Trying to school God.

1)Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig: Under Neo-Darwinism, the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Must Have a Rational Design

Casey Luskin 

In his book Why Evolution is True, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne claims that "Imperfectdesign is the mark of evolution; in fact it's precisely what we expect from evolution." (p. 81) He makes this prediction because "[n]ew parts don't evolve from old ones, and we have to work well with the parts that have already evolved. Because of this, we should expect compromises: some features that work pretty well, but some not as well as they might, or some features--like the kiwi wing--that don't work at all, but are evolutionary leftovers." (p. 81)

Thus according to Coyne, evolution predicts that some features will work well, some will work not-so-well, and some will work not at all. This is not exactly a useful set of predictions, but when he couples the argument with the dubious assertion that intelligent design (ID) requires "perfect design," then Coyne places evolution in a unique position to explain such examples of allegedly "imperfect design."

Coyne is by no means the first person to make this argument. In the largely anti-ID volumeIntelligent Design Creationism and its Critics, Kelly C. Smith states that "if a design in nature is clearly inferior to what a human engineer could produce, then we are entitled to [reject ID]." (p. 724) (Smith also purposefully mislabels ID as a form of creationism, but we'll ignore that for the moment.)

What both Coyne and Smith share in common is their granting of favored-argument-status to the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) as an alleged example of this "imperfect" or "inferior" design. As the argument goes, the RLN innervates the larynx. However, instead of running directly from the brain to the voice box, as one might expect, the nerve path travels down past the larynx, with the RLN branching off the vagus nerve down near the heart, then looping around the aorta and traveling back up the neck to innervate the larynx from below.

Coyne calls this extra distance the RLN takes to get to the larynx "[o]ne of nature's worst designs," (p. 82) and Smith calls it "a very poor design for its intended purpose." (p. 725) Likewise, Richard Dawkins says in a National Geographic video, "Obviously a ridiculous detour! No engineer would ever make a mistake like that." They all go further and argue that the seemingly circuitous route of the nerve is easily explained if one understands that our body evolved from a fish body and must operate under those constraints.

But a new article by pro-ID biologist, recently retired from the Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany,Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, titled "The Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe: Does it Prove Evolution?," explains that observed variation within humans implies that such so-called evolutionary constraints do not exist:

The fact is that even in humans in 0.3 to 1% of the population the right recurrent laryngeal nerve is indeed shortened and the route abbreviated in connection with a retromorphosis of the forth aortic arch. ("An unusual anomaly ... is the so-called 'non-recurrent' laryngeal nerve. In this condition, which has a frequency of between 0.3 - 1%, only the right side is affected and it is always associated with an abnormal growth of the right subclavian artery from the aortic arch on the left side" - Gray's Anatomy 2005, p. 644.; see also Uludag et al. 2009; the extremely rare cases (0.004% to 0.04%) on the left side appear to be always associated with situs inversus, thus still "the right side"). Nevertheless, even in this condition its branches still innervate the upper esophagus and trachea (but to a limited extent?). Although this variation generally seems to be without severe health problems, it canhave catastrophic consequences for the persons so affected: problems in deglutition (difficulties in swallowing) and respiratory difficulties (troubles in breathing) (see Rammerstorfer 2004; moreover "dysphagia (if the pharyngeal and oesophageal branches of nonrecurrent or recurrent inferior laryngeal nerve are injured)" - Yang et al, 2009)

Lönnig thus makes the following observations:

If mutations for such a short cut are possible and regularly appearing even in humans (not to mention some other non-shorter-route variations), - according to the law of recurrent variation (see Lönnig 2005, 2006), they must have occurred already millions of times in all mammal species and other vertebrates taken together from the Silurian (or Jurassic respectively) onwards. And this must also be true for any other (at least residually) functionally possible shorter variations of the right as well as of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve. Inference: All these 'short-cut mutations' were regularly counter-selected due to at least some disadvantageous and unfavourable effects on the phenotype of the so affected individuals (including any such mutants in the giraffes). Hence, they never had a chance to permeate and dominate a population except for the above mentioned very small minority of the (right) 'non-recurrent' laryngeal nerve, which is perhaps already accounted for by the genetic load ("The embryological nature of such a nervous anatomical variation results originally from a vascular disorder, named arteria lusoria in which the fourth right aortic arch is abnormally absorbed, being therefore unable to drag the right recurrent laryngeal nerve down when the heart descends and the neck elongates during embryonic development." Defechereux et al. 2000). Thus, even from a neo-Darwinian point of view, important additional functions of theNervus laryngeus recurrens should be postulated and looked for, not to mention the topic of embryological functions and constraints.

It seems quite likely that there are mutational pathways to a more efficient route for the RLN. Under neo-Darwinian thinking, this implies this pathway should have evolved. At the very least, it shows that there are no in-principle constraints based upon our alleged fish-ancestry which prevent this route from evolving. The fact that the pathway remains--under evolutionary logic--that there's some benefit to the current design, which implies that the current design isn't so imperfect after all.

In the next post and subsequent posts, we'll explore some potential benefits to the current design of the innervations of the larynx.

2)The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Does Not Refute Intelligent Design

Casey Luskin October 14, 2010 1:10 PM

In the prior post, I discussed challenges to the claim that our supposed fish-ancestry dictates that the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) must take a circuitous route from the brain to the larynx. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that common ancestry between mammals and fish is the best explanation for the nerve's path. Would that refute intelligent design? Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne assumes that ID is incompatible with common ancestry, which it isn't. As one pro-ID biologist wrote me on this topic, "this is only a problem for design if one assumes design means designed from scratch for each taxon, and if one believes that the designer would necessarily use the shortest distance between two points (in other words, that the designer thinks like we do), and that there are not other design considerations at play."

But if we set aside the question of whether evolutionary history explains the RLN's path, it's also never been clear to me why "imperfect design" should refute design. I've complained before about the breakdowns and flaws I've had with computers, but obviously computers are designed. In fact, every piece of technology that has ever had a flaw shows that imperfect designs are was still designed! "Imperfect design"--a term used by Coyne--is still design.

Regardless of whether evidence for common ancestry or evidence of imperfect design actually do refute design, both Jerry Coyne and Kelly C. Smith admit that if we find some rational function or a reasonable purpose for a design, then the "imperfect" or "inferior" design objection falls apart. Coyne tells us that imperfect design doesn't refute evolution because evolution predicts that both highly functional or poorly-functional parts may exist. Therefore it seems to actually really predict nothing whatsoever on this matter.

While Coyne's argument may not be coherent, one way to refute it is to to find rational function for the RLN's pathway in normal humans.

