Asexual reproduction vs. Darwin

 

More on the fall of the kingdom of the gene.

 

The kingdom of the gene has fallen?

 

Neanderthals: disinherited no more? II

 Neanderthals May Be “Same Species” As Us

Evolution News

At ScienceAlert, David Nield Reports on a new study from the University of Padua:

Our species is defined by a long list of cultural and genetic traits that set us apart from our ancient counterparts.

New research suggests at least some key distinctions date back earlier than previously estimated, hinting that modern and archaic humans — including our close, extinct relatives — have more in common than we ever thought.

“Our results point to a scenario where Modern and Archaic should be regarded as populations of an otherwise common human species, which independently accumulated mutations and cultural innovations,” writes a team of researchers led by biologist Luca Pagani from the University of Padova in Italy. 

“Archaic Humans Might Actually Be The Same Species as Us, Study Suggests,” January 7, 2025

Or, as Justin Jackson puts it at Phys.org, “Findings challenge traditional models that attribute certain genetic innovations exclusively to modern Homo sapiens. Similarities observed in both modern and archaic human genomes suggest many hallmarks of the Homo sapiens genetic landscape arose before the lineages split.”

Coalescence Analyses and Molecular Clock Assessments

Specifically, the abstract of the open-access preprint reads,

Homo sapiens diverged from its ancestors in fundamental ways, reflected in recent genomic acquisitions like the PAR2-Y chromosome translocation. Here we show that despite morphological and cultural differences between modern and archaic humans, these human groups share these recent acquisitions. Our modern lineage shows recent functional variants in only 56 genes, of which 24 are linked to brain functions and skull morphology. 

Luca Pagani et al., Partitioning the genomic journey to becoming Homo sapiens, bioRxiv (2024)

Using coalescence analyses and molecular clock assessments, the researchers reconstructed a timeline of genetic events, according to which a population bottleneck of humans occurred about 900,000 years ago. Then modern humans diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 650,000 years ago. And they also mingled again about 350,000 years ago.

This version of human history counters the usual tendency to keep Neanderthals and Denisovans separate from modern humans — most likely because in an evolution-based scheme, someone must be the subhuman. 

And now who will researchers draft for that role?

Why gradualism is a loose cannon on Darwinism's deck

 

The undead continue to prowl Darwinism's badlands.

 Darwin’s Zombies Are Still Shambling Along

David Coppedge

The Icons of Evolution that Dr Jonathan Wells wrote about 24 years ago have not been put out of our misery. Like denizens of Zombie Science, they keep reappearing in popular science articles, cartoons, and even scientific journals. The perpetrators should know better. There is no excuse for perpetuating the mythic fables that Darwinians have used to popularize just-so stories of how natural selection supposedly works (but doesn’t under the spotlight).

Two of the icons appeared in publications recently. The old stories are retold without remorse, in spite of the fact that new evidence contradicts them.

The Peppered Myth Still Walks

Perhaps word of the falsification of the peppered myth has not yet reached the Far East. That’s doubtful, but the University of Michigan co-authors of a new study that could have told their colleagues in Singapore and Japan not to write as if the peppered myth is still a valid case of natural selection. News from the University of Singapore says bluntly,

Lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) exhibit a splendid diversity of wing colour patterns, and many species display black and white, or dark and bright, wing colour pattern variants associated with the presence and absence of melanin. Many of these wing colour pattern variants are textbook examples of natural selection and evolution. Iconic examples include the rapid increase in frequency of the melanic form of the British peppered moth Biston betularia, driven by the sootier and darker environment caused by carbon burning and industrialisation in the late 1800s in the United Kingdom, and the mimetic radiation of Heliconius butterflies, among others. 

Can this be dismissed as a minor slip? Did they perhaps mean that peppered moths “were” or “used to be” textbook examples of natural selection and evolution? Clearly not; the press release includes a YouTube video by Antonia Monteiro, one of the co-authors of the paper in Science.1 The narrator calls it a “classic Darwinian story of natural selection.” The video repeats the peppered myth in all its gory, hoary just-so story form, claiming that the coloration provided camouflage as the moths rested on tree trunks and that nature selected them because color changes helped them evade predators — false claims made by Kettlewell and never substantiated since. We remind everyone that both light and dark moths are variants of the same species: Biston betularia.There was no origin of species. In the quote, they state that “many species” display dark and light “variants” yet they call these “textbook examples of natural selection and evolution.” Within species? How is that kind of selection going to get brains from bacteria?

What’s ironic is that the scientific findings undermine natural selection as the cause of the color variants. As I mentioned in a recent article, researchers have been finding that microRNAs and noncoding RNAs are likely responsible for the color changes — not mutations to the cortex gene or to any other gene. This new paper identifies a particular microRNA named mir-193, a derivative of ivory, a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), as the regulatory switch that turns on light or dark coloration. The outcome depends on the switch’s interaction with ivory or with the mRNA transcript of another gene called ebony. 

The video illogically says, 

It appears that the mutations that regulate the presence and absence of ivory and mir-193 across many different species are the go-to mutations that are repeatedly used to create the dark/light polymorphisms in insects.

Do the moths (or a blind Selector) “use” mutations to “create” on purpose? These are not genetic mutations assumed in neo-Darwinism. They are switches present in all butterflies that can produce one polymorphism or another. In the case of peppered moths, both the dark and light forms existed before and after the industrial revolution. All the story demonstrated, therefore, was “a shift in the proportions of two existing varieties of the same species,” as Wells stated in Zombie Science (p. 64). And it was not demonstrated, Wells goes on to say, that the moths routinely rest on tree trunks or that predation by birds altered the proportions of the pre-existing varieties. 

This is hardly a classic case of natural selection, therefore, and certainly not an instance of the origin of species. The new research merely finds a regulatory switching mechanism that can produce dark or light polymorphisms within species. MicroRNA transcripts of noncoding RNAs are likely implicated in variability in other animals as well.

Overall, our study identified a miRNA, processed from the primary transcript of a lncRNA, as the likely effector of a hotspot locus that underlies adaptive evolution in animals. This adds to a recent discovery of small noncoding RNAs being key regulators of adaptive flower color evolution and speciation. The burst of miRNA innovation at the base of Lepidoptera may have served as evolutionary raw materials to create a gamut of morphological diversity within this order, one of the most species-rich on earth.

This Is Not Your Grandpa’s Darwinism

The authors never mention genetic mutations, selection, inheritance, or fitness. The paper never says that phenotypic plasticity helps moths avoid predators. And Darwin the gradualist would have shuddered at any “burst of innovation” at the base of a taxonomic group. The authors did not witness a burst of innovation. They only asserted it. 

