Darwinism's failure as a predictive model IX

Darwin's Predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

in the twentieth century scientists studied blood immunity and how immune reaction could be used to compare species. The blood studies tended to produce results that parallel the more obvious indicators such as body plan. For example, humans were found to be more closely related to apes than to fish or rabbits. These findings were said to be strong confirmations of evolution. In 1923 H. H. Lane cited this evidence as supporting “the fact of evolution.” (Lane, 47) Later in the century these findings continued to be cited in support of evolution. (Berra, 19; Dodson and Dodson, 65)

 

But even by mid century contradictions to evolutionary expectations were becoming obvious in serological tests. As J.B.S.Haldane explained in 1949, “Now every species of mammal and bird so far investigated has shown quite a surprising biochemical diversity by serological tests. The antigens concerned seem to be proteins to which polysaccharides are attached.” (quoted in Gagneux and Varki)

 

Indeed these polysaccharides, or glycans, did not fulfill evolutionary expectations. As one paper explained, glycans show “remarkably discontinuous distribution across evolutionary lineages,” for they “occur in a discontinuous and puzzling distribution across evolutionary lineages.” (Bishop and Gagneux) These glycans can be (i) specific to a particular lineage, (i) similar in very distant lineages, (iii) and conspicuously absent from very restricted taxa only.

Here is how another paper described glycan findings: “There is also no clear explanation for the extreme complexity and diversity of glycans that can be found on a given glycoconjugate or cell type. Based on the limited information available about the scope and distribution of this diversity among taxonomic groups, it is difficult to see clear trends or patterns consistent with different evolutionary lineages.” (Gagneux and Varki) 

References 

Berra, Tim. 1990. Evolution and the Myth of Creationism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 

Bishop J., P. Gagneux. 2007. “Evolution of carbohydrate antigens--microbial forces shaping host glycomes?.” Glycobiology 17:23R-34R.

 

Dodson, Edward, Peter Dodson. 1976. Evolution: Process and Product. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company.

 

Gagneux, P., A. Varki. 1999. “Evolutionary considerations in relating oligosaccharide diversity to biological function.” Glycobiology 9:747-755.

Lane, H. 1923. Evolution and Christian Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Friendly advice to wannabe chatbot poet: don't quit your day job.

Move Over, Keats? Here Is AI-Generated Poetry 

William A. Dembski 

I’ve had my latest exchange with GPT-3, this time here. (Also see my earlier post, “Dialogue with ChatGPT on Intelligent Design.”) I asked: 

Would you please write me song lyrics in four stanzas about two lovers who get lost on the way up climbing Mount Everest and then get miraculously reunited? Thanks. 

I received this in reply: 

Verse 1

Two lovers, on a journey up the mountain side

Heading towards the summit, side by side

Each step a challenge, each breath a prayer

A love so strong, that nothing can compare

Chorus

Climbing up the mountain, hand in hand

The journey long and hard, but the love so grand

The summit the goal, but fate had other plans

Two lovers lost on their way up Mount Everest

Verse 2

Winds howling, the blizzard so strong

The path ahead obscured, the way so long

The snow so deep, and the air so cold

Direction lost, the two slowly unfold

Chorus

Climbing up the mountain, hand in hand

The journey long and hard, but the love so grand

The summit the goal, but fate had other plans

Two lovers lost on their way up Mount Everest

Verse 3

Two hearts beating, hope starts to fade

The darkness closing in, the two afraid

A glimmer of light, a miracle appears

Uplifting spirits, the two wiped away their tears

Chorus

Climbing up the mountain, hand in hand The journey long and hard, but 

It broke off there, before the 250-word limit. There are settings for word counts.

This poetry is bad to the point of hilarity, much as some movies are so bad that they’re “good.” I know it’s possible to make fun of these AI content-generating systems. But they’re in the early stages, so it will be interesting to see where they break down consistently and where they show continued improvement. My suspicion is that they will never write good original poetry.

 

A match made in heaven?

Do Centaurs Really Exist? The Surprising Truth 

Denyse O'Leary 

Classical Greek mythology featured the “centaur,” a creature that was half human, half horse. Neuroscientist and horse trainer Janet Jones, author of Horse Brain, Human Brain: The Neuroscience of Horsemanship (Trafalgar Square, 2020), tells us that there is a truth behind the myth (as so often).

In what amounts to a “neurobiological miracle,” the horse — a prey animal — and the human — a predator — can learn complete neurological co-operation to perform complex feats that neither can manage alone. 

How complex are these equestrian feats?

Horse-and-human teams perform complex manoeuvres in competitions of all sorts. Together, we can gallop up to obstacles standing 8 feet (2.4 metres) high, leave the ground, and fly blind – neither party able to see over the top until after the leap has been initiated. Adopting a flatter trajectory with greater speed, horse and human sail over broad jumps up to 27 feet (more than 8 metres) long. We run as one at speeds of 44 miles per hour (nearly 70 km/h), the fastest velocity any land mammal carrying a rider can achieve. In freestyle dressage events, we dance in place to the rhythm of music, trot sideways across the centre of an arena with huge leg-crossing steps, and canter in pirouettes with the horse’s front feet circling her hindquarters. Galloping again, the best horse-and-human teams can slide 65 feet (nearly 20 metres) to a halt while resting all their combined weight on the horse’s hind legs. Endurance races over extremely rugged terrain test horses and riders in journeys that traverse up to 500 miles (805 km) of high-risk adventure.

JANET JONES, “BECOMING A CENTAUR” AT AEON (JANUARY 14, 2022) 

In dressage, as illustrated in this video, the horse is responding to slight pressure from the human to change from one specific gait to another. 

How the Co-Operation Is Achieved 

Recent research into the horse brain is helping us understand more about how this co-operation is achieved. 

In mounted teams, horses, with prey brains, and humans, with predator brains, share largely invisible signals via mutual body language. These signals are received and transmitted through peripheral nerves leading to each party’s spinal cord. Upon arrival in each brain, they are interpreted, and a learned response is generated. It, too, is transmitted through the spinal cord and nerves. This collaborative neural action forms a feedback loop, allowing communication from brain to brain in real time. Such conversations allow horse and human to achieve their immediate goals in athletic performance and everyday life. In a very real sense, each species’ mind is extended beyond its own skin into the mind of another, with physical interaction becoming a kind of neural dance.

JANET JONES, “BECOMING A CENTAUR” AT AEON (JANUARY 14, 2022) 

As Jones goes on to explain, horses and humans have very different neurological skill sets. Humans major in concentration (hunters) and horses major in vigilance (hunted). It takes years of careful training to enable the two to meld into a complex, unified, co-operative performance like dressage.

Some other interesting facts about horse psychology:

Horses are not curious: “A horse believes that too much confidence or curiosity about something new could lead to its demise. Horses are natural born skeptics, lacking self-assurance and appearing cowardly when faced with novel things.” (Equisearch) They must be carefully reassured that their environment is safe.

But they do have good memories: “Horses usually are considered to have memories second only to elephants. In the wild, if an attack came at a certain place, the herd avoided that spot in the future. This caution is still practiced by wild horses in the United States. If it were not for the horse’s good memory, it would be considerably less useful to people. A well-trained young horse never forgets its training. Neither does the poorly trained one.” (Melvin Bradley, Department of Animal Sciences, University of Missouri Extension)

What about horse intelligence as such? Dr. Bradley goes on to note, 

Horses have not been outstanding on limited intelligence tests, although they do very complex things routinely when trained. You may have known an old horse that was considered highly intelligent because it could open most gates and doors on the farm. Idle horses tend to seek activity, some of which may involve gate latches. Once they succeed, their good memory keeps them trying to open doors. When they get the grain bin open, they remember only the joy of eating. They can’t associate overeating with the ensuing bellyache from colic or loss of hooves from founder.

