The designed intelligence of birds

 Capabilities of Migrating Birds Deserve Awards and Recognition 

David Coppedge 

Kids used to collect baseball cards passionately, trading them among their friends in hopes of getting the most famous players in their collections. They admired the photos of their heroes in action on the front side and memorized the player’s stats (batting average, RBIs, home runs) printed on the back. Might I suggest a product for some design-friendly entrepreneur? Animal Cards! Pack attractive cards in gum candies and let the youngsters chew on some intelligent design facts while having fun collecting and trading. 

A good starter set would feature migrating birds. These are true champions of long-distance flight, navigation, and endurance that leave many sports heroes far behind. Here are some flyers worthy of recognition on Bird Cards.

Common Whitethroat 

The common whitethroat (Curruca communis) is a small dusky-colored warbler that summers in Europe and winters in Africa, Arabia, or Pakistan. Its low weight (14 grams), plain appearance, and scratchy voice belie its migratory prowess. 

Two ornithologists from the University of St. Andrews, with a colleague in Nigeria, outfitted 40 of the birds with geologgers weighing only half a gram and recorded their flight paths. These lightweight contenders were measured traveling 5,000 km in just 52 days, including 2,000 km nonstop across inhospitable barriers like the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. How’s that for a home run? The scientists published the stats in PLOS ONE:

Departures from breeding grounds took place between July and August in a south-westerly direction. During spring migration individuals travelled longer distances at faster rates making its overall duration shorter than autumn migration. We suggest that, while Whitethroats can cross the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea in a single flight, they are likely to refuel before and after crossing. 

The small champions sometimes stop at the bases, but occasionally make home runs. “If under severe time constraints, however, individuals can successfully undergo a flight without making stopovers.” 

Bay-Breasted Warbler 

Another warbler takes the lead over its white-throated cousin. This little featherweight flyer with its handsome uniform also undertakes “extraordinary journeys” twice per year, flying over 6,400 km between Canada and South America. Christina Larson wrote for Phys.org about the feats of this species, Setophaga castanea. 

A bay-breasted warbler weighs about the same as four pennies, but twice a year makes an extraordinary journey. The tiny songbird flies nearly 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) between Canada’s spruce forests and its wintering grounds in northern South America. 

Red-Throated Loon 

Moving up into the welterweight category, look at another champion. Loons have a distinctive call of the wild that, like a howling wolf, makes an explorer feel like Jack London in the far north. Red-throated loons are excellent fishers in small lakes. When not fishing, they take long trips. 

Ornithologists at the University of Maine outfitted some red-throated loons (Gavia stellata) with satellite transmitters and monitored their routes. News from the University of Maine tells what they found: epic journeys through the cold lands of Greenland, Canada, and the Arctic. Groups of birds spread out, covering a vast area.

Despite sampling just 5% of the North American Atlantic coast non-breeding range, an area equivalent to just 0.001% of the presumed Atlantic flyway breeding range, the birds studied spread out across 65% of that breeding range, suggesting that the mid-Atlantic region constitutes the core of the non-breeding range for red-throated loons that winter. 

Wandering Albatross 

Moving up to the heavyweight class, the wandering albatross (pictured at the top) is a fascinating bird that can travel thousands of miles without flapping its wings. With its 11-foot wingspan (the longest of any living bird), this iconic soaring champion of the southern oceans attracted the attention of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Researchers show maps of its wanderings, and describe how it tilts and swoops in clever ways to take advantage of the wind’s energy. 

Wandering albatrosses lack sufficient musculature to sustain continuous flapping flight for long periods of time; however they have a shoulder lock that mechanically holds their wings outstretched so that little energy is expended while soaring, according to the paper. 

The wandering albatross is so good at efficient use of wind energy, NASA has taken notice. The BBC News reported that an albatross-inspired glider has been designed for future flights on Mars. Unlike rovers or the highly successful Mars demonstration helicopter, a flyer designed like an albatross could fly for free on the Martian wind, swoop up the slopes of volcanoes, and stay aloft for long periods of time. A demonstration Mars sailplane has been designed at the University of Arizona. With looks similar in proportions to the albatross, it can pack a small camera, and temperature and gas sensors to reconnoiter much farther than its battery-powered explorers can. 

