The fossil record fossil recording some more.

Fossil Friday: The Giant Armadillo Glyptodon and the Abrupt Origin of Xenarthrans

Günter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday we continue our series on the origins of the various modern placental mammal orders. Our subject today is the order Xenarthra, which is endemic to the New World and divided into two suborders, Cingulata (armadillos and their extinct relatives, pampatheres and glyptodonts) and Pilosa (sloths and anteaters). Both suborders include examples of the extinct Pleistocene megafauna of America. The suborder Pilosa includes the giant ground sloths like the genus Megatherium, and the suborder Cingulata includes the car-sized giant armadillos of the genus Glyptodon. A complete skeleton of Glyptodon asper from the Pleistocene of Argentina is featured at the top of this article. This specimen is on display at the Natural History Museum of Vienna. With an age of only 1.5 million years it is very far from being the oldest representative of this order. A recent review article by De Iuliis (2018) commented that: 

These three clades and the differences between them reflect deep histories that reach back at least to the Paleocene and their fossil representation (of cingulates and sloths, but not vermilinguans) is exceptionally rich and diverse. 

So, let’s have a closer look at this rich fossil record of xenarthrans. Gaudin & Croft (2015: fig. 2) provided an excellent chart of the stratigraphic distribution of the xenarthran fossil record with up-to-date chronology of the South American Land Mammal Ages (SALMA). They concluded that ”no unambiguous Paleocene fossil xenarthran remains are known.” So what are the oldest fossils of this order known to science? 

Oldest Fossils of the Order 

The more primitive suborder Cingulata is indeed well represented in the Paleogene fossil record from South America (Sedor et al. 2022). The earliest known cingulate and arguably oldest fossil representative of Xenarthra is Riostegotherium yanei described by Oliveira & Bergqvist (1998) from the Itaboraí Basin in the Rio de Janeiro State of Brazil. This material was already mentioned by Scillato-Yané (1976) under the incorrect name Prostegotherium. There is also at least one other undescribed armadillo-like species from this locality and age (Cifelli 1983, Bergqvist et al. 2004, 2019). A thorough revision of the material by Bergqvist et al. (2004) confirmed the identification of Riostegotherium as oldest xenarthran remains (also see Bergqvist et al. 2019). 

Interestingly, Bergqvist et al. (2004) also observed that “shared similarities to palaeanodonts add support to the proposal that Palaeanodonta may have been ancestral to, or is the sister-taxon of Xenarthra”. Why is this interesting? Because the extinct Palaeanodonta a few years later turned out to be stem pangolins and both turned out to not be related to Xenarthra at all (e.g., Gaudin et al. 2009). This shows how the alleged connection between morphological similarity and phylogenetic relationship is rather a Darwinist myth that is upheld as convenient tool to promote the theory.

Anyway, there are also some problems with the dating of Riostegotherium: The deposits where it was found belong to the Itaboraian SALMA, which was was originally dated by Marshall (1985) to the middle Paleocene (63.6-61 mya), but this was indirectly inferred in the absence of radioisotopic or magnetostratigraphic datings. Bond et al. (1995) instead suggested a Paleocene/Eocene age of 60-57 mya, which was also accepted by Bergqvist et al. (2004, 2019). Gelfo et al. (2009) provisionally re-dated the Itaboraian SALMA to an Early Eocene age of 55.5-53.5 mya (Lower Ypresian). The seminal work of Woodburne et al. (2014) moved the dating even a bit younger to the Middle Ypresian about 53-50 mya, contemporaneous with the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO). Similarly, Gaudin & Croft (2015) suggested an age of 54-52 mya in their stratigraphic chart. Nevertheless, Bergqvist et al. (2019) mentioned that “study in progress by the senior author challenges this latter 

interpretation, suggesting that at least part of the fissures was formed and filled during the late Paleocene.” Therefore they just gave a vague Paleocene/Eocene age. Apparently the study in progress is not yet published to this day. Therefore, it cannot yet be excluded that Riostegotherium might be of Late Paleocene age after all.

Prior to the discovery of Riostegotherium, the oldest xenarthrans were astegotheriine armadillos from the Barrancan subage of the Casamayoran SALMA of Argentina, which was believed to be about 7 million years younger (Scillato-Yané 1976). According to Kay et al. (1999) “the Casamayoran SALMA was at least 18–20 m.y. younger than previously assumed”. Therefore, Dunn et al. (2013) and Ciancio et al. (2016) dated the Barrancan to a Middle Eocene (Lutetian-Bartonian) age of 41.7-39.0 mya, which was basically confirmed by Woodburne et al. (2014) with an estimate of 42-38.5 mya (also see Gaudin & Croft 2015).

Remains of the astegotheriine armadillos Stegosimpsonia sp. and Astegotherium dichotomus were recovered from Cañadón Vaca in Patagonia. The respective layers date to the older Vacan subage (as opposed to the younger Barrancan subage) of the Casamayoran SALMA from the early Middle Eocene about 46-44 mya (Cifelli 1985, Gaudin & Croft 2015, Ciancio et al. 2018, 2019).

The extinct armadillo taxa Peltephilidae and Astegotheriini are also known from the Riochican SALMA of Patagonia (Simpson 1948, McKenna & Bell 1997, Oliveira & Bergqvist 1998, Gelfo et al. 2010). The Riochican SALMA is interspersed between the older Itaboraian SALMA and the younger Casamayoran SALMA. It had been dated to a Late Paleocene age of 57-55.5 mya by Bond et al. (1995), but was later re-dated to be only about 49-48.5 mya (Ypresian, Early Eocene) according to Woodburne et al. (2014), and to 51-49.5 by Gaudin & Croft (2015).Armadillo remains of Pucatherium parvum and Noatherium emilioi have recently been described from the lower Lumbrera Formation in Northwestern Argentina (Fernicola et al. 2021), which the latter authors re-dated to the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (Ypresian). This is older than previously believed, so that these armadillos could be contemporaneous with Riostegotherium if the re-dating of the Itaburaian by Woodburne et al. (2014) is correct (see above). 

Considerable Scientific Controversy 

Another recent discovery is a xenarthran metacarpal bone from the Late Eocene of Seymour Island in Antarctica (Davis et al. 2020). It was found in the Cucullaea I Allomember (TELM4) of the La Meseta Formation. The age of this formation is a matter of considerable scientific controversy, which I will discuss in great detail in a forthcoming technical paper on the waiting time problem in the origin of whales (Bechly et al. in prep.). Here it must be sufficient to note that an Early Eocene (Ypresian) age of 52-48 mya seems most likely and represents the consensus of most experts based on different lines of evidence (strontium isotopes, magnetostratigraphy, eustatic lowstands, dinoflagellate and mammalian biostratigraphy), while some dissenters are considering a younger Middle Eocene (Bartonian) age of about 40 mya mainly based on some dinoflagellate cysts.

