Rise of the planet of the monkeys?

 Monkey-Made “Tools” Cast Doubt on High Intelligence in Early Hominids

Casey Luskin 

A new paper in Science Advances, titled “Wild macaques challenge the origin of intentional tool production,” is making headlines. Macaque monkeys from Lobi Bay, Thailand, have been observed “unintentionally” producing stone tools that are “almost indistinguishable” from some very old stone artifacts typically attributed to our supposed evolutionary ancestors. Gizmodo reports, “Uh-Oh: Monkeys Make Stone Flakes That Look a Lot Like Human Tools.” According to The Hill, “New study on monkeys using stone tools raises questions about evolution.” The reason for the “Uh-Oh” and the “questions” is that if living monkeys can produce tools resembling those supposedly produced by our intelligent hominid ancestors, then many tools currently ascribed to our purported ancestors may be no such thing. From Gizmodo: 

              Researchers studying macaques in one of Thailand’s national parks made a surprising discovery: While cracking nuts, the monkeys make stone flakes that look an awful lot like the flakes that scientists have attributed to ancient human. The finding means that some of the material held up as the earliest evidence of hominin tool use may have actually come from monkeys and not our ancestors.

                    The Hill elaborates: 

The Thai monkeys produced stone artifacts “indistinguishable from what we see at the beginning of the [human] archeological record — what we see as the onset of being human,” said Lydia Luncz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a co-author on the study. 

The monkeys — long-tailed macaques — seem to have made their artifacts by accident, not by design. But in many ways, that only makes the finding more disruptive. 

[…]

Ancient humans used knapping to break apart rocks to create an incredibly flexible set of tools — the earliest forms of which cannot be distinguished from the ones macaques made by accident.

That points to a possibility that could throw a wrench into the established narrative, Luncz said: that “all the conoidal flakes we find in the archaeological record — deemed to be intentionally made — could be unintentional byproducts.”

                           

Doubts About Our “Ancestors”

Similarly Inverse reports, “Because the macaques created stone flakes by accident, Luncz and colleagues wondered if some ancient primates may have done the same — creating objects that researchers today might interpret as intentional tools.” It continues:

                For the new study, the researchers compared more than 1,000 stone flakes made by macaques to ancient flakes dating back 1.3 to 3.3 million years ago. Samples came from several excavated sites in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

Looking at the shape, size, and markings on each flake, the researchers determined that there were very few physical differences between the samples from today and those made by human ancestors from millions of years ago.

That leads the researchers to believe it’s possible that some ancient stone flakes may have been misinterpreted as intentionally-made tools, since the macaques make such similar ones without even trying.

“Given these similarities, it may be that some flakes and flaked stones from Plio-Pleistocene contexts are derived as a by-product of percussive behaviors and may be easily misidentified as intentional products,” they write.

                      

“All of the Same Characteristics”

Just how similar are these “tools” to the stone tools we find in the archaeological record? The technical paper reports “morphological overlap between unintentionally produced (macaque) material and those interpreted as intentional (Oldowan and Lomekwian),” and concludes, “These results show that between 30 and 70% of an Oldowan assemblage can be replaced by macaque flakes before significantly changing the central tendency of the morphological and technological parameters of the original assemblage.” A press release from the authors of the technical paper states:

                          [M]any of these artefacts bear all of the same characteristics that are commonly used to identify intentionally made stone tools in some of the earliest archaeological sites in East Africa.

               This evidence has apparently not been well received, as The Hill reports:

                    That idea remains controversial in the field, however. 

“You will not believe the fights we had to fight,” Luncz said.  

Even calling the macaque-produced stone flakes “artifacts” was controversial because some scientists felt it implied an overlap between tool use by Homo sapiens and other primates that wasn’t justified.

‘Artifacts,’ after all, shares its root with ‘art’ and ‘artifice’ — words that suggest intention, planning and humanity. 

“People were not happy with monkeys being able to create those artifacts,” she added. “And somewhere in the records of macaque and early hominid tools, there must be a difference. But right now, the diagnostic criteria we’re using can’t find one.”

           A Word of Caution

But the paper offers a potential way forward:

                         Our results suggest that larger, more elongated flakes, with high cutting edge–to–mass ratios and more platform preparation are attributes associated with intentional flake production. However, measures such as external platform angle and platform dimensions, flake scar frequency, flake scar directionality and cortical coverage on flakes, as well as exploitation strategies and number of exploited surfaces on flaked pieces do not differ between nut cracking and intentionally produced assemblages.

                      But the paper offers a caution at the end, noting that previously used criteria also turned out to wrongly infer “intentional” activity:

                        Previous studies have relied on the aforementioned co-occurring attributes to infer intentional hominin tool production. Building on previous studies of primate flaked stone assemblages, this study shows that these criteria now occur repeatedly within multiple phylogenetically and geographically diverse nonhuman primate lineages.

                    This study is a potential gamechanger. As they conclude, “The results of this study demonstrate that a fundamental reassessment of how we define and identify this uniquely hominin behavior in the archaeological record is still needed.” If current criteria for inferring intelligent tool production can be wrong, it raises the specter that future studies could show monkeys and apes are capable of “unintentionally” producing other complex tools still ascribed to our supposed hominid ancestors. This could mean that a sacred evolutionary icon — apelike species acting smart and making tools — could potentially be axed (pun intended!).

To make a long story short re: Darwinism's "simple beginning"

James Tour on why the OOL is the linchpin of the design argument.

How the giraffe got its neck? :with apologies to Rudyard Kipling.

 Evolution’s Tall Tale — The Giraffe Neck

Jonathan Witt 

The giraffe’s neck has long been a beloved icon of evolutionary theory. According to the story, one of the giraffe’s short-necked ancestors had a slightly longer neck, which helped him reach leaves the other animals on the savannah couldn’t. This gave him a survival advantage he passed on to his offspring. Or maybe the female giraffes really dug his slightly longer neck, giving him a reproductive advantage. Same result. He passed his slightly longer neck on to his offspring. Rinse and repeat a few thousand times, and voila, the lineage ends up with 600-pound, six-foot long giraffe necks.

But the devil is in the details. An article in the journal Nature frankly characterizes the evolution of the giraffe’s cartoonishly long neck as “a puzzle”:

             There should be a good reason for the extraordinary length, because it causes hardship. A giraffe’s heart needs to pump blood 2 metres up to the head, which requires a high blood pressure and management to avoid fainting or stroke. “It’s beautifully adapted to this, but it’s a big cost,” says Rob Simmons, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who was not involved in the study.

