The fossil record continues to set Darwinism straight.

 Fossil Friday: Eozoön, the Dawn Animal Fallen from Grace

Gunter Bechly

In the late 1850s the Canadian geologist William Logan, who as director of the Geological Survey of Canada mapped the geology of the country and authored the monumental Geology of Canada, discovered striped rocks from Precambrian limestone of eastern Canada, which he believed to be fossils of early life forms. He announced the discovery 1864 at a conference in Great Britain (Logan 1864, 1865), which immediately attracted tremendous interest and strong support by the British protistologist William Benjamin Carpenter. Famous geologist Charles Lyell commented that this represents “one of the greatest geological discoveries of my time” (Lyell 1864). Logan sent samples to his Canadian colleague John William Dawson (1865), who described the material as giant fossil protists, which he named Eozoön canadense, the dawn animal from Canada (also see Dana 1865). Dawson called it “one of the brightest gems in the scientific crown of the Geological Survey of Canada,” because at this time it was the earliest known evidence for life on Earth and “created a sensation in the geological community” (Adelman 2007).

Meet the Eozoönists

Most contemporary scientists did not doubt that Eozoön is a genuine fossil organism, with the exceptions of geologist William King and chemist Thomas Rowney from Queen’s College. These two skeptics, who did not believe in a biological origin of Eozoön, published a critique just a year after the original description and initiated one of the greatest scientific controversies of the 19th century. The supporters of the authenticity of the fossils, led by Dawson and Carpenter (1865), were called the Eozoönists, and both sides heavily relied on the scientific authority of their proponents and disputed the credibility of their opponents (Adelman 2007, O’Connor 2023). German naturalist Otto Hahn (1876) supported the critical view of King and Rowney with a paper refuting the fossil status of Eozoön. Other critics were the British protistologist Henry Carter (1874a, 1874b, 1874c) and the German zoologist Karl Möbius (1878), who both disputed any relationship with known protists, as well as the British geologist Henry Johnston-Lavis, who described very similar structures from volcanic marble shot out of Mount Vesuvius in Italy (Johnston Lavis & Gregory 1894), which were clearly of inorganic origin and therefore considered by many as final nail in the coffin of Eozoön. Nevertheless, the controversy persisted, and as late as 1947 Eozoön was endorsed as a first life form in a high school biology textbook (Moon et al. 1947). Since the 1950s other supposed evidence for Precambrian life began to accumulate (Schopf 2000), so that Eozoön simply lost its crucial importance for a solution to Darwin’s most vexing problem of a “missing Precambrian history of life” (also see Stephen C. Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt).

The Rise and Fall of Eozoön

Several papers in the past decades reviewed the scientific history of the rise and fall of Eozoön (O’Brien 1970, Schopf 2000, Adelman 2007, Wilson 2011, Dolan 2023, O’Connor 2023). Dolan (2023) recently showed that Eozoön “was never indisputably proven to be inorganic. Rather Eozoön simply faded away after its most ardent defenders died … To paraphrase a quote attributed to Mark Twain, the rumor of the death of Eozoön, announced with some authority at least three times, was each time, an exaggeration. King and Rowney believed that they had disproved the organic nature of Eozoön in 1866. Some 13 years later, Mobius clearly felt he had to show that Eozoön was not a fossil forminifera, as did Johnston-Lavis when he announced his discovery of Eozoön structures in volcanic ejecta in 1894.” 

Of course, there was a deeper reason why most scientists of Darwin’s era preferred to strongly defend Eozoön. This reason was clearly formulated by O’Brien (1970) in his review of the case:

… every aspect of nineteenth-century paleontology was scrutinized for its bearing on evolution …

There were two chief reasons for the persistence of the dispute. Most obvious and most important was the inability of early paleontology to settle the matter. The second reason, seldom stated by the disputants, was the significance of Eozoön in the larger issue of derivation of species. For, were Eozoön proved to be organic, evolutionists would be confronted with the most impressive of all gaps in the paleontological record, a gap that would give pause to even the most ardent evolutionist. On the other hand, if this gap were successfully explained or overcome by the finding of subsequent forms related to Eozoön, the evolutionists could rejoice in having found, at the earliest date of known animal life, the simplest form of life, a form reasonably akin to the “one primordial form” of Darwin’s speculation. In short, there was something at stake for both sides in the greater scientific controversy.

Darwin himself was interested in Eozoön and its promise for his position. He introduced Eozoön into the fourth edition of The Origin of Species: “After reading Dr. Carpenter’s description of this remarkable fossil, it is impossible to feel any doubt regarding its organic nature.” Darwin cited Eozoön in his famous tenth chapter, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record,” as an indication that gaps in the paleontological record were being filled, and that as the origins of life were pushed back, natural selection became a more reasonable mechanism of evolution (Darwin 1866: 371).

Defending Eozoön 

Dawson very early defended the biological nature of Eozoön (Dawson 1865b), continued until the end of his life (Dawson 1901), and was never convinced by any of the conflicting evidence presented by his critics. He even published two books on Life’s Dawn on Earth (Dawson 1876, 1897), in which he claimed Eozoön to be the starting point of creation. Indeed, Dawson was an ardent anti-Darwinist and did not believe in the quickly spreading theory of evolution. Thus, he was not amused at all that Darwinists jumped on his discovery and embraced it as support for their theory. He wrote (Dawson 1876: 227):

There is no link whatever in geological fact to connect Eozoön with the Mollusks, Radiates, or Crustaceans of the succeeding [rock record] … these stand before us as distinct creations. [A] gap … yawns in our imperfect geological record. Of actual facts [with which to fill this gap], therefore, we have none; and those evolutionists who have regarded the dawn-animal as an evidence in their favour, have been obliged to have recourse to supposition and assumption

In other words, Dawson thought that the “discovery of his ‘dawn animal’ had exposed the greatest missing link in the entire fossil record, a gap so enormous that it served to unmask the myth of evolution’s claimed continuity” (Schopf 2000, Wilson 2011). What an irony, which also shows how very differently the same fossil evidence can be interpreted by distinguished scientists.

In modern paleontology it is still a very common phenomenon that fossils are over-interpreted by the scientists and over-hyped in the media as undeniable and unequivocal proof for Darwinian evolution. Whenever you come across press releases that boldly claim a new fossil rewrites the history of life, represents a long-sought transitional form or missing link, or proves the gradual evolution of certain organs and body plans, all alarm bells should ring. This is usually a clear sign that the scientists have gone far beyond an objective description of the empirical evidence and are driven by the desire to support evolutionist hypotheses. Apparently, since the time of Darwin and Dawson, some things have not changed much.

