Darwinism's flag has fallen?

 “Crazy Stuff’? Dave Farina on the Waiting Time Problem 

Günter Bechly 

I now conclude my lengthy response to YouTuber “Professor Dave” aka Dave Farina, who published a video (Farina 2022) attacking Stephen Meyer and intelligent design. I have responded minute by minute, tracking my comments with timecodes in square brackets. I regret the length of this series, which is justified only by the fact that Farina is a popular would-be science educator. The video is tedious and grating, and thus I am glad to be done with it. This is the seventh and final post in this series. Find the rest here, here, here, here, here, and here.

[TC 1:05:55] Last but not least, we definitely have to address another mathematical argument I currently happen to work and publish about (Hössjer et al. 2018, 2021, Bechly et al. in prep.), which is the waiting time problem that Farina calls “crazy stuff.”

The formulation “crazy stuff” of course implicitly suggests that this is a pseudo-problem invented by evil and stupid creationists. Farina mostly relies on a silly and embarrassingly incompetent “debunking” video by another YouTuber, who has not even understood the problem. Both chaps seem to be totally unaware that the waiting time problem has a long history and has been much discussed in mainstream science (especially population genetics) and even plays an important role in cancer research. 

Farina would have done better if he had talked with Harvard professor Martin Nowak, who is an evolutionary biologist and expert on the waiting time problem. Here are just a few references of renowned scientists publishing about this “crazy stuff”: Bodmer (1970), Karlin (1973), Christiansen et al. (1998), Schweinsberg (2008), Durrett et al. (2009), Behrens et al. (2012), and Chatterjee et al. (2014). It was not before Behe & Snoke (2004, 2005) and Behe (2007) that the waiting time problem was recognized as an argument for intelligent design. Durrett & Schmidt (2008) attempted to refute Behe but arrived at a prohibitive waiting time of 216 million years for a single coordinated mutation in human evolution, while only about 6 million years are available since the origin of the human lineage from a common ancestor with chimps. Behe arrived at 1015 years for such a mutation in humans (Behe 2007: 61) by translating empirical data of an actual waiting time for a coordinated mutation that conveyed chloroquine drug resistance in Malaria. He simply applied these empirical findings to humans, considering their much lower population size and much longer generation time. Durrett & Schmidt’s result was based on a mathematical model, which of course must make certain simplifications that can introduce errors. When such model calculations conflict with hard empirical data, we should trust the empirical data as pointing closer to the truth. Anyway, both numbers are prohibitive and refute the feasibility of a Darwinian mechanism of macroevolution. 

Four Alleged Problems 

[TC 1:07:23] Farina raises four alleged problems as objections against the waiting time argument:

First, he raises the dreadful objection that boils down to the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” by saying that nature does not go for specific mutations as a target but is totally random. This argument fails because it presupposes the existence of many targets, which is contradicted by the rarity of function in the search space for proteins (see the work of Douglas Axe) and by the common phenomenon of convergence. The argument also fails to recognize that life cannot allow for periods of maladaptation only to descend a local peak of the fitness landscape to explore other ones. Instead, life has to further adapt to its local fitness peak, which requires specific solutions for specific problems. It’s not like any beneficial mutation will do. A stem whale would have no use for a mutation that would be beneficial for a stem bird, such as improving skeletal pneumaticity.

Second, he totally fails to grasp the concept of coordinated mutations by calling it meaningless. He thinks that every individual mutation can be selected for, which shows he didn’t get the point that in coordinated mutations each individual mutation is neutral and thus in principle cannot be selected for.

Third, he claims that the waiting time problem implies that mutations occur in a specific sequence, which is simply false.

Finally, he claims that the waiting time problem ignores recombination, which according to Farina “baselessly discounts the profound evolutionary benefit” and is “dramatically accelerating the accumulation of beneficial mutations.” This shows how unaware Farina is of the actual technical literature, because the influence of recombination on the waiting time problem has been studied by Christiansen et al. (1998), who have shown that: “Recombination lowers the waiting time until a new genotypic combination first appears, but the effect is SMALL [my emphasis] compared to that of the mutation rate and population size.”