One prevailing theory is that giraffes evolved longer necks to reach higher trees for food. “This is widely believed; it’s really entrenched,” says Simmons…. [But] research has shown that giraffes tend to eat from lower levels, and tall giraffes aren’t more likely to survive drought, when food competition is highest. Another idea is that giraffes evolved longer necks for sexual competition, with male giraffes engaging in violent neck-swinging fights and longer necks attracting mates…. [But] males don’t have longer necks than females.1

             

Fossil Phantasms

Fossils aren’t much help either. German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig surveyed the literature on fossils and giraffe evolution and reports that there is an abundance of fossils from giraffes and creatures said to be either giraffe ancestors or closely related to those ancestors, but what remains stubbornly absent is a smooth series of transitional fossils from short-necked to long-necked. He writes:

                No continuous series of fossil links leads to the Giraffa or Okapia. “The giraffe and the okapi of the Congo rain forest are considered as sister groups, the origins of which are still not known” (Devillers and Chaline 1993, p. 247). Similarly Starck (1995, p. 999) remarks: “The ancestry of Giraffidae is disputed.” Wesson (1991, pp. 238-239) agrees with these statements about giraffe fossils, as follows: “The evolving giraffe line left no middling branches on the way, and there is nothing, living or fossil, between the moderate neck of the okapi and the greatly elongated giraffe. The several varieties of giraffe are all about the same height.”

                 An okapi, keep in mind, is an extant even-toed ungulate that looks not dramatically different from a large deer. Between it and the giraffe there stretches a great morphological gulf.

There was a much-ballyhooed fossil find reported in 2015 purporting to bridge that great gulf. A Live Science article, “7-Million-Year-Old Fossils Show How the Giraffe Got Its Long Neck,” promised the moon, and the lead researcher, Nikos Solounias, was only slightly more restrained. “We actually have an animal whose neck is intermediate [in length] — it’s a real missing link,” he said. But as the evolutionists behind the study later concede, they don’t even think the creature, Samotherium major, is a direct ancestor of the giraffe. 

Stretching the Truth

More fundamentally, as researchers learn more and more about giraffe physiology, it’s increasingly clear that hundreds, maybe even thousands, of genetic changes would be needed to arrive at a functioning giraffe; many of the changes would need to arrive simultaneously for the creature to survive; and such big-jump changes would need to occur numerous times over millions of years. 

Yes, natural selection could jump in to preserve these coordinated mutation freak events if they ever occurred, but first the freak-event mutations would have to occur.

Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, famous for his many books defending atheism and evolutionary theory, characterizes the difference between a giraffe’s neck and that of its short-necked ancestor as relatively “slight.” Dawkins writes: “The giraffe’s neck has the same complicated arrangement of parts as the okapi (and presumably as the giraffe’s own short-necked ancestor). There is the same sequence of seven vertebrae [Lönnig contests this], each with its associated blood vessels, nerves, ligaments, and blocks of muscle. The difference is that each vertebra is a lot longer, and all its associated parts are stretched or spaced out in proportion.”2

So, how hard could it be to evolve?

Dawkins’s characterization is one a Darwin disciple could love, but never an attentive engineer, or any biologist with a working familiarity with giraffe physiology. As Lönnig puts it, Dawkins “simplifies the biological problems to a degree that is tolerable for evolutionary theory, but not realistic with regard to the biological facts.”

Giraffe Spectacular

Lönnig describes several things that must be either engineered or reengineered to arrive at a functional giraffe from a short-necked ancestor. First, giraffes, like cows and many other grazing animals, are ruminants, meaning they regurgitate a half-digested cud and chew on it before swallowing the food a second time, helping them digest tough fibrous grass and leaves. But to pull off this trick, a giraffe, with its neck as tall as a man, needs “a special muscular esophagus,” Lönnig explains. So that’s one reengineering challenge. 

Lönnig gives so many more that there isn’t room for them all here. His book debunking giraffe evolution, The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, is dense and thorough. But he helpfully quotes Gordon Rattray Taylor, who concisely summarized several of the reengineering challenges in his book The Great Evolution Mystery:

                 Nineteenth-century observers assumed that the giraffe had only to develop a longer neck and legs to be able to reach the leaves which other animals could not. But in fact such growth created severe problems. The giraffe had to pump blood up about eight feet to its head. The solution it reached was to have a heart which beats faster than average and a high blood pressure. When the giraffe puts his head down to drink, he suffers a rush of blood to the head, so a special pressure-reducing mechanism, the rete mirabile, had to be provided to deal with this. However, much more intractable are the problems of breathing through an eight-foot tube. If a man tried to do so, he would die — not from lack of oxygen so much as poisoning by his own carbon dioxide. For the tube would fill with his expired, deoxygenated breath, and he would keep reinhaling it. Furthermore, one study group found that the blood in a giraffe’s legs would be under such pressure that it would force its way out of the capillaries. How was this being prevented? It turned out that the intercellular spaces are filled with fluid, also under pressure — which in turn necessitates the giraffe having a strong, impermeable skin. To all these changes one could add the need for new postural reflexes and for new strategies of escape from predators. It is evident that the giraffe’s long neck necessitated not just one mutation but many — and these perfectly coordinated.3

                Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon cogently tease out the significance of all this: 

                   In short, the giraffe represents not a mere collection of individual traits but a package of interrelated adaptations. It is put together according to an overall design that integrates all parts into a single pattern. Where did such an adaptational package come from? According to Darwinian theory, the giraffe evolved to its present form by the accumulation of individual, random changes preserved by natural selection. But it is difficult to explain how a random process could offer to natural selection an integrated package of adaptations, even over time. Random mutations might adequately explain change in a relatively isolated trait, such as color. But major changes, like the macroevolution of the giraffe from some other animal, would require an extensive suite of coordinated adaptations.4

                           

A Lottery-Winning Fiend

This means that if we hold to the evolutionary story for the giraffe neck, we must go from believing that the giraffe lineage won a series of longshot lotteries over millions of years to believing that the various ancestors in the lineage each won numerous longshot lotteries simultaneously and managed to do this over and over. 

To grasp the enormous difference, imagine that the President of the United States takes a winding summer trip through the American heartland and buys a state lottery ticket in each of those 45 states that has a state lottery. (Not all do.) Later that summer it emerges that every one of the lottery tickets the President bought was a jackpot winner. The President’s handlers attribute this to “dumb luck,” but you can bet that 45 state lottery commissioners will smell a rat and, if brave enough, launch an investigation. They will reasonably infer that all those wins were somehow gamed in the President’s favor — that is, were intelligently designed. There are long odds, and then there are odds so long, and so beneficial to someone, that reasonable people begin to look for other explanations.

