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Sunday, 25 December 2022
Dag Hammarskjöld: a brief history.
Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XXII
Darwinism's Predictions
References
Saturday, 24 December 2022
File under"well said," LXXXVIII
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Edmund Burke
Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XXI
Darwinism's predictions
Cornelius G Hunter
References
Friday, 23 December 2022
The latest on the fossil record's fossil recording.
Fossil Friday: Miocene Aardvarks and the Abrupt Origin of Tubulidentata
Günter Bechly
Miocene to Pleistocene
The Eocene
A Real Conundrum
Little evolution has taken place in the genus over almost 20 million years, this is a hallmark of living fossils … , in all probability, the origin of tubulidentate taxa might date to the beginning of the Cenozoic era (Palaeocene epoch, about 65 Ma), and perhaps earlier (in the Cretaceous epoch of the Mesozoic era, some 70 Ma).
References
Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XX
Darwinism's Predictions
References
Thursday, 22 December 2022
2023: Year of the Darwin Skeptic?
The Year in Review: Intelligent Design Grows in Influence and Depth
Influencing Leading Scientists
Theory of Biological Design
Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XVIV
Darwinism's Predictions
Cornelius G Hunter
References
The engineering is real.
Synchronized Swimming in Siphonophores: A Design Worth Imitating
David Coppedge
A Floater to Avoid
But it’s not a jellyfish per se. The bell-shaped jellyfishes with which we are most familiar (phylum Cnidaria, subphylum Scyphozoa) are single individuals. The Portuguese man-o’war is classified in subphylum Hydrozoa, which includes the hydra. Like other siphonophores, it is a colony of individuals with specialized functions. Its distinctive gas-filled, sail-like bladder riding the waves like a Portuguese warship suggested the organism’s name.
Most other siphonophores — long, rope-like organisms with hairy-looking tentacles and gelatinous bulbs arranged in rows — sit and wait underwater until prey animals like fish and plankton drift into their stinging cells. But siphonophores can swim. In fact, they travel large distances every day. If the fishing is bad, they will move to a better spot. A video taken by a remotely operated submersible for the Nautilus Ocean Exploration Trust shows one purple-colored species swimming leisurely at the bottom of the ocean:
Its odd shape defied identification at first by the puzzled scientists wondering what it was. That’s understandable, because siphonophores are barely recognizable as animals. Some species can grow to over a hundred feet long (see photo at Smithsonian Magazine).
Common but Weird and Wonderful
The common siphonophore Nanomia bijuga is very plentiful in Monterey Bay. A video by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute of this “weird and wonderful” animal shows its two main sections: a nectosome made up of 5 to 20 nectophores (zooids which do the propulsion), and a siphosome, composed of zooids that sting and digest krill:
Like other “physonect” siphonophores, N. bijuga has a third part: a “pneumatophore” at the apex of the nectosome. Filled with carbon monoxide gas, the pneumatophore helps keep the colony in a vertical orientation. So numerous and effective are these little predators, they eat more krill per day than all the whales in the bay combined!
That is remarkable Considering images we have seen of humpback whales gulping big mouthfuls as they lunge with mouth agape into dense swarms of the little shrimp-like crustaceans. Another fascinating fact about N. bijuga is that it participates in the daily migration of plankton (diel vertical migration), descending to 800 meters during the daytime for protection, and up to the surface at night. That’s a lot of swimming for a little foot-long Ironman — a mile a day.
Jet Propulsion
Like jellyfish, squid, and octopuses, siphonophores move by jet propulsion. Each nectophore looks like a bubble with a small orifice. The zooid quickly squeezes the bubble, shooting water out to provide thrust, then fills up again. Arranged in pairs along the nectosome, the nectophores cooperate like rowers in a team. One fact about their teamwork fascinated scientists led by Kevin T. Du Clos and Kelly R. Sutherland at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, aided by scientists at other institutions including Caltech.
