A robust case for design.

 The Incredible Design of Muscles

Jonathan McLatchie

Muscle is one of the most fundamental of animal tissues. It is muscles that animate our bodies — allowing us to move, stand upright, breathe, and even speak. Muscles are precisely the sort of thing that we might expect a designer of embodied intelligent beings to produce. At the very least, on the supposition of intelligent design, the existence of muscles is not particularly surprising. But how surprising is the existence of muscles under the perspective of naturalism? 

The number of muscles in the human body exceeds six hundred. The majority are attached by tendons to the skeleton — their primary purpose being to move the skeleton. When skeletal muscles contract, they shorten and pull the bone. The contraction of muscles also generates heat, which contributes to the maintenance of our core body temperature. The muscular system is unable to perform its job of animating the skeleton without assistance from the nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems. The electrochemical impulses that drive muscle contraction are transmitted by motor neurons (the nervous system). Muscle cells contain many mitochondria, which perform cellular respiration, generating the ATP needed for contraction. This depends critically on the exchange of the gases oxygen and carbon dioxide between the blood and air by means of the respiratory system. The oxygen is brought to the muscles, and carbon dioxide removed, by means of the circulatory system. Thus, a tremendous amount of functional integration is required for muscle contraction to work.

In a series of two articles, I will summarize the incredible design of muscles that allows them to fulfil their function. In the first part, we shall review the structure and arrangements of muscles, as well as muscle tone and sense. In a second article, I shall explain the fascinating biochemistry of muscle contraction. I hope that the reader will get a sense for how improbable all this is from the vantage of the naturalistic hypothesis. The information that follows is well established and can be found in any decent textbook on anatomy and physiology

The Structure of Muscles

Each skeletal muscle contains many thousands of cells called muscle fibers, or myocytes. The number of muscle fibers that contract depends on the task being performed. For example, picking up a book requires the contraction of more finger-flexing muscle fibers than picking up a pencil, which requires the contraction of only a small number of fibers. 

The muscle fibers are organized into bundles called fascicles. These fascicles are given structural support by a connective tissue that surrounds them called the perimysium. The perimysium also protects and distributes the blood vessels and nerves that supply the muscle, in addition to facilitating the transmission of forces generated by muscle contractions. Together with the endomysium (connective tissue that surrounds individual muscle fibers) and the epimysium (connective tissue that surrounds the entire muscle), the perimysium helps to maintain the overall integrity and organization of the skeletal muscle. The structure of skeletal muscles is shown in the figure below

Having a muscular, nervous and respiratory system will do one no good, however, unless the muscles are attached to the skeleton. Muscles are attached to bones by tendons, which are tough, fibrous, connective tissues. When a muscle contracts, it generates force, which is transmitted to the bones by tendons, allowing the limb or body part to move. Tendons also provide stability to joints — acting as stabilizing elements that prevent excessive or unwanted movement, helping to maintain joint integrity during muscular contractions. Generally, a muscle possesses at least two tendons, each of them connected to a different bone. The attachment point where the muscle’s tendon connects to a less movable bone is referred to as the origin, whereas the attachment point where the muscle’s tendon connects to a more movable bone is called the insertion. When the muscle contracts, it pulls the insertion bone towards the origin, resulting in joint movement.

The Arrangement of Muscles

There are two common types of arrangements of muscles across joints and around the skeleton — namely, opposing antagonists and cooperative synergists. Antagonistic muscles are pairs of muscles that have opposite actions at a joint. One muscle in the pair is responsible for producing a specific movement, while the other has an opposing action. For example, the biceps and triceps in the upper arm are a classic example of antagonistic muscles (see the figure below). 

When you flex your elbow, the biceps (located on the front of the upper arm) contract to bend the arm, while the triceps relax and lengthen. Muscles are unable to push, exerting no force when they relax. Thus, the elbow can be flexed by the biceps but cannot be extended, and thus we need another muscle called the triceps (located on the back of the upper arm). When you extend your elbow, the triceps contract and the biceps relax.

Synergistic muscles, by contrast, work together to produce the same movement at a joint. They assist the prime mover in performing a specific action, helping to stabilize the joint and provide additional force or control to the movement. For example, when you flex your elbow, the biceps are the prime mover, but other muscles (the brachialis and brachioradialis) act as synergists to assist the biceps in generating the movement. These synergistic muscles provide support and help fine-tune the motion. You might wonder why we need three muscles to carry out the same task. When your hand is positioned palm up, the prime mover (which does most of the work of flexing) is the biceps. When your hand is positioned palm down, the prime mover is the brachialis. When your hand is positioned thumb up, the prime mover is the brachioradialis. Thus, depending on the position of your forearm, different muscles can be more or less effective at generating force.

Synergists can also serve to steady or stabilize a joint, rendering it possible to make more precise movements. For example, when drinking a glass of water, the prime mover for flexing the arm is the biceps. To assist in getting the water to your mouth and not spilling it down your chin or over your shoulder, the joint is stabilized by the shoulder muscles.

 Role of the Brain in Muscle Movement

he region of the brain responsible for generating the nerve impulses for movement is the frontal lobes of the cerebrum (the frontal lobes are labelled in the figure given below).

muscle fibers contract when they receive electrochemical impulses generated from the motor areas of the frontal lobes, that travel along motor neurons (grouped into nerves). A single neuron can innervate anywhere between a few to hundreds of muscle fibers, as its axon can branch extensively (this is referred to as a motor unit).

In muscles that carry out small and precise movements (such as those responsible for moving the eyes or fingers), muscles typically have small motor units (2 to 100 muscle fibers per neuron). On the other hand, muscles that have to carry out powerful rather than precise movements (for example, the large muscles of the hips and legs) have hundreds of muscle fibers per neuron.

The cerebellum (also labelled in the figure above) is the part of the brain responsible for regulating coordination and motor control, operating largely below the level of consciousness. This means that many of its functions occur without our awareness. The cerebellum receives input from multiple sensory systems, including the proprioceptive system (information about the body’s position and movements), the vestibular system (balance and spatial orientation), and the visual and auditory systems. These inputs help the cerebellum establish a sense of where the body is in space and how it is moving. The cerebellum also receives information from the motor cortex, which provides “efference copies” of the motor commands sent to muscles. Efference copies are predictions of the intended motor output and are used to compare with the actual sensory feedback. This comparison helps the cerebellum detect any discrepancies between the intended and actual movements. The cerebellum acts as an integration center for sensory and motor information. It constantly compares the efference copies with the incoming sensory feedback, such as proprioceptive signals from stretch receptors and Golgi tendon organs, as well as visual and vestibular input. This comparison occurs at the subconscious level, allowing the cerebellum to detect errors in movement even before they become apparent to the conscious mind.

When the cerebellum detects errors in movement or discrepancies between the intended and actual outcomes, it generates corrective signals. These signals are sent to the motor cortex and other motor control centers in the brain. The cerebellum adjusts the ongoing motor commands to correct the errors and improve the precision and accuracy of movements.

The cerebellum is also involved in motor learning and adaptation. Through repetitive practice and learning, the cerebellum stores information about various motor tasks and their associated sensory feedback. This allows it to refine movements over time, even without conscious awareness. For example, when you learn to ride a bike, the cerebellum helps you automatically adjust your balance and coordination without needing to consciously think about it.

The cerebellum also plays a role in feedforward control, where it predicts the sensory consequences of planned movements. It can make anticipatory adjustments to movements based on the expected sensory feedback. For example, when you reach for an object, the cerebellum can adjust the motor commands to account for the expected weight and resistance of the object, allowing for smoother and more precise movements.