The earliest fossil record for the suborder Pilosa is Pseudoglyptodon from the Priabonian-Bartonian (37.8 mya) of Argentina (Gaudin & Croft 2015). Within Pilosa there are two major subgroups: sloths (Folivora) and anteaters (Vermilingua). Ameghino (1895) described an astragalus of Proplatyarthrus longipes from the early Late Eocene (Mustersan SALMA), which could be the oldest folivoran, but unfortunately this specimen seems to be lost according to Pujos et al. (2021). The oldest other alleged sloth remains were from the Middle Eocene of Antarctica (Vizcaíano & Scillato-Yané 1995), but were disputed and considered to be an undetermined mammal by MacPhee & Reguero (2010). Pseudoglyptodon sallaensiswas described by Engelmann (1987), based on a mandible fragment from the Oligocene Salla Beds (Deseadan SALMA) of Bolivia, which also yielded other armadillo fossils (Billet et al. 2011). As already mentioned 

before, Pseudoglyptodon is commonly considered to be the oldest folivoran, but its possibly not a sloth in the strict sense (Pujos & De Iuliis 2007). Due to its peculiar characteristics and fragmentary preservation it remains enigmatic (Pujos & De Iuliis 2007, Pujos et al. 2021). Engelmann (1987) gave an age of 25-28 mya, which agrees with modern datings of the Deseadan SALMA to 29.4-24.2 mya (Dunn et al. 2013). McKenna et al. (2006) described new material of Pseudoglyptodon from the Late Eocene-Early Oligocene (Tinguirirican SALMA, 33.6-31.3 mya, Dunn et al. 2013) of Chile and the Late Eocene of Cerro Blanco in Argentina (Mustersan SALMA), and recognized this genus as the sister group of all other sloths. Nevertheless, Varela et al. (2019) commented: “However, as Pseudoglyptodon presents many convergences with cingulates, we cannot rule out its position to be an artifact of our limited knowledge of this taxon.” The Mustersan SALMA was traditionally considered to be of Middle Eocene age, then considered to be postdating 35-36 mya (Kay et al. 1999); but ultimately recognized as early Late Eocene with an age estimates of 38.2-38 mya (Dunn et al. 2013), and 37.9-36.5 mya (Woodburne et al. 2014, Gaudin & Croft 2015). Consequently, the Argentine material 

of Pseudoglyptodon indeed represents the oldest known fossil pilosans and likely the oldest sloths as well.

Some other very early fossil remains that are unequivocally referable to sloths are a Megalonychidae from the Early Oligocene (ca. 35 mya) of Puerto Rico (MacPhee & Iturralde Vinent 1995) and Patagonia (Carlini & Scillato-Yané_2004).

What About Anteaters? 

The oldest fossil record of anteaters is an undescribed vermilinguan from the Early Miocene Colhuehuapian SALMA (20 mya) of Patagonia (Carlini et al. 1992, Gaudin & Branham 1998, Gaudin & Croft 2015). This implies a 30 million year ghost lineage of undocumented existence (Delsuc et al. 2001). The oldest described vermilinguan is Protamandua rothi from the Early to Middle Miocene Santacruzian of Patagonia (Ameghino 1904, Hirschfeld 1976, Patterson et al. 1992, Gaudin & Branham 1998). According to Gaudin & Croft (2015) it is about 18 million years old, but PaleoDB gives a range of 17.5-11.608 mya. We see that in most cases even the most modern radiometric methods provided quite different and fuzzy datings of the fossil outcrops. This does not mean that all the datings are completely wrong, but it shows that we should not place too much confidence in the current consensus concerning precise dates and possible evolutionary scenarios that are based upon them.

This also holds for so-called molecular clock datings, which place the origin of armadillos around the K/Pg boundary (Delsuc et al. 2001, 2004, Presslee et al. 2019). For Darwinists this would necessarily require an even earlier origin for the order Xernarthra in the Late Cretaceous. Too bad, this is of course strongly contradicted by the fossil record and the total absence of any Cretaceous crown group placental mammals. Should we dare to consider the possibility that something is wrong with the Darwinist assumptions? Heaven forbid!

An Abrupt Appearance 

Anyway, we can conclude from the discussion above that the order Xenarthra appeared abruptly in the Lower Eocene about 53 million years ago, only 3 million years after the oldest fossils of our own order Primates, which we discussed last week. Carlini & Scillato-Yané (2004) made a revealing admission: 

The absence of most major groups of Xenarthra in South American mammal-bearing sediments of Late Cretaceous and Early Paleocene age is the greatest enigma in the study of this Superorder. 

I totally agree and can only note that this of course only emphasizes the abruptness of their appearance in the fossil record.

Xenarthra is one of the four major clades of placental mammals recognized in modern phylogenetic systematics. The three others are Afrotheria, Euarchontoglires, and Laurasiatheria. Next Fossil Friday we will look at a member of the African mammal clade Afrotheria, i.e., the aardvark order Tubulidentata and its fossil relatives.

P.S.: I have already discussed the misidentified alleged European anteater Eurotamandua from the Eocene Messel Pit in a previous Fossil Friday article (Bechly 2022).

 

The designed intelligence of birds

 Capabilities of Migrating Birds Deserve Awards and Recognition 

David Coppedge 

Kids used to collect baseball cards passionately, trading them among their friends in hopes of getting the most famous players in their collections. They admired the photos of their heroes in action on the front side and memorized the player’s stats (batting average, RBIs, home runs) printed on the back. Might I suggest a product for some design-friendly entrepreneur? Animal Cards! Pack attractive cards in gum candies and let the youngsters chew on some intelligent design facts while having fun collecting and trading. 

A good starter set would feature migrating birds. These are true champions of long-distance flight, navigation, and endurance that leave many sports heroes far behind. Here are some flyers worthy of recognition on Bird Cards.

Common Whitethroat 

The common whitethroat (Curruca communis) is a small dusky-colored warbler that summers in Europe and winters in Africa, Arabia, or Pakistan. Its low weight (14 grams), plain appearance, and scratchy voice belie its migratory prowess. 

Two ornithologists from the University of St. Andrews, with a colleague in Nigeria, outfitted 40 of the birds with geologgers weighing only half a gram and recorded their flight paths. These lightweight contenders were measured traveling 5,000 km in just 52 days, including 2,000 km nonstop across inhospitable barriers like the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. How’s that for a home run? The scientists published the stats in PLOS ONE:

Departures from breeding grounds took place between July and August in a south-westerly direction. During spring migration individuals travelled longer distances at faster rates making its overall duration shorter than autumn migration. We suggest that, while Whitethroats can cross the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea in a single flight, they are likely to refuel before and after crossing. 

The small champions sometimes stop at the bases, but occasionally make home runs. “If under severe time constraints, however, individuals can successfully undergo a flight without making stopovers.” 

Bay-Breasted Warbler 

Another warbler takes the lead over its white-throated cousin. This little featherweight flyer with its handsome uniform also undertakes “extraordinary journeys” twice per year, flying over 6,400 km between Canada and South America. Christina Larson wrote for Phys.org about the feats of this species, Setophaga castanea. 

A bay-breasted warbler weighs about the same as four pennies, but twice a year makes an extraordinary journey. The tiny songbird flies nearly 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) between Canada’s spruce forests and its wintering grounds in northern South America. 

Red-Throated Loon 

Moving up into the welterweight category, look at another champion. Loons have a distinctive call of the wild that, like a howling wolf, makes an explorer feel like Jack London in the far north. Red-throated loons are excellent fishers in small lakes. When not fishing, they take long trips. 

Ornithologists at the University of Maine outfitted some red-throated loons (Gavia stellata) with satellite transmitters and monitored their routes. News from the University of Maine tells what they found: epic journeys through the cold lands of Greenland, Canada, and the Arctic. Groups of birds spread out, covering a vast area.

Despite sampling just 5% of the North American Atlantic coast non-breeding range, an area equivalent to just 0.001% of the presumed Atlantic flyway breeding range, the birds studied spread out across 65% of that breeding range, suggesting that the mid-Atlantic region constitutes the core of the non-breeding range for red-throated loons that winter. 

Wandering Albatross 

Moving up to the heavyweight class, the wandering albatross (pictured at the top) is a fascinating bird that can travel thousands of miles without flapping its wings. With its 11-foot wingspan (the longest of any living bird), this iconic soaring champion of the southern oceans attracted the attention of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Researchers show maps of its wanderings, and describe how it tilts and swoops in clever ways to take advantage of the wind’s energy. 

Wandering albatrosses lack sufficient musculature to sustain continuous flapping flight for long periods of time; however they have a shoulder lock that mechanically holds their wings outstretched so that little energy is expended while soaring, according to the paper. 