[TC 1:08:25] Farina finally wonders how papers by ID proponents on the waiting time problem could somehow make it into peer-reviewed journals and shows our paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (Hössjer et al. 2021). Well, that’s easy: because it is good peer-reviewed science, which something Farina has never achieved. 

Confused about Intelligent Design 

[TC 1:08:48] Farina briefly elaborates on mechanisms of speciation and mentions observed speciation events like the marbled crayfish as “another dirty secret that many creationists don’t like to acknowledge.” Of course, such evidence for speciation is completely irrelevant, because neither intelligent design proponents nor even young earth creationists dispute speciation. Nobody doubts that, say, a founder species of Darwin finches could potentially speciate into more than a dozen relatively similar species (or semi-species) on the Galápagos Islands. So what? Farina obviously is very much confused about ID theory.

[TC 1:09:32] Farina then implies that speciation (microevolution) extrapolated over long periods of time can explain the origin of biological novelty (macroevolution). This is not only contradicted by the waiting time problem, but also by another problem that I recently introduced with the so-called “species pair challenge” (Bechly 2022g, 2022h). There clearly are limits to what neo-Darwinian evolution can achieve. Thus, Darwinism is not wrong per se, but has a much narrower realm of applicability than has been thought.

[TC 1:10:14] Farina lists examples of genes that are conserved and shared by different clades of organisms as evidence for an evolutionary scenario rather than design. Again, he confuses evidence for common descent, which is happily granted, with evidence for an unguided process of transformation, which is virtually non-existent. He simply does not get it. 

[TC 1:11:13] Farina ends with the claim that the “concept of genetic information” as Meyer applies it “is so vague that it’s unusable” and that “there are no metrics for determining how much information any given sequence of DNA has.” This is nonsense. Very precise scientific measures for the information content of DNA have indeed been suggested already by Gatlin (1966) and by many other later studies (e.g., Rao et al. 1979, Schneider 1997, Dix et al. 2006, and Wills 2016).

[TC 1:12:03] Farina triumphantly concludes that he debunked Meyer’s two main arguments:

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

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

According to Farina, Meyer’s only strategy is: 

“Premise: a lie about science”

“Conclusion: God did it!”

That’s not a joke or an exaggeration. Go to his video and check that he literally makes these ridiculous claims. Of course, Meyer’s argumentation isn’t anything remotely similar to this ludicrous caricature nor did Farina successfully debunk anything. Also, Meyer explicitly and thoroughly rejects a “God of the gaps” argument from ignorance (Klinghoffer 2018 and this video), which is by far the most trite stereotype against ID that Farina could bring up [TC 1:13:15]. Luskin (2014) carefully goes through Meyer’s argument for design as presented in Darwin’s Doubt and shows precisely why it is not a “gaps”-based argument. Instead of debunking Meyer, Farina only showed that he is not shy about using the crudest of crude propaganda tactics.

There is one last point. Farina predicts that ID proponents will desperately respond to his hit piece that he is just an “unqualified uncredentialled loser.” He said it, I didn’t. But who am I to disagree? However, the fact that Farina lacks formal credentials is not his problem. I know tons of non-PhDs who can speak authoritatively on scientific issues. Farina isn’t one of them, and his rudeness does not add to his authority, as he seems to think. He rightfully deserves to be called out for his behavior as well as his sloppy work. He is not just an off-putting communicator but also bad at appreciating scientific controversies, an unfortunate combo for someone who wants to teach science to young people. 

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Dhouailly D 2009. A new scenario for the evolutionary origin of hair, feather, and avian scales. Journal of Anatomy 214(4), 587–606. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7580.2008.01041.x.Dix TI, Powell DR, Allison L, Jaeger S, Bernal J & Stern L 2006. Exploring Long DNA Sequences by Information Content. pp. 97–102 in: Rousu J et al. (eds). Probabilistic Modeling and Machine Learning in Structural and Systems Biology (PMSB) Workshop, Helsinki Finland. Workshop Proceedings. https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/bioinfo/events/pmsb06/final/dix_et_al.pdf

Donoghue MJ & Doyle JA 2000. Seed plant phylogeny: Demise of the anthophyte hypothesis? Current Biology 10(3) R106–R109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(00)00304-3.

