It's official, Wikipedia has become the Borg.

Wikipedia Co-Founder Blasts “Appallingly Biased” Wikipedia Entry on Intelligent Design
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

When it comes to intelligent design, Wikipedia and its axe-grinding editors are ridiculously biased and unfair. And guess what? Even Wikipedia co-founder  Larry Sanger  agrees. He wrote as much last week on the Talk page for the Wiki article on ID,  under the heading, “My $0.02 on the issue of bias”:

As the originator of and the first person to elaborate Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, and as an agnostic who believes intelligent design to be completely wrong, I just have to say that this article is appallingly biased. It simply cannot be defended as neutral. If you want to understand why, read this. I’m not here to argue the point, as I completely despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways. I’m just officially registering my protest. —Larry Sanger (talk)  05:30, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

A philosophy PhD, Dr. Sanger worked with Jimmy Wales to found Wikipedia in 2001. He is a self-described  “zealot for neutrality,” and reasonably concludes that Wikipedia’s content on intelligent design is anything but neutral. This is the man who came up with the name “Wikipedia.” He further introduces himself on his Talk page:

I’m no longer associated with Wikipedia, which I co-founded. (I named it, crafted much of the policy that now guides the project, and led the project for its first year. As Jimmy Wales declared on March 25, 2002, a week before I resigned, I was “the final arbiter of what the consensus is” on Wikipedia.)

A thoughtful reader discovered Sanger’s candid comment after he (the reader) sought to edit the entry on ID. He says he corrected the absurdly biased opening sentence, only to find his edits almost instantly reversed, “within one minute.” The first sentence of the   entry reads:

Intelligent design (ID) is a religious  argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”,[1][2] though it has been found to be  pseudoscience.[3][4][5]

This matters for an obvious reason: countless people curious about ID receive their introduction to the subject via a Web search that starts, thanks to Google, with a visit to the Wikipedia article. Many will stop right there. Many science reporters and others in the media — heck, many professional scientists — seem to have informed themselves on the topic by going no further than Wikipedia.  You don’t have to be a neutrality “zealot” to understand that evidence of design in nature (not the “existence of God”) poses a question of huge, urgent interest, that serious scientific (not religious, or pseudoscientific) arguments are made for ID, and that it does a terrible disservice to public awareness to so grossly mislead readers. (And not only readers. Don’t forget anyone who uses  Amazon’s Alexa.)That is the case even if ID is ultimately wrong, or “completely wrong,” as Sanger puts it.

In a long and carefully argued essay, “Why Neutrality?”, he laments, “There’s a great latent demand for neutral content, and the demand is unmet.” And that is no doubt true. However, at Wikipedia, a masked mob of pseudonymous trolls has taken over and the public’s “latent demand” is permanently blocked from being satisfied. As I’ve pointed out,  many editors hardly bother to hide their ideological bias.

An interesting article at the news site Vice gives the background on Sanger’s involvement with Wikipedia.

It was Sanger, then, who synthesized emerging “wiki” technology with Nupedia’s original vision. Sanger came up with the name “Wikipedia,” wrote its founding documents, and spent the next 14 months as the site’s sole paid editor and philosophical leader. But as word about the project spread throughout web, Wikipedia and Sanger were inundated with new users, some of them trolls, who plagued Sanger with “edit wars” and resisted input from experts. In 2002, Sanger left Wikipedia and became an outspoken critic of the site, criticizing its quality and the disregard many users displayed for experts.

Indeed. We’ve already recounted how distinguished paleo-entomologist Günter Bechly, after coming out for intelligent design, found his entry deleted. This was following a surreal online editorial discussion led by an editor going by the pseudonym Jo-Jo Eumerus. Jo-Jo is a self-described 23-year-old “boy” from Switzerland with a dual online identity as a 500-year-old wizard. Under this other identity, the wizard  Septimus Heap, Jo-Jo explains of himself that, having been “diagnosed with Asperger syndrome,” he “sometimes [has] problems with society due to this.” Certainly he had a problem with Günter Bechly. The editors claimed the move to delete the entry was the result of their sudden realization that Bechly isn’t “notable” enough for Wikipedia. The  notability argument is a joke, and  even Darwinists conceded that Bechly was deleted for his support of ID.

