Has 'convergent evolution' become Darwinism's utility belt?

Pythons and boas shed new light on reptile evolution

Source:

Australian National University

A new study into pythons and boas has for the first time found the two groups of snakes evolved independently to share similar traits, shedding new light on how the reptiles evolved.

Pythons and boas are two families that include the largest snakes in the world, like the reticulated python and the anaconda boa, which have been known to grow close to eight meters in length.
The Australian National University (ANU) study found that by living in the same habitat, pythons and boas evolved independently to look similar. This happened at least five times in different habitats. Aquatic pythons look like aquatic boas, burrowing pythons look like borrowing boas and tree-dwelling pythons look like tree-dwelling boas.
Lead researcher Damien Esquerre said the study found pythons and boas were an important example of convergent evolution in reptiles. Convergent evolution is where species adapt to the same conditions and evolve similar traits.
"The finding of such a strong case of convergent evolution demonstrates the power of natural selection and adaptation in living organisms," said Mr Esquerre from the ANU Research School of Biology.
"If we see that different groups evolve the same things independently when they face the same challenges, we can find predictability in evolution."
Other famous examples of convergent evolution are sharks and dolphins, which are not related but have evolved similar body plans. Similarly, the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial mammal, and the wolf, a placental mammal, evolved similar body plans.
Although they look the similar and both constrict their prey, the pythons and boas last shared a common ancestor 70 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs.
The research focused on the head shape of close to 2,000 specimens in museum collections in Australia and America.
Mr Esquerre said not all evolution was driven by natural selection, but examples such as pythons and boas reinforce its importance in shaping biological diversity.
"By having greater understanding of the evolution of pythons and boas, researchers can now have better ideas of what extinct fossil snakes were doing before they disappeared," he said.

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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Australian National University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The establishments policy on design advocates:Give them a 'fair trial' and then hang them.

In the "Public Interest"? ProPublica Misrepresents Intelligent Design and Discovery Institute Policy
Sarah Chaffee


In a recent article on Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos (confirmed yesterday), Annie Waldman at ProPublica delves into intelligent design -- and in the process misrepresents design theory and Discovery Institute.

She starts by describing intelligent design as a "more nuanced outgrowth of creationism," and then says that Discovery Institute's Briefing Packet for Educators  advocates teaching ID under the guise of "critical thinking." That's wrong on both counts.

Intelligent design, unlike creationism, restricts itself to scientific evidence and the rational inferences that can be drawn from that evidence. It does not base its conclusions on the Bible or any other sacred text.

ProPublica, which claims to offer "Journalism in the Public Interest," insists that "[w]ithin this movement, 'critical thinking' has become a code phrase to justify teaching of intelligent design." Ms. Waldman then brings Discovery Institute in:

Advocates have contended that presenting  presenting intelligent design side-by-side , also known as "teaching the controversy," would enhance the critical thinking skills of students and improve their scientific reasoning. Indeed,  briefing packet for educators from the leading intelligent design group, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, walks teachers through this approach.

"In American public education today, the status quo teaches evolution in a dogmatic, pro-Darwin-only fashion which fails to help students use critical thinking on this topic," the report states, adding that teaching "the controversy" can help students "learn the critical thinking skills they need to think like good scientists."

John West, vice president of the Discovery Institute, said that the implication that "critical thinking" is code for intelligent design is "ludicrous."

"Critical thinking is a pretty foundational idea supported by lots of people, not just us," said West in an email, adding that he also thinks "critical thinking should apply to discussions of evolution."

Discovery Institute does NOT advocate pushing intelligent design into public schools. Waldman cites our Briefing Packet, but she seems to have skimmed over our science education policy, which is in that document. It notes:

As a matter of public policy, Discovery Institute opposes any effort to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education. Attempts to mandate teaching about intelligent design only politicize the theory and will hinder fair and open discussion of the merits of the theory among scholars and within the scientific community. Furthermore, most teachers at the present time do not know enough about intelligent design to teach about it accurately and objectively.

Instead of mandating intelligent design, Discovery Institute seeks to increase the coverage of evolution in textbooks. It believes that evolution should be fully and completely presented to students, and they should learn more about evolutionary theory, including its unresolved issues. In other words, evolution should be taught as a scientific theory that is open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can't be questioned.

Teaching intelligent design is not the same as teaching criticisms of evolution. An argument for design requires making a positive case -- starting with observations of what human designers create (specified complexity) and examinations of where we find specified complexity in nature.

Furthermore, science standards in Kansas and Ohio, mentioned by Ms. Waldman, did not call for teaching intelligent design, but rather critical analysis.

Waldman also quotes Greg McNeilly, identified as a "longtime aide to DeVos and an executive at her and her husband's privately held investment management firm." He says regarding Mrs. DeVos:

I don't know the answer to whether she believes in intelligent design -- it's not relevant...There is no debate on intelligent design or creationism being taught in schools. According to federal law, it cannot be taught.

