Darwinism Vs.Animal consciousness.

What Can We Hope to Learn About Animal Minds?
Denyse O'Leary December 4, 2015 3:36 AM

Human consciousness is difficult to define and "arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind," even though we experience it all our waking hours. If we can't even define our own consciousness, can we say whether a different type of life form has consciousness or a mind?

Some current philosophers have reasoned away the problem by positing that rocks have minds too. Their approach is summarized by New York Times writer Jim Holt as follows:

We are biological beings. We exist because of self-replicating chemicals. We detect and act on information from our environment so that the self-replication will continue. As a byproduct, we have developed brains that, we fondly believe, are the most intricate things in the universe. We look down our noses at brute matter.

Rocks, we are told, are full of chemical information, and in philosopher David Chalmers's slogan, "Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside."

On that view, it is simply impossible to demarcate anything between rocks and humans as a threshold of consciousness. That approach, if it lacks other merit, reveals the difficulty that consciousness creates for naturalism, the idea that nature is all that exists.

Consciousness (a mind) perceives and acts on information. But there are at least two -- more basic and probably unconscious qualities -- that distinguish life from non-life, and seem to act by processing information: self-preservation and adaptability.

Life forms constantly try to preserve themselves in a living state -- that is, they try to survive. They adapt their methods as needed, whenever possible. A rock falls from a high cliff and breaks; a cat has somehow learned to relax, turn in mid-air, and land on his feet. Or consider Slijper's goat and Faith the dog, both of whom, born without forelegs, adapted to a lifestyle that is quite unnatural for their species.

But why do life forms struggle so hard to remain alive when the option of simply dying -- ceasing to be a life form at all, and rejoining the chemical seas -- is readily available, and eventually inevitable?

Naturalist explanations don't turn out to be much help with any of this. Polymath Christoph Adami, interviewed in Quanta Magazine, sees life itself as "self-perpetuating information strings," and defines information as "the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance."

As it happens, he also thinks that "the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance":

On the one hand, the problem is easy; on the other, it's difficult. We don't know what that symbolic language was at the origins of life. It could have been RNA or any other set of molecules. But it has to have been an alphabet. The easy part is asking simply what the likelihood of life is, given absolutely no knowledge of the distribution of the letters of the alphabet. In other words, each letter of the alphabet is at your disposal with equal frequency.

So an alphabet arose by chance? Adami places some confidence in the idea that upheavals around volcanic vents began that alphabet. One can't help but wonder why volcanoes work so differently now.

Taking a slightly different tack, theoretical biologist Kalevi Kull, author of Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life Is the Action of Signs, asks whether life is a form of signaling. Perhaps so, but signaling places us in the world of purpose, not random events.

Communication begins far below the level of the whole life form. One can hardly talk about the genome now, it seems, without an understanding of its complex grammar, "more complex than that of even the most intricately constructed spoken languages in the world" according to Karolinska researchers:

Their analysis reveals that the grammar of the genetic code is much more complex than that of even the most complex human languages. Instead of simply joining two words together by deleting a space, the individual words that are joined together in compound DNA words are altered, leading to a large number of completely new words.

On Adami's view, all this purpose, adaptation, information, signaling, and language originates in the random creation of an alphabet in the ferment around a volcano. Such a position is forced by the claims of naturalism, but is in no way compelled by evidence.

And it all happens whether there is consciousness or not. We experience consciousness, so we assume that other humans do. When we say, informally, that an animal is conscious, we mean that its behavior suggests that it is aware of its own needs, sensations, and environment, of self vs. not-self, of relationships with "not-selves," and such.

So can we determine accurately whether life forms are conscious? Brainless jellyfish, for example, are now thought to act with purpose when fishing.

Are the jellyfish conscious of that purpose? That would amount to having a mind without a brain. But the actual relationship between mind and brain is not -- as we shall see -- as straightforward as was once supposed. For one thing, there does not seem to be a "tree of intelligence," in the sense of a completely consistent correlation between size/type of brain and observed intelligence. We might be best to stick with observation for now, and defer classification till later.

Life forms communicate with each other to a degree that often surprises researchers. Prey animals, for example, warn predators of the danger of eating them or advise other prey that a hiding place is taken. But evidence suggests that plants can communicate too. The Scientist tells us:

Researchers are unearthing evidence that, far from being unresponsive and uncommunicative organisms, plants engage in regular conversation. In addition to warning neighbors of herbivore attacks, they alert each other to threatening pathogens and impending droughts, and even recognize kin, continually adapting to the information they receive from plants growing around them. Moreover, plants can "talk" in several different ways: via airborne chemicals, soluble compounds exchanged by roots and networks of threadlike fungi, and perhaps even ultrasonic sounds. Plants, it seems, have a social life that scientists are just beginning to understand.

So while communication, like purpose, is everywhere, the degree to which a life form is conscious of itself in communication with another life form is still elusive.

Naturalists who do not define the problem out of existence by insisting that even rocks have minds have generally adopted another approach. They try to find animal behaviors that are such close equivalents to human behavior that all such behaviors can be lumped together as, in Francis Crick's phrase, "nothing but a pack of neurons." Nothing remains but to provide a naturalist account, like Adami's, as to how they originally came to be a pack.

What the naturalists are doing is called anthropomorphism -- ascribing human qualities to life forms that may experience life very differently. It was once the province of folk tales. Not today. This year, we were told in the science press that bacteria have morals:

Far from being selfish organisms whose sole purpose is to maximize their own reproduction, bacteria in large communities work for the greater good by resolving a social conflict among individuals to enhance the survival of their entire community.

This finding supports group selection rather than the selfish gene. But it raises questions: Do bacteria have a mind in the absence of a brain? Or is group selection a purposeful force that can operate (as if by magic), in the absence of a mind or brain? Or is the concept of "morals" in fact specific to the human mind, in which case bacteria are not best described as acting that way even by analogy, lest the description become misleading?

In a similar vein, philosopher Stephen Cave argues that animals have free will, proposing to measure it by an FQ, a freedom quotient analogous to IQ:

Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. They can choose whether to wait for the juicier titbit or not -- but only if that titbit comes very soon. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes -- or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. I am guessing that you could manage a lot longer.

Without knowing who the "you" is, I'm not betting anything. Not so sure I'd bet on an unknown chimp either, given the spread cited above.

The research sounds fascinating, but Cave then tells us that

... all around us, every day, we see a very natural kind of freedom -- one that is completely compatible with determinism. It is the kind that living things need to pursue their goals in a world that continually presents them with multiple possibilities.

Obviously, if "free will" is completely compatible with determinism (and Darwinism, he tells us, accounts for that) then free will as we traditionally understand it doesn't exist and can't be measured in any life form. So why claim it does, and can?

Cave's thesis about free will differs significantly from the observation above that jellyfish pursue fish with intent: The intentional behavior of jellyfish is observed; we simply don't know if they know their own intentions. Cave, by contrast, wants to account for human as well as animal intentions as entirely determined while appearing free -- in order to support a fully naturalist perspective.

These two approaches to gathering information are likely to come into increasing conflict. Is the purpose of gathering the information to find out what is going on or to provide support for naturalism? A naturalist will probably answer "Both!" A materialist assumes that any finding can be interpreted from his perspective, however bad the fit, and will keep tinkering until he find a somewhat better fit. The rest of us are prepared to look around and see there may be a better explanation.

