistic may help to break AES.  At present, there is no known practical attack that would allow someone without knowledge of the key to read data encrypted by AES when correctly implemented.

Side-channel attacks.

Side-channel attacks do not attack the cipher as a black box, and thus are not related to cipher security as defined in the classical context, but are important in practice. They attack implementations of the cipher on hardware or software systems that inadvertently leak data. There are several such known attacks on various implementations of AES.  In April 2005, D.J. Bernstein announced a cache-timing attack that he used to break a custom server that used OpenSSL's AES encryption. The attack required over 200 million chosen plaintexts. The custom server was designed to give out as much timing information as possible (the server reports back the number of machine cycles taken by the encryption operation). However, as Bernstein pointed out, "reducing the precision of the server's timestamps, or eliminating them from the server's responses, does not stop the attack: the client simply uses round-trip timings based on its local clock, and compensates for the increased noise by averaging over a larger number of samples."  In October 2005, Dag Arne Osvik, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer presented a paper demonstrating several cache-timing attacks against the implementations in AES found in OpenSSL and Linux's codice_1 partition encryption function. One attack was able to obtain an entire AES key after only 800 operations triggering encryptions, in a total of 65 milliseconds. This attack requires the attacker to be able to run programs on the same system or platform that is performing AES.  In December 2009 an attack on some hardware implementations was published that used differential fault analysis and allows recovery of a key with a complexity of 2.  In November 2010 Endre Bangerter, David Gullasch and Stephan Krenn published a paper which described a practical approach to a "near real time" recovery of secret keys from AES-128 without the need for either cipher text or plaintext. The approach also works on AES-128 implementations that use compression tables, such as OpenSSL. Like some earlier attacks this one requires the ability to run unprivileged code on the system performing the AES encryption, which may be achieved by malware infection far more easily than commandeering the root account.  In March 2016, Ashokkumar C., Ravi Prakash Giri and Bernard Menezes presented a side-channel attack on AES implementations that can recover the complete 128-bit AES key in just 6–7 blocks of plaintext/ciphertext, which is a substantial improvement over previous works that require between 100 and a million encryptions. The proposed attack requires standard user privilege and key-retrieval algorithms run under a minute.  Many modern CPUs have built-in hardware instructions for AES, which protect against timing-related side-channel attacks.

NIST/CSEC validation.

The Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) is operated jointly by the United States Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Computer Security Division and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of the Government of Canada. The use of cryptographic modules validated to NIST FIPS 140-2 is required by the United States Government for encryption of all data that has a classification of Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) or above. From NSTISSP #11, National Policy Governing the Acquisition of Information Assurance: “Encryption products for protecting classified information will be certified by NSA, and encryption products intended for protecting sensitive information will be certified in accordance with NIST FIPS 140-2.”  The Government of Canada also recommends the use of FIPS 140 validated cryptographic modules in unclassified applications of its departments.  Although NIST publication 197 (“FIPS 197”) is the unique document that covers the AES algorithm, vendors typically approach the CMVP under FIPS 140 and ask to have several algorithms (such as Triple DES or SHA1) validated at the same time. Therefore, it is rare to find cryptographic modules that are uniquely FIPS 197 validated and NIST itself does not generally take the time to list FIPS 197 validated modules separately on its public web site. Instead, FIPS 197 validation is typically just listed as an "FIPS approved: AES" notation (with a specific FIPS 197 certificate number) in the current list of FIPS 140 validated cryptographic modules.  The Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) allows for independent validation of the correct implementation of the AES algorithm at a reasonable cost. Successful validation results in being listed on the NIST validations page. This testing is a pre-requisite for the FIPS 140-2 module validation described below. However, successful CAVP validation in no way implies that the cryptographic module implementing the algorithm is secure. A cryptographic module lacking FIPS 140-2 validation or specific approval by the NSA is not deemed secure by the US Government and cannot be used to protect government data.  FIPS 140-2 validation is challenging to achieve both technically and fiscally. There is a standardized battery of tests as well as an element of source code review that must be passed over a period of a few weeks. The cost to perform these tests through an approved laboratory can be significant (e.g., well over $30,000 US) and does not include the time it takes to write, test, document and prepare a module for validation. After validation, modules must be re-submitted and re-evaluated if they are changed in any way. This can vary from simple paperwork updates if the security functionality did not change to a more substantial set of re-testing if the security functionality was impacted by the change.

Test vectors.

Test vectors are a set of known ciphers for a given input and key. NIST distributes the reference of AES test vectors as AES Known Answer Test (KAT) Vectors.

Performance.

High speed and low RAM requirements were criteria of the AES selection process. As the chosen algorithm, AES performed well on a wide variety of hardware, from 8-bit smart cards to high-performance computers.  On a Pentium Pro, AES encryption requires 18 clock cycles per byte, equivalent to a throughput of about 11 Mbit/s for a 200 MHz processor. On a 1.7 GHz Pentium M throughput is about 60 Mbit/s.  On Intel Core i3/i5/i7 and AMD Ryzen CPUs supporting AES-NI instruction set extensions, throughput can be multiple GB/s (even over 10 GB/s).

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES, česky "standard pokročilého šifrování") je standardizovaný algoritmus používaný k šifrování dat v informatice. Jedná se o symetrickou blokovou šifru šifrující i dešifrující stejným klíčem data rozdělená do bloků pevně dané délky. Norma nahradila dříve užívanou šifru DES. Je používána například pro bezdrátové Wi-Fi sítě v rámci zabezpečení WPA2 dle standardu IEEE 802.11i.


Education and academics.

Behe grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he attended grade school at St. Margaret Mary School and later graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School. He graduated from Drexel University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. He received his PhD in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978 to 1982, he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982 to 1985, he was assistant professor of chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife, Celeste. In 1985, he moved to Lehigh University and is currently a Professor of Biochemistry. Lehigh University exhibits a disclaimer on its website stating that the University does not endorse Behe's views on evolution:

Personal life.

Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic. He is married to Celeste Behe and the two have nine children who are homeschooled.

Irreducible complexity and intelligent design.

Behe says he once fully accepted the scientific theory of evolution, but that after reading "" (1985), by Michael Denton, he came to question evolution. Later, Behe came to believe that there was evidence, at a biochemical level, that some biological systems were "irreducibly complex". He thought that these systems could not, even in principle, have evolved by natural selection. He believed that the only possible alternative explanation for such complex structures was that they were created by an "intelligent designer". The logic is very similar to the watchmaker analogy given by William Paley in 1802 as proof of a divine creator. This argument of irreducible complexity has been rejected as an argument from ignorance relying on the lack of knowledge of a natural explanation to make the assumption of an intelligent cause outside of science.  The 1987 "Edwards v. Aguillard" U.S. Supreme Court decision barred the required teaching of creation science from public schools but allowed evolutionary theory on the grounds of scientific validity. After the decision, a later draft of the textbook "Of Pandas and People" (1989) systematically replaced each and every cognate of the word "creation" with the phrase "intelligent design" or similar ID terms. The books of lawyer Phillip E. Johnson on theistic realism dealt directly with criticism of evolutionary theory and its purported biased "materialist" science, and aimed to legitimize the teaching of creationism in schools. In March 1992, a conference at Southern Methodist University brought Behe together with other leading figures into what Johnson later called the "wedge strategy." In 1993, the "Johnson-Behe cadre of scholars" met at Pajaro Dunes, California, and Behe presented for the first time his idea of irreducibly complex molecular machinery. Following a summer 1995 conference, "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture," the group obtained funding through the Discovery Institute. In 1996, Behe became a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture), an organization dedicated to promoting intelligent design.  For the 1993 edition of "Pandas", Behe wrote a chapter on blood clotting, presenting arguments which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in his 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box". Behe later agreed that they were essentially the same when he defended intelligent design at the Dover trial.