The wandering albatross is so good at efficient use of wind energy, NASA has taken notice. The BBC News reported that an albatross-inspired glider has been designed for future flights on Mars. Unlike rovers or the highly successful Mars demonstration helicopter, a flyer designed like an albatross could fly for free on the Martian wind, swoop up the slopes of volcanoes, and stay aloft for long periods of time. A demonstration Mars sailplane has been designed at the University of Arizona. With looks similar in proportions to the albatross, it can pack a small camera, and temperature and gas sensors to reconnoiter much farther than its battery-powered explorers can. 

While these other forms of transport have been partly limited by power needs, the glider would use energy available in the atmosphere itself, explained Adrien Bouskela, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at the University of Arizona.

“It’s kind of a leap forward in those methods of extending missions,” he said.

Bird Migration Studies Flying High 

In a special issue on birds, Current Biology included a review paper titled, “New frontiers in bird migration research.” The open-access article discusses the current state of knowledge and future outlooks in this exciting field. 

Bird migrations are impressive behavioral phenomena, representing complex spatiotemporal strategies to balance costs of living while maximizing fitness. The field of bird migration research has made great strides over the past decades, yet fundamental gaps remain. Technologies have sparked a transformation in the study of bird migration research by revealing remarkable insights into the underlying behavioral, cognitive, physiological and evolutionary mechanisms of these diverse journeys. 

Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms with its examples of migrating champions and the requirements that permit them, might suggest changing “evolutionary mechanisms” to “engineered mechanisms.” But the paper’s mention of “specific requirements for flight” should attract readers’ attention, as well as the phrase “onboard algorithms” — which, sadly, was only used in reference to human designs for geologgers. Someday scientists will get it. Nothing gets off the ground in controlled flight without foresight and a plan to meet the requirements. Those necessities also apply to all the engineering marvels in our own bodies, as emphasized by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman in their new book, Your Designed Body. 

Cool Tools 

Also at Phys.org, Christina Larson announced a valuable new resource for a Bird Card project: 

The Bird Migration Explorer mapping tool, available free to the public, is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups that collect and analyze data on bird movements, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, Georgetown University, Colorado State University, and the National Audubon Society.

For the first time, the site will bring together online data from hundreds of scientific studies that use GPS tags to track bird movements, as well as more than 100 years of bird-banding data collected by USGS, community science observations entered into Cornell’s eBird platform, genomic analysis of feathers to pinpoint bird origins, and other data.

Animal Card entrepreneurs will want to use this online tool to design their collection on birds. 

We continue to seek straight answers.

 Why is it that expression God the Son occurs nowhere in scripture if there is such an entity that Christians ought to worship? 

Why is it that the expression God the spirit appears nowhere in scripture if there is such an entity that Christians must worship? 

We know that Jesus is called Son of the God because his Father is the God, so why is JEHOVAH never called the Father of the God if his Son is the God?

Plants possess brainless minds?

Are Plants Conscious? Science Writer Says Yes 

Denyse O'Leary Annaka Harris, a science writer focusing on neuroscience and physics and the author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019), challenges us to reflect on two points:

1) In a system that we know has conscious experiences — the human brain — what evidence of consciousness can we detect from the outside?

2) Is consciousness essential to our behavior?

The editor notes, introducing an excerpt from the book, “But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.”

Harris begins with a shoutout to natural selection (survival of the fittest), noting: 

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life… But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy —that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV (DECEMBER 8, 2022). A SUBSCRIPTION IS REQUIRED.

The problem with the “evolutionary” approach to thinking is this: If it’s true that we can’t trust the reasoning skills of our brains, which evolved merely in order to enable us to survive and reproduce (according to the theory) to arrive at a correct answer, we are in no position to evaluate Harris’s own thesis as either sound or unconvincing. Nor is she in a position to evaluate it herself. 

The Blink of an Eye 

She offers a look at locked-in syndrome — complete paralysis of the voluntary nervous system muscles except for those that control the eyes. The most famous example is probably Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952–1997) whose 1997 memoir of his post-stroke life The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was written with about two hundred thousand blinks. He died two days after its publication in 1997. There’s also a film.

She also notes anesthesia awareness where, in rare cases, patients are aware of events and pain during surgery.

Yes, these rare events where people are conscious — but we don’t know it — do occur. But how do we generally notice consciousness in other human beings? By their conscious interactions with us in situations where no other explanation seems plausible. In social situations, sudden unconsciousness in a human is likely to result in calls to 9-11. Human consciousness remains mysterious but it is not ambiguous.

If Harris wants to introduce the idea that plants are conscious, efforts to denigrate the significance of human consciousness are simply not the best place to begin. 

On Firmer Ground 

She is on firmer ground when she observes that plants have been found in recent research to do many things that animals do. She cites plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz, whose book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017) describes plant responses to touch, light, heat, etc.: 

Plants can sense their environments through touch and can detect many aspects of their surroundings, including temperature, by other modes. It’s actually quite common for plants to react to touch: a vine will increase its rate and direction of growth when it senses an object nearby that it can wrap itself around; and the infamous Venus flytrap can distinguish between heavy rain or strong gusts of wind, which do not cause its blades to close, and the tentative incursions of a nutritious beetle or frog, which will make them snap shut in one-tenth of a second. 

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV (DECEMBER 8, 2022) 

The electrical signals that stimulate nerve cells in plants are similar to those in animals and the genes that enable the plant to determine light or darkness are the ones humans use too. One might add to the list the fact that plants use glutamate to speed signal transmission — a technique also used by mammals.

In other words, given the physics and chemistry of our universe, a finite number of efficient communications systems is available. A variety of different life forms may be found using them. Those life forms may share nothing beyond the need to adopt one of the available systems.

But plant communication can be quite complex as well, as Suzanne Simard, has shown: 

She was studying the levels of carbon in two species of tree, Douglas fir and paper birch carbon in two species of tree, Douglas fir and paper birch, when she discovered that the two species were engaged “in a lively two-way conversation.” In the summer months, when the fir needs more carbon, the birch sent more carbon to the fir; and and at other times when the fir was still growing but the birch needed more carbon because it was leafless, the fir sent more carbon to the birch — revealing that the two species were in fact interdependent. Equally surprising were the results of further research led by Simard in the Canadian National Forest, showing that the Douglas fir “mother trees” were able to distinguish between their own kin and a neighboring stranger’s seedlings. Simard found that the mother trees colonized their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon below ground. The mother trees also “reduced their own root competition to make room for their kids,” and, when injured or dying, sent messages through carbon and other defense signals to their kin seedlings, increasing the seedlings’ resistance to local environmental stresses. Likewise, by spreading toxins through underground fungal networks, plants are also able to ravage threatening species. Because of the vast interconnections and functions of these mycorrhizal networks, they have been referred to as ‘Earth’s natural Internet.’”

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV (DECEMBER 8, 2022) A SUBSCRIPTION IS REQUIRED.

Evaluating Plant Interactions 

It’s possible that plant interactions are as complex as those of social insects, but that does not, in itself, establish consciousness. Ants, for example, might be best understood as thinking like computers, which implies efficacy but not consciousness. Harris acknowledges that fact: “Still, we can easily imagine plants exhibiting the behaviors described above without there being something it is like to be a plant, so complex behavior doesn’t necessarily shed light on whether a system is conscious or not.”

But then, in pursuit of plant consciousness, she cites artificial vs. human intelligence: “The problem is that both conscious and non-conscious states seem to be compatible with any behavior, even those associated with emotion, so the behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.”

No, wait. With AI, we humans are insiders. We invented AI. We know how it’s done. No one is sure what human consciousness even is but we are pretty sure what computers are and do. Even at their best, chatbots — to take one example — are simply scarfing up and reprocessing what humans say on the Internet. AI could only be conscious if somehow consciousness arises naturally from large scale computations. We do not, at present, have a reason to believe that it does.

The Philosopher’s Zombie 

She then brings up the philosopher’s zombie, the zombie that might act exactly like a close friend but has no consciousness: 

Let’s say your “zombie friend” witnesses a car accident, looks appropriately concerned, and takes out his phone to call for an ambulance. Could he possibly be going through these motions without an experience of anxiety and concern, or a conscious thought process that leads him to make a call and describe what happened? Or could this all take place even if he were a robot, without a felt experience prompting the behavior at all. Again, ask yourself what, if anything, would constitute conclusive evidence of consciousness in another person?

