On the madness of M.A.D

Re: the issue of controversy within Darwinism :it's complicated?

What Evolution “Controversy”? Scott Turner Gets High Praise from Quarterly Review of Biology

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

This confirms an observation that philosopher of science Stephen Meyer and others have often made. If you want to know what scientists themselves think about the current status of evolutionary theory, you have to look behind the curtain. You must read what they say in the relative privacy of their professional journals. Here, for example, is a review in the current volume of The Quarterly Review of Biology praising Scott Turner’s book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It.

While registering some mild reservations, chemist Addy Pross could hardly be friendlier. Pross is himself the author of What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology(2012, Oxford University Press). He is currently a professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. An expert of termite mounds, Turner is a biologist with the State University of New York.

The first sentence of the review is striking.

For those who still believe that the fundamentals of modern biology were firmly established by Darwin’s monumental theory of evolution a century and a half ago, and fine-tuned by neo-Darwinism some seven decades later, J. Scott Turner’s provocatively titled book Purpose & Desire is a further reminder that [biology’s] very nature remains mired in controversy and uncertainty.

Wait, “For those who still believe that the fundamentals of modern biology were firmly established by Darwin’s monumental theory…” (emphasis added)? You mean not everyone does “still believe” that anymore? What “controversy”? What “uncertainty”?

Pross writes:

The author…proceeds to build on this theme to argue three main points, all controversial in varying degrees. First, that the central thesis of neo-Darwinism, namely, that evolution is the result of what Turner labels a “soulless lottery” (p. 292) of the gene pool, rests on the shakiest of grounds and is long due for revision.

Wait, wait, wait! To say that the “central thesis of neo-Darwinism… rests on the shakiest of grounds” is a “controversial” statement? As in, not flat-out mistaken but one that’s legitimately up for debate?

No! I thought, “There’s No Controversy: Let’s Stop Failing Our Children On Evolution” (National Public Radio). I thought, “Mainstream scientists see no controversy” (Live Science). I thought, “There is no debate about evolution among the vast majority of scientists” (Union of Concerned Scientists). I thought, “There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution” (National Academy of Sciences). I thought, “[T]here’s still no debate over evolution” (Steven Newton, National Center for Science Education). I thought, again, “There is no scientific debate about the fundamentals of evolution” (NCSE). Etc., etc.

Ah, but those are all statements intended for media or public consumption. Don’t you see?

It is, says Pross, “All provocative stuff destined (intentionally) to make traditional neo-Darwinists recoil aghast.” To say that “modern Darwinism has failed to explain what makes something ‘alive’” is “provocative,” you say, but not evidence of madness, self-delusion, or the boogeyman always hiding behind the curtains or under the bed in contexts like this, so-called creationism?

While attributing some “quixotic ideas” to Dr. Turner, Dr. Pross could not, on the whole, be much more warmly disposed to the book or its author.

What makes the book so worthwhile and thought-provoking is, however, that Turner is a deeply knowledgeable biologist, well versed in the intimate details of evolutionary theory and the convoluted path the evolutionary debate has taken over the past 150 years.

The final paragraph:

Despite these more quixotic ideas, this beautifully written book, brimming with anecdotes and biological insights that only decades of field and life experiences could provide, will leave readers moved by Turner’s deep appreciation of life’s exquisiteness, its richness, and diversity. Purpose & Desire is a provocative thesis for sure, but one that is a wonderfully rich read, thought-provoking, and highly recommended.

That is a wonderful review, for any author and not least for a biologist who very interestingly straddles evolutionary theory and intelligent design. Listen to Scott Turner’s two-part podcast interview with Rob Crowther for ID the Future (here and here) ,where he talks about meeting Stephen Meyer and other ID proponents.

From assertions in the popular media that neo-Darwinism has got everything all figured out, you would expect that, in the hands of a distinguished scientist in a peer-reviewed journal, such a book would be mocked as the work of a crank or otherwise eviscerated. Not at all!

The shock-wave from The Cambrian explosion continues to rock fortress Darwin.

Cambrian Explosion Shrapnel Still Hitting Evolutionary Scenarios
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

How many evolutionary explanations for the Cambrian explosion have come and gone so far? We’ve seen the oxygen theory, the cancer theory, the slime theory, and others. Here’s another contender reported by Quanta Magazine: the tipping-point theory. Animals were trying really hard to hit on regulatory gene networks by chance. It took a really long time, but — finally! —  they hit the lottery, and it all took off.

This model is the brainchild of Nicholas Butterfield of the University of Cambridge. He published it in Geobiology. It’s open access, so you can take a look. Back at Quanta, staff writer Jordana Cepelewicz says that the new theory not only explains the suddenness of the Cambrian explosion, but why it took so long.