References

Adelman J 2007. Eozoön: debunking the dawn animal. Endeavor 31(3), 94–98. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2007.07.002

Carter HF 1874a. On the structure called Eozoon canadense in the Laurentian limestone of Canada. Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Ser. 4) 13(75), 189–193. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00222937408680843

Carter HF 1874b. On the structure called Eozoon canadense in the Laurentian limestone of Canada. Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Ser. 4) 13(77), 376–378. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00222937408680882

Carter HF 1874c. Eozoon canadense not a foraminifer or calcareous rhizopod secretion. American Journal of Science and Arts (Ser. 3) 7, 437–438. 

Dana JD 1865. On the History of Eozoön Canadense. American Journal of Science s2-40(120), 344–362. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2475/ajs.s2-40.120.344

Darwin CR 1866. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, London (UK), p. 371. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F385&viewtype=text

Dawson JW 1865. On the Structure of Certain Organic Remains in the Laurentian Limestones of Canada. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 21(1–2), 51–59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.JGS.1865.021.01-02.12

Dawson JW 1876. Life’s Dawn on Earth Being the History of the Oldest Known Fossil Remains and Their relations to geological time and the development of the Animal Kingdom. Hodder & Stoughton, London (UK), 239 pp.

Dawson JW 1897. Relics of Primeval Life: Beginning of Life in the Dawn of Geological Age. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York (NY), 336 pp. 

Dawson JW 1901. Fifty years of Work in Canada Being Autobiographical Notes by Sir William Dawson, C.M.G., LL.D., F.R.S. Etc. Etc. Ballantyne, Hanson, & Co., London (UK), 308 pp.

Dawson JW & Carpenter WB 1865. Notes on Fossils recently obtained from the Laurentian Rocks of Canada, and on objections to the organic nature of Eozoon. 367–366. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 23, 257–265. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.JGS.1867.023.01-02.40 

Dolan JR 2023. The saga of the false fossil foram Eozoon. European Journal of Protistology 87(2):125955, 38 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejop.2022.125955

Hahn O 1876. Is there such a thing as Eozoon canadense? A microgeological investigation. The Annals and Magazine of Natural History 17(100), 265–282. https://archive.org/details/biostor-92657 (English translation of German article: Hahn O 1876. Giebt es ein Eozoon canadense? Eine mikrogeologische Untersuchung von Otto Hahn in Reutlingen. Jahreshefte des Vereins für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg 32, 132–155. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=A487&viewtype=text)

Johnston-Lavis HJ & Gregory JW 1894. Eozoonal structure of the ejected blocks of Monte Somma. The Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society (Ser. 2) 5, 259–286.

Logan WE 1864. On organic remains in the Laurentian Rocks of Canada. American Journal of Science and Arts 37, 272–273.

Logan WE 1865. On the Occurrence of Organic Remains in the Laurentian Rocks of Canada. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 21, 45–50. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.JGS.1865.021.01-02.11

Lyell C 1864. Extracts from the Address of the President Sir Charles Lyell, D.C.L., F.R.S. Canadian Naturalist and Geologist 1, 389–403.

Meyer SC 2013. Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. HarperOne, New York (NY), viii+498 pp. https://darwinsdoubt.com

Möbius K 1878. Der Bau des Eozoon canadense nach eigenen Unterschungen verglichen mit dem Bau der Foraminifera. Paleontographica 25(5-6), 175–194. https://www.schweizerbart.de/papers/palae/detail/25/59572/Der_Bau_des_Eozoon_c

Moon TJ, Mann PB & Otto JH 1947. Modern Biology. Henry Holt and Company, New York (NY), 664 pp. 

O’Brien CF 1970. Eozoön Canadense: “The Dawn Animal of Canada”. Isis 61(2), 206–223. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/350620

O’Connor A 2023. Canadian Pseudo-fossil: This specimen was once thought to represent the earliest life on Earth. National Museum of Ireland website. https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Collection/Documentation-Discoveries/Artefact/A-Canadian-Pseudo-fossil/4272e35f-065a-4605-9be0-90a3404eada2

Schopf JW 2000. Solution to Darwin’s dilemma: Discovery of the missing Precambrian record of life. PNAS 97(13), 6947–6953. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.97.13.6947

Wilson M 2011. Wooster’s “Fossil” of the Week: The most famous pseudofossil ever (Proterozoic of Canada). Wooster Geologists May 8, 2011. https://woostergeologists.scotblogs.wooster.edu/2011/05/08/wooster’s-fossil-of-the-week-the-most-famous-pseudofossil-ever-proterozoic-of-canada/

Designed to connect?

 

Yet more colliding titans.

 

Things to consider before buying that slightly used theory from OOL science's pitchmen?

 

The post truth world on steroids?

 

The father of the bomb?

 

On the science of fireworks.

 

The fundamental constant is not constant?

 

..Just enough religion to make us hate.." continued.

 

James Tour on origin of life science etc.

 

More light ,less heat on OOL science's conundrums

 

Yet more on academia's replication crisis.

 

On Trinitarians' public enemy no.1

 

Oliver Cromwell: a brief history.

 

Go to the ant and be instructed?

 Ants Build Landmarks for Navigation

David Coppedge

Picture being alone on a featureless planet. You’ve just left your underground station and are seeking minerals necessary to supply the base. Soon, the station entrance vanishes from sight as you continue searching. When you find the minerals, you turn around and have forgotten the way home! The horizon all around you is a monotonous waste. You wish you had left breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretel, or better yet, had built a tall visible tower where the base is. 

This is the plight faced by Cataglyphis fortis ants that live on a salt pan in Tunisia. Tree ants and rock ants do not have this problem; they have plenty of landmarks. But the ones that live on the salt pan are surrounded by a white, flat horizon in all directions. Along the shoreline there are visual cues, but those out in the middle of the playa have few to none. The ants face death from heat exhaustion as they forage under the hot sun alone, walking fast to keep their feet from overheating. Scientists from Germany were intrigued how they can almost always navigate their way back to the nest. 

Eric Cassell discussed ant navigation in Animal Algorithms, noting that with brains only a quarter the size of a honeybee brain, ants “produce exquisitely efficient, robust navigation in complex environments” with their 250,000 neurons. As mentioned for the salt pan, simple environments without landmarks can be no less challenging. The situation calls for exceptional methods of path integration, especially for solitary foragers like C. fortis. For path integration to work, the ants need a neural compass and neural odometer and memory to store the global vector, Cassell says. The global vector can also be informed by odor trails, a polarized light compass and sun compass, and by landmarks.

