On OOL science's chirality issues

 Same-Handed Molecules Are an “Overarching Design Principle” in Life, Say Researchers 

David Coppedge 

Homochirality, the same-handedness of building blocks of DNA and proteins, poses a severe challenge for those who deny the intelligent design of life. Design advocates have explained the problem: James Tour, Casey Luskin, Rob Stadler, and many others (see a description of the problem here). The odds of random, blind forces selecting every amino acid in a protein to be left-handed, and every sugar in a DNA chain to be right-handed, are vanishingly small. 

Materialists also recognize this hurdle in their origin-of-life theories, because homochirality would have had to become established before natural selection could be called upon for assistance. But what happens when heterochiral molecules do make it into our cells? Bad things happen. 

Heterochirality Syndrome 

Normally, cells do a good job of keeping our molecules 100 percent homochiral. Stray wrong-handed molecules are either destroyed or turned into the correct hand before a protein or nucleic acid goes into service. A research team in France wondered what would happen if they forced certain genes to go rogue, or heterochiral. (Good thing they tried this on fruit flies and not humans.) They published the dire results in Nature Communications (open access). The Abstract of the paper by Banreti et al., “Biological effects of the loss of homochirality in a multicellular organism,” hints at troubles to come: 

Homochirality is a fundamental feature of all known forms of life, maintaining biomolecules (amino-acids, proteins, sugars, nucleic acids) in one specific chiral form. While this condition is central to biology, the mechanisms by which the adverse accumulation of non-l-α-amino-acids in proteins lead to pathophysiological consequences remain poorly understood. To address how heterochirality build-up impacts organism’s health, we use chiral-selective in vivo assays to detect protein-bound non-l-α-amino acids (focusing on aspartate) and assess their functional significance in Drosophila. We find that altering the in vivo chiral balance creates a ‘heterochirality syndrome’ with impaired caspase activity, increased tumour formation, and premature death. Our work shows that preservation of homochirality is a key component of protein function that is essential to maintain homeostasis across the cell, tissue and organ level.  

The authors call homochirality “an overarching design principle in all living organisms.” They do not delve into the origin of homochirality, and say essentially nothing about evolution (except for noting that a certain amino acid in a specific position of a gene is “evolutionarily conserved,” meaning it has not evolved). 

Surprisingly, the health effects of heterochirality have not been studied in detail before, they say. 

Furthermore, a direct link between the partial loss of homochirality and protein dysfunction has not been shown, and hence the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms connecting heterochirality to pathophysiological sequelae remains unknown. 

The bulk of the paper documents what happened to hapless flies forced to endure “heterochirality syndrome.” For example, one intervention involved knocking out the Pimt gene. This gene is an enzyme essential for repair of heterochiral proteins. It recognizes wrong-handed aspartame residues after translation and converts them into the correct left-handed form. Here’s what happened to the poor fly: 

Importantly, Pimt knock-out flies showed premature death, dying 14 days earlier than control flies (Fig. 5a). Premature death was due solely to the lack of Pimt activity, as the phenotype could be fully rescued by a Pimt wild type (Pimtwt), but not a Pimt catalytic dead (PimtS60Q) knock-in construct (Fig. 5a), in which the evolutionarily conserved serine60 residue (Supplementary Fig. 5) was replaced by glutamine. Furthermore, we found that loss of Pimt activity led to the formation of protein aggregates and large melanotic tumours inside the body (Fig. 5b, c). 

The loss of the heterochirality repair enzyme also gives mice a miserable, short life. And when the enzyme fails in humans, brain damage and lung cancer can result. 

Importantly, Pimt knock-out mice showed significant growth retardation succumbing to fatal seizures at an average of 42 days after birth, and increased proliferation and granule cell number in the dentate gyrus. Pimtexpression and enzyme activity were significantly decreased in human astrocytic tumours and promoted epithelial mesenchymal transition in lung adenocarcinoma cell lines, indicating that impaired Pimt activity has several pathophysiological consequences. 

The team excised the working part of Pimt using CRISPR-Cas9. Their observations of the aftereffects demonstrated that Pimt is “ubiquitously expressed in tissues throughout the fly life cycle” and in probably most other life forms. This fact adds to the materialist’s challenge, because even if simple cells found a way to start homochiral, they would quickly succumb to what we could dub the “right hook punch” from a wrong-handed amino acid.

What Causes the Trouble? 

The team found that wrong-handed amino acids change the 3-D conformation of proteins. One right-handed aspartate (D-aspartic acid, as opposed to the correct L- form), induces structural changes to the caspase cleavage site where the correction must occur. So altered, the enzyme cannot “fit” the repair site. Caspases are involved in cutting out defective parts of proteins. They also participate in programmed cell death, or apoptosis. 

Our results show that caspases malfunction when the consensus cleavage site of target proteins suffer a stereoinversion, which could potentially affect many important cellular processes. 

In summary, heterochirality syndrome reduces lifespan, increases susceptibility to tumors, inhibits apoptosis, and more. People suffering from even one enzyme with a wrong-handed amino acid “are expected to have massive physiological consequences on cell and tissue homoeostasis,” and the defect “might be implicated in many human diseases.” Due to cascading effects from a heterochiral building block, it’s all downhill when random chance lands a right hook. 

Overall, our results show that accumulation of non-l-α-AAs in proteins, promotes a progressive heterochirality syndrome, through a cascading effect across biological scales spanning from loss of molecular homochirality to increased resistance to caspase activity in cells, increased tumour susceptibility in organs and, consequently, premature death of the chiral-deficient animal (Fig. 6h). We further suggest that heterochirality spreading in living organisms represents a novel causal factor that may be associated with a broad range of defective cellular processes, diseases and ageing. 

What Are the Implications? 

Without foresight to solve heterochiral incidents, a primordial cell would quickly perish even if, against all odds, it began homochiral. These authors have shown one of the enzymes that prevents heterochirality syndrome by recognizing and fixing a single D-amino acid to its L- form. This is fascinating to ponder, since even intelligent chemists have difficulty separating the isoforms of chiral molecules (example 1, example 2). 

Biochemists realize that homochirality is functionally beneficial and would tend to be preserved by natural selection. A paper in the journal Chem explained why but failed to address the origin of homochirality. Occasionally a materialist will attempt to speculate about how a protocell “emerged” from a pool of heterochiral building blocks and evolved toward homochirality via “chance aided by luck,” but those attempts usually end like this example from 2010: 

Whether or not we will ever know how this property developed in the living systems represented on Earth today, studies of how single chirality might have emerged will aid us in understanding the much larger question of how life might have, and might again, emerge as a complex system. 

Statements like this beg the question of emergence. Must it be materialistic? If understanding is the goal, Ockham’s razor would favor the simplest cause that is capable of separating thermodynamically equivalent objects that differ only in geometry. That cause is intelligence. Even a child could easily separate left- and right-handed toy soldiers of equal mass. 

It’s been over 170 years since Louis Pasteur recognized chirality as a fundamental feature of biology (see here). Were it not for the philosophical preferences of some, the strength of intelligence over randomness in achieving perfect homochirality and maintaining it with molecular machines would universally be recognized as the most obvious choice to account for this “overarching design principle in all living organisms.” 

On God and grades.

Not a family matter: The effects of religiosity on academic outcomes based on evidence from siblings 

Ilana M.HorwitzaBenjamin W.DomingueaKathleen MullanHarrisb 

Abstract

Religiosity has been positively linked with multiple measures of academic success, but it is unclear whether the “effect” of religiosity on academic outcomes is causal or spurious. One source of heterogeneity that may contribute to a child's level of religiosity and his/her academic success is family background. This paper is the first to use sibling differences to estimate the associations between religiosity on short and long-term academic success. Our analysis yields two main results. First, more religious adolescents earned higher GPAs in high school, even after including family fixed effects. Second, because they earned higher GPAs in high school, more religious adolescents completed more years of education 14 years after their religiosity was measured. Our findings suggest that adolescents' religious commitments influence their schooling in both the short and long term and should be more actively included and theorized as important drivers of educational and economic stratification. 

