On irreducible complexity

 Answering Farina on Behe’s Work: Irreducible Complexity

Jonathan McLatchie

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Dr. McLatchie as a new colleague. He is Resident Biologist and Fellow at the Center for Science and Culture.

On the Internet, some people are worth responding to and others are not. We have written enough lately in response to YouTuber Dave Farina following his recent debate with Rice University synthetic chemist Dr. James Tour. However, Mr. Farina has also posted a popular video criticizing Dr. Michael Behe’s work, and I will turn to that now.

I am a specialist in molecular and cell biology, and was thus interested in Farina’s video reviewing Michael Behe’s three books — Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves. In this and several subsequent articles, I will offer a rebuttal to Mr. Farina’s analysis of Dr. Behe’s work. Here, I will address Farina’s commentary on Darwin’s Black Box – in particular, his alleged counterexamples of irreducibly complex systems having evolved by natural processes.

Evolution of the Cit+ Mutant

The video contends that Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity is empirically falsified by documented examples of systems that meet Behe’s definition of being “irreducibly complex” yet evolving by unguided mechanisms. The first exhibit is Richard Lenski’s long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli, in which it was observed that, after some 33,000 generations (15 years), bacterial cells evolved the ability to grow on citrate under aerobic conditions.1 The genetic basis for this ability was subsequently identified.2 E. coli already possesses the ability to grow on citrate under anaerobic conditions, facilitated by a citrate transporter protein encoded by the gene citT. A 2933 base pair stretch of DNA, containing the citT gene, underwent duplication. The result was that a copy of the hitherto unexpressed citT gene was placed under the control of the promoter of the adjacent gene, rnk, which as a consequence drove expression under aerobic conditions. This is a relatively simple change that does not require multiple co-dependent mutations to bring it about. Indeed, this instance of adaptation does not even require the origin of any novel genes and proteins, or even the modification of existing ones. The citT gene already codes for a citrate transporter which imports citrate into the cell in the absence of oxygen. The duplication event led to a loss of regulation of the citT protein such that it was expressed under both oxygen-rich and oxygen-deficient conditions, rather than in only oxygen-deficient ones.

Furthermore, the ability of the cells to grow on citrate under aerobic conditions was optimized by several other mutations.3 As Behe himself summarizes:

Even before the critical mutation occurred, a different mutation in a gene for a protein that makes citrate in E. coli degraded the protein’s ability to bind another metabolite, abbreviated NADH, which normally helps regulate its activity. Another, later, mutation to the same gene decreased its activity by about 90 percent. Why were those mutations helpful? As the authors write, ‘When citrate is the sole carbon source, [computer analysis] predicts optimal growth when there is no flux through [the enzyme]. In fact, any [of that enzyme] activity is detrimental.’ And if something is detrimental, random mutation will quickly get rid of it. Further computer analysis by the authors suggested that the citrate mutant would be even more efficient if two other metabolic pathways that were normally turned off were both switched on. They searched and discovered that two regulatory proteins that usually suppress those pathways had been degraded by point mutations; the traffic lights were now stuck on green.4

In other words, these mutations that optimized the ability of the cells to grow on citrate were in fact damaging. Since they supported the present needs of the organism, they were preserved by natural selection. As Behe argues at length in Darwin Devolves, the majority of mutations that are subject to positive selection are damaging rather than constructive, since there are far more ways to acquire an advantage by breaking something than there are ways to do so by building something. Readers may find interesting Behe’s response to Richard Lenski’s review of Darwin Devolves, which you can find here.

One researcher who has studied the evolution of citrate metabolism in E. coli is microbiologist Dr. Scott Minnich, a Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Farina is aware of this fact, and states that “Ironically, one of Behe’s colleagues at Discovery Institute, Dr. Scott Minnich — a professor in the department of agricultural and life sciences at the University of Idaho — co-authored a paper describing this pathway in detail, inadvertently highlighting its irreducible nature. I’m sure he got a slap on the wrist from Meyer and pals for that.” However, the Minnich paper5 in fact supports Behe’s interpretation of these results rather than Lenski’s — that is, that “no new functional coded element was gained or lost, just copied.”6 I am therefore doubtful that Farina has read the paper. Lenski’s original paper had suggested that the adaptation process involved three steps — potentiation (involving initial neutral mutations), actualization (the promoter fusion event described above), and refinement (increasing expression of the dctA gene, encoding a transporter that facilitates recovery of lost succinate during citrate import). In the view of Lenski and his colleagues, the reason the trait took some 15 years to evolve is because of the need for the initial neutral mutations (“historical contingency”) that by themselves do not promote growth but are necessary for the later actualization event. Minnich’s lab demonstrated that the mutants observed by the Lenski lab could be isolated much more rapidly — within 14 days rather than 15 years (and in as few as a hundred generations rather than 33,000) — and that the length of time it took in Lenski’s experiment more probably reflects an artifact of the experimental conditions than a requirement of evolution.

Vpu Protein

The video offers a few other supposed examples of irreducibly complex traits evolving, including the Vpu protein in HIV-1.7 Farina comments, 

This now has a novel function — inactivating a protein of the human immune system called tetherin. Human tetherin is different enough from the same protein in chimpanzees such that simian immunodeficiency virus, from which HIV evolved, can’t counter it. This new trait requires three to seven specific mutations, leading to several completely new protein binding sites. HIV only jumped from chimps into humans around 1930, so this is another recent example of an irreducibly complex trait evolving.

Vigan and Neil (2010) “carried out an extensive mutagenesis of the HIV-1 NL4.3 Vpu TM domain to identify three amino acid positions…that are required for tetherin antagonism.”8 Mutating two of these positions (namely, A14L and W22A) showed a marked defect, whereas the A18L mutant showed only a minor defect. Thus, it is not even the case that all three amino acid positions are crucial for tetherin antagonism. Furthermore, viruses have enormous population sizes and extremely high mutation rates. They are therefore able to evolve complex traits requiring multiple co-dependent mutations far more readily than more complex organisms, including bacteria. Thus, for those two reasons, this is really not a good example to cite in support of Farina’s contention about irreducible complexity arising in more complex organisms.

Horizontal Gene Transfer to the Rescue?

As a further example, the video offers “the many animals that eat photosynthetic algae which appear to be on their way to becoming photosynthetic themselves via endosymbiosis.” Farina cites a paper on “Horizontal gene transfer of the algal nuclear gene psbO to the photosynthetic sea slug Elysia chlorotica.”9 The paper discusses the acquisition of plastids by the sea slug Elysia chlorotica by ingestion of the photosynthetic algae Vaucheria litorea. Though more than 90 percent of the proteins required for plastid metabolism are encoded in the nuclear genome of the algae, the plastids are nonetheless still able to photosynthesize within the sea slug. The paper determines that the essential plastid proteins are supplied by the sea slug itself, and that the genes which support photosynthesis have been acquired through horizontal gene transfer. But this does not involve the evolution of any new complex traits. The genes and proteins already existed but were simply transferred from one organism to another.

Rapid Lizard Evolution?

