Wednesday 29 March 2023

File under "well said." XCIV

"he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race."

George Schuyler

Robert Shedinger: Darwin’s Sacred Cause Is “Historical Fiction”

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, science-and-religion scholar Robert Shedinger makes the case that a well-known historical work about Charles Darwin, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is deeply misleading. The book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore holds that Darwin was significantly motivated in his scientific work by abolitionist sentiments; and Shedinger says, not so fast. He had spent considerable time reading Darwin’s correspondence and had seen no evidence supporting this thesis, so he reread Darwin’s Sacred Cause, this time tracking down all the key citations the book offered as evidence, and a pattern soon emerged. The sources the authors cite didn’t actually support their thesis. Some were totally irrelevant. Some were cited completely out of context. In other cases, the authors gave the impression that Darwin said something when the comment they attributed to him was stitched together from multiple correspondences and the constituent comments were often about something else altogether. Shedinger says he realized that this biography that looked to be so well documented amounted to “historical fiction.” The effect of the book is to misrepresent Darwin in such a way as to make those who reject Darwinism appear to be opposing a saintly anti-abolitionist.

While Darwin did hold anti-slavery sentiments, they didn’t drive his science and he himself was anything but free from racism. In fact, his case for human evolution partly rested on deeply demeaning racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples. For more on this, see historian Richard Weikart’s book Darwinian Racism.

Also in this episode, Shedinger tells host Michael Keas about how he went from a scholar fully persuaded of Darwinian theory to a skeptic of modern evolutionary theory, attracted to the theory of intelligent design. Shedinger lays out his case against Darwinism in his recent Book The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms. Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Yet another clash of titans.

Copying the original engineer?

Engineering Brings Life and Vice Versa

David Coppedge

I came across an uplifting video about a life-saving invention that encapsulates several running themes about intelligent design. If you can, take 22 minutes to watch this video by Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer. I assure you it will be well worth your time.

The story is uplifting on many levels. How wonderful is it to see former enemies from a major genocide in 1994 having learned how to live together in peace 30 years later? How inspiring is it to see one near victim of that slaughter starting in poverty to become a Harvard engineer and inventor in a company that is saving lives? How beautiful is it to see smiling children mastering soccer with a makeshift ball? How gratifying to prove naysayers wrong, and to show the fruit of well-tested engineering being put to beneficial use in the poorest parts of the world? I was very impressed by this story.

There was one brief statement I will criticize, but otherwise this video made my day, especially since I have relatives in Africa on a medical mission who may soon benefit from this amazing technology. Whether or not you like drones or believe this type of delivery system will change shopping in America (I can see lawyers rubbing their hands), the way the invention is working in Africa right now cannot help but impress. This is the power of ethical intelligent design in action. Let’s look at some lessons from this story.

Biomimetics

The heroes of the story are the birds. They were already masters of takeoff, landing, and pinpoint navigation. An owl was the inspiration for the Zipline drone’s whisper-quiet propeller system. A hummingbird inspired their miniaturized and silent flight control. As I like to say, if the engineers can get their drones to lay eggs and hatch babies with the software and hardware already included, that can grow larger while maintaining function, and power themselves from the environment by ingesting worms, they will really have something to brag about. Bravo to the birds that once again inspired inventors from the Wright Brothers to the high-tech engineers of NASA and Zipline.

Trial and Error with Thinking

As Rober shows, Abdul and his crew had to try and fail many times. They succeeded through the failures and made progress because they applied their minds to problem solving. By thinking, and learning the principles of how things work, elucidated by great minds of the past, they could bring parts together to achieve a goal that first existed only in the mind’s eye. They could envision a concept, experiment, and test possibilities, making progress toward the goal by learning from their failures.

Darwinians tell us that is how natural selection works, but think about it. (In passing, note that thinking also requires a mind.) If nature is mindless and aimless, with no foresight, could it invent a Zipline delivery system, much less a bird as they claim happened? A fundamental ID principle first clearly enunciated by Michael Behe is that irreducibly complex systems defeat the Darwinian mechanism and give positive evidence for intelligent design. We see that in this story implicitly.