Similarly, consider the recent research on why hive workers sometimes kill their queens:

"Workers are assessing the situation in their colony and deciding to revolt against the queen only when the genetic makeup of the colony makes it favorable to do so," Loope said. "The main advantage is to allow your sister workers to lay male eggs, rather than the queen, who typically stops worker reproduction by egg eating, attacking reproducing workers, and by laying many of her own eggs. By eliminating the queen, a matricidal worker allows other workers and herself to lay male eggs."

...

"Hence the matricide," Loope said. "Workers are not mindless automatons working for the queen no matter what. They only altruistically give up reproduction when the context is right, but revolt when it benefits them to do so."

These short quotations from a longer account convey only in part the detailed reasoning hypothesized for the insects. That raises an obvious question: Who or what exactly is doing the reasoning? Some would say natural selection. But natural selection -- the fact that some life forms survive and pass on their traits, while others don't -- must be one of two things. Either it is a mind suited to detailed calculations of self-interest. Or it has somehow produced in the insects' minds capable of such a feat without, so far as we can see, having the brains to match.

Darwin believed that natural selection was the acting agent:

... natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

But Darwin wrote in an age when the behavior of life forms was not known to be this complex. He most likely had much simpler scenarios in view, squabbles over a kill perhaps.

Fortunately, we may not need to make sense of the current state of naturalism to gain at least some insights into animal mind. We humans have a sense of "self" that goes well beyond a drive to continue to exist. But to what extent do other life forms have this sense? Recent decades of research on apes and monkeys can give us some sense of the territory we are entering.


Next time, we'll discuss some of the hope, hype, and hard data about ape and monkey minds.

Between man and chimp the river impossible.

The Real Barrier to Unguided Human Evolution

Ann Gauger April 25, 2012 6:00 AM

Comparing DNA sequences and estimating by how many nucleotides we differ from chimps doesn't tell us much about what makes us human. Many of those nucleotide differences have no effect, because they are the product of neutral mutation and genetic drift. While these neutral mutations may affect the over-all mutation count, they don't answer how many mutations are required for the transition from chimp-like to human.

This problem is analogous to one we examined concerning protein evolution last year in the journal BIO-Complexity (Gauger and Axe 2011). Converting one protein to another's function can be viewed as a version, in miniature, of converting one species to another. But it is much easier to convert proteins than species.

We began by identifying two proteins that are close together in structure, but that have distinct functions. We examined what the minimal number of mutations to convert one protein to the other were. If all the places where they differed had to be changed, that would mean we would have to switch 70% of one protein to achieve conversion to the other's function. It's unlikely that all those mutations are required, however, since many if not most of those changes are due to neutral mutation and drift, just like in the chimp-like to human case.

So to estimate the minimal number of mutations required for conversion to a new function, we identified and tested the most likely amino acid candidates using structural and sequence comparisons, one by one and in combination. We ended up changing nearly the entire active site to look like the target protein, but failed to achieve conversion.

Based on the number of groups we changed, we made a minimum estimate that seven specific mutations would be required for a functional shift to be observed. To get seven coordinated mutations takes far too long, even for bacteria, with their high mutation rate and large population sizes. 10^27 years is our estimate, based on Doug Axe's population genetics model, also published in BIO-Complexity.

Personally, I think the chimp-like to human conversion would have to have taken many more years than any protein conversion, if it happened at all. A few years back Durrett and Schmidt published two papers in which they estimated how long it would take to get a single mutation, and then a second mutation to produce an eight base DNA binding site somewhere within a thousand base region near a gene. They stipulated that within the thousand base region there already was a sequence with six out of eight bases matching the target. The reason they chose to examine DNA binding sites? Many evolutionists think that evolution happens by changing gene expression, and changing gene expression most often requires changes to the regulatory regions around genes.

Their results? They calculated it would take six million years for a single base change to match the target and spread throughout the population, and 216 million years to get both base changes necessary to complete the eight base binding site. Note that the entire time span for our evolution from the last common ancestor with chimps is estimated to be about six million years. Time enough for one mutation to occur and be fixed, by their account.

To be sure, they did say that since there are some 20,000 genes that could be evolving simultaneously, the problem is not impossible. But they overlooked this point. Mutations occur at random and most of the time independently, but their effects are not independent. Mutations that benefit one trait may inhibit another. In addition, many if not all these traits are complex adaptations. Each trait requires multiple mutations to achieve a beneficial change. And many of the traits must occur together to be of any benefit. Take, for example, the changes required for upright bipedalism. Hips, legs, feet, spine, ribcage, skull all need to work together to allow free and efficient motion. All must be changed. But changing the hips before changing the angle of the legs would not be helpful. Changing to upright posture without lengthening the neck and setting the skull atop the spine would not work.

The point is this. There are hundreds of traits that distinguish us from chimps, probably requiring tens of thousands of mutations in total. But even if it takes only 30 or 40 specific trait changes to move from primate to human, and hundred of mutations, the time required would be astronomical. Longer than the age of the universe, actually.

Like Richard Sternberg's argument about whales, the argument from what is required to what is possible shows there just isn't time enough for it to have happened by unguided means.

The Watchtower Society's commentary on the biblical world.

WORLD:
This is the usual English term for translating the Greek koʹsmos in all of its occurrences in the Christian Greek Scriptures except 1 Peter 3:3, where it is rendered “adornment.” “World” can mean (1) humankind as a whole, apart from their moral condition or course of life, (2) the framework of human circumstances into which a person is born and in which he lives (and in this sense it is at times quite similar to the Greek ai·onʹ, “system of things”), or (3) the mass of mankind apart from Jehovah’s approved servants.

The King James Version used “world” to render not only koʹsmos but also three other Greek words in some of its renderings of them (ge; ai·onʹ; oi·kou·meʹne) and five different Hebrew words (ʼeʹrets; cheʹdhel; cheʹledh; ʽoh·lamʹ; te·velʹ). This produced a blurring or confused blending of meanings that made it difficult to obtain correct understanding of the scriptures involved. Later translations have served to clear up considerably this confusion.

The Hebrew ʼeʹrets and the Greek ge (from which come the English words “geography” and “geology”) mean “earth; ground; soil; land” (Ge 6:4; Nu 1:1; Mt 2:6; 5:5; 10:29; 13:5), although in some cases they may stand in a figurative sense for the people of the earth, as at Psalm 66:4 and Revelation 13:3. Both ʽoh·lamʹ (Heb.) and ai·onʹ (Gr.) relate basically to a period of time of indefinite length. (Ge 6:3; 17:13; Lu 1:70) Ai·onʹ may also signify the “system of things” characterizing a certain period, age, or epoch. (Ga 1:4) Cheʹledh (Heb.) has a somewhat similar meaning and may be rendered by such terms as “life’s duration” and “system of things.” (Job 11:17; Ps 17:14) Oi·kou·meʹne (Gr.) means the “inhabited earth” (Lu 21:26), and te·velʹ (Heb.) may be rendered “productive land.” (2Sa 22:16) Cheʹdhel (Heb.) occurs only at Isaiah 38:11, and in the King James Version it is rendered “world” in the expression “inhabitants of the world.” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (edited by G. Buttrick, 1962, Vol. 4, p. 874) suggests the rendering “inhabitants of (the world of) cessation,” while pointing out that most scholars favor the reading of some Hebrew manuscripts that have cheʹledh in place of cheʹdhel. The New World Translation reads “inhabitants of [the land of] cessation.”—See AGE; EARTH; SYSTEMS OF THINGS.

