Words are cheap and, in science as in other contexts, they can be
used to cover up and camouflage a multitude of areas of ignorance. In
this series so far, I have dealt summarily with several such terms,
since I anticipated that they are already familiar to readers, and as I
did not wish to belabor my fundamental point.
“Just Words”
I would, however, like to discuss in somewhat more detail a term
which is well enough known but whose manifold implications may not even
now, it appears to me, have been appreciated to their full extent. This
is the historically recent neologism “abiogenesis” — meaning spontaneous
generation of life from a combination of unknown chemical substances
held to provide a quasi-magical bridge from chemistry to biology. This
term, when subjected to strict logical parsing, I will argue, undermines
the very notion of what is commonly understood by Darwinian evolution
since it represents a purely notional, imaginary term which might also
(in my judgment) be usefully relegated to the category of “just words.”
The greatest problem for the acceptance of Darwinism as a
self-standing and logically coherent theory is the unsolved mystery of
the absolute origin of life on earth, a subject which Charles Darwin
tried to bat away as, if not a total irrelevance, then as something
beyond his competence to pronounce on. Even today Darwinian supporters
will downplay the subject of the origins of life as a matter extraneous
to the subject of natural selection. It is not. It is absolutely
foundational to the integrity of natural selection as a conceptually
satisfactory theory, and evolutionary science cannot logically even
approach the starting blocks of its conjectures without cracking this
unsolved problem, as the late 19th-century German scientist Ludwig
Buechner pointed out.1
Chicago 1953: Miller and Urey
Darwin famously put forward in a letter the speculation of life
having been spontaneously generated in a small warm pool, but did he not
follow up on the hunch experimentally. This challenge was left to
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, two much later intellectual legatees in
the middle of the 20th century who, in defiance of previous expert
opinion, staged an unusual experiment. The remote hinterland of this
experiment was as follows. In the 17th century, medical pioneer Sir
William Harvey and Italian scientist Francesco Redi both proved the
untenability of spontaneous generation: only life can produce life, a
finding later to be upheld by French scientist Louis Pasteur in the
latter half of the 19th century; but the two Americans proceeded on
regardless.
Far-Reaching Theological Implications
There is no getting away from the fact that the three-fold
confirmation of the impossibility of spontaneous generation by respected
scientists working independently of each other in different centuries
brought with it far-reaching theological implications. For if natural
processes could not account for life’s origins, then the only
alternative would be a superior force standing outside and above nature
but with the power to initiatenature’s processes. The three
distinguished scientists were in effect and by implication ruling out
any theory for the origin of life bar that of supranatural creation. So
it was hardly surprising that there emerged in later time a reaction
against their “triple lock” on the issue.
In what was shaping up to become the largely post-Christian 20th
century in Europe, the untenability of the abiogenesis postulate was
resisted by many in the scientific world on purely ideological grounds.
The accelerating secularizing trends of the early 20th century meant
that the outdated and disproven notion of spontaneous generation was
nevertheless kept alive on a form of intellectual life-support despite
the abundant evidence pointing to its unviability.
For presently both the Russian biologist Alexander Oparin and the
British scientist John Haldane stepped forward to revive the idea in the
1920s. The formal experiment to investigate the
possibility of spontaneous generation had then to wait a few decades
more before the bespoke procedure to test its viability in laboratory
conditions was announced by the distinguished team of Miller and Urey of
the University of Chicago in 1953. Clearly the unspoken hope behind
this now (in)famous experiment was the possibility that Pasteur, Harvey,
and Redi might have been wrong to impose their “triple lock” and that
mid 20th-century advances might discover a solution where predecessors
had failed. If ever there was an attempt to impose a social/ideological
construction of reality on science in line with materialist thinking,
this was it.
Next, “Imagining ‘Abiogenesis’: Crick, Watson, and Franklin.”
Notes
For the reception of Darwin in Germany, see Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwin inGermany, 1860-1914 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1981).
SETI is on a roll again. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence oscillates in popularity although it has rumbled on since
the 1970s like a carrier tone, waiting for a spike to stand out above
the cosmic noise. Instrument searches are largely automated these days.
Once in a while somebody raises the subject of SETI above the hum of
scientific news. The principal organization behind SETI has been busily
humming in the background but now has a message to broadcast.
The SETI Institute announced
that the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico has been outfitted to
stream data for “technosignature research.” Technosignatures are the new
buzzword in SETI. Unlike the old attempts to detect meaningful messages
like How to Serve Man, the
search for technosignatures involves looking for “signs of technology
not caused by natural phenomena.” Hold that thought for later.
COSMIC SETI (the Commensal
Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) took a big step towards using the National Science
Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) for 24/7 SETI observations.
Fiber optic amplifiers and splitters are now installed for all 27 VLA
antennas, giving COSMIC access to a complete and independent copy of the
data streams from the entire VLA. In addition, the COSMIC system has
used these links to successfully acquire VLA data, and the primary focus now is on developing the high-performance GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) code for analyzing data for the possible presence of technosignatures. [Emphasis added.]
A “Golden Fleece Award”
Use of government funding for SETI has been frowned on ever since Senator William Proxmire gave it his infamous “Golden Fleece Award” in 1979, and got it cancelled altogether three years later.
The SETI Institute learned from that shaming incident to conceal its
aims in more recondite jargon, and “technosignatures” fills the bill
nicely. So how did they succeed in getting help from the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to use a government facility? Basically,
it’s just a data sharing arrangement. COSMIC will not interfere with the
VLA’s ongoing work but will tap into the data stream. With access to 82
dishes each 25 meters linked by interferometry, this constitutes a data
bonanza for the SETI Institute — the next best thing to Project Cyclops
that riled Proxmire with its proposed 1,000 dishes costing half a
billion dollars back at a time when a billion dollars was real money.