Next, the video notes that “There are lizards which are transitioning from laying eggs to live birth, in one case doing both in a single litter,” citing a paper from 2019.10 But it seems more likely that the Saiphos equalis was designed with the capability of switching between laying eggs (“oviparous”) and carrying embryos internally until completely developed (“viviparous”). Indeed, as Farina noted, there was even one case of a female giving birth to a live infant and laying eggs in the same litter. Moreover, it has been shown that very similar genes are expressed between the two modes, suggesting “that reproductive mode is relatively labile in this species,” and that “there may be fewer physiological barriers to transitions between parity modes than previously thought, an assertion that is supported by our gene expression data, in which oviparous and viviparous individuals expressed genes with many of the same functions during the reproductive cycle.”11 Furthermore, it has been previously shown that differences in parity mode between two species of Phrynocephalus are due to differences in gene expression rather than the result of many mutations.12

Multicellular Algae

As a final example, the video argues that “There are the unicellular algae that evolved in the lab to become permanently multicellular,” citing a paper by Herron et al. (2018) — “De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation.”13 In the study, populations of the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii were subjected to selective pressure by the introduction of the filter-feeding predator Paramecium tetraurelia. They found that two of the five populations developed multicellular structures. However, the multicellular populations lacked motility and the multicellular structures did not evolve multiple cell types. Moreover, as the authors of the paper note, “The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids [i.e. multicellular structures] suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures.” While the strains that evolved in the experiment are obligately multicellular (meaning that being composed of multiple cells is an essential and permanent part of their life cycle), the authors suggest that the genetic basis of the evolved multicellularity phenotype “involves the co-option of a previously existing plastic response.” If this is the case, the authors note, “the shift from a primarily unicellular (but facultatively multicellular) to an obligately multicellular life cycle may have required only a change from facultative to obligate expression of the genes involved in palmelloid formation.” In other words, the transition from being able to exist as single-celled organisms, while forming multicellular structures under certain conditions, to being permanently multicellular may have involved a shift from being able to turn the relevant genes on or off to the genes being permanently locked on. See also this short article by Michael Behe where he addresses a similar paper.

Straw Man Arguments

A common tactic in debate is setting up and then knocking down a straw man argument — that is, a version of your interlocuter’s argument that has been modified to render it easier to refute. The Farina video complains that ID proponents turn scientific research into a game of whack-a-mole by moving on to some other system and claiming that it is irreducibly complex when prior similar claims have turned out to be false. He comments, “No matter how many times creationists point to a supposedly unevolvable system and then biologists figure out its evolutionary history, there’s always another system creationists will point to and say, ‘But this this one — surely, this one — couldn’t have evolved.” However, I am not persuaded that any of the systems that have been proposed by Behe and other proponents of ID to be irreducibly complex have been shown to be evolvable by naturalistic processes. It would be one thing if there were detailed, plausible evolutionary scenarios that could account for thousands of complex biological systems save for a relative handful. Instead, it is the case that essentially none of the complex systems found in living organisms can be plausibly accounted for in this way.

The video also grossly misrepresents the structure of the inference from irreducible complexity to design. As Farina summarizes, “Humans build things; therefore, everything must have been built.” In fact, the inference is much more nuanced. The argument says that well-matched arrangements of parts that work together to achieve some higher-level objective are the sorts of systems that are habitually associated with conscious agents — since intelligent beings, unlike naturalistic processes, are capable of goal-directedness. Therefore, on the hypothesis that a mind was involved in the creation of biological systems, the existence of irreducibly complex systems is not particularly surprising. However, if the design hypothesis is false, such systems become wildly surprising. Given the top-heaviness of this likelihood ratio (or “Bayes factor”), these systems favor a design hypothesis. Moreover, since each requires a significant appeal to chance, each one is epistemically independent, meaning that the Bayes factors for the many thousands of irreducibly complex systems multiply together, forming a massive cumulative case for design.

Notes

Blount ZD, Borland CZ, Lenski RE. Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008; 105(23):7899-906.

Blount ZD, Barrick JE, Davidson CJ, Lenski RE. Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population. Nature. 2012;489(7417):513-8.

Quandt EM, Gollihar J, Blount ZD, Ellington AD, Georgiou G, Barrick JE. Fine-tuning citrate synthase flux potentiates and refines metabolic innovation in the Lenski evolution experiment. Elife. 2015; 4:e09696.

Behe MJ, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution (HarperOne, 2020), 139.

Van Hofwegen DJ, Hovde CJ, Minnich SA. Rapid Evolution of Citrate Utilization by Escherichia coli by Direct Selection Requires citT and dctA. J Bacteriol.2016;198(7):1022-34.

Behe MJ, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution (HarperOne, 2020), 188.

Lim ES, Malik HS, Emerman M. Ancient adaptive evolution of tetherin shaped the functions of Vpu and Nef in human immunodeficiency virus and primate lentiviruses. J Virol. 2010; 84(14):7124-34. 

Vigan R, Neil SJ. Determinants of tetherin antagonism in the transmembrane domain of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 Vpu protein. J Virol. 2010; 84(24):12958-70.

Rumpho ME, Worful JM, Lee J, Kannan K, Tyler MS, Bhattacharya D, Moustafa A, Manhart JR. Horizontal gene transfer of the algal nuclear gene psbO to the photosynthetic sea slug Elysia chlorotica. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008; 105(46):17867-71.

Laird MK, Thompson MB, Whittington CM. Facultative oviparity in a viviparous skink ( Saiphos equalis). Biol Lett. 2019; 15(4):20180827.

Griffith OW, Brandley MC, Belov K, Thompson MB. Reptile Pregnancy Is Underpinned by Complex Changes in Uterine Gene Expression: A Comparative Analysis of the Uterine Transcriptome in Viviparous and Oviparous Lizards. Genome Biol Evol. 2016; 8(10):3226-3239.

Gao W, Sun YB, Zhou WW, Xiong ZJ, Chen L, Li H, Fu TT, Xu K, Xu W, Ma L, Chen YJ, Xiang XY, Zhou L, Zeng T, Zhang S, Jin JQ, Chen HM, Zhang G, Hillis DM, Ji X, Zhang YP, Che J. Genomic and transcriptomic investigations of the evolutionary transition from oviparity to viviparity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA.2019;116(9): 3646-3655.

M.D. Herron et al. (2019), “De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation,” Scientific Reports 9: 2328.

Primeval nanomachines troll Darwinism again?

Local Fitness Landscape Mapped Out For Green Fluorescent Protein

Cornelius G Hunter  

As we have discussed many times, proteins are a show-stopper for evolution. Proteins consist of dozens, hundreds and even thousands of amino acids and, like most machines, they don’t work very well until most of the parts (amino acids in this case) are in place. Half of the amino acids don’t give you half the function of a protein. Now, a new paper reinforces the problem of protein evolution.

One approach to studying how evolution could create new protein designs is to start with some sort of random sequence of amino acids, see how well it works, and try to evolve it to obtain a protein. This is difficult because the protein design space is astronomically huge and proteins are sparse within that space. Any random sequence of amino acids will merely give you junk. Furthermore, the fitness landscape is flat and doesn’t provide the guidance evolution needs to move toward functional proteins.

Another approach is to start at the end and work backwards. In other words, start with the finished product—a functional protein—and see what the fitness landscape looks like as you swap in different amino acids. This is difficult because, unfortunately for evolution, the fitness landscape drops off precipitously as you move away from the native protein design. Modifying only a few percent of the amino acids leads to a rapid loss of function.

The new paper takes this second approach. It uses a bioluminescent protein known as the green fluorescent protein, taken from the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria. It is a wonderful study that systematically mapped out the protein’s function (as measured by the protein’s fluorescence) for a total of 51,715 different protein sequences that are nearby the native sequence.

The results confirmed what earlier studies had indicated: the protein function drops off dramatically with only a relatively small number of substitutions. But the study also explored the effect of multiple substitutions. It is well known that the effect of two substitutions, for example, are not always simply the sum of their individual effects. They can interact with each other in either positive or negative ways. This is referred to as epistasis.

