Wednesday, 25 January 2023

Yet another Darwinian just so story bites the dust?

Darwin, We Have a Problem: Horse Teeth Are Not Less Evolved

David Coppedge

It was a perfect Darwinian tale. The evidence was right there in the fossils. Teeth evolved to have higher crowns in ruminants (e.g., cattle, sheep, antelopes, deer, giraffes) over time, because the rise of grasslands caused more tooth abrasion and required more durability. Evolution met the need and provided the dental and digestive toolkits for the evolving diet. Here’s how it was told, according to Gordon D. Sanson in a PNAS commentary:

The rise and spread of grasslands on different continents during the Tertiary coincided with the appearance of dental characters assumed to be adaptations for eating grass. The dogma was, and largely still is, that grasses are particularly tough and abrasive compared to the ancestral diet of woodland plants. Grasses have long been thought to be particularly abrasive because of their high levels of endogenous silica bodies (phytoliths) although exogenous dust or grit on the surface of grass leaves can also cause tooth wear. Grass-eaters evolved very durable teeth with sacrificial high crowns that could endure high levels of wear (Fig. 1). The teeth also developed highly folded and more complex enamel ridge patterns, assumed to be necessary for chewing a tough fibrous diet. There were other adaptations associated with moving onto grasslands, including changes in locomotory morphology, herd behavior, and body size, but the linkage between tooth form and function and the changing biomechanical properties of the diet are of interest here. It is a particularly rich story because teeth, being so hard and durable, are well preserved in the fossil record.

In addition, ruminants evolved forestomachs that wash and sort some of the grit from the grass, allowing the animals to regurgitate the food, chew the cud, and break down the bolus into finer particles. This provided an “inadvertent advantage” over mammals that didn’t evolve a forestomach, like horses.

A Difficulty with Tooth Evolution

Alas, an earlier paper in PNAS by Valerio et al. raised a difficulty with the tooth evolution story. As evolutionists, these agricultural scientists agreed with part of the tale. It appears true that cattle and other ruminants sort out the dirt and grit in the forestomach. The team proved this in a series of experiments. The sorting mechanism does appear to reduce wear on a cow’s teeth.

Many reasons have been suggested for the evolutionary success of the highly diverse clade of ruminants. Ruminants have evolved a forestomach physiology that leads to unparalleled chewing efficacy for mammals of their size, with an extreme particle size reduction. This is due to a well-documented particle sorting mechanism in their forestomach that is based on the density of the forestomach content, which floats/sediments in a liquid medium. This mechanism should, inadvertently, also wash off a large proportion of grit and dust before the material is regurgitated for rumination. Here, we show in live animals that this suspected washing actually takes place.

Sanson thought about this finding. He put the new evidence alongside the old evolutionary story and started asking questions. Recalling Kuhn’s philosophy of science, he wondered if biologists had been defending a paradigm without questioning its assumptions. If so, they’ve been doing it for a century and a half!

It is inevitable that we conduct research within the lens of existing paradigms, but Thomas Kuhn argued that reevaluation of assumptions encourages paradigm shifts. For over 150 y, the coevolution of grasses and large mammalian herbivores has interested biologists and has become a classic textbook paradigm of adaptation. Valerio et al.’s contribution prompts a fresh look at the assumptions underlying this paradigm. … Valerio et al.’s paper raises questions that are worth unpacking.

A simple observation should have perturbed the story long ago: horses are not ruminants. They eat grass but do not chew the cud. Why do equids appear so well adapted to grazing? Like ruminants, they can eat grass for eight hours a day and live long, healthy lives.

Is rumination a greater advantage than tooth complexity in avoiding wear?

Is crown height (hypsodonty) more advantageous than reduction of particle size in food?

Are grasses more abrasive than other plant diets? There is “little evidence” for this, Sanson asserts.

Did hypsodonty precede the emergence of grasslands? Apparently not in South America.

Are geological particles (e.g., volcanic ash) more abrasive than grass phytoliths?

To what extent do grasses accumulate more exogenous sources of grit (e.g., wind-borne sediments) than the endogenous grit in grass phytoliths? Where is the true grit?

Are high crowns more adaptive than enamel ridge complexity?

Do all ruminants benefit the same from the forestomach sorting mechanism if they ingest different quantities of grit?

Most importantly, “What is the driver for the evolution of tooth enamel complexity, durability, or cutting efficiency or effectiveness, or both?”

A Simplistic Scenario

Here’s a sample of Sanson ruminating on the complexities of these issues. They weaken, if not undermine, the simplistic evolutionary scenario.

The cause of abrasion has become more contentious since several studies have questioned the hardness of plant phytoliths and consequently their capacity to wear tooth enamel. However, even if plant phytoliths do contribute to enamel wear, it has been estimated that African buffalo may consume between 10 and 28 kg of grit and 300 and 400 kg of endogenous silica per year depending on the soil type. A fifteen-year-old buffalo on granite soils might have chewed over 200 million times on a diet containing about 6,000 kg of silica, 14 times the amount of grit on the food. These are formidable quantities and attest to the durability of teeth and the necessity for high crowns. With the potential for such quantities of abrasives in the diet, does any inadvertent advantage become less important in grazers if the wear from endogenous silica swamps the wear from exogenous grit? On the other hand, if browsing ruminants consume lower grit levels but virtually no silica, they may have a relatively higher inadvertent advantage. The relative contribution of endogenous to exogenous abrasives needs to be systematically measured over diets, seasons, and soil types and integrated with studies on chewing behavior.

Sanson remarks, “Arguably, Valerio et al. inadvertently highlight just how much we do not know about chewing, which is such a vital part of food mechanical preparation that a large herbivore might invest 8 h a day in the activity.” Then he proceeds to ask more questions:

Ruminant teeth must deal with fresh abrasive food on ingestion and softened, washed, and sorted food on rumination, possibly engaging with a wider range of biomechanical properties than a nonruminant. A horse must accommodate unwashed and unsorted food particles. Why then are the teeth so similar in many ways and why does the fundamental paradigm still make sense when the assumptions may not be so robust after all?Are the biomechanical properties relevant? Diet toughness is often considered in terms of the energy required to chew the food, but that may not be a limiting factor. Rather toughness might affect how the food locally resists fracture and flows along the basins between the complex enamel ridges when chewed.

On he goes, questioning assumptions that have supported a paradigm for a century and a half. Darn Valeria et al.! They just made it tougher to chew the Darwinian story.

Valerio et al. suggest an added level of complexity. Their perspective, as agricultural and veterinary scientists familiar with the intricate workings of the ruminant’s digestive system, bears on the assumptions made by paleontologists about the coevolution of grasses and grazers. Unraveling the selective forces that have led to the patterns of dental evolution has just become more difficult.

Unnecessary Difficulty

The difficulty lies in the narrative, not the evidence. Each mammal — ruminant or not — is living well in its habitat, because it has the right tools for the job. We don’t see horses or cows keeling over in the grass from starvation, suffering from worn-out teeth in aging gums. Ranchers have more horse sense than this; they can tell a horse’s age by looking at its teeth, even if they are courteous enough to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth. Retired horses put out to pasture continue to graze and usually die of other causes than tooth loss. The cows are not laughing at them, mooing that they should have evolved forestomachs.