Approximately 540 million years ago, life rapidly diversified in an evolutionary burst — a biological “Big Bang” that witnessed the emergence of nearly every modern animal group. Scientists have long sought to determine what caused the Cambrian explosion, and to explain why animal life didn’t take this step at any point about a billion years earlier.

Butterfield doesn’t buy the oxygen theory. He points to other situations where animals make do without modern levels of oxygen. Surely microbes could have figured out how to get the needed energy. Besides, there should have been enough oxygen in the oceans to support life long before the so-called Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago — and that was long before the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago).

Before animals could explode onto the scene, he thinks, they needed two things: the ability to re-engineer oxygen structure in the oceans (what he calls “aquatic bioturbation”) and the invention of gene regulatory networks to adapt to the new environment.

Eventually, this cascading interplay between animals’ inadvertent re-engineering of ocean structure and their adaptive responses to those changes reached a tipping point. “The system went critical,” in Butterfield’s words, resulting in the sudden eruption of animal diversity and complexity during the Cambrian.

The delayed appearance of animals in the ocean was therefore not caused by a lack of oxygen, according to Butterfield, but rather because blind Darwinian evolution needed time to arrive at that tipping point. “The gene regulatory network to build an animal is the most complex algorithm that evolution has ever produced,” he said. “And it’s only ever happened once, [just as] it’s only ever happened once in land plants,” which he points out are the only other lineage of organisms to have derived differentiated tissues, organs and organ systems. “And that took even longer. It followed the evolution of animals by another 100 million years.”

Notice first of all that Butterfield turns the oxygen theory on its head. A rise in oxygen was a result, not a cause, of the explosion. Secondly, observe that his argument is basically a blind watchmaker argument: “blind Darwinian evolution” was trying very hard to arrive at the magic combination to unlock the inherent potential of animals to evolve. It took a long time, but once it happened, the rest was easy. Selective pressures would guarantee the emergence of muscles, eyes, digestive systems, armor, and all the rest.

All biological exchange ultimately depends on chemical diffusion, but it is the associated fluid‐dynamic context that determines physiological and ecological properties (Agutter, Malone, & Wheatley, 2000). In the context of early animal evolution, it was the evolutionary assembly of increasingly sophisticated devices for manipulating fluids that revolutionized the biosphere. Collectivized flagellar beating was clearly the place to start, providing the stepping stone to higher‐order divisions of labour … In its wake came efficiencies of scale, the evolutionary discovery of muscular propulsion and stepwise application of emergent hydrodynamic properties.

It all began with the first microbes inventing ways to utilize the available oxygen. They did this by creating currents around their bodies, increasing diffusion of dissolved oxygen so they could use it for energy. The more those microbes perfected this novelty, the more they restructured the ocean depths with aquatic bioturbation, sending more oxygen downward for more microbes to use. Once the gene regulatory networks were discovered by chance, the fuse was lit. Evolution was set to discover muscles and all kinds of other neat inventions.

Instant Flagella

Butterfield starts with flagella already working. Isn’t that a bit like assuming a can opener? Actually, yes, and he isn’t the only one. In Current Biology, Khan and Scholey take a look at the three different cases of rotary outboard motors in the three kingdoms life: the flagellum in bacteria (prokaryotes), the archaellum in archaea, and the cilium in eukaryotes. Guess which one they think emerged first. That’s right: according to Figure 1, the bacterial flagellum — the icon of intelligent design and irreducible complexity — emerged first. (If you’re going to believe in miracles of chance, might as well start big.) The other two, being structurally different, could not have evolved from it, because they “assemble from distinct subunits that do not share a common ancestor and generate torque using energy derived from distinct fuel sources…” In comes one of Darwinism’s favorite magic phrases to explain this situation:

Cells from all three domains of life on Earth utilize motile macromolecular devices that protrude from the cell surface to generate forces that allow them to swim through fluid media. Research carried out on archaea during the past decade or so has led to the recognition that, despite their common function, the motility devices of the three domains display fundamental differences in their properties and ancestry, reflecting a striking example of convergent evolution.

Other Cambrian News

Remember the Cambrian fossil bed in northern Greenland we recently talked about? Researchers found exquisite preservation of “not just one, but 15 fossilized brains from a 520-million-year-old marine predator,” reports Live Science. The discovery “is helping scientists understand how ancient brains evolved into the complex command centers they are today.” National Geographic breathes life into these complex National Geographic:

The extinct species, Kerygmachela kierkegaardi, swam in ocean waters during an evolutionary arms race called the Cambrian explosion. Flanked by 11 wrinkly flaps on each side of its body, the ancient predator sported a long tail spine and a rounded head. Its fearsome forward-facing appendages grasped prey, says UK-based paleontologist Jakob Vinther, “making lives miserable for other animals.”