I have discovered that the zombie thought experiment is also capable of influencing our thinking beyond its intended function in the following way: Once we imagine human behavior around us existing without consciousness, that behavior begins to look more like many behaviors we see in the natural world which we’ve always assumed were non-conscious, such as the obstacle-avoiding behavior of a starfish, which has no central nervous system [7]. In other words, when we trick ourselves into imagining a person who lacks consciousness, then we can begin to wonder if we’re in fact tricking ourselves all the time when we deem other living systems — climbing ivy, say, or stinging sea anemones — to be without it. We have a deeply ingrained intuition, and therefore a strongly held belief, that systems that act like us are conscious, and those that don’t are not. But what the zombie thought experiment makes vivid to me is that the conclusion we draw from this intuition has no real foundation. Like a 3D image, it collapses the moment we take our glasses off.

ANNAKA HARRIS, “CONSCIOUSNESS MAY NOT REQUIRE A BRAIN” AT IAI.TV A SUBSCRIPTION IS REQUIRED.(DECEMBER 8, 2022) 

Again, wait. Every human beings knows about human consciousness in the first person. But not one of us can ever be absolutely sure that another human being is conscious. Our minds are, perhaps by design, accessible to others only by what we say and do. Yes, the consciousness of others could be an illusion but then the whole universe around us could be an illusion — in theory.

We assume conscious human behavior in other human beings when they behave like conscious human beings. That makes sense because the alternative — that you or I are the only conscious one — requires a much greater stretch of belief.

As for “climbing ivy, say, or stinging sea anemones,” we don’t think they are conscious because nothing in their behavior prompts such an interpretation. It’s not a matter of intuition or prejudice; we are just not seeing evidence. 

A Comparison with Chimpanzees 

Harris’s argument here is similar to the one we encounter in claims that chimpanzees think like humans. If they do, why don’t we see anything like a human culture growing up among them, just occasional flashes of intelligent behavior?

Harris would do well to stick to the point that plant behavior is turning out to be as complex as animal behavior. The question of consciousness is a separate one and there is no reason or need to assume that plants are conscious.

You may also wish to read: Do ants think? Yes, they do — but they think like computers. Computer programmers have adapted some ant problem-solving methods to software programs (but without the need for complex chemical scents). Navigation expert Eric Cassell points out that algorithms have made the ant one of the most successful insects ever, both in numbers and complexity.

 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XIV

 Darwinism's predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

A fundamental concept in evolutionary theory is the inheritance of genetic variations via blood lines. (Forbes) This so-called vertical transmission of heritable material means that genes, and genomes in general, should fall into a common descent pattern, consistent with the evolutionary tree. Indeed, such genes are often cited as a confirmation of evolution. But as more genomic data have become available, an ever increasing number of genes have been discovered that do not fit the common descent pattern because they are missing from so many intermediate species. (Andersson and Roger 2002; Andersson and Roger 2003; Andersson 2005; Andersson, Sarchfield and Roger 2005; Andersson 2006; Andersson et. al. 2006; Andersson 2009; Andersson 2011; Haegeman, Jones and Danchin; Katz; Keeling and Palmer; Richards et. al 2006a; Richards et. al 2006b; Takishita et. al.; Wolf et. al.)

 

This type of pattern is also found for genome architecture features which are sporadically distributed and then strikingly similar in distant species. In fact these similarities do not merely occur twice, in two distant species. They often occur repeatedly in a variety of otherwise distant species. This is so widespread that evolutionists have named the phenomenon “recurrent evolution.” As one paper explains, the recent explosion of genome data reveals “strikingly similar genomic features in different lineages.” Furthermore, there are “traits whose distribution is ‘scattered’ across the evolutionary tree, indicating repeated independent evolution of similar genomic features in different lineages.” (Maeso, Roy and Irimia) 

One example is the uncanny similarity between the kangaroo and human genomes. As one evolutionist explained: “There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order. We thought they’d be completely scrambled, but they’re not.” (Taylor)

 

It is now well recognized that this prediction has failed: “Vertical transmission of heritable material, a cornerstone of the Darwinian theory of evolution, is inadequate to describe the evolution of eukaryotes, particularly microbial eukaryotes.” (Katz) And these sporadic, patchy patterns require complicated and ad hoc scenarios to explain their origin. As one paper explained, the evolution of a particular set of genes “reveals a complex history of horizontal gene transfer events.” (Wolf et. al.) The result is that any pattern can be explained by arranging the right mechanisms. Features that are shared between similar species can be interpreted as “the result of a common evolutionary history,” and features that are not can be interpreted as “the result of common evolutionary forces.” (Maeso, Roy and Irimia)

 

These common evolutionary forces are complex and must have been created by evolution. They can include horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer, gene loss, gene fusion, and even unknown forces. For instance, one study concluded that the best explanation for the pattern of a particular gene was that it “has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism.” (Takishita et. al.) Even with the great variety of mechanisms available, there still remains the unknown mechanism.

References 

Andersson, J., A. Roger. 2002. “Evolutionary analyses of the small subunit of glutamate synthase: gene order conservation, gene fusions, and prokaryote-to-eukaryote lateral gene transfers.” Eukaryotic Cell 1:304-310.

 

Andersson, J., A. Roger. 2003. “Evolution of glutamate dehydrogenase genes: evidence for lateral gene transfer within and between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 3:14.

 

Andersson, J. 2005. “Lateral gene transfer in eukaryotes.” Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 62:1182-97.

 

Andersson, J., S. Sarchfield, A Roger. 2005. “Gene transfers from nanoarchaeota to an ancestor of diplomonads and parabasalids.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 22:85-90.

 

Andersson, J. 2006. “Convergent evolution: gene sharing by eukaryotic plant pathogens.” Current Biology 16:R804-R806.

 

Andersson, J., R. Hirt, P. Foster, A. Roger. 2006. “Evolution of four gene families with patchy phylogenetic distributions: influx of genes into protist genomes.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 6:27.

 

Andersson, J. 2009. “Horizontal gene transfer between microbial eukaryotes.” Methods in Molecular Biology 532:473-487.

 

Andersson, J. 2011. “Evolution of patchily distributed proteins shared between eukaryotes and prokaryotes: Dictyostelium as a case study.” J Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology 20:83-95.

 

Haegeman, A., J. Jones, E. Danchin. 2011. “Horizontal gene transfer in nematodes: a catalyst for plant parasitism?.” Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions 24:879-87.

Katz, L. 2002. “Lateral gene transfers and the evolution of eukaryotes: theories and data.” International J. Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology 52:1893-1900.

 

Keeling, P., J. Palmer. 2008. “Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 9:605-18.

 

Maeso, I, S. Roy, M. Irimia. 2012. “Widespread Recurrent Evolution of Genomic Features.” Genome Biology and Evolution 4:486-500.

 

Richards, T., J. Dacks, J. Jenkinson, C. Thornton, N. Talbot. 2006. “Evolution of filamentous plant pathogens: gene exchange across eukaryotic kingdoms.” Current Biology 16:1857-1864.

 

Richards, T., J. Dacks, S. Campbell, J. Blanchard, P. Foster, R. McLeod, C. Roberts. 2006. “Evolutionary origins of the eukaryotic shikimate pathway: gene fusions, horizontal gene transfer, and endosymbiotic replacements.” Eukaryotic Cell 5:1517-31.

 

Takishita, K., Y. Chikaraishi, M. Leger, E. Kim, A. Yabuki, N. Ohkouchi, A. Roger. 2012. “Lateral transfer of tetrahymanol-synthesizing genes has allowed multiple diverse eukaryote lineages to independently adapt to environments without oxygen.” Biology Direct 7:5.