While these other forms of transport have been partly limited by power needs, the glider would use energy available in the atmosphere itself, explained Adrien Bouskela, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at the University of Arizona.

“It’s kind of a leap forward in those methods of extending missions,” he said.

Bird Migration Studies Flying High 

In a special issue on birds, Current Biology included a review paper titled, “New frontiers in bird migration research.” The open-access article discusses the current state of knowledge and future outlooks in this exciting field. 

Bird migrations are impressive behavioral phenomena, representing complex spatiotemporal strategies to balance costs of living while maximizing fitness. The field of bird migration research has made great strides over the past decades, yet fundamental gaps remain. Technologies have sparked a transformation in the study of bird migration research by revealing remarkable insights into the underlying behavioral, cognitive, physiological and evolutionary mechanisms of these diverse journeys. 

Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms with its examples of migrating champions and the requirements that permit them, might suggest changing “evolutionary mechanisms” to “engineered mechanisms.” But the paper’s mention of “specific requirements for flight” should attract readers’ attention, as well as the phrase “onboard algorithms” — which, sadly, was only used in reference to human designs for geologgers. Someday scientists will get it. Nothing gets off the ground in controlled flight without foresight and a plan to meet the requirements. Those necessities also apply to all the engineering marvels in our own bodies, as emphasized by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman in their new book, Your Designed Body. 

Cool Tools 

Also at Phys.org, Christina Larson announced a valuable new resource for a Bird Card project: 

The Bird Migration Explorer mapping tool, available free to the public, is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups that collect and analyze data on bird movements, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, Georgetown University, Colorado State University, and the National Audubon Society.

For the first time, the site will bring together online data from hundreds of scientific studies that use GPS tags to track bird movements, as well as more than 100 years of bird-banding data collected by USGS, community science observations entered into Cornell’s eBird platform, genomic analysis of feathers to pinpoint bird origins, and other data.

Animal Card entrepreneurs will want to use this online tool to design their collection on birds. 

We continue to seek straight answers.

 Why is it that expression God the Son occurs nowhere in scripture if there is such an entity that Christians ought to worship? 

Why is it that the expression God the spirit appears nowhere in scripture if there is such an entity that Christians must worship? 

We know that Jesus is called Son of the God because his Father is the God, so why is JEHOVAH never called the Father of the God if his Son is the God?

Plants possess brainless minds?

Are Plants Conscious? Science Writer Says Yes 

Denyse O'Leary Annaka Harris, a science writer focusing on neuroscience and physics and the author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019), challenges us to reflect on two points:

1) In a system that we know has conscious experiences — the human brain — what evidence of consciousness can we detect from the outside?

2) Is consciousness essential to our behavior?

The editor notes, introducing an excerpt from the book, “But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.”

Harris begins with a shoutout to natural selection (survival of the fittest), noting: 

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life… But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy —that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV (DECEMBER 8, 2022). A SUBSCRIPTION IS REQUIRED.

The problem with the “evolutionary” approach to thinking is this: If it’s true that we can’t trust the reasoning skills of our brains, which evolved merely in order to enable us to survive and reproduce (according to the theory) to arrive at a correct answer, we are in no position to evaluate Harris’s own thesis as either sound or unconvincing. Nor is she in a position to evaluate it herself. 

The Blink of an Eye 

She offers a look at locked-in syndrome — complete paralysis of the voluntary nervous system muscles except for those that control the eyes. The most famous example is probably Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952–1997) whose 1997 memoir of his post-stroke life The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was written with about two hundred thousand blinks. He died two days after its publication in 1997. There’s also a film.

She also notes anesthesia awareness where, in rare cases, patients are aware of events and pain during surgery.

Yes, these rare events where people are conscious — but we don’t know it — do occur. But how do we generally notice consciousness in other human beings? By their conscious interactions with us in situations where no other explanation seems plausible. In social situations, sudden unconsciousness in a human is likely to result in calls to 9-11. Human consciousness remains mysterious but it is not ambiguous.