“Kosmos” and Its Various Senses. The basic meaning of the Greek koʹsmos is “order” or “arrangement.” And to the extent that the concept of beauty is bound up with order and symmetry, koʹsmos also conveys that thought and therefore was often used by the Greeks to mean “adornment,” especially as regards women. It is used in that way at 1 Peter 3:3. Hence also the English word “cosmetic.” The related verb ko·smeʹo has the sense of ‘putting in order’ at Matthew 25:7 and that of ‘adorning’ elsewhere. (Mt 12:44; 23:29; Lu 11:25; 21:5; 1Ti 2:9; Tit 2:10; 1Pe 3:5; Re 21:2, 19) The adjective koʹsmi·os, at 1 Timothy 2:9 and 3:2, describes that which is “well-arranged” or “orderly.”

Evidently because the universe manifests order, Greek philosophers at times applied koʹsmos to the entire visible creation. However, there was no real unanimity of thought among them, some restricting it to the celestial bodies only, others using it for the whole universe. The use of koʹsmos to describe the material creation as a whole appears in some Apocryphal writings (compare Wisdom 9:9; 11:17), these being written during the period when Greek philosophy was making inroads in many Jewish areas. But in the inspired writings of the Christian Greek Scriptures this sense is virtually, perhaps entirely, absent. Some texts may appear to use the term in that sense, such as the account of the apostle’s address to the Athenians at the Areopagus. Paul there said: “The God that made the world [form of koʹsmos] and all the things in it, being, as this One is, Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in handmade temples.” (Ac 17:22-24) Since the use of koʹsmos as meaning the universe was current among the Greeks, Paul might have employed the term in that sense. Even here, however, it is entirely possible that he used it in one of the ways discussed in the rest of this article.

Linked With Mankind. Richard C. Trench’s Synonyms of the New Testament (London, 1961, pp. 201, 202), after presenting the philosophic use of koʹsmos for the universe, says: “From this signification of κόσμος [koʹsmos] as the material universe, . . . followed that of κόσμος as that external framework of things in which man lives and moves, which exists for him and of which he constitutes the moral centre (John xvi. 21; I Cor. xiv. 10; I John iii. 17); . . . and then the men themselves, the sum total of persons living in the world (John i. 29; iv. 42; II Cor. v. 19); and then upon this, and ethically, all not of the ἐκκλησία [ek·kle·siʹa; the church or congregation], alienated from the life of God and by wicked works enemies to Him (I Cor. i. 20, 21; II Cor. vii. 10; Jam. iv. 4).”

Similarly, the book Studies in the Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament, by K. S. Wuest (1946, p. 57), quotes Greek scholar Cremer as saying: “As kosmos is regarded as that order of things whose center is man, attention is directed chiefly to him, and kosmos denotes mankind within that order of things, humanity as it manifests itself in and through such an order (Mt. 18:7).”

All humankind. Koʹsmos, or the “world,” is therefore closely linked and bound up with mankind. This is true in secular Greek literature and is particularly so in Scripture. When Jesus said that the man walking in daylight “sees the light of this world [form of koʹsmos]” (Joh 11:9), it might appear that by “world” is meant simply the planet Earth, which has the sun as its source of daylight. However, his next words speak of the man walking at night who bumps into something “because the light is not in him.” (Joh 11:10) It is primarily for mankind that God gave the sun and other heavenly bodies. (Compare Ge 1:14; Ps 8:3-8; Mt 5:45.) Similarly, using light in a spiritual sense, Jesus told his followers they would be “the light of the world” (Mt 5:14), certainly not meaning they would illuminate the planet, for he goes on to show their illuminating would be for mankind, “before men.” (Mt 5:16; compare Joh 3:19; 8:12; 9:5; 12:46; Php 2:15.) The preaching of the good news “in all the world” (Mt 26:13) also means preaching it to mankind as a whole, even as in some languages “all the world” is the common way of saying “everybody” (compare French tout le monde; Spanish todo el mundo).—Compare Joh 8:26; 18:20; Ro 1:8; Col 1:5, 6.

In one basic sense, then, koʹsmos refers to all humankind. The Scriptures therefore describe the koʹsmos, or world, as being guilty of sin (Joh 1:29; Ro 3:19; 5:12, 13) and needing a savior to give it life (Joh 4:42; 6:33, 51; 12:47; 1Jo 4:14), things applicable only to mankind, not to the inanimate creation nor to the animals. This is the world that God loved so much that “he gave his only-begotten Son, in order that everyone exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life.” (Joh 3:16, 17; compare 2Co 5:19; 1Ti 1:15; 1Jo 2:2.) That world of mankind forms the field in which Jesus Christ sowed the fine seed, “the sons of the kingdom.”—Mt 13:24, 37, 38.

When Paul says that God’s “invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made,” he must mean from the creation of mankind forward, for only when mankind appeared were there minds on earth capable of ‘perceiving’ such invisible qualities by means of the visible creation.—Ro 1:20.

Similarly, John 1:10 says of Jesus that “the world [koʹsmos] came into existence through him.” While it is true that Jesus shared in the production of all things, including the heavens and the planet Earth and all things in it, koʹsmos here applies primarily to humankind in whose production Jesus likewise shared. (Compare Joh 1:3; Col 1:15-17; Ge 1:26.) Hence, the rest of the verse says: “But the world [that is, the world of mankind] did not know him.”

“The founding of the world.” This clear connection of koʹsmos with the world of mankind also aids one in understanding what is meant by “the founding of the world,” as referred to in a number of texts. These texts speak of certain things as taking place ‘from the founding of the world.’ These include the ‘shedding of the blood of the prophets’ from the time of Abel onward, a ‘kingdom prepared,’ and ‘names being written on the scroll of life.’ (Lu 11:50, 51; Mt 25:34; Re 13:8; 17:8; compare Mt 13:35; Heb 9:26.) Such things relate to human life and activity, and hence “the founding of the world” must relate to the beginning of mankind, not of the inanimate creation or the animal creation. Hebrews 4:3 shows that God’s creative works were, not started, but “finished from the founding of the world.” Since Eve was evidently the last of Jehovah’s earthly creative works, the world’s founding could not precede her.

As shown under ABEL (No. 1) and FOREKNOWLEDGE, FOREORDINATION (Foreordination of the Messiah), the Greek term (ka·ta·bo·leʹ) for “founding” can refer to the conceiving of seed in human conception. Ka·ta·bo·leʹ literally means “a throwing down [of seed]” and at Hebrews 11:11 may be rendered “conceive” (RS, NW). Its use there evidently refers to Abraham’s ‘throwing down’ human seed for the begetting of a son and Sarah’s receiving that seed so as to be fertilized.

Therefore “the founding of the world” need not be taken to mean the beginning of the creation of the material universe, nor does the expression “before the founding of the world” (Joh 17:5, 24; Eph 1:4; 1Pe 1:20) refer to a point of time prior to the creation of the material universe. Rather, these expressions evidently relate to the time when the human race was ‘founded’ through the first human pair, Adam and Eve, who, outside of Eden, began to conceive seed that could benefit from God’s provisions for deliverance from inherited sin.—Ge 3:20-24; 4:1, 2.

