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Friday, 10 June 2022

Primeval A.I?

 How Brains Use Data Compression to Get Things Right

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

We are used to thinking of data compression in connection with computers but a recent study with mice shows that brains compress data too. The researchers ask us to imagine a dilemma from an

early video game:


If you were a kid in the 80s, or are a fan of retro video games, then you must know Frogger. The game can be quite a challenge. To win, you must first survive a stream of heavy traffic, only to then narrowly escape oblivion by zig-zagging across speeding wooden logs. How does the brain know what to focus on within all this mess?


CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN, “THE BRAIN APPLIES DATA COMPRESSION FOR DECISION-MAKING” AT EUREKALERT (JUNE 6, 2022)

Driving in snarled, heavy traffic can feel like that…


Neuroscientists are well aware that, when processing data from our senses, our brains routinely block out information that is irrelevant to an immediate, pressing problem. A person who suddenly smells smoke from the kitchen might barely hear the ring tone of an anxiously awaited, important phone call just coming in.


Priority Processing

But are the cognitive areas of our brains similarly adapted to priority processing? It can’t be done simply by simply blocking out irrelevant signals. If it’s cognitive, there aren’t any signals. The current research, using mice, points to a different technique for focused cognitive decision-making:


A study published today (June 6th) in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience provides a possible solution: data compression. ‘Compressing the representations of the external world is akin to eliminating all irrelevant information and adopting temporary ‘tunnel vision’ of the situation”, said one of the study’s senior authors Christian Machens, head of the Theoretical Neuroscience lab at the Champalimaud Foundation in Portugal.


CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN, “THE BRAIN APPLIES DATA COMPRESSION FOR DECISION-MAKING” AT EUREKALERT (JUNE 6, 2022); THE PAPER REQUIRES A FEE OR SUBSCRIPTION BUT YOU CAN READ THE PREPRINT FOR FREE.

So how did the mice show this?:


The mice were challenged with estimating if two tones were separated by an interval longer than 1.5 seconds while researchers recorded the activity of dopamine neurons, known to play a key role in learning the value of actions.


“If the animal wrongly estimated the duration of the interval on a given trial, then the activity of these neurons would produce a “prediction error” that should help improve performance on future trials,” Christian Machens, one of the study’s senior authors, said in a news release. 


ADAM SCHRADER, “BRAIN APPLIES ‘DATA COMPRESSION’ WHEN MAKING DECISIONS, STUDY FINDS” AT UPI (JUNE 6, 2022)

Of course, the mice were was rewarded for getting the answer right.


The researchers noted in a preprint of the study that the mice almost always made the correct choice, but that the results became more variable the closer they were to the 1.5-second target. Previous research has shown that animals estimate their own ability to correctly classify different stimuli.


ADAM SCHRADER, “BRAIN APPLIES ‘DATA COMPRESSION’ WHEN MAKING DECISIONS, STUDY FINDS” AT UPI (JUNE 6, 2022)

Loss but Not Failure

And where does compressed data come in? Greater compression resulted in some information loss (lossy compression) but not total failure:


The team discovered that only models with a compressed task representation could account for the data. “The brain seems to eliminate all irrelevant information. Curiously, it also apparently gets rid of some relevant information, but not enough to take a real hit on how much reward the animal collects overall. It clearly knows how to succeed in this game”, Machens said.


CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN, “THE BRAIN APPLIES DATA COMPRESSION FOR DECISION-MAKING” AT EUREKALERT (JUNE 6, 2022)

Eating very much concentrates the mouse mind; we just didn’t know that the mice use a technique somewhat like AI to do it.


Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Another look at Darwinism's OOL problem.

 Topoisomerase Origins Defy Darwinian Explanations

David Coppedge

When Discovery Institute released the new animation of Topoisomerase II back in February, evolutionists could have sought to refute it. They could have submitted detailed accounts of how this multi-talented tool arose by a Darwinian process from simpler ancestors. Instead, they turned on their usual speculation machine.