If Harris wants to introduce the idea that plants are conscious, efforts to denigrate the significance of human consciousness are simply not the best place to begin. 

On Firmer Ground 

She is on firmer ground when she observes that plants have been found in recent research to do many things that animals do. She cites plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz, whose book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017) describes plant responses to touch, light, heat, etc.: 

Plants can sense their environments through touch and can detect many aspects of their surroundings, including temperature, by other modes. It’s actually quite common for plants to react to touch: a vine will increase its rate and direction of growth when it senses an object nearby that it can wrap itself around; and the infamous Venus flytrap can distinguish between heavy rain or strong gusts of wind, which do not cause its blades to close, and the tentative incursions of a nutritious beetle or frog, which will make them snap shut in one-tenth of a second. 

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV (DECEMBER 8, 2022) 

The electrical signals that stimulate nerve cells in plants are similar to those in animals and the genes that enable the plant to determine light or darkness are the ones humans use too. One might add to the list the fact that plants use glutamate to speed signal transmission — a technique also used by mammals.

In other words, given the physics and chemistry of our universe, a finite number of efficient communications systems is available. A variety of different life forms may be found using them. Those life forms may share nothing beyond the need to adopt one of the available systems.

But plant communication can be quite complex as well, as Suzanne Simard, has shown: 

She was studying the levels of carbon in two species of tree, Douglas fir and paper birch carbon in two species of tree, Douglas fir and paper birch, when she discovered that the two species were engaged “in a lively two-way conversation.” In the summer months, when the fir needs more carbon, the birch sent more carbon to the fir; and and at other times when the fir was still growing but the birch needed more carbon because it was leafless, the fir sent more carbon to the birch — revealing that the two species were in fact interdependent. Equally surprising were the results of further research led by Simard in the Canadian National Forest, showing that the Douglas fir “mother trees” were able to distinguish between their own kin and a neighboring stranger’s seedlings. Simard found that the mother trees colonized their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon below ground. The mother trees also “reduced their own root competition to make room for their kids,” and, when injured or dying, sent messages through carbon and other defense signals to their kin seedlings, increasing the seedlings’ resistance to local environmental stresses. Likewise, by spreading toxins through underground fungal networks, plants are also able to ravage threatening species. Because of the vast interconnections and functions of these mycorrhizal networks, they have been referred to as ‘Earth’s natural Internet.’”

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV (DECEMBER 8, 2022) A SUBSCRIPTION IS REQUIRED.

Evaluating Plant Interactions 

It’s possible that plant interactions are as complex as those of social insects, but that does not, in itself, establish consciousness. Ants, for example, might be best understood as thinking like computers, which implies efficacy but not consciousness. Harris acknowledges that fact: “Still, we can easily imagine plants exhibiting the behaviors described above without there being something it is like to be a plant, so complex behavior doesn’t necessarily shed light on whether a system is conscious or not.”

But then, in pursuit of plant consciousness, she cites artificial vs. human intelligence: “The problem is that both conscious and non-conscious states seem to be compatible with any behavior, even those associated with emotion, so the behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.”

No, wait. With AI, we humans are insiders. We invented AI. We know how it’s done. No one is sure what human consciousness even is but we are pretty sure what computers are and do. Even at their best, chatbots — to take one example — are simply scarfing up and reprocessing what humans say on the Internet. AI could only be conscious if somehow consciousness arises naturally from large scale computations. We do not, at present, have a reason to believe that it does.

The Philosopher’s Zombie 

She then brings up the philosopher’s zombie, the zombie that might act exactly like a close friend but has no consciousness: 

Let’s say your “zombie friend” witnesses a car accident, looks appropriately concerned, and takes out his phone to call for an ambulance. Could he possibly be going through these motions without an experience of anxiety and concern, or a conscious thought process that leads him to make a call and describe what happened? Or could this all take place even if he were a robot, without a felt experience prompting the behavior at all. Again, ask yourself what, if anything, would constitute conclusive evidence of consciousness in another person?