This and future investigations of noncoding RNAs will shed light on the long-standing hypothesis that it is the complexity of swiftly evolving noncoding components of the genome (cis-acting regulatory DNA elements and trans-acting noncoding RNAs), rather than the relatively static evolution of protein sequences, that drives organismal complexity

Here again they assert “swiftly evolving” parts of the genome without proof. The old gradualistic neo-Darwinism, updated for modern genetics, would only have produced “relatively static evolution of protein sequences” by mutations. Complexity within a species, genus or family because of regulatory elements is not the same as universal common ancestry due to natural selection of random mutations. How, then, can this be a “textbook example of natural selection and evolution” as the authors claim in the press release? The paper doesn’t even mention natural selection.

The authors do not say what cues — whether environmental or otherwise — trigger action by the mir-193 regulatory switch. They mention four times that the colors are “adaptive” in some way, but non-Darwinian interpretations are possible: genetic drift, or (as some ID researchers are proposing) internal engineering: i.e., switches that can be triggered by environmental cues. The return of the light-colored peppered moths after the industrial revolution suggests that the switching is reversible. Connecting the activity of miRNAs and lncRNAs to environmental cues sounds like a good follow-up experiment for non-Darwinian scientists.

The Miller Myth Still Walks

It the same issue, Science trotted out another zombie icon for celebration: the Miller experiment.2 In Darwinian style, Antonion Lazcano’s article, “On the origins of organisms,” praises both Aleksander Oparin and Stanley Miller. “The heterotrophic theory of the origin of life turns 100,” the subtitle announces triumphantly. Oparin’s 1924 book, The Origin of Life,

proposed that life had emerged in an oxygen-free primitive environment that led to the synthesis and accumulation of organic compounds that subsequently formed gel-like droplets from which the first heterotrophic organisms evolved. The volume became quite popular among student associations, workers’ clubs, and biology teachers, and the small edition quickly sold out, never to be reprinted. On its 100th anniversary, Oparin’s visionary work is worth revisiting.

Oparin the Marxist, who had been influenced by Ernst Haeckel, expanded his book for a 1936 edition whose 1938 translation was highly influential to Harold Urey. His PhD student Stanley Miller is pictured in a large photo standing by his spark-discharge apparatus.

Does Lazcano ever warn his readers that Oparin and Miller’s works have been demoted to irrelevant historical footnotes because the early earth likely had oxygen? Does he lament the fact that Miller used an improbable reducing atmosphere? Does he point out that the predominant product of the spark-discharge apparatus was tar that would have destroyed the desired products faster than they formed, had Miller not built a trap to separate them out? No; instead, he calls the experiment “spectacular” —

The 1938 English translation of Oparin’s second book played a seminal role in shaping Stanley L. Miller’s famous 1953 synthesis of amino acids and other organic compounds under possible primitive conditions. The spectacular results of Miller’s laboratory simulation marked the start of the laboratory phase of what we now call prebiotic chemistry.

Why Risky? And Useful to Whom?

Lazcano grants that “No scientific theory remains unchanged as time goes by, and the prebiotic soup remains a useful but risky metaphor.”

The fact that a number of biochemical components of contemporary forms of life can be synthesized nonenzymatically does not necessarily imply that they were also essential for the origin of life or that they were available in the primitive environment.

We do not know when, where, or how life appeared on Earth, but the current debates on the significance of extraterrestrial organic molecules, together with our laboratory reconstructions of primitive environments, are in themselves a recognition of the key role that prebiotic chemistry played in the processes that led to the emergence of the first life-forms.

Oparin and Miller had the right religion, in other words: materialism. They had the wrong atmosphere. They had the wrong ingredients. They interfered in the experimental design. But they had the right doctrine: some unknown form of “prebiotic chemistry” led to “the emergence of the first life-forms” — no intelligence allowed. 

For this reason — science notwithstanding — the mainstream media continues to allow these zombie icons to “shed light” on evolution, rising from the tombs, putting on Darwin costumes, holding up their sparking flasks, distributing samples of prebiotic soup to the townspeople as peppered moths flutter about their heads.

Notes

Shen Tian et al., A microRNA is the effector gene of a classic evolutionary hotspot locus. Science 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1135-1141. DOI: 10.1126/science.adp7899.

Antonio Lazcano, On the origins of organisms. Science 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1098-1099. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads5691.

The fossil record on homoiothermic animals vs. Darwin.

 Fossil Friday: A Scientific Controversy About Warm-Blooded Animals

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the exceptionally well-preserved fossil bird Nahmavis grandei from the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming, as an example for a fossil representative of warm-blooded animals. Nowadays, every high-school biology class teaches that mammals and birds, even though both are warm-blooded tetrapods, are not closely related and were derived from different reptilian-like ancestors. Their similar physiology is attributed to so-called convergent evolution, thus is claimed to have had an independent evolutionary origin. However, if generally anatomical, physiological, genetic, and behavioral similarities are mostly explained by common descent, why are all warm-blooded animals not grouped together as descendants of a common warm-blooded ancestor? Indeed, based on much earlier observations of John Ray (1693), Charles Darwin’s famous opponent at the British Museum for Natural History, the paleontologist Richard Owen (1866), who had coined the word dinosaur, had first suggested to group birds and mammals together in a taxon Haematothermia, based on their similar warm-blooded physiology.

This was mostly ignored by other biologists until about 120 years later, when the two maverick biologists Søren Løvtrup (1977, 1985) and Brian Gardiner (1982, 1993) took up the idea and again suggested that all warm-blooded vertebrates form a clade Haemothermia, thus birds and mammals would be most closely related sister groups. They both suggested that the complex physiological similarities are unlikely to be convergences and rather represent deep evolutionary homologies. Nobody less than the famous French vertebrate paleontologist Philippe Janvier (1984) even published a reconstruction drawing how a hypothetical ancestor of Haemothermia might have looked like (reproduced by Sivgin 2020). This went against a growing consensus among evolutionary biologists that mammals were derived from synapsid “mammal-like reptiles” like the Permian pelycosaurs, while birds were diapsids more closely related to dinosaurs and crocodiles as well as other living reptiles. Consequently, their suggestion was immediately met with harsh criticism (Benton 1985, 1991, Kemp 1988, Gauthier et al. 1988a, 1988b) and their “radical hypothesis” (Peters 2014) was ultimately rejected as absurd (Kuhn-Schnyder 2009). The reason were the numerous other similarities from skeleton to genomics (e.g., Janke & Arnason 1997) that rather supported the mainstream view.

Pterosaurs and Dinosaurs

However, it must be noted that Gardiner (1993) explicitly agreed that pterosaurs and dinosaurs are close relatives of birds, and “mammal-like reptiles” were relatives and ancestors of mammals. He simply included those reptile-like groups in Haematothermia, and indeed there has been considerable evidence accumulated in the past decades that they also were warm-blooded. Here is a quote from Gardiner’s (1993) abstract:

An exhaustive parsimony analysis of amniote phylogeny using 97 characters has substantiated the hypothesis that mammals and birds are sister groups. This deduction is further supported by parasitological and molecular evidence. The presumed importance of “synapsid” fossils in amniote phylogeny is questioned and it is concluded that they represent a transformation series which, when broken down into constituent monophyletic groups, does not support the separation of the Mammalia from the remainder of the amniotes. Fossil members of the Haematothermia include pterosaurs and “dinosaurs” (both stem-group birds) and Dinocephalia, Dicynodontia, Gorgonopsida and Therocephalia (all stem-group mammals). The Dromaeosauridae are the most crownward stem-group birds and the Morganucodontidae the most crownward stem-group mammals.

