Darwinism in time trouble?

Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists 

Günter Bechly

 

 

In the many years of vehement debate between proponents of unguided evolution and intelligent design, it sometimes may look like all has already been said and there are no new arguments on either side. However, this is not the case at all. Intelligent design theory has greatly developed since its early beginnings and many new arguments have been added in support of the design inference. Here, I want to introduce another new argument and formulate a challenge to my Darwinist colleagues. This challenge is by no means rhetorical and could be easily met with simple research in publicly available data bases. Here it is.

As I have laid out in various publications (e.g., Bechly & Meyer 2017) and lectures, the fossil record demonstrates that the history of life was not a series of gradual transformations by an accumulation of small changes over long periods of time. Instead of conforming to this gradualist prediction of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the fossil record consistently documents a series of saltational transitions with abrupt appearances of new body plans within very short windows of time. This implies a fatal problem for Darwinism called the waiting time problem, because population genetic calculations and simulations show that the windows of time established by the fossil record are orders of magnitude too short to accommodate the required genetic changes for these body plan transformations.

Some examples of abrupt body plan transitions are the origin of photosynthesis; the origin of eukaryotes; the origin of the Ediacaran biota (Avalon Explosion) and Cambrian animal phyla (Cambrian Explosion) such as the origin of trilobites from worm-like ancestors in less than 13 million years (Daley et al. 2018, Bechly 2018); the origin of efficient eyes in arthropods, cephalopods, and vertebrates; the terrestrialization of plants (embryophytes), arthropods (tracheae), and vertebrates (tetrapod limbs); the origin of wings in insects, pterosaurs, bats, and birds (including the origin of pennaceous feathers from filamentous precursors); the origin of secondarily marine vertebrates such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, manatees, and whales; the origin of echolocation in bats and whales; the origin of complex new reproductive systems (angiosperm flowers, dragonfly secondary copulatory apparatus, holometabolic insect metamorphosis, amniote egg, and eutherian placenta); the origin of distinct new body plans in vertebrates (e.g., snakes, turtles, bats, and whales); and even the origin of our own genus Homo and of a globular braincase correlated with the “Creative Explosion” of symbolic thinking within Homo sapiens.

The Lifespan of a Single Species

An additional fact that underscores the waiting time problem in cases like whale origins (see this Long Story Short 2020 video) is the average longevity of larger mammal species and especially artiodactyls at only 4.1-4.39 million years (Prothero 2014). Whales are thought to be nested in and derived from artiodactyl ungulates. The fossil record shows that the transition from quadrupedal whale ancestors similar to Raoellidae (such as Indohyus) and Pakicetidae to fully marine pelagicete whales like Basilosauridae happened in just 4.5 million years. This implies that the body plan transition from a pig-like animal to a dolphin-like animal happened within the lifespan of a single species. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility of several successive speciation events within this time period, but it is still a fact that illustrates the biological abruptness of this major anatomical re-engineering.

Finally, there is also another related problem that has been hitherto largely overlooked: The morphological similarity of modern species pairs, which have diverged in a similar time frame, poses a severe problem. That is because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that allegedly were at work and common during all periods of Earth history and in all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species. To explore this issue, I surveyed TimeTree.org (Hedges & Kumar 2009, Hedges et al. 2006, 2015, Kumar et al. 2017), which is a databank of 97,085 living species of different groups of organisms, with molecular clock estimates of their time of divergence based on 3,998 studies. When probing any pairs of species, even those with longer divergence times than available for the development of the body plan differences between pakicetids and basilosaurids, we find without exception that their morphologies are hardly distinguishable for laymen and they often still can hybridize.

So Much for the Theoretical Prelude

Now let’s look at some more-or-less random examples from TimeTree to see what I mean.

Firs (Abies spec.) and cedars (Cedrus spec.) belong to the same subfamily of conifer trees but separated already 141 million years ago. That is more than 30 times the time available for the origin of marine whales, but there is hardly any difference in body plan. Of course, this might just be a case of evolutionary stasis as in living fossils, but the next examples will make you think again.

Fir (Diliff, Wikimedia / GFDL).

Cedar (Emöke Dénes, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0).

The common house fly (Musca domestica) and the small house fly (Fannia scalaris) diverged about 48 million years ago. For laymen they look basically indistinguishable. Hmmm, that’s strange, but could still be a fluke.

Common house fly (Alvesgaspar, Wikimedia / GFDL).

Lesser house fly (Sanja56568, Wikimedia / GFDL).

My favorite animals are dragonflies and damselflies. The northern damselfly (Coenagrion hastulatum) and the azure damselfly (Coenagrion puella) diverged 11.8 million years ago. Even as an expert on these insects, I have to resort to a determination key to distinguish them. Can you?

Northern damselfly, Gilles San Martin, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Azure damselfly (Loz, Wikimedia / GFDL).

What about amphibians? The European common frog (Rana temporaria) and moor frog (Rana arvalis) diverged 21.4 million years ago. They look almost identical. Do we start to see a pattern?

European common frog (Richard Bartz, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.5).

Moor frog (Christian Fischer, Wikimedia / GFDL).

“Reptiles” show the same pattern. The Galapagos land iguanas (Conolophus spec.) and marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus spec.) diverged 18.2 million years ago. The marine iguanas can excrete salt from a gland at their nostrils and have a more flattened tail, but otherwise still look very much like their cousins.