The claim that intelligent design is against federal policy is false. Perhaps he was referring to Kitzmiller v. Dover, a court decision involving design, but that applies only to the Middle District of Pennsylvania. For more on Kitzmiller, see our book  Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision.

Teaching the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution is different from teaching ID. Let me give you a couple examples of what critical analysis might look like:

Evaluating whether natural selection acting on random mutation can account for all life we see around us. This is an important discussion right now in the scientific world -- in fact, at the November Royal Society Conference, "New Trends in Evolutionary Biology," theoretical biologist Gerd Müller noted  that natural selection has a hard time accounting for phenotypic novelty and complexity. The conference provided a forum for proponents of the Modern Synthesis and the Third Way of Evolution to discuss questions about evolutionary mechanisms.

Learning about various proposed scientific scenarios for the origin of life. This includes discussing the code-first model (most prominently, RNA world), the metabolism first model, and the protein-first model. As the 2007 Priestley Medalist George M. Whitesides has noted: "Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea."

A quality science education teaches students accurate, up-to-date information. But it does more than that as well: It teaches them to think critically about science.

Scientific inquiry is fostered, not suppressed, by teaching topics, such as evolution, that are still under debate by scientists. No one expects high school biology students to solve the origin of life dilemma in the classroom, but by tracing the research and arguments of scientists in the field, they learn about approaches and methods of science that can only be beneficial to them in the future -- inside or outside the lab.


Critical analysis does not entail any discussion of religion. ProPublica's insistence to the contrary showcases a bias, common in the media, against any presentation of valid criticisms of neo-Darwinism. That's not in the public interest, and certainly not in the interest of students.

On Darwinism's conflating of micro with macro.

Incremental Versus Radical Innovation: A Response to Josh Swamidass on Evolution and Cancer

Brian Miller

Joshua Swamidass is an Assistant Professor of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine at Washington University, and a frequent critic of intelligent design. At the theistic evolutionary site BioLogos, he  recently posted  on the use of evolutionary theory in understanding cancer. He has written on this topic previously, and we have analyzed his arguments (see  here, here, and here ). I would like to take a step back and put his case in a larger context, the question of incremental versus radical innovation.

But first, let's meet Dr. Swamidass. Recently, he and I exchanged emails, giving me a chance to ask him to clarify his positions. I thank him for his time.

Swamidass explained that he is a devout Christian, and believes that God did create life. However, he thinks that the exact means by which this was accomplished, how the blueprints of different species were instantiated in the physical world, is a mystery. Because of this, he said, he doubts that the unfolding of life can ever be disentangled from physical processes.

Instead, he feels the evidence for design in nature should be seen as an entire package. He is skeptical of any characteristics of living organisms being used, via modern design-detection methods, as distinct, isolated evidence for design. Rather, he thinks the Modern Synthesis offers a very helpful framework for understanding many aspects of nature, such as antibiotic resistance and  cancer growth. He sees connections between these small-scale changes and patterns identified when comparing the genomes of different species. Therefore, he promotes the standard theory of evolution as the best approach to understanding the development of life.

There is some common ground here. Proponents of intelligent design agree with Swamidass that the evidence from nature taken as a whole points to a designer, while he's right as well that just how this design was instantiated in biology remains a mystery. There follows, however, a sharp parting of ways. First, ID theorists argue that many features of life could not plausibly arise from undirected natural process, and that those features instead display signatures (in the form of biological information) uniquely associated with intelligent agents. Second, we observe, recognizing this fact is scientifically fruitful. It leads to essential insights and new directions in research needed to fully understand biological processes and patterns.

Many biologists appear to recognize the second point, at least unconsciously. We notice this, in their frequent use of design language and logic in describing systems ranging from single cells to complex structures (see  here  and here). Of course, they always attribute such design features to the wondrous power of natural selection. This is their faith.

Which brings us to the subject of cancer. As Swamidass recognizes, and this is the key to his argument, an evolutionary framework can indeed provide insights into how tumor cells change and propagate (see here and here). However, this is true only to a certain limited extent. The key question is whether the sorts of mutations seen in tumors could accumulate in independent organisms to drive the large-scale transformations seen throughout the history of life. The answer is no. We see this, in part, from theories of engineering design that focus on the process of innovation. Such approaches recognize a fundamental difference between improving an existing design (incremental innovation) and creating an entirely new design based on a different design logic (radical innovation).

A crude example would be the difference between slightly modifying a car by streamlining the frame, on one hand, and changing a car into a helicopter, on the other. Making slight improvements through a series of small steps would help optimize performance. However, this process could not be extrapolated to change the basic design architecture. Very soon after incremental changes were made to start turning the car into a helicopter, the car would suffer a dramatic loss of functionality. This would occur long before it could ever fly. The problem is that the two basic designs operate under fundamental constraints that are directly in conflict. Any change helping to meet the target constraints (e.g., power from the engine redirected to turning the rotor) would cause the system to fail to meet the original constraints (e.g., power from the engine directed to turning the wheels), thus downgrading performance or eliminating it altogether. Such self-defeating alterations would be immediately abandoned, causing the "evolutionary" process to come to a halt.

