As I have suggested already in this series, there undoubtedly was
much at stake in the Miller-Urey experiment — considerably more than was
realized at the time by those who listened uncritically to Carl Sagan
and others with an interest in deceptively boosting the supposed
importance of the experiment. Its implicit promise for many observers as
well as eager readers of the American and world press would have been
that it would extend Darwin’s timeline back to the pre-organic formation
of the first living cell, and so establish the fundamental point of
departure for the mechanism of natural selection to go to work on. It
would also of course have delivered a stunning victory for the
materialist position. In the event, though, it succeeded only in dealing
a disabling body-blow to materialist notions by giving game set and
match to the theistic position. This point has not, to my knowledge,
been publicly acknowledged.
Hot Springs, Hydrothermal Vents, Etc.
Most devastatingly for Darwinists, the complete failure of this and
more recent experiments to find the origins of primitive life forms in
hot springs, hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor, et al.,
have removed the indispensable foundation for the operation of natural
selection. By that I mean that any postulated selective mechanism must
obviously have something to select. No raw material means no evolution,
no nothing. Without an “abiogenetic moment” Darwin’s entire theory of
evolution via natural selection falls flat.
As matters stand, the bare emergence of living cells remains
an unsolved mystery, let alone the claimed corollary of that mysterious
and unexplained cellular “complexification” (yet another word without
any demonstrable referent, it may be noted) said to follow from it and
to have occasioned the fabled development from microbes to (wo)man. The
most significant finding of Miller and Urey appears to have been a
categorical disproof of Darwinian ideas and a presumptive indication of a
supra-natural etiology for the cellular system — an inference to
theistic creation/evolution which was of course the very obverse of the
result they were seeking.
Nothing Can Come from Nothing
To sum up: there is perhaps limited value in trying to rank in order
of gravity the many objections to Darwinism which have been thrown up
over the last 160 years. If pressed to do a sort of countdown to number
one, however, I would have to say that this particular objection should
rank very high up. This is because to attempt to discuss the subject of
how the process of selection by nature began to operate whilst not even
broaching the question of how nature itself arose in the first place must count as a major evasion.
It is in fact such a glaring logical elision that it can only be
viewed (in plain English) as a cop-out. Nothing can come of nothing,
goes the old tag, and without knowledge of or at the very least a
credible theory concerning the provenance of organic material,
the theory of “natural selection” lacks any coherent foundation even for
the starting point of its putative operations. Evolutionary biology
finds itself in the unenviably anomalous position of being based on an
illusory premise without any discernible foundation. Yet the urge to
find proof for “natural selection” endures. That, I guess, is a powerful
reminder that words, even meaningless words, have the power to create
their own virtual realities in our minds, with no relation to any
definable referent in the world we inhabit.
Daniel2:35KJV"Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken
to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer
threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found
for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain,
and filled the whole earth."
Daniel2:44KJV"And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom,
which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to
other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever."
Revelation20:11KJV"And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face
the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for
them."
Note please that the Rule of JEHOVAH'S kingdom over this earth takes place after the destruction of the present human kingdoms there is to be no millennium of parallel rule between JEHOVAH'S kingdom and Satan's empire.
Revelation20:6KJV"Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection:
on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God
and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years."
1Corinthians15:23KJV"But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming(Parousia)."
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."
Note that the millenium Follows the first resurrection which follows the beginning of Christ parousia Paul makes it clear that the present age is not the time for Christians to seek any dominion over the earth or any part thereof."Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us:
and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you."
Hebrews2:8KJV"Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see NOT YET all things put under him."
Evidently Paul did not think that Christ millenial reign had begun.
I have been writing about the neologism “abiogenesis” (see earlier posts here and here). Like “panspermia,”1 it
is but one example of an old concept (it was first mooted by Svante
Arrhenius in 1903) which periodically undergoes a curious form of
(intellectual) cryogenic freezing only to reappear after a decent lapse
of time and memory to be presented afresh under a revamped name2 as an idea claimed to be worth a second look.
