A tangled web for Darwinism?

 

Time to listen to your body re: the design debate?

 

The lowly butterfly vs. Darwinism

 Battle Butterflies

Daniel Witt

You can probably think of a lot of creatures that a military might decide to copy for its submarine designs. Sharks or giant squids. Whales, perhaps. Or what about… butterflies? 

MIT reports that one of their engineers, Dr. Philip Daniel, is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Defense to a create a magnetic navigation system inspired by monarch butterflies. Daniel explains:

They’re able to migrate long distances and find the exact forest that their ancestors were born into. How? One theory is that they’re able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. They have a compass in their head, and they can use it to get where they want to go. The question is: Can humanity take advantage of the Earth’s magnetic field to accurately navigate without GPS?

Every year, around a billion monarchs travel from across North America to gather overwinter in a few specific locations in Mexico. Because adult monarchs live less than a year, none of these butterflies have made the journey before, yet they all somehow know how to travel hundreds upon hundreds of miles to arrive in the same place. (The sheer awesomeness of this journey is well-presented in the excellent Illustra Media documentary Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies (2011). If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.)

Magnetic Fingerprints

Daniel calls the navigational mechanism a compass, but this is just a shorthand. The word “compass” doesn’t do justice to the equipment monarchs have, as Daniel himself would no doubt be the first to acknowledge — after all, the U.S. miliary already has compasses. But monarchs have much more. What they need to navigate from different locations across the U.S. and Canada to a specific destination in Mexico is more like a complete GPS system. 

So how do they do it? Daniel explains that deposits of metal in the earth’s crust can create ripples in the magnetic field, giving certain sites specific “fingerprints” to a highly sensitive detector. It has been hypothesized that monarchs use such a system, and that’s what he is hoping to create for the U.S. military. 

Monarch navigation is still poorly understood, although we have figured out some pieces of it. The hypothesis of a magnetic map is necessary because what they are already known to use wouldn’t be enough to do what they do. So far, it’s known that they have an internal solar compass calibrated with an internal clock, and an internal magnetic compass as a backup for night and cloudy weather, but both of those systems would only tell them latitudinal direction, not longitude. 

A reason to suspect that a magnetic map might be the solution is that it has been shown to exist in other animals. Experiments have demonstrated that turtle hatchlings can use magnetic fields to determine both latitude and longitude, implying they possess a sort of internal geographic coordinate system based on the earth’s magnetic field. 

Nobody knows how this magnetic mapping system actually works. Whether it’s turtles, monarchs, or one of the other animals with seemingly magical navigational capabilities, we can still only wonder at what they can do. But if Dr. Daniel and his lab can crack the problem and engineer even a large and clumsy human equivalent of a magnetic mapping system, it might yield clues towards the design of the natural systems. A manmade functioning version would show how the system theoretically can work, and those details might enable scientists to make hypotheses that can be experimentally tested on butterflies and other migratory animals. 

As always, biologists and engineers working together yields both better manmade designs and better understanding of the designs of living creatures. 

Next on the Agenda…Self-Assembling Helicopters? 

Incidentally, this navigation system is not even the most impressive thing about butterfly design. Another engineering marvel, also discussed in Metamorphosis, is the metamorphosis itself. It turns out, during the transformation the caterpillar completely dissolves within the chrysalis into a gooey soup, before self-assembling into a butterfly. Needless to say, this requires an incomprehensible level of coordination and planning to succeed. 

Who knows? Eventually, the U.S. miliary might invent a tank than can dissolve and reassemble itself as a helicopter. 

But I guess we’d better just start where we are. For the time being, the sophistication of butterfly design is far, far beyond us. 

Darwinism should keep its enemies closer?

 

Suboptimal design or suboptimal science?

 The Panda’s Thumb: An Extraordinary Instance of Design?

Andrew McDiarmid

Does the panda’s thumb refute intelligent design? Or is it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in the mammalian world, as one respected study has found? On this episode of ID the Future, host Casey Luskin speaks with philosopher Dr. Stephen Dilley about his recent paper evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the iconic panda’s thumb argument for evolution.

Harvard scientist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould is well-known for his theory that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria and best kept separate from one another. Yet one of his favorite arguments for evolutionary processes was the panda’s thumb, which is underpinned by a theology-laden premise: namely, God wouldn’t design the panda’s thumb like this, therefore a clumsy step-wise natural process is responsible. But does this argument hold up to philosophical and scientific scrutiny? 

In this conversation, Dr. Dilley challenges the assumptions implicit in the panda’s thumb argument. He also explains that what might be deemed by some as sub-optimal design may actually be an engineering trade-off. Optimizing a structure can sometimes come at the cost of certain design constraints. Ultimately, Dilley holds that the panda’s thumb may be more of a problem for an evolutionary view than a design perspective: “If in fact the very best studies commend the thumb for its efficiency, its dexterity, its precision…then by Gould’s own framing the panda’s thumb would pose a problem” for evolutionists. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Animal navigators vs. Darwin

 

Coded communication and design.

 New Study Reveals Secrets of Honey Bee Waggle Dance

Eric Cassell

The honey bee “waggle dance” is the method used to communicate to members of a hive information about the location of food sources as well as potential nest locations. The information includes direction and distance. One of the mysteries about the method is how other bees are able to detect the direction that the dancer bee is attempting to communicate. There are several factors that make detecting direction challenging for the observing bees. One is that the dances take place inside a dark hive. Therefore, other bees can’t visually observe the dancing bees. Second is that the surface in the hive where it occurs is vertical, whereas the direction that is being communicated is lateral. Third is that it takes place in a crowded hive with hundreds of tightly packed bees.

Do the Hustle

Previously it had been assumed that the following bees aligned their bodies with the dancing bees to determine direction. However, a new study published in Current Biology has provided evidence that the non-dancing bees (followers) utilize a more sophisticated method where they use their antennae to track the movement of a dancing bee and therefore its relative orientation.1 The followers do this by maintaining a constant angle between their antennae and the direction of the waggle dance line. As explained by the authors, “Knowing its own orientation relative to gravity, this allows the follower to deduce the dancer’s orientation relative to gravity.” The gravitational direction is a proxy for the direction of the sun, and the dance angle represents the communicated direction relative to the sun. 

Another important aspect of the method is that “the dancer’s orientation remains consistent (relative to gravity) over continuously varying angles of the follower to the dancer, so that by continuous integration of this estimate” the follower can determine the direction. The paper points out that their hypothesis requires two other assumptions. The first is that bees can track their head direction relative to gravity. It is not known how gravity is represented in the bee brain, specifically within what is known as the “central complex.” The second assumption is that the bee antenna position influences information processing in the central complex. The paper points out that, “There is evidence from bees, locusts, cockroaches, and flies that mechanical signals from antennae reach the central complex.” This is a region that is common in all insects. 

As described by noted bee expert Lars Chittka, the central complex, “contains the computational centers for integration of the polarized light-based sky compass, information about the animal’s own position and movement, and landmark information.”2 In other words, the central complex is the region of the brain where it appears that much of this information processing and algorithmic computation takes place.

