Supposed bridge between land and marine mammals a bridge to nowhere.

Whale of a Tale: Straining at Mutational Gnats While Swallowing Genetic Camels
Evolution News & Views

If there was ever a prime hunting ground for evolutionary evidence in the genes, it should be in the relationship between land mammals and marine mammals. Think of the obvious differences between a four-footed ancestor and a whale: the scope of the genetic changes necessary to transform one into the other in a relatively short time would be staggering.

According to Darwin's theory, furthermore, it happened three times! Cetaceans (dolphins and whales), pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses), and sirens (manatees and dugongs) are believed to have evolved their seagoing lifestyles independently within the last 60 million years.

Three scientists from the University of Pittsburgh looked into the genes for insight into this "great transformation" undertaken by the three groups of marine mammals. In a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, they announce the discovery that "Hundreds of genes experienced convergent shifts in selective pressure in marine mammals" [emphasis added].

A look at the details, though, gives a critical reader cause to think celebrations might be a tad premature. Why? Well, for one thing, shouldn't there be thousands? In the film Living Waters, Richard Sternberg considers the number of adaptations required to be "unfathomably complicated" to allow a land animal to live entirely in an aquatic environment. The film lists just a few categories of adaptations for humpback whales:

Respiratory system

Locomotive structures

Musculoskeletal system

Dentition

Urinary system

Cardiopulmonary system

Thermoregulation

Sensory organs

Reproductive organs

You can imagine any of these outward changes requiring thousands of genetic changes. "Just think of all the parameters that would have to be modified," Sternberg says, "and then multiply that by, I don't know -- a thousandfold, or more than that. That's the scale of the problem that you're dealing with." In the Q&A feature of the film Icons of Evolution, David Berlinski tried to quantify the number of morphological changes necessary to turn a cow into a whale (like turning a car into a submarine), and stopped counting at 50,000.

It's hard, therefore, to get excited about "hundreds of genes" announced by the Pittsburgh crew. Do these genes deal with the major modifications in whales? You decide:

We present evidence of widespread convergence at the gene level by identifying parallel shifts in evolutionary rate during three independent episodes of mammalian adaptation to the marine environment. Hundreds of genes accelerated their evolutionary rates in all three marine mammal lineages during their transition to aquatic life. These marine-accelerated genes are highly enriched for pathways that control recognized functional adaptations in marine mammals, including muscle physiology, lipid-metabolism, sensory systems, and skin and connective tissue. The accelerations resulted from both adaptive evolution as seen in skin and lung genes, and loss of function as in gustatory and olfactory genes. In regard to sensory systems, this finding provides further evidence that reduced senses of taste and smell are ubiquitous in marine mammals.
Let's grant that adaptations to skin, muscles, lungs, and sensory systems are important. It's a little odd that they get excited about "loss of function" in taste and smell that "has been suggested to result from change in prey, swallowing food whole, and the masking of tastes by seawater." That sounds Lamarckian. You'd hope to hear about how Darwinian natural selection produced one of the real innovations, like the origin of dolphin sonar, the blowhole, the tail fluke, or the cooling system for the internalized male testes described in Living Waters. But score a few points for Darwin. Not quite 50,000, but four or five.

But wait! When you look into the details of the paper, you find reasons to doubt even the examples they offer as evidence of positive selection in the genes.

First of all, they didn't really witness genetic evolution as much as convergence in the "rate" of change in genes that they assume occurred by evolution. Isn't that circular? Don't you have to believe the animals evolved in the standard evolutionary timeline before accepting this as evidence?

While past studies have searched for convergent changes at specific amino acid sites, we propose an alternative strategy to identify those genes that experienced convergent changes in their selective pressures, visible as changes in evolutionary rate specifically in the marine lineages. We present evidence of widespread convergence at the gene level by identifying parallel shifts in evolutionary rate during three independent episodes of mammalian adaptation to the marine environment.
In other words, they looked at the endpoint differences and merely assumed natural selection brought them about. Design advocates would expect the differences were planned for the aquatic lifestyle of these mammals.

Second, cases of "positive selection" appear strained. They "observed strong evidence of positive selection and a marine-acceleration in a large number of skin-associated proteins." They claim further positive selection for some lung surfactant proteins. But those are only building-block changes; they say nothing about how hairy cowhide turned into tightly-knit, waterproof armor over blubber arranged into a long, sleek form suitable for gliding in water. They didn't say how the skin took form in fins and a powerful tail fluke. They couldn't even rule out that the rate increases were due to selective pressure from pathogens on the skin and lungs in seawater.

