On the designed intelligence of the insect world's apex predator.

 

Dragonflies Make the Most of a Tiny Brain

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Picture the size of a dragonfly’s head, including its eyes and brain. For such tiny assets, one would think its capabilities would be severely limited. But powered flight? Targeting and chasing and intercepting a fast-darting prey? Never underestimate the ability of biological design to pack these feats — and more — into a tiny space. The secret lies in the engineering. Engineers routinely work with optimizing performance within constraints.

In PNAS, Sara Nicholson (Flinders University, Australia) and Karin Nordström (Uppsala University, Sweden) took a look at how dragonflies and other targeting insects achieve “Facilitation of neural responses to targets moving against optic flow.” Optic flow is just what it sounds like: optical information that flows past you when you are moving. Gamers know all about simulated optic flow. They try to stay focused on their objective when information and noise is moving around them. Think “jump to light speed” in Star Wars movies, or dodging rocks as Han Solo tries to negotiate an asteroid belt to get to a planet without getting hit. Optic flow is a major issue for flying insects, and dragonflies come well equipped to deal with it — and use it.

Nicholson and Nordström consider how insects succeed at targeting prey. Consider the noisy environment involved. Get into a dragonfly’s head, like an X-wing gunner, and visualize all the clutter in the heat of battle: enemy craft on the left and right, coming in from a distance, and pieces of debris passing above and below you. Rapid correction of pitch, yaw, and roll is required for your seat and for the craft, but this only adds to the visual confusion. Insects face an even greater challenge, because their fields of view are highly textured, and their prey is small compared to the background. The prey, moreover, is constantly darting in unpredictable directions. “Efficient target detection is a computationally challenging task,” they say, “which becomes even more difficult when done against visual clutter.”

Dragonflies (order Odonata) and hoverflies (order Diptera) are among insect flyers equipped with special neurons for targeting with optic flow.

The ability of insects to successfully pursue targets in clutter is thus remarkable and suggests a high level of optimization, making the underlying neural mechanisms interesting to study. Indeed, insects that pursue targets, including predatory dragonflies and robberflies, as well as territorial hoverflies, have higher-order neurons in the optic lobes and the descending nerve cord that are sharply tuned to the motion of small, dark targets. Target-tuned neurons often have receptive fields in the part of the compound eye that has the best optics. Target selective descending neurons (TSDNs) project to the thoracic ganglia where wing and head movements are controlled, and electrically stimulating dragonfly TSDNs leads to wing movements. Taken together, this suggests that TSDNs subserve target pursuit. However, how TSDNs respond to targets moving against translational and rotational optic flow is unknown.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

One strategy for staying on course is to keep one’s forward vision on the prey, to “lock on” to the target like fighter pilots do. (This is called “gaze stabilization.”) Another strategy is to watch for anything that moves against background. Those are helpful for initial targeting from a stationary position, but things quickly get complicated when taking flight.

However, as soon as the pursuer moves, its own movement creates self-generated widefield motion across the retina, often referred to as optic flow or background motion. In addition to self-generated optic flow, when a pursuer is subjected to involuntary deviations away from their intended flight path, for example by a gust of wind, this also generates optic flow. Quickly correcting such unplanned course deviations is essential for successfully navigating through the world.

When everything is moving — hunter, target, and background — what then? If the hunter rotates, everything in the field of vision rotates with the same angular velocity (rotational movement). If the hunter turns, by contrast, more distant objects move more slowly (translational movement). Surprisingly, many flying insects show “behavioral segregation between rotational and translational movements,” they say. “How this may influence target detection is currently not known.” Into the lab they went.

Flight Simulator

The authors put a hoverfly into a flight simulator, where they could control what kind of motion it perceived with programmed moving dots. Using electrodes, they watched the response of its TSDNs.

