The pagan roots of catholicism?

 

The origin of life remains the main pressure point re:teleology in nature.

 

JEHOVAH'S glory demystified.

  

Heb. 1:3 / Isa. 42:8 Does Jesus really share JEHOVAH'S Glory?

Is. 42:8 - "I am the LORD [JEHOVAH - ASV]: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images" - KJV.

Heb. 1:3 - "[Jesus] being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person...sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" - KJV.

After quoting the above two verses, some trinitarians will claim that they prove that Jesus is JEHOVAH. They claim that if JEHOVAH will not share his glory with anyone else, then Jesus must be JEHOVAH because he shares JEHOVAH'S glory.

Well, first we should note that others have "shared" or reflected JEHOVAH'S glory. For example, the angel at Luke 2:9 appeared with "the glory of the LORD." God was not physically present, but the angel He personally sent to represent him was there with God's reflected glory to identify him as being from God and representing God. This particular angel was not even Jesus since Jesus had already been born on earth (verse 11). We see a similar thing at Rev. 21:10, 11 where the city of holy Jerusalem has descended from God and has the glory of God! That is how it can be identified as being from God: It has the glory of God!

Why, even some Christians will reflect God's glory: 2 Cor. 3:7-18. And Jesus himself said that the glory which the Father had given him he had also given to his followers! - John 17:22.

So it certainly appears that God allows his glory to be with others who represent him as a sign of the authority He has given them and who do not represent that glory as being their very own.

But there is something else that makes the trinitarian argument incredibly poor (if not downright dishonest). That is the actual meaning of "glory." You see, "glory" meant, even as it does today, two different things. Often it meant "honor" or "praise" which a person has earned. On occasion, however, the same word meant the visible, brilliant light radiating from something or someone.

So we can see that Isaiah also uses this meaning at Is. 60:1-3 where "shine," "light," "brightness" are used in conjunction with God's "glory" and that glory (`kaw-bode' in the Hebrew) will be seen. We find this same meaning at Acts 7:55 (where the glory was seen), Luke 2:9 (where the glory 'shone' all around them). Obviously, a visible light-radiating type of glory is intended at these places.

But at Is. 42:12 and 43:7 we can see that the same Hebrew word "kaw-bode" clearly means "honor" or "praise." In fact, that same Hebrew word ("kaw-bode") is even translated as "honour" at Ps. 66:2 (and 30 other places in the KJV).

Even today in modern English we have those same two meanings for "glory." 

(1) "Praise, honor, or distinction accorded by common consent; renown," and (2) "Brilliancy; splendor." - Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, ("Glory").

For example, we might say that the Nobel Prize winner did not want to share the glory with another scientist who had merely copied some of his scientific work. "Glory" in this sense is not a visible brightness or radiance he gives off but the recognition, honor, and praise he will receive. The glory of a beautiful sunset, however, is a visual brightness or beauty which others receive or observe.

So which meaning was intended at Is. 42:8? (1) A shining visible "glory" given off by someone or (2) "praise" and "honor" owed to someone?

Well we can see from how it's used at Is. 42:8 that it clearly means "praise" or "honor" - "I am [JEHOVAH]: that is my name [see Ps. 83:18] and my glory [`kaw-bode'] will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images." This style of writing is very common in the Holy Scriptures. It is called parallelism because similar (or parallel) meanings are written (in different words) beside each other.

For example: the familiar verse at Is. 9:6 begins "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." You can easily see that the second clause ("unto us a son is given") is parallel (similar in meaning) to the first clause ("unto us a child is born").

We can see, then, that the entire verse at Is. 42:8 is about the honor that is due God alone. Jehovah starts the verse by declaring his name (to which he has said honor is due forever - Ps. 83:18; Ps. 86:9; Ps. 113:1-3; Ps. 145:21; Ezek. 39:6, 7). He then follows that with the parallelism: (1) "my glory [`kaw-bode'] I will not give to another" and (2) "neither my praise to graven images." Clearly the word "glory" (paralleled by "praise" in the next statement of this verse) here means "praise" or "honor." - see Is. 42:12, 17.