Animal Algorithms

Recent research has also revealed that learning is integral to bee’s interpretation of the distance associated with the dance and translating that to travel distance.3 That study concluded that the distance calibration, as well as the directional component, requires fine-tuning through learning.4

As I describe in my book Animal Algorithms,5 there are several programmed algorithms designed to detect and apply the information that is used to guide the bees to specific locations. Detecting the waggle dance direction and computing the navigation guidance involves algorithms that apply several forms of mathematics, including geometry and coordinate transformation. The Current Biology paper is further confirmation of that, and an indication of a larger number and complexity of the algorithms. Even though much has been learned about these sophisticated behaviors, there are still several elements that are poorly understood, among them being how the brain’s neural networks are designed to implement the algorithms.

Notes

Anna Hadjitofi and Barbara Webb, “Dynamic antennal positioning allows honeybee followers to decode the dance,” Current Biology, 34, April 22, 2024, 1-8.

Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 144.

“Social signal learning of the waggle dance in honey bees,” Dong et al., Science 379, March 10, 2023, 1015-1018. 

Eric Cassell, “The Role of Learning in the Honey Bee Waggle Dance,” Evolution News, March 20, 2023.

Eric Cassell, Animal Algorithms (Discovery Institute Press, 2021), 60-62.

The thumb print of JEHOVAH Geology edition.

 

Ignorance is indeed bliss?

 Ignorance of Evolutionary Theory as a “Superpower”

Daniel Witt

Princeton University recently offered a glowing profile of their maverick developmental biologist Celeste Nelson. The piece talks about how her lab is, atypically, not simply composed of biologists but contains researchers from wildly different fields — engineering, physics — working together to study lung development. It turns out they are getting results by not knowing what “everyone knows” in biology. 

Nelson says:

What I like about putting them all together in one lab is that they start to question each other’s assumptions. Everyone comes in with a certain level of ignorance, and that ignorance is a massive superpower, because they don’t know what the dogmas are. Just about all our major findings have come from being completely ignorant about how biology is supposed to work, and actually seeing the system with fresh eyes.

So what are these burdensome assumptions? The example the piece gives as an illustration is, interestingly, an evolutionary assumption: 

Within the biology community, for instance, it’s traditionally been assumed that conserved traits — those shared by different species and selected by evolution on multiple occasions — are inherently important, while nature’s outliers are less worthy of study. Because many in Nelson’s group were trained outside the world of biology, they’re not beholden to its assumptions and have no issue prioritizing the study of unconserved traits, like mechanisms of lung development. 

Of course, if you believed that all biological systems were built with care by a designer, you wouldn’t assume that less-common designs were most likely inferior or worthless evolutionary dead-ends. I have no reason to think that Nelson supports intelligent design or that she is in any way a critic of contemporary evolutionary theory. But as you read her profile, you begin to get the uneasy feeling that it’s not just ignorance in general that is a superpower in her lab, but more particularly ignorance of evolutionary theory. 

The example above is only the beginning. In one short article (which seems in no way intended as a critique of evolutionary theory) I can see about five other examples of the superpower of evolutionary ignorance at play.  

1.Homology vs. Unique Design

Early in her career, Nelson tried to publish a paper on chicken lung development. The reviewers were not very interested in her findings, because scientists had found similar results about mouse lungs, and “the conventional wisdom at the time said that chicken lungs form and behave like mouse and human lungs.” 

This response made her question if the lungs of different species really were so similar, or if that was merely an assumption. 

She started looking into it, and found that lungs actually develop by significantly different processes in different related species. Homology was only assumed — it wasn’t the reality. How often might that be the case? 

2.Reductionism vs. Holism 

Nelson was able to uncover these differences in the lungs of different species by setting aside the genes and proteins — which are so often the focus — and actually studying the developing lungs themselves. 

There has long been a tendency to reduce an entire living organism to its genes. And no wonder; this approach is very comfortable for a Darwinian perspective, because random variation in genes seems relatively manageable for evolution — switch out a few letters, and voilà! you’ve got a new gene, perhaps a functional one. 

But this view of things doesn’t grasp the full of scale of organization and complexity of life. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the genetic code is only one factor that guides the development of organisms. Which was to be expected, in retrospect — living systems are obviously intricate in the extreme, and we never should have imagined that translating this intricacy into code would somehow make it less complex. 

3.Going Solo vs Coordinated Action

One of the new discoveries Nelson’s lab has made is that smooth muscles guide lung development:

Nelson found that a type of stiff tissue called smooth muscle, which was previously assumed to lack a role in lung development, is critical for the formation of branches in mouse lungs…Using mouse cells that express fluorescent proteins, Nelson’s team created a time-lapse video that showed smooth muscle wrapping around the elongating bronchiole like a telephone cord, forcing the softer bronchiole to fork into two daughter branches that, fittingly, together resemble Mickey Mouse ears. This process occurs at the terminus of each growing branch, resulting in millions of such branching events over the course of lung development.

One part actively directing another part, with precision, is par for the course in engineering. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is also ubiquitous in biology. However, is it not what an evolutionary framework leads one to expect, because random beneficial mutations are not coordinated. Even if there is a viable evolutionary pathway to a complex system of interworking parts — with no step in the process lacking functionality for either the new structures or the organism as a whole, through some sort of “co-option” or “scaffolding” process — Darwinian mechanisms do not increase the likelihood of evolutionary development occurring according to this pathway, because the huge adaptive pay-off at the end of the process would not be foreknown and would therefore not itself be selected for. 

A large pile-up of individual useful traits is much more likely through Darwinian mechanisms than it would be by sheer luck, but a single useful trait that emerges only out of many traits working together is not.

4.Incremental Change vs. Synchronicity

In fact, this is the very problem Nelson is currently working on — but from a developmental biology perspective, not an evolutionary biology perspective. (The change of subdisciplines apparently makes the problem suddenly relevant and worth discussing.) Nelson calls it the “Thanksgiving dinner problem.” The perennial difficulty of Thanksgiving dinners is that it’s hard to time everything just right so every dish finishes at the same time, and nothing gets cold. It’s the same problem in embryo development — if something gets “done” before everything else is done, the organism dies or is permanently impaired. That’s because all the parts are working together, and their coordination is what makes an organism function. 

When you think about it, it’s clear that problem applies to both development and evolution: a developing embryo can’t gain one organ without gaining another at the same time, or it doesn’t work — and the same goes for an evolving species. If five days of miscoordination in developmental history kills or impairs an individual organism, then of course 5 million years of miscoordination in evolutionary history wouldn’t work — since even one generation in this state would be an evolutionary dead end. 

In developmental biology, the solution is assumed to be some sort of underlying plan — biologists look for the signals, the code, written in the DNA or somewhere else, that must be directing the development. So the obvious question is, what’s guiding the timing of evolution?

5.Randomness vs. Engineering 

Richard Dawkins has said that biology is the study of natural systems that have the appearance of design. But many scientists seem to be overburdened by the length of this definition. It must be hard to always remember to add “the appearance of.” They perpetually revert to just saying “design.” 