MELVIN BRADLEY, “PRACTICAL HORSE PSYCHOLOGY” AT UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI EXTENSION 

Animal Intelligence Tests 

That raises an interesting question about animal intelligence tests: They may sometimes be capturing only a narrow set of data that is irrelevant to how the animal sees to its own needs.

And lastly, why do horses do what we teach them? Most animals can’t or won’t. “Another important component of horse psychology is understanding herd hierarchy and how the human fits into the pecking order. The desired relationship between horse and human is that of a herd of two. According to the laws of the herd (the only rules horses really understand) the hierarchy is linear, meaning each and every individual of the herd is either dominate over or subordinate to each and every other individual. Think of the horse-human relationship as a herd of two, and within that herd, one is dominant and one is subordinate. Ideally, the human is the dominant member, but that is frequently not the case.” (Julie Goodnight, “Horse Psychology & the Language of Horses”)

You may also wish to read: Why cats can remember other cats’ names. University of Kyoto scientists found that they can indeed remember, provided they live in the same household. The researchers are unsure exactly how cats remember other cats’ names. But that may not be a great mystery if we keep in mind what is involved.

 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model VIII

 Darwin's Predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

The pentadactyl structure—five digits (four fingers and a thumb for humans) at the end of the limb structure—is one of the most celebrated proof texts for evolution. The pentadactyl structure is found throughout the tetrapods and its uses include flying, grasping, climbing and crawling. Such diverse activities, evolutionists reason, should require diverse limbs. There seems to be no reason why all should need a five digit limb. Why not three digits for some, eight for others, 13 for some others, and so forth? And yet they all are endowed with five digits. As Darwin explained, “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?” (Darwin, 382)

 

Such a suboptimal design must be an artefact of common descent—a suboptimal design that was handed down from a common ancestor rather than specifically designed for each species. And the common descent pattern formed by this structure is often claimed as strong evidence for evolution. (Berra, 21; Campbell et. al., 509; Futuyma, 47; Johnson and Losos, 298; Johnson and Raven, 286; Mayr, 26) One text calls it a “classic example” of evolutionary evidence. (Ridley, 45) 

Such a suboptimal design must be an artefact of common descent—a suboptimal design that was handed down from a common ancestor rather than specifically designed for each species. And the common descent pattern formed by this structure is often claimed as strong evidence for evolution. (Berra, 21; Campbell et. al., 509; Futuyma, 47; Johnson and Losos, 298; Johnson and Raven, 286; Mayr, 26) One text calls it a “classic example” of evolutionary evidence. (Ridley, 45)

 

But this prediction is now known to be false as the digit structure in the tetrapods does not conform to the common descent pattern. In fact, appendages have various digit structures and they are distributed across the species in various ways. This is found both in extant species and in the fossil record. As evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould explained, “The conclusion seems inescapable, and an old ‘certainty’ must be starkly reversed.” (Gould)

 

This means that evolutionists cannot model the observed structures and pattern of distribution merely as a consequence of common descent. Instead, a complicated evolutionary history is required (Brown) where the pentadactyl structure re-evolves in different lineages, and appendages evolve, are lost, and then evolve again. And as one recent study concluded, “Our phylogenetic results support independent instances of complete limb loss as well as multiple instances of digit and external ear opening loss and re-acquisition. Even more striking, we find strong statistical support for the re-acquisition of a pentadactyl body form from a digit-reduced ancestor. … The results of our study join a nascent body of literature showing strong statistical support for character loss, followed by evolutionary re-acquisition of complex structures associated with a generalized pentadactyl body form.” (Siler and Brown) 

References 

Berra, Tim. 1990. Evolution and the Myth of Creationism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Brown, R., et. al. 2012. “Species delimitation and digit number in a North African skink.” Ecology and Evolution 2:2962-73.

Campbell, Neil, et. al. 2011. Biology. 5th ed. San Francisco: Pearson.

 

Darwin, Charles. 1872. The Origin of Species. 6th ed. London: John Murray.

http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F391&viewtype=text&pageseq=1

 

Futuyma, Douglas. 1982. Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution. New York: Pantheon Books.

 

Gould, Steven Jay. 1991. “Eight (or Fewer) Little Piggies.” Natural History 100:22-29.

 

Johnson, G., J. Losos. 2008. The Living World. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

 

Johnson, G., P. Raven. 2004. Biology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

 

Mayr, Ernst. 2001. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books.

 

Ridley, Mark. 1993. Evolution. Boston: Blackwell Scientific.

Siler C., R. Brown. 2011. “Evidence for repeated acquisition and loss of complex body-form characters in an insular clade of Southeast Asian semi-fossorial skinks.” Evolution 65:2641-2663.

The thumb print of JEHOVAH: Human body edition III

 Your Designed Respiratory System: Causal Circularities and Irreducible Complexities 

Evolution News 

On a new episode of ID the Future, Your Designed Body author and physician Howard Glicksman sits down with host and professor of neurosurgery Michael Egnor to further explore Glicksman’s new book, co-authored with engineer Steve Laufmann. Here Glicksman gives a quick take on what they explore in fascinating depth in the book, namely the irreducible complexity of that extraordinary systems of systems that is the human respiratory system. As Glicksman explains, there are individual systems that are irreducibly complex, and these are joined together into a higher-level system of systems that is also irreducibly complex, marked by causal circularities and coherent interdependencies at every turn. Without all of it guided by various highly precise control mechanisms, there can be no life. Darwinian gradualism is powerless to construct such wonders, Glicksman and Laufmann argue. The better explanation, they suggest, is the ingenious engineering of an intelligent designer.  Download the podcast or listen to it here

Why attempts to school JEHOVAH never age well II

 The Human Body Handles Its Supply Chain Beautifully. Why Can’t Humans Do the Same? 

David Klinghoffer 

We’ve lived for a couple of years now with the supply chain disaster, generated by COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates. So we’re better equipped than ever to appreciate how the human body handles its own daunting supply chain issues — and does so, unlike some human beings we can think of, with breathtaking efficiency. Systems engineer Steve Laufmann offers that illuminating metaphor in a brief video, explaining the scale of the challenge facing large organisms like ourselves as compared with single-celled ones. The challenge can only have been solved by intelligent design 

The problem, as it may take an engineer or physician to fully recognize, is how to supply our cells with what they need if those cells have no direct access to the environment, and on the flip side, how to rid the cells of toxic waste generated in the process of living. Proponents of the “poor design” argument, such as evolutionist Nathan Lents, claim that the body is sloppily constructed. Professor Lents calls it a “panorama of glitches.” Oh, really, is that so? Laufmann and his co-author, Dr. Howard Glicksman, examine this and other ingenious designs that permit us to survive from day to day — and moment to moment — in their new book, Your designed body 

The thumb print of JEHOVAH: Human body edition II

 Your Designed Body: Hearing Is a Symphony of Parts 

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. 

To hear, your body must collect acoustic signals from the environment (pressure waves in the air), channel them to the right locations, convert them into nerve impulses, send them to the brain, and correctly interpret them into experiences like speech and music. And, just as with vision, if any one of those parts works incorrectly, or even just a bit less efficiently, hearing is either severely degraded or impossible. 

The human ear can detect sound when the eardrum is displaced by as little as one-tenth the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. Yet it can also hear and correctly interpret sounds with acoustic pressure levels approaching the loudest sounds produced in nature (~1 kilopascal (kPa)). 