It was Jo-Jo who made the final decision to permanently pull the plug on Dr. Bechly’s entry. The disparity in expertise — wizard versus paleo-entomologist — is blindingly obvious. Bechly changed his views on evolution and ID while serving as a curator at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, where he amassed an extremely impressive scholarly record studying the evolution of dragonflies over tens of millions of years. As Jo-Jo says of his own daily activities, “Nowadays, I mostly spend my time with World Building projects and seeing a bit forward with life.”

For more on Bechly’s turn to ID, see here:

Another ID scholar, Walter Bradley at Baylor University, suffered  comparable treatment at the hands of the fantastical pseudonyms editing Wikipedia. Manhandled by entities including Freakshownerd, Apollo The Logician, and Theroadislong, Dr. Bradley was not erased but he did see his entry disemboweled, reduced to nearly nothing.

You can’t fight back because people like Jo-Jo, Freakshownerd, etc. seem to have unlimited time at their disposal to revert edits they don’t like, over and over and over, at lightning speed. The sociology is interesting, but so is the psychology. As Larry Sanger recounts his experiences, Wikipedia from the start attracted not only trolls as editors, but trolls with, in some cases, mental problems.

There was one guy called 24, but I suspect that he was literally insane. He wrote some really wacked-out stuff. And there’s there another one called LIR. That person was… abrasive is not the right word, and [them] being confrontational wasn’t the problem. It was them doing so needlessly, for no good purpose other than to stir the pot. Because [Wikipedia] was wide open, and anybody could participate, there were people who would spent a lot of their time wasting everyone else’s time. I doubt that many of those people are just “bad,” they might just be abrasive, confused… “mentally unhinged,” in a few cases.

Having all that leisure to volunteer in “editing” online encyclopedia articles might correlate with being retired, or a dedicated hobbyist, or it could correlate with being on the margins, someone with “problems with society,” “confused,” “wacked-out,” “unhinged,” even “insane.” I apologize if this sounds unkind. But high-functioning people — employed or with other serious responsibilities, with friends, families, community commitments, and more — are not ideally suited to be Wikipedia editors or to engage in the endless editing wars that go along with it.

And this, again, is how a large segment of the public is introduced to the subject of intelligent design. The page received 30,494 views in the past 30 days alone.It’s not only the ID entry and related articles that are twisted by bias and inaccuracy, of course. But design, as I said, poses an ultimate question that scientists and philosophers have been discussing for millennia, and will go on discussing. That is not true of many other controversial subjects on Wikipedia.

It’s a real shame. As Larry Sanger says, we “despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways.” Sadly, there’s not much you can do about it — other than to warn your friends, family, and other contacts to be wary and  consult other sources. And that I certainly urge you to do.

We know more we understand less?

Are Scientists Smarter Now, or Dumber?
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

A conversation with a friend of our oldest son solicited, if I understood correctly, the observation from this friend that people including students know more, are better educated, than in previous generations, thanks to things like the Internet. This is a very bright and curious young man, but I was dumbfounded by his statement.

He pointed to the fact that we, as a culture, “know more” than ever before. That is true in a limited sense, but acquisition of data is a long way from having the wisdom to understand and interpret it, which I think is what we mean when we talk about the kind of smarts that really matters. It’s what you do with what you know.

On the gathering specifically of scientific knowledge, our paleontologist colleague Günter Bechly nails it in a comment on Facebook:

My theory is: Scientists nowadays are far dumber than scientists centuries ago, which is a consequence of over-specialization and lack of philosophical education in natural science university curricula. The only reason why we know so much more than centuries ago is time, much larger number of scientists, and much more resources pumped into science, which resulted in an explosion of knowledge acquired by dumber scientists.

This might explain the unthinking dismissal of an idea like intelligent design not just by media people with a tendency to shallowness, but by scientists. I mentioned here the other day that even professionals in the sciences often seem to have gleaned the little they understand about ID from skimming the main Wikipedia article.

ID is a quintessential multidisciplinary field of study, asking us to consider not only biology but chemistry, cosmology, philosophy, and more. As Dr. Bechley points out, the trend to ever greater specialization combined with philosophical illiteracy go a long way toward explaining the condition of our “dumb” scientists.

Why OOL Science remains design Opponents' weakest point II

The Origin of Life: The Information Challenge
Brian Miller

I previously responded to an article by Vincent Torley on the origin of life by correcting the errors in his understanding of thermodynamics and in the state of origins research. Today, I will correct mistakes related to information theory, and I will identify the fundamentally different approaches by ID advocates and critics toward assessing evidence.