Another method that the SETI Institute is employing is looking for laser pulses over wide patches of the night sky. Last year,
the institute announced progress in installing a second LaserSETI site
at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii with the cooperation of the
University of Hawaii. The first one is at Robert Ferguson Observatory in
Sonoma, California. No tax dollars are being spent on these
initiatives.
Initial funding for LaserSETI was raised through a crowdfunding campaign in 2017, with additional financing provided through private donations.
The plan calls for ten more instruments deployed in Puerto Rico, the
Canary Islands, and Chile. When this phase is complete, the system will
be able to monitor the nighttime sky in roughly half of the western
hemisphere.
Unprecedented Searches
This brings up another reason for growing SETI news: technological
advancements are making possible unprecedented searches. “Each LaserSETI
device consists of two identical cameras rotated 90 degrees to one
another along the viewing axis,” they say. “They work by using a
transmission grating to split light sources up into spectra, then read
the camera out more than a thousand times per second.” This optical form
of search differs from the traditional radio wave searches of the past,
and is once again a hunt for technosignatures.
Writing for Universe Today,
Evan Gough connected the search for biosignatures, such as microbes
being sought by Mars Rovers, with technosignatures being sought by the
SETI Institute.
The search for biosignatures is
gaining momentum. If we can find atmospheric indications of life at
another planet or moon — things like methane and nitrous oxide and a
host of other chemical compounds — then we can wonder if living things
produced them. But the search for technosignatures raises the level of the game. Only a technological civilization can produce technosignatures.
NASA has long promoted the search for biosignatures. Its Astrobiology
programs that began with the Mars Meteorite in 1997 have continued
despite later conclusions that the structures in the rock were abiotic.
In the intervening years, astrobiology projects have been deemed
taxpayer worthy, but SETI projects have not. That may be changing.
Marina Koen wrote for The Atlantic in 2018 that
the search for technosignatures has gained a little support in
Congress, boosted by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets from the
Kepler Mission. SETI Institute’s senior astronomer Seth Shostak has
become friends with one congressman.
“Kepler showed us that planets are
as common as cheap motels, so that was a step along the road to finding
other life because at least there’s the real estate,” says Shostak.
“That doesn’t mean there’s any life there, but at least there are
planets.”
Decadal Survey on Astronomy
Gough mentions the Decadal Survey on Astronomy, named Astro2020, that
was released in 2021 from the National Academies of Sciences (NAS). It
contained initiatives that could overlap astrobiology with SETI by
extending searches for biosignatures to searches for technosignatures.
Worded that way, they don’t seem that far apart. One white paper specifically linked the two:
The Astro2020 report outlines numerous recommendations that could significantly advance technosignature science. Technosignatures refer to any observable manifestations of extraterrestrial technology, and the search for technosignatures is part of the continuum of the astrobiological search for biosignatures (National Academies of Sciences 2019a,b). The search for technosignatures is directly relevant to
the “World and Suns in Context” theme and “Pathways to Habitable
Worlds” program in the Astro2020 report. The relevance of
technosignatures was explicitly mentioned in “E1 Report of the Panel on
Exoplanets, Astrobiology, and the Solar System,” which stated that
“life’s global impacts on a planet’s atmosphere, surface, and temporal
behavior may therefore manifest as potentially detectable exoplanet biosignatures, or technosignatures” and that potential technosignatures, much like biosignatures, must be carefully analyzed to mitigate false positives. The connection of technosignatures to this high-level theme and program can be emphasized, as the report makes clear the purpose is to address the question “Are we alone?” This question is also presented in the Explore Science 2020-2024 plan1 as a driver of NASA’s mission.
The most likely technosignature that could be seen at stellar
distances, unfortunately for the SETI enthusiasts, would have to be on
the scale of a Dyson Sphere: a theoretical shield imagined by Freeman
Dyson that collects all the energy from a dying star by a desperate
civilization trying to preserve itself from a heat death (see the
graphic in Gough’s article). The point is that such a “massive
engineering structure” would require the abilities of intelligent beings
with foresight and planning much grander than ours.
Hunting for technosignatures is less satisfying than “Contact” — it
lacks the relationship factor. It’s like eavesdropping instead of
conversing. We can only wonder what kind of beings would make such
things. Maybe the signatures are like elaborate bird nests, interesting
but instinctive. Worse, maybe the signatures have a natural explanation
we don’t yet understand.
A unique feature of intelligent life, SETI enthusiasts often assume,
is the desire to communicate. We’ll explore that angle of SETI next
time.
Recently an email correspondent asked me about a clip from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Cosmos where
he claims that eyes could have evolved via unguided mutations. Even
though the series is now eight years old, it’s still promoting
implausible stories about eye evolution. Clearly, despite having been
addressed by proponents of intelligent design many times over, this
issue is not going away. Let’s revisit the question, as Tyson and others
have handled it.
In the clip, Tyson claims that the eye is easily evolvable by natural
selection and it all started when some “microscopic copying error”
created a light-sensitive protein for a lucky bacterium. But there’s a
problem: Creating a light-sensitive protein wouldn’t help the bacterium
see anything. Why? Because seeing requires circuitry or some kind of a
visual processing pathway to interpret the signal and trigger the
appropriate response. That’s the problem with evolving vision — you
can’t just have the photon collectors. You need the photon collectors,
the visual processing system, and the response-triggering system. At the
very least three systems are required for vision to give you a
selective advantage. It would be prohibitively unlikely for such a set
of complex coordinated systems to evolve by stepwise mutations and
natural selection.
A “Masterpiece” of Complexity
Tyson calls the human eye a “masterpiece” of complexity, and claims
it “poses no challenge to evolution by natural selection.” But do we
really know this is true?
Darwinian evolution tends to work fine when one small change or
mutation provides a selective advantage, or as Darwin put it, when an
organ can evolve via “numerous, successive, slight modifications.” If a
structure cannot evolve via “numerous, successive, slight
modifications,” Darwin said, his theory “would absolutely break down.”