Isn’t that the motivation that causes so many evolutionary tales to fall? In their myth of progress, they envision animals emerging with more complexity over millions of years. Their “universal tree of life” icon starts at a single root and branches out in all directions, each branch “innovating” the tools necessary for whatever creature happens along. Innovations emerge because of “selective forces” that impel them toward solutions for the challenges that the environment throws at them. It’s such a blissful scenario. How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

Evolutionists have been chewing this cud for too long, assuming that Darwin’s magical “selective forces” have the true grit to deal with gritty grass. Time to change the channel and watch The Way Things Work.

Greetings to our new robot overlords?

On the fallacious reasonings of reductive spiritualists.

Our souls must be concretely distinct from our bodies because we are capable of abstract thinking on morals and math and the like? Really? Or our souls are concretely distinct from our bodies because though the material making up our bodies constantly changes our inner identity does not?

Are we capable of abstract thinking from the womb? Why not? Why would our concretely distinct souls be limited in any way by the size or state of development of our brains? In as much as those making these arguments claim that we don't need a brain at all to do abstract thinking and moral reasoning. But some of us beg to differ.

Is there a dog heaven? Because the notion of a continuous self despite a changing body can also be employed to argue for a concretely distinct dog self that would exist after the death of the the dog body. But most of those making these kinds of "arguments" would likely balk at such a thought.

Here is the thing about the so called near death experiences that many are left to depend on for virtually the entirety of their reasoning for the reductive spiritualism paradigm. These are not post death experiences. If I want to know what the experience of living in Venezuela is like I'm not going to rely on a source who has live his whole life in Guyana because the two countries share a border. A near Venezuela experience is not the same as a actual Venezuela experience. Ninety five plus percent of those who experience near death trauma recall no such NDEs. Why not? Are some souls more reductive than most?

Most of those so called NDEs yield unverifiable/unreliable information. That's right reductive spiritualists are left relying on an anomalous finding within an anomaly for virtually the entirety of their argument. The sacred text provides an alternative explanation for this anomalous anomaly. We note that necromancy was forbidden on pain of death by our loving heavenly Father the Lord JEHOVAH. Why? There are malignant superhuman intelligences who have a stake in turning men away from the one true hope for the dead i.e the resurrection.

Job14:14,15NIV"If someone dies, will they live again?

All the days of my hard service

I will wait for my renewal b to come.

1 5You will call and I will answer you;

you will long for the creature your hands have made.

Would a re-imprisonment of ones freed spirit soul in a body of flesh that hampers rather than enhances its powers be something to look forward to?

Job was rather hoping in JEHOVAH to live AGAIN. A very different hope to some mysterious afterlife.

But of course to actually be resurrected one must first actually die.

1Corinthians15:35,36NIV"But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. "

So either there is an afterlife or there is a resurrection,one can't have it both ways.

On post modernism.

Tuesday, 24 January 2023

Darwinists are probably being disingenuous?

The “All Outcomes Are Equiprobable” Argument

Cornelius G Hunter

I’ve been busy lately with a big landscaping job for the neighborhood evolutionist. He wanted a massive set of stones to be carefully arranged in his backyard. He wanted stones of different colors, and the careful arrangement would spell out “Evolution Is True.”

Unfortunately, the day I finished this big job there was an earthquake in the neighborhood which jumbled the stones I had carefully arranged. I had to go back to the evolutionist’s property and put the stones back in order.

To makes matters worse, the evolutionist wouldn’t pay me for the job. When I sued him he told the judge that I was lying. He said I didn’t do the job, but instead the arrangement of the stones was due to the recent earthquake.

I explained to the judge that such an event would be unlikely, but the evolutionist retorted that landscapers don’t understand probability. The evolutionist explained to the judge that all outcomes are equally probable. Every outcome, whether it spells out “Evolution Is True” or nothing at all, have a probability of one divided by the total number of possible arrangements. He said that I was committing a mistake that is common with nonscientific and uneducated people. He explained that if you toss a coin 500 times the sequence of heads and tails will be astronomically unlikely. But it happened. All such sequences, even if they spell out a message in Morse code, are equiprobable.

The judge agreed. He fined me for bringing a frivolous lawsuit against the evolutionist and made me write “Evolution Is True” 500 times.

What is the biblical orthodoxy re: the only true God?

The science is settled?: the end is near?

Time to address the elephant in the lab?

The Elephant in the Science Lab

Stephen Iacobini

In previous posts I have been seeking to describe the science of purpose. Now it is worth getting down to the basics of what science actually is and how it works. The goal is to tease out what has heretofore been elusive for conventional science. I am referring to the elephant in the room, or rather in the laboratory: purpose.

In this context it is necessary to distinguish between measuring grossly objective phenomena versus observing the effects of invisible forces and creating a theory as to what might account for them. Newton came up with a model for that ubiquitous invisible force called gravity. Einstein proved that Newton was not entirely correct and offered a more sophisticated model of why we are snuggled tightly to the ground.

The point is that for much of science, where we cannot actually touch or see what we are describing, we create a model that allows us to think in macroscopic, concrete terms about what might be going on below the level of our senses.

Invisible Entities

Consider the models we create to describe the action of the invisible entities we refer to as molecules. The study of molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. And chemistry began with simple compounds such as water, hydrogen, oxygen, ammonia, etc. This was inorganic chemistry, arising in the 19th century. And for over a century it seemed that the models we created to describe the reactions between these entities was indeed verifiable in test tubes.

But something very strange has happened in the world of chemistry for the past 20 to 40 years. We now have the discipline of molecular biology, aka biochemistry, where we study the behavior of the molecules of life.These are well-known entities: DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids, etc. When these new disciplines arose in the second half of the 20th century, the models of the 19th century were still employed. After all, these were still just molecules. They must obey the basic laws of chemistry and physics. They must behave like Tinkertoy objects, mindlessly responsive to all the impinging forces of the organic milieu.

But Is This Really True?

When we apply an electrical charge to H2O, we know what will happen. But when we read a sequence of DNA, the human mind and all of its computers are powerless to determine exactly what protein will be translated through the spliceosome and the ribosome. The answer is not deterministic at all, at least in ways that we understand. And that failure to understand is what brings us all the way back to the beginning of our analysis. By definition, when our observations do not comport with our predictions, it is not nature that is at fault. The fault lies with our predictions, and the fundamental source of the prediction is the model.

The greatest molecular biologist of all time was Carl Woese. He ended his career, after having discovered archaea, by proclaiming that the models of molecular biology must be completely reconsidered. He understood, unlike the naturalists, that molecules behave in a purposeful fashion in ways that the model of mindless Tinkertoys can never predict.

Surprising Terminology

Open any textbook on molecular biology and you will find terminology such as “chaperoning,” “translating,” “interpreting,” “fashioning,” “alternating,” “optimizing,” “stimulating,” “selecting,” “repressing,” etc. These words are applied to the action of biomolecules in the same way that you would apply them to any conscious creature.

As Woese said, we must embrace the revolution in biology, a revolution quite similar to the one that Einstein and Schrodinger wrought in physics over a hundred years ago. A lot of what chemists figured out in past centuries was true, up to a point, but those days are in the past, and the complexity of life requires an entirely new analysis. The function of macromolecules within the cell is decisive, selective, and quite frankly, purposefully conscious.

Those who deny seeing the elephant in the laboratory should wonder what else there is in the room with them.

And still even more on the business of war: blood money?

Yet more cross talk from the fossil record re: Darwinism.

