Yet more on the Darwinism of the gaps fallacy.

Denis Lamoureux on the God-of-the-Gaps Fallacy
Brian Miller

I previously pointed out the dangers of Denis Lamoureux’s proposed synthesis between Darwinian evolution and religious belief. Today, I will correct his error that arguments for design in life fall into what is referred to as the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. The basic claim is that people of faith, particularly Christians, have often argued that some phenomenon which was not currently understood in nature (e.g., the complex motion of the planets) could only be explained by God’s direct intervention. They were in effect inserting God into the gaps of the current scientific understanding. However, future discoveries eventually demonstrated how natural processes explained the phenomenon, thus obviating the need for God. Therefore, scientists should not make the same mistake today by arguing that many features of life appear designed. For, in the future evolutionary explanations will inevitably explain what was once attributed to a designer. 

This argument appears compelling at first, but it actually demonstrates a misunderstanding of trends in scientific discovery over the past several decades. 

The God-of-the-gaps fallacy has only applied to natural processes related to common matter and energy. It has never applied to life. Living systems and their components represent arrangements of molecules that cannot be comprehended primarily in terms of their physical and chemical properties any more than the arrangement of parts in a car can be understood in terms of the material properties of metal, rubber, and glass. Instead, they can only be fully understood in relation to the purposeful functions they were designed to perform. As a consequence, attempts to explain the origin and development of life purely in terms of natural processes have constantly fallen into the materialism-of-the-gaps fallacy — evolutionary and other materialist narratives that seem plausible at first consistently topple as science advances.  

Origin of Life

The trend is perhaps most pronounced in origin of life research. Advances in organic synthetic chemistry have increasingly demonstrated the implausibility of any undirected process on the early earth producing life’s complex building blocks. And, nearly every step in the development of the first cell appears increasingly intractable as the underlying physics and chemistry are better understood. For instance, the forming of a functional cell membrane had long been assumed to be one of the easiest steps, but it now represents yet another insurmountable hurdle. At an even more foundational level, the thermodynamic challenges have grown increasingly problematic with advances in our understanding of non-equilibrium systems. The obstacles now appear so severe that arguing for a purely materialist account for life’s origin represents a modern day version of the quest for a perpetual motion machine

Evolutionary Narratives

Similarly, attempts to envision evolutionary narratives for the appearance of complex adaptations consistently collapse with advances in our understanding of the underlying biology. For instance, biologists once claimed that they had constructed for the evolution of the vertebrate eye a “detailed step-by-step” description. However, each stage in this cartoonish story proved increasingly implausible with new discoveries in the developmental biology of eye formation. For instance, the undirected origin of the lens requires a series of initial mutations to allocate undifferentiated tissue in front of the photoreceptors. This tissue must have then accumulated more mutations to eventually evolve into a fully functional lens. However, the tissue’s first appearance would have severely degraded the animal’s vision, so the  early mutations would have been strongly selected against and quickly removed from the population. 

In addition, the lens would not have become even marginally functional until a complex network of developmental genes emerged to complete its formation. Such a feat would have required hundreds of coordinated mutations, not to mention numerous changes beyond the developmental network, yet the allowable time would have been sufficient for only two or three,even if negative selection were ignored. Therefore, accumulating even a tiny fraction of the needed changes in a feasible timeframe would have been next to impossible. Other evolutionary scenarios for major transformations also fail upon similar analyses. Those which seem plausible only do so because the underlying biology is not well understood, or simply ignored, and rigorous mathematical calculations of required time scales have been avoided.  

Fossil Record

Evolutionary theory has also faced increasing challenges from the fossil record. Even if one assumed that common ancestry were true, the timescale allowed by the record for the appearance of new complex innovations has typically decreased to within geological instances. In addition, once a species appears, it remains essentially the same throughout its tenure on earth. This pattern is most clearly seen where the fossil record is most complete. Copious documentation of these trends was collected by Walter ReMine in his book The Biotic Message. One particularly illustrative example is from Derek Ager’s The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (Ager, pp. 16-17, as cited in ReMine, p. 314):  

Peregrinella … is one of the most distinctive brachiopods in the whole record and it has internal structures which make it clear that none of the abundant brachiopods in the strata above or below could possibly be classified as even distant relations. …. In other words, we have fossils that just suddenly appear around the world at one moment in geological history and ‘whence, and whither flown again, who knows’? … the Mesozoic brachiopods are now very thoroughly documented in every stage and the relations of these large and distinctive forms can hardly have been missed.