Indeed, hints of important functions for the RLN nerve can be seen in the old authority, Gray's Anatomy, which states regarding the normal human design:

As the recurrent nerve hooks around the subclavian artery or aorta, it gives off several cardiac filaments to the deep part of the cardiac plexus. As it ascends in the neck it gives off branches, more numerous on the left than on the right side, to the mucous membrane and muscular coat of the esophagus; branches to the mucous membrane and muscular fibers of the trachea; and some pharyngeal filaments to the Constrictor pharyngis inferior.

So it seems that the RLN is innervating a lot more than just the larynx. Pro-ID biologist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, in his article "The Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe: Does it Prove Evolution?," quotes a passage from a much more recent 1980 edition of Gray's Anatomy stating much the same thing:

As the recurrent laryngeal nerve curves around the subclavian artery or the arch of aorta, it gives several cardiac filaments to the deep part of the cardiac plexus. As it ascends in the neck it gives off branches, more numerous on the left than on the right side, to the mucous membrane and muscular coat of the oesophagus; branches to the mucous membrane and muscular fibers of the trachea and some filaments to the inferior constrictor [Constrictor pharyngis inferior].

(Gray's Anatomy, 1980, p. 1081, similarly also in the 40th edition of 2008, pp. 459, 588/589)

Lönnig further states: "I have also checked several other detailed textbooks on human anatomy like Sobotta - Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen: they are all in agreement. Some also show clear figures on the topic. Pschyrembel - Germany's most widely circulated and consulted medical dictionary (262 editions) - additionally mentions 'Rr. ... bronchiales'."

So the RLN's sole purpose, or as ID-critic Kelly Smith put it, its "intended function," is not simply to innervate the larynx, as it provides innervations for the heart and even for the esophagus. And for those organs it takes a direct, or as Coyne might put it, "rational" route from the brain.

All of this this would seem to satisfy what Kelly Smith called evidence of a "global" function, which Smith admits makes "an instance of local imperfection" (i.e. the circuitous route of the RLN) more acceptable in an argument for design (See Smith's article in the volume "Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critcis," p. 725). So what is Smith complaining about?

Embryological Considerations for the RLN's Design

Lönnig also hints that there may be embryological reasons for the design of the RLN:

However, just to refer to one possible substantial function of the Nervus laryngeus recurrens sinister during embryogenesis: "The vagus nerve in the stage 16 embryo is very large in relation to the aortic arch system. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch. It has been suggested that tension applied by the left recurrent laryngeal nerve as it wraps around the ductus arteriosus could provide a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery, rather than an elastic artery" - Gray's Anatomy, 39th edition 2005, p. 1053.

Another pro-ID thinker commented to me privately about this matter as follows:

So according to this description, nerve filaments emanate along its length from the cardiac plexus to the esophagus, which if accurate might well dictate its positioning. Whether due to a requisite embryogenic sequence, for optimal nerve routing, or even an evolutionary carryover, it is a workable routing in all mammals, and therefore lacks substance as an argument against design based upon "poor design."

Dr. Lönnig thus concludes:

To innervate the esophagus and trachea of the giraffe and also reach its heart, the recurrent laryngeal nerve needs to be, indeed, very long. So, today's evolutionary explanations (as is also true for many other so-called rudimentary routes and organs) are not only often in contradiction to their own premises but also tend to stop looking for (and thus hinder scientific research concerning) further important morphological and physiological functions yet to be discovered. In contrast, the theory of intelligent design regularly predicts further functions (also) in these cases and thus is scientifically much more fruitful and fertile than the neo-Darwinian exegesis (i.e. the interpretations by the synthetic theory).

To sum up: The Nervus laryngeus recurrens innervates not only the larynx, but also the esophagus and the trachea and moreover "gives several cardiac filaments to the deep part of the cardiac plexus" etc. (the latter not shown below, but see quotations above). It need not be stressed here that all mammals - in spite of substantial synorganized genera-specific differences - basically share the same Bauplan ("this infinite diversity in unity" - Agassiz) proving the same ingenious mind behind it all.

Lönnig goes on to make a devastating critique of Dawkins and others who use the alleged poor design of the laryngeal nerve to refute ID. See Lönnig's article, "The Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe: Does it Prove Evolution?," for details.

The next post in this series will show that the exact form of direct innervations of the larynx from the brain--demanded by ID-critics--in fact exists.

3)Direct Innervation of the Larynx Demanded by Intelligent Design Critics Does Exist

Casey Luskin October 15, 2010 1:33 PM

Intelligent design (ID) critics Jerry Coyne, Kelly Smith, and Richard Dawkins have all argued that the allegedly circuitous innervations of the larynx from the brain by the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) is an "imperfect design" that refutes ID. What they rarely disclose, however, is that there are in fact nerves that innervate the larynx directly from the brain through the superior laryngeal nerve (SLN), without taking the longer path of the RLN--exactly as they demand.Thus, the larynx is in fact innervated from both above and below, by both the RLN and the SLN. This is clearly seen in the diagram below, from Elsevier's Atlas of Regional Anesthesia, 3rd ed., hotlinked from here:

As noted here, damage to the SLN can in fact affect the ability of people to swallow, yell, sing, or properly control voice pitch.

Thus, the preferred design of Coyne, Dawkins and Smith actually DOES exist in our bodies, as the larynx is innervated from above, directly from the brain.

Given the different medical conditions encountered when the laryngeal nerves (such as the SLN and RLN) are damaged, it seems that the two nerves are performing distinct functions. The SLN--which innervates from above--has something to do with producing higher-pitched sounds, and the RLN--which innervates from below--has something to do with producing lower-pitched sounds.

Rather than being an "imperfect design," perhaps the dual innervation of the larynx from both above and below is a good design principle -- a form of redundancy, or complementation to help minimize the impact upon function if one of these two nerves is damaged. Thus we see hints of function and design optimization in the innervation of the larynx. Again, this is evidence of optimization for a "global function," which ID-critic Kelley C. Smith admits is a good design principle.

In the final post we'll explore some medical considerations for the design of the RLN.

4)Medical Considerations for the Intelligent Design of the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve

Casey Luskin October 16, 2010 8:31 AM

In the previous three posts (see part 1, part 2, and part 3), we've seen that the arguments of intelligent design (ID) critics based that the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) is an "imperfect design" fail for a variety of reasons. These include:

(1) There is evidence that supposed fundamental evolutionary constraints which would prevent loss of the circuitous route of the RLN do not exist. This implies that there is some beneficial function for the circuitous route.

(2) The path of the RLN allows it to give off filaments to the heart, to the mucous membranes and to the muscles of the trachea along the way to the larynx.