In the giraffe’s case, a bit of reasoning goes a long way. Blind evolution doesn’t look ahead and coordinate a group of changes for some future advantage. It’s blind and must proceed by one small useful step at a time. No evolutionist, for instance, believes that a small number of mega-mutations turned a land mammal into a whale. 

But what if loads of changes are needed simultaneously to successfully make a biological transition, or even just a significant step in a larger transition? We know of only type of cause with the demonstrated ability to meet such a challenge, and it isn’t dumb luck and natural selection. The engineering marvel that is the giraffe, long neck and all, was intelligently designed.

On humanity's privileged homeworld.

The Problem of Earth Privilege: It’s Getting Worse 

Evolution News 

On a new episode of ID the Future, astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, provides a rapid survey of some of the growing evidence that Earth is finely tuned in numerous ways to allow for life. He draws a helpful distinction between local fine-tuning and universal fine-tuning. And he tells us about the many extra-solar planets astronomers have discovered in recent years and how all that new data continues to undermine the misguided assumption (encouraged by the misnamed “Copernican Principle”) that Earth is just a humdrum planet. Far from it, Gonzalez argues. Download the podcast or listen to it here

The mind of a slave with the power of a king?

Russia's man of steel: then and now.

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2a7CDKqWcZ0" title="Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #289" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Why we will always have the poor with us?

Yet more on separating artificial from actual intelligence.

Depths of Design: Moving Pixels

Nathan Jacobson  

Editor’s note: This is Part II of a series. Look here for Part I. Cross-posted from Mind Matters News.

As with traditional art, computer animation has followed a similar trajectory toward realism. Early animations were as crude as rock carvings, limited as they were by relatively weak CPU’s, as yet undeveloped rendering engines, and a lack of digital artists. The monochromatic Space Invaders was endlessly playable, as were the whirling, 8-bit dervishes of Centipede and the bubble-gumless, three-dimensional spaces of Duke Nukem. But the graphics were a million pixels from virtual reality.

         Now decades and countless iterations in, with enormous human capital and ingenuity invested in motion graphics and GPUs, the optics are indeed seductive, convincing, and engrossing. Head phones on and eyes glued to the screen, it’s easy to get lost in the sprawling world and epic narrative of Mass Effect, or to feel that you are attacking the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen with an M1 Garand rifle, your rag-tag squad assisting. With each iteration, game developers make strides in simulating the unique recoil of each gun model, the aural pattern of explosions near versus far, the game physics of spilt blood and bent grass underfoot, and the fraying edges of a soldier’s ribbon bars, specific to rank and nation.

           

Bravo! Charlie!

It’s amazing. It’s an adrenaline rush. And it’s all artifice. These animations are becoming ever more realistic, but not in the least bit more the kind of real thing which they represent.

In addition to cosmetic advances, motion capture technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. Painstaking attention to plotting our distinctive expressions and gaits has greatly increased the appearance of natural movement. Ever since Andy Serkis so convincingly gave life to Gollum, recordings of humans in motion have supplied the scaffolding for countless characters. 

                  In animation … everything is fabricated. … Every moment. Every scratch and look. Everything is a discussion. There are no gifts. There are no happy accidents … It was useful having the live action performance reference. We’d pull them up in front of the animators and say, look at what’s happening here. Little twitches underneath the eyelid, little things that are involuntary became very important.

GORE VERBINSKI, “RANGO BEHIND THE SCENES: BREAKING THE RULES”

                One of the joys as a viewer is having that dawning recognition of a familiar actor who has been reincarnated as Puss in Boots, Shrek the ogre, or Mator the tow truck. The idiosyncrasies and tics of the human originals are prized source material for the animators. So, Kristen Bell’s signature phrase — “Wait, what?” — and her habit of biting her lip is mirrored in Anna of Arendelle. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s brow wave personalizes Maui. Although these beloved characters are singing and dancing and joking along, like Mona Lisa, the image is a mirror image. It has no life of its own. 

                

No Breaths, No Sacrifices

Though we are moved by these pixels on the screen, our digital allies and enemies breathe no breaths, make no sacrifices, feel no lonely deaths. Whether crying, dying, or respawning, they are as lifeless as a dead pixel and vacuous as a wireframe.

               Because the textures that skin them and algorithms that animate them are more sophisticated, it is tempting to think that the ducking and evading Juvies, Pouncers, and Swarmaks of Gears of War are more intelligent than Pac Man’s nemeses: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. One might think that whereas the ghosts that haunted Pac Man had a wisp of personality, the villainous grunts of a modern first-person shooter have a measure more. Surely, in some future game, they’ll reach self-realization. Game AI will continue on this trajectory and surpass human intelligence, just as Watson bested Kasparov. But the truth is, none of these avatars possess any inherent intelligence whatsoever. Every human instinct therein is an extension of a game developer’s forethought. The characters are thoughtless.

We’ve erected this elaborate system of gears and pulleys using electronic nodes. The number of these levers that we can fit on a circuit is mind boggling. At the push of a button and the tilt of a joystick, these systems are able to reenact remarkable routines that the human programmers have strung together. But as the less exhaustively routinized NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) in the game betray, if the programmer hasn’t yet written the routine, the character will be left kicking blindly into a wall.

A financial pandemic?

<iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_bUcyfvysWo" title="USA BANK RUN PANIC as Third Bank COLLAPSES in 5 Days. Signature Bank Closed by FDIC after BANK RUN" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> 

Iron vs. Bronze?

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v5q1rerf-qw" title="How Rome Conquered Greece - Roman History DOCUMENTARY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

File under "well said." XCII

  "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." 

George orwell

Photosynthesis and Darwinism's quest for a simple beginning

 Brand new study on the evolution of photosynthesis.

Cornelius G Hunter 

How exactly is evolution a fact when, as the number two science journal in the world put it, “How and when Cyanobacteria evolved the ability to produce oxygen through photosynthesis is poorly understood”? Or as evolutionist Robert Blankenship admitted, “The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any apparent forebears.”

If the cyanobacteria that do photosynthesis “just appeared” with this “very advanced capability” and “without any apparent forebears,” and if how and when they evolved photosynthesis “is poorly understood,” then just how is it that evolutionists are so certain that evolution is a fact?

What am I missing here?

It is not as though photosynthesis is a tangential capability or a minor event in the so-called “evolutionary history” of life. As the leading science writer Charles Q. Choi put it, “One of the most pivotal moments in Earth’s history was the evolution of the photosynthetic life that suffused air with the oxygen on which virtually all complex life on the planet now depends.”