"Darwin's Black Box".

In 1996, Behe published his ideas on irreducible complexity in his book "Darwin's Black Box". Behe's refusal to identify the nature of any proposed intelligent designer frustrates scientists, who see it as a move to avoid any possibility of testing the positive claims of ID while allowing him and the intelligent design movement to distance themselves from some of the more overtly religiously motivated critics of evolution.  As to the identity of the intelligent designer, Behe responds that if, deep in the woods, one were to come across a group of flowers that clearly spelled out the name "LEHIGH", one would have no doubt that the pattern was the result of intelligent design. Determining who the designer was, however, would not be nearly as easy. He remarks: "Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer." — "Darwin's Black Box", pp. 195–196  "... 'designer' is often seen as a not-too-subtle code word for God, both by those who like the implications and by those who don't....Like it or not, a raft of important distinctions intervene between a conclusion of design and identification of a designer....The designer need not necessarily even be a truly'supernatural' being....if one wishes to be academically rigorous, one can't leap directly from design to a transcendent God....To reach a transcendent God, other, nonscientific arguments have to be made – philosophical and theological arguments. It is not my purpose here to rehearse what has been said over the millennia on that score, or to say why I myself find some of those arguments persuasive and others not. Here I'm content to 'take "purposeful designer" in a very broad sense. — "The Edge of Evolution" (2007), pp. 227–229 Behe gives the following reply to the assertion that intelligent design is "unfalsifiable" or that he is attempting to avoid the possibility of testing the positive claims of intelligent design: "In fact, "my argument for intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal". Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In "Darwin's Black Box" (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can't be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum--or any equally complex system--was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven." To this, these responses have been made:  "Behe's claim that intelligent design would be 'disproven' is not correct for the simple fact that no legitimate test of the intelligent design theory has been provided in his example. Once again, what we have to acknowledge is that in order to test intelligent design theory, the required test conditions must be such that the causal interaction between an intelligent agent and organism must be available to observation... Behe's suggestion of an experiment involving active selection for mobility is quite irrelevant to testing an intelligent design theory since the causal conditions involve the experimenter, not the intelligent agent to which the theory refers."  "Behe is wrong. Even if his experiment did produce the flagellum, ID's proponents could argue that the intelligent agent was merely acting in the test tube. There is no way to tell, from this experiment, whether the intelligent agent was actually working inside the laboratory; therefore, the test does not falsify the theory."  "There simply is no way to replicate the number of sequential trials (i.e. the total population of bacteria or the amount of genetic variation within that population) or the amount of time involved...[A computer simulation] showed that a binding site that Behe himself characterized as irreducibly complex could evolve in 20,000 years. Yet here he is demanding that scientists do an actual experiment with actual bacteria, the numbers of which could not possibly be contained in a lab, on the evolution of a much more complex biochemical system that would almost certainly take longer to evolve than the whole of recorded human history." Behe has charged that his detractors are inconsistent: "Coyne's conclusion that design is unfalsifiable, however, seems to be at odds with the arguments of other reviewers of my book. Clearly, Russell Doolittle (Doolittle 1997), Kenneth Miller (Miller 1999), and others have advanced scientific arguments aimed at falsifying ID....If the results with knock-out mice (Bugge "et al". 1996) had been as Doolittle first thought, or if Barry Hall's work (Hall 1999) had indeed shown what Miller implied, then they correctly believed my claims about irreducible complexity would have suffered quite a blow. And since my claim for intelligent design requires that no unintelligent process be sufficient to produce such irreducibly complex systems, then the plausibility of ID would suffer enormously....Now, one can't have it both ways. One can't say both that ID is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental reproach, or it can be criticized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable. The fact that critical reviewers advance scientific arguments against ID (whether successfully or not) shows that intelligent design is indeed falsifiable."  Unlike William A. Dembski and others in the intelligent design movement, Behe accepts the common descent of species, including that humans descended from other primates, although he states that common descent does not by itself explain the differences between species. He also accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the age of the Universe. In his own words:  "Evolution is a controversial topic, so it is necessary to address a few basic questions at the beginning of the book. Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin's mechanism – natural selection working on variation – might explain many things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life. I also do not think it surprising that the new science of the very small might change the way we view the less small." "Darwin's Black Box", pp 5–6. "For example, both humans and chimps have a broken copy of a gene that in other mammals helps make vitamin C.... It's hard to imagine how there could be stronger evidence for common ancestry of chimps and humans.... Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives." "The Edge of Evolution", pp. 71–72 "...it's understandable that some people find the idea of common descent so astonishing that they look no further. Yet in a very strong sense the explanation of common descent is also trivial. Common descent tries to account only for the "similarities" between creatures. It says merely that certain shared features were there from the beginning – the ancestor had them...In contrast, Darwin's hypothesized mechanism of evolution – the compound concept of random mutation paired with natural selection...tries to account for the "differences" between creatures....What could cause such staggering transformations?...By far the most critical aspect of Darwin's multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept." "The Edge of Evolution", p. 2 In 1997, Russell Doolittle, on whose work Behe based much of the blood-clotting discussion in "Darwin's Black Box," wrote a rebuttal to the statements about irreducible complexity of certain systems. In particular, Doolittle mentioned the issue of the blood clotting in his article, "A Delicate Balance." Later on, in 2003, Doolittle's lab published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" which demonstrates that the pufferfish lacks at least three out of 26 blood clotting factors, yet still has a workable blood clotting system. According to Doolittle, this defeats a key claim in Behe's book, that blood clotting is irreducibly complex.  In reviewing a book by Robert T. Pennock, Behe took issue with the "intelligent design" group being associated with "creationism," saying readers would typically take that to mean biblical literalism and young Earth creationism (YEC). In 2001 Pennock responded that he had been careful to represent their views correctly, and that while several leaders of the intelligent design movement were young Earth creationists, others including Behe were "old-earthers" and "creationists in the core sense of the term, namely, that they reject the scientific, evolutionary account of the origin of species and want to replace it with a form of special creation."

Behe and Snoke article.

In 2004, Behe published a paper with David Snoke, in the scientific journal "Protein Science" that uses a simple mathematical model to simulate the rate of evolution of proteins by point mutation, which he states supports irreducible complexity, based on the calculation of the probability of mutations required for evolution to succeed. However, the paper does not mention intelligent design nor irreducible complexity, which were removed, according to Behe, at the behest of the reviewers. Nevertheless, the Discovery Institute lists it as one of the "Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design."  Michael Lynch authored a response, to which Behe and Snoke responded. "Protein Science" discussed the papers in an editorial.  Numerous scientists have debunked the work, pointing out that not only has it been shown that a supposedly irreducibly complex structure can evolve, but that it can do so within a reasonable time even subject to unrealistically harsh restrictions, and noting that Behe and Snoke's paper does not properly include natural selection and genetic redundancy. When the issue raised by Behe and Snoke is tested in the modern framework of evolutionary biology, numerous simple pathways to complexity have been shown. In their response, Behe and Snoke assumed that intermediate mutations are always damaging, where modern science allows for neutral or positive mutations. Some of the critics have also noted that the Discovery Institute continues to claim the paper as 'published evidence for design,' despite its offering no design theory nor attempting to model the design process, and therefore not providing an alternative to random chance.  Many of Behe's statements have been challenged by biologist Kenneth R. Miller in his book, "Finding Darwin's God" (1999). Behe has subsequently disputed Miller's points in an online essay.