That fact is that N. bijuga employs both synchronized and asynchronous propulsion: sometimes the nectophores “pull” together, and sometimes they work independently. Why is that, and does it make a functional difference? They published their findings in PNAS: “Distributed propulsion enables fast and efficient swimming modes in physonect siphonophores.”
Siphonophores are colonial cnidarians that, unlike single jetters such as squids, swim using propulsion from multiple jets, produced using subunits called nectophores. Distributing propulsion spatially provides advantages in redundancy and maneuverability, and distributing propulsion over time enables context-adaptive swimming modes. We use experiments and modeling to compare swimming modes. We show that synchronous swimming produces high mean speeds and accelerations. By contrast, asynchronous swimming consumes less energy. Thus, by simple variations to the timing of thrust production, siphonophores achieve similar functionality to that of fishes, the ability to adapt swimming performance to context. A greater understanding of the benefits of multijet propulsion may also improve underwater vehicle design.
So once again, we see nature inspiring design by imitation. These scientists found measurable benefits to the travel habits of a lowly, nondescript whatchamacallit. Its ability to get around and migrate a mile a day attracted them to wonder how, and why, with such simple equipment, this organism achieved similar performance to fish. Expecting a reason, they found one: the siphonophore can adapt its “gait” (so to speak) to the needs of the moment: pulling together to escape a predator, but breaking cadence to save energy. It’s something like we see with marching bands, sometimes moving in strict order and sometimes in a “scatter” formation to get into position with less energy.
Think what the humble common siphonophore’s ingenuity could mean to energy-conscious marine vehicle design:
Providing specific advice for vehicle design is beyond the scope of this study, but experimental pulsed single jet vehicles that operate within the Reynolds number range this study (SI Appendix, Fig. S1) have been tested (e.g., Re = 1,300–2,700 for (33)), and there are general principles from this study that could be useful for vehicle research and design. Analogously to N. bijuga, a single underwater vehicle with multiple propulsors could use different modes to adapt to context. Our model test cases suggest strategies for tuning the behavior of a vehicle depending on the desired performance characteristics. A propulsion pattern mimicking the asynchronous case—in which thrust is low, and asynchronous—is best if power consumption is the primary concern because it minimizes the cost of transport.
If speed is more important, the asynchronous-matched case—in which thrust is high and asynchronous—is likely the best because it decreases the cost of transport with only small losses in speed when compared to the synchronous case. Interestingly, the intuitive approach of producing high thrust synchronously (as represented by the synchronous case) may be the least useful, with its primary advantage being high initial acceleration.
Our results also suggest a general approach to selecting the number of propulsors an underwater vehicle should employ. Swimming speed, efficiency, cost of transport, and synchronous acceleration all improved with increasing colony lengths in our model, but these benefits approached asymptotes for the longest colonies(Fig. 3). For underwater vehicles with few propulsors, adding propulsors may provide large performance benefits, but when the number of propulsors is high, the increase in complexity from adding propulsors may outweigh the incremental performance gains.
The multijet strategy provides flexibility in the spatial and temporal distributions of propulsion. Multijet swimmers, such as N. bijuga, take advantage of this flexibility to increase their maneuverability, redundancy, and context-specific swimming performance.
The authors were impressed enough with the animal’s skill, they used the word “design” four times, but evolution zero times. Good thing; trying to figure out the phylogeny of siphonophores is a challenge (Molecular Biology and Evolution).
The Kicker
The design, for sure, proceeds all the way from the whole colony down to each cell, where molecular machines, a genome, and network of parts enables the whole. A siphonophore is, using Douglas Axe’s term, a “functional whole” with design evident at every level.
It’s quite a show. And like the design plan, the synchronization continues throughout and within every player in the colony — even in the decision to break cadence and go async when that swimming strategy makes the most sense.
Wednesday, 21 December 2022
On the death blow to spontaneous generation.
The 200th Birthday of Louis Pasteur: A Man of Science and Faith
Evolution News
On the forbidden question.