The most dramatic conflict between evolutionary theory and reality is the sudden appearance of new animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion. The only cogent attempt to explain this event was presented by paleontologist Charles Marshall and his colleagues. They recognized that the transformation of body plans required the rewiring of the genetic networks which controlled the animals’ embryological development. They also understood that such changes were impossible in modern organisms. In response to these facts, they proposed that animals ancestral to each phyla had genetic networks of a completely different nature from today in that they were far more malleable. As a result, animals could transform dramatically though alterations in these networks without harm. After sudden changes occurred in each branch of the tree, the genetic networks in every phylum uniformly transformed into the unchangeable forms we see today. 

The charm of this model is that it is almost completely untestable since it revolves around groups of organisms which left no trace in the fossil record. It also has to make several rather dubious ad hoc conjectures which could never be verified. However, it does rely on one key assumption which can be studied. Namely, the model presupposes that the development of a new phylum of animal does not require large numbers of new genes, and that that claim has been disproven. Consequently, the fact that enormous amounts of information appeared suddenly in the origin of most animal phylapoints clearly to intelligent design since its production is only possible through a mind. 

Most design critics ignore the data mentioned above and instead attempt to defend evolutionary theory by using groups of organisms where the evidence is considerably less complete and atypical (e.g., whale series). In these cases, the gaps in evolutionists’ knowledge provide room for their imaginations to project their assumptions unto the data. Namely, they infer that groups of species/genera are connected through the gradual branching of an evolutionary tree. The challenge is that the presumed tree has no basis in reality. Even common icons such as the whale series do not represent clear ancestor-descendant relationships, but each “transitional link” is simply assumed to reside on a branch of a hypothetical tree near other links on neighboring branches. The animals are believed to be closely related due to similarities in their traits. The problem is that mounting evidence has demonstrated that similarities of every type between different groups of organisms are not reliable indicators of common ancestry. For, the similarities do not imply a consistent evolutionary tree engineer or computer programmer implementing common design modules to meet similar goals. 

Imperfection-of-the-Gaps Fallacy

Another error perpetrated by many evolutionists comes when they encounter some feature of life where the design logic is not immediately obvious. They often claim that such features represent examples of poor design which no competent engineer would have created. Such claims have constantly fallen into the imperfection-of-the-gaps fallacy. The perception of poor design simply reflected a lack in understanding of the underlying biology or ignorance of engineering principles. As biologists or engineers more carefully studied the features, they consistently came to recognize that they represented exceptional design.For instance, biologists in the 19th century identified dozens of what were then believed to be useless organs in the human body. Nearly all have since been shown to be fully functional. Recent examples include the appendix, tonsils, and the tail bone (coccyx). Other refuted examples of poor design include many examples of junk DNA, the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye, the laryngeal nerve, the panda’s thumb, and pelvic bones in whales. Some examples of currently suboptimal design might exist due to their having degraded over time from deleterious mutations, but such examples no more refute the argument for design in life than rust on a car argues for it being the product of a tornado moving through a junk yard. In reality, the more biology and engineering advance, the more the evidence for design in life increases.     

False Understanding of Nature

Denis Lamoureux’s invoking the god-of-the-gaps argument reflects a false understanding of nature. He conceives of the universe as a well-designed clock that should not need continuous rewinding. A more accurate metaphor is that the universe is like a musical instrument that was designed to interact with its designer. Specifically, our universe was wonderfully engineered to sustain life, but it was also designed to later manifest infusions of information in the origin of the first cell and in the later appearance of complex innovations. This choice for the structure of the cosmos has one particularly important advantage. If the universe were designed to generate and radically transform life, the information required for the first cell and later innovations would have needed to have been built into the laws of physics. The laws would have then been so complicated and intractable that the development of science would have been impossible. 