Fossil Friday: Sea Cows and the Abrupt Origin of Sirenia and Desmostylia

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the reconstructed skeleton of the “walking sea cow” Pezosiren from the Eocene of Jamaica, because today we look into the origins of the placental mammal order Sirenia, commonly known as sea cows. This order of herbivorous aquatic mammals includes only four living species of manatees and dugongs as well as the giant Steller’s sea cow, which was unfortunately exterminated by overhunting just a few decades after its discovery in the mid 18th century. Together with Proboscidea (elephants) and the extinct Desmostylia and Embrithopoda, the order Sirenia belongs to a subgroup of afrotherian mammals that is called Tethytheria (McKenna 1975, Gheerbrant et al. 2005, Nishihara et al. 2005, Berta et al. 2006, Seiffert 2003, 2007, Tabuce et al. 2008, Domning et al. 2010, O’Leary et al. 2013, Self-Sullivan et al. 2014, Domning 2018b), because they are thought to have evolved on the coast of the ancient Tethys Ocean (Heritage & Seiffert 2022).

The fossil record of sirenians is comparatively rich and even includes a lot of more or less complete skeletons. Domning et al. (1982: table 1), Domning (1994), and Self-Sullivan (2014)provided lists of all the ancient fossil sirenians known at that time. Diedrich (2013: fig. 1) and Springer et al. (2015: fig. 5) featured very good charts of the stratigraphic distribution of fossil sirenians, while Heritage & Seiffert (2022) provided the most comprehensive and up-to-date study or their phylogenetic relationships, ages or divergence, and paleobiogegraphic history. Based on molecular data, Sirenia are believed to have originated in the Earliest Paleocene about 65 million years ago (Springer et al. 2015: fig. 4), but when do sirenians first appear in the actual fossil record?

First Fossil Appearance

A putative fossil sirenian, Ishatherium subathuensis, was described by Sahni & Kumar (1980)and Sahni et al. (1980) from the early Eocene (Ypresian, 55.8-48.6 mya) Subhatu Formation in the Himalayas. It might represent the oldest known sirenian (Sereno 1982) but it could as well be an anthracobunid perissodactyl or a moeritheriid proboscidean (Wells & Gingerich 1983, Domning et al. 1986, Zalmout et al. 2003, Cooper et al. 2014, Rose et al. 2019). Domning et al. (1982) questioned the sirenian affinity as well as the dating. Two poorly preserved maxillary fragments from the Early Eocene (48.6-48.0 mya) Casamayoran Formation of Patagonia, which were named Florentinoameghinia mystica, were later attributed to Sirenia by Sereno (1982), but Domning (2001b) considered them as mammal of uncertain affinity.

The oldest unequivocal fossil sea cow is the quadrupedal prorastomid Prorastomus sirenoides from the Chapelton Formation (Yellow Limestone Group) in west-central Jamaica. It was first described by Richard Owen (1855), the famous enemy of Charles Darwin. Savage et al. (1994) re-described the holotype and described a second specimen. Even though Prorastomus is considered to be the most primitive known sirenian, it has some derived traits “that exclude it from the direct ancestry of other sirenians” (Savage et al. 1994). It is often stated to be of early Middle Eocene (48.6-40.4 mya) age, but according to Savage et al. (1994) the layers of the Stettin Member, where both known specimens were found, rather dates to the late Early Eocene (Ypresian) (Robinson 1988, Gold et al. 2018), thus about 49-50 million years ago.

About the same age of 48 million years (Late Ypresian / Early Lutetian), if not even slightly more ancient (Black 2013), is a petrosal bone from Chambi in Tunisia described by Benoit et al. (2013), which seems to be even more primitive than the Eocene prorastomids from Jamaica.

Only slightly younger are the prorastomid Pezosiren portelli from Chapelton Formation in Jamaica (Domning 2001a), which is of early Middle Eocene (Lutetian 48.6-40.4 mya, but rather 47 mya) age (Donovan 2002), and an unnamed prorastomid from the Lutetian of Senegal (Hautier et al. 2012). The skeletal reconstruction of Pezosiren, which is featured in this Fossil Friday article and became quite popular as the “walking sea cow” (Berta 2012, Prothero 2015), actually represents a composite of some hundred isolated bones collected from the same layers and believed to belong to the same species by Domning (2001a). The distal part of the tail and most of the feet bones were not found and added as “educated guesses.” This does not mean that the reconstruction is wrong, but at least some caution may be warranted.

From layers of the same Middle Eocene (Lutetian, 48.6-40.4 mya) age, several protosirenids have been found: Ashokia antiqua from the Harudi Formation in India (Bajpai et al. 2009), Libysiren sickenbergi from the Wadi Thamit Formation in Lybria (Domning et al. 2017), and Protosiren eothene from the early Lutetian Habib Rahi Formation in Pakistan, which is “virtually the same age as the prorastomids” according to Zalmout et al. 2003, early Lutetian). Furthermore, there are Sobrarsiren cardieli from the late middle Lutetian (SBZ15/C19r, 42 mya) Sobrarbe Formation in Spain (Díaz-Berenguer et al. 2018, 2020), and a possible sirenian vertebra from the early Lutetian of Israel (Goodwin et al. 1998). All these protosirenid stem sea cows still had four legs and had an amphibic way of life (actually Sobrarsiren is not a genuine protosirenid but more closely related to the fully aquatic sirenians).

The oldest fully aquatic sea cows, with reduced hind legs and (likely) a fluke, are the Middle Eocene (Lutetian, 48.6-40.4 mya) “dugongids” Anisosiren pannonica from Hungary (Kordos 1979, 2002), Eosiren abeli from Egypt (Sickenberg 1934), Eotheroides sp. (Samonds et al. 2009), and Sirenavus hungaricus from Felsogalla in Hungary (Kretzoi 1941, Kordos 1981, 2002). These advanced stem sirenians resembled modern dugongs, but crown group Sirenia first appear with genuine Dugongidae at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary about 33.9 million years ago (Heritage & Seiffert 2022).

Nevertheless, based on dental synapomorphies, Domning et al. (2010) had considered Eotheroides as a crown-group sirenian closer related to Dugongidae than to Trichechidae, which led to the use of this taxon as calibration data point for the age of crown group Sirenia by Benton et al. (2015, also see Fossil Calibration Database), who erratically also cited “Gheerbrant et al. (2005)” in support of this hypothesis even though these authors did not even mention Eotheroides. Such a crown group position was also suggested for Eotheroidesand Eosiren by the cladistic studies of Savage (1976), Springer et al. (2015), Vélez-Juarbe & Domning (2015), and Balaguer & Alba (2016). Domning et al. (2017) not only recovered Eotheroides as a crown group sirenian in Dugongidae, but even resolved the quadrupedal protosirenids Ashokia, Libysiren, and Protosiren as crown group sirenians closer related to Trichechidae than to Dugongidae (compare Savage 1976). This would make fully aquatic sirenians diphyletic, as already indicated by Diedrich (2013). On the other hand, the studies by Domning (1994), de Buffrénil et al. 2010, Díaz-Berenguer et al. (2018), and especially Heritage & Seiffert (2022) had the protosirenid genera as well as Eotheroides and Eosirenresolved well outside the crown group. I am sorry to say that phylogenetics turns out to be nothing but junk science when you look at the actual studies and their highly incongruent results and not just at the fancy polished text book figures. Darwin’s modern bulldogs like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne are either totally ignorant or deliberately spreading falsehoods when they make their readers believe that there is one well-established tree of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Phylogenetics is a mess!