The cerebellum also receives information from inner ear receptors for equilibrium and uses it to balance the contractions of antagonistic muscles such that the contractions of one set do not cause the body to fall over.

Muscle Tone

With the exception of certain stages of sleep, the majority of our muscles exist in a state of slight contraction, called muscle tone. This enables us to keep an upright posture. Only a few muscle fibers in the muscle have to contract in order for the muscle to be in a slightly contracted state. To prevent the muscle from becoming fatigued, alternate fibers take turns at contracting. This is subconsciously regulated by the cerebellum. The heat produced by muscle fibers during cellular respiration (necessary for production of ATP) accounts for roughly 25 percent of the total body heat at rest.

Muscle Sense

Muscle sense (also known as proprioception) is the body’s ability to sense and perceive the position, movement, and tension of one’s muscles and joints. It plays a crucial role in maintaining balance and coordinating movement. It operates in the background of our conscious awareness, enabling us to perform various tasks without having to constantly think about the position of our limbs or the force required for specific actions. Activities that involve fine motor skills (such as typing on a keyboard or playing on a musical instrument) depend heavily on muscle sense for control and accuracy, and these improve with repetition and practice due to what is called muscle memory. As neural pathways that control the necessary movements become strengthened, the experienced pianist or typist need not consciously think about every movement.

Muscles contain receptors known as stretch receptors (otherwise known as muscle spindles or proprioceptors), which detect changes in muscle length when it is stretched. The brain interprets these sensory impulses to generate a mental image of where the muscle is in space. The impulses responsible for muscle sense are received and processed by in the cerebellum (for unconscious muscle sense) and the parietal lobes of the cerebrum (for conscious muscle sense).

Evidence of Design

As we have seen, multiple interdependent systems are required for the muscular system to work — among those needed are the circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems, in addition to the tendons that attach muscle to bone — not to mention the incredible structure and arrangement of the muscles themselves (containing many mitochondria to meet the energy demand; being comprised of thousands of muscle fibers; being arranged antagonistically and synergistically for coordinated action, etc). The origin of the skeletal muscles, then, depends on many co-dependent changes in order to come about. This is not particularly surprising in light of a design perspective, but becomes wildly surprising if we suppose the falsity of design. Thus, muscles provide powerful evidence of intelligent design.

In a second article, I shall review the process of muscle contraction, which (as we will see) takes the inference to design to an entirely new level.

There's a reason that it sounds to good to be true.

 

Kemal attaturk: a brief history.

 

The rise and fall of the final caliphate.

 

Our fingerprints = us?

 

The real apex predator?

 

On evolutionary biology's post Darwinian distopia.

 Why Evolutionary Biologists Are “Fatigued” by Darwin

Emily Sandico

Increasingly, evolutionary biologists acknowledge — in the peer-reviewed literature — that there are serious problems with the modern Darwinian synthesis. The decorated Cambrian paleontologist Simon Conway Morris calls this “Darwin fatigue.” According to Conway Morris, the unresolved problems exposed by the Cambrian Explosion have “opened the way to a post-Darwinian world.” Though you wouldn’t hear this from Bill Nye the Science Guy, and you wouldn’t read it in a high-school or college biology textbook, real-life evolutionary biologists now live in the Wild West of evolutionary thinking, where multiple models compete to replace neo-Darwinism.

In his book 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘸𝘪𝘯’𝘴 𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘵, Stephen Meyer draws on the research of many others to demonstrate that “the neo-Darwinian math is itself showing that the neo-Darwinian mechanism cannot build complex adaptations — including the new information-rich genes and proteins that would have been necessary to build the Cambrian animals.”

Why is this? Current research shows that the numbers of organisms and generations required for the neo-Darwinian mechanism to produce complex features far exceeds the probabilistic resources realistically available over the history of life on Earth.

This sounds suspiciously, well, scientific. Want to know more? See here for a brief “A Précis of Darwin’s Doubt.” Meyer’s work is thoroughly sourced from the mainstream field of evolutionary biology and peer-reviewed scientific literature. So check it out: Darwin's Doubt is available in print, Kindle, and audiobook formats from all major book retailers and many libraries!

The pan-Arab movement and the Arab/Israeli conflict

 

There are no good guys IV

 

C.S Lewis on the rise of the technocracy

 John West: C. S. Lewis and the Prophet in the White Lab Coat Who Declares, “Thus Saith the SCIENCE”

David Klinghoffer

Science needs its critics as much as any field of human endeavor does. Maybe even more so today, since there is a widespread feeling, hardly upset by our experience with the public health tyranny imposed in the context of Covid, that “the Science” is beyond question. 

John West edited the book The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society and he talked recently with podcaster Joseph Weigel about the model of science criticism that Lewis provides. It’s a theme that threads through many of Lewis’s writings — including That Hideous Strength (a great novel, and Dr. West’s favorite, he says, though the choice is a tough one), the third chapter of The Abolition of Man, and elsewhere. 

Lewis’s Prescience on “Technocracy”

For a shorter read, West recommends Lewis’s essay “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.” He has pointed out the eerie prescience of this passage by Lewis:

We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers — a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians — a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.

That was in 1958, when it was already evident that many in the West were all too willing to obey the prophet in the white lab coat who declares, “Thus saith the SCIENCE.” The abuses committed under the resulting “scientocracy” are the theme of West’s very interesting conversation with Weigel. Listen to it here. 

Why we are free to acknowledge free moral agency.

 A Scholarly Riposte to Pop Free Will Denialism

Denyse O Leary

If you’ve heard the latest from pop science, you probably “know” that science disproves free will. Actually, after decades of research on the topic, it doesn’t.

Chapter 14 of Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023) is neuroscientist and educator Cristi L. S. Cooper’s look at the real state of the neuroscience on free will. In “Free Will, Free Won’t, and What the Libet Experiments Don’t Tell Us,” Cooper recounts in some detail the research around readiness potentials in the brain. 

“Readiness Potential” or RP

The controversy started with 1983 findings by American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet (1916–2007). Briefly, Libet et al. found that the brain initiates spontaneous movements (“readiness potential” or RP) before subjects recall making a choice to act. Cooper notes, “This finding kicked off the next forty years, up to the present day, of scientists referring to the Libet experiment as being the seminal experiment in the field that showed that there is no free will.” (p. 267) Thus, “Libet’s experiments are so foundational to the ‘neuroscience of free will’ that nearly every review of the subject begins with a description of his work.”

A 2021 review by Aaron Schurger et al. drove this point home: ‘It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the conclusions of Libet’s papers on the RP have permeated the intellectual zeitgeist.’” (p. 266)

An Easy Crowd

It’s not hard to see why that conclusion came to dominate the field. Neuroscientists were an easy crowd. They mostly didn’t (and don’t) believe in free will, not because they are scientists but because they are mostly materialists.

Oddly, Libet himself did not really buy into all that. For one thing, it’s not clear just what the readiness potential actually signifies. The brain is very complex and many findings, then and now, could easily be misinterpreted. At any rate, as Cooper recounts, one certain result was a number of further studies.

One outcome of a great deal more research is that Libet’s caution turned out to be justified. It became much less clear what the readiness potential really signifies. By 2021, Shurger’s team was reporting in Trends in Cognitive Sciences,

If recent models of the RP are on the right track, we cannot infer from the existence of the phenomenon that it reflects an actual signal in the brain that, in individual trials, has the characteristics of the RP, or that has causal efficacy. Because of this, one cannot infer that we lack conscious free will based on the temporal profile of the RP. If these models are correct, they may have implications for our understanding of free will, but none that avoid significant and substantive philosophical commitments. But given all the other reasons that have been raised for rejecting the classical interpretation (e.g. [3,14,16,17]), even if SDMs are mistaken and the RP does reflect a real neural signal, albeit one difficult to detect on individual trials, the RP would still fail to support the classic inference for the inefficacy of conscious will.