Landmark Foresight

The successful strategy of C. fortis ants was revisited recently in Current Biology by Freire, Bollig, and Knaden. Their observations and experiments showed that the ants build landmarks on the journey out — but only when needed. Commenting on the research in the same issue, Cornelia Buehlmann rhapsodized about the architectural abilities of ants and many other creatures.

When we look at structures built by animals, we instantly appreciate that animals are naturally better architects than most humans. For example, beavers build fascinating constructions containing dams and dome-shaped lodges; birds construct elaborated nests; badgers form setts consisting of extensive underground networks of tunnels and chambers; termites build enormous mounds that can be a few metres in height; and ants build amazingly complex nest structures in many sizes and shapes. The key purpose of most homes is to provide a safe shelter for its inhabitants. Animals need to be safe from harsh weather conditions, hide from prey or house their offspring. Most animals have optimised the way of building their homes to get the best possible protection. Termites and ants, for example, have the ability to build nest mounds that allow perfect thermoregulation and ventilation and also protect from occasional flooding. Of course, nest structures can also have other functions: bird nests, for example, can play a role in sexual selection. A new study reported in this issue of Current Biology by Freire et al. now shows that nest hills from desert ant colonies not only provide a safe home but that they are built as visual landmarks and are crucial for successful navigation.

The height of the nest hill is one strategy used by C. fortis ants for navigation. The entrance hill can be up to 10 cm high, visible tens of meters away. Some foraging ants, though, travel up to 1 km away, beyond line-of-sight visibility. This new measurement, longer than previously recorded for this species, shows that ants must be able to use multiple cues for path integration.

Experimental Setup

To see if the ants use their tall nest hills for navigation, the research team removed 16 nest hills at sites deep in the salt pan too far out for visual cues from the shoreline. They placed cookie crumbs at various distances to tempt foragers to venture out. Adjacent to half of the nest entrances, they placed 50-cm black cylinders as artificial landmarks, then followed individual foraging ants at a safe distance. They found that the ants were able to use the artificial landmarks to get back, but navigation was impaired without the cylinders. At those sites, they observed the ants inside the colony busily rebuilding their nest hills. This proved that the height of the nest hill is important as a visual landmark, not just for flood protection or thermoregulation. Buehlmann comments,

These results show that ants are less likely to build these hills when other landmarks are available. This is a fascinating finding that suggests that ants sensibly decide whether it is necessary to build a nest hillthat facilitates the accurate localisation of the nest entrance.

To Buehlmann, this implies that “Small-brained animals have the cognitive ability to control the colonies’ navigational success.” As a result, fewer individuals die of heat exhaustion or are killed by a predator.

Foraging in the salt pan is a race against time. About 20 percent of the foraging ants that were displaced by the researchers died in the desert sun while trying to find their way back. Other arthropods routinely die in the heat, too, providing a main source of food for the C. fortis ants. The cookie crumbs were undoubtedly a treat. One ant got as far as 2 km out but didn’t make it back. The record for distance and successful return with its cookie crumb was 1.1 km — probably near the limit of its physical ability. So far from its visual cue, it must have relied on other cues to successfully integrate its path back home. 

Investment Wisdom and Information Flow

The importance of having a tall nest was a surprise to the research team:

We were surprised that Cataglyphis ants not only build their own nest-associated landmarks but also do so readily when deprived of other visual cues necessary for navigation. A colony’s investment into building a nest hill is justified when other guiding visual cues are absent, as fast and efficient homing is evidently paramount for survival in the harsh habitat of the salt pan. However, as soon as other visual cues are present, the investment does not seem justified anymore and no nest hill is rebuilt. 

The whole colony must be involved in the investment of having a tall landmark.

Foraging is usually the last task in the life of a Cataglyphis worker, while the digging involved in building the nest hill is often performed by younger ants. This calls for some kind of information flow between the older foraging ants that face the lack of visual cues surrounding the nest and their younger nestmates responsible for building the nest-defining landmark.

How Do They Know?

If the younger ants do the work of rebuilding the nest hill, Buehlmann wonders how they know to get to work on the project.

If so, how do they know whether there is a lack of nest-defining cues around the nest? At the start of an ant’s foraging career, ants do well-choreographed learning walks around the nest. Their general purpose is the acquisition of information about the visual surrounds of the nest with relation to celestial compass cues. Future experiments will need to reveal the mechanisms of the described nest building behaviour and show who is triggering the hill re-building. It will be exciting to learn how individual foraging and navigation relates to colony-level nest building activities and if and how information is shared between nestmates about the need to build a nest hill for navigational purposes.

Beyond Machinery

In this extreme case of life-or-death navigaton, the ants show themselves remarkably well equipped. They are born into the world with sensors, algorithms, and integrated systems of moving parts supplied by nutrients and machines that enable them to walk fast under the hot sun and perform sophisticated navigation. But more is required.

Of interest in the context of the design debate, information flow is once again shown to be central to the story. Having neurons packed into a tiny brain is important, but neurons are useless without information. Information is an intangible, nonphysical, conceptual reality that makes life work. Information is the substrate on which life operates, and wisdom is the effective use of information. It can be programmed into code, but wisdom is the bequest of a beneficent and capable mind.

On the metaphysics of science?

 Can Science Escape Faith-Based Beliefs? Maybe It Needs Them!

Denyse O Leary

Physicist and astronomer Marcelo Glieser offered some thoughts recently on faith and science, noting that the scientific revolution has hardly changed the picture of faith much: “the great scientific advances of the past four centuries have not radically diminished the number of believers” in transcendent realities

If science is to help us, in the words of the late Carl Sagan, by providing a “candle in the dark,” it will have to be seen in a new light. The first step in this direction is to admit that science has fundamental limitations as a way of knowing, and that it is not the only method of approaching the unattainable truth about reality. Science should be seen as the practice of fallible humans, not demigods. We should confess our confusion and acknowledge our sense of being lost as we confront a Universe that seems to grow more mysterious the more we study it. We should be humble in our claims, knowing how often we must correct them. We should, of course, share the joy of discovery, the achievements of human inventiveness, and the importance of doubt. 