‘Spectacle to world, both to angels and men.’ Some have understood the use of the word koʹsmos in 1 Corinthians 4:9 to include both invisible spirit creatures and visible human creatures, by the rendering: “We are made a spectacle unto the world, both to angels and men.” (AS) However, the footnote offers an alternative reading in saying: “Or, and to angels, and to men.” This latter rendering is also the way in which other versions render the Greek text here. (KJ; La; Mo; Vg; CC; Murdock) Young’s translation reads: “A spectacle we became to the world, and messengers, and men.” Just preceding this, in 1 Corinthians 1:20, 21, 27, 28; 2:12; 3:19, 22 the writer uses the word koʹsmos to mean the world of humankind, so that evidently he does not depart from that sense immediately afterward in 1 Corinthians 4:9, 13. Hence, if the rendering “both to angels and men” is admitted, the expression is merely an intensification, not to enlarge the meaning of the word koʹsmos, but to enlarge on the spectatorship as going beyond the world of mankind, so as to include “angels” as well as “men.”—Compare Ro.

The human sphere of life and its framework. This does not mean that koʹsmos loses all of its original sense of “order” or “arrangement” and becomes merely a synonym for mankind. Mankind itself reflects a certain order, being composed of families, tribes, and having developed into nations and language groups (1Co 14:10; Re 7:9; 14:6), with their wealthy and poor classes and other groupings. (Jas 2:5, 6) A framework of things that surround and affect mankind has been built up on earth as mankind has grown in number and in years of existence. When Jesus spoke of a man as ‘gaining the whole world but forfeiting his soul in the process,’ he evidently meant gaining all that the human sphere of life and human society as a whole could offer. (Mt 16:26; compare 6:25-32.) Of similar significance are Paul’s words about those “making use of the world” and the married persons’ ‘anxiety for the things of the world’ (1Co 7:31-34), as also is John’s reference to “this world’s means for supporting life.”—1Jo 3:17; compare 1Co 3:22.

In the sense of signifying the framework, order, or sphere of human life, koʹsmos has a meaning similar to that of the Greek ai·onʹ. In some cases the two words can almost be interchanged. For example, Demas is reported to have forsaken the apostle Paul because he “loved the present system of things [ai·oʹna]”; while the apostle John warned against ‘loving the world [koʹsmon]’ with its way of life that appeals to the sinful flesh. (2Ti 4:10; 1Jo 2:15-17) And the one who is described at John 12:31 as “the ruler of this world [koʹsmou]” is identified at 2 Corinthians 4:4 as “the god of this system of things [ai·oʹnos].”

At the close of his Gospel, the apostle John says that if all the things Jesus did were set down in full detail, he supposed “the world [form of koʹsmos] itself could not contain the scrolls written.” (Joh 21:25) He did not use ge (the earth) or oi·kou·meʹne (the inhabited earth) and thereby say that the planet could not contain the scrolls, but he used koʹsmos, evidently meaning that human society (with its then existing library space) was not in position to receive the voluminous records (in the book style then used) that this would have entailed. Compare also such texts as John 7:4; 12:19 for similar uses of koʹsmos.

Coming “into the world.” When one is ‘born into this world,’ then, he is not merely born among mankind but also comes into the framework of human circumstances in which men live. (Joh 16:21; 1Ti 6:7) However, while references to one’s going or coming into the world may refer to one’s birth into the human sphere of life, this is not always the case. Jesus, for example, in prayer to God said: “Just as you sent me forth into the world, I also sent them [his disciples] forth into the world.” (Joh 17:18) He sent them into the world as grown men, not as newborn babes. John speaks of false prophets and deceivers as having “gone forth into the world.”—1Jo 4:1; 2Jo 7.

The many references to Jesus’ ‘coming or being sent forth into the world’ evidently do not refer primarily, if at all, to his human birth but more reasonably apply to his going out among mankind, publicly carrying out his assigned ministry from and after his baptism and anointing, acting as a light bearer to the world of mankind. (Compare Joh 1:9; 3:17, 19; 6:14; 9:39; 10:36; 11:27; 12:46; 1Jo 4:9.) His human birth was solely a necessary means to that end. (Joh 18:37) In corroboration of this, the writer of Hebrews represents Jesus as speaking words from Psalm 40:6-8 “when he comes into the world,” and Jesus logically did not do this as a newborn babe.—Heb 10:5-10.

When his public ministry among mankind came to its close, Jesus knew “that his hour had come for him to move out of this world to the Father.” He would die as a man and would be resurrected to life in the spirit realm from which he had come.—Joh 13:1; 16:28; 17:11; compare Joh 8:23.

“The elementary things of the world.” At Galatians 4:1-3, after showing that a child is like a slave in the sense of being under the stewardship of others until he is of age, Paul states: “Likewise we also, when we were babes, continued enslaved by the elementary things [stoi·kheiʹa] belonging to the world.” He then proceeds to show that God’s Son came at the “full limit of the time” and released those becoming his disciples from being under the Law that they might receive the adoption of sons. (Ga 4:4-7) Similarly at Colossians 2:8, 9, 20 he warns the Christians at Colossae against being carried off “through the philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary things [stoi·kheiʹa] of the world and not according to Christ; because it is in him that all the fullness of the divine quality dwells bodily,” stressing that they “died together with Christ toward the elementary things of the world.”

Of the Greek word stoi·kheiʹa (plural of stoi·kheiʹon) used by Paul, The Pulpit Commentary (Galatians, p. 181) says: “From the primary sense of ‘stakes placed in a row,’ . . . the term [stoi·kheiʹa] was applied to the letters of the alphabet as placed in rows, and thence to the primary constituents of speech; then to the primary constituents of all objects in nature, as, for example, the four ‘elements’ (see 2 Pet. iii. 10, 12); and to the ‘rudiments’ or first ‘elements’ of any branch of knowledge. It is in this last sense that it occurs in Heb. v. 12.” (Edited by C. Spence, London, 1885) The related verb stoi·kheʹo means “walk orderly.”—Ga 6:16.

In his letters to the Galatians and Colossians, Paul was evidently not referring to the basic or component parts of the material creation but, rather, as German scholar Heinrich A. W. Meyer’s Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book (1884, Galatians, p. 168) observes, to “the elements of non-Christian humanity,” that is, to its fundamental, or primary, principles. Paul’s writings show this would include the philosophies and deceptive teachings based purely on human standards, concepts, reasoning, and mythology, such as the Greeks and other pagan peoples reveled in. (Col 2:8) However, it is clear that he also used the term as embracing things of a Jewish nature, not only non-Biblical Jewish teachings calling for asceticism or “worship of the angels” but also the teaching that Christians should put themselves under obligation to keep the Mosaic Law.—Col 2:16-18; Ga 4:4, 5, 21.

