Monday, 27 February 2023

The gene dethroned?

New Study: Transgenerational Epigenetics Can Have a Profound Impact

The Third Rail of Evolution

In the spring of 2006 I gave a talk on the campus of Cornell University and afterwards was joined by then Cornell professors Richard Harrison and Kern Reeve for a sort of panel discussion or debate about biological evidences and origins. I presented a dozen or so interesting and important evidences that I felt needed to be recognized in any discussion of origins. The evidences falsified key predictions of evolution and so needed to be acknowledged and reckoned with, one way or another. One of the items on my list was the so-called directed adaptation mechanisms which, broadly construed, can include everything from non random, directed, mutations to transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. But I was in for a big surprise when Harrison and Reeve gave their response.

Directed adaptation is reminiscent of Lamarckism. Rather than natural selection acting over long time periods on biological variation which is random with respect to need, directed adaptation mechanisms provide rapid biological change in response to environmental challenges. Like physiological responses, directed adaptation can help an organism adjust to shifts in the environment. But those adaptations can then be inherited by later generations. Stresses which your grandparents were subjected to may be playing out in your own cells.

In the twentieth century evolutionists had strongly rejected any such capability. Lamarckism was the third rail in evolutionary circles. And for good reason, for it would falsify evolutionary theory. But empirical evidence had long since pointed toward the unthinkable, and by the twenty first century the evidence was rapidly mounting.

While there was of course still much to learn in 2006 about directed adaptation (as there still is today for that matter), it could no longer be denied, and needed to be addressed. At least, that is what I thought.

I was shocked when Harrison and Reeve flatly denied the whole story. Rick waved it off as nothing more than some overblown and essentially discredited work done by Barry Hall and John Cairns, back in the 1970s and 80s (for example here).

But there was a body of work that had gone far beyond the work of Hall and Cairns. Incredulously I responded that entire books had been written on the subject. Rick was quick to respond that “entire books are written about all kinds of discredited things.”

True enough. It was me versus two professors on their home turf with a sympathetic audience, and there was no way that I was going to disabuse them of what they were convinced of.

Confirmation testing and theory-laden evidence are not merely philosophical notions. They are very real problems. I’m reminded of all this every time a new study adds yet more confirmation to the directed adaptation story, such as the recent Paper out of Nicola Iovino’s lab on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in house flies, which states:

Gametes carry parental genetic material to the next generation. Stress-induced epigenetic changes in the germ line can be inherited and can have a profound impact on offspring development.

The Press release gives little indication of the controversy as it admits that these findings were once considered impossible:

It has long been thought that these epigenetic modifications never cross the border of generations. Scientists assumed that epigenetic memory accumulated throughout life is entirely cleared during the development of sperms and egg cells

It is hard enough to see how organisms can respond intra-lifetime to environmental challenges, but how can it be inherited as well? For epigenetic changes that occur in somatic cells, that information must also enter into the germ line as well. Somehow it must be incorporated into the sperm and/or egg cells.

It is an enormous problem to explain how such capabilities evolved. Not only are a large number of mutations required to make this capability work, it would not be selected for until the particular environmental condition occurred. That means that, under evolution, it would be not preserved, even if it could somehow arise by chance.

Prophet of the master race and his apostles.

Cambridge UP Book Airbrushes Darwin’s Contribution to Scientific Racism

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the future historian Richard Weikart (Cal State Stanislaus) dissects a recent Cambridge University Press book on Social Darwinism by Jeffrey O’Connell and Michael Ruse. Weikart, author of Hitler’s Ethic, From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Religion, and The death of humanity, says a major shortcoming of the book is the authors’ attempt to put as much distance as possible between Darwin and eugenics thinking, and between Darwin and Hitler. The new book paints Darwin follower Herbert Spencer as the eugenics-championing bad guy and contends that Darwin and Darwinism had little or no influence on Hitler’s warped master-race ethic. Weikart patiently highlights some key evidence to the contrary, including statements front and center in Hitler’s writing. Did Darwin cause Hitler? No. Would Darwin have approved of Hitler? Almost certainly not. But according to Weikart, Darwin’s own racist and pro-eugenics thinking, combined with some implications of his theory that he himself explicitly expressed, manifestly did lay the groundwork for Hitler’s diabolical outlook on war, “the master race,” “the struggle for life,” and eugenics.

More on why no rise of the machines.

Are you tired of hearing about ChatGPT yet — “basically high-tech plagiarism,” as Noam Chomsky has said? Dr. Robert J. Marks, director of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center, appeared on a segment of The Agenda recently to examine the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. He was joined by Melanie Mitchell of the Sante Fe Institute and MIT’s Max Tegmark. Hosted by Steve Paikin, the three discussed the benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in a technological age, as well as the perennial question of consciousness. You can watch the entire conversation on YouTube:

Dr. Marks had the opportunity to talk about some of the key themes he discusses in his book Non-computable you: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will, contending that AI, while it has benefits, does not, and never will, have the creativity, empathy, and personal consciousness unique to human beings.

Saturday, 25 February 2023

On distinguishing between natural and artificial selection.

Robot Evolution? How the Trick Is Done

David Coppedge

It’s been decades since Richard Dawkins committed the Weasel Blunder and since Tim Berra committed Berra’s Blunder, but some evolutionists still don’t get it. You can’t design something for a purpose and call it Darwinism. Even if some randomness is thrown in, once a goal is specified in advance, that’s not evolution; it’s intelligent design.

An example comes from PLOS ONE: “Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development,” by Brodbeck, Hauser, and Iida. Look for the evidence of guidance by the investigators:

Artificial evolution of physical systems is a stochastic optimization method in which physical machines are iteratively adapted to a target function. The key for a meaningful design optimization is the capability to build variations of physical machines through the course of the evolutionary process. The optimization in turn no longer relies on complex physics models that are prone to the reality gap, a mismatch between simulated and real-world behavior. We report model-free development and evaluation of phenotypes in the artificial evolution of physical systems, in which a mother robot autonomously designs and assembles locomotion agents. The locomotion agents are automatically placed in the testing environment and their locomotion behavior is analyzed in the real world.This feedback is used for the design of the next iteration. Through experiments with a total of 500 autonomously built locomotion agents, this article shows diversification of morphology and behavior of physical robots for the improvement of functionality with limited resources.