Galapagos land iguana (Bermard Gagnon, Wikimedia / GFDL).

Marine iguana (Diegoarielvega, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0).

Avian Examples

Birds rank among the best studied groups in terms of speciation. The green warbler (Phylloscopus nitidus) and Bonelli’s warbler (P. bonelli) diverged 15.2 million years ago (but at least 4-7 million years according to Helbig et al. 1995). They look identical and may still be able to hybridize.

Green warbler (Wouter van der Ham, Wikimedia / CC BY 3.0).

Bonelli’s warbler (Kookaburra 81, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0).

Here is another avian example to show this is a common pattern among recent bird species. The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and tree sparrow (Passer montanus) diverged 10.2 million years ago. They have some minor differences in color pattern but indeed hybridize even in the wild. Still thinking evolution can achieve miracles in a few million years? Where the heck is the evidence?

House sparrow (Mathias Appel, Wikimedia / PD).

Tree sparrow (Laitche, Wikimedia / PD).

Well, let’s move on to mammals. The common house mouse (Mus musculus) and house rat (Rattus rattus) diverged 20.9 million years ago (at least 12 million years according to Kimura et al. 2015). Apart from the size difference they look very much alike.

House mouse (Amirekul, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0).

House rat (CSIRO, Wikimedia / CC BY 3.0).

Did you ever taste beefalo steak? Beefalos are hybrids between European bison (Bison bonasus) and cattle (Bos taurus) that diverged 4.88 million years ago, which is about the same time frame as in the whale example. Some archaic breeds of cattle like the Scots highland cattle look even more similar to the bison and the aurochs.

European bison (Michael Gäbler, Wikimedia / CC BY 3.0).

Highland cattle (APictche, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0).

Horse (Equus caballus) and ass (Equus asinus) diverged 7.7 million years ago and can still hybridize as mules. Their wild ancestors looked even more similar than most of their modern domesticated breeds.

Przewalski’s horse (Charles Miller, Wikimedia / CC BY 2.0).

African wild ass (Ericj, Wikimedia / GFDL).

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and African elephants (Loxodonta africana) diverged 25.9 million years ago (at least 7.6 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007), and they mainly differ in the tip of the trunk, ear size, and shape of their withers. Even the two almost identical African species of the savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) diverged 7.6 million years ago (at least 4 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007). Not really a new body plan.

Asian elephant (Yathin S Krishnappa, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0).

African savannah elephant (Bernhard Gagnon, Wikimedia / GFDL).

African forest elephant (Peter H. Wrege, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0).

The South American spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and Asian black bear (Ursus / Selenarctos thibetanus) diverged 16.5 million years ago. They look very similar and can hybridize in captivity (Mondolfi & Boede 1981).

Spectacled bear (Ltshears, Wikimedia / GFDL).

Asian black bear (Dr. Raju Kasambe, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0).

River otter (Lutra lutra) and brown fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) diverged about 40 million years ago. They indeed look quite different, but still a far cry from the difference between pakicetids and basilosaurids in a tenth of the time. This example is interesting because some experts thought that otters represent the closest related group to pinnipeds, or at least assumed stem pinnipeds like the Miocene Puijila darwini were very similar to otters. Therefore, this case seems to be a pretty good analogue to the early amphibious stem whales, which made a much bigger transition in terms of body plan in just a few million years.

River otter (Factumquintus, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0) .

Brown fur seal (Roger Culos, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Sister Group of Whales 

In modern phylogenetic reconstructions hippos are consistently recovered as the sister group of whales. So, we might expect to find a comparable evolutionary disparity within this group. However, even though the river hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and pygmy hippo (Choeropsis liberiensis) diverged 9.6. million years ago, they share the same body plan and only differ somewhat in size and proportions. Still not convinced?

River hippo (Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia / GFDL).

Pygmy hippo (Rodw, Wikimedia / PD).

Now, let’s have a look at modern cetaceans. Maybe they are different? The common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) diverged 3.99 million years ago. This represents about the timeframe available between pakicetids and basilosaurids and shows what blind evolution at best can achieve with whales in this time: only very minor differences!

Common dolphin (Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0).

Bottlenose dolphin (NASA, Wikimedia / PD).

Finally, what about great apes and humans. Chimp (Pan paniscus) and gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) diverged according to TimeTree 9.06 million years ago and humans (Homo sapiens) from chimps 6.7 million years, which agrees with the hominin fossil record. There are two possibilities: Either you follow those scientists who consider the biological difference between humans and chimps as marginal. Then this example would just confirm the pattern described above. Or, you consider humans as very different from chimps, based on their different bipedal locomotion and especially their mental capacity and cultural achievements. In the latter case humans would represent the only exception to the pattern that I could find, which would be a remarkable confirmation of Judeo-Christian human exceptionalism.

Chimp (Magnus Johansson, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0),

Gorilla (Rufus46, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Humans (Kelley Boone, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0).

Two Indisputable Facts

These examples could be expanded endlessly but should be sufficient to establish the point. There are clearly limits to what unguided evolution can do within a few million years, and these limits are far below the level of any major body plan transitions. Thus, we can safely conclude that there are two indisputable facts that require an adequate explanation:

1.) There are many examples of fossil species pairs with very different body plans that diverged within a window of time of 5 (±5) million years. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are only about 350,000 described fossil species (extrapolated based on data in Teichert 1956, Valentine 1970, Raup 1976, and Alroy 2002), which represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 5-50 billion species that have ever lived on Earth (Raup 1991).