Doyle JA 2006. Seed ferns and the origin of angiosperms. Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society 133(1), 169–209. DOI: 10.3159/1095-5674(2006)133[169:SFATOO]2.0.CO;2.

Droser ML, Tarhan LG, Gehling JG 2017. The Rise of Animals in a Changing Environment: Global Ecological Innovation in the Late Ediacaran. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 45, 593–617. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-063016-015645.

Dunham W 2014. ‘Missing link’ found for spectacular ancient sea reptiles. Reuters November 7, 2014. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-ichthyosaurs-idUSKBN0IP2AU20141107

Dunn FS & Liu AG 2017. Fossil Focus: The Ediacaran Biota. Palaeontology Online 7(1), 1–15. https://www.palaeontologyonline.com/articles/2017/fossil-focus-ediacaran-biota/Dix TI, Powell DR, Allison L, Jaeger S, Bernal J & Stern L 2006. Exploring Long DNA Sequences by Information Content. pp. 97–102 in: Rousu J et al. (eds). Probabilistic Modeling and Machine Learning in Structural and Systems Biology (PMSB) Workshop, Helsinki Finland. Workshop Proceedings. https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/bioinfo/events/pmsb06/final/dix_et_al.pdf

Donoghue MJ & Doyle JA 2000. Seed plant phylogeny: Demise of the anthophyte hypothesis? Current Biology 10(3) R106–R109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(00)00304-3.

Doyle JA 2006. Seed ferns and the origin of angiosperms. Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society 133(1), 169–209. DOI: 10.3159/1095-5674(2006)133[169:SFATOO]2.0.CO;2.

Droser ML, Tarhan LG, Gehling JG 2017. The Rise of Animals in a Changing Environment: Global Ecological Innovation in the Late Ediacaran. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 45, 593–617. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-063016-015645.

Dunham W 2014. ‘Missing link’ found for spectacular ancient sea reptiles. Reuters November 7, 2014. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-ichthyosaurs-idUSKBN0IP2AU20141107

Dunn FS & Liu AG 2017. Fossil Focus: The Ediacaran Biota. Palaeontology Online 7(1), 1–15. https://www.palaeontologyonline.com/articles/2017/fossil-focus-ediacaran-b4426–44294426–44294426–4429https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2100-8.1000iota/

Chickens coming home to roost?

 Ukraine considers ban on Russian affiliated churches

Milton Quintanilla 

Ukrainian authorities recently called for a ban on churches within its borders that are affiliated with Russia.

As reported by Reuters, Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council asked the government to make a law banning churches that are possibly taking orders from Russia.

In an address last Thursday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy argued that pro-Russian influences are trying to "weaken Ukraine from within" as war rages on between Ukraine and Russia.

"We have to create conditions where no actors dependent on the aggressor state [Russia] will have an opportunity to manipulate Ukrainians and weaken Ukraine from within," Zelenskyy said. "We will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul."

The security council also called for an investigation into alleged "subversive activities of Russian special services in the religious environment of Ukraine" and a call for sanctions against unspecified individuals.

Meanwhile, last Friday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) raided at least five parishes belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had previously been linked to the Russian Orthodox Church.

A former diocese head was also served a notice of suspicion by authorities. The former leader is suspected of organizing a Pro-Moscow campaign with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Metropolitan Kliment, a spokesperson for the church, says his organization "has always acted within the framework of Ukrainian law."

"Therefore, the state of Ukraine does not have any legal grounds to put pressure on or repress our believers," he added.

According to The Christian Post, last month, authorities conducted searches at the Ivano-Frankivsk Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate and the Pochaiv Theological Seminary in Ternopil Oblast. The SBU claimed that pro-Russian materials were found in both locations.

In a message via Telegram, Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called authorities in Kyiv "Satanists" and "enemies of Christ and the Orthodox faith."

"This is how the whole Christian world should treat them," he continued.

Photo courtesy: Andriyko Podilnyk/Unsplash

Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. He is also the co-hosts of the For Your Soul podcast, which seeks to equip the church with biblical truth and sound doctrine. Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.

Revelation17:16KJV"And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire."

Death and taxes indeed.