A Review of Topoisomerases

Also in February, Yves Pommier from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and three colleagues wrote a review article in Nature Reviews Molecular Biology about “Human topoisomerases and their roles in genome stability and organization.” This team no doubt wrote before the animation came out, and likely were unaware of it. Their review does not address origins; there is no mention of evolution, natural selection, or common ancestry. Neither is there any indication of intelligent design, although they mention molecular machines and motors six times.


First, let us marvel at the ubiquity and versatility of these molecular machines. It raises the question of whether any incipient life form could do without them, because even RNA molecules are subject to topological problems. An unstable genome is a dead genome.


DNA topoisomerases are present in all domains of life to resolve a wide variety of topological problems arising from the length of the human double-helix DNA polymer (about 3 × 109 bp) as it is folded, bent and highly compacted into the cell nucleus while remaining accessible to RNA and DNA polymerases. In addition, each human cell contains 100–1,000 copies of circular, ~16,000 bp mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), as well as long and folded RNAs that are even more abundant than DNA and present in all subcellular compartments. [Emphasis added.]


There are six known topoisomerases in humans. “We discuss their specific and overlapping roles as regulators of nucleic acid topology and metabolism,” they begin, also indicating that failure in those roles often lead to cancer and other diseases (see Table 1 for a frightening list of syndromes caused by topoisomerase malfunctions: seizures, retardation, autism, premature aging, various cancers, and more).


To manage the topology of the long, folded and intertwined DNA and RNA polymers that are attached to scaffolding structures and are metabolically and dynamically processed by large molecular machines (such as transcription, DNA replication, chromatin remodelling and DNA repair complexes), human cells use their six topoisomerases often redundantly, but also in specific ways depending on the topological problem, the surrounding cellular structures and the differentiation status of the cell. This section outlines topological problems and the molecular solutions provided by each of the topoisomerases.TOPS Are Always Needed

Topological problems are most likely to occur when the polymerases and helicases attach to DNA and RNA during key operations: transcription, replication, and chromatin remodeling among them. Operations that involve loop extrusion create risks for knots, over-twists, under-twists, catenanes, and other forms of torsional strain. These can lead to crossovers of the strands that can result in improper joining. Even single-stranded RNAs are subject to distortions in the genetic sequence. Operations that bring promoters and enhancers together, which can be considerable distances apart, can also lead to chromatin loops that require topoisomerase activity. 


The six TOP machines are well equipped to handle specific emergencies, and they do not work in isolation; additional repair enzymes and cofactors must be at hand in all parts of the cell.


Human topoisomerases and the associated repair enzymes tyrosyl-DNA phosphodiesterases (TDPs; TDP1 and TDP2) are located both in the nucleus and in mitochondria; in addition, cytoplasmic RNAs are handled by TOP3B and TDP2.


Figures 1-3 in the paper show simplified diagrams of some common topological problems and illustrate which TOP machines work on them. The modes of action, though, as illustrated in the DI animation, are not discussed in detail in the review. The authors do speak of a “fine-tuned balance” between TopIIA and condensin during mitosis, pointing to another design requirement: just-in-time delivery of parts, reminiscent of assembly lines and operating rooms. Throughout replication and condensation of chromosomes during mitosis, the right TOP machines need to present at the right times and in the right quantities. Checkpoints ensure these requirements are met. 


All mutations discussed in the review are disease-causing if not life threatening. Darwinians would wait in vain for a rare beneficial mutation, say from a UV ray, to “help” in any way. And if it occurred in a somatic cell instead of a germ cell, it would be but a brief and quickly forgotten stroke of luck.


Topoisomerases are magicians of DNA and RNA, and their full range of functions remain to be discovered.


How Can Evolutionists Darwinize All This?

Considering these facts, only a bold (or reckless?) individual would attempt to account for the origin of the topoisomerase system by unguided natural processes. One such attempt appeared in bioRxiv by Guglielmini and five co-authors, “Viral origin of eukaryotic type IIA DNA topoisomerases.” They start by recognizing the problem:


Type II DNA topoisomerases of the family A (Topo IIA) are present in all bacteria (DNA gyrase) and eukaryotes. In eukaryotes, they play a major role in transcription, DNA replication, chromosome segregation and modulation of chromosome architecture. The origin of eukaryotic Topo IIA remains mysterious since they are very divergent from their bacterial homologues and have no orthologues in Archaea.


