“The wheel has turned,” writes biologist Michael Denton in his new book, out today, The Miracle of Man.
A widening divorce that originated in the 16th century between our
understanding of man and of the cosmos has been healed by discoveries in
modern science. That is, if we’re willing to recognize it.
From the heliocentric revolution of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, to Darwin’s Origin of Species in
1859, science demoted man further and further, to the status of an
afterthought in the cosmic scheme. Or not even an “afterthought.” As it
seemed, neither life nor the universe gave evidence of a thinking
designer. Rather than reflecting cosmic purpose, man was evidently of no
consequence. This thought had profound consequences for Western
culture. In 1901, with the science of his day in mind, Nietzsche could
write that “nihilism stands at the door.” That, however, was about to
change.
Downfall and Recovery
In 1911 and 1913, two pivotal years, there appeared books by Alfred
Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection) and
Harvard chemist Lawrence Henderson. In their work, the extraordinary
fine-tuning of chemistry and physics was starting to come into focus. As
it advanced, science delivered the news that from the outset of
physical existence, at the Big Bang, the universe had planned for a
miracle. And the miracle came. It was the rise of our human species in
the Pleistocene epoch, proceeding from the use of stone tools to fire to
metalworking, giving us, ultimately, our modern world.
For this, a vast suite of chemical and physical parameters were
precisely set. These parameters are “uniquely fit” for creatures like
ourselves, as Denton shows:
[O]ur existence as
energy-demanding active air-breathing terrestrial organisms critically
depends on a wildly improbable ensemble of natural environmental fitness
comprising various chemical and physical laws as well as the properties
of specific molecules such as oxygen and CO2 and specific elements such as the transition metals, properties that must be almost exactly as they are.
The cosmic and planetary environments, in other words — the
hydrological cycle, the atmosphere, water, oxygen, and more — were
designed with us in mind — our breathing, circulation, vision, muscles,
nerves, brain, bones, and much else.
“A Primal Blueprint”
Both lyrical and soberly detailed, Denton writes,
The exquisitely fine-tuned
ensembles of environmental fitness described here, each enabling a vital
aspect of our physiological design, amount to nothing less than a
primal blueprint for our being, written into the fabric of reality since
the moment of creation, providing compelling evidence that we do
indeed, after all, occupy a central place in the great cosmic drama of
being.
This is the miracle of man. We are not positioned in the
spatial center of the universe as was believed before Copernicus, but
what we have found over the past two centuries confirms the deep
intuition of the medieval Christian scholars who believed that “in the
cognition of nature in all her depths, man finds himself.”
The Miracle of Man takes
a story of downfall and recovery full circle. And it does so in a
fascinatingly similar way to the story told by Denton’s Discovery
Institute colleague, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, in his recent
book Return of the God Hypothesis.
The evidences discussed by Denton and by Meyer are quite different. But
they point to the same conclusion. This is so much so that Denton’s
book could accurately, but not mellifluously, have been titled Return of the Anthropocentric Hypothesis.
True but Trivial
Of course, there’s a ready objection. Since humans find ourselves in
existence, we must be fit for our environment. This is obviously true,
says Denton. But it’s “trivial.” The remarkable observation is just how precisely the environment was specified for us. That is not trivial at all. It is a mark of supreme privilege.
From Denton’s superb presentation, other conclusions follow. For one,
if the universe harbors intelligent extraterrestrials, they will not be
“aliens” to us. Instead, because of the cosmic design, they will
“strongly resemble Homo sapiens.” Their planet, or planets,
will resemble our own, for the same reason. If they find a way to visit
us, as UFO believers say, they will feel that they have come home.
The book culminates the series of works in Dr. Denton’s Privileged Species series.
And it arrives, I have to add, in a strangely providential manner. In
the United States, sputtering nihilists and screaming anarchists have
turned their rage on the idea that someone, somewhere, could be thinking
that the unborn man or woman is a miracle worth protecting. This is a
consequential book — and, as the editors could not have predicted, a
timely one.
Scholars today are cranking out multitudes of books exposing the
racism in our society. Three prominent examples from 2021 — published by
academic presses — are Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism, Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, and J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy.
One can hear a similar refrain on NPR: for example, in the July 2020
report, “White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S.
Christianity” or in many reports during 2021 warning about white
supremacism inherent in “Christian nationalism.”
While it is salutary to examine and expose the religious roots of
racism, one might get the mistaken impression from this discourse that
today’s white nationalists are direct heirs of the Ku Klux Klan, who did
indeed (mis)use religion to promote their racist ideology.
The Real Roots of Racism: Pseudo-Science
What often seems neglected in this discussion is the history of
scientific racism, which was in some ways more virulent than most
religious forms of racism. This is not to say that historians have
completely ignored scientific racism. Indeed, I have contributed to this
scholarly discussion in some of my earlier works, as well as in my
recently released book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.
However, it seems that the way scientific racism is presented differs
substantially from the way religious racism is treated. Many scholarly
works and NPR stories on religious racism assume that religion —
especially evangelical Christianity — is still heavily tainted by
racism. Indeed, an op-ed in Scientific American in 2021,
“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy,” overtly slammed
creationists as white supremacists, completely ignoring the fact that
Ken Ham, a leader among young-earth creationists, co-authored a book
(with an African American), in which he vigorously opposes racism.