The new study found that negative epistasis was strong and prevalent. As one of the researchers explained:

We were really surprised when we finally had a chance to look at exactly how the interactions between mutations occur. We also did not expect that almost all the mutations that are only slightly damaging on their own can destroy fluorescence completely when combined together.

It was well understood that evolving a protein is an astronomically unlikely event, and these results indicate it is even more difficult. Those negative results, however, were not reported in the paper. Instead, the paper discussed possible ways that one green fluorescent protein, found in one particular species, may have evolved into other green fluorescent proteins, found in other species. The implications for the initial evolution of a protein were ignored.

The Origin of Life=the origin of information?

 Information and Life’s Origin — A Retrospective View

Eric Hedin

In the late 1980s, I first encountered the science of information theory and its application to theories of the origin of life. My introduction to the subject was a book, Origins and Destiny1, by research scientist Robert Gange. He described the idea of a generalized form of the traditional Second Law of Thermodynamics, based on quantum statistical mechanics. In conjunction with the understanding that the formation of life from non-life constitutes a rise in specified complexity rather than increasing order, this generalized Second Law raised a theoretical barrier against any natural origin of life scenario.

The traditional Second Law of Thermodynamics is viewed as an inviolable arbiter of possible outcomes for all physical processes. In particular, any conceivable proposal for a perpetual motion machine can, without analysis, be rejected based on the Second Law. With regars to the origin and development of life, the generalized Second Law states that any “alleged natural explanation…will be untrue in the same way a patent examiner in Washington, DC, knows an alleged invention for a perpetual motion machine is untrue.”2

A Postdoc Wonders

As a young postdoctoral researcher in physics, I wondered why the quantum statistical version of the Second Law wasn’t more widely recognized as an aspect of physical reality that limited any proposed natural mechanism for the origin of life. However, since the background physics of the generalized Second Law is typically buried in graduate-level texts on quantum statistical mechanics, perhaps its low visibility isn’t surprising.

Since my own physics research trajectory took me from experimental plasma physics to integrated optics to computational nano-electronics, my professional work did not directly intersect with research on the physical aspects of information theory. However, my personal interest in seeing how evidence for intelligent design held up to scientific advances kept my attention focused on relevant developments in cosmology and molecular biology.

In the early 1990s, the graduate library at the University of Washington provided access to research articles by Hubert Yockey on the application of information theory to the origin of life. Noting that “The information content of amino acid sequences cannot increase until a genetic code with an adaptor function has appeared,” Yockey states,

Nothing which even vaguely resembles a code exists in the physico-chemical world. One must conclude that no valid scientific explanation of the origin of life exists at present.3

Unlocking Life’s Enigma

By the mid 1990s, I had read The Mystery of Life’s Origin4, in which the authors distinguish between thermal entropy (related to the distribution of energy in the system), and configurational entropy (related to the distribution of mass — for example, the specific sequence of amino acids comprising a protein). Their analysis of multiple proposals for natural mechanisms to overcome the thermodynamic barrier represented by the high degree of configurational entropy in living systems led them to conclude that all such mechanisms are “clearly inadequate to account for the configurational entropy work of coding.”5

In the documentary video “Unlocking the Mystery of Life,” the premise of intelligent design was cogently defended as an alternative to the shortcomings of naturalism to explain such biochemical enigmas as irreducible complexity and the specific sequences of amino acids comprising functional proteins. The latter example of nature’s inability to increase the information content of a closed system over time led biophysicist Dean Kenyon to disavow his own research, published earlier in his textbook, Biochemical Predestination.

In the late 1990s, my academic schedule allowed me to pursue other source material on the physics of the generalized Second Law, and I obtained copies of two main textbooks on statistical mechanics referenced by Gange. The author of one of these texts gives a fundamental definition of information that emphasizes the relationship between information and the mind:

Information is the entity which makes the difference between knowing and not knowing, between being faced with a number of possibilities and between knowing the one that actually prevails.6

Only in the context of the mind is the difference between knowing and not knowing a meaningful distinction. The author of the other text, Arthur Hobson, affirms that given an initial measurement of a system, predictions of the system at a later time “cannot contain more information (but may contain less information)” than the initial data describing the system.7 This limitation on natural processes, based upon the laws of quantum mechanics, prohibits a system (even the entire universe bounded by the cosmic horizon) from progressing from a state of lower information (pre-life) to a state of higher information (post-life) by any combination of natural forces.

Chance and Necessity

William Dembski affirms the proscriptions of the generalized Second Law by showing that chance and necessity are insufficient to ratchet up the complex specified information (CSI) content of a closed system over time:

What natural causes cannot do, however, is originate CSI. This strong proscriptive claim, that natural causes can only transmit CSI but never originate it, I call the Law of Conservation of Information. It is this law that gives definite scientific content to the claim that CSI is intelligently caused.8

In 2005, while mentoring a senior honors student on a study of the boundaries of science, I read Stephen Meyer’s groundbreaking article outlining intelligent design as a source of biological information.9 Complementing the conclusions of other lines of research, Meyer’s analysis and conclusions added to the scientific literature affirming the validity of the generalized Second Law as a fundamental boundary of nature that disallows an unguided origin of life.

Have the last twenty years produced any experimental research demonstrating how unguided natural processes can successfully produce the complex, specified arrangements of components inherent in functional biomolecules? Any dearth of success in this field is not for lack of trying, nor is it surprising that scientists have not been able to coax even a single biochemically relevant protein into existence from a mix of ingredients likely to be available on the early Earth. 

The Limits of Unguided Processes

A Rice University professor of chemistry, James Tour, who is renowned for his research in synthetic organic chemistry, draws this conclusion regarding any naturalistic origin-of-life scenario:

the requisite molecules (lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates) are so unlikely to have occurred in the states and quantities needed, that we could never have gotten to the point of figuring out the genesis of the requisite code or information.10

Unguided natural processes, according to the generalized Second Law, cannot systematically increase the information content of a closed system over time. Since the origin of life, represented by the formation of a single-cell organism, constitutes just such an increase in information, natural processes are not expected to be the cause. Intelligence is the only recognized source of information, as inherent in living organisms. What we know of the laws of physics supports this conclusion.

Notes

Robert Gange, Origins and Destiny (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1986).

Gange, Origins, (1986), 91.

Hubert P. Yockey, “Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory,” J. Theor. Biol. 91 (1981), 13-31.

Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984).

Thaxton, et al, Mystery (1984), ch. 8 (available online: https://www.ldolphin.org/mystery/chapt8.html ).

Amnon Katz, Principles of Statistical Mechanics: The Information Theory Approach (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1967), 14.

Arthur Hobson, Concepts in Statistical Mechanics (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1971), 142-145.

William A. Dembski, “Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information,” (1997); https://www.discovery.org/a/118/ .

Stephen C. Meyer, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” Proc. of the Biological Society of Washington, 117(2), (2004), 213-239.

https://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/evolution-creation/.

Before all roads led to Rome.

From the graveyard of empires.

David Berlinski against reductionism

On Reductionism and the meaning of life.