A third problem is that the genetic changes do not appear specific to marine mammals.

All of the marine-accelerated genes under positive selection also showed significant evidence of positive selection across the mammalian tree (Supplemental Table S1), so their positive selection is not specific to marine branches. However, they did nevertheless show increased evolutionary rates on marine branches, suggesting these genes experienced a greater pressure to adapt in the marine environment (Supplemental Table S3).
Anyone see a strong genetic case for cow-to-whale evolution? Fourthly, the researchers in many cases could not rule out neutral evolution. (Here's where the camel trots in.) It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the imploding story:

Convergent changes on marine branches could have resulted from neutral processes or alternatively due to positive selection for the same amino acid variant. For the latter case, we would expect there to be more convergent amino acid changes in these genes for marine species compared to negative control species. We tallied convergent changes within a control set of species not expected to show convergence and chosen to match the topology and branch lengths of the marine species (Supplemental Fig. S3C) (alpaca, camel and their ancestral branch, bushbaby, human, and aardvark). As an additional control, we tallied the convergent changes between the marine and control branches (Supplemental Fig. S3D). The marine branch dataset did not show an excess of convergent amino acid sites (mean proportion = 0.086) compared to the control datasets (0.088 and 0.052, for control branches and marine-versus control branches, respectively) (Supplemental Fig. S3). Furthermore, the proportion of convergent changes on marine branches is small compared to the amount of excess changes that led to the acceleration in relative rate (mean proportion = 0.549; Supplemental Fig. S3B). Overall, we found no evidence for adaptively driven site- and amino acid-specific convergence in marine-accelerated genes.
This is sad. There was far greater evidence for "relaxation of constraint" than for positive selection (that's the kind of evolution that turns cave fish blind). There was NO evidence for "adaptively driven" change to the genes they decided had "accelerated" their evolution. Here's where the gnat flies into the picture:

On the other hand, marine-accelerated genes participating in olfaction, gustation, and muscle function exhibited overwhelming evidence of relaxation of constraint. These observations included greatly accelerated rates consistent with neutral evolution and even obvious genetic lesions and pseudogenization (e.g. GNAT3).
Obviously, genetic lesions (deleterious mutations) and pseudogenization are not going to help a cow swim. In Living Waters, Sternberg showed mathematically that it would take longer to expect just two cooperative mutations to occur than the maximum time expected for the entire evolution of a whale (100 million years vs 9 million years).

If this is the best evidence for the story of a Darwinian transformation of a land animal into a successful full-time marine creature, they should watch Living Waters and consider the explanatory power of "Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth." It's not enough to point to possible amino acid differences here or there (not specific to marine mammals, and not clearly tied to innovative complex structures like echolocation) and announce Q.E.D. by saying they might have evolved faster in whales than they did with camels.

A good scientific explanation needs to account for the whole animal, with all its parts. A designing intelligence knows how to integrate multiple complex systems for function. Unguided natural processes are incapable of that, as Granville Sewell illustrated here with tornadoes and iPhones recently.

Once the materialistic bias against intelligence is lifted from the causal toolkit, science is liberated from an unnecessary restriction against knowledge. Sternberg says in the film:

Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer -- or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that's out of the way -- if that just does not explain the evidence -- then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.
Whales illustrate a "global architecture that only a mind can bring about," Paul Nelson adds.

The data from genetics and molecular biology and a host of other fields have proven impossible to reconcile with undirected material causes. And, if science is an open-ended search for the truth, regardless of where the evidence leads, then what difference should it make if it leads to an intelligent cause?

Straining at irrelevant details to support a predetermined narrative because of some arbitrary rule that disallows non-material causes blinds science to the obvious. It strains at gnats while swallowing camels.

Blind to design.

UCLA Team Turbo-Charges Berra's Blunder
Evolution News & Views

Berra's Blunder has long been a prime example of how some evolutionists don't understand their own theory. It started back in 1990 when Tim Berra illustrated Darwinian evolution by showing how Corvettes showed "descent with modification" between 1953 and 1955. Phillip Johnson was quick to point out that "every one of those Corvettes was designed by engineers."

Far from illustrating naturalistic evolution, he argued, they illustrate "how intelligent designers will typically achieve their purposes by adding variations to a basic design plan." Casey Luskin caught Francis Collins and Karl Giberson committing this blunder in 2011. In 2014, Adrian Bejan confused airplane design with Darwinian evolution. And last year, the BBC News committed the blunder by applying evolution to robotics.