Lamoureux laments that people of faith would desire to construct sophisticated arguments from science to demonstrate the existence of God. In one sense he has a point. The evidence from life for an intelligent cause is so clear that anyone should recognize it with little effort. Unfortunately, typical science education often conditions the mind to suppress that reality. Attempting to see design then becomes like an art patron who lost nearly all of his or her vision attempting to appreciate an impressionist painting from a distance. The rigorous design arguments function analogously to high-powered glasses that help restore normal vision. Naturally, people who have completely lost their sight or the desire to see altogether will not appreciate such assistance. However, they should not attempt to rob others of the opportunity

Design denial crashes into a brick wall or former atheist confronts his selective scepticism.

The brick wall
January 1, 2016 Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design

I’ve had a very interesting night. After watching Dr. David Wood (a Christian apologist and former atheist) and skeptic John Loftus (an atheist and former Christian preacher) debate whether Jesus rose from the dead in a very lively exchange, I decided to have a look at David Wood’s fascinating but very disturbing conversion story (WARNING: Do NOT watch this with children in the room!) At one point in the video (20:38), David Wood describes how several things combined to destabilize his entire atheistic belief system. The first was the argument from design:

First, what’s called the design argument finally hit me. I was looking at a wall, and how the bricks were arranged, and I thought to myself: “You know, if someone told me that these bricks went into this order by some process that didn’t involve intelligence, I’d smack him in the mouth. And yet I believe that life formed without intelligence, when the most basic living cell is unimaginably more complicated than some bricks stacked on a wall.” Why did I blindly accept the extraordinary claim that life arose spontaneously from non-life without demanding some very good evidence?

David Wood’s argument is not directed at unguided evolution, but at abiogenesis, so the standard reply that an organism is not like a wall (or a watch, for that matter) because it can reproduce, is beside the point. What we are talking about here is the origin of the first living thing that could reproduce.

Now, if I were an atheist, I might respond to David Wood’s argument as follows: “Maybe even the most basic living cells today are far, far more complicated than the first self-replicating molecule was. And maybe the first self-replicator was simple enough to have originated spontaneously on the primordial Earth, by an unguided process, over a period of hundreds of millions of years. And once it originated, it could have evolved into bacteria and other living organisms.”

I might say that, but the problem is that:

(a) there’s not a smidgen of evidence for the existence of these primitive self-replicators;

(b) there’s also no evidence that even a primitive self-replicator could have evolved within the time available;

(c) peer-reviewed calculations by a senior evolutionary biologist suggest that the origin of the simplest possible life-form – a “a coupled replication-translation system” – on the primordial Earth would have been a fantastically improbable event, even over a period of billions of years;

(d) we have no evidence that such a primitive life-form could have evolved into the kinds of cells that we find on Earth today;

(e) while someone might invoke the multiverse to beat the overwhelming odds against abiogenesis, there are also universes out there in which brick walls form spontaneously, too – yet we don’t go around saying that design inferences for brick walls; and

(f) in any case, there are good scientific arguments against the existence of an infinite multiverse.

Finally, Dr. David Wood does not present his design argument as a knock-down demonstration. The question he posed was: “Why did I blindly accept the extraordinary claim that life arose spontaneously from non-life without demanding some very good evidence?” Right now, we have no evidence for abiogenesis, let alone very good evidence.

So my question for readers today is: what do you think of David Wood’s “brick wall” design argument?

The new wild west?

Mass Human Cloning May Soon Be Upon Us
Wesley J. Smith

Human cloning has been accomplished, but the field remains generally stalled because of a shortage of human eggs — one needed per cloning attempt — and eggs for use in research are hard to come by.


That impediment may soon be overcome. Scientists have changed human blood cells into immature egg cells. The next steps should go even farther, eventually allowing for the eventual mass lab-creation of eggs capable of being fertilized or used in cloning.. From the Motherboard story:

The eggs produced by [Mitinori] Saitou and his colleagues are far too immature to be fertilized, much less grow into a human child. Still, they open the door for babies made from the genetic material of relatives, dead or alive. They could also provide a way for infertile people or same-sex partners to produce a child made from their own DNA.


The next step, according to the researchers, is to apply a similar process to the production of human sperm and to create egg cells that are mature enough to be fertilized. This will not only require a lot more research, but creating viable human eggs in a lab is also sure to be incredibly controversial.

Ya think?