(3) There is dual-innervation of the larynx from the SLN and RLN, and in fact the SLN innervates the larynx directly from the brain. The direct innervation of the larynx via the superior laryngeal SLN shows the laryngeal innervations in fact follows the very design demanded by ID critics like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Various medical conditions encountered when either the SLN or RLN are damaged point to special functions for each nerve, indicating that the RLN has a specific laryngeal function when everything is functioning properly. This segregation may be necessary to achieve this function, and the redundancy seems to preserve some level of functionality if one nerve gets damaged. This dual-innervation seems like rational design principle.

To add another reason, pro-ID professor of neurosurgery Michael Egnor has suggested that the RLN may have a medical function which gives the organism a warning that it is sick, and needs to heal from an internal infection or disease originating in the chest area. Dr. Egnor offered me some insightful comments about function of the design of the RLN pathway from his vantage as a doctor and professor of medicine:

There is actually a design advantage to the course of the recurrent nerves, if one wishes to pursue this line of argumentation. The course of the nerves brings them through the mediastinum, where the heart and lungs meet. There are many lymph nodes there, and enlargement of these lymph nodes from processes such as cancer or infection (e.g. tuberculosis) often irritates these nerves and causes hoarseness or coughing. The course of the nerves reveals disease in an otherwise hidden part of the body (deep in the chest) by interfering with a process (speech) that is readily evident. It serves as an early warning to get medical care (or, with infectious diseases, as a warning to others that this person is ill), and this early warning has saved many more lives than the redundant course of the nerves has cost lives. The risk/benefit ratio needs to be examined comprehensively before one claims that the course of the nerves is biologically disadvantageous.

While it's impossible to get into the mind of the designer and there's a lot we still don't understand about development, it's equally clear that the RLN's pathway allows it to serve a variety of functions. We do have solid positive evidence for multiple important functions of the RLN. Indeed, Michael Egnor wrote an elegant explanation of why it is the evolutionists who are basing their arguments upon our ignorance, not facts, of developmental biology:

Of course ID advocates have never claimed perfect design. But the argument that the anatomy of the recurrent laryngeal nerve is evidence for 'bad design' fails on many levels. The descent of the recurrent nerves below the aortic arch and subclavian artery is the result of patterns of coalescence and movements of components of the aortic arch during embryogenesis. It appears that proximity of various layers and structures in the embryo serve to guide embryogenesis (it's called induction). The details of this process are only beginning to be understood, and the Darwinist argument that the relationship between the recurrent nerves and the aortic arch is evidence of bad design fails to take into account the enormous complexities of embryonic development. It's analogous to a 3 year-old taking apart a computer and asserting that it was designed badly because some of the circuit board patterns were 'curvy' instead of straight. The design wisdom of the anatomy of the recurrent nerves can only be judged by someone who knows all of the design specifications necessary for that region of the human body. Even the best embryologists are pre-schoolers when it comes to that.

Conclusion
Clearly, the RLN is performing many jobs, not just one. Its "intended function" is much more than simply innervating the larynx; and the larynx is in fact innervated directly, exactly as ID-critics say it should be.

All of this this would seem to satisfy what Kelly Smith called evidence of a "global" function, which Smith admits makes "an instance of local imperfection" (i.e. the circuitous route of the RLN) more acceptable in an argument for design ("Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics," p. 725). The argument against intelligent design of the RLN has collapsed.

If anything is clear here, it's that we don't know enough to presume that the RLN is "[o]ne of nature's worst designs" (Coyne's words), but that we do know enough to see that it's definitely not "a very poor design for its intended purpose" (Smith's words).

Ancient whale may have eaten Darwin defenders home work.

A Whale of a Problem for Evolution: Ancient Whale Jawbone Found in Antartica
October 14, 2011 Posted by Jonathan M 

MSNBC.com is reporting on the discovery of a jawbone of an ancient whale in Antarctica: the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered. The news story reports,

The jawbone of an ancient whale found in Antarctica may be the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered, Argentine scientists said Tuesday.

A scientist not involved in the find said it could suggest that whales evolved much more quickly from their amphibian precursors than previously thought.

Argentine paleontologist Marcelo Reguero, who led a joint Argentine-Swedish team, said the fossilized archaeocete jawbone found in February dates back 49 million years. In evolutionary terms, that’s not far off from the fossils of even older proto-whales from 53 million years ago that have been found in South Asia and other warmer latitudes.

Those earlier proto-whales were amphibians, able to live on land as well as sea. This jawbone, in contrast, belongs to the Basilosauridae group of fully aquatic whales, said Reguero, who leads research for the Argentine Antarctic Institute.

“The relevance of this discovery is that it’s the oldest known completely aquatic whale found yet,” said Reguero, who shared the discovery with Argentine paleontologist Claudia Tambussi and Swedish paleontologists Thomas Mors and Jonas Hagstrom of the Natural History Museum in Stockholm.

Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist who wasn’t involved in the research, said that if the new find withstands the scrutiny of other scientists, it will suggest that archaeocetes evolved much more quickly than previously thought from their semi-aquatic origin in present-day India and Pakistan.

“The important thing is the location,” Sereno said. “To find one in Antarctica is very interesting.”

As many readers will doubtless be aware, the evolution of the whale has previously raised substantial problems because of the extremely abrupt timescale over which it occurred. Evolutionary Biologist Richard von Sternberg has previously applied the population genetic equations employed in a 2008 paper by Durrett and Schmidt to argue against the plausibility of the transition happening in such a short period of time.  Indeed, the evolution of Dorudon and Basilosaurus (38 mya) from Pakicetus (53 mya) has been previously compressed into a period of less than 15 million years.

Such a transition is a feat of genetic rewiring and it is astonishing that it is presumed to have occurred by Darwinian processes in such a short span of time. This problem is accentuated when one considers that the majority of anatomical novelties unique to aquatic cetaceans (Pelagiceti) appeared during just a few million years – probably within 1-3 million years. The equations of population genetics predict that – assuming an effective population size of 100,000 individuals per generation, and a generation turnover time of 5 years (according to Richard Sternberg’s calculations and based on equations of population genetics applied in the Durrett and Schmidt paper), that one may reasonably expect two specific co-ordinated mutations to achieve fixation in the timeframe of around 43.3 million years. When one considers the magnitude of the engineering fete, such a scenario is found to be devoid of credibility. Whales require an intra-abdominal counter current heat exchange system (the testis are inside the body right next to the muscles that generate heat during swimming), they need to possess a ball vertebra because the tail has to move up and down instead of side-to-side, they require a re-organisation of kidney tissue to facilitate the intake of salt water, they require a re-orientation of the fetus for giving birth under water, they require a modification of the mammary glands for the nursing of young under water, the forelimbs have to be transformed into flippers, the hindlimbs need to be substantially reduced, they require a special lung surfactant (the lung has to re-expand very rapidly upon coming up to the surface), etc etc.

