The fossil record goes awol again re:Darwinism II

Fossil Friday: Purgatorius and the Abrupt Origin of Primates 

Günter Bechly 

With this Fossil Friday I introduce a new series of articles on the age of origin of the various modern placental mammal orders. These orders are the higher categories of mammal systematics, which for example include groups like bats, rodents, primates, carnivores, sirenians, elephants, even-toed and odd-toed ungulates etc. This issue is quite relevant and important for ID research as it establishes the abrupt origin of all these groups after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction caused by the global consequences of the Chicxulub impact. This week we open this series with the origin of our very own order, Primates.

The bestselling author Stephen Baxter (2003) mused in the first chapter of his novel Evolution what it was like to be “Purga,” one of our remote primate ancestors, on the last day of the reign of the dinosaurs before the asteroid impact. He might have borrowed this idea from the popular Disney animation movie Dinosaur (2000), which featured lemur-like primates frolicking with dinosaurs until the cosmic cataclysm ended the edenic scenery. Is this just Hollywood fantasy like The Flintstones or is there some scientific support for such a picture? Indeed, a recent study was celebrated in media reports as suggesting that primates walked with dinosaurs (McKeever 2021). Let’s have a look. 

The fossils featured today are dental remains of the small Paleogene mammal Purgatorius, which is generally considered to belong to the extinct order Plesiadapiformes as their oldest and most primitive representative (Van Valen 1994, Clemens 2004, Rose 2006, Fox & Scott 2011). Plesiadapiformes is a very diverse group of more than 140 named species in 50 genera and 11-12 families that lived between the Early Paleocene and the Late Eocene (Fleagle 2013, Silcox 2014, Silcox et al. 2017). The genus Purgatorius was named after the Purgatory Hill locality in Montana, where it was first described by Van Valen & Sloan (1965), but has also been found in contemporaneous outcrops in Canada (Fox & Scott 2011). Most of the finds are of Puercan age, which is a brief period of only 1 million years in the Early Paleocene (Lofgren et al. 2004). These tiny animals presumably resembled squirrels and certainly had an arboreal way of life (Fiegl 2012, Chester et al. 2015, 2017, 2019). They are not yet known by skeleton finds, but only by isolated teeth or jaw fragments and some ankle bones, which is a very common situation in fossil mammals and paleoanthropology 

A Single Tooth 

Anyway, until recently the oldest fossil record of Purgatorius was from the Early Paleocene of North America. A single tooth from the Hell Creek Formation of Harbicht Hill in Montana was initially considered to be of Late Cretaceous origin, because it was found in the same deposit as Triceratops dinosaur remains (Van Valen & Sloan 1965), but it was later shown to be a Tertiary intrusion in sediments of mixed origin (Clemens 2004). Other alleged Cretaceous material from the Ravenscrag Formation and the Bug Creek Group was later re-dated to a Paleocene age (Lillegraven et al. 1979). Unfortunately, the long-refuted attribution to the Late Cetaceous is still considered in some more recent textbooks such as Fleagle (2013: 215).

Clemens (2004) suggested that the abundance of Purgatorius in the Puercan 2-3 of Montana is explained by a dispersal in the Early Paleocene 64.75-64.11 million years ago. Chester et al. (2015) described tarsal bones attributed to Purgatorius from late Puercan (65 mya) of Montana. A new study by Wilson Mantilla et al. (2021) described three new species of Purgatorius from this locality, which has been more precisely dated to be of Earliest Paleocene age (65.921 mya), only about 105-139 thousand years after the K/Pg boundary (McKeever 2021, Sanders 2021). They concluded that these oldest plesiadapiform fossils suggest “purgatoriids and, by extension, Pan-Primates, Euarchonta and Placentalia probably originated by the Late Cretaceous”. That would be a reasonable conclusion if and only if Purgatorius was a placental mammal and a stem primate. So, was the Disney movie history after all? Sorry, to disappoint any fans, but here comes the fly in the ointment. 