Thus, Gardiner (1993) rather suggested that Synapsida and Archosauria are sister groups, which is a hypothesis that is still endorsed by the highly controversial fringe paleontologist David Peters (2024) in his large reptile tree based on 2323 taxa and 236 characters.

Gardiner is said to still have embraced the Haematothermia hypothesis until later in his life (Naish 2008, 2012). Nevertheless, the idea of such a clade of warm-blooded animals was quickly buried and forgotten by the scientific community again, so that the work of Løvtrup and Gardiner is not even mentioned anymore in modern treatises on the origin of endothermy in vertebrates (e.g., Koteja 2004, Nespolo et al. 2011, Benton 2021, Grigg et al. 2022, Faure-Brac et al. 2024). After all, isn’t it really silly to just look at a superficial similarity like warm-bloodedness and ignore all the conflicting evidence. Yes, that might have been silly indeed, but it was not at all what Løvtrup and Gardiner did. Indeed they assembled substantial evidence for their Haematothermia hypothesis that went far beyond only a superficial similarity in physiology, but included a cladistic analysis of 28 specific similarities, of which even the most ardent critics recognized at least 8 as valid (Kemp 1988).

Also, other authors often admitted that birds and mammals share many similarities of the “cardiovascular, renal, gastrointestinal, endocrine and nervous systems” (Carvalho & Gonçalves 2011). Even more recently, a paper on the supposed convergences between birds and mammals published by Wu & Wang (2019) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, confirmed these similarities and suggesting even more:

Extant birds and mammals share a number of highly similar characteristics, including but not limited to, enhanced hearing, vocal communication, endothermy, insulation, shivering, respiratory turbinates, high basal metabolism, grinding, sustained activity, four-chambered heart, high blood pressure, and intensive parental care.

A Very Incomplete List

Here is a very incomplete list of a dozen complex derived similarities shared by birds and mammals, which I stumbled upon during a quick survey of the recent scientific literature I made for this article:

Visceral endothermy or warm-bloodedness means that birds and mammals share the ability to maintain a stable internal body temperature, a characteristic crucial for active living in a wide range of environmental conditions (Nespolo et al. 2011). If this endothermy would be homologous in birds and mammals we should expect that they acquired this trait at the same time, which is exactly what we find (Benton 2021), allegedly based on a shared adaptation to nocturnality in their early evolution (Wu & Wang 2019). Of course, the warm-bloodedness correlates with high metabolic rates in birds and mammals, compared to most reptiles, supporting their increased energetic demand for sustained activity and thermoregulation.

Mammals and birds possess a four-chambered heart that efficiently separates oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, facilitating high metabolic rates required for endothermy. However it must be noted that a four-chambered heart is also present in crocodylians, who may have secondarily reverted to ectothermy (Grigg et al. 2022). With this knowledge I suppose that Gardiner would have decided to include crocs in his Haematothermia clade of synapsids and archosaurs.

Both birds and mammals posses integumental structures (feathers in birds and fur in mammals), made from keratin and originating from placodes that are homologous to reptilian scales, as specialized body coverings for insulation to reduce heat loss, which is of course a crucial adaptation for endothermy (Chernova 2005, Dhouailly 2009, Di-Poï & Milinkovitch 2016).

Even though very different in organisation, birds and mammals have the most complex lungs among vertebrates and a highly efficient respiratory systems that support their high metabolic demands (Meyer et al. 1981, Powell & Hopkins 2004, West et al. 2007).

Both birds and mammals exhibit relatively large brains compared to body size, particularly in regions associated with higher cognitive function, such as learning, problem-solving, and social behaviors. More specifically, only mammals and birds possess a well-developed neocortex, called dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) in birds (UChicago Medicine 2012, Kebschull 2020, Stacho et al. 2020, Ball & Balthazart 2021). Apart from the increased relative brain size and highly laminar telencephalic areas, birds and mammals also share a complex cerebellar folding, enhancing motor control and coordination, as well as advanced auditory circuits capable of processing complex sounds (Striedter & Northcutt 2019).

Only mammals and birds have episodic-like memory (Rattenborg & Martinez-Gonzalez 2011, 2013).

Even though sleep was for decades considered to be exclusive to mammals and birds, it is meanwhile shown to be a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. However, “REM sleep, the major source of dreams, and slow wave sleep are unique to mammals and birds” (AAAS 2015, Hayashi et al. 2015). 

Birds and mammals have specialized hearing mechanisms, including middle ear ossicles (ossicular chain) that transmit sound vibrations effectively, allowing for acute auditory sensitivity (Köppl 2011, Anthwal et al. 2012: fig. 1).

Both groups possess complex endocrine hormonal systems that regulate growth, metabolism, and reproduction. Actually, “birds produce homologues of the vast majority of mammalian hormones. These can have similar roles in birds and mammals.” (Scanes 2015). For instance, the thyroid and adrenal glands play essential roles in metabolic rate control, and prolactin controls seasonality in birds and mammals (Stewart & Marshall 2022).

Both birds and mammals engage in complex social behaviours, including cooperation, communication, intricate mating rituals and significant parental care, including prolonged juvenile periods and provisioning of food, which enhances offspring survival in challenging environments. Play behaviour was long considered to be unique to mammals and birds (Dinets 2023), but it has been meanwhile recorded from a few ectothermic animal species as well, but it is still only widely occurring and well-developed in birds and mammals.

Both groups possess complex endocrine hormonal systems that regulate growth, metabolism, and reproduction. Actually, “birds produce homologues of the vast majority of mammalian hormones. These can have similar roles in birds and mammals.” (Scanes 2015). For instance, the thyroid and adrenal glands play essential roles in metabolic rate control, and prolactin controls seasonality in birds and mammals (Stewart & Marshall 2022).

Both birds and mammals engage in complex social behaviours, including cooperation, communication, intricate mating rituals and significant parental care, including prolonged juvenile periods and provisioning of food, which enhances offspring survival in challenging environments. Play behaviour was long considered to be unique to mammals and birds (Dinets 2023), but it has been meanwhile recorded from a few ectothermic animal species as well, but it is still only widely occurring and well-developed in birds and mammals.

A cladistic study of 16 ultrastructure characters of spermatozoa (Jamieson & Healy 1992) strongly supported the bird + mammal clade (Haemothermia) with three uniquely derived similarities, and did not substantiate the traditional grouping. This is significant because it is a totally independent source of evidence unrelated to warm-blooded physiology.