So, not unexpectedly, the subtitle of the article lauds the “efficient designs” of various organisms that Nelson’s lab has uncovered. But this goes deeper than just semantics. If you think about Nelson’s research, most of her success comes from looking at life from an engineering perspective — even to the point of involving engineers in her lab. Whether she admits it or not, life is best understood through the framework of design. Might that be a hint about whether it might actually be designed?

All things considered, it looks like ignorance really is a superpower. No doubt that’s true in any area of expertise, since beginners can see things with fresh eyes. But I suspect it is especially true in the current field of evolutionary biology. 

Perfect solar eclipses and the case for design.

 To Understand the Meaning of a Solar Eclipse

Jay W Richards

The sun and the moon are not just the same shape, but the same apparent size in the sky. It’s this happy arrangement that produces total solar eclipses as seen from the earth’s surface.

Americans got a chance to view such an eclipse on Monday — an event we won’t see again from coast to coast until 2045. The moon’s 115-mile wide central shadow entered Texas from Mexico around 12:29 p.m. over Eagle Pass before grazing the edge of San Antonio, and then passing over Dallas-Ft. Worth. It continued on a northeasterly pass over 11 other states until it reached Maine. (You can find the precise path at NationalEclipse.com.)

In a total solar eclipse, just before “totality,” the last bright bit of the sun’s photosphere looks like a pink diamond in an engagement ring. When the moon covers the sun’s disk, the sky goes dark; the temperature drops; the stars appear. Bugs and animals get confused and go quiet or start squawking. And the dim outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona, reaches out from the black lunar disk like the gray iris of an eye with a black pupil in the middle. At that point you can take off your protective glasses and see it with your naked eyes.

Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez (my co-author on The Privileged Planet) and I provided live commentary for an eclipse viewing in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas — where totality lasted four minutes and 19 seconds. (You can find highlights at X on the @DiscoveryCSC feed.)

In order for a total solar eclipse to occur, the moon, sun, and Earth have to line up in a straight line. When the moon passes in front of the sun, you can see an eclipse if you’re in the path of the moon’s shadow.

Those fully in the shadow — the umbra — see the moon cover the sun. If you’re just outside that path, you see a partial eclipse — the penumbra. The difference between a partial and total eclipse is like the difference between day and night. It’s impossible to capture with mere words the experience of seeing a total eclipse. But words can help us ponder its meaning.

Finely Tuned

The sun is a giant ball of gas and plasma. The moon is a much smaller rock. And yet, during a total eclipse, they mark off the same space in our sky. They match. On Earth, we can see not just total eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses.

The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun. But the moon is also about 400 times closer to the earth than is the sun. As a result, the size of the moon matches the size of the sun from our perspective. And since they appear as round disks, they match in both size and shape.

Physics doesn’t require this arrangement. There are 65 major moons in our solar system and many smaller ones. But only we enjoy perfect solar eclipses when a moon just barely covers the sun’s bright photosphere. If there were life forms on Mars or Jupiter, they wouldn’t see such eclipses.

So the best place to view total solar eclipses in our solar system is just where there are observers to see them. Let that sink in a minute.

A Habitable Planet

Most astronomers chalk this up to coincidence. And yet, without this precise arrangement of the earth, the moon, and the sun, we probably wouldn’t exist.

Let me explain. For lots of reasons, a planet almost surely needs liquid water on its surface to host complex life. Almost all places in the solar system and in the universe are either way too hot or way too cold for this. To be “habitable,” a planet needs to be in the “Goldilocks Zone” around its star: not too hot and not too cold. Think of this zone as a narrow, nearly circular ring of space around a star. (Netflix’s Three-Body Problem is fun science fiction, but any planet in a three-star system would almost surely be lifeless.)

The earth is, of course, safely inside the Goldilocks Zone. And as a result, the sun appears to be a certain size in our sky.

Our large, well-placed moon also plays a key role in making Earth habitable by stabilizing the tilt of its axis. That gives our planet a more stable climate. The moon also contributes to Earth’s ocean tides, which mix nutrients from the land into the oceans. The two tiny moons around Mars are much too small to serve in this role. As a result, Mars wobbles on its axis far more than the earth does. That’s bad news for Martians.

Now put these two facts together.

When a planet, like Earth, is in the cozy, life-friendly zone around a star, that star will appear to be a certain size in its sky.

A habitable planet like Earth also needs to have a moon of a certain size in its sky to create the right amount of gravitational pull to stabilize the planet.

Not just “certain” sizes, but nearly the same apparent sizes. So, two of the key ingredients for building a habitable planet also produce perfect eclipses for observers on that planet.

Our Eclipses Are a Gold Mine for Science 

That alone seems fishy. But there’s more: Our ability to see perfect solar eclipses has played a pivotal role in several major scientific discoveries. Those discoveries would have been hard to make on the planets that don’t enjoy such eclipses.

First, eclipses helped us unlock the mystery of stars.

Scientists since Isaac Newton (1666) have known that sunlight splits into all the colors of the rainbow when passed through a prism. But only in the 19th century did astronomers begin to observe solar eclipses with spectroscopes, which use prisms. This allowed them to discover how the sun produces its light.

The beginning and end of totality present the best chances to examine the thin middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, called the chromosphere. It shines in the ruby-red light of hydrogen gas heated to more than 20,000° Celsius (36,000° Fahrenheit). Just beyond the moon’s silhouette during an eclipse, observers may also see solar prominences: brilliant red arcs, loops, and jets of hot gas propelled by the explosive release of the sun’s magnetic energy.

All of this gave astronomers a way to figure out the structure of the sun itself. Since the sun looks larger from the earth than from any other planet with a moon, we can discern finer details in its chromosphere and corona than we could from any other planet.

This knowledge, in turn, has allowed astronomers to make sense of the light from the distant stars. Perfect eclipses, then, have been a key that allowed us to unlock the physics of stars.

Testing Einstein’s Theory

Eclipses have done far more than help astronomers decipher starlight, however.

In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein predicted in his General Theory of Relativity that light passing near a massive object like the sun would be visibly bent. To test his theory, astronomers needed to measure the changes in the positions of starlight passing near the sun’s edge compared to their positions months later when the sun was in another part of the sky.

Have you ever tried to look at starlight right next to the edge of the sun? It’s a bad idea and wouldn’t work anyway. The test could only be done during a total solar eclipse. That’s why, during the 1919 eclipse, two teams of astronomers set out to confirm Einstein’s theory.

They succeeded, as did other astronomers during later eclipses. This led scientists to embrace Einstein’s theory, which is the basis of our current knowledge of the universe.

Conspiracy, Not Coincidence

There’s far more to this story. Indeed, the perfect eclipses we enjoy are just one of many examples of an eerie pattern Gonzalez and I discuss in detail in The Privileged Planet. That pattern points to a startling conclusion: Life-friendly places like Earth are also the best places, overall, for doing science. That is, the rare places where observers can exist are also the best overall places for observing. The universe seems to be designed not just for life but also for discovery.