In essence it seems to draw its strength from pseudo-scientific
folk-beliefs that life could somehow be made to emerge from non-life, a
conception most notably exploited (and obliquely criticized) in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In another example of the
literary/media intelligentsia being ahead of the curve, the refusal of
the discredited spontaneous generation to give up the ghost gave that
anarchic auteur Mel Brooks ample raw material to ridicule the atavistic
misconception in his inspired 1974 comic movie, Young Frankenstein.
Two American Scientists
For those who did not catch this laugh-out-loud film: the engaging
anti-hero, played by the inimitable Gene Wilder, scion of the notorious
Baron Frankenstein, at first does everything possible to put distance
between himself and his notorious ancestor, whom he memorably dismisses
before a class of his students as a “kook,” and thereafter insists on
his surname being pronounced Frankensteen. However, the
temptation to attempt the impossible “one last time” proves too much
either for “Dr. Frankensteen” (whom the film shows reverting to type
when he latterly de-Americanizes his surname to Frankenstein) or, it appears, for two American scientists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, to resist.
Most of us probably remember Brooks’s oeuvre as being of a somewhat variable standards, but in amongst the pure goofery of Young Frankenstein,
as Brooks himself put it in an interview, the film contained an
unmistakably satirical thrust because “the doctor (Wilder) is
undertaking the quest to defeat death — to challenge God.”3 That is a not inappropriate epitaph for the Miller-Urey experiment as well as its later avatars, it might be thought.
Next, the final post in this series, “Existential Implications of the Miller-Urey Experiment.”
Notes
The (unfounded) notion that life was “seeded” on Earth after
having been wafted to here from distant planets — a much-derided notion
but one which still re-emerges from time to time as a somewhat desperate
kite-flying exercise on the part of some scientists who, now as ever,
remain at a loss to account for the emergence of animal and human life
on earth.
Aristotle had termed it spontaneous generation.
Cited by Patrick McGilligan in his biography, Funny Man: Mel Brooks (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), p. 355.
I wrote here yesterday about
the Miller-Urey experiment at the University of Chicago in 1953 as an
effort to investigate the possibility of spontaneous generation. To be
fair to both distinguished collaborators, Stanley Miller and Harold
Urey, this was no desperate shot in the dark to bolster materialist
thinking. They had clearly done all the requisite preparation for their
task. Miller and Urey (a later recipient of the Nobel Prize) theorized
that if the conditions prevailing on primeval Earth were reproduced in
laboratory conditions, such conditions might prove conducive to a
chemical synthesis of living material.
To Produce Life
To abbreviate a long, more complex short, they caused an electric
spark to pass through a mixture of methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and water
to simulate the kind of energy which might have come from thunderstorms
on the ancient Earth. The resulting liquid turned out to contain amino
acids which, though not living molecules themselves, are the building
blocks of proteins, essential to the construction of life.1 However,
the complete chemical pathway hoped for by many was not to materialize.
In fact, the unlikelihood of such a materialization was underscored in
the very same year that the Miller-Urey experiment took place when
Francis Crick, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin succeeded in
identifying the famous double helix of DNA. Their discovery revealed,
amongst other things, that even if amino acids could somehow be induced
to form proteins, this would still not be enough to produce life.
Despite over-optimistic press hype in the 1950s, which came to include inter alia fulsome
eulogizing by Carl Sagan, it has in more recent decades been all but
conceded that life is unlikely to form at random from the so-called
“prebiotic” substrate on which scientists had previously pinned so much
hope. To be sure, there are some biologists, such as Richard Dawkins,
who still pin their faith in ideas which have resulted only in blankly
negative experimental results.2 Some notions, it appears,
will never completely die for some, despite having been put to the
scientific sword on numerous occasions —as long of course as they hold out the promise of a strictly materialist explanation of reality.
Next, “Frankenstein and His Offspring.”
Notes
Inside human cells, coded messages in the DNA are translated by
RNA into working molecules of protein, which is responsible for life’s
functions.
“Organic molecules, some of them of the same general
type as are normally only found in living things, have spontaneously
assembled themselves in these flasks. Neither DNA nor RNA has appeared,
but the building blocks of these large molecules, called purines and
pyrimidines, have. So have the building blocks of proteins, amino acids.
The missing link for this class of theories is still the origin of
replication. The building blocks haven’t come together to form a
self-replicating chain like RNA. Maybe one day they will.” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin, 1986, p. 43)
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.
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