Semantic Information

The first issue relates to the comparison of the sequencing of amino acids in proteins to the letters in a sentence. This analogy is generally disliked by design critics since it so clearly reveals the powerful evidence for intelligence from the information contained in life. It also helps lay audiences see past the technobabble and misdirection often used to mislead the public, albeit unintentionally.

Torley’s criticism centers on the claim that sequences of amino acids in life demonstrate functional but not semantic information.

Dr. Miller, like Dr. Axe, is confusing functional information (which is found in living things) with the semantic information found in a message…functional information is much easier to generate than semantic information, because it doesn’t have to form words, conform to the rules of syntax, or make sense at the semantic level.

Unfortunately, this assertion completely contradicts the opinion of experts in the field such as Shen and Tuszynski.

Protein primary structures have the same language structure as human languages, especially English, French, and German. They are both composed of several basic symbols as building blocks. For example, English is composed of 26 letters, while proteins are composed of 20 common amino acids. A protein sequence can be considered to represent a sentence or a paragraph, and the set of all proteins can be considered to represent the whole language. Therefore, the semantic structure is similar to a language structure which goes from “letters” to “words,” then to “sentences,” to “chapters,” “books,” and finally to a “language library.”

…

The goals of semantic analysis for protein primary structure and that for human languages are basically the same. That is, to find the basic words they are composed of, the meanings of these words and the role they play in the whole language system. It then goes on to the analysis of the structure of grammar, syntax and semantics.

In the same way letters combine to form meaningful sentences, the amino acids in proteins form sequences that cause chains to fold into specific 3D shapes which achieve such functional goals as forming the machinery of a cell or driving chemical reactions. And sentences combine to form a book in the same way multiple proteins work in concert to form the highly integrated cellular structures and to maintain the cellular metabolism. The comparison is nearly exact.

Sequence Rarity

A second issue Torley raises is the question of the rarity of protein sequences. In particular, he argues that the research of Doug Axe, which demonstrated extreme rarity, was invalid. Criticisms against Axe’s work have been addressed in the past, but the probability challenge is so great that such a response is unnecessary. The most essential early enzymes would have needed to connect the breakdown of some high-energy molecule such as ATP with a metabolic reaction which moves energetically uphill. One experiment examined the likelihood of a random amino acid sequence binding to ATP, and results indicated that the chance was on the order of   one in a trillion. Already, the odds against finding such a functional sequence on the early Earth is straining credibility. However, a useful protein would have required at least one other binding site, which alone squares the improbability, and an  active site which properly oriented target molecules and created the right chemical environment to drive and interconnect two reactions  — the breakdown of ATP and the target metabolic one. The odds of a random sequence stumbling on such an enzyme would have to have been far less than 1 in a trillion trillion, clearly beyond the reach of chance.

The challenge for nucleotide based enzymes (ribozymes) is equally daunting. Stumbling across a random sequence that could perform even one of the most basic reactions also requires a search library  in the trillions.So, any multistage process would also be beyond the reach of chance. A glimmer of hope was offered by Jack Szostak when he published a paper that purported to show RNA could self-replicate without the aid of any enzyme. Unaided self-repliation would have greatly aided the search process. However, he later retracted the paper after the results could not be reproduced.

The problem has since been shown to be even worse. In particular, Eugene Koonin determined that the probability of an RNA-to-protein translation system forming through random arrangements of nucleotides is less than 1 in 101000 which would equate to an impossibility in our universe. His solution to this mathematical nightmare was to propose a probabilistic deus ex machina. He actually argued for the  existence of a multiverse which would contain a virtually infinite number of Earth-like planets. We just happen to reside in a lucky universe on the right planet where life won a vast series of lotteries.

Genetic Code

The next issue relates to the problem of explaining how a protein sequence was encoded into RNA or DNA using a genetic code where each amino acid corresponds to sets of three nucleotides known as codons. The key challenge is finding a causal process for the encoding when no physical or chemical connection exists between a given amino acid and its corresponding codons. Torley argues that a connection does exist. He quotes from Dennis Venema who stated that certain codons bind directly to their amino acids. Unfortunately, this claim is false. Venema was referencing the research by Michael Yarus, but he misinterpreted it. Yarus states that no  direct physical connect exists exists between individual amino acids and individual codons. He instead argues for correlations in chains of nucleotides (aptamers) between amino acids and codons residing where the latter binds to the former. However, Koonin argued  that correlations only existed for a handful of amino acids, and they were the least likely ones to have formed on the early Earth.