With this new fossil find, however, dating to 49 million years ago (bear in mind that Pakicetus lived around 53 million years ago), this means that the first fully aquatic whales now date to around the time when walking whales (Ambulocetus) first appear. This substantially reduces the window of time in which the Darwinian mechanism has to accomplish truly radical engineering innovations and genetic rewiring to perhaps just five million years — or perhaps even less. It also suggests that this fully aquatic whale existed before its previously-thought-to-be semi-aquatic archaeocetid ancestors.

Another day; another bad day for Darwinism.

No free will,no civil liberty?

Free Will Denial and PreCrimes
Michael Egnor

Tamler Sommers, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston who blogs at Naturalism.Org,  argues that we don’t really have free will, and that giving up the idea of moral responsibility would be beneficial to society:

[T]he idea that criminals do not morally deserve punishment is tough to accept… In fact, giving up on the idea of deep moral responsibility has no … anarchical or distressing consequences. Let’s suppose we did start viewing terrible crimes as we do natural disasters. Would this mean we would not try to prevent future crimes?  Of course not, no more than it would suggest that we not tape our windows or retrofit buildings to protect ourselves from hurricanes and earthquakes. It would mean only that we cease to relentlessly blame criminals (or political figures) for their behavior.

Sommers inadvertently points out the most dangerous consequence of the denial of free will. If we deny free will and treat criminals as we would treat natural disasters, then preemption of crime becomes the logical goal, just as preemption of damage from natural disasters is smart public policy. As Sommers candidly admits, we should “try to prevent future crimes.” We tape our windows before hurricanes, reinforce our buildings before earthquakes, and evacuate our trailer parks before tornadoes. We don’t blame hurricanes and earthquakes for the damage they cause, in any moral sense; natural disasters aren’t guilty of anything. They’re just physical events. A consequence of this pragmatic approach is that we preempt the damage caused by natural events. We act before the natural disaster has happened, to mitigate its effects.

If we treat criminals the way we treat natural disasters — as physical events without moral culpability — the pragmatic approach is preemption as well. Why wait for a murderer to commit murder? In order “to prevent future crimes,” by Sommers’s reasoning, we can identify people with a statistical propensity to commit murder (based on race, age, sex, prior behavior, etc.), and incarcerate them before their crime, and prevent the damage.

Of course, Sommers would argue: you should’t incarcerate innocent people for crimes they haven’t committed! But if Sommers is right, and free will is not real, then there are no innocent people, any more than there are guilty people. There is no innocence or guilt at all, because innocence and guilt only have moral meaning if we have free will. If there is no free will and no innocence and guilt, there are just natural systems (us) doing what natural systems do. And, as with natural disasters, it’s prudent to preempt.

The preemption of crime is the theme of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, which describes an imaginary world several decades in the future in which people are arrested and incarcerated (in a virtual reality world) before they commit crimes, based on the skills of experts who can visualize the future. The “crimes” of which they are convicted are called PreCrimes.n Sommers’s society in which free will is denied and guilt and innocence are rendered meaningless, there is no moral reason not to incarcerate people for PreCrimes. Of course, they’re not guilty, but they aren’t guilty even after they commit a crime, and they are never innocent either. Why wait to incarcerate people predisposed to crime? Why wait to board up your windows and evacuate your home with the approach of a hurricane? Why wait until a man has committed a crime to incarcerate him?

Hannah Arendt  observed that a hallmark of totalitarian states is the eclipse of the concept of guilt and innocence. In a totalitarian state, masses of people are managed like livestock, irrespective of any imputation of personal guilt or innocence. Hitler didn’t kill Jewish children because they were guilty of crimes. He cared not whether they were guilty or innocent. Stalin didn’t starve millions of Ukrainians because they were individually guilty. He starved them as a matter of public policy, without regard for individual moral culpability.

The denial of free will, and the denial of moral culpability that follows on it, is the cornerstone of totalitarianism. The denial of free will does not, pace Dr. Sommers, herald an era of tolerance and understanding. It heralds an era of human livestock management, and the early experiments based on denial of free will and moral culpability — in Germany and the Soviet Union — have already been run.

Darwinists summon cancer to the ramparts.

Sick of the Oxygen Theory of the Cambrian Explosion? Here’s the Cancer Theory
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

You thought you’d heard it all? All the desperate materialist theories seeking to explain the burst of biological novelty some 530 million years ago that Meyer writes about in Darwin’s Doubt? You were wrong. Along comes Lund University in Sweden with a “Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth.”  Get ready for the cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion.

Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key. 

Not many of us who have seen friends suffer or die from cancer would sanctify tumors as “biological innovations” leading to anything good.

The new hypothesis holds that the dramatic diversification of animals resulted from a revolution within the animals’ own biology, rather than in the surrounding chemistry on Earth’s surface.

This will be a hard sell, but charitably, let’s give them their slot on the Cambrian Gong Show and try to understand their act. It’s good to see they toss out the oxygen theory, the runner-up for worst explanation. Agreed, “a causal relationship between the Cambrian explosion and increasing atmospheric oxygen lacks convincing evidence.” With itching ears we await their convincing evidence for the new hypothesis.

The leader figure behind the cancer theory is geobiologist Emma Hammarlund. She got in touch with a tumor biologist, Sven Påhlman, to consider how cancer acts like a multicellular organism.

“I wanted to learn what tumor scientists observe on a daily basis, in terms of tissue growth and how it relates to oxygen. Tumours are after all, and unfortunately, successful versions of multicellularity”, explains Emma Hammarlund.

OK, so we have multicellularity. Tumors don’t seem to automatically grow eyes and articulated limbs, though. As far as we can tell, tumors only seem to be good at killing their hosts. What’s up with this new hypothesis?

The team, including also tumor biologist Dr. Kristoffer von Stedingk at Lund University’s Paediatrics division, tackled the historic question of why animals developed so late and dramatically with novel clues from the field of tumour biology.

Basically, they looked at stem cells to see how they respond to oxygen. Generally, low oxygen (hypoxia) is a threat to a cell, and stem cells are particularly sensitive to hypoxia (are you still following?). Stem cells, therefore, have various mechanisms to deal with fluctuating oxygen levels. Well lo and behold, tumor cells do, too!

These systems involve a protein that can ‘fool’ cells [to] act as if the setting was hypoxic. This can also fool cells to get stem cell-like properties.

Tumor cells, they say, are able to maintain their stem-cell-like traits in spite of low oxygen. This gives them the freedom to evolve, just like microbes found a way to use sunlight. (What?) You may have to read this news several times to see how they get from point A, an uncontrolled tumor cell, to point B, a trilobite.