2.) There exist no living species pairs with even remotely similar differences in body plan that are dated to have diverged in a similar time frame. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are an estimated 8.7 million living species (Mora et al. 2011, Strain 2011, Sweetlove 2011), of which more than 2 million are described (IISE 2012). Previous estimates of the total number of living species varied from 3-100 million species (May 1988, Tangley 1997, Chapman 2009), but if microbes are included, it could even be up to a trillion living species (Locey & Lennon 2016, Latty & Lee 2019).

Considering the fact that windows of time of only 5-10 million years account for most of the abrupt appearances of new body plans in the fossil record (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021), the Bayesian likelihood of not finding a single example of similar morphological disparity having originated on a similar time frame among the millions of living species is basically close to zero. I consider this simple argument as a final nail in the coffin of Darwinian unguided evolution.

A Public Challenge

Having made my case, I here formally and publicly pose the challenge again to prove me wrong. My dear Darwinist friends and colleagues, please find in the vast database of 97,000 species at TimeTree.org just a single example of any pair of different species that have diverged about 5 million years ago (give or take a few million years) according to a consensus of multiple molecular clock studies, and that exhibit a morphological disparity in their body plans comparable to, say, Pakicetus and Basilosaurus. To be clear, of course no evolutionist ever claimed that Pakicetus was the actual ancestor of Basilosaurus. It rather represented a side branch of the cetacean stem group. But what evolutionists definitely do imply is that the stem species was roughly similar in body plan to Raoellidae and Pakicetidae. Therefore, this challenge is absolutely valid and reasonable.

An obvious possible objection by Darwinists might be that recent species pairs do not represent ancestor-descendent lineages but just cousin lineages that both diverged from a common ancestor. Yes, I get it. However, this also applies for most fossil examples, and there is a catch: While differences in ancestor-descendent lineages could only accumulate in a single evolving lineage, recent lineages could both evolve differences during the same time in each lineage and thus should rather present more and not less morphological disparity. Therefore, this point makes the problem even worse for Darwinists.

Maybe evolutionists will appeal to yet unknown non-Darwinian processes. However, the great advantage of this new argument is that it is totally independent of the nature of the transformation process. You could simply consider that process as a black box. Therefore, it is totally irrelevant if Darwinists invent some new possible mechanism. The crucial point is not the process, but the resulting pattern of new body plans consistently having come into being abruptly in the distant past, but not in the more recent past.       

No Conceivable Reason

There is no conceivable reason why a disparity like that between Pakicetus and Basilosaurus should be limited to the fossil record, where it can be found in numerous examples among all groups of organisms, while being totally absent among the millions of recent species. So, let’s be generous and not restrict the challenge to the TimeTree database. Just find any pair of species among the millions of living species to meet the challenge. Only one! Come on, if unguided evolution really can do its magic, this should not be too difficult, should it? Well, I won’t hold my breath, but if the challenge cannot be met, Darwinists should be asked to explain why.

Here is my explanation. Darwinism is wrong, and this applies not only to the neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection but to any unguided evolutionary processes including those suggested by proponents of the so-called Extended Synthesis (e.g., Shapiro et al. 2014, Laland et al. 2014, 2015, Garte 2016, Müller 2016, 2017). 

There is no evolutionary reason why the creative power of this process should have been active over all of Earth history but then ceased to function within the past 10 million years. Intelligent design proponents can easily explain this pattern: there was creative intelligent intervention in the history of life, but this creative activity deliberately ceased with the arrival of humans as the final telos. Any further explanation would have to transgress the methodological limits of the design inference, but Judeo-Christian theists will certainly recognize an eerie correspondence with the Biblical message, which says that God rested from his creative activity after the creation of humans (Genesis 2:2-3).

