Is Darwinism cleverer than Darwinists?

Vertebrates to Land Is an Evolutionary Transition Dripping with Teleology - 
David Klinghoffer


Cornelius Hunter, among other observers, has pointed out the recurring need on the part of evolutionary thinking to resort to the language of teleology. Darwinian evolution is supposed to have done away with the need for purpose or will in driving the history of life. The words of Darwinists themselves tend to refute that idea.

That’s especially the case when they don’t have the defense of highly technical language to obscure what’s going on. As an illustration, see how researchers describe their idea about how vertebrates made the transition from sea to land some 385 million years ago.

Getting to solid ground, according to previous thinking, was driven by the evolution of limbs. These scientists, however, say it was all in the eyes.

Large eyes are unhelpful in water, but a necessity on land. So to make the launch to dry earth, sea creatures “evolved” larger eyes. They explain in an article for Science Daily, “Vision, not limbs, led fish onto land 385 million years ago.” “Led“? Note the language suggestive of teleology, purpose, forethought, in bold:

A provocative new Northwestern University and Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer colleges study suggests it was the power of the eyes and not the limbs that first led our ancient aquatic ancestors to make the momentous leap from water to land. Crocodile-like animals first saw easy meals on land and then evolved limbs that enabled them to get there, the researchers argue.

…

[E]yes nearly tripled in size before — not after — the water-to-land transition. The tripling coincided with a shift in location of the eyes from the side of the head to the top. The expanded visual range of seeing through air may have eventually led to larger brains in early terrestrial vertebrates and the ability to plan and not merely react, as fish do.

It sounds like it was not only the early terrestrial vertebrates that were doing the “planning.” More:

“We found a huge increase in visual capability in vertebrates just before the transition from water to land. Our hypothesis is that maybe it was seeing an unexploited cornucopia of food on land — millipedes, centipedes, spiders and more — that drove evolution to come up with limbs from fins,” MacIver said.

“Seeing” the food “drove evolution” to “come up with,” i.e., to invent, limbs. A longing for tasty treats on land! They saw that the millipedes and whatnot were good for food, and that this “cornucopia” was a delight to the eyes, or they would have if they had eyes adapted for seeing through air instead of water — no small thing.

What Big Eyes You Have!

The problem, again: Who needs larger eyes in water? Nobody. Yet they “evolved” larger eyes, appropriately situated. The researchers wondered what the “point,” the purpose, might be.

“Bigger eyes are almost worthless in water because vision is largely limited to what’s directly in front of the animal,” said Schmitz, assistant professor of biology at the W.M. Keck Science Department, a joint program of Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer colleges.

“But larger eye size is very valuable when viewing through air. In evolution, it often comes down to a trade-off. Is it worth the metabolic toll to enlarge your eyes? What’s the point? Here we think the point was to be able to search out prey on land,” he said.

Teleology is the study of such “points” to things. The article concludes: “Rather than limbs, it was eyes that brought our ancestors to land.”

Obviously, in ordinary English “bringing” things, “leading” them, implies purposeful action. A report on the same study for Quanta Magazine puts it in intriguing terms: “The ancient creatures who first crawled onto land may have been lured by the informational benefit that comes from seeing through air.” The early vertebrates were lured ashore by information!

The reference is to information about food. But researcher Malcolm MacIver doesn’t seem to realize how much he sounds like an ID theorist when he tells Quanta, “It’s hard to look past limbs and think that maybe information, which doesn’t fossilize well, is really what brought us onto land.” Don’t worry, he’s not a design advocate, but it’s amusing to think you could just as easily have lifted that sentence out of a book by Stephen Meyer.

Greetings from Burbank

The paper in PNAS (“Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates“) fills in the technical details and gives the theory a cute name:

The consequent combination of the increase in eye size and vision through air would have conferred a 1 million-fold increase in the amount of space within which objects could be seen. The “buena vista” hypothesis that our data suggest is that seeing opportunities from afar played a role in the subsequent evolution of fully terrestrial limbs as well as the emergence of elaborated action sequences through planning circuits in the nervous system.

If Buena Vista (“good vision”) rings a bell, by the way, that might be because it’s the street in Burbank, California, where the Walt Disney Studios has its headquarters, leading to a brand name, Buena Vista, long associated with Disney. The brand name is the result of the street name. It was chosen purposefully, consciously to match one with the other, a minor example of action directed toward an end.

As Dr. Hunter notes:

The teleology is not a mere slip-up. As we have documented many times, it is a common thread running throughout the genre of evolutionary literature. It is needed to make sense of the data, because evolution doesn’t.

Certainly, “buena vista” is a prerequisite to life on land. It seems to have been “selected” for, however, prior to there being much need for it. That kind of looking ahead to future requirements is a hallmark not of blind Darwinian shuffling but, of course, of intelligent design.