And just as clearly, we can see that the word "glory" at Heb. 1:3 means the visible radiance given off by him (as with the angel of Luke 2:9 who reflected God's glory). - see Heb. 1:3 in TEV, NIV. In fact, some modern trinitarian Bibles even translate Heb. 1:3 as "He reflects the glory of God" - RSV (compare NAB; MLB; GNB; and Moffatt's translation).

Therefore, if God said "I shall not share the praise or honor due me" at Is. 42:8, what kind of "evidence" is it to point out that Jesus reflects God's visible radiance at Heb. 1:3?

The spectre of the cambrian explosion continues to loom over Darwinism

 Fossil Friday: Hemichordate Body Plan and Lifecycle Goes Back to the Cambrian Explosion

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday we will discuss the abrupt origin of yet another animal phylum during the famous Cambrian Explosion. It is the marine invertebrate phylum Hemichordata, which is represented by the pterobranchs (including the extinct graptolites) and the acorn worms (enteropneusts) as well as the enigmatic Planctosphaeroidea, which might just be planktic larva of some unknown deep sea acorn worms. Like chordates, hemichordates are deuterostome animals and considered to be the closest relatives (sister group) of echinoderms such as sea urchins and starfish. They have a tripartite body with three body cavities. While pterobranchs are sessile filter feeders, acorn worms are detritivores living in U-shaped burrows in the sea floor. The fossil record of Hemichordata goes back to the Early/Middle Cambrian (Maletz 2014, Nanglu et al. 2020).

The oldest known hemichordate and oldest pterobranch is the zooid fossil Galeaplumosus abilus from the 525-518 million year old Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Konservat-Lagerstätte of southern China (Hou et al. 2011, also see Hou et al. 2017).

Only very few fossil enteropneusts have been described yet in just eight fossil species (Cameron 2018, Yang et al. 2024) from the Cambrian (Walcott 1911, Caron et al. 2013, Nanglu et al. 2016, Yang et al. 2024), the Carboniferous (Bardack 1997, Maletz 2014, Cameron 2016), and the Jurassic periods (Arduini et al. 1984, Alessandrello et al. 2004, Bechly & Frickhinger 1999). Possible trace fossils of acorn worms have been reported from the Lower Triassic of Italy by Twitchett (1996). This rarity is quite remarkable because some other soft-bodied worm-like organisms that burrow in the sea floor are much better represented in the fossil record. Actually, the only enteropneust specimen from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria in Germany was described by myself as Mesobalanoglossus buergeri (also see Bechly 2015). The featured image shows the holotype specimen (no. SNSB-BSPG 1998-I-15), which is 68.8 cm long and 2.6 cm wide, and deposited at the Natural History Museum in Munich.

Abrupt Appearance, Yet Again

Recently, 39 specimens of the previously unknown acorn worm Cambrobranchus pelagobenthos were described from the Hayiyan Lagerstätte in China (Yang et al. 2024), which belongs to the famous Lower Cambrian Chengjiang biota. The scientists could also describe larvae and juveniles and thereby document the characteristic indirect development with a pelago-benthic lifestyle already for these earliest known representatives of acorn worms.

Thus, both major subgroups of the phylum Hemichordata are known from Lower Cambrian fossils with completely modern morphology and life cycle, which confirms the overall pattern of the abrupt appearance of animal phyla in the Cambrian Explosion. Furthermore, the putative stem-hemichordate Gyaltsenglossus senis was described by Nanglu et al. (2020) from the Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada. However, with an estimated age of 506 million years, it is 10-20 million years younger than the oldest crown group representatives discussed above and thus requires an ad hoc explanation in terms of ghost lineages to be accommodated within a Darwinian paradigm

References

Alessandrello A, Bracchi G & Riou B 2004. Polychaete, sipunculan and enteropneust worms from the Lower Callovian (Middle Jurassic) of La Voulte-sur-Rhône (Ardèche, France). Memoire della Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano (Fascicolo I) 32, 1–16.

Arduini P, Pinna G & Terruzzi G 1981. Megaderaion sinemuriense n.g. n.sp., a new fossil enteropneust of the Sinemurian of Osteno in Lombardy. Atti della Societa Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano 122(1-2), 104–108. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/325194

Bardack D 1997. Wormlike animals: Enteropeusta. pp. 89–92 in: Shabica CW & Hay AA (eds). Richardson’s Guide to the fossil fauna of Mazon Creek. Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago (IL), 308 pp.