Anyway, the sirenian fossil record, just like that of whales, is remarkable in featuring early representatives that still were quadrupedal and amphibic, which arguably supports common descent of sea cows from terrestrial ancestors and thus a secondary adaptation to a fully aquatic way of life (Sickenberg 1931, Heal 1973, Savage 1976, Domning & Gingerich 1994, Domning 1982, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2018b, Berta et al. 2006, Uhen 2007, de Buffrénil et al. 2010, Berta 2012, 2017, Self-Sullivan et al. 2014, Prothero 2015, Díaz-Berenguer et al. 2020, Heritage & Seiffert 2022, and Wikipedia).

Everything OK So Far?

So, is every thing OK with Darwinism after all? No so fast. Actually, there are some problems that do not square well with a Darwinian scenario:

1.Sirenians appear abruptly in the fossil record at the onset of the Middle Eocene, together with other placental mammal orders, without a long transitional series establishing any kind or gradual development.

2.There is a distinct morphological gap between the quadrupedal forms (Prorastomidae and Protosirenidae) and fully aquatic sea cows (Dugongidae and Trichechidae).

3.Fully aquatic sirenians that looked like modern dugongs appear more or less around the same time as the primitive quadrupedal stem sirenians. Thus, sirenians immediately appear with a large diversity in the Middle Eocene.

4.The origin of Trichechidae is totally in the dark, without any clear connection to the Dugongidae and their stem line.

Even though the fossil evidence in my view indeed supports common descent, it contradicts Darwinian expectations and does not at all support an unguided mechanism of evolution, which would imply slow and gradual transformations with small changes accumulating over long periods of time via numerous transitional species that only slightly differ from each other. The saltational pattern in the fossil record rather suggests very quick and dramatic changes within only a few transitional species, which arguably requires an infusion of new information from outside the system (also known as intelligent design).

Before we move on, I would like to share a little trivia that shows under what strange circumstances some important fossil finds were made: Voss et al. (2019) published one of the oldest fossil sea cows (Prototherium spec.) from Europe, which was found in Middle Eocene limestone from Spain that is dated to an Early Bartonian age of about 40 million years (also see Astibia et al. 2010). More precisely, the fossil was discovered in the paving stones of a shopping mall in the city of Girona in Catalonia, where thousands of people walked over this treasure for several years before its importance was recognized.

The Enigmatic Desmostylia

In the context of the fossil history of sirenians it is also necessary to discuss the extinct mammal order Desmostylia, because these semiaquatic herbivorous marine mammals were somewhat similar to early quadrupedal sirens and possibly closely related. Initially they were even erroneously considered to be sirenians (e.g., Hannibal 1922, Simpson 1945). The degree of their aquatic adaptation is still a matter of scientific debate (Inuzuka et al. 1994, Domning 2002, Clementz et al. 2003, Gingerich 2005, Uhen 2007, Hayashi et al. 2013). Desmostylia are only known from the Early Oligocene to Late Miocene of the North Pacific rim in 2-4 families and 10-12 genera with 13-14 species (Beatty 2009, Domning 2018a, Matsui & Tsuihiji 2019). Some relic species may have survived until the Pliocene (Kimura 1966). The most primitive and among the oldest representatives are the Behemotopsidae (Ray et al. 1994, Beatty & Cockburn 2015, Domning 2018a), while the families Paleoparadoxiidae and Desmostylidae (= Cornwalliiidae) are more derived and usually younger. But if we look more closely into the data, the fossil record tells a somewhat different story:

According to PaleoDB all the earliest desmostylian fossils are of Chattian age (28.4-23.03 mya) and include:

Behemotopsidae:

Behemotops proteus from the Pysht Formation in Washington and the Sooke Formation on Vancouver Island 24.8-24.1 mya.

Behemotops katsuiei from the Moravan Formation in Japan

Seuku emlongi from Yaguina Formation in Oregon

Desmostylidae:

Ashoroa laticosta from the Moravan Formation in Japan (Inuzuka 2000)

Cornwallius sookensis from the Sooke Formation on Vancouver Island, Yaquina Formation in Oregon, Unaslaska Formation in Alaska, and Baja California in Mexico

Many sources (including Wikipedia) still cite an Early Oligocene (Rupelian) age for Behemotops, which would make it to the oldest desmostylian. However, this appears to be based on an obsolete dating of the Pysht Formation in Washington (Domning et al. 1986, Barnes & Goedert 2001), which has been re-dated as Late Oligocene / Chattian (Prothero et al. 2001, Beatty & Cockburn 2015). Actually, the layers where Behemotops proteus was found in the Pysht Formation (Chron C6Cr) have been more precisely dated to 24.8-24.1 million years ago (Prothero et al. 2008). A specimen of Behemotops from Hokkaido in Japan was initially believed to be older, but rather was more or less contemporaneous with the North American congeneric specimens (Saito et al. 1988).

In one of the more recent studies on Desmostylia the authors presented a diagram of the stratigraphic distribution (Matsui & Tsuihiji 2019: fig. 4), in which some of the more derived Desmostylidae not only appear together with the more primitive Behemotopsidae, but even predate them in the fossil record. The desmostylid Ashoroa laticosta is shown around the Rupelian/Chattian boundary about 29-27 mya and Cornwallius sookensis even from the middle Rupelian about 31 mya. The authors do not cite their sources for these more precise stratigraphic ranges, but they are congruent with the dating for all the localities of Cornwallius sookensis by Beatty (2002, 2006a, 2006b, 2009) to a Late Oligocene / Zemorrian (33.5-22 mya) age, which overlaps with the Rupelian and Chattian.

Finally, there is an isolated atlas vertebra from an undetermined putative desmostylian from the Lincoln Creek Formation in Washington, which dates to the Eocene/Oligocene boundary, about 37-36 million years ago (Prothero & Armentrout 1985), and arguably represents the oldest known fossil record of Desmostylia (Barnes & Goedert 2001).

Unlike Any Living Mammals

Desmostylians were quite unlike any living mammals, maybe resembling hippos, but their life reconstruction is still controversial even though complete skeletons are known (Inuzuka 1984, Halstead 1985, Domning 2002). The evolutionary origins of Desmostylia remain totally in the dark, and also their phylogenetic affinities are still hotly debated. Usually, they are considered as relatives of elephants and sea cows within Tethytheria (Reinhart 1953, McKenna 1975, Domning et al. 1986, Novacek & Wyss 1987, McKenna & Bell 1997, Domning 2018a), but is unclear if they are closer related to elephants (Domning et al. 1986, Clementz et al. 2003, Berta et al. 2006, Uhen 2007, Beatty 2009, Asher & Seiffert 2010) or to sea cows (Vélez-Juarbe & Domning 2015).