- See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/vertebrates-land-evolutionary-transition-dripping-teleology/#sthash.2eWJYL38.dpuf

Some speech is freer than others(With apologies to George Orwelle).

Bloggingheads TV and Me

Michael Behe 

I've just been through the weirdest book-related experience I've had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me. Last week I got the following email bearing the title "Invitation to Appear on Bloggingheads TV" from a senior editor at that site:

Hi, Michael--

I'd like to invite you to appear on Bloggingheads.tv, a web site that hosts video dialogues between journalists, bloggers, and scholars. We have a partnership with the New York Times by which they feature excerpts from some of our shows on their site.

Past guests include prominent thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Paul Ehrlich, Frans de Waal, David Frum, Richard Wrangham, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Michael Kinsley.

Here is one of our recent shows, a dialogue between Paul Nelson, of the Discovery Institute, and Ron Numbers, of Wisconsin-Madison:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21107

I'm hoping that you might be interested in participating, as well. First-time participants often report how refreshingly unconstrained they find the format--how it lets them present their views with a depth and subtlety not possible on TV or radio. We'd love to have you join us.

If you're available, please let me know, and we can see about arranging a taping. Thank you for your time.

He seemed like such a nice fellow, so after a couple days I emailed him back to say, sure, I'd be glad to. The editor responded, okay, sometime next week, your discussion partner will be John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute. I had never heard of McWhorter before, so googled his name, and saw that he's a linguist who often writes on race matters. I didn't know what to expect because I know some conservatives (which he seemed to be from his bio) don't like ID one bit.

Everything was arranged for the taping Tuesday afternoon. When the interview started, I was surprised and delighted to learn that McWhorter was actually a fan of mine. He said (I'm paraphrasing here) he loved The Edge of Evolution and wanted the book to become better known. He said that this was one of the few times that he initiated an interview at Bloggingheads. He said he was familiar with criticisms of the book and found them unpersuasive. He said that Darwinism just didn't seem to him to be able to cut the mustard in explaining life, and he had yet to read a good, detailed explanation for a large evolutionary change. He also said that he had never believed in God, but that EOE got him thinking. In return I summarized my arguments from EOE, talked about protein structure, addressed his objections that intelligent design is "boring" and a scientific dead-end, and so on. At the end of the taping I thought, gee, those folks at Bloggingheads TV are a real nice bunch.

The next day I emailed the Bloggingheads editor to ask when the show would go on. He answered right back that at that very moment it had been activated, and thanks for participating. I clicked the link, and there was the show. I thought I looked older on screen than I am (my beard isn't really that white), but emailed some friends to let them know the interview was up anyway. That evening I got an email from one of them saying that he couldn't find the interview -- it had been yanked.

Let me emphasize this, dear readers. Here we are living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And yet a web site puts up an interview with an (ahem...) somewhat controversial figure, pulls it back down within hours, erases it, sends it down the memory hole. Why might that be? There would seem to be two possibilities: 1) maybe we aren't quite as free as we think, or 2) maybe not quite as brave.

I bet on possibility #2. Because of the magic of the internet, it turns out that shortly after the show's posting the comments section of the site was overrun by "bitterly virulent" (in the words of one principal in this saga) cyber bullies, some murmuring darkly about a grim future for Bloggingheads. After I found out the video was removed I emailed John McWhorter and the editor to ask for an explanation, and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on the site feature discussions between people who agree on many things). Rather, I suspect the folks at the website weren't expecting the vitriolic reaction, began to worry about their good names and future employment prospects, pictured themselves banished to a virtual leper colony, panicked, and folded.

Well, mobs, including internet mobs, are scary things, and it's understandable to panic when they unexpectedly show up at your door. But if you're going to set up a website to air discussions about contentious issues of the day, you should have a whole lot more guts than displayed by Bloggingheads TV.

'Birdbrained':Insult or compliment?

"Bird Brain" Is a Compliment
Evolution News & Views



Next time someone calls you a birdbrain, smile and say "thank you." Our feathered friends come well equipped with hardware and software for complex behaviors. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts birds on par with macaques and other mammals, and even suggests they can think.

Here's what the news from Vanderbilt University says about the results of a detailed study by researchers primarily from the University of Prague, with additional team members from Austria, Brazil, and the United States:

The macaw has a brain the size of an unshelled walnut, while the macaque monkey has a brain about the size of a lemon. Nevertheless, the macaw has more neurons in its forebrain -- the portion of the brain associated with intelligent behavior -- than the macaque.
That is one of the surprising results of the first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of more than two dozen species of birds ranging in size from the tiny zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, which found that they consistently have more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian or even primate brains of the same mass. [Emphasis added.]