MARCELO GLEISER, “FAITH-BASED BELIEFS ARE INESCAPABLE IN SCIENCE,” BIG THINK, JUNE 28, 2023

As he implies, there’s no reason why it should. Science, for better or worse, is a faith-based enterprise. Along with many easier quests, scientists continue to pursue outliers like the origin of life, whether there is life in remote star systems, and the nature of consciousness. Many such topics border on metaphysics and may well involve imponderables. But then finding the right answer might not be as important in some cases as developing the right questions.

Why must scientists have faith that we can make progress in understanding our world? Political analyst M. Anthony Mills proposes at least three general ideas about what science does. What we expect science to do for us largely depends on which one of them we adhere to.

First Model

The first is what we might call the accumulationist model of scientific progress. According to this model, science progresses through the steady accumulation of data, facts, or information. The guiding metaphor here is the container: scientists go out and find bits of knowledge and add them to the container. Scientific progress is therefore a cumulative process, linear and gradual.

M. ANTHONY MILLS, “WHAT DOES ‘SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS’ MEAN, ANYWAY?” THE NEW ATLANTIS, SPRING 2023 

This model is popular but it can lead us astray. “Science will find the answer!” is only meaningful if the question is framed in a way that science can address. Science can’t tell us whether we are our brother’s keeper, whether it profits us to gain the whole world if we lose our souls, or whether some unfortunate person’s life is worth living. Unfortunately, science is sometimes misused to add apparent weight to a given answer, when the question is really one of ultimate spiritual values, not of science.

Second Model

Another model is what Mills calls “Kuhnian,” after the famous philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), who introduced the concept of paradigm shifts in science:

According to this account, progress is not linear and gradual; it is punctuated by moments of profound conceptual change and innovation. There are periods of relative calm — what Kuhn termed “normal” science — during which progress looks a lot like it does to the accumulationist. But these periods are interrupted by crises, when prevailing theories break down. Rivals emerge, challenge the consensus, ultimately overthrow a prevailing paradigm, and take its place, as when relativistic and quantum physics dethroned classical physics. These are the scientific revolutions that Kuhn called “paradigm shifts.”  

M. ANTHONY MILLS, “WHAT DOES “SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS” MEAN, ANYWAY?” THE NEW ATLANTIS, SPRING 2023

When we are contemplating a vast historical sweep, Kuhn’s theories are indeed helpful. But on the ground, we usually can’t know for sure whether we are living in a massive paradigm shift. Theories rise and fall all the time. Which of the changes matter? For example, findings from the James Webb Space Telescope upended a variety of assumptions but how much they will change the basic paradigm remains to be seen.

Third Model

He calls the third model Baconian, after the early modern philosopher of science Francis Bacon (1561–1626):

According to the third model, however, science progresses not by extending existing scientific paradigms, nor by resolving problems or crises internal to science. Instead, science progresses by grappling with problems posed to it from outside by social, political, and economic needs. We recognize scientific progress not by advances or innovations in our theoretical knowledge but by whether and to what extent our theories help us solve practical problems. Does science generate technological breakthroughs, contribute to economic growth, or help us solve pressing social and political problems?  

M. ANTHONY MILLS, “WHAT DOES “SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS” MEAN, ANYWAY?” THE NEW ATLANTIS, SPRING 2023

Of course, if we rely entirely on the third model, we might reject science that isn’t telling us what we want to hear, even if what it is telling us is true and important.

Generally, as Mills acknowledges, we must try all three models to see how much each can contribute to our understanding. But each model requires an initial input of faith: Faith that a big picture will emerge from small contributions (Model 1), faith that we will recognize when theories must change (Model 2), and faith in a bigger picture of the universe that we don’t allow our current issues to completely obscure (Model 3).

No matter how scientists navigate between models, Gleiser thinks that, for creativity in science, faith is indispensable:

A scientist therefore must base their approach on an imponderable process that some call a hunch or an intuition. This is an intellectually guided expression of faith in how the scientist imagines the world to be. There is no way to venture into the unknown without this guiding light, and that light comes from a source that is not completely known. This is where science meets faith.

MARCELO GLEISER, “FAITH-BASED BELIEFS ARE INESCAPABLE IN SCIENCE,” BIG THINK, JUNE 28, 2023 

It’s hard to imagine creativity in science working any other way.

Finding context for the sophistication of primeval technology

 Something Is Missing from the Materialist Framework

Stephen J Iacoboni

In sketching here what I have called the science of purpose, I have argued that the best way to topple the materialist paradigm is to reverse the fundamental concepts of structure and function. (See, most recently, “Replacing Chemistry with Purpose.”) The framework of materialism is based on randomness, from which, combined with natural selection, any structure theoretically can arise. In this way of thinking, over billions of years, randomly generated structures accidentally began to perform functions, resulting in life on Earth as we know it. That is, all the seemingly designed function in the biosphere is simply a result of randomly generated structures. The appearance of design is an illusion.

What is not an illusion, not even to materialists, is the nearly unfathomable complexity of function carried out, nanosecond by nanosecond, in every living creature since life first arose. From the time you started reading this article, perhaps 60 seconds ago, trillions upon trillions of discrete exquisitely tuned chemical reactions took place in your body. And that has been going on since the time that your father’s sperm met your mother’s egg.

And so of course no one argues the fact that function is real. 

But Is It Designed?

The funny thing about function is that it is utterly dependent on context. You could have cells with insulin receptors so that glucose is allowed into the cytoplasm from the extracellular compartment. That chemical reaction, even by itself, is enormously complex. But then what? Without all the necessary enzymes to convert glucose and oxygen into ATP, which is another 20 or so extraordinarily exquisite metabolic steps, the entry of glucose into the cell by itself is meaningless. Purpose is only served when the entire series of molecular events achieves the end, the telos, that it was designed to accomplish: benefit the host.

This straightforward analysis creates a conundrum for the materialist who wants to maintain that function emerges out of randomly generated structures. Let’s say the primordial soup randomly generated lipid-encasing vesicles that let glucose in and out. You might call this a mechanical operation, but it is not a function. Function only has meaning when it serves a purpose, and purpose only materializes when it serves a self.

It Is Really That Simple

Function and purpose are meaningless terms absent a self that benefits from their realization. You can pound a board with a hammer all you want. But until you put a nail between the hammer and the board, so that the board attaches to some other object that creates a structure that achieves the end that the carpenter intended, you have accomplished nothing. No function has been carried out. No purpose served.