"The Edge of Evolution".

In 2007, Behe's book "The Edge of Evolution" was published arguing that while evolution can produce changes within species, there is a limit to the ability of evolution to generate diversity, and this limit (the "edge of evolution") is somewhere between species and orders.  In this book Behe's central assertion is that Darwinian evolution actually exists but plays only a limited role in the development and diversification of life on Earth. To this aim, he examines the genetic changes undergone by the malaria plasmodium genome and the human genome in response to each other's biological defenses, and identifies that "the situation resembles trench warfare, not an arms race", by considering the hemoglobin-destroying, protein pump-compromising as a "war by attrition". Starting from this example, he takes into account the number of mutations required to "travel" from one genetic state to another, as well as population size for the organism in question. Then, Behe calculates what he calls the "edge of evolution", i.e., the point at which Darwinian evolution would no longer be an efficacious agent of creative biological change, arguing that purposeful design plays a major role in the development of biological complexity, through the mechanism of producing "non-random mutations", which are then subjected to the sculpting hand of natural selection  The book was reviewed, by prominent scientists in "The New York Times", "The New Republic", "The Globe and Mail", "Science", and "Nature" who were highly critical of the work noting that Behe appears to accept almost all of evolutionary theory, barring random mutation, which is replaced with guided mutation at the hand of an unnamed designer. The book earned Behe the Pigasus Award for the year 2007.

"Darwin devolves".

Behe also promotes Intelligent Design (ID) in his 2019 book, "Darwin devolves" whose central premise is that the combination of random mutation and natural selection, apart from being incapable of generating novelty, is mainly a degradative force. Like his previous books, "Darwin devolves" received negative reviews from the scientific community, including a scathing review in "Science" by Nathan H. Lents, Richard Lenski, and S. Joshua Swamidass, a harsh critique by Jerry Coyne in the "Washington Post", and a detailed scholarly rebuttal from his own colleagues at Lehigh University.

Popular writing.

Behe has written op-ed features in the "Boston Review", "The American Spectator", and "The New York Times." Behe, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates William A. Dembski and David Berlinski, tutored Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book "" (2006). Coulter devotes approximately one-third of the book to polemics on evolution, which she terms "Darwinism." In the book, Coulter thanks Behe, Dembski and Berlinski for their assistance.

Court cases.

Dover testimony.

In "Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District," the first direct challenge brought in United States federal courts to an attempt to mandate the teaching of intelligent design on First Amendment grounds, Behe was called as a primary witness for the defense and asked to support the idea that intelligent design was legitimate science. Some of the most crucial exchanges in the trial occurred during Behe's cross-examination, where his testimony would prove devastating to the defense. Behe was forced to concede that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred" and that his definition of 'theory' as applied to intelligent design was so loose that astrology would also qualify. Earlier during his direct testimony, Behe had argued that a computer simulation of evolution he performed with Snoke shows that evolution is not likely to produce certain complex biochemical systems. Under cross examination however, Behe was forced to agree that "the number of prokaryotes in 1 ton of soil are 7 orders of magnitude higher than the population [it would take] to produce the disulfide bond" and that "it's entirely possible that something that couldn't be produced in the lab in two years... could be produced over three and half billion years."  Many of Behe's critics have pointed to these exchanges as examples they believe further undermine Behe's statements about irreducible complexity and intelligent design. John E. Jones III, the judge in the case, would ultimately rule that intelligent design is not scientific in his 139-page decision, citing Behe's testimony extensively as the basis for his findings:  Jones would later say that Eric Rothschild's cross examination of Behe was "as good a cross-examination of an expert witness as I have ever seen. It was textbook."

"ACSI v. Roman Stearns".

Behe received $20,000 for testifying as an expert witness on behalf of the plaintiffs in "Association of Christian Schools International v. Roman Stearns." The case was filed by Association of Christian Schools International, which argued that the University of California was being discriminatory by not recognizing science classes that use creationist books. The 2005 filing claimed that University of California's rejection of several of their courses was illegal "viewpoint discrimination and content regulation prohibited by the Free Speech Clause." In 2007, Behe's expert witness report claimed that the Christian textbooks, including William S. Pinkston, Jr.'s "Biology for Christian Schools" (1980; 2nd ed. 1994), are excellent works for high school students. He defended that view in a deposition. In August 2008, Judge S. James Otero rejected Behe's claims, saying that Behe "submitted a declaration concluding that the BJU [Bob Jones University Press] text mentions standard scientific content.... However, Professor Behe 'did not consider how much detail or depth' the texts gave to this standard content." Otero ruled in favor of the University of California's decision to reject courses using these books.

Michael J. Behe ( ; born January 18, 1952) is an American biochemist, author, and advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design (ID). He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Behe is best known as an advocate for the validity of the argument for irreducible complexity (IC), which claims that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design. Behe has testified in several court cases related to intelligent design, including the court case "Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District" where his views were cited in the ruling that intelligent design is not science and is religious in nature.

Profesor Michael J. Behe (* 18. ledna 1952) je americký biochemik, kritik neodarwinismu a zastánce kontroverzní myšlenky inteligentního designu. Je profesorem biochemie na Lehigh University.


Origin.