And Here’s the Thing

It isn’t just eggs and cloning. Biotechnology researchers are creating the most powerful technologies invented since the splitting of the atom. For example:

CRISPR allows any cell or life form to be genetically engineered, potentially used in life-saving genetic therapies or the unleashing of a genetically altered viral pandemic.
Three parent embryos are being created in labs to be brought to birth.
Artificial life forms are being created with no predicate in creation or evolution.
Researchers are putting human stem cells into mouse brains and making other forms of chimeric lab animals.
The list goes on and on.


Yet, there are few concerted national and international discussions outside the research community to find ways to govern these experiments or to draw firm boundary lines. Indeed, other than some government funding restrictions, scientists are generally ethically bound only by their own consciences. That is unacceptable.

Missing: A Systematic Ethical Conversation

George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics attempted to carry on a systematic ethical conversation about these crucial issues. But the Council was roundly attacked in the media and among mainstream bioethicists for daring to have a conservative perspective and, as a consequence, much of its intellectually sterling work is too often ignored.

Time and scientists wait for no one! Yet our leaders dither. There is no serious discussion that I can discern within the current Administration about gathering a bioethics/biotechnology advisory council together.

We need a robust societal debate, led, I believe, by a council with members holding various, even conflicting, ethical and political perspectives — I call it a populist bioethics council — to duke it out publicly. Nothing attracts media attention or public interest like a good policy donnybrook, out of which we can hope to achieve at least some policy and societal consensuses.


It’s time to focus! Anything goes, or leaving our biotechnological future “up to the experts,” is not a wise or sustainable approach.

A clash of Titans.LXXVI

Bad design or bad logic?

Critic of Intelligent Design Acknowledges: “Bad Design” Arguments Don’t Work
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

It’s good to be able to report progress. Nathan Lents, whose name you’re probably tired of hearing, wrote a Wall Street Journal article and a whole book

themed on the idea of “poor design” in the human body. In the book, he included one section about the sinuses and their supposedly “suboptimal design” (pp. 8-13). Lents is a biologist and college professor who, to judge from the language he used in fighting this out with us, apparently didn’t know some basic terminology about the anatomy of the sinuses.

Writing here, here, here, and here,neuroscientist Michael Egnor responded to Lents on a range of topics, which to me seemed like a proper job of “shellacking” Professor Lents, as I wrote in a tweet. Lents was still smarting about that when he agreed to participate in a forum at the Peaceful Science blog administered by computational biologist Josh Swamidass. To make a long story short, Lents accused Egnor of making an elementary error and refusing to acknowledge it. But But Evolution News demonstrated that it was Lents, not Egnor, who was wrong. It was not a matter of opinion or interpretation.

A Mere Quibble?

Now Swamidass, a prominent critic of intelligent design, acknowledges as much. See, “Who Is Right About Sinuses?” So does Lents, while nevertheless brushing off the whole matter as a quibble over terminology: “They did correctly [point] out one mistake I made in terminology, which they make a huge deal out of, and which I have corrected in the text below.” So when he thought he had caught an unacknowledged error on our end, it was a big deal. Now, it’s not. Hey, why fuss about a bit of mistaken terminology? Well, it wasn’t anyone around here who wrote a section of a book, asserting the poor design of the human sinuses, only to have it shown that we didn’t understand that “the maxillary sinus is in fact one of the paranasal sinuses.”

A small point? You decide. But this is interesting. As Swamidass notes, the argument from “bad design” is commonplace, however as he goes on to say, it’s also invalid.

    Though it is not the focus or precise argument of his book, Dr. Lents is often making a “bad design” argument for evolution. This is a common argument offered to support evolution, and Dr. Lents is certainly not the first to make it.

Having recognized that Dr. Lents holds to a very common view, I confess that I do not personally think the bad design argument is valid. In my view, it mistakes the quirks and “seams” in our body as errors, and makes a theological argument that extends beyond science. In contrast with the bad design argument, I prefer to insist science remain neutral and silent on theological arguments such as these, and see these quirks as biological mysteries that often reveal evidence of common descent, and non-intuitive details of how our bodies work. I know I may be in the minority among biologists in disputing the bad design argument, but I hope that could shift in the future. Nothing intrinsic to evolutionary science requires us to make those arguments. 