Bioethics: In Canada, Medically Assisted Death Is a Solution for Poverty

Wesley J. Smith 

Death is increasingly seen as the answer to a variety of woes in Canada, with its euthanasia libertinism running truly amuck. This includes veterans being offered euthanasia for PTSD and a nursing home patient lethally injected because she did not want to be isolated during a COVID lockdown. There are also cases in which people ask to die because they can’t access prompt medical care from Canada’s socialized healthcare system, and one in which death was offered to a disabled woman rather than a stairs chair lift. 

A Culture of Abandonment

Now, a disabled man wants to die because he is afraid of falling into poverty. And at least one doctor has said yes. From the Daily Mail story: 

A Canadian pensioner seeking euthanasia because he fears homelessness has received approval from a doctor despite admitting poverty is a major factor in the decision to end his own life.

Les Landry, 65, told assessors for the procedure he ‘doesn’t want to die’ but has applied for medical assistance in dying (MAID) because he can’t afford to live comfortably.

Astonishingly, a doctor has given one of the two signatures required for Landry to end his own life, despite knowing that financial hardship — not illness — is a leading reason for the profound decision. 

Landry plans to go doctor-shopping to obtain the second MD approval:

 Landry is awaiting the decision of a second doctor who has assessed his eligibility. If that doctor rejects the application, Landry says he will simply ‘shop’ around for another who’s prepared to sign off on his death — something that’s allowed under Canada‘s assisted dying laws. 

Suicide by Zoom Call 

Note that this is allowed in U.S. assisted-suicide laws too. In fact, many assisted suicides are facilitated by doctors who have not treated the patient and only met them briefly for the purpose of obtaining the lethal prescription. These days, assisted suicide can even be obtained in a Zoom call.

The problem for Landry is that Canada won’t assist him to live with dignity. 

Landry uses a wheelchair and has several other disabilities that mean he is eligible for MAID, including epilepsy and diabetes. But until recently, he was able to live comfortably, sharing his modest home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his service dog.

Changes to his state benefits when he turned 65 in May meant his income was cut and he’s now left with around $120 per month after paying for medical bills and essentials.

Landry is also braced for a rent hike in January that could mean his benefits no longer cover the cost of essentials, placing him on the brink of homelessness.

In a series of interviews with DailyMail.com, he detailed his spiral into hardship and decision to pursue the ‘bizarre’ MAID application process that’s made ‘state-sanctioned suicide’ a viable solution to his struggles. 

I’m glad the media and many commentators are finally paying attention to the crass culture of abandonment to which assisted suicide and its advocacy logically leads. I just don’t know whether that increasingly clear consequence of “death with dignity” laws matters much anymore. 

What Colwell's rule actually states.

 Colwell's rule. 

Wikipedia 

"Colwell discovered that "Definite predicate nouns which precede the verb usually lack the article ... a predicate nominative which precedes the verb cannot be translated as an indefinite or a 'qualitative' noun solely because of the absence of the article; if the CONTEXT suggests that the predicate is definite, it should be translated as a definite noun ... "

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XI

 Darwinism's predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

Early 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.

It still looks like engineering because it still is II

Steve Laufmann: Is Biology Engineering? 

Evolution News 

On a classic ID the Future episode, systems engineer Steve Laufmann joins host Tod Butterfield to discuss an article he wrote for Evolution News in which he spotlights how biology is becoming increasingly engineering-centric. Laufmann describes how his work as a systems engineer relates to the red hot field of systems biology, the significance of the fact that “the value of the system as a whole is derived largely from the relationship of the parts,” and the extreme improbability of a well-engineered biological system of systems assembling by way of purely blind processes. Laufmann is author, with physician Howard Glicksman, of the groundbreaking new book, Your designed body 

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST OR LISTEN TO IT HERE

 

The Catholic reformatíon :a brief history.

 The Catholic reformatíon.