Writing in The New Republic some years ago, evolutionist Jerry
Coyne essentially concurred on that: “It is indeed true that natural
selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not
confer a net benefit on the organism.” So are there structures that
would require multiple steps to provide an advantage, where intermediate
steps might not confer a net benefit on the organism? If you listen to
Tyson’s argument carefully, I think he let slip that there are.
Tyson says that “a microscopic copying error” gave a protein the
ability to be sensitive to light. He doesn’t explain how that happened.
Indeed, biologist Sean B. Carroll cautions us to “not be fooled” by the
“simple construction and appearance” of supposedly simple
light-sensitive eyes, since they “are built with and use many of the
ingredients used in fancier eyes.” Tyson doesn’t worry about explaining
how any of those complex ingredients arose at the biochemical level.
What’s more interesting is what Tyson says next: “Another mutation
caused it [a bacterium with the light-sensitive protein] to flee intense
light.”
An Interesting Question
It’s nice to have a light-sensitive protein, but unless the
sensitivity to light is linked to some behavioral response, then how
would the sensitivity provide any advantage? Only once a behavioral
response also evolved — say, to turn towards or away from the light —
can the light-sensitive protein provide an advantage. So if a
light-sensitive protein evolved, why did it persist until the behavioral
response evolved as well? There’s no good answer to that question,
because vision is fundamentally a multi-component, and thus a
multi-mutation, feature. Multiple components — both visual apparatus and
the encoded behavioral response — are necessary for vision to provide
an advantage. It’s likely that these components would require many
mutations. Thus, we have a trait where an intermediate stage — say, a
light-sensitive protein all by itself — would not confer a net advantage
on the organism. This is where Darwinian evolution tends to get stuck.
Tyson seemingly assumes those subsystems were in place, and claims
that a multicell animal might then evolve a more complex eye in a
stepwise fashion. He says the first step is that a “dimple” arises which
provides a “tremendous advantage,” and that dimple then “deepens” to
improve visual acuity. A pupil-type structure then evolves to sharpen
the focus, but this results in less light being let in. Next, a lens
evolves to provide “both brightness and sharp focus.” This is the
standard account of eye evolution that I and others have critiqued
before. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, for example, have made a
similar set of arguments.
Such accounts invoke the abrupt appearance of key features of
advanced eyes including the lens, cornea, and iris. The presence of each
of these features — fully formed and intact — would undoubtedly
increase visual acuity. But where did the parts suddenly come from in
the first place? As Scott Gilbert of
Swarthmore College put it, such evolutionary accounts are “good at
modelling the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the
fittest.”
Hyper-Simplistic Accounts
As a further example of these hyper-simplistic accounts of eye evolution, Francisco Ayala in his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion asserts,
“Further steps — the deposition of pigment around the spot,
configuration of cells into a cuplike shape, thickening of the epidermis
leading to the development of a lens, development of muscles to move
the eyes and nerves to transmit optical signals to the brain — gradually
led to the highly developed eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods
(octopuses and squids) and to the compound eyes of insects.” (p. 146)
Ayala’s explanation is vague and shows no appreciation for the
biochemical complexity of these visual organs. Thus, regarding the
configuration of cells into a cuplike shape, biologist Michael Behe asks
(in responding to Richard Dawkins on the same point):
And where did the “little cup”
come from? A ball of cells–from which the cup must be made–will tend to
be rounded unless held in the correct shape by molecular supports. In
fact, there are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell
shape, and dozens more that control extracellular structure; in their
absence, cells take on the shape of so many soap bubbles. Do these
structures represent single-step mutations? Dawkins did not tell us how
the apparently simple “cup” shape came to be.
Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, p. 15 (Free Press, 1996)
An Integrated System
Likewise, mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski has assessed
the alleged “intermediates” for the evolution of the eye. He observes
that the transmission of data signals from the eye to a central nervous
system for data processing, which can then output some behavioral
response, comprises an integrated system that is not amenable to
stepwise evolution:
Light strikes the eye in the form
of photons, but the optic nerve conveys electrical impulses to the
brain. Acting as a sophisticated transducer, the eye must mediate
between two different physical signals. The retinal cells that figure in
Dawkins’ account are connected to horizontal cells; these shuttle
information laterally between photoreceptors in order to smooth the
visual signal. Amacrine cells act to filter the signal. Bipolar cells
convey visual information further to ganglion cells, which in turn
conduct information to the optic nerve. The system gives every
indication of being tightly integrated, its parts mutually dependent.
The
very problem that Darwin’s theory was designed to evade now reappears.
Like vibrations passing through a spider’s web, changes to any part of
the eye, if they are to improve vision, must bring about changes
throughout the optical system. Without a correlative increase in the
size and complexity of the optic nerve, an increase in the number of
photoreceptive membranes can have no effect. A change in the optic nerve
must in turn induce corresponding neurological changes in the brain. If
these changes come about simultaneously, it makes no sense to talk of a
gradual ascent of Mount Improbable. If they do not come about
simultaneously, it is not clear why they should come about at all.
The
same problem reappears at the level of biochemistry. Dawkins has framed
his discussion in terms of gross anatomy. Each anatomical change that
he describes requires a number of coordinate biochemical steps. “[T]he
anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple,” the
biochemist Mike Behe remarks in a provocative new book (Darwin’s Black Box),
“actually involve staggeringly complicated biochemical processes.” A
number of separate biochemical events are required simply to begin the
process of curving a layer of proteins to form a lens. What initiates
the sequence? How is it coordinated? And how controlled? On these
absolutely fundamental matters, Dawkins has nothing whatsoever to say.