True, the Mosaic Law was of divine origin. However, it had now been fulfilled in Christ Jesus, “the reality” to which its shadows pointed, and it was therefore obsolete. (Col 2:13-17) Additionally, the tabernacle (and later temple) was “worldly” or of human construction, hence, “mundane” (Gr., ko·smi·konʹ; Heb 9:1, Mo), that is, of the human sphere, not heavenly or spiritual, and the requirements related thereto were “legal requirements pertaining to the flesh and were imposed until the appointed time to set things straight.” Christ Jesus had now entered into the “greater and more perfect tent not made with hands, that is, not of this creation,” into heaven itself. (Heb 9:8-14, 23, 24) He himself had told a Samaritan woman that the time was coming when the temple at Jerusalem would no longer be used as an essential part of true worship but that the true worshipers would “worship the Father with spirit and truth.” (Joh 4:21-24) So the need to employ such things that were only “typical representations” (Heb 9:23) within the human sphere picturing the greater things of a heavenly nature had ceased with Christ Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven.

Hence the Galatian and Colossian Christians could now worship according to the superior way based on Christ Jesus. He, and not humans and their principles or teachings, or even the “legal requirements pertaining to the flesh” as found in the Law covenant, should be recognized as the appointed standard and the full means of measuring the truth of any teaching or way of life. (Col 2:9) Christians should not be like children by voluntarily placing themselves under that which was likened to a pedagogue or tutor, namely, the Mosaic Law (Ga 3:23-26), but they were to be in a relationship with God like that of a grown son with his father. The law was elementary, “the A B C of religion,” as compared with the Christian teaching. (H. Meyer’s Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book, 1885, Colossians, p. 292) Anointed Christians, because of their being begotten to heavenly life, had, in effect, died and been impaled to the koʹsmos of the human sphere of life, in which regulations such as fleshly circumcision had been in force; they had become “a new creation.” (2Co 5:17; Col 2:11, 12, 20-23; compare Ga 6:12-15; Joh 8:23.) They knew that Jesus’ Kingdom was not from a human source. (Joh 18:36) They certainly should not turn back to “the weak and beggarly elementary things” of the human sphere (Ga 4:9) and thereby be deluded into giving up the “riches of the full assurance of their understanding” and “accurate knowledge of the sacred secret of God, namely, Christ,” in whom are concealed “all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge.”—Col 2:1-4.

The world alienated from God. A use of koʹsmos unique to the Scriptures is in making it stand for the world of mankind apart from God’s servants. Peter writes that God brought the Deluge “upon a world of ungodly people,” while preserving Noah and his family; in this way “the world of that time suffered destruction when it was deluged with water.” (2Pe 2:5; 3:6) It may again be noted that the reference here is not to the destruction of the planet or of the celestial bodies of the universe, but it is restricted to the human sphere, in this case the unrighteous human society. It was that “world” that Noah condemned by his faithful course.—Heb 11:7.

The pre-Flood unrighteous world, or human society, ended, but mankind itself did not end, being preserved in Noah and his family. After the Flood the majority of mankind again deviated from righteousness, producing another wicked human society. Still there were those who took a separate course, adhering to righteousness. In course of time God designated Israel as his chosen people, bringing them into covenant relationship with himself. Because the Israelites were thus made distinct from the world in general, Paul could use koʹsmos, “world,” as equivalent to the non-Israelite “people of the nations,” or “Gentiles,” at Romans 11:12-15. (NW; KJ) He there pointed out that Israel’s apostasy led to God’s revoking his covenant relationship with them and that it opened up the way for the Gentiles to enter into such relationship and its riches, by being reconciled to God. (Compare Eph 2:11-13.) The “world,” or koʹsmos, then, during this post-Flood and pre-Christian period again designated all humanity outside of God’s approved servants, and specifically those outside Israel during the period of its covenant relationship with Jehovah.—Compare Heb 11:38.

In a similar manner and with great frequency, koʹsmos is used to signify all non-Christian human society, regardless of race. This is the world that hated Jesus and his followers because they bore witness concerning its unrighteousness and because they maintained separateness from it; such world thereby showed hatred for Jehovah God himself and did not come to know him. (Joh 7:7; 15:17-25; 16:19, 20; 17:14, 25; 1Jo 3:1, 13) Over this world of unrighteous human society and its kingdoms, God’s Adversary, Satan the Devil, exercises rulership; in fact, he has made himself “the god” of such world. (Mt 4:8, 9; Joh 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; compare 2Co 4:4.) God did not produce such unrighteous world; it owes its development to his chief Opposer, in whose power “the whole world is lying.” (1Jo 4:4, 5; 5:18, 19) Satan and his “wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places” act as the invisible “world rulers [or, cosmocrats; Gr., ko·smo·kraʹto·ras]” over the world alienated from God.—Eph 6:11, 12.

Not simply humanity, of which Jesus’ disciples were a part, but the whole organized human society that exists outside the true Christian congregation is meant in such texts. Otherwise Christians could not cease to be a “part of the world” without dying and ceasing to live in the flesh. (Joh 17:6; 15:19) Though unavoidably living in the midst of that society of worldly persons, including those engaging in fornication, idolatry, extortion, and similar practices (1Co 5:9-13), such Christians must keep themselves clean and unspotted by that world’s corruption and defilement, not entering into friendly relations with it, lest they be condemned with it. (1Co 11:32; Jas 1:27; 4:4; 2Pe 1:4; 2:20; compare 1Pe 4:3-6.) They cannot be guided by worldly wisdom, which is foolishness in God’s sight, nor can they ‘breathe in’ the “spirit of the world,” that is, its selfish and sinful activating force. (1Co 1:21; 2:12; 3:19; 2Co 1:12; Tit 2:12; compare Joh 14:16, 17; Eph 2:1, 2; 1Jo 2:15-17; see SPIRIT [Impelling Mental Inclination].) Thus, through their faith they ‘conquer the world’ of unrighteous human society, even as did God’s Son. (Joh 16:33; 1Jo 4:4; 5:4, 5) That unrighteous human society is due to pass away by divine destruction (1Jo 2:17), even as the ungodly pre-Flood world perished.—2Pe 3:6.


Ungodly world ends; humankind preserved. Thus, the koʹsmos for which Jesus died must mean the world of mankind viewed simply as the human family, all human flesh. (Joh 3:16, 17) As to the world in the sense of human society alienated from God and in actual enmity toward God, Jesus did not pray on behalf of such world but only for those who came out of that world and put faith in him. (Joh 17:8, 9) Even as human flesh survived the destruction of the ungodly human society, or world, in the Deluge, so Jesus showed that human flesh is to survive the great tribulation that he likened to that Flood. (Mt 24:21, 22, 36-39; compare Re 7:9-17.) “The kingdom of the world” (evidently meaning of humankind) is, in fact, promised to become “the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ,” and those reigning with Christ in his heavenly Kingdom are due to “rule as kings over the earth,” hence over humankind apart from the deceased ungodly human society dominated by Satan.—Re 11:15; 5:9, 10.

DeMythifying science.

Science Doesn’t Work the Way You Might Think
Not even for Einstein
THOMAS LEVENSON  NOV 10, 2015   SCIENCE


One hundred years ago this month, Albert Einstein put the final polish on a new theory, one that transformed how humankind understands the fundamental nature of reality. With his general theory of relativity Einstein displaced the most famous idea in science, Newton’s theory of gravity, replacing the old idea of a force with a radically strange vision of a cosmos in which space warps and time bends.

When, four years later, during a total eclipse, measurements of starlight curving around the sun confirmed general relativity, Einstein became a global celebrity, and the first line of the catechism of science was reaffirmed: A single brute fact can destroy the most beautiful idea.