The new hypothesis that gives credit to a biological innovation to have triggered animal diversification is similar to how we think of biological innovations changing life in the past. Just the presence of free oxygen is the result of some microbes finding a way of using sunlight to get energy. This was also a biological event.

Dr. Hammarlund is a little clearer about what she means in her article at The Conversation, “Cancer tumours could help unravel the mystery of the Cambrian explosion.”

Could tumours help us explain the explosion of life of Earth? Scientists have typically explained the period of history when large animal species became much more diverse very quickly as the result of the planet’s rising oxygen levels. But my colleagues and I have developed a new idea that the change might have started within animals’ own biology, based on evidence from proteins found in tumours. It wasn’t until animals developed these proteins that they could take advantage of the oxygen and start diversifying.

This new hypothesis appears partly motivated by the failure of the oxygen theory to account for the Cambrian explosion. Here’s how it goes. In short, proteins “developed” out of nowhere. By chance, they gave cells the opportunity to “take advantage” of oxygen. This set them free to diversify. And there you go: trilobites.

Does she explain exactly how they diversified into animals with multi-system, hierarchical body plans with complex systems and behaviors? Not at all. Take a look at this newly discovered Cambrian bristle worm from Marble Canyon in Canada and see if it looks like the product of a tumor set free to diversify (Live Science).

Maybe the original paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution can clarify things. The title is, “Refined control of cell stemness allowed animal evolution in the oxic realm.” The peer-reviewed explanation follows:

Animal diversification on Earth has long been presumed to be associated with the increasing extent of oxic niches. Here, we challenge that view. We start with the fact that hypoxia (<1 a="" achieved="" action="" adult="" allowed="" and="" animal="" animals="" at="" be="" biology="" can="" cell="" cells="" cellular="" challenges="" concentrations.="" conditions="" consistent="" continuously="" control="" cope="" diversification="" enabled="" evidence="" evolution="" evolve="" factors="" fluctuating="" from="" geological="" how="" hypoxia-inducible="" hypoxia-response="" i="" illuminate="" immaturity="" in="" insights="" into="" is="" life.="" machinery="" maintains="" multicellular="" nevertheless="" new="" novel="" o2="" of="" on="" onset="" over="" oxic="" oxygen-sensing="" oxygen="" oxygenated="" paradoxically="" perspective="" provided="" provides="" realm.="" refinement="" regenerate="" regenerating="" settings.="" stem="" stemness="" suggest="" that="" the="" them="" then="" these="" this="" through="" thus="" tissue.="" tissue="" to="" transcription="" tumour="" unprecedented="" view="" we="" whereas="" with="">

From this, you see that all they are really doing is “enabling” microbes to evolve into animals, no matter how much oxygen is present. The authors endow microbes with new transcription factors that don’t restrict the action of their stem-cell properties as oxygen levels rise. Microbes can now become “successful versions of multicellularity” like cancerous tumors, and thus evolve into the Cambrian animals. Are we missing something? Do the judges want to gong this show yet?

In his recent book, Zombie Science, Jonathan Wells already gonged the cancer act when it played in a different venue. Evolutionists feel depressed at the lack of enthusiasm for Darwinism in medical science. A recent paper in PLOS ONE admits this:

Evolutionary biology currently has a marginal place within medicine. There is even a significant tendency to avoid the ‘e-word’ in the biomedical literature when referring to antimicrobial resistance.

In his chapter on antimicrobial existence as an icon of evolution (Chapter 8), Wells discusses the cancer hypothesis as another proposed example of “speciation” of sorts. This claim goes back to Julian Huxley in 1958, and continues today. Most recently, Joshua Swamidass used cancer not as an example of speciation, but of evolution by mutation and selection of the “fittest variants” (not fittest for the host, obviously). Swamidass and others try to view tumor cells as innovators. Wells looks into the examples provided by evolutionists and finds them lacking true novelty. They only rewire existing complex functions, but already have existing complex resources to draw on (p. 166). This is not innovation. It’s more like theft.

Evolutionary theory, furthermore, does little to guide medical science into new treatment options for cancer patients. Its value is “questionable, at best,” Wells concludes (p. 167). It certainly fails as evidence for evolution.

But some people argue that cancer is at least of value in providing evidence for evolutionary theory. Something doesn’t seem right here. According to evolutionary theory, the human body originated by mutation and selection, though the evidence shows that those processes cannot produce anything like a human body. Now we have evidence that mutation and selection can produce cancer, which destroys the human body. How does that support evolutionary theory? (pp. 167-168).

Applying this reasoning to Hammarlund’s cancer hypothesis for the Cambrian explosion, one finds no evidence that tumors can innovate the body plans of Cambrian animals. Jonathan Wells’s last paragraph applies here as well:

Darwinian evolution needs examples of biological processes that build new forms and functions. Cancer destroys these things. Saying cancer is evidence for biological evolution is like saying that I have a theory that explains the rise of modern civilization, and the evidence for my theory is the night of the living dead. (p. 168).

So to the cancer theory for the Cambrian explosion, the most desperate yet, we hit the gong and await the next act.

Mind over matter?

The Representation Problem and the Immateriality of the Mind
Michael Egnor

Materialism as a metaphysical perspective fails on countless levels. Nowhere is that failure more clear than in the understanding of the mind and the brain. The central failure of materialism in philosophy of the mind is the representation problem.

Mental representation is a big topic and has been a fertile issue in philosophy, especially over the past two centuries. I’ll focus on the role of mental representation in abstract thought, which is where the inadequacies of materialism are most obvious.

Thoughts may be divided into thoughts about particulars and thoughts about universals. Thoughts about particulars are thoughts, including perceptions, imagination, memory, etc., about particular objects in our environments. Thoughts about my coffee, or my car, or my family would be thoughts about particulars.

Thoughts about universals are abstract thoughts, and are thoughts about concepts. Justice, mercy, logic, mathematics, etc., are abstract thoughts.

For a materialist, all thoughts are generated by the brain. All that exists is matter, as understood by physics and chemistry. Thus, all thoughts, for the materialist, are generated purely physically, by neurons, neurotransmitters, action potentials, etc. So when we think about a particular object, that thought must somehow actually be a physical thing — a molecule or a relationship between molecules, etc. But of course, if I think about a particular thing — my cat Tabby, for example — my actual cat Tabby isn’t in my brain, so the materialist would say that my cat Tabby is somehow “represented” in my brain, and that representation constitutes the thought, without (immaterial) remainder. In the materialist view, all thought is, boiled down, matter of some sort, or is at least wholly represented in matter.