In short, RP is not the rabbit; it’s a rabbit-potential hole. As Cooper puts the matter, “After scientific interrogation of the Libet experimental paradigm over the last forty years, scientists know much more about the readiness potential and the moment of conscious will but don’t seem any closer to agreeing as to the significance of many aspects of the original findings.” (p. 271)

An Old Problem in Education

She adds — and this is something we should especially take note of: “… at the popular level, non-neuroscientists use Libet’s studies to support a deterministic view of the mind.” It’s a longstanding problem in higher education today that findings supportive of materialism are often given far more standing in the lecture room than they have in the journals or in reliable sources of history.

Let’s take just one example — Phineas Gage, the American railroad worker who had a tamping rod driven through his head in 1848 but, remarkably, survived. According to hundreds of lectures, his personality changed radically and abruptly in the direction of uncontrollable rage; one could call it “the evolution of a Lecture Room Psychopath.” The historical record presents a much more mundane picture of survival with a disability:

What we can learn from contemporary accounts of Gage’s post-trauma life is this: For a while after the accident, he drifted, and even ended up briefly in P. T. Barnum’s freak show, exhibiting himself and the tamping rod. But he then settled down and worked a year and a half in a stable. Later, he went with a friend to Valparaiso in Chile where he cared for horses and drove a coach and six for eight years … Of course, Gage had been catastrophically injured, and about twelve years later, the effects caught up with him. By February 1860, back from Chile, he continued to try to work on farms while living with or near his mother, who had moved to San Francisco. But he began to have frequent epileptic convulsions. They worsened, and he died on May 21, 1860.

So Gage, who had no access to modern rehab, probably suffered and acted out a lot during the initial recovery phase and that was the origin of the legend. The legend is quite misleading as an account of his post-injury life. However, it provides much more useful materialist talking points. Thus decade after decade, it reappeared.

Myths from Social Psychology

Social psychology features other such myths, depending on who’s teaching. Here are six more,including:

The claim of a widely circulated 2008 study that perceptions of cleanliness affect moral judgements has not been replicated. Efforts by David Johnson, Felix Cheung and Brent Donnellan (two graduate students and their adviser) of Michigan State University to replicate it found no such difference, despite testing about four times more subjects than the original studies, Slate reports. One obvious problem with the study is that people may have radically different ideas about what the standards of cleanliness even require. (Students often discover this when they share quarters with roommates.)

MERCATORNET

ome pop science myths are more harmful than others, of course. As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out, denial of free will is a quick route to totalitarianism. If you can’t be guilty because you can’t choose, you can’t be innocent either. In fact, you must be controlled by the powers that be for your own good. So you can’t really have the rights or dignity that a free society accords to human beings.

At any rate, in her chapter, Cooper provides a helpful scholarly riposte to pop science claims that free will has been disproved.

Cambridge's comment on zechariah ch.2:9

Cambridge

 For, behold, I will shake mine hand upon them, and they shall be a spoil to their servants: and ye shall know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me.

9. shake mine hand] Job 31:21; Isaiah 19:16.

a spoil to their servants] They “which spoiled you,” Zechariah 2:8, shall be themselves “a spoil,” and that to those whom they held in servitude, those that served them R. V.

hath sent me] The divine mission of the angel who foretells these things shall be attested by the event. Comp. Zechariah 2:11, Zechariah 4:9, Zechariah 6:15.

Continuing to plagiarize the original technologist?

 Paper Digest: Biomimicry Uses the Design of Biological Organisms to Improve Human Technology

Emily Reeves

In biology, organisms have elegant and sophisticated reliability and safety strategies that may be mimicked to produce better human-engineered systems. This has been a subject of study for more than 20 years. In 2002, engineering professor Stuart C. Burgess published a review article in the Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering titled, “Reliability and safety strategies in living organisms: potential for biomimicking.” He catalogs over 32 such strategies among organisms ranging from deep-sea fish with their unique body structures to humans (and of course other creatures) with our self-healing of skin. 

His paper explores these incredible mechanisms from the perspective of potential biomimicry. Intelligent design (ID) is the theory that organisms have been optimized by the intelligent processes of a mind. Accordingly, compared with evolutionary theory, ID provides more justification for emulating biological design. By contrast, evolutionary thinking has pointed to numerous seemingly poor designs as examples of evolution working as an unguided process that can only tinker. Interestingly, many claims of poor design — junk DNA, the human appendix, the human ankle joint, the reverse wiring of the human eye, the GTP hydrolysis mediated proofreading step, and more — have been proven incorrect, when the engineering constraints placed upon these systems were taken into account. 

Back to the Paper

Stuart Burgess has published extensively in the field of biomimetics, showing how the complex designs we find in nature can help inspire and improve human technology. Throughout this paper, he emphasizes the supremacy of natural systems over human-engineered ones:

T]he human heart can function as a self-maintaining subsystem for 75 years or more. During this time it beats the order of 2.5 billion times and pumps the order of 150 million litres of blood. This performance is superior to any man-made pump working in similar conditions, and indeed, it is very difficult to design a man-made replacement heart with anywhere near the same capability as a living heart.

However, the fail-safe systems in engineering are relatively simple compared with those found in nature.

Analogous Systems and Processes 

The  goal of this study is to show how engineered systems are similar to biological systems, and thus to improve the reliability of engineered systems. Burgess mentions that the extensive use of reliability strategies in nature supports their continued and increased application in engineering. He concludes by predicting that as engineering develops, the application of biological dependability and safety techniques will likely become more common. Some of the technologies used by biological organisms will find their way into human engineered designs — something that, from a Darwinian perspective, you probably wouldn’t expect

On defining the science.

 

Atheists need to first remove the beam from their own eye.

 If we define religion as uninformed/unreasoning/intolerant credulity. The facts of history have clearly demonstrated that political atheists are at least as likely to be "religious" in that sense as political theists.

Can you blame them?

 Every(as in without exception) society conceived of and administered by atheists has been a mass-murdering thugocracy. I suspect that that is no mere coincidence. Thus the toxin is not true religion but totalitarian politics masquerading as religion. 

Whence an objective moral code for the atheist universe/multiverse?

Evolutionist Jerry Coyne Has a Puzzling View on Hamas

Michael Egnor

The recent atrocities committed by the terrorist group Hamas against Israeli non-combatants give us a moment of clarity on matters of moral law, atheism, and free will. Apropos of that, Jerry Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology who is an atheist, a determinist, and who denies free will. At Why Evolution Is True, he has recently written passionately about the Hamas atrocities, and I agree with much that he has written. 

But the moral atrocity committed by Hamas seems not to have diminished Coyne’s passion for atheism, determinism, and free will denial. He flips directly from commenting critically on media cover of the war to lauding a recently published book by Robert Sapolsky, a hirsute neuroendocrinology researcher and professor at Stanford. Sapolsky comes at anthropology from a distinctly materialist perspective. Each year he spends time with wild baboons in Kenya studying their physiological reactions to stress, and he attributes human emotions to purely materialistic physiological causes — neurotransmitters, endogenous steroids, and the like. Sapolsky leaves no room for a spiritual human soul — we are just meat on the hoof in his view. Like Coyne, Sapolsky embraces determinism and denies libertarian free will. Like Coyne, he presumably does so involuntarily. 