     Very good — I like the language about “seams.” I am looking right now at the sweater I’m wearing, and it too has “seams” while at the same time reflecting someone’s intelligent design. Thank you, Dr. Swamidass!

Swamidass adds, “Though the acrimony is not necessary, it is not surprising. These are the grand questions we are facing, and they are important.” Yes, they are both grand and important. Speaking only for myself, though, I think the reason for the “acrimony” is that ID scientists are routinely misrepresented, to malign, dismiss, and often to harm them professionally. This pressure to conform or be punished comes from both named opponents and unnamed ones (e.g., Wikipedia editors). Evolutionists face no parallel dynamic.

I do not like to see that happen to respected colleagues. Using the medium we have available to us to forcefully resist these efforts is not only “not surprising.” It’s the correct thing to do.

    

National insecurity?:Pros and cons.

More on lady justice broken scales.

The universe finetuned for furries?

Was Universe Designed for Hairy-Nosed Wombats?
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Professor David Barash of the University of Washington is an evolutionary biologist known for delivering a yearly talk to his students disabusing them of the idea that science can reasonably be reconciled with religious faith. He boasted about this in the New York Times. He calls it The Talk.

Writing today over at Aeon, he offers an essay on “Anthropic arrogance,” arguing that, “Claims that the Universe is designed for humans raise far more troubling questions than they can possibly answer.” He begins by cracking wise.

Welcome to the ‘anthropic principle’, a kind of Goldilocks phenomenon or ‘intelligent design’ for the whole Universe. It’s easy to describe, but difficult to categorise: it might be a scientific question, a philosophical concept, a religious argument — or some combination. The anthropic principle holds that if such phenomena as the gravitational constant, the exact electric charge on the proton, the mass of electrons and neutrons, and a number of other deep characteristics of the Universe differed at all, human life would be impossible. According to its proponents, the Universe is fine-tuned for human life.

This raises more than a few questions. For one, who was the presumed cosmic dial-twiddler? (Obvious answer, for those so inclined: God.) Second, what’s the basis for presuming that the key physical constants in such a Universe have been fine-tuned for us and not to ultimately give rise to the hairy-nosed wombats of Australia, or maybe the bacteria and viruses that outnumber us by many orders of magnitude? In Douglas Adams’s antic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), mice are ‘hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings’ who are responsible for the creation of the Earth. What if the Universe isn’t so much anthropic as mouse-thropic, and the appearance and proliferation of Homo sapiens was an unanticipated side effect, a ‘collateral benefit’?

Did I say he cracks “wise”? Wrong word.

A Puerile Challenge

This is well-timed because Ann Gauger’s beautiful essay this morning, “Beyond Adapation: The Human Brain Is Something New,” answers the puerile challenge very nicely. In a universe “designed” for mice or hairy-nosed wombats (which, by the way, are a lot cuter than they sound) it would be mice or wombats writing poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The human brain, whether you believe it channels the soul or not, is undoubtedly unique in the world of life.

With our brains we write music, dance the ballet, paint landscapes, play chess, and do theoretical physics. We send men to the moon and then bring them back. We contemplate our origin, what and who we are, and give thanks. Non-human primates [like wombats and mice] don’t do these things. Furthermore, these abilities far exceed what is needed for survival, and at least in the case of theoretical physics and traveling to the moon, are not useful for finding true love. The verdict on chess is still out.

The key point that Gauger makes is that of all the exceptional things that humans can do with our minds, the most exceptional are not explained by adaptation, and so can’t be explained by the evolutionary biology that Dr. Barash teaches. 

Yes, “bacteria and viruses…outnumber us by many orders of magnitude,” but I’m not able to see the sense or wisdom in privileging sheer numbers as a mark of cosmic significance over, for example, the utterly exceptional ability — unique in the universe, as far as we know — of a human being to say and mean, “Thank you.”

Nature's navigators v. Darwin.

Marvelous Migrations at All Scales
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Think of the simple reasons for animals to migrate back and forth from one area to another. They might need to look for food. They might need to get away from cold or heat as the seasons change. They might want to get away from predators or parasites. If any of these were universal natural laws, though, we wouldn’t find so many exceptions.