For thoughts about particular objects, this materialist scheme is not entirely implausible. For some aspects of visual perception, for example, there is a mapping of the visual field from the retina to the cortex, so that an image (of sorts) is represented in the brain as a field of neurons that are activated in a pattern. One might say that the pattern is the representation of the visual image. This still leaves much to be explained, but at least it is not utterly implausible to say that a thought about a particular thing — for example, a perception of my cat Tabby — is a representation in my brain. We still have no scientific (or metaphysical) explanation as to how this neuronal pattern actually becomes the thought, of course. But mental representation may provide a real level of explanation for thought about particulars.

But abstract thought is different. Consider a thought about justice. Justice is a concept, not a particular thing existing in the physical world. The materialist must ask: how can a thought about justice be represented in the brain? It certainly can’t merely be a mapped field in the cortex — justice has no shape or physical pattern, unlike my cat Tabby. A materialist would no doubt say that, like perception of particulars, thought about justice is represented in the cortex. But note carefully what representation means: a representation is a map of a thing. It presumes the existence, in the physical world, of that which it maps. A representation of a city — a map — presumes the city. A representation of my cat presumes my cat. And here’s the problem: a representation of my thought about justice presumes my thought about justice. So representation cannot provide any final explanation for abstract thought, because the representation of an abstract thought, even if it exists, presupposes the abstract thought itself.

As an example, let us suppose that a certain pattern of neuronal activation in my cortex were shown to represent my thought about justice. Obviously that pattern is not my thought about justice itself — justice is a concept, not a bunch of neurons. And if that pattern of neuronal activation represented my thought about justice, it must map to my thought of justice, which presupposes my thought about justice and thus cannot explain it.

Succinctly, mental representation of abstract thought presupposes abstract thought, and cannot explain it. It is on abstract thought that materialism, as a theory of mind, flounders. Abstract thought, classically understood as intellect and will, are inherently immaterial. Any representation in the brain of abstract thought (while it may exist) necessarily presupposes abstract thought itself, which must, by its nature, be an immaterial power of the mind.

The human mind is a composite of material particular thought and immaterial abstract thought. Interestingly, modern neuroscience supports this view. Perception of particulars maps with precision to brain anatomy, but abstract thought is not mapped in the same way. Material powers of the brain are ordinarily necessary for exercise of abstract thought (e.g., you have to be awake to think about justice), but matter is not sufficient for abstract thought.

Abstract thought is an immaterial power of the mind.

The bomb-throwing continues.

The Scientist Who Shouldn’t Exist — New Book by Matti Leisola, Jonathan Witt 
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Matti Leisola isn’t supposed to exist. According to the standard patter from evolutionists, there is no controversy about evolution in the scientific community, nor any need for serious consideration of the theory of intelligent design. That’s because no legitimate scientist doubts modern evolutionary theory; and even if there may be a handful of such doubters in the U.S., there certainly are none to speak of in enlightened Western Europe.

A new book by and about distinguished Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola authoritiatively brushes aside these Darwinist talking points. The book is Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, co-written with Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Witt, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture.

Dr. Leisola is the former dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology, and the author of 140 peer-reviewed science publications on enzymes and rare sugars. Among other distinctions, he is a winner of the Latsis Prize of the ETH Zürich.

While arguing, from vast experience, against modern evolutionary theory and for intelligent design, the book is also a memoir. The back cover nicely summarizes the narrative thread:

What happens when an up-and-coming European bioscientist flips from Darwin disciple to Darwin defector? Sparks fly….Heretic is the story of Leisola’s adventures making waves — and many friends and enemies — at major research labs and universities across Europe.

Leisola’s deep knowledge of biology is evident throughout the book, but fellow scientists may find Chapter 10 particularly valuable. There, Leisola unpacks what he has learned about evolution and design from his work on engineering enzymes and microbes.

Dr. Witt worked with Dr. Leisola to make the book readily accessible to a broad audience. A gifted science writer and explainer, Witt is the author previously of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Intelligent Design Uncensored, and three documentaries that have appeared on PBS, including The Privileged Planet.

From the introduction, describing how Leisola started down the path to scientific heresy:

As a young student, I used to laugh at those who, as I thought, placed God in the gaps of our scientific knowledge. This God-of-the-gaps criticism is often leveled against Christians and other religious believers, against all those who insist there is clear evidence of design in nature. To my way of thinking, such people lacked the patience and level-headedness that I possessed. It was so clear to me: Instead of plugging away to discover the natural mechanism for this or that mystery about the natural world, these pro-design people threw up their hands and used the God-did-it explanation as a cover for ignorance.

This criticism of intelligent design proponents struck me as reasonable, so I didn’t listen to their arguments. But eventually I came to realize that this criticism cuts both ways, since a functional atheist also can reach for pat explanations in the face of mystery. It’s just that for him, the pat explanation will never be God. That is, you do not need God in your explanatory toolkit in order to short-circuit careful scientific investigation and reasoning. I realized that I myself had been all too willing to stuff vague materialistic explanations into the gaps of our scientific knowledge….

Also, their argument for entertaining only material explanations in the sciences just assumes that everything we find in nature has a purely material cause. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if there are features of the natural world — the laws and constants of nature itself, for instance — that really are the work of a creative intelligence?

Scientists are supposed to investigate mysteries with an open mind, not assume an explanation from the outset. I came to see that the best approach is to evaluate which explanation among the live options is more logical and fits the facts better.

The book has already garnered impressive endorsements from other scientists. One is from Dr. Erick J. Vandamme, Emeritus Professor of Bioscience Engineering, Centre for Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology, Ghent University, Belgium. Another is by Zombie Science author and biologist Jonathan Wells.

More on those later. Here we’ll only quote an especially colorful passage from German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönning’s endorsement. Heretic, he writes, is “the exciting story of almost the entire spectrum of aberrant motives, absurd fears, and unreasonable reactions to intelligent design (ID) by evolutionary scientists, clergymen, and church institutions alike.”

Heretic is also a story of fellow Darwin doubters discovered, and new supporters for ID won, in the most unexpected places. But for that you will have to read the book. Get it now at Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

Yet more on the Elixir of life.

Behind Water’s Beauty, Wondrous Utility
Sarah Chaffee

This scene is about a five-minute walk from our Seattle office, and it never gets old. But when I think about it, it’s a lot about water.

In Seattle, it’s particularly easy to accept the centrality of water to every aspect of our lives — whether it’s salmon for dinner, taking the ferry to the peninsula, wearing hooded jackets from October to April (it’s a Seattle saying that you can pick out the tourists by looking to see if they are using an umbrella). Or (for me) it’s spending a day up at Snoqualmie Pass, snowshoeing on the Pacific Crest Trail.

But it’s more than that. As the picture above shows, we see the water cycle in action. Here’s an explanation.