And so, onward they proceed into the darkness of the mystery, looking for Darwin’s Cheshire-cat smile in the trees. But their entire approach is to look for homology between Type IIA topoisomerase genes and DNA sequences in certain viruses. 


To elucidate the origin of the eukaryotic Topo IIA, we performed in-depth phylogenetic analyses combining viral and cellular Topo IIA homologs. Topo IIA encoded by bacteria and eukaryotes form two monophyletic groups nested within Topo IIA encoded by Caudoviricetes and Nucleocytoviricota, respectively…. The topology of our tree suggests that the eukaryotic Topo IIA was probably acquired from an ancestral member of the Nucleocytoviricota of the class Megaviricetes, before the emergence of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). This result further highlights a key role of these viruses in eukaryogenesis and suggests that early proto-eukaryotes used a Topo IIB instead of a Topo IIA for solving their DNA topological problems.


The homology argument, as shown in our video Long Story Short: Homology, is a circular fallacy: “Homology can’t be used as evidence for evolution because it assumes the very thing it’s trying to prove.” There’s also a personification fallacy in that last sentence. What in a proto-eukaryote, if such a thing existed, could decide it had a topological problem and would know how to latch onto a Topo IIB to solve it? And where did that handy tool come from? 


With the root of the eukaryotic tree being still debated (Burki et al. 2019), it is difficult to propose a scenario for the evolution of Topo IIAs in eukaryotes. From our phylogenetic analyses, one cannot exclude that LECA already contained more than one Topo IIA.


Needless to say, their “scenario” presupposes the existence of Topo IIB and the viral genome to begin with. Some origin story! Begin with the thing already existing.


The eukaryotic molecular fabric appears to be a melting pot of proteins that originated in Nucleocytoviricota (mainly Megaviricetes), those that emerged de novo in the eukaryotic stem branch, proteins inherited from the bacterial ancestor of mitochondria and chloroplasts, and proteins that had ancestors in Archaea (in two domains scenarios) or in the common ancestor of Archaea and eukaryotes (in three domains scenario). Sorting out the viral component of our eukaryotic ancestors is now a major task in understanding eukaryogenesis.


This glimpse into the mental perspiration of Darwinians to account for the origin of exquisitely orchestrated factories of molecular machines serves a purpose other than entertainment. It shows that intelligent design remains the only serious contender for explaining the origin of life. We just need to get the word out. Sharing our animation on social media is a good way to participate.

Information driven evolution V. Evolution driven information?

 Here’s a New Evolutionary Theory Based on Information

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC


One reason that the theory of evolution is controversial is the claim that sheer randomness produces information. That is, randomly generated events are somehow selected for survival and continuing complex development (Darwinian evolution). The theory is understandably popular because, if correct, it would answer a great many questions. The problem is, we do not see randomly generated events producing complex mechanisms in the life around us. We are asked, however, to believe that this modern synthesis (MS) is true over the grand sweep of evolutionary time.


The Third Way

Over the years, it has become evident that evolution happens in a number of ways, including horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species, epigenetic inheritance of genes that changed during our parents’ lifetimes, and convergent evolution — where vastly different life forms end up with very similar mechanisms as a result of pursuing a common goal. Efforts to incorporate these processes into evolutionary theory are sometimes called the the Third Way or extended evolutionary synthesis (EES).


A new model of evolution relies on information theory, which is itself interesting because information is governed by different rules from matter and energy. For example, it is created by ruling out possibilities, it is relational, not causal, and it is not reduced by being shared. It is also immaterial. For example, Einstein’s bomb equation, e = mc2, had a huge impact on the world but by itself, it is an immaterial idea.


Information can be stripped of all matter and appear in a variety of media: We could phone and tell you the winning lottery number or send you an email or a letter about it or discuss it on radio or TV. Vastly different material media; same information.

<iframe width="770" height="433" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aA-FcnLsF1g" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Different Questions, Different Answers

Reinterpreting evolution as a transfer of information will lead to both different questions and different answers.