Introduction 

Religion permeates every aspect of American society. Religious commitments shape where Americans live, how they vote, who their friends are, and even how happy they are. Religion is a particularly salient feature for millions of American teenagers: one in two see faith as central to their daily life, and one in three say they pray daily (Smith and Denton, 2005).1 When it comes to academic performance, religiously engaged adolescents appear to have better academic outcomes than those who are not religiously active. They earn higher GPAs (Glanville et al., 2008; Good and Willoughby, 2011; McKune and Hoffmann, 2009; Milot and Ludden, 2009; Regnerus and Elder, 2003; Tirre, 2017; Toldson and Anderson, 2010), aspire to go farther in school2 (Al-fadhli and Kersen, 2010; Muller and Ellison, 2001; Regnerus, 2000), and actually stay in school longer (Brown and Gary, 1991; Kim, 2015; Lee et al., 2007; Lee and Pearce, 2019; Lehrer, 2010, 2004; Loury, 2004; Mohanty, 2016). The theoretical reason for this positive association is that increased religiosity tends to deter young people from risky behaviors, promotes social capital and network closure, and motivates youth to act in ways that adhere to the moral grounding of their religious teachings (Smith, 2003).

While the evidence suggests that more religiously engaged students have better academic outcomes, questions remain as to how to interpret this evidence. The existing evidence has been derived from observational approaches that inherently limit the scope of inference; as a consequence, there is uncertainty about whether the “effect” of religiosity on academic outcomes is causal or spurious (Bagiella et al., 2005; Cochran et al., 1994; Freeman, 1986; Regnerus and Smith, 2005). We are particularly concerned about the role of family background—a key source of heterogeneity that influences children's level of religiosity as well as their academic success (Eirich, 2012; Ludwig and Mayer, 2006). While previous studies have attempted to eliminate family-level confounders by including a set of observed family-level controls (e.g., parental education, family income, and family structure), these controls do not effectively address family-level heterogeneity, especially when these factors are unobserved (Kim, 2018). Thus, previous studies may be overstating the actual effect of religiosity, which could be null or even negative. Approaches that allow for more stringent analyses of such observed associations are useful in such settings. Here, conduct within-family analysis by analyzing sibling pairs to better understand the association of religiosity, high school GPA, college aspirations, and educational attainment. Data on sibling pairs allow us to separate the contribution of religiosity from families by examining whether sibling differences in religiosity translate into sibling differences in academic achievement  (since family differences are muted between siblings).

The Lord JEHOVAH explanation/heuristic?

Coast to Coast — Stephen Meyer Takes the God Hypothesis to a Huge and Unusual Audience

David Klinghoffer 

I suppose Stephen Meyer could do the safe thing and talk only to audiences that largely already accept his picture of reality. That would be safe. But would it be fun? Find out the meaning of “fun” when Dr. Meyer talks with host George Noory tonight on the phenomenally popular overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM, with 2.75 million weekly listeners. You can locate a station near you by consulting this link. 

As a rule, the show covers a fascinating a mix of topics, with an emphasis on the strange and supernatural, and is never dull. For example, after the Return of the God Hypothesis author is on for two hours, from 10-12 pm Pacific / 1-3 am Eastern, the next guest is a gentleman who says he communicates with the dead. That’s right, first it’s Steve Meyer, talking about the Webb Space Telescope and the Big Bang, then a necromancer. It’s quite the pairing. Well, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any materialist’s philosophy! I intend to stay up and listen.

Also, look here for Meyer’s recent article for the Daily Wire, “Here’s Why James Webb Telescope Discoveries Are Causing Scientists To Rethink Galaxy Formation (But Not The Big Bang).” 

 

On Darwinism's failure as a predictive model.

 By Cornelius Hunter. 

In addition to the DNA code, there are other fundamental molecular processes that appear to be common to all life. One intriguing example is DNA replication which copies both strands of the DNA molecule, but in different directions. Evolution predicts these fundamental processes to be common to all life. Indeed this was commonly said to be an important successful prediction for the theory. As Niles Eldredge explained, the “underlying chemical uniformity of life” was a severe test that evolution passed with flying colors. (Eldredge, 41) Likewise Christian de Duve declared that evolution is in part confirmed by the fact that all extant living organisms function according to the same principles. (de Duve, 1) And Michael Ruse concluded that the essential macromolecules of life help to make evolution beyond reasonable doubt. (Ruse, 4)

But this conclusion that the fundamental molecular processes within the cell are common to all species was superficial. In later years, as the details were investigated, important differences between species emerged. For example, key DNA replication proteins surprisingly “show very little or no sequence similarity between bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes.” (Leipe) Also different DNA replication processes have been discovered. These results were not what were expecte

In particular, and counter-intuitively, given the central role of DNA in all cells and the mechanistic uniformity of replication, the core enzymes of the replication systems of bacteria and archaea (as well as eukaryotes) are unrelated or extremely distantly related. Viruses and plasmids, in addition, possess at least two unique DNA replication systems, namely, the protein-primed and rolling circle modalities of replication. This unexpected diversity makes the origin and evolution of DNA replication systems a particularly challenging and intriguing problem in evolutionary biology. (Kooni

Some evolutionists are reconsidering the assumption that all life on Earth shares the same basic molecular architecture and biochemistry, and instead examining the possibility of independent evolution, and multiple origins of fundamentally different life forms. (Cleland, Leipe). 

References 

Cleland, Carol. 2007. “Epistemological issues in the study of microbial life: alternative terran biospheres?.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38:847-861.

de Duve, Christian. 1995. Vital Dust. New York: BasicBooks.

Eldredge, Niles. 1982. The Monkey Business. New York: Washington Square Press.

Koonin, E. 2006. “Temporal order of evolution of DNA replication systems inferred by comparison of cellular and viral DNA polymerases.” Biology Direct 18:1-39.

Leipe, D., L. Aravind, E. Koonin. 1999. “Did DNA replication evolve twice independently?.” Nucleic Acids Research 27:3389-3401.

Ruse, Michael. 1986. Taking Darwin Seriously. New York: Basil Blackwell.

In search of an RNA world?

 When Popular Mechanics is Dissing Your Evolution Theory You Know You Have Problems 

Cornelius Hunter 

Don’t Two Wrongs Make a Right?

We’ve long since lost track of how many times the RNA World hypotheses—which states that life originated from an RNA enzyme-genome combination rather than from DNA—failed only to be once again resurrected, but we do know this crazy idea will, for a long time to come, continue to be cited as “good solid” evidence for evolution. This despite new research which gives yet another reason for its failure.

There are big problems with the idea that life arose from a random assembly of DNA. Aside from the little problem of generating astronomical amounts of crucial information from, err, random mutations, the resulting DNA doesn’t do anything by itself. That is because proteins are needed to extract said information and do something with it.

So, evolutionists came up with the clever idea of using RNA instead of DNA, since RNA can both store genetic information and also do something with it. Of course, this idea still has that little problem of generating the information in the first place. Oh, also, there is precisely zero evidence of any “RNA World” organisms.

Now or ever.

There is no organism that does this. There is no organism that does anything like this. There is no controlled, laboratory, version of such a thing. There isn’t even a computer simulation of it, at least in any kind of detail.

Not only does this call the entire idea into question, it also raises another little problem that if there was this so-called RNA World, then it must have gone away at some point, and neatly transitioned into a DNA world, without leaving a trace. But aside from vague speculation, there is no compelling notion of how this would occur. 

This is but a brief introduction to the problems one finds with the RNA World, that have led to its repeated downfall, before its repeated resurrections.

Now, this new research points out the rather inconvenient fact that RNA is too sticky:

But while RNA strands may be good at templating complementary strands, they are not so good at separating from these strands. Modern organisms make enzymes that can force twinned strands of RNA—or DNA—to go their separate ways, thus enabling replication, but it is unclear how this could have been done in a world where enzymes didn’t yet exist. 

Amazingly enough, this story was picked up by, of all mags, Popular Mechanics.

Yup. You know you have problems with Popular Mechanics is dissing your evolutionary theory.

And while one might have thought that this rather fundamental problem would have disqualified the RNA World hypothesis a long time ago—RNA’s “stickiness” was not just discovered yesterday—it turns out that fundamental problems such as this tend to be openly discussed only when a replacement theory is at the ready.

And sure enough, since DNA didn’t work, and perhaps now we can finally say that RNA also didn’t work, perhaps the trick is to combine them. Don’t two wrongs make a right? And so, it is, the new research indeed proposes that life got going by using fancy chimeric molecular strands that are part DNA and part RNA.

Well, evolution dodged another bullet. But we think we can at least say that Alexander Oparin’s 1924 prediction that origin of life research would be solved “very, very soon” hasn’t quite turned out right.Religion drives science, and it matters.

On being argumentative in lieu of making an argument.