In The Wonder of Water, this is what Michael Denton says about what water does between mountains and ocean:

[W]e have seen that it is the unique capacity of water to exist in the three stages of matter in the ambient temperature range, in conjunction with the low viscosity of ice and water, that makes possible the hydrological cycle, which has reliably delivered water to the terrestrial ecosystems of planet Earth for millions of years. And because the turning of the hydrological wheel depends largely on the unique properties of water, this means that in effect, water, the very matrix of life, delivers itself to land-based ecosystems by its own capacities. We also have seen that water further possesses just the right suite of diverse chemical and physical properties for the efficient erosion and weathering of the rocks, and for extracting the essential nutrients of life, while at the same time generating the key constituents of the soils that store that vital harvest for the benefit of plant life and indirectly all animal life on land.

In the case of water’s erosional and weathering abilities, it is hard to imagine any phenomenon more indicative of design. Here is a diverse set of physical and chemical properties that convey the impression of having been arranged specifically to the end of breaking down rocks both mechanically and chemically. Even if just one property were involved in eroding the rocks it would be wonder enough, especially in conjunction with the fact that the hydrological cycle depends, as discussed above, on the unique capacity of water to exist in multiple states in ambient conditions. But already we have touched on not one but at least five different properties of water that work together in the task of breaking down rocks and weathering minerals: (1) water’s ability to exist in three different staets in the ambient temperature range; (2) water’s high surface tension; (3) water’s expansion on freezing; (4) water’s viscosity; and (5) water’s capacity to dissolve an unusually wide variety of substances.

Perhaps the conspiracy is not the result of design? But certainly the appearance of design is highly suggestive, or even “overwhelming” — the term used by Paul Davies in describing the apparent design of the cosmic fine-tuning of the laws of physics for life.

Further, if the precious water and its cargo of dissolved minerals is to be used by land plants, it must be entrapped in some medium and held fast rather than permitted to run quickly to the sea. Again, water comes to the rescue. Because as we saw, the same erosional and weathering processes that provide the minerals for land-based life also inevitably generate a set of material components, including perhaps most importantly various clays, that confer on soil superb water- and mineral-retaining properties, which are vital if those same minerals are to be accessed and used by growing plants.

So the same process that yields the minerals also yields the means for plants to use them. Moreover, one of the properties that assists in the erosion of the rocks and hence in the making of soil — water’s high surface tension — is also the key property that holds water in the micropores in the sol, retaining it for use by land plants. And of course all this is a fitness for land-based life! Marine plants have no need for water-retaining soil!

Water’s properties are fit as a delivery man, quarry master, and store-keeper for land-based life, all in one! This is not mere everyday design; analogous to that seen in human technology; this is design of a transcending elegance and parsimony.

Hmm. Behind the beauty of Seattle’s famous views, there is wondrous utility.

Naturalism v. Naturalism?

Naturalism and Self-Refutation
Michael Egnor

Tom Clark  at Brandeis University has a blog called  Naturalism.Org. On his blog he presents a lengthy defense of naturalism as a metaphysical, scientific, and social project. Clark’s blog is valuable because he presents detailed arguments in favor of naturalism, which is unusual. Much of naturalist/materialist blogging is so poorly thought-out that it’s difficult to respond to with anything except satire. Clark at least attempts a coherent logical defense of naturalism, and this opens the door to some interesting discussions.

What is naturalism? Clark defines it thus:

Naturalism asserts that the world is of a piece; everything we are and do is included in the space-time continuum whose most basic elements are those described by physics.

Already we encounter problems for naturalism. Mathematics is certainly something we do. Is mathematics “included in the space-time continuum [with] basic elements … described by physics”? It seems a stretch. What is the physics behind the Pythagorean theorem? After all, no actual triangle is perfect, and thus no actual triangle in nature has sides such that the Pythagorean theorem holds. There is no real triangle in which the sum of the squares of the sides exactly equals the square of the hypotenuse. That holds true for all of geometry. Geometry is about concepts, not about anything in the natural world or about anything that can be described by physics. What is the “physics” of the fact that the area of a circle is pi multiplied by the square of the radius? And of course what is natural and physical about imaginary numbers, infinite series, irrational numbers, and the mathematics of more than three spatial dimensions? Mathematics is entirely about concepts, which have no precise instantiation in nature as described by physics.

Clark would likely argue that the concepts of mathematics are the products of our brains, which are purely material things. But that’s merely an assertion based on metaphysical presupposition, without any basis in physics or science. The hallmarks of the mind — intentionality, qualia, restricted access, the generation of propositions and logic, etc., have nothing whatsoever to do with matter. Matter, as understood by physics, isn’t intentional — it isn’t about anything. Matter is not inherently subjective, it doesn’t generate propositions or logic, etc.

For Clark, thoughts merely appear out of matter, which has no properties, by the laws of physics, for generating thought. For Clark to assert that naturalistic matter as described by physics gives rise to the mind, without immateriality of any sort, is merely to assert magic.

Furthermore, the very framework of Clark’s argument — logic — is neither material nor natural. Logic, after all, doesn’t exist “in the space-time continuum” and isn’t described by physics. What is the location of modus ponens? How much does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem weigh? What is the physics of non-contradiction? How many millimeters long is Clark’s argument for naturalism? Ironically the very logic that Clark employs to argue for naturalism is outside of any naturalistic frame.

The strength of Clark’s defense of naturalism is that it is an attempt to present naturalism’s tenets clearly and logically. That is its weakness as well, because it exposes naturalism to scrutiny, and naturalism cannot withstand even minimal scrutiny. Even to define naturalism is to refute it.

Going nuclear?

Earlier Burgess-Shale-Type Fossils Found in Greenland
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Graham Budd has been critical of associations between Ediacaran fauna and Cambrian animals, and has also debunked alleged Precambrian animal ancestors such as Vernanimalcula (Stephen Meyer,Darwin’s Doubt, pp. 85, 90-91). Budd also was in attendance at the Darwin-doubting Altenberg 16 conference in 2008 (p. 292), confessing that the fossil record tells little about the origin of biological forms. This Cambrian expert from Uppsala University has a new paper in Geology describing new exquisitely-preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale type, but earlier. Along with lead writer Ben Slater, Graham Budd’s team unveils photographs of tiny but exquisite parts of arthropods, worms and other animals that burst into appearance in the Cambrian Explosion. What’s amazing is that these fossils were collected not in Canada or China, but in the northern reaches of Greenland.