We found that orthogonal optic flow attenuated the TSDN target response but to a lesser degree than syn-directional optic flow. This suggests that the vector divergence between the target and the optic flow is important. Most strikingly, we found that counterdirectional optic flow increased the TSDN response to target motion, if the target moved horizontally. We found that projecting optic flow to only a small frontal portion of the eye was sufficient to elicit both TSDN attenuation and facilitation. As descending neurons control behavioral output, the response attenuation and facilitation could play a role in modulating optomotor, or gaze stabilizing corrective turns, as needed during target pursuit.

The first experiments showed that the neurons responded most strongly to counteracting optic flow: i.e., when the target was moving opposite the background optic flow. They narrowed it down further and found that frontal optic flow was “required and sufficient” to trigger TSDN response. “In summary, our results show that a small spatial window of optic flow in either the dorsal or ventral visual field is enough to strongly attenuate (Fig. 3B) or facilitate (Fig. 3C) the TSDN response to target motion.” That appears to be a clever strategy for making the most of a limited set of neurons.

This suggests that the level of vector divergence between the target and the optic flow influences the TSDN responses, so that maximum attenuation is generated at minimum vector divergence, whereas maximum facilitation is generated at maximum divergence.

Further experiments with pitch, yaw, and roll seemed to support this elegant, simple strategy. Since there are other neurons participating, though, the true picture is more complex. Further experiments altering the density of dots added some complications. Upstream small target motion detectors (STMDs) also inform the TSDNs, but in different amounts depending on the type of motion. Vector divergence from optic flow, therefore, was not enough to explain all the responses. Some neurons may inhibit other neurons in some motions but facilitate them in other motions. Further work will be required to disambiguate all the factors in play.

Nevertheless, our findings make behavioral sense. Prior to initiating target pursuit, male Eristalis hoverflies predict the flight course required to successfully intercept the target, based predominantly on the target’s angular velocity. To successfully execute an interception flight, the hoverfly turns in the direction that the target is moving. In doing so, the hoverfly creates self-generated optic flow counterdirectional to the target’s motion. In this case, the TSDNs would be facilitated, which could be beneficial. Importantly, the facilitation would take place across a range of dot densities, suggesting that even relatively sparse background textures would affect the TSDN response.

When the TSDNs are quiet, the insect can assume it is still on target with the prey. Only when contrary optic flow is perceived does the TSDN signal that a course correction is required. How head movements and wing movements factor into these rapid decisions remains to be discovered. The authors did not speculate about how these organs, neurons, and responses might have evolved.

Behold the Beast

A cover story of the IEEE Spectrum shows a magnified dragonfly head. That’s where all this processing goes on. The story, “Fast, Efficient Neural Networks Copy Dragonfly Brains,” tells how “An insect-inspired AI could make missile-defense systems more nimble.” The author, Frances Chance, works at Sandia Labs on dragonflies. Like Nicholson and Nordström., she does flight simulations but in simplified software models instead of making actual measurements on the insect’s neurons. Was a reference to evolution really necessary or helpful in her opening paragraph?

In each of our brains, 86 billion neurons work in parallel, processing inputs from senses and memories to produce the many feats of human cognition. The brains of other creatures are less broadly capable, but those animals often exhibit innate aptitudes for particular tasks, abilities honed by millions of years of evolution.

Her article contains some amazing facts: those ants in your pantry have 250,000 neurons, while dragonflies have close to a million. Dragonflies intercept and capture 95 percent of the prey they pursue. Their eyes are faster than ours, operating at “the equivalent of 200 frames per second.” Without access to GPS, a compass, or gyroscope (as far as we know), a dragonfly successfully intercepts hundreds of mosquitos per day.

What intrigues Chance is how these insects do so much with so little. The AI products that make news come at a huge processing cost. These small animals rival our best capabilities in some aptitudes, and they do it by balancing simplicity with sophistication. Her model results appear oversimplified. Maybe that is due to her assumption of evolution:

It is possible that biological dragonflies have evolved additional tools to help with the calculations needed for this prediction. For example, dragonflies have specialized sensors that measure body rotations during flight as well as head rotations relative to the body — if these sensors are fast enough, the dragonfly could calculate the effect of its movements on the prey’s image directly from the sensor outputs or use one method to cross-check the other. I did not consider this possibility in my simulation….