Innovation experts  Donald Norman and Roberto Verganti  have illustrated this distinction in terms of hill climbing. They picture incremental improvements (in the evolutionary context, microevolution) as gradually climbing to the top of a local hill. A person only going uphill (improved fitness) would eventually reach a peak and become stuck. However, radical innovation (macroevolution) is the equivalent of moving from the face of one hill to an entirely different one. This would require a single, dramatic leap over the suboptimal terrain in between. What's more, the different hills are so isolated that any undirected leap would land the system in the middle of a sea of nonfunctional arrangements of parts. The whole basis of innovation theories (e.g., TRIZ) lies in using previous knowledge of innovation to anticipate where the islands of functionality might reside. Therefore, innovation can only proceed through intelligent direction.

The natural next question is to what extent this characteristic of engineered systems applies to life. At first glance, the logic seems to transfer completely. An illustration in nature would be the lung of a typical tetrapod evolving into the lung of a bird. All vertebrates, which long predate birds, have sack-like lungs, while birds and a few reptiles have lungs that are tubes, with air flowing in one direction only. Any mutation that alters a sack-like lung in such a way as to start turning it into a tube (e.g., puncturing a hole in the end) would seem to diminish the lung's effectiveness. This challenge, by the way, is part of the larger hurdle of a theropod dinosaur transforming into a bird.

However, the analogy is not complete. Living organisms differ from machines in many ways, such as their ability to grow, self-repair, and reproduce. Could these differences cause a comparison with human engineering to break down? Research over the past decades suggests the opposite. All of the differences actually result in even tighter constraints on life, making the challenge to evolution dramatically more severe. Imagine engineering a giant box filled with machinery, which self-assembles into a car. The constraints on that machinery would be greater than on a pre-assembled car, since any alteration at the beginning would have magnifying effects throughout the assembly process.

The self-assembly of a car corresponds in many ways to the development and growth of life (e.g., steps leading from a fish egg to an adult fish). The original egg cell divides into two cells. Then, those cells divide into four cells, and so forth for many generations. The earlier stages of this process establish the basic architecture (body plan) of an organism through networks of genes, which control cell duplication, migration, and differentiation. These developmental networks have been studied for decades, and the  conclusion of leaders in the field  is that they cannot tolerate even minor alterations. Any change that significantly alters an organism's body plan is always harmful and typically fatal, for the effects of early changes grow downstream, resulting in catastrophe for the adult. As a result, the fitness terrain that best corresponds to the different body plans is a series of highly isolated mountains, where every side is a steep, unscalable cliff.

Thus, changing from one body plan, such as a sponge or worm, into another plan, such as a fish, requires many dramatic alterations to be implemented, at once, through intelligent guidance. This conclusion leads directly to the expectation that new body plans (phyla) should appear suddenly in the fossil record without a continuous series of intermediates leading back to the trunk of an evolutionary tree. And this is what we find.


The prediction perfectly matches the pattern seen in the  Cambrian explosion and in n later sudden appearances of new architectures. Joshua Swamidass's protests about cancer notwithstanding, this seamless integration of design theory, developmental networks, and the fossil record is only possible within an ID framework.

The most favored foe?

The Curious Romance of Darwinism and Creationism -- And Why Intelligent Design Must Be Silenced
David Klinghoffer

One of the many smart observations in Tom Bethell's new book, Darwin's House of Cards, pertains to the curious relationship of Darwinism and Creationism -- and how that bears on efforts to suppress investigation of the theory of intelligent design.
Darwinists seem to long for the good old days when their only opposition was from Biblical creationism. This is reflected in efforts to conflate ID with creationism, or to make the former a kind of forbidden science, off limits to discussion. As Bethell writes in his chapter on "Intelligent Design and Information Theory":

Darwinians today are eager to stick their own labels onto ID: "Intelligent design creationism" is one favorite. It's as though an unseen collective voice had cried out: "Give us back our preferred enemy! Bring back creationism! That, we knew how to respond to." But so far, no intelligent rebuttal of intelligent design has appeared.

The longing, the romance -- perhaps "bromance"? -- makes sense, since for all that separates them, Darwinism and creationism have in common that they are both inferences from prior doctrines (respectively, materialism, or a particular way of reading the Bible). ID is different. Says Bethell, "Intelligent design is not a deduction from a philosophy but an inference from observed facts."
This is what's so enraging to Darwinists, and it goes some way to explaining why they lash out -- holding their own tongue, and punishing ID advocates and open-minded researchers for failing to hold theirs.
Bethell cites a telling lecture by University of Akron researcher Nita Sahai, "The Origins of Life: From Geochemistry to Biochemistry." (See the video by clicking on the image at the top.) You actually see her catch herself, as she's helped out by a colleague, first saying that her lab work simulating OOL requires "intelligent design" -- no, no, no, make that "careful selection."
Mr. Bethell also tells the story of the publication of The Privileged Planet. Arguably more interesting than the book itself, he says, is what happened to its astronomer co-author at the Iowa State University, denounced by

[o]ver 400 professor across the state [who] signed various statements, opposing "all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor." Both on and outside the planet, whether in astronomy or biology, the professors insisted, the philosophy of naturalism is expected to enjoy a monopoly.