Debunking “Professor Dave’s” Hit Piece Against Stephen Meyer 

Günter Bechly 

In a previous series at Evolution News (Bechly 2022a, 2022b, 2022c), I answered the diatribe by YouTuber “Professor Dave” directed against our Discovery Institute colleague, geologist Dr. Casey Luskin. The popular YouTuber, whose real name is Dave Farina, is neither a professor nor a PhD but just a failed ex-teacher who unsuccessfully tried twice to get a master’s degree in chemistry. These are simply facts about him. But his more than two million subscribers and others, who may come across his misleading content, deserve some fact-checking. Therefore, I exposed the non-professor’s propaganda and incompetence. In a second episode (Farina 2022) aimed at intelligent design proponents, Mr. Farina did it again, focusing on philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer and in particular Meyer’s New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013a). This YouTube video runs to about an hour and a quarter, so I will be answering him once again in a series, minute by minute. I have added timecodes in square brackets for easier reference. 

So Let’s Begin 

I have no problem at all with people who disagree strongly with intelligent design theory, nor with other worldviews including atheism, but one should at least assume that the other side is as honestly committed to a quest for truth as you yourself are. However, civilized discourse is not Farina’s cup of tea. In the first five minutes of his new video, he calls ID proponents “clowns,” “charlatans,” “frauds,” and “liars,” and calls ID arguments “pseudo-science,” “rubbish,” “horse manure,” and “dishonest tripe.” His personal agenda is revealed by the ridiculous statement [TC 3:00] that genocide, infanticide, eugenics, and other evils are “all the heinous acts that historically have been the exclusive domain of religion.” Has he never heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot? 

Apparently, Farina thinks the best way to deal with anybody he disagrees with is to bully and berate them with hate speech and gutter language. Here is an example of what I mean from one of his comments on YouTube (I’ve replaced certain letters with asterisks to make the profanity more tolerable to read): 

Um, I’m pretty sure I would make Meyer cry. He’s a f****ing moron, as I demonstrated in this video you didn’t watch. Why are all you creationist tools such cowardly sh**bags? 

When a commenter on his video against Stephen Meyer criticized his harsh language, Farina responded with even more over-the-top vituperation: 

They are liars. I show how they are liars. That’s all it is. And for f****’s sake, I’m exposing the agenda of what is essentially a terrorist organization that wants to drag America back to an authoritarian theocracy and ruin millions of lives, and you have the balls to call me nasty and mean-spirited for speaking out against them? You’re f****ing stupid. I suggest you work on that. [“They” refers to Discovery Institute and ID proponents.] 

What Is Wrong with This Guy? 

This is not how a sane and reasonable adult writes. Since when are academic questions and intellectual debates settled by lobbing f-words? I can only pity the school kids who suffered under such an intolerant and rude person as a science teacher. Farina seems to have some significant anger management issues. He certainly is not the type of person any reasonable parents would like to have around their kids! This has nothing to do with intelligent design vs. materialism or religion vs. science. Farina’s immature pottymouth should disqualify him from any serious discourse about anything with anyone. He really needs a “time out.”

What is more, nobody who knows his stuff and is confident about his position talks or writes like Farina does. The only reason I bother to address his erroneous arguments is to equip viewers of his video with some accurate information about the scientific evidence. Therefore, I will have to heavily quote from the technical literature and provide references to mainstream peer-reviewed scientific sources. You’ll see that Farina is parroting familiar claims by ID critics like Charles Marshall (2013), Nick Matzke (2013), and Donald Prothero (2013) that have been addressed and refuted many times (e.g., Klinghoffer 2015 and CSC 2019).

  Farina’s Ridiculous Parodies 

[TC 5:06] Farina initially suggests that the two following arguments characterize the position of Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt: 

“1) Some lies about the Cambrian explosion mean intelligent design is true.”

“2) I don’t understand genetics even a little bit so intelligent design must be true.”  

Every reader should recognize these two points as ridiculous parodies. To justify his silly claims, Farina would have to establish that Meyer is not just wrong about the Cambrian Explosion and genetics, but that he is deliberately lying. He also would have to establish that Meyer suggests intelligent design is true only because of explanatory gaps in the Cambrian Explosion or genetics. Of course, Farina does nothing like that. He shows no evidence whatsoever that Meyer is lying, because of course Meyer is not doing so. He fails to show that Meyer’s claims about the Cambrian Explosion and about genetics are incorrect or that they do not represent good science. And of course, Farina himself is grossly misrepresenting the design argument, which as Meyer shows in meticulous detail is not an argument from ignorance but an inference to the best explanation based on what we do know about the causal structure of the universe.  

[TC 6.55] Farina says that denying that the fossil record documents gradual change is a “huge lie.” He claims there are countless examples and lists the transitions of reptiles to mammals, fish to tetrapods, amphibians to reptiles to birds, land mammals to sea mammals (e.g., walking whales), and early hominids to humans. We will come back to these examples shortly. 

A Claim of Science Denial 

[TC 7:30] Farina also maintains that disputing transitional fossils is science denial. This claim has two major problems.

First, it uses an ambiguous term, “transitional fossil.” Evolutionary paleontologists and Darwin skeptics mean different things by this term. As I have written (Bechly 2021e: 346-7): 

Evolutionists often say that there are many transitional fossils, while creationists often say that there are none. It seems that one side must be wrong, but actually both are right because they talk past each other and use the same term for two different things. When evolutionists talk about transitional fossils, then they usually only mean transitional in the anatomical sense. This refers to fossils that possess a mosaic pattern of characters, with some primitive characters of the assumed ancestors still retained, while some (but not all) derived characters of the assumed descendants are already developed so that the fossil is anatomically intermediate. Evolutionists do not necessarily imply with the term transitional fossil that these forms are direct ancestors, as they could well be side branches from the ancestral lineage. Therefore, transitional fossils are not necessarily in the correct temporal sequence, because such side branches could persist and even outlive more advanced forms. 

When creationists and critics of Darwinism say that there is a lack of transitional fossils, they usually mean transitional in the sense of a gradual sequence of direct ancestor-descendent relationships, which implies not only a fine-graded directional anatomical transition but also a correct temporal order. While transitional fossils in the first sense are indeed very common and exist for most groups of organisms, transitional fossils in the second sense are extremely rare and mostly missing indeed

Second, it is a total red herring because, as I and others have emphasized ad nauseam in the past, intelligent design theory is agnostic concerning the question of material common descent. Farina over and over confuses intelligent design with Biblical creationism. Many prominent design proponents explicitly affirm common descent (e.g., Michael Behe, Michael Denton, Richard Sternberg, and myself) and therefore have no problems with transitional fossils and transitional series at all.

Farina gives his viewers the misleading impression that the fossil sequences he mentions establish a gradual and continuous development as predicted by Darwin. This is false. 

Let’s Look at Each of His Examples 

Reptile-mammal transition: Even though the so-called mammal-like reptiles indeed form a nice roughly transitional series (according to the evolutionist’s definition, given above), which is elegantly explained by common descent, they do not form an unbroken gradual series, even though this has been claimed in a few older studies (e.g., Hopson 1994 and Sidor & Hopson 1998). Rather they exhibit four distinct radiations (i.e., pelycosaurs, therapsids, cynodonts, and mammaliaforms), where each new construction appears abruptly in the fossil record (Carroll 1988: fig. 17-1). The first synapsids, previously called “pelycosaurs,” appear without precursors in the Upper Carboniferous about 307-310 mya, so that the lack of a gradual series of ancestral forms cannot be attributed to the famous “Romer’s Gap” in the fossil record after the end of the Devonian. As Kemp (2012) has emphasized, “Pelycosaur-grade synapsids originated as one of the amniote lineages that constituted part of the explosive radiation of tetrapods in the Carboniferous.” The same authors talk about the “explosive Middle Permian radiation of therapsids.” Kemp (2005: 84) mentions in his textbook on the evolution of mammals “the sudden appearance of the diverse therapsid fauna 270 Ma,” which has also been called the “therapsid event” (Lucas & Shen 2018: 13) or “Kazanian revolution” (Bakker 1980). Spindler (2014) says that the successful clade of therapsids occurs rather suddenly in the fossil record.” He refuted the alleged earlier therapsid Tetraceratops, and described a possible older bone fragment, but admits that its identification as a therapsid is weak because of limited anatomical information and conflicting characters.  