 

Taylor, R. 2008. “Kangaroo genes close to humans,” Reuters, Canberra, Nov 18.

Wolf, Y., L. Aravind, N. Grishin, E. Koonin. 1999. “Evolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases--analysis of unique domain architectures and phylogenetic trees reveals a complex history of horizontal gene transfer events.” Genome Research 9:689-710. 

 

The thumb print of JEHOVAH: cosmic edition.

A Miraculous Existence 

Marvin Olasky 

In A Big Bang in a Little Room, Zeeya Merali describes the consensus among science’s biggest brains: “The notion that a god made our universe is several rungs on the wackiness ladder above the idea that it was made by aliens.” Nevertheless, Merali describes herself as a believer in God. She’s also the holder of an Ivy League PhD in theoretical physics. So she asks a good question: If God desired to send us a message, how would He do it?

Published in 1985, Carl Sagan’s novel Contact included speculation about finding a code in the digits of pi, which starts out 3.14159 and keeps going forever — but no one’s found it. Others said God might encode a message within the human genome — but that would be useful only for creatures on this planet. Merali suggests a message embedded in background radiation, so any sufficiently advanced creatures anywhere in the universe could perceive it. (Astronomers learn about distant galaxies and galaxy clusters by mapping tiny radiation wrinkles.)

The Moment of Creation 

The time to engrave such a message in the sky would be at the moment of creation, Merali writes: “Think of it like drawing a smiley face in marker on a balloon straight out of the package. Blow up the balloon and the picture stretches with the rubber. In the same way, as the cosmos rapidly inflated, its creator’s message would shine out across the whole sky.” She says no one has found such a message thus far, thus disappointing those who believe in God.

No such message? With respect for Merali, who writes charmingly, I think she’s wrong, for three reasons. 

First, we live on a Goldilocks “just right” planet within a Goldilocks universe. More than one thousand features of the universe and Earth must fall within narrow ranges to allow for the possibility of life, and then for advanced life. For example: We need a particular composition of the earth’s core and atmosphere, a particular Earth axis tilt and rotation speed, particular capillary action and surface tension, and so on.We exist because of things most of us know nothing about: cosmic ray protons, intergalactic hydrogen gas clouds, molecular hydrogen formed by supernova eruptions, etc. If one loose definition of a miracle is “a highly improbable or extraordinary event,” look at the likelihood of simple bacteria being able to survive anywhere in the universe apart from divine action: One chance in 10 followed by 556 zeros. What about the likelihood of advanced life? One chance in 10 followed by 1,054 zeros. 

In the memorable 2017 Super Bowl, the New England Patriots trailed by 25 points with 17 minutes and seven seconds left in the game. They managed to tie the game and win it in overtime: Headlines proclaimed “a miracle comeback.” But what if the Patriots had trailed by 8,216 points and needed to score one touchdown (plus two extra points) in every one of those 1,027 seconds left in the game? That gives us a sense of the unlikeliness of our existence purely through material causes — and we’d have to multiply that physical improbability/impossibility by about a trillion. (That’s why some atheistic scientists grab on to the wacky multiverse theory.)

Flipping the Surmise 

A second piece of evidence for God’s existence: the history of the 20th century. Decisions by three atheists — Mao, Stalin, and Hitler — led to one hundred million deaths. Some people say that shows a merciful God does not exist, but we should flip the surmise: Atheism kills, and we’ve seen since the 1930s what happens when we worship human gods. God warns us throughout the Bible that sin has consequences: Should we consider Him a liar because He tells the truth?

Why don’t we wake up every morning and realize our existence is miraculous? Maybe because so much noise surrounds us. But here’s a third reason to believe in God: I’ve met some men in their twenties whose thinking as teens was so destructive that it looked like they would soon be dead, imprisoned, or traitorous. I was one of them. But “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end” — and the Bible tells me so. 

God has sent a message, not in background radiation but in our existence, our history, and in what should be our daily reading.

 

Yet another attempt to school JEHOVAH goes off the rails.

 The Supposed Bad Design of the Human Pharynx 

Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann 

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

In our book, Your Designed Body, we apply a five-part test for evaluating ostensible instances of bad design. This test can help determine whether we’re looking at a bad design, or simply a bad argument. Let’s consider the example of the human pharynx. Is it poorly engineered?

The figure below shows that the pharynx is the common entry for both the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts. Whatever is ingested can potentially go down the airway and cause obstruction, which can result in death by choking.

Some insist that the pharynx is therefore miserably designed, something no wise designer would engineer, but that evolution, with its trial-and-error messiness, very well might. “The biggest danger in the human throat’s design is choking,” writes Nathan Lents. “If we had separate openings for air and food, this would never happen. Swallowing is a good example of the limits of Darwinian evolution. The human throat is simply too complex for a random mutation — the basic mechanism of evolution — to undo its fundamental defects. We have to resign ourselves to the absurdity of taking in air and food through the same pipe.”1

Abby Hafer, in her pointedly titled book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not, sounds a similar note. “A better designed system would keep the tubes for air and food separate to avoid unnecessary fatalities,” she writes. “If we were designed why did the Designer do this job so badly? Or is it that the Creator likes other animals better? There are creatures in which the air passages and food passages are entirely separate. The whale’s respiratory system is separate from its digestive system. This means that a whale, unlike a human, can’t choke on its food by inhaling it. If the Creator could do that for the whales, I don’t know why he couldn’t do it for us?”2

These arguments are riddled with problems. To see why, we need to take a closer look at the human pharynx.

How It Works 

In addition to the structures identified in the figure above, fifty different pairs of muscles, connected by six different nerves, are needed to swallow. After food in the mouth has been formed into a small ball (bolus), the tongue voluntarily moves it to the pharynx, which automatically triggers the involuntary swallow reflex.

As the bolus enters, the pharynx sends sensory information to the swallow center in the brainstem, which immediately turns off respiration so that air is not breathed in during swallowing. This prevents the lungs from drawing food into the airway. The brainstem also sends precisely ordered signals telling the various muscles to contract and move the bolus downward into the esophagus, bypassing the airway. This takes about a second.

As swallowing begins, several muscles contract to move the bolus into the pharynx, while moving the back of the palate and the upper pharynx close together to close off the path to the nose. 

Next comes the tricky part. The bolus has been blocked from going up into the nose, and muscular contraction is hurtling it down towards the airway and the esophagus. Three separate actions take place to protect the airway. First, muscles contract to close the larynx, which is the gateway to the lungs. Second, other muscles move the larynx up and forward (which you can feel in the front of your neck while swallowing) to hide it under the floor of the mouth and the base of the tongue while being protected by the epiglottis. Third, this action, combined with other muscular activity, opens the upper esophagus to allow the bolus to enter.3The timing and coordination are remarkable. The swallow center must send the right signals via the right nerves to the right muscles, with the exact right split-second timing. Since all this is triggered by the bolus entering the pharynx, the signals from throat to brainstem and back to the many muscles involved (with their reaction times) must be fast enough to prevent choking.

While critics seem to miss the amazing design of this system, it should give the reader pause. Somehow, swallowing happens, usually without incident, a thousand times a day. 

Where did the information come from that specifies the size, shape, position, and range of movement of the pharynx, each of its nearby structures, and the fifty pairs of muscles involved in swallowing? How could such a system come about gradually, by accident? 

Where did the information come from to make the swallow center in the brainstem and the logic it uses to control safe swallowing? Where is the repository for the information needed to orchestrate the precisely ordered, well-coordinated contraction sequence of fifty pairs of muscles?

Scoring the Pharynx-Is-Poorly-Designed Argument 

With that primer on the pharynx and the swallowing system of which it’s a part, let’s now score the argument that the pharynx is badly designed and therefore not intentionally designed. 