I have discovered that the zombie thought experiment is also capable of influencing our thinking beyond its intended function in the following way: Once we imagine human behavior around us existing without consciousness, that behavior begins to look more like many behaviors we see in the natural world which we’ve always assumed were non-conscious, such as the obstacle-avoiding behavior of a starfish, which has no central nervous system [7]. In other words, when we trick ourselves into imagining a person who lacks consciousness, then we can begin to wonder if we’re in fact tricking ourselves all the time when we deem other living systems — climbing ivy, say, or stinging sea anemones — to be without it. We have a deeply ingrained intuition, and therefore a strongly held belief, that systems that act like us are conscious, and those that don’t are not. But what the zombie thought experiment makes vivid to me is that the conclusion we draw from this intuition has no real foundation. Like a 3D image, it collapses the moment we take our glasses off.

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV A SUBSCRIPTION IS REQUIRED.(DECEMBER 8, 2022) 

Again, wait. Every human beings knows about human consciousness in the first person. But not one of us can ever be absolutely sure that another human being is conscious. Our minds are, perhaps by design, accessible to others only by what we say and do. Yes, the consciousness of others could be an illusion but then the whole universe around us could be an illusion — in theory.

We assume conscious human behavior in other human beings when they behave like conscious human beings. That makes sense because the alternative — that you or I are the only conscious one — requires a much greater stretch of belief.

As for “climbing ivy, say, or stinging sea anemones,” we don’t think they are conscious because nothing in their behavior prompts such an interpretation. It’s not a matter of intuition or prejudice; we are just not seeing evidence. 

A Comparison with Chimpanzees 

Harris’s argument here is similar to the one we encounter in claims that chimpanzees think like humans. If they do, why don’t we see anything like a human culture growing up among them, just occasional flashes of intelligent behavior?

Harris would do well to stick to the point that plant behavior is turning out to be as complex as animal behavior. The question of consciousness is a separate one and there is no reason or need to assume that plants are conscious.

You may also wish to read: Do ants think? Yes, they do — but they think like computers. Computer programmers have adapted some ant problem-solving methods to software programs (but without the need for complex chemical scents). Navigation expert Eric Cassell points out that algorithms have made the ant one of the most successful insects ever, both in numbers and complexity.

 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XIV

 Darwinism's predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

A fundamental concept in evolutionary theory is the inheritance of genetic variations via blood lines. (Forbes) This so-called vertical transmission of heritable material means that genes, and genomes in general, should fall into a common descent pattern, consistent with the evolutionary tree. Indeed, such genes are often cited as a confirmation of evolution. But as more genomic data have become available, an ever increasing number of genes have been discovered that do not fit the common descent pattern because they are missing from so many intermediate species. (Andersson and Roger 2002; Andersson and Roger 2003; Andersson 2005; Andersson, Sarchfield and Roger 2005; Andersson 2006; Andersson et. al. 2006; Andersson 2009; Andersson 2011; Haegeman, Jones and Danchin; Katz; Keeling and Palmer; Richards et. al 2006a; Richards et. al 2006b; Takishita et. al.; Wolf et. al.)

 

This type of pattern is also found for genome architecture features which are sporadically distributed and then strikingly similar in distant species. In fact these similarities do not merely occur twice, in two distant species. They often occur repeatedly in a variety of otherwise distant species. This is so widespread that evolutionists have named the phenomenon “recurrent evolution.” As one paper explains, the recent explosion of genome data reveals “strikingly similar genomic features in different lineages.” Furthermore, there are “traits whose distribution is ‘scattered’ across the evolutionary tree, indicating repeated independent evolution of similar genomic features in different lineages.” (Maeso, Roy and Irimia) 

One example is the uncanny similarity between the kangaroo and human genomes. As one evolutionist explained: “There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order. We thought they’d be completely scrambled, but they’re not.” (Taylor)

 