Scientific names can be fun to analyze. This one, named by Graham Budd in 1993, honors philosopher Søren Kierkegaard for some reason. The genus name is even more peculiar for an evolutionary context. Kerygma is Greek for “the preaching of the gospel of Christ, especially in the manner of the early church,” and chela is Greek for pincer or claw. We leave it to the reader’s imagination how this creature got its name. Whatever you call it, it was a complex animal with image-forming eyes, looking somewhat like an anomalocarid. The main point was that its brain was so well preserved, the discoverers could make out details of its structure.

Did animal burrowing begin before the Cambrian explosion? News from Nagoya University  reports U-shaped tunnels under some Ediacaran environments found in Mongolia show “early origins of animal behavior.” No animals were found. The rest is optimistic speculation:

“It is impossible to identify the kind of animal that produced the Arenicolites traces,” lead author Tatsuo Oji says. “However, they were certainly bilaterian animals based on the complexity of the traces, and were probably worm-like in nature. These fossils are the earliest evidence for animals making semi-permanent domiciles in sediment. The evolution of macrophagous predation was probably the selective pressure for these trace makers to build such semi-permanent infaunal structures, as they would have provided safety from many predators.”

One would like to see actual worms before accepting the premise of this series of cumulative speculations. The centimeter-diameter traces, reported in the Royal Society Open Science journal, could have other explanations, given that they are not found anywhere else. It sounds like a case of exaggerated special pleading to call this the beginning of an “agronomic revolution” that “did not proceed in a uniform pattern across all depositional environments during the Cambrian radiation, but rather in a patchwork of varying bioturbation levels across marine seafloors that lasted well into the early Paleozoic.”

Another discovery should put the brakes on speculations that Cloudina was evolving into a Cambrian animal (see these March and July entries at Evolution News from last year). The simple cup-shaped Ediacaran was not a reef builder, according to PNAS. The title by Mehla and Maloof says it all: “Multiscale approach reveals that Cloudina aggregates are detritus and not in situ reef constructions.”

It has been suggested that some Ediacaran microbial reefs were dominated (and possibly built) by an abundant and globally distributed tubular organism known as Cloudina. If true, this interpretation implies that metazoan framework reef building — a complex behavior that is responsible for some of the largest bioconstructions and most diverse environments in modern oceans — emerged much earlier than previously thought. Here, we present 3D reconstructions of Cloudina populations, produced using an automated serial grinding and imaging system coupled with a recently developed neural network image classifier. Our reconstructions show that Cloudina aggregates are composed of transported remains while detailed field observations demonstrate that the studied reef outcrops contain only detrital Cloudina buildups, suggesting that Cloudina played a minor role in Ediacaran reef systems.

As a simple isolated organism that would get swept into heaps of debris, it was not complex enough to qualify as a transitional form to the Cambrian animals.

That’s it for this episode of the  Cambrian Explosion Gong Show.

Parental instinct v. Darwin.

Contradicting Darwinian Gradualism, Earliest Animals Show Complex Parental Behavior
Günter Bechly

Based on the Darwinian narrative, we should expect not only that morphological complexity increases gradually in the fossil record, but we should also expect the same for complex animal behavior. This is because according to Darwinists, “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact, but…it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work” (Dawkins 2009). Charles Darwin himself strictly insisted on gradualism and famously quoted the Latin phrase “natura non facit saltus” (“nature does not make jumps”) no fewer than six times in his Origin of Species. He realized that any kind of significant saltational change would imply a miracle-like intelligent intervention.

Therefore, it is a problem for Darwinism if we find evidence that complex behavior, instead of arising gradually, was already present in the oldest animals we know. And indeed, this is exactly what we do find.

Earlier this month the discovery of extended parental care was described for the 520-million-year-old arthropod Fuxianhuia protensa from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang locality in China (Fu et al. 2018). This new discovery made worldwide headlines (Davis 2018, Fox-Skelly 2018, Hugo 2018). It also paralleled two earlier discoveries from a few years ago (Fang 2015, Geggel 2015, Lacerda 2015), which documented brood care in the 508-million-year-old arthropod Waptia from the famous Burgess Shale in Canada (Caron & Vannier 2016), and the discovery of brood care in the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang arthropod Kunmingella douvillei (Duan et al. 2014).