Nor is it as though photosynthesis is a simple capability, in no need of explanation for how it possibly could have arisen by random mutations. Anyone who has studied photosynthesis even superficially knows it is incredibly complex. And for those who have studied in greater detail, it only gets worse. The molecular machines and their exquisite, finely-tuned, functions are truly amazing. It doesn’t “just happen.”

Even evolutionists, who are always trying to explain how easy it would be for biology’s wonders to arise by happenstance, admit to the complexity of photosynthesis. As Blankenship put it, photosynthesis is a “very advanced capability.” Similarly, Woodward Fischer agreed that the evolution of photosynthesis would be “very challenging”:

            It took a substantial unfolding of evolutionary time before oxygenic photosynthesis developed, perhaps because, as we know, it was a very challenging biochemistry to develop.

                      Nor is it as though the evidence we do have suggests any kind of a straightforward evolutionary development of photosynthesis.

If evolution is true, then we must fire up fresh rounds of evolution’s fake news, including incredible convergences and massive horizontal, or lateral, gene transfer and fusion. Round up the usual suspects:

             The phylogenetic relationships of these prokaryotes suggest that the evolution of aerobic respiration likely occurred multiple times. This, along with evidence that the modern photosynthetic system apparently arose through the lateral gene transfer and fusion of two photosynthetic systems

                            This is absurd. Convergence, horizontal gene transfer, and fusion are all made up mechanisms to fix the problem that the scientific evidence contradicts evolutionary theory. This isn’t making sense.

But it gets worse.

Not only are evolutionists forced to draw from their army of phony explanatory mechanisms, but they are left with the proverbial “missing link.” The problem is, from where did the photosynthesis come? It couldn’t have come from the purported common ancestor via descent, and it “just appeared” with this “very advanced capability.” So evolutionists have to usher in their horizontal gene transfer story.

But from where?

From where did the incredible battery of genes—that would just happen to team up and create the all-time incredible capability of photosynthesis—come? Conveniently for evolutionists—and here’s one of the beauties of being an evolutionist—they can never know. Like Flew’s gardener, evolutionists are certain that some “missing link” organism somehow had photosynthesis up and running, or just happened to have the crucial genes just lying around, but we likely will never observe that organism because it has long since become extinct.

Oh how convenient. Some mysterious organism did it. We’ll never know just how photosynthesis evolved because the organism where it happened has long since gone extinct, billions of years ago. Since then, it just luckily passed the technology around for other organisms to have, such as the cyanobacteria. Choi and Fischer explain:

                   The fact that Oxyphotobacteria possess the complex apparatus for oxygenic photosynthesis while their closest relatives do not suggests that Oxyphotobacteria may have imported the genes for photosynthesis from another organism via a process known as lateral gene transfer. It remains a mystery what the source of these genes was, “and because it happened long ago, it's pretty likely that the group may actually have gone extinct,” Fischer said.

             Can I be an evolutionist too?

Photosynthesis is crucial to life and incredibly complex, evolutionists haven’t a clue how it could have evolved, it doesn’t fit the evolutionary common descent model and “just appeared” without a hint of where it came from, evolutionists are forced to make up a long just-so story to try to explain it, their story can’t be falsified because the origin of photosynthesis has long since disappeared, and on top of all this, evolutionists insist their theory is a fact, beyond all reasonable doubt.

This is hilarious. It is like something out of a Monte Python skit. Evolution loses every battle, but manages to win the war because, after all, it’s right.

How the U.S went from king George to president George.

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DZO1O3CeW2w" title="The election of George Washington was weirder than you think" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Molecular biology and the edge of Darwinism.

 <iframe width="932" height="699" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GrSPmpMITNI" title="Intelligent Design Under Fire" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Darwinism's metaphysics?

 <iframe width="932" height="699" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Alwn4CMi1w" title="How Darwinists Think - Lecture and Q&amp;A" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Octopuses troll Darwinism,?

 

Massive RNA Editing and the octopus.

Cornelius G Hunter 

<iframe width="420" height="236" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PmDTtkZlMwM" title="Shapeshifting Octopus, amazing camouflage" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Click the video to see an octopus mimic algae. Octopuses have an amazing ability to sense and mimic the coloration, shape, and texture of their surroundings. They literally “blend in” as the video illustrates. Note how the audience appropriately responds at the end of the video. You can read more about this amazing ability here. The idea that such mimicry evolved is unlikely. The problem is that evolution’s random mutations are not up to the task. Too many of them are required. And no, natural selection doesn’t make it happen. Selection cannot coax, cajole, persuade or otherwise sweet talk mutations into happening. Selection is simply a label for what happens afterwards: in a word, harmful mutations are eliminated. Indeed, evolution co-founder Alfred Wallace thought the term “natural selection” should be dropped altogether, because it really doesn’t do anything and so is misleading. According to evolutionary theory, selection can have no forward influence on mutations. It cannot cause helpful mutations to occur—no teleology. But helpful mutations are what is needed, and in spades. The octopuses amazing mimicry needs both to sense the surrounding environment, and then to perform its amazing blending ability. Sensing without blending is useless. And blending without sensing is useless. You need both, and that is beyond the reach of random mutations. It isn’t going to happen. In fact, this same problem applies to both sensing and to blending, taken individually. This is because a large number of mutations are required to construct either one. And to add insult to injury, research at the molecular level is just making things worse.

Evolution is supposed to be caused by random mutations in the genome. Mutations in segments of the DNA where genes reside may change the gene product, such as a protein. But organisms have a way of creating such genetic changes on the fly, and it is called RNA editing. After a gene is transcribed, the RNA copy can be edited, for example by altering a single nucleotide. This RNA editing, or recoding, is done by a protein machine.

RNA editing is typically not very common. But in recent years, high levels of recoding have been found in the octopus, and new research is adding to the story. In the octopus and allied species, the majority of RNA transcripts are found to have an edited nucleotide and, importantly, they are often conserved across the species.

In other words, whereas in most species that have been studied there is relatively little RNA editing, in the octopus and its closest neighboring species there is extensive RNA editing and the recoding sites are often conserved across these neighboring species. Also the DNA flanking sequences, on either side of the recoding sites, tend to be conserved across these neighboring species.

                        This evidence demolishes evolution. Here are seven reasons why.

First, why would these few species suddenly have such an escalation of RNA editing? Evolution has no explanation why this mechanism would suddenly take on such importance in this small group of species. As one evolutionist admitted, “Most organisms have very few functional [editing] sites in coding regions. This is why we find it so unusual and surprising that in squid, octopus, and cuttlefish, we see exactly the opposite.”