Cynodonts appear suddenly in the latest Late Permian (Botha et al. 2007). The first mammaliaforms (i.e., Haramiyida) appear likewise suddenly about 247-245 mya in the Lower Triassic with an “explosive origin followed by a rapid early diversification” (Abdala et al. 2007). This was followed by a “Jurassic Big Bang” of mammaliaform evolution (Brusatte & Luo 2016). It was not Stephen Meyer who came up with terms like “therapsid event,” “Kazanian revolution,” or “Jurassic Big Bang,” but rather the experts in the mammalian fossil record, who would not have used such terms for a slow and gradual pattern of appearance.

Fish-tetrapod transition: This transition is far from being resolved in a gradual way, which is why a recent study concluded that “the fish-to-tetrapod transition is one of the fundamental problems in evolutionary biology” (Wood & Nakamura 2018). Is there a series of transitional fossils morphologically connecting lobe-finned fish and tetrapods? Yes, they are often called fishapods, and include famous taxa like Tiktaalik and Ichthyostega. Do tetrapods appear gradually from these fishapods? No, not by any stretch of the imagination! Actually, the oldest evidence for tetrapods (the Zachelmie tracks from Poland) predates the oldest fishapods by 10 million years (Ahlberg 2019). It even predates fish-like forms such as Eusthenopteron that rather resembled a salmon. Of course, this inconvenient truth can be explained away with ad hoc hypotheses like ghost lineages and an incomplete fossil record. What cannot be explained away is the simple fact of an extremely sudden appearance of tetrapods. But there is not just this temporal paradox of assumed descendants being older than their assumed ancestors. There are also large gaps in the morphological transition. This holds true especially for the transition from typical pectoral and pelvic lobe-fins to the typical tetrapod hand and foot skeleton with phalanges, for which the first evidence was just recently discovered in a well-preserved specimen of Elpistostege (Cloutier et al. 2020)

genetic changes, was achieved within the lifespan of a single species. This raises a severe waiting time problem (Evolution News 2016, also see further on) because a neo-Darwinian slow and gradual accumulation and selection of small changes over long periods of time cannot explain such fast transitions. It is not a question of implausibility, but a question of mathematical impossibility. 

Early hominids to humans: It is a common misconception that the human fossil record shows a nice gradual transition from the ape-like early hominins (i.e., australopithecines) to our own genus Homo and modern humans. The truth is that there is a distinct gap between australopithecines and early Homo. The latter appears so abruptly that it has inspired a “Big Bang Theory of Human Evolution” (Swanbrow 2000). The renowned paleoanthropologist John Hawks has written (Hawks et al. 2000) that “In sum, the earliest H. sapiens remains differ significantly from australopithecines in both size and anatomical details. Insofar as we can tell, the changes were sudden and not gradual.” The authors explain it with an assumed population bottleneck two million years ago that led to a series of sudden, interrelated changes. 

 

On the tyranny of the expertocracy past and present.

Eugenics Movement Presents Remarkable Historical Parallels with “Gender-Affirming Care”

David Klinghoffer 

Wesley Smith and Jay Richards had a great conversation for the Humanize podcast on “What Every Parent Should Know About Gender Ideology and Gender-Affirming Care.” Identifying a remarkable historical echo, Dr. Richards says something I hadn’t thought about. Today’s strange trans ideology with its cruel medical interventions, including surgical mutilation, to affirm subjective gender identity bears a strong resemblance to the eugenics movement. The latter is now recognized as a malevolent and abusive force; but like evolution-based pseudoscientific racism, it was hailed in its day as the best and most responsible science, cheered on by the mainstream media, public school teachers, and the government. All that is true of our contemporary transgender ideology. 

There’s more. Endorsed by prestige academic opinion, eugenics focused on surgical sterilization for the “unfit.” Similarly endorsed by prestige opinion, transgender ideology welcomes the surgical removal of genitalia, and even provides “eunuch” as a new possible trans identify. In the case of eugenics, sterilization was coerced, not a matter personal preference. But as Richard also observes, pushing trans theory on vulnerable young children, molding their brains before they’ve reached the age of consent, is hardly giving them a free choice in how they think of gender. In a final parallel, it was religious people who were foremost in opposing the eugenicists and the pseudoscientific racists. John West makes this clear in his documentary Human Zoos (see it below). Today as well, many traditional religious perspectives resist the advances of trans activism. 

 

On the measurement problem.

Measurement problem

In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem is the problem of how, or whether, wave function collapse occurs. The inability to observe such a collapse directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer.

The wave function in quantum mechanics evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation as a linear superposition of different states. However, actual measurements always find the physical system in a definite state. Any future evolution of the wave function is based on the state the system was discovered to be in when the measurement was made, meaning that the measurement "did something" to the system that is not obviously a consequence of Schrödinger evolution. The measurement problem is describing what that "something" is, how a superposition of many possible values becomes a single measured value.

To express matters differently (paraphrasing Steven Weinberg),[1][2] the Schrödinger wave equation determines the wave function at any later time. If observers and their measuring apparatus are themselves described by a deterministic wave function, why can we not predict precise results for measurements, but only probabilities? As a general question: How can one establish a correspondence  between quantum reality and classical reality?[3] 

Schrödinger's cat 

A thought experiment often used to illustrate the measurement problem is the "paradox" of Schrödinger's cat. A mechanism is arranged to kill a cat if a quantum event, such as the decay of a radioactive atom, occurs. Thus the fate of a large-scale object, the cat, is entangled with the fate of a quantum object, the atom. Prior to observation, according to the Schrödinger equation and numerous particle experiments, the atom is in a quantum superposition, a linear combination of decayed and undecayed states, which evolve with time. Therefore the cat should also be in a superposition, a linear combination of states that can be characterized as an "alive cat" and states that can be characterized as a "dead cat". Each of these possibilities is associated with a specific nonzero probability amplitude. However, a single, particular observation of the cat does not find a superposition: it always finds either a living cat, or a dead cat. After the measurement the cat is definitively alive or dead. The question is: How are the probabilities converted into an actual, well-defined classical outcome? 

Interpretations 

The views often grouped together as the Copenhagen interpretation are the oldest and, collectively, probably still the most widely held attitude about quantum mechanics.[4][5] N. David Mermin coined the phrase "Shut up and calculate!" to summarize Copenhagen-type views, a saying often misattributed to Richard Feynman and which Mermin later found insufficiently nuanced.[6][7]

Generally, views in the Copenhagen tradition posit something in the act of observation which results in the collapse of the wave function. This concept, though often attributed to Niels Bohr, was due to Werner Heisenberg, whose later writings obscured many disagreements he and Bohr had had during their collaboration and that the two never resolved.[8][9] In these schools of thought, wave functions may be regarded as statistical information about a quantum system, and wave function collapse is the updating of that information in response to new data.[10][11] Exactly how to understand this process remains a topic of dispute.[12]

Bohr offered an interpretation that is independent of a subjective observer, or measurement, or collapse; instead, an "irreversible" or effectively irreversible process causes the decay of quantum coherence which imparts the classical behavior of "observation" or "measurement".[13][14][15][16] 

Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation attempts to solve the problem by suggesting that there is only one wave function, the superposition of the entire universe, and it never collapses—so there is no measurement problem. Instead, the act of measurement is simply an interaction between quantum entities, e.g. observer, measuring instrument, electron/positron etc., which entangle to form a single larger entity, for instance living cat/happy scientist. Everett also attempted to demonstrate how the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics would appear in measurements, a work later extended by Bryce DeWitt. However, proponents of the Everettian program have not yet reached a consensus regarding the correct way to justify the use of the Born rule to calculate probabilities.[17][18]

De Broglie–Bohm theory tries to solve the measurement problem very differently: the information describing the system contains not only the wave function, but also supplementary data (a trajectory) giving the position of the particle(s). The role of the wave function is to generate the velocity field for the particles. These velocities are such that the probability distribution for the particle remains consistent with the predictions of the orthodox quantum mechanics. According to de Broglie–Bohm theory, interaction with the environment during a measurement procedure separates the wave packets in configuration space, which is where apparent wave function collapse comes from, even though there is no actual collapse.[19] 

A fourth approach is given by objective-collapse models. In such models, the Schrödinger equation is modified and obtains nonlinear terms. These nonlinear modifications are of stochastic nature and lead to a behaviour that for microscopic quantum objects, e.g. electrons or atoms, is unmeasurably close to that given by the usual Schrödinger equation. For macroscopic objects, however, the nonlinear modification becomes important and induces the collapse of the wave function. Objective-collapse models are effective theories. The stochastic modification is thought to stem from some external non-quantum field, but the nature of this field is unknown. One possible candidate is the gravitational interaction as in the models of Diósi and Penrose. The main difference of objective-collapse models compared to the other approaches is that they make falsifiable predictions that differ from standard quantum mechanics. Experiments are already getting close to the parameter regime where these predictions can be tested.[20] The Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) theory proposes that wave function collapse happens spontaneously as part of the dynamics. Particles have a non-zero probability of undergoing a "hit", or spontaneous collapse of the wave function, on the order of once every hundred million years.[21] Though collapse is extremely rare, the sheer number of particles in a measurement system means that the probability of a collapse occurring somewhere in the system is high. Since the entire measurement system is entangled (by quantum entanglement), the collapse of a single particle initiates the collapse of the entire measurement apparatus. Because the GRW theory makes different predictions from orthodox quantum mechanics in some conditions, it is not an interpretation of quantum mechanics in a strict sense. 