Torley references the article where Koonin dismisses Yarus’s model, but he misinterprets him by implying that the code could be partly explained by some chemical connection. Koonin does reference the possibility of the evolution of the modern translation system being aided by chemical attractions between amino acids and pockets in tRNA. But he states that the sequences in those pockets would have been “arbitrary,” so they would not relate to the actual code. As a result, no physical explanation exists for the encoding of amino acid sequences into codons, nor can the decoding process either be explained or directly linked to the encoding process. Such a linkage is crucial since the  encoding and decoding  must use the same code. However, without any physical connection, the code must have preexisted the cell particularly since both processes would have had to have been instantiated around the same time. The only place a code can exist outside of physical space is in a mind.

Examining Assumptions

In my responses to Torley I have addressed several problems with his interpretation of specific experiments. However, a more fundamental issue is the differences between our overall approaches to evaluating evidence, which I will illustrate with an analogy. Imagine that a boxing match is scheduled between Daniel Radcliffe, actor who played Harry Potter, and Manny Pacquiao, former world boxing champion. You learn that the fight will take place in three days and Radcliffe recently broke his leg and two arms in a skiing accident. You tell your friend that you are certain Pacquiao will win. Your friend then says that you are mistaken since Radcliffe will simply heal his body with a flick of his magical wand and then turn Pacquiao into a rat. You suddenly realize that your friend is conceiving of the fight in the imaginary world of Hogwarts from the fantasy series.

The same difference in perspectives exists between ID proponents and materialist scientists. The former wish to focus on experiments that attempt to accurately model conditions on the early Earth and on actual physical processes that have been demonstrated. In contrast, the latter wish to focus on highly orchestrated experiments which have no connection to realistic early conditions and on physical processes that reside only in the imaginations of researchers or in artificial worlds created through simulations. For instance, Torley references an an  article that proposes hydrogen peroxide  could have assisted in generating homochiral mixtures of nucleotides, but the author fully acknowledges that his ideas are purely speculative. Likewise, Koonin describes a scenario of how the protein translation system could have evolved, but nearly every step is only plausible if intelligently guided. In other words, he is constantly smuggling in design without giving due credit. To accept any of these theories requires blind faith in the materialist philosophical assumptions.

At the end of his article, Torley navigates out of the stormy seas of scientific analysis into the calmer waters of philosophical discourse which is his specialty. He argues that one can never prove design. On this point he is correct, if by prove one means demonstrating with mathematical certainty. The ID program does not claim to offer the type of absolute proof a mathematician would use to demonstrate the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem. Instead, we are arguing that the identification of design is an inference to the best explanation  which can be made with the same confidence one would have in identifying design in the pattern of faces on Mount Rushmore or in a signal from space which contained the schematics of a spaceship.

The skeptic could always argue that some materialistic explanation might eventually be found to explain those patterns, so design cannot be proven. Yet, the identification of design is still eminently reasonable. The evidence for design in the simplest cell is unambiguous since it contains energy conversion technology, advanced information processing, and automated assembly of all of its components, to name just a few features. The real issue is not the evidence but whether people’s philosophical assumptions would allow them to deny the preposterous and embrace the obvious.

The Baghdad Bobs of the origins debate?

“Fake News” Isn’t a Phony Concept, as Media and Wikipedia Coverage of Intelligent Design Shows
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Some critics assert that the concept of “fake news,” inescapable in the headlines, itself is phony as well as dangerous. Are they correct? In fact, I know they are wrong.

Sure, goes this line of thinking, the influential people in the business of informing the public may make mistakes. But these are readily corrected. There may be the occasional bad apple among reporters or editors. But these are weeded out. There’s no systematic faking going on.

This is really an issue in group psychology, and our own experience with intelligent design and its treatment by the media and on the Internet has settled the question to my satisfaction. It did so long before “fake news” became a familiar phrase. ID presents a helpful case in point.