Bechly G 2015. [Chapter] Eichelwürmer (Hemichordata: Enteropneusta). p. 324 in: Arratia G, Schultze HP, Tischlinger H & Viohl G (eds). Solnhofen – Ein Fenster in die Jurazeit. 2 vols. Pfeil Verlag, Munich (Germany), 620 pp. [In German] https://pfeil-verlag.de/publikationen/solnhofen-ein-fenster-in-die-jurazeit/

Bechly G & Frickhinger KA 1999. Acorn worms. pp. 76–79 in: Frickhinger KA (ed.). The Fossils of Solnhofen 2: New specimens, new details, new results. Goldschneck-Verlag, Korb (Germany), 190 pp. [German PDF]

Cameron CB 2016. Saccoglossus testa from the Mazon Creek fauna (Pennsylvanian of Illinois) and the evolution of acorn worms (Enteropneusta: Hemichordata). Palaeontology 59(3), 329–336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12235

Cameron CB 2018. Class Enteropneusta: Introduction, Morphology, Life Habits, Systematic Descriptions, and Future Research. Treatise Online 109, 1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17161/to.v0i0.7889 (dead link)

Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Cameron CB 2013. Tubicolous enteropneusts from the Cambrian period. Nature 495, 503–506. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12017

Hou X-g, Aldridge RJ, Siveter DJ, Siveter DJ, Williams M, Zalasiewicz J & Ma X-y 2011. An Early Cambrian Hemichordate Zooid. Current Biology 21(7), 612–616. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.005

Hou X-g, Siveter DJ, Siveter DJ, Aldridge RJ, Cong P-y, Gabbott SE, Ma X-y, Purnell MA & Williams M 2017. Hemichordata. Chapter 22, pp. 250–251 in: The Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China: The Flowering of Early Animal Life. 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (UK) / Hoboken (NJ), xii+316 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118896372.ch22

Maletz J 2014. Hemichordata (Pterobranchia, Enteropneusta) and the fossil record. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 398, 16–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2013.06.010

Nanglu K, Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Cameron CB 2016. Cambrian suspension-feeding tubicolous hemichordates. BMC Biology 14: 56, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-016-0271-4

Nanglu K, Caron J-B & Cameron CB 2020. Cambrian Tentaculate Worms and the Origin of the Hemichordate Body Plan. Current Biology 30(21), 4238–4244.e1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.078

Twitchett RJ 1996. The Resting Trace of an Acorn-Worm (Class: Enteropneusta) from the Lower Triassic. Journal of Paleontology 70(1), 128–131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1306375

Walcott CD 1911. Cambrian Geology and Paleontology II: No. 5 – Middle Cambrian annelids. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 57, 109–145. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/34820

Yang X, Kimmig J, Cameron CB, Nanglu K, Kimmig SR, de Carle D, Zhang C, Yu M & Peng S 2024. An early Cambrian pelago-benthic acorn worm and the origin of the hemichordate larva. Palaeontologia Electronica 27(1): a17, 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26879/1356

Perfect solar eclipses and the case for design.

 To Understand the Meaning of a Solar Eclipse

Jay W Richards

The sun and the moon are not just the same shape, but the same apparent size in the sky. It’s this happy arrangement that produces total solar eclipses as seen from the earth’s surface.

Americans got a chance to view such an eclipse on Monday — an event we won’t see again from coast to coast until 2045. The moon’s 115-mile wide central shadow entered Texas from Mexico around 12:29 p.m. over Eagle Pass before grazing the edge of San Antonio, and then passing over Dallas-Ft. Worth. It continued on a northeasterly pass over 11 other states until it reached Maine. (You can find the precise path at NationalEclipse.com.)

In a total solar eclipse, just before “totality,” the last bright bit of the sun’s photosphere looks like a pink diamond in an engagement ring. When the moon covers the sun’s disk, the sky goes dark; the temperature drops; the stars appear. Bugs and animals get confused and go quiet or start squawking. And the dim outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona, reaches out from the black lunar disk like the gray iris of an eye with a black pupil in the middle. At that point you can take off your protective glasses and see it with your naked eyes.

Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez (my co-author on The Privileged Planet) and I provided live commentary for an eclipse viewing in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas — where totality lasted four minutes and 19 seconds. (You can find highlights at X on the @DiscoveryCSC feed.)