Early Primates? 

Initially, plesiadapiforms and Purgatorius were indeed considered as early primates (Van Valen & Sloan 1965, Clemens 1974, Szalay & Delson 1979, Van Valen 1994), mainly because they share certain arboreal adaptations (e.g., long fingers) and some similar dental features, even though they differed by still having claws and smaller lateral orbits. Furthermore, the dental similarities are only developed in some plesiadapiforms (Rose et al. 1994), so that Rose (1994) already found that “the detailed dental similarity must be convergent” and generally concluded: 

“Although considerable evidence has been adduced to ally plesiadapiforms with primates, adapids with strepsirhines and anthropoids, and omomyids with tarsiers and haplorhines,much of it is based on either superficial resemblance, symplesiomorphy, or obvious convergence. Controversy persists because compelling evidence of these relationships, in the form of clear and significant synapomorphies, is still wanting. Opinion is increasing that Plesiadapiformes are not primates …” 

Of course, a potential solution for this incongruent distribution of similarities could be a nesting of primates within a paraphyletic plesiadapiform grade, so that some plesiadapiform genera could be more closely related to primates than others. This was indeed suggested by the study of Bloch et al. (2007). However, as emphasized by Fleagle (2013):  

“The scenario in which crown primates are nested within plesiadapiforms as the sister taxon of plesiadapoids involves an evolutionary reversal of increasing tooth number and dramatic reduction of the procumbent incisors that seems unlikely” (also see Godinot 2017). 

Concerning the arboreal 

adaptations, more recent studies of living tree shrews have suggested that these adaptations already belonged to the archontan ground plan (Archonta are the supposed clade including tree shews, colugos, and primates) and thus do not suggest a uniquely primate relationship (Godinot 2017). 

Considerable Scientific Debate 

The significance of the similarities between plesiadapiforms and primates is still matter of considerable scientific debate to this day (e.g., Silcox et al. 2007 vs Soligo & Martin 2007). Already in the 1960-80s the consensus more and more shifted towards an exclusion of Plesiadapiformes from the order Primates (Hartwig 2002, Fleagle 2013). Rose (2006) is one of the few exceptions and tentatively accepted plesiadapiforms as early stem primates, but he readily admitted that: 

“Plesiadapiforms, as well as euprimates, are usually traced back to early Paleocene Purgatorius, although no transitional forms leading to euprimates have been identified, and the source of Purgatorius itself is completely unknown …” 

Most other authors instead considered Plesiadapiformes to be a separate order, which is either the sister group of primates, or of colugos (Dermoptera), or of both together (Kemp 2005, Silcox 2014, Godinot 2017). Kay et al. (1992) proposed a close relationship of plesiadapiforms and colugos based on the shared reduction of the internal carotid artery. Beard (1990, 1993) and McKenna & Bell (1997) came to the same result based on skeletal characters, and a recent cladistic analysis confirmed this position (Morse et al. 2019). Kemp (2005) commented in his standard textbook on The Origin & Evolution of Mammals that “Purgatorius is the earliest member of a diverse group, Plesiadapiformes, which many authors no longer believe to be primates”. But then a cladistic study by Bloch et al. (2007, 2016; also see Silcox 2001 and Bloch & Silcox 2006) indeed placed plesiadapiforms with primates and found no evidence supporting a dermopteran relationship. They suggested a divergence of the two groups about 62 million years ago, which they admitted to imply an euprimate ghost lineage of 7 million years. Chester et al. (2015, 2017, 2019) also recovered Purgatorius and other plesiadapiforms as early stem group representatives of primates. On the other hand, Ni et al. (2013, 2016) recovered plesiadapiforms as sister group to Dermoptera+Primates in their parsimony analyses and concluded “Plesiadapiforms, traditionally regarded as archaic primates, are not even stem primates, corroborating the now common practice of excluding plesiadapiforms from the order Primates”. Therefore, Godinot (2017) agreed with Hartwig (2002) that “there is no clear evidence that Plesiadapiformes are the closest sister group of the Euprimates”. In the most recent phylogenetic study, Plesiadapiformes and Purgatoriidae have been corroborated to be successively more closely related to a clade of colugos and primates (Seiffert et al. 2020), and excluded from the primate lineage with a 100% posterior probability in the Bayesian analysis.