The authors of a recent open access paper in the journal BioSystems, marine researcher Rasmus Skern-Mauritzen and forester Thomas Nygaard Mikkelsen, make clear that they understand information to be immaterial. Here is the Summary of their Information Continuum Model of evolution:


Summary


1. Information is immaterial by nature but must have a physical form to exist.


2. Inherited information may be found in many forms.


3. The forms have divergent properties and information may over time change its physical form.


4. We suggest the term ‘hereditome’ to refer to the sum of inherited information and its forms.


5. The substrate of natural selection is immaterial information.


6. The Information Continuum Model is a simple heuristic model that allows evolution and natural selection to be investigated without conceptual restrictions imposed by the properties of individual hereditome components.


7. The conceptual nature of Information Continuum Model enables it to serve as an interdisciplinary platform for collaboration between natural and social sciences.


Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Daring to doubt Darwin: in the beginning.

 Meet Samuel Haughton, Darwin’s First Scientific Critic

Neil Thomas

The first unofficial critic of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was Whitwell Elwin, editor of the journal Quarterly Review, selected by Darwin’s publishing house to vet his manuscript in advance of possible publication. Elwin memorably advised against publication on the grounds that the work was “a wild and foolish piece of imagination” whose author would have been better advised to omit his speculative flights and confine himself to the subject of pigeons. Elwin’s magnificent bathos was in the event disregarded by the press’s trustees who went on to publish regardless. However, Elwin’s negative verdict was subsequently supported in many essentials by the great majority of formal reviewers, as David Hull has documented.1 Yet neither Elwin nor the official reviewers were the first to pass judgement on Darwin’s ideas, for they had all been preceded by an Irish academic: Professor Samuel Haughton.


Awful Force

Haughton has been down on us with awful force. 2


CHARLES DARWIN

In his autobiography Darwin gives a short mention of Haughton,3 a professor of geology at Dublin, who had already heard of the pre-publication airing accorded to the views of both Darwin and Wallace at the fabled meeting of the Linnaean Society organized by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker in London more than a year before the official publication of the Origin. Darwin reports Haughton’s verdict as having been that “all that was new in there was false, and what was true was old.” This was a painfully honest representation of remarks Haughton really did make to members of the Geological Society of Dublin on February 9, 1859.4 He further developed his comments in an anonymous article written for the 1860 edition of The Natural History Review.5


Taking up Haughton’s point, there is no doubt that many of Darwin’s ideas were old, some ancient. Had Darwin been able to read the ancient writers, writes Rebecca Stott, “he might have recognized in parts of Aristotle’s writings and in corners of Epicurus, Democritus and Empedocles the glimmerings of thoughts and questionings that were remarkably similar to his own.”6 Haughton showed a greater familiarity with ancient writings than Darwin, but had little respect for philosophical speculations he termed puerile or for their authors, whom he deemed “weavers of pleasant webs of fiction.” He showed no more respect for those moderns who resorted to the same sort of speculative habits of thoughts as their remote forbears in ancient Greece and Rome, and who, he wrote, were wont to draw “large conclusions from slender premises.”7


Not Likely to Impress

The idea of variations selected by competition was a commonplace of Victorian thought, not likely when developed in conversation to impress clever men as a dazzling ingenuity. 8


WILLIAM IRVINE

Yet when Haughton wrote that much of Darwin and Wallace’s presentations represented a “truism,” he was referring not so much to the ancients as to more immediate predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries. The term “old” in his usage essentially meant “old hat.” For instance, it was well known that the 18th-century French naturalist Buffon had identified various factors later synthesized and unified by Darwin. These matters of more or less common observation included: life tends to multiply faster than its food supply; there is typically a struggle for existence; nature offsets the effects of its own over-fecundity (by culling); the fittest win out in the competition for limited resources. Such matters were taken for granted by scientists and livestock breeders alike in the following century.


Little wonder that Loren Eiseley observed that Darwin was building on sundry “premonitory beginnings” to bring about a creative synthesis of predecessors’ hints and that “natural selection was in the air, was in a sense demanding to be born.”9The distinguished Victorian writer G. H. Lewes had long since observed that Darwin supplied “an articulate expression to the thought which had been inarticulate in many minds.”10 It was doubtless for that reason that Darwin, after the publication of Origin, had some rather unwelcome accusations of plagiarism leveled at him.