1. Not Understanding the Design of the Pharynx 

The pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language, and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing. The percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx, are absolutely required for the nuanced communication that’s essential to the human experience. So the pharynx has at least three major functional design objectives. If you were asked to design a system with these capabilities, how would you approach it? How would your design make the trade-offs needed to do all this with a single system? If you used separate systems, as advocated by the critics above, how would you achieve the right kinds of functions, and how would this affect how these functions are packaged into the body as a whole? The critics ignore these questions, apparently because they haven’t bothered to understand the design of the system, as a system — either its core objectives or the orchestration of its many parts. 

2. Not Considering Trade-Offs when Criticizing the Pharynx 

Clearly, the pharynx’s main three functions cause design conflicts that must be solved. We could use two or maybe even three separate systems to achieve these vastly different goals. However, since all three functions need similar components, two or possibly three copies of many of these structures would be necessary. If, as the critics recommend, we were structured to use the mouth only for swallowing food and water, and not for breathing, thereby precluding speech and language as we know it, the nasal passageways would need to be much larger to bring in enough oxygen during high levels of activity. 

To keep all three functions, duplication of parts may be an option. We’d need two mouths, one for eating and another for breathing and speaking, and we’d need two large pipes, one for air and the other for food. We’d need two tongues, one for manipulating food in the eating mouth, and another for speaking in the breathing/speaking mouth. For making the hard-consonant sounds in speech, we’d need something like teeth in the breathing/speaking mouth, but we’d also need teeth for chopping up food in the eating mouth. For making complex tonal sounds, the nasal cavities would need to be attached to the breathing/speaking mouth. But we’d also need the nose’s smell sensors in the eating mouth in order to fully experience the taste of our food. We could go on, but you get the idea.In the end, the anatomical changes for either scenario, precluding or preserving speech and language as we know it, would require a complete reconfiguration of the head and neck and possibly also some parts of the lungs and stomach in the body’s core. At a minimum, an increase in the size of the nasal passageways would require the head and face to be much wider. But to house duplicate systems, the volume of the head and neck would need to roughly double, and depending on the positioning of the two mouths, the passageways to the lungs and stomach would likely need to be rearranged too.

Maybe if our bodies were shaped more like a whale, this would work better, but of course this might make it harder to climb mountains. Or even to turn our heads quickly.

Building these different functions into a single set of components, with the programming and orchestration to make them work properly, is another example of elegant invention. The obvious trade-off is that it’s possible to choke, never mind how well-designed the system that’s in place to avoid this problem. Of course, the critics also neglect to consider whether it would be easier or harder to choke in a system with two mouths, as the risk of this happening would be their relative positions to each other. 

The marvel is that the system combines these three separate functions in such a compact space, and the whole works so well at all three of its core functions.  

3. Not Acknowledging Pharynx Degradation over Time 

How and why do humans die from choking? One common cause of swallowing problems is neuromuscular injury or degeneration related to aging or disease. Since swallowing requires precisely orchestrated contractions of many different muscles, any condition that compromises nerve or muscle function can lead to difficulties in swallowing. Common conditions include stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis (MS), each of which puts the person at risk for aspirating food into their lungs and choking to death. These represent about half of the annual deaths by choking. One could argue that the body’s inability to fight off Parkinson’s or MS is also a design flaw, but these are also instances of degradation. Complex systems always degrade over time and generations, so it’s unrealistic to think this should never happen to the human body if it were well designed.

Another common cause of choking is user abuse. When a healthy adult takes in too large a piece of food, or doesn’t chew sufficiently, or a child takes in a foreign object like a small toy, these objects can get stuck in the airway and choking results. One could insist that the design should have been foolproof against such abuses, but this merely takes us back to the question of trade-offs. 

To even hope to make the system abuse-proof, the three functions of the pharynx would have to be divided out into two or three separate systems, and we’ve already seen all the problems that attend that strategy. Moreover, no matter how carefully an engineer designs a product, it’s always at risk of being misused and, due to wear and tear, its functional capacity lessening over time.

4. Jumping from Poor Design of the Pharynx to No Intentional Design 

Even if we were to grant for the sake of argument that the pharynx is a case of shoddy engineering, it wouldn’t follow from this alone that it wasn’t intentionally designed (as the Yugo car and Tacoma Narrows bridge aptly illustrate). The evolutionists who reach this unsound conclusion perhaps get there by embracing the false premise that poorly designed things must be unintentionally designed things, and combining it with the equally mistaken view that the pharynx is a botched design. But perhaps the error is a bit subtler. 

In logic, one of the formal fallacies is known as affirming the consequent. That logical fallacy runs like this:

Major Premise: If A is true, then B is true.

Minor Premise: B is true.

Conclusion: Therefore, A is true.

That’s an invalid syllogism. For it to be valid, the major premise would need to be “If B is true, then A is true.” As it is, the conclusion simply doesn’t follow. This is affirming the consequent, or put more generally, it’s a non sequitur. This may be how the evolutionists above have reached their invalid conclusion, thus: 

Major Premise: If A (something came about without intention), then B (it is poorly constructed).

Minor Premise: B is the case: the human pharynx is poorly constructed.

Conclusion: A is true: the pharynx came about without intention.

Even if we granted both premises, the conclusion wouldn’t follow, since it’s an invalid syllogism guilty of affirming the consequent. 

It’s not clear that this is exactly how evolutionists are reasoning, but it well may be close to the mark based on their statements.

But wait, there’s more. Professor Lents asserts that “if we had separate openings for air and food, [choking] would never happen.” But in any system that requires breathing air into the body, the opening for the air can become blocked — no matter where you put it on the body or how it’s configured. How will these critics’ “improved” system prevent choking from ever happening? 

Even a design that is truly suboptimal in one respect cannot demonstrate that it’s a poor design, since the “suboptimal” feature may simply be the natural outcome of a perfectly reasonable design trade-off. (And as noted, even if a suboptimal feature were a true design blunder, this would not be sufficient warrant to claim that it wasn’t intentionally designed.)

Another error in reasoning: “The human throat is simply too complex for a random mutation — the basic mechanism of evolution — to undo its fundamental defects,”4 Lents insists. But if the human throat is too complex for a random mutation to undo a “design defect,” how could random mutations have built such a complex feature in the first place? And if it works and the species thrives, can it be called a defect? 

Or recall this argument from Hafer: “If the Creator could [separate the respiratory from the digestive systems] for the whales, I don’t know why he couldn’t do it for us?”5 Being capable of doing something doesn’t make it a good idea. We could design an iPhone with tires, but this may not be helpful to that device’s purpose. Whales are also able to live their whole lives in the ocean. Why couldn’t the Creator give humans that ability, too? It would certainly cut down on skateboard injuries and fatal traffic accidents. Maybe it just wasn’t the plan.

While the above are likely intended as arguments to poor design, in the end they come across as logical “rubbish,” to borrow a phrase from our British colleagues.

5. Aesthetic Considerations in Evaluating the Pharynx 

The two critics above, at least in the quotations above, do not level aesthetic objections against the design of the pharynx. The irony is that if the designer of the human body had taken their advice and used the vastly clunkier and less elegant approach of creating two or three separate systems for breathing, eating/drinking, and communicating in order to minimize choking, the anti-design critics might have lodged an aesthetic argument against such a choice, namely that no properly ingenious “tidy-minded engineer” would have failed to elegantly combine the three primary functions into a single clever system. 

Engineers know this game — damned if you do and damned if you don’t, with critics ignoring the question of trade-offs. Engineers develop thicker skins as a natural coping mechanism. (Which, come to think of it, is another clever adaptive design feature of the human body!)

Ingenious Design 

Most people swallow a thousand times a day without incident, all the while breathing in enough air, swallowing enough food and water, verbally communicating with nuance, and sometimes even singing. Thus, the rare possibility of choking to death provides little actual evidence of incompetent design. Rather, the human pharynx is more accurately viewed as a clever, elegant solution to a complicated set of competing design objectives, with justifiable choices regarding design trade-offs, within rigid constraints. Further, the solution is profoundly well packaged and even provides a way to equalize the air pressure in the middle ear. This is ingenious design. 