However, several new studies (Cooper et al. 2014, Rose et al. 2019; also see Beatty & Cockburn 2015 and Heritage & Seiffert 2022) suggested that desmostylians are no tethytheres at all but rather odd-toed ungulates (Perissodactyla), thus not even members of the afrotherian clade. This would align with the fact that demostylians have “no African record whatsoever” (Asher et al. 2003). Gheerbrant et al. (2016) recovered desmostylians either as sister group of Paenungulata or as stem perissodactyls, but also found evidence for long-branch attraction between Desmostylia and Paenungulata (Tethytheria), suggesting possible convergent similarity. Therefore, Matsui (2017) and Matsui & Tsuihiji (2019) considered desmostylian affinities as controversial. If a perissodactyl relationship should be corroborated, then all the morphological similarities with Tethytheria would have to be reinterpreted as independently acquired convergences and thus not based on common ancestry. If you followed my previous articles in this series, this will hardly come as a surprise. I recently wrote a Fossil Friday article about the strange phenomenon of horizontal tooth displacement that independently originated three times within Tethytheria and confused scientists (Bechly 2022). As I said: phylogenetics is a mess and calling it science is misplaced and overselling this kind of fancy storytelling and educated guessing based on highly incongruent data!

Next Fossil Friday we will look into the final member of the Afrotheria, the order Proboscidea, which includes elephants and their fossil relatives.

Monday, 23 January 2023

And still yet more on the business of war.

A wolf in sheep's clothing?

Sunday, 22 January 2023

Four decades later and it's (still) design all the way down.

Omega-3 Nutrition Pioneer Tells How He Saw Irreducible Complexity in Cells 40 Years Ago

Evolution News

On a classic episode of ID the Future, Jorn Dyerberg, the Danish biologist and co-discoverer of the role of omega-3 fatty acids in human health and nutrition, talks with host and physicist Brian Miller about finding irreducible complexity in cells, and how it takes many enzymes and co-enzymes working together for life-essential metabolism to work in every living cell. This poses a problem for neo-Darwinism, Dyerberg explains, since if these enzymes showed up one at a time, and evolved via one or two small mutations at a time, as Darwinian gradualism posits, then “over these eons, the other enzymes would just be sitting there waiting for the next one to come,” and waiting around without any function that might explain why natural selection working on random mutations bothered to engineer them, or keep them around. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Grand Central NY: a brief architectural history.

What is meant by "design" re:human biology?

Fleshing Out a Theory of Biological

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, author and engineer Steve Laufmann delves into the theory of biological design he develops in Your Designed Body, his new book co-authored with physician Howard Glicksman. Laufmann explains how his engineering background has helped him further develop design theory and, with help from Glicksman, apply it to the human body. In exploring the causal capacities of intelligent design, Laufmann spotlights four elements: (1) intentional actions, which in turn require mind, agency, and foresight; (2) adaptive capabilities, which involve, among other things, control systems that employ sensors, logic, and effectors; (3) design properties (e.g., modularity); and (4) degradation prevention.

The last of these features is implemented by engineers to get a system to last longer. In the case of living organisms, it works at the individual level, as with our immune system and other bodily repair systems; but as Laufmann notes, it also works across generations to slow genetic degradation. Laufmann and host Michael Egnor explore these and other insights at the intersection of biology and engineering. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Thursday, 19 January 2023

How we can know that the engineering is real II.

On the Miracles of Physiological Design

Neil Thomas

Shortly before coming to the recently published volume Your Designed body, by systems engineer Steve Laufmann and veteran physician Howard Glicksman, I had happened to be reading an old interview with eminent medical academic Sir Roger Bannister (the first under-four-minute mile runner) whose specialism had been the autonomic nervous system. Said Bannister to his interviewer:

You have probably not heard of that system but it regulates the heart and circulation. These are functions of the brain which it probably thought wise to exclude from voluntary control. Are you with me? We don’t want to know what our heart is doing, we don’t want to know whether we are breathing or not. This part of the brain does it all for us.1

Neither history nor the wider context of the interview records what agency Bannister might have had in mind to account for the formation of this finely discriminating design feature, but it is a question which advances to front and center of the new Laufmann/Glicksman volume. A good part of the book is devoted to explaining the finely engineered features of human anatomy, and after reading those some three hundred dense and clearly illustrated pages I defy any open-minded reader to accept the old canard of Lucretius, David Hume, Darwin, and their modern apologists to the effect that the sublimely detailed and integrated structures of our bodies represent only the appearance of design (see discussion in Laufmann/Glicksman, pp. 20-21).

Such features, the two authors point out, must ultimately be the work of a designer-engineer transcending all observable dimensions and conventional categories of understanding (see esp. pp. 439-41). By comparison, we are obliged to come to the humble conclusion that human efforts at artificial automation and prosthetics, whilst being entirely commendable, are puny by comparison. Some few readers may remember the 1960s BBC TV series called Tomorrow’s World in which it was predicted that we would have biddable mechanical servants by the 1980s. Such hubristic prognostications were of course silently dropped as the decades wore on and we were left to ponder how organic creation must have occurred at some level we cannot even begin to fathom.

Not the Same as Generating

The authors are particularly good at unmasking the immoderate claims made for “natural selection” as a force with the power to shape the whole organic universe. Such claims, they point out, are “short on engineering details” and, most fundamentally, the authors point out that selecting is not the same as generating. This is a truly critical distinction and they point to the work of Gerd Műller of the University of Vienna whose research has led him to state categorically that neo-Darwinism simply has no theory of the generative and therefore no innovative capacity: nothing in Darwin’s theory can generate any nontrivial innovations (p. 370).

Darwin, furthermore, should have known this. The authors point to the letter he sent to Charles Lyell in September 1860 in which he concedes that “natural preservation” would have been the better term to have used because selection in the way that intelligent animal breeders operate could not possibly be part of an unintelligent process (contrary to what Darwin had once insisted against the well-meaning counsels of friends and colleagues). Whether Darwin permitted himself to realize it or not,2 his concession to Lyell invalidates his claim that natural selection could produce innovation (new body parts/plans/species), hence the grand biological pathway from microbes to man is thereby invalidated. By every logical criterion, his rowing back on that point was absolutely fatal to his macromutational claims and this should by rights have stopped the accelerating Darwinian bandwagon dead in its tracks in the Fall of 1860.

An Interesting Hypothetical

It would make an interesting historical hypothetical to consider how history might have developed had Darwin and his legatees had the logical acumen or even fundamental honesty to acknowledge that the letter to Lyell signaled the logical death-knell of the theory of natural selection. Alas, that is not how things panned out as Darwin and his successors colluded to throw verbal smoke screens round the issue. He and his supporters were clearly too committed to the hope of natural selection coming through as a deus ex machina to provide a (claimed) mechanism or vera causa to justify the idea of evolution developed by Erasmus Darwin (alongside sundry 18th-century French philosophes). For more than a century that theory of evolution had been greeted with considerable skepticism by the generality of people and so it was vital to talk up the supposed “scientific” credentials of natural selection as a (claimed) bona fide mechanism. Only in that way would it be possible to rescue the idea of evolution from the scorn and ultimately the oblivion to which it was heading before 1859. Only in that way would it be possible to secure acceptance for the new, secular myth many wished to promote.

The two authors chance their arm by advancing what they see as the probability that the sheer pressure of data will soon topple the Darwinian house of cards (p. 367, note 12). It should perhaps be added that this collapse would be more probable if we were dealing with dispassionate science — but we are not. If such were the case, then all those who read Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (UK 1985, USA 1986) and followed Denton’s “formal disproof” of Darwin’s work would have been forced by sheer weight of evidence to conclude that a major revaluation of evolutionary thinking was an urgent requirement. However, in Darwinism we are dealing not with science but with what anthropologists and folklorists term a “mythic universal” — in this case taking the form of an apparently ineradicable, millennia-old Lucretian thoughtway about the origin and evolution of the world. In its modern guise the narrative has of course reinvented itself by hitching a ride from the perceived prestige of science to strengthen its mythic force.