And you can do more than register sounds of varying pitch and volume. From an early age you could tell from the sound of your mom’s voice just how much trouble you were in, and which direction she was calling from (so you knew which way to run). These and other features of human hearing require — and by now this should come as no surprise to readers — not just one or two clever engineering solutions, but a suite of ingenious solutions upon ingenious solutions. 

The figure below illustrates the main parts of the body’s auditory system. Its many parts work together to gather sound waves from the environment and transmit them accurately and efficiently to the cochlea, where a subsystem called the organ of Corti converts them into nerve impulses and sends them to the brain.  

The ear is divided into three regions: the outer (external) ear, the middle ear, and the inner (internal) ear. We’ll walk through these parts in order — that is, following a sound wave as it moves from outside the body to the inside where it’s converted into information and eventually into an experience.

The Outer Ear 

The outer ear is made up of the pinna (ear flap), the ear canal, and the tympanic membrane (eardrum).

The pinna acts like a satellite dish, collecting sound waves and funneling them down the ear canal. But it does more than just collect. The pinna’s ridges and folds reflect and absorb certain frequency components of incoming sound waves. Since the pinna is not circularly symmetric, sounds coming from different directions have slightly different acoustic characteristics. This means certain frequencies in a sound will be slightly softer or louder depending on the direction they enter the ear. This allows you to tell the direction a sound comes from. This is why we instinctively look up when we hear a sound coming from above us. 

To further help with this, we have two ears for stereo sound. We can detect differences as small as ten microseconds in the time of arrival of the same sound in each ear. We can also detect subtle differences in loudness between our two ears. Coupled with the fine-grained sound-shaping done by the outer ear, this allows us to tell the direction of a noise and hear in three dimensions. That is, our minds can generate a three-dimensional understanding of what’s going on around us based solely on sounds.

Close your eyes and listen carefully to the sounds you hear. Where are they, both in direction (left or right, front to back, up or down) and distance away from you? If you have good ears and are used to exercising this skill, your hearing should prove informative on this score.

The ear canal is a hollow tube about two centimeters long. It forms an acoustic channel between the pinna and the eardrum. The ear canal may not seem interesting at first glance, but its length plays a crucial role in hearing.

Much like a pipe in a pipe organ, the outer ear consists of a rigid tube open at one end and sealed at the other. Incoming waves bounce off the closed end and create standing waves in the tube (ear canal). This amplifies sounds at or near the tube’s resonant frequencies (constructive interference) and dampens sounds at other frequencies (destructive interference). This increases sensitivity to particular frequencies while diminishing the amplitude of others. Basically, it’s a passive amplifier!

For the human ear, this amplification is strongest at around 3,000 Hz. While this is higher than the central frequencies of human speech, it’s exactly the range where the percussive elements of the consonants in human speech are most prominent, and the consonants are essential for distinguishing the nuances of human speech. 

The net effect is that the outer ear preprocesses incoming sound waves to maximize sensitivity to the natural frequencies of human speech. That is, our ears are fine tuned to hear best at the same frequencies we naturally speak.

The human ear can hear sounds from 20 Hz to around 20,000 Hz. Normal human speech ranges from 80–2,500 Hz. The lowest note on a tuba is 16 Hz, middle C on a piano is 262 Hz, and the highest note on a flute is 2,093 Hz. 

The eardrum (tympanum) is a small membrane, about one centimeter in diameter, at the inner end of the ear canal. It’s a durable piece of skin tightly stretched across an opening in the bony skull. The eardrum vibrates at the same frequency as an incoming sound wave, enabling it to accurately and efficiently transmit sounds from outside the body to the inside. All the while, it maintains a barrier that seals the delicate inner workings of the ear from foreign matter and bacteria.

The Middle Ear 

The middle ear is an enclosed air-filled chamber, beginning at the inner surface of the eardrum and ending at the cochlea.

The middle ear contains the ossicles, the three smallest bones in the body. These are the malleus (hammer), incus (anvil), and stapes (stirrup). They were given these familiar names because they resemble those objects in shape. Together, they transmit the vibrations of the eardrum into the inner ear. 

To do this, the malleus is attached to the eardrum and the incus, the incus is attached to the malleus and the stapes, and the stapes is attached to the incus and the oval window of the cochlea, as shown in the figure below.

Sound waves make the eardrum vibrate, which vibrates the malleus, which vibrates the incus, which vibrates the stapes, which vibrates the oval window of the cochlea. But the key to hearing is how these bones are precisely shaped and interconnected to modify incoming vibrations. 

Interestingly, these bones are fully formed at birth and do not grow as the entire body around them grows from infancy to adulthood. These are the only bones in the body with this property. 

How does the body grow all its other bones while keeping just these specific ones from growing? What mechanisms and control systems are needed? So far, neither medical science nor biology has answers, but engineers know that such things don’t happen by accident, so there seem to be many interesting discoveries yet to be made. 

Less-than-Obvious Problems 

As you’d expect by now, there are some less-than-obvious problems with hearing that the body needs to solve.

First, just like all the body’s cells, the cells in the tissue surrounding the middle ear need oxygen for respiration. Since the middle ear is filled with air, these cells have direct access to a ready supply. But they will gradually absorb all the available air, causing a vacuum effect, which would reduce eardrum movement and impair hearing.

Without a way to replenish its air supply, the ear would quickly lose hearing acuity. To solve this problem, it uses a small tube, called the eustachian (auditory) tube, that connects the middle ear to the back of the throat. When you swallow or yawn, this tube opens, allowing fresh air to enter the middle ear. This equalizes the middle ear’s air pressure with the pressure outside the body. This tube can get clogged, as during a head cold, preventing the middle ear from equalizing pressure, which, as we all know, degrades hearing and causes earaches.

As a second and more formidable problem, sounds entering the body come through the air, but the cochlea is filled with fluid. The cochlea’s fluid, as we’ll see, serves a vital purpose, but it presents a thorny acoustic problem for accurate hearing. Because air is much less dense than liquid, and far more compressible, without some skillful engineering most of the energy of the sound wave would simply be reflected back into the ear canal. A rough analogy would be throwing a rubber ball at the sidewalk. Most of the ball’s energy is reflected in the ball’s bounce back to the thrower. Very little is transmitted to the sidewalk.

For proper hearing, then, the body needs to amplify the signal between the eardrum and the cochlea. The best way to do this is with a lever system. Since the malleus is attached to the eardrum and the stapes to the cochlea, this leaves the middle bone, the incus, to serve as a lever. But not just any lever will do. Only a very specific configuration of that lever will properly translate the pressure waves in the air into corresponding pressure waves in the fluid.  

Impedance Transformation 

The middle ear must provide a mechanical advantage to accurately bridge the different densities of air and fluid, and do so with minimal loss of either loudness or tonality. Mechanical engineers call this impedance transformation, a tricky problem to overcome in even a simple system.

The ear’s solution involves the precise shapes and configurations of all three bones of the middle ear. The malleus has a larger surface area than the stapes. Also, the two arms of the incus’s lever have different lengths. Each provides mechanical advantage. Pressure waves hitting the large area of the eardrum are concentrated into the smaller area of the stirrup so that the force of the vibrating stirrup is nearly fifteen times greater than that of the eardrum. This makes it possible to hear even the faintest sounds.

These bones can only do their job effectively when surrounded by air. If they were immersed in fluid, the viscosity of the fluid would degrade their mechanical properties. This drives the need for an air supply to the middle ear.

The three bones of the middle ear, and the ways they’re held in place by various tendons, act as a four-bar mechanism. The specific configuration in the ear is called a double-crank rocker. Engineers use four-bar mechanisms to fine tune mechanical relationships in systems where exacting precision and sophistication are needed, as they most certainly are in the middle ear. To achieve the necessary mechanical advantage, the shapes of the parts and the positions of the several hinge points must be precisely tuned, with little room for error. 