It is now well recognized that this prediction has failed: “Vertical transmission of heritable material, a cornerstone of the Darwinian theory of evolution, is inadequate to describe the evolution of eukaryotes, particularly microbial eukaryotes.” (Katz) And these sporadic, patchy patterns require complicated and ad hoc scenarios to explain their origin. As one paper explained, the evolution of a particular set of genes “reveals a complex history of horizontal gene transfer events.” (Wolf et. al.) The result is that any pattern can be explained by arranging the right mechanisms. Features that are shared between similar species can be interpreted as “the result of a common evolutionary history,” and features that are not can be interpreted as “the result of common evolutionary forces.” (Maeso, Roy and Irimia)

 

These common evolutionary forces are complex and must have been created by evolution. They can include horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer, gene loss, gene fusion, and even unknown forces. For instance, one study concluded that the best explanation for the pattern of a particular gene was that it “has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism.” (Takishita et. al.) Even with the great variety of mechanisms available, there still remains the unknown mechanism.

References 

Andersson, J., A. Roger. 2002. “Evolutionary analyses of the small subunit of glutamate synthase: gene order conservation, gene fusions, and prokaryote-to-eukaryote lateral gene transfers.” Eukaryotic Cell 1:304-310.

 

Andersson, J., A. Roger. 2003. “Evolution of glutamate dehydrogenase genes: evidence for lateral gene transfer within and between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 3:14.

 

Andersson, J. 2005. “Lateral gene transfer in eukaryotes.” Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 62:1182-97.

 

Andersson, J., S. Sarchfield, A Roger. 2005. “Gene transfers from nanoarchaeota to an ancestor of diplomonads and parabasalids.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 22:85-90.

 

Andersson, J. 2006. “Convergent evolution: gene sharing by eukaryotic plant pathogens.” Current Biology 16:R804-R806.

 

Andersson, J., R. Hirt, P. Foster, A. Roger. 2006. “Evolution of four gene families with patchy phylogenetic distributions: influx of genes into protist genomes.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 6:27.

 

Andersson, J. 2009. “Horizontal gene transfer between microbial eukaryotes.” Methods in Molecular Biology 532:473-487.

 

Andersson, J. 2011. “Evolution of patchily distributed proteins shared between eukaryotes and prokaryotes: Dictyostelium as a case study.” J Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology 20:83-95.

 

Haegeman, A., J. Jones, E. Danchin. 2011. “Horizontal gene transfer in nematodes: a catalyst for plant parasitism?.” Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions 24:879-87.

Katz, L. 2002. “Lateral gene transfers and the evolution of eukaryotes: theories and data.” International J. Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology 52:1893-1900.

 

Keeling, P., J. Palmer. 2008. “Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 9:605-18.

 

Maeso, I, S. Roy, M. Irimia. 2012. “Widespread Recurrent Evolution of Genomic Features.” Genome Biology and Evolution 4:486-500.

 

Richards, T., J. Dacks, J. Jenkinson, C. Thornton, N. Talbot. 2006. “Evolution of filamentous plant pathogens: gene exchange across eukaryotic kingdoms.” Current Biology 16:1857-1864.

 

Richards, T., J. Dacks, S. Campbell, J. Blanchard, P. Foster, R. McLeod, C. Roberts. 2006. “Evolutionary origins of the eukaryotic shikimate pathway: gene fusions, horizontal gene transfer, and endosymbiotic replacements.” Eukaryotic Cell 5:1517-31.

 

Takishita, K., Y. Chikaraishi, M. Leger, E. Kim, A. Yabuki, N. Ohkouchi, A. Roger. 2012. “Lateral transfer of tetrahymanol-synthesizing genes has allowed multiple diverse eukaryote lineages to independently adapt to environments without oxygen.” Biology Direct 7:5.

 

Taylor, R. 2008. “Kangaroo genes close to humans,” Reuters, Canberra, Nov 18.

Wolf, Y., L. Aravind, N. Grishin, E. Koonin. 1999. “Evolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases--analysis of unique domain architectures and phylogenetic trees reveals a complex history of horizontal gene transfer events.” Genome Research 9:689-710.