In spite of differential rates of transposable element accumulation “the genome size in mammals and birds shows remarkably little interspecific variation compared with other taxa.” The results of a study by Kapusta et al. (2017) imply that “DNA removal in both mammals and birds has proceeded mostly through large segmental deletions”, which has been called an “accordion model” of genome size evolution.

All these striking similarities would have to be considered as convergent adaptations, which were the result of similar selective pressures in birds and mammals that have led to the independent origin of these complex traits. So, both alternatives, the mainstream view and the Haematothermia hypothesis, imply a lot of convergences, so that many similarities cannot be readily explained with common descent. Ultimately, a bureaucratic counting of which alternative is supported by a few more similarities (see Kemp 1988) decides for evolutionary biologists, which common descent hypothesis is embraced and which is rejected as absurd. If you look at many of the publication dates of the references in my list above, you see that a lot more characters that would support Haematothermia have been discovered since the time of Løvtrup and Gardiner.

To be clear, I do not suggest that the Haematothermia hypothesis is a better alternative to the mainstream view, but rather suggest that the strongly conflicting data point to a deeper problem. In the view of us critics of neo-Darwinian evolution, the large amount of incongruent and conflicting evidence rather questions all alternatives and the very paradigm of common descent itself. Even though common descent may well still be true, either on a universal level or at least for more restricted groups, it cannot be convincingly demonstrated by just pointing to shared similarities. Those similarities would have to be overwhelmingly congruent and mostly point to the same nested hierarchy, if the story of a single tree of life would be true. But they don’t. Incongruent evidence is found abundantly in all groups and all levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. The theory of Darwinism made a prediction of similarities that neatly fall into a nested hierarchy without significant incongruence, but it failed the test by empirical data miserably. Other processes than common descent with modification have to account for the similarities and differences between organisms, and intelligent design definitely is a premier candidate.

Ignoring the Evidence

How do popularizers of Darwinism such as Richard Dawkins react? Unsurprisingly, they just ignore the evidence and boldly tell their gullible fanboys (and girls) that evolution is a proven fact because all data unambiguously suggest a single true tree of life. Is this mere ignorance or deliberate deception? The materialist-naturalist world view critically depends of Darwinian evolution and must defend it at all cost, even if it means that the facts have to be tweaked, fudged, and denied to fit the theory. And all critics must be silenced as dangerous science-deniers and peddlers of pseudoscience and evil religious superstition. More and more people no longer fall for this crude propaganda and rather follow the evidence wherever it leads. Isn’t this what science is all about, or at least should be?

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Rattenborg NC & Martinez-Gonzalez D 2013. Episodic-like memory and divergent brain systems in mammals and birds. PNAS 110(40), E3741–E3741. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1312035110

Ray J 1693. Synopsis Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis. Robert Southwell, London (UK).

Scanes CG 2015. Avian Endocrine System. Chapter 22, pp. 489–496 in: Sturkie’s Avian Physiology. 6th Ed. Academic Press / Elsevier, Amsterdam (NL). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-407160-5.00022-1

Sivgin TK 2020. Unorthodox Ideas about Bird Origins. Manospondylus August 26, 2020. https://www.manospondylus.com/2020/08/unorthodox-ideas-about-bird-origins.html

Stacho M, Herold C, Rook N, Wagner H, Axer M, Amunts K & Güntürkün O 2020. A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain. Science 369(6511): eabc5534, 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc5534

Stewart C & Marshall CJ 2022. Seasonality of prolactin in birds and mammals. JEZ-A Ecological and Integrative Physiology 337(9-10), 919–938. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.2634

Striedter GF & Northcutt RG 2019. The Rise of Endothermy: Mammals, but also Birds. Chapter 6, pp. 337–422 in: Brains Through Time: A Natural History of Vertebrates. Oxford University Press, Oxford (UK). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195125689.003.0006

UChicago Medicine 2012. Homolog of Mammalian Neocortex Found in Bird Brain. UChicago Medicine News September 30, 2012. https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/news/homolog-of-mammalian-neocortex-found-in-bird-brain

West JB, Watson RR & Fu Z 2007. Major differences in the pulmonary circulation between birds and mammals. Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology 157(2-3), 382–390. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resp.2006.12.005

Wu Y & Wang H 2019. Convergent evolution of bird-mammal shared characteristics for adapting to nocturnality. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286(1897): 20182185, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2185

On darwinian apologists sleight of hand

 Evolutionary Flimflam: Watch Out for These Common Parlor Tricks in Science Reporting

Jonathan Witt

I suspect the average person comes to accept modern evolutionary theory, not through a series of careful arguments, but through a near-constant drip of pro-evolution propaganda. The propaganda comes in many forms and from many directions. Here I want to focus on just one source, popular news stories about evolution, and specifically on a couple of parlor tricks often embedded in these articles.

Bait-and-Switch

Probably the most common trick begins with a news headline or lead sentence promising a new discovery of evolution in action. The article then highlights an actual, observed species changing over time. But the example it cites is mere microevolution, such as a change in fur color or minor changes in beak size or leg length. 

That won’t do. If Charles Darwin had argued that nature can produce modest variations in existing species, the collective response would have been, now tell us something we don’t know. Evolutionary theory needs to provide evidence of its distinctive claim, namely, that purely natural mechanisms can and do produce major innovations — something like the first wings, the first eyes, new molecular biological machines, or novel animal body plans. 

A recent example of this bait-and-switch begins with the headline, “Long-term Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology.”1 The headline gives the impression that maybe the lizards in the study, refusing to play by the restrictive rules of standard evolutionary theory, hauled off and evolved in a much more daring way than conventional thinking had allowed. But then we learn that the study’s big finding helps explain cases where evolution doesn’t generate anything impressive — that is, cases of stasis, where a species remains largely unchanged for millions of years. 

Hmm, that sounds like the opposite of impressive evolutionary daring-do, doesn’t it? 

Troubled by this inconsistency but undaunted, we read on and are soon informed that the researchers have solved a big evolutionary conundrum. The news story invites us to wonder how there could be so many cases of stasis in the history of life when we see evolution doing amazing stuff right before our eyes all the time. The article doesn’t mention any of these amazing broad-daylight transformations. Instead it informs us that the study found that the lizards varied in minor ways (e.g., longer or shorter legs) and that the changes, rather than accumulating into something dramatically novel, canceled each other out. Voilà — an explanation for stasis.

That’s it. That’s the study’s big finding. No macroevolution. Just the observation of what was the common view before Darwin’s theory of evolution — that healthy members of a species can vary a bit, but only within strict limits.

To sum up the parlor trick: Promise to demonstrate bigtime evolution. Demonstrate minor changes and hope the audience doesn’t notice the difference. 