So, hearing hinges on the precise configuration of these three tiny bones, with their very specific shapes which are essential to their purposes. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the bones of the middle ear. 

Actual intelligence v. Artificial intelligence?

Dialogue with ChatGPT on Intelligent Design 

William A. Dembski 

Here is an interesting chat between me and OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the topic of intelligent design. Interesting especially how it ended. Think of ChatGPT as a context-dependent natural language generator that tries to respond relevantly to textual prompts from human users to simulate conversation. The first of these conversation bots goes back to the 1960s with Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza program. The current incarnation of these programs have become much more sophisticated, exploiting machine learning and big data. 

ME: What is intelligent design?

ChatGPT: Intelligent design is the belief that certain features of the universe and living things show signs of having been designed by an intelligent cause. It is often seen as an alternative to the theory of evolution, which proposes that species have changed over time through natural processes. Proponents of intelligent design argue that certain features of the natural world are too complex to have evolved through natural processes, and therefore must have been created by a higher power. This belief is not supported by scientific evidence, and is considered a form of creationism by many scientists.

ME: Why do you say that the belief in intelligent design is not supported by scientific evidence?

ChatGPT: There is no scientific evidence to support the belief in intelligent design. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is supported by a vast amount of scientific evidence, including fossil records, genetic data, and observations of natural selection in action. Scientists have studied the natural world for centuries, and the evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea that species have evolved over time through natural processes. In contrast, there is no scientific evidence to support the belief that certain features of the natural world were created by a higher power.

ME: Seriously, no evidence? What do you make of the specified complexity that is evident in the genes and proteins of the cell? Why don’t you consider this as constituting evidence for intelligent design?

ChatGPT: The complexity of genes and proteins does not constitute evidence for intelligent design. In fact, scientists have been able to explain the complexity of these structures through the theory of evolution. The genetic code, for example, is the result of natural selection acting on random mutations over countless generations. The same is true for the proteins found in cells. While these structures are certainly complex, that complexity can be explained through natural processes.

ME: But all organisms share the genetic code and would not be alive without it. So the genetic code must in some sense predate existing life forms. Natural selection, by contrast, requires life already to exist. So it is misguided to claim that natural selection acting on random mutations can “produce the genetic code.” Wouldn’t you agree?

ChatGPT: An error occurred. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com. [Yes, this final output was in red.] 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model VII

 Darwin's Predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

In the 1960s molecular biologists learned how to analyze protein molecules and determine the sequence of amino acids that comprise a protein. It was then discovered that a given protein molecule varies somewhat from species to species. For example, hemoglobin, a blood protein, has similar function, overall size and structure in different species. But its amino acid sequence varies from species to species. Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling reasoned that if such sequence differences were the result of evolutionary change occurring over the history of life, then they could be used to estimate past speciation events—a notion that became known as the molecular clock. (Zuckerkandl and Pauling)

In later decades this concept of a molecular clock, relying on the assumption of a roughly constant rate of molecular evolution, became fundamental in evolutionary biology. (Thomas, et. al.) As the National Academy of Sciences explained, the molecular clock “determines evolutionary relationships among organisms, and it indicates the time in the past when species started to diverge from one another.” (Science and Creationism, 3) Indeed the molecular clock has been extolled as strong evidence for evolution and, in fact, a common sentiment has been that evolution was required to explain these evidences. As a leading molecular evolutionist wrote, the molecular clock is “only comprehensible within an evolutionary framework.” (Jukes, 119, emphasis in original) The claim that the molecular clock can only be explained by evolution is, however, now a moot point as the mounting evidence shows that molecular differences often do not fit the expected pattern. The molecular clock which evolutionists had envisioned does not exist. The literature is full of instances where the molecular clock concept fails. For example, it was found early on that different types of proteins must evolve at very different rates if there is a molecular clock. For example the fibrinopeptide proteins in various species must have evolved more than five hundred times faster than the histone IV protein. Furthermore, it was found that the evolutionary rate of certain proteins must vary significantly over time, between different species, and between different lineages. (Thomas, et. al.; Andrews, 28)

The proteins relaxin, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and the glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GPDH), for example, all contradict the molecular clock prediction. On the one hand, SOD unexpectedly shows much greater variation between similar types of fruit flies than it does between very different organisms such as animals and plants. On the other hand GPDH shows roughly the reverse trend for the same species. As one scientist concluded, GPDH and SOD taken together leave us “with no predictive power and no clock proper.” (Ayala)

Evolutionists are finding growing evidence that the purported rates of molecular evolution must vary considerably between species for a wide range of taxa, including mammals, arthropods, vascular plants, and even between closely related lineages. As one study concluded, “The false assumption of a molecular clock when reconstructing molecular phylogenies can result in incorrect topology and biased date estimation. … This study shows that there is significant rate variation in all phyla and most genes examined …” (Thomas, et. al.)

Evolutionists continue to use the molecular clock concept, but the many correction factors highlight the fact that the sequence data are being fit to the theory rather than the other way around. As one evolutionist warned, “It seems disconcerting that many exceptions exist to the orderly progression of species as determined by molecular homologies; so many in fact that I think the exception, the quirks, may carry the more important message.” (Schwabe) 

References 

ndrews, Peter. 1987. “Aspects of hominoid phylogeny” in Molecules and Morphology in Evolution, ed. Colin Patterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ayala, F. 1999. “Molecular clock mirages.” BioEssays 21:71-75.

Jukes, Thomas. 1983. “Molecular evidence for evolution” in: Scientists Confront Creationism, ed. Laurie Godfrey. New York: W. W. Norton.

Schwabe, C. 1986. “On the validity of molecular evolution.” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 11:280-282.

Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences. 2d ed. 1999. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Thomas, J. A., J. J. Welch, M. Woolfit, L. Bromham. 2006. “There is no universal molecular clock for invertebrates, but rate variation does not scale with body size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103:7366-7371.

Zuckerkandl, E., L. Pauling. 1965. “Molecules as documents of evolutionary history.” J Theoretical Biology 8:357-366.

 

Still seeking straight answers III

To trinitarians: please point out(if you are so able) the logical fallacy in the following premise or it's conclusion.

The triune God alone is the most high God, Jesus is not the triune God, therefore Jesus is not the most high God.  

Ps. As corollaries ,JEHOVAH is the most high God ,Jesus is not the most high God therefore Jesus is not JEHOVAH.

Anyone who is the most high God is greater than anyone who is not the most high God

JEHOVAH is the most high God,

Jesus is not the most high God,

Therefore JEHOVAH is greater than Jesus

On Darwinism's failure as a predictive model VI

 By Cornelius G Hunter 

Histones are proteins which serve as the hubs about which DNA is wrapped. They are highly similar across vastly different species which means they must have evolved early in evolutionary history. As one textbook explains, “The amino acid sequences of four histones are remarkably similar among distantly related species. … The similarity in sequence among histones from all eukaryotes indicates that they fold into very similar three-dimensional conformations, which were optimized for histone function early in evolution in a common ancestor of all modern eukaryotes.” (Lodish et. al., Section 9.5) And this high similarity among the histones also means they must not tolerate change very well, as another textbook explains: “Changes in amino acid sequence are evidently much more harmful for some proteins than for others. … virtually all amino acid changes are harmful in histone H4. We assume that individuals who carried such harmful mutations have been eliminated from the population by natural selection.” (Alberts et. al. 1994, 243)

So the evolutionary prediction is that in these histone proteins practically all changes are deleterious: “As might be expected from their fundamental role in DNA packaging, the histones are among the most highly conserved eucaryotic proteins. For example, the amino acid sequence of histone H4 from a pea and a cow differ at only at 2 of the 102 positions. This strong evolutionary conservation suggests that the functions of histones involve nearly all of their amino acids, so that a change in any position is deleterious to the cell.” (Alberts et. al. 2002, Chapter 4) 

This prediction has also been given in popular presentations of the theory: “Virtually all mutations impair histone’s function, so almost none get through the filter of natural selection. The 103 amino acids in this protein are identical for nearly all plants and animals.” (Molecular Clocks: Proteins That Evolve at Different Rates)

But this prediction has turned out to be false. An early study suggested that one of the histone proteins could well tolerate many changes. (Agarwal and Behe) And later studies confirmed and expanded this finding: “despite the extremely well conserved nature of histone residues throughout different organisms, only a few mutations on the individual residues (including nonmodifiable sites) bring about prominent phenotypic defects.” (Kim et. al.)