Professor Terrence Deacon, a distinguished biological anthropologist as well as a widely published author and materialist, has described this confusing state of affairs, even coining a word, “ententional,” to help to characterize it. In his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, he asks how “teleological appearances of living processes [can] be accounted for…Investigators could neither accept ententional properties as foundational nor deny their reality, despite this apparent incompatibility.” (p. 147)

Scientists have learned over the centuries that when a fundamental theoretical impasse is encountered, we do not blame nature. We must blame the theory that fails to account for the observed natural phenomenon.

Something is missing from the theoretical framework of natural science if it cannot explain the function and purpose that are ubiquitous in life. And yes, the answer is there in plain sight in Professor Deacon’s own words. The truth is that “intentional” properties are foundational. They are the genesis of all purpose in life. 

The rise and fall of black excellence?

 

Finally, an electric truck?

 

Conditionalism is not a kook position?

 

Luddites :a brief history.

 Luddite

Wikipedia

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, often by destroying the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.[3]

The Luddite movement began in Nottingham, England and spread to the North West and Yorkshire between 1811 and 1816.[4] Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.[5]

Over time, the term has been used to refer to those opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies in general.[6]

Ryan Mullins on God, time and space the other side of the story.

 

If you shoot at the king don't miss.

 

That time NASA spotted an alien starship?

 

The irrationality of created time and space.

 One particularly circular line of reasoning re:the negation of the monarchy of JEHOVAH. Is the argument that Jesus cannot in fact be the first creation if through him all other things were created because all other things must include time and space.

Apparently no creating can happen outside of time and space.

Obviously the one thinking up this "defense" of the eternity of the Son needs to think some more the problem of creating outside of time would apply to any creation including time and space if these were made the first creations. There would be no here or now(as these are temporal and spatial delineations) in which any emergence of a created time or space could occur.

Not to mention that a finite time and space would cancel free moral agency.

In the scriptures time and space are purely abstract values that can neither be created nor destroyed . Thus there would be no need create time or space.

Psalms ch.90:2NIV"Before the mountains were born

or you brought forth the whole world,

from everlasting(olam) to everlasting(olam) you are God."

Time is permanent like JEHOVAH whom it describes

1Kings ch.8:30NIV"Hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place. Hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive."

So there is an eternal place outside of the creation where JEHOVAH the unmoved mover is permanently stationed.

We know that this dwelling is outside the creation because 

Verse 27NIV"“But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, CANNOT contain you. "

JEHOVAH CANNOT and need not enter his creation to accomplish his will. It is this fact that vindicates him as a perfect creator.  Indeed that is the purpose of the manifesting of JEHOVAH's logos to vindicate JEHOVAH as creator.

John ch.8:50NIV"I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge."

Feathered primates?

 

From the four corners of the document?

 

Matter is not reducible to matter?

 Can the Quantum Realm Explain Reality?

Peter Biles

If we can uncover the smallest quantum particles in nature, will we have uncovered the fundamental secrets of reality? A longstanding philosophical tradition in the sciences claims “yes.” Uncovering the mystery of the world, we’re told, lies in the ability to interrogate the smallest of the small. 

But Is That True?

What special status does the tiny have over the large? A paper at IAI News by London philosopher Peter West argues that reality can’t in fact be elucidated simply by observing quantum mechanics. He talks at some length about the 17th-century text Micrographia by Robert Hooke, which features various images of insects and other organisms under the microscope. West notes that Hooke set the stage, in part, for the impending empiricism of the Enlightenment, writing, 

According to Hooke, microscopes, like telescopes, put us on the cusp of doing what philosophers from Antiquity onwards had always tried to do, namely, understand the fundamental nature of reality.

Hooke’s book brought about the formerly unconsidered notion of another world teeming everywhere around them. Not only were the heavens seemingly infinite, but the downward regions of the infinitesimal suddenly abounded with complexity and mystery. West believes the book sparked a “paradigm shift,” and furthermore, relates today’s interest in quantum mechanics to Hooke’s microscopic ventures. However, unlike the microscopic, the quantum realm continues to evade human observation. West continues, 

The microscopic realm, once thought of as the bottom-most layer of reality, has been replaced by the quantum realm; and the quantum does not succumb to human observation. Indeed, the more of it we observe, the less we seem to understand it; for the quantum realm is, or seems to be, observer-dependent. And yet, the quest to identify a ‘base layer’ that the world around us is reducible to doesn’t seem to have been given up.

A Philosophical Commitment

West notes that many scientists and mathematicians, such as the late Stephen Hawking, remain committed to the idea that ultimate reality will eventually be explained via material causes and substances. However, the commitment is philosophical, not scientific, resting on prior assumptions and aims that color the scientific endeavor. West recommends giving up the hope of reducing all of reality to the physical, and instead to be open to many areas of inquiry, accepting that nature is “multifaceted and complex.” As mathematician David Berlinski writes in his new book, Science After Babel, 

That quantum mechanics makes no sense is widely celebrated as one of its virtues. Not a day passes in which its weirdness is not extolled. As much might be said of the Eucharist, but with this considerable difference: scientific weirdness tends inexorably toward a kind of bleakness. 

DAVID BERLINSKI, SCIENCE AFTER BABEL | EVOLUTION NEWS

The real post fossil future?

 

E.Vs: the other side of the argument

 

Making himself equal to JEHOVAH?

 John ch.5:18NASB"For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal(isa) with (the) God."

Strong's isos:isos: equal

Original Word: ἴσος, η, ον

Part of Speech: Adjective

Transliteration: isos

Phonetic Spelling: (ee'-sos)

Definition: equal

Usage: equal, equivalent, identical.

Those Trinitarians who are eager to make common cause with the slanderers of our Lord for the sake of advancing their extra biblical conclusions are not paying attention to implications of his accusers charges. Isos is never used in scripture to denote identity but equivalence. So if the religious leaders, who were the source of this accusation, were in the right it would necessarily imply that Jesus was not JEHOVAH or claiming to be JEHOVAH .Because that was not implication of the charge. The implication of the charge was that Jesus was claiming to be equivalent to the God(ho Theos) not merely the Father (ho Pater)

and not numerical identity to the God(not merely the Father) . Note Jesus' being numerically identical to the one God would also falsify the trinity because no member of the trinity is a God in his own right or that would result in polytheism and definitely not the only God as that would result in modalism.

So agreement with the false charges made at John ch.5:18 leads to the necessary implications that Jesus was neither the God nor claiming to be the God ,also the God that he was equal(isos) to is not the JEHOVAH of scripture.

Psalm ch.83:18KJV"That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth."

JEHOVAH Singlehandedly exhausts the category of Most high God he is without equal.