There is an informal, leaderless mob out there that has shown itself perfectly willing to distort the truth about ID and feed that to a trusting general audience. This is important, not less important than anything else in the public square since it bears on the ultimate question of how life itself came to be as it is. It’s not about so-called “creationism.” It’s a controversy that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, in a millennia-long debate with Epicureanism about purpose in the universe. An interesting review the other day in the Wall Street Journal the other day gives some of the philosophical background.

An Epicurean mob? Strange to say, but yes. We’ve  documented in excruciating detail  the axe-grinding and distortions from a wide range of media sources whenever ID or academic freedom come up for coverage. There are a couple of big themes. The fake news equates ID with creationism, and it claims that design proponents seek to teach ID in public schools.

We’ve shown again and again that these notions are false. We talk with reporters. Write to them. Argue with them. Many simply refuse to listen, much less correct what they say.

And then there is Wikipedia, which has done more to mislead readers about ID than any other single source. It’s entry on intelligent design opens by calling the theory “pseudoscience,” a “religious argument for the existence of God,” which are all fake charges, and it goes on from there. It’s impossible to correct because the editors won’t permit it. Even the online encyclopedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, an agnostic and no fan of ID, has  blasted Wiki editors for their “appallingly biased” coverage of the subject. This is the guy who came up with the name “Wikipedia” and formulated its original rules for neutrality. He “despairs,” though, of “persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways.”

As we’ve reported here already, when the editors took notice of the Wikipedia entry for a prominent scientist who had come out for intelligent design, German paleontologist Günter Bechly, they erased him. In Stalinist fashion, they deleted his entry, claiming a sudden realization that he isn’t notable enough to be featured. Even  Darwinists saw through that one.  Another ID scholar, Walter Bradley, had his  entry gutted to near nothing.

The interesting psychological issue here turns upon the question of whether these people in the media and at Wikipedia are deliberately lying or not. Maybe the critics of the “fake news” concept find it hard to believe that they are, since that would amount to a conspiracy, but a strange one with no leadership or discernible organization.

I don’t believe they are lying, though. At least not deliberatively. Instead, on certain ideologically and personally charged subject, people see what they want to see, and you can’t talk them out of it. If you read their User pages, Wikipedia’s editors are often  frank about their perspectives. Reporters dissemble more, but the bias is still discernible.

What drives the self-deception? It’s been called worldview-induced blindness, but it also includes something more personal, the picture of yourself you carry around in your head. Pride very much enters into it. The complex of forces can make it difficult to see things other than how you wish to see them. There’s also an echo chamber dynamic where the memes become self-reinforcing. The result is fake news.

The example of ID is an illustration of how it happens, and that it happens, all the time. If it does so with regard to a contentious issue like evolution, it’s not hard to imagine that it occurs in the context of even more incendiary topics in current events. No, “fake news” isn’t fake. At least with regard to intelligent design, it’s quite real.

Red flags?

A walk on the darkside?

Letters from deep time?

Why OOL science remains design opponents weakest point.

James Tour and the Challenge to Theistic Evolution from Synthetic Chemistry
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

On a new ID the Future podcast, Sarah Chaffee talks with biologist Ann Gauger about the new Theistic Evolution critique. After reviewing some of the contents of this intellectual feast, they focus on the chapter by Rice University synthetic chemist James Tour, “Are Present Proposals on Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms Accurately Pointing Toward First Life?” His answer is an emphatic no.

Listen to the conversation here.

Dr. Gauger explains what synthetic chemistry means and elaborates a little on Dr. Tour’s exciting work in nanotechnology with its implications for fighting cancer. The bottom line is that a chemist like Tour, a very distinguished one, knows from a career’s worth of lab work how painstakingly difficult it is to synthesize molecules you want — that is, in a modern lab designed (intelligently designed) for such a purpose. Origin-of-life scenarios can’t, obviously, summon a laboratory and a team of top chemists at the dawn of life’s history and must therefore, if they refuse to consider ID, picture as possible things occurring in the wild that are difficult to accomplish with all the expertise and equipment available to Dr. Tour and his colleagues.

Only design can overcome that challenge. Yet TE proponents won’t consider it. That’s one of a variety of scientific and philosophical problems covered in this comprehensive yet accessible book.

It seems that Darwinism's undead minions are as restless as ever.