Genesis 1 says that God created lights in the sky for “signs.” One of those signs has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Yet more on junk DNA's exposure as junk science.

 

JEHOVAH Continues to school his would be correctors

 Is the Panda’s Thumb Suboptimal?

Stephen Dilley

In a classic argument, Stephen Jay Gould claimed that the panda’s thumb was suboptimal and, thus, counted as evidence in favor of evolution over special creation. In the contemporary era, this argument has become something of an icon as well as a broader symbol of the apparent problem of suboptimality in nature.1 If nature is the product of an intelligent designer, why are some biological phenomena so poorly made? In a recent peer-reviewed essay in the journal Religions, I revisited Gould’s argument as a way into this question and others like it.2 In a series of five posts here, of which this is the first, I will analyze the subject in some detail.

Here is the abstract of my article for Religions:

The panda’s thumb argument, championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, stands as one of the most famous polemics for common ancestry. In this essay, I analyze Gould’s argument in several steps. First, I attempt to reconstruct the argument in both deductive and likelihood formulations. I contend that both versions of the argument rest on a theological claim — roughly, that God would not (likely) create or allow a suboptimal panda’s thumb. I then argue that a wide range of people are not rationally obligated to accept this theological claim. Next, I give special attention to the likelihood formulation’s emphasis on a contrastive argument for evolution over special creation. I contend that a great number of people are not rationally obligated to accept this formulation either. I next consider and reply to an objection that Gould never intended the panda argument as an apologetic for evolution (and an attack on special creation) but rather as a critique of adaptationism. Finally, I argue that the panda argument conflicts with Gould’s broader views about the human mind and the relationship between theology and science. I also note along the way that the shortcomings of the panda argument apply to a number of other arguments for evolutionary theory. To be sure, I do not criticize evolution itself or the comprehensive grounds for it. Instead, my primary aims are to analyze the panda argument and suggest that caution is in order about similar arguments as well.

Let’s first consider the crucial empirical question of whether the panda’s thumb is indeed suboptimal. Is it “clumsy” and “highly inefficient,” as Gould claims it to be? Or does it perform its function just fine? In subsequent posts, I will analyze more philosophical questions and topics: Is the panda argument a problem for intelligent design scientists? And is the panda argument a problem for evolutionists? 

Clumsy, Clumsy, Clumsy

As to the question of suboptimality, the answer centers on the thumb’s function. Gould thinks it does its job in a mediocre way. He notes that Darwin thought much the same about orchids. Gould explains:

The panda’s thumb provides an elegant zoological counterpart to Darwin’s orchids. An engineer’s best solution is debarred by history. The panda’s thumb is committed to another role, too specialized for a different function to become an opposable, manipulating digit. So the panda must use parts on hand and settle for an enlarged wrist bone and a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable solution. The sesamoid thumb wins no prize in an engineer’s derby.3

He also explains:

The panda’s “thumb” demonstrates evolution because it is clumsy and built from an odd part, the radial sesamoid bone of the wrist. The true thumb had been so shaped in its ancestral role as the running and clawing digit of a carnivore that it could not be modified into an opposable grasper for bamboo in a vegetarian descendant.4

At the heart of Gould’s argument is the claim that the panda’s thumb is “clumsy” or, as he says elsewhere, “highly inefficient.”5

Gould explains that suboptimality favors evolution whereas “ideal design” favors special creation.

[I]deal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution — paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.6

The basic argument is that “[o]dd arrangements and funny solutions” point to evolution whereas “ideal design” points to a “sensible God.” Given that the panda’s thumb “wins no prize in an engineer’s derby,” it supports evolution rather than divine design.

The Empirical Evidence

Yet the scientific data say otherwise. As I explain in the article:

Oddly, Gould does not give strong reasons to accept this claim [that the panda’s thumb is suboptimal]; nowhere in his writings does he provide a detailed empirical study that demonstrates the suboptimality of the panda’s thumb. The major research that Gould relies upon, Dwight Davis’s study, used a dead panda for its conclusions about comparative morphology; it did not examine how effective living pandas are at stripping bamboo leaves. Biologist John Gittleman notes that the analyses of both Davis and Gould arose “despite any real information on how the giant panda lives in nature.”7

Two major studies gave high praise to the function and efficiency of the panda’s thumb:

The first major study of living pandas — focusing specifically on their adaptation to bamboo — was conducted by George Schaller’s team, which published its results in The Giant Pandas of Wolong. They observed that pandas “efficiently bring food to the mouth with their forepaws” and “handle bamboo stems with great precision by holding them as if with forceps in the hairless groove connecting the pad of the first digit and pseudothumb.”8

Schaller and his team reported:

When watching a panda eat leaves, stem or new shoots we were always impressed by its dexterity. Forepaws and mouth work together with great precision, with great economy of motion, as the food is grasped, plucked, peeled, stripped, bitten and otherwise prepared for being swallowed. Actions are fluid and rapid…9

Similarly, in 1999, a team of Japanese scientists conducted perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of the panda’s thumb to date. They used “computed topography, magnetic resonance imaging, and live observation to analyze the structure and function of the panda’s thumb.” They reported that the thumb 

and its accessories enable the panda to “manipulate objects with great dexterity.” In fact, the “way in which the giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, uses the radial sesamoid bone — its ‘pseudo-thumb’ — for grasping makes it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in mammalian evolution.” They conclude that “the hand of the giant panda has a much more refined grasping mechanism than has been suggested in previous morphological models,” including Davis’s model.10

Turning the Tables

Gould’s claim is mistaken. The panda’s thumb is not suboptimal. The best studies we have conclude that the thumb is anything but “clumsy” or “highly inefficient.” Instead, they describe it as having “great precision,” “great economy of motion,” and “great dexterity.” It may even rank as “one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems” among mammals. That is quite an accolade.

Indeed, one might rather regard the thumb as positive evidence for intelligent design. A system of such precision, efficiency, economy, and dexterity is a spectacle of a high order. That sounds very much like the kind of sophistication that only engineers produce. 

On this score, recall the way Gould himself framed the panda argument: “[o]dd arrangements and funny solutions” point to evolution whereas “ideal design” points to a “sensible God.”11 So, by this logic, the panda’s thumb appears to count as stronger evidence in favor of design. Perhaps it’s time to champion the panda’s thumb not as an icon for evolution but for intelligent design

Notes

See Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 1.

Stephen Dilley. 2023. “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb.” Religions 14: 1006. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel14081006.

Stephen Jay Gould. 1980. The Panda’s Thumb. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 24.

Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 29, original emphasis.

Stephen Jay Gould. 1986. “Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, Or Why History Matters.” American Scientist 74: 60-69, esp. p. 63.

Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 20-21.

Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 11. For the Gittleman quote, see John L. Gittleman. 1985. “Review of The Giant Pandas of Wolong.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 60: 524. 

Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 11. For the Schaller quote, see George B. Schaller, Hu Jinchu, Pan Wenshi, and Zhu Jing. 1985. The Giant Pandas of Wolong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 4, 215.

Schaller et al., The Giant Pandas of Wolong, p. 58.

Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 11. See also Hideki Endo, Daishiro Yamagiwa, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Hiroshi Koie, Yoshiki Yamaya, and Junpei Kimura. 1999. “Role of the Giant Panda’s ‘Pseudo-thumb’.” Nature 397: 309-10.

Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 20-21.

Engineerless engineering is a thing?

 Design Without a Designer? New Book Says Yes!

Daniel Witt

The more we learn about living systems, the harder they are to explain without invoking teleology — purpose, planning, goal. If an intelligent designer is off the table, this creates a dilemma for some. 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your cake and eat it too — have design, without a designer? In 2023, MIT Press released an edited volume of papers by prominent biologists and philosophers of science titled Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems. The purpose of the volume is to promote the theory of “teleonomy.” Teleonomy is “internal teleology” — goal-directedness that comes from within a system, not from outside. Under this theory, there need be no God (or aliens, or Platonic or Aristotelian forms, or anything of the sort) guiding the development of living systems; the living systems themselves set the goals.

The “Unspoken” Inference 

Biologist Peter Corning, one of the editors of the volume, writes: 

The evolution of humankind is undoubtedly the most striking example of how teleonomy has exerted a shaping influence in biological evolution, but a case can be made that teleonomy was also involved in many of the great turning points and transitions in the history of life on Earth, including the earliest colonization of the seafloor, the emergence of the eukaryotes, the migration of life forms from the oceans onto the land, the rise of multicellular organisms, the development of land plants and trees, the origin of fish, birds, and mammals, the invention of social organization, the division of labor (task specialization), and more. 

Teleonomy is also an implicit (though unspoken) influence in connection with many other familiar terms, I would argue, including “symbiogenesis,” “organic selection theory,” evolutionary “pacemakers,” the “Baldwin effect,” “major transitions theory,” “niche construction theory,” “gene-culture coevolution theory,” “natural genetic engineering,” many examples of “semiosis,” and, recently, the concept of “agency” in evolution. These terms all suggest the role of purposive behavior. A radically different view of evolution has been emerging in this century. We now know that living systems actively shape their own evolution, in various ways.

In other words, Corning is saying that all sorts of evolutionary theories contain the hidden assumption of purposiveness, i.e., design. This is an important admission, since it’s what ID theorists have been saying. 

Of course, he differs on where this design comes from. But it’s worth noting that the thesis of teleonomy implicitly acknowledges the validity of the design inference. If you can infer design in nature, you can infer design in nature. Period. Then you can decide whether it comes from within or from without.

That means that if the teleonomic explanation (“living systems actively shape their own evolution”) doesn’t hold up, the old alternative hypothesis will be there, waiting. 

Is Teleonomy a Good Explanation? 

So, does the teleonomic explanation hold up? Well, we have to ask: where does “teleonomy” come from? Why does it exist? 

The answer, according to Evolution “On Purpose”, is that it come from… drum roll… evolution. In addition to causing evolution. 

The term “teleonomy,” Corning writes, was coined “to draw a contrast between an ‘external’ teleology (Aristotelian or religious) and the ‘internal’ purposiveness and goal-directedness of living systems, which are products of the evolutionary process and of natural selection.” However, teleonomy is “not simply a product of natural selection. It is also an important cause of natural selection and has been a major shaping influence over time in biological evolution.” Conversely, natural selection “has been both a cause of this purposiveness and an outcome.”

This is not, in itself, illogical. You could have two forces at work — purpose and natural selection — that synergistically encourage each other, in a sort of positive feedback loop. But then, you still have to explain how the feedback loop got started. 

Imagine that someone asks an evolutionary biologist where chickens came from. 

“Eggs,” the scientist replies. 

“Where did eggs come from?” his interlocuter replies. 

“Chickens!” says the scientist. 

The problem with this explanation is not that it is false. As it happens, it is quite true. The problem is that it fails to explain. It does not answer the question that was really being asked.

Likewise, “teleonomy” fails to explain. The design of nature requires an explanation, an ultimate explanation. Rather than explain, invoking “teleonomy” just dodges the question. If we say that natural selection and random variation cannot explain something, evolutionary biologists can say, “Well, it’s not random variation, it’s goal-oriented.” If we ask where the goal-oriented-ness itself came from, they will say “natural selection.” The question returns to where it began; a final cause for the existence of design in nature has yet to be proposed.

Avoiding the Question

I suspect it will never be proposed, because the point is to sweep the problem under the rug by obscuring it in a complexity of causes. The theory of teleonomy does not address — is not even in dialogue with — the arguments of, say, Michael Behe or William Dembski that unguided processes simply cannot generate novel information or irreducibly complex systems. But it does make it harder to apply those arguments, because there is nothing concrete to discuss. We are not talking about a bacterial flagellum, or an eye, or even a brain — we are talking about a vague internal “purposiveness.” This purposiveness, if it exists and is not supernatural, would have to arise from some organized and complex system. But the exact nature of that system is hidden somewhere in an endless chain of “purposiveness caused by natural selection caused by purposiveness caused by natural selection…” going back who knows how far.

In future posts, I plan to discuss some of the specific mechanisms for evolution proposed in the Evolution “On Purpose”anthology. However, this is the basic problem that underlies the whole endeavor. At the end of the day, ordered complexity requires either extreme luck or intentional planning. The idea that life itself did this planning may sound like a clever work-around, but in the end it’s no better than the idea of a god who created himself. 

Nothing can create itself. Everything has a cause, until you get back to some eternal First Cause. Any attempt to avoid that logical destination is just stalling. 

Information is in the mind of the informed?

 The Connection Between Intelligence and Information

Willam Dembski

The key intuition behind the concept of information is the narrowing of possibilities. The more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. If I tell you I’m on planet Earth, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information.

Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more possibilities are excluded, the greater the information provided. As philosopher Robert Stalnaker put it in his book Inquiry: “To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. To understand the information conveyed in a communication is to know what possibilities would be excluded by its truth.” I’m excluding much more of the world when I say I’m in Texas forty miles north of Dallas as opposed to when I say I’m merely in the United States. Accordingly, to say I’m in Texas north of Dallas conveys much more information than simply to say I’m in the United States.

An Exclusionary Understanding

The etymology of the word information is congruent with this exclusionary understanding of information. The word information derives from the Latin preposition in, meaning in or into, and the verb formare, meaning to give shape to. Information puts definite shape into something. But that means ruling out other shapes. Information narrows down the shape in question. A completely unformed shmoo is waiting in limbo to receive information. But until it is given definite shape, it exhibits no information.

The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches up neatly with the concept of intelligence. The word intelligence derives from two Latin words: the preposition inter, meaning between, and the verb legere, meaning to choose. Intelligence thus, at its most fundamental, signifies the ability to choose between. But when a choice is made, some possibilities are actualized to the exclusion of others, implying the narrowing of possibilities. And so, an act of intelligence is also an act of information.