Richard Feynman once phrased that credo a bit more gracefully, writing that science gains its unique power to determine “whether something is so or not” through the commandment that “observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.” In one form or another, that’s what would-be scientists (and the rest of us) are told from a first-science-fair Coke-and-Mentos volcano onwards: Science advances because at every turn it is subject to the test of reality, the judgment of nature from which there is no appeal.That’s what happened, or seemed to, when the British scientists who measured the path of starlight around the sun reported to a meeting of the Royal Society that they had observed a number that matched Einstein’s prediction and contradicted Newton. A single unequivocal observation had spoken: Light swerves along the contours of spacetime, and just like that, the 200-year-old Newtonian cosmos came crashing down.There’s only one problem: It didn’t happen that way.

Albert Einstein had no need to wait four years for confirmation of his theory. From at least a week before he completed general relativity in its final form, he already knew that nature agreed with him. When he did his sums, what had seemed a tiny error in an obscure measurement could be completely accounted for by his theory. For him, that was enough: The general theory was the real thing.

At first glance, that’s just another example of how Feynman said science ought to work. But actually, the mystery that convinced Einstein had gone unsolved for over half a century—and no one, not even Einstein himself until the very end, had recognized the phenomenon for what it was: a decisive challenge to Newton’s whole approach. Instead, decades were spent in pursuit of a planet that by every reasonable measure should have existed, but didn’t.

The story of that missing planet begins with one that was and is very much present. A definitive analysis of the orbit of Mercury in 1859 had revealed a glitch. A tiny wobble, less than one part in 10,000 of the innermost planet’s track around the sun could not be explained by any known source of gravity within the solar system. Within the framework of Newtonian gravitation, the explanation was obvious: If every recognized body had been accounted for, then Mercury’s misbehavior could only be explained by something yet to be discovered, a planet between it and the sun.
First sight of the expected body, captured in transit across the face of the sun, came almost immediately, in December 1859. The new planet was so obviously necessary that there was no hesitation in naming it: Enter Vulcan. Astrophotography—the technique of attaching cameras to telescopes—was in its infancy, so this first observation was drawn and described, but to be confirmed, it would have to be repeated by someone else. No one did, but no matter. Professional and serious amateur astronomers would glimpse their version of Vulcan at least a dozen times over the next 20 years.


The final “Eureka!” came at the great American eclipse of 1878, when James Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, recognized Vulcan in a small reddish object within a few degrees of the limb of the shadowed sun. Unfortunately, none of the other professional astronomers at the eight stations set up by the federal government to observe the eclipse saw anything out of the ordinary.

With that the scientific consensus came to rest: Each “discovery” had been a mistake; a sunspot, a mis-identified star, a wish. Vulcan had every right to exist. In Newton’s universe it had an obligation to be there. It wasn’t.

The next move was obvious, except no one dared make it: Could Newton be wrong? A few astronomers proposed ad-hoc solutions: Maybe the sun was fatter around the middle than believed (it’s not); perhaps there is an unseen halo of dust that could exert a gravitational tug on Mercury (there isn’t); maybe one could play with Newton’s numbers a bit to make all the sums work out (they don’t). But for the most part, for the next 30 years, Mercury’s rambles faded into obscurity. On one side, there was the most successful theory in the history of modern science. On the other, a tiny unaccountable anomaly. It was no contest.


The challenge to Newton did come, of course. In 1905, Albert Einstein published the special theory of relativity, which showed that the tick of time and the measurement of space must differ for observers in motion relative to each other. By 1907, Einstein realized that the logic of this first theory of relativity conflicted with the classical understanding of motion and gravity. For one example: In Newton’s view, the force of gravity leaps across empty space instantly, the sun’s tug grabbing earth with no time delay at all, while under Einstein’s relativity, nothing, not even force, can move faster than the speed of light.There were other issues as well, but it was that kind of contradiction and no mere awkward observation that led Einstein to extend relativity into a theory of gravity. It would take him eight years, but finally, in November of 1915, he had got it: both the physical picture of a universe in which energy and matter deform space and time—and the mathematical framework that allowed him to calculate the paths matter-energy must take in this new cosmos.And so, when Einstein had finally tuned his math to the point where he could calculate an actual example from the real world, he turned to the case of a planet traveling close to its star: Mercury. Sometime in the week between November 11 and November 18, he inserted the appropriate numbers and cranked through the equations. Twenty-four steps later and he had his answer. Mercury’s path, Vulcan-inspiring wobble and all, appeared on the page in all its glory—or, as Einstein wrote: “This theory agrees completely with the observations.”

With that, Einstein knew. He told one friend that on seeing Mercury drop out of his equations that he felt his heart stumble, and another that he was “beside himself with joy.” There was no need to wait for the eclipse—which is why he once said that if the British expedition had come back with the “wrong” numbers “I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”
A century on, we celebrate general relativity and Einstein’s re-imagining of how the universe organizes itself. Vulcan now rates barely a footnote to the history of astronomy. But it has its uses. Contrary to the myth of science, facts are not autonomous. They gain meaning from the frameworks within which human beings interpret them. It can be—it was for Vulcan—almost impossibly hard to see past what ought to exist to what does.

The decades Vulcan lasted as almost-real mark the distance separating our myth of scientific progress and the way science actually happens day by day. Its biography is perhaps the cleanest example of how hard it is in the midst of the fray to recognize the decisive observation, but it is hardly the only such case.

The strangeness of the geology and fossil evidence behind the theory of continental drift helped drive a half-century of resistance to the idea. Siddhartha Mukherjee documented in his book The Emperor of All Maladies how a fixation on the cure for a misconceived disease inhibited recognition of the complexity of cancer for a generation. It took decades before physicists came to grips with experiments that showed that the speed of light was constant for every observer—and even then, only the very young Einstein took that observation seriously enough to produce his first relativity theory.

In the long run, it’s true: Reality imposes a final and authoritative judgment on the rights and wrongs of any idea. In the moment, though, each moment, including ours, meaning in science emerges painfully, slowly, one fallible, historically contingent, self-deceiving and (very) occasionally triumphant scientist at a time. In other words, Vulcan’s brief brush with existence (1859-1915, RIP) is no mere curiosity. It’s a caution.

The terms "species " and "speciation" Just became a bit coudier

Snake turns out to be six different “species”
November 29, 2015 Posted by News under News, speciation

From ScienceDaily:

The Persian dwarf snake is wrongly classified as one species, scientists say. New research shows it is composed of six different species, a finding which might be important for the conservation of the snake.

Well, the new finding might be important for the conservation of the snake but, together with many other instances, it isn’t doing much for a science-based use of the term “species.”

That’s been noted here before. except for claiming instances of evolution right under our noses on weak evidence.

The research, which was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, revealed that the Persian dwarf snake is not a single species at all. It is composed of 6 different species, wrongly classified as the species Eirenis persicus. A molecular clock analysis revealed that the divergence and diversification of the E. persicus species group mainly correspond to Eocene to Pliocene orogeny events subsequent to the Arabia-Eurasia collision.