An Audacious Use of Stasis

A particularly brazen variation on this bait-and-switch appears in an article out of Ireland. The lead sentence announces, “Palaeontologists at UCC have discovered X-ray evidence of proteins in fossil feathers that sheds new light on feather evolution.”2 What is the discovery? That, contra expectations, the protein in question has not evolved for tens of millions of years. In other words, the findings suggest more stasis in the history of life and diminished evidence for evolution. 

So now it’s not microevolution (minor changes) standing in for macroevolution (big innovations). It’s a discovery of stasis (basically, no change) standing in for macroevolution. Laughable if you’re paying attention, but if you’re just skimming headlines and articles, well, the word “evolution” appears three times, and the scientific paper being reported on appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Sounds like a whole lotta evolution goin’ on. 

Drip, drip, drip. So works the propaganda.

Dazzle and Distract

A second parlor trick used to the same end is a tad harder to spot. It involves reporting on a discovery that sheds light on how some complex biological process works, and then promises that the finding gives us important insights into how the process evolved. How so? The teaser turns out to be yet another of evolutionary theory’s many promissory notes, one you will grow old waiting on for payment.

We shouldn’t take the promise on faith, since it’s far from automatic that discovering how a given biological mechanism works will help biologists understand how the process evolved. Certainly it wouldn’t if evolution did not actually generate the mechanism in question. But even if we grant for the sake of argument that the biological process did evolve, and did so through blind material forces, it’s perfectly possible that gaining a better understanding of how a mechanism works would in no way reveal how the process it’s embedded in evolved. 

Nor is it enough to show that the newly understood mechanism is useful to the biological system it’s a part of. Yes, natural selection tends to favor the useful over the useless in the evolutionary process, but that doesn’t allow evolution’s blind process of gradual change to magically look ahead so as to bring together various parts to assemble an intricate new mechanism. The act of looking ahead (foresight) and planning for a distant goal is the exclusive domain of minds. Mindless evolution, lacking this capacity, requires a series of small, functional, random mutations (blind baby steps) in order to evolve, say, the first bat sonar or the first air-breathing animals. The evolutionist should detail a plausible stepwise path of this sort, and then we can talk.

This second parlor trick, to summarize, runs like this: (1) Highlight a fresh insight into how a biological mechanism works. (2) Tout the discovery as shedding important light on how a system or process evolved. (3) Don’t actually demonstrate #2, but instead dazzle and distract the reader with the challenging technical details of the discovery highlighted in #1.

The Curious Case of TCOF1

An example of this second parlor trick appears in a Science Daily news piece titled, “Study Explains How Part of the Nucleolus Evolved.”3 What did the researchers learn? “Biologists discovered that a scaffolding protein called TCOF1 is responsible for the formation of a biomolecular condensate called the fibrillar center, which forms within the cell nucleolus.”

We could challenge the phrasing there. The language makes it sound like the scaffolding protein single-handedly forms the fibrillar center, when we can be sure the protein is just one crucial player in a process involving many other factors without which we would have no fibrillar center. But set that quibble aside. 

The article further informs us that “biomolecular condensates perform many critical functions” in cells. Then we encounter a refreshing note of humility: “It is not well understood how proteins and other biomolecules come together to form these assemblies within cells.” Then an overdue qualifier: “The findings could help to explain a major evolutionary shift, which took place around 300 million years ago, in how the nucleolus is organized.” 

So we’ve gone from “Study Explains” in the headline to “The findings could help to explain.” 

Then another concession: “Biologists do not yet fully understand why this shift happened.” Although a welcome injection of honesty, the sentence also subtly implies that biologists mostly understand why the shift happened, just not fully. But the article doesn’t give us the mostly. It just implies that the understanding is out there and leaves us to accept the implicit claim on faith. 

What the article does explain is quite different from what the headline promised:

“If you look across the tree of life, the basic structure and function of the ribosome has remained quite static; however, the process of making it keeps evolving. Our hypothesis for why this process keeps evolving is that it might make it easier to assemble ribosomes by compartmentalizing the different biochemical reactions,” says Eliezer Calo, an associate professor of biology at MIT and the senior author of the study.

So, the ribosome presents another striking case of stasis, but at least the process of how it is made keeps evolving, or so we are told. But how do they know the process evolved, and evolved through mindless material mechanisms, as the theory of evolution holds? Just showing that nature has more than one way of making ribosomes doesn’t demonstrate that these methods evolved one from another, or from a common ancestral method. After all, the various methods might each have been separately designed, as the various methods for assembling cars were separately designed.

What of the researcher’s specific evolutionary hypothesis summarized in the block quote above? It’s at best an extremely partial explanation. He is saying that the assembly method evolved because the innovation might make the assembly go smoother. In other words, the explanation of how it evolved boils down to pointing out a possible functional improvement in the method. But usefulness is only a necessary condition of evolution by natural selection; it’s far from a sufficient condition, just as being able to dribble a ball is a necessary condition of being an NBA basketball player, but far from a sufficient one.

If the researchers had identified a definite functional improvement as an explanation for how the assembly method evolved, that would be weak tea; but they didn’t even do that. They only identified a possible functional improvement. And from all this we get the breathless headline, “Study Explains How Part of the Nucleolus Evolved.”

And so it goes. Drip, drip, drip.

Notes

Catherine Barzler, “Long-term Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology,” Phys.org (October 9, 2023). 

“Dinosaur Feathers Reveal Traces of Ancient Proteins,” University College Cork, Ireland (September 22, 2023).

“Study Explains How Part of the Nucleolus Evolved,” Science Daily (August 15, 2023).

Darwinism and teleology: Friends/enemies/frenemies?

 Did Darwin Banish Teleology from Nature or Not?

Richard Weikart

I have been reviewing a new collection from Cambridge University Press, Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods. (See my earlier posts here and here.) James G. Lennox opens his essay about Darwin’s views on teleology with Friedrich Engels’s statement in a letter to Karl Marx. Engels exulted that Darwin had demolished teleology. This is a view that is commonplace among many Darwinian biologists, as well as historians. Lennox, however, calls it a myth that Darwin banished teleology from nature.

Lennox defines teleology thus: “A teleological explanation is one in which some property, process or entity is said to exist or be taking place for the sake of a certain result or consequence.” In the course of the essay Lennox points out that when discussing organisms’ adaptations, Darwin often used the language of teleology: “final cause,” “contrivances for this end,” etc.

Lennox also correctly points out that Darwin’s teleology differed from that of Harvard biologist Asa Gray, who argued that teleology implied natural theology. Darwin completely rejected natural theology. Lennox is right that this makes Darwin’s and Gray’s teleology different.

The problem with Lennox’s analysis is twofold: 1) Darwin recognized that his use of teleological language could be problematic; and 2) the kind of teleology that Lennox claims Darwin embraced is trivial compared to the kind of teleology he rejected.

Darwin’s Teleological Language

To be sure, Darwin used teleological language when discussing organisms’ adaptations. Lennox quotes from an 1862 essay, where Darwin wrote that “the final cause of all this mimicry” among butterflies is evading predation. Lennox then states, “It is this valuable consequence of mimicry that explains its selective advantage — that is the end achieved by mimicry.” (p. 191) Thus, Darwin recognized that adaptations had purposes. For instance, the eye has a purpose — it is for seeing.