 David Berlinski on the Immaterial, Alan Turing, and the Mystery of Life Itself

Evolution News

The recently published book Science After Babel is again in the spotlight at ID the Future, with its author, philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, and host Andrew McDiarmid considering various elements of the work. In a new podcast, the pair discuss the puzzling relationship between purely immaterial mathematical concepts (the only kind) and the material world; World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, depicted in the 2014 film The Imitation Game; and the sense that the field of physics, once seemingly on the cusp of a theory of everything, finds itself at an impasse. Then, too, Berlinski writes, there is the mystery of life itself. If scientists thought that its origin and nature would soon yield to scientific reductionism, they have been disappointed. Life’s “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” remain before us, suggesting, as Berlinski puts it, “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

The rise and fall of ancient Egypt.

Sorry design denier that's my line.

 We Can Say It, But You Can’t

Cornelius G Hunter

Highly, Intricately, and Precisely Integrated Networks of Entities and Interactions

As Carl Woese explained in 2004:

The cells we know are not just loosely coupled arrangements of quasi-independent modules. They are highly, intricately, and precisely integrated networks of entities and interactions. … To think that a new cell design can be created more or less haphazardly from chunks of other modern cell designs is just another fallacy born of a mechanistic, reductionist view of the organism.

Mechanistic, reductionist view? It appears Woese put his finger on precisely what he believed in: evolution. Replace “cell” with just about any biological structure and Woese has, in a nutshell, summarized evolutionary theory, what little there is of it. As Richard Dawkins once explained:

The bombardier beetle’s ancestors simply pressed into different service chemicals that already happened to be lying around. That’s often how evolution works.

The future of energy again?

On Darwin's natural selector.

 Darwinian Natural Selection: A Covert Theology of Nature?

Neil Thomas 

“What is life?” legendary father of quantum physics Erwin Schrödinger asked in 1943, arguing that the essence of life might best be defined as a force and form of agency. The contention appeared to imply an approving nod in the direction of the Lamarckian postulation of an invisible “pouvoir de la vie” (life power); and it is noteworthy that in 1956 Schrödinger went on to express the opinion that “it is difficult to believe that […] all resulted from Darwinian ‘accumulation by chance.’”1 He appeared to be steering a path in his thinking between Darwinian and Lamarckian paradigms, as was noted by Nobel Prize-winner Paul Nurse in his recent, identically titled analysis, What Is Life?2

Conflicting Paradigms

Observing distinct hints of Lamarckism in Schrödinger’s expositions, Nurse even went so far as to suggest that the veteran German scientist had come close to advancing a form of vitalism3 — a conception of animate nature long since banished from scientific discourse for being a residue of prescientific thinking. So for instance In the very early decades of the 17th century Shakespeare could portray an active external nature issuing portents of future misfortune as warnings to humanity. In the dramatist’s imagination Nature was active to such an extent as to be capable of “staging” such meteorological warning signs as thunderstorms and sundry other “horrid sights seen by the watch.” But such stage evocations are interpreted by today’s audiences only as dramatic devices (referred to technically under the name of pathetic fallacy). For hard on Shakespeare’s heels chronologically had come a finger-wagging brigade of mid to late 17th-century natural philosophers exhorting the bard’s intellectual heirs to view nature in considerably less responsive terms as an entirely passive phenomenon. No will or agency should henceforth be attached to natural phenomena, these early scientists insisted, and it was their understanding which was to become an informing axiom of post-Enlightenment science. Lamarck’s ideas of a spirited, self-making, and transforming Nature now seemed out of step with respectable science. Or were they?

Darwin, although he would officially retreat behind the safe and accredited confines of the new nature-as-passive axiom, was also known to flirt with Lamarckian ideas, most conspicuously in his attempt to postulate a link between ape and Homo sapiens. By 1871 Darwin no longer appeared to repose the same absolute faith in natural selection, as a mechanism capable of delivering limitless boons, as he did in the period preceding the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859. In order to put together a tolerably coherent explanation for the ape-to humankind transition, for instance, we find him appealing to what he had once bluntly denounced as the Lamarckian heresy. Hence in his Descent of Man he could write,

The mental powers of some earlier progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use; but we may confidently believe that the continued use and advancement of this power would have reacted on the mind itself, by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought.4

The officially frowned-on Lamarckian idea of the use/disuse of organs is here quite conspicuously pressed into service as a helping or even — faute de mieux — necessary adjunct to his own theory of natural selection. 

What Makes Us Tick? 

It was in fact only in the era of neo-Darwinism that Darwin’s intellectual legatees would take it upon themselves to excise any last traces of Darwinian equivocation on this issue. Yet as Stanford history professor Jessica Riskin has pointed out in her The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Old Argument Over What Makes Us Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), to which I am much indebted for what follows, the issue can hardly be said to be fully resolved even today. Riskin documents the many ways in which the matter of internal versus external agency has remained a live issue up to the present day. Hence even post-Enlightenment accounts of living phenomena can be observed being permeated by officially disallowed appeals to agency (as in Darwin’s case, cited above). The ostensibly losing opinion associated with the name of Lamarck has not been irretrievably lost to modern science.

The crux of the historical issue has been this: Do the order and action which we can all plainly observe in the natural world originate inside or outside of nature itself? Lamarck’s “inside” theory presupposed an immanent force driving plants and animals to form themselves and to “complexify” their structures over time to produce that plethora of different animal species we witness today. Harking back to ideas originally proposed by Denis Diderot and like-minded philosophes in the mid 18th-century, Lamarck proposed that creatures might be able to alter their own internal physiology and, by an act of will, develop such new organs as might be requisite to their purposes in life. His most (in)famous illustration of this claimed ability was the much-cited example of the giraffe over time possessing the ability to elongate its neck to be able to reach leaves at the tops of trees. 

Consistently with the tenets of his own theory of an immanent power in nature, Lamarck was to look askance at the famous watch-on-the heath analogy formulated by William Paley, insisting that the essential motor of the living being was integral to it rather than something coming from an external source. Paley’s watch on a notional Lamarckian heath would not presumably have needed to be periodically wound up by a divine Horologist. In that particular sense, as Riskin observes, Lamarck’s was the more “dangerous” idea since Lamarck posited self-evolving entities without apparent need of an external director. In Lamarck’s vision of things, as Schrödinger put it, “efforts at improvement are not lost in the biological sense but form a small but integrating part of the striving of the species towards higher and ever higher perfection.”5 In short, Lamarck had ostensibly replaced an external God with an inner force. 

Difficulties with History

Riskin makes the further point that Darwin may have been drawn to Lamarck not only pragmatically because Lamarckian ideas could plug cognitive gaps in his own argumentation (as in the example from his Descent of Man cited above) but also on ideological grounds. For despite its associations with antiquated animism, if one reframes the Lamarckian idea in the manner suggested by Riskin one can then see that “Lamarckism represented its era’s most naturalist, nontheological account of species-change.”6 It is a point she develops further by claiming,

The biologists and philosophers of biology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have categorically excluded Lamarckian explanations and all nonrandom variation as beyond the bounds of legitimate science have believed they were expressing a commitment to an ongoing naturalism. But history places them in the opposite camp. In fact, they are the heirs to the tradition with which they meant to do battle: the argument from design.7

Both Darwin and more modern evolutionists essentially hitched their wagons to a tradition that from its early inception denied agency in Nature precisely in order to ascribe it to a designer God. The argument to which Darwin expressed his official allegiance was ab initio and by the express wish of its originators an argument to and from design since “a material world lacking agency assumed, indeed required, a supernatural god.”8 The 17th-century banishment of agency, perception, consciousness, and will from nature and natural science gave a monopoly on all those attributes to an external god: the paradigm simply could not function without “an accompanying theology.”9

Climbing Mount Improbable 

Because the devisers of modern science after circa 1650 banished mysterious agencies to within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Christian God, they left a more atheistically inclined posterity with a considerable dilemma. For the new, mechanistic science was adamant that one could not procure a lens instrument without an instrument maker. By the same token one could not have an eye without a divine Optician (hence Darwin’s famous shudder when he asked himself rather disconsolately how anything of such supreme intricacy as the eye could have been fashioned by natural selection). Darwin, to use the old cricketing cliché, had come out to bat on a decidedly sticky wicket in the larger arena of science. By which I mean that the problem for Darwin appeared to be logically insurmountable given that his quest was to find a purely secular mechanism for evolution without the “accompanying theology” obligatory to the theory as it had been established by its founding fathers in the century immediately preceding the Enlightenment.