Second, the flanking sequences are difficult to evolve. These consist of hundreds of nucleotides, and once transcribed they need to form RNA secondary structures which the RNA editing protein recognizes. These sequences can be highly specific. In some cases even a single nucleotide substitution can abolish RNA editing. In other words, evolution’s random mutations must somehow luckily find these specific sequences. Without the right secondary structure, RNA editing is greatly slowed. But at the start of the search evolution is most likely nowhere close to having a sequence that will form the right secondary structure. And it would be unlikely for a random mutation to make the difference. In other words, multiple mutations are required before even a hint of success is obtained. And of course this all must occur while not disrupting any preexisting messages the sequence carries. This is highly unlikely. And yet this must occur not just once, but twice, on both sides of the recoding site. And furthermore, this must occur not just twice but, err, hundreds of thousands of times, at the many different recoding sites. It’s not going to happen.

Third, these long conserved flanking sequences, hundreds of nucleotides long on either side of the recoding sites, imply evolution loses the ability to evolve.

Fourth, according to evolutionary theory the fact that these recoding sites are conserved across different species means that they are adaptive. In other words, they improve fitness. This massive RNA editing is a feature, not a bug. But given that there are many thousands of these recoding sites, evolution faces a combinatorial explosion. Not only is there an astronomical number of different combinations of RNA editing actions, but for any given gene there is the question of which RNA transcripts to recode? Unless a very simple solution is found, this combinatorial explosion is way beyond the meager resources of evolution’s random mutations.

Fifth, undoubtedly RNA editing is used to respond to changing conditions. Recoding has been shown, for example, to affect potassium channel function. But if RNA editing is a mechanism for response to changing conditions, then there must be signaling instructions that tell the RNA editing protein when and where to perform its editing. But the origin of that signaling system would require a great many mutations. Again, that likely would be beyond evolution’s resources.

Sixth, this massive RNA editing capability will not function properly without its many components in place. You need the recoding site, the flanking sequences, the RNA editing protein, and the signaling system. It will do no good to have the proper DNA sequences without the editing protein, or both of those without the signaling system, or the signaling system without the flanking sequences. In other words, there are multiple, interdependent components which all need to be in place for this RNA editing capability to function.

                   Seventh, it is silly to think evolution could find the right recoding sites. The problem is that, even if this RNA editing capability could evolve and all the different interdependent components could fall into place, it would not likely pick the right recoding site. Simply put, each evolutionary experiment would require a monumental effort and time span before the needed feedback could be obtained about whether or not the recoding site was a good one. Evolution would need to evolve the recoding site and the flanking sequences before natural selection could act. Undoubtedly most recoding sites would not help. They might be neutral, or they might be harmful. But they would not help to construct the adaptive RNA editing capability we find in the octopus. Therefore this evolution search problem is astronomically difficult. It needs to search through a large number of mostly useless candidate recoding sites, and each try would require an eternity. But it gets worse, for it is likely that any single recoding site isn’t going to accomplish much all by itself. There are many thousands of these recoding sites, and undoubtedly multiple recoding sites are needed to work together. So even if evolution could somehow accomplish the search for a single recoding site, which is astronomically difficult, it likely would not improve fitness by itself.

One look at the video above and anyone can see evolution is not a good theory. This is just common sense. Not surprisingly, the science confirms this common sense. In fact, the science doubles down, many times over.

There simply is no excuse for continuing to thinking evolution created the species. There are just too many contradictions, too many absurdities, too many ridiculous examples showing evolution to be a complete failure.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising that all of this leaves evolutionists a bit shell-shocked. They can manage little more than the usual Aristotelian teleology. As one headline explained, “ ‘Smart’ cephalopods trade off genome evolution for prolific RNA editing.” Trade off genome evolution for prolific RNA editing? That is teleological. Likewise, an evolutionist explained, “Mutation is usually thought of as the currency of natural selection, and these animals are suppressing that to maintain recoding flexibility at the RNA level.” Again, more teleology. The infinitive form tells all.

The research paper explains that these species “invented” the massive recoding. Invented? The paper also turns these species into intelligent agents:

                  .....  Why would the coleoids choose to alter genetic information within RNA rather than hardwire the change in DNA?

                              Choose to?

This is absurd.

Evolution has been demolished by science. We are far, far beyond any kind of controversy. While evolutionists want to claim they do legitimate science, the empirical evidence has long since left the station. Evolution has been utterly demolished.

                

Yet more on Darwinism as secular superstitition

 New evolution book reviewed by Hans Madueme.

Cornelius G Hunter 

If you want to understand evolutionary thought just read the literature. Charles Darwin accurately characterized his 1859 book on evolution as “one long argument.” That argument was based on several popular religious beliefs leading to faulty science. For example, throughout the volume Darwin’s ideas rely on a popular religious doctrine called utilitarianism, and in Chapter Six Darwin explicitly states that his theory would absolutely fail without it.

Ever since Darwin, little has changed. One after the other, evolutionists have attempted to explain and prove Darwin’s idea. And one after the other, they have simply confirmed that evolutionary thought is not a scientific theory in the normal sense but rather is, at its core, a religious idea with little regard for the science. It really is nothing more than the ancient Epicureanism, inserted into modern science. Consider the latest entry, Adam and the Genome, a brand new Brazos Press title authored by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight.

In the tradition of the evolution literature, the first part of the book presents a long list of arguments for why we should believe the biological world arose by evolution—a combination of chance and natural law. The second part of the book, as the title suggests, addresses the question of Adam and Eve. Simply put, the book argues that Scripture, read rightly, never did point to a historical Adam in the first place. This makes Scripture consistent with evolution’s call for humanity to begin as a relatively large population.

But this reading of Scripture is influenced by evolution. As McKnight explains, his approach accepts “the reality of genetic evidence supporting a theory of evolution”. [173] But, in fact, there is no such “reality.” The genetic evidence does not support evolution—quite the opposite.

Religious beliefs mandating evolution are what led to today’s theory of evolution, not empirical scientific findings. And now, new scientific observations (such as genetics) are interpreted according to evolution. The observations are theory-laden. Furthermore, with the broad acceptance of evolution, theologians such as McKnight are telling us we need to adjust our religious understandings in light of the “reality” of the scientific evidence.

This is what computer scientists refer to as Garbage-In, Garbage-Out (GIGO). It is little wonder McKnight and many others are calling for this “new” understanding of Scripture, for that “new” understanding is centuries old, and is what mandated evolution in the first place. What goes around comes around.

Unfortunately the myth that evolution is a scientific no-brainer, a given, a fact, and on par with gravity and the round Earth, is difficult to dispel. The powerful religious ideas mandating evolution have led to the myth that evolution is legitimate and compelling science.