That monopoly was challenged on another campus, Baylor University, by mathematician William Dembski.

Dembski formed the Polanyi Institute to debate these issues, with Darwinians and ID opponents included on the board. But the Institute was shut down after vehement protests from Baylor's biology faculty. They did not want ID to be so much as discussed.

Not even discussed. That is about as telling a statement as there could be. ID, unlike creationism, challenges Darwinian evolution on its own turf. That is not acceptable. Creationism for the Darwinist is a welcome foil. On the other hand, ID, which practices science where Darwinism is ultimately an exercise in philosophy, must be silenced.

How politics poisons everything.

March for Science Gets "Hijacked" by Partisanship
Wesley J. Smith

The Left twists any and every discreet issue, politicizing it into the usual culture war agenda items. Now it's the March for Science, which presents "colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism," etc. as "scientific issues."

Over at the American Council on Science and Health blog, Alex Berezow (with whom I have sometimes disagreed) sounds the alarm and explains why he won't be marching:

I wrote previously of my concern that the Science March would be hijacked by the kind of political partisanship it should instead be concerned about - and that has indeed come true. This fear was based on not-so-subtle hints provided by its Twitter feed, such as embracing "intersectionality" (a concept taught in classes on feminism) as a core principle.

...

If you're wondering what this has to do with science, you're certainly not alone. The answer, of course, is nothing. These issues are the primary concern of revisionist historians and social justice warriors, not empirically minded scientists.

Berezow is exactly right: For example, science can tell us the biological nature of a fetus. It cannot tell us whether it is right or wrong to have an abortion. Questions like that belong in a discussion of morality, ethics, or religion.

If science properly understood ever becomes conflated in the public mind with left-wing advocacy, it will profoundly harm that crucial sector and hence, the human future. Science is already too politicized by policy or ethical debates that turn into fights over whether one side or the other is "anti-science."


I suspect that if we were to dig deep enough, we would find George Soros money paying for all of this. Be that as it may, no reputable scientist should march in the March for Science.

A house built on sand?

Tom Bethell on Mind, Matter, and Self-Defeating Darwinism
David Klinghoffer

Over at  The Stream, Tom Bethell, author of  Darwin's House of Cards, clarifies why Darwinists don't talk so much about one straightforward inference from their own commitment to materialism.

If mind is just a special configuration of brain cells, then mind is nothing but matter. How can neurons "decide" to do one thing rather than another? Nerve cells can't make decisions. So, materialism repudiates free will.

The consistent materialist sees this, denies free will and dismisses consciousness as a delusion. "Our sense of self is a neuronal illusion," said Jerry Coyne, a fully paid-up materialist and author of Why Evolution Is True. Molecular biologist Francis Crick said the same thing. "Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules," he wrote. Or as he put it more succinctly, "You're nothing but a pack of neurons."

How deeply do materialists believe this? Notice that many of them grow outraged at public intellectuals who reject Darwinian materialism. But why the outrage if beliefs, ambitions and will are "nothing but a pack of neurons." On that view the person skeptical of Darwinism can't help himself, so why get outraged at the poor fellow?

The materialists might concede that their outrage is irrational, a byproduct of evolution -- the fight-or-flight mechanism run amok. But that explanation opens a can of worms. If mind is a byproduct of an evolutionary process that maybe saddled us with various irrationalities, why trust human reason? Why trust it to lead us to the truth about biological origins?

In my decades as a journalist covering evolution and interviewing some of the world's leading evolutionary thinkers, I have found that materialists have no good answers to this question, or to many of the evidential challenges that have endured and grown since Darwin's time.

For me the conclusion is inescapable: Modern Darwinism is built on a foundation of sand -- a house of cards, threatened even by the outraged huffing and puffing of its defenders.

In short, there's no sense in placing faith in the kind of reasoning done by a brain that's a product of Darwinian processes.


Beyond this, as Bethell notes in the book, anyone with some common sense and self-knowledge must realize that denying free will is bunk. Our will, the freedom to make good or bad choices, is something we experience every waking moment. The assertion of materialism, which is the foundation of Darwinian theory, runs headlong into what we know about our own inner lives. It's self-defeating. So evolution's defenders naturally play all this down, while being unable to deny it.

On how Darwinists have got befogging down to a science.