Altruistic Design

Another thing the Darwinians continue to teach (examples here and here) is that altruism evolved by natural selection. Indeed, they attribute every noble ideal in human society to this blind, aimless, purposeless “mechanism” that works in bacteria similarly to how (they say) it works in human societies. With their evolutionary game theory models, they divide up members of a population into cooperators and cheaters whose actions are genetically determined by the mechanism, not by morality or by human exceptionalism. But doesn’t this quote from the video knock the air out of that explanation? Rober shows battle scars from the Rwandan genocide, then says,

As horrific as that ways, it galvanized the country to a period of healing and solidarity as a single Rwandan people instead of divisive ethnic groups. For instance, on the last Saturday of the month, literally everyone spends the day picking up trash and volunteering in their local communities. And that’s one of the reasons you hardly see litter anywhere…. There was just a pervasive optimism everywhere. Everyone was moving with a purpose everywhere we went, not just working hard, but working smart with the resources on hand…

For over a decade, attending school up to age 16 has been both mandatory and free. And when you combine that with leapfrogging to new technologies like drone delivery, in the last decade their economy has been growing at four times the rate of the U.S. economy, while their violent crime rate has been 15 times less than the U.S.

Who can say with a straight face that these Rwandan people, recovering from a devastating civil war, are just pawns of evolutionary game theory? Who can say that Abdul, after his near escape from terror that took his family, is no better than a germ cooperating with other bacteria? To even suggest such a notion is to defeat it. That word purpose stands out as anti-Darwinian as anything in the whole video.

This calls for an occasion to promote the new Book Darwin Comes to Africa by Olufemi Oluniyi, who recounts the abominations wrought by the European imperialists who were mostly ardent believers in Social Darwinism. Would Darwinists today draw no distinctions between the altruistic, cooperative black Africans of Rwanda, whose behavior serves as a model for Westerners, than the colony of gorillas Mark Rober visited next in the video? Perish the racist thought. Westerners could learn some lessons from the morals of these friendly people who turned evil into good, and from Abdul whose noble soul did not take the evolutionary route of retaliation for his own personal fitness but instead is today saving the lives of distant people he hasn’t even met.

Teaching Design

Rober bypasses academia at one point. He shares his vision of getting children to build things and learn by doing, realizing that “thinking like an engineer” means breaking things to figure out what works and what doesn’t. How many of the happy children he shows trying to solve simple problems, like getting a ping pong ball to bounce into a boot, will be likely to end up Darwinists? The harder the problem, the more the student will learn that things don’t just happen. Teaching engineering at an early age may prove to be the antidote to Darwinism for the next generation

The Flaw

OK, so what is the lone criticism I have of the video? It’s a throwaway line when Rober claims that “with owls, there’s an evolutionary pressure to be as quiet as possible” as he shows an owl flying imperceptibly past a line of microphones. What can possibly be meant by “evolutionary pressure”? The Darwinist imagines that adaptations are caused by an organism’s surroundings. The Darwinist believes that innovations that are engineering marvels, like powered flight, can emerge this way. For those who maintain that environments have such power, consider a simple illustration. The desert pupfish in Nevada have faced environmental pressure from increasing salinity as their habitats dry up, and now survive high salt concentrations that would kill other fish. Isn’t that “evolutionary pressure” forcing them to adapt? There are several problems with this explanation.

For one thing, a chance mutation that helps a lone pupfish survive increasing salt is not going to aid the individual, but only its offspring. Standard neo-Darwinism teaches that the beneficial mutation needs to occur in the germline, not in somatic cells. Even if epigenetic benefits can be inherited, as has been shown more recently, they cannot happen gradually by random mutations, but involve rewiring of complex genetic circuits. Second, the neo-Darwinian explanation transfers the cause of adaptation to the environment instead of locating it in the organism. This borders on vitalism or personification, as if the environment is pressuring the organism in certain adaptive directions. The environment is mindless; it cannot care what happens. Extinction is a perfectly valid option, as the fossil record shows. Third and most important, the pupfish can only adapt if there is built-in engineering for adaptation prior to need. This presupposes an ability to sense the change, reprogram itself, and alter its own responses. Intelligent design for robustness in changing environments matches what engineers do when they build in redundancy and fail-safe mechanisms, as shown in the video. The owl that flies silently was not “pressured” by “evolution” to adapt its wing feathers. The cause of the adaptation was internal to the owl. That required foresight, not a randomly changing environment.

Enough on that minor flaw in the video. Everything else was spectacularly encouraging for ID advocates. By the way, signups are being taken for the next CELS event (Conference on Engineering in Living Systems) in Texas this June 3-10. Read about it here.

The Uplift

For an upbeat summary, Rober’s ending comment bears repeating.

Here you have Abdul, who bears a scar on his head from the same machete that killed his entire family as a child, not only using his engineering knowledge to save the lives of his people, but more importantly, to inspire the next generation of problem solvers to dream even bigger. It’s the type of thing that leaves you feeling a little bit of that contagious Rwandan optimism for the future and the incredible potential of us mere humans.

Human exceptionalism is real; it is part of our own experience and of human history. We thrive best when using our minds and morals unselfishly to solve problems for the improvement of our world.