Sometimes Darwin’s contemporaries criticized him for using teleological language. In 1877 Darwin responded to Alphonse de Candolle’s critique:

There is much justice in your criticisms on my use of the terms object, end, purpose; but those who believe that organs have been gradually modified by natural selection for a special purpose, may I think use the above terms correctly though no conscious being has intervened. I have found much difficulty in my occasional attempts to avoid these terms; but I might perhaps have always spok[en] of a beneficial or serviceable effect.1

Darwin’s claim here that there was some justice in the critique, as well as his confession that he sometimes tried to avoid teleological terms, suggests that Darwin was not entirely comfortable using teleological language. However, he defends the use of teleological language nonetheless, because he believed that adaptations did serve a purpose — helping an organism survive and reproduce in the struggle for existence. In light of this, perhaps Lennox has a point.

The Teleology Darwin Did Banish from Nature

However, Lennox seems to miss the point that, even though Darwin admitted that adaptations served a purpose, he vociferously denied that the evolutionary process was teleological. When Engels and most scholars insist that Darwin banished teleology from nature, they are denying that evolution is a teleological process. They are not denying that specific organs of animals and plants serve specific purposes.

Darwin often stressed that evolution on the whole was non-teleological. In an 1881 letter to William Graham, Darwin stated that his primary disagreement with Graham “is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this.”2 Both here and in many other writings Darwin explicitly denied the existence of any over-arching purpose for organisms.

In 1861 Darwin wrote to Lyell a letter where he denied that adaptations had originated for a purpose: “No doubt these [i.e., variations] are all caused by some unknown law, but I cannot believe they were ordained for any purpose; & if not so ordained under domesticity, I can see no reason to believe that they were ordained in a state of nature.”3 Since variations are the source of evolutionary change, Darwin was hereby denying that evolution had any goal toward which it was moving.

Darwin often used the term “chance” to describe variations in nature, because he did not believe variations arose for any purpose or toward any goal. This is why Darwinian evolution is a non-teleological process. Thus, despite Lennox’s arguments, it still makes sense to say that Darwin banished teleology from the evolutionary process, even if biological adaptations do serve various purposes.

Notes

Darwin to Alphonse de Candolle, August 3, 1877, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-11092.xml&query=purpose.

Darwin to William Graham, July 3, 1881, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13230.xml&query=purpose.

Darwin to Charles Lyell, August 13, 1861, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3230.xml&query=purpose.

Why the punctuation in the fossil record is problematic for the Darwinian narrative.

 

On more Darwinian mythmaking and mythbusting.

 Is It a Myth That Darwin Rejected Design?

Richard Weikart

In the new book I’m reviewing here, Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods, the actual title of Michael Ruse’s chapter is “Myth 4: That Darwin Always Rejected the Argument from Design in Nature and Developed His Own Theory to Replace It.” (See my first post in this review series here.) I have never heard anyone claim that Darwin always rejected the argument from design, because before he came to believe in evolution in the late 1830s, he found William Paley’s natural theology — which was based on the argument from design — convincing. Many scholars — myself included — believe that as Darwin formulated his theory in the late 1830s, he rejected the argument from design and used natural selection as a way to explain how things could look designed without actually being designed. Ruse disagrees, claiming that Darwin still embraced design when he wrote The Origin of Species in 1859.

In his essay, the late Professor Ruse correctly explains that Darwin rejected theism and embraced deism in the 1830s, and he continued using deistic language in The Origin of Species. Deism is the idea that God created the cosmos and its natural laws, but thereafter did not intervene with miraculous events. Sometime after 1859 and before 1870, Ruse informs us, Darwin gave up on deism and embraced an agnostic position. 

So Far, So Good

However, Ruse then makes the controversial — and misguided — claim that throughout this deistic phase of Darwin’s life — including during his writing of The Origin of Species — he continued to believe in the argument from design in nature. Ruse is correct that in Origin and in his correspondence, Darwin continued to admit that the universe and natural laws seem designed, and some kind of deistic God probably created those laws. However, Ruse then confuses this notion that the cosmos as a whole is designed with the idea that biological organisms exhibit design.

Strangely, Ruse even quotes from an 1860 letter that Darwin wrote to Harvard biologist Asa Gray. Darwin continually debated with Gray about the argument from design, with Darwin taking the position that organisms are not designed. Here is the passage Ruse quotes:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me. — I am bewildered. — I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do & as I sh[oul]d wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed.

This is a clear expression of Darwin rejecting the design of organisms and their adaptations. Ruse, however, will not admit this, but instead inexplicably states, “The argument from design interpreted in a deistic manner seems still to have legs.” Really? Where? Darwin has just stated that he “cannot see . . . evidence of design,” and he denied that cats or eyes are designed.

An Untenable Position

Ruse’s position is simply untenable, especially if one reads even more of Darwin’s correspondence in the year or two after publishing Origin, where he directly confronted the issue of design. 

In a July 1861 letter Darwin explained clearly his view of design:

The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed; yet, where one would most expect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design. Asa Gray and some others look at each variation, or at least at each beneficial variation (which A. Gray would compare with the rain drops which do not fall on the sea, but on to the land to fertilize it) as having been providentially designed. Yet when I ask him whether he looks at each variation in the rock-pigeon, by which man has made by accumulation a pouter or fantail pigeon, as providentially designed for man’s amusement, he does not know what to answer; and if he, or any one, admits these variations are accidental, as far as purpose is concerned (of course not accidental as to their cause or origin); then I can see no reason why he should rank the accumulated variations by which the beautifully adapted woodpecker has been formed, as providentially designed.1

So, while Darwin may have had a vague idea about the cosmos being designed, he clearly rejected the notion that biological organisms exhibited design.

Correspondence with Charles Lyell

Another example is an 1861 letter to his friend Charles Lyell, the founder of uniformitarian geology. Darwin discussed his disagreement with Gray, who believed that God guided variations. Darwin wrote:

The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make natural selection entirely superfluous, & indeed takes whole case of appearance of new species out of the range of science. . . . It seems to me that variations in the domestic & wild conditions are due to unknown causes & are without purpose & in so far accidental; & that they become purposeful only when they are selected by man for his pleasure, or by what we call natural selection in the struggle for life & under changing conditions.2

In this letter Darwin maintained that natural selection could explain purpose or design in organisms, thus rendering divine providence unnecessary.

As many scholars have argued, Darwin’s rejection of the argument from design preceded his publication of Origin by many years; it was not an afterthought.