In order for a total solar eclipse to occur, the moon, sun, and Earth have to line up in a straight line. When the moon passes in front of the sun, you can see an eclipse if you’re in the path of the moon’s shadow.

Those fully in the shadow — the umbra — see the moon cover the sun. If you’re just outside that path, you see a partial eclipse — the penumbra. The difference between a partial and total eclipse is like the difference between day and night. It’s impossible to capture with mere words the experience of seeing a total eclipse. But words can help us ponder its meaning.

Finely Tuned

The sun is a giant ball of gas and plasma. The moon is a much smaller rock. And yet, during a total eclipse, they mark off the same space in our sky. They match. On Earth, we can see not just total eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses.

The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun. But the moon is also about 400 times closer to the earth than is the sun. As a result, the size of the moon matches the size of the sun from our perspective. And since they appear as round disks, they match in both size and shape.

Physics doesn’t require this arrangement. There are 65 major moons in our solar system and many smaller ones. But only we enjoy perfect solar eclipses when a moon just barely covers the sun’s bright photosphere. If there were life forms on Mars or Jupiter, they wouldn’t see such eclipses.

So the best place to view total solar eclipses in our solar system is just where there are observers to see them. Let that sink in a minute.

A Habitable Planet

Most astronomers chalk this up to coincidence. And yet, without this precise arrangement of the earth, the moon, and the sun, we probably wouldn’t exist.

Let me explain. For lots of reasons, a planet almost surely needs liquid water on its surface to host complex life. Almost all places in the solar system and in the universe are either way too hot or way too cold for this. To be “habitable,” a planet needs to be in the “Goldilocks Zone” around its star: not too hot and not too cold. Think of this zone as a narrow, nearly circular ring of space around a star. (Netflix’s Three-Body Problem is fun science fiction, but any planet in a three-star system would almost surely be lifeless.)

The earth is, of course, safely inside the Goldilocks Zone. And as a result, the sun appears to be a certain size in our sky.

Our large, well-placed moon also plays a key role in making Earth habitable by stabilizing the tilt of its axis. That gives our planet a more stable climate. The moon also contributes to Earth’s ocean tides, which mix nutrients from the land into the oceans. The two tiny moons around Mars are much too small to serve in this role. As a result, Mars wobbles on its axis far more than the earth does. That’s bad news for Martians.

Now put these two facts together.

When a planet, like Earth, is in the cozy, life-friendly zone around a star, that star will appear to be a certain size in its sky.

A habitable planet like Earth also needs to have a moon of a certain size in its sky to create the right amount of gravitational pull to stabilize the planet.

Not just “certain” sizes, but nearly the same apparent sizes. So, two of the key ingredients for building a habitable planet also produce perfect eclipses for observers on that planet.

Our Eclipses Are a Gold Mine for Science 

That alone seems fishy. But there’s more: Our ability to see perfect solar eclipses has played a pivotal role in several major scientific discoveries. Those discoveries would have been hard to make on the planets that don’t enjoy such eclipses.

First, eclipses helped us unlock the mystery of stars.

Scientists since Isaac Newton (1666) have known that sunlight splits into all the colors of the rainbow when passed through a prism. But only in the 19th century did astronomers begin to observe solar eclipses with spectroscopes, which use prisms. This allowed them to discover how the sun produces its light.

The beginning and end of totality present the best chances to examine the thin middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, called the chromosphere. It shines in the ruby-red light of hydrogen gas heated to more than 20,000° Celsius (36,000° Fahrenheit). Just beyond the moon’s silhouette during an eclipse, observers may also see solar prominences: brilliant red arcs, loops, and jets of hot gas propelled by the explosive release of the sun’s magnetic energy.

All of this gave astronomers a way to figure out the structure of the sun itself. Since the sun looks larger from the earth than from any other planet with a moon, we can discern finer details in its chromosphere and corona than we could from any other planet.

This knowledge, in turn, has allowed astronomers to make sense of the light from the distant stars. Perfect eclipses, then, have been a key that allowed us to unlock the physics of stars.

Testing Einstein’s Theory

Eclipses have done far more than help astronomers decipher starlight, however.