Clearly, complex parental behavior was well established in different groups of the earliest known animals from the Cambrian explosion. This is especially significant because such parental behaviors imply complex morphological innovations as well as correlated changes in the behavior of adult and juvenile organisms. Complex codependent innovations of this nature are virtually impossible without coordinated mutations, which in turn creates a so-called “waiting-time problem.” We know from other examples (e.g., the origin of whales) that the waiting times (calculated with the mathematical apparatus of mainstream population genetics) for such coordinated mutations to originate and spread in a population are far too long to be possibly accommodated by the available windows of time established by the fossil record. Even millions and billions of years are not enough deep time to make the neo-Darwinian process feasible. 

Fuxianhuia protensa was first described in 1987 from incomplete material and remained for several years a relatively poorly known fossil taxon of controversial affinity. This changed when more complete specimens were discovered that showed the head segmentation and undifferentiated limbs. At first Fuxianhuia was considered a stem-group chelicerate, but modern cladistic analyses usually located this extinct taxon close to the stem of all euarthropods (Wills et al. 1996, Fortey & Thomas 2012). New material and more modern techniques have meanwhile made Fuxianhuia one of the best known fossil organisms.

Not only do we know now the complete external morphology of its body, including its growth pattern over fifteen larval stages (Fu et al. 2018), but also its head segmentation (Chen et al. 1995, Budd 2008), detailed brain structure and nervous system (Ma et al. 2012), its complete cardiovascular system (Ma et al. 2014), its digestive system (Bergström et al. 2008, Fu et al. 2018), and now even details about its brood care behavior (Fu et al. 2018). All these structures are as highly organized as in modern arthropods, even though Fuxianhuia lived 520 million years ago and ranks among the oldest known arthropods and animals.

Where is the gradual transition implied by Darwinian evolution? Complexity of all kinds and on all levels was there from the very beginning, and the fossil history of animal life gives no evidence that it developed over long periods of time in a gradual way with numerous small steps as suggested by Charles Darwin and his modern followers. The fossil record does not support but contradicts the evolutionary narrative.

Literature:

• Bergström J, Hu X, Zhang X, Liu Y, Clausen S 2008. “A new view of the Cambrian arthropod Fuxianhuia.” GFF 130(4): 189-201.
• Budd GE 2008. “Head structure in upper stem-group euarthropods.” Palaeontology 51(3): 561-573.
• Caron J-B, Vannier J 2016. “Waptia and the Diversification of Brood Care in Early Arthropods.” Current Biology 26: 69-74.
• Chen J, Edgecombe GD, Ramsköld L, Zhou G 1995. “Head Segmentation in Early Cambrian Fuxianhuia: Implications for Arthropod Evolution.” Science 268: 1339-1343.
• Davis J 2018. “Earliest Evidence of Parental Care Found in 520 Million-Year-Old Fossil.” IFL Science! 06 Mar 2018.
• Dawkins R 2009. The Greatest Show on Earth. Free Press (Google Books).
• Duan Y et al. 2014. “Reproductive strategy of the bradoriid arthropod Kunmingella douvillei from the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstätte, South China.” Gondwana Research 25: 983-990.
• Fang J 2015. “Oldest Evidence of Parental Care Discovered in Half-Billion-Year-Old Fossils.” IFL Science!18 Dec 2015.
• Fortey RA, Thomas RH 2012. Arthropod Relationships. Springer Science, 383 pp. (Google Books).
• Fox-Skelly J 2018. “Ancient sea animal doted on young.” New Scientist 10 March 2018: 6.
• Fu D, Ortega-Hernández J, Daley AC, Zhang X, Shu D 2018. “Anamorphic development and extended parental care in a 520 million-year-old stem-group euarthropod from China.” bioRxiv preprint.
• Geggel L 2015. “Ancient Mom: Oldest Brood of Preserved Embryos Found.” LiveScience December 21, 2015.
• Hugo K 2018. 520-million-year-old fossil of Fuxianhuia protensa and four babies is our oldest evidence of parenting. Newsweek 3/6/18.
• Lacerda J 2015. Oldest example of a caring mother found in Canada. Earth Archives.
• Ma X, Hou X, Edgecombe GD, Strausfeld NJ 2012. Complex brain and optic lobes in an early Cambrian arthropod. Nature 490: 258-261.
• Ma X, Cong P, Hou X, Edgecombe GD, Strausfeld NJ 2014. An exceptionally preserved arthropod cardiovascular system from the early Cambrian. Nature Communications 5:3560, doi: 10.1038/ncomms4560.
• Wills MA, Edgecombe GD, Ramsköld L 1996. Classification of the arthropod Fuxianhuia. Science 272(5262): 746-748.

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