The role of decoherence 

Erich Joos and Heinz-Dieter Zeh claim that the phenomenon of quantum decoherence, which was put on firm ground in the 1980s, resolves the problem.[22] The idea is that the environment causes the classical appearance of macroscopic objects. Zeh further claims that decoherence makes it possible to identify the fuzzy boundary between the quantum microworld and the world where the classical intuition is applicable.[23][24] Quantum decoherence becomes an important part of some modern updates of the Copenhagen interpretation based on consistent histories.[25][26] Quantum decoherence does not describe the actual collapse of the wave function, but it explains the conversion of the quantum probabilities (that exhibit interference effects) to the ordinary classical probabilities. See, for example, Zurek,[3] Zeh[23] and Schlosshauer.[27]

The present situation is slowly clarifying, described in a 2006 article by Schlosshauer as follows:[28]

Several decoherence-unrelated proposals have been put forward in the past to elucidate the meaning of probabilities and arrive at the Born rule ... It is fair to say that no decisive conclusion appears to have been reached as to the success of these derivations. ... 

As it is well known, [many papers by Bohr insist upon] the fundamental role of classical concepts. The experimental evidence for superpositions of macroscopically distinct states on increasingly large length scales counters such a dictum. Superpositions appear to be novel and individually existing states, often without any classical counterparts. Only the physical interactions between systems then determine a particular decomposition into classical states from the view of each particular system. Thus classical concepts are to be understood as locally emergent in a relative-state sense and should no longer claim a fundamental role in the physical theory. 

Further reading: R. Buniy, S. Hsu and A. Zee On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics (2006)

The la-5: a brief history.

 Lavochkin La-5 

The Lavochkin La-5 (Лавочкин Ла-5) was a Soviet fighter aircraft of World War II. It was a development and refinement of the LaGG-3, replacing the earlier model's inline engine with the much more powerful Shvetsov ASh-82 radial engine. During its time in service, it was one of the Soviet Air Force's most capable types of warplane, able to fight German designs on an equal footing. 

The La-5 descended from the LaGG-1 and LaGG-3, aircraft designed by Vladimir Gorbunov before the Second World War. The LaGG-1 was underpowered, and the LaGG-3 - with a lighter airframe and a stronger engine did not solve the problem. By early 1942, the LaGG-3's shortcomings led to Lavochkin falling out of Joseph Stalin's favour, and LaGG-3 factories converting to Yakovlev Yak-1 and Yak-7 production.

During the winter of 1941–1942, Lavochkin worked unofficially to improve the LaGG-3. Design work was conducted in a small hut beside an airfield. In early 1942, Gorbunov replaced a LaGG-3's inline engine with the stronger Shvetsov ASh-82 radial engine. The nose was replaced with the nose of the ASh-82-powered Sukhoi Su-2. The new engine required work to maintain the aircraft's balance. The prototype first flew in March, and demonstrated surprisingly acceptable performance; air force test pilots considered it to be superior to the Yak-7, and intensive flight tests began in April. The aircraft was named LaG-5; the change from LaGG was because Mikhail Gudkov, one of the original LaGG designers, was no longer with the programme. By July, it was called La-5, although Gorbunov was still involved. 

By July, the La-5 was ordered into full production, including the conversion of incomplete LaGG-3 airframes. Production based on the prototype began almost immediately in factories in Moscow and the Yaroslav region. Changes to the main production model included slats to improve all-round performance. The La-5 was inferior to the best German fighters at higher altitudes, but equal at lower altitudes; it was suitable for air combat over the Eastern Front which typically took place at altitudes under 5,000 m (16,404 ft).

The aircraft received further modifications. The La-5F improved the pilot's exterior visibility with a cut down rear fuselage. The definitive La-5FN had a fuel-injected engine, a different engine air intake, and was further lightened. A full circle turn took 18–19 seconds. Very late-production La-5FN had two 20mm Berezin B-20 cannon installed in the cowling in place of the heavier two 20mm ShVAK; both were capable of a salvo weight of 3.4 kg/s.

9,920 La-5s of all variants were built, including dedicated trainer versions, designated La-5UTI.

The La-5 was the basis for the further improved Lavochkin La-7.

A number of La-5s continued in the service of Eastern Bloc nations after the end of the war, including Czechoslovakia. 

Performance 

In mid-1943, a new La-5 was captured by the Germans after making a forced landing at a German airfield. The aircraft was assessed by Luftwaffe test pilot Hans-Werner Lerche.[1] Lerche noted that the La-5FN excelled at altitudes below 3,000 m (9,843 ft) but suffered from short range and flight time of only 40 minutes at cruise engine power. All of the engine controls (throttle, mixture, propeller pitch, cowl flaps, and supercharger gearbox) had separate levers which forced the pilot to make constant adjustments during combat or risk suboptimal performance. For example, rapid acceleration required moving no less than six levers. In contrast, contemporary German aircraft with the BMW 801 used the Kommandogerät engine computer system that automatically controlled all of these settings from a single throttle lever. Due to airflow limitations, the engine boost system (Forsazh) could not be used above 2,000 m (6,562 ft). Stability in all axes was generally good. The authority of the ailerons was deemed exceptional but the rudder was insufficiently powerful at lower speeds. At speeds in excess of 600 km/h (370 mph), the forces on control surfaces became excessive. Horizontal turn time at 1,000 m (3,281 ft) and maximum engine power was 25 seconds. 

The La-5's top speed and acceleration were comparable to Luftwaffe fighters at low altitude. The La-5FN roll rate was slightly higher than the Messerschmitt Bf 109; the Bf 109 was slightly faster, and had higher climb and turn rates.[2] The La-5FN climbed slightly faster and had a smaller turn radius than the Focke-Wulf Fw 190A-8. However, the Fw 190A-8 was faster at all altitudes and had significantly better dive performance and a superior roll-rate. Lerche advised Fw 190 pilots to draw the La-5FN to higher altitudes, escape attacks by diving followed by a high-speed shallow climb, and avoid prolonged turning engagements. Both German fighters had superior performance at all altitudes when using MW 50 fuel.

The most serious La-5 defects were the engine's thermal isolation, lack of cockpit ventilation, and a canopy that was impossible to open at speeds over 350 km/h. Furthermore, poor engine compartment insulation allowed exhaust gas to enter the cockpit; in response, pilots frequently ignored orders by flying with open canopies.[3] 

Soviet pilots were generally satisfied with the La-5. "That was an excellent fighter with two cannons and a powerful air-cooled engine", recalled pilot Viktor M. Sinaisky. "The first La-5s from the Tbilisi factory were slightly inferior, while the last ones from the Gorki plant, which came to us from Ivanovo, were perfect. At first we received regular La-5s, but then we got new ones containing the ASh-82FN engine with direct injection of fuel into the cylinders. It was perfected and had better maneuverability, acceleration, speed and climb rate compared to the early variants. Everyone was in love with the La-5. It was easy to maintain, too."[4]

Nevertheless, La-5 losses were high, the highest of all fighters in service in USSR, excepting those of the Yak-1. In 1941–45, VVS KA lost 2,591 La-5s: 73 in 1942, 1,460 in 1943, 825 the following year, and 233 in 1945.[5] 

Operational history 

The La-5F arrived at the frontline in February 1943. It was able to challenge the Bf 109G-2 and the Fw 190A-4 on more or less equal terms, while at tree-top height it was even faster. One of the most successful La-5 units was 5th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, that flew 3,802 combat sorties, claiming 128 enemy aircraft shot down while losing 52 Lavochkins.[6] 

The quantum world v. reductive materialism

Quantum Physics Axed Materialism. Many Hope the World Won’t Know 

Denyse O'Leary 

Quantum mechanics, which developed in the early 20th century, has been a serious blow to materialism. 