Zombie Watch: Debunked Finches Re-Emerge to Validate Darwin
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Peter and Rosemary Grant are the Princeton pair who have spent their careers on the Galápagos Islands trying to tease out the slightest bits of evidence to support the iconic myth of Darwin’s finches. Having received the  Royal Medal in Biology last summer, they’re at it again. That is despite having been soundly refuted by Jonathan Wells in his book  Zombie Science. Now that the Grants are passing the baton to younger researchers, we will undoubtedly be treated to more parades of this zombie icon.

In “Rapid hybrid speciation in Darwin’s finches” in the journal Science, four other lead authors, accompanied by the Grants, try to sanctify neo-Darwinism with a melodrama about three “species” of finches that can all interbreed. Mind you, they are all finches. They are all Galápagos finches. They are all family.

Any differences among the groups are tiny changes in beak size and shape, and changes in the songs one group sings.  Science Daily has a cartoon version of the story, complete with a lineage called “Big Bird”:

The arrival 36 years ago of a strange bird to a remote island in the Galapagos archipelago has provided direct genetic evidence of a novel way in which new species arise.

In this week’s issue of the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University and Uppsala University in Sweden report that the newcomer belonging to one species mated with a member of another species resident on the island, giving rise to a new species that today consists of roughly 30 individuals.

The study comes from work conducted on Darwin’s finches, which live on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection. 

The first question is obvious: If they can interbreed, how can they be called different species? Darwin’s book was about the Origin of Species, not the origin of varieties. As Wells points out, “If they continue to breed and exchange genes, they are usually regarded as varieties of the same species, even if they are morphologically different (as is the case with dog breeds)” (Zombie Science, p. 68).

The “strange bird” that showed up was a lone male who had a slightly different song. He found a mate, they had chicks, and the family decided to live in the same community away from the others. This is called “reproductive isolation” and is considered by Darwinians as a step toward speciation. But people do that. How many stories are told of a wayfaring stranger appearing from a far country, finding a bride, and, over the objections of her family, taking her to start a new life together in a different place? Are they now “reproductively isolated”? Are they emerging as a new species? As Wells says in his charitable way, “Indeed, it is far from obvious why we should consider them separate species at all.” He gives an example:

The Ainu people of northern Japan and the !Kung people of southern Africa are separated not only physically and linguistically, but also (for all practical purposes) reproductively. Are they therefore separate species? Or are they all human beings? Of course the Ainu and the !Kung are all members of the same species.

Since the Galapagos finches regularly interbreed, why should we call them separate species, other than to make them appear to be evidence for evolution?

The  BBC News tries to have it both ways:

In the past, it was thought that two different species must be unable to produce fertile offspring in order to be defined as such. But in more recent years, it has been established that many birds and other animals that we consider to be unique species are in fact able to interbreed with others to produce fertile young.

They’d better not push that idea too far, or else they will be calling Japanese a different species from Germans. That’s no joke; to evolutionists, human beings fit in the category “other animals.”

The cartoon version accentuates the differences between the birds to make them look as different as possible. Science Daily continues:

The offspring were also reproductively isolated because their song, which is used to attract mates, was unusual and failed to attract females from the resident species. The offspring also differed from the resident species in beak size and shape, which is a major cue for mate choice. As a result, the offspring mated with members of their own lineage, strengthening the development of the new species.

Humans do this, too. Think of cases where an immigrant population kept to themselves, because they had their own culture and music. This affected their “mate choice,” as well.

The paper in Science makes a big deal of hybridization (see here about how rampant hybridization is scrambling Darwin’s tree). Science Daily explains:

A critical requirement for speciation to occur through hybridization of two distinct species is that the new lineage must be ecologically competitive — that is, good at competing for food and other resources with the other species — and this has been the case for the Big Bird lineage.

But again, the human analogy gives the lie to this idea. If an Ainu woman married a !Kung man, we wouldn’t, needless to say, call their children hybrids. In addition, human tribes in many places on Earth are reproductively isolated, yet successful. They can even be reproductively isolated in the same country, preferring to marry ones that have the same tastes or looks. The idea that they must be competitive comes from Malthus and Darwin, not from real life.

Here’s another glitch in the story not apparently noticed by the researchers:

Researchers previously assumed that the formation of a new species takes a very long time, but in the Big Bird lineage it happened in just two generations, according to observations made by the Grants in the field in combination with the genetic studies.