David
Berlinski, “Keeping an Eye on Evolution: Richard Dawkins, a Relentless
Darwinian Spear Carrier, Trips Over Mount Improbable,” Globe & Mail (November 2, 1996)
More or Less One Single Feature
In sum, standard accounts of eye evolution fail to explain the evolution of key eye features such as:
The biochemical evolution of the fundamental ability to sense light
The origin of the first “light-sensitive spot”
The origin of neurological pathways to transmit the optical signal to a brain
The origin of a behavioral response to allow the sensing of light to give some behavioral advantage to the organism
The origin of the lens, cornea, and iris in vertebrates
The origin of the compound eye in arthropods
At most, accounts of the evolution of the eye provide a stepwise
explanation of “fine gradations” for the origin of more or less one
single feature: the increased concavity of eye shape. That does not
explain the origin of the eye. But from Neil Tyson and the others, you’d
never know that.
When
college is held up as the one true path to success, parents—especially
highly educated ones—might worry when their children opt for vocational
school instead.
Toren Reesman knew from a young
age that he and his brothers were expected to attend college and obtain a
high-level degree. As a radiologist—a profession that requires 12 years
of schooling—his father made clear what he wanted for his boys: “Keep
your grades up, get into a good college, get a good degree,” as Reesman
recalls it. Of the four Reesman children, one brother has followed this
path so far, going to school for dentistry. Reesman attempted to meet
this expectation, as well. He enrolled in college after graduating from
high school. With his good grades, he got into West Virginia
University—but he began his freshman year with dread. He had spent his
summers in high school working for his pastor at a custom-cabinetry
company. He looked forward each year to honing his woodworking skills,
and took joy in creating beautiful things. School did not excite him in
the same way. After his first year of college, he decided not to return.
He
says pursuing custom woodworking as his lifelong trade was
disappointing to his father, but Reesman stood firm in his decision, and
became a cabinetmaker. He says his father is now proud and supportive,
but breaking with family expectations in order to pursue his passion was
a difficult choice for Reesman—one that many young people are facing in
the changing job market.
Many
jobs now require specialized training in technology that bachelor’s
programs are usually too broad to address, leading to more “last mile”–type vocational-education programs after the completion of a degree. Programs such as Galvanize aim to teach specific software and coding skills; Always Hired offers a “tech-sales bootcamp” to graduates. The manufacturing, infrastructure, and transportation fields are all expected to grow in the coming years—and many of those jobs likely won’t require a four-year degree.
Toren Reesman handcrafted this piece for his wife for Christmas. (Toren Reesman)
This
shift in the job and education markets can leave parents feeling unsure
about the career path their children choose to pursue. Lack of
knowledge and misconceptions about the trades can lead parents to steer
their kids away from these programs, when vocational training might be a
surer path to a stable job.
But
not everyone in the Funks’ lives understands this decision. Erin says
she ran into a friend recently, and “as we were catching up, I mentioned
that my eldest had decided to go to the vocational-technical school in
our city. Her first reaction was, ‘Oh, is he having problems at school?’
I am finding as I talk about this that there is an attitude out there
that the only reason you would go to a vo-tech is if there’s some kind
of problem at a traditional school.” The Funks’ son has a 3.95 GPA. He
was simply more interested in the program at Penta Career Center. “He
just doesn’t care what anyone thinks,” his mom says.
The
Funks are not alone in their initial gut reaction to the idea of
vocational and technical education. Negative attitudes and
misconceptions persist even in the face of the positive statistical
outlook for the job market for these middle-skill careers.
“It is considered a second choice, second-class. We really need to
change how people see vocational and technical education,” Patricia
Hsieh, the president of a community college in the San Diego area, said
in a speech at the 2017 conference for the American Association of
Community Colleges. European nations prioritize vocational training for
many students, with half of secondary students
(the equivalent of U.S. high-school students) participating in
vocational programs. In the United States, since the passage of the 1944 GI Bill, college has been pushed over vocational education. This college-for-all narrative has been emphasized for decades as the pathway to success and stability; parents might worry about the future of their children who choose a different path.
Dennis
Deslippe and Alison Kibler are both college professors at Franklin and
Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, so it was a mental shift
for them when, after high school, their son John chose to attend the
masonry program at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology,
a two-year accredited technical school. John was always interested in
working with his hands, Deslippe and Kibler say—building, creating, and
repairing, all things that his academic parents are not good at, by
their own confession.
Deslippe
explains, “One gap between us as professor parents and John’s
experience is that we do not really understand how Thaddeus Stevens
works in the same way that we understand a liberal-arts college or
university. We don’t have much advice to give. Initially, we needed some
clarity about what masonry exactly was. Does it include pouring
concrete, for example?” (Since their son is studying brick masonry, his
training will likely not include concrete work.) Deslippe’s grandfather
was a painter, and Kibler’s grandfather was a woodworker, but three of
their four parents were college grads. “It’s been a long-standing idea
that the next generation goes to college and moves out of ‘working with
your hands,’” Kibler muses. “Perhaps we are in an era where that formula
of rising out of trades through education doesn’t make sense?”
College doesn’t make sense
is the message that many trade schools and apprenticeship programs are
using to entice new students. What specifically doesn’t make sense, they
claim, is the amount of debt many young Americans take on to chase
those coveted bachelor’s degrees. There is $1.5 trillion in student debt
outstanding as of 2018, according to the Federal Reserve. Four in 10 adults under the age of 30 have student-loan debt, according to the Pew Research Center. Master’s and doctorate degrees often lead to even more debt. Earning potential does not always offset the cost of these loans, and only two-thirds of those with degrees think that the debt was worth it for the education they received. Vocational and technical education tends to cost significantly less than a traditional four-year degree.
This
stability is appealing to Marsha Landis, who lives with her
cabinetmaker husband and two children outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Landis has a four-year degree from a liberal-arts college, and when she
met her husband while living in Washington, D.C., she found his
profession to be a refreshing change from the typical men she met in the
Capitol Hill dating scene. “He could work with his hands, create,” she
says. “He wasn’t pretentious and wrapped up in the idea of degrees. And
he came to the marriage with no debt and a marketable skill, something
that has benefited our family in huge ways.” She says that she has seen
debt sink many of their friends, and that she would support their
children if they wanted to pursue a trade like their father.
