Tuesday 14 March 2023

Rules for aspiring titans.

Darwinism simple beginning is more than a phantom? Pros and cons.

Rise of the planet of the monkeys?

Monkey-Made “Tools” Cast Doubt on High Intelligence in Early Hominids

Casey Luskin

A new paper in Science Advances, titled “Wild macaques challenge the origin of intentional tool production,” is making headlines. Macaque monkeys from Lobi Bay, Thailand, have been observed “unintentionally” producing stone tools that are “almost indistinguishable” from some very old stone artifacts typically attributed to our supposed evolutionary ancestors. Gizmodo reports, “Uh-Oh: Monkeys Make Stone Flakes That Look a Lot Like Human Tools.” According to The Hill, “New study on monkeys using stone tools raises questions about evolution.” The reason for the “Uh-Oh” and the “questions” is that if living monkeys can produce tools resembling those supposedly produced by our intelligent hominid ancestors, then many tools currently ascribed to our purported ancestors may be no such thing. From Gizmodo:

Researchers studying macaques in one of Thailand’s national parks made a surprising discovery: While cracking nuts, the monkeys make stone flakes that look an awful lot like the flakes that scientists have attributed to ancient human. The finding means that some of the material held up as the earliest evidence of hominin tool use may have actually come from monkeys and not our ancestors.

The Hill elaborates:

The Thai monkeys produced stone artifacts “indistinguishable from what we see at the beginning of the [human] archeological record — what we see as the onset of being human,” said Lydia Luncz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a co-author on the study.

The monkeys — long-tailed macaques — seem to have made their artifacts by accident, not by design. But in many ways, that only makes the finding more disruptive.

[…]

Ancient humans used knapping to break apart rocks to create an incredibly flexible set of tools — the earliest forms of which cannot be distinguished from the ones macaques made by accident.

That points to a possibility that could throw a wrench into the established narrative, Luncz said: that “all the conoidal flakes we find in the archaeological record — deemed to be intentionally made — could be unintentional byproducts.”

Doubts About Our “Ancestors”

Similarly Inverse reports, “Because the macaques created stone flakes by accident, Luncz and colleagues wondered if some ancient primates may have done the same — creating objects that researchers today might interpret as intentional tools.” It continues:

For the new study, the researchers compared more than 1,000 stone flakes made by macaques to ancient flakes dating back 1.3 to 3.3 million years ago. Samples came from several excavated sites in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

Looking at the shape, size, and markings on each flake, the researchers determined that there were very few physical differences between the samples from today and those made by human ancestors from millions of years ago.

That leads the researchers to believe it’s possible that some ancient stone flakes may have been misinterpreted as intentionally-made tools, since the macaques make such similar ones without even trying.

“Given these similarities, it may be that some flakes and flaked stones from Plio-Pleistocene contexts are derived as a by-product of percussive behaviors and may be easily misidentified as intentional products,” they write.

“All of the Same Characteristics”

Just how similar are these “tools” to the stone tools we find in the archaeological record? The technical paper reports “morphological overlap between unintentionally produced (macaque) material and those interpreted as intentional (Oldowan and Lomekwian),” and concludes, “These results show that between 30 and 70% of an Oldowan assemblage can be replaced by macaque flakes before significantly changing the central tendency of the morphological and technological parameters of the original assemblage.” A press release from the authors of the technical paper states:

[M]any of these artefacts bear all of the same characteristics that are commonly used to identify intentionally made stone tools in some of the earliest archaeological sites in East Africa.

This evidence has apparently not been well received, as The Hill reports:

That idea remains controversial in the field, however.

“You will not believe the fights we had to fight,” Luncz said.

Even calling the macaque-produced stone flakes “artifacts” was controversial because some scientists felt it implied an overlap between tool use by Homo sapiens and other primates that wasn’t justified.

‘Artifacts,’ after all, shares its root with ‘art’ and ‘artifice’ — words that suggest intention, planning and humanity.

“People were not happy with monkeys being able to create those artifacts,” she added. “And somewhere in the records of macaque and early hominid tools, there must be a difference. But right now, the diagnostic criteria we’re using can’t find one.”

A Word of Caution

But the paper offers a potential way forward:

Our results suggest that larger, more elongated flakes, with high cutting edge–to–mass ratios and more platform preparation are attributes associated with intentional flake production. However, measures such as external platform angle and platform dimensions, flake scar frequency, flake scar directionality and cortical coverage on flakes, as well as exploitation strategies and number of exploited surfaces on flaked pieces do not differ between nut cracking and intentionally produced assemblages.

But the paper offers a caution at the end, noting that previously used criteria also turned out to wrongly infer “intentional” activity:

Previous studies have relied on the aforementioned co-occurring attributes to infer intentional hominin tool production. Building on previous studies of primate flaked stone assemblages, this study shows that these criteria now occur repeatedly within multiple phylogenetically and geographically diverse nonhuman primate lineages.