Similarly another paper documented these contradictory results: “It is remarkable how many residues in these highly conserved proteins can be mutated and retain basic nucleosomal function. … The high level of sequence conservation of histone proteins across phyla suggests a fitness advantage of these particular amino acid sequences during evolution. Yet comprehensive analysis indicates that many histone mutations have no recognized phenotype.” (Dai et. al.) In fact, even more surprising, many mutations actually raised the fitness level. (Dai et. al.) 

References 

Agarwal, S., M. Behe. 1996. “Non-conservative mutations are well tolerated in the globular region of yeast histone H4.” J Molecular Biology 255:401-411.

Alberts, Bruce., D. Bray, J. Lewis, M. Raff, K. Roberts, J. Watson. 1994. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 3d ed. New York: Garland Publishing.

Alberts, Bruce., A. Johnson, J. Lewis, et. al. 2002. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 4th ed. New York: Garland Publishing. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26834/

Dai, J., E. Hyland, D. Yuan, H. Huang, J. Bader, J. Boeke. 2008. “Probing nucleosome function: a highly versatile library of synthetic histone H3 and H4 mutants.” Cell 134:1066-1078.

Kim, J., J. Hsu, M. Smith, C. Allis. 2012. “Mutagenesis of pairwise combinations of histone amino-terminal tails reveals functional redundancy in budding yeast.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:5779-5784.

Lodish H., A. Berk, S. Zipursky, et. al. 2000. Molecular Cell Biology. 4th ed. New York: W. H. Freeman. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21500/

“Molecular Clocks: Proteins That Evolve at Different Rates.” 2001. WGBH Educational Foundation and Clear Blue Sky Productions.

The fossil record goes awol again re:Darwinism.

Springtails: Wingless Arthropods that Can Fly 

David Coppedge

If you’ve hiked along streams and lakes, you may have noticed tiny bugs moving about on the water, appearing to pop into the air like popcorn. They were probably springtails: tiny non-insect hexapods without wings. Evolutionary biologists used to think that hexapods like this evolved into insects when they first earned their wings, but news from Stanford points out several problems with that idea. The fossil record shows a “Hexapod Gap”: 

“There’s been quite a bit of mystery around how insects first arose, because for many millions of years you had nothing, and then just all of a sudden an explosion of insects,” said study first author Sandra Schachat, a graduate student at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Many ideas have been proposed to explain this curious lacuna in the insect fossil record, which scientists have dubbed the Hexapod Gap. 

Unfortunately for Darwin, the two leading theories to explain the gap can be ruled out; “No Excuses,” the news items says in a subtitle, silently agreeing that the insect explosion mentioned in the Science uprising episode about fossils is real:

The only way to preserve Darwinism is with a just-so story. 

As part of the new study, the team reexamined the ancient insect fossil record and found no direct evidence for wings before or during the Hexapod Gap. But as soon as wings appear 325 million years ago, insect fossils become far more abundant and diverse.

“The fossil record looks just how you would expect if insects were rare until they evolved wings, at which point they very rapidly increased in diversity and abundance,” Payne said. 

So Much for Darwin; Let’s Try Design Thinking 

A closer look at springtails shows admirable design. Six scientists from South Korea and from Georgia Tech investigated these little gymnasts. Publishing in PNAS, Victor M. Ortega-Jimenez and his team wrote about “Directional takeoff, aerial righting, and adhesion landing of semiaquatic springtails.” After refuting some myths about them, the scientists expressed amazement at their acrobatic abilities. 

Springtails are the largest group of noninsect hexapods renowned for their unique and enigmatic appendices for jumping (furcula) and adhesion (collophore). However, it has been erroneously assumed that they are unable to control their explosive takeoff, mid-air spinning, and landing. We discover that semiaquatic springtails can indeed control all three phases of jumping by adjusting their body posture and taking advantage of their appendages. They adjust the body angle and actuation speed of their leaping organ during takeoff, change their body posture in midair, and exploit the hydrophilic property of their ventral adhesive tube. The combination of these strategies allows springtails to achieve locomotion control, stability, and maneuverability, which can inform the design of small bio-inspired robots with controlled landing. 

To appreciate what they found, one must watch the slow-motion videos from the project, which are embedded in the paper. The graceful performances, with high jumps, flips, spins, and explosive horizontal dashes, are stunning enough for Olympic “short performances” in tumbling. The hexapods perform their stunts in tuck, pike, and full layout positions. And then, being able to “stick” the landing is a goal of every gymnast. The little bugs “perform directional jumps, rapid aerial righting, and near-perfect landing on the water surface,” nailing the landing 87 percent of the time after rotating so fast the action would look like a blur if not slowed down to 10,000 frames per second. This silent video really needs music!

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. After watching the performance, the judges tried to copy the design: 

We validated the springtail biophysical principles in a bioinspired jumping robot that reduces in-flight rotation and lands upright ~75% of the time. Thus, contrary to common belief, these wingless hexapods can jump, skydive, and land with outstanding control that can be fundamental for survival. 

Who Needs Wings? 

Springtails are among the smallest of arthropods, measuring 0.2 to 10 mm in length. They may seem deprived compared to their winged insect neighbors, but their physical prowess exceeds their humble appearance. The South African Biodiversity Institute tells us that they live on every continent, “even in the most inhospitable environments such as Antarctica and the Namib desert.” Their specialized exoskeleton lets them move easily on water: “Most interestingly, their skin has comb-like hexagonal or rhombic granules that are water repellent and self-cleaning.” 

Classified in phylum Arthropoda, class Entognatha, subclass Collembola, springtails are not harmful to humans unless they pop into your house by the hundreds for a visit and become a nuisance. They live on algae, fungi, and detritus, and rarely harm plants. And yes, these tiny gymnasts contain all the necessary equipment for sensation, digestion, movement, circulation, mating, sex, and communication. Like everything else, they run on ATP, with complex specified information encoded in DNA. All the respiratory and epigenetic systems that I discussed in my recent article about mitochondria are at work in their tiny bodies.

Anatomy and Physiology for Gymnastics 

The name “springtail” comes from the furcula under the abdomen, a forked, spring-like appendage powerful enough to launch them several meters into the air. Some of the 650 species of springtails that live in soil lack this organ. Another distinctive organ of springtails is the collophore, a tube-like structure under the abdomen. The PNAS paper tells how this organ plays a key role in the little bugs’ acrobatics: 

We discover that semiaquatic springtails, Isotomurus retardatus, can perform directional jumps, rapid aerial righting, and near-perfect landing on the water surface. They achieve these locomotive controls by adjusting their body attitude and impulse during takeoff, deforming their body in midair, and exploiting the hydrophilicity of their ventral tube, known as the collophore. 

Researchers proved that this organ prevents bouncing on landing. The collophore picks up a drop of water at launch. On landing, the droplet grips the surface by water cohesion, providing a cushioned impact and adhesion so that the bug doesn’t bounce. 