HR had a word with Jerry Coyne?

Jerry Coyne — An Evolutionist and His Ideology 

Robert Shedinger 

Evolutionist Jerry Coyne habitually charges others with ignoring scientific evidence to advance a religious or other non-scientific viewpoint. With this in mind, it’s never out of place to remind readers of an episode from Coyne’s own past in which he was influenced in his scientific work by larger ideological battles.

The iconic image of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is of course a staple in biology textbooks, meant to convince students that natural selection is real and can be observed on human time scales. But the reality is far more complex, as Jonathan Wells has shown in Icons of Evolution. The experiments done in the 1950s by Bernard Kettlewell, widely hailed as demonstrating industrial melanism to be an example of natural selection in action, were horribly flawed, flaws meticulously documented by Michael Majerus in his 1998 book Melanism: Evolution in Action.

Where Coyne Comes In

This is where Jerry Coyne comes in. In a review of Majerus’s book appearing in Nature in 1998, Coyne confessed to not knowing anything about the flaws in Kettlewell’s experiments until reading about them in Majerus’s book, even though these flaws had been well documented in the literature since the 1960s. Coyne registered his dismay at realizing he had been incorrectly teaching the example of the peppered moth as tantamount to learning that Santa Claus is the one who brings presents on Christmas Eve, not his father. This forced Coyne to conclude: 

for the time being we must discard Biston as a well-understood example of natural selection in action, although it is clearly a case of evolution.1 

Coyne’s review quickly came to the attention of Darwin skeptics who were only too happy to trumpet the words of a noted evolutionary biologist now discarding one of the most iconic pieces of evidence for natural selection. I imagine Coyne caught real blow-back from his fellow evolutionists for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I’m sure he wanted a chance to redeem himself. 

He Did Not Have to Wait Long 

Four years later (2002), science writer Judith Hooper published Of Moths and Men, a more popular criticism of the peppered moth story. Coyne jumped at the opportunity to review Hooper’s book, also in the pages of Nature. He was far more critical of Hooper than he had been of Majerus, concluding: 

The dramatic rise and fall of the frequency of melanism in Biston betularia, occurring in parallel on two continents, is a compelling case of evolution by natural selection.2 

So in just four short years, industrial melanism in the peppered moth had gone from something needing to be discarded as an example of natural selection in action to becoming once again a compelling case of natural selection in action, and without any new evidence coming to light. What drove this change?

We need not speculate, for Coyne tells us later in the review: 

This issue matters, at least in the United States, because creationists have promoted the problems with Biston as a refutation of evolution itself. Even my own brief critique of the story (Nature 396, 35-36, 1998) has become grist for the creationist’s mill.3 

It was Coyne’s fear of being seen as advancing a “creationist” cause that led him to reverse his position on the status of industrial melanism in the peppered moth. But this is not the end of the story. 

Another Opportunity to Weigh In 

In 2009, Coyne published Why Evolution Is True, a book for general readers designed to put the nail in the coffin of intelligent design approaches. In marshalling evidence for evolution to convince a skeptical public, Coyne had another opportunity to weigh in on industrial melanism in the peppered moth. After discussing the action of natural selection in laboratory experiments with bacteria, Coyne writes: 

But perhaps it would be even more convincing to see the whole process in action in nature — without human intervention. That is, we want to see a natural population meet a natural challenge, we want to know what that challenge is, and we want to see the population evolve to meet it before our eyes.4 

If Coyne believed his 2002 endorsement of industrial melanism as “a compelling case of evolution by natural selection,” this would be the perfect place to introduce it. What better example of natural selection happening before our very eyes? But Coyne does not employ the peppered moth here or anywhere else in his book. There is not a single mention of the peppered moth, industrial melanism, or Bernard Kettlewell anywhere in this book designed to argue for the truth of evolution! Given the opportunity to make the case for evolution in action, Coyne simply punts.

Instead, he follows up with: 

We can’t expect this circumstance to be common. For one thing, natural selection in the wild is incredibly slow.5 

It is pretty clear that Coyne’s feelings about industrial melanism are the one’s he announced in 1998 — the peppered moth should be discarded as an example of natural selection in action. (See my The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms, pp. 117-128, for more on the ideological nature of the peppered moth story.) He reversed his position in 2002, it seems, because he feared losing credibility with his scientific colleagues. Instead of courageously standing for what he believed to be scientifically true, he backed down in the face of pressure to conform. 

At least some others have the courage to stand for what they believe even in the face of potential criticism. Before Jerry Coyne criticizes them for being motivated more by ideology than science, he might want to first look in the mirror. Isn’t there something about people who live in glass houses not casting stones? 

Notes 

1)Jerry Coyne, “Not Black or White,” Nature 396 (1998): 35.

2)Jerry Coyne, “Evolution under Pressure,” Nature 418 (2002): 20.

3)Coyne, “Evolution under Pressure,” 20.

4)Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (Penguin 2009), 132.

5)Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 132.    

 

Plato's republic: a brief history

 By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 

The Republic, one of the most important dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, renowned for its detailed expositions of political and ethical justice and its account of the organization of the ideal state (or city-state)—hence the traditional title of the work. As do other dialogues from Plato’s middle period, and unlike his early or Socratic dialogues, the Republic reflects the positive views of Plato himself rather than the generally skeptical stance of the historical Socrates, who had been Plato’s teacher. (“Socrates” is the main character in most of Plato’s dialogues.) The middle dialogues are literary as well as philosophical masterpieces, containing sensitive portrayals of characters and their interactions, dazzling displays of rhetoric, and striking and memorable tropes and myths, all designed to set off their leisurely explorations of philosophy.

In the Republic, Plato undertakes to show what justice is and why it is in each person’s best interest to be just. Although the dialogue starts from the question “Why should I be just?,” Socrates proposes that this inquiry can be advanced by examining justice “writ large” in an ideal state. Thus, the political discussion is undertaken to aid the ethical one. According to Plato, the ideal state comprises three social classes: rulers, guardians (or soldiers), and producers (e.g., farmers and craftsmen). The rulers, who are philosophers, pursue the good of the entire state on the basis of their knowledge of the form of the Good and the form of the Just—both being abstract essences, knowable only by the mind, through which things or individuals in the sensible world are, to varying degrees, good or just, respectively. Political justice, then, is the condition of a state in which each social class performs its role properly, including by not attempting to perform the role of any other class.

More From Britannica Plato: Happiness and virtue

Corresponding to the three social classes are the three parts of the individual soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—each of which has a particular object or desire. Thus, reason desires truth and the good of the whole individual, spirit is preoccupied with honour and competitive values, and appetite has the traditional low tastes for food, drink, and sex. Justice in the individual, or ethical justice, is a condition analogous to that of political justice—a state of psychic harmony in which each part of the soul performs its role properly. Thus, reason understands the form of the Good and desires the actual good of the individual, and the other two parts of the soul desire what it is good for them to desire, so that spirit and appetite are activated by things that are healthy and proper.

The middle books of the Republic contain a sketch of Plato’s views on knowledge and reality and feature the famous figures of the Sun and the Cave, among others. The position occupied by the form of the Good in the intelligible world is the same as that occupied by the Sun in the visible world: thus, the Good is responsible for the being and intelligibility of the objects of thought. The usual cognitive condition of human beings is likened to that of prisoners chained in an underground cave, with a great fire behind them and a raised wall in between. The prisoners are chained in position and so are able to see only shadows cast on the facing wall by statues moved along the wall behind them. They take these shadows to be reality. The account of the progress that they would achieve if they were to go aboveground and see the real world in the light of the Sun features the notion of knowledge as enlightenment. Plato proposes a concrete sequence of mathematical studies, ending with harmonics, that would prepare future rulers to engage in dialectic, whose task is to say of each thing what it is—i.e., to specify its nature by giving a real, rather than merely lexical, definition. The dialogue concludes with a myth concerning the fate of souls after death. See also Political philosophy: Plato.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

Allan Bloom

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Allan Bloom

American philosopher and author

Alternate titles: Allan David Bloom

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Edit History

Allan Bloom, in full Allan David Bloom, (born Sept. 14, 1930, Indianapolis, Ind., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1992, Chicago, Ill.), American philosopher and writer best remembered for his provocative best-seller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987). He was also known for his scholarly volumes of interpretive essays and translations of works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Plato.