In
the United States, college has been painted as the pathway to success
for generations, and it can be, for many. Many people who graduate from
college make more money than
those who do not. But the rigidity of this narrative could lead parents
and students alike to be shortsighted as they plan for their future
careers. Yes, many college graduates make more money—but less than half of students finish the degrees they start. This number drops as low as 10 percent
for students in poverty. The ever sought-after college-acceptance
letter isn’t a guarantee of a stable future if students aren’t given the
support they need to complete a degree. If students are exposed to the possibility of vocational training early on, that might help remove some of the stigma, and help students and parents alike see a variety of paths to a successful future.
About conscientious objection to military service and human rights
The right to conscientious objection to military service is based on article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
which guarantees the right to freedom of thought, conscience and
religion or belief. While the Covenant does not explicitly refer to a
right to conscientious objection, in its general comment No. 22
(1993) the Human Rights Committee stated that such a right could be
derived from article 18, inasmuch as the obligation to use lethal force
might seriously conflict with the freedom of conscience and the right to
manifest one’s religion or belief.
The Human Rights Council, and previously the Commission on Human
Rights, have also recognized the right of everyone to have conscientious
objection to military service as a legitimate exercise of the right to
freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as laid down in article 18
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(see their resolutions which were adopted without a vote in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2012, 2013 and 2017).
OHCHR’s work on conscientious objection to military service
OHCHR has a mandate to promote and protect the effective enjoyment by
all of all civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, as
well as to make recommendations with a view to improving the promotion
and protection of all human rights. The High Commissioner for Human
Rights has submitted thematic reports on conscientious objection to
military service both to the Commission on Human Rights (in 2004 and 2006) and to the Human Rights Council (in 2007, 2008, 2013, 2017 and 2019). The latest report (A/HRC/41/23,
para. 60) stresses that application procedures for obtaining the status
of conscientious objector to military service should comply, as a
minimum, with the following criteria:
Availability of information
Cost-free access to application procedures
Availability of the application procedure to all persons affected by military service
Recognition of selective conscientious objection
Non-discrimination on the basis of the grounds for conscientious objection and between groups
No time limit on applications
Independence and impartiality of the decision-making process
Good faith determination process
Timeliness of decision-making and status pending determination
Right to appeal
Compatibility of alternative service with the reasons for conscientious objection
Non-punitive conditions and duration of alternative service
Freedom of expression for conscientious objectors and those supporting them.
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the first article in the series. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).
My professional background in European languages and linguistics has
given me some idea of how easy it is for people in all ages and cultures
to create neologisms or ad hoc linguistic formulations for a whole variety of vague ideas and fancies. In fact, it seems all too easy
to fashion words to cover any number of purely abstract, at times even
chimerical notions, the more convincingly (for the uncritical) if one
chooses to append the honorific title of “science” to one’s subjective
thought experiments.
One can for instance, if so inclined, muse with Epicurus, Lucretius,
and David Hume that the world “evolved” by chance collocations of atoms
and then proceed to dignify one’s notion by dubbing it “the theory of
atomism.” Or one can with Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Peter
Atkins1 conclude that the universe and all within it arose
spontaneously from “natural law.” But in all these cases we have to be
willing to ignore the fact that such theories involve what is known
grammatically as the “suppression of the agent.” This means the failure
to specify who the agent/legislator might be — this being the sort of
vagueness which we were taught to avoid in school English lessons. A
mundane example of this suppression of the agent is the criminal’s
perennial excuse, “The gun just went off in my hand, officer, honest.”
A Universe by an “Agentless Act”
As I have pointed out before,2 it is both grammatical
solecism and logical impossibility to contend with Peter Atkins that the
universe arose through an “agentless act” since this would imply some
form of pure automatism or magical instrumentality quite outside common
experience or observability. In a similar vein one might, with Charles
Darwin, theorize that the development of the biosphere was simply down
to that empirically unattested sub-variant of chance he chose to term
natural selection.3 Since no empirical evidence exists for
any of the above conjectures, they must inevitably remain terms without
referents or, to use the mot juste from linguistics, empty signifiers.
Empty Signifiers in Science
Many terms we use in everyday life are, and are widely acknowledged
to be, notional rather than factual. The man on the moon and the fabled
treasure at the end of the rainbow are trivial examples of what are
sometimes termed “airy nothings.” These are factually baseless terms
existing “on paper” but without any proper referent in the real world
because no such referent exists. Nobody of course is misled by
light-hearted façons de parler widely understood to be only
imaginary, but real dangers for intellectual clarity arise when a
notional term is mistaken for reality.
One famous historical example of such a term was the substance dubbed
phlogiston, postulated in the 1660s as a fire-like substance inhering
in all combustible bodies; but such a substance was proved not to exist
and to be merely what we would now rightly term pseudo-science just over
a century later by the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier. Or again in
more recent times there is that entirely apocryphal entity dubbed
“ectoplasm.” This was claimed by Victorian spiritualists to denote a
substance supposedly exuded from a “medium” (see the photo above) which
represented the materialization of a spiritual force once existing in a
now deceased human body. Needless to say, the term “ectoplasm” is now
treated with unqualified skepticism.
Next, “The Man on the Moon and Martian Canals.”
Notes
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov, The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions ofLife (London: Bantam, 2011); P. W. Atkins, Creation Revisited (Oxford and New York: Freeman, 1992); Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing (London: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
See Neil Thomas, Taking Leave of Darwin (Seattle: Discovery, 2021), p. 110, where I point out how that expression is a contradiction in terms.
Darwin in later life, stung that many friends thought he was all but deifying natural selection, came to concede that natural preservation might
have been the more accurate term to use — but of course that opens up
the huge problem of how organic innovation (the microbes-to-man
conjecture) can be defended in reference to a process which simply
preserved and had no productive or creative input.
A recent study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface reports on “A feedback control principle common to several biological and engineered systems.” The researchers, Jonathan Y. Suen and Saket Navlakha, show how harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) use a feedback control algorithm to regulate foraging behavior. As Science Daily notes,
the study determined that, “Ants and other natural systems use
optimization algorithms similar to those used by engineered systems,
including the Internet.”