Most works on scientific racism admit that scientists erred in the
past by promoting racist ideas, but then the historians celebrate the
triumph of science, since later scientists overcame these misguided
ideas. Of course, most scientists today — just as most religious leaders
today — do reject racism. One of the outliers — Nobel-Prize-winning
biologist James Watson — is often condemned by colleagues when he makes
racist statements.
The Eugenicist in the Room
So, if the vast majority of scientists reject racism, one might
conclude that scientific racism is no longer a problem. Maybe religious
racism really is a more important target. However, this conclusion
ignores the elephant in the room.
What elephant? Well, how about examining the white nationalist scene
today to see what they actually believe? How do they justify their
racist ideology? While researching my book, Darwinian Racism, I
examined the websites and publications of many neo-Nazi, white
nationalist, and alt-right individuals and organizations. What I
discovered was that most white nationalists and white supremacists today
embrace a social Darwinist version of scientific racism and vehemently
oppose Christianity.
Might Is Right
One of the most virulent pieces of social Darwinist racism I have ever read is the 1896 book Might Is Right by
Ragnar Redbeard (a pseudonym), which is currently popular among white
supremacists. Indeed, in 2019, shortly before a 19-year-old gunman at
the Gilroy Garlic Festival killed three and wounded 17, he recommended
on social media that people read Redbeard’s book.
Many white nationalist websites recommend this book, and some even sell it. The subtitle of Redbeard’s book is Survival of the Fittest,
and it is laced with Darwinian themes, such as the inescapable
necessity of a struggle for existence between races. In addition to
demeaning non-white races, Redbeard’s book also vociferously attacks
Christianity.
The Survival of the Fittest … Race
Many white nationalists claim that Darwinism directly supports their
ideology, because they think that races have evolved to different
levels. They are convinced that races are pitted in a merciless struggle
for existence. Their penchant for white supremacy is their bid to win
the Darwinian struggle for existence.
Those doing battle against the religious roots of racism do often
uncover vestiges of racism and this can be helpful. However, sometimes
they seem to be letting the most flagrant proponents of racism off the
hook. Could it be that they are uncomfortable recognizing that most
white nationalists today are thoroughly secular and are inspired by
Darwinism and science, rather than religion?
This article was originally published at Townhall.
There’s a final common objection to intelligent design that the
positive case for ID, outlined in this series, helps us to answer. In
his Kitzmiller v. Dover testimony, biologist Kenneth Miller referred to intelligent design as a “science stopper.”1 Similarly, in his book Only a Theory,
Miller stated, “The hypothesis of design is compatible with any
conceivable data, makes no testable predictions, and suggests no new
avenues for research. As such, it’s a literal dead end…”2
Yet as we’ve already seen, ID makes a variety of testable and
successful predictions. This allows ID to serve as a paradigm guiding
scientific research to make new discoveries. The list below shows
various fields where ID is helping science to generate knowledge. For
each field, multiple ID-friendly scientific publications are cited as
examples.
How ID Inspires the Progress of Science
Protein science: ID encourages
scientists to do research to test for high levels of complex and
specified information in biology in the form of the fine-tuning of
protein sequences.3 This has practical implications not just
for explaining biological origins, but also for engineering enzymes and
anticipating and fighting the future evolution of diseases.
Physics and cosmology: ID
has inspired scientists to seek and find instances of fine-tuning of
the laws and constants of physics to allow for life, leading to new
fine-tuning arguments such as the Galactic Habitable Zone. This has
implications for proper cosmological models of the universe, hinting at
proper avenues for successful “theories of everything” that must
accommodate fine-tuning, and other implications for theoretical physics.4
Information theory: ID
leads scientists to understand intelligence as a cause of biological
complexity, capable of being scientifically studied, and to understand
the types of information it generates.5
Pharmacology: ID
directs both experimental and theoretical research to investigate the
limitations of Darwinian evolution to produce traits that require
multiple mutations in order to function. This has practical implications
for fighting problems like antibiotic resistance or engineering
bacteria.6
Evolutionary computation: ID
produces theoretical research into the information-generative powers of
Darwinian searches, leading to the discovery that the search abilities
of Darwinian processes are limited, which has practical implications for
the viability of using genetic algorithms to solve problems.7
Anatomy and physiology: ID
predicts function for allegedly “vestigial” organs, structures, or
systems whereas evolution has made many faulty predictions of
nonfunction.8
Bioinformatics: ID
has helped scientists develop proper measures of biological
information, leading to concepts like complex and specified information
or functional sequence complexity. This allows us to better quantify
complexity and understand what features are, or are not, within the
reach of Darwinian evolution.9
Molecular machines: ID
encourages scientists to reverse-engineer molecular machines — like the
bacterial flagellum — to understand their function like machines, and
to understand how the machine-like properties of life allow biological
systems to function.10
Cell biology: ID
causes scientists to view cellular components as “designed structures
rather than accidental by-products of neo-Darwinian evolution,” allowing
scientists to propose testable hypotheses about cellular function and
causes of cancer.11
Systematics: ID
helps scientists explain the cause of the widespread features of
conflicting phylogenetic trees and “convergent evolution” by producing
models where parts can be reused in non-treelike patterns.12 ID
has spawned ideas about life being front-loaded with information such
that it is designed to evolve, and has led scientists to expect (and now
find!) previously unanticipated “out-of-place” genes in various taxa.13
Paleontology: ID
allows scientists to understand and predict patterns in the fossil
record, showing explosions of biodiversity (as well as mass extinction)
in the history of life.14
Genetics: ID
has inspired scientists to investigate the computer-like properties of
DNA and the genome in the hopes of better understanding genetics and the
origin of biological systems.15 ID has also inspired
scientists to seek function for noncoding junk-DNA, allowing us to
understand development and cellular biology.16
Avenues of Discovery
Critics wrongly charge that ID is just a negative argument against
evolution, that ID makes no predictions, that it is a “god of the gaps”
argument from ignorance, or that appealing to an intelligent cause means
“giving up” or “stopping science.” As this series has shown, these
charges are misguided.