This study is a potential gamechanger. As they conclude, “The results of this study demonstrate that a fundamental reassessment of how we define and identify this uniquely hominin behavior in the archaeological record is still needed.” If current criteria for inferring intelligent tool production can be wrong, it raises the specter that future studies could show monkeys and apes are capable of “unintentionally” producing other complex tools still ascribed to our supposed hominid ancestors. This could mean that a sacred evolutionary icon — apelike species acting smart and making tools — could potentially be axed (pun intended!).

To make a long story short re: Darwinism's "simple beginning"

James Tour on why the OOL is the linchpin of the design argument.

How the giraffe got its neck? :with apologies to Rudyard Kipling.

Evolution’s Tall Tale — The Giraffe Neck

Jonathan Witt

The giraffe’s neck has long been a beloved icon of evolutionary theory. According to the story, one of the giraffe’s short-necked ancestors had a slightly longer neck, which helped him reach leaves the other animals on the savannah couldn’t. This gave him a survival advantage he passed on to his offspring. Or maybe the female giraffes really dug his slightly longer neck, giving him a reproductive advantage. Same result. He passed his slightly longer neck on to his offspring. Rinse and repeat a few thousand times, and voila, the lineage ends up with 600-pound, six-foot long giraffe necks.

But the devil is in the details. An article in the journal Nature frankly characterizes the evolution of the giraffe’s cartoonishly long neck as “a puzzle”:

There should be a good reason for the extraordinary length, because it causes hardship. A giraffe’s heart needs to pump blood 2 metres up to the head, which requires a high blood pressure and management to avoid fainting or stroke. “It’s beautifully adapted to this, but it’s a big cost,” says Rob Simmons, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who was not involved in the study.

One prevailing theory is that giraffes evolved longer necks to reach higher trees for food. “This is widely believed; it’s really entrenched,” says Simmons…. [But] research has shown that giraffes tend to eat from lower levels, and tall giraffes aren’t more likely to survive drought, when food competition is highest. Another idea is that giraffes evolved longer necks for sexual competition, with male giraffes engaging in violent neck-swinging fights and longer necks attracting mates…. [But] males don’t have longer necks than females.1

Fossil Phantasms

Fossils aren’t much help either. German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig surveyed the literature on fossils and giraffe evolution and reports that there is an abundance of fossils from giraffes and creatures said to be either giraffe ancestors or closely related to those ancestors, but what remains stubbornly absent is a smooth series of transitional fossils from short-necked to long-necked. He writes:

No continuous series of fossil links leads to the Giraffa or Okapia. “The giraffe and the okapi of the Congo rain forest are considered as sister groups, the origins of which are still not known” (Devillers and Chaline 1993, p. 247). Similarly Starck (1995, p. 999) remarks: “The ancestry of Giraffidae is disputed.” Wesson (1991, pp. 238-239) agrees with these statements about giraffe fossils, as follows: “The evolving giraffe line left no middling branches on the way, and there is nothing, living or fossil, between the moderate neck of the okapi and the greatly elongated giraffe. The several varieties of giraffe are all about the same height.”

An okapi, keep in mind, is an extant even-toed ungulate that looks not dramatically different from a large deer. Between it and the giraffe there stretches a great morphological gulf.

There was a much-ballyhooed fossil find reported in 2015 purporting to bridge that great gulf. A Live Science article, “7-Million-Year-Old Fossils Show How the Giraffe Got Its Long Neck,” promised the moon, and the lead researcher, Nikos Solounias, was only slightly more restrained. “We actually have an animal whose neck is intermediate [in length] — it’s a real missing link,” he said. But as the evolutionists behind the study later concede, they don’t even think the creature, Samotherium major, is a direct ancestor of the giraffe.

Stretching the Truth

More fundamentally, as researchers learn more and more about giraffe physiology, it’s increasingly clear that hundreds, maybe even thousands, of genetic changes would be needed to arrive at a functioning giraffe; many of the changes would need to arrive simultaneously for the creature to survive; and such big-jump changes would need to occur numerous times over millions of years.

Yes, natural selection could jump in to preserve these coordinated mutation freak events if they ever occurred, but first the freak-event mutations would have to occur.

Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, famous for his many books defending atheism and evolutionary theory, characterizes the difference between a giraffe’s neck and that of its short-necked ancestor as relatively “slight.” Dawkins writes: “The giraffe’s neck has the same complicated arrangement of parts as the okapi (and presumably as the giraffe’s own short-necked ancestor). There is the same sequence of seven vertebrae [Lönnig contests this], each with its associated blood vessels, nerves, ligaments, and blocks of muscle. The difference is that each vertebra is a lot longer, and all its associated parts are stretched or spaced out in proportion.”2

So, how hard could it be to evolve?

