Patron saint of the long shot.

Natural Selection: Could It Be the Single Greatest Idea Ever Invented?
Denyse O'Leary 

Information, according to Darwin's idea (natural selection), can exist without intelligence. Nature produces intelligent designs, just because some life forms survive and others don't. That's it. That's all it takes. How odd that no one noticed.

A letter written by Darwin, the theory's originator, might fetch $90,000 at an upcoming auction. The Guardian explains:

The 19th-century naturalist and fervent letter writer had largely evaded this question since the publication of the book in 1859. The now classic text introduced his theory of natural selection, which demonstrated that species evolve through gene variation; it was a divisive proposition for Christian readers who believed that humans were made in God's image, distinct from other animals.

That distinction can prove relevant if one thinks civil liberties matter. Many of us live in countries where the invocation of a supreme being is a basis for civil liberties (though those liberties may not extend to mosquitoes).

Darwin's theory of evolution (natural selection acting on random mutations) is a cultural icon, like the Big Bang, or e=mc2. One needn't know anything specific about any of these ideas. Indeed, media professionals can be passionately devoted to Darwinism without knowing anything about it at all.

That makes sense. Professed loyalty to Darwin is an admission to good parties. And Darwinism's relationship to modern warfare and eugenics is drowned out by cultural support. True, hillbillies thump the Bible against it, to the groans of the better educated. But what if...?

First, what exactly is Darwin's theory anyway, other than an invite to the approved parties?

Here it is: Information can be created without intelligence. That is, natural selection acting on random mutation explains the order of life we see all around us. What can't survive won't, and that explains how very complex life forms and structures -- including the human mind -- get built up.

True: Things that can't survive don't. But why would that fact alone drive nature to produce anything as simple as a kitten, let alone a math genius?

We've looked earlier at documented ways evolution can really happen -- if all we really want to know is how life forms can change over time. That said, I spent the last fifteen years trying to understand the cultural part. Darwinism isn't just about evolution as such. It is also a way of looking at life. It tries to explain life without assuming that there is any actual mind at all, dispensing with traditional philosophies and religions.

Humans are assumed to do what they do because they are guided by their instincts, in the same way that nature haphazardly produces a kitten or a math genius.

Ideas have consequences. Think of that when, for example, an elaborately coiffed person on prime time TV announces that she believes in evolution (by which she means Darwinism) when she probably has no better idea what it means than the existence of space aliens (of which she is also perfectly certain, on the same level of evidence). Then decide.

See the rest of the series to date at "Talk to the Fossils: Let's See What They Say Back."

The unholy trinity.

Trinity And Pagan Influence

Trinity And Pagan Influence

1. "The trinity was a major preoccupation of Egyptian theologians .... Three gods are combined and treated as a single being, addressed in the singular. In this way the spiritual force of Egyptian religion shows a direct link with Christian theology." - Egyptian Religion.

2. "The Egyptians believed in a resurrection and future life, as well as in a state of rewards and punishments dependent on our conduct in this world. The judge of the dead was Osiris, who had been slain by Set, the representative of evil, and afterwards restored to life. His death was avenged by his son Horus, whom the Egyptians invoked as their "Redeemer." Osiris and Horus, along with Isis, formed a trinity, who were regarded as representing the sun-God under different forms." - Trinitarian scholar Dr. M.G. Easton; Easton's Bible Dictionary, Thomas Nelson Publ.

3. "This triad of Abydos [Horus, Isis, and Osiris] is apparently much older than even the earliest records .... These 3 main gods were skillfully incorporated into the Great Ennead or State religion of Egypt .... particularly during the first 5 [3110-2342 B.C.] or 6 dynasties when the worship of this triad was prominent." - The Ancient Myths, A Mentor Book, Goodrich, p. 25, 1960.

4. Alexandria, Egypt, had even developed a trinity doctrine of its very own long before Christian times. It appears to have been a blend (not surprisingly) of Egyptian, Hindu, and Greek philosophy/mystery religions.

"This fusing of one god with another is called theocrasia, and nowhere was it more vigorously going on than in Alexandria. Only two peoples resisted it in this period: The Jews, who already had their faith in the one God of heaven and earth, Jehovah, and the Persians, who had a monotheistic sun worship [Mithras]. It was Ptolemy I [who died in 283 B. C.] who set up not only the Museum in Alexandria, but the Serapeum, devoted to the worship of a trinity of gods which represented the result of a process of theocrasia applied more particularly to the gods of Greece and Egypt [with a distinct Hindu flavor].