Ironically, when critics claim that research is not permitted to
detect design because that would stop science, it is they who hold
science back by preventing scientists from investigating the scientific
theory of intelligent design. When researchers are allowed to infer
intelligent agency as the best explanation for information-rich
structures in nature, this opens up many avenues of discovery that are
bearing good fruit in the scientific community.
Notes
Kenneth R. Miller, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Day 2 AM Testimony (September 27, 2005).
Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008), 87.
Axe,
“Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on
Enzyme Exteriors”; Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences
Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds”; Behe and Snoke, “Simulating Evolution
by Gene Duplication of Protein Features That Require Multiple Amino
Acid Residues”; Axe, “The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein
Folds”; Gauger and Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme
Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway”; Reeves et al., “Enzyme
Families-Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the
GABA-Aminotransferase Family”; Thorvaldsen and Hössjer, “Using
statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and
systems.”
Guillermo Gonzalez and Donald Brownlee, “The Galactic Habitable Zone: Galactic Chemical Evolution,” Icarus 152 (2001), 185-200; Guillermo Gonzalez, Donald Brownlee, and Peter D. Ward, “Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe,” Scientific American (2001), 62-67; Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC, Regnery, 2004); Guillermo Gonzalez, “Setting the Stage for Habitable Planets,” Life 4 (2014), 34-65; D. Halsmer, J. Asper, N. Roman, and T. Todd, “The Coherence of an Engineered World,” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics 4 (2009), 47-65.
William A. Dembski, The Design Inference;
William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Bernoulli’s Principle of
Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer
Search,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics(October
2009), 2647-2652; William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The
Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level
Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics 14 (2010), 475-486; Øyvind Albert Voie, “Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent,” Chaos, Solitons and Fractals 28 (2006), 1000-1004; McIntosh, “Information and Entropy —Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?”
Behe
and Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein
features that require multiple amino acid residues”; Ann K. Gauger,
Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive Evolution
Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High
Fitness,” BIO-Complexity 2010 (2).
William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans 39
(September 2009), 1051-1061; Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and
Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a
Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (October
2009); Dembski and Marks, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason
and Conservation of Information in Computer Search”; Winston Ewert,
George Montanez, William Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per
Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” 42nd South Eastern Symposium on System Theory (March 2010), 290-297; Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, and Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints,” Plos One 3 (June 2008), e2246.
Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research”; William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Living Systems (Dallas, TX: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008).
Meyer,
“The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic
categories”; Kirk K. Durston, David K.Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T.
Trevors, “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 4
(2007), 47; David K.Y. Chiu and Thomas W.H. Lui, “Integrated Use of
Multiple Interdependent Patterns for Biomolecular Sequence Analysis,” International Journal of Fuzzy Systems4 (September 2002), 766-775.
Minnich
and Meyer. “Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III
Regulatory Circuits in Pathogenic Bacteria”; McIntosh, “Information and
Entropy—Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?”
Jonathan Wells, “Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?,” Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum,
98 (2005), 71-96; Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic
analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in
pathogenic bacteria,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature Rhodes Greece (2004); Behe, Darwin’s Black Box; Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity.”
Lönnig,
“Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible
complexity”; Nelson and Jonathan Wells, “Homology in Biology”; Ewert,
“The Dependency Graph of Life”; John A. Davison, “A Prescribed
Evolutionary Hypothesis,” Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum 98 (2005), 155-166; Ewert, “The Dependency Graph of Life.”
Sherman,
“Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa: Thoughts About Evolution”;
Albert D.G. de Roos, “Origins of introns based on the definition of exon
modules and their conserved interfaces,” Bioinformatics 21 (2005), 2-9; Albert D.G. de Roos, “Conserved intron positions in ancient protein modules,” Biology Direct 2 (2007), 7; Albert D.G. de Roos, “The Origin of the Eukaryotic Cell Based on Conservation of Existing Interfaces,” Artificial Life 12 (2006), 513-523.
Meyer
et al., “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang”; Meyer, “The
Cambrian Information Explosion”; Meyer, “The origin of biological
information and the higher taxonomic categories”; Lönnig, “Dynamic
genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible
complexity.”
Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica 56
(September 2008), 205-232; Voie, “Biological function and the genetic
code are interdependent”; David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors,
“Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models,” Physics of Life Reviews 3 (2006), 211-228.
Richard
v. Sternberg, “On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context
of a Unified Genomic– Epigenetic System”; Jonathan Wells, “Using
Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research”; Josiah D.
Seaman and John C. Sanford, “Skittle: A 2-Dimensional Genome
Visualization Tool,” BMC Informatics 10 (2009), 451.
One big change they note: the number of exo-planets discovered has
exploded, from 200 or so to several thousand. Gonzalez walks through
this and other exciting recent advances in astronomy, and the two
reflect on how these new discoveries bear upon the predictions and
arguments they advanced in their book. Also in the conversation,
Gonzalez speculates about what the James Webb Space Telescope may
uncover after it comes online.
When a stem cell divides, one daughter cell must maintain its
stemness (i.e., ability to differentiate into any cell type) while the
other specializes. Therein lies another truckload of requirements for
coordinated action that, if it goes awry, can spell disaster for an
animal or human. Watch this subject grow into a huge problem for
evolutionary theory.
Researchers at University of California at Riverside investigated what happens when stem cells divide and specialize. UCR’s reporter Iqbal Pittawala describes how “genome organization influences cell fate.”
Understanding the molecular mechanisms that specify and maintain the identities of more than 200 cell types of the human body is arguably one of the most fundamental problems in molecular and cellular biology, with critical implications for the treatment of human diseases. Central to the cell fate decision process are stem cells residing within each tissue of the body. [Emphasis added.]
The two daughter cells face a massive organization problem. Even
though they contain the same DNA code, they will take on separate roles
in the cell. This means that the accessibility of genes between the two
cells must radically differ.
Chromatin — a package of DNA wrapped around histone proteins — makes
some genes accessible for transcription but hides others from the
transcription factors (additional proteins) that switch on
transcription. Begin to get a sense of how difficult this will be. There
are tens of thousands of genes, and 200 cell types that utilize
specific genes but not others. What process determines how chromatin
will package the specialist daughter cell to make genes available if it
will be a nerve cell as opposed to a muscle cell or heart cell? And how
does the system keep the other daughter cell unaltered from the original
stem cell?
A Challenge for a Librarian
Biochemist Sihem Cheloufi at UCR, together with colleague Jernej
Murn, researched a protein complex involved in the process named
“chromatin assembly factor 1” or CAF-1. As you read their description,
think of the challenge a librarian faces with the card catalog for a
large library.
“To help CAF-1 secure correct chromatin organization during cell division, a host of transcription factors are attracted to open regions in a DNA sequence-specific manner to serve as bookmarks and recruit transcription machinery to
correct lineage-specific genes, ensuring their expression,” she said.
“We wondered about the extent to which CAF-1 is required to maintain
cell-specific chromatin organization during cell division.”
CAF-1 normally keeps genes tightly bound in chromatin so that they are inaccessible to transcription factors.
For a specific case, the biochemists looked at how blood stem cells
divide and specialize into neutrophils — a type of white blood cell that
acts as a first responder against an invasion by pathogens. They
noticed that the levels of CAF-1 are finely balanced to prevent access
by a particular transcription factor for that lineage named ELF1. (Note
in passing that each cell type has its own suite of lineage-specific
transcription factors.) Neutrophils artificially deprived of CAF-1 went
awry and forgot their identity.
“By looking at chromatin organization, we found a whole slew of genomic sites that are aberrantly open and attract ELF1 as a result of CAF-1 loss,” Murn said. “Our study further points to a key role of ELF1 in defining the fate of several blood cell lineages.”
Peeking into a Keyhole
Recalling the 200 cell types in the human body, how does CAF-1
organize chromatin for each type? How does it know what genes to make
accessible for a kidney cell, an astrocyte in the brain, or a liver
cell? The UCR work is peeking into a keyhole of a library with a big
operation inside. They don’t yet know how CAF-1 “preserves the chromatin
state at specific sites and whether this process works differently
across different cell types.” Think of our librarian just starting to
get a handle on the job of arranging books in one wing and then finding
200 more wings to manage. Maybe a different analogy will expose the
magnitude of this challenge.
“Like a city, the genome has its landscape with specific landmarks,” Cheloufi said. “It would be interesting to know how precisely CAF-1 and other molecules sustain the genome’s ‘skyline.’ Solving this problem could also help us understand how the fate of cells could be manipulated in a predictive manner. Given the fundamental role of CAF-1 in packaging the genome during DNA replication, we expect it to act as a general gatekeeper of cellular identity. This would in principle apply to all dividing cells across numerous tissues, such as cells of the intestine, skin, bone marrow, and even the brain.”
Surely there is much, much more involved than one protein complex
named CAF-1. Something needs to “know” how to keep one daughter cell’s
chromatin unchanged to maintain the stem cell pool, while reorganizing
the chromatin for the differentiating cell — assuming the system also
“knows” what cell type that daughter cell must become out of 200
possibilities. This implies a complex signaling system for triggering
the production of specific cell types, which must trigger the
appropriate suite of protein complexes to package the chromatin for
access by that cell type’s lineage-specific transcription factors.