The ants forage for seeds that are widely scattered and usually do
not occur in concentrated patches. Foragers usually continue their
search until they find a seed. The return rate of foragers corresponds
to the availability of seeds: the more food is available, the less time
foragers spend searching. When the ants successfully find food, they
return to the nest in approximately one third of the search time
compared to ants unable to find food. There are several aspects of this
behavior that point to intelligent design.
Feedback Control
First, it is based on the general engineering concept of a feedback
control system. Such systems use the output of a system to make
adjustments to a control mechanism and maintain a desired setting. A
common example is the temperature control of heating and air
conditioning systems. An analogy in biology is homeostasis, which uses
negative feedback, and is designed to maintain a constant body
temperature.
Mathematical Algorithm
A second aspect of design is the algorithm used to implement the
specific control mechanism. Suen and Navlaka describe the system as
“multiplicative-increase multiplicative-decrease” (MIMD). The MIMD
closed loop system is a hybrid combination of positive and negative
feedback. Receiving positive feedback results in multiplying the
response, while negative feedback results in reducing the response by a
constant value. The purpose relates to the challenge of optimizing ant
foraging. As the paper explains:
If foraging rates exceed the rate
at which food becomes available, then many ants would return
“empty-handed,” resulting in little or no net gain in colony resources.
If foraging rates are lower than the food availability rate, then seeds
would be left in the environment uncollected, meaning the seeds would
either be lost to other colonies or be removed by wind and rain.
The authors found that positive feedback systems are “used to achieve
multiple goals, including efficient allocation of available resources,
the fair or competitive splitting of those resources, minimization of
response latency, and the ability to detect feedback failures.” However,
positive control feedback systems are susceptible to instability (think
of the annoying screech when there is feedback into microphones in a
sound system). Therefore, a challenge for MIMD systems is to minimize
instability.
In this application, when foraging times are short, the feedback is
positive, resulting in a faster increase in the number of foragers. When
foraging times are longer, the feedback is negative, resulting in a
reduction in the number of foragers. A mathematical model of the
behavior has confirmed that the control algorithm is largely optimized.
(See Prabhakar et al., “The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information,” PLOS Computational Biology, 2012.) As I describe in my recent book, Animal Algorithms, the harvester ant algorithm is just one example of behavior algorithms that ants and other social insects employ.
Suen and Navlakha point out that the mechanism is similar to that
employed to regulate traffic on the Internet. In the latter context,
there are billions of “agents” continuously transmitting data.
Algorithms are employed to control and optimize traffic flow. The
challenge for Internet operations is to maximize capacity and allow for
relatively equal access for users. Obviously, Internet network control
is designed by intelligent engineers. In contrast, the harvester ant
behavior is carried out by individuals without any central control
mechanism.
Physical Sensors
A third feature indicating design is the physical mechanism used by
the ants to determine how long returning foragers have been out. When
ants forage for food, molecules called cuticular hydrocarbons change
based on the amount of time spent foraging. This is due to the
difference in temperature and humidity outside of the nest. As the ants
return to the entrance of the nest, there are interactions between the
returning and the outgoing ants via their antennae. These interactions
enable detection of the hydrocarbons, which provide a mechanism to
enable outgoing ants to determine the amount of time that returning ants
spent foraging.
These three elements of harvester ant behavior (feedback control,
mathematical algorithm, and physical sensors) present a severe challenge
for the evolutionary paradigm. From a Darwinian perspective, they must
have arisen through a combination of random mutations and natural
selection. A much more plausible explanation is that they are evidence
of intelligent design.
Hosea11:9KJV"I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee: and I will not enter into the city."
Having rejected the immutability of the most fundamental binary of all (i.e that between creator and creature) with their nonsensical God-man hypothesis. Why are so many of Christendom's clerics puzzled that many of their flock find no issue with rejecting the immutability of the far less fundamental gender binary?
You say that Darwinism invokes the free lunch fallacy, defies mathematical falsification and further more is a clear violation of occam's razor? Tell us about it trinitarian?
If God can become man why can't the same sovereign power not make it possible for any chosen creature to become God?
I mean if God can be three and yet one with no contradiction he can be nine and yet three with no contradiction. Don't believe me? Consider.
Revelation1:4,5NASB"John to the seven churches that are in Asia:Grace and peace to you from Him who is and who was and who is to come,and from the seven spirits who are before His throne and from Jesus Christ..." Making a total of nine members of the multipersonal Godhead revealed in scripture but there is no principle in Christendom's philosophy that can be invoked to limit it to this figure. That's the thing with rejecting Commonsense as a principle once you are off the reservation all bets are off
John11:34,35KJV"And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see.
35Jesus wept."
Why these tears for a saint who finally received his reward? If Jesus and his followers honestly believed that Lazarus was in heaven joyfully cavorting with the angels and saints in the presence of JEHOVAH God himself, would they not have responded quitedifferently to news of his departure from this life.
John11:24KJV"Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. " Note Martha's actual hope for her brother though.
where would she have gotten such an idea?From her Lord perhaps?
John6:39KJV"And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he
hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the LAST DAY. "
No one goes to heaven when they die including Jesus himself. John20:17KJV"Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my
Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my
Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God."
Acts2:31KJV"He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul
was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption." Thus like everyone elseJesus went to hell(sheol) when he died.His hope was his God and Father just like the rest of us.Hebrews5:7KJV"Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and
supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to
save him from death, and was heard in that he feared;"
John11:34KJV"And said, Where have ye laid him? ..." Note please our Lord did not ask where have you laid his body but where have you laid HIM. Third person singularreferring to the person.obviously Lazarus was not in heaven.How could it be regarded as a kindness to recall anyone from the joy of heaven to the trials of this present age. Reject the mental contortions necessary to believe Christendom's falsehoods.