The Order of the Golden Fleece was established on 10 January 1430, by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (on the occasion of his wedding to Isabella of Portugal), in celebration of the prosperous and wealthy domains united in his person that ran from Flanders to Switzerland. The jester and dwarf Madame d'Or performed at the creation of the order of the Golden Fleece in Bruges. It is restricted to a limited number of knights, initially 24 but increased to 30 in 1433, and 50 in 1516, plus the sovereign. The order's first king of arms was Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Remy. It received further privileges unusual to any order of knighthood: the sovereign undertook to consult the order before going to war; all disputes between the knights were to be settled by the order; at each chapter the deeds of each knight were held in review, and punishments and admonitions were dealt out to offenders, and to this the sovereign was expressly subject; the knights could claim as of right to be tried by their fellows on charges of rebellion, heresy and treason, and Charles V conferred on the order exclusive jurisdiction over all crimes committed by the knights; the arrest of the offender had to be by warrant signed by at least six knights, and during the process of charge and trial he remained not in prison but in the gentle custody of his fellow knights. The order, conceived in an ecclesiastical spirit in which mass and obsequies were prominent and the knights were seated in choirstalls like canons, was explicitly denied to heretics, and so became an exclusively Catholic honour during the Reformation. The officers of the order were the chancellor, the treasurer, the registrar, and the king of arms (herald, ).  The Duke's stated reason for founding this institution had been given in a proclamation issued following his marriage, in which he wrote that he had done so "for the reverence of God and the maintenance of our Christian Faith, and to honor and exalt the noble order of knighthood, and also... to do honor to old knights;... so that those who are at present still capable and strong of body and do each day the deeds pertaining to chivalry shall have cause to continue from good to better; and... so that those knights and gentlemen who shall see worn the order... should honor those who wear it, and be encouraged to employ themselves in noble deeds...".  The Order of the Golden Fleece was defended from possible accusations of prideful pomp by the Burgundian court poet Michault Taillevent, who asserted that it was instituted:  Translated into English:  The choice of the Golden Fleece of Colchis as the symbol of a Christian order caused some controversy, not so much because of its pagan context, which could be incorporated in chivalric ideals, as in the Nine Worthies, but because the feats of Jason, familiar to all, were not without causes of reproach, expressed in anti-Burgundian terms by Alain Chartier in his "Ballade de Fougères" referring to Jason as "Who, to carry off the fleece of Colchis, was willing to commit perjury." The bishop of Châlons, chancellor of the order, rescued the fleece's reputation by identifying it instead with the fleece of Gideon that received the dew of Heaven.  The badge of the order, in the form of a sheepskin, was suspended from a jewelled collar of firesteels in the shape of the letter B, for Burgundy, linked by flints; with the motto ('No Mean Reward for Labours') engraved on the front of the central link, and Philip's motto ('I will have no other') on the back (non-royal knights of the Golden Fleece were forbidden to belong to any other order of knighthood).  During this time, the Burgundian court was culturally leading in Europe and so the new order, with its festivals, ceremonies, rituals and constitution, was seen by many as a role model in the sense of a princely order based on the ideals of Christian chivalry. Aid to the Byzantine Empire or the pushing back of the Ottomans was repeatedly promoted by the Burgundian dukes in connection with their order. The Burgundian fleet actually crossed Rhodes and the Black Sea, but all of the ideas came from an extended planning phase that was not yet complete. After the death of Charles the Bold in an attempt to conquer the Duchy of Lorraine caused the extinction of the House of Burgundy in 1477, the order passed to the House of Habsburg. A few months after his marriage to the heiress Mary of Burgundy, Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg was knighted in Bruges on April 30, 1478 and then appointed sovereign (grand master) of the order. All renegade or disloyal knights of the order in the course of the subsequent War of the Burgundian Succession were expelled from the order by Maximilian. The memory of the dead was erased and their coats of arms were broken.  From Emperor Charles V or King Philip II of Spain, the sovereign was on the one hand the head of the Spanish line of the Habsburgs and on the other hand also king of Spain. Charles V was appointed head of the order at the age of 9 and identified himself strongly with this community throughout his life. The ideal of chivalrous and brave living was brought to him by William de Croÿ. When in 1700 Charles II of Spain died childless, both the Habsburgs from the Habsburg lands and the Bourbons, as the new kings of Spain, claimed sovereignty of the order. Both noble houses basically invoked their claims regarding the Spanish crown. The House of Habsburg's claim relied on Article 65 of the Statutes. Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI was able to claim sovereignty of the Netherlands, the Burgundian heartland, during the War of the Spanish Succession and thus he could celebrate the order's festival in Vienna in 1713. As with Maximilian I or Charles V, the order was again closely associated with the Holy Roman Empire.  Regardless of this, the order was divided into two lines. The Habsburg order owns the archive and the old insignia and adheres more to the original statutes.

Spanish order.

With the absorption of the Burgundian lands into the Spanish Habsburg empire, the sovereignty of the order passed to the Habsburg kings of Spain, where it remained until the death of the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, Charles II, in 1700. He was succeeded as king by Philip V, a Bourbon. The dispute between Philip and the Habsburg pretender to the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles, led to the War of the Spanish Succession, and also resulted in the division of the order into Spanish and Austrian branches. In either case the sovereign, as Duke of Burgundy, writes the letter of appointment in French.  The controversial conferral of the Fleece on Napoleon and his brother Joseph, while Spain was occupied by French troops, angered the exiled king of France, Louis XVIII, and caused him to return his collar in protest. These, and other awards by Joseph, were revoked by King Ferdinand on the restoration of Bourbon rule in 1813. Napoleon created by Order of 15 August 1809 the Order of the Three Golden Fleeces, in view of his sovereignty over Austria, Spain and Burgundy. This was opposed by Joseph I of Spain and appointments to the new order were never made.  In 1812, the acting government of Spain conferred the Fleece upon the Duke of Wellington, an act confirmed by Ferdinand on his resumption of power, with the approval of Pope Pius VII. Wellington therefore became the first Protestant to be honoured with the Golden Fleece. It has subsequently also been conferred upon non-Christians, such as Bhumibol Adulyadej, King of Thailand.  There was another crisis in 1833 when Isabella II became Queen of Spain in defiance of Salic Law that did not allow women to become heads of state. Her right to confer the Fleece was challenged by Spanish Carlists.  Sovereignty remained with the head of the Spanish House of Bourbon during the republican (1931–1939) and Francoist (1939–1975) periods, and is held today by the present king of Spain, Felipe VI. There is confusion towards the conferral of the Fleece on Francisco Franco in 1972. The order was illegally offered by Infante Jaime to him on the occasion of his son's wedding to the dictator's granddaughter, Carmen. Franco kindly refused the order on the basis of legitimacy and primogeniture, stating that the Golden Fleece could only be granted by the reigning king of Spain. Moreover, the right of conferral was in any case a pejorative of Jaime's younger brother, Infante Juan, as designated heir to the throne of Spain by his father Alfonso XIII.  Knights of the order are entitled to be addressed with the style "His/Her Excellency" in front of their name.

Living members.

Below a list of the names of the living knights and ladies, in chronologic order and, within parentheses, the year when they were inducted into the order:

Austrian (Habsburg) order.

The Austrian order did not suffer from the political difficulties of the Spanish, remaining (with the exception of the British prince regent, later George IV) an honour solely for Catholic royalty and nobility. The problem of female inheritance was avoided on the accession of Maria Theresa in 1740, as sovereignty of the order passed not to herself but to her husband, Francis.  The entire treasure of the order, which also includes the "Ainkhürn sword" of the last duke of Burgundy and the centuries-old oath cross, which contains a cross splinter of the True Cross, is located in the Vienna Treasury and, like the archive and the old insignia, is the property of the Habsburg branch.  Upon the collapse of the Austrian monarchy after the First World War, King Albert I of Belgium requested that the sovereignty and treasure of the order be transferred to him as the ruler of the former Habsburg lands of Burgundy. This claim was seriously considered by the victorious Allies at Versailles but was eventually rejected due to the intervention of King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who took possession of the property of the order on behalf of the dethroned emperor, Charles I of Austria.  Nazi Germany classified the order as hostile to the state and tried to confiscate the entire treasure of the order including the archive. Hitler categorically rejected the centuries-old Habsburg principles of "live and let live" in relation to ethnic groups, peoples, minorities, religions, cultures and languages, and also wanted to seize significant works of art that are unique worldwide. Hitler intended to decide on the use of the assets after they had been confiscated. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Max von Hohenberg, Habsburg representative in the affairs of the order, was immediately sent to a concentration camp.  After the Second World War in 1953, the Republic of Austria continued to confirm to the House of Habsburg the right to the Order on its territory, in particular that the Order has its own legal personality. As a result, the order itself remains the owner of the treasure and the archive. The historically and artistically extremely valuable treasure from the early days of the order includes the oath cross from 1401/02, the golden collar of office for the herald (1517), collars of the order (approx. 1560), vestments and historical relics.  Sovereignty of the Austrian branch remains with the head of the House of Habsburg, which was handed over on 20 November 2000 by Otto von Habsburg to his elder son, Karl von Habsburg.  November 30 (feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle, patron saint of Burgundy) is the day of the order, when new members are accepted into the order. The extremely valuable treasures are in the Vienna Treasury and in the Austrian State Archives. To date, the new knights and officers take the oath in front of the so-called "oath cross", which is kept in the treasury in Vienna. It is a simply designed golden cross set with precious stones (sapphires, rubies and pearls). In the central part of the cross there is a splinter of the Holy Cross, which makes it a relic cross.