The simulated dragonfly does not quite achieve the success rate of the biological dragonfly, but it also does not have all the advantages (for example, impressive flying speed) for which dragonflies are known.

Frances Chance is mesmerized by the navigational achievements of insects, and glows with imagined possibilities for biomimicry. She knows she needs to check her simulation against real world dragonflies. ID advocates should encourage her to do so, because often the sophistication of biological engineering that implies designing intelligence is seen in the details. 

Rise of the expertocracy.

Ann Bauer: Science Tyranny, Science Uprising

David Klinghoffer

Do yourself a favor and read a heartbreaking and beautifully written essay at Tablet, “I Have Been Through This Before.” The writer, Ann Bauer, recounts her experience with her son Andrew, diagnosed with autism and subjected to the tyranny of the medical experts with their ever-changing treatments and medications. Andrew died at age 28: “My personal explanation is that he was tired of being controlled by the fickle czars of autism and he was just done.”

“Fickle czars” — of science and medicine — is a great phrase. It belongs in the Science Uprising series.

Bauer recounts the strange and fascinating career of psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, with his cult-like Orthogenic School, who developed the cruel “refrigerator mother” theory of autism that won praise from the experts, only to be sharply rejected later on by still other experts:

This was the moment Bettelheim’s work was entirely spurned by a new group of experts who neatly whipsawed the other direction. They changed positions but held onto the religiosity. Nature was in, nurture was out. Brain chemistry became the only thing that mattered. Everything we’d done during Andrew’s childhood — talk therapy, sensory integration, cross-patterning, behavior training, biofeedback — they rejected as quackery.

That’s far too often the way it is with expertise. 

Where She Is Heading

From the title of Ann Bauer’s essay, you may see where this is going: namely, March 2020.

Suddenly there emerged a cadre of pandemic experts who recommended — then quickly required — extreme and unprecedented things. People shouldn’t see their parents, visit friends, hold funerals or hug. We could never shake hands again. Wearing masks was useless! We MUST mask, both indoors and out. There were hotlines set up in many cities — including mine — for citizens to report their neighbors who did not comply. Police were sent to break up a Jewish funeral in New York City.

Day after day, media rained down information about who was to blame. Millennials, spring breakers, Southerners, motorcyclists. Scientists who proposed different theories were muffled, derided, sidelined. They were deemed dangerous, their ideas “misinformation.” To question was sacrilege.

I had lived through all of this before.

The “Shape” of Tyranny

Indeed, so have I. I’m not talking about the pandemic, or about treatments for autism, but about controversies around the study of biological and cosmic origins — the themes of the Science Uprising series: “To question is sacrilege.”

Bauer cites her husband:

John is an internet security expert with a background in mathematics. He’ll often talk about the “shape” of a problem. This is its outline, its gestalt. He envisions it like dots on a chart, or waves on a graph. I see holographic images — the shape of an ambitious refugee [meaning, Bruno Bettelheim], white coats and flimflam men, glimmering under the figures we see today.

That is a useful way of thinking about the experts and the tyranny they may impose, that we allow them to impose. It all assumes a certain familiar “shape.” There is an eerie sameness.

At any given moment, what the experts say before the next “whipsaw” switch in their favored opinions might prove ultimately to be correct. Or maybe not:

In the end, what I believe doesn’t really matter. History will out. Ten or 15 or 25 years from now there will a reckoning, deep research, a spate of biographies and memoirs from the people who spent 2020-21 under the sway of gurus. News media that trumpeted their wisdom and methods will issue brisk, researched, documentary-style reports. People will swarm out of the shadows to claim they didn’t really believe the experts embodied science and were secretly resisting all along; even those who preached their gospel and strong-armed the public’s obedience will insist they actually did not.