In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein predicted in his General Theory of Relativity that light passing near a massive object like the sun would be visibly bent. To test his theory, astronomers needed to measure the changes in the positions of starlight passing near the sun’s edge compared to their positions months later when the sun was in another part of the sky.

Have you ever tried to look at starlight right next to the edge of the sun? It’s a bad idea and wouldn’t work anyway. The test could only be done during a total solar eclipse. That’s why, during the 1919 eclipse, two teams of astronomers set out to confirm Einstein’s theory.

They succeeded, as did other astronomers during later eclipses. This led scientists to embrace Einstein’s theory, which is the basis of our current knowledge of the universe.

Conspiracy, Not Coincidence

There’s far more to this story. Indeed, the perfect eclipses we enjoy are just one of many examples of an eerie pattern Gonzalez and I discuss in detail in The Privileged Planet. That pattern points to a startling conclusion: Life-friendly places like Earth are also the best places, overall, for doing science. That is, the rare places where observers can exist are also the best overall places for observing. The universe seems to be designed not just for life but also for discovery.

Genesis 1 says that God created lights in the sky for “signs.” One of those signs has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Darwinism's God?

 Was God a Bacterium? 

Daniel Witt

University of Bonn biologist František Baluška has an explanation for the apparent design in biology. He believes that there was design involved in evolution — yet not from an outside designer, but from the organisms themselves. He maintains that all living organisms are sentient, even down to simplest bacteria, and that they used their minds to evolve.

You read that right. And it’s not a mischaracterization of his views. For example, here’s how Baluška and his collaborators William B. Miller Jr. and Arthur S. Reber summarize the thesis in a recent paper1:

The first eukaryotic cells emerged some 2–1.5 billion years ago, which implies that it took nearly two billion years to get from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells. Our cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model states that all living cells utilize cellular sentience to survive and evolve. We argue that the prolonged timeline to evolve eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells was necessitated by the complex level of evolutionary novelty required to assemble unitary consciousness from several formerly independent prokaryotic versions of cellular consciousness, as successive orders of cognition…Once an initiating eukaryotic threshold of cognition was attained, eukaryotic evolution (based on its novel eukaryotic version of cellular sentience and cognition) proceeded relatively rapidly alongside an active unicellular sphere, including a huge diversity of protozoa and other protists that has thrived and evolved until our present day. Some 0.8 billion years ago, and on several occasions, colonial protists invented the multicellular forms that evolved into fungi, animals, and plants, emerging first in the sea and later also on land. Cellular cognition enabled multicellularity and permitted its successful continuous evolution toward the higher level of cohesive cellular complexities exhibited in multicellular organisms, with symbiotic fungal–plant/tree roots networks representing one of its most extensively integrated forms.

Notice the use of the word “invented.” For once, this is not a case of sloppy language or the tendency to anthropomorphize natural selection. They are really saying that protists invented complex multicellular life, using their minds. First life evolved the ability to think; then it used that ability to evolve everything else. As they put it later on: “Evolutionary development is creative not only through either mutations or natural selection but also — and mainly — through the linked cognitive activities and preferences of individual organisms.”

Poetic License? 

Peter Corning, an editor of the volume in which the paper appears, seems a little wary of going all-in on the idea of conscious microorganisms. In his introductory essay to the volume, he says that biologists who say primordial organisms exhibit sensation, choosing, and mind are exercising “poetic license.” 

Poetic license is well and good — in poetry. But poetry does not cut it as scientific explanation. If the idea of primordial consciousness is mere poetry, it does not explain. If, on the other hand, it is not mere poetry… well, that is something very astonishing. It speaks either to a non-physical intellect, or else to a level of ordered complexity much harder to account for than the complex systems it is invoked to explain away in the first place. Neither option is quite tolerable, apparently, so Corning seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. Primordial “consciousness” can be invoked to get past the nasty difficulties with neo-Darwinism, but if it’s called out as too ridiculous, or demanding explanation, that charge can be brushed away with “poetic license.”

At any rate, I see no evidence that Baluška and his colleagues are being the least bit poetical. They make it very clear that what they are talking about is literally mind, cognition, consciousness, sentience — terms they seem to use interchangeably. They attribute mind to primordial organisms, and attribute evolution to the decisions made by these minds. 