How is this possible? The answer includes miniaturization and efficient packaging:

That is possible because the neurons in avian brains are much smaller and more densely packed than those in mammalian brains, the study found. Parrot and songbird brains, for example, contain about twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass and two to four times as many neurons as equivalent rodent brains.
Not only are neurons packed into the brains of parrots and crows at a much higher density than in primate brains, but the proportion of neurons in the forebrain is also significantly higher, the study found.

The scientists note that even despised birds like pigeons show much the same brain power. Powered flight, obviously, takes a lot of hardware and software to operate in any bird; how much so in the supreme flyers Illustra Media showed in Flight: The Genius of Birds: starlings, Arctic terns, and especially the tiny hummingbirds? Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzl, lead author of the study, shows her delightful surprise in video clips in the news item. The small heads of birds belie the observations of complex behaviors they perform.

But it's not just routine tasks the brains must perform. Some birds can remember where they stored hundreds of seeds. Birds have been observed to hide a seed while another bird is watching, then move it when the neighbor is gone -- indicative of a possible 'theory of mind' that shows planning and recognizing what the other bird is thinking.

The study provides a straightforward answer to a puzzle that comparative neuroanatomists have been wrestling with for more than a decade: how can birds with their small brains perform complicated cognitive behaviors?
The conundrum was created by a series of studies beginning in the previous decade that directly compared the cognitive abilities of parrots and crows with those of primates. The studies found that the birds could manufacture and use tools, use insight to solve problems, make inferences about cause-effect relationships, recognize themselves in a mirror and plan for future needs, among other cognitive skills previously considered the exclusive domain of primates.

Indeed, crows have shown the ability to solve a puzzle made famous in an Aesop's fable (Reuters): dropping stones in a pitcher to raise the water level in order to get a drink. New Caledonian crows have shown the ability to use three tools in succession to reach a food source (BBC News). Owners of parrots know the cleverness of their pets; their ability to mimic human speech and singing is astonishing. Some cockatiels can even do the Riverdance.

Finding such detail and complexity in the brains of birds poses a serious evolutionary problem. The old progressive gradualism of Darwin saw humans at the pinnacle of evolution, with everything that came before less advanced. To find that birds, so completely distant from mammals on the Tree of Life, having comparable brains to primates is unexpected from a Darwinian view.In the second video clip from Vanderbilt, Herculano-Houzl struggles to give an evolutionary account. She intimates that birds evolved intelligence first and then kept it at that level while mammals, evolving separately, arrived at comparable intelligence later. That only compounds the problem. The paper further compounds the problem by postulating that "songbirds and parrots independently evolved vocal learning pathways by duplication of preexisting, surrounding motor circuits." But duplication does not add information; it's an accident. The statement amounts to saying bird intelligence happened by chance.

As Denyse O'Leary has explored here at Evolution News, intelligence does not require a specific type of brain. What better way to dismiss evolutionary pathways than to show independent brain types with similar capabilities for cognition and intelligence? It's similar to Tim Standish's comment in Living Waters about a mind being able to know a solution to a problem (in that case, magnetic navigation) and applying it over and over again in different contexts. Isn't that a better explanation than admitting ignorance and tossing out suggestions?

What ultimate mechanisms drive the evolution of the enlarged, neuron-rich telencephalon, which sets parrots and songbirds apart from the more basal birds we examined, remains poorly understood. We suggest that this expansion has been due to simultaneous selective pressures on cognitive enhancement and an evolutionary constraint on brain size, which may stem from the constraints on body size imposed by active flight.
One cause we know that can optimize multiple, competing constraints is intelligence. When a cause is known to be necessary and sufficient to explain a phenomenon, that cause should be preferred as the vera causa (true cause). It would seem that intelligent causes are best equipped to take up the challenge the researchers leave at the end of their paper:

Our finding of greater than primate-like numbers of neurons in the pallium of parrots and songbirds suggests that the large absolute numbers of telencephalic neurons in these two clades provide a means of increasing computational capacity, supporting their advanced behavioral and cognitive complexity, despite their physically smaller brains. Moreover, a short interneuronal distance, the corollary of the extremely high packing densities of their telencephalic neurons, likely results in a high speed of information processing, which may further enhance cognitive abilities of these birds. Thus, the nuclear architecture of the avian brain appears to exhibit more efficient packing of neurons and their interconnections than the layered architecture of the mammalian neocortex.
Further comparative studies on additional species are required to determine whether the high neuronal densities and preferential allocation of neurons to the telencephalon represent unique features of songbirds, parrots, and perhaps some other clades like owls, or have evolved multiple times independently in large-brained birds. More detailed quantitative studies should assess the distribution of neurons among various telencephalic regions involved in specific circuits subserving specific functions. The results, combined with behavioral studies, will enable us to determine the causal relationships between neuronal numbers and densities and perceptual, cognitive, and executive/motor abilities, and greatly advance our understanding of potential mechanisms linking neuronal density with information-processing capacity.