Nadir of the Irrational

The sequel is, of course, history. The Epicurean/Lucretian conjecture, which had chosen to see the world as a mindless collocation of atoms assembled by nothing more than chance, was regarded for literally thousands of years as the very nadir of irrational absurdity. Newly decked out in its now “scientific” livery, on the other hand, it has been able to deceive the beau monde for more than a century and a half under its portentous guise of “natural selection.” It is that wholly irrational belief system which would have to be overcome amongst a group of people who are not willing to leave the matter to the proper adjudication of hard evidence. That is the essential stumbling block we face. In the upper echelons of academic biology we are up against a protective screen of professional unity superintended by what has been memorably termed “the secular inquisition.”3 The result is that open dissent of the sort shown by such as Michael Denton and somewhat more recently by Michael Behe is rarely encountered (and even more rarely from the ranks of the untenured).

It is an old and dismal story which need not be pursued any further here. On the plus side, the optimism of the two authors may be justified by the frequent whispers we overhear about some evolutionary scientists harboring private reservations about the truth-value of dogmas which they are constrained to defend ex officio. Laufmann and Glicksman mention the Viennese scientist Gerd Müller, but he is by no means the only one. I encountered further exceptions to the strictly policed omertà rule in the shape of a volume published under the conventionally respectable aegis of the New Scientist publishing house. I refer to the volume of collected essays entitled Chance,4 organized in a largely viva voce seminar format which appears to have encouraged a refreshing degree of candor from its distinguished contributors. I shall give a brief notice of that volume and its relevance to the issue at hand.

Chance, Necessity — and Conjecture

Now as ever, the mystery of life having somehow appeared on earth in the midst of a dead outer cosmos remains a perennial enigma (cosmologists have the candor to admit that they can provide no empirically defensible pathway for our emergence). There has been exceedingly broad-brush speculation on the issue but nothing with any serious claim to empirically testable truth status. As noted in regard to the formation of life by one of the contributors, Paul Davies, it is not just the basic chemical ingredients of life which have proved unfathomable: even more challenging has been “the logical structure and organization of the molecules … which implies a certain sort of organized complexity.” He goes on to pose the still unanswerable question:

How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software, and where did the very peculiar form of information needed to get the first living cell up and running come from?

P. 16

Bracketing off the unknown means and modalities by which life may have originated, Professor Nick Lane proceeds to the next question:

THEN what happens? It is generally assumed that once simple life has emerged, it gradually evolves into more complex forms, given the right conditions. But that’s not what happens on Earth … If simple cells had evolved slowly into more complex ones over billions of years, all kinds of intermediate forms would have existed and some still should. But there are none.

P. 16

Between the simplest and the more complex forms of cell life there is a gulf of billions of years since “simple cells just don’t have the right cellular architecture to evolve into more complex forms” (p. 29). Hence, Lane concludes, the emergence of complex life must have hinged not on slow Darwinian progression but on a single, fluke event:

This means that there is no inevitable trajectory from simple to complex life. Never-ending natural selection, operating on infinite populations of bacteria over millions of years, may never give rise to complexity. Bacteria simply do not have the right architecture.

P. 32

Davies concurs with this verdict when discussing the perennial riddle of abiogenesis:

Darwinism kicks in only when life is already under way. How can we appeal to natural selection in the prebiotic stage?

P. 19

Dr. Bob Holmes then jumps in to continue the theme and support the opinions of other participants:

Surprisingly, natural selection may have little role to play in one of the key steps of evolution — the origin of new species. Instead it would appear that speciation is merely an accident of fate.

P. 33

Citing the work of Professor Mark Pagel, Holmes points out that Darwin, despite his chosen title of Origin of Species, offered no concrete suggestions as to how speciation actually occurred. What is more, even the discovery of Mendelian genetics has brought us little further enlightenment:

With the benefit of genetic hindsight, which Darwin lacked, you might think that they [modern biologists] would have cracked it. Not so. Speciation still remains one of the biggest mysteries in evolutionary biology.

P. 34

This conclusion, he points out with some understatement, “is a disquieting one for evolutionary biologists” since “the unexamined view of natural selection leading to large-scale innovations is not true.” (p. 35) Concurring with Lane and Davies, he sees speciation as little more than “some single, sharp kick of fate that is, in the evolutionary sense, unpredictable. Speciation has nothing to do with natural selection since it can only shape existing species, not spawn new ones.”

Not Minor Objections

The above views are not minor objections. Instead, cumulatively they point to the fact that humanity must go back to the drawing board to study the issue of its provenance and development on planet Earth. As of the present moment in time the contributors freely confess their ignorance. To ascribe something to mere chance, for instance, can only be accounted a major evasion. So how did animal and human life emerge? A decade ago Thomas Lessl wrote with some justice:

To declare that “Nature did it” without any information about HOW is hardly any more rigorous than than to assert that “God did it,” absent any scientific means for testing supernatural causation.5

The operative word in that sentence is “information,” for at the end of the day Darwinism gives us speculation rather than hard information. It is precisely the failure of any “scientific means” to provide convincing explanations of how Nature really functions that is increasingly preventing the full acceptance of Darwinian explanations by a modern populace educated to reject empirically ungrounded conjectures. This resistance to Darwinian theorizing typically proceeds not from any theistic bias or untutored “argument from incredulity” (as is often tendentiously implied) but rather from an extreme logical unease about Darwinian postulates and would-be explanations. The book under review is a splendid and uniquely well-informed contribution to the debate about what is by all available indices a theory in deep and quite possibly terminal crisis.

Home: the past and future of education?

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

What's so special about special relativity?

The animal kingdom's navigators v. Darwin.

Intelligent Design in Animal Self-Location and Navigation

Eric Cassell

While much has been learned about animal navigation methods (see my book Animal Algorithms), not as much is known about how different animals actually determine a reference to the location of “self,” and how they use that information to navigate. It has been known for some time that mammalian brains include basic mechanisms for locating self. These include neurons that are so-called “place cells,” “grid cells,” and head-direction cells.1

Primarily in the Hippocampus

In mammals the self-locating neuron networks are found primarily in the hippocampus. It is theorized that these networks provide support for the ability of animals to form cognitive maps. The initial studies in mammals focused on rats and mice, and identified primarily “static” two-dimensional self-locating mechanisms. More recent studies have been conducted with bats during flight. In that case the self-location is three-dimensional in space. Even more intriguing is that the bat mechanism can be applied on a time continuum, representing past, present, and future. The authors of one study conclude, “These results reveal a positional representation in flying bats that extends along a continuum of space and time and could support a representation of remembered paths.”2 The mechanism may also be the source of a predictive map used in navigating flight paths.

An open question is whether such mechanisms exist in more ancient brain regions of other animals. A new study has identified a self-location mechanism in zebrafish.3 The study found a self-location mechanism in the fish hindbrain, which is the region that controls coordinated physical movements (action patterns) associated with orienting, feeding, and escape mechanisms. The specific function identified in the zebrafish is to enable positional homeostasis, which is a challenge since fish typically have to deal with currents in maintaining a constant position. Fish (as well as some other animals) are able to estimate velocity based on optical flow, which is the rate at which visual objects appear to move. Mathematically, position can be obtained by integrating velocity over time.