References

• Alroy J 2002. How many named species are valid? PNAS 99(6), 3706–3711. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.062691099.
• Bechly G 2018. Alleged Refutation of the Cambrian Explosion Confirms Abruptness, Vindicates Meyer.Evolution News May 29, 2018.
• Bechly G 2021. Chapter 31: Does the Fossil Record Demonstrate Darwinian Evolution? Pp 345–356 in: Dembski WA, Luskin C, Holden JM (eds). The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Eugene (OR): Harvest House.
• Bechly G, Meyer SC 2017. Chapter 10. The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry. Pp 331–361 in: Moreland JP, Meyer SC, Shaw C, Gauger AK, Grudem W (eds). Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Wheaton (IL): Crossway.
• Chapman AD 2009. Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World. 2^nd ed. Canberra (Australia): Australian Biological Resources Study. [PDF]
• Daley AC, Antcliffe JB, Drage HB, Pates S 2018. Early fossil record of Euarthropoda and the Cambrian Explosion. PNAS 115(21), 5323–5331. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1719962115.
• Garte S 2016. New Ideas in Evolutionary Biology: From NDMS to EES. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 68, 3–11. [PDF]
• Hedges SB, Kumar S (eds.) 2009. The Timetree of Life. New York (NY): Oxford University Press. 
• Hedges SB, Dudley J, Kumar S 2006. TimeTree: a public knowledge-base of divergence times among organisms. Bioinformatics 22, 2971–2972. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btl505.
• Hedges SB, Marin J, Suleski M, Paymer M, Kumar S 2015. Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification. Molecular Biology and Evolution 32, 835–845. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msv037.
• Helbig AJ, Seibold I, Martens J, Wink M 1995. Genetic Differentiation and Phylogenetic Relationships of Bonelli’s Warbler Phylloscopus bonelli and Green Warbler P. nitidus. Journal of Avian Biology 26(2), 139–153. DOI: 10.2307/3677063.
• IISE 2012. 2011 SOS State of Observed Species. Tempe (AZ): International Institute for Species Exploration. [Website]
• Kimura Y, Hawkins MTR, McDonough MM, Jacobs LL, Flynn LJ 2015. Corrected placement of Mus–Rattus fossil calibration forces precision in the molecular tree of rodents. Scientific Reports 5: 14444, 1–9. DOI: 10.1038/srep14444.
• Kumar S, Stecher G, Suleski M, Hedges SB 2017. TimeTree: A Resource for Timelines, Timetrees, and Divergence Times. Molecular Biology and Evolution 34, 1812–1819. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msx116.
• Laland KN, Uller T, Feldman MW, Sterelny K, Müller GM, Moczek A, Jablonka E, Odling-Smee J, Wray GA, Hoekstra HE, Futuyma DJ, Lenski RE, Mackay TFC, Schluter D, Strassmann JE 2014. Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Nature 514, 162–164. DOI: 10.1038/514161a.
• Laland KN, Uller T, Feldman MW, Sterelny K, Müller GM, Moczek A, Jablonka E, Odling-Smee J 2015. The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282:20151019, 1–14. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1019.
• Latty T, Lee T 2019. How many species on Earth? Why that’s a simple question but hard to answer. The Conversation April 28, 2019.
• Locey KJ, Lennon JT 2016. Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity. PNAS 113(21), 5970–5975. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521291113.
• Long Story Short 2020. Ep. 2 Whale Evolution: Good Evidence for Darwin? Discovery Science YouTube channel 24.04.2020.
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• Mondolfi E, Boede EO 1981. A hybrid of a spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and an Asiatic black bear (Selenarctos thibetanus) born at the Maracay Zoological Park, Venezuela. Memoria de la Sociedad de Ciencias Naturales La Salle 41(115), 143–148. [ResearchGate]
• Mora C, Tittensor DP, Adl S, Simpson AGB, Worm B 2011. How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? PLoS Biology 9(8): e1001127, 1–8. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127.
• Müller G 2016. The extended evolutionary synthesis. Talk presented at the scientific meeting New Trends in Evolutionary Biology at The Royal Society, November 7-9, 2016, London. https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2016/11/evolutionary-biology/
• Müller G 2017. Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary. Interface Focus 7:20170015, 1–11. DOI: 10.1098/rsfs.2017.0015.
• Prothero DR 2014. Species Longevity in North American Fossil Mammals. Integrative Zoology 9, 383–393. DOI: 10.1111/1749-4877.12054.
• Raup DM 1976. Species diversity in the Phanerozoic: a tabulation. Paleobiology 2(4), 279–288. DOI: 10.1017/s0094837300004917.
• Raup DM 1991. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York (NY): W.W. Norton. [also see New Scientist 13 September 1991]
• Rohland N, Malaspinas A-S, Pollack J, Slatkin M, Matheus P, Hofreiter M 2007. Proboscidean Mitogenomics: Chronology and Mode of Elephant Evolution Using Mastodon as Outgroup. PLOS Biology 5(8): e207, 1663–1671. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050207.
• Shapiro JA, Noble D, Pookottil R 2014. The Third Way of Evolution. Website: https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com.
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• Sweetlove L 2011. Number of species on Earth tagged at 8.7 million. Nature 23 August 2011. DOI: 10.1038/news.2011.498.
• Tangley L 1997. How many species are there? US News & World Report 8/10/97. 
• Teichert C 1956. How Many Fossil Species? Journal of Paleontology 30(4), 967–969. JSTOR: 1300432.
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The agrora unbound?

Hail the Lord JEHOVAH: the great king!

◄ Psalm 83 ►

American Standard Version

God, Don't Keep Silent

1O God, keep not thou silence: Hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.

2For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult; And they that hate thee have lifted up the head.

3Thy take crafty counsel against thy people, And consult together against thy hidden ones.

4They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; That the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.

5For they have consulted together with one consent; Against thee do they make a covenant:

6The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites; Moab, and the Hagarenes;

7Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre:

8Assyria also is joined with them; They have helped the children of Lot. Selah

9Do thou unto them as unto Midian, As to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the river Kishon;

10Who perished at Endor, Who became as dung for the earth.

11Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; Yea, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna;

12Who said, Let us take to ourselves in possession The habitations of God.

13O my God, make them like the whirling dust; As stubble before the wind.

14As the fire that burneth the forest, And as the flame that setteth the mountains on fire,

15So pursue them with thy tempest, And terrify them with thy storm.

16Fill their faces with confusion, That they may seek thy name, O JEHOVAH.

17Let them be put to shame and dismayed for ever; Yea, let them be confounded and perish;

18That they may know that thou alone, whose name is JEHOVAH, Art the Most High over all the earth. 

 

 

◄ Psalm 8 ►

American Standard Version

1O JEHOVAH, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth, Who hast set thy glory upon the heavens!

2Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou established strength, Because of thine adversaries, That thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

3When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

4What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?