University of Bonn researchers think that they may have taught fish to count. They
tested the fact that many life forms can note the difference in small
quantities between “one more” and “one less,” at least up to five items,
on fish. Not much work had been done on fish in this area so they
decided to test eight freshwater stingrays and eight cichlids:
All of the fish were taught to
recognize blue as corresponding to “more” and yellow to “less.” The fish
or stingrays entered an experimental arena where they saw a test
stimulus: a card showing a set of geometric shapes (square, circle,
triangle) in either yellow or blue. In a separate compartment of the
tank, the fish were then presented with a choice stimulus: two gates
showing different numbers of shapes in the same color. When the fish
were presented with blue shapes, they were supposed to swim toward the
gate with one more shape than the test stimulus image. When presented
yellow shapes, the animals were supposed to choose the gate with one
less. Correct choices were rewarded with a food pellet. Three of the
eight stingrays and six cichlids successfully learned to complete this
task.
Rafael Núñez, a cognitive
scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not
involved in the study, regards the study as “well conducted,” adding
that “the problem is the interpretation.” For him, the paper provides
information about what he termed “quantical cognition” — the ability to
differentiate between quantities — in a 2017 paper. According to Núñez,
arithmetic or counting doesn’t have to be invoked to explain the results
in the present paper. “I could explain this result by . . . a fish or
stingray having the perceptual ability to discriminate quantities: in
this case, this will be to learn how to pick, in the case of blue, the
most similar but more, and in the case of yellow, the most similar but
less. There’s no arithmetic here, just more and less and similar.”
The problem, as Núñez says, is with interpretation. Animal cognition researcher Silke Goebelpoints out that
many life forms can distinguish between “more” and “less” in large
numbers. Researchers have also found that, so far, infants, fish, and
bees can recognize changes in number between 1 and 3. But they don’t get
much beyond that.
To say seriously that fish “do math” would, of course, be misleading.
Mathematics is an abstract enterprise. The same operations that work
for single digits work for arbitrarily large numbers. It is possible to
calculate using infinite (hyperreal) numbers. There are imaginary numbers,unexplained/unexplainable numbers, and at least one unknowable number. But we are stepping out into territory here that will not get a fish its food pellet.
Still, it’s a remarkable discovery that many life forms can
manipulate quantities in a practical way. Here are some other recent
highlights.
Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
We’ve just ended the first quarter of the year. It’s a long way to New Year’s Eve 2022. But this new open access paper from
senior author Sara Walker (Arizona State) and her collaborators will be
hard to top, in the “Wow, that is so interesting!” category. (The first
author of this paper is Dylan Gagler, so we’ll refer to it as “Gagler et al. 2022” below.)
1. Back in the day, the best evidence for a single Tree of
Life, rooted in the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), was the
apparent biochemical and molecular universality of Earth life.
Leading neo-Darwinian Theodosius Dobzhansky expressed this point eloquently in his famous 1973 essay, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”:
The unity of life is no less
remarkable than its diversity…Not only is the DNA-RNA genetic code
universal, but so is the method of translation of the sequences of the
“letters” in DNA-RNA into sequences of amino acids in proteins. The same
20 amino acids compose countless different proteins in all, or at least
in most, organisms. Different amino acids are coded by one to six
nucleotide triplets in DNA and RNA. And the biochemical universals
extend beyond the genetic code and its translation into proteins:
striking uniformities prevail in the cellular metabolism of the most
diverse living beings. Adenosine triphosphate, biotin, riboflavin,
hemes, pyridoxin, vitamins K and B12, and folic acid implement metabolic
processes everywhere. What do these biochemical or biologic
universals mean? They suggest that life arose from inanimate matter only
once and that all organisms, no matter now diverse, in other respects,
conserve the basic features of the primordial life.[Emphasis added.]
For Dobzhansky, as for all neo-Darwinians (by definition), the
apparent molecular universality of life on Earth confirmed Darwin’s
prediction that all organisms “have descended from some one primordial
form, into which life was first breathed” (1859, 494) — an entity now
known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. So strong is the
pull of this apparent universality, rooted in LUCA, that any other
historical geometry seems unimaginable.
The “Laws of Life”
Theoretician Sara Walker and her team of collaborators, however, are looking for an account of what they call (in Gagler et al. 2022)
the “laws of life” that would apply “to all possible biochemistries” —
including organisms found elsewhere in the universe, if any exist. To
that end, they wanted to know if the molecular universality explained
under neo-Darwinian theory as material descent from LUCA (a) really
exists, and (b) if not, what patterns do exist, and how might those be explained without presupposing a single common ancestor.
And a single common ancestor, LUCA? That’s what they didn’t find.
2. Count up the different enzyme functions — and then map that number within the total functional space.
Many thousands of different enzyme functional classes,
necessary for the living state, have been described and catalogued in
the Enzyme Commission Classification, according to their designated EC
numbers. These designators have four digits, corresponding to
progressively more specific functional classes. For instance, consider
the enzyme tyrosine-tRNA ligase. Its EC number,
6.1.1.1, indicates a nested set of classes: EC 6 comprises the ligases
(bond-forming enzymes); EC 6.1, those ligases forming carbon-oxygen
bonds; 6.1.1, ligases forming aminoacyl-tRNA and related compounds;
finally, 6.1.1.1, the specific ligases forming tyrosine tRNA. (See
Figure 1.)
The Main Takeaway from This Pattern?
Being a ligase — namely, an enzyme that forms bonds using ATP — entails belonging to a functional group, but not a group with material identity among its members.
A rough parallel to a natural language such as English may be helpful.
Suppose you wanted to express the idea of “darkness” or “darkened”
(i.e., the relative absence of light). English supplies a wide range of
synonyms for “darkened,” such as:
murky
shaded
shadowed
dimmed
obscured
The same would be the case — the existence of a set of synonyms,
i.e., words with the same general meaning, but not the same sequence
identity — for any other idea. The concept of something being “blocked,”
for instance, takes the synonyms:
jammed
occluded
prevented
obstructed
hindered
While these words convey (approximately) the same meaning, and hence fall into the same semantic functional classes, they are not the same character strings.