Stamped by Design

These researchers from Switzerland carefully crafted a “mother robot” that could assemble pre-fab parts into blocks that could perform some simplified locomotion. The algorithm was set to reward “offspring” that performed faster. Despite employing Darwinian words like “fitness” and “selection,” their work has “design” stamped all over it. Reporters, though, went ape attributing this to Darwinian evolution.

At Phys.Org, Sarah Collins titled her report, “On the origin of (robot) species” in tribute to the Great Bearded Guru. She’s like a viewer of a magic show unaware of how the trick is done:

For each robot child, there is a unique ‘genome’ made up of a combination of between one and five different genes, which contains all of the information about the child’s shape, construction and motor commands. As in nature, evolution in robots takes place through ‘mutation’, where components of one gene are modified or single genes are added or deleted, and ‘crossover’, where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals.

In order for the mother to determine which children were the fittest, each child was tested on how far it travelled from its starting position in a given amount of time. The most successful individuals in each generation remained unchanged in the next generation in order to preserve their abilities, while mutation and crossover were introduced in the less successful children.

In all fairness, Collins points out some differences between robots and natural organisms. Still, nowhere does she explain how the experiment clearly requires design instead of natural selection. She thinks the “mother” robot did the designing. And she takes on faith the opinion of one of the authors that they were watching Darwinian evolution happen before their eyes:

“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” said lead researcher Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing — we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.“

“Learning to Evolve”

At the BBC News, evolution reporter Pallab Ghosh titled his coverage, “Robots learn to evolve and improve.” It’s not clear how one could “learn to evolve” if evolution is an unguided natural process, but that’s not the only conundrum in his article. Like Collins, he fails to make any distinction between intelligently designed robots and natural processes.

Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance.

A robot arm builds “babies” that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention.

The ultimate aim of the research project is to develop robots that adapt to their surroundings.

There’s a second conundrum: if human minds are developing robots that evolve, isn’t Ghosh making a case for intelligent design?

What the designers and reporters all seem to be missing is the fact that goals were determined from the outset. “Improvement” was defined as the ability to move faster. Yet in nature, not every successful animal is the speediest (consider the sloth, or the fabled tortoise and hare). Darwinian evolution cannot work toward a distant target. As Paul Nelson remarks in the film Living Waters, “Any evolutionary process you consider, any materialistic process you can consider has no foresight. It can’t see five years, five seconds, five milliseconds into the future. For that, you need a mind.”

An Aim and an Approach

The paper actually makes a powerful if unintended case for intelligent design when you think about it. Ghosh reports that Dr. Iida got into robotics because the ones he saw in real life were not as good as the ones he enjoyed in movies like Star Trek and Star Wars. “His aim was to change that,” Ghosh says, “and his approach was to draw lessons from the natural world to improve the efficiency and flexibility of traditional robotic systems.” He had an aim. He had an approach. He wanted to gain knowledge, or information. So he looked at the efficiency and flexibility of natural solutions, where he found efficient designs worth copying. In other words, he was motivated by biomimicry — an approach saturated with design thinking.

But he used an evolutionary algorithm, someone might complain. True, but it wasn’t evolutionary in the Darwinian sense. There’s no such thing as a Darwinian “algorithm” despite the use of familiar lingo like mutation, selection, and fitness in the paper. Algorithms are intelligently designed for function. Once an algorithm is defined, a mindless mechanism like a computer program or robot can use it, applying inputs and monitoring outputs, as in this case. But those mechanisms were also predesigned to implement the predetermined goal.

Animal and plant breeders use “evolutionary algorithms” of a sort; they know what they want; they use algorithms of sexual reproduction, and they monitor the output to decide what offspring get to breed in the next iteration. All this is under the guiding hand of the intelligent agent (the breeder). Artificial selection is intelligent design, not Darwinism.

If the authors and reporters really wanted to see materialistic Darwinian processes in action, they should have taken their hands off the equipment, shut the door, and let nature take its course. Most likely, nothing more interesting would happen than rust.

Two Blunders in One

Dawkins set a goal of generating Shakespeare’s phrase “Methinks it is like a weasel.” Berra watched cars “evolve” but missed the role of designers. The designers of these robots (and their Darwin-friendly reporters) committed both blunders. They had a target, designed a way to reach it, yet presumed after the fact that their carefully engineered “mother robot” resembled a mindless, material entity working by Darwinian natural selection. We can at least thank them for providing another opportunity to show why they really made the case for design.

The Fossil record's trolling of Darwinism continues .

Fossil Friday: A Strange Dragonfly Larva

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features Nothomacromia sensibilis, a strange type of dragonfly larva from the Early Cretaceous (ca. 115 mya) Crato limestones of northeast Brazil. I photographed this specimen at a German trader collection in April 2010, before it was acquired by the famous private collector Burkhard Pohl, who also runs the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

These nothomacromiid larvae are not uncommon at this fossil locality and are found in different sizes corresponding to different instars. The largest ones are about three inches long, which implies very large adults.

In a monograph in 2007, I suggested that these larvae may not be genuine dragonflies of the suborder Anisoptera, but could instead represent the larval stages of the anisozygopteroid Cratostenophlebia. Another possibility is that these larvae correspond to the larval stages of the extinct family Aeschnidiidae that I featured last Fossil Friday. Whatever these enigmatic larvae were, they look highly unusual with their spidery legs, lyra-shaped antennae, and forcep-like anal appendages that do not form the typical anal pyramid of anisopteran larvae.

On the dark art of building a master race?

The politics of making the master race.

Friday, 24 February 2023

The future of clean energy?

A window on the history of Uruguay.

Finally the truth?

The thumb print of JEHOVAH within

Scientists Discover a “New” Fourth (Meningeal) Membrane Surrounding the Brain

Howard Glicksman

Stop the presses, at least the ones for medical, physiology, and neuroscience textbooks! It looks like Science has done it again. It’s discovered something our bodies have but we didn’t know it!