“Why Life?”: A Question Atheist Scientists Never Ask
One cannot understand organisms — that is, life itself — without incorporating the concept of purpose within biology, the science of organisms. Such purpose is observable and measurable, and therefore well within the bounds of scientific inquiry.
The facts are clear. All life is purpose-driven, from the biomolecule up to the ecosystem itself, and everything in between. Angiosperms cannot reproduce without insects, and pollinating insects cannot live without nectar. Chipmunks cannot live without acorns, and oak trees cannot propagate without chipmunks. Even something as catastrophic as the eruption of Mount St. Helens was, in the end, a life-giving event. In the subsystem of biology known as succession, fire and even lava are sometimes necessary to bring forth new life.
A Struggle for Existence
More strikingly, the purpose-driven nature of life precedes Darwinian natural selection as the fundamental agency of evolution. Simply put, the well described Darwinian struggle for existence can occur if and only if living creatures “make the effort.” The word “struggle” is apropos. Surviving in the wild is not easy. It requires constant vigilance, exertion, and determination. That’s true even for the king of beasts. There was never a lioness who took down a wildebeest or water buffalo without risking a fatal blow from hooves or horns. The great white shark must roll its eyes back behind its jaws to survive its own attack upon its prey.
No Mystery Here?
To an atheist scientist, none of this seems mysterious.
The shark, the lion, and every other predator is simply driven to the hunt by hunger. And that is just a chemical reaction, when the gut sends a message to the brain that there is a need for nutrition. It is the same with reproduction, they would say. The urge to mate is purely physiological. Despite the great risk, bulls and boars and bucks will fight it out for the right to breed.
As for those creatures that are preyed upon, they watch out carefully for danger, and flee from the hunter. Understanding the biochemistry of not wanting to have your flesh torn open is not hard to understand.
Of course, that is all true. The issue is not whether we can understand the behavior of animals surviving in the wild. Or surviving indoors, where conditions are safer. I recall vividly as a child in school watching the clock tick up to noon, anxious to be able to open my lunch pail and satisfy my hunger. There was nothing profound about that.
But in order to understand life, it is not sufficient to simply observe what is happening. The real question is why things are the way they are.
But in order to understand life, it is not sufficient to simply observe what is happening. The real question is why things are the way they are.
However, did we not just decide that animals eat because they are hungry and avoid danger to eschew harm? Yes, these are clearly purpose-driven activities, and they all have a biochemical or physiologic basis.
True enough. But the deeper question is, why are these physiologic stimuli there in the first place? Answer: to allow for life. But then… why life?
“Why life?” is the ultimate question.
If, as the atheist scientists endlessly insist, we exist merely as an accidental collocation of molecules strewn together on some small planet in the backwater of an insignificant galaxy, then again, “Why life?”
Time, Energy, and Matter
The answer, finally, comes all the way back to where we started: purpose. Time, energy, and inanimate matter carry on ceaselessly with no apparent purpose. But arising out of the inorganic are living creatures, utterly purpose-driven. There is absolutely no reason for purpose-driven life to exist within this milieu, unless purpose itself exists at the fundamental core of reality itself.
Every religion has taught this, always. It is not a new revelation, however forgotten in modern times.
Let us return to the wisdom of our elders.
Reductive physicalism in a nutshell
It's like finding a book written in an unknown language and then imagining that a study of the physical and chemical properties of paper and ink would be sufficient to decipher said book or explain its origin.
Still the gold standard.
Bloodless Medicine and Surgery
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Patient blood management is the use of science-based medical and surgical techniques to conserve a patient’s own blood and minimizing or avoiding the need for the transfusion of donor blood components. Many people object to receiving blood or blood products. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, object based on religious beliefs. Others do so as a result of healthcare concerns, knowledge of potential complications, or other personal convictions.
