A Gap to wide?

 How Darwin and Wallace Split over the Human Mind

Neil Thomas

Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker begins with the grand claim that “our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but … it is a mystery no longer because it is solved, Darwin and Wallace solved it.” Leaving to one side the fact that this statement is a prime example of what writer and satirist Tom Wolfe has dubbed the temptation to “cosmogonism — the compulsion to find the ever-elusive Theory of Everything.”1 The statement is, at best, only half true. For Alfred Russel Wallace as early as the mid 1860s had parted company with Charles Darwin on the subject of the human mind, with its staggering complexity and unique language facility. For him, on more mature reflection, no simple ape-to-human progression was any longer tenable and he could no longer assent to the ontological equivalence of humans and nonhuman animals proposed by Darwin — and later subjected to a reductio ad absurdum by the philosopher Peter Singer, best known for his Animal Liberation (1975) and for his (seriously proposed) advocacy for a normalization of sexual relations between humans and animals.

Marvelously Free of Racism

Wallace had given much thought to his change of heart. Marvelously free of any racist prejudice even at the height of the colonial era, he had noted in his more than a decade of fieldwork in far-flung locations of the globe that primitive tribes were intellectually the equals of Europeans, even if not (yet) their equals at the technological level. “Savages” were, however, required to operate only in the context of simple activities where their great brainpower was redundant given the simplicities of their daily rounds. So, what was the point of their great mental powers and, more importantly, how had it evolved? After all, natural selection would not have been “called on” to enable them to perform cognitively challenging tasks for which there was presently no need. By extension, what was the survival value of musical and mathematical abilities for Europeans? These were patently not brute survival skills. How could they have been promoted by natural selection which favors only immediate utility since, as Darwin himself repeatedly stated, it had no power of foresight? Wallace eventually answered that question (to his own satisfaction) by claiming that “an influx of a higher life” had supervened to accompany the arrival of Homo sapiens on the world’s stage — a volte-face which disappointed Darwin and made Wallace the target of some opprobrium from Darwin’s supporters. 

Wallace and Natural Theology

In his older years Wallace came to reject natural selection as an explanation for the unfurling of all human and even animal life. By then he had transitioned towards the espousal of a form of natural theology; but his initial and gravest misgiving in the 1860s was focused four-square on the mystery of how the human brain could have evolved according to Darwinian lines of explanation. For Wallace it had become so clear that an additional power must have played a role that he thenceforth felt constrained to bid adieu to material modes of explanation. Rather like the adherents of the modern intelligent design trend, Wallace could not see how what is now termed “irreducible complexity” could have been thrown together by the only marginally discriminating forces of natural selection.

It is not difficult to sympathize with Wallace’s doubts. As Michael Ruse recently put it, “mind is the apotheosis of final cause, drenched in purpose … irreducibly teleological.”2 At the same time, however, Ruse puzzlingly and to me somewhat contradictorily contends, “Why should the evolutionist be expected to explain the nature of consciousness? Surely it can be taken as a given, and the evolutionist can move on … leave the discussion at that.”3 Wallace was certainly not prepared to accept such cherry-picking evasions and “leave the discussion at that.” And despite Dawkins’s transparent attempt to airbrush Wallace’s “apostasy” out of the historical record, the latter’s century-and-a half old question about natural selection’s inability to create the human mind has been maintained as a live issue by professional philosophers.

On Darwinian Principles

Wallace’s point was reprised by philosopher Anthony O’Hear who objected that evolutionary theory was inadequate to account for the emergence of the human mental and moral faculties. On Darwinian principles there was simply no source from which human morality and other higher faculties could have originated (all the less so if one believes that we as a species represent essentially a congeries of “selfish genes”):

How is it conceivable that consciousness should develop from unconscious precursors? There is no explanation to date and only those who believe that the difference between a cabbage or an automaton and a sentient human being is of small account will minimize the significance of this incomprehension.4

In other words, Darwinism simply cannot explain human nature to anything like its fullest extent. Both O’Hear and philosopher Richard Rorty have pointed to the plethora of “non-Darwinian motivations” in humankind, including that non-selfish moral compass which exists in all bar the most abject psychopaths. Hence O’Hear attacked the argument of Richard Dawkins when the latter insisted it was possible for humans to resist their selfish biological endowment in order to achieve more morally accountable human societies. Such moral resistance would not be logically possible if one holds to the strict doctrine of biological determinism. For given such a scenario, what resources would people have to draw on in order to escape the adamantine bonds of the deterministic straitjacket they were born into? There is then clearly a fatal logical contradiction in claiming that ethical behavior could be salvaged from the unyielding toils of biological determinism.5

As Anthony Flew once put it, “No eloquence can move pre-programmed robots.”6 It is therefore difficult to make a rationally justified case for the human mind having had the form of evolutionary history commonly imputed to it. Furthermore, the philosophical conclusion towards which Wallace was an early contributor has also come to be buttressed by an empirical discipline unknown in Wallace’s time — that of neuroscience, which throws valuable light on this philosophical issue, even, I would suggest, for those who publicly disdain the discipline of philosophy.

Philosophy and Neuroscience

Neuroscientist Donald Hoffman, who once worked with DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick in attempting to crack the problem of human consciousness, recently conceded that the nature and origins of consciousness remain “completely unsolved” and may best be termed an eternal mystery.7 The brusque and decidedly no-nonsense Crick was in the event fated to meet his Waterloo when it came to the subject of consciousness, explains Hoffman. Crick had at first attempted to explain it somewhat airily as nothing but an “emergent” property which “naturally” arose when matter reaches a certain level of complexity. However, he was at length obliged to withdraw that vacuous contention, conceding that there is nothing about conscious experience that is relatable to the physical stuff or material of the brain. Consciousness simply lies beyond our empirical perception and cognitive reach.

Hoffman develops the point further: “At the most microcosmic level the brain consists of subatomic particles which have qualities like mass, spin and charge. There is nothing about these qualities that relates to the qualities associated with consciousness such as thought, taste, pain or anxiety.”8 To suggest otherwise, continues Hoffman, would be like asserting that numbers might emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb. The bottom line seems to be that we are not only ignorant but, alas, prostrate in our ignorance of the brain’s arcana.9 Theoretically, of course, there may yet emerge an as yet undiscovered materialist explanation for the brain and human consciousness. But to date we must conclude that today’s science cannot with integrity support such a claim on the evidence presently available.

Both Hoffman and Crick were finally forced to conclude that all purely physicalist theories of consciousness had failed to provide illumination and that the state of consciousness could not be explained in neurological terms, a conclusion powerfully endorsed for more than three decades by distinguished British neuroscientist Raymond Tallis in his long opposition to what he terms “Darwinitis.”10 In short, consciousness is simply not derivable from physical laws but remains an inexplicable phenomenon of the human endowment which we are simply left to wonder at. To suggest otherwise, writes philosopher David Bentley Hart, is to fall into the trap of a “misapplication of quantitative and empirical terms to unquantifiable and intrinsically non-empirical realities.”11 This indicates that vague, would-be Darwinian attempts to imagine consciousness arising as an “epiphenomenon” of other physiological processes are misconceived. In fact, not being able to identify the precise biological pathway leading to the claimed “epiphenomena” disqualifies this contention as a bona fide theory and relegates it to the status of little more than magical thinking (which I define as postulating an effect without an identifiable agent or cause).