Now Berra's Blunder is back with a vengeance. If Berra restricted his evolution to Corvettes, Stuart Wolpert (writing for the UCLA Newsroom) applies it to every horseless carriage from the Model T to the DeLorean DMC-12, with color photos for emphasis. And Wolpert is not alone; he is backed up by Erik Gjesfjeld, a postdoctoral scholar in UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics, smiling for the camera, and by Michael Alfaro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA:

"Cars are exceptionally diverse but also have a detailed history of changes, making them a model system for investigating the evolution of technology," Gjesfjeld said.
The team drew data from 3,575 car models made by 172 different manufacturers, noting the first and last year each was manufactured.

"This is similar to when a paleontologist first dates a particular fossil and last sees a particular fossil," Gjesfjeld said. [Emphasis added.]

Writers could be forgiven for using evolution as a figure of speech, knowing that cars are intelligently designed. But these writers see no difference between cars and fossils.

Alfaro said applying an evolutionary biology approach worked so well because the automotive industry's technological records are very similar to the paleontological fossil record.
"In many instances, it is superior," he said. "We find in only a handful of cases a fossil record this complete."

Moreover, Gjesfjeld and Alfaro, with Wolpert in the newsroom, speak of competition, diversification, and survival as if cars are out in the jungle fending for themselves (fenders notwithstanding).

Based on the study, the researchers can project how the electric car marketplace will evolve over the next several years. Alfaro said the field now is in an early phase of rapid diversification, and although it's likely that many more electric and hybrid models will be introduced over the next 15 to 20 years, many won't survive for very long due to increasing competition. This, he said, will eventually lead to consolidation, with a small number of dominant models that will thrive.
Ultimately, Gjesfjeld said, the technique could help us make sense of the bewildering array of technologies humans have created. "Despite the use of numerous technologies in our everyday life, we lack a basic understanding of how all this technological diversity came to be," he said.

That he lacks a basic understanding of how cars came to be is true indeed, if he really thinks they emerged by a Darwinian process.

Too harsh? The news item does speak of design and management. The evolutionists don't say that random mutations in cars are selected. But the Darwinian comparison is clear from the opening paragraph:

A UCLA-led team of researchers has taken a unique approach to explain the way in which technologies evolve in modern society. Borrowing a technique that biologists might use to study the evolution of plants or animals, the scientists plotted the "births" and "deaths" of every American-made car and truck model from 1896 to 2014.
Surely the three men know cars are designed by intelligent engineers. What the article indicates, though, is a complete misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. In its core essence, Darwinian evolution is unguided, purposeless, and mindless. That cannot be said of business managers who decide, using their minds, how best to beat the competition by designing their next models.

Maybe they committed artistic license. Let's see if the blunder vanishes in the peer-reviewed paper in the open-access journal Palgrave Communications, titled "Competition and extinction explain the evolution of diversity in American automobiles." The title, you notice right away, isn't helpful.

Despite considerable focus on the evolution of technology by social scientists and philosophers, there have been few attempts to systematically quantify technological diversity, and therefore the dynamics of technological change remain poorly understood. Here we show a novel Bayesian model for examining technological diversification adopted from palaeontological analysis of occurrence data. We use this framework to estimate the tempo of diversification in American car and truck models produced between 1896 and 2014, and to test the relative importance of competition and extrinsic factors in shaping changes in macro-evolutionary rates.
And thus it goes. But like a ray of light in the darkness, there is one point in the paper where Gjesfeld, Alfaro, and their three co-authors do catch the difference between designed automobiles and biological evolution.

Evolution has been and continues to be a valuable source of methods and theories for the study of human culture. Previous research has demonstrated that human culture undeniably evolves, but to what degree cultural change mirrors biological change remains an unsettled question (Tëmkin and Eldredge, 2007). The evolution of technology is a topic in which the evolutionary analogy has been particularly contentious, with debate often centred on the unit of evolutionary analysis, the replication of technological designs and the applicability of branching models to understanding the evolution to intentionally designed objects. This article presents an alternative perspective to the study of technological evolution that highlights the concept of diversity and a suite of macro-evolutionary methods useful in quantifying the dynamics of technological diversification.
Score one for recognizing "intentionally designed objects." But then, they leap right back into the blunder by comparing automobiles to organisms that they assumed evolved without intention or design. If Darwinian evolution fails to explain animal disparity and diversity in the fossil record, why on earth would they believe it can explain automobiles, which they surely recognize as intentionally designed objects?