There is no way to make sense of it if immaterial entities like information, observation, or the mind are not real. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder struggles against the effects of this fact.

In a recent video, she asks, “Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Effects?” (November 19, 2022). 

She asks, why did some physicists like von Neumann and Wigner think that consciousness is necessary to make sense of quantum mechanics, and can consciousness influence the outcome of a quantum experiment? (0:33)

Well, they had good reason. Any effort to exclude consciousness from reality fails. 

A Hostile Witness 

Hossenfelder, a hostile witness, kindly offers an example from the work of Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990): 

John Bell used the following example: “When the Queen dies in London, the Prince of Wales becomes instantaneously king.” No matter where he is. So why wasn’t the speed of light limit broken when the queen died? Because we can update our *knowledge about what happened elsewhere without causing any event elsewhere. And this is how Bohr thought about the collapse of the wave-function. You can update it instantaneously because it just describes what we know. Einstein wasn’t convinced, but Bohr won the argument. (2:14 

But isn’t it reasonable to ask, what does it mean to say that “the Queen” “dies”? On September 8 of this year, Elizabeth II, head of state for the Commonwealth, which includes many countries, including Canada, Jamaica, and Nigeria, died, as is the fate of all mortals. 

The Nature of Consciousness 

Now, here is a question that more directly concerns the nature of consciousness, a topic that has rattled the pioneer quantum physicists, if not Hossenfelder: Did goats or termites in any of those environments notice or care?

The big question is, could those entities have cared? No. They could not. It is not a question of their opinion. They can’t grasp the matter. Something is happening in human consciousness that is not happening in theirs.

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

Apparently monogamy makes dollars as well as sense.

Moving In Together Doesn’t Match the Financial Benefits of Marriage, but Why? 

Married couples are four times as wealthy as unmarried couples who live together 

By Julia Carpenter 

A walk down the aisle can be a route to greater wealth and prosperity for couples in the U.S. Married people have higher net worths and are more likely to be homeowners than their unmarried counterparts their age are.  

The mystery, though, is why cohabitating but unmarried couples struggle to build wealth in the same way. As of 2019, the median net worth for cohabiting couples age 25 to 34 was $17,372, a quarter that of the $68,210 for married couples of that same age range, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. For singles it is $7,341.

“If you build an arch, the cornerstone is the first piece you put in and the capstone is the last,” he said. “What this means is people see an economic bar they need to clear before they get married. Couples wait until they have good jobs, a car that won’t break down, maybe even a house. Then, they get married.”

Melissa Mowery, a 30-year-old communications manager in Asheville, N.C., has been with her boyfriend for five years and living together for nearly four. The two don’t share a joint bank account, but they split the cost of rent and other bills. Even so, Ms. Mowery said she can’t make sense of the financial gap between her relationship and that of married couples. 

“We’re already saving a lot of money and splitting the cost on most things,” she said. “I don’t understand how married couples are accumulating wealth in a way we’re not doing.” 

While there are legal and tax benefits to marriage, research suggests the financial security and long-term mind-set of those who tie the knot may also be a powerful driver of wealth. More married couples pool their money—such as sharing savings accounts and investing together—to achieve certain goals, Ms. Kent said. Cohabiting couples are less likely to combine finances and investments.

Working with two incomes and combining their investments to maximize compound interest can significantly increase a couple’s financial prospects, said Emily Garbinsky, associate professor of marketing at Cornell University, who has studied couples’ financial behavior. Simply put, married people may be more likely to be on the same page financially, she said. 

“Married people may be much more likely to have these conversations around what goals they have for their financial future,” she said. “There seems to be something very special and unique about deciding to share finances.” 

Unmarried couples may be less willing to commingle their money, said Prof. Garbinsky.

“Our money, our income, represents a huge part of who we are,” she said. “[Sharing] that can be scary for people, so they tend to be very protective.”  

Both married and unmarried couples who do pool finances also experience greater relationship satisfaction and may even stay together for longer, Prof. Garbinsky said. 

Housing is one of the biggest factors in establishing a couple’s wealth. Compared with single people and cohabiting couples, married couples hold a larger concentration of housing wealth, according to data from the St. Louis Fed. 

“Most of my married friends have bought a house,” Ms. Mowery said, noting high housing costs in her area. “I just don’t know how they did it. Everyone talks about how when you get married, you accumulate wealth but I don’t know what that means.” 

In the current hypercompetitive housing market, as smaller, more affordable starter homes vanish and housing affordability declines, single people and cohabiting couples are often at a disadvantage. 

My problem with NDEs.

 Leviticus19:31ASV"Turn ye not unto them that have familiar spirits, nor unto the wizards; seek them not out, to be defiled by them: I am Jehovah your God." 

As then there are now some who claim to have the gift of being able to communicate with the departed spirits of our loved ones. If as some suggest death is merely an illusion in the case of humans, and that the real us is merely freed from captivity to a superfluous physical form by what we mistake for death. Why would God object to communication between those still trapped in their physical forms and those freed. Surely such communication would provide comfort for his people. 

1Corinthians10:20NIV"No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons." 

The occult and mystical practices of those worshiping any other God than JEHOVAH put said practitioners in contact with demons, malignant superhuman intelligences who promote false religious ideas. 

Speaking of their overlord our Lord declares 

John8:44KJV"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof. " 

The prince of demons/unclean spirits is the speaker of the first lie. What was that first lie? 

Genesis3:4ASV"And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: "  

Well it sure seems like they died, but typical of their modus operandi the prince of darkness and his lieutenants have been working assiduously to muddy the waters re: the truth of death. Note please it is only if death is real that a resurrection is necessary. 

1Corinthians15:36,37NIV"How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37When you sow, you do NOT plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. " 

If we do not die there is no need for a resurrection. Note also that it is not the body that is to be raised up but the soul/self. 

The demons use the occult to keep the marvelous hope of resurrection from the people. Promoting the false notion that death is not real and as a necessary corollary that the resurrection as described in the bible is not real. 

A key tell that deception (either self-deception or something more sinister) is afoot with these "NDEs" is the physical nature of this alleged spirit world. See the article dated 13/11/2022 . We are being ask to believe that the spirit world is just a stylized mirror image of the physical complete with all the plants ,animals physical materials like gold that we are familiar with. That spirit forms are humanoid possessing human orientation like up or down front or back. Just a modicum of thought will expose all this as very unlikely. 

The design is real though the amber is fake.

Fossil Friday: Fake Amber and the Piltdown Fly  

Günter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features an apparent fossil wasp in Mexican amber. What it actually shows is a crude forgery, where a modern wasp has been embedded in artificial resin. Such simple forgeries are commonly sold to tourists in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Eastern Europe, and Eastern Asia. They can be easily recognised and hardly any real expert would fall for them (Poinar 1982, Ross 1998, Gröhn 2013). However, there exist much more sophisticated forgeries of amber inclusions that even fooled famous scientists (Grimaldi et al. 1994, Eriksson & Poinar 2015). They are crafted by using real pieces of amber.

Fossiliferous amber pieces usually were formed by several successive flows of tree resin and therefore have a layered composition that is called “Schlauben.” Cunning forgers split a piece of amber along these natural surfaces, carve a cavity in which they place a dead recent insect, fill the cavity with resin or Canada balsam, glue the two halves together again, and polish the piece to hide the fissure. Such sophisticated forgeries are hard to detect, because any test of the amber substance only confirms its authenticity. The considerable effort of course only makes sense to a forger in case of very rare inclusions that achieve a high market price among collectors, unless somebody only wants to play a trick on a scientist. Here is an interesting example (McAlister 2012). 

The Modern Latrine Fly 

Professor Willi Hennig was one of the most famous entomologists and biologists of the 20th century: founder of modern phylogenetic systematics (cladistics), one of the world’s leading experts on Dipteran systematics of his time, and a predecessor of mine as curator for the amber collection of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart (Germany). In 1966 he described an inclusion of the modern latrine fly species Fannia scalaris in Baltic amber (Hennig 1966). The specimen had already been briefly mentioned by the German collector and dipteran researcher Herrmann Loew in 1850, but was now studied for the first time in detail by Hennig. His discovery seemed quite important because it featured one of the very few fossil representatives of the dipteran family Muscidae, with large implications for the phylogenetic and biogeographic history of flies. It also contributed to the textbook wisdom (e.g., Carpenter 1992) that some species apparently survived unchanged since the Oligocene.