Deconstructing Darwinian Postulates

It cannot be denied that there are philosophers content to follow the Darwinian line and even to become Darwinian apologists (and indeed cheerleading eulogists — such as Daniel Dennett). But there are very many more who feel a vocational duty to deconstruct Darwinian postulates and unmask their debatable pretensions. Remarkably, Richard Spilsbury felt so strongly on this point that he took to task an older generation of philosophers for being cowed by materialist confirmation bias into not addressing the problem. His remarks were directed at the logical positivist philosophers, in the orbit of Sir Alfred Ayer and his famous Language, Truth and Logic of 1936, for what he saw as their culpable silence on Darwinism.

As a matter of historical record, no group of thinkers was more inclined to denounce propositions for being “non-sense” (in the philosophical sense of not having sufficient logical stringency to merit serious discussion) than the logical positivists. Yet no criticism of Darwinism issued from within that group. Spilsbury’s explanation for the omission seems all too plausible: “It is rather surprising that they [Darwinists] have largely been left alone by logical positivists in search of new demolition work. Perhaps neo-Darwinism has been saved from this [demolition] by its essential contribution to the world view that positivists share” 12 (i.e., materialism). Given that the underlying aim of the Ayerian philosophy was broadly speaking to make the world a safe place for positivism, by discouraging any form of mysticism or metaphysics, I find Spilsbury’s explanation entirely convincing. Nonsense can apparently be exempted from critique when it supports the materialist cause. 

It is uncertain how future generations will react to theories without evidential foundation, simply at the paternalistic direction of scientists riding high on materialist hobbyhorses. Common experience suggests that many persons today are inclined to resist unsubstantiable theories in favor of their own tried-and-tested observations of reality. And the rise of intelligent design thought may be understood as a manifestation of this more precise, empirical mode of thinking. It cannot therefore be stressed strongly enough that inferences to a designing power (of some sort) is not, pace Dawkins, always anchored in an adherence to a particular revealed faith. People now are considerably less swayed by deference and 19th-century fideism (believing on trust). In fact, the (historically) paradoxical truth is that for growing numbers of people today it is science that points in the direction of an “unmoved mover” more than any “positive” or revealed religion — hence Anthony Flew’s well-publicized defection from non-theistic rationalism to a form of deism which he dubbed his “pilgrimage of reason.”

Inference to the Best Explanation

In that remarkable philosophic odyssey, the erstwhile president of the British Rationalist Society finally arrived at an understanding of the world as disclosed to him by natural theology, the multitudinous signatures of which he interpreted as empirical markers for a design which, pace Lucretius, David Hume, Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Lawrence Krauss could not have arisen “autonomously” without a designer. For Flew as a professional logician, such a position simply represented the inference to the best explanation. He came to reject chance in the sense of the fortuitous configurations and re-configurations of matter postulated by Lucretius (and, mutatis mutandis, by Darwin with reference to the organic world). He found his a more rational explanation than that offered by those of Darwin’s intellectual heirs who seem to be more interested in cooking the books to protect materialist assumptions from theistic incursions than in facing up to the inadequacies of a science which dramatically contradicts their own philosophical case. For such ideologically tainted denials can sometimes seem to represent little more than a covert desire to throw a protective cordon sanitaire around the theory of a purely material genesis for the biosphere and so stifle further debate.

In Wallace’s Footsteps

The acceptance and promotion of what is strictly speaking non-discussible nonsense (in the Ayerian sense)13 by groups of people supposedly devoted to the truth wherever it leads provides a disquieting specter of intellectual integrity playing second fiddle to ideological commitment. In fact, the attempt by more doctrinaire scientific materialists to bounce lay persons into gainsaying their own rational judgments results in a truly incongruous situation. That is, when big science brings forward a host of findings which might most fairly be glossed as prima facie proofs of a higher agency, but thereupon proceeds to deny the most intuitively logical import of its own discoveries, unbiased men and women prove unsurprisingly resistant. That resistance arises from their ability to appreciate the true existential implications of said findings and their entirely consequential determination to cry “Foul!” to the scientists for trying to mislead them. Such persons are in effect following in Wallace’s footsteps, without of course in most cases being fully aware of the historical recapitulation. And this in turn furnishes a very good argument why Wallace should not be erased from the Darwinian narrative. Indeed, welcome historical revisions have been set in train in the last decade, much of that from the pen of Michael Flannery.14

What is impressive about Wallace’s testimony is the without-fear-or-favor intellectual independence it reveals. He suffered no disabling sense of self-consciousness about doing his U-turn from his earlier opinions. He simply accepted the unexceptional fact that persons’ opinions will change over time according to how they come to revisit evidence on more mature reflection. Wallace was, as Frank Turner once put it, primarily a disinterested student of life with no interest in orthodox posturing, even after numerous honors had been bestowed upon him later in life.15

Darwin, on the other hand, found himself in a very different situation, being oppressively aware of the luster of the family name, especially as it pertained to his grandfather, Erasmus. His insistence that his theory had to be true for the sake of personal and family honor may do much to explain his state of obdurate denial when coming up against the many counter-indications to it which he encountered, even from close colleagues such as Thomas Huxley. His intransigence in facing opposition seems to have stemmed from a form of duelist’s point d’honneur. This attitude of mind had already been detectable in the way that he had worked at a break-neck pace to produce the manuscript of the Origin for publication when, after receiving Wallace’s famous Ternate Letter in 1858, he sensed a competitor snapping at his heels.16 It was clearly important to him to be able to have the Darwin imprimatur embossed on his evolutionary ideas. In that way he could both underscore his own status amongst his peers and also be seen to be consummating the glorious tradition of evolutionary speculation inaugurated by his grandfather. For Darwin was for all his adult life concerned with a peculiarly familial construction of reality the truth-value of which he never questioned. He framed his life’s work as a consummation of his grandfather’s endeavors to prove evolution — which was why he was so gratified to be able to advance what he took to be a mechanism to account for evolutionary ideas first advanced by Erasmus Darwin. 

No Intellectual Pedigree

By contrast, Wallace had no intellectual pedigree to live up to. Natural selection was only one part of his life as a naturalist and intellectual17 and he was well able to keep things in perspective. That was all the more so since he had no grand family tradition to live up to. Family piety was simply not a consideration for him since his grandfather had not been a famous naturalist pushing the envelope ever further in quest of illumination of the unknown. For that reason, I find that there is more trust to be placed in Wallace’s cool-headed testimony than there is in Darwin’s desperate denials that there “could be any other explanation.” Wallace was his own man and this bestowed on him the inner strength to follow the evidence where it led him without feeling the need to trim his position in apprehension of how others might react. He seems not to have felt anything like the need shown by Darwin to impress public opinion or pose as a Great Man of Science. And this, I would argue, makes his testimony concerning the fatal weakness of the theory of natural selection all the worthier of heed.

Notes

Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016), p. 20.

On Purpose (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2018), p. 182.

On Purpose, p. 182.

Beyond Evolution Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Speculation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), p.65.

Beyond Evolution, pp. 213-14.

There IS a God (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 81.

Donald D. Hoffman, The Case against Reality: How Evolution hid the Truth from our Eyes (London: Penguin, 2020), pp. 1-21, citation p. 6.

The Case against Reality, pp. 60-61.

See also on this general point Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World (London: Watkins, 2018).

See for instance Tallis’s Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham: Acumen, 2011).

Atheistic Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 2009), p. 7.

Providence Lost, p. 21.

I repeat that I am using this term in the strict philosophical sense of a proposition admitting of no form of rational analysis which could form a legitimate part of discursive practice.

See his Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology (Alabama: Alabama UP, 2018). 

Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1974), pp. 72-3.

Wallace had dispatched a letter to Down House laying out very similar evolutionary ideas to those hit upon by Darwin himself, and this essentially bounced Darwin into publishing his Origin of Species only one year later (on November 24, 1859).