Analogous to an Electronic Circuit

One finding from the study is that, “Fish integrate visual flow into a representation of location change and correct for unintended location changes.” There are a number of other significant findings from the Yang study. One is that it is a complex distributed neural network within the brain, meaning it is not restricted to a small number of proximate neurons. The authors also describe this as a “circuit,” analogous to an electronic circuit. The network represents a classical closed loop engineering control system, where feedback is used to adjust and maintain a position. Another finding is that fish have the ability to store locations in memory for 15 to 20 seconds.

Taking a step back and assessing the significance of these recent findings, several observations can be made. One is that they provide more evidence that animal movement and navigation behaviors involve complex algorithms. Some include methods for performing or mimicking mathematical calculations. The algorithms appear to involve complex neural networks or circuits. All of these observations provide more evidence for the engineering design of these behaviors.

From tyrant king to philosopher king?

New Claim: Tyrannosaur Was as Smart as a Monkey

Denyse O' Leary

Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel tells us, in a recent paper, that tyrannosaurs had similar numbers of brain neurons to “primates.”

But how would we know? Herculano-Houzel starts with the assumption that dinosaurs are descended from birds and makes a distinction between the theropod dinosaurs like the tyrannosaur and others:

From that assumption, Herculano-Houzel realized that theropods in particular had a similar correlation between body mass and brain size to pre-impact birds, or basal birds. From there, she used the neuron count of modern birds like emus and ostritches and applied the same rules of scaling to figure out how many neurons theropods like the T-Rex may have had. FRANK LANDYMORE, “IN TERRIFYING NEWS, BIG BRAINED T-REX MAY HAVE BEEN AS SMART AS PRIMATES” AT FUTURISM (JANUARY 9, 2023) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS

In Other Research

Here are a few thoughts from other research:

First, we tend to think of the extinct vertebrate order of dinosaurs as very much like reptiles today and that reptiles cannot be smart. But reptiles today may be smarter than is generally believed. The limits may be practical rather than intrinsic.

Here’s an example: The anole lizard was found to be as capable as the tit (a small bird) in a problem-solving test for a food reward (a grub). But because anoles are exothermic (cold-blooded), they didn’t need many grubs. Not compared with the birds, anyway. Birds are endothermic (warm-blooded). So the anoles had the same problem-solving ability but didn’t need it nearly as often because they can simply shut down their metabolism instead. Of course, dinosaurs may have been endotherms like birds rather than exotherms like reptiles but the difference may not always play out as a difference in intelligence.

Intelligence tests for life forms should probably factor in issues like: How important is it for this life form to solve this problem soon?

Crocodilians (alligators, caymans, crocodiles) have been reported to use sticks as decoys, play, and work in teams.

All it really means is that endothermy and problem-solving intelligence are not the same thing.

And then there is the, by now famous, octopus: The invertebrate controls eight limbs and consequently has a huge amount of brain tissue. Perhaps that allows it to rival mammals in intelligence.

Plausible — Maybe Not Correct

None of this shows that Herculano-Houzel’s hypothesis is correct; only that it is plausible. Predators tend to be smarter than prey, after all, and exotherms can definitely be smart. In any event, the most widely accepted thesis as to why the entire order Dinosauria went extinct is not that they were all stupid but that the planet was hit by an asteroid

NASA keeps track of possible asteroid hits today. We aren’t immune, though we do have a greater chance of creating defenses than the dinosaurs did. Whether or not dinosaurs ever used tools.

You may also wish to read: Even lizards can be smart — if you catch them at the right time. But can we give machines what the lizard has by nature? What is it that we want machines to be and do under our guidance that these — often seemingly strange — life forms are and do spontaneously? The life forms do those things to stay alive. Does it matter then that machines are not alive?

Tuesday, 17 January 2023

Why Darwinism is destined to fail.

Evolution: How Darwin’s Four Causal Factors Fail

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, Your Designed Body co-author and systems engineer Steve Laufmann continues his conversation with host and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor. In this episode, Laufmann reviews four causal factors involved in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and explains why they lack the power to generate life’s great variety of forms (including the beetles pictured above that Charles Darwin collected). Download the podcast or listen to it here. To go deeper into the argument, check out Laufmann’s new book co-authored with physician Howard Glicksman.

On fake food.

On presentism.

Presentism;In literary and historical analysis,

Wikipedia

presentism is a pejorative term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter.[1] The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation for presentism in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been used in this meaning as early as the 1870s. The historian David Hackett Fischer identifies presentism as a fallacy also known as the "fallacy of nunc pro tunc". He has written that the "classic example" of presentism was the so-called "Whig history", in which certain 18th- and 19th-century British historians wrote history in a way that used the past to validate their own political beliefs. This interpretation was presentist because it did not depict the past in objective historical context but instead viewed history only through the lens of contemporary Whig beliefs. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present, things that do not seem relevant receive little attention, which results in a misleading portrayal of the past. "Whig history" or "whiggishness" are often used as synonyms for presentism particularly when the historical depiction in question is teleological or triumphalist.[2]erary and historical analysis)

Monday, 16 January 2023

Settled science's apostles' lack of self awareness.

No country for rich men?

Paul Johnson on the patron saint of the master race.

Remembering Paul Johnson’s Assessment of Darwin

Michael Flannery.

Editor’s note: The wonderful historian and journalist Paul Johnson died today at age 94. His 2012 biography Darwin: Portrait of a Genius provoked discussion and disagreement at Evolution News when it was published. We offer science historian Michael Flannery’s review below.

An eminent historian and author of numerous bestsellers, Paul Johnson has just published a book that is provoking hysterical responses. The book is Darwin: Portrait of a Genius. Writing at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern calls it an “effort to smear evolution.” Stern complains, “He [Johnson] got it horribly, almost comically wrong.” But Stern isn’t laughing, and he concludes that “no thoughtful reader could possibly tolerate Johnson’s stunning intellectual dishonesty.” Similarly, Rowan Hooper, writing for the New Scientist (posted at Culture Lab), called the book “ludicrous . . . a vendetta, an agenda-driven hatchet job.”

Why all the fuss? What is “horribly wrong” and who is driving the “agenda”? Anyone familiar with the controversial nature of Darwin’s theory should immediately step back and at least ask, Who exactly is wielding the hatchet?

Johnson’s work is not strictly speaking a biography; it is a historian’s assessment of modern evolutionary theory and the man behind it. It takes the form not of an exhaustive account of the life and work of Charles Darwin but rather of an essay, a 151-page essay to be precise. There is much value in a work of this kind. After all, few but the most committed specialist or obligated graduate student would plod through Janet Browne’s 1,040-page (not counting references and index!) two-volume biography of the man. More serviceable is Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, but at 677 pages of text it too can be a daunting task. While a careful reading of both (especially the latter) will offer permanent rewards, the considered opinion of a seasoned historian on the importance and impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution, stripped of the minutiae, has real value.

Explaining Life’s Diversity

As Johnson emphasizes, Darwin produced an explanation for the diversity of life (common descent by means of natural selection) that was transformative of how people viewed themselves and the world. It was an idea whose time had come. From its publication on November 24, 1859, the Origin of Species quickly became the must-read volume for much of England, and not just the elite. The accession of five hundred copies by Mudie’s circulating library (an extraordinarily large order) helped to introduce Darwin to the rising middle class. In fact, Johnson correctly notes that Mudie’s enthusiastic acquisition and distribution of the Origin was tantamount to society’s seal of approval.