For example, in his review of Adam and the Genome, Hans Madueme rightly explains that the history of science should give us pause regarding evolution. Too often scientists have had high confidence in ideas that later would be discarded. Madueme accurately detects such high confidence in evolutionary thought, as exemplified in Adam and the Genome.

Unfortunately Madueme also gives high marks to the science presented in the book. According to Madueme, it “unpacks the genomic evidence for evolution and common ancestry,” and even “skeptical readers will come away impressed at the deep explanatory power of evolutionary theory.” Impressed?

And what exactly is this “deep explanatory power of evolutionary theory” to which Madueme refers? Well, err, Madueme fails to mention any for he “skipped over most of the details.” But it is precisely in those details where the evidences and arguments fall apart. We have already seen that the book makes erroneous arguments that the fossil evidence and echolocation support evolution (here and here). In fact, as we saw, both these evidences and arguments, once stripped of the religion, far from supporting evolution, severely contradict the theory.

In my next post I will look at another one of the book’s arguments involving pseudogenes. What we will find, again, is not “deep explanatory power of evolutionary theory” but exactly the opposite.

Your AI companion maybe all ears but don't ask him for a hand?

 For AI, Human Hands Are Exceptional…For Now

Peter Biles 

AI image generators like Midjourney or DALL-E are generally adept at capturing the accuracy of the human form. The concerns over copyright, job infringement, and general degradation of the visual arts via such AI are ongoing concerns for many artists and practitioners. However, a new New Yorker article by Kyle Chayka identifies a noticeable flaw in AI artwork: human hands. 

                

Missing the Big Picture

Chayka recalls an art class where he was asked to draw his own hand. It’s an assignment for beginners, and as behooves a novice, tempts the artist to focus more on the specific contours of the hand instead of the overall structure and form. The forest gets lost in the trees, so to speak. AI is guilty of a similar flaw. In many artificially contrived images, the hands come up gnarled, disfigured, or otherwise anatomically incorrect. Some of them are minor yet noticeable mistakes upon investigation. Others are repulsive, looking alien and mutant. Chayka writes, 

                   A generator can compute that hands have fingers, but it’s harder to train it to know that there should be only five, or that the digits have more or less set lengths in relation to one another. After all, hands look very different from different angles. Looking down at my own pair as I type this on my laptop keyboard, my fingers are foreshortened and half obscured by my palms; an observer wouldn’t be able to determine their exact X-ray structure from a static image.

KYLE CHAYKA, THE UNCANNY FAILURE OF A.I.-GENERATED HANDS | THE NEW YORKER 

                Hands are hard for computers to replicate given the many angles they can rest in and their general complexity. The result isn’t pretty. 

Chayka thinks that someday we will look back on this flaw with wistful nostalgia. Eventually, AI will learn the form of the human hand and no longer be a novice in Art 101. We will then wish for the days when it produced a bad hand and could remember how a real person could do it more justice. For now, though, AI’s failure in this arena shows a gap in its capacities and highlights an area in the arts still best left to human creators.

                  

Art and Human Bonding 

This week, professor of economics Gary Smith wrote on the importance of critical thinking and writing skills for students. ChatGPT, he says, tempts students to outsource their cognitive brainpower to the machine, but notes that this is setting kids up for failure. In addition, ChatGPT will fail to perform complex written tasks that are best left to humans. He also notes that “writing bonds us,” commenting, 

When I tell you what I think, you learn more about me. When you respond, I learn more about you. We learn about our similarities and differences and, if done politely, become closer. All of that is lost if our written communication becomes my LLM chatting with your LLM.

GARY SMITH, LEARNING TO COMMUNICATE | MIND MATTERS 

                               I wonder if Smith’s wonderful observations here might translate into the issue of AI “art.” Both writing and drawing depend acutely on observation. We have to pay attention to the world around us before we can link together a coherent sentence or draw a glass vase sitting on the kitchen counter. In addition, what if art, like writing, “bonds” us? Isn’t that, after all, one of art’s

 principal purposes? Even if Midjourney and DALL-E master the human hand and its images become indistinguishable from the best digital art done by humans, it lacks a human genesis. It fails to “speak” to us.

      

Communicating with a Live Intelligence 

The essayist Becca Rothfeld frames the problem in terms of whether ChatGPT could write a novel, writing brilliantly in this piece from The Point,

                      Indeed, we read novels, rather than textbooks or user’s manuals, because we are not in the business of extracting propositions but in the business of effecting intimacy with another live intelligence. Literature is not (only) a conveyer of information but a locus of communication, and we cannot communicate with an inanimate mechanism, whirring its insensate way through text it does not even comprehend. For this reason, we could only ever really care about words that have been deliberately placed on a page by another person. Books, the German Romantic novelist Jean Paul once wrote, are “thick letters to friends.” Who would want to correspond with the void?

BECCA ROTHFELD, WHAT CHATBOTS CAN’T DO | THE POINT MAGAZINE 

                        In Rothfeld’s estimation, the technical abilities of AI don’t lay a foundation for its artistic and linguistic value. We don’t go to books and art to ingest information formulated by “the void,” but, as she so eloquently puts it, to commune “with another live intelligence.” The more we value literature and art created by humans, for humans, the more we can discern AI’s proper use and purpose.

Before victory,there must be trials and testings.

Scammed by the crown?

The warmth of solitude?

On the missing mass: Molecular biology edition?

 Richard Sternberg on the Trail of the Immaterial Genome

Evolution news 

On a classic episode of ID the Future, Dr. Richard Sternberg, research fellow at Biologic Institute, speaks on his mathematical/logical work showing the difficulty of identifying genes purely with material phenomena, and that DNA doesn’t have all that’s needed to direct the development of organisms. The math, he says, is even showing gaps in the computability of what happens in the cell, which could help shed light on how machine-like organisms are or are not, how evolvable they are, and whether artificial life is possible. Download the podcast or listen to it here

All noise no signal?

 What the Big Bang Theory Tells Us About Creation

Rob Sheldon 

Writing at Big Think, University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank informs us, “The Big Bang says nothing about the creation of the cosmos.”

                  We are often told that the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic creation — that it tells us how the Universe was created out of nothing and went on to evolve into all the galaxies, stars, and planets. The problem with that characterization is that only the second part of it is true. Yes, what we call the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic evolution. But the Inflationary Universe standard model that guides cosmology says nothing about cosmic origins. The birth of space, time, matter, and energy is simply not there.