Differentiation proceeds down a stepwise transition through progenitor
cell states until the specialized cell, such as a neutrophil, results.
How many evolutionists have thought about this challenge?
Quality-Control Terms from Engineering
The research paper is published open access. It is Franklin et al., “Regulation of chromatin accessibility by the histone chaperone CAF-1 sustains lineage fidelity,” in Nature Communications.
Perhaps the magnitude of the challenge caused the 21 authors to shy
away from referring to evolution in the paper. Instead, they refer to
“lineage integrity” or “lineage fidelity” a dozen times. Those are
quality-control terms from engineering and systems design.
Cell fate commitment is
driven by dynamic changes in chromatin architecture and activity of
lineage-specific transcription factors (TFs). The chromatin
assembly factor-1 (CAF-1) is a histone chaperone that regulates
chromatin architecture by facilitating nucleosome assembly during DNA
replication. Accumulating evidence supports a substantial role of CAF-1 in cell fate maintenance, but the mechanisms by which CAF-1 restricts lineage choice remain poorly understood.
Here, we investigate how CAF-1 influences chromatin dynamics and TF
activity during lineage differentiation. We show that CAF-1 suppression
triggers rapid differentiation of myeloid stem and progenitor cells into
a mixed lineage state. We find that CAF-1 sustains lineage fidelity by controlling chromatin accessibility at specific loci, and limiting the binding of ELF1 TF at newly-accessible diverging regulatory elements. Together, our findings decipher key traits of chromatin accessibility that sustain lineage integrity and point to a powerful strategy for dissecting transcriptional circuits central to cell fate commitment.
Expecting random mutations to somehow emerge then be “selected” by some blind, aimless, uncaring “agentless act” (as Neil Thomas has
put it) to construct this complex system seems beyond rational
consideration. Intelligent design scientists, though, could make
testable predictions to guide further research. Knowing how comparable
systems are made by intelligent engineers — that is, systems involving
coordinated reorganization of information for multiple applications —
they could expect to find new types of sensors, feedback circuits,
quality-control checkpoints, or other functional modules at work. These
might consist of proteins, protein complexes, small RNAs, sugars, ions,
or combinations of them capable of storing or conveying information.
(Note: even if automated, these are not “agentless acts.” The agency is
one step removed from mind to program, but a mind with foresight was
necessary for its origin.)
For example, an ID research team might look for a comparable system
in industry that faces the same kind of challenge. They could identify
the minimum number of job descriptions required to make the system work,
then look for molecules performing those roles in the cellular
analogue. Even if the match is imperfect, the ID approach can advance
science, because what the researchers learn can feed back into
biomimetic design, leading to improved applications in industry.
Poor Darwin. With his crude awareness of cells dividing that looked
like bubbles separating, he had no idea what he would be in for in the
21st century.
John West had a great conversation on the Pints with Jack podcast about his book The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society.
Dr. West reminds listeners of an insight of Lewis’s that doesn’t get
the attention it deserves, perhaps because it comes in the Epilogue of
the last book Lewis completed, the fascinating The Discarded Image.
It’s not his Lewis’s most widely read work. The subject matter is not
what everyone associates with him — not fantasy, or science fiction, or
apologetics, but an account of the Medieval mental picture of the world.
Neither Fiction Nor Fact
In the Epilogue, he turns his focus on the “Models” that we all bring
to bear in understanding our world. Medieval Europeans had one. We have
another. These Models, which are neither fictional nor fully objective
or factual either, dictate a certain understanding of nature, among
other things. In Lewis’s view, “nature gives most of her evidence in
answer to the questions we ask her.” Ask different questions and you
will get different answers.
From The Magician’s Twin:
Lewis recalled that when he was
young he “believed that ‘Darwin discovered evolution’ and that the far
more general, radical, and even cosmic developmentalism… was a
superstructure raised on the biological theorem. This view has been
sufficiently disproved.” What really happened according to Lewis was
that the “[t]he demand for a developing world — a demand obviously in
harmony both with the revolutionary and the romantic temper” had
developed first, and when it was “full grown” the scientists went “to
work and discover[ed] the evidence on which our belief in that sort of
universe would now be held to rest.”
Lewis’s view has momentous
implications for how we view the reigning paradigms in science at any
given time — including Darwinian evolution. “We can no longer dismiss
the change of Models [in science] as a simple progress from error to
truth,” argued Lewis. “No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities,
and none is a mere fantasy… But… each reflects the prevalent psychology
of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s
knowledge” Lewis added that he did “not at all mean that these news
phenomena are illusory… But nature gives most of her evidence in answer
to the questions we ask her.”
Recognizing what West calls the “human fallibility of science” is
even more important today than it was in 2012 when he edited his book,
or in 1964 when Lewis wrote his. The spirt or psychology of the day
gives us the science we wished for. This makes it highly fallible, and
potentially dangerous. The notion that science is our guide to morality,
policy, and beyond is called scientism. The idea is ripe with
possibilities of totalitarianism. But it’s what Americans and other
Westerners seem to want.