Thus, neither plesiadapiforms in general nor Purgatorius in particular can be considered to be well-established fossil stem primates. The weak indirect evidence for a contemporaneous occurrence of early primates and dinosaurs evaporates into a mist of evolutionist speculation and storytelling. That said: in theory the evidence indeed could be consistent with the possibility that primate-like ancestors of the clade of colugos and primates may have lived in the latest stages of the age of dinosaurs close to the extinction event. Of course, there exists not a single fossil to empirically prove this speculation. 

But It Gets Worse 

There is substantial anatomical evidence, which suggests that Purgatoriusnot only has to be excluded from primates, but may not even be a crown group placental mammal. It rather seems to be related to enigmatic stem mammals like the “condylarthran” genus Protungulatum (Wible et al. 2007, 2009, Goswami et al. 2011, Halliday et al. 2015; also see Davies et al. 2017). Chester et al. (2015) mentioned this fact, but considered it as an artifact of taxon sampling, because their data matrix supported a primate affinity within placental mammals. This was mainly based on the ankle characters, so that it is surprising that the authors do not even consider the possibility that similarities between Purgatorius and primates could rather be based on convergent adaptation to an arboreal life. Apparently, Chester et al. were unaware of the concurrent study by Halliday et al. (2015), which they do not cite, while the Halliday paper included the evidence from Chester’s. The studies by Chester et al. (2017, 2019) and by Wilson Mantilla et al. (2021) can hardly be given such a benefit of doubt when they simply ignored this conflicting evidence and the crucial study by Halliday et al., which arguably represents the most important work on the affinities of enigmatic Paleocene mammals. Finding Purgatorius outside of placental mammals would have rendered Wilson Mantilla’s sensational story dead in the water. Honi soit qui mal y pense. 

Since neither Purgatorius nor Plesiadapiformes seem to be stem primates, all the other plesiadapiform taxa, which have been suggested by some authors to rank among the earliest primates, also have to rejected as such. These include for example the following Paleocene genera and species (age ranges are based on the PaleoDB database at fossilworks.org): 

Carpolestes twelvemilensis (61.7-56.8 mya)

Draconotus apertus (63.3-61.7 mya)

Dryomomys millenius (61.7-56.8 mya)

Elphidotarsius florencae (63.3-61.7 mya)

Micromomys silvercouleei (61.7-50.3 mya)

Nannodectes spp. (61.7-56.8 mya)

Pronothodectes jepi and P. matthewi (63.3-61.7 mya)

Russellodon haininense (66.043-61.7 mya) (De Bast & Smith 2017)

Saxonella crepaturae (61.7-58.7 mya)

Torrejonia wilsoni 62.4 mya (Chester et al. 2019) 

But even if these plesiadapiform taxa would represent early stem primates, what they likely do not (see above), they would only document the presence of primates in the Early Paleocene but not prior to the dinosaur mass extinction at the K/Pg-boundary.

If Purgatorius and plesiadapiforms are not the earliest fossil primates, then which are the better supported candidates for this illustrious position?

A few teeth and a mandible fragment from the Late Paleocene of Morocco (about 58.7-55.8 mya) were described by Sigé et al. (1990) as Altiatlasius koulchii. The describers and many subsequent authors considered it to be the earliest euprimate (e.g., Rose 1994, Tabuce et al. 2004, Bloch et al. 2007, Godinot 2017), and maybe an omomyoid stem tarsier (Fleagle 2013) or even a simian (Godinot 1994, Beard 2006, Bajpai et al. 2008). However, the precise systematic position of Altiatlasius is very much disputed (Hartwig 2002, Fleagle 2013). Even a plesiadapiform relationship has been suggested (Hooker et al. 1999, Hartwig 2002) and has recently been supported by a cladistic analysis (Morse et al. 2019), which recovered Altiatlasius in a non-primate clade of plesiadapiforms and colugos. As in so many cases, phylogenetics proves to be a kind of guessing game rather than a hard science. 