Living members.

Below a list of the names of the living knights, in chronological order, followed in parentheses by the date, when known, of their induction into the order:

The Distinguished Order of the Golden Fleece (, ) is a Catholic order of chivalry founded in Bruges by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in 1430, to celebrate his marriage to Isabella of Portugal. Today, two branches of the order exist, namely the Spanish and the Austrian Fleece; the current grand masters are Felipe VI, King of Spain and Karl von Habsburg, head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, respectively. The Grand Chaplain of the Austrian branch is Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna.

Řád zlatého rouna (, ) je rytířský řád založený roku 1430, a jako spolek rytířů organizovaný po vzoru duchovních rytířských řádů. Později byl stále více privilegovaným a byl udělován velmistrem jako odměna za zásluhy. Řádový odznak tvoří na řetězu zavěšená zlatá beránčí kůže.


Origin.

The term originates from the Hebrew word "shibbólet" (), which literally means the part of a plant containing grain, such as the head of a stalk of wheat or rye; or less commonly (but arguably more appositely) "flood, torrent".  The modern use derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect used a differently sounding first consonant. The difference concerns the Hebrew letter "shin", which is now pronounced as (as in "shoe"). In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead under the command of Jephthah inflicted a military defeat upon the invading tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the River Jordan back into their home territory, but the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word "shibboleth". The Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like "sibboleth". In the King James Bible the anecdote appears thus (with the word already in its current English spelling):

Modern use.

In modern English, a shibboleth can have a sociological meaning, referring to any in-group word or phrase that can distinguish members from outsiders – even when not used by a hostile other group. It is also sometimes used in a broader sense to mean jargon, the proper use of which identifies speakers as members of a particular group or subculture.  The term shibboleth can be extended, as in the discipline of semiotics, to describe non-linguistic elements of culture such as diet, fashion and cultural values. Cultural touchstones and shared experience can also be shibboleths of a sort. For example, people about the same age who are from the same nation tend to have the same memories of popular songs, television shows, and events from their formative years. One-hit wonders prove particularly distinctive. Much the same is true of alumni of a particular school, veterans of military service, and other groups. Discussing such memories is a common way of bonding. In-jokes can be a similar type of shared-experience shibboleth.  In information technology a shibboleth is a community-wide password that enables members of that community to access an online resource without revealing their individual identities. The origin server can vouch for the identity of the individual user without giving the target server any further identifying information. Hence the individual user does not know the password that is actually employed – it is generated internally by the origin server – and so cannot betray it to outsiders.  The term can also be used pejoratively, suggesting that the original meaning of a symbol has in effect been lost and that the symbol now serves merely to identify allegiance, being described as "nothing more than a shibboleth". In 1956, Nobel Prize-laureate economist Paul Samuelson applied the term "shibboleth" in works including "Foundations of Economic Analysis" to an idea for which "the means becomes the end, and the letter of the law takes precedence over the spirit." Samuelson admitted that "shibboleth" is an imperfect term for this phenomenon.  In Swedish the consonant cluster ⟨rs⟩ is pronounced, whereas in the province of Småland it is pronounced. The first Thursday in March is celebrated in Småland with marzipan, as this highlights the shibboleth: "massipan i fössta tossdagen i mass " vs. elsewhere in Sweden "marsipan i första torsdagen i mars".

Examples.

Shibboleths have been used by different subcultures throughout the world at different times. Regional differences, level of expertise, and computer coding techniques are several forms that shibboleths have taken.  The legend goes that before the Guldensporenslag (Battle of the Golden Spurs) in May 1302, the Flemish slaughtered every Frenchman they could find in the city of Bruges, an act known as the "Brugse Metten". They identified Frenchmen based on their inability to pronounce the Flemish phrase'(shield and friend), or possibly'(friend of the Guilds). However, many Medieval Flemish dialects did not contain the cluster "sch-" either (even today's Kortrijk dialect has "sk-"), and Medieval French rolled the r just as Flemish did.  "Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries" means "Butter, rye bread and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian" and was used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during a Frisian rebellion (1515–1523). Ships whose crew could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia himself.  In Cologne, a common shibboleth to tell someone who was born in Cologne from someone who had moved there is to ask the suspected individual, "Saag ens "Blodwoosch"" (say "blood sausage", in Kölsch). However, the demand is a trick; no matter how well one says "Blodwoosch" (the pronunciation in IPA is [ˈblo̬ˑ˥˩t.voːɕ]; the falling pitch accent is likely to give the most trouble) one will be recognized as an "Imi" (the common local slang for a foreigner; short for "imitator"); the correct answer is to say a different word entirely; namely, "Flönz", the other Kölsch word for blood sausage; ironically "Flönz" itself is completely pronounceable for a Standard German speaker, featuring no pitch accents or unusual vowel sounds.  The Dutch used the name of the seaside town of Scheveningen as a shibboleth to tell Germans from the Dutch ("Sch" in Dutch is analyzed as the letter "s" and the digraph "ch", producing the consonant cluster, while in German it is analyzed as the trigraph "sch," pronounced ).  In Sardinia, 28 April is celebrated as "sa dii de s'aciappa" (the day of pursuit and capture) or Sa die de sa Sardigna (Sardinia's Day). On that date in 1794 people in Cagliari chased suspected officers of the ruling Piedmontese king and asked them to say "nara cixidi" (Sardinian for ‘chickpea’), which the Piedmontese could not pronounce. Some 514 officers were thus identified and sent back to the mainland.  In October 1937, the Spanish word for parsley, "perejil", was used as a shibboleth to identify Haitian immigrants living along the border in the Dominican Republic. The president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, ordered the execution of these people. It is alleged that between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals were murdered within a few days in the Parsley Massacre, although more recent scholarship and the lack of evidence such as mass graves puts the actual total closer to 1,000.  During the Black July riots of Sri Lanka in 1983, many Tamils were massacred by Sinhalese youths. In many cases these massacres took the form of boarding buses and getting the passengers to pronounce words that had hard ⟨ba⟩'s at the start of the word (like "baldiya" – bucket) and executing the people who found it difficult.  During World War II, some United States soldiers in the Pacific theater used the word "" as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people often pronounce the letter L as R or confuse Rs with Ls. In Oliver Gramling's "Free Men are Fighting: The Story of World War II" (1942) the author notes that, in the war, Japanese spies would often approach checkpoints posing as American or Filipino military personnel. A shibboleth such as "lollapalooza" would be used by the sentry, who, if the first two syllables come back as "rorra," would "open fire without waiting to hear the remainder".  During the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachheads in 1944, hand-to-hand fighting occurred throughout the hedgerows and thick undergrowth of the Norman countryside. British and American troops were told to use the word "Thunderer" as a countersign through the thick foliage. Given the number of syllables and the leading "th" sound, it was believed that the word would invariably be mispronounced by native German speakers.  During The Troubles in Northern Ireland, use of the name Derry or Londonderry for the province's second-largest city was often taken as an indication of the speaker's political stance, and as such frequently implied more than simply naming the location. The pronunciation of the name of the letter H is a related shibboleth, with Catholics pronouncing it as "haitch" and Protestants often pronouncing the letter differently.  In Australia and New Zealand, the words "fish and chips" are often used to highlight the difference in each country's short-i vowel sound [ɪ] and asking someone to say the phrase can identify which country they are from. Australian English has a higher forward sound [i], close to the y in happy and city, while New Zealand English has a lower backward sound [ɘ], a slightly higher version of the a in about and comma. Thus, New Zealanders hear Australians say "feesh and cheeps," while Australians hear New Zealanders say "fush and chups."