Perplexed by Coyne

Which brings me to the Hamas atrocity. I am perplexed by Coyne’s view that Hamas culpably violated objective moral law, considering Coyne’s metaphysical commitment to atheism, determinism, and free will denial. After all, if there is no God, there is no source for objective moral law at all. Nature is a collection of facts; without God nature has no overarching values, and the only values on tap are the separate values of individual human beings. Without God, value judgments are merely individual human opinions, akin to individual preferences for flavors of ice cream. There is no factual basis to prefer Coyne’s value judgments to Hamas’ value judgments — values like “don’t kill innocent people” are not facts of nature. But Coyne clearly (and rightly) holds Hamas to the moral responsibility not to kill innocents. If there is no God, from where does Coyne get this objective moral law that he invokes? Who is Coyne to judge? 

From the Beginning of Time

It determinism is true, then everything that happens was determined at the beginning of time and Hamas’s slaughter of innocents was baked into the cake from the Big Bang onward. If Coyne is right about determinism, Hamas’s genocide and Raoul Wallenberg’s heroism are both mere outcomes of the original physical state of the universe at the time of the Big Bang. We humans are only acting out the script handed to us, without the freedom to change it. In Coyne’s view, Hamas and Wallenberg are moral equals — they must be moral equals, if determinism is true. How can Hamas be held morally culpable, and Wallenberg lauded, when both lack free will and both are just involuntarily running the primordial determinist program of the universe?

I can’t see how Coyne as a determinist, an atheist, and a free will denier can hold Hamas morally responsible for their atrocities, any more than he could hold the wind morally responsible for deaths in a tornado. Perhaps Coyne will comment on the glaring cognitive dissonance in his condemnation of the murder of innocents and his embrace of a metaphysical perspective that reduces such murder to a value-free maelstrom of atoms. 

There are no good guys .III

 

There are no good guys. II

 

Darwinian apologists: It's not chance and necessity. It's necessity and chance.

 Darwinism Needs Laws to Look Scientific; Cronin and Hazen Stand Ready to Serve

David Coppedge

The debate over the scientific legitimacy of Darwinism has never stopped since Darwin proposed the “law of natural selection” as a scientific theory. His “law” was immediately criticized as a personification of nature (i.e., a religion) when he compared it to artificial selection. No less it was criticized as a rhetorical device (i.e., a con job) that opened a host of just-so stories (see Doubts About Darwin, by Dr. Thomas Woodward). Desperate to justify their worldview as scientific, some Darwinians are making up new “laws of nature” to appear welcome inside the big tent of science.

Invisible Bridges Across a Chasm

In the.movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Indy stands at a precipice, a yawning chasm below him, blocking his approach to the Holy Grail. A cryptic text tells him he must make a leap of faith to prove his worth. With great trepidation, he puts out his foot, closes his eyes, and a bridge appears! It was there all the time, but invisible. The memorable scene is a piece of moviemaking magic, but science must deal with some conceptual chasms, the biggest of which is the gap between life and non-life. The Darwinians, looking into their cryptic text (The Origin of Species), have faith that a bridge exists across this chasm. When they make their leap of faith, can they trust that invisible laws of nature suggested in cryptic clues from their prophet will save them?

The Constructal Law

An earlier attempt at formalizing evolution as a law of nature was proposed in 1996 by Adrian Bejan. He called it the Constructal Law: “for any finite flow system to persist… it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier and easier access to its currents.” I critiqued this “law” back in 2014, which was not hard to do, since a reporter summarized it this way: “The view that emerges is that the evolution phenomenon is broader than biological evolution. The evolution of technology, river basins, and animal design is one phenomenon, and it belongs in physics.” It was quite a trick. Bejan bridged the chasm by eliminating it conceptually, pretending that airplanes, rivers, and animals belong in one category: systems that evolve! I concluded that the Constructal Law was “a mental imposition on nature that allows Bejan to salvage mindless Darwinism by making it appear law-driven.” Four years later, we found Bejan had elevated his Constructal Law to a new law of thermodynamics, leading one of his disciples to commit Berra’s Blunder.

Assembly Theory

Lee Cronin’s entry into the contest of searching for laws to make Darwinism scientific was published by Nature earlier this month. With five co-authors, he proposed a new “Assembly Theory” that claims biological evolution is governed by laws of physics. The paper argues that Cronin and his colleagues were not proposing a new law of physics:

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection. To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary. We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units. We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects.

According to the University of Glasgow, where Cronin teaches, Assembly Theory promises a magnificent bridge between nonlife and life, if you will accept Cronin’s promissory note:

Assembly Theory provides an entirely new way to look at the matter that makes up our world, as defined not just by immutable particles but by the memory needed to build objects through selection over time,” said Professor Lee Cronin, a chemist from the University of Glasgow and co-lead author. 

 

“With further work, this approach has the potential to transform fields from cosmology to computer science.It represents a new frontier at the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology and information theory.” 

Sara Walker, a co-author, added that Assembly Theory as “a completely new lens for looking at physics, chemistry and biology as different perspectives of the same underlying reality.” Chasm? What chasm? Take a leap. Trust that “selection” (Darwin’s genie) will assemble simple things into complex things, whether nonliving or living. 

 The new study introduces mathematical formalism around a physical quantity called ‘Assembly’ that captures how much selection is required to produce a given set of complex objects, based on their abundance and assembly indices…. 

“With this theory, we can start to close the gap between reductionist physics and Darwinian evolution – it’s a major step toward a fundamental theory unifying inert and living matter.” 

Writing last week for Evolution News, Tova Forman reported that other Darwinian evolutionists were outraged by Professor Cronin’s Assembly Theory, some even calling it a “Trojan horse for creationism.” Why? They already believed there was no chasm! Calling attention to a gap, they alleged, opened the door to intelligent design. 

Since Assembly Theory is not gaining traction among Darwinists, let’s move on to the next Law of Evolution — a “missing law” that its proponents claim to have discovered.

Law of Increasing Functional Information

A more impressive search team for laws to make Darwinism scientific announced their discovery in PNAS. News from Carnegie Science proclaims, “Authored by a nine-member team — scientists from Carnegie, Caltech, and Cornell University, and philosophers from the University of Colorado — the work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.” Robert Hazen and Michael Wong from Carnegie were leaders of this effort with two other colleagues, assisted by philosophers Carol Cleland, Daniel Arend, and Heather Demarest from Colorado, Stuart Bartlett from Caltech, and planetary scientist (expert on Saturn’s moon Titan) Jonathan Lunine from Cornell. 

Michael Wong and a colleague at Carnegie had proposed in February that cells could be considered the first data scientists (Royal Society). Robert Hazen, who recorded a course “Origins of Life” for the Teaching Company along with two other courses about science, has lately been cataloging hundreds of minerals that he believes “evolved” on the Earth by the same forces of selection that caused organisms to evolve and diversify. Jonathan Lunine was a strong proponent of life on Titan during the Cassini mission (2004-2017) but was baffled by the low quantity of methane detected, which should have formed a global ocean on the large moon but was not seen by the Huygens Probe that landed on the surface in 2005 nor by radar maps. In this paper, he revisits the bizarre chemistry of Titan without answering where the global ocean went.

This interdisciplinary team positioned itself in the long tradition of scientific discovery of the laws of nature. One hundred fifty years after the last laws of physics were formalized, they have a new one to offer!