Another very old group of primitive primates is the extinct order Adapiformes (not to be confused with Plesiadapiformes), which is believed to be closer related to lemurs than to simians. Some of the oldest representatives are the notharctid genera Notharctus (50.3-40.4 mya), Cantius (50.3-40.4 mya), and Donrussellia (55.8-48.6 mya) from the Early Eocene of North America and France (Gingerich 1986, Hartwig 2002), as well as Marcgodinotius from the early Eocene (52 mya) of India (Bajpai et al. 2005). These early adapiforms arguably establish an appearance of the lemur lineage 55 million years ago.

Archicebus achilles was described by Ni et al. (2013) from the Earliest Eocene (55.8-54.8 mya) of Hubei Province in central China. It is a relatively complete skeleton of a tiny, tree-dwelling mammal, which was even smaller than the smallest living primate but had a monkey-like habitus and anatomy (Chen 2013, ESRF 2013). It is 7 million years older than all previously found early primate skeletons and was thoroughly studied with X-ray synchrotron tomography. It proved to be a very basal tarsiiform and thus closer related to simians (“monkeys”) than to lemurs (Fleagle 2013).

The Eocene genus Teilhardina, which is known in several different species from North America and Eurasia, belongs to the extinct family Omomyidae (Bown 1976, Rose 2006). This family is generally attributed to the stem group of tarsiers (Kemp 2005), or more rarely to the common stem of tarsiers and simians (Fleagle 2013, Morse et al. 2019) suggesting an Asian origin of this clade (Ni et al. 2005). These animals may have looked similar to modern bush babies. Teilhardina asiatica was discovered in the Hunan Province of China and dated to an earliest Eocene age of 54.97 mya (Ni et al. 2004). The fossil is a partial skull with complete dentition, which is a quite rare condition for early primate fossils. The closely related species Teilhardina 

magnoliana was found in the earliest Eocene Tuscahoma Formation from the Gulf Coastal Plain in North America (Beard 2008). Beard suggested that its ancestor must have crossed the land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska more than 55.8 million years ago (Nickerson 2008), thus somewhat earlier than believed before (Smithet al. 2006). New material of Teilhardina brandti, which was originally described by Gingerich (1993) as oldest omomyid from North America, also is about 55.8 million years old (Rose et al. 2011, Boyer et al. 2018, Hoose 2018).

Teilhardina and Archicebus are the oldest well-dated primates, while all others suffer from a relatively wide range of uncertainty in their dating that could make them significantly younger. Therefore, these two genera are best supported by the evidence as earliest fossil record of primates and also establish the presence of the tarsier lineage about 55 million years ago. 

Other Contenders 

Some of those other contenders, especially for the position as oldest simians (Anthropoidea), are the following:

The genera Azibius and Algeripithecus are small-bodied primates from the Eocene of Algeria. Azibius was originally described by Sudre (1975) and considered to be a plesiadapiform (“paromomyid”), then recognized as adapid primate by Gingerich (1976), again transferred to Plesiadapiformes by Tabuce et al. (2004) which was questioned by Rose (2006), and yet again reinstated as a lemuriform primate (Tabuce et al. 2009). Algeripithecuswas originally described by Godinot & Mahboubi (1992) as earliest known simian, which was widely accepted and considered as support for an African origin of simians (Godinot 1994). A more recent evaluation of the age of the Glib Zegdou Formation in Algeria suggests an early-middle Eocene age of 49-45 mya (Coster et al. 2012), which would support this ranking. Rose (2006) commented on Algeripithecus that its “significance will remain moot until more complete evidence is found.” A few years later, Marivaux et al. (2011) studied the talus bone and concluded that Algeripithecus is not a simian at all but was closely related to Azibius and belonged to the strepsirrhine branch of primates that also includes lemurs. This was strongly confirmed by the more recent study of Tabuce et al. (2009), who also emphasized that this strongly challenges the role of Africa as the ancestral homeland for simians.