Experiments and mathematical modeling indicate that directional-impulse control during takeoff is driven by the collophore’s adhesion force, the body angle, and the stroke duration produced by their jumping organ, the furcula. In midair, springtails curve their bodies to form a U-shape pose, which leverages aerodynamic forces to right themselves in less than ~20 ms, the fastest ever measured in animals. A stable equilibrium is facilitated by the water adhered to the collophore. 

Another trick in the springtail’s repertoire is the rapid skip. Springtails can scoot across the water horizontally at amazing speeds, using both the furcula and collophore. 

In a few extreme cases, we even observed individuals locomote on the water surface without detaching the collophore from the surface. These springtails were able to skip on the water surface, frequently actuating their furcula. They reached traveling speeds of up to 28 cm/s (~280 bodies per s) …We observed that springtails moving horizontally on the water use their legs to adjust their yaw direction before each leaping. 

Watch and Wonder 

A truly astonishing set of springtail jumps was filmed by Dr. Adrian Smith at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. His YouTube video on the Ant Lab channel shows what the tiny springtails look like close up. He shows them leaping more than 86 times their body height into the air and rotating in 14 somersaults or more at 290 flips per second! The final clips, filmed at 73,510 frames per second, show how the furcula works: it slaps the surface, bends at a knee-like joint, and then arcs backward under the body, eventually folding back into position in midair. 

For an encore, Smith posted another YouTube video

He collected springtails in his backyard and filmed them at double the previous speed: 150,000 fps. One member of an elongated species took 0.0048 seconds to take off, accelerating at 80 m/s2 or 8 G. That was only the silver medalist! A globular species took off in a third of that time (0.0015s), accelerating at 798 m/s2 or 81 G, ten times the other one’s g-force! It’s a marvel that the head doesn’t separate and fly off under that kind of physical stress. And yet these tiny creatures jump like that all day long, every day.

Awe and Intelligent Design

People travel the world to watch the Olympic Games every four years. The gymnastics competitions are among the most popular. Without diminishing the human skill, strength, and artistry in those events, here we have seen wonders in a scientist’s backyard of equal magnificence that most of us pass by unaware. Most scientists are trained to have a keener sense of awareness of the world around them. They like to observe phenomena in detail to understand how they work. None of these scientists needed Darwinism in their study. The expectation of a functional design capable of explaining the feat sufficed to motivate the research. 

Isn’t that one of the key benefits of design thinking for science? Curiosity leads to attention, attention to observation, observation to research, research to innovation to improve observation, innovation to understanding, and understanding to imitation. Throughout that “evolution” — defined in its etymological sense of unfolding, from the Latin evolvere — intelligent design was implicitly present whether the scientist was aware of it or not.

Something else builds on understanding: awe. Many scientists testify that awe of nature led them to seek a career in science. Design science, I believe, yields a cornucopia of awe for which we can be thankful.

 

On the devaluing of the body.

Nature Worship Advances as Human Dignity Retreats 

Wesley J. Smith 

The New York Times has a long article out promoting human composting as a means of final disposition. The idea is to quickly turn bodies into dirt and then plant flowers in the remains or return the compost to the forest as fertilizer.

I have no objection to composting the dead being legal, as it now is in five states, and soon, apparently, in New York. But the story illustrates how profoundly traditional Christianity has collapsed in the West, and indeed, the meteoric growth of what might be called a nature worshipping neo-paganistic ethos: Per the Times:

I visited another forest in Southern Washington. After decades of depletion by logging, this forest had been taken over by a conservation organization with a special mission. A golf cart drove me along a re-wilding logging path, up to a field of dark-brown compost. The soil in this compost had once made up the bodies of 28 different humans: now, all were one, part of the woods around them. These 28 people chose to donate their soil to help regrow native trees and eventually bring shade to a salmon-spawning stream. 

Notice the anonymity of the deceased. Notice that, unlike traditional Christian burial practices, with human composting, the body itself has no real meaning. 

Body and Soul 

Yes, Christianity understands that, as Ash Wednesday has it, dust we were and dust we shall be. But that’s not all we are or will be in traditional Christian practice. Indeed, the dead body has value because the human person does. For example, the Orthodox Church believes: 

Not only do the Orthodox revere the body, but we also acknowledge the part our physical bodies play in our salvation. Our bodies are just as valuable as our souls. According to Holy Tradition and Scripture, we will be resurrected in our physical bodies at the Second Coming of Our Lord. We must take care of our bodies, feeding them properly, getting adequate rest, and healing them with the Holy Mysteries.

Today, many Western Christians now allow cremation, in light of the fact that its association with paganism or Gnosticism is no longer a reality. However, the Orthodox Church asserts that voluntary cremation, regardless of its detachment from pagan thought or ritual, in every instance denies the value of the human body and of material creation in general. Hence, we as Orthodox Christians are to avoid it. 

Human Life and Human Dignity 

How we treat our dead reflects our views on what we think about the living. In this sense, human composting — and even more so, another growing practice of liquifying bodies and pouring the remains into the sewer — reflects a disturbing mindset that denies ultimate meaning to human life and views us, essentially, as just another animal in the forest. At the very least, these innovations reflect a lamentable, accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian values that undergird Western Civilization. 

Ps. The lack of self awareness on display here compels me to rant some more about Christendom's thought leaders' inability/reluctance to take the premises of their theology to it's logical conclusion ,acts17:32NIV"When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, " why? Because they took the premise of an immortal true self to its logical conclusion. If the self is concretely distinct from the physical form and immortal it is absurd to speak of a resurrection. 

1Corinthians15:36NIV"36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." 

No death no resurrection. There can be a re-embodying or a reincarnation but not a resurrection. 

All neo pagans are doing is reclaiming a doctrine expropriated from its palaeo-pagan forbearers by Christendom's theologians and taking its premises to their logical conclusions 

 

The failure of Darwinism as a predictive model V

 By Cornelius G Hunter 

Protein coding genes make up only a small fraction of the genome in higher organisms but their protein products are crucial to the operation of the cell. They are the workers behind just about every task in the cell, including digesting food, synthesizing chemicals, structural support, energy conversion, cell reproduction and making new proteins. And like a finely tuned machine, proteins do their work very well. Proteins are ubiquitous in all of life and must date back to the very early stages of evolution. So evolution predicts that proteins evolved when life first appeared, or not long after. But despite enormous research efforts the science clearly shows that such protein evolution is astronomically unlikely.

One reason the evolution of proteins is so difficult is that most proteins are extremely specific designs in an otherwise rugged fitness landscape. This means it is difficult for natural selection to guide mutations toward the needed proteins. In fact, four different studies, done by different groups and using different methods, all report that roughly 1070 evolutionary experiments would be needed to get close enough to a workable protein before natural selection could take over to refine the protein design. For instance, one study concluded that 1063 attempts would be required for a relatively short protein. (Reidhaar-Olson) And a similar result (1065 attempts required) was obtained by comparing protein sequences. (Yockey) Another study found that from 1064 to 1077 attempts are required (Axe) and another study concluded that 1070 attempts would be required. (Hayashi) In that case the protein was only a part of a larger protein which otherwise was intact, thus making for an easier search. Furthermore these estimates are optimistic because the experiments searched only for single-function proteins whereas real proteins perform many functions.

This conservative estimate of 1070 attempts required to evolve a simple protein is astronomically larger than the number of attempts that are feasible. And explanations of how evolution could achieve a large number of searches, or somehow obviate this requirement, require the preexistence of proteins and so are circular. For example, one paper estimated that evolution could have made 1043 such attempts. But the study assumed the entire history of the Earth is available, rather than the limited time window that evolution actually would have had. Even more importantly, it assumed the preexistence of a large population of bacteria (it assumed the earth was completely covered with bacteria). And of course, bacteria are full of proteins. Clearly such bacteria would not exist before the first proteins evolved. (Dryden) Even with these helpful and unrealistic assumptions the result was twenty seven orders of magnitude short of the requirement.