"This trinity consisted of the god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis), the goddess Isis (= Hathor, the cow-moon goddess), and the child-god Horus. In one way or another almost every god was identified with one or other of these three aspects of the one god, even the sun god Mithras of the Persians. and they were each other; THEY WERE THREE, BUT THEY WERE ALSO ONE." - The Outline of History, Wells, vol. 1, p. 307, 1956 ed.

5. The book The Symbolism of Hindu Gods and Rituals admits, regarding the ancient Hindu trinity that was taught centuries before the first Christians:
"Siva is one of the gods of the Trinity. He is said to be the god of destruction. The other two gods are Brahma, the god of creation and Vishnu, the god of maintenance.... To indicate that these three processes are one and the same the three gods are combined in one form." - Published by A. Parthasarathy, Bombay. (As quoted in ti-E, p. 12.)

6. The Encyclopedia Americana tells of the fully developed "Hindu Trinity" existing "from about 300 B. C.," p. 197, v. 14, 1957. Brahmana writings, probably from 800 B. C. or before, frequently include the Vedic triad concept. - Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., v. 3, pp. 1014-1016, and 34, also see The Portable World Bible, The Viking Press, pp. 23, 25.

7. "Vishnu, Brahma, and Siva together form the trinity of the Hindu Religion. At one time these were distinct Hindu deities. Their rival claims for recognition were finally met by making them three forms of the one supreme god. This was, however, a creation of the priests and ecclesiastical students." - Encyclopedia Americana, 1957 ed., v. 28, p. 134.
  
8. "There is a tendency in [pagan] religious history for the gods to be grouped in threes .... Even in Christianity, the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost reflects the underlying tendency. In India, the great Triad included Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer. These represent the cycle of existence, just as the Babylonian triad of Anu, Enlil and Ea represent the materials of existence: air, water, earth." - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Ferm, p. 794, 1945.

9. Not only did the ancient Babylonians have the major trinity of Anu, Enlil, and Ea, but they worshiped more than one trinity of gods. - Babylonian Life and History, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, 1925 ed., pp. 146, 147.

10. "On the basis of  Pythagorean and gnostic theories, each number [in the Medieval Number Method] was assigned a root meaning and diversified representations.  Some root meanings were: 1 = UNITY OF GOD, ... 3 = TRINITY, extension of Godhead, ... 10 = extension of Unity, Perfect Completeness." - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Ferm, 1945, p. 755.

11. "... the doctrine of the Trinity was of gradual and comparatively late formation; that it had its origin in a source entirely foreign from that of the Jewish and Christian scriptures; that it grew up, and was ingrafted on Christianity, through the hands of the Platonizing Fathers."– p. 34, The Church of the First Three Centuries, Alvan Lamson, D.D. (see WT 15 Oct. 1978, p. 32.)

"All things are three, and thrice is all:  and let us use this number in the worship of the gods. For as the Pythagoreans say, everything and all things are bound by threes, for the end, the middle, and the beginning have this number in everything, and these compose the number of the trinity." - Aristotle, as quoted in Paganism in our Christianity, Arthur Weigall, p. 198, Putnam, NY.  (Weigall is quoting from On the Heavens, Bk I, ch. i., by Aristotle who died  322 B.C.)

So it appears that this "holy" number three used to "worship the gods" in unity came down from the extremely influential Pythagoras to the ancient Greek philosophy/mystery religions and even to Plato himself.

"NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM...appeared during the first century B. C. [the faithful Jews were still clinging to their faith in a single one-person God, Jehovah the Father] in Rome, whence it traveled to Alexandria (the sect's chief center) where it flourished until Neo-Platonism absorbed it in the 3rd century A. D."  - Encyclopedia Americana, p. 98, v. 20, 1982 ed.

12. Weigall relates many instances of the trinity concept in pre-Christian pagan religions and then states: "The early Christians, however, did not at first think of applying the idea to their own faith." And, "Jesus Christ never mentioned such a phenomenon, and nowhere in the New Testament does the word `trinity' appear. The idea was only adopted by the Church three hundred years after the death of our Lord; and the origin of the conception is entirely pagan." - The Paganism in our Christianity, pp. 197,198, Arthur Weigall.

13. "If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by paganism. The pure Deism of the first Christians (who differed from their fellow Jews only in the belief that Jesus was the promised Messiah) was changed by the Church at Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of the trinity. Many of the pagan tenets, invented by the Egyptians and idealized by Plato, were retained as being worthy of belief." - The History of Christianity, (Preface by Eckler).