Picture the bison in Yellowstone suffering through some of the harshest winters in America, yet enduring hot August days in their shaggy coats as tourists snap pictures. The swans stay, but the sandhill cranes migrate. The coyotes and rabbits stay, while their fellow mammals, the elk and deer, migrate off the plateau in winter. Some crows migrate, but others do not. Is there a design story in this mixture of phenomena?

As we recently shared in a post about a European bird, technology is opening new windows on animal migratory habits that were never before possible. Let’s begin by looking at a few of the more spectacular examples of animal Olympians:

Homing pigeons can find home when released from an unfamiliar location.

The bar-tailed godwit, a shore bird, can fly 11,000 km, the longest known example of non-stop flapping flight.

The globe skimmer dragonfly completes a 15,000 km circuit in four generations.

Monarch butterflies cover 9,000 km in four generations; painted lady butterflies fly almost 10,000 km from England to Africa and back.

15 million free-tailed bats migrate up to 1,500 km each year between Mexico and the US.

Zebras make the longest walking migration in Africa: 500 km (longer than wildebeest circuits).

The arctic tern flies from pole to pole each year, a circuit of 50,000 km.

Sea turtle hatchlings can find their nesting beach after 30 years away. Loggerhead turtles cross the entire Pacific from Australia to South America.

Whales, tunas, eels and turtles cross ocean basins during their life cycles.

The greatest biomass movement on earth is the daily swimming up and down in the water column of billions of planktonic animals. (Cyrus Martin, Current Biology) 

That’s a lot of targeted motion! Migrating animals come in all sizes, from the mightiest whales to the smallest copepods in ocean plankton. Even bacteria can cover relatively large distances with their flagella.

In September, Current Biology published a special issue on migration. Migrating animals appear in a wide variety of animal groups:

Vertebrates: salmon, eels, tunas, sea turtles, numerous bird species, wildebeest, zebra, deer, bats, whales

Arthropods: butterflies, moths, dragonflies

Crustaceans: copepods and other zooplankton

Plants: the seeds of plants can “migrate” through air and water, sometimes crossing oceans. It’s a fascinating topic, but this article will focus mainly on animal migration

Mechanisms for navigation are also very diverse. Bees and flies use a sun compass. Salmon and sea turtles guide by the earth’s magnetic field and also use olfaction. Dung beetles navigate at night by the Milky Way Current Biology.Birds use landmarks, sun angles and stars, and olfactory cues. Mammals and birds can “follow the leader,” staying with an individual that has made the trip before. Whales may use infrasound. Animals coordinate the external cues with their internal circadian clock; for instance, monarch butterflies time their migrations to the angle of the sun. Some animals, like birds and eels, migrate in massive flocks; others, like sea turtles, go it alone but end up together at the same places.

Involves or Evolves

Kenneth Lohmann, an expert on sea turtles, notes that long-distance migration “involves considerable costs in terms of energy and risk. Thus, for such behavior to evolve, the benefits must be high.” Even if a large benefit were easily discernible, though, Darwinians face high hurdles explaining particular cases:

Different species that are closely related evolutionarily, and sometimes even different populations of the same species, exhibit very different scales and patterns of migration. Much of this variation is under genetic control, but the genes involved are largely unknown. A new and burgeoning field of migration research seeks to unravel the genetic architecture of migration. This is challenging because migration involves a complex, interrelated suite of physiological, morphological and behavioral traits that are mediated by an inherited ‘migratory gene package’, which in turn can be viewed as part of a ‘migratory syndrome’

Some aspects of migration appear to be genetically inherited, because Pacific golden plover chicks can find the Hawaiian islands from Alaska over the trackless ocean, and butterflies can find the same trees their great-grandparents did, never having flown there before. The fact that sea turtles can find their feeding grounds as hatchlings implies they are born with an inherited genetic map. But routes can also adapt quickly to changes in the environment. Lohmann points out two cases of rapid alteration of inherited maps:

Migratory adaptations arise and vanish rapidly. For example, monarch butterflies were introduced into Australia only about a century ago, but now have a migration in which the timing and direction are altered by 6 months and 180° relative to the North American population from which they presumably descended Another interesting example involves the central European population of a migratory bird, the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), which evolved a new migration route to the British Isles in only three decades. The direction of first migration appears to be encoded by at most a few genes and the new route appears to be based on a novel, genetically programmed orientation preference that is spreading rapidly through the population.