This is how I see the scientific reckoning to come over intelligent design and evolution, which the most esteemed experts tell us will never come, since the theory of evolution is already perfect: “There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.” The controversies are different, but the “shape” is hauntingly familiar.

Three less gaps for Darwin's God.

 

Three Stunners Challenge Traditional Darwinism

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Here are three unrelated but surprising discoveries that will be of interest to the intelligent design community.

Shared Code

Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We’re leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!

A person can leave DNA on a surface without directly touching it, a Flinders University study has found, with the longer someone spends in a room the more likely they are to leave a trace of themselves behind.

The researchers placed DNA collection plates half a meter to five meters apart in offices that had been sanitized.

Without anyone directly touching the collection plates, DNA from multiple people was present after only one day, with the DNA profiles stronger the closer the plates were to an individual and the longer they stayed out. [Emphasis added.]

They published their findings in Forensic Science International Genetics. 

This discovery will be alarming to criminals, as they learn that police can follow their trail even without fingerprints. For the rest of us, it illustrates two things: (1) Forensics is an example of intelligent design in action, and (2) Our earth is indeed a privileged planet. It is loaded with complex specified information! What other world in our solar system can boast of such a distinction? Think of it: coded information is everywhere in our world: in clouds, on rock walls, in the soil, and even under the seafloor. Code not only inhabits life; it makes the world habitable, traveling on global transportation systems.

We share our personal CSI everywhere we go, resembling the character “Pig-Pen” in the old Peanuts cartoons, who walked with a cloud of dust around him — except that our dust is the most densely packed information in the known universe. Presumably our whole genome could be reconstructed from invisible particles that float off our skin and breath, as if we are sharing copies of our biography everywhere we go — a biography so information-rich that if printed in 130 volumes would require 95 years to read (University of Leicester).

Cambrian Giant

Remember when fossil hunters found Marble Canyon, a fossil bed in Canada that surpassed the Burgess Shale in extent and species richness? Scientists have extricated another amazing fossil there: a giant predator unlike anything seen before. Named Titanokorys gainesi by the Royal Ontario Museum, it is half a meter long, almost as big as the famous Anomalocaris.

“The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, ROM’s Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology.

Like Anomalocaris, it has a toothed round mouth characteristic of radiodonts (round teeth). And like all the Cambrian animals, there is no evidence of transitional forms. Titanokorys carried a big carapace over its soft parts, including its enormous head and a suite of complex organs.

Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming.

Live Science’s coverage begins with a 3D animation of the animal’s body plan. That’s a pretty big and complex animal to explode into the fossil record. Marble Canyon, remember, is thought to be earlier than the Burgess Shale. Remember, too, that a vertebrate fish called Metaspriggina was discovered there.

Calling on the DNA Cable

Proteins communicate long distance through DNA, announces the Weizmann Wonder Wander site. This may provide new theories about how proteins activate genes, contrary to the old “central dogma” that taught one-way communication from DNA to protein.

Proteins can communicate through DNA, conducting a long-distance dialogue that serves as a kind of genetic “switch,” according to Weizmann Institute of Science researchers. They found that the binding of proteins to one site of a DNA molecule can physically affect another binding site at a distant location, and that this “peer effect” activates certain genes. This effect had previously been observed in artificial systems, but the Weizmann study is the first to show it takes place in the DNA of living organisms.

The research also bears on the interesting discovery of horizontal gene transfer occurring in DNA libraries in the soil (see “Non-Mendelian Inheritance Undermines Neo-Darwinism”). A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science was looking into how some bacteria can “enrich their genomes by taking up bacterial gene segments scattered in the soil around them,” when they tapped into a long-distance “conversation” on DNA. When two copies of a transcription factor called ComK bind to DNA, they transmit a signal down the “wire” that facilitates binding by ComK at another remote binding site. The activation of all four copies surpasses a threshold, “switching on the bacterium’s gene scavenging ability.”

“We were surprised to discover that DNA, in addition to containing the genetic code, acts like a communication cable, transmitting information over a relatively long distance from one protein binding site to another,” Rosenblum says.