If, as science had come to insist, nature was like a clock, a passive mechanism, it must needs be wound up by an external agent. The only vera causa of evolution would on this view have to be a divine one. No wonder that Sir Charles Lyell and others at the time were prompted to ask of Darwin, What agency was he proposing, precisely (if not a divine one)? In what did the creative power in Darwin’s theory consist and what was the driving force (vera causa) of his evolutionary ideas? Darwin’s famous answer was of course “natural selection” but it has perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged (either by Darwin or by his posterity) that this confident answer was to lose much of its force once Darwin had been compelled to confess that his theory of natural selection did not in reality select at all but merely preserved. Belatedly capitulating to colleagues’ numerous objections that natural selection was entirely unlike the “intelligent selection” practised by professional animal breeders, Darwin at that point had to throw in the towel, conceding in a letter to Lyell in 1860,

Talking of “Natural Selection,” if I had to commence de novo, I would have used natural preservation.10

The truly insurmountable obstacle confronting Darwin after that concession was that the term in which he had acquiesced, natural preservation, could by definition be only passive rather than active, so that the formation of new body parts (let alone new species) now became out of the question. As Michael Ruse recently pointed out, natural selection is better understood as a score-recording statistic than as a “true cause” of anything:

Natural selection is simply keeping score, as does the Dow Jones [Industrial] Average. The Dow Jones does not make things (cause things to) happen. It is just statistics about what did happen.11

The trouble with Darwin’s being forced to eat his own words and so revise his original theory so drastically was that notions of evolutionary innovation in terms of new body parts/species seemed now to be logically indefensible since mere preservation, by definition, cannot produce the kind of physiological innovation which could lead from a microbe to a whale (or even to a mouse). So redefined, natural selection cannot create anything at all. Darwin would have had to conclude that, by making this concession, he was being obliged to abandon what he had always thought of as the limitlessly creative force of his own theory. At some level of apprehension, he must have felt forced to accept that natural selection might have little or no motive force at all — a devastating conclusion entirely subversive of his theory (hence his later flirtation with Lamarckism).

Darwin Versus Modern Biological Science

What makes matters worse for Darwin posthumously is that a number of modern researchers have come forward to reinforce the sombre conclusion that (neo-)Darwinism simply has no theory of the generative to commend it since nothing in Darwin’s theory can account for anything bar trivial micromutations.12 The author’s semantic retreat was fatal to any more substantial, macromutational claims. As Professor Nick Lane has more recently explained on the basis of precise observations,

It is generally assumed that once simple life has emerged, it gradually evolves into more complex forms, given the right conditions. But that’s not what happens on Earth […] If simple cells had evolved slowly into more complex ones over billions of years, all kinds of intermediate forms would have existed and some still should. But there are none [….] This means that there is no inevitable trajectory from simple to complex life. Never-ending natural selection, operating on infinite populations of bacteria over millions of years, may never give rise to complexity. Bacteria simply do not have the right [physiological] architecture.13

Darwin’s espousal of the “outside” argument (as opposed to the Lamarckian interior force) makes it unsurprising that he had the gravest difficulty in trying to make his argument entirely secular and free of theistic implications. His aspiration to free his theory from the entangling toils of theology never really came off. His key metaphor of natural selection was in fact recently unmasked as little more than “an anthropomorphic but superhuman agency, ‘daily and hourly scrutinizing’ all variation, and making intelligent and benevolent decisions like a Paleyan Designer.”14 Indeed, according to Darwin’s somewhat hyperbolic evocations, the powers of natural selection transcended human intelligence to such a degree that he appeared to impute to it the capacity for intelligent design. He proposed that Nature, with limitless millennia at her disposal, could do a more comprehensive job of bringing about major physiological changes (and eventually new species) than could any human breeder, however resourceful and intelligent. He gave lyrical, arguably even mystical expression to that conviction in a famous passage in his Origin of Species:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation. Even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.15

The tone of the above passage makes it unsurprising that Bishop Samuel Wilberforce became convinced that Darwin was implicitly ascribing to Nature the same ontological status as his fellow theists customarily ascribed to the Christian God. Darwin’s apparent raising of external nature to crypto-divine status was, concluded Wilberforce, just as much an article of faith as any of the more conventional forms of theistic allegiance available to him. Wilberforce (who was not alone in coming to this conclusion) surely had a point. Dov Ospovat ascertained in a foundational study some four decades ago that Darwin was often influenced by theological ideas without always recognizing them as theological ideas.16 Darwin did not for instance seem to have questioned why a process he insisted was blind should somehow be automatically in favor of progress. The fact that natural selection was effectively a theory of progressive (arguably even providential) development as much as of ad hoc or merely opportunistic adaptation appears to have been a matter of unquestioned faith for him. As Michael Ruse recently observed, 

Darwin’s theory, like Christianity, takes final cause very seriously. Organisms are not just thrown together; they show purpose — the eye for seeing, the hand for grasping. For the Christian, this was the work of God; for Darwin, of natural selection. This shared perspective is not accidental. Remember how Darwin started with Paley [author of Natural Theology, 1802].17

Squaring the Circle?

It is well enough known that Darwin maintained to the end of his days a significant residue of his earlier Christian faith and that in later years was apt to call himself a Theist (Darwin’s capitalization). There seems, then, to have been an unacknowledged providential dimension lying at the heart of Darwin’s thinking. For in later years he came to harbor the suspicion that there might be, in Thomas Huxley’s phrase, a “wider teleology” in nature’s processes which far exceeded the bounds of natural selection.

Hence it might even be claimed that Darwin’s theory was in an unwitting sense more a special form of Nature mysticism than an empirically demonstrable theory in line with modern demands for testability. Precisely this point was urged more than a century ago by the eminent botanist responsible for pioneering the then new science of Mendelian genetics in Cambridge at the beginning of the twentieth century, F. W. Bateson. Bateson expressed himself entirely dissatisfied with the lack of detail surrounding the term natural selection. He objected that the vagueness of Darwin’s description of natural selection as occurring by insensible and imperceptible stages could not possibly give the slightest hint as to what the precise operative mechanism might consist in. It was, he felt, wholly inadequate to talk in Delphic terms of organisms having “evolved” from simpler systems without supplying any detailed descriptors of what precise physiological modalities may have occasioned such changes.18

Darwin was plainly no doctrinaire atheist in the mold of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and the famous instances of Angst he experienced in grappling with his faith may provide some indication that a “still small voice” was apt to whisper to him that his life’s work might rest on an insecure foundation of questionable assumptions. This would certainly account for some of his more tormented animadversions in the decade preceding his death concerning his riven attitude to the Christian faith. At that later point in his life Darwin appears to have been seriously tempted to return to the Christian fold, at least with one foot. For although he set his face against a once-and-for-all Creation of the Biblical sort, he nevertheless saw in the evolutionary process a force which could bring about the same net result as Divine creation. The prime difference was that this became a series of gradualistic movements in multiple creative phases requiring eons for its completion. Creation for Darwin was simply a continuous process rather than a “one-off.” Those in Britain and America in the latter half of the 19th century who interpreted the essence of Darwinism as being an explanation of evolution in (covertly) theistic terms appear to have had a point.19

Notes

What Is Life? With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches, with Foreword by Roger Penrose (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 109.