Furtive shibboleths.

A "furtive shibboleth" is a type of a shibboleth that identifies individuals as being part of a group, not based on their ability to pronounce one or more words, but on their ability to recognize a seemingly innocuous phrase as a secret message. For example, members of Alcoholics Anonymous sometimes refer to themselves as "a friend of Bill W.", which is a reference to AA's founder, William Griffith Wilson. To the unindoctrinated, this would seem like a casual – if off-topic – remark, but other AA members would understand its meaning.  Similarly, during World War II, a homosexual US sailor might call himself a "friend of Dorothy", a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of a stereotypical affinity for Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz". This code was so effective that the Naval Investigative Service, upon learning that the phrase was a way for gay sailors to identify each other, undertook a search for this "Dorothy", whom they believed to be an actual woman with connections to homosexual servicemen in the Chicago area.  Likewise, homosexuals in Britain might use the cant language Polari.  Mark Twain used an explicit shibboleth to conceal a furtive shibboleth. In "The Innocents Abroad" he told the Shibboleth story in seemingly "inept and uninteresting" detail. To the initiated, however, the wording revealed that he, Twain, was a freemason.  "Fourteen Words", "14", or "14/88" are furtive shibboleths used among white supremacists in the Anglosphere.  Furtive shibboleths can also come in the form of seemingly innocuous symbols. For example, the Ichthys has been used as a furtive shibboleth among Christians since the early church.

In art.

Colombian conceptual artist Doris Salcedo created a work titled "Shibboleth" at Tate Modern, London, in 2007–2008. The piece consisted of a 548-foot-long crack that bisected the floor of the Tate's lobby space.  Salcedo said of the work:

In fiction.

In an episode of "The West Wing" titled "Shibboleth", President Bartlet discusses the meaning of the word at length. His advisors believe it is a catch phrase or cliche, after which Bartlet reminds them of its earlier biblical significance. He later becomes certain that a group of Chinese religious asylum seekers are indeed Christian when their representative uses the word to refer to his faith during a meeting.  In an episode of Seinfeld titled The Van Buren Boys, Kramer unintentionally makes the eponymous street gang's shibboleth, eight outstretched fingers signifying the eighth US president, Martin Van Buren.

A shibboleth () is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.

Šibolet (:, : "obilný klas") je jazykový prostředek, který v komunikačních situacích slouží k rozlišení členů jedné (společenské, nářečové) skupiny od druhé, v širším smyslu jakékoliv znamení, heslo, poznávací heslo, narážka.


In linguistic pragmatics.

In disciplinary linguistics, indexicality is studied in the subdiscipline of pragmatics. Specifically, pragmatics tends to focus on deictics—words and expressions of language that derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality—since these are regarded as "[t]he single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves" Indeed, in linguistics the terms "deixis" and "indexicality" are often treated as synonymous, the only distinction being that the former is more common in linguistics and the latter in philosophy of language. This usage stands in contrast with that of linguistic anthropology, which distinguishes deixis as a particular subclass of indexicality; see below.

In linguistic anthropology.

The concept of indexicality was introduced into the literature of linguistic anthropology by Michael Silverstein in a foundational 1976 paper, "Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description". Silverstein draws on "the tradition extending from Peirce to Jakobson" of thought about sign phenomena to propose a comprehensive theoretical framework in which to understand the relationship between language and culture, the object of study of modern sociocultural anthropology. This framework, while also drawing heavily on the tradition of structural linguistics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, rejects the other theoretical approaches known as structuralism, which attempted to project the Saussurean method of linguistic analysis onto other realms of culture, such as kinship and marriage (see structural anthropology), literature (see semiotic literary criticism), music, film and others. Silverstein claims that "[t]hat aspect of language which has traditionally been analyzed by linguistics, and has served as a model" for these other structuralisms, "is just the part that is functionally unique among the phenomena of culture." It is indexicality, not Saussurean grammar, which should be seen as the semiotic phenomenon which language has in common with the rest of culture.  Silverstein argues that the Saussurean tradition of linguistic analysis, which includes the tradition of structural linguistics in the United States founded by Leonard Bloomfield and including the work of Noam Chomsky and contemporary generative grammar, has been limited to identifying "the contribution of elements of utterances to the referential or denotative value of the whole", that is, the contribution made by some word, expression, or other linguistic element to the function of forming "propositions—predications descriptive of states of affairs". This study of reference and predication yields an understanding of one aspect of the meaning of utterances, their "semantic meaning", and the subdiscipline of linguistics dedicated to studying this kind of linguistic meaning is semantics.  Yet linguistic signs in contexts of use accomplish other functions than pure reference and predication—though they often do so simultaneously, as though the signs were functioning in multiple analytically distinct semiotic modalities at once. In the philosophical literature, the most widely discussed examples are those identified by J.L. Austin as the performative functions of speech, for instance when a speaker says to an addressee "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow", and in so saying, in addition to simply making a proposition about a state of affairs, actually enters into a socially constituted type of agreement with the addressee, a wager. Thus, concludes Silverstein, "[t]he problem set for us when we consider the actual broader uses of language is to describe the total meaning of constituent linguistic signs, only part of which is semantic." This broader study of linguistic signs relative to their general communicative functions is pragmatics, and these broader aspects of the meaning of utterances is "pragmatic meaning". (From this point of view, semantic meaning is a special subcategory of pragmatic meaning, that aspect of meaning which contributes to the communicative function of pure reference and predication.).  Silverstein introduces some components of the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce as the basis for a pragmatics which, rather than assuming that reference and predication are the essential communicative functions of language with other nonreferential functions being mere addenda, instead attempts to capture the total meaning of linguistic signs in terms of all of their communicative functions. From this perspective, the Peircean category of indexicality turns out to "give the key to the pragmatic description of language."  This theoretical framework became an essential presupposition of work throughout the discipline in the 1980s and remains so in the present.

Adaptation of Peircean semiotics.