The Pretenders

In the 1860s a number of persons came forward to stake a claim to having discovered the very phenomenon which Darwin always regarded as his own intellectual fiefdom, natural selection. Darwin might have fondly supposed that Wallace was his sole rival, but now others came forward with the ambition of advancing their claims.11 The claims of the Darwinian contenders were extremely modest and uncontroversial compared with those that Darwin was to advance. Take for instance the first of the contenders in chronological ranking, William Wells. In 1813 Wells read out a paper to the Royal Society of London touching on the subject of African ancestry having the advantage of conferring immunity to certain diseases. Some would bear disease better than others, he said. Those would consequently multiply, the others decrease, not only from their inability to combat the disease but also from their disadvantage in contending with their stronger peers. There is little more there than Buffon had advanced, and indeed little that might have displeased Haughton.


The same might be said for commercial horticulturalist Patrick Matthew who put forward his own survival-of-the-fittest idea in an appendix to a somewhat recondite publication called Timber and Naval Arboriculture in 1831:


As Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time’s decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing — either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means of subsistence.12


Matthew expressly stated that the conception of natural selection “came intuitively as a self-evident fact without the effort of concentrated thought.” It had not occurred to him that he had made a great discovery and he clearly saw his perceptions as everyday truisms for persons concerned with growing plants or rearing animals. Such empirically observable phenomena required no special explanation, Matthew stated.


Thomas Malthus

Darwin knew little or nothing of these somewhat obscure pretenders to his crown, but instead paid tribute to the demographer Thomas Malthus for providing him with his vital spark of inspiration. Malthus’s dominant concern was competition between humans for resources to survive, what Herbert Spencer was later to lexicalize as the battle for the survival of the fittest. Reading Malthus’s work on human populations13 out of personal interest, it dawned on Darwin that he might redirect Malthus’s ideas about laissez-faire capitalist societies to the struggle for existence in the wider biological world. Using that analogy, he concluded that


favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work … I saw, on reading Malthus on population, that natural selection was the inevitable result of the rapid increase of all organic beings [… Malthus] gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.14


Malthus’s ideas were largely consistent with what Wells and Matthew had stated and so not startlingly novel. Even Darwin’s son, Francis, feeling the matter to be self-evident, expressed surprise that his father had found his reading of Malthus such a revelation when many others such as Erasmus Darwin, William Paley, and Charles Lyell had already described the same struggle for existence in comparable terms. Friedrich Engels too was unimpressed by the Darwin/Malthus connection, writing that it was not necessary to have consulted Malthus in order to perceive the struggle for existence since this was an idea which cohered effortlessly and intuitively with the social attitudes of the upper classes in Europe. Engels viewed the Malthusian idea as a tacit ratification of the individualist ideology of the arriviste merchants then acquiring a sphere of power in Europe.15 In fact, Malthus’s ideas hit such a chord of recognition that that they were used as leverage to alter the older but more generous Elizabethan Poor Law in Great Britain (under the new law the poor had to compete for work or else be consigned to the workhouse).


Such knowledge as that listed above would doubtless have counted in Haughton’s terms as being “old.” In fact these various disclosures from other contenders coming shortly after the publication of Origin prompted the conclusion that Darwin’s theory “was just as much the discovery of British clergymen, doctors, fruit-farmers and gentlemen-naturalists working away with microscopes in the British provinces.”16 In a limited sense this conclusion is true, but it fails to take account of Darwin’s significant extension and elaboration of his theory into areas which Haughton came to see as being “false” and “contrary to fact.” 


The Formation of New Species

What stands out as being incongruous in Darwin’s response to his reading of Malthus and hence in serious need of further explanation is the single sentence, “The results of this would be the formation of new species.” Malthus was unconcerned with biological matters and had obviously written nothing about the transmutation of species, so that, as it stands, the sentence looks to be an unheralded non sequitur — an idea Darwin chose to tack on rather than a logical entailment or corollary of anything touched upon by Malthus. Whence this anomaly?