How Life Works (Not Just How It Looks)

As New Scientist reports, the newly discovered layer of the meninges is called the subarachnoid lymphatic-like membrane (SLYM). With a width of only a few cells, the SLYM is now considered to be the fourth layer of the meninges, the connective tissue surrounding the brain that gives it support and protection.

The first layer of the meninges is the thick and tough dura mater which is attached to the inner surface of the skull. The second layer is the fibrous web-like arachnoid mater that sits just below and lines the dura mater separated from it by the subdural space. The third meningeal layer is the thin and very delicate pia mater which covers and is in direct contact with the brain tissue.

Between the arachnoid and pia maters is the subarachnoid space, which is filled with a clear, colorless liquid called the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Except for having a lot less protein, the chemical content of CSF is similar to plasma and is constantly being produced and recycled so there are about four to five ounces present in the brain. Propelled mostly by the pulsation of the heart, CSF circulates through the ventricular system within the brain and over its surface.

The SLYM is located within the subarachnoid space separating the CSF within it into inner and outer compartments. The SLYM is so delicate that the standard technique for removing the brain at autopsy causes it to disintegrate and so up until now has been unnoticed. Nuclear scanning of the brains of mice recently allowed for the detection of the SLYM and by changing post-mortem procedures, it has now become microscopically detectable in humans.

A Puzzle for Scientists

Due to the brain’s unique structure, for many years scientists have been puzzled by how it manages certain important physiological functions. The meninges, CSF, and the fluid between the brain cells, the interstitial fluid (ISF), have also been thought to play a role in these functions.

First, in contrast to most of the body, the brain seems to lack a normal lymphatic system to help manage the control of excess fluid and toxic chemicals while providing access for immune cells. Scientists have wondered how the brain compensates for this apparent lack. In the last decade the discovery of the glymphatics (drainage microtubules next to the arterioles in the subarachnoid space) and lymphatic vessels associated with the meninges seems to have at least partially answered this question. Now, it would seem that the SLYM is involved in this function too.

Second, in contrast to most of the body, which only has to deal with the ISF, the brain has two fluid compartments, the ISF and the CSF in the subarachnoid space. Scientists have always wondered if, or to what degree, the fluid in the ISF and CSF communicate. Studies in the last several years show that there is significant communication between the ISF and CSF through the glympathics, other pathways, and now it would seem the SLYM as well.

Third, in contrast to most of the body, the structure of the brain’s capillaries results in it having unique blood-brain and blood-CSF barriers which affects which molecules can pass through. Further analysis shows that the SLYM, which separates the CSF in the inner subarachnoid space from the CSF in the outer subarachnoid space, only allows very small molecules to pass through, thereby excluding most proteins. This means that the SLYM seems to act as yet another barrier within the brain that has to be taken into account when considering neurological function.

So far scientists think that the SLYM seems to be involved in the management of fluid along with various chemicals and molecules within the brain and the prevention of the build-up of toxic metabolic waste products. In addition, the SLYM seems to provide access to immune cells to protect the brain from microbes and toxins.

A better understanding of the microscopic and molecular structure of the SLYM and how it works to keep the brain healthy and functioning properly will afford medical science the ability to better understand brain malfunction and help in the development of more effective treatments.

It is thought that malfunction of the SLYM may be linked to many neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and delayed healing after traumatic brain injury.

The Question of Causation

One has to wonder from where the SLYM came? After all, it’s been present and working in the brains of all humans since they came into being. But we didn’t even know about it until recently. The answer on offer to the question of causation is likely to be the standard narrative gloss that the SLYM “evolved.”

But such a simplistic knee-jerk response, especially when so little is known about the molecular and microscopic structure of the SLYM and its function within the brain, seems a tad premature. To say this would mean that, a priori, before Science knows anything about how any component of life works, and what it would have taken to build it from the ground up, one must assume to know how it was caused — evolution. This sounds more like ideology than anything else.

That being said, when considering the SLYM (and any other component of life) let’s see how my recent book, co-authored with Steve Laufmann, Your Designed Body, can help you to determine for yourself which of the only two possible explanatory options for causation (materialism or intelligent design) is more likely at work.

In the book we explain that the body consists of trillions of cells working together and that there are four basic types of tissues: epithelial, nerve, muscle, and connective tissue. Connective tissue consists of cells that secrete, and are embedded within, a clear, colorless, gel-like material (ground substance) and the supportive protein fibers crisscrossing within it.

The ground substance and the different types of protein fibers within it make up what is called the extracellular matrix (ECM). Different types of connective tissue, made up of various types of ECMs, provide the different tissues and organs of the body with the specific structural and chemical support they need to live and function properly.

As noted above, the meninges are specialized layers of connective tissue which surround and protect the brain. The dura mater is “thick and tough,” the arachnoid mater is “fibrous and web-like,” and the pia mater is “very thin and delicate.” Scientists are still working on categorizing the qualities of the SLYM.

Like types of connective tissues, each meningeal layer has a different ECM that affords it the ability to perform its specific functions. Our book delves into many of the different types of functions performed by the different tissues and organs of the body. Some of these as they apply to the meninges include protection, waste recycling, and fluid dynamics.

Only Two Possibilities

When it comes to causation, there are only two classes of causal forces; those are material causes and intelligent causes. In addition, one of the main causal hurdles that would have applied for the SLYM (and the other three layers of the meninges) is that there must have been a body plan somewhere to designate how to make, and where to place, each of them.

In other words, there must be information in the body that instructs it about how to make the right types of cells, secreting the right types of ECM, resulting in the four different types of meningeal membranes each with the right specifications, while placing each of them in the right order and position around the brain to provide it with the right amount of support and protection. But from where could this information have come?

Your Designed Body analyzes the causal factors of neo-Darwinism and concludes that neo-Darwinism lacks any power to generate non-trivial innovations, tends to select for death, and is counterintuitive. The increase in understanding of the true complexities of living systems over the last few decades has steadily eroded the plausibility of Darwin’s causal explanations.