The concept of indexicality has been greatly elaborated in the literature of linguistic anthropology since its introduction by Silverstein, but Silverstein himself adopted the term from the theory of sign phenomena, or semiotics, of Charles Sanders Peirce. As an implication of his general metaphysical theory of the three universal categories, Peirce proposed a model of the sign as a triadic relationship: a sign is "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity." Thus, more technically, a sign consists of  Peirce further proposed to classify sign phenomena along three different dimensions by means of three trichotomies, the second of which classifies signs into three categories according to the nature of the relationship between the sign-vehicle and the object it represents. As captioned by Silverstein, these are:  Silverstein observes that multiple signs may share the same sign-vehicle. For instance, as mentioned, linguistic signs as traditionally understood are symbols, and analyzed in terms of their contribution to reference and predication, since they arbitrarily denote a whole class of possible objects of reference by virtue of their semantic meanings. But in a trivial sense each linguistic sign token (word or expression spoken in an actual context of use) also functions iconically, since it is an icon of its type in the code (grammar) of the language. It also functions indexically, by indexing its symbol type, since its use in context presupposes that such a type exists in the semantico-referential grammar in use in the communicative situation (grammar is thus understood as an element of the context of communication).  So icon, index and symbol are not mutually exclusive categories—indeed, Silverstein argues, they are to be understood as distinct modes of semiotic function, which may be overlaid on a single sign-vehicle. This entails that one sign-vehicle may function in multiple semiotic modes simultaneously. This observation is the key to understanding deixis, traditionally a difficult problem for semantic theory.

Referential indexicality (deixis).

In linguistic anthropology, "deixis" is defined as referential indexicality—that is, morphemes or strings of morphemes, generally organized into closed paradigmatic sets, which function to "individuate or single out objects of reference or address in terms of their relation to the current interactive context in which the utterance occurs.". "Deictic" expressions are thus distinguished, on the one hand, from standard denotational categories such as common nouns, which potentially refer to any member of a whole class or category of entities: these display purely semantico-referential meaning, and in the Peircean terminology are known as "symbols". On the other hand, deixis is distinguished as a particular subclass of indexicality in general, which may be nonreferential or altogether nonlinguistic (see below).  In the older terminology of Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson, these forms were called "shifters". Silverstein, by introducing the terminology of Peirce, was able to define them more specifically as referential indexicals.

Non-referential indexicality.

Non-referential indices or "pure" indices do not contribute to the semantico-referential value of a speech event yet "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables." Non-referential indices encode certain metapragmatic elements of a speech event's context through linguistic variations. The degree of variation in non-referential indices is considerable and serves to infuse the speech event with, at times, multiple levels of pragmatic "meaning." Of particular note are: sex/gender indices, deference indices (including the affinal taboo index), affect indices, as well as the phenomena of phonological hypercorrection and social identity indexicality.  Examples of non-referential forms of indexicality include sex/gender, affect, deference, social class, and social identity indices. Many scholars, notably Silverstein, argue that occurrences of non-referential indexicality entail not only the context-dependent variability of the speech event, but also increasingly subtle forms of indexical meaning (first, second, and higher-orders) as well.

Sex/gender indices.

One common system of non-referential indexicality is sex/gender indices. These indices index the gender or "female/male" social status of the interlocutor. There are a multitude of linguistic variants that act to index sex and gender such as:  Many instances of sex/gender indices incorporate multiple levels of indexicality (also referred to as "indexical order"). In fact, some, such as the prefix-affixation of o- in Japanese, demonstrate complex higher-order indexical forms. In this example, the first order indexes politeness and the second order indexes affiliation with a certain gender class. It is argued that there is an even higher level of indexical order evidenced by the fact that many jobs use the "o-" prefix to attract female applicants. This notion of higher-order indexicality is similar to Silverstein's discussion of "wine talk" (see below) in that it indexes "an identity-by-visible-consumption [here, "employment"]" that is an inherent of a certain social register (i.e. social gender indexicality).

Affect indices.

Affective meaning is seen as "the encoding, or indexing of speakers emotions into speech events." The interlocutor of the event "decodes" these verbal messages of affect by giving "precedence to intentionality"; that is, by assuming that the affective form intentionally indexes emotional meaning.  Some examples of affective forms are: diminutives (for example, diminutive affixes in Indo-European and Amerindian languages indicate sympathy, endearment, emotional closeness, or antipathy, condescension, and emotional distance); ideophones and onomatopoeias; expletives, exclamations, interjections, curses, insults, and imprecations (said to be "dramatizations of actions or states"); intonation change (common in tone languages such as Japanese); address terms, kinship terms, and pronouns which often display clear affective dimensions (ranging from the complex address-form systems found languages such a Javanese to inversions of vocative kin terms found in Rural Italy); lexical processes such as synecdoche and metonymy involved in affect meaning manipulation; certain categories of meaning like evidentiality; reduplication, quantifiers, and comparative structures; as well as inflectional morphology.  Affective forms are a means by which a speaker indexes emotional states through different linguistic mechanisms. These indices become important when applied to other forms of non-referential indexicality, such as sex indices and social identity indices, because of the innate relationship between first-order indexicality and subsequent second-order (or higher) indexical forms. (See multiple indices section for Japanese example).

Deference indices.

Deference indices encode deference from one interlocutor to another (usually representing inequalities of status, rank, age, sex, etc.). Some examples of deference indices are:

T/V deference entitlement.

The T/V deference entitlement system of European languages was famously detailed by linguists Brown and Gilman. As previously mentioned, T/V deference entitlement is a system by which a speaker/addressee speech event is determined by perceived disparities of 'power' and'solidarity' between interlocutors. Brown and Gilman organized the possible relationships between the speaker and the addressee into six categories: The 'power semantic' indicates that the speaker in a superior position uses T and the speaker in an inferior position uses V. The'solidarity semantic' indicates that speakers use T for close relationships and V for more formal relationships. These two principles conflict in categories 2 and 5, allowing either T or V in those cases: Brown and Gilman observed that as the solidarity semantic becomes more important than the power semantic in various cultures, the proportion of T to V use in the two ambiguous categories changes accordingly.  Silverstein comments that while exhibiting a basic level of first-order indexicality, the T/V system also employs second-order indexicality vis-à-vis 'enregistered honorification'. He cites that the V form can also function as an index of valued "public" register and the standards of good behavior that are entailed by use of V forms over T forms in public contexts. Therefore, people will use T/V deference entailment in 1) a first-order indexical sense that distinguishes between speaker/addressee interpersonal values of 'power' and'solidarity' and 2) a second-order indexical sense that indexes an interlocutor's inherent "honor" or social merit in employing V forms over T forms in public contexts.

Japanese honorifics.

Japanese provides an excellent case study of honorifics. Honorifics in Japanese can be divided into two categories: addressee honorifics, which index deference to the addressee of the utterance; and referent honorifics, which index deference to the referent of the utterance. Cynthia Dunn claims that "almost every utterance in Japanese requires a choice between direct and distal forms of the predicate." The direct form indexes intimacy and "spontaneous self-expression" in contexts involving family and close friends. Contrarily, distal form index social contexts of a more formal, public nature such as distant acquaintances, business settings, or other formal settings.  Japanese also contains a set of humble forms (Japanese "kenjōgo" 謙譲語) which are employed by the speaker to index their deference to someone else. There are also suppletive forms that can be used in lieu of regular honorific endings (for example, the subject honorific form of : "meshiagaru" 召し上がる). Verbs that involve human subjects must choose between "distal" or "direct" forms (towards the addressee) as well as a distinguish between either no use of referent honorifics, use of subject honorific (for others), or use of humble form (for self). The Japanese model for non-referential indexicality demonstrates a very subtle and complicated system that encodes social context into almost every utterance.

Affinal taboo index.