AI = the death of art?

File under "well said." XCIII

"We always plan too much and think too little.We resent a call to and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe."

Joseph Schumpeter.

Just smarter apes?

But, But, But … We’re 98% Similar to the Chimp!

Cornelius G Hunter

Transposable elements just don’t make sense. These so-called “jumping genes” are segments of junk DNA that insert themselves at random in our genomes. That is the evolutionary interpretation of these genetic units, but how and why do they move about, and why don’t they wreak havoc on the genome? The answers to these questions, which have been emerging in recent years, is that transposable elements are exquisite, finely-tuned, highly-functional molecular machines that contradict evolutionary expectations. Evolutionists have a long, failed history of presumed disutility—after all, the world arose by chance, surely it doesn’t work very well—and transposable elements are just one more example of this failed prediction. But the junk-to-hero story is only one of three ways that transposable elements utterly demolish evolutionary theory. The other two prongs in this Darwin-destroying triad are serendipity and pattern.

By serendipity, I am referring to the rather awkward findings, which are undeniable at this point, that if evolution is true, then it must have come about by highly complex, non adaptive, mechanisms. From diploid genetics to horizontal gene transfer, alternate gene splicing, genetic regulation, epigenetics, mechanisms that cause adaptive mutations, and transposable elements, evolution must have bumbled along by luckily constructing fantastically complex mechanisms. Those mechanisms would provide no immediate adaptive value, yet somehow would persist and become vital agents in evolutionary history. Simply put, evolution must have created evolution in a most unlikely (astronomically unlikely) set of circumstances. That’s serendipity, not science, and transposable elements heaps more fuel onto the fire.

By pattern, I am referring to another set of awkward findings, again undeniable, that the pattern of structures observed across the species consistently contradicts evolution’s predictions. One of those contradictions are the enormous differences found in otherwise allied species.

All three of these contradictions—disutility, serendipity, and pattern—are on display this week in new, systematic study of transposable elements out of Didier Trono’s lab in Switzerland. The study details the interactions between transposable elements and a class of proteins. The findings indicate the complexity and interdependency of these molecular mechanisms. As the press release admits:

Long considered as junk DNA, transposable elements are now recognized as influencing the expression of genes. … the extent of this regulation and how it is harnessed were so far unknown. EPFL scientists have now taken the first extensive look at a family of ~350 human proteins, showing that they establish a complex interplay with transposable elements … KZFPs can convert transposable elements in exquisitely fine-tuned regulatory platforms that influence the expression of genes, which likely takes place at all stages of development and in all human tissues. … It is a highly combinatorial and versatile system … As a field, epigenetics has come into prominence in recent years, revealing a previously unimagined complexity and elegance in genetics.

Not exactly junk DNA. And of course all of this would require large amounts of serendipity. For evolutionists are now forced to say that transposable elements would have to have played a, err, key role in evolution itself. Evolution would have had to have constructed this highly specific, detailed, system including hundreds of proteins and genetic elements, with hundreds of specific interactions, providing no immediate benefit. As Trono explains:

The vast majority of KZFPs binds to specific motifs in transposable elements. For each KZFP we were able to assign one subset of transposable elements, and also found that one transposable element can often interact with several KZFPs.

Finally, all of this contradicts the expected common descent pattern. This failure has become so common we now have non evolutionary terminology, such as “species-specific” and “lineage-specific.” The paper uses the term “species-restricted”:

KZFPs partner with transposable elements to build a largely species-restricted layer of epigenetic regulation

Species-restricted? In other words, the designs we are discovering in biology are unique to particular species. This is precisely the opposite of what evolution expects. Note also the teleological language (which as usual is evident in the infinitive form): The proteins “partner” with the transposable elements “to build” a largely “species-restricted” layer of epigenetic regulation. This is a classic example of evolution’s absurd creation story language.

The contradictory pattern was, of course, unsuspected. As Trono explains:

KZFPs contribute to make human biology unique. Together with their genomic targets, they likely influence every single event in human physiology and pathology, and do so by being largely species-specific -- the general system exists in many vertebrates, but most of its components are different in each case. … This paper lifts the lid off something that had been largely unsuspected: the tremendous species-specific dimension of human gene regulation.

Yes, it was largely unsuspected. For what these findings reveal is a tremendous species-specific dimension of human gene regulation. In other words, we would need proteins and genetic elements to evolve, via independent and yet interdependent, random mutations, to construct an entirely new set of genetic regulation instructions. This is astronomically unlikely, no matter how many millions of years are available. From a scientific perspective, these findings demolish evolution.

meditations of aservantofJEHOVAH

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