As famed Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin wrote in his book Foresight, “If Nobel-caliber intelligence was required to figure out how this existing engineering marvel works, what was required to invent it in the first place?” With so many systems in the body, that is indeed the question.

When the slippery slope is behind you?

Canadian Lawmakers Support Euthanasia for Minors without Parental Consent

Wesley J Smith

Euthanasia advocates tend to advance their cause by requesting that panels of “experts” or lawmakers conduct oh, so careful studies to recommend policies that, invariably, would legalize assisted suicide or expand it where already allowed. These are stacked decks; activities choreographed to reach a particular conclusion.

Such a bit of theater was just performed in Canada, where a report was published by the Canadian Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD). Surprise! It calls for even further expansion of the already permissive law that allows terminally ill and chronically ill adults, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly to opt to be killed by doctors or nurse practitioners. The mentally ill are scheduled to be included in this dismal list next month under existing law, but that may be put off for a year because of domestic and international agitation around the issue. But, mark my words, they too will eventually become eligible for the lethal jab.

Death for “Mature Minors”

The committee has now recommended that “mature minors” whose deaths are “reasonably foreseeable” be allowed to access death — perhaps even without parental consent. From, the AMAD report’s Recommendations:

Recommendation 14: That the Government of Canada undertake consultations with minors on the topic of MAID, including minors with terminal illnesses, minors with disabilities, minors in the child welfare system and Indigenous minors, within five years of the tabling of this report.

Recommendation 15: That the Government of Canada provide funding through Health Canada and other relevant departments for research into the views and experiences of minors with respect to MAID, including minors with terminal illnesses, minors with disabilities, minors in the child welfare system and Indigenous minors, to be completed within five years of the tabling of this report.

These two provisions loosen the foreseeable-death requirement listed below, as it already has been for adults:

Recommendation 16: That the Government of Canada amend the eligibility criteria for MAID set out in the Criminal Code to include minors deemed to have the requisite decision-making capacity upon assessment.

Recommendation 17: That the Government of Canada restrict MAID for mature minors to those whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable. . . .

Recommendation 19: That the Government of Canada establish a requirement that, where appropriate, the parents or guardians of a mature minor be consulted in the course of the assessment process for MAID, but that the will of a minor who is found to have the requisite decision-making capacity ultimately take priority.

Parental Objection Notwithstanding

In other words, children would be able to choose to die even over the objections of their parents. (It’s worth noting that a similar recommendation was previously made in a medical-journal article by Canadian pediatricians, which I wrote about Here)

The committee also wants people who have been diagnosed with dementia to be allowed to order themselves killed in an advance directive:

Recommendation 21: That the Government of Canada amend the Criminal Code to allow for advance requests following a diagnosis of a serious and incurable medical condition disease, or disorder leading to incapacity.

Recommendation 22: That the Government of Canada work with provinces and territories, regulatory authorities, provincial and territorial law societies and stakeholders to adopt the necessary safeguards for advance requests.

My editorial comment: What a joke.

Recommendation 23: That the Government of Canada work with the provinces and territories and regulatory authorities to develop a framework for interprovincial recognition of advance requests.

Why Should We Care?

This practice is already allowed in the Netherlands and Belgium — and yes, there have been abuses of these laws that haven’t matter a whit.

Will these recommendations be followed in Canada? Almost surely, in part or in full. That’s why the committee was asked to file a report in the first place. Why should we, in the U.S., care? Canada, being our closest (and, according to many progressives, a far more enlightened) cultural cousin, exerts a substantial influence on our own country’s social policies.

Beyond that, the same process of broadening access to death is happening here, too, albeit more slowly. Already most states that previously legalized assisted suicide have loosened their eligibility guidelines by, for example, reducing waiting times, allowing virtual assisted-suicide requests, and/or ending residency requirements. The more Americans generally support euthanasia, the speedier that process will occur, which is why adamant opposition in places where the practice remains illegal is a moral imperative — as is doctors’ total noncooperation wherever it has already been legalized.

Ps. At its root this is a spiritual/culutural problem and simply will not yield to the kind of blunt force interventions that lawfare types favour. The world needs JEHOVAH more than ever.

A window on Mesoamerican history.

A window on African history.

Thursday, 23 February 2023

The art of conversation is on its deathbed?

A case study in Darwinism's contribution to the rise of the master race.

John West Introduces Darwin Comes to Africa

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, political scientist John West introduces Darwin Comes to Africa, the new book by Nigerian pastor, theologian, journalist, scholar, and human rights activist Olufemi Oluniyi. The work explores the poisonous influence of Social Darwinism on British rule in Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an influence felt in Oluniyi’s home country down to the present, he argues. The book project grew out of Oluniyi’s intimate knowledge of Nigerian culture as well as his attendance at the 2017 Center for Science & Culture Summer Seminar program in Seattle. By the end of that nine-day gathering, he had resolved to write a book about the impact of Social Darwinism on his home country and announced that intention to his fellow attendees. He died of Covid-19 four years later, but not before completing in-depth research on the subject of the book and sending Discovery Institute Press his manuscript. Learn more about what Oluniyi discovered. Download the podcast or listen to it here

The case for empire?

Superheroes by design?

Meet the Ghostly Organisms that Rescue the Planet

David Coppedge

A man was paddleboarding last month when he came across a mysterious creature three miles off the shoreline of California. He was startled by the sight, and then filled with wonder. What was this “see-through floating spine” in front of his paddleboard? If it could talk, it might have said, “Fear not. I am here to rescue your world from global warming.”

The story is told on Phys.org by Amanda Lee Myers. On the other side of the world, another man had a similar revelation. David Malmquist, writing for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, tells about a swimmer who was snorkeling through waters off the coast of New Zealand when he found himself enveloped in a fog of translucent beings. If these angelic creatures could talk, they might have said, “We mean you no harm. We are your servants. Our work is to remove the gases with which your species has polluted the atmosphere and send them to the bottom of the sea.”