5For thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor.

6Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:

7All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the field,

8The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

9O JEHOVAH, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth!

 

On Russia's "Cosa Nostra"

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Saving junk DNA?

Dan Graur: The Core Rationale for Claiming “Junk DNA”

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

 

 

See the last entry in this Twitter thread (below), and then our follow-up comments under the screen capture. Dan Graur is a University of Houston biologist and prominent junk DNA advocate. The link to the article in The Scientist that he is grumbling about is included at the very end of this post.

So What’s Wrong with Graur’s Argument?

First, it is unlikely that the growing number of biologists looking for possible functions in so-called “junk DNA” are ID proponents (although a few might be).

Consider this syllogism, however:

1. Evolutionary processes lack foresight.
2. Processes without foresight create novel functions only infrequently, more often causing non-functionality.
3. “Junk DNA” appears to be non-functional.
4. Therefore, since evolution is true, it is pointless to look for functions in apparently functionless (“junk”) DNA; what appears to lack function, truly does lack function.

Here’s the Problem

Premises (1) and (2) could be true, as doubtless most biologists would agree, yet (3) does not follow from either premise, and refers in any case only to an appearance, exactly the sort of superficial impression calling for further analysis. Moreover, (4) is a counsel of despair — a GENUINE science-stopper. Since “only infrequently” in premise (2) is defined entirely by the sample size, not by evolutionary theory itself, “no function” claims are empirically unsupportable, resting wholly on negative evidence.

Graur’s argument also affirms the consequent, as tendentious arguments often do. Just take a look at premises (2) and (3) and their logical relation.

That explains why many researchers, who are fully on board with evolution, nonetheless ignore Graur’s advice. They decline to kiss the no-function wall, as Paul Nelson put it back in 2010:

Why Kissing the Wall Is the Worst Possible Heuristic for Biological Discovery

In biology, the claim “structure x has no function” can only topple in one direction, namely, towards the discovery of functions. “No function” represents a brick wall of infinite extent, from which one can only fall backwards, into the waiting arms of a function one didn’t see, or overlooked.

Because one was kissing the wall, so to speak.

Here is the article that got under Graur’s skin: “Evolutionary Jumps,” by Christie Wilcox.

 

On being in the crosshairs of the ministry of truth.

Coup de etats ,for fun or profit.

And speaking of election meddling.

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Don't give peace a chance?

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On the sword of the second horseman.

Another exposition on engineerless engineering.

Darwinists Seek to Explain the Eye’s Engineering Perfection

David Coppedge

 

 

Yesterday we looked at a paper by Tom Baden and Dan-Eric Nilsson in Current Biology debunking the old canard that the human eye is a bad design because it is wired backwards. We saw them turn the tables and show that, in terms of performance, the inverted retina is actually as good or better than the everted retina. Vertebrate eyes “come close to perfect,” they said. Ask the eagles with “the most acute vision of any animal,” which would include cephalopods with their allegedly more logical arrangement. Eagles win! Squids lose! Baden and Nilsson looked at eyes from an “engineer’s perspective” and shared good reasons for the inverted arrangement. They even spoke of design seven times; “the inverted retinal design is a blessing,” they argued.

And yet they maintain that eyes evolved by blind, unguided natural processes. How can they believe that? In this follow-up, we look at the strategies they use to maintain the Darwinian narrative despite the evidence.

Personification

First, they turn evolution into an engineer. Personification is a common ploy by Darwinists. Richard Dawkins envisioned a “blind watchmaker” replacing Paley’s artificer. Darwin even gave natural selection a gender:

Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight, successive variations. She can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.

Evolutionists speak freely of natural selection as a “tinkerer” cobbling together whatever odd parts are handy so that a solution, however, awkward, comes to satisfy a need brought on by “selection pressure.” The resulting structures give the illusion of design but are not the work of a rational agent. Neil Thomas calls such stories “agentless acts” by which engineered structures arise by “pure automatism or magical instrumentality quite outside common experience or observability.” Evolutionists need no magician; the rabbit emerges out of the hat spontaneously, as if an invisible hand pulled on its ears. Watch how Baden and Nilsson personify evolution and turn it into a Blind Tweaker and Opportunist:

So, in general, the apparent challenges with an inverted retina seem to have been practically abolished by persistent evolutionary tweaking. In addition, opportunities that come with the inverted retina have been efficiently seized. In terms of performance, vertebrate eyes come close to perfect. [Emphasis added.]

Visualization

A second tactic Baden and Nilsson use is visualization. Figure 3 in their article shows three stages of a possible evolutionary path from a primitive photoreceptor to a “high quality spatial vision” with “usable space” between the lens and retina. “This space could be usefully filled by the addition of neurons that locally pre-process the image picked up by the photoreceptors,” the caption reads. Well, then, what personified tinkerer would not take advantage of such prime real estate? Give the Blind Tweaker room to homestead and you will shortly find him (or her) setting up shop. What’s missing in the visuals are giant leaps over engineered systems in the gaps, and an account of how they all become coordinated to make vision work.

Inevitability

Another tactic used by Baden and Nilsson is the notion of inevitability. Evolution was forced to take the path it did. Evolution had no choice, they imply, because the first time a layer of light-sensitive cells began to invaginate into a cup shape, the path forward was set in concrete.