Evolution: Explanation or Assumption?

Most of the articles in this special edition of Current Biology invoke the phrase “has evolved” as a magic wand, never explaining how things evolved. Other than asserting that migration “has evolved repeatedly in numerous species occupying diverse ecological niches,” Lohmann has little to say about evolution. Migration might keep parasites from evolving more virulent forms, he says, and might increase the health of the migrating population; but other than those suggestions, he offers no explanation for the origin of precision mechanisms that make migration possible: celestial navigation hardware and software, olfactory organs with accuracies of parts per trillion, and sensors that can detect the intensity and angle of the earth’s magnetic field lines. Merely possessing the equipment, though, would never provide an advantage for animals physically incapable of long distance travel. Evolution needs to explain the whole animal as a migration-capable machine.

In their article on “The Ecology of Migration,” Alerstam and Bäckman agree that migration offers various “selective advantages” to animals, “like exploitation of seasonal and ephemeral resources, and avoidance of predators, diseases and competitors.” But a potential selective advantage does not create the tools to exploit it. Instant long-distance communication across the globe could be called an advantage to humans, but would that account for the emergence of the iPhone? The authors say that populations that migrate reproduce better than those that don’t, but they fail to explain how magnetic maps and olfactory systems as sensitive as those in Pacific salmon came to be.

The Closest Attempt

The closest attempt to invoke a neo-Darwinian explanation for any aspect of animal migration can be seen in Reppert and de Roode’s entry, “Demystifying Monarch Butterfly Migration.” Those who remember Illustra’s film Metamorphosis, with its multiple challenges to Darwinism, will want to watch this show! Reppert and de Roode link specific mutations with selective advantages:

Monarchs have become a textbook example of warning coloration and plant-derived toxicity to predators. Monarch larvae sequester cardenolides from their milkweed diet, and broadcast their toxicity through the black, white and yellow stripes in larvae, and the bright orange marked with black and white accents in adults. Classical studies have demonstrated that avian predators quickly learn to associate the bright colors with bitter taste and emesis, leading to prey avoidance.

Cardenolides exert their toxic effects in most animals by interfering with the Na+/K+-ATPase sodium pumps, but monarchs and other milkweed specialists have mutations that reduce cardenolide binding. Evolution of cardenolide insensitivity evolved in a step-wise manner during the macroevolution of milkweed butterflies, with monarchs having at least two non-conservative mutations that strongly reduce their sensitivity to cardenolides…

The high level of resistance to cardenolides allows monarchs not only to feed on milkweeds, but also to sequester cardenolides for their own defenses. Although the sequestration of cardenolides by monarchs has been mostly studied in the context of predation, recent studies suggest that these toxins also provide protection against infection with a virulent protozoan parasite…. Monarchs reared on milkweed species with higher concentrations of heart-arresting cardenolides experience lower infection rate, less parasite growth and fewer disease symptoms than those reared on milkweeds with lower concentrations. Furthermore, when given a dual choice between milkweeds that vary in their anti-parasitic effects, infected female monarchs prefer to lay their eggs on the anti-parasitic species…, thereby reducing infection and disease symptoms in their offspring. These studies have also shown that despite their high level of insensitivity, monarchs are not fully resistant to cardenolides, with highly toxic cardenolides reducing adult monarch lifespan.

That’s it. In the whole series of articles, that is the closest that any author comes to an actual neo-Darwinian explanation for any trait in any species, other than to tell us, over and over, that everything “has evolved.” But notice: this example says nothing about navigation or migration itself. It only talks about how mutations in the butterfly allow it to ingest cardenolides without dying of heart attacks. And they got this ability by breaking things: breaking the binding link that makes the toxin interfere with the sodium pump. That may protect them from birds, but doesn’t account for the origin of the time-compensated sun compass, the inherited map, and the ability to fly unerringly 3,000 miles to the exact trees where their ancestors roosted three generations back.