The truth of the matter appears to be that Darwin was reading Malthus through spectacles he had “borrowed” from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Charles’s highly elliptical reasoning only becomes clear in the context of that transmutational speculation, going back more than a century, that he was privy to via his grandfather. In that preceding century a number of naturalists had mooted the possibility of one species modulating biologically into another one over vast swathes of time, what Charles’s grandfather called transmutation. His grandson clearly “picked up the ball and ran” with the theory, arguably — to employ a sporting metaphor — beyond the perimeter of the playing field and clean out of the stadium.


Hence the younger Darwin’s (Erasmian) hypothesis was that successful members of any given species would not only become stronger and fitter at the micro level but, at the macro level, might eventually develop to such an extent that they would become (over countless ages) superior forms unrecognizable as having sprung from the older, inferior biological stock. The results of this long process would be nothing less than a series of phylogenetic revolutions (as opposed to that “descent with modifications” which Charles called the process with misleading understatement). By an aggregation of small incremental differences, he proposed, like his grandfather, that this process has resulted in thoroughgoing transformation, starting from microscopic beginnings in the form of unicellular common ancestors, like bacteria, via numberless further stages up to ape-like intermediaries, thence towards the evolution of Homo sapiens. He clearly shared with his free-thinking grandfather the belief that was that this was a more probable route along which the animal world might have developed than the doctrine that all species had been created fully formed by a divine power. 


Haughton, on the other hand, would have none of this. He felt that Darwin had fallen for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: that is, as Haughton phrased it, the delusion that mere succession necessarily implies causation.17


Edward Blyth’s Recantation

It is conspicuous that the one “pretender” who came nearest to the more ambitious claim advanced by Darwin was Edward Blyth, who wrote in the following terms about artificial selection:


When two animals are matched together, each remarkable for a certain peculiarity, no matter how trivial, there is also a decided tendency in nature for that tendency to increase; and if the produce of these animals be set apart, and only those in which the same peculiarity is apparent, be selected to breed from, the next generation will possess it in a still more remarkable degree; and so on, till at length the variety I designate a breed is formed, which may be very unlike the original type… May not, then, a large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common parentage?18


Yet Blyth subsequently retreated from the bold conjecture he advances in the last sentence, realizing that in those circumstances living species would blend into each other in a continual process of hybridization which had never been recorded and was not observable in nature. Had not the 18th century French naturalist Cuvier stated that all animal life could not be fitted into a unilineal ascending system? Diverse animals constituted a bush rather than a ladder since they belonged to distinct groups: vertebrates, molluscs, articulates, radiata, etc. Hence there were many stairways to life rather than one. The molluscan body plan could never “transition” into the vertebrate one because the differences between the two types were insuperable. Thus concluded the French naturalist in what became known as Cuvier’s Law of Correlation. 


Today, biologists use slightly different terminology in pointing to the species barrier and the insuperable difficulties of co-adaptation if animals were to advance beyond their basic physiological contours. However, the thought may in its essentials be traced back to Cuvier. For instance, to establish a convincing evolution of ape to human it would be necessary to establish that simians could over time have increased their communicative vocabularies so as to transform inarticulate emotional cries into specific vocal symbols. But this in turn brings up the closely related problem of how to explain the rapid mental processing on which articulate speech depends. Without the simultaneous co-adaptation of the simian brain how could the facility of speech, which depends on the interdependent agency of the brain in tandem withthe specialized organs of vocal articulation, have developed by the unplanned processes of natural selection?


Difficulties with the Darwinian Theory

Blyth corrected himself when in dawned on him that what he was musing on was a physiological impossibility. Swiftly retreating from his own conjecture, he realized that, in the circumstances he had envisaged in his mind’s eye, living species would routinely evidence patterns of morphological development which were simply not recorded in nature. He corrected his initial conjecture in line with observable circumstances by the kind of reality check which Charles Darwin chose to override. It is not as if Darwin did not know of the difficulty his theory posed. He must have known as well as Blyth in his heart of hearts that the kind of transmutation he was postulating did not exist in nature. In the following admirably candid words Darwin even tacks on the correlated problem of the lack of fossil evidence as a further hindrance to the acceptance of his theory: 


Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?19


“Why indeed,” one might ask. Haughton commented sardonically on this point, “Mr. Darwin admits that the facts of Geology are opposed to his theory, and they are pleasantly alluded to as the Geological Difficulty!”20 Turning a blind eye to such obstacles, Darwin appears to have been driven by family piety in the direction of a form of materialist confirmation bias and what was fundamentally a social/ familial construction of reality.