The specific reason for our own retinal orientation is the way the nervous system was internalised by invagination of the dorsal epidermis into a neural tube in our pre-chordate ancestors. The epithelial orientation in the neural tube is truly inside out. The vertebrate eye cup develops from a frontal (brain) part of the neural tube, where the receptive parts of any sensory cells naturally project inwards into the lumen of the neural tube (the original outside). In contrast, the eyes of octopus and other cephalopods develop from cups formed in the skin, and the original epithelial outside keeps its orientation.

This tactic gives a Darwinist the flexibility to use the same theory to explain opposite things. Evolution is so rigid it must follow the path the ancestor took, but so malleable that all subsequent engineering can be optimized to perfection. Surely, though, if natural selection has the magical powers the Darwinists ascribe to it, it could have ditched ancestral traditions and remodeled the eye cup. Isn’t that how all innovations begin in the theory? 

Airy Nothings

The sneakiest tactic used by the authors is what Neil Thomas described as “notional terms.” These are “airy nothings” and “empty signifiers” that gloss over difficulties by replacing evidence with factoids. A factoid, Thomas says, is “a contention without empirical foundation or any locatable referent in the tangible world but one nevertheless held to be true by the person who proposes it” (italics in original). To use this tactic, just assume that your notion is true. Complex things evolved. They originated. They emerged. They arose. They started. They came. They developed. They improved.

Bipolar cells emerged, slotting in between the cones and the ganglion cells to provide a second synaptic layer right in the sensory periphery. Further finesse came through the addition of horizontal and amacrine cells. The result is a structurally highly stereotyped sheet of neuronal tissue present in all extant vertebrates….

Notional terms like this, that assume what need to be proved, can slip through unnoticed unless one is on guard for them. The following contains two of them, while distracting readers with the ID-friendly argument that the eye is not flawed.

Arguments for a basically flawed orientation of the vertebrate retina are built around an eye that we encounter in a grossly enlarged state compared to its humbler origins. We are now more than 500 million years down the road from where vertebrate vision started in the early Cambrian.

When the readers weren’t paying attention, they were being told that the eye had humble origins in the early Cambrian. A truer statement would have read, “Arguments for a basically flawed orientation of the vertebrate retina are built around the assumption of Darwinian evolution.”

Consensus

Baden and Nilsson might counter that they don’t need to give any details about how evolution achieved engineering perfection, because the scientific community has already reached a consensus that Darwinian evolution explains everything in biology, so they can just take it for granted. This is a form of argument from authority, but worse in this instance. As shown in the previous post, the strongest case for eye evolution — so strong that Richard Dawkins celebrated it publicly — was the 1994 graphic that Jonathan Wells and David Berlinski exposed, and Nilsson was one of the perpetrators! To take that for granted would be like drawing a picture of a unicorn in 1994 and then using that drawing as evidence for unicorns in 2022. Evolutionists leaped onto that 1994 article because nothing better had shown up since Darwin got cold shudders considering this “organ of extreme perfection,” the eye.

The Power of Master Narratives

A doctorate in a relatively rare field of expertise called the Rhetoric of Science is held by Thomas Woodward, author of Doubts About Darwin (2003). In that book he examines the role of “fantasy themes” (which he prefers to call “projection themes”) in the history of the Darwin versus Design debate. One of these is the “progress narrative” that the universe is on a continuous path toward higher complexity (p. 52). These projection themes — not empirical data — were of paramount importance in the wide acceptance of evolution when the Victorian atmosphere was fragrant with feelings of progress. Darwin and his successors had a simple, compelling story that was part “factual-empirical narrative” and part “semi-imaginative narrative” (p. 22). 

To understand how Darwinians continue to maintain what appears to ID advocates as cognitive dissonance, i.e., that nature is exquisitely engineered but emerged by blind processes, observers need to be cognizant of the projection themes and rhetorical tactics Darwinians use to forestall a Design Revolution. The ones used by Baden and Nilsson cannot be conquered merely by appeals to empirical facts. They need to be exposed as the ploys they are and supplanted by better narratives founded on stronger evidence and logic.

 

Charles Darwin the design advocate?

Charles Darwin’s “Intelligent Design”

Robert F. Shedinger

 

I wrote here yesterday about Charles Darwin’s orchid book. Shortly after its publication, reviews of the book began appearing in the British press. Unlike with the Origin, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Reviewers were extremely impressed with Darwin’s detailed documentation of the variety of contrivances in orchids. But much to Darwin’s dismay, they did not see this as evidence of natural selection.

An anonymous reviewer in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History wrote in response to Darwin’s contention that nature abhors perpetual self-fertilization:          

Apart from this theory and that of ‘natural selection,’ which we cannot think is much advanced by the present volume, we must welcome this work of Mr. Darwin’s as a most important and interesting addition to botanical literature.

Other reviewers went much further. M. J. Berkeley, writing in the London Review, said:

…the whole series of the Bridgewater Treatises will not afford so striking a set of arguments in favour of natural theology as those which he has here displayed.

Marvels of Divine Handiwork 

A review by R. Vaughn in the British Quarterly Review opined:

No one acquainted with even the very rudiments of botany will have any difficulty in understanding the book before us, and no one without such acquaintance need hesitate to commence the study of it. For, in the first place, it is full of the marvels of Divine handiwork.

According to the Saturday Review:

By contrivances so wonderful and manifold, that, after reading Mr. Darwin’s enumeration of them, we felt a certain awe steal over the mind, as in the presence of a new revelation of the mysteriousness of creation. 