Elsewhere, Baluška and Reber write, “let us be clear about what we mean by sentience or consciousess [sic] as it is manifested in unicellular species. We are referring to feelings, subjective states, a primitive awareness of events, including an awareness of internal states.”

But How Does It Work? 

We should acknowledge that this theory is, unlike some similar attempts, at least an actual solution: if true, it would explain how complex life evolved. However, in solving that problem, Baluška and his colleagues create another, equally formidable problem: how does this primordial sentience work, and where did it come from? 

While there does appear to be evidence that plants, fungi, protozoans, bacteria, and archaea respond to the world in a manner that is much more like “thinking” than we are typically taught to believe, there is a lot of mystery about how they do it. The following explanation, from the first paper, is typical:

The plasma membrane provides all cells with a sheltered space, allowing exotic biophysical phenomena based on charged ions, reactive oxygen species, and bioelectric as well as biomagnetic phenomena.

Throw in a random assortment of poorly understood phenomena, and boom! you have consciousness. Of course, the authors would admit that the exact mechanisms of cellular consciousness are still poorly understood. That’s fine. But do they really think that once they uncover the details of these primordial minds, those minds will be easier to explain naturalistically than, say, the bacterial flagellum?

A Cure Worse than the Disease

The thing is, if we ever came down to hard details about what Baluška et al. are proposing, all the old design arguments would still be waiting to be dealt with. There is no reason to hope that “cellular cognition,” “plant neurons,” or a “fungal mind” is less likely to be irreducibly complex or require foresight in its engineering than any other biological system. Actually, it would probably be much more complex than most. 

Essentially, what these researchers are doing is taking the most advanced and perplexing system in biology, the brain, and putting it at the beginning of the evolutionary process instead of the end. That’s a fascinating theory, and they are to be commended for their courage and willingness to think outside the box. If true, it’s revolutionary. But it’s not going to make things easier on unguided evolution.

For now, it might make things easier on scientists who prefer to hide from design arguments rather than face them head on. But in the end, there is no escaping the fact that if this theory is true it speaks to a level of design in nature far more exquisite and improbable than anything hitherto dreamt of. 

Notes

Baluška, František, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber. “Cellular Basis of Cognition and Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks.” In Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems, edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross. 33-58. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023. 

Synergies did it?

 Synergies All the Way Down 

Daniel Witt

The turn of the 21st century saw the publications of several works that challenged the theoretical basis of Darwin’s theory, notably Darwin’s Black Box (1996), by Michael Behe, and The Design Inference (1998) and No Free Lunch (2001) by William Dembski. The books were generally ignored or disparaged in the evolutionary biology community. Yet around that time (no doubt by coincidence) the search began for a “grand unified theory” of evolution, that would provide “some single principle or some small set of principles” to explain the tendency of life to become more complex. 

Of course, “natural selection and random variation” was supposed to be that single principle. But unofficially, Darwin’s unifying theory had been deemed inadequate, and the quest was on for something that actually worked. 

Evolutionary biologist Peter Corning seems to be rather annoyed by this quest. After giving a summary of the state of things (including the quotes above), Corning writes that there already is such a unifying theory, and he invented it.1 It was proposed decades ago in his 1983 book The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution. 

This is how Corning explains his theory:

Synergistic selection refers to the many contexts in nature where two or more genes/genomes/individuals have a shared fate; their combined effects are functionally interdependent…Although it may seem like backwards logic, the thesis is that functional synergy is the cause of cooperation and complexity in living systems, not the other way around.

The idea is that pre-existing systems combine to make more complex systems, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Examples of synergy cited by Corning include: self-replicating molecules enclosed in cell walls; chromosomes linking those self-replicating molecules together relationally; the genetic code connecting RNA, DNA, and proteins; eukaryotes created by the absorption of one prokaryote into another; multicellularity; sexual reproduction; emperor penguins huddling together for warmth. 

Foresight, or Synergy? 

If you survey this list, you may notice something. Most of the examples are used by ID proponents, but for a different purpose — to point to the principle of planning or foresight in living systems. When a system requires many complex interworking parts to function, this can’t be explained by minor innovations building up over time, except perhaps by an insanely lucky fluke; another principle besides Darwin’s mechanism is needed, and that principle is design. 