A Narrowing of Possibilities

A synonym for the word choose is decide. This last word is likewise from the Latin, combining the preposition de, meaning down from, and the verb caedere, meaning to cut off or kill (compare our English word homicide). Decisions, in keeping with this etymology, raise up some possibilities by cutting down, or killing off, others. When you decide to marry one person, you cut off all the other people you might marry. An act of decision is therefore always a narrowing of possibilities. It is an informational act. But given the definition of intelligence as choosing between, it is also an intelligent act.

Given the etymology of information and intelligence, it’s obvious that the two are related notions. The million dollar question in connecting the two is how we can know when an intelligence is actually responsible for an item of information. Information can happen naturally — a rock falls naturally here rather than there. But information can also happen intelligently — a rock may be put deliberately here rather than there. So how do we tell the difference? 

Answering that question is the whole point of specified complexity and the design inference. If you’ve got the time and inclination to probe this question deeply, get the book: William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert, The Design Inference, 2nd edition. Otherwise, stay tuned here — I’ll be providing a user-friendly synopsis of how to know when an intelligence is responsible for information.

Postscript

The featured image here may look like a random inkblot, but it’s not. Many people don’t at first see what’s there. Once they see it, they know that the information there is the product of intelligence. But until then, they would be within their rights to think that it’s just a random naturally-formed inkblot.

Thomas Reid's argument from common sense re:design in nature.

 

Michael Behe holds court.

 Michael Behe: A Mousetrap for Darwin

Evolution News

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson interviews biochemist Michael Behe about his book A Mousetrap for Darwin. In this episode, Behe explains that he was spurred to build this collection of essays by a review in the journal Science claiming he had never answered his critics on key points. That annoyed Behe, because he had, multiple times. A Mousetrap for Darwin compiles more than a hundred of his responses, some of them from difficult-to-access places. The book also contains fresh material from Dr. Behe, including some lively behind-the-scenes details about his interactions with colleagues and critics. 

In this episode, the Lehigh University biochemist answers misconceptions about irreducible complexity, responds to the claim that “molecular machines” is a misnomer, relates the surprising confessions some of his fellow biologists have made outside the spotlight about evolutionary theory, and offers his appraisal of why scientists in general don’t know what’s going on with studies in evolution or intelligent design. Behe remains optimistic, though. “You can’t deny the data forever,” he says. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Yet another Darwinian argument from poor design ages like milk

 

The cell membrane vs. Darwinism's Simple Beginning.

 Secrets of Active Transport Become Visible

David Coppedge

Active transport — the ability to move molecules against a concentration gradient — is one of the key distinguishing features between life and non-life. Passive transport, as with osmosis, we know by experience: a fluid will naturally spread through a semipermeable membrane from a region of high concentration to one of low concentration until the concentration is equalized. That’s why bromine tablets in a spa will spread from the filter out into the water. It’s why wildfire smoke will leak into a room through any cracks in the wall, but not out. It would take Maxwell’s Demon to combat this natural tendency which follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Life cannot operate on the principle of osmosis. A cell with a passive osmotic membrane will die. Cells need to actively bring in or expel substances, often forcing them against a strong concentration gradient. They need to maintain pH homeostasis regardless of conditions outside, often pumping in cations like Na+, K+, Ca2+and Mg2+ or anions like chloride Cl– even when the interior already has a much higher concentration than the exterior. By osmosis, these concentrations would quickly equalize and life would stop. In a real sense, life involves a constant battle against thermodynamic entropy, using energy to combat what natural forces would do.

Unnatural Selection

Biochemists have long known about the existence of specialized membrane channels where active transport takes place, and knew they were highly efficient, but how they operated was long a mystery. Roderick MacKinnon was one scientist who began to figure out the mechanisms of active transport in the 1990s. He won the Nobel Prize in 2003 for his discoveries about “selectivity filters” within ion channels that permit some molecules to pass but not others. Since then, advances in super-resolution microscopy have been revealing details at near-atomic scales about what might be dubbed “unnatural selection” inside these channels.

Membrane channels are often named according to the molecules they transport: anion or cation channels, sodium channels, potassium channels, chloride channels, aquaporins (water channels), and others. Let’s examine the inner workings of one chloride channel, about which scientists’ knowledge has been updated recently. We can share the excitement of discovery about how its “selectivity filter” determines which ions are allowed to pass. As a teaser, consider that the selectivity filter of a potassium channel is much smaller than the width of a potassium ion, yet it can transport 100 million ions per second!

The CFTR Chloride Channel

Last month in PNAS, Levring and Chen announced the “Structural identification of a selectivity filter in CFTR,” a chloride channel responsible for fluid homeostasis in epithelial tissues. It’s called CFTR (Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane conductance Regulator) because of the fatal disease that occurs when genetic defects hinder passage of chloride ions. At the other extreme, cholera makes the channel too indiscriminate, leading to the diarrhea that causes dehydration and death. Kidney disease can also result from defective CFTR channels. This is not a part to mess with!

The shape of CFTR looks like a curved cornucopia with a narrow constriction inside. Notice how the authors identify precise amino acid residues (indicated by a letter and a position number) along the channel path that interact with the chloride ions passing through:

In this study, we identify a chloride-binding site at the extracellular ends of transmembrane helices 1, 6, and 8, where a dehydrated chloride is coordinated by residues G103, R334, F337, T338, and Y914. Alterations to this site, consistent with its function as a selectivity filter, affect ion selectivity, conductance, and open channel block. This selectivity filter is accessible from the cytosol through a large inner vestibule and opens to the extracellular solvent through a narrow portal. The identification of a chloride-binding site at the intra- and extracellular bridging point leads us to propose a complete conductance path that permits dehydrated chloride ions to traverse the lipid bilayer.

Diagrams of the interior show a chloride ion making electrostatic contacts with amino acid residues on its traverse, as if running the gauntlet through armed guards that each ensure it has a valid permit to pass. The structure “encloses a continuous conduit across the membrane for chloride to permeate down its electrochemical gradient.” Each chloride ion is hydrated with a water jacket but must remove its jacket on the way through:

Hydrated chloride enters the inner vestibule from the cytosol through a lateral portal between TMs [transmembrane domains] 4 and 6…. Chloride remains hydrated in the inner vestibule and is stabilized by a positive electrostatic surface potential. The width of the vestibule tapers down and converges at a selectivity filter, where only dehydrated chloride can enter. Dehydrated chloride moves into this selectivity filter, stabilized by interactions with G103, R334, F337, T338, and Y914 and rehydrates upon exit into the epithelial lumen through a narrow lateral exit between TMs 1 and 6.

Precision Authentication

How does the channel filter out other anions? Fluorine (atomic number 9) is smaller than chlorine (atomic number 17), so why doesn’t it slip through? The authors tested the authentication ability of CFTR by means of amino acid substitutions. They confirmed that four residues in the channel perform a qualification test on incoming anions as they dehydrate:

As was previously reported, and consistent with permeating anions having to dehydrate, wild-type CFTR exhibits a lyotropic permeability sequence, with relative permeabilities inversely related to the enthalpy of dehydration … Upon R334A, F337A, T338A, or Y914F substitution, the relative anion permeabilities were all altered, albeit to different degrees, consistent with previous work.