The new work presents a modern addition — a proposed macroscopic law recognizing evolution as a common feature of the natural world’s complex systems, which are characterized as follows:

They are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly;

Are subject to natural processes that cause countless different arrangements to be formed;

Only a small fraction of all these configurations survives in a process called “selection for function.”  

If Cronin’s theory flopped, it’s not apparent why this one should do any better. Both rely on “selection” as a fundamental property — the same personification fallacy in Darwin’s “law of natural selection” that was based on an illogical comparison with artificial selection. Who is the selector in Cronin’s or Hazen’s theory? This is especially odd in Hazen’s proposal, where “selection for function” is a key concept. Cronin only viewed selection in terms of objects allowed to exist that retain a memory of their history, such as a metabolic reaction network or a genome. Hazen’s selection for “functional information” can be anything living or nonliving, including a star, a mineral, or the neck of a giraffe. But then, what is a function?

Insofar as processes have causal efficacy over the internal state of a system or its external environment, they can be referred to as functions. If a function promotes the system’s persistence, it will be selected for.

This leads to the classic tautology within Darwinism: if it survives, it was selected. If it was selected, it persists (survives). This truism explains nothing. According to this loose definition, boulders that pile up on the bottom of a cliff or sand grains that pile up in dunes were “selected for function.” By this reasoning, anything that persists was selected!

The authors frequently conflate abiotic patterns like these with biological phenomena, such as enzymatic reactions. In life, though, functional molecules depend on highly specific sequences of building blocks encoded elsewhere by separate information-rich genetic molecules. The transcribed information is then translated into a separate code of twenty amino acid “letters” that are assembled in a specified order by additional information-rich entities (molecular machines, like ribosomes). The machines do error checking and require a host of auxiliary enzymes. Products of nucleosynthesis in exploding stars, and mineral products in geological layers, have nothing resembling coded information. It is a wild extrapolation to conflate these physical processes with life as “systems that evolve toward greater degrees of functional information.”

The Missing Mind

A weird aspect of the paper is how they integrate human technology into evolving systems. Like Bejan, who committed Berra’s Blunder by considering airplanes and engineers as a single evolving species, Hazen and his colleagues leapfrog from mindless evolution to mind-directed activity. Society, to them, consists of interacting subunits subject to selective pressures. The subunits, which we could give the Trekkian designation of “carbon units,” explore configuration space to find stable arrangements that increase functional information. In their view, this includes human art, music and language, which they reduce to “ancillary functions” — 

Ancillary functions may become so distant from core functions that it is difficult to understand their connections to the survival of the larger system. For example, the creation of art and music may seem to have very little to do with the maintenance of society, but their origins may stem from the need to transmit information and create bonds among communities, and to this day, they enrich life in innumerable ways. Perhaps, like eddies swirling off of a primary flow field, selection pressures for ancillary functions can become so distant from the core functions of their host systems that they can effectively be treated as independently evolving systems, perhaps eventually generating their own core functions….

In the Darwinist mind, it’s evolutionary turtles all the way down. Understandably, they use the word “imagine” and other speculative expressions throughout the paper. To them, the human ability to reason about counterfactuals is simply one more “core function” that emerged by selective pressures that explore possible configurations in an unguided law that favors the increase of functional information. Evolution searches configuration space for novelties that persist. It’s no different in principle from a stellar interior exploding to produce all the novel elements of the periodic table, or a volcano selecting all the possible configurations of elements to form novel minerals. Once biological evolution began, the sky was the limit.

One distinction with respect to life is the fact that biological evolution appears to be “open-ended,” forging adaptations and constructing new possibility spaces in an unpredictable and undecidable manner. In contrast, abiotic examples seem bounded. Recent work has estimated the combinatorial phase space of Earth’s present-day biosphere vastly outweighs the combinatorial phase space of the abiotic universe. Furthermore, biological and technological evolution seems to increase in its pace of innovation as a function of time. At the very least, life on Earth has evolved the ability to tune its evolvability.

Where will evolvability lead? At one disturbing point, the authors speculate that selection will take humans beyond individuality toward a collectivist ontology. The wording recalls to mind some historically distasteful utopian regimes:

The prevailing model of life as a collection of well-defined individuals may need revision. We anticipate a biological paradigm shift analogous to the leap between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics: just as we replaced localized individual particles and discrete electron orbitals with wavefunctions and electron clouds, we may one day replace biological individuals with a “fuzzier,” networked picture of life. Such a view might still permit the existence of individual units but would stress the relationality among them in a process-based ontology.

Circular Law

concept of “selection” drives both papers. It is the favorite word used by Cronin’s team and Hazen’s team. They assume that anything that exists was selected by some unknown force and use their existence as evidence of selection. They then exalt selection as a law of nature. In this way they Darwinize the entire universe. But is this a legitimate way of reasoning about nature? Suppose a charlatan concocts a theory that galumph is a mysterious force that explains everything. Is he allowed to call galumph a fundamental law of nature alongside the classical laws painstakingly derived by Newton, Maxwell, and the other great founders of science? If sufficiently clever, the charlatan could write equations that quantify the degrees of galumphity that explain minerals and planetary interiors, and that lead to chemical evolution, multicellularity, and technology. He might even use his law to predict that the next discovery will be explainable with galumph. Behold: a theory of everything! It bridges the chasm between nonlife and life. Galumph is a designer substitute. It has given mankind enlightenment! Is not “selection” like this? Who or what is the selector? Hint: it’s what the ancients used to call an idol.

Still working out this free speech thing I see.

 

The Israeli/Arab conflict: an analysis

 

Time for a truly universal suffrage?

 Animal-Rights Philosopher, Published by Oxford University Press: “Let Animals Vote!”

Wesley J Smith

The radicalism never stops. A post published by Oxford University Press — not a fringe entity! — has advocated giving voting rights to animals. Ioan-Radu Motoarcă asks, “Should Animals Have the Right to Vote?”

Many countries have adopted legislation that protects the interests of animals to some extent — see, for example, the 2006 Animal Welfare Act in England, or the 1966 Animal Welfare Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act in the US. These laws ordinarily ban animal cruelty and place various restrictions on people’s treatment of animals.

That is all well and good. But suppose we went one step further. Suppose it were suggested that animals’ interests would be even better protected if we recognized a right of political participation to animals.

How to Do Such a Ridiculous Thing?

One way to do that would be to have human representatives cast votes on behalf of animals with respect to different legislative proposals. Thus, monkeys, parrots, and other creatures in the Amazonian forests in Brazil would have a say in the adoption or rejection of laws impacting their environment. Pigs, cows, and chickens on animal farms would have a say on laws related to their life conditions. This proposal would elevate animals to the status of actual actors in the political process. Right now, animals are merely subjects of our legal protection, but they don’t get to directly influence their own welfare. Under the proposal just stated, animals would have more direct control over their lives.

Wait a minute, Wesley! Animals are oblivious to political processes and utterly incapable of voting. So? Animal-rights ideologues would vote on behalf of those that — not who — can’t vote for themselves, and always against allowing human uses of animals:

Animal voting might take place along dimensions that are captured better by a voting system, than merely by laws for the protection of animals. For example, some candidates in an election might propose laws offering a mandatory minimum food quantity for certain categories of animals, say rabbits. Similarly, a candidate could promise shelter to various species (e.g., subsidizing farmers to build more sheds for horses and cows). In those cases, the animals’ vote would go to those candidates.