Wallace lived well into the early 20th century when he made a considerable name for himself by his contributions to cosmology and in a broader sense to debates in the capacity of what we would now term a public intellectual.

Lives not worth living?

 Canadian Bill to Allow Euthanasia of Dementia Patients

Wesley J. Smith

The Netherlands and Belgium already permit people diagnosed with dementia to sign an advance directive ordering themselves killed when they become incapacitated. This has even resulted in one case in which such a patient was euthanized despite resisting — and the government responded by changing the law to enable death-doctors to drug and euthanize such patients without permission.

Now Canada — which last year greatly loosened the criteria for euthanasia — may be on the verge of taking the same path. A bill has been filed in the Senate that would permit patients to order themselves killed without final consent if they become mentally incapacitated. From S-248:

For the purposes of subparagraph (3.‍2)‍(a)‍(ii), a person may waive the need for final consent [to receiving lethal jab] if

(a) they made a declaration in writing that a medical practitioner or nurse practitioner may administer a substance to cause that person’s death should the person lose the capacity to consent to receiving medical assistance in dying and be suffering conditions related to their serious and incurable illness, disease or disability that are identified clearly in the declaration and can be observed by the medical practitioner or nurse practitioner;

(b) the declaration was made after a diagnosis of a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability by a medical practitioner, but no more than five years have elapsed since the declaration was made;

(c) in the declaration, the person consented to the administration by a medical practitioner or nurse practitioner of a substance to cause their death if they are suffering from the conditions listed in the declaration and have lost their capacity to consent to receiving medical assistance in dying prior to that point;

(d) the declaration was witnessed by two independent witnesses to confirm that it was made voluntarily and not as a result of external pressure and each witness signed and dated it . . .

If the patient resists, the killing is not supposed to take place. Right. As though the person would know what was happening.

Once the seeds of euthanasia are planted in a culture, it grows like weeds.

Cross-posted at The Corner.

The resistance?

 Brian Miller: The Intelligent Design Underground

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Sarah Chaffee talks with physicist and Center for Science & Culture Research Coordinator Brian Miller about the growing intelligent design underground. Miller says that as many as one-quarter of Harvard post-docs in relevant fields privately express sympathy for ID. And more and more scientists who don’t agree with ID are at least standing up against common sound-bite misrepresentations. In their conversation Miller also reviews what he describes as three “major pillars” of evolutionary theory that in recent years have been “dramatically shaken.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Primeval A.I?

 How Brains Use Data Compression to Get Things Right

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

We are used to thinking of data compression in connection with computers but a recent study with mice shows that brains compress data too. The researchers ask us to imagine a dilemma from an

early video game:

If you were a kid in the 80s, or are a fan of retro video games, then you must know Frogger. The game can be quite a challenge. To win, you must first survive a stream of heavy traffic, only to then narrowly escape oblivion by zig-zagging across speeding wooden logs. How does the brain know what to focus on within all this mess?

CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN, “THE BRAIN APPLIES DATA COMPRESSION FOR DECISION-MAKING” AT EUREKALERT (JUNE 6, 2022)

Driving in snarled, heavy traffic can feel like that…

Neuroscientists are well aware that, when processing data from our senses, our brains routinely block out information that is irrelevant to an immediate, pressing problem. A person who suddenly smells smoke from the kitchen might barely hear the ring tone of an anxiously awaited, important phone call just coming in.

Priority Processing

But are the cognitive areas of our brains similarly adapted to priority processing? It can’t be done simply by simply blocking out irrelevant signals. If it’s cognitive, there aren’t any signals. The current research, using mice, points to a different technique for focused cognitive decision-making:

A study published today (June 6th) in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience provides a possible solution: data compression. ‘Compressing the representations of the external world is akin to eliminating all irrelevant information and adopting temporary ‘tunnel vision’ of the situation”, said one of the study’s senior authors Christian Machens, head of the Theoretical Neuroscience lab at the Champalimaud Foundation in Portugal.

CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN, “THE BRAIN APPLIES DATA COMPRESSION FOR DECISION-MAKING” AT EUREKALERT (JUNE 6, 2022); THE PAPER REQUIRES A FEE OR SUBSCRIPTION BUT YOU CAN READ THE PREPRINT FOR FREE.

So how did the mice show this?:

The mice were challenged with estimating if two tones were separated by an interval longer than 1.5 seconds while researchers recorded the activity of dopamine neurons, known to play a key role in learning the value of actions.

“If the animal wrongly estimated the duration of the interval on a given trial, then the activity of these neurons would produce a “prediction error” that should help improve performance on future trials,” Christian Machens, one of the study’s senior authors, said in a news release. 

ADAM SCHRADER, “BRAIN APPLIES ‘DATA COMPRESSION’ WHEN MAKING DECISIONS, STUDY FINDS” AT UPI (JUNE 6, 2022)

Of course, the mice were was rewarded for getting the answer right.

The researchers noted in a preprint of the study that the mice almost always made the correct choice, but that the results became more variable the closer they were to the 1.5-second target. Previous research has shown that animals estimate their own ability to correctly classify different stimuli.

ADAM SCHRADER, “BRAIN APPLIES ‘DATA COMPRESSION’ WHEN MAKING DECISIONS, STUDY FINDS” AT UPI (JUNE 6, 2022)

Loss but Not Failure

And where does compressed data come in? Greater compression resulted in some information loss (lossy compression) but not total failure:

The team discovered that only models with a compressed task representation could account for the data. “The brain seems to eliminate all irrelevant information. Curiously, it also apparently gets rid of some relevant information, but not enough to take a real hit on how much reward the animal collects overall. It clearly knows how to succeed in this game”, Machens said.

CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN, “THE BRAIN APPLIES DATA COMPRESSION FOR DECISION-MAKING” AT EUREKALERT (JUNE 6, 2022)

Eating very much concentrates the mouse mind; we just didn’t know that the mice use a technique somewhat like AI to do it.

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

Another look at Darwinism's OOL problem.

 Topoisomerase Origins Defy Darwinian Explanations

David Coppedge

When Discovery Institute released the new animation of Topoisomerase II back in February, evolutionists could have sought to refute it. They could have submitted detailed accounts of how this multi-talented tool arose by a Darwinian process from simpler ancestors. Instead, they turned on their usual speculation machine.

A Review of Topoisomerases

Also in February, Yves Pommier from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and three colleagues wrote a review article in Nature Reviews Molecular Biology about “Human topoisomerases and their roles in genome stability and organization.” This team no doubt wrote before the animation came out, and likely were unaware of it. Their review does not address origins; there is no mention of evolution, natural selection, or common ancestry. Neither is there any indication of intelligent design, although they mention molecular machines and motors six times.

First, let us marvel at the ubiquity and versatility of these molecular machines. It raises the question of whether any incipient life form could do without them, because even RNA molecules are subject to topological problems. An unstable genome is a dead genome.

DNA topoisomerases are present in all domains of life to resolve a wide variety of topological problems arising from the length of the human double-helix DNA polymer (about 3 × 109 bp) as it is folded, bent and highly compacted into the cell nucleus while remaining accessible to RNA and DNA polymerases. In addition, each human cell contains 100–1,000 copies of circular, ~16,000 bp mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), as well as long and folded RNAs that are even more abundant than DNA and present in all subcellular compartments. [Emphasis added.]

There are six known topoisomerases in humans. “We discuss their specific and overlapping roles as regulators of nucleic acid topology and metabolism,” they begin, also indicating that failure in those roles often lead to cancer and other diseases (see Table 1 for a frightening list of syndromes caused by topoisomerase malfunctions: seizures, retardation, autism, premature aging, various cancers, and more).