Wikipedia

The Counter-Reformation (Latin: Contrareformatio), also called the Catholic Reformation (Latin: Reformatio Catholica) or the Catholic Revival,[1] was the period of Catholic resurgence that was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation. It began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and largely ended with the conclusion of the European wars of religion in 1648.[citation needed] Initiated to address the effects of the Protestant Reformation,[citation needed] the Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort composed of apologetic and polemical documents and ecclesiastical configuration as decreed by the Council of Trent. The last of these included the efforts of Imperial Diets of the Holy Roman Empire, heresy trials and the Inquisition, anti-corruption efforts, spiritual movements, and the founding of new religious orders. Such policies had long-lasting effects in European history with exiles of Protestants continuing until the 1781 Patent of Toleration, although smaller expulsions took place in the 19th century.[2] 

Such reforms included the foundation of seminaries for the proper training of priests in the spiritual life and the theological traditions of the Church, the reform of religious life by returning orders to their spiritual foundations, and new spiritual movements focusing on the devotional life and a personal relationship with Christ, including the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality.[1] It also involved political activities that included the Spanish Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa and Bombay-Bassein etc. A primary emphasis of the Counter-Reformation was a mission to reach parts of the world that had been colonized as predominantly Catholic and also try to reconvert nations such as Sweden and England that once were Catholic from the time of the Christianisation of Europe, but had been lost to the Reformation.[1] Various Counter-Reformation theologians focused only on defending doctrinal positions such as the sacraments and pious practices that were attacked by the Protestant reformers,[1] up to the Second Vatican Council in 1962–1965.[3]

Key events of the period include: the Council of Trent (1545–63); the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570), the codification of the uniform Roman Rite Mass (1570), and the Battle of Lepanto (1571), occurring during the pontificate of Pius V; the construction of the Gregorian observatory in Rome, the founding of the Gregorian University, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and the Jesuit China mission of Matteo Ricci, all under Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585); the French Wars of Religion; the Long Turkish War and the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600, under Pope Clement VIII; the birth of the Lyncean Academy of the Papal States, of which the main figure was Galileo Galilei (later put on trial); the final phases of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) during the pontificates of Urban VIII and Innocent X; and the formation of the last Holy League by Innocent XI during the Great Turkish War (1683–1699).[

The protestant reformation: a brief history.

Reformation 

Wikipedia 

The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation)[1] was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in particular to papal authority, arising from what were perceived to be errors, abuses, and discrepancies by the Catholic Church. The Reformation was the start of Protestantism and the split of the Western Church into Protestantism and what is now the Roman Catholic Church. It is also considered to be one of the events that signified the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period in Europe.[2] 

Prior to Martin Luther, there were many earlier reform movements. Although the Reformation is usually considered to have started with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther in 1517, he was not excommunicated by Pope Leo X until January 1521. The Diet of Worms of May 1521 condemned Luther and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas.[3] The spread of Gutenberg's printing press provided the means for the rapid dissemination of religious materials in the vernacular. Luther survived after being declared an outlaw due to the protection of Elector Frederick the Wise. The initial movement in Germany diversified, and other reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin arose. In general, the Reformers argued that salvation in Christianity was a completed status based on faith in Jesus alone and not a process that requires good works, as in the Catholic view. Key events of the period include: Diet of Worms (1521), formation of the Lutheran Duchy of Prussia (1525), English Reformation (1529 onwards), the Council of Trent (1545–63), the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570), Edict of Nantes (1598) and Peace of Westphalia (1648). The Counter-Reformation, also called the Catholic Reformation or the Catholic Revival, was the period of Catholic reforms initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation.[4] The end of the Reformation era is disputed among modern scholars. 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model X

 Darwinism's predictions 

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 

Andrews, 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.

On the designed intelligence of cephalopods.

 MicroRNAs: A New Clue About Octopus Intelligence? 

Denyse O'Leary 

In general, the “intelligent” animals (apes, elephants, crows, whales, dogs, dolphins) are vertebrates, not invertebrates. There is one glaring exception: the cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish). They, like vertebrates, developed large, complex brains and unexpectedly sophisticated cognitive abilities.

When thinking about the puzzle, we sometimes fall victim to a sort of confusion: We reason that greater intelligence results from the fact that it “helps the octopus survive better.” Perhaps it does. But, while greater intelligence might help many life forms survive better, only a few develop it. In short, we need a “how” explanation here, not a “why” explanation. 