             While strictly true, that is a bit misleading. It’s like saying that evolution has nothing to say about the origin of life (OOL). That’s what Ernst Mayr said anyway. But it does. Evolution says that the first life began with a very, very simple cell. And everything evolved from there. The theory of evolution does not say that life came from a primeval pair of humans, for example. Simply by accepting the theory, one excludes many, many creation myths about origins. 

In the same way, simply by accepting the Big Bang, many origin stories are excluded. The universe did not begin with a cosmic snow globe, or an accident at the CERN accelerator. It had to begin with Georges Lemaître’s “Cosmic Egg.”   

If one thinks that OOL is constrained by being forced into an evolutionary theory, then one could at least argue that the origin of the universe is constrained by being fitted into a Big Bang theory. 

scams as WMD?

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Eb7al22iNPc" title="How Scammers Destroyed an Entire Country" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

A paper fortress falls?

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tbc1ooJWG3I" title="BANK RUN PANIC - Second USA Bank in 3 Days sees Run of Withdrawals &amp; Has Nasdaq Shares Suspended" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Transcending biology?

 

Canadian masters athletics ratifies first national record by a trans female.

Running Magazine Canada

In February 2022, at an indoor meet at Toronto’s York University, Tiffany Newell of Welland, Ont., ran 18:02.30 over 5,000m, breaking the Canadian W45-49 record by six seconds. That record was recently ratified by Canadian Masters Athletics (CMA), under the rules and regulations of World Masters Athletics (WMA); it’s the first time a Canadian record was set on the track by a trans woman.

     Newell, a former soccer player and triathlete, began her transition in 2017, but did not begin competing until she completed her transition in 2020 and her testosterone levels matched World Athletics’ current transgender athlete’s policies (WMA follows the rules of the sport set by its worldwide governing body, World Athletics). 

The World Athletics policy states that to be eligible for female competition, transgender athletes must follow three guidelines:

1) provide a written and signed declaration, in a form satisfactory to WA Medical Manager, confirming their gender identity is now female; however, athletes need not have sought or obtained legal recognition of their gender identity or changed the sex marker on official identification (i.e. passports or drivers license).

2) demonstrate to the satisfaction of WA officials “on the balance of probabilities” that the concentration of testosterone in their blood serum has been less than 5 mol/L continuously for a period of at least 12 months (WA’s average range for serum testosterone in males is 7.7-29.4 mol/L; the average for females is 0.2-1.68 mol/L).

3) transgender athletes must keep their serum testosterone concentration below 5 mol/L to maintain eligibility and compete in the female category.

Newell has had some success in her past two seasons. She won a silver medal at the 2021 Canadian XC Championships in the masters 8K and finished second at the 2022 Hamilton Marathon (2:55:57).

Athletics Ontario and Athletics Canada currently offer two gender choices on their annual membership application (male or female), and they do not check the selection unless there is a national record application involved. The member lines up and competes in the gender category that they select. 

The inclusion of transgender athletes in sports became a public debate when U.S. collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas began to break NCAA records. Thomas competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team from 2017 to 2020 and the women’s swim team from 2021 to 2022. In March 2022, she became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport, winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle event.

As a result of Thomas’ success, swimming’s world governing body World Aquatics (known as FINA), voted to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in elite women’s competitions and is working to establish an ‘open’ category in some events as part of its new policy.

World Athletics announced shortly after FINA’s decision that it would review its transgender eligibility policies after swimming passed new rules that restrict transgender participation in women’s events in June 2022.

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said to Insider that when it comes to transgender athletes, he believes in prioritizing fairness over inclusion. “If you pushed me and said I had to choose between fairness or inclusion, I will always lean towards fairness, because that’s what sports have to be based on.”

Newell thinks there are pros and cons to the open category: “The policy makes sense for non-binary athletes, but I don’t feel comfortable racing against men. It categorizes me in the sex I am not identified as. I am a woman, and I feel most comfortable racing against women or other transgender women. I believe an open category can work if athletes can continue to race against athletes of the same gender.”

Waiting for Darwinism?

 Fossil Friday: A Waiting Time Problem for Feathers

Gunter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features a beautiful fossil feather from the Lower Cretaceous Crato limestones of northeast Brazil, which are about 115 million years old. I photographed this fossil at a German trader collection in July 2008. The feather with preserved color pattern could have belonged to a primitive bird or a feathered theropod dinosaur, which coexisted at this time in Earth history. Actually, the origin of pennaceous feathers represents another striking example of the waiting time problem as an obstacle to neo-Darwinian evolution. The rich fossil record of the dinosaur-bird transition shows that there are only a few million years available for the transformation of hair-like dino-fuzz into real bird feathers. This window of time corresponds to only about the average longevity of a single species, but has to accommodate the origin and fixation of multiple coordinated mutations to allow for the formation of vaned feathers, which are considered the most complex integumental structures in the animal kingdom.

Mathematical calculations based on mainstream population genetics strongly suggest that this time interval is much too short for such a transition to be plausibly explained with a blind process of natural selection acting on random mutations. Birds may well have descended from small bipedal dinosaurs, but this transition arguably required the input of very specific new genetic information that had to come from somewhere. Wherever you look in the history of life you stumble upon overwhelming evidence for design.

The highest cliffs in natural history's fitness landscape?

 New book: New proteins evolve very easily.

Cornelius G Hunter 

We  have seen that a new evolution book co-authored by evolutionist Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight is influenced by the mythical Warfare Thesis (here and here) and makes erroneous arguments that the fossils, echolocation, and pseudogenes support evolution (here,  here and here). We now move on to another topic: protein evolution. Proteins are composed of a linear string of amino acids, often hundreds in length, and perform all sorts of important tasks in the cell. They could not have evolved by any stretch of the imagination, and so pose a rather difficult problem for evolutionists. Our new book on evolution attempts to resolve this problem with a claim that has long since been understood to be false. In fact, the claim, properly understood, provides yet more scientific evidence against evolution. 

The problem of protein evolution

For evolution to work biology must be chocked full of structures that can arise via long, gradual evolutionary pathways. Mutations must be able to slowly accumulate, gradually improving the structure. In other words, the “fitness landscape” must be smooth and gradual, not rugged or precipitous.

That evolutionary expectation has been found to be false many times, and proteins are no exception. It is now clear that for a given protein, only a few changes to its amino acid sequence can be sustained before the protein function is all but eliminated. Here is how one paper explained it:

                     The accepted paradigm that proteins can tolerate nearly any amino acid substitution has been replaced by the view that the deleterious effects of mutations, and especially their tendency to undermine the thermodynamic and kinetic stability of protein, is a major constraint on protein evolvability—the ability of proteins to acquire changes in sequence and function

                   In other words, protein function precipitously drops off with only a tiny fraction of its amino acids altered. It is not a gradual fitness landscape. Another paper described the protein fitness landscape as rugged.