To manage the topology of the long, folded and intertwined DNA and RNA polymers that are attached to scaffolding structures and are metabolically and dynamically processed by large molecular machines (such as transcription, DNA replication, chromatin remodelling and DNA repair complexes), human cells use their six topoisomerases often redundantly, but also in specific ways depending on the topological problem, the surrounding cellular structures and the differentiation status of the cell. This section outlines topological problems and the molecular solutions provided by each of the topoisomerases.TOPS Are Always Needed

Topological problems are most likely to occur when the polymerases and helicases attach to DNA and RNA during key operations: transcription, replication, and chromatin remodeling among them. Operations that involve loop extrusion create risks for knots, over-twists, under-twists, catenanes, and other forms of torsional strain. These can lead to crossovers of the strands that can result in improper joining. Even single-stranded RNAs are subject to distortions in the genetic sequence. Operations that bring promoters and enhancers together, which can be considerable distances apart, can also lead to chromatin loops that require topoisomerase activity. 

The six TOP machines are well equipped to handle specific emergencies, and they do not work in isolation; additional repair enzymes and cofactors must be at hand in all parts of the cell.

Human topoisomerases and the associated repair enzymes tyrosyl-DNA phosphodiesterases (TDPs; TDP1 and TDP2) are located both in the nucleus and in mitochondria; in addition, cytoplasmic RNAs are handled by TOP3B and TDP2.

Figures 1-3 in the paper show simplified diagrams of some common topological problems and illustrate which TOP machines work on them. The modes of action, though, as illustrated in the DI animation, are not discussed in detail in the review. The authors do speak of a “fine-tuned balance” between TopIIA and condensin during mitosis, pointing to another design requirement: just-in-time delivery of parts, reminiscent of assembly lines and operating rooms. Throughout replication and condensation of chromosomes during mitosis, the right TOP machines need to present at the right times and in the right quantities. Checkpoints ensure these requirements are met. 

All mutations discussed in the review are disease-causing if not life threatening. Darwinians would wait in vain for a rare beneficial mutation, say from a UV ray, to “help” in any way. And if it occurred in a somatic cell instead of a germ cell, it would be but a brief and quickly forgotten stroke of luck.

Topoisomerases are magicians of DNA and RNA, and their full range of functions remain to be discovered.

How Can Evolutionists Darwinize All This?

Considering these facts, only a bold (or reckless?) individual would attempt to account for the origin of the topoisomerase system by unguided natural processes. One such attempt appeared in bioRxiv by Guglielmini and five co-authors, “Viral origin of eukaryotic type IIA DNA topoisomerases.” They start by recognizing the problem:

Type II DNA topoisomerases of the family A (Topo IIA) are present in all bacteria (DNA gyrase) and eukaryotes. In eukaryotes, they play a major role in transcription, DNA replication, chromosome segregation and modulation of chromosome architecture. The origin of eukaryotic Topo IIA remains mysterious since they are very divergent from their bacterial homologues and have no orthologues in Archaea.

And so, onward they proceed into the darkness of the mystery, looking for Darwin’s Cheshire-cat smile in the trees. But their entire approach is to look for homology between Type IIA topoisomerase genes and DNA sequences in certain viruses. 

To elucidate the origin of the eukaryotic Topo IIA, we performed in-depth phylogenetic analyses combining viral and cellular Topo IIA homologs. Topo IIA encoded by bacteria and eukaryotes form two monophyletic groups nested within Topo IIA encoded by Caudoviricetes and Nucleocytoviricota, respectively…. The topology of our tree suggests that the eukaryotic Topo IIA was probably acquired from an ancestral member of the Nucleocytoviricota of the class Megaviricetes, before the emergence of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). This result further highlights a key role of these viruses in eukaryogenesis and suggests that early proto-eukaryotes used a Topo IIB instead of a Topo IIA for solving their DNA topological problems.

The homology argument, as shown in our video Long Story Short: Homology, is a circular fallacy: “Homology can’t be used as evidence for evolution because it assumes the very thing it’s trying to prove.” There’s also a personification fallacy in that last sentence. What in a proto-eukaryote, if such a thing existed, could decide it had a topological problem and would know how to latch onto a Topo IIB to solve it? And where did that handy tool come from? 

With the root of the eukaryotic tree being still debated (Burki et al. 2019), it is difficult to propose a scenario for the evolution of Topo IIAs in eukaryotes. From our phylogenetic analyses, one cannot exclude that LECA already contained more than one Topo IIA.

Needless to say, their “scenario” presupposes the existence of Topo IIB and the viral genome to begin with. Some origin story! Begin with the thing already existing.

The eukaryotic molecular fabric appears to be a melting pot of proteins that originated in Nucleocytoviricota (mainly Megaviricetes), those that emerged de novo in the eukaryotic stem branch, proteins inherited from the bacterial ancestor of mitochondria and chloroplasts, and proteins that had ancestors in Archaea (in two domains scenarios) or in the common ancestor of Archaea and eukaryotes (in three domains scenario). Sorting out the viral component of our eukaryotic ancestors is now a major task in understanding eukaryogenesis.

This glimpse into the mental perspiration of Darwinians to account for the origin of exquisitely orchestrated factories of molecular machines serves a purpose other than entertainment. It shows that intelligent design remains the only serious contender for explaining the origin of life. We just need to get the word out. Sharing our animation on social media is a good way to participate.

Information driven evolution V. Evolution driven information?

 Here’s a New Evolutionary Theory Based on Information

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

One reason that the theory of evolution is controversial is the claim that sheer randomness produces information. That is, randomly generated events are somehow selected for survival and continuing complex development (Darwinian evolution). The theory is understandably popular because, if correct, it would answer a great many questions. The problem is, we do not see randomly generated events producing complex mechanisms in the life around us. We are asked, however, to believe that this modern synthesis (MS) is true over the grand sweep of evolutionary time.

The Third Way

Over the years, it has become evident that evolution happens in a number of ways, including horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species, epigenetic inheritance of genes that changed during our parents’ lifetimes, and convergent evolution — where vastly different life forms end up with very similar mechanisms as a result of pursuing a common goal. Efforts to incorporate these processes into evolutionary theory are sometimes called the the Third Way or extended evolutionary synthesis (EES).

A new model of evolution relies on information theory, which is itself interesting because information is governed by different rules from matter and energy. For example, it is created by ruling out possibilities, it is relational, not causal, and it is not reduced by being shared. It is also immaterial. For example, Einstein’s bomb equation, e = mc2, had a huge impact on the world but by itself, it is an immaterial idea.

Information can be stripped of all matter and appear in a variety of media: We could phone and tell you the winning lottery number or send you an email or a letter about it or discuss it on radio or TV. Vastly different material media; same information.

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Different Questions, Different Answers

Reinterpreting evolution as a transfer of information will lead to both different questions and different answers.

The authors of a recent open access paper in the journal BioSystems, marine researcher Rasmus Skern-Mauritzen and forester Thomas Nygaard Mikkelsen, make clear that they understand information to be immaterial. Here is the Summary of their Information Continuum Model of evolution:

Summary

1. Information is immaterial by nature but must have a physical form to exist.

2. Inherited information may be found in many forms.

3. The forms have divergent properties and information may over time change its physical form.

4. We suggest the term ‘hereditome’ to refer to the sum of inherited information and its forms.

5. The substrate of natural selection is immaterial information.

6. The Information Continuum Model is a simple heuristic model that allows evolution and natural selection to be investigated without conceptual restrictions imposed by the properties of individual hereditome components.

7. The conceptual nature of Information Continuum Model enables it to serve as an interdisciplinary platform for collaboration between natural and social sciences.