The same would go for another trinitarian favourite

Phillipians ch.2:6NASB"who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be [f]grasped, "

Again JEHOVAH has no equal So if Paul is saying that Jesus is (isos) equal to God as distinct to being numerically identical to God( BTW both claims would falsify the trinity). Necessarily Jesus would not be God and neither Jesus nor this God that he was (isos) equal to would be the JEHOVAH of scripture who is supreme.

The finetuning of our homeworld.

 

On origin of life science's attempts to map a path to a replicator.

 

The whale flipper is obviously designed?

 

On Origin of Life science's rose colored glasses

 More Scientific Problems with Paul Rimmer’s Views on Origin of Life

Brian Miller

In an article here yesterday, I analyzed astrochemist Paul Rimmer’s commentary on the debate between James Tour and Dave Farina. I focused on the specific research Rimmer cited and how his position as an origin of life (OOL) researcher likely shapes his evaluation of its relevance to explaining how a cell could have emerged through natural processes. Here, I will describe additional serious scientific problems with Rimmer’s optimistic assessment of the state of the field.

            

Proposed Path to Life

Rimmer presents the stages toward life’s genesis proposed by leading origins researcher John Sutherland (Figure 1). The postulated path to life entails a continuous series of stable systems gradually increasing in complexity until an autonomous cell emerges capable of Darwinian evolution. Since Sutherland assumes that life must have originated from undirected physical processes, he believes such stable intermediates must have existed. 

Many have attempted to justify this assumption by appealing to such researchers as Jeremy England who have demonstrated that far-from-equilibrium systems can generate self-organizational behavior such as a hurricane’s funnel cloud. Theorists propose that analogous self-organizational processes could have driven a chemical system from one stable state to the next. 

The Underlying Challenge

The problem with such claims is that naturally occurring self-organization is fundamentally different from the order in living systems, and all experiments that demonstrate self-organizational behavior that is even remotely life-like must apply artificial energy sources to systems designed to properly interact with the applied energy. For instance, Bachelard et al. (2017) applied acoustic waves of specific frequencies to meniscus particles in a waveguide to generate desired patterns in the acoustic bandgap (i.e., graph of transmitted frequencies). And Sacanna et al. (2014) applied light within carefully chosen frequency ranges to asymmetric semiconductor spheres in a solution of hydrogen peroxide fuel to generate self-propulsion and crystal formation. I describe other studies in my response to Jeremy England that employed comparable investigator ingenuity. In every example, the self-organizational behavior depends on the expertise of the researchers acting to achieve desired results. 

In contrast, energy sources available on the early Earth properly interact with few, if any, biologically relevant chemical reactions or physical processes. Instead, raw energy tends to break apart complex molecules (e.g., proteins and RNA) and cellular structures. Any interactions that would have allowed a chemical system to move even a tiny step toward life would have been exceedingly rare. 

The same holds true for even the earliest stages of origin scenarios. Tour has detailed how research that purportedly moves a chemical system toward life must start with carefully chosen molecules in concentrations and purities far higher that what could have occurred naturally. They must also employ highly orchestrated experimental procedures (here, here, here, here). Any chain of chemical events on the early Earth that achieved the same results would also have been exceptionally rare. 

Alternative Perspective

These challenges convince scientists who do not assume that life originated through undirected natural processes that the journey toward the first cell should be depicted very differently from that of Sutherland. Consider this figure which realistically presents what is necessary for life to arise: 

Figure 2 depicts four required processes for constructing a minimally complex cell:

The building blocks of life must be synthesized, including proteins, RNA, DNA, and cellular structures. 

The building blocks must be transported to the same location. This step is far more difficult to explain through natural processes than most realize. The origin of the constituent molecules and linking them together require at least eight different environments.

The building blocks must be properly assembled into a functional cell. The number of configurations corresponding to life divided by the number of all possible configurations is an unimaginably small ratio. 

Energy must be harnessed from the environment and converted into biologically useful forms, and that energy must be directed toward constructing a cell and then sustaining it. Continuous and reliable energy conversion and delivery can only be achieved with complex molecular machinery (here, here, here)

Figure 2 also depicts how every step toward life accomplished through a natural process corresponds to very “rare events.” In contrast, the natural processes continuously acting on an emerging protocell would have relentlessly driven it back toward biologically useless complex mixtures. 

Even a 95 percent complete cell would irreversibly decompose into simpler molecules. Every chance step in the local environment toward cellular autonomy (e.g., two amino acids linking) would be matched by physical processes breaking apart the cell membrane, disassembling cellular machinery, and degrading proteins, RNA, and DNA. Every step forward would have been overshadowed by countless steps backward. 

The Chicken or the Egg

Jeremy England elegantly describes the thermodynamic challenge for all life in his book Every Life Is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things when he states:

Like all living things, plants are structures that absorb energy from specific sources in ways that lead to internal motions that correct or undo each incremental bit of falling to pieces that happens at every moment. This process goes on not only when a wound heals, but also much more instantaneously every time sunlight is used to regenerate a molecule of chemical fuel that was just burned up, or every time a molecular chaperone burns up some chemical fuel in order to help a protein that has become misfolded to get back into the correct, functional shape. The fuel-consuming, heat-dissipating activities of proofreading, quality control, and self-maintenance lie at the core of what living things are doing all the time to remain alive, and every one of these activities involves some kind of cyclical motion, whereby work absorbed from the environment perpetually drags things back up the mountain as each little downward slip and slide occurs.

The dilemma for life’s origin is that the machineries for “proofreading, quality control, and self-maintenance” are required early along the journey to life, but they can only be built by cells that are already fully autonomous. In other words, life cannot form unless life already exists. 

Final Analysis

As I said in my previous article, I applaud Paul Rimmer’s civility, thoughtfulness, and stature as a committed theist who works in the field of origin of life research. Many might be attracted to his approach, and rightly so. I hope for the opportunity to have a dialogue with him someday. But just as hoping and believing in something doesn’t therefore make it true, being civil and thoughtful does not change the state of the scientific evidence. We must face reality, and when we realistically consider the complexity of biological systems, the quest to explain life’s origin through natural chemical processes shows every sign of being an impossible scientific goal. 

In fact, those not committed to the philosophy of scientific materialism often see attempts to explain life’s origin through natural processes as falling into the same category as alchemy or the quest for a perpetual motion machine. In addition, the minimal requirements for cells, such as information processing, energy production, and error correction, represent indisputable evidence for direct design. The denial of design is not driven by the empirical data or theoretical analyses but by philosophical commitments. 