Born: September 14, 1930 Indianapolis Indiana

Died: October 7, 1992 (aged 62) Chicago Illinois

Notable Works: “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”

Subjects Of Study: higher education

Bloom received a Ph.D. in 1955 from the University of Chicago, where, under the tutelage of the German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss, he became a devotee of the Western classics and a proponent of the philosophical tenet of “transcultural truth.” He taught at the University of Chicago (1955–60) and Yale (1962–63) and Cornell (1963–70) universities and was on the faculties of several foreign universities. He published such well-received works as Shakespeare’s Politics (1964), a collection of essays, and a translation of Plato’s Republic (1968).

Britannica Quiz Philosophy 101

In 1969 a group of students took control of Cornell’s administration building and demanded that certain mandatory classes be dropped in favour of those deemed more “relevant” to them. After the university yielded to their demands, Bloom tendered his resignation, and in 1979 he returned to the University of Chicago. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom argued that universities no longer taught students how to think and that students, especially those attending the top schools, were unconcerned about the lessons of the past or about examining ideas in a historical context. His blistering critique, which offered no solutions to the crisis in education, blamed misguided curricula, rock music, television, and academic elitism for the spiritual impoverishment of students. A later collection of essays, Giants and Dwarfs, was published in 1990. Bloom’s Love and Friendship (1993) and Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (2000) appeared posthumously.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.

In the Republic, Plato undertakes to show what justice is and why it is in each person’s best interest to be just. Although the dialogue starts from the question “Why should I be just?,” Socrates proposes that this inquiry can be advanced by examining justice “writ large” in an ideal state. Thus, the political discussion is undertaken to aid the ethical one. According to Plato, the ideal state comprises three social classes: rulers, guardians (or soldiers), and producers (e.g., farmers and craftsmen). The rulers, who are philosophers, pursue the good of the entire state on the basis of their knowledge of the form of the Good and the form of the Just—both being abstract essences, knowable only by the mind, through which things or individuals in the sensible world are, to varying degrees, good or just, respectively. Political justice, then, is the condition of a state in which each social class performs its role properly, including by not attempting to perform the role of any other class. 

Corresponding to the three social classes are the three parts of the individual soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—each of which has a particular object or desire. Thus, reason desires truth and the good of the whole individual, spirit is preoccupied with honour and competitive values, and appetite has the traditional low tastes for food, drink, and sex. Justice in the individual, or ethical justice, is a condition analogous to that of political justice—a state of psychic harmony in which each part of the soul performs its role properly. Thus, reason understands the form of the Good and desires the actual good of the individual, and the other two parts of the soul desire what it is good for them to desire, so that spirit and appetite are activated by things that are healthy and proper.

The middle books of the Republic contain a sketch of Plato’s views on knowledge and reality and feature the famous figures of the Sun and the Cave, among others. The position occupied by the form of the Good in the intelligible world is the same as that occupied by the Sun in the visible world: thus, the Good is responsible for the being and intelligibility of the objects of thought. The usual cognitive condition of human beings is likened to that of prisoners chained in an underground cave, with a great fire behind them and a raised wall in between. The prisoners are chained in position and so are able to see only shadows cast on the facing wall by statues moved along the wall behind them. They take these shadows to be reality. The account of the progress that they would achieve if they were to go aboveground and see the real world in the light of the Sun features the notion of knowledge as enlightenment. Plato proposes a concrete sequence of mathematical studies, ending with harmonics, that would prepare future rulers to engage in dialectic, whose task is to say of each thing what it is—i.e., to specify its nature by giving a real, rather than merely lexical, definition. The dialogue concludes with a myth concerning the fate of souls after death. See also Political philosophy: Plato.

The ministry of truth is real?

 How Media and the Medical Establishment Suppressed COVID Heterodoxy

Peter Biles 

Last month, the peer-reviewed journal Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning, and Policy published an important article on COVID-related censorship. I’ve written about it already here. The researchers introduced their article by defining some terms, recalling certain COVID controversies, and noting how multiple respected medical professionals were hurt in the fallout of the pandemic controversy. 

They went on to describe the specific experiences of their study participants, including 13 established doctors, scientists, and medical professionals who were censored, suppressed, or otherwise punished for expressing dissent with regard to the prevailing COVID-19 orthodoxy. All those who participated have either an MD or PhD in their respective fields, and four have both. These are not, then, conspiracy types or Internet trolls. They are reputable minds who simply transgressed against the “consensus” view, which, as I said in my earlier article, has changed drastically since March 2020. 

Standing and Credibility 

The researchers kept these participants anonymous to protect them, but emphasized their standing and credibility. In interviews, they gathered firsthand quotes to show just how harsh and brazen the censorship was in some cases, listing the tactics the medical establishment and media used against them. They reported: 

Tactics of censorship and suppression described by our respondents include exclusion, derogatory labelling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication. 

The study respondents noted that publications that formerly endorsed and published them began excluding their work and refusing to publish or interview them. One participant said,  

Neither X nor Y [two major newspapers in the respondent’s country] wanted to publish my articles. Without a proper explanation. …It was quite blatant, that they stopped accepting articles expressing a different opinion from that of the Ministry of Health (MOH). The number of journalists who can really be talked to, who are willing to listen to another opinion, to publish, has been greatly reduced, and most health reporters today are very biased towards the MOH. 

Beyond mere exclusion from publication privileges, respondents also experienced outright denigration. News headlines called them out for their criticisms, defaming them, harming their reputations, and distorting their views. One participant said, “I have been vilified…I’ve been called a quack…, an anti-vaxxer and a COVID denier, a conspiracy theorist.” Facing ridicule of that sort, other likeminded medical professionals understandably kept silent. So, the silencing tactic may have suppressed many more medical professionals, as the researchers note in their introduction.  

Not the Only Casualties 

The study also showed how reputations weren’t the only casualties. Whole careers were destroyed. Another respondent reported: 

I lost my job…, I was working for the last 20 years in X [the institution’s name]… And so, the media started coming to X… there was a concerted effort to… ruin my reputation, even though, this is unbelievable, they had the lowest death rate basically in the world, and the doctor who brought it to them, gets vilified and slandered. So, I left on my own…  

Other respondents described being censored by social media. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, removed heterodox posts, and in some cases, suspended the respondent’s account. That Twitter blacklisted and “shadow-banned” prominent medical experts like Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has since been confirmed. One study participant said: 

I’ve always had videos, just my teaching material I’ve been putting up on YouTube…, but I also started to put up materials around this, just sort of talking through some of the research… looking at the vaccine efficacy data… YouTube started taking it down. And so now…, I cannot post, I can’t even mention vaccines, because within seconds, as soon as I’m actually trying to upload the video, YouTube will say this video goes against our guidelines… 

No Explanation or Due Process 

Beyond media censorship, the medical establishment suppressed research and viewpoint diversity. Academic institutions, peer-reviewed journals, and scientific committees played a hand in excluding certain respondents and refusing to give their voices a fair hearing. One respondent said he was “stripped” from a committee and editorial position with no explanation or due process. The respondent had been on this particular committee for decades, but still was cut off without a word. In addition, the researchers noted that some respondents “recounted how their research had been retracted by the journal after publication.” During the pandemic, it became increasingly difficult for some of the respondents to publish in journals where their work had been formerly welcomed. 

The study went on to document how the participants initially responded to these tactics of suppression, and the tactics they used to fight back. I’ll cover that in my next and final post in this series.