The article doesn’t say, but I assume the approach would be a matter of one animal, one vote. If so, that would mean a herd of 5,000 cattle “voting” for the human candidate in an election dealing with ranching issues promising to act against the interests of the rancher. Indeed, considering the number of animals that live among us, the potential for radical disruption of human thriving should this proposal ever be implemented is beyond describing.

Just a “First Step,” Mind You

Laughably, the proposal is defined as more moderate than what animal-rights activists really want, that is, as a “first step” toward the end goal of outlawing all human ownership of animals:

The voting proposal is actually more modest than a purported law mandating the elimination of all harm to animals . . . [A]rguing that animals should have a voice regarding their rights, the burden of proof is not as high as in arguing directly that animals should be subject to no harm whatsoever, or that they are entitled to sufficient food or shelter (and that therefore laws should be passed protecting these rights).

The end result of each argument may end up being the same, for example laws may be passed protecting animals from harm or providing them with food and shelter. But getting there in the indirect manner (through voting for candidates who support animal-oriented policies), given the significant size of conservative (in outlook, rather than political affiliation) constituencies everywhere, should be more acceptable in public debate today, and thus the safer way to go.

The  article illustrates how animal-welfare laws are now scorned among the animal-rights crowd as too little protection and wrong because they allow animals to be used for our benefit. Thus, the author argues:

Indirect protection of animals through legislation has made significant advances, but the general track-record of this approach remains dismal. Animals are still being slaughtered by the dozens of billions every year (you read that right; check out the live Animal Kill Clock in the US) and turned into food (generating huge amounts of unnecessary waste in the process). By this standard, the effects of laws banning animal cruelty and protecting endangered species dwindle almost to insignificance. It doesn’t look like things are getting anywhere like this. So why not try something new? And a voting scheme for animals may provide just the right amount of novelty and provocation to jilt politicians and policymakers out of their apathy.

Sounds Crazy? Maybe Because It Is

Look, I know this sounds insane — precisely because it is. But since when does irrationality stop radicals? Indeed, that one of the foremost academic publishers in the world granted an animal-rights ideologue the space to propose such a ridiculous idea seriously demonstrates how thoroughly the intellectual set has been infected with the virus of anti-human exceptionalism.

As I always say, if you want to see what is going so badly wrong in society, read the professional and intellectual journals. Because once the craziness receives the imprimatur of the intellectual class, it often is imposed from on high as public policy regardless of what most people think.

If you doubt that, starting about ten years ago, advocacy in the journals urged that puberty blockers be administered to adolescents with gender dysphoria. People rolled their eyes and said it would never happen. Today, puberty blocking is deemed by medical associations and much of the political leadership class to be uncontroversial “gender-affirming care,” as 14-year-old girls with gender confusion are having their breasts cut off.

Literally absurd.

 Matthew ch.18:9NIV"And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell."

Do those who use this verse as a defence for the traditionalist position on E.C.T Really believe that our Lord opined that we ought Literally gouge our eyes out if they habitually gravitate to the wrong imagery? That some will enter heaven with missing body members having literally dismembered themselves so as to keep from sinning?

The Israeli/Arab conflict: a brief history?

 

The two state solution : a brief history?

 

Setting straight what has been made crooked?

 

Be grateful for your flawlessly designed body.

 Nancy Pearcey: Love Your Designed Body, Made for a Purpose

Evolution news

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Tod Butterfield talks with CSC Fellow Nancy Pearcey about her Book Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality. Who — or what — determines what we are? Why does it matter? And how should we act in light of the answers to those questions? Professor Pearcey explores these questions, and explains how just about everything in ethics — including sexuality — begins with what we think about whether life has a design and a purpose. “Once you accept a Darwinian materialist view of nature,” says Pearcey, “logically speaking you are going to end up with a low view of the body.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

The artefact hypothesis fails even as an explaining away?

 Fossil Friday: New Study Challenges the Artifact Hypothesis 

Gunter Bechly

The abrupt appearance of many different animal phyla with distinct body plans in the Cambrian Explosion, about 530 million years ago, presents one of the many fatal problems for Darwinian evolution. That theory necessarily predicts that such complex biological novelties came into being by a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small changes over long periods of time, with thousands of intermediate forms. However, no such transitional fossils have been identified in the late Precambrian strata that preceded the Cambrian Explosion. Even though the terminal period of the Precambrian, called Ediacaran, features the earliest known macro-fossils of remarkably complex biota, their affinity with the later Cambrian animal phyla has been rejected or is at least highly controversial even within mainstream evolutionary biology (Bechly 2018d, 2020a,b,c, 2020e,f,g, 2021a,b,c, 2022c, 2023i). Where are the predicted transitional forms?

The Gravest Objection

Charles Darwin himself recognized that this may be the gravest objection that could be raised against his theory and commented that “it is indisputable that before the lowest [Cambrian] stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed … and … the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer” (Darwin 1859). Darwin appealed to the incompleteness of the fossil record, and this is still the most common approach to explain away the highly inconvenient conflicting data from paleontology. The claim is that the predicted animal ancestors of course must have existed, but are only missing in the fossil record because they were too small and soft-bodied to become easily fossilized (Runnegar 1982, Fortey et al. 2005), or because suitable layers with favorable preservational conditions somehow happened to be absent in the Precambrian, or because of our incomplete knowledge of the fossil record (“just give us 100 more years and we will find them”), maybe because we simply looked at the wrong places (Brasier et al. 2011). This so-called artifact hypothesis has been addressed and rejected by Stephen C. Meyer in his bestselling book Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013). The artifact hypothesis has also been empirically refuted in the past years by the discovery of several Ediacaran fossil localities of the so-called Burgess Shale Type (BST), which would have allowed for the preservation of small and soft-bodied animal precursors, but only yielded fossil algae (featured this Fossil Friday) and a few problematic organisms (see my review in Bechly 2020d).

Now a new study drove a further nail into the coffin of the artifact hypothesis: A team of paleontologists led by an eminent expert on Cambrian fossils, Derek Briggs, compared the fossilization processes and geology of Precambrian and Cambrian strata. They published their findings in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (Anderson et al. 2023, Shelton 2023). The scientists found a total absence of animals in Precambrian layers that would have allowed their preservation and therefore suggest a soft maximum constraint on animal antiquity at 789 million years ago. The authors conclude that “Burgess Shale-type conditions are rarely associated with Neoproterozoic fossil biotas, but in the few assemblages with these conditions, dated to 789 million years ago or older, no animals have been identified, suggesting they had not evolved by this time.”

A Cryogenian Gap

The authors implicitly suggest that a Cryogenian gap in exceptionally preserved biotas may explain the later abrupt appearance of animals, which they place at 574 million years ago, even though at this age only the strange Ediacaran biota appeared abruptly but uncontroversial metazoan or even bilaterian animals are absent (see above). The sloppy or even dishonest reasoning to hide even greater conflicting evidence is obvious from the authors’ figure 1, which places the “minimum age of crown Metazoa from oldest unambiguous fossils” at 574 million years ago, but in the figure legend only list a “possible cnidarian” and a “possible sponge” as well as Dickinsonia as an early animal, even though the oldest Dickinsonia fossils are more than 15 million years younger (at 558 mya from White Sea; see Cunningham et al. 2016: 5) and their animal affinity far from established (Bechly 2018d, 2022c). It is unbelievable and shocking what passes peer review as “unambiguous” evidence in evolutionary biology nowadays.