Did Complex Flight Feathers "Emerge"?
Evolution News & Views

Here's a thought experiment. Consider something you know is intelligently designed: for example, software code for an app that flies a drone. Now let's describe its "emergence" in Darwinian langauge:

Once assembly language emerged, it diversified into logic gates of increasing complexity, as crawling robots co-opted various functions for novel adaptations, including powered flight. The coding mechanism driving this spectacular process remains unclear. Through morphological analysis of robots in various stages of development, we identify two logic gates that act as major controllers for the topologies of drone propeller blades. Comparison of early and late drone models identifies three major transformations in drone blade evolution: (i) the appearance of stiff protrusions, (ii) further shaping of the protrusions into vanes, and (iii) specialization of the vanes into airfoils of increasing efficiency. Some of the vanes became grouped into fours separated by right angles. Besides these major transformative events, other morphological features that evolved include controlled rotation, autonomous navigation, communication with a smartphone, and so on.
All clear now? You'll find this kind of vacuous language masquerading as scientific explanation repeatedly in the literature when evolutionists describe how complex systems "evolved." Complex functions emerge. Novelty arises. Innovations appear. To show that our parody is not far off the mark, here are opening statements from a paper in Nature Communications  about feather evolution. Notice all the words that assume evolution instead of demonstrating it. Notice also how the authors freely appropriate design words (like program, tuning):

Adaptation of feathered dinosaurs and Mesozoic birds to new ecological niches was potentiated by rapid diversification of feather vane shapes. The molecular mechanism driving this spectacular process remains unclear. Here, through morphology analysis, transcriptome profiling, functional perturbations and mathematical simulations, we find that mesenchyme-derived GDF10 and GREM1 are major controllers for the topologies of rachidial and barb generative zones (setting vane boundaries), respectively, by tuning the periodic-branching programme of epithelial progenitors.... Incremental changes of RA gradient slopes establish a continuum of asymmetric flight feathers along the wing, while switch-like modulation of RA signalling confers distinct vane shapes between feather tracts. Therefore, the co-option of anisotropic signalling modules introduced new dimensions of feather shape diversification.
Major novel functions of feathers that evolved include endothermy, communication, aerodynamic flight and so on. These are achieved through stepwise retrofitting of the original feather forms. [Emphasis added.]

Yikes! "Aerodynamic flight" just evolved? The authors casually toss in three miracles as an afterthought: "major novel functions of feathers that evolved." Let's be clear: warm-bloodedness, communication and powered flight are not afterthoughts. Nor do they arise by "stepwise retrofitting" of feather forms. As Paul Nelson aptly says in Flight:  Flight: The Genius of Birds, "You don't just partly fly, because flight requires not just having a pair of wings, but having your entire biology coordinated towards that function."

Then they toss out even more wonders:

Besides these major transformative events, other morphologic features that emerged during evolution include the deep follicles containing stem cells for cyclic regeneration, the hooklets and curved flanges in barbules and the solid cortex and air-filled pith in rachis and ramus. Together, these features enhanced feather mechanical strength, reduced weight, improved air-trapping efficiency and ensured renewability of feathers after damage.
Argument by assertion is not argument at all. To speak of "features that emerged during evolution" enlightens the reader only about the authors' beliefs. It's not a statement of science; it's a statement of ideology.

Recall the animation of flight feathers in the Illustra film in all their glory: vanes, barbs, barbules, hooks, all interconnected to provide a firm, lightweight, water-resistant airfoil easily repaired by the bird. But having perfect feathers is not enough. Feathers have to be connected to bones, and those to muscles and nerves, and nerves to a brain programmed to know how to fly. Without everything working together, "the evolution of feathers" signifies nothing.

The researchers identified some genes and tweaked them in chickens to see what happened. In some cases, the barb angles changed. In others, the density of barbs grew or shrank. Identifying genes involved in feather "tuning" is fair game in science. It's like reverse-engineering software to identify the logic routines used. Engineers might even run tests to see what happens when the logic routines are modified or rearranged. Those tests, however, would say nothing about the "emergence" of logic routines and complex functions.

The rest of the paper has very little to say about Darwinian evolution -- certainly nothing about mutation and natural selection.

Another paper generalizes the error. In the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two American evolutionists strive to learn about "Emergence of function from coordinated cells in a tissue." Emergence again. It's a favorite word among evolutionists, obviating any need to identify causation. In this paper, the authors show that by repeatedly stating that something "gives rise to" something else.

A basic problem in biology is understanding how information from a single genome gives rise to function in a mature multicellular tissue. Genome dynamics stabilize to give rise to a protein distribution in a given cell type, which in turn gives rise to the identity of a cell. We build a highly idealized mathematical foundation that combines the genome (within cell) and the diffusion (between cell) dynamical forces. The trade-off between these forces gives rise to the emergence of function. We define emergence as the coordinated effect of individual components that establishes an objective not possible for an individual component. Our setting of emergence may further our understanding of normal tissue function and dysfunctional states such as cancer.
It "may further our understanding," but then again, it may not. This paragraph only makes sense in light of intelligent design (or else what could "an objective" refer to?). Information in a gene can "give rise to" function if and only if it was programmed to do so. Read the paragraph that way, and it makes sense. In fact, the whole paper can be read that way. We would understand cells taking shape as tissues, and tissues "giving rise to" their preprogrammed functions the way the designer intended.

Unfortunately, this is not what the authors appear to be saying. They speak only of forces, distributions, and equilibria -- blind, unguided natural processes.

You can find forces, distributions, and equilibria in rocks or ocean currents, but no "function" could be expected to "emerge" by unguided processes. Function implies a programmed response for the good of the whole in a coordinated, robust fashion, such that the whole organism can move, metabolize, and reproduce.