Paul Nurse, What Is Life? (Oxford: Fickling, 2021)

Nurse, What Is Life? p. 189.

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 110, emphasis added.

Schrödinger, p. 107.

Riskin, p. 363.

Riskin, p. 363

Riskin, p. 4.

Riskin, p. 4

Letter to Charles Lyell, September 1860. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-2935.xml

Michael Ruse, Understanding Natural Selection (Cambridge: CUP, 2023), p.133.

Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, Your Designed Body (Seattle: Discovery, 2022), p. 370.

Nick Lane, “Lucky to Be There,” in Michael Brooks (editor), Chance: The Science and Secrets of Luck, Randomness, and Probability (London: Profile/New Scientist, 2015), pp. 22-33, citations pp. 28, 32.

Sander Gliboff, H.G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), p. 136.

Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 66.

Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology and Natural Selection 1839-1859, 2nd edition (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), especially pp. 207-12.

Michael Ruse, Evolution and Christianity (Cambridge: CUP, 2022), p. 60.

Bateson’s objection has been taken up by Neil Broom, How Blind is the Watchmaker? Nature’s Design and the Limits of Naturalistic Science(Downers Grove and Leicester: Intervarsity Press, 2001) p. 39, note.

See James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1981).

Once more we turn to Gods of our own making?

At the Altar of that Hideous Strength

Peter Biles 

 C. S. Lewis’s 1946 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength is almost eighty years old now. Written during the throes of World War II, the novel is the culmination of Lewis’s cosmic trilogy, preceded by Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There are hosts of other articles attending to the prescience of Lewis’s terrifying novel, and for good reason; That Hideous Strength is a warning against using technology to dehumanize people and ultimately cripple the world into submission. It’s a great book as a novel, but it seems especially appropriate to revisit in lieu of the growing interest in transhumanism and the rapid acceleration of AI development. 

It feels like much of the talk on AI in recent months involves its surface-level manifestations or consequences. It might take away jobs in journalism and help college kids cheat on exams. These are real concerns. The other dangers involving AI scams, disinformation, and deepfakes are formidable, too. And yet a novel like The Hideous Strength shows the danger behind the danger: the temptation to reject being merely human.

A N.I.C.E. Organization

The novelist’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, must decide whether he’ll opt into a scheme to destroy humanity via machine intelligence. Mark, a sociologist in training, gets caught up in a secret society known as N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. N.I.C.E. is the perfect symbol of today’s benevolent-sounding yet bloated and banal administrative state, carrying out power initiatives that impact everyday people. While it’s unclear exactly what the overall goals of the Institute are, one thing is clear: it’s time to throw off the limits of being human and transcend into the world of pure intelligence. 

Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, both have a lot to learn in the book. Mark is eager to find acceptance among elites at N.I.C.E., while Jane, who is a lapsed academic struggling to finish her dissertation on John Donne, longs for a kind of freedom and independence that her married life fails to afford her. Through their own journeys, both learn that accepting their limits and choosing to commit to each other is the real path to freedom. In the end, domestic family life, which includes birth, growth, and death, is envisioned as a kind of antidote to the mad quest for human immortality and domination. 

That Didn’t Take Long

Okay, so that was 1946. It’s 2023. OpenAI, ChatGPT, Altos Labs, bio-longevity; is any of that relevant to C. S. Lewis’s great book? Paul Kingsnorth thinks so. Kingsnorth writes often on the state of our tech-intoxicated culture. He doesn’t own a smartphone. He apologetically writes on Substack while decrying all the bad things the Internet has done to us. But, his voice is among the few out there pointing out how “merging ourselves with the Machine” will compromise our humanity. In a recent piece, “The Abbey of Misrule,” Kingsnorth asks what we gain by developing these new AI tools. He writes, 

Nearly sixty years back, the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan offered a theory of technology which hinted at an answer. He saw each new invention as an extension of an existing human capability. In this understanding, a club extends what we can do with our fist, and a wheel extends what we can do with our legs. Some technologies then extend the capacity of previous ones: a hand loom is replaced by a steam loom; a horse and cart is replaced by a motor car, and so on.

What human capacity, then, is digital technology extending? The answer, said McLuhan, was our very consciousness itself. 

Paul KINGSNORTH, THE UNIVERSAL – BY PAUL KINGSNORTH – THE ABBEY OF MISRULE (SUBSTACK.COM)

While technologies made life more convenient, faster, or efficient, artificial intelligence is about extending human consciousness. Do we want that? What would that mean to our ability to think, understand, and reason on our own? Beyond that, AI at its worst will be a kind of divinity, a man-made God. At least, that’s what our friends over in the transhumanist camp would like. Kingsnorth continues, 

Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems ‘we are making God.’ Transhumanist Elise Bohan says ‘we are building God.’ Kevin Kelly believes that ‘we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.’ ‘Does God exist?’ asks transhumanist and Google maven Ray Kurzweil. ‘I would say, “Not yet.”’ These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves — or to build their own versions.

For the last two years, I have found myself writing a lot here about God; more than I had intended. I have claimed several times that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it. Humans are fundamentally religious animals. We are drawn towards transcendence whether we like it or not. But here in the West, we have dethroned our old god, and now we can barely look at him.

We Should All Keep Our Heads

Kingsnorth’s article is worth reading in full, and his Substack is consistently interesting and compelling. 

We don’t like to try and predict the future here at Mind Matters, since it seems so difficult to do. Nonetheless, C. S. Lewis’s novel and Kingsnorth’s warning rightly point out the dangers of depending too much on the machines we create. They might make us feel powerful, but in reality, they leave us weak. 

Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, wrote about this idea in his great book The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings. As the title indicates, the book goes into depth on Tolkien’s intricate worldview, conception of ethics, and the battle between good and evil. Kreeft writes, 

We have done exactly what Sauron did in forging the Ring. We have put our power into things in order to increase our power. And the result is, as everyone knows but no one admits, that we are now weak little wimps, unable to survive a blow to the great spider of our technological network. We tremble before a nationwide electrical blackout or a global computer virus. Only hillbillies and Boy Scouts would survive a nuclear war. In our drive for power we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we have become more powerful when all the time we have been becoming less.

PETER KREEFT, THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOLKIEN: THE WORLDVIEW BEHIND THE LORD OF THE RINGS

This is why it probably wouldn’t be so great an idea to force everyone to get electric stoves. Power goes out, and everyone’s basically doomed. I appreciate the technology of a lighter, but if I’m ever trapped in the Colorado wilderness and need to keep warm, I’d probably need a how-to manual for making fire from friction. Technology shows the remarkable ingenuity of human beings, but the more sophisticated it gets, the more tempting it will be to compromise the creativity that makes us unique and live as makeshift drones. 

In short, we create technology, but we seem to be at a point where it’s compromising the very things that allowed us to develop it in the first place: innovation, creativity, hard work. If it’s ever stripped away, will we have the skills, stamina, and discipline to recover? If I upload my memories, consciousness, and relationships into the Machine, will I have laid myself at the altar of that hideous strength?

On the rise and fall of free speech.