What is the physical mechanism for this kind of information transmission? They suggest it might involve twisting tension in the double helix. Perhaps, though, that is just the carrier signal on which higher-level information is transmitted.

They found that the sites must be at a specific distance from each other and have the same orientation, but that the intervening sequence of DNA letters had little effect. Perhaps this finding will unveil more function in so-called “junk” DNA.

“Long-distance communication within a DNA molecule is a new type of regulatory mechanism — one that opens up previously unavailable methods for designing the genetic circuits of the future,” Hofmann says.

Their paper in Nature Communications by Rosenblum et al. dispenses with the obligatory Darwin formalities briefly. “Whether natural promoters evolved to efficiently transmit allosteric signals across many nanometres remained largely unclear,” they say. Maybe it’s unclear because Darwinism puts static on the line.

Intelligent Design Expectations

Shared code, another Cambrian giant, and DNA communication all fit within intelligent design expectations, but challenge traditional Darwinism. The more that design advocates can present better explanations for surprising discoveries like these, the faster some researchers may pay attention to the design revolution that is clearly underway.

Yet more Just so stories as darwinists tackle the origins of human psychology.

 

There Is No Such Thing as a Fossil Mind

Denyse O'Leary

This month, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (Harvest House 2021) appeared. The basic theme of the handbook, as described by editors William Dembski, Casey Luskin, and Joseph Holden, is how “Science and Christianity are often presented as opposites, when in fact the order of the universe and the complexity of life powerfully testify to intelligent design.”

I wrote one of the chapters, “What Is Evolutionary Psychology?” It concerns the effort to understand human psychology by appealing to a prehuman “evolutionary” past. As such, it explains a large variety of human behaviors as the unconscious enactment of a Darwinian survival scenario among not-quite humans that is wired into modules in our brains. 

Why We Do What We Do

Thus, the reasons we do things are not at all what we suppose:

Evolution explains, for example, why we shop: “Gatherers sifted the useful from things that offered them no sustenance, warmth or comfort with a skill that would eventually lead to comfortable shopping malls and credit cards.” Or gossip: “Back in the day, if you didn’t care to find out what was going on, you were more likely to die and less likely to pass on your incurious genes.” Oh, and anger over trivial matters was once key to our survival.

As the examples above illustrate, EP does not explain puzzling human behavior so much as it offers Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest explanations for conventional behavior, which supplant traditional ones.

For example, why we are sexually jealous (not fear of abandonment, but “sperm competition”); why we don’t stick to our goals (evolution gave us a kludge brain); why we developed music (to “spot the savannah with little Pavarottis”); why art exists (to recapture that lost savannah); why many women don’t know when they are ovulating (if they knew, they’d never have kids); why some people rape, kill, and sleep around (our Stone Age ancestors passed on their genes via these traits), and why big banks sometimes get away with fraud (we haven’t evolved so as to understand what is happening). 

EP also accounts for dreams (they increase reproductive fitness), false memories (there might be a tiger in that tall grass… ), menopause (men pursuing younger women), monogamy (control of females or else infanticide prevention), premenstrual syndrome (breaks up infertile relationships), romantic love (a “hardwired” drive to reproduce), rumination on hurt feelings (our brains evolved to learn quickly from bad experiences but slowly from the good ones), smiling (earlier, a cringe reaction), and wonder at the universe (explained by how early man lived).

In the chapter, I offer many more examples of the current effort to explain aspects of life or human behavior in a narrow, “Darwinian” way. These explanations satisfy a need felt by many for a “scientific” account of their behavior. But often, the science behind evo psych is nothing more than the fact that the persons offering the explanation have degrees in one or another field of psychology — and a knack for coming up with an idea that is easy to market in popular media. The output has earned considerable skepticism.

Good Conversation Starters…But “Science”?

Of course, we are free to accept these ad hoc evo psych explanations if we wish. Like astrology and palm reading, they make good conversation pieces. But the claim that they are “science” does not strengthen them and should not give them more credibility.