One might point to the "emergence" of nuclear fission in certain radioactive deposits, like the natural Oklo reactor in Gabon, Africa (Scientific American) as a kind of function. One might consider ocean currents driven by the moon to show the "emergence" of a cycle. Those cases, however, stretch the definition of "function" because they have no objective. A muscle tissue has an objective to generate force according to the will of the controlling brain behind it, for the purpose of movement, metabolism or reproduction. That's the kind of function these two mathematicians are talking about. They think a liver's function "emerges" from natural forces in the tissues it contains, and the protein distribution of each cell in the tissue. There's no thought of a program in their discussion.

Our main theorem (Theorem 5) establishes that monotonicity, a property that we introduce here, implies global convergence of the tissue dynamics to the equilibrium, where all cells have the same protein distribution. This gives a biological justification for our framework and a model for "emergence of function," as well as suggestions for studying the passage from emergence to morphogenesis. On the other hand one could see the emergence described here as a final stage of morphogenesis, completing a cycle.
Our model could give some support to obtaining more insights. Further questions, where quantitative support is expected, are also suggested: (i) To what extent is there a common equilibrium of proteins in each cell in a tissue? (ii) How do cells in a tissue cooperate to give rise to function? And (iii) how do we measure the diffusion between the cells?

One might as well speak of the emergence of metals "giving rise to" the morphogenesis of a bicycle, and the morphogenesis of the bicycle "giving rise to" the emergence of function like locomotion, "completing a cycle." Is something missing in this description?

The math in the paper looks pretty recondite. But no amount of scholarly dressing can overcome a bad premise. If there is no mention of a design plan, program, or purpose in their model, then their concept of "morphogenesis" cannot extend beyond the repetitive patterns in crystals and currents. Snowflakes -- lovely and intricate as they are -- present no function beyond falling and melting. The dynamics of currents can lead to standing waves and cycles; laws of nuclear reactions can "give rise to" sustained fission. None of these non-biological cases exhibit the kind of emergence of function the authors are trying to model. (They specifically refer to examples like skeletal muscle and the liver.)


Rather than increasing our understanding, these authors decrease it by reducing it to vacuous concepts of emergence and morphogenesis which, when stripped of programmed design, cannot "give rise to" a feather, much less an Arctic tern.

On how "fake news" drives the elites' agenda

On the science of sleep

File under "Well said" XLVI

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." John Adams

Nature's extreme navigators v. Darwin.

These Animals Really Get Around
Evolution News & Views

What does it take to navigate? Think of the requirements. You have to have a map of some sort, a compass, and robust locomotion anatomy. You have to know where you want to go, and possess the sensory equipment and the stamina to get there. Illustra Media spotlighted some spectacular examples of navigation in the animal world in the  Design of Life series. To show those cases are far from unique, consider these recently-reported findings, some of which are quite astonishing.

Insect Pilots

In Science Magazine, Elizabeth Pennisi relates that, "Like birds, insects may travel in sync with the seasons." Here's a wonder hidden to the naked eye. Consider these "stunning" stats that made one evolutionary ecologist exclaim, "Wow":

Birds and human vacationers aren't the only creatures that take to the skies each year to migrate north or south. An analysis of a decade's worth of data from radars specifically designed to track airborne insects has revealed unseen hordes crossing parts of the southern United Kingdom--2 trillion to 5 trillion insects each year, amounting to several thousand tons of biomass, that may travel up to hundreds of kilometers a day. [Emphasis added.]
Pennisi refers to a study reported in the same issue of  Science about a "mass movement of invisibles." The  University of Haifa  calls says, "This movement constitutes the largest migration found in today's world, creating a mass that is almost eight times that of birds that migrate from Britain to Africa." Put another way, that's the equivalent of 20,000 flying reindeer,  Phys.org quips. Seriously, when you consider that 30,000 songbirds take off for Africa each year, but the mass of migrating insects is seven times that, you're talking oodles of bugs going the distance. The migrators include flies, butterflies, hoverflies, ladybirds, and other beetles, aphids, and moths. This has been going on overhead for eons, but has only been reported now? The reason is that we never had the equipment or inclination to look.

The study did not examine the starting points and destinations of each insect population, but the researchers believe that this migration takes place over distances of at least several hundred kilometers, and possibly much more. "Since there is evidence that this migration also takes place over sea, and since Great Britain is an island, these insects must have come to Britain in the spring, and at least some of them must reach continental Europe in the fall," Dr. Sapir explains.
The researchers do not elaborate on the equipment necessary for insects to navigate over the open ocean, other than to note, "The ubiquity of tailwind selectivity in such a diverse group indicates that compass mechanisms must be universal in larger insect migrants." Wow, indeed.

Insect Truckers

Let's not overlook ground transportation. The BBC News reports that ants use the sun and memories to navigate. "Ants stand out in the insect world because of their navigational ability," Helen Briggs writes. Ants are also remarkably ambidextrous with their six legs, able to maintain their orientation when moving forward or backward, such as when hauling food to the nest. What tools are required to do this?