Dawkins’s characterization is one a Darwin disciple could love, but never an attentive engineer, or any biologist with a working familiarity with giraffe physiology. As Lönnig puts it, Dawkins “simplifies the biological problems to a degree that is tolerable for evolutionary theory, but not realistic with regard to the biological facts.”

Giraffe Spectacular

Lönnig describes several things that must be either engineered or reengineered to arrive at a functional giraffe from a short-necked ancestor. First, giraffes, like cows and many other grazing animals, are ruminants, meaning they regurgitate a half-digested cud and chew on it before swallowing the food a second time, helping them digest tough fibrous grass and leaves. But to pull off this trick, a giraffe, with its neck as tall as a man, needs “a special muscular esophagus,” Lönnig explains. So that’s one reengineering challenge.

Lönnig gives so many more that there isn’t room for them all here. His book debunking giraffe evolution, The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, is dense and thorough. But he helpfully quotes Gordon Rattray Taylor, who concisely summarized several of the reengineering challenges in his book The Great Evolution Mystery:

Nineteenth-century observers assumed that the giraffe had only to develop a longer neck and legs to be able to reach the leaves which other animals could not. But in fact such growth created severe problems. The giraffe had to pump blood up about eight feet to its head. The solution it reached was to have a heart which beats faster than average and a high blood pressure. When the giraffe puts his head down to drink, he suffers a rush of blood to the head, so a special pressure-reducing mechanism, the rete mirabile, had to be provided to deal with this. However, much more intractable are the problems of breathing through an eight-foot tube. If a man tried to do so, he would die — not from lack of oxygen so much as poisoning by his own carbon dioxide. For the tube would fill with his expired, deoxygenated breath, and he would keep reinhaling it. Furthermore, one study group found that the blood in a giraffe’s legs would be under such pressure that it would force its way out of the capillaries. How was this being prevented? It turned out that the intercellular spaces are filled with fluid, also under pressure — which in turn necessitates the giraffe having a strong, impermeable skin. To all these changes one could add the need for new postural reflexes and for new strategies of escape from predators. It is evident that the giraffe’s long neck necessitated not just one mutation but many — and these perfectly coordinated.3

Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon cogently tease out the significance of all this:

In short, the giraffe represents not a mere collection of individual traits but a package of interrelated adaptations. It is put together according to an overall design that integrates all parts into a single pattern. Where did such an adaptational package come from? According to Darwinian theory, the giraffe evolved to its present form by the accumulation of individual, random changes preserved by natural selection. But it is difficult to explain how a random process could offer to natural selection an integrated package of adaptations, even over time. Random mutations might adequately explain change in a relatively isolated trait, such as color. But major changes, like the macroevolution of the giraffe from some other animal, would require an extensive suite of coordinated adaptations.4

A Lottery-Winning Fiend

This means that if we hold to the evolutionary story for the giraffe neck, we must go from believing that the giraffe lineage won a series of longshot lotteries over millions of years to believing that the various ancestors in the lineage each won numerous longshot lotteries simultaneously and managed to do this over and over.

To grasp the enormous difference, imagine that the President of the United States takes a winding summer trip through the American heartland and buys a state lottery ticket in each of those 45 states that has a state lottery. (Not all do.) Later that summer it emerges that every one of the lottery tickets the President bought was a jackpot winner. The President’s handlers attribute this to “dumb luck,” but you can bet that 45 state lottery commissioners will smell a rat and, if brave enough, launch an investigation. They will reasonably infer that all those wins were somehow gamed in the President’s favor — that is, were intelligently designed. There are long odds, and then there are odds so long, and so beneficial to someone, that reasonable people begin to look for other explanations.

In the giraffe’s case, a bit of reasoning goes a long way. Blind evolution doesn’t look ahead and coordinate a group of changes for some future advantage. It’s blind and must proceed by one small useful step at a time. No evolutionist, for instance, believes that a small number of mega-mutations turned a land mammal into a whale.

But what if loads of changes are needed simultaneously to successfully make a biological transition, or even just a significant step in a larger transition? We know of only type of cause with the demonstrated ability to meet such a challenge, and it isn’t dumb luck and natural selection. The engineering marvel that is the giraffe, long neck and all, was intelligently designed.

On humanity's privileged homeworld.

The Problem of Earth Privilege: It’s Getting Worse

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, provides a rapid survey of some of the growing evidence that Earth is finely tuned in numerous ways to allow for life. He draws a helpful distinction between local fine-tuning and universal fine-tuning. And he tells us about the many extra-solar planets astronomers have discovered in recent years and how all that new data continues to undermine the misguided assumption (encouraged by the misnamed “Copernican Principle”) that Earth is just a humdrum planet. Far from it, Gonzalez argues. Download the podcast or listen to it here

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Russia's man of steel: then and now.

Why we will always have the poor with us?

meditations of aservantofJEHOVAH

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