Simian exceptionalism?

 Good as Gould? Ask a Chimp

David Berlinski 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Science After Babel, the latest book from mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. This article is adapted from Chapter 13.

Among other things, medieval thinkers believed that human beings were unique in ways that were absolute and inviolable. This doctrine many modern biologists have emphatically rejected. “The Western world,” Stephen Jay Gould remarks, “has yet to make its peace with Darwin.”1 The great impediment to this reconciliation, he goes on to add in his mad way (the sense strong that he is urging a difficult truth on a dogmatic public), “lies in our unwillingness to accept continuity between ourselves and nature, our ardent search for a criterion to assert our uniqueness.” He continues:

Chimps and gorillas have long been the battleground of our search of uniqueness; for if we could establish an unambiguous distinction — of kind, rather than degree — between ourselves and our closest relatives, we might gain the justification long sought for our cosmic arrogance. The battle shifted long ago from a simple debate about evolution: educated people now accept the evolutionary continuity between human and apes. But we are so tied to our philosophical and religious heritage that we still seek a criterion for a strict division between our abilities and those of chimpanzees.2

Now I quote all this not merely because Gould [held] a chair at Harvard and I do not, although this made the target all the more tempting, but because Gould represents a charming intelligence corrupted by a shallow system of belief.

No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: The chimpanzees invariably are the ones behind the bars of their cages. There they sit, solemnly munching bananas, searching for lice, aimlessly loping around, baring their gums, waiting for the experiments to begin. No distinction? Chimpanzees cannot read or write; they do not paint, or compose music, or do mathematics; they form no real communities, only loose-knit wandering tribes; they do not dine and cannot cook; there is no record anywhere of their achievements; beyond the superficial, they show little curiosity; they are born, they live, they suffer, and they die.

No Distinction? 

No species in the animal world organizes itself in the complex, dense, difficult fashion that is typical of human societies. There is no such thing as animal culture; animals do not compromise and cannot count; there is not a trace in the animal world of virtually any of the powerful and poorly understood powers and properties of the human mind; in all of history, no animal has stood staring at the night sky in baffled and respectful amazement. The chimpanzees are static creatures, solemnly poking for grubs with their sticks, inspecting one another for fleas. No doubt, they are peaceable enough if fed, and looking into their warm brown eyes one can see the signs of a universal biological shriek (a nice maneuver that involves hearing what one sees), but what of it?

One may insist, of course, that all this represents a difference merely of degree. Very well. Only a difference of degree separates man from the Canadian goose. Individuals of both species are capable of entering the air unaided and landing some distance from where they started.

Notes

Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), 26.

Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 27

Physics to mind?

It's official "Neanderthal" is now a compliment.

 Researchers: Neanderthals Invented Process to Produce Birch Tar

Denyse O' Leary

Many of us grew up with “Neanderthal!” used as a term of abuse for a stupid person. A 2021 study from the University of Tübingen and others, dusted off at ScienceAlert, paints quite a different picture,in connection with Neanderthals’ manufacture of birch tar. The tar from burnt birch wood can be used as glue, insect repellent, and antiseptic. It can be scraped from a fire naturally or it can be produced in a controlled way. Which method Neanderthals used says something about the development of their culture.

The study authors, Patrick Schmidt et al., went to a lot of potentially messy trouble to try to answer the question:

Some think of black tar as a happy accident that Neanderthals simply scraped from surrounding rocks after burning birch bark. Others think the sticky, water-resistant material was carefully crafted in an underground oven long before our species learned the trick.

This might seem like a pedantic squabble, but intentionally distilling useful substances from raw materials is commonly assumed to be another activity that sets human intelligence apart from other species.

Based on the analysis of two pieces of birch tar found at an archaeological site in Germany, this latest study argues that “birch tar may document advanced technology, forward planning, and cultural capacity in Neanderthals.”

SCIENCEALERT, JUNE 4, 2023.

Specifically, the authors say, “they distilled tar in an intentionally created underground environment that restricted oxygen flow and remained invisible during the process. This degree of complexity is unlikely to have been invented spontaneously. Our results suggest that Neanderthals invented or developed this process based on previous simpler methods and constitute one of the clearest indicators of cumulative cultural evolution in the European Middle Palaeolithic.” Stop Underestimating Neanderthal intelligence!

If Neanderthals really were making tar as far back as 200,000 years, that beats any evidence of Homo sapiens making tar by 100,000 years.

"Thus,” [the] researchers write, “what we show here for the first time is that Neanderthals invented and refined a transformative technique, most likely independently of the influence from Homo sapiens.”

Previous discoveries have shown that Neanderthals had complex diets involving multiple food preparation steps. Their use of fire, however, may not have been confined to heating or cooking.

The intelligence of our earlier cousins should not be underestimated any longer.

SCIENCEALERT, JUNE 4, 2023.

Note that the authors recommended that we stop underestimating the intelligence of Neanderthals after they tried to do their job themselves, using only tools available back then.

But underestimating the intelligence of Neanderthals has not been merely an academic sport. There is a hard practical reason for it: The nearly impossible question of the evolution of the human mind would be rendered much easier if paleontologists could demonstrate a long, slow succession of not-quite-humans gradually becoming more like humans until… And Neanderthal man has been a complete, utter flop in that regard.

He certainly came well recommended for the role. For example, in 2011, ex-evangelical and unidirectional skeptic Michael Shermer told us,

… there is almost no evidence that Neanderthals would have ever ‘advanced’ beyond where they were when they disappeared 30,000 years ago. Even though paleoanthropologists disagree about a great many things, there is near total agreement in the literature that Neanderthals were not on their way to becoming “us.”

IN BRUCE L. GORDON AND WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI, THE NATURE OF NATURE (WILMINGTON, DE: ISI BOOKS, 2011), P. 452).

Okay, but a steady stream of new finds from Neanderthal culture in relation to speech, burying the dead, and producing art, has resulted in comments like that of Clive Finlayson, Director of the Gibraltar Museum, “The historical downgrading of our Neanderthal cousins has gone well beyond the scientific.”

And now here’s a sign of the times for you: Although Neanderthals no longer exist as a separate group, it turns out that many moderns have at least some Neanderthal DNA. That is surely the reason that do-it-yourself DNA analysis firm 23andMe now celebrates “Neanderthal Nerds.” (Ah yes. First rule of business, ignored by some high-profile firms in recent months: Don’t act like you think your loyal customer is the class dunce!)

The Big, Obvious Question…

If Neanderthals were so smart, why didn’t they advance much faster technologically before they merged with the rest of us or died out? Ah, that’s one of the harsh facts about technology: Technological progress is not a simple stepladder.

The more technologies we already have, the faster the progress. For example, most progress awaited the development — much, much later — of mining and metallurgy. If we stopped using metals today, most current technology would just disappear. Creativity, without the right tools and materials, doesn’t suffice.

Also, there never were very many Neanderthals at any given time and they were widely scattered. The steady growth and increasing density of the human population means many more people working together on problems now, rapidly developing and communicating solutions. That likely means a continued rapid pace of innovation without the need for any corresponding increase in average human intelligence.

On the whole, that last fact should be good news for most of us. Meanwhile, where is that missing link?

Yet another clash of Titans.

Rhinos trample gradualism underfoot?

 What Do We Know about the Origin of Rhinos?