We should get to know these friendly servants. Who are they? What are they? They are called sea salps. They look a bit like jellyfish with their transparent bodies, but they are not jellyfish. Scientists classify them as tunicates: animals with see-through “shirts” of gelatin. Sea squirts are more familiar examples of tunicates. A tunicate is an odd kind of invertebrate because, though it looks like jellyfish, it has the key characteristic of phylum chordata: a notochord. A notochord is believed by evolutionists to be a precursor to a spinal cord, then a backbone. This gives Darwin-loving reporters the chance to amuse their readers with claims that sea salps are our “distant relatives” — closer to us than they are to jellyfish, which outwardly they more closely resemble. Phylogeny acquaints a species with strange bedfellows.

How Salps Sequester Carbon

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science reports on a study led by Dr. Deborah Steinberg of William and Mary. Her team found that “salps play [an] outsize role in damping global warming.” How? The salps, also called jelly plankton, are good at absorbing carbon dioxide and “pumping” it down to the ocean bottom. Their numbers, furthermore, can multiply into huge “blooms” when CO2 is plentiful.

Jelly plankton blooms can offset as much CO2 as emitted by millions of cars. Humans continue to amplify global warming by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A new study reveals that a distant human relative plays an outsize role in damping the impacts of this greenhouse gas by pumping large amounts of carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it contributes nothing to current warming.

A NASA-funded multidisciplinary project called EXPORTS is combining satellite data with shipboard measurements to understand a global phenomenon: the “biological pump.”

The goal of EXPORTS, for EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing, is to combine shipboard and satellite observations to more accurately quantify the global impact of the “biological pump.” This is a suite of biological processes that transport carbon and other organic matter from sunlit surface waters to the deep sea, effectively removing carbon dioxide from the surface ocean and atmosphere. Tiny drifting animals called zooplankton play a key role in the pump by eating phytoplankton — which incorporate carbon from carbon dioxide into their tissues during photosynthesis — then exporting that carbon to depth.

These “jelly barrels” with their notochords are like “transparent whales,” Malmquist writes, taking in the carbon dioxide from their meals and pumping it down to the ocean floor in their fast-sinking fecal pellets. But wait, there’s more: the salps, like Salpa aspera, also take the stored carbon down in person. Sea salps take part in the “diel vertical migration” habit of many plankton: a daily ritual of swimming to the surface during the night to feed, then swimming to the depths during the day to avoid predators. Since these asexual organisms can multiply rapidly, the combined influence of their biological pumping can be huge. Do the math:

To put things in perspective, the observed salp bloom covered more than 4,000 square miles (~11,000 km2), about the size of Connecticut. With onboard experiments showing salps capable of exporting a daily average of 9 milligrams of carbon through each square meter at 100 meters below the bloom, the amount of carbon exported to the deep sea was about 100 metric tons per day. For comparison, a typical passenger car emits 4.6 metric tons per year. Comparing these values shows the carbon removed from the climate system each day of the bloom is equal to taking 7,500 cars off the road. Adjusting these values using the team’s highest measured rate of salp-mediated export (34 mg of C per day) increases the carbon offset to more than 28,000 vehicles.

There’s still more. Steinberg says that many salp blooms go undetected. A global model that estimates their effects leads to a startling conclusion: these tunicates transport a whopping “700 million metric tons of carbon to the deep sea each year, equal to emissions from more than 150 million cars.” Thank you, sea salps!

Steinberg’s research was published open access in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Global Biological Pump

Another study was published in Nature’s open-access journal Nature Communications by Decima et al., “Salp blooms drive strong increases in passive carbon export in the Southern Ocean.” A 14-member team from New Zealand and from Southern California’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied another salp species in the Southern Ocean, Salpa thompsoni. Like its cousin, this species takes part in the diel migration and drops its solidified carbon load in fast-sinking fecal pellets.

zooplankton grazers, and their changing abundance and distribution patterns as a consequence of global warming, have the potential to not only alter marine food webs, but also biogeochemistry. if the increasing trend in salp abundance in the southern ocean persists at comparable rates, we can expect important changes in areas where salp blooms are recurrent: in the dynamics of phytoplankton bloom formation and termination, in the absorption and sequestration of carbon dioxide by the ocean, and in the composition of exported plankton affecting both organic and inorganic carbon flux to the deep ocean.

More Ways to Appreciate Jelly Plankton

Myers’s article at Phys.org includes “six wild facts about sea salps” to increase our appreciation of our global servants. Some of those have been mentioned above. The first two are newsworthy:

They move by pumping water through their bodies in what’s considered one of the most efficient examples of jet propulsion among animals, according to the Journal of Zoology.

Sea salps also eat using jet propulsion, consuming microscopic plants known as phytoplankton as they pump water through their bodies, the journal says.

They are also among the fastest-growing animals known, Myers continues, able to increase their body length by as much as 10 percent per hour. So while salps share jet propulsion finesse with jellyfish, they are more closely related to humans, evolutionists say.

Now for Something Completely Different: A Geological Carbon Pump

Adding to salps’ outsized role in carbon sequestration, a non-biological process also participates in saving the planet. Brantley et al., writing in Science, relate “How temperature-dependent silicate weathering acts as Earth’s geological thermostat.” Silicate weathering “is an important way that carbon dioxide is regulated over geological time scales.” News from Penn State says that it must have been in operation throughout the history of life:

“Life has been on this planet for billions of years, so we know Earth’s temperature has remained consistent enough for there to be liquid water and to support life,” said Susan Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. “The idea is that silicate rock weathering is this thermostat, but no one has ever really agreed on its temperature sensitivity.”

Measurements in the paper indicate that, indeed, chemical weathering responds to earth temperature automatically: hotter temperatures increase carbon sequestration by weathering, and lower temperatures reduce it. The paper says this explicitly:

Over multimillion-year time scales, the balance between weathering of silicate rocks and volcanic degassing may control the atmospheric concentration of CO2, one of the most important greenhouse gases that regulate Earth’s climate. Silicate weathering accelerates with temperature, acting as a negative feedback that buffers Earth’s climate and maintains its habitability.

The earth, therefore, seems to come with built-in regulators for climate and temperature. Are climate modelers who warn us of impending catastrophe incorporating these “poorly understood” processes into their dire predictions?

Evidence of Providence?