Rather Awkward

Interestingly, at the close of his essay, Ruse puts forward an argument that is rather awkward in light of his overall point. He claims that Darwin — after writing Origin — “came to see that the variations produced by a deistic God are no less directed than the variations produced by a theistic God.” Ruse then states, “Natural selection makes guided variations unnecessary. No need to assume a Designer. Hence, even as it keeps the major premise, that organisms are as-if designed, natural selection destroys the argument from design.” (p. 55) Ruse never explains why he thinks Darwin did not understand this point already in the late 1830s as he developed his theory, as many other scholars have insisted.

In sum, Ruse admits that natural selection eliminates the need for design. However, he wrongly argues that Darwin did not fully understand that until after writing Origin.

Notes

Charles Darwin to Frances Julia Wedgwood, July 11, 1861, Darwin Correspondence Project,https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3206.xml&query=design.

Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, August 1, 1861, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3223.xml&query=purpose

On Darwinian mythmaking and mythbusting.

 A New Scholarly Book Trying to Debunk Myths about Charles Darwin and His Theory

Richard Weikart

In a new book published by Cambridge University Press, Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods, an array of prominent Darwin scholars attempt to dismantle 24 myths about Darwin and his theory. Many of these essays are excellent examples of historians setting the record straight. However, while myth-busting is a venerable pursuit for historians, caution must be exercised, especially when dealing with ideologically loaded subjects. Indeed, ironically, in a few cases in this volume, which I will discuss in subsequent posts, the debunkers need to be debunked themselves, because instead of correcting falsehoods, they end up creating or perpetuating falsehoods.

Problems with “Mythology”

Indeed, the whole notion of mythology can at times be problematic, because some scholars brand as “myth” interpretations of other scholars with whom they disagree. For example, James G. Lennox, in his chapter on Darwin and teleology (which I will discuss in a subsequent post), informs us that the Darwinian biologist Michael Ghiselin has dubbed as myth the view that Darwin’s theory included teleology. Lennox states, “In this chapter, then, my aim is to show that what Michael Ghiselin claims to be a myth is in fact reality, and that his assertion that Darwin rid biology of teleology is itself a myth.” (p. 183) So here we have two scholars insisting that the other one is embracing a myth.

A related problem is that in some cases, the scholars in this volume disagree among themselves on what is mythical. For example, David Depew in his essay claims that in addition to natural selection, Darwin also believed in group selection. (p. 177) In his essay on Darwin and race, Erik L. Peterson seems to agree, strongly implying that Darwin believed in group selection. (p. 255) The late Michael Ruse, however, in trying to distance Darwin from Alfred Russel Wallace, claims rather emphatically that Darwin rejected group selection. (pp. 133-34)

So, Which Is the Myth?

On this particular issue of group selection, it seems to me that Ruse is the one perpetuating a misconception about Darwin. Ruse uses rather twisted logic to maintain his position. After quoting a passage in Descent of Man where Darwin discusses tribes competing with other tribes (which is group selection), Ruse makes the bizarre claim that this is not really group selection. Why not? Well, Ruse informs us that right after this discussion of tribes competing, Darwin promoted what we call today “reciprocal altruism.” Therefore, Ruse oddly asserts, Darwin could not be promoting the idea of group selection. (I should note that Ruse is wrong about the placement of this passage, as it actually comes three pages earlier than the one about the tribes, but this is a minor point). Ruse’s logic is fallacious, because group selection and reciprocal altruism are not contradictory. Darwin believed them both. No wonder Depew and Peterson disagree with Ruse, as do a host of other Darwin scholars.

Before I critique the other essays that are problematic, let me draw attention to some of the myths about Darwin that this volume properly addresses. John Hedley Brooke refutes the myth that the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley demolished Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at their famous 1860 debate before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It seems that the debate (or discussion) was more of a toss-up. I was surprised to learn from Brooke’s essay that one scientist who had embraced Darwinism before this event actually abandoned Darwinism as a result of the discussion that day. (p. 151)

White Supremacy and Genocide

An interesting essay by Erik L. Peterson refutes the myth that Darwin believed in racial equality. Peterson acknowledges that Darwin hated slavery, but shows that it was not because he believed in racial equality. Both in Descent of Man and in his correspondence Darwin not only clearly expressed belief in the racial superiority of Europeans, but he insisted that the Europeans’ triumph in the racial struggle for existence — which would result in the racial extermination of allegedly inferior races — would bring evolutionary advance to the human species. In an 1860 letter to Lyell, Darwin stated, “White man is ‘improving off the face of the earth’ even races nearly his equal.” Right after quoting this, Peterson comments, “Here again, we might find jarring Darwin’s cavalier references to white supremacy and genocide as supportive of his overall theory.” (p. 254)

In another essay Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. counters the widespread idea that Darwin rejected Lamarck’s ideas about use and disuse and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. To be sure, Burkhardt explains that Darwin stressed the primacy of natural selection and considered Lamarckian mechanisms secondary. However, Darwin did not dismiss them outright, as some later Darwinians, such as the German biologist August Weismann, did.

John Van Whye makes a strong case against the claim that Darwin delayed publication of The Origin of Species for twenty years, allegedly because he was afraid to make his views public. Van Whye shows that Darwin divulged his theory to many of his contemporaries in his correspondence. None of Darwin’s family or contemporaries ever claimed that Darwin delayed publishing his theory. Indeed, the idea that he delayed only arose in the mid 20th century. During those twenty years between discovering his theory and publishing it, Darwin was studying and doing research to buttress and refine his theory.

Just a Sampling

This is just a sampling of the many interesting and useful essays in this work. However, as I indicated, some of the essays are problematic, and I will address a few of these in the coming days.

The "equilbrium" in "punctuated equilibrium" ?

Fossil Friday: Evolutionary Stasis in Beetles

Gunter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features the living ground beetle genus Loricera, which has recently been recovered as fossil adults and larvae from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. The genus belongs to the ground beetle family Carabidae and features in adults as well as the larval stage specially modified antennae and mouth parts for predation on springtails (Collembola) in leaf litter. Spiny hairs at the base of the antennae and the maxillae serve as a kind of catching cage for their springtail prey. This complex adaptation has now turned out to be much more ancient than expected.

In two recent papers Li et al. (2024a, 2024b) described adult and larval Loricera beetles from the mid-Cretaceous Kachin amber (Burmite) of Myanmar, which has been radiometrically dated to an age of 99 million years. These fossil beetles are basically indistinguishable from the various living species of the genus Loricera and have identical anatomical features of adults and larvae. This means that this beetle with its unique adaptations existed in unchanged form since at least about 100 million years and survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The Crucial Point

A popular science article in Wired (Kahil 2024) freely admits that “the Loricera beetle’s survival story challenges conventional notions of evolution” and exhibits “a remarkable consistency in an ever-changing world.” This is indeed the crucial point, because such striking cases of stasis are commonly explained away by evolutionary biologists as due to stabilizing selection in a stable environment of their ecological niche. However, this explanation simply is not plausible over hundreds of millions of years with changing habitats, changing climate, changing biota, and even mass extinction events of apocalyptic dimensions. The press release (NIGPAS 2024) reporting the new discovery acknowledges that “the K/Pg mass extinction triggered one of the most profound biodiversity reorganizations in geological history,” but still “the study suggests that both springtails and their predators have exhibited significant evolutionary stasis, both in terms of individual species morphology and community structure.”