The Role of MicroRNAs 

A recent study from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine points to the possible role of microRNAs (miRNAs). MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that regulate gene expression after genes have been transcribed. They are considered powerful regulators of activities like cell growth, differentiation, development, and death. Octopuses have 

… a massively expanded repertoire of microRNAs (miRNAs) in their neural tissue – reflecting similar developments that occurred in vertebrates. “So, this is what connects us to the octopus!” says Professor Nikolaus Rajewsky, Scientific Director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB), head of the Systems Biology of Gene Regulatory Elements Lab, and the paper’s last author. He explains that this finding probably means miRNAs play a fundamental role in the development of complex brains. 

MAX DELBRÜCK CENTER FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE IN THE HELMHOLTZ ASSOCIATION, “WHAT OCTOPUS AND HUMAN BRAINS HAVE IN COMMON” AT EUREKALERT (NOVEMBER 25, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

That probably isn’t the whole story of intelligence but some features are very suggestive: 

The most interesting discovery was in fact the dramatic expansion of a well-known group of RNA genes, microRNAs. A total of 42 novel miRNA families were found — specifically in neural tissue and mostly in the brain. Given that these genes were conserved during cephalopod evolution, the team concludes they were clearly beneficial to the animals and are therefore functionally important…

“This is the third-largest expansion of microRNA families in the animal world, and the largest outside of vertebrates,” says lead author Grygoriy Zolotarov, MD, a Ukrainian scientist who interned in Rajewsky’s lab at MDC-BIMSB while finishing medical school in Prague, and later. “To give you an idea of the scale, oysters, which are also mollusks, have acquired just five new microRNA families since the last ancestors they shared with octopuses — while the octopuses have acquired 90!” Oysters, adds Zolotarov, aren’t exactly known for their intelligence. 

MAX DELBRÜCK CENTER FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE IN THE HELMHOLTZ ASSOCIATION, “WHAT OCTOPUS AND HUMAN BRAINS HAVE IN COMMON” AT EUREKALERT (NOVEMBER 25, 2022) 

Ways Octopuses Are Smart but Weird 

Octopuses are unusual in that they have both a central brain and a nervous system that controls the tentacles that can act independently. The central brain is not at all like ours: 

The construction of the octopus eye itself is like our own, but that’s where the similarity ends. Behind the eye, the octopus’ brain is wildly different from mammalian brains in terms of architecture and design, yet it uses similar building blocks and accomplishes the same tasks…

For a team of neuroscientists in Oregon, understanding this invertebrate brain is both fascinating and informative. “The sensor is really similar, but the brain that’s processing the information is completely different,” explained Cris Niell, professor of biology and neuroscience at the University of Oregon. 

BRADLEY VAN PARIDON, “MAPPING THE OCTOPUS BRAIN” AT ADVANCED SCIENCE NEWS (NOVEMBER 22, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

How different? Much information doesn’t even go through the brain: 

Now, in a new study published on November 28 in Current Biology, Hale, William Rainey Harper Professor of Organismal Biology and Vice Provost at UChicago, and her colleagues have described something new and totally unexpected about the octopus nervous system: a structure by which the intramuscular nerve cords (INCs), which help the animal sense its arm movement, connect arms on the opposite sides of the animal. 

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER, “UNIQUE FEATURES OF OCTOPUS CREATE ‘AN ENTIRELY NEW WAY OF DESIGNING A NERVOUS SYSTEM’” AT EUREKALERT (NOVEMBER 28, 2022) PAPER. 

And another study found that the octopus uses different neurotransmitters from vertebrates. 

A “Second Genesis”  

The octopus brain and nervous system has been called a “second genesis” of intelligence. That raises an interesting issue: If intelligence was a fluke when it was generated once, as some claim, what about finding it generated again in a different neurological format? When flukes repeat themselves, something else is usually going on. 

Note: This year, researchers spotted octopuses throwing things at each other: “Underwater cameras captured the cephalopods collecting shells, silt and algae with their arms and hurling them at one another by using jets of water from their siphon to propel the scraps. The researchers even observed the receiving octopuses ducking to avoid a hit.” (Scientific American, December 7, 2022) 

You may also wish to read: Octopuses get emotional about pain, research suggests. The smartest of invertebrates, the octopus, once again prompts us to rethink what we believe to be the origin of intelligence. The brainy cephalopods behaved about the same as lab rats under similar conditions, raising both neuroscience and ethical issues. 

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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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.