Figure 5 in the paper shows a chloride ion being inspected by four amino acid residue “cops” on four sides. A rogue molecule is not going to pass! The precision of this filter is astonishing. How much mutation could the system tolerate without breakdown? And how many accidents built this filter by chance in the first place? Details in the following quote will not be on the quiz, but to get a feel for the complexity involved, look at how many residues participate in authenticating chloride ions as they run the gauntlet:

Previous mutational work has identified a plethora of residues, many are arginine and lysine, that influence CFTR ion selectivity and/or conductance. Mapping these residues onto the CFTR structure indicates that basic residues, including K95, R104, R117, K190, R248, R303, K335, R352, K370, K1041, and R1048… are positioned along the cytosolic and extracellular vestibules, with their side chains exposed to solvent. Different from the residues that directly coordinate chloride [the selectivity filter], the function of these arginine and lysine residues is to stabilize the partially hydrated anions through electrostatic interactions and to discriminate against cations.The side chains of Q98 and S341 also face the cytosolic vestibule to form anion–dipole interactions with chloride and contribute to ion selectivity. R334, positioned at the extracellular mouth of the pore, plays a dual role in forming the selectivity filter and attracting anions into the pore through electrostatic interactions. Many other functionally important residues, including P99, L102, I106, Y109, I336, S1118, and T1134…, do not directly interact with chloride. Instead, they form a second coordination sphere of [the selectivity filter] that likely contributes to structuring [selectivity filter] residues with the appropriate geometry to coordinate chloride.

Airport Analogy

Think of these other “important residues” as part of the “coordination sphere” at an airport. The entire structure serves the purpose of narrowing down the flow of passengers to the “selectivity filter” of X-ray machines that inspect passengers and their baggage. The entire superstructure is necessary and must have been planned with the appropriate geometry and personnel to guide the passengers to the inspection site, even though the X-ray machine is as narrow as a human.

TSA workers at airports could never boast of this much quality control in their authentication protocols. And human workers have eyes and minds to think about what they are doing! The CFTR channel operates automatically in the dark, by the delicate “touch” of electrostatic interactions within a precisely structured narrow passageway within the coordination sphere. One source says that CFTR conducts millions of chloride ions per second! The TSA could learn something about efficiency here, as many of us airline passengers could attest.

Speaking of touch, my next article will discuss some other channels that respond when contacted — the so-called mechanosensitive channels.

Useless Darwinese

Did CFTR evolve? Because the CFTR channel has some similarities to other chloride channels like CLC, the authors glibly surmise that it “uniquely evolved from a family of active transporters,” assuming that “unrelated ion channels have evolved to select and conduct chloride using common chemical strategies.” Such a narrative gloss is not only useless, it makes no sense. A strategy implies foresight: seeing a need and designing a solution. While some frequent flyers might be tempted to smirk that TSA strategies seem mindless and unguided, elaborate structures like CFTR channels that operate extremely efficiently and accurately with low tolerance for alteration look engineered. They had to work from the start. Without those precisely placed amino acid residues already present at the right spot within a larger coordination sphere, there would be no authentication, and active transport would stop. The alternative is disease and death. Our uniform experience confirms that elaborate, efficient strategies that work — employing irreducibly complex structures with multiple coordinating parts supporting the function — are always products of intelligent design.

Hummingbirds vs. Darwin.

 

 Ingenious Artistry in the Origin of Hummingbirds

Wolf Eckhardt Lönnig

Please see below the Abstract of my recent article which asks, “Can Neo-Darwinism Explain the Origin and Variation of the Hummingbirds?”

Abstract

Richard Dawkins is one of the leading spokesmen for the evolutionary theory’s modern synthesis (neo-Darwinism). He is in full agreement with virtually all his colleagues when he asserts that “evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” So, the entire array of the fascinatingly different 366 hummingbird species of the family Trochilidae, being “distinctly different than all other avians,” must have evolved by natural selection through — in Darwin’s words — “infinitesimally small changes,” “infinitesimally slight variations,” “insensibly fine steps,” and “insensibly fine gradations.” Many of those gradations are thought to have been due to mutations with only “invisible effects on the phenotype,” according to Ernst Mayr. However, 

“Even a new mutation that is slightly favorable will usually be lost in the first few generations after it appears in the population, a victim of genetic drift. If a new mutation has a selective advantage of S in the heterozygote in which it appears, then the chance is only 2S that the mutation will ever succeed in taking over the population. So, a mutation that is 1 percent better in fitness than the standard allele in the population will be lost 98 percent of the time by genetic drift.” (Emphasis added.)

Let us apply this method to individual hummingbird species, including their sexual dimorphism, and the corresponding flower formations of their nectar-producing host plants. Together these imply coordinated inter-kingdom mutations and interactions. Five examples will be discussed in the following article: (1) the strongly curved beaks of the two species of Eutoxeres, (2) Lophornis gouldii (the dot-eared coquette), (3) Docimastes ensifer (Gould) = Ensifera ensifera (the sword-billed hummingbird), (4) Sappho sparganurus (the red-tailed comet), and finally (5) Loddigesia mirabilis (the marvelous spatuletail). 

All five examples display sexual dimorphism. Now, sexual selection stands in clear opposition to natural selection. Here that is the case not only because of the fact that “conspicuously colored males preferentially fall victim to their enemies,” but also because their often astoundingly acrobatic behavior to impress the females necessitates a tremendous expenditure of energy for the show. Ontogenetically, it requires development of a strikingly showy and flamboyant plumage. In the present cases, displays by the males in color, size, and shape almost completely dwarf those of the females. (Compare with this the prime example of the phenomenon among the class Aves: the well-known peacock.)

      Moreover, to evolve a special preference for brightly colored males with specially formed short and/or long decorative feathers, sexual selection presupposes the occurrence of a series of highly unusual mutations in the females. For these mutations, however, there is not the slightest evidence. 

Now, let us look briefly at the species mentioned above, in reverse order. We begin with (5) Loddigesia, whose males possess two stunningly long tail feathers ending in large flat violet-blue discs (see the photo at the top of this article). To evolve in a process of continuous evolution, this would mean thousands of unknown mutations — mutations, again, with “slight or even invisible effects on the phenotype,” each new step implying the substitution of the entire population of birds. All this would have happened regularly in opposition to natural selection. The females, however, have been described as “not easily impressed” by the show of the males. So, one may ask: are there really decisive selective advantages for the survival of spatuletail populations due to changes of about 1 millionth of 1 meter or 1 thousandth of 1 mm of the male’s two tail feathers?