Strong scientific evidence shows that overall, patients who avoid transfusions have fewer complications, faster recoveries, and shorter hospital stays. Benefits of patient blood management include lower rates of the most serious postoperative complications, including heart attack, stroke, and infections; decreased risk of immunological complications and allergic reactions; less exposure to blood-borne viruses and infections; and no risk of receiving the wrong blood type
Our Mission
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Guided by ethical and humanistic principles, our program provides consistently accessible, high-quality PBM to all patients, including bloodless care for patients for whom transfusion is not an option. We accomplish this by aligning the very best that medicine, science and technology offer with the goals of each individual patient.
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News: Watch our documentary film, The birth of bloodless,the Englewood experience now available online. The film chronicles the 25-year history of the bloodless medicine program at Englewood Health, tracing its roots from its humble beginnings to its current reputation as the model for patient blood management programs throughout the world.
Sons of the original firemaker? II
Neanderthals Had a Thing for Eagles — And Hyenas
Although technically a dog expert, Mark Derr has given some thought since the 1990s to Neanderthal man who seems to get smarter each time we study him:
For instance, Neanderthal appears to have mastered and used fire for a variety of purposes including cooking after their appearance in Eurasia some 300,000 or more years ago. They also made carvings into ivory, and they almost certainly communicated using speech. To show how slowly attitudes change, I have recently seen people speculate that Neanderthal may have only seasonally had fire, but in general were incapable of igniting tinder on their own. This view recently received what would appear to be a mortal blow when Ceren Kabukcu and colleagues revealed that Neanderthal not only had fire throughout the year, but also used fire to cook a wide variety of foods which they consumed.
MARK DERR, “NEW VIEWS OF NEANDERTHAL ARE RESHAPING PREHISTORY” AT PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (DECEMBER 11, 2022)
He raises the fact that Neanderthals had an interesting relationship with raptors and hyenas.
Elsewhere, we have learned that Neanderthal captured golden eagles and other raptors, presumably to take their talons and feathers for use in various rituals and decorative objects. According to Stewart Finlayson et al., the Neanderthals “selectively took the largest raptors at their disposal within Eurasia,” which turned out to be the golden eagle, with regional and local exceptions. Whether they hunted with golden eagles is not known, but given the time and effort they spent collecting them, it is not unimaginable that they did not at least make an attempt to tame them.
MARK DERR, “NEW VIEWS OF NEANDERTHAL ARE RESHAPING PREHISTORY” AT PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (DECEMBER 11, 2022)
While we don’t know if Neanderthals tried falconry, as it is called, it’s well established that they used the eagles’ feathers and talons “perhaps as religious totems, perhaps as icons of personal strength.” (Audubon News, June 21, 2019) Researchers think that Neanderthal use of raptor emblems in this way is an instance of symbolic expression, implying an intellectual life. (PLOS, March 5, 2012) Neanderthals also incorporated corvids (crows, for example) into their symbolic life. The crow, like the eagle, is rich in symbolism in many human cultures.
What About the Hyenas?
There’s a story in that: Neanderthals are not thought, based on current evidence, to have had much interest in dogs, Mietje Germonpré, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences told Derr: “archeological evidence suggests that modern humans had a special interest in canids, while such an interest seems absent in Neanderthals.”
But they had a special regard for the hyena, the most dog-like of felines. Neanderthal and hyena remains have been discovered together in caves:
Hyenas and Neanderthals appear to have had an especially extensive relationship, the boundaries of which are unknown. One might ask whether hyenas were Neanderthals’ “dogs.” Upper Paleolithic sites reveal, in contrast with Middle Paleolithic sites, large quantities of personal objects made from canid teeth, especially from foxes, wolves, and bears.
MARK DERR, “NEW VIEWS OF NEANDERTHAL ARE RESHAPING PREHISTORY” AT PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (DECEMBER 11, 2022)
Well, there is only one way to find out: Keep digging.
You may also wish to read: Our ancestors were cooking much earlier than thought. The more we learn about early humans, the more sophisticated we find their culture to be. The basics of human culture seem to undergo less development than we think. The culture may appear at about the same time as the humans.