Scientists say that despite its small size, the brain of ants is remarkably sophisticated.

"They construct a more sophisticated representation of direction than we envisaged and they can incorporate or integrate information from different modalities into that representation," Dr [Antoine] Wystrach added.

The details are reported in Current Biology . The open-access paper states, "This reveals substantial flexibility and communication between different types of navigational information: from terrestrial to celestial cues and from egocentric to holonomic directional memories."

Ocean Navigators

Navigating underwater presents a different set of challenges. You can't see the stars, vision underwater is impaired, and the sea is full of predators. We learned how salmon, whales, and sea turtles meet these challenges in Living Waters, but here we encounter additional talented animal migrators -- both large and small.

What could be smaller than the larva of a coral reef fish?  Current Biology says that packed into that tiny organism a magnetic compass lurks. The abstract relates another "wow" story:

Many coral reef fish larvae spend days to months in the open ocean before settlement on coral reefs. Early in development, larvae have limited swimming capabilities and will therefore be greatly affected by currents. This can potentially result in dispersal distances of tens of kilometers. Nevertheless, up to 60% of surviving larvae have been shown to return to their natal reefs. To home, the larvae must develop strong swimming capabilities and appropriate orientation mechanisms. Most late-stage larval reef fish can, after being passively drifted for days to weeks, swim strongly, and Ostorhinchus doederleini larvae have been shown to use chemotaxis to identify their natal reef once in its vicinity and a sun compass for longer distance orientation during the day. But how do they orient at night? Here, we show that newly settled fish caught at One Tree Island (OTI) at the Capricorn Bunker Reef Group (Great Barrier Reef) can use geomagnetic compass information to keep a south-east heading. This behavior might help them return to their natal reef in the absence of any celestial cues at night.
Moving to large fish,  Fox News Science  reports that a male mako shark migrated 13,000 miles in less than two years. That's equivalent to swimming over halfway around the globe -- a new record for a fish. "He was like the Energizer bunny -- he kept going and going and going," one marine biologist remarked. The team used an electronic tag to monitor his movements by satellite. For fun, you can track him and other fish on the  Nova Southeastern University website.

In the middleweight category, shannies, like sea turtles, find their way back to their favorite nesting sites. "This behaviour is reminiscent of migratory birds such as white storks or swallows," New Scientist reports. "But unlike them, the fish does not migrate over long distances. Instead, it disappears for months on end from its rocky shore breeding sites along the western coasts of Europe and North Africa, travelling offshore to feed." The scientists don't yet know how they do find their way back home, but they understand the requirements:

Returning to breeding sites, much like sea turtles do, requires homing abilities, including well-developed navigation skills and an aptitude for keeping track of your position....

"Many species of intertidal rock-pool fish have excellent homing capabilities backed up by fantastic spatial learning," says Culum Brown at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Birds

One way to appreciate bird migration is to fly with them. A "human swan" flew in a powered paraglider,  Live Science  reports, to trail endangered swans on their epic 4,500 mile migration. Sacha Dench was glad that the swans accepted her presence and essentially ignored her. This allowed her to document the entire migration path across 10 countries, aided by a ground team that monitored five tagged birds. It took three months to fly the "absolutely stunning" route. See photos here .

Phys.org reports that migrating birds tend to fly when resources are at their peak. How they determine these peaks is not known, but three species monitored by ornithologists at the University of Copenhagen -- shrikes, nightingales and cuckoos -- revealed that "all three birds cross continents to match highest levels of resource supply" thanks to "innate programmes" of some sort.

Mammals


Many kinds of mammals migrate, particularly herbivores like wildebeest, elephants, and bats, but we'll save their stories for another time. Suffice it to say that a multitude of diverse species carry sophisticated navigational equipment in their bodies. Are we to believe that this equipment evolved by trial and error over millions of years? Timothy Standish pointed out in Living Waters that it all has to be present at the same time to succeed. He also pointed out that finding this ability in such different animals as fish, sea turtles, and birds -- members of entirely different orders of vertebrates -- to say nothing of different phyla like insects (arthropods) and even bacteria, is entirely expected by design but presents a serious challenge to natural selection, despite the oft-cited but vacuous appeal to "convergent evolution." We hope these latest findings about animal navigation will serve to amplify your appreciation of intelligent design in the living world.

A clash of Titans. XLVI

Examining the house that Darwin built

Tom Bethell's Rebuke to Fellow Journalists: A Skeptical Look at Evolution Is Not Beyond Your Powers
David Klinghoffer

The popular media's attitude on evolution mixes several elements: loathing for the large part of the public that doubts the Darwinian narrative, preening at its own (presumed) superiority in grasping science, and a fawning reverence for evolutionary biologists. Added to this is an unwillingness to weigh the evidence for themselves, offering the excuse that the experts must know best, so why bother? Veteran journalist Tom Bethell's new book offers a marvelous implicit rebuke on In Darwin's House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, , he records his own investigation of the evidence, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper. Lo and behold, it's not beyond the intellectual reach of a reporter to get to the bottom of the controversy and to estimate the plausibility of Darwin's theory.