Given these several significant problems, the chances of evolution finding proteins from a random start are, as one evolutionist explained, “highly unlikely.” (Tautz) Or as another evolutionist put it, “Although the origin of the first, primordial genes may ultimately be traced back to some precursors in the so-called ‘RNA world’ billions of years ago, their origins remain enigmatic.” (Kaessmann) 

References 

Axe, D. 2004. “Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds.” J Molecular Biology 341:1295-1315.

Dryden, David, Andrew Thomson, John White. 2008. “How much of protein sequence space has been explored by life on Earth?.” J. Royal Society Interface 5:953-956.

Hayashi, Y., T. Aita, H. Toyota, Y. Husimi, I. Urabe, T. Yomo. 2006. “Experimental Rugged Fitness Landscape in Protein Sequence Space.” PLoS ONE 1:e96.

Kaessmann, H. 2010. “Origins, evolution, and phenotypic impact of new genes.” Genome Research 10:1313-26.

Reidhaar-Olson J., R. Sauer. 1990. “Functionally acceptable substitutions in two alpha-helical regions of lambda repressor.” Proteins 7:306-316.

Tautz, Diethard, Tomislav Domazet-Lošo. 2011. “The evolutionary origin of orphan genes.” Nature Reviews Genetics 12:692-702.

Yockey, Hubert. 1977. “A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory.” J Theoretical Biology 67:377–398.

On acknowledging the thumb print of JEHOVAH.

God Hypothesis: In Defense of Stephen Meyer’s Book Title 

Michael Egnor 

A friend and interlocutor, the philosopher Edward Feser, takes exception to the title of Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis.

Responding to a tweet from David Klingoffer, Dr. Feser writes: 

With all due respect, the phrase “the God hypothesis” gets my hackles up. If X is something on which the world might merely “hypothetically” depend then X isn’t God. An argument gets to God only if it establishes the reality of an X on which the world couldn’t fail to depend.

Hence arguments that present theism as a “hypothesis” are — qua arguments for theism — time-wasters at best and indeed cause positive harm insofar as they yield a distorted conception of God and his relation to the world.

That is not to rule out a priori the possibility that considerations of the kind raised by Meyer point to real difficulties with some particular naturalistic theory, or indeed with naturalism as such as it is generally understood today. And that’s important.

But to criticize naturalism is not by itself sufficient to establish theism. The relationship between the two sets of issues is more complex than that. Moreover, the arguments that explain the rationale of theism take the form of demonstrations (not mere hypotheses), and proceed from premises that go deeper than particular facts about this or that empirical phenomenon (adaptation, fine-tuning, or whatever). For the interested uninitiated reader, these are matters I set out in Five Proofs of the Existence of God. 

I think Dr. Feser is exactly right in this sense: God’s existence is not a scientific theory on a par with Darwin’s theory of evolution or Big Bang theory or General Relativity. It is certainly possible that Darwinism or the Big Bang or Relativity could be wrong in a fundamental way — in fact, it is obvious that each of these theories is far from an exhaustive explanation of nature. 

A Necessary Predicate 

God’s existence, as Feser has brilliantly shown in several of his books (e.g., here, here and here ), is a necessary predicate for the existence of anything, including the natural world. God is the ground of existence — the Necessary Existence — on which existence itself utterly depends.

But in defense of Dr. Meyer’s book title, there is another perspective that I think is important. Natural theology is a branch of theology (and properly a branch of natural science, in my view) that demonstrates God’s existence from evidence in nature. Feser is an expert in the thought of the great Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274). In Aquinas’ view, all demonstrations of God’s existence are natural theology, because existence is absolutely distinct from essence.

The implication of this is that any valid demonstration of God’s existence must begin with evidence and proceed to the most satisfactory explanation that accounts for that evidence. This is the basis for Aquinas’ refutation of Anselm’s Ontological Argument: the Ontological Argument is a purely formal deductive argument, and you can’t prove the existence of anything by logic alone (essence) without invoking evidence (existence) of some sort. 

Aquinas’ Metaphysics 

Thus, as I understand Aquinas’ metaphysics, God’s existence is a theory in natural science, and (aside from revelation) it is only via natural science (i.e., natural theology) that His existence can be demonstrated. Of course, when you look carefully at the natural demonstrations of God’s existence, His existence is absolutely undeniable, because to deny His existence is to deny the reality of change in nature (The First Way), causation in nature (The Second Way), the existence of anything in nature (The Third Way), degrees of perfection in nature (The Fourth Way), teleology in nature (The Fifth Way), interconnectedness of processes in nature (The Neo-Platonic Proof), the reality of universals (The Augustine Proof), the real distinction between essence and existence in nature (The Thomistic Proof), the existence of sufficient reason for nature (The Rationalist Proof), and the reality of Moral Law.

To deny God’s existence is to admit abject ignorance or, if the denier is conversant with these proofs, insanity. But nonetheless, by Aquinas’ own criterion, these proofs are hypotheses in natural science, in the sense that they are inductive arguments that begin with natural (scientific) evidence and proceed to inference to best explanation. 

Science Correctly Understood 

It is in this light that I see Dr. Meyer’s book title — the validity of the God hypothesis is demonstrated by modern science correctly understood. Of course, the arguments presented by Dr. Meyer are not Thomistic or classical philosophical proofs, but his arguments are accessible to the public and to scientists in ways that classical natural theology may not be.

I suspect that more people in our philosophically innocent modern culture will be convinced of God’s existence by the Big Bang, the genetic code, and anthropic coincidences than will be convinced by the Augustinian Proof or the Neo-Platonic Proof. Dr. Feser makes excellent points — particularly the point that it is dangerous to use atheists’ own metaphysical presumptions in this debate — but what Dr. Meyer did was enter the atheist camp, take up their flawed tools, and defeat them with their own weapons.

Dr. Meyer’s brilliant book is a 21st century Areopagus Sermon, fitted to the scientistic world in which we live and move and have our being.

 

On the crux of the design debate?

 Luskin on the Heart of Intelligent Design Theory 

Evolution News 

On a classic episode of ID the Future, intelligent design geologist Casey Luskin sits down with podcast host Dr. Jeff Myers to explain the heart of intelligent design theory and why it should matter to Christians and to anyone who prizes a culture committed to the view that life is meaningful and human beings more than matter in motion. Dr. Luskin also responds to evolutionist attempts to explain the origin of exquisite molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum motor, and he offers some advice for pro-ID college students facing professors hostile to anything that challenges mainstream evolutionary theory.  

Download the podcast or listen to it here

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model IV

 Competition is greatest among neighbors 

Cornelius G Hunter 

rwin’s basic theory of evolution, by itself, did not account for the tree-like, hierarchical pattern the species were thought to form. Darwin was keenly aware of this shortcoming and wrestled with it for years. He finally conceived of a solution for why modified offspring would continue to evolve away and diverge from their parents. The principle of divergence, the last major theoretical addition before Darwin published his book, held that competition tends to be strongest between the more closely related organisms. This would cause a splitting and divergence, resulting in the traditional evolutionary tree pattern. (Desmond and Moore 1991, 419-420; Ridley, 378-379)

But no such trend has been observed. In a major study of competition between freshwater green algae species, the level of competition between pairs of species was found to be uncorrelated with the evolutionary distance between the pair of species. As the researchers explained, Darwin “argued that closely related species should compete more strongly and be less likely to coexist. For much of the last century, Darwin’s hypothesis has been taken at face value […] Our results add to a growing body of literature that fails to support Darwin’s original competition-relatedness hypothesis.” (Venail, et. al., 2, 9) The team spent months trying to resolve the problem, but to no avail. As one of the researchers explained: It was completely unexpected. When we saw the results, we said “this can’t be.” We sat there banging our heads against the wall. Darwin’s hypothesis has been with us for so long, how can it not be right? … When we started coming up with numbers that showed he [Darwin] wasn’t right, we were completely baffled. … We should be able to look at the Tree of Life, and evolution should make it clear who will win in competition and who will lose. But the traits that regulate competition can’t be predicted from the Tree of Life. (Cimons)

Why this long-standing prediction was not confirmed remains unknown. Apparently there are more complicating factors that influence competition in addition to evolutionary relatedness. 