Go ahead. With all this in mind, you can judge the credibility of the evolutionary explanation for yourself.

On the evolution of Darwinism.

Evolution, Then and Now
Guy Coe

Let's set the record straight; things have changed a lot since "then."
When Darwin first ventured to propose an explanation for the origin of species, he didn't really try to address the question of the origin of life. No one, at that point, had any good idea of what even really needed to be explained.
When early optical microscopy gave us our first images of cells, what we saw was puzzling, but not particularly awe-inspiring. As microscopy advanced, in conjunction with advances in physics and chemistry, what came clearer into focus was that cellular structure, function and metabolism, and thus biochemistry as a whole, was a universe awaiting new discoveries of its own.
Who could have guessed that the micro-world would dwarf in complexity and organization the macro-cosmos we had only recently come to more fully appreciate? Or that additional discoveries on all orders of scale would point more cogently to deliberative design than ever?
A parable might help. Two people are walking down the beach; one is a philosopher, the other a geologist. As they walk along, they take in the view, and appreciate the beauty of the scene. The geologist explains the visible coastal rock formations, the action of plate tectonics, erosion and sedimentation, and -- wait; what is that?

Both stare in unbelief. There in the sand, about six foot square, is... well, apparently, a sand painting. Miles from anywhere, on the open beach, is an image of the Mona Lisa.
They study it. It's not perfect, but awfully close. The philosopher begins to form a hypothesis. Perhaps the image we call the "Mona Lisa" is just an archetype of a fundamental pattern recurring in nature. The painting by Leonardo da Vinci was, perhaps, just a particular manifestation of this pattern. A closer study of the grains of sand show that the various pigments each possess are a function of the weight and size of each grain. The areas of lighter sand lay, mysteriously, a little lower than the areas with darker, denser sand.
If swirling coastal winds had selectively removed the lighter sand from some areas, the remaining image could be an accidental production of chance variations in the sedimentary deposition of the underlying sand.
The geologist is not convinced. The odds against a pattern match this good, on this scale, are just too improbable. It looks like a product of deliberate artistry. They decide to come back in a few months, to see what changes, if any, develop in the pattern. Six months later, they return. It seems to have changed, imperceptibly, but the pattern is undeniably the same.
Ten years later, it's a tourist destination. It has still only changed imperceptibly. In a concerted effort to explain it, several forensic scientists have decided to sample various grains of the sand, to see if there are any telltale signs of human manipulation or manufacture. Under powerful microscopes, the individual grains reveal something astonishing -- they're not sand at all! They're three-dimensional crystalline-compound computer chips, complete with micro-circuitry and logic processors.
It turns out the persistence of the pattern derives from pre-programmed electro-chemical affinities, specified individually within each grain, mapping to surrounding grains, with reference to the pattern as a whole, which is also present within each grain. The electrical force each uses derives from tiny solar cells embedded in their structure.
The case for random sedimentary origination becomes untenable, and a whole new generation of scientists sets itself to work on understanding the logic of the programming in these chips.
As a parable of the developments of the last 50 years of biochemical research and discovery, this is not an unreasonable characterization of the situation. The closer we've looked, the more we've understood, the more we've been challenged to be able to hold onto theories of chance or unaided development which used to seem adequate.
Lifelong academic atheist Antony Flew, before his death at age 87, summarized his change of mind about the issue of intelligent design in an October 30th, 2007 interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker. When asked to explain his reasoning, Flew said:

There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself - which is far more complex than the physical universe - can only be explained in terms of an intelligent source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a lucky chance. If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.

There is more to explain now than ever before. A half a decade of studied observation has brought us closer to an answer for the origin of life, mostly by virtue of failed research paradigms. And that's the way of science; we gain in knowledge not merely by validating hypotheses, but by rejecting those which fail. The more we've rejected hypotheses involving mere chance, and allowed for a theory of intelligent organization, origination and even perhaps periodic intervention, the more we've come to understand the distinctives of the fossil record, the prospects for rapidity of change, and the subtleties of genetic programming.
Research into "junk DNA," pseudogenes, and other areas of supposedly vestigial code degradation, is yielding avenues of new discovery and practical application, as active functions are discovered for these areas of former confusion. The odds are too long to continue to bet against, much less exclude by definition, the involvement of a designing intelligence.
Despite millions spent in research, a myriad of discoveries made, and many legitimately helpful applications of that knowledge, a strictly naturalist paradigm is becoming vestigial, and it's more necessary now than ever to seek to understand the instrumentalities employed by life's intelligent designer.