Design advocates agree that the innate mechanisms for migration can adapt to changing environments, as shown in the Australian monarch butterflies. You can call that “evolution” in a limited microevolutionary sense. But in the only cases we know of where navigation equipment and the ability to use it came into being, it was designed by intelligent minds. Try telling our ace fighter pilots or ship captains that the radar instruments that allow them to go far afield and back again “have evolved” simply because they possess a “selective advantage.” If their routes change, they will most likely tell you that the capability to modify routes is built into the system.

And still yet further continuing to rethink the unrethinkable.

On staying alert in the marketplace

Introducing the Richards Scale – Your Tool for Evaluating Grounds for Science Skepticism
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Writing at the NPR science blog 13.7, U.C. Berkeley psychology professor Tania Lombrozo is concerned about “skepticism.”

Calling someone a “skeptic” can be a term of praise or condemnation.
That is true, and interesting. When is skepticism appropriate, and when not? Sometimes it’s an easy call. Hearing that someone doubts the moon landing, for example, and thinks it’s some sort of U.S. government conspiracy, I would rapidly lose interest in whatever he had to say after that. Where do you draw the line, though?

Lombrozo says of herself, “I might praise skepticism towards homeopathic medicine, but disdain skepticism towards human evolution.” “Disdain” is a strong word, and a telling one.

To skepticism, she prefers “truth-tracking and humility.”

Truth-tracking is about getting things right: identifying the signal amidst the noise. We don’t want to be fooled by noise (about a link between vaccines and autism, for example), but we also don’t want to miss out on signal (about the real benefits of vaccination). Truth-tracking isn’t (only) about rejecting noise, but about differentiating signal from noise.

Humility is about recognizing the possibility for error, and therefore holding beliefs tentatively (or “defeasibly“). But recognizing uncertainty doesn’t mean that all bets are off. Some bets are still much better than other bets. You don’t know who will win the next horserace, for example, but that doesn’t mean that you’d assign equal probabilities to all contenders. Similarly, we can quantify uncertainty by assigning degrees of belief to different propositions. I might think that life on other planets is unlikely, and that ESP is unlikely, yet assign a much higher probability to the former than to the latter. Similarly, I might think that rain tomorrow and human evolution are highly likely, but assign a much higher probability to the latter than to the former.
“Getting things right,” and “recognizing the possibility for error.” That’s very nice. We should all strive for both…but they’re a bit vague for practical implementation. Where would those virtues leave you, confronted with the question of, for instance, the scientific “consensus” on Darwinian evolution?

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation recently, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay Richards addressed the topic, offering a much more practical set of guidelines for deciding when doubt is in order. It’s a new podcast episode of ID the Future.  Listen to it here, or download it here.

Dr. Richards, who leads the excellent news site The Stream, has 12 triggers for your skepticism. Think twice about a “proposed consensus”:

“When different claims get bundled together”
“When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate”
“When scientists are pressured to toe the party line”
“When publishing and peer review in the discipline is cliquish”
“When dissenters are excluded from the peer-reviewed journals not because of weak evidence or bad arguments but to marginalize them”
“When the actual peer-reviewed literature is misrepresented”
“When consensus is declared before it even exists”
“When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus”
“When ‘scientists say’ or ‘science says’ is a common locution”
“When it is being used to justify dramatic political or economic policies”
“When the ‘consensus’ is maintained by an army of water-carrying journalists who defend it with partisan zeal, and seem intent on helping certain scientists with their messaging rather than reporting on the field as fairly as possible”
“When we keep being told that there’s a scientific consensus”
He elaborates on these further, here. I love this as a practical tool for the citizen and science consumer. In fact, with a tip of the hat to Jay, I would propose a scale for quantifying grounds for skepticism – the Richards Scale. For any controversial scientific claim, you count up the clicks on those 12 reasons for doubt, giving you a number between 1 and 12. An idea could register, for example, 3 or 4 on the Richards Scale – prompting mild doubt – or an 11 or 12 – where something fishy is almost certainly going on.

Richards observes:

There’s always this crank somewhere available immediately online that doubts any particular scientific idea, and so the fact that there’s skeptics is not itself an argument against the proposed consensus.
Right, and one does not want to be that crank. Which is why, as he says, you need to examine the sociological dynamics underlying the “consensus.” Tania Lombrozo with her “disdain” for doubts about evolution doesn’t help much with that. The Richards Scale does!