Their locations in an English dictionary, ordered by alphabet sequence,
may be hundreds of pages apart. Moreover, as studied by the discipline
of comparative philology, the historical roots of a word such as
“hindered” will diverge radically from its functional synonyms, such as
“blocked.” These two words, although semantically largely synonymous,
enter English from originally divergent or unrelated antecedents — a
character string gap still reflected by their very different spellings.
A strikingly similar pattern obtains with the critical (essential) components of all organisms. Gagler et al. 2022
looked at the abundances of enzyme functions across the three major
domains of life (Bacteria, Archaea, Eukarya), as well as in metagenomes
(environmentally sampled DNA). What they found was remarkable — a
finding (see below) which may be easier for non-biological readers to
understand via another analogy.
3. A segue into computer architectures — then back to enzymes.
The basic architecture of laptop computers includes components present in any such machine, defined by their functional roles:
Central processing unit (CPU) — the primary logic operator
Memory — storage of coded information
Power supply — electrons (energy) needed for anything at all to be computed
And so on. (Although exploring this point in detail would take us far
afield, it is worth noting that in 1936, when Alan Turing defined a
universal computational machine, he did so with no idea about the
arrival, decades down the road, of silicon-based integrated circuits,
miniaturized transistors, motherboards, solid-state memory devices, or
any of the rest of the material parts of computers now so familiar to us. Rather, his parts were functionally, not materiallydefined, asabstractions
occupying the various roles those parts would play in the computational
process — whatever their material instantiation would later turn out to
be.) Now suppose we examined 100,000 laptops, randomly sampled from
around the United States, to see what type of CPU — meaning which materialpart (e.g., built by which manufacturer) — each machine used as its primary logic operator.
A range of outcomes is possible (see Figures 2A and 2B). For
instance, if we plot CPUs from different manufacturers on the y axis,
against the total number of laptop parts inspected on the x axis, it
might be the case that the distribution of differently manufactured
(i.e., materially distinct) CPUs would scale linearly with laptops
inspected (Figure 2A). In other words, as our sample of inspected laptop
parts grows, the number of different CPUs discovered would trend
upwards correspondingly.
Or — and this fits, of course, with the actual situation we find (see
Figure 2B) — most of the laptops would contain CPUs manufactured either
by Intel or AMD. In this case, we would plot a line whose slope would
change much more slowly, staying largely flat, in fact, after the CPUs
from Intel and AMD were tallied.
The Core Rationale of Their Approach
Now consider Figure 3 (below), from the Gagler et al. 2022
paper. This shows the core rationale of their approach: tally the
EC-classified enzyme “parts” within each of the major domains, and from
metagenomes, and then plot that tally against the total EC numbers.
Figure 3 is used from Gagler et al. 2022 under Creative Commons License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Figure 3 also shows their main finding. As the enzyme reaction space
grows (on the horizontal axis — total EC numbers), so do the number of
unique functions (on the vertical axis — EC numbers in each EC class).
The lesson that Gagler et al. 2022 draw from this discovery? The pattern is NOT due to material descent from a single common ancestor, LUCA. Indeed,
under the heading, “Universality in Scaling of Enzyme Function Is Not
Explained by Universally Shared Components,” they explain that material
descent from LUCA would entail shared “microscale features,” meaning
“specific molecules and reactions used by all life,” or “shared
component chemistry across systems.” If we use the CPU / laptop analogy,
this microscale commonality would be equivalent to finding CPUs from
the same manufacturer, with the same internal logic circuits, in every
laptop we examine.
But what Gagler et al. 2022 found was a macroscale pattern,
“which does not directly correlate with a high degree of microscale
universality,” and “cannot be explained directly by the universality of
the underlying component functions.” In an accompanying news story,
project co-author Chris Kempes, of the Santa Fe Institute, described
their main finding in terms of functional synonyms: macroscale functions
are required, but not the identical lower-level components:
“Here we find that you get these
scaling relationships without needing to conserve exact membership. You
need a certain number of transferases, but not particular transferases,”
says SFI Professor Chris Kempes, a co-author on the paper. “There are a
lot [of] ‘synonyms,’ and those synonyms scale in systematic ways.”
As Gagler et al. frame the point in the paper itself (emphasis added):
A critical question is whether the
universality classes identified herein are a product of the shared
ancestry of life. A limitation of the traditional view of biochemical
universality is that universality can only be explained in terms of
evolutionary contingency and shared history, which challenges our
ability to generalize beyond the singular ancestry of life as we know
it. …Instead, we showed here that universality classes are not directly correlated with component universality,
which is indicative that it emerges as a macroscopic regularity in the
large-scale statistics of catalytic functional diversity. Furthermore, EC universality cannot simply be explained due to phylogenetic relatedness since the range of total enzyme functions spans two orders of magnitude, evidencing a wide coverage of genomic diversity.
Sounds Like Intelligent Design
It is interesting to note that this paper was edited (for the PNAS)
by Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
For many years, Koonin has argued in his own work that the putative
“universality due to ancestry” premise of neo-Darwinian theory no longer
holds, due in large measure to what he and others have termed
“non-orthologous gene displacement” (NOGD). NOGD is a pervasive pattern
of the use of functional synonyms — enzyme functions being carried out
by different molecular actors — in different species. In 2016, Koonin wrote:
As the genome database grows, it
is becoming clear that NOGD reaches across most of the functional
systems and pathways such that there are very few functions that are
truly “monomorphic”, i.e. represented by genes from the same orthologous
lineage in all organisms that are endowed with these functions.
Accordingly, the universal core of life has shrunk almost to the point
of vanishing…there is no universal genetic core of life, owing to the
(near) ubiquity of NOGD.
Universal functional requirements, but without the identity of material components — sounds like design.
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