14. "Christianity did not destroy Paganism; it adopted it .... From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, …. the adoration of the Mother and Child…." – p. 595, The Story of Civilization: vol. 3, Simon & Schuster Inc., by noted author and historian Will Durant.

15. The Trinity "is a corruption borrowed from the heathen religions, and ingrafted on the Christian faith." - A Dictionary of Religious Knowledge

16. "When Newton was made a fellow of the College, along with an agreement to embrace the Anglican faith, the Trinity fellowship also required ordination within 8 years. During his studies Newton had come to believe that the central doctrine of the church, the Holy and Undivided Trinity was a pagan corruption imposed on Christianity in the fourth century by Athanasius." -Sir Isaac Newton And The Ocean of Truth; "Theology and the word of God"

Posted by Elijah Daniels

Mammalian hearing v. Darwin.

Mammals Compute Sound Timing in the Microsecond Range
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

At a basic level, we all know that two ears give us the ability to detect the direction of a sound. Cover one ear, and it’s hard to tell. Uncover; we hear in stereo. But when you look into the physics of sound localization, the requirements are stringent.

Sound waves coming from the left hit your left eardrum only microseconds (millionths of a second) before they hit the right eardrum. Your ears must not only be able to capture that tiny difference in arrival time, but preserve the information through noisy channels on the way to the brain. And they must be able to do that continuously. Consider an ambulance siren moving left to right; the inter-aural time difference (ITD) is constantly changing. Your ears need to keep up with the microsecond-by-microsecond changes as they occur, without the prior information getting swamped by the new information.

Now consider being in an auditorium, listening to an orchestra with your eyes closed. You can tell where each instrument is located, even when they are playing together, just by the ITDs from each player. How amazing is that?

This can only work if the auditory system maintains the information all the way to the brain. The brain receives the timing differences after a delay: first, the eardrum converts pressure waves to membrane vibrations, which trigger mechanical movements of the middle ear bones (ossicles), which convert the mechanical motions into fluid waves in the cochlea, which converts the fluid waves to electrical impulses in the neurons. These things take time, but we’re still not there.

Each axon of each neuron has to cross synapses where the electrical information is converted to chemical information and back again in the next neuron. This is getting very complicated! There’s bound to be some noise in the transmission pathway. How can the ITD at the outer ear be maintained all the way to the brain through these multiple energy conversions?

Two neurobiologists from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, appreciating the problem of maintaining sound localization information, decided to run experiments on mice and gerbils. Think how much closer together those ears are than human ears! The smaller inter-aural distance compounds the problem, tightening the requirements even more. Under the news headline  “Auditory perception: where microseconds matter,” Drs. Grothe and Pecka announce what they found.

Gerbils (who depend on sound localization more than mice) use multiple mechanisms to maintain accurate ITD information in their sound transmission apparatus. The researchers explain the challenge:

In the mammalian auditory system, sound waves impinging on the tympanic membrane of the ear are transduced into electrical signals by sensory hair cells and transmitted via the auditory nerve to the brainstem. The spatial localization of sound sources, especially low-frequency sounds, presents the neuronal processing system with a daunting challenge, for it depends on resolving the difference between the arrival times of the acoustic stimulus at the two ears. The ear that is closer to the source receives the signal before the contralateral ear. But since this interval – referred to as the interaural timing difference (ITD) — is on the order of a few microseconds, its neuronal processing requires exceptional temporal precision. [Emphasis added.]

Grothe and Pecka, along with seven other colleagues, published the results of their research in an open-access paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  (PNAS). They report “a specific combination of mechanisms, which plays a crucial role in ensuring that auditory neurons can measure ITDs with the required accuracy.”

Back in 2015, the team observed structural modifications of the myelin sheaths wrapping the auditory nerves. The axons of these neurons, they also noted, were particularly thick. Discontinuities in the sheaths, coupled with the axon thickness, seemed to turbo-charge the neurons “to enable rapid signal transmission.” That’s necessary for sound localization, but it’s not enough. If the synapses introduce additional varying delays, you’ll just get faulty information transmitted faster. There must be something else going on. Here’s what they found this time:

Before cells in the auditory brainstem can determine the ITD, the signals from both ears must first be transmitted to them via chemical synapses that connect them with the sensory neurons. Depending on the signal intensity, synapses themselves can introduce varying degrees of delay in signal transmission. The LMU team, however, has identified a pathway in which the synapses involved respond with a minimal and constant delay. “Indeed, the duration of the delay remains constant even when rates of activation are altered, and that is vital for the precise processing of interaural timing differences,” Benedikt Grothe explains.