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

Daring to doubt Darwin: in the beginning.

 Meet Samuel Haughton, Darwin’s First Scientific Critic

Neil Thomas

The first unofficial critic of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was Whitwell Elwin, editor of the journal Quarterly Review, selected by Darwin’s publishing house to vet his manuscript in advance of possible publication. Elwin memorably advised against publication on the grounds that the work was “a wild and foolish piece of imagination” whose author would have been better advised to omit his speculative flights and confine himself to the subject of pigeons. Elwin’s magnificent bathos was in the event disregarded by the press’s trustees who went on to publish regardless. However, Elwin’s negative verdict was subsequently supported in many essentials by the great majority of formal reviewers, as David Hull has documented.1 Yet neither Elwin nor the official reviewers were the first to pass judgement on Darwin’s ideas, for they had all been preceded by an Irish academic: Professor Samuel Haughton.

Awful Force

Haughton has been down on us with awful force. 2

CHARLES DARWIN

In his autobiography Darwin gives a short mention of Haughton,3 a professor of geology at Dublin, who had already heard of the pre-publication airing accorded to the views of both Darwin and Wallace at the fabled meeting of the Linnaean Society organized by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker in London more than a year before the official publication of the Origin. Darwin reports Haughton’s verdict as having been that “all that was new in there was false, and what was true was old.” This was a painfully honest representation of remarks Haughton really did make to members of the Geological Society of Dublin on February 9, 1859.4 He further developed his comments in an anonymous article written for the 1860 edition of The Natural History Review.5

Taking up Haughton’s point, there is no doubt that many of Darwin’s ideas were old, some ancient. Had Darwin been able to read the ancient writers, writes Rebecca Stott, “he might have recognized in parts of Aristotle’s writings and in corners of Epicurus, Democritus and Empedocles the glimmerings of thoughts and questionings that were remarkably similar to his own.”6 Haughton showed a greater familiarity with ancient writings than Darwin, but had little respect for philosophical speculations he termed puerile or for their authors, whom he deemed “weavers of pleasant webs of fiction.” He showed no more respect for those moderns who resorted to the same sort of speculative habits of thoughts as their remote forbears in ancient Greece and Rome, and who, he wrote, were wont to draw “large conclusions from slender premises.”7

Not Likely to Impress

The idea of variations selected by competition was a commonplace of Victorian thought, not likely when developed in conversation to impress clever men as a dazzling ingenuity. 8

WILLIAM IRVINE

Yet when Haughton wrote that much of Darwin and Wallace’s presentations represented a “truism,” he was referring not so much to the ancients as to more immediate predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries. The term “old” in his usage essentially meant “old hat.” For instance, it was well known that the 18th-century French naturalist Buffon had identified various factors later synthesized and unified by Darwin. These matters of more or less common observation included: life tends to multiply faster than its food supply; there is typically a struggle for existence; nature offsets the effects of its own over-fecundity (by culling); the fittest win out in the competition for limited resources. Such matters were taken for granted by scientists and livestock breeders alike in the following century.

Little wonder that Loren Eiseley observed that Darwin was building on sundry “premonitory beginnings” to bring about a creative synthesis of predecessors’ hints and that “natural selection was in the air, was in a sense demanding to be born.”9The distinguished Victorian writer G. H. Lewes had long since observed that Darwin supplied “an articulate expression to the thought which had been inarticulate in many minds.”10 It was doubtless for that reason that Darwin, after the publication of Origin, had some rather unwelcome accusations of plagiarism leveled at him.

The Pretenders

In the 1860s a number of persons came forward to stake a claim to having discovered the very phenomenon which Darwin always regarded as his own intellectual fiefdom, natural selection. Darwin might have fondly supposed that Wallace was his sole rival, but now others came forward with the ambition of advancing their claims.11 The claims of the Darwinian contenders were extremely modest and uncontroversial compared with those that Darwin was to advance. Take for instance the first of the contenders in chronological ranking, William Wells. In 1813 Wells read out a paper to the Royal Society of London touching on the subject of African ancestry having the advantage of conferring immunity to certain diseases. Some would bear disease better than others, he said. Those would consequently multiply, the others decrease, not only from their inability to combat the disease but also from their disadvantage in contending with their stronger peers. There is little more there than Buffon had advanced, and indeed little that might have displeased Haughton.

The same might be said for commercial horticulturalist Patrick Matthew who put forward his own survival-of-the-fittest idea in an appendix to a somewhat recondite publication called Timber and Naval Arboriculture in 1831:

As Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time’s decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing — either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means of subsistence.12

Matthew expressly stated that the conception of natural selection “came intuitively as a self-evident fact without the effort of concentrated thought.” It had not occurred to him that he had made a great discovery and he clearly saw his perceptions as everyday truisms for persons concerned with growing plants or rearing animals. Such empirically observable phenomena required no special explanation, Matthew stated.

Thomas Malthus

Darwin knew little or nothing of these somewhat obscure pretenders to his crown, but instead paid tribute to the demographer Thomas Malthus for providing him with his vital spark of inspiration. Malthus’s dominant concern was competition between humans for resources to survive, what Herbert Spencer was later to lexicalize as the battle for the survival of the fittest. Reading Malthus’s work on human populations13 out of personal interest, it dawned on Darwin that he might redirect Malthus’s ideas about laissez-faire capitalist societies to the struggle for existence in the wider biological world. Using that analogy, he concluded that

favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work … I saw, on reading Malthus on population, that natural selection was the inevitable result of the rapid increase of all organic beings [… Malthus] gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.14

Malthus’s ideas were largely consistent with what Wells and Matthew had stated and so not startlingly novel. Even Darwin’s son, Francis, feeling the matter to be self-evident, expressed surprise that his father had found his reading of Malthus such a revelation when many others such as Erasmus Darwin, William Paley, and Charles Lyell had already described the same struggle for existence in comparable terms. Friedrich Engels too was unimpressed by the Darwin/Malthus connection, writing that it was not necessary to have consulted Malthus in order to perceive the struggle for existence since this was an idea which cohered effortlessly and intuitively with the social attitudes of the upper classes in Europe. Engels viewed the Malthusian idea as a tacit ratification of the individualist ideology of the arriviste merchants then acquiring a sphere of power in Europe.15 In fact, Malthus’s ideas hit such a chord of recognition that that they were used as leverage to alter the older but more generous Elizabethan Poor Law in Great Britain (under the new law the poor had to compete for work or else be consigned to the workhouse).

Such knowledge as that listed above would doubtless have counted in Haughton’s terms as being “old.” In fact these various disclosures from other contenders coming shortly after the publication of Origin prompted the conclusion that Darwin’s theory “was just as much the discovery of British clergymen, doctors, fruit-farmers and gentlemen-naturalists working away with microscopes in the British provinces.”16 In a limited sense this conclusion is true, but it fails to take account of Darwin’s significant extension and elaboration of his theory into areas which Haughton came to see as being “false” and “contrary to fact.” 

The Formation of New Species

What stands out as being incongruous in Darwin’s response to his reading of Malthus and hence in serious need of further explanation is the single sentence, “The results of this would be the formation of new species.” Malthus was unconcerned with biological matters and had obviously written nothing about the transmutation of species, so that, as it stands, the sentence looks to be an unheralded non sequitur — an idea Darwin chose to tack on rather than a logical entailment or corollary of anything touched upon by Malthus. Whence this anomaly?