Or perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s “synergy”?

Corning believes that this principle explains the complex interdependency of living systems, without the need for a designer. He sees his model as a Darwinian theory. It’s not that Darwinism needed replacing: it was just missing an ingredient, and synergy is that ingredient. 

Solving the Problem, or Just Describing It?

Okay, that’s a theory… or is it? Is synergy an explanation, or merely a description? The term “synergy” points to the reality that organisms are wholes much greater than the sum of their parts, with the parts working together in a symphony of complex relationships. It does not, in and of itself, explain how that came to be. The final cause is left unspecified. 

You can see this in the fact that Corning mixes up cases of synergy that are clearly caused by an identifiable intelligent mind (e.g., emperor penguins huddling together for warmth) with cases where no such mind is apparent (e.g., the appearance of chromosomes to connect genes together). In the case of the emperor penguins, penguin intelligence is the explanation for the penguin huddle. The synergy happens because they decide they want it to happen, using their intelligence. Can RNA, DNA, proteins, and cell membranes do the same? 

Yes or no? Neither answer helps Darwinian evolution out much. If the answer is yes, that’s truly remarkable, and itself requires intelligent design, since all the usual design arguments would apply to this undoubtedly complex (though apparently hidden) molecular intellect. If the answer is no, Corning has done nothing but describe the situation. He has not explained it. Yes — RNA, DNA, proteins, and cell membranes work together in beautiful synchronization to create a system greater than the sum of its parts — well and good, but how did this come to be?

Without foresight, why should two complex, compatible systems be sitting there, ready-made and waiting to be combined in intricate ways to form something greater? There is no reason implicit in the laws of nature why they should be. And the odds of it happening by chance, through a single random variation at a time, are not likely to be any better than the odds of simply building the whole system that way. If, on the other hand, the systems are not designed to be compatible, how are they to come together? How could evolution do the necessary random tinkering, a vast amount of it, without destroying the functionality of one or both systems?

If you doubt the difficulty of this, take a couple of man-made machines and try to combine them, preserving function in every step of the process. It’s not easy, even though you are using intelligent design to do it — unless the two machines were intentionally designed to be compatible.  

The funny thing is, these are the standard arguments for intelligent design in biology. Corning only calls attention to the problem. He does not solve it, because in the end his explanation just backs the question. He deals with the improbability of design by explaining it through synergy, not caring that this synergy is itself a design marvel in need of explanation. And why should he care? No doubt that design marvel can be explained by synergy, too — and on and on, back into the misty dawn of life where nothing is visible and therefore nothing needs to be explained.

“It’s Turtles All the Way Down”

Corning concludes his paper with a familiar story. He writes:

There is a story attributed to the famed twentieth century philosopher Bertrand Russell about a public lecture in which he discussed various properties of the Solar System. At the end of his lecture, an elderly woman in the audience approached him and told him he was wrong. The sun is held up on a turtle’s back, she said. A startled Russell responded by asking her, so what holds up the turtle? “You think you’re so clever,” she replied. “It’s turtles all the way down.” So what explains the rise of complexity in evolution? From the perspective of the Synergism Hypothesis and Synergistic Selection, it’s synergies all the way up.

Honestly, it’s a bit perplexing that he would choose such an example to sum up his views. The tone of his writing here is triumphant, but doesn’t he realize that the old woman is supposed to be either foolish, crazy, or pulling Russell’s leg?

I’m also not quite sure why he substitutes “up” for “down” in the phrase “synergies all the way up.” There is no logical reason to do so. You can envision the process of evolution from either direction, just as you can look at a stack of turtles from either above or below. Our actual perspective, however, is from the top, and we are looking down into the past in search of the final cause of complex systems. So the original phrasing is really more fitting. 

One has to wonder if Corning changed the word due to a subconscious realization that there was a rhetorical risk in drawing attention to the parallel between himself and Russell’s crazy turtle lady. But mixing up the phrasing isn’t going to solve that problem, because the logic is the same. “Synergies all the way down” may be good enough for Corning, but some of us would like to know what it all rests on.

Notes

Corning, Peter A. “Teleonomy in Evolution: “The Ghost in the Machine”.” In Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems, edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross. 11-31. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2023.

I evolved therefore I am not?