Therefore it is not surprising that various studies on evolving proteins have failed to show a viable mechanism. One study concluded that 10^63 attempts would be required to evolve a relatively short protein. And a similar result (10^65 attempts required) was obtained by comparing protein sequences. Another study found that 10^64 to 10^77 attempts are required, and another study concluded that 10^70 attempts would be required.

So something like 10^70 attempts are required yet evolutionists estimate that only 10^43 attempts are possible. In other words, there is a shortfall of 27 orders of magnitude.

But it gets worse. The estimate that 10^43 attempts are possible is utterly unrealistic. For it assumes billions of years are available, and that for that entire time the Earth is covered with bacteria, constantly churning out mutations and new protein experiments. Aside from the fact that these assumptions are entirely unrealistic, the estimate also suffers from the rather inconvenient fact that those bacteria are, err, full of proteins. In other word, for evolution to evolve proteins, they must already exist in the first place.

This is absurd. And yet, even with these overly optimistic assumptions, evolution falls short by 27 orders of magnitude.

The numbers don’t add up. Proteins reveal scientific problems for evolution. What is interesting is how evolutionists react to these problems.

                

The “solution” to protein evolution

A common solution cited by evolutionists for the problem of protein evolution is the case of nylonases—enzymes that rapidly arose in bacteria, in the last century, and are able to breakdown byproducts of the nylon manufacturing process. The idea here is that these byproducts of the nylon manufacturing process were present in the bacteria’s environment for the first time. The bacteria had never been exposed to such chemicals, and yet in an evolutionary blink of an eye, were able to produce proteins to metabolize the new chemicals. Does this not demonstrate that the chance origin of a protein-coding genes is not a problem? Proteins could have evolved with no problem, after all, we just witnessed it occur with the origin of nylonases. As the new book explains, protein evolution “appears to be trivial for evolution to achieve.” [86]

Unfortunately this icon of evolution is an enormous misrepresentation of the science.

                           

The science

The evolutionary claim that the nylonases demonstrate how easy protein evolution is non scientific for several reasons. Indicators of this include that fact that the nylonases evolved so rapidly—in an entirely unrealistic time frame under evolution, and that they arose in bacteria with thousands of preexisting proteins. Again, this evolutionary claim of how proteins evolve is circular, it requires the preexistence of proteins.

None of this is feasible given the problems of protein evolution discussed above. The scientific inference would be that the bacteria developed the nylonases because those chemicals they metabolize were present in the environment. In other words, directed adaptation.

Indeed, this is precisely what researchers in the field have concluded. They hypothesize that the new metabolism capability is a stress response, an adaptation to a challenging environment. In other words, the environment influenced the adaptation. This is not a case of evolutionary change. The nylonase enzymes did not arise from a random search over sequence space until the right enzymes were luckily found and could be selected for. That would have required eons of time, and is far beyond evolution’s capability, as we have seen. Instead, cellular structures rapidly formed new enzymes, due to the environmental change.

Indeed, such adaptation to nylon manufacture byproducts has been repeated in laboratory experiments. In a matter of months bacteria acquire the ability to digest the unforeseen chemical. Researchers speculate that mechanisms responding to environmental stress are involved in inducing adaptive mutations.

This does not demonstrate protein evolution. In fact it refutes evolution. Evolution does not have the resources to have created directed adaptation mechanisms. And even if it did, such mechanisms would not have been selected for because they provide no immediate fitness improvement.

This is not evidence that protein-coding genes can evolve by chance. A new gene, arising within a modern cell responding to an environmental challenge, is not analogous to chance origin. Unfortunately evolutionists have a long history of inappropriately claiming otherwise (for example, see here and here).

We have seen that this new evolution book makes erroneous arguments that the fossils, echolocation, and pseudogenes support evolution. We now see another erroneous argument for protein evolution.

All these arguments and evidences are typical. They are icons of evolution, and it is astonishing how durable they are in the evolution literature given their complete failure.

If evolution was indicated by the science I would be the first to sign up. But in fact it is an age-old religious idea that makes no sense on the science. And likewise this new book is an utter disaster. The confection immediately crumbles under even a little probing.

From savage 'wolf' to civilised 'wolf'?

 When Darwinian Racism Came to Africa, and to the West

Evolution News 

A new episode of ID the Future features another reading from scholar Olufemi Oluniyi’s new book, Darwin comes to Africa. In this excerpt we learn how Darwin himself laid much of the groundwork for social Darwinist ideas, primarily in his book The Descent of Man, and how those ideas were energetically developed in the ensuing decades by various mainstream scientists. Oluniyi further details how their work fueled pseudo-scientific racism against Africans and other indigenous peoples outside the West. Download the podcast or listen to it here. To learn more about this neglected corner of modern Western history, and for the good news that the flow of evidence has turned against Darwinism and, with it, social Darwinist principles, pick up Oluniyi’s book here.

Dr. Frankenstein's Children?

 Mice Born with No Mother, Two Fathers: What Next? 

Wesley Smith 

Biotechnologists keep pushing the borders of what is possible in procreation. Mice pups have now been born with no mother and two fathers.

It was done, apparently, by transforming skin cells from male mice into pluripotent stem cells and thence into egg cells with XX chromosomes. From the Guardian story:

                             Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes.

“The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome,” said Hayashi. “We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome.”

Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilised with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups.

Why Do Such a Thing?

Ostensibly the purpose would be to help with rare forms of infertility in women. But these are dual-edged technologies. This, I believe, is the real aim behind such experiments:

                            “Purely in terms of technology, it will be possible [in humans] even in 10 years,” he said, adding that he personally would be in favour of the technology being used clinically to allow two men to have a baby if it were shown to be safe.

                  Why? What is the urgency in that?

And What About the Baby?

There is no assurance that the baby would not be harmed by such biological manipulation. Or, is that a secondary concern to the great contemporary maw of “I want”?

But Wesley, what if it really is “safe”? How would we know without unethical human experimentation? Humans are much more complex organisms than mice. The only way such procreative manipulation could “be shown to be safe” in humans would require repeated experiments — that would almost surely involve repeated abortions, stillbirths, or babies born with birth defects — to perfect techniques. It would also require surrogate mothers or artificial gestation chambers to bring the babies to term, which would pose other ethical issues.

Because we might be able to figure out how to twist nature into a knot doesn’t mean that we should. The time is long past due to legally regulate human experiments in this field of biotechnology before it is too late.

The sausage factory?

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1Yt2xUJfdyw" title="Supreme Revenge (full documentary) | FRONTLINE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>