The location, called Sirius Passet in Peary Land in the far north of Greenland, has been known as an early Cambrian fossil site, but it lies close to a geological fold belt. Having been heated to 200° C or more by metamorphism, most of the fossils at Sirius Passet have suffered thermal alteration and are difficult to interpret. Not far to the south, however, the team found sites in the same formation that escaped most of the alteration.News from Uppsala University describes how they found a “treasure trove of highly detailed fossils” of the Burgess Shale type.

The ‘Cambrian explosion’ of animal diversity beginning ~541 million years ago is a defining episode in the history of life. This was a time when the seas first teemed with animal life, and the first recognisably ‘modern’ ecosystems began to take shape.

Current accounts of this explosion in animal diversity rely heavily on records from fossilised shells and other hard parts, since these structures are the most likely to survive as fossils. However, since most marine animals are ‘soft-bodied’ this represents only a small fraction of the total diversity.

Rare sites of exceptional fossilisation, like the world-famous Burgess Shale, have revolutionised palaeontologists understanding of ‘soft-bodied’ Cambrian life. Because of the special conditions of fossilisation at these localities, organisms that did not produce hard mineralized shells or skeletons are also preserved. Such sites offer a rare glimpse into the true diversity of these ancient seas, which were filled with a dazzling array of soft and squishy predatory worms and arthropods (the group containing modern crustaceans and insects). 

Also important is that these fossils date earlier than the Burgess Shale by 10 million years (518 million instead of 508 million), and yet are recognizable as the same animals. This indicates that the Cambrian animals had a global distribution at the time they were fossilized. The same animals are found many thousands of miles apart on three continents.

Instead of the large, articulated fossils from China and Canada, those at the Greenland sites are made up of tiny fragments. So rich were the deposits, they often found 100 specimens in a 50-gram sample.

A team of palaeontologists from Uppsala (Ben Slater, Sebastian Willman, Graham Budd and John Peel) used a low-manipulation acid extraction procedure to dissolve some of these less intensively cooked mudrocks. To their astonishment, this simple preparation technique revealed a wealth of previously unknown microscopic animal fossils preserved in spectacular detail.

Most of the fossils were less than a millimetre long and had to be studied under the microscope. Fossils at the nearby Sirius Passet site typically preserve much larger animals, so the new finds fill an important gap in our knowledge of the small-scale animals that probably made up the majority of these ecosystems. Among the discoveries were the tiny spines and teeth of priapulid worms — small hook shaped structures that allowed these worms to efficiently burrow through the sediments and capture prey. Other finds included the tough outer cuticles and defensive spines of various arthropods, and perhaps most surprisingly, microscopic fragments of the oldest known pterobranch hemichordates — an obscure group of tube-dwelling filter feeders that are distant relatives of the vertebrates. This group became very diverse after the Cambrian Period and are among some of the most commonly found fossils in rocks from younger deposits, but were entirely unknown from the early Cambrian. This new source of fossils will also help palaeontologists to better understand the famously difficult to interpret fossils at the nearby Sirius Passet site, where the flattened animal fossils are usually complete, but missing crucial microscopic details.

The photos of the small carbonaceous fossils (SCFs) in the paper show exquisite details of identifiable Burgess Shale type animals. Pieces of trilobite cuticles were also found. Trilobites are among the most complex of Cambrian animals, possessing articulated limbs, eyes and multiple body systems for locomotion, digestion and survival. The authors seem most excited about finding the earliest pterobranch hemichordates (a type of filter feeder known in the Burgess Shale), recognizing that the worldwide distribution indicates an even earlier origin. The paper says,

Our report of early Cambrian pterobranch fragments confirms this hypothesis [of early origin], and their potential affinities to Graptolithina also suggest that the divergence and radiation of the pterobranch clades containing cephalodiscids and graptolites had a somewhat deeper, early Cambrian origin.

Nowhere do they suggest evidence for evolution or transitional forms. On the contrary, these new fossils confirm the picture of abrupt appearance and stasis. The best the team can say is that this fossil site offers “new insights” into the fossilization process and may “reshape our view” of this ‘episode’ known as the Cambrian explosion:

“The sheer abundance of these miniature animal fossils means that we have only begun to scratch the surface of this overlooked resource, but it is already clear that this discovery will help to reshape our view of the non-shelly animals that crawled and swam among the early Cambrian seas more than half a billion years ago,” says Sebastian Willman, researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University.

Marshall Is Back

In 2013, U.C. Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall published a critique of Darwin’s Doubt in the journal Science that Stephen Meyer considered the first critical review to actually address the main argument in the book: the inability of standard evolutionary mechanisms to explain the origin of morphological novelty in the Cambrian period. Meyer wrote a four-chapter response to Marshall in the follow-up book,  Debating Darwin’s Doubt (2015).

Late last year, Marshall wrote an article in Science (November 29, 2017) called “A tip of the hat to evolutionary change,” in which he reviewed another paper in the same issue that claims to reveal “an unexpectedly simple pattern of driver action in peak evolutionary success.” That paper by Žliobaitė et al concludes from the fossil record of herbivorous mammals that species rise toward success and decline toward extinction in a “hat shape” graph (thus his title).  In passing, Marshall admits that “one of the challenges of studying evolution … is the hierarchical structure of the evolutionary process.” What drives innovation: abiotic (environmental) processes or biotic processes, like competition? How do they work together? How simple is the rise to “evolutionary success”?

Though only peripherally related to evolutionary processes in the Cambrian explosion, Marshall’s article shows what he thinks these days about the origin of biological novelty. Old-fashioned Darwinian competition is a driver of extinction, he agrees, but what drives innovation?

The results of Žliobaitė and colleagues’ work also provide insight into the drivers of evolutionary innovation. The authors’ data for North America and Europe show that, although both biotic and abiotic factors contribute roughly equally to genus origination rates, neither contribution is statistically significant. As the authors note, this provides evidence that evolutionary innovation is not driven by biotic or abiotic external changes. Instead, the data support the idea that evolutionary innovation is influenced by intrinsic factors — the less-predictable origin of the ‘right’ variants at the right time, able to exploit either existing or new resources.

This statement indicates that nothing much has changed in his thinking. It appears Marshall still has no better tool for innovation than lucky mutations that just happen to arrive at the right time to be exploited. How this solution can possibly address the “hierarchical structure of the evolutionary process” leading to body plans with hierarchical levels of morphological innovation seems lost in academic jargon and generalizations.

The Greenland fossils are observational facts. Graham Budd’s team in that cold, remote, northern wasteland could look at those cold, hard facts under a microscope, seeing complexity that shouldn’t be there by any unguided natural process. If Charles Marshall had a better mechanism for innovation than sheer dumb luck, he has had years to announce it. Until and unless he does, Meyer’s thesis remains unchallenged: only intelligent design can account for the functional hierarchical organization revealed by the Cambrian animals.