Despite the popularity of Darwin’s magnum opus, Johnson further explains that his complete theory was really contained in three books. First, of course, was the Origin (his best, a succinct and accessible exposition of his theory), then in 1871 the Descent of Man (the explicit connection of his evolutionary principles to humanity), and finally one year later his Expression of the Emotions (an odd compilation whose purpose was to provide “evidence” that man was different from animal by degree not kind).

Where Origin succeeded, Descent and Expressions failed. Darwin’s handling of human attributes was superficial and, when comparing mankind with other species, often naïvely anthropomorphic.

Much of Descent, writes Johnson, consisted of “rambling stuff of no scientific value whatever” (p. 105) while other parts merely served to justify racial stereotypes. Darwin’s handling of sexual selection when applied to Homo sapiens was patronizing and patriarchal. The reason that the Descent was such an inferior production, Johnson astutely observes, is that Darwin was a poor anthropologist. He “did not bring to his observation of humans the same care, objectivity, acute notation, and calmness he always showed when studying birds and sea creatures, insects, plants, and animals. He jumped to conclusion and believed gossip . . .” (p. 29). Darwin’s Expression book wasn’t any better, a strange collection of extrapolations of animal reactions to human emotions augmented with “photographs of hysterics, lunatics, savages, and other interesting mug shots” (p. 102).

Two Important Points

All of this may have passed with varying degrees of reviewer tolerance but for two important points made by Johnson. First, he links Darwin’s theory to the most unseemly aspects of social Darwinism. It’s not that Darwin is personally responsible for this; but the book proposed an idea that took on a life of its own. As Johnson puts it:

Origin is a book that, with total success, embodies an exciting idea and had a devastating intellectual and emotional impact on world society. The word devastating is accurate: It destroyed many comfortable assumptions, thus clearing space for new concepts and ideas to spring up in almost every subject. It acted like a force of nature itself, and by the end of January 1860, when the second edition sold out, it was quite beyond Darwin’s control.

Darwin’s idea of life emerging from the wholly random activity of natural selection driven by chance and necessity (emphasizing domestic breeding as a primary example and proof of this process) paved the way for eugenics, forced sterilizations, and even the “racial hygiene” of Nazi Germany. Richard Weikart has written in depth on these themes in From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic, but Johnson also brings up the influence of social Darwinism (direct or indirect) on the thought of Mao Tse-tung, Stalin, and Pol Pot, among others.

Social Darwinism Comes to America

As for its tragic effects in America, one need only read Samuel J. Holmes’s comments in 1939 to appreciate the influence of American eugenics on the eve of Nazi expansion and its overt Darwinian connection. Harry Bruinius has estimated that forced sterilizations of the “unfit” in America during the pre-World War II years may be modestly estimated at 65,000. Iowa-born Harry Laughlin would become America’s leading eugenicist, and his enthusiasm for “racial betterment” was matched only by his admiration for Germany in pursuing it. It was not by mere whimsy that Heidelberg University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to “race hygiene” in 1936 (see Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity).

Darwin’s apologists can engage in indignant handwaving but they cannot refute these sad facts. But their reaction is expected. Such is the response of ideologues faced with the baring of their favored patron saint’s gospel and its consequences.

Here is Johnson’s second offense. He correctly objects to

the enthusiasm of the Darwinian fundamentalists, who over the last few decades have sought to give Darwin a quasi-divine status and to abuse those who subject him and his work to the continuing critical scrutiny that is the essence of true science. Darwin was the first to admit his limitations, and . . . they were numerous and sometimes important.

A Few Flaws

There are a few flaws in Johnson’s treatment. For example, he claims Wallace first read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population about the same time as Darwin did in 1836, but this is doubtful as Wallace would have been only 13 years old. Wallace states in his autobiography My Life that he read it in the town library at Leicester in 1844. More serious is Johnson’s assertion that Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were poor mathematicians (in fact, having once been a surveyor, Wallace was exceptionally good in math and geometry) and that their uncritical evaluation of Malthus’s poor statistical analysis caused them to accept a flawed economic “law” that claimed food supplies rise arithmeticallywhile population increase geometrically.

According to Johnson, this fit “the horror scenario” of Darwin’s view of nature’s struggle, a view that Johnson believes Wallace shared. But Johnson is apparently unfamiliar with how Wallace actually incorporated Malthus into his own evolutionary theory. I have pointed out that Wallace read Malthus quite differently from Darwin (Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, p. 63).

Johnson too readily lumps Wallace together with Darwin’s theory. Actually, Wallace presented a teleological view of evolution and of humanity’s place that was strikingly different from Darwin’s. Another error is Johnson’s mention at several points in the book of Darwin’s opposition to vaccination. This is simply false. Darwin did write in the Descent that vaccination helped to preserve weak members of society and thus permitted them to “propagate their kind.” Nevertheless, Darwin himself was a fastidious vaccinator when it came to his own children, and he never supported the growing and powerful anti-vaccination movement in Victorian England.

Johnson also errs in stating that Darwin handled the God question in the Origin with “fine judgment and exquisite tact” (p. 82). If duplicity may be counted as complementary to judgment and tact then perhaps this assessment may stand, but there is little question that Darwin was less than honest here. He told Joseph Hooker in a letter dated March 29, 1863, of his regret that he had “truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process.” For promotional reasons, however, he never removed the “Pentateuchal term of creation” from any subsequent edition. While this leaves Johnson’s appraisal dubious, it does substantiate his claim that Darwin had “stealthy self-promoting instincts” (p. 92).

Paul Johnson at His Best

Despite these missteps, Johnson’s analytic powers are at their best when he is assessing the impact of Darwinian theory on society and indeed on Darwin himself. Darwin’s disciples can bemoan the connection all they want, but the materialistic chance-driven world ushered in by their Down House hero had devastating human consequences. “In the twentieth century,” Johnson concludes, “it is likely that over 100 million people were killed or starved to death as a result of totalitarian regimes infected with varieties of social Darwinism” (p. 136).

On a personal level the evolutionary theory that Darwin spent much of his life fostering — his “child” — weighed heavily on him in later years. Darwin’s genius — what “genius” there was — came from his powers of observation, not his ability to think abstractly or for that matter particularly deeply. Johnson astutely observes that Darwin “deliberately shut his eyes to the ultimate consequences of his work, in terms of the human condition and the purpose of life or the absence of one. Though he sometimes, in his published works, put in a reassuring phrase, his private views tended to be bleak” (pp. 144-145). It was a fate that his “Bulldog Defender” Thomas Henry Huxley also met over the question of morality in a blind, purposeless nature. Nihilism haunted them both.

The reviewers that insist this work is “ludicrous,” a “smear,” or a “hatchet job” are wrong; it is none of these. It is a book that follows some excellent and courageous scholars like Jacques Barzun, Gertrude Himmelfarb, R. F. Baum, Stanley Jaki, Phillip Johnson, and Benjamin Wiker in suggesting that Darwin’s evolutionary theory is built upon questionable premises and has had a deleterious effect upon every society it has touched. The Darwinian fundamentalists hate to admit it, but more than twenty years after attorney Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, the relentless questioning continues.

This time a different Johnson examines the witness. Darwin: Portrait of a Genius was certainly titled in a spirit of irony, but nonetheless it represents an interesting and valuable brief to an ever-expanding minority opinion.

while population increase geometrically.

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