The six species are Eirenis nigrofasciatus, Eirenis walteri, Eirenis angusticeps, Eirenis walteri, Eirenis mcmahoni and Eirenis occidentalis. Except for E. occidentalis, which is a completely new discovery by the researchers, these species were already described between 1872 and 1911. However, during the last half of the previous century, herpetologists considered them as a single species with some difference in color and pattern, because the overall morphology is quite similar. More.

The fact that the very concept of “species” is such a mess, with no sign of taking the matter in hand, is the sort of thing that causes some to call biology the “social sciences of the sciences.”* Apparently, the hallowed popular status of On the Origin of Species is enough warrant for comfort with chaos.

See also: Single jaw finds three species to be one

* Note: And social sciences return the compliment. Psychology Today informed us in 2009 that social sciences are branches of biology.I Oh no! It can’t be as bad as all that!

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Here’s the abstract:


The Persian dwarf snake Eirenis (Pseudocyclophis) persicus (Anderson, 1872) has a wide distribution range in south-western Asia. This species group was comprehensively studied here using traditional biometry, geometric morphometrics, ecological niche modelling, and genetics. Our analyses revealed that E.?persicus is split into two clades. A western clade, bearing at least two different species: E.?persicus, distributed in south-western Iran, and an undescribed species from south-eastern Turkey and western Iran. The eastern clade consists of at least three species: Eirenis nigrofasciatus, distributed across north-eastern Iraq, and western and southern Iran; Eirenis walteri, distributed across eastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and western and southern Pakistan, and Eirenis angusticeps, distributed in north-eastern Pakistan. Ecological niche modelling revealed that the distribution of the species in the western clade are mainly affected by winter precipitation, and those in the eastern clade are mainly affected by the minimum temperature of the coldest month. A molecular clock analysis revealed that the divergence and diversification of the E.?persicus species group mainly correspond to Eocene to Pliocene orogeny events subsequent to the Arabia–Eurasia collision. This study confirms that specimens with the unique morphology of having 13 dorsal scale rows on the anterior dorsum, occurring in the Suleiman Mountains in central Pakistan, can be referred to Eirenis mcmahoni (Wall, 1911). However, at this moment we have insufficient data to evaluate the taxonomy of this species. © 2015 The Linnean Society of London Open access – Mahdi Rajabizadeh, Zoltán T. Nagy, Dominique Adriaens, Aziz Avci, Rafaqat Masroor, Josef Schmidtler, Roman Nazarov, Hamid Reza Esmaeili, Joachim Christiaens. Alpine-Himalayan orogeny drove correlated morphological, molecular, and ecological diversification in the Persian dwarf snake (Squamata: Serpentes:Eirenis persicus). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/zoj.12342

Depending on whom you ask the human brain just became more "comprehensible"

We Just Discovered 6 New Kinds of Brain Cells

The map of the human brain gets a little more complete.

By William Herkewitz

Nov 26, 2015 @ 3:19 PM

Thanks to a handful of newly discovered neurons, the brain just became a little bit less mysterious.

Today a team of neuroscientists led by Xiaolong Jiang and Andreas Tolias at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston announced six altogether new types of brain cells. The neuroscientists came across these new neurons while conducting a census of brain cells in adult mice in a part of the brain called the the primary visual cortex, an area chiefly concerned with  sight. The researchers credit their new insight to a recently developed method of slicing razor-thin slices of mature brain. The discovery is reported today in the journal Science. 

"Just asking 'what types of cells make up the brain' is such a basic question... that establishing a complete census of all neuron cell types is of great importance in moving the field of neuroscience forward," says Tolias, at Baylor College of Medicine.​

Most previous studies investigating the odd menagerie of brain cells have used juvenile mice, mostly because it's easier to get high-resolution pictures of their brains. But there's a problem: Brains keep maturing and complicating as they get older, and Jiang's team believes that their new-found neurons might not form until adulthood. 

In their study, Jiang and his colleagues meticulously surveyed 11,000 neurons in three layers of the primary visual cortex in adult mice.​ All told, they found 15 types of neurons, six of which had never before been seen or described. The neuroscientists used a complex recoding method called octuple patch-clamp recordings—a way of tracking the many connections brain cells form with one another, all at the same time.

"You can almost think of the task of finding these news cell types like identifying trees and grouping them into classes like pine, cedar or oak—we're separating the groups based on their obvious differences of shape and structure," says Tolias. But there's a huge difference between grouping cells and trees. For neuroscientists, tracing the absurdly complex branch-work in even just a few neurons is an insanely arduous task. Tolias says that this cell census (remember, this is just three layers of one tiny section of the brain) took three and a half years and over 200 separate imaging experiments.​

Although we call them all neurons, your brain has an enormous menagerie of brain cells. Even if we ignore the specialized neurons that attach to our muscles or sensory organs like our eyes and tongue (and forget our brains' helpful support cells, called glial cells) mammals like mice or humans are thought to have in excess of hundreds of flavors of so-called interneurons—brain cells that just connect with other brain cells. And today's six new neurons fall in this class.​These neurons can differ from one another in a myriad of ways, such as when they'll fire up or what their genetic makeup looks like. But the most glaring difference is how they're shaped; specifically, in how they wend and branch, and which other cells they connect to. In fact, the names of many of previously-discovered interneurons become clear when you create a 3D rendering of them. For example: chandelier, shrub, and basket cells form wiry connections that look like those three objects. Today's six new neurons form a variety of shapes that haven't been seen before. 

"Our brains contain billions of neurons linked through trillions of synaptic connections. Obviously, we are faced with a problem of immense complexity," explains Tolias. "However, if neurons can be classified into distinct cell types... and if we understand [their underlying] rules, it will be an important step in deciphering the wiring of the brain," he says.​

It's hard to understate just how important it could be to scientists to find and describe all these new cells. It will help neuroscientists to refine the human brain's complex wiring diagram, and that circuitry map underlies almost every question we have about how our brains work, from understanding how memories are created to defining consciousness. Plus, it's thought that malfunctions of the microcircutry of individual cell types (lets say, your chandelier cells just aren't chandelier-ing) could be related to brain disorders as disparate as epilepsy or autism spectrum disorders.

"And we can safely say that there a plenty more cell types to be discovered, throughout the brain in both mice and humans. We only studied a few layers in the visual cortex of a mouse, even just in other parts of that same cortex, there could be many more cell types waiting to be discovered," says Tolias. ​

On cybernetics and the challenge of optimal design.

What Can We Learn from Cybernetics?
Evolution News & Views January 11, 2013 3:49 PM

Cybernetics is a multi-disciplinary field that provides hope for those who have lost the ability to move their bodies. It is also a field that is rife with ethical dilemmas and grandiose promises. In a BBC article, Martin Angler explores the question of neural enhancement through cybernetic interfaces. The reality is that we have things like cochlear implants that convey signals to the brain. The dream is to implants to make people smarter and, perhaps, eventually full man/machine integration (a cyborg).

On a practical level, cybernetics teaches us about the difficulties in repairing lost function versus the difficulties of creating entirely new (and improved) functionality. This is a key distinction from an evolutionary perspective because one of the roles of natural selection (coupled with random mutations) in a Darwinian paradigm is to not only restore lost function or optimize current function, but also to create entirely new function.