They sound delighted to find that speciation occurred fast, but think of what that means. Those islands have been isolated from the mainland for at least 8 million years — maybe 90 million. Unless the evolutionists believe the Big Bird incident was extremely rare or unique, such hybridizations should have been frequent. If so, wouldn’t the gene pool be scrambled beyond recognition? If rare, the story begins to look like a case of special pleading. Neither option is particularly helpful to Darwinian theory. The paper appeals to “rare and chance events” to explain Big Bird. Isn’t it odd that such a rare event happened while the Grants just happened to be watching? What’s the probability of that?

Why do the Darwinians make so much of so little? The reason: the Galápagos Islands are holy ground. Researchers will work for years to honor the founder of their worldview.

Mining the womb?

China Shows Eugenics Is Not a Thing of the Past
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

As Todd Butterfield points out on an ID the Future episode, we may mistakenly think of eugenics as a horror from the history of a century ago, from which all good people pulled back in disgust when they saw the science, or pseudoscience, embraced to the fullest by Nazi Germany.

But Discovery institute’s Wesley Smith reminds us that eugenic practice is a frontier currently being explored, prominently, by China in the form of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), allowing for the selection of preferred babies and the disposal of others. Ostensibly intended to combat disease, it’s equally possible to pick embryos for life for other reasons entirely. The technique is ripe for abuse, to say the least.

Wesley explains that, as a tyranny, China is a Wild West of sorts for unethical science, with the government and its researchers answering to no one. And he worries of an international “race to the bottom” as other countries bow to pressure and follow Chinese scientists where they lead. It’s chilling — human life as a “resource,” available to be exploited.  Listen to the new podcast here.

And yet more primeval tech v. Darwin.

Telescope-Like Eyes in a “Simple” Mollusk
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

You may not eat scallops with quite the same gusto again. The humble shellfish of the phylum Mollusca, a staple seafood delicacy, could have seen the fishermen coming — with hundreds of elegantly designed eyes. Now that scientists have had a detailed look at the tiny eyes of scallops, superlative adjectives are rising to the surface. Phys.org  says:

Scallops may look like simple creatures, but the seafood delicacy has 200 eyes that function remarkably like a telescope, using living mirrors to focus light, researchers said Thursday

Like a telescope? Yes! The eyes of Pecten maximus use biological concave mirrors, like the Newtonian telescope design. And there’s more design to talk about.

Scientists have known since the 1960s that these shellfish that inspired the Shell Oil logo had “eyes” of some sort, but it was difficult to dissect them. Now, new imaging techniques that freeze them before they can dry have allowed researchers from Lund University and Weizmann Institute to see them in detail and model how they work.

One thing that is interesting about the paper in Science by this team of ten researchers is that there is no mention of evolution. No, not even phylogeny, ancestor, mutation, or natural selection. The focus is on its unique functional design.

Although multilayered retinas have infrequently been observed in other animals, in these cases, they are used to enhance light sensitivity or act as spectral filters. In contrast, in the scallop, the upper and lower parts of the retina seem to be specialized for discriminating different fields of view. Thus, at the highest hierarchical level of organization, the complex 3D shape of the scallop eye mirror appears to be controlled to focus light from a broad field of view onto two retinas placed at different heights above its surface.

How Is the Scallop Eye Constructed?

Unlike other eyes in the animal kingdom, the scallop’s visual system uses mirrors in addition to a weakly refracting lens. The light path passes through a cornea, then an iris, then a lens, then through crystals of guanine stacked like tiles. The crystals form a biological concave mirror that reflects the light back through the system and onto a unique two-layered retina.

Some other animals, including spiders and beetles and even silver-haired monkeys, use guanine crystals for spectacular visual displays. This instance, though, deserves a new kind of design prize for the ultimate in functional art:

Perhaps the most complex optical function of guanine crystals in nature is in image formation. This function demands an extremely high degree of ultrastructural organization because light must not only be reflected but also focused. The hierarchal organization of the scallop mirror is finely tuned for image formation, from the component guanine crystals at the nanoscale to the overall shape of the mirror at the millimeter level. The scallop controls the crystal morphology and spacing to produce a tiled multilayer mirror with minimal optical diffraction aberrations, which reflects wavelengths of light that penetrate its habitat and are absorbed by its retinas. The mirror forms functional images on both retinas, which appear to be specialized for different functions.