“New and Marvelous Instances of Design” 

Even Darwin’s pigeon-fancier friend, William Tegetmeier, noted the existence in the book of “new and marvelous instances of design.” And an anonymous reviewer in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review wrote:

To those whose delight it is to dwell upon the manifold instances of intelligent design which everywhere surround us, this book will be a rich storehouse.

Darwin’s “flank movement on the enemy” failed miserably. Unable to make a convincing case for natural selection in his broader species work, he tried instead to stealthily impress the scientific world by appeal to the exquisite variety of fertilization methods among orchids. Darwin impressed the scientific world alright. He showed how difficult it is to understand the variety of living organisms without appeal to design. 

His orchid book may well be the most important of all Darwin’s publications. It made a unique contribution to 19th-century natural history — or is that natural theology? I can think of no greater irony than the fact that Charles Darwin, who Richard Dawkins felt made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, actually bequeathed to 19th-century natural historians one of the most impressive cases for intelligent design ever made.

 

 

JEHOVAH may have known what he was doing after all?

Evolutionists: The Eye Is “Close to Perfect”

David Coppedge

 

Two evolutionists have made a stunning admission: the human eye is not oriented backwards. This collapses a long-standing argument for poor design in the eye. There are good reasons why vertebrate eyes have backward-pointing retinas, they say. In fact, human eyes may outperform the eyes of cephalopods, which have been held up as a smarter example of engineering design. 

Our analysis of this major rethink will be divided into two parts. First, we will see why the design of the human eye, with its backward-pointing retina, makes sense. Second, we will see how the authors try to rescue Darwinism from this major rethink. Of special interest to this story is that one of the authors, Dan-Eric Nilsson, made a splash with Suzanne Pelger in 1994 with a graphic of eye evolution showing how a light-sensitive spot could evolve into a vertebrate eye in stages. Richard Dawkins made hay with that story. The episode required a lot of fact-checking to refute, as Jonathan Wells and David Berlinski remember. 

Terms and Facts

A couple of terms and facts should be enunciated. Cephalopods (octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish) have everted retinas, with the photoreceptor cells pointing toward the light source. Vertebrates all have inverted retinas, with the photoreceptors pointed away from the light source. Some other invertebrates have either one arrangement or the other. Some animals, like zebrafish larvae, have no vitreous space between the lens and the retina. Humans exemplify most vertebrate arrangements with a fluid-filled vitreous humor between the lens and retina. 

The new article by Tom Baden and Dan-Eric Nilsson appeared this month in Current Biology, under the title, “Is Our Retina Really Upside Down?” They do not argue that one form is better than the other, but rather, because of trade-offs owing to size, habitat, and behavior, what works for one animal may not be optimal for another.

But in general, it is not possible to say that either retinal orientation is superior to the other. It is the notions of right way or wrong way that fails. Our retina is not upside down, unless perhaps when we stand on our head.

Criticisms of the “Backward Retina” Disappear

Knowing that many of their evolutionary colleagues have criticized the inverted retina as a bad design, Baden and Nilsson elaborate on the criticism then state their thesis:

From an engineer’s perspective, these problems could be trivially averted if the retina were the other way round, with photoreceptors facing towards the centre of the eye. Accordingly, the human retina appears to be upside down. However, here we argue that things are perhaps not quite so black and white. Ranging from evolutionary history via neuronal economy to behaviour, there are in fact plenty of reasons why an inverted retinal design might be considered advantageous. [Emphasis added.]

For the remainder of the article, with 28 references, they consider advantages of the inverted retina, which humans share with all other vertebrates, and the everted retina shared by most invertebrates, with ample evolutionary storytelling thrown in. Here are specific criticisms of the inverted retina with their responses.

Blind spot. The inverted retina needs a place for bundling the nerves from the photoreceptors into a hole so they can join in the optic nerve to the brain. This so-called blind spot is “not all that bad,” they point out; it only occupies 1% of the visual field in humans and is filled in with data from the other eye. “Moreover, body movements can ensure suitable sampling of visual scenes despite this nuisance,” they say. “After all, when is the last time you have felt inconvenienced by your own blind spots?”

Optically compromised space. Surely the tangles of neural cells in front of the photoreceptors reduce optical quality, don’t they? Not really, say Baden and Nilsson, for several reasons:

Looking out through a layer of neural tissue may seem to be a serious drawback for vertebrate vision. Yet, vertebrates include birds of prey with the most acute vision of any animal, and even in general, vertebrate visual acuity is typically limited by the physics of light, and not by retinal imperfections. Likewise, photoreceptor cell bodies, which in vertebrate eyes are also in the way of the retinal image, do not seem to strongly limit visual acuity. Instead, in several lineages, which include species of fish, reptiles and birds, these cell bodies contain oil droplets that improve colour vision and/or clumps of mitochondria that not only provide energy but also help focus the light onto the photoreceptor outer segments.

They don’t specifically mention the Mueller cells that act as waveguides to the photoreceptors, but surely those are among the “surprising” ways that the “design challenges have been met” in the inverted retina.

Benefits of Inverted Retinas

The inverted retina also provides distinct advantages:

Preprocessing. One thing the everted retina cannot do as well is process the information before it gets to the brain. Baden and Nilsson spend some time discussing why this is so very beneficial.