In 1993 the young scientist Andrew Ross, who later became a well-known expert for amber fossils, studied the remarkable specimen at the Natural History Museum in London, where it had been deposited since 1922, after being acquired with other parts of the Loew amber collection. Ross was shocked when the amber piece overheated by the suboptimal microscope lighting and recognized a strange crack appearing above the fly. The supposed mishap turned out to be a lucky circumstance. A closer examination of the crack revealed to his big surprise that the apparent fossil fly was nothing but a clever forgery using a common recent latrine fly (Grimaldi et al. 1994, Ross 1998, Eriksson & Poinar 2015). Ross gave this forged fossil the fitting nickname “Piltdown fly” in his very first scientific publication (Ross 1993), alluding to the infamous Piltdown man hoax. The discovery of this forgery even made headlines in the tabloids (Anonymous 1993, Highfield 1993, Kellaway 1993) as well as popular science media (Palmer 1993). 

A Possibility of Forgery 

Was Hennig unaware of the possibility of a forgery? Or course not. He even quoted Crowson (1965), who had already suggested that in all cases of apparently recent species in amber the possibility of a forgery should be carefully evaluated and excluded. Hennig (1966)commented that there is zero evidence that any such case ever happened, and categorically dismissed this possibility as “totally unfounded” for his amber fly. That was not just a quite bold statement but actually pretty careless for such a distinguished expert.

Therefore, it was even speculated that Hennig might have been involved in a deliberate joke, because his paper was published on April Fools’ Day 1969, moreover in a non-peer-reviewed journal published by the Stuttgart museum, where he worked as curator. However, this possibility seems highly unlikely considering the serious style and far-reaching scientific conclusions of his manuscript, so that I rather think the publishing date is a mere coincidence, even though a very ironic one.

Unfortunately, forgeries still abound in the international fossil trade, and after some further scandals like the notorious Archaeoraptor case, scientists are nowadays very much aware of the risk. Therefore, important new finds from potentially dubious provenance are very carefully studied with highly sophisticated methods and the most modern technology to make sure the fossils are really authentic before any scientific studies are published on them. Hopefully, this will prevent further Piltdown fossils to make it into scientific literature. Nevertheless, some caution may still be advised. 

References 

Anonymous 1993. Student enttarnt Fossilien-Fälschung. Focus 47.

Carpenter FM 1992. Superclass Hexapoda. in: Moore RC & Kaesler RL (eds). Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Part R Arthropoda 4, Volume 4. Geological Society of America & University of Kansas, Boulder (CO) & Lawrence (KS), pp. 398–399, 443.

Crowson RA 1965. Some Thoughts concerning the Insects of the Baltic Amber. p. 133 in: Freeman P (ed.). Proceedings XIIth International Congress of Entomology, London, 8-16 July, 1964, 842 pp.

Eriksson ME & Poinar GO Jr 2015. Fake it till you make it—the uncanny art of forging amber. Geology Today 31(1), 21–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gto.12083

Grimaldi DA, Shedrinsky A, Ross A & Baer NS 1994. Forgeries of Fossils in “Amber”: History, Identification and Case Studies. Curator The Museum Journal 37(4), 251–274. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1994.tb01023.x

Gröhn C 2013. Fälschungen — Wie erkenne ich eine Inklusenfälschung. pp. 106–109. in: Alles über Bernstein. Wachholtz, Neumünster (DE), 207 pp.

Hennig W 1966. Fannia scalaris Fabricius, eine rezente Art im Baltischen Bernstein? (Diptera: Muscidae). Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde 150, 1–12. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Stuttgarter-Beitraege-Naturkunde_150_0001-0012.pdf

Highfield R 1993. Fossil hoaxer puts fly in the ointment for insect history. Daily Telegraph. 

Kellaway R 1993. Jura-fix Park fly. The Sun November 12, 1993, p. 3.

Loew H 1850. Über den Bernstein und die Bernsteinfauna. Programm der Königlichen Realschule zu Meseritz, 44 pp.

McAlister E 2012. Piltdown Fly. NHM December 21, 2012. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/blogs/diptera-blog/2012/12/21/piltdown-fly.html

Palmer D 1993. Fatal flaw fingers fake fossil fly. NewScientist November 13, 1993. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14018990-400-fatal-flaw-fingers-fake-fossil-fly/

Poinar GO Jr 1982. Amber-True or False? Gems and Minerals (April) 534, 80–84.

Ross AJ 1993. The ‘Piltdown Fly’ (abstract). Palaeontology Newsletter 20, p. 16.

Ross A 1998. Fake Amber. pp. 6–9 in: Amber — The Natural Time Capsule. The Natural History Museum, 73 pp.

Be grateful for your eyes' flawless design once more.

Look: On Thanksgiving, Be Grateful for the Intelligent Design of Your Eyes

David Klinghoffer 

Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re looking for one more thing to express gratitude for, look no further than…eyes. As engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman write in their new book, Your Designed Body: 

Our eyes differentiate the nuances across an amazing spectrum of colors. The same eyes that work in painfully bright light can also see in almost total darkness. How do they turn light (photons) into information (electrical impulses), and how does our brain turn that into images? 

Eyes were quite the sudden, unanticipated gift in the history of life. Charles Darwin expected that they must have developed from simple forerunners through the usual (hypothesized) series of gradual steps. But at the Cambrian explosion some 530 million years ago, we find clear evidence of both compound (as in the trilobite pictured above) and camera eyes already in use by creatures among the first animals in the fossil record. BOOM: There they are. 

An Evolutionary Icon 

We take our own eyes for granted. However, our ability to interact with the world through vision — its beauty, its marvels, the information all around us — is beyond remarkable. At the same time, the eyes are an evolutionary icon, in two senses. In a powerful short video written and directed by Rachel Adams, we consider the scientific evidence around the question of eye evolution: 

To deal with and demote the exquisite sensitivity of our vision — the ability to detect a single photon — Darwinists claim that vertebrate eyes are built backwards in testimony to the haphazard ways of evolution. But as Discovery Institute biologist Jonathan Wells explains, evolutionists are working with outdated science. It’s not ID proponents, but entirely mainstream research, that increasingly reveals the optimal design of our eyes.

Don’t let the truth about life and its origins get canceled. If, like me, you are grateful for the courageous voices of Dr. Wells and other scientists with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, please take a moment now to donate to keep Evolution News — the daily voice of the intelligent design research community — going strong in 2023! 

 

Be thankful for your body's flawless design.

“Poor Design”? Actually, the Human Body Is Amazing; Here’s Why  

Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from Your Designed Body, the new book by engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman.

In the human body, even a cursory look shows us that a lot is going on. Hands that wield a sledgehammer during the day can play evocative piano sonatas in the evening. In a triathlon, the same body swims, bicycles, and runs — three very different activities — in rapid succession and with extreme endurance. The same body that completed that triathlon can also climb a mountain (though perhaps on a different day). 

Our bodies keep a constant internal temperature, manage our water levels effectively, and keep us going even when we eat the wrong foods. When we stand up, our blood pressure adjusts almost instantly to keep blood flowing to the brain. We know when we need food and water. Even with our eyes closed, we can sense the position of all our body parts and make detailed adjustments in movement. 

Our eyes differentiate the nuances across an amazing spectrum of colors. The same eyes that work in painfully bright light can also see in almost total darkness. How do they turn light (photons) into information (electrical impulses), and how does our brain turn that into images? 

Our ears face similar challenges, only they turn sound (pressure waves) into electrical signals. Further, they’re configured such that our minds can generate a three-dimensional understanding of the objects around us, just by the sounds those objects emit (or block). 

When we cut our finger, the blood quickly stops and the wound scabs over and heals. When we get sick, our bodies generally do an excellent job of fixing the problem and getting well again. 

While our bodies are neither the fastest, nor the biggest, nor the strongest in the animal kingdom, they are without question the most versatile. The human body’s range of capabilities boggles the mind. 

On top of all this, we can make new people. Anyone who has experienced the birth of a child knows that in this astonishing process something special happens. 

A Comparison with Human Design 

What is a fitting response to such wonders? 

Several years ago, I (Steve Laufmann) was perusing an online discussion board frequented by some fellow enterprise and systems architects when one post caught my attention. The writer observed that human-designed systems architectures can’t compare to the amazing architectures we see in living organisms. This comment sparked an energetic discussion. Of particular interest to me, one responder agreed that these biological systems would indeed be amazing architectures, but since they resulted from entirely random, unguided Darwinian processes, as he believed, they could not be considered architecture. After all, architects know that good architectural design takes hard work and never happens by accident. 