Dyirbal, a language of the Cairns rain forest in Northern Queensland, employs a system known as the affinal taboo index. Speakers of the language maintain two sets of lexical items: 1) an "everyday" or common interaction set of lexical items and 2) a "mother-in-law" set that is employed when the speaker is in the very distinct context of interaction with their mother-in-law. In this particular system of deference indices, speakers have developed an entirely separate lexicon (there are roughly four "everyday" lexical entries for every one "mother-in-law" lexical entry; 4:1) to index deference in contexts inclusive of the mother-in-law.

Hypercorrection as a social class index.

Hypercorrection is defined by Wolfram as "the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy." DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that "hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a prestige dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered." Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of "social class" and an "Index of Linguistic insecurity". The latter index can be defined as a speaker's attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility.  Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes "hand-in-hand" with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of "lesser" phonological variants. He concluded that sociologically "lesser" individuals would try to increase the frequency of certain vowels that were frequent in the high prestige dialect, but they ended up using those vowels even more than their target dialect. This hypercorrection of vowels is an example of non-referential indexicality that indexes, by virtue of innate urges forcing lower class civilians to hypercorrect phonological variants, the actual social class of the speaker. As Silverstein claims, this also conveys an "Index of Linguistic insecurity" in which a speaker not only indexes their actual social class (via first-order indexicality) but also the insecurities about class constraints and subsequent linguistic effects that encourage hypercorrection in the first place (an incidence of second-order indexicality).  William Labov and many others have also studied how hypercorrection in African American Vernacular English demonstrates similar social class non-referential indexicality.

Multiple indices in social identity indexicality.

Multiple non-referential indices can be employed to index the social identity of a speaker. An example of how multiple indexes can constitute social identity is exemplified by Ochs discussion of copula deletion: "That Bad" in American English can index a speaker to be a child, foreigner, medical patient, or elderly person. Use of multiple non-referential indices at once (for example copula deletion and raising intonation), helps further index the social identity of the speaker as that of a child.  Linguistic and non-linguistic indices are also an important ways of indexing social identity. For example, the Japanese utterance "-wa" in conjunction with raising intonation (indexical of increasing affect) by one person who "looks like a woman" and another who looks "like a man" may index different affective dispositions which, in turn, can index gender difference. Ochs and Schieffilen also claim that facial features, gestures, as well as other non-linguistic indices may actually help specify the general information provided by the linguistic features and augment the pragmatic meaning of the utterance.

Indexical order.

In much of the research currently conducted upon various phenomena of non-referential indexicality, there is an increased interest in not only what is called first-order indexicality, but subsequent second-order as well as "higher-order" levels of indexical meaning. First-order indexicality can be defined as the first level of pragmatic meaning that is drawn from an utterance. For example, instances of deference indexicality such as the variation between informal "Tu" and the more formal "Vous" in French (See T/V deference indexes) indicate a speaker/addressee communicative relationship built upon the values of 'power' and'solidarity' possessed by the interlocutors. When a speaker addresses somebody using the V form instead of the T form, they index (via first-order indexicality) their understanding of the need for deference to the addressee. In other words, they perceive/ recognize an incongruence between their level of 'power' and/or'solidarity', and that of their interlocutor and employ a more formal way of addressing that person to suit the contextual constraints of the speech event.  Second-Order Indexicality is concerned with the connection between linguistic variables and the metapragmatic meanings that they encode. For example, a woman is walking down the street in Manhattan and she stops to ask somebody where a McDonald's is. He responds to her talking in a heavy "Brooklyn" accent. She notices this accent and considers a set of possible personal characteristics that might be indexed by it (such as the man's intelligence, economic situation, and other non-linguistic aspects of his life). The power of language to encode these preconceived "stereotypes" based solely on accent is an example of second-order indexicality (representative of a more complex and subtle system of indexical form than that of first-order indexicality).  Michael Silverstein has also argued that indexical order can transcend levels such as second-order indexicality and discusses higher-order indexicality in terms of what he calls "oinoglossia" or "wine talk". (For discussion see below.)

Oinoglossia ("wine talk").

For demonstrations of higher (or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of "life-style emblematization" or "convention-dependent-indexical iconicity" which, as he claims, is prototypical of a phenomenon he dubs "wine talk." Professional wine critics use a certain "technical vocabulary" that are "metaphorical of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture." Thus, a certain "lingo" is created for wine that indexically entails certain notions of prestigious social classes or genres. When "yuppies" use the lingo for wine flavors created by these critics in the "actual context" of drinking wine, Silverstein argues that they become the "well-bred, interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person" that is iconic of the metaphorical "fashion of speaking" employed by people of higher social registers, demanding notoriety as a result of this high level of connoisseurship. In other words, the wine drinker becomes a refined, gentlemanly critic and, in doing so, adopts a similar level of connoisseurship and social refinement. Silverstein defines this as an example of higher-order indexical "authorization" in which the indexical order of this "wine talk" exists in a "complex, interlocking set of institutionally formed macro-sociological interests." A speaker of English metaphorically transfers him- or herself into the social structure of the "wine world" that is encoded by the "oinoglossia" of elite critics using a very particular "technical" terminology.  The use of "wine talk" or similar "fine-cheeses talk", "perfume talk", "Hegelian-dialectics talk", "particle-physics talk", "DNA-sequencing talk", "semiotics talk" etc. confers upon an individual an identity-by-visible-consumption indexical of a certain macro-sociological elite identity and is, as such, an instance of higher-order indexicality.

In philosophy of language.

Philosophical work on language from the mid-20th century, such as that of J.L. Austin and the ordinary language philosophers, has provided much of the originary inspiration for the study of indexicality and related issues in linguistic pragmatics (generally under the rubric of the term "deixis"; see above), though linguists have appropriated concepts originating in philosophical work for purposes of empirical study, rather than for more strictly philosophical purposes.  However, indexicality has remained an issue of interest to philosophers who work on language. In contemporary analytic philosophy, the preferred nominal form of the term is "indexical" (rather than "index"), defined as "any expression whose content varies from one context of use to another... [for instance] pronouns such as 'I', 'you', 'he','she', 'it', 'this', 'that', plus adverbs such as 'now', 'then', 'today', 'yesterday', 'here', and 'actually'. This exclusive focus on linguistic expressions represents a narrower construal than is preferred in linguistic anthropology, which regards linguistic indexicality ("deixis") as a special subcategory of indexicality in general, which is often nonlinguistic; see above.  Indexicals appear to represent an exception to, and thus a challenge for, the understanding of natural language as the grammatical coding of logical propositions; they thus "raise interesting technical challenges for logicians seeking to provide formal models of correct reasoning in natural language." They are also studied in relation to fundamental issues in epistemology, self-consciousness, and metaphysics, for example asking whether indexical facts are facts that do not follow from the physical facts, and thus also form a link between philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.  The American logician David Kaplan is regarded as having developed "[b]y far the most influential theory of the meaning and logic of indexicals".

In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign "pointing to" (or "indexing") some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.

Index je druh znaku, kde mezi znakem a jím označovaným objektem existuje věcná souvislost. Jako index lze označit např. kouř (znak ohně, věcná souvislost mezi kouřem a ohněm), v lingvistice pak např. „já“ (znak mluvčího) či „ty“ (znak naslouchajícího), slovesné časy (značí tu konkrétní řečovou situaci, od které se odvíjí, co je minulost, přítomnost a budoucnost).