Anyway, another study by Daley et al. (2018) looked at BST-localities from the Ediacaran (ignored by Anderson et al. 2023) and placed the maximum constraint for the first animals at an even much younger age of about 550 million years, which is quite close to the beginning of the Cambrian (542 million years ago). Either way, the suggested maximum ages not only contradict the gradualist assumptions of Darwinian evolution, but also contradict the hypothetical datings of all molecular clock studies. It is time for Darwinists to stop their audacious science denial and face the stark fact that empirical data strongly and consistently contradict and refute core predictions of their theory.

References

Anderson RP, Woltz CR, Tosca NJ, Porter SM & Briggs DEG 2023. Fossilisation processes and our reading of animal antiquity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution June 27, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.05.014

Bechly G 2018d. Why Dickinsonia Was Most Probably Not an Ediacaran Animal. Evolution News September 27, 2018. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/why-dickinsonia-was-most-probably-not-an-ediacaran-animal/

Bechly G 2020a. Did Cloudinids Have the Guts to be Worms. Evolution News January 7, 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/01/did-cloudinids-have-the-guts-to-be-worms/

Bechly G 2020b. Ancestor of All Animals in 555-Million-Year-Old Ediacaran Sediments? Evolution News March 26, 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/03/ancestor-of-all-animals-in-555-million-year-old-ediacaran-sediments/

Bechly G 2020c. The Myth of Precambrian Sponges. Evolution News May 12, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/05/the-myth-of-precambrian-sponges/

Bechly G 2020d. The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis. Evolution News July 6, 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/07/demise-of-the-artifact-hypothesis-aggravates-the-problem-of-the-cambrian-explosion/

Bechly G 2020e. Namacalathus, an Ediacaran Lophophorate Animal? Evolution News July 9, 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/07/namacalathus-an-ediacaran-lophophorate-animal/

Bechly G 2020f. Namacalathus, Alleged Ediacaran “Animal,” Fails to Refute Abrupt Cambrian Explosion. Evolution News July 10, 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/07/namacalathus-alleged-ediacaran-animal-fails-to-refute-abrupt-cambrian-explosion/

Bechly G 2020g. Was Kimberella a Precambrian Mollusk? Evolution News September 3–21, 2020. [14 part article series] https://evolutionnews.org/2020/09/bechly-series-no-ancestors-for-cambrian-animals-darwins-doubt-remains/

Bechly G 2021a. Resurrecting Namacalathus as an Ediacaran Animal. Evolution News January 18, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/01/resurrecting-namacalathus-as-an-ediacaran-animal/

Bechly G 2021b. Namacalathus Revisited — Not Much to See. Evolution News January 19, 2021. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/01/namacalathus-revisited-not-much-to-see/

Bechly G 2021c. A Precambrian House of Cards. Evolution News March 22–29, 2021). [7 part article series about Trilobozoa] https://evolutionnews.org/tag/precambrian-house-of-cards-series/

Bechly G 2022c. Fossil Friday: Dickinsonia, the Ediacaran Animal that Wasn’t. Evolution News July 29, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/07/fossil-friday-dickinsonia-the-ediacaran-animal-that-wasnt/

Bechly G 2023i. Fossil Friday: Cloudina Still Lacks the Guts to Be a Worm. Evolution News July 14, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/fossil-friday-cloudina-still-lacks-the-guts-to-be-a-worm/

Cunningham JA, Liu AG, Bengtson S & Donoghue PCJ 2017. The origin of animals: Can molecular clocks and the fossil record be reconciled? BioEssays 39(1): e201600120, 10–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201600120

Daley AC, Antcliffe JB,Drage HB & Pates S 2018. Early fossil record of Euarthropoda and the Cambrian Explosion. PNAS 115(21), 5323–5331. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1719962115

Darwin C 1859. On the Origin of Species …. . John Murray: London (UK), 502 pp.

Brasier MD, Wacey D & McLoughlin N 2011. Taphonomy in Temporally Unique Settings: An Environmental Traverse in Search of the Earliest Life on Earth. pp. 487–518 in: Allison PA & Bottjer DJ (eds). Taphonomy: Process and Bias Through Time. Springer: Dordrecht (NL), xii+600 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8643-3_14

Fortey RA, Briggs DEG & Wills MA 2005. The Cambrian evolutionary ‘explosion’ recalibrated. Bioessays 19(5), 429–434. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.950190510

Meyer SC 2013. Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Harper One: New York, viii+498 pp. https://darwinsdoubt.com/

Runnegar B 1982. The Cambrian explosion: Animals or fossils? Journal of the Geological Society of Australia 29(3-4), 395–411. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00167618208729222

Shelton J 2023. Clues in the clay: Scientists narrow the search for the first animals. Yale News June 27, 2023. https://news.yale.edu/2023/06/27/clues-clay-scientists-narrow-search-first-animals

Meritocacy is not how you fight the power? Pros and Cons.

 

Meritocracy is how you fight the power?

 

Meritocracy is not how you fight the power? II

 

The issue. If one asked a palestinian.

 

The issue. If one asked an Israeli.

 

Lee Cronin is the Sphinx?

I’m Baffled by Lee Cronin, and I’m Not Alone

Tova Forman

As Dr. James Tour’s sixty-day challenge to ten top origin-of-life scientists draws to a close this coming Monday, I wonder what brilliant comments will appear in response to the question, “How did life evolve from non-life?” The challenge, as David Klinghoffer summarized: “The deal is, if any of them can answer just one of five questions, relevant to solving the mystery of the origin of life, Professor Tour promises to shut up about the OOL and take down all his public material on the subject.” Professor Lee Cronin is one of the ten. He said this the other day on X:

If the origin of life is the origin of evolution & nothing comes before life then we are indeed stuck. I don’t think we need to be. Let’s shed the dogma, ego, & closed minds & ask the question clearly. How do we detect the onset of evolution BEFORE biology?

5:15 PM · Oct 16, 2023

Not a Mind Reader

I am curious what if anything Cronin and the other nine will offer in response to Dr. Tour. Perhaps they have already cracked the challenge behind the scenes and Tour will be obliged on Monday to admit defeat. But when I tried to interpret Cronin’s comment, I struggled. I’m no expert on OOL myself. Not a mind reader, either. Perhaps Dr. Cronin intended his remark in response to interlocutors other than Tour — like the scientists who are currently taking issue with his new paper with Sara Walker in Nature. As Philip Ball comments in Chemistry World:

The paper claims that an idea called assembly theory (AT) ‘explains selection and evolution’. This has drawn a clamour of responses from scientists on social media – many of them offended, some baffled — and prompted unusually vigorous debate in the online ‘comments’ section of the Nature site. Evolutionary biologists in particular have expressed outrage — denouncing the paper as nonsense, and even a Trojan horse for creationism.

It’s not hard to see why. From the first sentence of the abstract, the paper seems to imply that the authors have cracked a foundational problem for biology: ‘Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics.’ No we haven’t, biologists respond – we have never found the slightest contradiction between them, and to suggest otherwise opens the door to intelligent design

Apparently, being “baffled” puts me in good company. Which brings us back to Cronin’s recent tweet. 

Taking the Bait

Do you know those prank mirror illusions where some object seems to just be sitting in a dish ready to be picked up, but you reach for it and there’s nothing there? Trying to find the promised clarity in his tweet was like reaching for the bait and finding nothing.

Our physicist colleague Brian Miller helped rephrase Cronin’s argument: “Imagining life originating spontaneously and then evolving seems implausible. Instead, long before a cell formed that could reproduce, much simpler chemical mixtures copied themselves, which allowed them to evolve into a cell.” Reducing that to a syllogism (a logical structure), Cronin is saying, “All life undergoes change, and some change is nonbiological, so life and its origin can be nonbiological too.” Apparently, finding evidence of nonbiological chemical change can help explain the OOL.