We have learned about another class of amazing little animals — sea salps — that many of us probably never heard of but depend on. These studies add to growing knowledge about the roles of plankton, including polychaetes, diatoms, and other small ocean creatures, whose benefits to the planet are as elegant as their well-engineered designs.

Are sea salps living only for their own fitness, or do we see evidence of providence here? Their outsized role gives the earth a biological feedback mechanism, somewhat like a thermostat, to regulate carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Maybe the planet needs biology as much as biology needs the planet. And to discover that biological and geological processes work together automatically to regulate greenhouse gases and keep global temperatures optimized for habitability seems uncanny. That would seem to require foresight and wisdom on a grander scale than Darwin’s theory can handle.

All primates are not created equal?

Chimp and Human Genomes: An Evolution Myth Unravels

Evolution news

On a new episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the human and chimp genomes are 98-99 percent similar as surely resulted from Darwinian common descent. Luskin cites an article in the journal Science which describes the 98-99 percent claim as a myth. The original figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison, but once you compare the entire genomes, and use more rigorous methods, the similarity drops several percentage points, and on one account, down into the mid 80s. Additionally, the chimp genomes used in the original comparison studies borrowed the human genome for scaffolding, thus artificially boosting the degree of similarity. Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Wednesday, 22 February 2023

Evolution by design(again)?

Between Narcos and Thanos?

Catching the wind?

More of James Tour deconstructing the would be deconstructors of teleology re: OoL

James Tour holds court(again) re: OoL science's failure to falsify teleology.

The dismal science on income inequality.

Tuesday, 21 February 2023

On the story of project HARP.

On Darwin and the rise of the uberman.

The Cruel Legacy of Social Darwinism in Nigeria

Olufemi Oluniyi

Editor’s note: The following article by the late Dr. Olufemi Oluniyi is adapted from his preface to his recently released book, Darwin comes to Africa: Social Darwinism and British Imperialism in Northern Nigeria (Discovery Institute Press, 2023).

Social Darwinism is a rickety notion, rich in assumptions but destitute of facts. It reminds me of a Mandinka proverb widely recognized in Africa which says, “An empty bag cannot stand.” It is, however, resourceful. Social Darwinism rests like a tiger moth on Darwinism, its mother theory; when challenged with facts, it flits to a slightly different position and poses anew, where its camouflaging coloration allows it to survive a bit longer.

However, Social Darwinism is not merely as tricky and insubstantial as a tiger moth. It also is as dangerous as a tiger. As shall be shown in these pages, a large portion of Northern Nigeria’s suffering can be laid directly at the feet of this tiger and its parent. This book is an invitation to readers, and to African scholars particularly, to look around them and determine to what extent Social Darwinism has mauled their respective societies and nations.

What Precisely Is This Dangerous Creature?

Though it goes by many camouflaging names, Social Darwinism is the pseudo-scientific ideology which posits that the biological principles of Darwin’s scientific theory of random mutation and natural selection bear analogy to human society.

One startling iteration of Social Darwinism occurred under the guise of tactical warfare in the 1920s, when a Russian scientist sought to produce a race of super-soldiers for Stalin’s army by impregnating women from French Guinea with the sperm of a dead chimpanzee — black African women, mind you, who were presumed to be less highly evolved and thus closer to chimpanzees than were white European women. The Russian scientist was not a lone gunman, so to speak. Colonial authorities approved the plan, and the Russian found support amongst both French and American scientists.

Horrifying though this experiment is in terms of religion and morality, it makes ethical sense under Social Darwinism. If humans are naught but evolutionarily advanced animals, and if we breed and crossbreed animals to suit our purposes, why should we not breed humans in the same manner?

Darwin’s theory of evolution further posited the natural world as a place where the fittest survive and the less fit decline and die; if this is indeed the case, thought Darwin’s contemporaries (and indeed many of our own), then who are we to battle nature herself? Why should we not let the less-fit die? Indeed, why should we not hasten their demise if it will profit us — the survivors, the fittest — economically, geographically, or politically? Why should the Briton not manipulate, oppress, and exploit the Nigerian? After all, the fact that he can do so surely proves that he is right to do so — he is fulfilling his very destiny, as decreed by Nature herself.

True, such predatory impulses are as old as man himself. This book, however, explores the 19th-century attempt to repackage those age-old myths, prejudices, racism, and general selfishness in a pseudo-scientific wrapper.

Examining the Wrapper

That pseudo-scientific wrapper has allowed myriad evils to flourish up to the present day. Without doubt, Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution and its social ramifications, though unproven and indeed increasingly discredited, hold pernicious sway in classrooms and boardrooms, in the halls of politics, medicine, and trade.

Though the objective of Social Darwinism was and still is the denigration, subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization of targeted peoples, these evils generally are cloaked in the benevolent language of guiding an inferior race or protecting a superior one by weeding out supposedly inferior stock. At various times and in various places people so targeted have been the mentally or physically disabled, the elderly, the ill, the homosexual, the unborn; those whose ethnicity, nationality, or appearance has posed a real or perceived barrier to the fulfilment of another group’s desires; and those whose poverty or criminality has been blamed, Darwinist-fashion, upon inferior genetics. The problems of Social Darwinism are various and are pervasive worldwide, and all people wronged by Darwin and his followers deserve to have their stories told and the false narratives wielded against them deconstructed. My focus in these pages, however, will be on my people and my country.

Four Thousand Miles Away

Here is how the idea of a 19th-century scientist traveled four thousand miles to grievously wound Northern Nigeria: Charles Darwin emerged at a time when Europe and Great Britain were hungry for an excuse to exploit Africa. Darwin’s theories provided a morally palatable (though as we shall see, entirely wrong and illogical) excuse. Further, in addition to justifying self-serving colonization, Darwin’s theories shaped the way British administrators managed Northern Nigeria and the various people groups therein.