American philosopher Subrena E. Smith recently launched a sharp attack on evo psych. She points out that neuroscience has never identified the brain modules or systems that would enable evo psych to make sense.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Another Darwinian just so story deconstructed.

 

Listen: Scale-to-Feather Evolution Doesn’t Fly

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic ID the Future episode, Casey Luskin continues his review of Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith. Giberson and Collins point to the feather as a prime example of a novel feature arising via blind evolution. According to them, it evolved from elongated scales. But Luskin points to recent findings from developmental biology that have led even many evolutionists to abandon the proposal. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Wicca: a brief history.

 Wicca is a modern Pagan religion. Scholars of religion categorise it as both a new religious movement and as part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism. It was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant. Wicca draws upon a diverse set of ancient pagan and 20th-century hermetic motifs for its theological structure and ritual practices.

Wicca has no central authority figure. Its traditional core beliefs, principles, and practices were originally outlined in the 1940s and 1950s by Gardner and an early High Priestess, Doreen Valiente. The early practices were disseminated through published books and in secret written and oral teachings passed along to their initiates. There are many variations on the core structure, and the religion grows and evolves over time. It is divided into a number of diverse lineages, sects and denominations, referred to as traditions, each with its own organisational structure and level of centralisation. Due to its decentralized nature, there is some disagreement over what actually constitutes Wicca. Some traditions, collectively referred to as British Traditional Wicca, strictly follow the initiatory lineage of Gardner and consider the term Wicca to apply only to similar traditions, but not to newer, eclectic traditions.

Wicca is typically duotheistic, worshipping, and/or working with a Goddess and a God. These are traditionally viewed as the Triple Goddess and the Horned God, respectively. These deities may be regarded in a henotheistic way, as having many different divine aspects which can in turn be identified with many diverse pagan deities from different historical pantheons. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as the "Great Goddess" and the "Great Horned God", with the adjective "great" connoting a deity that contains many other deities within their own nature. Some Wiccans refer to the goddess deity as the "Lady" and the god deity as the "Lord"; in this context, when "lord" and "lady" are used as adjectives, it is another way of referring to them as a divine figure. These two deities are sometimes viewed as facets of a greater pantheistic divinity, which is regarded as an impersonal force or process rather than a personal deity. While duotheism or bitheism is traditional in Wicca, broader Wiccan beliefs range from polytheism to pantheism or monism, even to Goddess monotheism.

Wiccan celebrations encompass both the cycles of the Moon, known as Esbats and commonly associated with the Goddess (female deity), and the cycles of the Sun, seasonally based festivals known as Sabbats and commonly associated with the Horned God (male deity). An unattributed statement known as the Wiccan Rede is a popular expression of Wiccan morality, although it is not universally accepted by Wiccans. Wicca often involves the ritual practice of magic, though it is not always necessary.

File under "well said" LXXVIII.

 "The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interest. He becomes primitive again."

Joseph Schumpeter. 

I.D as heuristic?

 

Studies on Stickleback Fish Further Validate Engineering Models for Adaptation

Brian Miller

In my previous article, I described how studies of cichlid variation confirm the predictions of the engineering models for adaption (here, here). This article will describe how the models are further validated by research on stickleback fish diversity. Like cichlids, stickleback populations demonstrate constrained variation, natural genetic engineering (NGE), and phenotypic plasticity. 

Constrained Variation 

All studies of stickleback diversity demonstrate that variation is tightly constrained, and the sticklebacks’ underlying design plan or blueprint always remains intact. Hohenlohe et al. in a 2010 study documented how the same variation in traits and genetics appears repeatedly in separate populations:

Genomic regions exhibiting signatures of both balancing and divergent selection were remarkably consistent across multiple, independently derived populations, indicating that replicate parallel phenotypic evolution in stickleback may be occurring through extensive, parallel genetic evolution at a genome-wide scale.