I hate to burst your bubble who ever you might be, but just because you went to some antiJW propaganda mill and got your skull pumped full of lying propaganda it does not mean that you know me. I am the world's number one expert on what I believe and why I believe it. If you want to know what I actually believe and why just ask me. I have no problem with people disagreeing with my beliefs.
John15:20KJV"Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than
his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if
they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also."
I am not vain enough to compare myself to Jesus, so I fully expect that the reasoning and logic that impresses me will not impress everyone. But it really gets my goat when people pretend to know what I believe better than I do.
On a classic episode of ID the Future, biophysicist Cornelius
Hunter explains how mitochondria, the powerhouses of eukaryotic cells,
pose a powerful and growing problem for evolution. For years
evolutionists thought some early cells must somehow have brought other
cells inside of them, and those other cells then mysteriously evolved
into mitochondria. But recent research undermines that notion. Why do
many evolutionists then still cling to the idea? Dr. Hunter’s answer
explains how a lot of evolutionary thinking persists in the face of
mounting contrary evidence. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
In a recent article at Evolution News (Bechly 2022)
I introduced a new argument against Darwinian evolution and a challenge
to Darwinists. Here is the argument in a nutshell: Among the 350,000
described fossil species, we can identify numerous abrupt origins of new
body plans within a 5–10 million years window of time. Among an
estimated 8.7 million recent species we find no such body plan disparity
in any pairs of species that diverged in a similar time frame according
to molecular clock studies. This contradicts expectations from a
Darwinian perspective.
The simple challenge to Darwinists is to find a single pair of recent
species that have diverged within about 5 million years ago and that
exhibit a disparity in body plan similar to major transitions in the
history of life (e.g., compared to Pakicetus and Basilosaurus). Apparently, I rattled the Darwinist cage, because it took only a few days for a fevered response at the Peaceful Science forum. They claimed to have met the challenge and also invited me to join the discussion at the forum.
Therefore, let me first briefly explain why I declined this invitation and will never participate at Peaceful Science, which in my view deserves to be rebranded as Unpeaceful Science (Clemmons & Luskin 2021).
This forum is dominated mainly by the very same group of hardcore
anti-ID activists (such as Joe Felsenstein, John Harshman, Arthur Hunt,
Puck Mendelssohn, and “Rumraket”) who are notorious for their vitriolic
attacks against intelligent design proponents at other Darwinist forums
like Panda’s Thumb. You just have to skim through the comments
in some of the threads to realize that there is not the slightest
interest in a mutually respectful, fair, and unbiased discussion of
arguments and evidence. Sorry not to be sorry that I have zero tolerance
for such behavior and will never waste my time in a forum that exhibits
such a low level of intellectual integrity.
Two Blatant Examples
Also, the recent two threads at Peaceful Science about my article abound with uncharitable comments and misrepresentations of the arguments. Here are just two blatant examples:
At the very beginning of the initial posting of the thread at Peaceful Science there
is a gross misrepresentation of my argument by commenter Art Hunt.
Contrary to his statement, my argument was emphatically not that
“should a pair of species diverge and go off on their evolving ways,
one would expect to see (inevitably, invariably?) dramatic differences
in such species pairs as time passes.” How anybody could read my article
and come to this conclusion is beyond me. By the way: In my argument I
also do not claim that all recent species pairs that diverged only a few
million years ago necessarily must look so similar that they appear
indistinguishable to laypeople, even though this is often the case. The
crucial point is rather to find different body plans in species that
diverged only a few million years ago, which is common in the fossil
record but virtually absent among recent species.
Another commenter, named Roy, claimed in the second thread at Peaceful Science that I exaggerated the sudden origin of trilobites within 13 million years and misrepresented the paper by Daley et al. (2018). He triumphantly says:
I’ve checked the reference given for his claim of “the origin of trilobites from worm-like ancestors in less than 13 million years”. Not only does it not mention worm-like anything, but it actually says
“The first arthropod traces (Rusophycus )
appear at approximately 537 Ma, shortly after the start of the Cambrian
at approximately 540 Ma. Crown group euarthropods (trilobites) appear
at 521 Ma…”
That’s 16my between trilobites and Rusophycus, trace fossils which are definitely not worm-like because they show signs of being made by legs.
Bechly, like most ID and YEC advocates, must be counting on no-one checking his references.
Well, what I do count on is an average reading comprehension. Of course, Rusophycus traces
show evidence of legs! That’s the whole point. Contrary to most trace
fossils, which are paleontological problematica and cannot be attributed
to a specific organism as trace maker, every undergraduate paleontology
student learns that Rusophycus traces are the resting traces
of trilobites and trilobite-like arthropods. So, by these traces we have
evidence for crown group arthropods like trilobites for 537 million
years ago. The same paper by Daley et al. (2018) also
explicitly acknowledged that 560–550 million years ago there as yet
existed no bilaterian animals (and certainly no arthropods). That is
because of the clear evidence from so-called BST-localities, which are
Ediacaran localities of the Burgess Shale Type that could have preserved
even small and soft-bodied animal ancestors. The current mainstream
view is that at best, coelenterates (jellies) and enigmatic worm-like
animals existed at this Ediacaran time. Even if this were true (I
challenged such claims for Ediacaran animals in several article series
at Evolution News), it would mean that the arthropod body plan
with exoskeleton, articulated legs, mouth parts, compound eyes, central
nervous system, and gut system evolved within 13 million years from such
assumed jelly- or worm-like ancestors. The 13 million years represent
the time span from the Ediacaran BST-localities 550 million years ago to
the oldest Rusophycus traces 537 million years ago. Commenter Roy did not understand either my argument or the Daley article (also see Bechly 2018). Unfortunately, such an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect is all too commonly found among the most vocal critics of intelligent design on the Internet.