Angler comments:

The dream is to create the type of brain augmentations we see in fiction that provide cyborgs with advantages or superhuman powers. But the ones being made in the lab only aim to restore lost functionality -- whether it's brain implants that restore limb control, or cochlear implants for hearing... Creating implants that improve cognitive capabilities, such as an enhanced vision "gadget" that can be taken from a shelf and plugged into our brain, or implants that can restore or enhance brain function is understandably a much tougher task. But some research groups are [beginning] to make some inroads.
Working within the design of a fully functioning organism is one thing. The difficult task of coming up with a design that will perform a function, then integrating it into the body, has already been accomplished for you. The components are there for a reason and as we have seen with genetics and neuroscience, these functions are intricately interwoven into the organism's system. When a part of the body malfunctions, we still understand what it was meant to do. A broken foot is still a foot. In cybernetics, the goal is often to re-gain (or gain for the first time) functionality that should have been there in the first place. The components and structure are in place; there is either something missing, or something is malfunctioning.
If engineers struggle with adding new design components to the body, can we expect natural selection to do better? Natural selection coupled with mutations (and subsequent reproduction) can optimize an organism for its environment. Those organisms with traits that are best suited for a particular environment are able to live and reproduce, as in the case of bacterial resistance. If an organism lacks functionality that it should have, and this lack affects its ability to survive, then natural selection is optimizing the population for proper functionality, or at least it does so up to a point. This is limited to factors that affect survival.

However, this is not the same thing as producing a completely novel feature. Michael Behe addresses this in his book The Edge of Evolution. Natural selection acting on mutations can do things like adapt to environmental pressures, but the extent to which the organism changes is limited. Much as in cybernetics, to make a completely novel component would require an incredible amount of planning to overcome the barriers in integrating the component into a system. It isn't just an matter of attaching a new piece, but of rewiring. Similarly, regarding claims that the Darwinian mechanisms can form novel components, it needs to be show how these mechanisms were also able to integrate the components into the already existing system so that the organism has some sort of survival advantage at each step of the process; otherwise there is no reason to expect the new components to be preserved into the next generation.


Cybernetics has helped restore hearing and movement to those who have lost them. It is a field that helps us understand the incredible biological and mechanical barriers that must be overcome in order to restore function. It also helps us understand what is entailed in adding novel functionality to an organism -- it is about more than constructing a part, it also involves integrating that part into the body plan. It seems to entail quite a bit of goal-oriented planning and design. These are not strengths of Darwinian evolution.

On absence of evidence and evidence of absence re:Darwinism's tree of life

Clearcut: Publish the Claim, then Destroy the Data
Evolution News & Views January 16, 2013 5:55 PM 

Most of the data to support claims about Darwin's Tree of Life over the last two decades have been "irrevocably lost," a survey found.

Bryan T. Drew, working in conjunction with the Open Tree of Life Project, decided to check the data supporting the growing construction of Darwin's tree. He reported the somewhat shocking results in Nature:

Of 6,193 papers we surveyed in more than 100 peer-reviewed journals, only 17% present accessible trees and alignments (used to infer relatedness). Contacting lead authors to procure data sets was only 19% successful. DNA sequences were deposited in GenBank for almost all these studies, but it is the actual character alignments that are pivotal for reproducing phylogenetic analyses. We estimate that more than 64% of existing alignments or trees are permanently lost. (Emphasis added.)
This implies that nearly 4,000 published papers cannot back up their claims with the actual evidence. Perhaps improved practices in the future can rectify the situation, but Drew believes it is serious:
This problem will increasingly hinder phylogenetic inference as the use of whole-genome data sets becomes common. Journals need to reinforce a policy of online data deposition, either as supplementary material or in repositories such as TreeBASE (http://treebase.org) or Dryad (http://datadryad.org) -- including for data sets based on previously published sequences. Ecologists, evolutionary biologists and others will then have access to rigorous phylogenetics for testing their hypotheses.
The "others" could reasonably include skeptics of the Tree of Life who want to evaluate whether the claims made are justified by the data or instead are held aloft by prior assumptions that Darwinian evolutionary common descent is true.
The Open Tree of Life website adds more reason for concern. Only a small portion of phylogenetic data is stored publicly, an article headlined "The Glass Is Still Pretty Empty" warns:

Sometimes you wonder whether the glass is half full or half empty.
But when it is only filled for four percent -- the other 96 percent is just air -- there is only one conclusion: it is time for more.
Despite Drew's estimate in Nature that more than 64% of phylogenetic data are lost, the actual number could be much higher. This article says that only a tiny portion of published trees can be checked against the data:
At least that is what some scientists in the phylogenetic community argue, because only about four percent of all published phylogenies are stored in places such as TreeBASE or Dryad. Their message is quite simple: it is time to bring together more databases with estimations on how species are possibly related to each other.
Several journals in the evolutionary biology field recently adopted policies that encourage or require contributors to make their data publicly available online. Yet, this only leads to the storage of a very small percentage of ten-thousands of phylogenies that have been constructed in the past few decades.

What this implies is that evolutionary phylogenies are largely baseless (if you'll pardon the pun). Sure, there may be ways to reconstruct some of them, but who would be willing to go to the trouble?
Of course, there are also other ways to receive data that are not stored on the Internet, but those alternatives are commonly not the most efficient routes. For instance, it is possible to send an email to a scientist who published a phylogenetic tree and "sometimes wait for six months to maybe get a response -- either with or without the data," says Keith Crandall, one of the Open Tree of Life investigators and the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute at George Washington University.
Multiply that by 4,000 papers and you can be sure nobody has that kind of time or patience. Evolutionary biologists are not necessarily being deceptive about their claims; it's just too much bother to upload all those sequences when there are no standards. Nevertheless, this data loss hinders one of science's primary ideals: reproducibility. How many "Libraries of Alexandria" are figuratively being burned by negligence? (See "Science Can Perpetuate Myths.")
Only an overwhelming amount [of online data] provides scientists the opportunity to efficiently explore where prior studies are in agreement on how species are related, but also where there are conflicts that still need to be resolved.
Where replication has been tried, it has often failed:
A group of scientists from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States recently published an article about current practices for storing datasets with tree estimates. They concluded that "most phylogenetic knowledge is not easily re-used due to a lack of archiving, lack of awareness of best practices, and lack of community-wide standards for formatting data, naming entities, and annotating data." As a result, "[m]ost attempts at data re-use seem to end in disappointment."
The article ends with optimism that things will get better. Up till now, some participants have been "appropriately cautious" about promised solutions. They also want to see "some positive signs that the Open Tree of Life project will be successful" first. This implies that, to date, it has not been successful.
Maybe things will get better. Maybe someday inferences about Darwin's Tree will be justified by overwhelming data available for all to check. But for now, despite all the advances in genome sequencing, Darwin's Tree is a phantom, not a reality. Knock on the wood. It's 96% air.

Meanwhile, a recent paper in PNAS finds "widespread horizontal gene transfer of retrotransposons" in vertebrate genomes, including those of cattle, cats and koalas. This could further confound evolutionary inferences:

A phylogenetic tree built from BovB sequences from species in all of these groups does not conform to expected evolutionary relationships of the species, and our analysis indicates that at least nine HT [horizontal transfer] events are required to explain the observed topology. Our results provide compelling evidence for HT of genetic material that has transformed vertebrate genomes.

This is not the kind of "transformism" that Darwin hoped to document. It implies the documentation itself has been transformed, making it harder to see a tree.