A New Revelation

There is no folly that human fancy can devise, when truth has ceased to be of primary importance, and right reason and sound logic have been discarded, that has not been produced, and preached as a new revelation.21


SAMUEL HAUGHTON

Whether Charles Darwin’s theory of the whole biosphere having essentially developed by “natural selection” was more antecedently probable than the doctrine of divine creation remained a contentious point, much debated by scientific and lay peers. Haughton at any rate, in company with other members of the wider Victorian public22, failed to see how such a grand and exquisitely crafted symphonic whole as the terrestrial biosphere had, allegedly, been able to magic itself into existence without any empirically identifiable agency to direct it. Then as before, most were prompted by the application of humble logic to seek the solution to life’s deepest enigmas not in natural selection but in natural theology.


The grandeur and sublime subtleties of our terrestrial environment have for millennia been viewed as in and of themselves empirical markers for design. The idea of intelligent design is as much a common-sense, empirical deduction as a formal philosophical theory or religious tenet. It seems intuitively right to many without benefit of any formal elaboration of the philosophical or metaphysical kind. Hence Darwin’s theory that life on Earth could have evolved mindlessly, due to the unpredictable ministrations of Mother Nature, has never ceased to appear improbable, even impossible, to the generality of people. In short, the notion that life’s diversity could have developed by some preternaturally benign concatenation of flukes does not commend itself as an intuitive probability to unbiased observers with no stake in finding a wholly materialistic explanation for all things. 


Could Nature, without any intelligence itself, have been capable of developing creatures with immense reserves of intelligence, or is this, as opponents have persistently objected, just a freethinking donnish fantasy harbored by those who simply will there to be a materialist Grand Theory of Everything? The jury is very much still out on that one, and Samuel Haughton’s doubts have not been allayed. For as he wrote in the peroration of his review, “No progress in natural science is possible as long as men will take their crude guesses at truth for facts, and substitute the fancies of their imagination for the sober rules of reasoning.” 


Notes

For a comprehensive reprint together with editor’s commentary on reviews from the 1860s, see Hull’s Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1973).

Letter to Joseph Hooker, April 30, 1860.

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow, (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 122.

“This speculation of Mess. Darwin and Wallace would not be worthy of note were it not for the weight of authority of the names under whose auspices it has been brought forward [Lyell and Hooker]. If it means what it says, it is a truism; if it means anything more, it is contrary to fact.”

http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1860_Review_Origin_Biogenesis_Haughton_A1128.pdf

Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 40.

“The Moderns have resolved, by their speculations on the past, to show that in ingenuity and oddness of conceit and, probably, also in wideness from the truth, they are in no respect inferior to the Ancients.” (Review, p. 5)

William Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians: A Joint Biography of Darwin and Huxley (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1955), p. 105.

Loren Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X (London: Dent, 1979), p. 6.

Cited by Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 22.

These included the Oxford Professor of Geometry, Baden Powell, the French naturalist Charles Naudin, Robert Grant (Darwin’s Edinburgh tutor), Dr. William Wells (his claim going back to 1813), Patrick Matthew, a well-to-do Scottish farmer and fruit grower, in 1831, and Edward Blyth, a young zoologist (1835). A comprehensive account of Darwin’s predecessors is given by Rebecca Stott in the aforementioned Darwin’s Ghosts.

W. J. Dempster, Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century: Natural Selection and Patrick Matthew (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1996), p. 245.

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Human Population, edited by Anthony Flew (London: Penguin, 1970).

Cited by Anthony Flew, Essay on the Principle of Population, Introduction, pp. 49-50.

See on this point Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (Chicago: Chicago Up, 1989), pp. 2-3.

Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts, p. 17.

Review, p. 10.

Cited by Loren Eisley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X, pp. 55-6, 58.

Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 129.

Haughton, Review, p. 6.

Review, p. 7

See Alvar Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-72 (Gothenburg: Elanders, 1958).