Meanwhile, a very active atheist commenter and anti-ID activist,
writing under the pseudonym Rumraket, suggested that dog breeds qualify
because they look so different (just think of a Pug and an Irish Setter)
and originated within a few thousand years. However, there are of
course two major problems with this preposterous claim:
The differences in size, shape, and fur of dog breeds
are not at all differences in body plan but just simple variations
within the same species based on phenotypic plasticity. No organisms
with a different body plan would be able to interbreed and produce
fertile offspring.
The rapid changes in appearance are based on
human breeding, which is a teleologically guided process and thus an
example of intelligent design. No comparable variations exist in any
wild canine species.
Commenter Roy suggested that otters and ferrets should meet the challenge because they diverged “just over 10mya.” According to TimeTree.org, otters (genus Lutra) and ferrets (genus Mustela)
diverged an estimated 17.5 million years ago. And of course, they do
not even remotely exhibit anything like different body plans. Commenter
Matthew Dickau in the same thread predicts that I will likely reject the
examples as not different enough. Yup, that is exactly what I do,
because they aren’t. Actually, they are still very similar even though
they had more than triple the time available that separates pakicetids
and earliest pelagicetid whales. The fact that none of the biologists
at Peaceful Science, who definitely should know better than “30-year veteran Roy,” objected to this ludicrous example is very telling indeed.
But enough of this. Let’s move on to a more interesting claim that
the challenge has been met. Has it? Spoiler alert: no, it hasn’t!
This more serious contender was suggested by botanist Arthur G. Hunt,
a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Kentucky
and one of the most active commenters at Peaceful Science. He mentions the fascinating case of a group of plants called the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance. They comprise 33 species in the three genera Argyroxiphium, Dubautia, and Wilkesia, which are endemic to the Hawaiian Islands (Carr 1985).
They form a monophyletic group (clade) within the sunflower family
Asteraceae, and are believed to have colonized Hawaii about 5 million
years ago with a single pioneer species of tarweed from California that
then quickly radiated into differently adapted species (Baldwin et al. 1990; Baldwin & Sanderson 1998; Barrier et al. 2001; Landis 2018). These species exhibit a surprising diversity of phenotypes and, especially in the genus Dubautia,
we even find very different growth forms such as cushion plants, mat
plants, rosette plants, subshrubs, shrubs, trees, and lianas or vines (Baldwin & Robichaux 1995; Baldwin 1997; Baldwin & Sanderson 1998). Therefore, they are considered one of the most important examples of adaptive radiation in the plant kingdom (Purugganan & Robichaux 2005; Blonder et al. 2016).
Professor Hunt’s claim is simple and seductive: the Hawaiian Sword
Alliance allegedly developed very different body plans within 5 million
years and thus perfectly meets my challenge. Does it? Not really, and
here is why.
A minor quibble concerns the dating of the radiation, which proved to
be tricky in the absence of a fossil record. The current estimates rest
on multiple assumptions concerning the phylogenetic relationship,
paleoclimate, and paleogeography (Landis et al. 2018),
which introduces considerable uncertainty. The fact that other
radiations on Hawaii are much older than the estimate for Silverswords (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998),
should at least raise some doubts concerning the reliability of this
estimate. After all, the Kure Atoll, the oldest island of the
archipelago was already formed 29 million years ago. Nevertheless, this
issue is of minor importance, and we can grant the current consensus
dating of 5.1-5.2 million years (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998; Landis et al. 2018) for the sake of the argument.
A more important point is the fact that the differences among the
species of Hawaiian Silverswords are all related to different growth
forms and allometric shifts of already existing structures. Even though
the differences appear superficially striking, they do not involve any
novel body plans (i.e., no new proteins, new tissues, or new organs).
Therefore, the radiation of Hawaiian Silverswords is not comparable
to major body plan transitions such as from “worm” to trilobite, from
terrestrial quadruped to marine whale, or from hair-like dino-fuzz to
pennaceous feathers, etc. If the different growth forms of Hawaiian
Silverswords really represented different body plans, they would not
have been classified in the same family and subfamily as their
continental tarweed relatives, and, in the case of Dubautia,
even within the same genus, at least not prior to the cladistic
revolution in the 1970s when typological thinking still prevailed in
biological systematics.
The second crucial issue is phenotypic plasticity: On the University of Hawaii Botany website about the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance you will find photos of very different pincussion-like and shrub/tree-like growth forms within the same species, Dubautia waialealae. A very similar variability is found in Dubautia laxa,
for which “it is unclear if the recognized subspecies represent unique
evolutionary entities or if the ecological and morphological diversity
within this group is a product of recurrent local adaptation or
phenotypic plasticity” (McGlaughlin & Friar 2011).