The truth of the matter appears to be that Darwin was reading Malthus through spectacles he had “borrowed” from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Charles’s highly elliptical reasoning only becomes clear in the context of that transmutational speculation, going back more than a century, that he was privy to via his grandfather. In that preceding century a number of naturalists had mooted the possibility of one species modulating biologically into another one over vast swathes of time, what Charles’s grandfather called transmutation. His grandson clearly “picked up the ball and ran” with the theory, arguably — to employ a sporting metaphor — beyond the perimeter of the playing field and clean out of the stadium.

Hence the younger Darwin’s (Erasmian) hypothesis was that successful members of any given species would not only become stronger and fitter at the micro level but, at the macro level, might eventually develop to such an extent that they would become (over countless ages) superior forms unrecognizable as having sprung from the older, inferior biological stock. The results of this long process would be nothing less than a series of phylogenetic revolutions (as opposed to that “descent with modifications” which Charles called the process with misleading understatement). By an aggregation of small incremental differences, he proposed, like his grandfather, that this process has resulted in thoroughgoing transformation, starting from microscopic beginnings in the form of unicellular common ancestors, like bacteria, via numberless further stages up to ape-like intermediaries, thence towards the evolution of Homo sapiens. He clearly shared with his free-thinking grandfather the belief that was that this was a more probable route along which the animal world might have developed than the doctrine that all species had been created fully formed by a divine power. 

Haughton, on the other hand, would have none of this. He felt that Darwin had fallen for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: that is, as Haughton phrased it, the delusion that mere succession necessarily implies causation.17

Edward Blyth’s Recantation

It is conspicuous that the one “pretender” who came nearest to the more ambitious claim advanced by Darwin was Edward Blyth, who wrote in the following terms about artificial selection:

When two animals are matched together, each remarkable for a certain peculiarity, no matter how trivial, there is also a decided tendency in nature for that tendency to increase; and if the produce of these animals be set apart, and only those in which the same peculiarity is apparent, be selected to breed from, the next generation will possess it in a still more remarkable degree; and so on, till at length the variety I designate a breed is formed, which may be very unlike the original type… May not, then, a large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common parentage?18

Yet Blyth subsequently retreated from the bold conjecture he advances in the last sentence, realizing that in those circumstances living species would blend into each other in a continual process of hybridization which had never been recorded and was not observable in nature. Had not the 18th century French naturalist Cuvier stated that all animal life could not be fitted into a unilineal ascending system? Diverse animals constituted a bush rather than a ladder since they belonged to distinct groups: vertebrates, molluscs, articulates, radiata, etc. Hence there were many stairways to life rather than one. The molluscan body plan could never “transition” into the vertebrate one because the differences between the two types were insuperable. Thus concluded the French naturalist in what became known as Cuvier’s Law of Correlation. 

Today, biologists use slightly different terminology in pointing to the species barrier and the insuperable difficulties of co-adaptation if animals were to advance beyond their basic physiological contours. However, the thought may in its essentials be traced back to Cuvier. For instance, to establish a convincing evolution of ape to human it would be necessary to establish that simians could over time have increased their communicative vocabularies so as to transform inarticulate emotional cries into specific vocal symbols. But this in turn brings up the closely related problem of how to explain the rapid mental processing on which articulate speech depends. Without the simultaneous co-adaptation of the simian brain how could the facility of speech, which depends on the interdependent agency of the brain in tandem withthe specialized organs of vocal articulation, have developed by the unplanned processes of natural selection?

Difficulties with the Darwinian Theory

Blyth corrected himself when in dawned on him that what he was musing on was a physiological impossibility. Swiftly retreating from his own conjecture, he realized that, in the circumstances he had envisaged in his mind’s eye, living species would routinely evidence patterns of morphological development which were simply not recorded in nature. He corrected his initial conjecture in line with observable circumstances by the kind of reality check which Charles Darwin chose to override. It is not as if Darwin did not know of the difficulty his theory posed. He must have known as well as Blyth in his heart of hearts that the kind of transmutation he was postulating did not exist in nature. In the following admirably candid words Darwin even tacks on the correlated problem of the lack of fossil evidence as a further hindrance to the acceptance of his theory: 

Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?19

“Why indeed,” one might ask. Haughton commented sardonically on this point, “Mr. Darwin admits that the facts of Geology are opposed to his theory, and they are pleasantly alluded to as the Geological Difficulty!”20 Turning a blind eye to such obstacles, Darwin appears to have been driven by family piety in the direction of a form of materialist confirmation bias and what was fundamentally a social/ familial construction of reality.

A New Revelation

There is no folly that human fancy can devise, when truth has ceased to be of primary importance, and right reason and sound logic have been discarded, that has not been produced, and preached as a new revelation.21

SAMUEL HAUGHTON

Whether Charles Darwin’s theory of the whole biosphere having essentially developed by “natural selection” was more antecedently probable than the doctrine of divine creation remained a contentious point, much debated by scientific and lay peers. Haughton at any rate, in company with other members of the wider Victorian public22, failed to see how such a grand and exquisitely crafted symphonic whole as the terrestrial biosphere had, allegedly, been able to magic itself into existence without any empirically identifiable agency to direct it. Then as before, most were prompted by the application of humble logic to seek the solution to life’s deepest enigmas not in natural selection but in natural theology.

The grandeur and sublime subtleties of our terrestrial environment have for millennia been viewed as in and of themselves empirical markers for design. The idea of intelligent design is as much a common-sense, empirical deduction as a formal philosophical theory or religious tenet. It seems intuitively right to many without benefit of any formal elaboration of the philosophical or metaphysical kind. Hence Darwin’s theory that life on Earth could have evolved mindlessly, due to the unpredictable ministrations of Mother Nature, has never ceased to appear improbable, even impossible, to the generality of people. In short, the notion that life’s diversity could have developed by some preternaturally benign concatenation of flukes does not commend itself as an intuitive probability to unbiased observers with no stake in finding a wholly materialistic explanation for all things. 

Could Nature, without any intelligence itself, have been capable of developing creatures with immense reserves of intelligence, or is this, as opponents have persistently objected, just a freethinking donnish fantasy harbored by those who simply will there to be a materialist Grand Theory of Everything? The jury is very much still out on that one, and Samuel Haughton’s doubts have not been allayed. For as he wrote in the peroration of his review, “No progress in natural science is possible as long as men will take their crude guesses at truth for facts, and substitute the fancies of their imagination for the sober rules of reasoning.” 

Notes

For a comprehensive reprint together with editor’s commentary on reviews from the 1860s, see Hull’s Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1973).

Letter to Joseph Hooker, April 30, 1860.

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow, (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 122.

“This speculation of Mess. Darwin and Wallace would not be worthy of note were it not for the weight of authority of the names under whose auspices it has been brought forward [Lyell and Hooker]. If it means what it says, it is a truism; if it means anything more, it is contrary to fact.”

http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1860_Review_Origin_Biogenesis_Haughton_A1128.pdf

Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 40.

“The Moderns have resolved, by their speculations on the past, to show that in ingenuity and oddness of conceit and, probably, also in wideness from the truth, they are in no respect inferior to the Ancients.” (Review, p. 5)

William Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians: A Joint Biography of Darwin and Huxley (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1955), p. 105.

Loren Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X (London: Dent, 1979), p. 6.

Cited by Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 22.

These included the Oxford Professor of Geometry, Baden Powell, the French naturalist Charles Naudin, Robert Grant (Darwin’s Edinburgh tutor), Dr. William Wells (his claim going back to 1813), Patrick Matthew, a well-to-do Scottish farmer and fruit grower, in 1831, and Edward Blyth, a young zoologist (1835). A comprehensive account of Darwin’s predecessors is given by Rebecca Stott in the aforementioned Darwin’s Ghosts.