This fate reminds of the case of Darwinius marsillae from the Middle Eocene oil shale (ca. 47 mya according to Franzen 2005) of the Messel pit in Germany. See my previous Fossil Friday article (Bechly 2022) about the remarkable story of this fossil, which was nick-named “Ida” and heavily overhyped as one of the oldest simian fossils and an important “missing link”, only to be quickly revealed to be just another early relative of lemurs. 

The currently oldest fossil record of simians is the extinct family Eosimiidae. It is based on the fragmentary remains of Eosimias sinensis described by Beard et al. (1994) from the Middle Eocene of Jiangsu Province in China. Its age was estimated to be about 45 mya, but unfortunately no radiometric dates were available for this deposit. The simian and even primate affinity of Eosimias was disputed by several other experts (e.g., Godinot 1994), but the discovery of better material of a second species of Eosimias confirmed its simian relationship (Beard et al. 1996, Beard & Wang 2004, Rose 2006), even though some experts still remain skeptical (e.g., Godinot 2017). The Middle Eocene age would be about 10 million years younger than the oldest fossil record for stem tarsiers. Evolutionists had to explain away this inconsistency with a so-called ghost lineage of undocumented existence, because simians of course have to be as old as their sister group tarsiers. However, unlike many other such cases this particular problem got solved by the new discovery of another genus of Eosimiidae, which was described as Anthrasimias by Bajpai et al. (2008) from the Early Eocene (55-54 mya) of India. Thus the first appearance of the simian lineage can also be dated to about 55 million years ago. 

An Abrupt Appearance 

We can conclude from all the mentioned up-to-date research that the placental mammal order of Primates appears abruptly in the fossil record of the Eocene about 55-56 million years ago, during the hothouse climate of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This just confirms what Rose (1994) already had concluded in his seminal review article on the earliest primates: 

“Undisputed primates appear suddenly in the Holarctic fossil record at the beginning of the Eocene, approximately 55 million years ago.”

The fact that almost thirty years of great progress in primate paleontology did not change this result provides some confidence that it is not an artifact of an incomplete fossil record, but is here to stay. Primates not only appeared suddenly, but their different subgroups of lemurs, tarsier, and simians all appeared at about the same time. Primates never shared the planet with dinosaurs, even if Hollywood and National Geographic want to sell you a different story. We will see in subsequent articles in this series that such an abrupt appearance in a narrow window of time of the Paleogene period represents a consistent pattern found in all the placental mammal orders. Such a saltational pattern contradicts Darwinian gradualist expectations and is better explained by pulses of new information infused into the system. Even Darwinists implicitly admit this when they say that “eutherians experienced elevated evolutionary rates in the immediate aftermath of the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction” (Halliday et al. 2016). Unlike ID theorists, they have no plausible explanation of how a meteorite impact produced the genetic information for an explosive diversification of placental mammals. 

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Marivaux L, Tabuce R, Lebrun R, Ravel A, Adaci M, Mahboubi MH & Bensalah M 2011. Talar morphology of azibiids, strepsirhine-related primates from the Eocene of Algeria: Phylogenetic affinities and locomotor adaptation. Journal of Human Evolution 61(4), 447–457. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.05.013

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Morse PE, Chester SGB, Boyer DM, Smith T, Smith R, Gigase P & Bloch JI 2019. New fossils, systematics, and biogeography of the oldest known crown primate Teilhardina from the earliest Eocene of Asia, Europe, and North America. Journal of Human Evolution 128, 103–131. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2018.08.005

Ni X, Wang Y, Hu Y & Li C 2004. A euprimate skull from the early Eocene of China. Nature427(6969), 65–68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02126

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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