Compare this with the evolutionist’s claim that pig-like mammals similar to Indohyus and Pakicetus changed into fully marine dolphin-like whales such as Dorudon and Basilosaurus in just 4 to 8 million years. Natural selection is the great magician in evolutionary fantasy land, where it explains rapid change in explosive radiations as well as no change at all over eons in so-called “living fossils.” However, a theory that is always perfectly consistent with any possible outcome is not explaining anything, but rather is as dubious as Freudian psychoanalysis or astrology, with their vague predictions that always fit. And every fit is sold to the gullible public as a successful corroboration of the theory, which is why people still believe in astrology and — for what it’s worth — in unguided evolution through natural selection acting on random mutations. It is time to call neo-Darwinism out for what it indubitably is: a pseudoscience, which is nurtured, promoted, and fiercely defended by a gigantic industry in mainstream academia that depends on it!

References

Kahil N 2024. This black beetle is a survivor of the dinosaur extinction. Wired November 4, 2024. https://wired.me/science/this-black-beetle-is-a-survivor-of-the-dinosaur-extinction/

Li Y-D, Tihelka E, Engel MS, Huang & Cai C 2024a. Specialized springtail predation by Loricera beetles: An example of evolutionary stasis across the K-Pg extinction. The Innovation 5(3): 100601, 1–2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xinn.2024.100601

Li Y-D, Tihelka E, Engel MS, Xia F-Y, Huang D-Y, Zippel A, Tun KL, Haug GT, Müller P & Cai C-Y 2024b. Description of adult and larval Loricera from mid-Cretaceous Kachin amber (Coleoptera: Carabidae). Palaeoentomology 7(2), 265–276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/palaeoentomology.7.2.10

NIGPAS 2024. Cretaceous Amber Reveals the Stability of Beetle-Specialized Predation. NIGPAS Newsroom September 25, http://english.nigpas.cas.cn/new/hs/rp/202409/t20240925_690552.html

Those time travelling birds again?

 Fossil Friday: New Fossil Stem Bird Is Surprisingly Modern

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the bird Navaornis hestiae from the Late Cretaceous Adamantina Formation of southeastern Brazil, which is dated to an age of about 80 million years. This fossil was attributed to an extinct group called Enantiornithes, which thrived in many species around the globe in the Cretaceous period. The new taxon was just described this month by Chiappe et al. (2024) in the journal Nature. The discovery of this perfectly preserved fossil bird turned out be a kind of puzzle for evolutionary biologists, who study the history of bird origins.

The beautiful fossil even preserved detailed structures of the brain that could be studied with high-resolution CT scanning. A morphometrical analysis of the geometry of the brain placed Navaornis about midway between Archaeopteryx and modern birds. This is certainly interesting and arguably fits with the common evolutionary scenario. The authors of the new study say that “Navaornis exhibits a brain morphology intermediate between Archaeopteryx and crown birds along the main axis of endocranial shape variation” and thus “the morphology of the endocast of Navaornis shows an intermediate stage in the evolutionary history of the unique avian brain.” A news report in SciNews (News Staff 2024) quotes one of the authors with a comment that “the brain structure of Navaornis hestiae is almost exactly intermediate between Archaeopteryx and modern birds — it was one of these moments in which the missing piece fits absolutely perfectly.” Such a gem of course directly made it into the headline of the article that is titled ”80-Million-Year-Old Enantiornithine Fossil Fills Gap between Archaeopteryx and Modern Birds”.

So Far So Good

But there is a little complication. Even though entantiornithine birds are considered as stem birds because of several relatively “primitive” traits in their anatomy, the new species shows a remarkable similarity to modern birds that was quite unexpected for the scientists. The authors describe that the “cranial geometry of Navaornis shows an unprecedented degree of similarity between crown birds and enantiornithines” and note that “despite an overall geometry quantitatively indistinguishable from crown birds, the skull of Navaornis retains numerous plesiomorphies.” They admit this “implies that the origins of these ‘advanced’ traits often associated with crown birds either predated the origin of Ornithothoraces or evolved convergently among both Enantiornithes and crownward Euornithes.” They conclude as follows:

This degree of geometric convergence between Enantiornithes and crown birds suggests that developmental constraints responsible for canalizing the general shape of the bird skull may have been present throughout much of avian evolutionary history, predating both the phylogenetic divergence between Enantiornithes and Euornithes more than 130 million years ago as well as the evolutionary acquisition of several apomorphic characteristics of crown bird skull and brain morphology. The exceptionally well-preserved skull of Navaornis emphasizes the necessity of hitherto elusive undistorted Mesozoic bird skulls for illuminating the complex sequence by which the unique brains and skulls of modern birds arose.

Note the Crucial Word

Convergence means similarity not based on common descent, “may have been” means they have no clue, and “complex sequence” means that the data are not what they expected to find. Prior to this discovery none of the experts would have predicted such a modern skull in a “primitive” stem bird, but after the fact evolutionary biologists are always quick to offer a fancy just-so-story that reconciles the evidence with the theory.

It is quite remarkable that popular science reports such as an article in New Scientist (Woodford 2024) only emphasize that this “exquisite bird fossil provides clues to the evolution of avian brains”, and quotes one of the authors as saying that “Navaornis fills a roughly 70-million-year-long gap in our understanding of how the distinctive brains of modern birds evolved.” Reuters reports that this “’One-of-a-kind’ skull fossil from Brazil reveals bird brain evolution” (Dunham 2024). Is it really just a happy accident that there is no mention of the unexpected similarity of this alleged primitive bird to modern birds and the implied problems for bird evolution? Why do we mostly hear only one side of the story in the media? I suppose we must be protected from dangerous questions that could come up.

References

Chiappe LM, Navlón G, Martinelli AG, de Souza Carvalho I, Miloni Santucci R, Wu Y-H & Field DJ 2024. Cretaceous bird from Brazil informs the evolution of the avian skull and brain. Nature 635(8038), 376–381. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08114-4

Dunham W 2024. ‘One-of-a-kind’ skull fossil from Brazil reveals bird brain evolution. Reuters November 13, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/science/one-of-a-kind-skull-fossil-brazil-reveals-bird-brain-evolution-2024-11-13/

News Staff 2024. 80-Million-Year-Old Enantiornithine Fossil Fills Gap between Archaeopteryx and Modern Birds. SciNews November 14, 2024. https://www.sci.news/paleontology/navaornis-hestiae-13425.html

Woodford J 2024. Exquisite bird fossil provides clues to the evolution of avian brains. New Scientist November 13, 2024. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2456043-exquisite-bird-fossil-provides-clues-to-the-evolution-of-avian-brains/