In this research, technological diversity is conceptualized as the number of different technological lineages represented in a system. This definition of diversity is different from disciplines that acknowledge diversity as having the additional dimensions of balance and disparity (Stirling, 2007), but is analogous to the concept of species richness in biology, where a large number of methods are available for characterizing this component of diversity through time.
In no subsequent passage do they refer to intelligence, intention, or guidance. It's all diversification by means of non-intelligent factors. The blunder is especially clear in their Conclusion:

Just as the fossil record provides evidence for biological change through time, the archaeological and historical record has an important role to play in our understanding of technological and cultural evolution by providing empirical evidence for change through time. Our analyses of American car models reveals the shifting roles that origination and extinction have played in shaping diversity in one of the most important and ubiquitous technologies of the twentieth century. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the analysis of cultural change in a birth-death framework provides a means for testing alternative hypotheses about the extrinsic and intrinsic controls on technological diversification. Our approach is flexible and easily adapted to other cultural systems where a record of first and last appearances of artifacts is available. Overall, the quantitative study of diversification within a macro-evolutionary framework offers enormous potential to enrich our understanding of cultural and technological change.
Sorry, one cannot even begin to understand "cultural evolution" by basing one's explanation on a blunder. Darwinian evolution is not a theory of "change through time." It is a materialistic creation story. It gives, or seeks to give, design without a designer. In Darwin's theory, innovations occur randomly, and are selected by a mindless environment. Would it make any sense to speak of the evolution of a guided missile by unguided processes?


Such language is bound to confuse, not enlighten. Anything not reducible to unguided natural processes is not evolution; it is intelligent design. Before any progress can be made in the debate on origins, there must be clarity.

The argument for design condensed.

In The Design of Life, Dembski and Wells Offer a Powerful Survey of the Case for Intelligent Design
Evolution News & Views

To really appreciate the evidence for intelligent design, do you ever get the feeling you need several shelves of weighty tomes by design theorists, a great deal of time for reading and understanding them, and a PhD in biology, math, or philosophy wouldn't hurt either?


At the same time, the question of whether life's history bears the imprint of purposeful guidance is an ultimate question. Perhaps the ultimate question for every person to consider.Shouldn't weighing the inference to design be readily comprehensible to any thoughtful adult? Surely the folks at Discovery Institute owe it to the public to offer a slim and attractive, one-volume survey of the evidence for ID, authored by top ID scholars but also an easily accessible read, something you could, perhaps, give as a gift to a curious friend who you know perfectly well isn't going to wade through a whole library of ID works? But who might read one book...

Or put it a different way: How about a book that gives a view of the forest of ID evidences from high above, rather than one tree, however magnificent? Come on, Discovery Institute, give it to us!

Well, guess what? We did, and it's here. It is The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems, by mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski and molecular and cell biologist Jonathan Wells. Both are Senior Fellows of the Center for Science & Culture, prolific authors and star scholars, decorated with advanced degrees from the University of Chicago, Yale, and UC Berkeley.

No less important than their academic distinctions, they also have a gift for explaining difficult scientific ideas in clear, inviting prose. That's what they do in The Design of Life, published originally by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, now available to celebrate the launch of a new imprint of Discovery Institute Press, Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) Books.

Through July 8, we will be selling the book for only $10 -- that's more than a 70 percent discount! And it includes both the full-color hardcover and an accompanying CD with additional materials.  Order now, because this special discount won't last long!

The Design of Life hits all the most fascinating challenges to orthodox evolutionary theory posed by top ID advocates, and the most substantial reasons for substituting Design for Darwinism. It's all here! Dembski and Wells survey the case for ID with sections on "Human Origins," "Genetics and Macroevolution," "The Fossil Record," "Similar Features," "Irreducible Complexity," "Specified Complexity," "The Origin of Life," and concluding with an Epilogue, "The 'Inherit the Wind' Stereotype."

All that in fewer than three hundred pages, with handsome color photos and illustrations, in a study and slim hardcover edition. In addition, each section concludes with thought-provoking Discussion Questions, which make The Design of Life the perfect guide and companion for your study group.

Another key figure in ID's scientific community, biochemist Michael Behe, says, "When future intellectual historians list the books that toppled Darwin's theory, The Design of Life will be at the top."

If overturning a stale, overbearing relic of 19th century materialism represents a challenge not only of persuading scientists but in explaining the relevant science to the lay public, then that would have to be true. This is the broad overview of ID that has been missing from your reading list.

Design in biology is real, not an illusion. Not convinced? Still uncertain that you've understood the inference to intelligent design? The Design of Life seals the deal.  If you haven't read this wonderful book, now is your chance!