But his logic seems faulty, particularly considering Tour’s challenge. 

Let’s say I were to ask you, “I wonder, how did the first music soundtrack originate?” Please don’t respond, “Your ego and your lack of clarity are a little too much. It’s key to remember that musical notes predate movies. Simple sets of notes formed spontaneously and then randomly changed the notes into a music soundtrack. Let me tell you about early musical notes.” Cronin’s reasoning follows the same logical structure and is just as confusing.

Shall We Play Chess?

Another oddity about his tweet strikes me: it doesn’t seem very sporting to respond to a challenge (whether from Tour or other scientists) by altering it. If your friend says, “Care for a game of chess?” you can’t very well respond, “Chess is my favorite, and I always win. If you wouldn’t mind, though, I think we should switch out the pieces for a deck of cards and use a cribbage board.” Tour detailed five challenge questions, and Cronin’s reformulation looks as similar to Tour’s questions as cribbage is to chess. Cronin assumes that simple chemical mixtures capable of reproduction formed spontaneously, and they then evolved into modern cells. The problem is that the formation of amino acids into protein chains or nucleotides into RNA or DNA are the very problems that Tour challenged experts to explain.

The unsound logic, ad hominem, and goalpost swapping in Cronin’s tweet are hardly what one should expect from a professor. But there are a few days left, and he can always follow up with a relevant chemical equation in another tweet. 

Oh, by the way, Cronin has also tweeted this, back in 2021:

Origin of life research is a scam.

5:09 PM · Oct 28, 2021

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That, from an OOL researcher? Baffling indeed. Well, Dr. Tour is waiting for illumination. Evidently so are a lot of other people.

On what ID is and is not.

 Words for Wednesday! Disentangling ID from Creationism

Emily Sandico

There are so many words out there in need of definitions! Yesterday on Stephen Meyer’s Facebook page we launched the new “Terminology Tuesday” feature, with a quick read about just what we mean by intelligent design, and what we DON’T mean. We don’t mean creationism.

Yes, we’ve noticed that many folks are unsure how “intelligent design” and “creationism” differ. Indeed, misunderstanding (willful or otherwise) of what we mean is rampant in the comments section. So on this extra-wordy Wednesday we’ll tackle both terms together. 

Intelligent design (“ID”) is the theory, based on the scientific method and empirical evidence, that the best explanation for the “apparent design” in the universe, which is acknowledged by most scientists, is actual design by an intelligent agent. 

Creationism is the belief, typically based on religious scripture and tradition, that the universe has been designed and created by a divine agent. 

Many Flavors to Choose From

Intelligent design proponents and creationists come in many flavors. Creationists certainly believe that the creator is intelligent. They might also believe that the creation account in the book of Genesis should be interpreted as six 24-hour days, and that the earth is just several thousand years old. But some creationists interpret the Genesis account differently, and believe that the earth and universe are very old. Others start with different religious traditions altogether. Many creationists look for scientific data that supports their religious tradition. 

Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, do not necessarily subscribe to any particular view of who or what the designing intelligence is. In other words, creationism starts with the identity of the designer and works downward to the creation, while intelligent design theory starts with empirical evidence and does not, from this scientific evidence, ascribe an identity to the designing mind.

Do creationists believe that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent? Yes! 

Do intelligent design theorists believe that the intelligent agent was the creator described in the Hebrew Bible? Some do. Others don’t.   

One reason the distinction is important is that many materialists (those who believe that everything about the universe is explicable in purely material terms, apart from a mind) ridicule creationism and lump ID in with it as if the two are equivalent. Whatever you believe, it’s important to recognize that creationism and ID are not the same thing. Creationism starts with the belief in a designer and interprets data accordingly, while ID starts with scientific evidence and infers the best possible explanation for that evidence.

Man is not Just another ape?

 When a Child and a Chimp Were Raised Together

Denyse O' Leary

A recent item on X pointed to a story many of us hadn’t heard before about a couple’s effort to raise their infant son with a baby chimpanzee. Before you interrupt to offer condemnation, let me start by saying that the (true) story took place in the early 1930s when materialism seemed new and exciting to many. If anyone tried that in 2023, Child Protective Services and the SPCA would promptly be called.

Into the Time Capsule

But let’s climb into the time capsule (in our imaginations) and go back to 1931, when this kind of thing was still New and Cool.

When their son Donald Kellogg was ten months old, psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg decided to raise him alongside a baby female chimpanzee (7 months), Gua, in their temporary home in Florida, near a primate research center. Winthrop Kellogg had written about the possibilities of humanizing the ape and the birth of a son was his chance. He would treat the two infants in the exact same way.

was a confident time for projects like humanizing a baby chimp. But after nine months, the Kelloggs had to cancel the experiment. What happened? Different stories are told: Here’s one from Reuters in 1951:

The experiment was described by Sir Cyril Burt, former professor of psychology at London University in an article for The Family Doctor, the British Medical Association magazine. Raised by the professor and his wife, “Gua was treated, not as an animal pet, but as a member of the family, dressed exactly like the child, nursed and trained in the same way, rewarded, scolded or punished in the same way,” the article said. But early in the second year the child began to use words and phrases quite spontaneously, and to imitate the actions of its elders, in a way the animal never could manage. 

“LITTLE ‘CHIMP’ PROVES SMARTER THAN HUMAN BABY AFTER 1 YEAR”. THE MONTREAL GAZETTE. REUTERS. JULY 27, 1954

A More Nuanced Story

So there  was a natural divergence of abilities. But a more nuanced story emerged later:

Rachel Nuwer writes at Smithsonian Magazine:

     It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua’s chimp noises. “In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study,” the authors write.

RACHEL NUWER, “THIS GUY SIMULTANEOUSLY RAISED A CHIMP AND A BABY IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN,SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, JULY 28, 2014

Well, now that the journal authors mention it, if a child is raised with a chimpanzee who is treated as if she were another child, that would interrupt his development. Donald was supposed to be learning to speak from parents, sibs, and playmates during critical formative years, not from an ape. Ultimately, the chimpanzee would never go on to talk but the boy could end up with delayed speech.

The parents did get a study and a book out of it though, published in 1933:

The overall study, called The Ape and the Child, is of more historical than scientific interest. Gua developed, physically, a great deal faster than Donald did. Gua imitated adult behaviors, wearing shoes, opening doors using the door handle, and feeding herself with a glass and a spoon. The chimp also outperformed the human when it came to physical tests.

ESTHER INGLIS-ARKELL, “THE 1931 EXPERIMENT THAT PAIRED A NEWBORN CHIMP WITH A NEWBORN BABY,” GIZMODO, DECEMBER 5, 2013

In the end, the Kelloggs returned to Indiana. Gua was returned to the primate center where she died a year later of pneumonia. And several authors have felt it worth mentioning that Donald Kellogg killed himself in 1973, aged just 43.

Not a Material Thing

Looking at the story from nearly a century’s distance, it’s hard to see what the experiment really demonstrated that could not have been observed by studying baby humans and baby chimps separately: Chimpanzees develop faster physically but then reach an intellectual plateau, relative to children, from which they never advance. Though there have been various attempts, no one has ever been able to give chimpanzees human minds — the real goal all along, surely — because the human mind is not a material thing. We cannot go around dispensing what we simply do not control.

And we can all be grateful for experimentation ethics committees today. At least it’s an effort. 

Ps. The chimp's mind is not material either but like the human mind a physical substrate is absolutely necessary to its existence.

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