Wolf-Ekkeard Lonnig

Editor’s note: We are delighted to direct readers to a new paper by geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, “Origin and Evolution of the Rhinos (Family Rhinocerotidae): What Do We Really Know?” What follows is the paper’s Abstract:

Some rhinoceroses, including the square-lipped Ceratotherium simum of the African savanna, weigh more than three tons and thus represent the largest land mammals after the African elephant. After an extensive revision of the family Rhinocerotidae, presently some 21 genera have been found to be valid. Most of those, however, do not exist anymore. Just four genera are still extant. 

Although they are not the handsomest or most graceful creatures in the animal kingdom, the Rhinocerotoidea (superfamily) are a fascinating group for research due not only to an extraordinarily rich fossil record1 but also to many striking anatomical and physiological characteristics. 

Intriguingly, according the geological time table, many of the past and present forms have lived contemporaneously for millions of years. Also, all families and genera of the rhinocerotoids appear abruptly in the fossil record. Contrary to Darwinian expectations, none of them is linked to any other by a series of “infinitesimally small changes,” “infinitesimally slight variations,” “insensibly fine steps,” etc. Hence, the fossil record is in full agreement with the statement of the eminent evolutionary biologist Donald R. Prothero, paleontologist and leading rhino researcher, that “the most striking thing about the overall pattern of rhinocerotid evolution is that of stasis.” Even at the species level he notes that “although some limited examples of gradual change can be documented in the rhinocerotids, the overwhelming pattern is one of stable species which show no measurable change over long periods of time, consistent with the predictions of Eldredge and Gould (1972).”2

So, what do we really know about their origin and evolution? The entire fossil series of the family of the rhinos starts with a rhinoceros (Teletaceras) and ends with rhinoceroses. The viewpoint of natural selection of random or accidental or haphazard DNA mutations can be — except for microevolution — excluded for many scientific reasons, as will be shown below. Intelligent design is definitely the scientifically superior explanation. 

Notes

According to the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) (2023) for the superfamily: “Collections (2419 total)” and for the family Rhinocerotidae alone “Collections (1892 total)”. Let’s take for a comparison the family Elephantidae, showing an “excellent”, “very complete” fossil record, displaying an “enormous quantity of fossil bones”: “Collections (1316 total).” (Numbers of PBDB all retrieved 10 June 2023.) For the fossil record of the elephants, see also: http://www.weloennig.de/ElephantEvolution.Critique.pdf.

Emphasis added. 

Coleman Hughes and Thomas C Williams being heterodox

Tampering with the record?

 Fossil Friday: The Supposed Oldest Cheetah Was Yet Another Fraud

Gunter Bechly

In 2008 two scientists from the Shanghai Science Museum and the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen described a new mammalian species, Acinonyx kurteni, from a supposedly 2.2-2.5 million year old skull, as the oldest known fossil cheetah (Christiansen & Mazák 2009). This discovery allegedly also proved an Old World origin for these feline carnivores (Carroll 2008), contrary to earlier beliefs that placed the origin in the New World together with the American cougar.

Even before the publication, the Chinese scientists Deng Tao and Qiu Zhanxiang had revealed the skull to be a crude forgery (Stone 2010, Wang 2013) and said that just from photos of the specimen one could easily recognize that parts of the skull had been concocted from plaster. The journal PNAS, which happens to be one of the top ten high-impact journals in science, was informed in advance but dismissed the protest and published the paper anyway. The responsible editor was nobody less than famous Darwinist Francisco Ayala (who died this year). Only one year after the original describers had still defended their work in the prestigious journal Science (Mazák & Christiansen 2011), the lead author finally retracted the paper in 2012 with the lukewarm explanation that it was based on “a composite specimen from the late Miocene laterite and not from the early Pleistocene loess” (Mazák 2012, Anonymous 2012).

Among the Worst

This example certainly ranks among the worst kinds of fraudulent fossils, as it received widespread global media attention just like the “Piltdown bird,” Archaeoraptor. Contrary to the claims of some science popularizers and the Darwinist thought police, forged fossils from countries like China and Russia do indeed represent a significant problem (Stone 2010, Wang 2013) and have repeatedly led to junk science published in peer-reviewed journals. This case also demonstrates that such frauds can be driven by the desire to present and support evolutionary scenarios, which may also suppress any doubts among reviewers and editors as the shocking example of Ayala shows.

References

Anonymous 2012. Author retracts PNAS paper about alleged Pliocene cheetah fossil that critics said was a fake. Retraction Watch August 20, 2012. https://retractionwatch.com/2012/08/20/author-retracts-pnas-about-alleged-pliocine-cheetah-fossil-that-had-been-questioned/

Carroll R 2008. Ancient Cheetah Fossil Points to Old World Roots? National Geographic News December 29, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20090221125349/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081229-cheetah-skull.html

Christiansen P & Mazák JH 2009. A primitive Late Pliocene cheetah, and evolution of the cheetah lineage. PNAS 106(2), 512–515. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810435106

Mazák JH 2012. Retraction for Christiansen and Mazák, A primitive Late Pliocene cheetah, and evolution of the cheetah lineage. PNAS 109(37), 15072. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211510109

Mazák JH & Christiansen P 2011. A defense of the primitive cheetah skull. Science 331(6021), 1136–1137. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.331.6021.1136-bStone R 2010. Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem. Science 330(6012), 1740–1741. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740

Wang X 2013. Mortgaging the future of chinese paleontology. PNAS 110(9), 3201. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301429110

Commonsense gets a jab in?

 England’s National Health Service Bans Most Puberty-Blocking

Wesley J Smith

Following up on an earlier advisory recommending against providing puberty blockers to adolescents who feel they are a different sex, the National Health Service in England has now banned their administration except in the context of a formally approved clinical trial. Moreover, social gender-affirmation will not be the automatic approach taken for children presenting with “gender incongruence.” From the NHS England advisory :

The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally and psychosocially appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence. The clinical approach should be mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for pre-pubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes . . . .

A significant proportion of children and young people who are concerned about, or distressed by, issues of gender incongruence experience co-existing mental health, neuro-developmental and/or personal, family or social complexities in their lives. The relationship between these presentations and gender incongruence may not be readily apparent and will often require careful exploration.

Treating each patient as an individual instead of a category to be checked off, one approach fits all: what a concept!

Non-scientific and Ideologically Driven

Please note that this guidance is the precise opposite of immediate gender-affirmation in all cases regardless of the particular circumstances of the patient — a non-scientific, ideologically driven policy pushed by woke medical associations, and the laws and pending legislative proposals in our most progressive states (such as California’s A.B. 957).

The new approach will ban puberty-blocking except in the structured circumstance of a clinical trial. From another NHS England advisory:

The new approach will ban puberty-blocking except in the structured circumstance of a clinical trial. From another NHS England advisory:

We have previously made clear, including the draft interim service specification we consulted on, the intention that the NHS will only commission puberty suppressing hormones as part of clinical research. This approach follows advice from Dr Hilary Cass’ Independent Review highlighting the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments.

We are now going out to targeted stakeholder testing on an interim clinical commissioning policy proposing that, outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence/dysphoria.

Let us not forget that Norway, France, Sweden, and Finland — not exactly part of the Bible Belt — are also pursuing this more rational approach to gender incongruence. The approach, it is worth noting, is far more similar to the laws of Florida, Tennessee, and some other states than to those of California, Washington, and the rest of the gender-affirmation cartel.

The science is not settled. Gender-affirming care is not necessarily in the best interests of children presenting with gender incongruence. The time is long past for the American media and policymakers to recognize this fact, so that a truly science-based discourse can be launched about how best to care for these children.

For every pro there is a con.

Devil's advocate?

The weirdness of light