The false narrative of Social Darwinism as promoted by British colonizers caused great and unjust harm to Nigeria, and to this day many aspects of the pernicious narrative are widely and harmfully believed to be true. However, the critical link between the increasingly insatiable appetite for Africa’s resources, on the one hand, and Charles Darwin’s growing visibility, on the other hand, has been ignored, as if willfully, in the conventional Social Darwinist historiography. I will present ample evidence for my claims in Part One of this book, drawing on official documents, public statements, well-attested historical events, and so forth.

This book does not deny that there are differences in material culture, literacy, and technological attainments between Europe and Black Africa; rather, it firmly rejects the sleight of hand according to which these external differences indicate a difference in the basic building blocks of the European and of the African (understood to mean black-skinned Africans), and that this supposed inherent difference causes cultural differences and warrants “Europeans are superior to Africans” propaganda. These matters I shall discuss in Part Two of this book.

My purpose is not merely to point the finger of blame, nor is it only to restore a view of the black African as equal in all ways to the white European. It is also to show that Social Darwinism rests on a faulty foundation, so that perhaps the day may come when the House of Darwin and all his unruly, self-serving children harm no longer.

On the Gordian knot that is the Israeli Palestinian conflict

Controversy over the p-value

Cornelius G Hunter

There is much to agree with in Steven Novella’s article from this past week on the P-value. The latest news regarding the beleaguered statistical parameter used in hypothesis testing is the call to reduce its associated threshold for statistical significance by an order of magnitude from its venerable value of 0.05 to 0.005. This is a modest proposal compared the outright banning the use of P-values in recent years. But in any case, while a move to 0.005 would likely help to reduce problems, what is more desperately needed is the underlying training and peer review to ensure proper statistical testing, period, regardless of the value selected threshold for the P-value. This is because the problems discussed by Novella are dwarfed by hypothesis testing fallacies, such as false dichotomies, that routinely appear in the literature. Those problems, unfortunately, are routinely ignored.

Monday, 20 February 2023

Uncommon sense re: intellectuals and society,

The Netherlands :the silent superpower?

Survival of the fittest taken to its logical conclusion?

When Darwin Came to Africa

John G West

Charles Darwin did not actually visit Africa. But his poisonous ideas certainly did, spread by aggressive Social Darwinists who left a bitter legacy that impacts Africans even today.

My dear friend Olufemi Oluniyi spent the last years of his life documenting what happened so the world could finally know the truth.

Olufemi was a Nigerian pastor, theologian, journalist, scholar, and human rights activist. I met him in 2017 when he participated in the Center for Science & Culture’s Summer Seminar program here in Seattle.

A Resolution to Write

As Nigerian scholar Mary-Noelle Ethel Ezeh explains,

Ideas rule the world, and corrosive ideologies damage human relations and destroy societies. In this book, Olufemi Oluniyi lucidly exposes how the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism fueled manipulative and exploitative British imperialist policies in Northern Nigeria to damage human relations and destroy societies… The author… vividly shows how British Social Darwinist policies were a root cause of the damaged relations among the peoples of Nigeria. This root cause continues to exert its influence in Nigeria’s effort to build a sustainable democracy in the 21st century.

Dr. Ezeh is Professor of Ethics and Christian History at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University in Nigeria.

Historian Richard Weikart adds that Darwin Comes to Africa provides “a powerful reminder that Social Darwinism and the scientific racism flowing from it had profoundly damaging influences on real people, especially those — such as black Africans — denigrated by scientific elites as ‘inferior’ on the evolutionary ladder.” Weikart is Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Stanislaus, and author most recently of Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

More Than an Indictment

Olufemi’s book isn’t just an indictment of Social Darwinism. It also tells the story of how Christian missionaries in Africa pushed back against Social Darwinism. And it presents evidence showing how all humans reflect the intelligent design of their creator.

“The author powerfully challenges evolutionary arguments for racism,” notes African scholar Dr. Richard Ochieng’. “He also refutes Western myths about the history of Africa as the ‘dark continent,’ recounting Africa’s many contributions to ancient manufacturing, medicine, architecture, mathematics, and more. Overall, the book presents an inspiring vision of the transcendent value of all people as equal members of the same human race.” Dr. Ochieng’ is a Lecturer at the University of Eldoret in Kenya and Chair of the BioCosmos Kenya Trust Foundation.

If you want to learn more about Darwinism’s real-world consequences in history, you couldn’t do better than add Darwin comes to Africa to your reading list.

More on Darwinism's simple beginning problem

File under "well said" XCI

"It is better to have the wrong answer to the right question than the right answer to the wrong question"

Anonymous graffiti writer.

Sunday, 19 February 2023

Human exceptionalism on its deathbed?

World’s Oldest Medical Journal Endorses “Nature Rights”

Wesley J Smith

I have been writing for some time about how establishment medicine and bioethics have become profoundly ideological to the point of crossing into the nihilism of anti-humanism. Now, The Lancet, the world’s oldest and one of the field’s most established medical — not environmental — journals has published an advocacy column in favor of granting “rights” to “nature.”

The author backs the concept of granting humans the right to a clean environment: a plausible proposition that at least maintains the concept of rights that belong exclusively to the human realm.

However, according to Hong Kong–based bioethicist and law professor Eric C. Ip, such rights do not go nearly far enough. He wants rights granted to nature, which would thereby reject human exceptionalism. From the piece, “From the Right to a Healthy Planet to the Planetary Right to Health,”

Some interpretations of the right to a healthy planet could still be problematic. The planet’s ecosystems consist of communities of life forms, of which humanity is but one member, that interact with each other and their landscapes.

The Rio Declaration’s reference to the positioning of humans “at the centre of concerns for sustainable development” could no longer be defended. It is impossible to protect the well-being of the planet if humans persist in pursuing endless, albeit narrowly defined, growth with an aura of species superiority.

Jesting? Unfortunately, Not a Chance

In other words, we, flora, fauna, and, indeed, geological features such as rivers and granite outcroppings are equal. Lest you think I jest, at least six rivers and two glaciers have already been granted “rights” as this antihuman movement spreads.