The fossil record continues to be fuel for doubt re:Darwin.

 Fossil Friday: Cloudina Still Lacks the Guts to Be a Worm

Gunter Bechly

In a previous article series at Evolution News I discussed and debunked various alleged Precambrian animals, including the tube-like cloudinomorphs (Bechly 2020), which had recently been claimed by Schiffbauer et al. (2020) to represent bilaterian worms because of a preserved longitudinal structure that was interpreted by these authors as a digestive tract. This should support the existence of a hypothetical late Ediacaran “worm world.” I criticized this interpretation and the taxonomic attribution and concluded that “cloudinomorphs remain what they were before the recent paper by Schiffbauer et al. (2020): a problematic group of shelly fossils, which were almost certainly not bilaterian worms, but quite possibly related to cnidarians.” My conclusion has since then been strongly corroborated by three new studies.

First Study

Park et al. (2021) identified “derived characters linking some members of an enigmatic animal group, the cloudinids, which first appeared in the Late Ediacaran, to animals with cnidarian affinity from the Cambrian Series 2 and the Miaolingian.” These authors also mentioned that the alleged cloudinomorpha with preserved gut lack the characteristic funnel-in-funnel structure of the tubes and thus may be unrelated to typical cloudinids. This would leave the theoretical possibility that those “cloudinomorphs” (e.g., Saarina and Costatubus) indeed were bilaterian worms with a convergent similarity to cloudinids. However, the authors “propose an alternative hypothesis for the phylogenetic affinity of the cloudinid-like tubular organisms,” because recent cnidarian polyps of coronate scyphozoan affinity produce tubes that are superficially similar and often conflated with polychaete tubes. They also possess a lengthy gastrovascular cavity that could be misinterpreted as an annelid-like gut in the fossils.

Second Study

My hypothesis (Bechly 2022) that all the tube-like Ediacaran fossils with a stacked composition of the sclerotized tubes do represent burrowing cnidarians, has been strongly supported by the discovery that similar phosphatized and annulated tube-like fossils from the Cambrian were not worms but indeed cnidarians (Zhang et al. 2022). The latter authors concluded that “early annulated tubular exoskeletons from the latest Ediacaran and Cambrian are better understood as variations on cnidarian exoskeletons rather than early annelids.”

Third Study

Finally, Dunn et al. (2022) described a supposed crown-group cnidarian from the Ediacaran of Charnwood Forest in the UK. They discussed the affinities of Cloudina and the interpretation of its body structures. Here is what they found:

The affinities of Cloudina and similar taxa are controversial, with some authors arguing for an annelid affinity while others compare them with non-bilaterians, chiefly cnidarians. Proponents of an annelid affinity for Cloudina have argued that the putative presence of direct development excludes a placement in Cnidaria; however, there are several Cambrian, skeletonizing fossil cnidarian taxa known to undergo direct development (see below). Furthermore, the annelids with which Cloudina has been closely compared (Serpulidae and Siboglinidae) both go through indirect development via a trochophore larva, a feature common to many marine annelids and their close relatives. The tube microstructures in Cloudina that are comparable with those of annelids have evolved many times (for example, in Alvinellidae and Siboglinidae), while the granular tube microstructure of Cloudina is found in living cnidarians but is absent in calcareous tube-forming annelids, along with polytomous branching, a lack of attachment structures and a closed tube base (except in individuals that have undergone damage). Further evidence for a total-group bilaterian affinity was provided by the discovery of fossilized soft tissues, interpreted as a through gut. The proposed gut morphology was used as evidence against a cnidarian affinity due to the absence of features characteristic of anthozoans, such as an actinopharynx, and longitudinal septa are also absent from the skeleton. However, these features are not present in medusozoan polyps with many medusozoans having a gut gross morphology that is broadly comparable with that observed in the soft tissues of cloudinomomorphs. Furthermore, there are a variety of annelid-mimicking bilaterian groups known from the Palaeozoic era, although these mostly first appear from the Ordovician period onwards. While recent discoveries have provided critical insights into the tube ultrastructure, growth and soft-tissue structures of cloudiniids, placing Cloudina in the total group of any animal phylum may be premature and we chose not to consider it in our phylogenetic analysis.

In sum: the evidence for an affinity of cloudinids with bilaterian worms does not stand up to scrutiny, while there is stronger new evidence for a cnidarian relationship. This adds to the growing evidence that the Cambrian bilaterian animal phyla were mostly or even totally absent in the Ediacaran and thus highlights the abruptness of the Cambrian Explosion as a discontinuous burst of biological novelty.

It is becoming a striking pattern that we intelligent design proponents make one successful prediction after another, while Darwinism’s track record of failed predictions grows ever longer. This should give our critics some reason to pause and think, but for mainstream science Darwinian evolution must be true by default and intelligent design is a priori ruled out as an acceptable option, irrespective of any conflicting evidence or predictive scores. Unfortunately, not everybody is prepared to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

References

Bechly G 2020. Did Cloudinids Have the Guts to Be Worms? Evolution News January 17, 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/01/did-cloudinids-have-the-guts-to-be-worms/

Bechly G 2022. Let’s Help “Professor Dave” Understand the Precambrian. Evolution News December 2, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/lets-help-professor-dave-understand-the-precambrian/

Dunn FS, Kenchington CG, Parry LA, Clark JW, Kendall RS & Wilby PR 2022. A crown-group cnidarian from the Ediacaran of Charnwood Forest, UK. Nature Ecology & Evolution 6, 1095–1104. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01807-x

Park T-YS, Jung J, Lee M, Zhen YY, hua H, Warren LV & Hughes NC 2021. Enduring evolutionary embellishment of cloudinids in the Cambrian. Royal Society Open Science 8(12):210829, 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210829

Schiffbauer JD, Selly T, Jacquet SM, Merz RA, Nelson LL, Strange MA, Cai Y & Smith EF 2009. Discovery of bilaterian-type through-guts in cloudinomorphs from the terminal Ediacaran Period. Nature Communications 11:205, 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13882-z

Zhang G, Parry LA, Vinther J & Ma X 2022. Exceptional soft tissue preservation reveals a cnidarian affinity for a Cambrian phosphatic tubicolous enigma. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289(1986): 20221623, 1–9.

   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.

..and one Lord Jesus Christ?

 

The Father is one God his Son is one Lord?

 

For the hyper-titan crushing titans is but a pastime?

 

Continuing to rethink the unrethinkable again.