To fully understand the merits of the inverted design, we need to consider how visual information is best processed. The highly correlated structure of natural light means that the vast majority of light patterns sampled by eyes are redundant. Using retinal processing, vertebrate eyes manage to discard much of this redundancy, which greatly reduces the amount of information that needs to be transmitted to the brain.This saves colossal amounts of energy and keeps the thickness of the optic nerve in check, which in turn aids eye movements.

For example, they say, a blue sky consists of mostly redundant information. The vertebrate eye “truly excels” at concentrating on new and unexpected information, like the shadow of a bird flying against the sky. Neurons that monitor portions of the visual field that have not changed can stay inactive, saving energy. What’s more, the vertebrate eye contains layers of specialized cells that preprocess the information sent to the brain, giving the eye “predictive coding” as reported elsewhere. They touch on that fact here:

The extensive local circuitry within the eye — enabled by two thick and densely interconnected synaptic layers, achieves an amazingly efficient, parallel representation of the visual scene. By the time the signal gets to the ganglion cells that form the optic nerve, spikes are mostly driven by the presence of the unexpected.

Useful space. The inverted retina uses to good advantage the vitreous space for placing the “extensive local circuitry” for the preprocessing cells. Squid eyes, with the photoreceptors smack against the optic lobe, lack that benefit. Here, Baden and Nilsson turn the tables on the “bad design” critics so eloquently one must read it in their own words:

Returning to our central narrative, the intraocular space of vertebrate eyes is an ideal location for such early processing, hinting that the vertebrate retina is in fact cleverly oriented the right way! … Taking larval zebrafish as the best studied example, the somata and axons of their ganglion cells are squished up right against the lens, while on the other end the outer segment of photoreceptors sits neatly inserted into the pigment epithelium that lines the eyeball. Clearly, in these smallest of perfectly functional vertebrate eyes, the inverted retina has allowed efficient use of every cubic micron of intraocular real estate. In contrast, now it is suddenly the cephalopod retina that appears to have an awkward orientation. … For tiny eyes, the everted design wastes extremely valuable space inside the eye whereas the inverted retinal design is a blessing. With this reasoning, cephalopods have an unfortunate retinal orientation and, contrary to the general notion, it is the vertebrate retina that is the right way up.

“Close to Perfect”

As a capstone to their argument, they conclude that “In terms of performance, vertebrate eyes come close to perfect.” This does not mean the poor octopus is the loser in this surprising upset. If scientists knew more about cephalopod eye performance within the animals’ own circumstances, a similar conclusion would probably be justified. “Both the inverted and the everted principles of retinal design have their advantages and their challenges, or shall we say ‘opportunities’.”

Surely with all this engineering and design talk, the authors are ready to jump the Darwin ship and join the ID community, right? One must never underestimate the stubbornness and storytelling ability of evolutionists. Next time we will look at how they explain all this engineering perfection in Darwinian terms.

 

Loaded much?

A Thought Experiment

Ann Gauger

 

 

I’d like to propose a thought experiment for you. I will ask three questions and offer three possible answers for each. I would like you, the reader, to consider the answers as objectively as you can, and pick the answer that is correct. It shouldn’t be too hard, right? 

Ah, but if your worldview is at stake, what then?

1. A doctor, having found out that I did intelligent design research, asked me if my research indicated something could evolve that I had thought could not, would I publish it?

A. Of course.

B. No.

C. Keep trying until I get the answer I want.

2. A doctor, having found out that I did evolutionary biology research, asked me if my research indicated something could not evolve that I had thought could, would I publish it?

A. Of course.

B. No.

C. Keep trying until I get the answer I want.

Question 1 happened to me. I answered, “Of course.” This is because I am a scientist first, and an intelligent design advocate second. To even ask the question impugned my integrity as a scientist. That was the point of the question, I suppose.

The same doctor would not ask question 2 of an evolutionary biologist. He was already sure evolution was true, so the question would be meaningless for him. 

Final question.

3. Why should anyone think it is OK to question the integrity of a scientist (or anyone) because of her views on intelligent design or evolution?

A. Because they are JUST WRONG. And they ought to know it.

B. Because they are just protecting their turf.

C. It’s not OK.

Well?

 

Another revolution eating her children?

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Shell companies: An exposition.

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London: Financial laundromat of the world?

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Woman: A definition by mirriam webster.

Definition of woman

1a : an adult female person

 

James R. Lewis in his own words.

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Ibn Battuta: A brief history.

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Pre darwinian complexity and the design debate.

Existential Implications of the Miller-Urey Experiment

Neil Thomas

 

Editor’s note: We have been delighted to present a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the seventh and final article in the series. Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).

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.

 

Censorship is for the greater good?

My problem with Postmillenialism.

 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. 

Why the Origin Of Life remains darwinism's unicorn. III

Frankenstein and His Offspring

Neil Thomas

 

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the sixth article in the series. Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).

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

1. 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.
2. Aristotle had termed it spontaneous generation.
3. Cited by Patrick McGilligan in his biography, Funny Man: Mel Brooks (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), p. 355.

 

Why the Origin Of Life remains darwinism's unicorn II

Imagining “Abiogenesis”: Crick, Watson, and Franklin

Neil Thomas

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the fifth article in the series. Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).

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

1. Inside human cells, coded messages in the DNA are translated by RNA into working molecules of protein, which is responsible for life’s functions.
2. “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)