What can you say but “Wow! That’s amazing”? We tend to think of vertebrate eyes as the best, but for its needs, the “simple scallop” has achieved optical nirvana.

Even Jerry Coyne was impressed. Over at  Why Evolution Is True, he posted some of the best pictures and videos of scallops and their amazing eyes. But when it came to explaining them, all he could say was:

The mirror reflecting light onto an image-detector is precisely the way reflecting telescopes work, though human-constructed mirrors are very different from those of the scallop. In fact, I don’t think humans are capable of making mirrors like this bivalve does. As Leslie Orgel once said, evolution is cleverer than you are.

Ring the gong for that show!

The electron micrographs show tile-like crystal squares arranged like roof tiles in stacks. Everything in this arrangement is for a purpose, they explain:

The key to the functionality of the mirror lies in the regular square plates of β-guanine, which constitute the mirror’s basic building blocks. This unusual square morphology differs markedly from the theoretically predicted prismatic growth form of guanine. In this morphology, the crystal face with the highest refractive index (n = 1.83) is preferentially expressed, as is also the case in many other highly reflective natural photonic systems. The crystals are arranged so that the high-refractive-index faces are oriented toward the direction of the incident light across the mirror (fig. S1), creating a highly reflective surface. The square-plate morphology is also optimized for tiling. Each layer of the mirror is formed from an almost perfectly tessellated mosaic of two-dimensional (2D) squares — closely resembling the segmented mirrors used in reflecting telescopes. In Euclidean geometry, there are only three possible ways to completely tile a surface using regular congruent polygons: with equilateral triangles, with hexagons, or with squares. Crystal tiling minimizes surface defects at the crystal interfaces that would cause optical diffraction effects (which would result in a reduction in the image contrast) and optical loss owing to transmission of light through the mirror. Thus, at the lowest hierarchical level of organization, the scallop controls crystal growth to produce a crystal morphology that minimizes surface defects in the mirror and enables the formation of a highly reflective surface.

There’s more. The surface of the concave mirror is not perfectly spherical, but has a variable curvature with a flattened base. This sends the reflected light off-axis in two directions, to the proximal retina for the lower visual field, and to the distal retina for the upper visual field. “The nonspherical symmetry and tilt of the mirror produce more complex vision than was previously imagined,” they explain. “A simple on-axis, spherical mirror would not result in opposite sides of the visual field being focused as distinctly separate images at different heights above the mirror.”

How Does It Work?

Although it’s impossible to know for sure what the creature actually perceives, ray-trace models indicate that the scallop obtains more finely focused vision for nearby objects that move (triggering defense or escape behaviors), along with a wide field of peripheral vision that “could provide useful information to control and guide its movement while swimming with jet propulsion or to assess static features of its habitat.” The two types of focus also expand the dynamic range of vision, similar to how rods and cones overlap in brightness sensitivity in vertebrates.

One more question: Why does the scallop need 200 of these light detectors? For that, we have to consider the brain of this creature:

What benefit does the scallop receive by having up to 200 eyes located on the periphery of its semi-circular mantle, spanning ~250°? Ray tracing reveals that the images formed on both retinas of one eye vary substantially in focal quality across their visual fields. Interestingly, the optic nerves from nearly all of the eyes project on to the lateral lobes of the parieto-visceral ganglion (PVG), the site of visual processing in scallops. We speculate that neural processing in the PVG can combine the visual information from the substantially overlapping and differently focused views from multiple eyes, allowing the scallop to improve visual acuity relative to the isolated eye and potentially to determine the depth of features in the environment. This would offset the drawback of limited areas of well-focused vision in individual eyes.

This is a complete system, in other words, with all the contributing parts working together to optimize visual acuity. A short video by the AAAS (see the top of this post) puts the whole picture together.

It’s so good, the authors conclude, human engineers would do well to imitate it:

The crystal morphology, multilayer structure, and 3D shape of the scallop’s eye mirror are finely controlled to produce functional images on its two retinas. Understanding the strategies that organisms use to control crystal morphology and arrangement for complex optical functions paves the way for the construction of novel bio-inspired optical devices. In particular, the resemblance of the scallop’s tiled, off-axis mirror to the segmented mirrors of reflecting telescopes provides inspiration for the development of compact, wide-field imaging devices derived from this unusual form of biological optics.

So is design science a science stopper? Does scallop vision not make sense except in the light of evolution? We rest our case.