 

Coming to terms with E.C.T

 

The God and Father of Jesus is the only true God?: Pros and Cons.

 

Just enough religion to make us hate. III

 

James Tour vs. Dave Farina: the view from the centre

 Origin of Life: Cambridge Astrochemist Paul Rimmer Analyzes the Tour-Farina Debate

Brian Miller

Cambridge University astrochemist Paul Rimmer analyzed the debate between James Tour and Dave Farina on the Podcast Capturing Christianity. Rimmer has been recognized as a rising star in the study of the origin of life (OOL). In his charitable and thoughtful demeanor, he represents the antithesis of Farina. He also displays a commitment to describing the science with precision and nuance.

I have many positive thoughts about Rimmer, and I anticipate that many people who watch his post-debate analysis will rightfully come away with a positive view of him. However, the viewer should be aware of a critical caveat: Ultimately, Paul Rimmer is far too credulous about chemical explanations for the origin of life. His stance undoubtedly reflects his membership in the field of mainstream OOL research. To those outside that community, even the research Rimmer lauds as advancing the field only further confirms that life’s originating through natural processes is impossible on scientific grounds.

Analysis of the Debate

Rimmer begins with a helpful tutorial on research into life’s origin. He includes a diagram by John Sutherland on the presumed stages leading to the first self-replicating cell and the current state of the field. Rimmer summarizes the journey toward life as a continuous series of stable systems gradually increasing in complexity until one emerges capable of Darwinian evolution.

Rimmer then expands on specific topics raised by Tour and Farina. He elucidates the research cited by Farina in response to Tour’s question about how the amino acids Asp and Lys could have linked together on the early Earth. Rimmer acknowledges that the articles Farina cited do not directly address Tour’s questions, but he claims they still provide clues as to how amino acid chains could have emerged. He describes how Leman, Orgel, and Ghadiri (2004) linked the amino acids Ala, Phe, Leu, Ser, and Try together with the assistance of carbonyl sulfide. He then describes how Singh et al. (2022) linked aminonitriles (precursors to amino acids) to amino acids by employing catalysts such as thiols.  

Rimmer continues by explaining the research referenced by Farina related to the origin of RNA. During the debate, Tour described how nucleotides often join a growing chain with 2’-5’ linkages instead of the standard 3’-5’ linkages — nucleotides connect at the wrong carbon on the ribose molecule. Farina responded to this hurdle by citing Engelhart et al. (2013) who validated that a nucleotide chain known as a hammerhead ribozyme (RNA enzyme) could still break apart an RNA molecule even if the ribozyme possessed some 2’-5’ linkages. 

Rimmer states that RNA with the wrong linkages could not have been reliably copied, posing a major hurdle to further progress toward life. A single RNA molecule would almost always break apart before it could migrate to the right local environment where it could facilitate a life-relevant reaction. It would have to be copied numerous times before it could play any role in life’s origin. 

Yet Rimmer argues that this challenge is not necessarily insurmountable since Mariani and Sutherland (2017)demonstrated a chemical pathway that replaces 2’-5’ linkages with the correct 3’-5’ linkages. Rimmer acknowledges that this study does not fully solve the problem of building RNA since the correction process is not highly efficient or reliable, but he claims such research provides a “clue” as to how RNA molecules could have emerged. There are additional problems with this research that I will describe below. 

Differing Assumptions

The differing perspectives of Tour and Rimmer result from the differences in their starting assumptions. Rimmer’s scientific education trained him to only consider the possibility that life originated from natural processes. Rimmer tacitly acknowledges this fact in his response to a question about the appearance of design in life. He essentially argues that the origin of life requires “mind” only insofar as chemistry or biology or anything else that happens in nature requires mind. This is consistent with what he has written elsewhere predicting that we will one day find a “complete biological explanation … for the question of how life first originated on Earth.” He states that he does not wish to examine the evidence for design beyond the apparent design behind the laws of physics that allow for life to exist. Consequently, he is not concerned if experiments perfectly match what could have occurred on the early Earth or even if the chemistry is prebiotically plausible.He considers progress as simply finding clues as to what might have occurred. 

In contrast, Tour considers progress in understanding life’s origin as demonstrating a chemical process that could have occurred naturally and could have produced molecules in sufficient abundance and purity to drive the next step toward life. Tour has convincingly argued that no such research exists (see for example here or here).

From Tour’s perspective, a careful analysis of the procedures used in the research Rimmer references (here and here, ) reveals that the studies only moved chemical systems toward life by starting with carefully chosen molecules in concentrations and purities that could never have arisen naturally. The experiments also employed meticulously designed experimental protocols with only marginal similarity to what could have transpired on the ancient Earth. 

If the experiments used more realistic chemical mixtures and environmental conditions, they would not have produced anything biologically relevant. In addition, if the resulting products were deposited in any ancient environment, they would have simply degraded into biologically useless asphalts. Steven Benner describes this tendency as the Asphalt paradox. In other words, this research, while interesting, does not mimic a realistic natural environment, nor does it produce chemical mixtures that could eventually produce life. 

Probability Paradox

The hammerhead ribozyme study cited by Farina and Rimmer poses an additional seemingly insurmountable hurdle to the RNA world hypothesis. Ribozymes with 2’-5’ bonds have primarily been shown to break apart RNA, leading to what Benner refers to as the Probability paradox , which he describes as follows:

Experiments show that RNA molecules that catalyze the destruction of RNA are more likely to arise in a pool of random (with respect to fitness) sequences than RNA molecules that catalyze the replication of RNA, with or without imperfections.

If a system of randomly sequenced RNA had emerged on the early Earth, biologically useful ribozymes would have quickly vanished as the system degraded into simpler molecules. 

Future Presentations

As I noted, Paul Rimmer is thoughtful, civil, and his voice should be heard. He said nothing wrong in his presentation since he was asked to analyze the debate from the perspective of a scientist working in the field of OOL research. But those not working in the field can find many reasons why the research he cites is not persuasive that the chemical origin of life is possible. Perhaps in future discussions, Rimmer could explore how his philosophical framework shapes his interpretation of the results of OOL studies. Ideally, he would also explain why scientists not operating within the same framework assess the state of the field very differently. 

As someone who has also engaged in thoughtful dialogue with OOL researchers, I would be very happy to be part of such a conversation. But I do not want to put Paul Rimmer’s career in any jeopardy: Those working in the field of OOL research would be ill-advised to publicly speak with too much candor about fundamental weaknesses in that field since doing so might jeopardize their career. 

More false Gods?

 

The game of titans?