For each species, this immensely improbable process of continuous evolution implies thousands of mutations, with visible or invisible effects on the phenotype, each time selected with certainty by the respective females. This observation applies to (4) the “deeply forked, spectacular, long, iridescent, golden-reddish tail, longer than the length of the body,” of Sappho sparganurus (the red-tailed comet); (3) the enormously long bill distinctive of Docimastes ensifer (the sword-billed hummingbird); (2) the “long dark rufous feathers [that] on its crown form a crest” plus the “long white feathers with shiny green dots [that] make tufts that fan out and back on the cheeks” of Lophornis gouldii (the dot-eared coquette); and (1) the strongly curved beaks of the two species of Eutoxeres (the sicklebills), seemingly in coordination with the flower forms of Centropogon and Heliconia.

If neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain even differences between the hummingbirds themselves (including their sexual dimorphism), what then can we expect when it comes to the origin of the entire family of this anatomically and physiologically well-defined group of birds? From an evolutionary standpoint, we must agree with many hummingbird researchers, including the clear statement of Jillian Mock, that “the origins of hummingbirds are still a major mystery.”

With this in mind, we turn to the theory of intelligent design (ID). According to Stephen Meyer, “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” ID, writes Michael Behe, is usually recognized by “a purposeful arrangement of parts.” In what follows I argue that the origin of hummingbirds reflects brilliant, ingenious artistry, not the work of an endless number of infinitesimally small coincidences, haphazardly chained together by the “truly hideous process” of natural selection, “rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror,” etc. 

In contrast with neo-Darwinism, I conclude that an absolutely ingenious artist was at work here, transcending all human abilities, ideas, and powers.

For all details and references, please see,

“Can Neo-Darwinism Explain the Origin and Variation of the Hummingbirds?”

On ID and reductionism.

 Understanding “Reductionism” and Intelligent Design

Daniel Witt

The burgeoning field of “systems biology,” as defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),

is an approach in biomedical research to understanding the larger picture — be it at the level of the organism, tissue, or cell — by putting its pieces together. It’s in stark contrast to decades of reductionist biology, which involves taking the pieces apart.

I’m sure that statement is designed to make systems biology sound radical and exciting, and it succeeds. It’s especially exciting for proponents of intelligent design, because ID theorists have been arguing against reductionism in biology for a long time. 

But we need to be careful. We don’t want to make an argument based on an equivocation. The word “reductionism” is thrown around a lot, but it can mean several different things. It’s not as simple as saying, “Biologists are learning that reductionism is bad!” 

As it turns out, the move away from reductionism in systems biology is significant for the ID debate, but not simply by word-association. So I want to take some time to suss out the different meanings of the word “reductionism” and what they have to do with intelligent design.  

There are two kinds of reductionism that are relevant to this discussion: methodological reductionism and ontological reductionism. (For a third kind, epistemological reductionism, see this Cartoon.) The opposing philosophies are, respectively, methodological antireductionism and ontological antireductionism. The terms are a bit eye-splitting, but they aren’t difficult to understand. 

Methodological Reductionism

Methodological reductionism is the idea that a thing can best be understood by breaking it down into its parts. The contrary philosophy, methodological antireductionism, says that a thing can be best understood by looking at it as a whole. 

The opposing views are summed up nicely in a conversation between the wizards Saruman and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman shows Gandalf his new rainbow-colored outfit and tells him that he has decided to stop going by “Saruman the White” and go by “Saruman of Many Colours” instead.  

“I liked white better,” says Gandalf. 

“White!” Saruman sneers. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” 

“In which case it is no longer white,” says Gandalf. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” 

Saruman is a methodological reductionist and Gandalf is a methodological antireductionist. 

Methodological reductionism: “The white light can be broken.” 

Methodological antireductionism: “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

Ontological Reductionism

Ontological reductionism, on the other hand, is not about the best way to study something, but rather about what that thing “really is” at the deepest level. Ontological reductionism says that a thing can be reduced to its most basic parts, and that’s what it is — nothing more. According to this theory, a tree is a collection of cells, which in turn are collections of molecules, which are collections of atoms, which are collections of subatomic particles. So in the final analysis, a “tree” is a collection of subatomic particles. 

This view, and its antithesis, is expressed in C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader. On an island near the edge of the world, the characters meet a being named Ramandu who claims to be a star.

“In our world,” Eustace Scrubb objects, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son,” replies Ramandu, “that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

Eustace is an ontological reductionist and Ramandu is an ontological antireductionist. (And if Ramandu’s statement seems mind-bending or baffling, that’s because most of us were educated into ontological reductionism.)

Ontological reductionism: “A star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

Ontological antireductionism: “That is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”  

Gandalf Points to Ramandu

The field of systems biology is methodologically antireductionist. It does not have to be ontologically antireductionist. So, systems biologists do not necessarily reject materialism or physicalism. They do not have to believe in minds, or be willing to posit neo-Platonic souls of cabbages, or think the true meaning of a mushroom can only be found in its wholeness. 

They have simply found it to be the case that looking at living organisms as complete systems yields better results than only taking them apart to focus on their bare components. Researchers are coming to realize that it is more productive to think about the plan of an organism than simply about its physical structure or components. 

But this is important, because whether systems biologists always admit it or not, methodological antireductionism implies ontological antireductionism. Gandalf agrees with Ramandu, not Eustace.  

That’s not to say that ontological antireductionism logically follows from methodological antireductionism, or vice versa. In theory, you could have one without the other. But the success of methodological antireductionism fulfills a prediction of the hypothesis of ontological antireductionism.

That is: if there really is a plan, then you would naturally suppose that looking for a plan would turn out to be a great strategy, and that proceeding as if there were no plan would not be a great strategy. And that is the reality. It turns out that when you take a creature apart to see what it’s parts are, you see a bunch of parts; but when you take a step back and look for a plan, you find a plan

This Is What Intelligent Design Predicts

Intelligent design is a sub-type of ontological antireductionism. To be exact, it is one way of answering the question “if a thing isn’t just the sum of its parts, then what is it?” ID proposes that (at least some) natural entities are more than the sum of their parts because they are ultimately an expression of an idea in a conscious mind. If this is true, then you would predict those entities to be best understood by grasping the idea behind them; you would try to see the scheme, the purpose, the outline, the plan. 

The neo-Darwinian model, in contrast, does not inherently lead to this prediction, because the mechanism of natural selection and random variation is, by definition, an uncoordinated piling-up of useful features, whereas a “plan” is the coordination of useful features. (Michael Behe’s three books and Marcos Eberlin’s Foresight explore this idea in depth.)

This is not proof of the design hypothesis, but it is evidence for it. In fact, this sort of evidence is one of the pillars of the scientific method: the strength of a scientific hypothesis depends on its ability to make predictions that are borne out by investigation. Based on that criterion, the hypothesis of intelligent design is doing very well. The hypothesis of mindless evolution is not doing so well, because although mindless processes might generate great complexity, they do not make plans.

Some systems biologists may want to reject Saruman but stay with Eustace; to reap the practical benefits of methodological antireductionism while avoiding the philosophical costs. But they may find that stance difficult to maintain. An unwary systems biologist could easily drift over to Ramandu’s Island, where the ID theorists are waiting.