Not a religious apologist or a cheerleader for any competing view, but rather an old-fashioned skeptic, Bethell has been doubting Darwin since he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. I admit he's a longtime friendly acquaintance and a contributor to Evolution News, so I'm not unbiased. But others who, like me, have followed him for years agree in savoring his work.

That includes some eminent names. Novelist Tom Wolfe has called him "one of our most brilliant essayists," and Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard, a great writer himself, says, "As a journalist, Tom Bethell is fearless. As a storyteller and stylist he is peerless. All his gifts are on generous display in this fascinating and admirable book."

He has been writing about Darwin (among many other subjects, of course) for forty-plus years, beginning with an article in Harper's in 1976. Wry, unfailingly clear, never technical, yet astonishingly well informed, he has produced what might be the Platonic ideal of an introduction to an often challenging and certainly controversial subject. He covers the waterfront, probing the strength of Darwinian thinking with reference to common descent, natural selection, extinction, homology, convergence, the fossil record, biogeography, cladistics, Lenski's long-term experiment with bacteria, and much more.

He concludes that while confidence in the pillars of Darwinism -- common descent and innovation through natural selection -- hit their high-water mark at the celebration of the Origin of Species in 1959, the evidence has steadily and increasingly gone against the theory. The whole edifice rested on a 19th century faith in Progress, propped up by a dogmatic commitment to materialism. As the former falters, the whole structure is in danger of collapse.

With an apt metaphor, he sums up:

At the moment, I believe, the science of Darwinism amounts to little more than the "wedding" of materialism and Progress. We have seen that if materialism is true, then Darwinism -- or something very much like it -- must also be true. But materialism is highly improbable and has been widely challenged. At the same time it only takes one partner to break up a marriage, and as we know, Progress has wandered off the straight and narrow.
His humor is dry, subtle, his focus expansive, and his attitude utterly unapologetic. A unique feature of the book is its interviews. Philosopher of science Karl Popper, for example, spent time at the Hoover Institution at Stanford when Bethell was there and explained that despite reports, he never really recanted his rap on Darwinism ("...not a testable scientific theory," "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this").

Bethell's own view of evolution is as a thoroughly unjustified extrapolation from meager evidence. He recalls touring the Natural History Museum in London with senior paleontologist Colin Patterson, who

told me that he was looking for cases where the actual common ancestor of two given species was identified in the diagram on display. These would be at the "nodes" in the tree of life. But all the nodes shown in the museum were vacant...
Patterson told me that as far as he could see, nodes are always empty in diagrams of the tree of life.

The vaunted fossil record is a mystery in evolutionary terms, with almost all known phyla having sprung into existence in a "twinkling" of perhaps five or six million years. "How sudden is that? Compared with the reported three-billion year history of life on earth, the Cambrian explosion is the equivalent of one minute in a twenty-four-hour day."

As time goes by, evolution explains less and less. Conundrums abound, and seem increasingly invulnerable to being solved -- with any formula, that is, that excludes design. Experimentation shows that organisms "evolve" -- only to revert to a mean, a predictable "Reversion to the Average," as famed breeder Luther Burbank put it. Species "inhabit 'plateaus' of limited space upon which variants are free to roam," says Bethell. Artificial selection, beloved by Darwin, can "push" varieties around the plateau, nothing more.

Stasis and extinction, not transmutation, is observed. In a chapter on systematics, Bethell visits paleontologist Gareth Nelson at New York's American Museum of Natural History, a leading expert on anchovies. Nelson had a selection of the tiny fish preserved in alcohol and arrayed on his desk.

When I asked about anchovy fossils, he said that a graduate student at the museum studied the question, and it turned out that "all the fossils previously described as anchovies are not anchovies at all." So the fossil record of anchovies was reduced to zero. But then they found one in the British Museum, maybe 10 million years old, from the Miocene in Cyprus. It turns out to be the only known anchovy fossil. "There is information suggesting it is the same kind of animal we find inhabiting the Mediterranean today," Nelson said.
You can almost hear the sigh in the scientist's voice. I love this kind of quietly mordant writing.

Evolutionary science is in a depressed condition, despite all that the media do to put a bright face on the situation. They never tell you what biologists say behind closed doors, in their technical literature, or to a journalist with the temerity to ask difficult questions. A random individual on Twitter tweeted to me the other day, "Natural selection is the only theory that fits the facts. That's why it's a theory and not a long-discredited hypothesis like 'intelligent design.' Get out of your bubble."

The naivety is heartbreaking, foisted on us by the credulous, pampered media. In fact, Darwin's theory, of boundless novelty generated via stuff blindly swishing around together, fits few or none of the facts. Get out of your own bubble, friend. Picking up a copy of Tom Bethell's wonderful book (published by Discovery Institute Press, thank you very much) would be a fine start, an act of self-liberation and great read, as well.each of these points, but on the last in particular.