Tuesday, 20 December 2022
Be grateful for your body's flawless design.
A Physician’s Fantastic Voyage through Your Designed Body
On a new episode of ID the Future, Your Designed Body author and physician Howard Glicksman takes a close looks with Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn at Glicksman’s new book, co-authored with systems engineer Steve Laufmann. As Glicksman puts it, he and Laufmann consider not just how the human body appears but what it actually takes for it to work and not die, and what this implies for evolutionary theory.
Begin by piling up the layers of complexity in the human body — the layer upon layer of complex interdependent systems. Then ask hard questions about whether any blind and gradual evolutionary process could have kept our evolutionary ancestors alive at every generational stage as all this was gradually engineered by countless random mutations over millions of generations, beginning with the first single-celled organisms billions of years ago. Once one faces those hard questions without retreating to vague just-so stories about nature needing vision (or hearing or any number of other bodily functions) and therefore magically evolving it, at that point Darwinism’s story of gradual and blind evolution collapses. The explanation that is left standing, according to Glicksman, Laufmann, and Your Designed Body, is intelligent design. Download the podcast or listen to it here
Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XVIII
Darwinism's Predictions
Ever since Darwin the universal evolutionary tree has been a unifying principle in biology. Evolution predicted that this universal tree can be derived by arranging the species according to their similarities and differences. And as more data became available, particularly from the dramatic breakthroughs in molecular biology in the latter half of the twentieth century, expectations were high for the determination of this tree. As one paper explains, “Once universal characters were available for all organisms, the Darwinian vision of a universal representation of all life and its evolutionary history suddenly became a realistic possibility. Increasing reference was made to this universal, molecule-based phylogeny as the ‘comprehensive’ tree of the “entire spectrum of life” (O’Malley and Koonin) But those expectations were dashed: “By the mid-1980s there was great optimism that molecular techniques would finally reveal the universal tree of life in all its glory. Ironically, the opposite happened.” (Lawton)
As one study explained, the problem is so confusing that results “can lead to high confidence in incorrect hypotheses.” And although evolutionists thought that more data would solve their problems, the opposite has occurred. With the ever increasing volumes of data, incongruence between trees “has become pervasive.” (Dávalos) As another researcher explained, “Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves.” (Woese) These incongruities are not minor statistical variations and the general failure to converge on a single topology has some researchers calling for a relaxation from “tree-thinking.” (Bapteste, et. al.) Nor are these incongruities limited to protein-coding genes. As one research commented, “I’ve looked at thousands of microRNA genes, and I can’t find a single example that would support the traditional tree.” (Dolgin)
These incongruities have forced evolutionists to filter the data carefully in order to obtain evolutionary trees. As one paper explains, “selecting genes with strong phylogenetic signals and demonstrating the absence of significant incongruence are essential for accurately reconstructing ancient divergences.” (Salichos and Rokas) But this raises the question of whether the resulting tree is real: “Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal TOL [tree of life] rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true.” (Doolittle and Bapteste).
References
Bapteste E., et. al. 2005. “Do orthologous gene phylogenies really support tree-thinking?.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 5:33.
Dávalos L., et. al. 2012. “Understanding phylogenetic incongruence: lessons from phyllostomid bats.” Biological Reviews Cambridge Philosophical Society 87:991-1024.
Dolgin, E. 2012. “Phylogeny: Rewriting evolution.” Nature 486:460-462.
Doolittle, W., E. Bapteste. 2007. “Pattern pluralism and the Tree of Life hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:2043-2049.
Lawton, G. 2009. “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.” New Scientist January 21.
O’Malley, M., E. Koonin. 2011. “How stands the Tree of Life a century and a half after The Origin?.” Biology Direct 6:32.
Salichos L., A. Rokas. 2013. “Inferring ancient divergences requires genes with strong phylogenetic signals.” Nature 497:327-331.
Woese C. 1998. “The universal ancestor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95:6854-6859.