Huh? 

Surely the architecture — the quality of the engineering in any system, including a living system — is evident in the resulting system, independent of who, or what, did the architectural work. And from a systems perspective, it’s clear that living systems have extraordinarily hard problems to solve, else they can’t be alive. For example, many single-celled organisms can intake oxygen from the surrounding environment, but how do the cells in a large multi-cellular body (like a human’s) get oxygen when most of them have no access to the external environment? 

It takes complex, multi-part systems to solve problems of this kind — to make a large and complex body work. And such systems only happen when there’s a suitable architectural framework to define how they fit together — and how they work together. In the example above, a naïve architecture would likely fail to get the necessary oxygen to each and every cell, or would make any of a million other similar errors that would render life impossible. 

The human body is unquestionably a marvel of engineering, but what is the source of the engineering? We’ve all been told that we are cosmic accidents, built gradually over eons by the purposeless forces of nature. We also have been told that we are purposely made. 

Which Is It?  

To shed light on the question we intend a detailed examination of the human body. The exploration will benefit from two distinct, complementary perspectives: 

A medical perspective — to understand the sophisticated and extraordinarily precise functional capacities, dynamics, and coordination of the body’s many interconnected systems. 

An engineering perspective — to explore the exquisite engineering of these systems: the mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and electrical systems, the control systems, the internal signaling and coordination mechanisms, the information processing systems, and much more. 

Throughout, we’ll base our observations and arguments on incontrovertible medical and engineering knowledge. 

We’ll also consider claims that one or another part of the human body is poorly engineered. The past several years have seen a growing move to denigrate and demote the human body’s architecture. According to this argument, the human body is actually not so well designed. Rather, it’s filled with the many errors and evolutionary dead ends you’d expect if it resulted from billions of small, random, purposeless mutations threshed by natural selection. This argument for blind evolution is commonly known as the argument from poor design. We’ll look at a few examples of this line of argument in the course of the book and take a deeper dive into the matter in Chapter 23, after we’ve explored many recurring design principles and patterns in the human body. 

We will argue that the exquisite architecture and engineering-design of the human body reveal daunting hurdles to any causal explanation — hurdles that can no longer be ignored. In the final chapters we will detail a theory of biological causation rooted in the lessons of engineering and systems biology, and compare it to the modern evolutionary paradigm. 

Controversial? Definitely 

assumptions, a person may not let go of the assumption that is most reasonable to let go of. Instead, he may let go of the one he cherishes the least. 

As you examine the evidence laid out in these pages, our encouragement to you is, don’t be the guy in the story. Be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. 

Clever Solutions  

The question of human origins is also, of course, a question of biological origins generally. Organic life must overcome many thorny problems, both to be alive and to reproduce. While the laws of physics and chemistry are precisely tuned to permit life, they are incapable of causing it, and of course have no way to care whether life exists or not. 

And the matter calls for considerable care. Life depends on a delicate balance of forces, arranged with precision. As Richard Dawkins famously put it, “However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.”2 Life’s margin of error is small. But as we’ll show, jump-starting, sustaining, and reproducing life are enormously hard problems to solve. How is it possible to get so much right, to land within the margin of error again and again and again? 

Hard problems require ingenious solutions. Fortunately for us, ingenious solutions are everywhere in biology — and nowhere more so than in the human body. 

Virtually every one of the body’s ingenious solutions involves one or more systems (1) composed of various parts that (2) work together to achieve a function that none of the parts can perform on its own, (3) all of which are correctly arranged, assembled, and integrated, with (4) exactly the needed range of capacities, while (5) operating within tight tolerances and under tight deadlines. Most of us know from firsthand experience that when any one of these systems breaks down, bad things happen. 

Producing a next generation is even trickier. If something goes wrong, even something seemingly modest — and early in embryonic development, particularly — the result is that life simply ceases. Life never exists as a formless blob, but instead always exists in an architecturally complex form. Nor, of course, does life exist in the often- fertile imaginations of materialist scientists. Life is found in the real world, and reality has a way of humbling theories that are not grounded in the nitty-gritty details of what life requires. 

Coherent Interdependent Systems — Do or Die  

engineering marvel. An engineering perspective, then, should shed important light on how it works. 

Though their mistakes sometimes take longer to discover than those of physicians, engineers also must live in the real world. Engineers design, build, deploy, and operate complex systems that do real work in the real world. And it takes yet more work to keep these systems from failing, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen at the least opportune times. 

Engineers know that all the following are required to make systems that work: Systems require many parts. The parts are usually specialized to perform certain tasks under certain conditions. Systems are typically composed of other systems, constituting a hierarchy of systems — a system of systems. 

Systems must be coherent. A system’s parts must be precisely coordinated. They must fit together correctly, with the right interfaces and integrations for functional coherence. And they must be carefully orchestrated over time to achieve their overall function(s), for process coherence. Failure at either will prevent the system from working. 

Systems of systems usually exhibit complex interdependencies. Individual systems or subsystems often require other working subsystems in order to function. Many times, these dependencies go both ways. For example, your car’s engine won’t start without a charged battery, but the battery won’t charge unless the engine runs. 

For human engineers it takes a lot of ingenuity, hard work, and perseverance to achieve such things, typically including many iterations of the classic design-build-test cycle. Engineers know that working systems are never an accident. So if someone suggests that a coherent, interdependent system of systems (like the human body) arose by chance, they’ll need to back that up with a detailed engineering analysis. 

Notes 

Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. Frank Gaynor (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 33–34.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 9. 

 

It still looks like engineering because it still is.

New Book Offers a Fresh Test for Human Origins: Explain Your Own Body 

David Klinghoffer 

Whatever other challenges it may introduce in our lives, money has this virtue: it doesn’t lie. Bioengineer Stuart Burgess made this excellent point at the recent Westminster Conference on Science and Faith. The amount of money that investors are putting into biomimetics research — the quest for engineering solutions inspired by biology — is remarkable and telling. 

These investors don’t seek to make a philosophical statement about intelligent design or evolution. They’re trying to turn their money into more money. That’s all. The highest tribute to biological design is their recognition of the genius behind the design of life, most notably human life. Unlike Darwinists, in the grip of ideology or of group think, investors put their money where the solutions are. Money doesn’t lie. 

A “Panorama” of Errors? 

The new book Your Designed Body (Discovery Institute Press), by engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman, is a powerful, highly substantive, and delightfully written rebuttal to the ideology of “poor design.” The latter is the notion that our bodies are a “panorama of glitches,” as one Darwinist, biologist Nathan Lents, put it in the title of his own book. Such a conclusion is dictated to evolutionists by their premise that all life is only a product of chance winnowed by death. Of course, then, it follows that humans are a “panorama” of errors.

As Laufmann and Glicksman summarize in the introduction to Part Six of their book, “In these pages so far, we have gone beyond how the human body looks, to examine how it actually works. We find coherence, interdependencies, and finely tuned dynamics everywhere we explore. These characteristics present a vast array of formidable causal hurdles, sufficient to test any theory of human origins.” 

Laufmann and Glicksman, in other words, are proposing an evolutionary test: Does the evidence of our own bodies argue for a designed, or an undesigned origin? Evolutionary biologists ask this question, too, but without the professional background that these authors can bring to bear. Physicians know things that evolutionary biologist don’t appreciate in the same way, not remotely: “The body must follow the rules.” “The body must take control.” “The body must possess exactly the right functional capacities.” “The body must be finely tuned.”

Similarly, unlike evolutionary biologists, engineers are highly attuned to certain realities about complex systems: “Systems require many parts.” “Systems must be coherent.” “Systems of systems usually exhibit complex interdependencies.” 

No Equivalent of Malpractice 

Evolutionists who are neither physicians nor engineers can get away with failing to understand why things work in life. They can be satisfied by surface appearances. That’s a luxury that Howard Glicksman, Steve Laufmann, and their respective colleagues don’t have in their work. When systems fail, those who practice medicine and engineering know they can be held responsible — not just morally but legally. That tends to clarify your thinking. Imagine driving a car in a place where you could never get pulled over by the police or be issued a citation. That is evolutionary biology, with no equivalent of malpractice or negligence, in a nutshell.

Bringing these professional sensibilities, and sensitivities, together is the unique contribution of Your Designed Body, an important new addition to the debate about intelligent design. We’ll say more about that in coming weeks as we look more closely at the book. Meanwhile, you can get your copy here.