Miller et al. in a 2019 study came to the same conclusion after analyzing the genetic differences between populations that inhabited lakes in the presence and absence of prickly sculpin, a fish that is a stickleback predator. Sticklebacks that interacted with prickly sculpin rapidly acquired similar alterations to hundreds of the same genes. 

Parallel differentiation of genomes between stickleback from the different lake types involved ~1.8% of the genome, overlapping 587 genes with a wide diversity of biological functions. Widespread adaptation is implicated because genetic drift is unlikely to cause repeated, parallel evolution in multiple evolving populations in association with a specific environmental feature. These extensive changes underscore the rapid and profound effects of a seemingly simple biotic interaction on stickleback evolution.

Natural Genetic Engineering

The two studies demonstrate that sticklebacks adapt genetically to environmental changes predictably and rapidly. These observations suggest that NGE might be driving targeted genetic alterations. 

Other research has identified NGE more explicitly. Ishikawa et al. in a 2019 study discovered that multiple stickleback species duplicated the Fads2 enzyme allowing the species to better synthesize the essential fatty acid DHA. This enhanced ability allowed them to colonize DHA-deficient freshwater environments. The authors suggest that the duplications were facilitated by NGE, possibly the relocation of transposable elements. 

Future research will almost certainly uncover additional examples of variation resulting not from random mutations but from targeted genetic rewriting.

Phenotypic Plasticity

Other investigators identified examples of phenotypic plasticity. McCairns and Bernatchez in a 2010 study discovered that sticklebacks inhabiting freshwater and saltwater zones of a large estuary measure the salinity of the water. They use this information to optimally regulate the expression of genes controlling the transport of salt ions, so the fish can quickly adapt to salinity changes. 

Baker et al. in a 2015 study demonstrated that stickleback females track internal physiological information (e.g., lipid supply and liver glycogen level) and environmental cues such as availability of food and population density. Different cues initiate adjustments to such reproductive parameters as time of breeding, egg size, and clutch or brood size. The alterations improve the likelihood for the population’s continued survival. The researchers also discovered that individual fish coordinate the fine-tuning of multiple traits to ensure optimal reproductive success:

…traits are linked both genetically and functionally, and thus expressed plasticity in one trait would seem to require simultaneous plastic expression in at least one other trait, and perhaps more.

As a final example, Tibblin et al. in a 2020 study raised sticklebacks in an aquarium with different color backgrounds. The investigators also mimicked the presence of predators by chasing fish with a dip-net and introducing chemical cues mimicking the presence of Pike, which is a natural predator. Both color and predatorial stimuli triggered changes in the dorsal coloration that assisted the fish in avoiding detection. 

The Toppling of Evolutionary Icons

Cichlid and stickleback fish are two of the most iconic examples of adaption that biologists present as evidence for the plausibility of evolutionary processes driving large-scale transformations. Yet research over the past few decades supports the opposite conclusion. Evolutionary and adaptive processes are constrained in cichlids and sticklebacks, as in all complex organisms, to only minor alterations to existing traits or to the loss or duplication of an existing structure. Most adaptation results from engineered processes that leave little to chance. The belief in the limitless creative capacity of evolutionary processes now rests on little more than blind faith in the philosophy of scientific materialism.  

A theory in crisis?

 

Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

A new ID the Future episode spotlights The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and specifically, an essay in the new anthology by biologist Jonathan Wells, “Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?” As Wells and host Casey Luskin note, the essay title alludes to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued there that if one studies the history of scientific revolutions, one finds that when the scientific evidence has begun to turn against a dominant scientific paradigm — when its days are numbered — its adherents do not simply concede defeat. Instead they use all their institutional power to suppress dissent and punish proponents of any competing paradigm.

This is the period of crisis, which can last for years and even decades. Wells contends that modern evolutionary theory is a current instance of a dominant paradigm in crisis. He briefly makes the case in this episode, and at greater length in his essay, which appears in the newly released anthology from Harvest House, edited by William Dembski, Casey Luskin, and Joseph Holden. Download the podcast or listen to it here.