Specifically, the team discovered “stable synaptic delays” in the transmission neurons by a unique mechanism previously unknown in other neural circuits. Without a unique “inhibitory pathway” described in the paper, synapse transmission times would vary under continuous excitation, wiping out the ITD information. (This can happen, for instance, as a result of changes in vesicle abundance needed to carry the neurotransmitter molecules across a synapse.)

Functionally, stable synaptic delays seem to represent a specific adaptation for faithful ITD processing, because it would prevent fluctuations in the relative timing of direct excitation and indirect inhibition for responses to onsets vs. ongoing sounds in the range of tens to hundreds of microseconds. Such fluctuations may be negligible for most neuronal computations, but not for microsecond ITD processing of low-frequency sounds.

We now know the challenge; something needs to keep these synapses in a consistent readiness state, so that the crossing time delays are constant. One method might be buffering, so that enough vesicles are always at the ready. That’s one mechanism they observed, but not the only one. The solution also involves computation. There are two bodies at the receiving end, named the LSO and the MSO, that share information. The LSO deals with sound levels, and is less stringent about timing. The MSO, however, requires precise time information to calculate ITDs. By comparing one another’s inputs, the LSO and MSO can “detect coincidences between inputs from the two ears.” The authors note another “striking shared structural feature is the contralateral inhibitory pathway that is specialized for speed and reliability.”

That’s still not all. Two other structures upstream from the MSO are involved, but they cannot inhibit too much, or they, too, will introduce noise. So they, too, are finely tuned:

Recently we showed that the inhibitory pathway conquers this challenge via a two- to threefold thicker axon diameter of GBCs [globular bushy cells] compared with the spherical bushy cells, which comprise the excitatory input. Moreover, we revealed the presence of a dramatic decrease of internode length toward the terminal region in both fiber classes.

The details of these specializations need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that multiple mechanisms ensure that ITD information is preserved from eardrum to brain: structural properties of axon diameter and sheathing patterns, buffering of vesicles, and computation of differences between inputs received at the auditory cortex. No other part of the body requires this level of timing precision, and no other circuit achieves it.

For a real-world application of this need for precision, consider the echolocating bat. This creature darts about in the air, making sudden turns every second, listening to echoes from its high-frequency chirps. Research at Johns Hopkins finds that bats respond to a noisy environment by turning up the volume. We humans do that, too, but bats do it in 30 milliseconds: 10 times faster than the blink of an eye! That means that these little flying mammals, with ears much closer together than ours, are able to respond to the sound location information calculated from their ITDs extremely fast, while simultaneously operating their wings in a constantly changing auditory environment.

Our brief look into the complexity of auditory localization in mammals provides a good example of not only Behe’s irreducible complexity, but also what Douglas Axe calls functional coherence, “the hierarchical arrangement of parts needed for anything to produce high-level function — each part contributing in a coordinated way to the whole” (Undeniable, p. 144). None of these parts (MSO, myelin, synapses) perform sound localization individually, but collectively, they do.

We could explore the hierarchy further by looking more closely at how molecular machines within the neuron cells participate in the “functional whole” of sound localization. Taking the wide-angle view, we see how all the lower levels in the hierarchy contribute to the bat’s amazing ability to catch food on the wing. Functional coherence is not just beyond the reach of chance (Axe, p. 160), it provides positive evidence for intelligent design. In all our uniform human experience, only minds are capable of engineering complex, hierarchical systems exhibiting functional coherence. The complexity of this one circuit — sound localization — makes that loud and clear.

Good luck with that.

Falsify Intelligent Design? Try Simulating the Cambrian Explosion Digitally
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Want to falsify the theory of intelligent design? Here’s one way.

Show with a convincing computer simulation – no cheating allowed — that the infusion of biological information in the Cambrian explosion could occur absent the intervention of a guiding intelligence: artificial life in a variety as we see in the Cambrian event, but without design.

Researchers have tried, in multiple cases, as Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics author Winston Ewert tells biologist Ray Bohlin on a new episode of ID the Future. But each time, the simulations hit a “complexity barrier,” as the scientists themselves concede, and fail. It’s a fascinating conversation. Listen to it here, or download it here.

Ewert calls it “the mystery of the missing digital Cambrian explosion,” observing that “something is missing from all of the different artificial life simulations.” There’s a secret ingredient, and guess what that is? Intelligent design.