This fact alone totally debunks the claim. If such different growth
forms were really comparable to body plan differences bigger than in any
mammals, as Art Hunt claims, this would be as if we were to find a
quadruped with a normal tail and a marine animal with flippers and fluke
as variations within the same species. Of course, such different growth
forms are not comparable to different body plans but just represent phenotypic plasticity that is a common phenomenon in the plant kingdom.
It is of course also true that many of the different phenotypes of
Hawaiian Silverswords do correlate with taxonomic differences in genus
and species (Carr 1985; Blonder et al. 2016: 221). However, the very fact that there are species like Dubautia waialealae with
very different growth forms shows that the same can be reasonably
assumed for the ancestral species prior to the radiation. Such an
ancestral species could have colonized the Hawaiian Islands as early as
29 million years ago when the oldest island (Kure) originated but
certainly much earlier than 5.2 million years (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998).
During the later radiation such ancestral phenotypic plasticity could
become partly stabilized and fixed in different species. This scenario
is strongly supported by the finding that the Hawaiian Silverswords seem
to have originated from a polyploid hybrid (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998; Barrier et al. 1999, 2001; Purugganan & Robichaux 2005), which is known to increase phenotypic plasticity in plants (Weber & D’Antonio 2000; Ainouche & Jenczewski 2010; Te Beest et al. 2012; Cara et al. 2013).
My judgment that these plants do not have very different body plans,
in spite of their often strikingly different growth forms, is also
supported by the fact that they still frequently hybridize without
sterility (Carr & Kyhos 1981, 1986; Carr 1985, 1995; Baldwin et al. 1990; Baldwin 2006).
I can only repeat myself: organisms with different body plans cannot
successfully interbreed. It is a common Darwinian dogma that new body
plans correlate with significant genetic changes in early development
(John & Miklos 1988: 309; Van Valen 1988; Thomson 1992: 111; Arthur 1997: 14+21; Kalinka & Tomancak 2012; Willmore 2012; Meyer 2013), which arguably would prevent any hybridization.
An Avian Example
Since we are talking about Hawaiian island radiations, it may also be
worth mentioning the avian example of the honeycreepers, which is yet
another example for such radiations of “closely related species [that]
are characterized by levels of phenotypic diversity otherwise associated
with higher taxa” (Baldwin et al. 1990). The Hawaiian honeycreepers are
a group of passerine birds endemic to the Hawaii, of which many are
already extinct or critically endangered. They are believed to be most
closely related to the Asian rosefinches of the genus Carpodacus and to have colonized the Hawaiian Islands 5.7–7.2 million years ago (Lerner et al. 2011).
These beautiful birds have very different plumage and very different
beak shapes, from short and thick finch-like beaks to long, thin, and
curved beaks. Might these birds meet the challenge? Again, the answers
must be no, because changes in color pattern and beak shape are not at
all body plan differences. It has been experimentally demonstrated in
the famous Galápagos finches (Abzhanov et al. 2004, 2006; Lawson & Petren 2017)
that very simple genetic switches are responsible for modification of
beak shape. Mainly two simple genes, BMP4 and Calmodulin, control all
three dimensions of the bird’s beak. The same certainly also applies to
the very different beaks of the Hawaiian honeycreepers, as well as to
their different colors.
Similar arguments could be made about the radiation of cichlid fish
in the East African Lake Malawi, which “constitute the most extensive
recent vertebrate adaptive radiation” (Malinsky et al. 2018).
Within about 4 million years, this radiation produced quite
different-looking animals in terms of size, shape, color, and behavior (Schedel et al. 2019), but again no new body plans. These popular ornamental fish are still very similar genetically and often hybridize (Kuraku & Meyer 2008).
Even Young Earth Creationists do not deny that neo-Darwinian mechanisms
may quickly change such simple traits and explain fast speciation, and
neither do I.
To be clear: The rejection of these examples is neither moving the
goalposts nor committing the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. They simply do
not meet the condition of different body plans. It should not be too
difficult to realize that quantitative modifications and variations in
size, shape, color, behavior, or growth form are not the same thing as
the de novo origin of totally new organ systems such as the
counter-current heat exchange system in whales or the origin of all the
organs necessary to make an arthropod from a worm-like ancestor. If
Darwinists should find something significantly better than Silverswords
or dog breeds, I will happily be the first to recognize a successful
response. But of course, even if such a single example were to
be found, it would not be sufficient to remove the general problem of a
clear pattern of big changes in short time being ubiquitous in the
fossil record but not in the present fauna. This pattern is undeniable
and requires an explanation. Anyway, my challenge still stands and has
not yet been met. Try again and try harder, and next time also try not
to misrepresent the argument!
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On a new episode of ID the Future, intelligent design pioneer
William Dembski tells the story of his rocky journey into and out of
higher education, the reasons for his sabbatical from the ID movement,
his recent success as an entrepreneur, and his return to ID work. Along
the way Dembski bats down a mistaken rumor about his sabbatical. The
occasion for his conversation with host Casey Luskin is the recent
anthology Dembski and Luskin contributed to and helped edit, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