W. J. Dempster, Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century: Natural Selection and Patrick Matthew (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1996), p. 245.

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Human Population, edited by Anthony Flew (London: Penguin, 1970).

Cited by Anthony Flew, Essay on the Principle of Population, Introduction, pp. 49-50.

See on this point Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (Chicago: Chicago Up, 1989), pp. 2-3.

Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts, p. 17.

Review, p. 10.

Cited by Loren Eisley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X, pp. 55-6, 58.

Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 129.

Haughton, Review, p. 6.

Review, p. 7

See Alvar Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-72 (Gothenburg: Elanders, 1958).

Bacteria: The real world savers?

 “Bacteria Are Incredible” — Here Are More Illustrations

David Coppedge

In his latest “Secrets of the Cell” video, biochemist Michael Behe tells about wonderful bacteria that eat organic waste, remove smells from mud by conducting electricity, recycle plastic, aid our digestion, and more. “Folks, you can’t make this stuff up!” he exclaims. “Bacteria are incredible.”

That is true, and I provided some illustrations yesterday. Here are more. 

Think of man’s worst environmental disasters. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Chernobyl nuclear accident probably take priority on the list. The American Chemical Society posted a video showing how bacteria are good at cleaning up oil spills, radioactive waste and toxic chemicals — not that this fact gives humans license to damage the planet, but it’s interesting. The narrator, who demonstrates a controlled experiment with oil-eating bacteria in her kitchen, was surprised that the microbes that flock to oil spills need no genetic engineering. They get to work on their own and seem to enjoy it. “How cool is it that genetic tinkering is not always needed?” she comments. Much of our plastic debris, however, accumulates in the oceans where it collects in huge revolving garbage patches on the surface called gyres. How many people faithfully recycle plastic bottles only to find in news reports that China no longer accepts the West’s barges of compressed plastic, and so it ends up in the ocean anyway? It’s depressing. Some have remarked that recycling might do more damage than throwing it in the regular trash. For those trying to be environmentally conscious, that’s really depressing.

Environmental engineers fret as plastic waste accumulates and circulates in those gyres. But a few decades ago, scientists began to discover that these garbage patches are not lifeless deserts. They are teeming with a class of organisms collectively known as “neuston.” New Scientist reports:

Neuston are organisms that float on the ocean surface. They encompass a wide range of species, including blue sea dragons (Glaucus atlanticus), violet snails (Janthina janthina), blue button jellyfish (Porpita porpita) and by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella).

Rebecca Helm at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and colleagues found that there are more neuston in the center of the North Pacific Garbage Patch than at the edges. This is probably true worldwide, as similar garbage patches are found in the South Pacific, South Atlantic, and Indian oceans. At least some life forms are making a living on our trash! Some of the organisms are quite beautiful.

So now, Helm is worried that cleanup efforts could endanger these thriving communities of organisms. Another worry is that fish and whales could imbibe plastic by feeding on the neuston. There is a race against time to give the plastic-degrading bacteria time to work while the higher organisms enjoy their merry-go-round ride on artificial boats. There’s a research project: to what extent does the neuston ecosystem contribute to the breakdown of floating plastic?

If environmental engineers can find ways to accelerate bacteria’s good work, it may prove to be a much more cost-effective way to recycle plastic than packing it on barges. Maybe biodegradation could be started earlier in the process. Either way, it appears that the food chain, with microbes at the base, has the power to degrade all that plastic eventually if a true circular economy comes to fruition and the accumulation in the gyres ceases.

A Food Chain of Recyclers

Alice Klein’s article in New Scientist doesn’t mention the food chain, but earlier reports have found that microbes contribute to the breakdown of ocean garbage and even larger artificial junk. We know that organisms recycle our shipwrecks in the deep sea. If you want to visit the Titanic by submarine, you had better hurry; it could vanish by 2037. The EE Times explained why:

The iconic ocean liner is, in fact, disintegrating where it lies; as well as animals and plants, its inhabitants include bacteria, which are eating their home at a staggering rate. One type of bacteria transforms dissolved iron into insoluble iron oxide to create rusticles — like icicles, but made of rust. Other types of the dozen or so microbes present effectively eat the rusticles.

And so the evidence of man’s grandiose projects — elegant ballrooms under chandeliers on a doomed “unsinkable” ship — vanishes into memory, as the ocean reclaims its own. But there’s a happy side to some of our shipwrecks. Multitudes of fish and other sea creatures have taken up residence in and around battleships from the South Pacific, even those sunk by nuclear bomb tests. Considering this discovery, some ships have been submerged on purpose to provide havens for fish and scuba divers. Microbes and viruses are sure to be key players in those thriving ecosystems.

Don’t Dismiss Bacteria

Instead of dismissing bacteria as primitive remnants of early evolution, design-thinking scientists can help our planet’s tiny ecosystem engineers solve some of the most pressing problems facing us today. By looking at microbes as the intelligently designed systems they are — having shown their benefits in many ways — ID advocates can partner with them. Like the first ranchers, they can bridle and saddle up these tiny workhorses that come equipped to tackle planet-sized loads.

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What unbelievers need to believe.

 Three Realities Chance Can’t Explain That Intelligent Design Can.

Granville Sewell

The scientific establishment is slowly beginning to allow scientists who believe in intelligent design to have a platform. Why? It may be because the theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many realities that theories based on chance do not.

Perhaps the simplest and best argument for intelligent design is to clearly state what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, as I did in my book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Peter Urone, in his physics text College Physics, writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.”

This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design: that the origin and evolution of life, and the evolution of human consciousness and intelligence, are due entirely to a few unintelligent forces of physics. Thus you must believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into computers and science texts and jet airplanes and nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.    

These four unintelligent forces of physics may indeed explain everything that has happened on other planets, but let us look at three essential elements of our human existence and examine whether the currently believed origin theory can explain them.

1. The Origin of Life

To appreciate that we still have no idea how the first living things arose, you only have to realize that with all our advanced technology we are still not close to designing any type of self-replicating machine; that is still pure science fiction. We can only create machines that create other machines, but no machine that can make a copy of itself. 

When we add technology to such a machine, to bring it closer to the goal of reproduction, we only move the goalposts because now we have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So how could we imagine that such a machine could have arisen by pure chance?

Maybe human engineers will someday construct a self-replicating machine. But if they do, I’m sure it will not happen until long after I am gone, and it will not show that life could have arisen through natural processes. It will only have shown that it could have arisen through design. 

2. The Origin of Advanced Life Forms

Furthermore, imagine that we did somehow manage to design, say, a fleet of cars with fully automated car-building factories inside, able to produce new cars — and not just normal new cars, but new cars with fully automated car-building factories inside them. Who could seriously believe that if we left these cars alone for a long time, the accumulation of duplication errors made as they reproduced themselves would result in anything other than devolution, and eventually could even be organized by selective forces into more advanced automobile models?  

No, we could confidently predict that the whole process would grind to a halt after a few generations without intelligent humans around to fix the mechanical problems that would inevitably arise, long before we saw duplication errors that held any promise of advances. 

The idea that it could even be remotely plausible that random mutations could produce major improvements relies completely on the observed but inexplicable fact that, while they are awaiting rare favorable mutations, living species are able to preserve their complex structures and pass them on to their descendants without significant degradation. We are so used to seeing this happen that we don’t appreciate how astonishing it really is.  

But perhaps trying to imagine designing self-replicating cars, and trying to imagine that these cars could make progress through the accumulation of duplication errors, may help us realize that we really have no idea how living things are able to pass their current complex structures on to their descendants, generation after generation — much less how they evolve even more complex structures.

Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, in his 2019 book Darwin Devolves, writes:

Darwinian evolution proceeds mainly by damaging or breaking genes, which, counterintuitively, sometimes helps survival. In other words, the mechanism is powerfully de-volutionary. It promotes the rapid loss of genetic information. Laboratory experiments, field research, and theoretical studies all forcefully indicate that, as a result, random mutation and natural selection make evolution self-limiting. … Darwin’s mechanism works chiefly by squandering genetic information for short-term gain.

So, according to Behe, duplication errors, even when organized by selective forces, have the same effect on living species as we would expect them to have on self-replicating cars: only devolution and degradation.

Also, here we have not even discussed what is generally considered to be the main problem with Darwinism: its inability to explain the appearance of major new, irreducibly complex features that consistently appear suddenly in the fossil record. (I discussed this problem in my article “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” and in the second part of my video “Why Evolution is Different.”)

3. The Origin of Human Intelligence and Consciousness

Trying to imagine that the accumulation of duplication errors made by our fleet of self-replicating cars could eventually result in conscious, intelligent machines might help us to realize that the evolution of intelligent beings, capable of designing computers, science texts, jet airplanes, and Apple iPhones, is an especially monumental and unsolved problem. 

In my video “A Summary of the Evidence for Intelligent Design,” I began my fifth point with a picture of three children in the 1950s. One of them is me, the other two are not. I saw the world from inside one of these children. I saw every picture that entered through his eyes, I heard every sound that entered through his ears, and when he fell on the sidewalk, I felt his pain. How did I end up inside one of these children? 

This is a question that rarely seems to trouble evolutionists. They talk about human evolution as if they were outside observers and never seem to wonder how they got inside one of the animals they are studying. They consider that human brains are just complicated computers, and so to explain how we got here they just have to explain how these mechanical brains evolved. 

But even if they could explain how animals with mechanical brains evolved out of the primeval slime, that would leave the most important question — the one evolutionists never seem to even wonder about — still unsolved: How did I get inside one of these animals?

The argument for intelligent design could not be simpler or clearer: Unintelligent forces alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones, and any attempt to explain how they can must fail somewhere because they obviously can’t. Perhaps this is the best way to understand why explanations without design will never work, and why science may finally be starting to recognize this.

Cross-posted from The Federalist with permission of the author.

Could one man(not God-man) really save humanity from sin.

 1Corinthians15:21ASV"For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. "

The first human sinner did not inherit his sinful state he chose it. Unlike his descendants he had a choice in the matter.

1Timothy2:14KJV"And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

Now what if humanity's founding father had made the moral choice. Would it not be the case that he would be our savior? So then that is all that is required to save mankind. A father who choses aright.

Can this tree be replanted? III

 More Turbulence at the Base of the Tree of Life

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Here is a new open-access paper, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, that is instructive: “Eukaryogenesis: The Rise of an Emergent Superorganism.” Author Philip J. L. Bell begins:

Although it is widely taught that all modern life descended via modification from a last universal common ancestor (LUCA), this dominant paradigm is yet to provide a generally accepted explanation for the chasm in design between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Counter to this dominant paradigm, the viral eukaryogenesis (VE) hypothesis proposes that the eukaryotes originated as an emergent superorganism and thus did not evolve from LUCA via descent with incremental modification. [Emphasis added.]

The “chasm in design”? For a theory (i.e., the universal Tree of Life, rooted in LUCA — universal common descent, or UCD) whose empirical strength is so great that it cannot be doubted, UCD certainly is doubted a lot.

Doubted by biologists, in fact, with no known interest in intelligent design.

On the anternet.

 Yes, Ants Think — Like Computers

Denyse O'Leary

Navigation expert Eric Cassell, whose recent book is Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts, offers some insights into how ants organize themselves by using what amount to algorithms, without any central command:

Ants are remarkably consistent in their lifestyle. All of the roughly 11,000 species of ants live in groups, large or small. There are no known solitary ants. 

Living in groups, they have developed a social lifestyle that includes “agriculture, territorial wars, slavery, division of labor, castes, consensus-building, cities, and a symbolic language.” (p. 85) How is this managed by ants with very small brains (200,000 to 250,000 neurons) and very limited individuality?

For comparison, among mammals, the agouti has roughly 857 million neurons, the capybara has 1.60 billion, and the capuchin monkey, 3.690 billion. Humans have roughly 85 billion neurons. It seems that the ant is doing something that does not rely on individual problem-solving skills.

Cassell points out that the ants’ complex colony organization where one queen or several queens lay all the eggs and the other females do all the work is almost exclusively the domain of life forms with very small brains. The naked mole rat is the only mammal that follows this pattern. Incidentally, the naked mole rat has fewer neurons in a smaller brain than expected for its body size, relative to other rodents.

Such colonies are sometimes called “superorganisms” because the individual organisms work for the survival of the colony as a whole. Take these leafcutter ants in Brazil:

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What Are Some of the Ant Colony’s Methods?

We don’t know exactly how the ant “algorithm” works out divisions of labor but one study found that young ants typically tend to the eggs, larvae, and pupae while older ants forage outside the nest. Foraging is a much more dangerous activity than tending the young, so if the older ants forage, fewer days of ant life are lost to the colony (pp. 89–90). Some ant species have castes of workers with specially shaped heads, best suited to specific purposes like attacking other ants or blocking a tunnel (pp. 95–96). In that case, they might naturally gravitate to the task without having to think about it. They just find it easier than the differently structured ants would.

Ants communicate mainly by pheromones, scents that provide information. In their book The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (2008), Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) identified 12 areas of communication mediated by pheromones, including “alarm, attraction, recruitment, grooming, feeding, exchange of fluids and solid particles, group effect, recognition of nestmates, caste determination, control of other individuals competing for reproduction, territoriality, and sexual communication” (p. 90).

What makes pheromones a complex communication system is that most emissions are of several pheromones mingled rather than only one. Some signals are recognized by all ants in the vicinity, others only by the ant’s own species, and others are specific to the ant’s colony. 

One evolutionary biologist describes the processing of pheromones as equivalent to AND gates and STOP in a computer system. (p. 91). The ant is not so much deciding what to do as responding to an AI-like signal.

Computer programmers have adapted ant algorithms to the computer:

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Welcome to the Anternet!

Stanford’s Deborah M. Gordon, a specialist in ant behavior, thinks of the complex algorithms ants use to communicate without personal understanding as the “anternet”:

Ant colonies use dynamic networks of brief interactions to adjust to changing conditions. No individual ant knows what’s going on. Each ant just keeps track of its recent experience meeting other ants, either in one-on-one encounters when ants touch antennae, or when an ant encounters a chemical deposited by another.

DEBORAH GORDON, “WHAT DO ANTS KNOW THAT WE DON’T?” AT WIRED

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

Pseudoscience vs. actual science.

 Listen: Mendel vs. Darwin

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic episode of ID the Future, geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, former research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, talks with host Casey Luskin about Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, how they clashed with the thinking of Charles Darwin, and how acceptance of Darwinism hindered acceptance of Mendel’s great insights. Listen in as Dr. Lönnig explains Mendel’s laws and why they’re still relevant for biology, and particularly genetics. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Can this forest be replanted?

 Study: “Most of Our Evolutionary Trees Could Be Wrong”

Günter Bechly

From Phys.org:

Study suggests that most of our evolutionary trees could be wrong

New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study, published in Communications Biology, shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.

In other words: often anatomical similarities are not based on common descent and different lines of evidence (anatomy versus genetics) conflict and thus do not converge on one true tree of life! This refutes one of the favorite talking points of popularizers of Darwinism like Richard Dawkins.