Ip claims that human rights and nature rights are mutually reinforcing:

In their current form, rights of nature are enforceable rights attributed to natural entities of Earth, such as ecosystems; these rights — mainly the rights to exist, flourish, and restoration — underscore the core planetary health insight that humanity is part of, and not apart from, an interconnected planet. Practically speaking, the right to a healthy environment and the planetary right to health converge on the same obligation on the part of humanity to protect the planetary community. There does not seem to be any irreconcilable conflict between these two mutually reinforcing rights. Humans have an intrinsic right to flourish; however, that is impossible if they treat the natural foundations of life with disrespect.

This Is Simply Not True

Nature’s “rights” are typically defined, by environmental organizations, as “the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” That’s akin to both a right to life and noninterference with natural processes and life cycles.

Laws that grant rights to nature do so for the purpose of handcuffing human thriving by inhibiting development, all in the name of saving the planet. They generally allow anyone to bring court action to prevent development activities — meaning that all human endeavors that impact the natural world are at the mercy of the sensibilities of the most radical environmentalist. And that includes essentials such as the generation of electricity with fossil fuels, as well as the mining of minerals such as lithium needed to make renewables functional.

A Radical Agenda

At the very least, granting “rights” to “nature” would grant the natural world and human needs equal consideration before the law. Even if related lawsuits on behalf of nature’s “rights” are lost eventually, the chilling effect of their potential alone would be catastrophic. Imagine trying to obtain liability insurance for a new waterfront hotel or a mining operation when the insurance company knows that the most extreme anti-development activist can take the project to court.

Radical environmental misanthropy is on the march, now co-opting the medical establishment. Its activists are well funded and ideologically committed. The time has come to stop rolling our eyes at the apparent insanity of these proposals and take the threat posed by them seriously. The future of human prosperity and our self-identification as the special species, uniquely possessed with both rights and responsibilities, depend on defeating this radical agenda.

In search of what the science actually says re:.Darwinism.

Rob Staedler and the NABT

Cornelius G Hunter

It's no secret that the origins debate is highly polarized. Many people have their minds made up and too often there is no place for a reasoned evaluation of the science. That’s tragic because that is where things become interesting. I once spoke to a roomful of high school science teachers, explaining that they could accurately teach how the science bears on the theory of evolution—both positively and negatively. The response I got was that this would confuse the students who needed to be given a simple, unambiguous message. One teacher was concerned that anything other than an obvious, “evolution is true,” message would be detrimental to the learning. To be sure there can be a tension between detail and clarity in classroom settings. High school students learn introductory history lessons out of necessity. They simply are not ready for research-level topics. Clarity sometimes comes at the cost of less detail. But there is a difference between simplifying a lesson and biasing a lesson. I was again reminded of all this when I heard about how the National Association of Biology Teachers responded to Dr. Robert Stadler’s new book, The scientific approach to Evolution.

It would be difficult to find someone more qualified than Stadler to analyze how the scientific evidence bears on the theory of evolution. His academic background is in Biomedical Engineering, with degrees from the top universities in the nation (Case Western Reserve University, MIT, and Harvard). And he has twenty years of experience in the field, with more than 100 patents to his name.

Stadler’s interest in evolution skips over the usual culture wars arguments and focuses on the science. Stadler provides an approach that is sorely needed. While there are plenty of texts and popular books that review the scientific evidence for evolution, they invariably fail to provide any kind of accounting of the strength of the evidence. The field outside my window is flat and so is evidence that the Earth is flat. But of course that evidence is weak.

On the other hand, there is plenty of academic work dealing with methods of rigorous, quantitative, theory evaluation, such as Bayesian approaches. But they invariably fail to engage the real-world evidences for evolution, in any kind of comprehensive way.

For all the talk, there is too often a lack of actual practice of analyzing the evidence. Enter Rob Stadler and his thoroughly accessible approach to laying out how the evidence bears on the theory of evolution. Importantly, Stadler explains not just the evidences, but the strengths and weaknesses of those evidences.

Because Stadler’s approach is accessible, it is an excellent classroom resource. Indeed, regardless of what one believes about a scientific theory such as evolution, the learning is greatly enhanced when one is allowed to explore the evidence, think critically about it, form opinions, and defend them in discourse. Rather than rehearse the carefully selected subset of evidences routinely presented in textbooks, the science should be allowed to speak for itself.

Unfortunately those science teachers I spoke to are not the only ones uncomfortable with allowing science such freedoms. Earlier this year Stadler worked with an agency to place an advertisement for his new book with the National Association of Biology Teachers. The contract was signed, funds were paid, and beginning in May the ad was to appear on the NABT website.

But strangely enough, on May 1 the advertisement failed to appear. It was through the ad agency that Stadler learned that the NABT had no intention of running the ad. The agency informed Stadler that the NABT had “concerns” over the content of the book.

And what exactly was the problem? The Scientific Approach to Evolution allows the evidence to speak for itself. According to Stadler’s book, there could be negative evidences, as well as positive evidences.

And that was not acceptable.

The NABT was concerned that “Dr. Sadler’s attempts to address ‘strengths and weaknesses’ in order to establish a climate of controversy in the scientific community regarding evolution where there is none.”

Ironically, the NABT was also concerned that Dr. Sadler underappreciates that “theories are open to revision and refinement as new data becomes available.” That’s ironic because Sadler’s book does precisely that. Sadler appeals to new data to refine and revise our understanding of evolution.

Indeed, if Sadler’s theory-neutral appeal to the scientific evidence makes him guilty of attempting to “establish a climate of controversy” where there is none, then how can theories such as evolution ever be revised?

The fact is, the NABT’s ground rules are a form of theory protectionism. They won’t even run an advertisement for a book that dares question evolution on scientific grounds.

And rather than address the evidence that Sadler brings forth, the NABT contrives nefarious motives. According to the NABT, Sadler is guilty of dishonest pedagogy, and seeking “to establish a climate of controversy.” In the name of scientific integrity the theory must be protected. Darwin’s supporter TH Huxley called for a very different approach. We must, Darwin’s bulldog explained:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Huxley insisted that we cast aside our preconceived notions, and follow the evidence to wherever it leads. Otherwise “you shall learn nothing.” Unfortunately Huxley would not recognize today’s classroom. The NABT would do well to heed the warning of Darwin’s most vocal advocate.

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