References 

Cimons, Marlene. 2014. “Old Idea About Ecology Questioned by New Findings.” National Science Foundation.

Desmond, Adrian, James Moore. 1991. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York: W. W. Norton.

Ridley, Mark. 1993. Evolution. Boston: Blackwell Scientific.

Venail , P.A., A. Narwani , K. Fritschie, M. A. Alexandrou, T. H. Oakley, B. J. Cardinale. 2014. “The influence of phylogenetic relatedness on competition and facilitation among freshwater algae in a mesocosm experiment.” Journal of Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.12271.

Surrendering to dying of the light?

We Aren’t an Anti-Suicide Culture Anymore 

Wesley J. Smith 

Oh, sure. We bemoan the suicide of veterans and teenagers — still — but the elderly, ill, and disabled? Not so much.

The assisted-suicide movement boosts suicide in many forms. One of the most insidious is known in euthanasia parlance as VSED, which stands for “voluntary stop eating and drinking.” The idea is for people who want to die to starve and dehydrate themselves to death — with doctors palliating the agony of such a course. The euthanasia movement particularly targets the elderly for this type of advocacy. 

A Matter of Autonomy 

The Washington Post Magazine now tells the tale of one such death of an elderly man, depicting the event as merely a matter of autonomy (with the implied message that assisted suicide should be legalized so people who want to die don’t have to go to such extreme measures): 

Ben Griffith rose before the sun the morning of March 18, 2022, packed his car and began the long drive from his house in Frankfort, Ky., to suburban Kansas City, Mo. The time had come to help his father die.

Months earlier, when John Griffith made clear to his three sons that he would end his life by denying himself food and drink rather than go into an assisted-living facility, his two older sons objected. Only Ben, the youngest at 67, agreed to keep vigil with his 99-year-old father. Now that John’s quality of life had deteriorated to the point where he would rather die than have his misery prolonged with unwanted treatment in assisted living, Ben was heading to his father’s house. 

Be clear. VSED is suicide every bit as much as if the suicidal person jumped off a bridge. That means that the Post story violated most of the WHO Media Suicide Guidelines on reporting:

Don’t place stories about suicide prominently and don’t unduly repeat such stories.

Don’t use language which sensationalizes or normalizes suicide, or presents it as a constructive solution to problems.

Don’t explicitly describe the method used.

Don’t provide details about the site/location.

Don’t use sensational headlines.

Don’t use photographs, video footage or social media links.

Moreover, the story fails to inform readers where and how to access suicide-prevention services, which suicide-prevention experts urge be included in every story about a suicide death. 

Encouraged to Die 

The story shows how a person committing VSED may be, shall we say, encouraged, to continue on that deadly course in instructions provided by euthanasia boosters to caregivers: 

Ben arrived at his father’s townhouse in Gladstone, Mo., about 3 o’clock the afternoon of March 18, having driven the better part of 11 hours. He had braced himself for the ordeal, knowing it could become more difficult if his father wavered and requested food or water. Ben could not deny him that. “It’s voluntary,” Ben says. “If a person wants food or water, you give it to him. I had done my homework with Compassion & Choices and read their list of guidance. It says remind the person, ‘Dad, you know you’re doing VSED. If you take ice chips or water, it’s going to delay the process.’ I prepared before I left for that.” 

One final point. The reporter depicts the VSED suicide as merely a matter of refusing medical treatment. But this was not a case of a patient refusing tube feeding, which under the law is deemed a medical treatment that can be withdrawn — just ask Terri Schiavo.

No, a man stopped taking sustenance when he was capable of so doing and thus died by dehydration/starvation. From what I could discern, the man wasn’t otherwise terminally ill. He was in assisted living. The only medical treatment provided was by misguided hospice personnel who made it easier for the man to die by making the dehydration physically bearable. But for those actions, he wouldn’t have even needed hospice care.

Morally, that’s another way of assisting suicide, and it furthers the purpose of whoever alerted the reporter to the story — which is to give unhappy elderly people lethal ideas.  

Ps. It does seem at times that those who subscribe to notions like unconditional immortality and reductive spiritualism don't think through those premises to their logical conclusion. If we take as a given that the true self is an immortal spirit temporarily imprisoned in a physical form which has nothing to do with our identity/personhood then strictly speaking there is no death and hence no homicide/suicide. Might the thought that life is inherently limitless and concretely distinct from the vessel containing it cause sum to devalue that vessel?(postscript mine)

 

Reductive materialists try to define their problem away?

Sabine Hossenfelder, Taking on Consciousness, Tackles Panpsychism 

Denyse O'Leary

 Recently, I’ve been looking (here and here) at theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s argument that quantum mechanics does not show that consciousness is essential for understanding the universe. The topic has become very interesting because of the growth of panpsychism in science — which Hossenfelder references in the video.

Panpsychism is the belief that all of nature participates in some way in consciousness but that it is most highly developed in humans. Many prefer it to materialism because the panpsychist does not need to show that human consciousness is some kind of illusion that we evolved to believe in (?). It is part of the normal functioning of the universe even if we don’t understand how it works.

To see what’s at stake here, consider the concept of the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Why is it a “hard problem”? It’s only that if we assume a universe that should not have consciousness but, unaccountably, does. 

Changing Our Assumptions 

Suppose we change our assumptions and assume that consciousness is a normal part of the universe that requires no special explanation in principle? The panpsychist can approach the question of human consciousness as a much more restricted one because the goal has changed: It is no longer to explain the existence of consciousness in principle, only how it comes to exist in a certain way in humans.

Anyway, in “Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Effects?” (November 19, 2022), Hossenfelder talks about some of the theories in this area:

For example, just a few months ago, David Chalmers and Kelvin MacQueen wrote a paper about this. They proposed to address the issues of the Wigner–von Neuman interpretation by using a particular mathematical model for consciousness, that is integrated information theory, IIT for short. We briefly talked about IIT in an earlier video. The basic idea is that each system is assigned a quantity, big Psi, that you can calculate from how well-connected the system is, and how it processes information. The bigger Psi, the more conscious the system. (8:11)

In this theory, consciousness it’s not binary, it’s not on or off, it’s gradual. This is why Christof Koch, one of the proponents of Integrated Information Theory, thinks it’s a panpsychist theory. Everything is a little bit conscious; it’s just that humans are a little bit more conscious than carrots. I want to apologize to all carrots who are watching. (8:36) 

But carrots aren’t watching. 

And That Is the Point 

Christof Koch of the Allen Institute is a proponent of the admittedly panpsychist Integrated Information Theory (IIT), originally developed by fellow neuroscientist Giulio Tonioni.

David Chalmers first coined the expression “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995. Chalmers and MacQueen’s paper is here: They write, “Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by experiments with quantum computers. The upshot is not that consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there is a research program here worth exploring.”

Read the rest at Mind matters

File under "well said" LXXXVI

"Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves." 

Thomas Hobbes