Thursday 15 February 2024
Wednesday 14 February 2024
Tuesday 13 February 2024
Time for some much needed iconoclasm re: St.Darwin?
Does the World Need Another Book About Darwin?
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present an excerpt from the new book by Dr. Shedinger, Darwin's Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished. This article is adapted from the Introduction.
What can anyone say that has not already been said about this seminal figure, Charles Darwin, considering the wealth of literature written about him? To the question posed in the headline above, the simple answer is yes, we do need another book about Darwin, for there are aspects of his life and work that have surprisingly continued to evade the attention of his many biographers and interpreters.
The very human Charles Darwin has grown into a mythological figure — the paradigmatic example of a true scientist — without whom nothing in biology would make sense, in the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Unfortunately, this mythological figure would be scarcely recognizable to Darwin’s own contemporaries.
Happily for the present enterprise, the flesh-and-blood Charles Darwin is considerably more interesting than the two-dimensional Darwin of the hagiographies.
The state of his scientific legacy is also more intriguing than those same hagiographies would allow — intriguing because it is embattled in ways confessed to in some of the peer-reviewed literature and at high-level scientific conferences but rarely acknowledged beyond these specialized contexts.
Modern scientific advances in fields like molecular biology, genomics, epigenetics, paleontology, developmental biology, and more are raising significant questions about the power of the Darwinian mechanism of variation and natural selection to account for the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Some are calling for an extended evolutionary synthesis while others believe the entire Darwinian edifice needs to be overhauled. It is no longer clear that Darwin can be said to have answered the question of the origin of species. There is thus no reason to begin an investigation into his life and work with the assumption that he did.
Abstract Art
One effect of Darwinian mythology has been to downplay the 19th-century Englishman’s own characterization of The Origin of Species as a mere abstract of his species theory, a summary lacking much of the facts, evidence, and authorities he promised would follow in a later work. The Origin is usually treated as Darwin’s magnum opus, a characterization in keeping with Darwinian mythology but out of step with Darwin’s own view of his work. In truth, The Origin of Species was an abstract of a much larger book on species that Darwin was working on (and that was three-quarters complete) before events forced him to put the larger book aside and instead publish a mere abstract of it.
Once the Origin was in circulation, Darwin’s many correspondents anticipated that he would quickly follow up with the publication of his big book on species so they could better evaluate the argument for natural selection made in the Origin. Indeed, Darwin himself created this expectation both in the Origin and in his correspondence. Even early reviewers of the Origin noted the lack of empirical evidence for natural selection but gave Darwin the benefit of the doubt since the Origin was a mere abstract and therefore could not be expected to provide all the evidence. Given the anticipation among Darwin’s readers for the big book on species, anticipation that Darwin himself repeatedly stoked, why did he never publish the big book? This question is rarely asked.
A rough, handwritten manuscript of Darwin’s big book, titled Natural Selection, survived among his papers and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1975.1 Yet despite the easy access scholars now have to this work (I bought a copy on Amazon), there has been little detailed engagement with its contents or comparison of this work with its abstracted form in the Origin. Such a comparison proves enlightening, for it serves to highlight the secondary nature of the Origin as a hastily written abstract rather than a finely honed scientific treatise, thus challenging the iconic status of the Origin as the foundational text of the modern biological sciences. This, of course, may be precisely why the big book gets overlooked.
Missing Goods
Another reason the big book has been largely ignored, I hope to show, is that it does not deliver the promised goods. This, I will also argue, is the best explanation for why Darwin never brought the book to print. It wasn’t, as one might suppose, that he had made little headway on it and simply lacked the time or energy to produce it. Abstracts are usually distillations of longer works already in existence. So, if the Origin, as Darwin constantly repeats, is only an abstract, it would suggest the big book on species already existed in some substantial form prior to 1859. And in fact, this was the case. The manuscript contained nine chapters and was close to 300,000 words in length. It would likely have been around 400,000 words complete. Given that this book was nearly three-quarters complete, why did Darwin never publish it? And why did he instead turn to the study of orchids as a follow-up to the Origin? Because, as will become clear, he came to see that it did not answer some key criticisms that the Origin had elicited. So, he abandoned the project, even as he allowed anticipation of its publication to persist for many years.
To be sure, Darwin’s orchid book, which he called “a flank movement on the enemy,”2 did attempt to provide some of the evidence for natural selection missing from the Origin (and, as it turns out, missing from the big book as well). He tried to outflank his opponents by putting before them an entirely new work on the numerous contrivances (Darwin’s word) found among orchid flowers to ensure their cross-fertilization by insects. Surely this would impress his readers with the power of natural selection to evolve all these exquisite contrivances.
But Darwin’s strategy failed. Reviewers of his orchid book read it as providing evidence for natural theology, not natural selection. And surprisingly, even Darwin himself in one place likened his orchid book to the Bridgewater Treatises, a series of writings designed to extol the power of God manifest in nature! Could anything be more ironic than that Charles Darwin, the poster child for the triumph of scientific naturalism in biology, actually advanced the cause of natural theology in his day? This is an aspect of his life and work that has been entirely erased by the prevailing mythological Darwinian narrative.
For all these reasons, a more nuanced assessment of Darwin’s evolutionary writings is warranted.
An Enigmatic Victorian
In my engagement with Darwin, I will give pride of place to his voluminous correspondence as the evidentiary basis of this more critical portrait of a truly enigmatic Victorian figure. The argument that lies ahead cites more than 250 letters written by and to Darwin up to the year 1863, some never cited in Darwinian biographies. These letters represent Darwin’s engagement with more than seventy friends, family members, and scientific correspondents. I have elected to adorn the book with many direct quotations from these letters, since I think it is crucial for readers to hear Darwin’s own voice on the page as much as possible to truly encounter the thought patterns and rhetorical style of this fascinating individual.
Many of Darwin’s biographers take the reverse approach — providing their own paraphrases of Darwin’s words — which has the effect of subordinating Darwin to the mythological figure the biography exists to perpetuate. I have also elected, for authenticity’s sake, to retain Darwin’s spelling and punctuation rather than correct them to modern standards. We need to let Darwin speak for himself. It turns out that Darwin, given the opportunity, is quite capable of dismantling his own mythology.
The four horsemen should have let sleeping dogs lie.
Richard Dawkins and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Post-1945 evolutionary studies were, as far as the public could discern at any rate, a relatively sedate affair right up to the later 1970s. Then, a new, brasher breed of biologists and philosophers began to declaim an unambiguously atheistic interpretation of Darwin’s legacy. This new trend can be dated to the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in 1976, a volume which enjoyed the then unusual novelty for science writing of not just presenting dispassionate reporting, but of inaugurating a new era of scientific proselytization. Without a trace of irony, it appeared, Dawkins in Selfish Gene and his numerous later publications was setting up his stall as a would-be messianic preacher with a distinctly secular/nihilist gospel to spread.
Educator or False Messiah?
The polarized responses elicited by Dawkins’s sermonizing are well enough known. Those who witnessed post-1976 discursive developments in real time will likely remember a narrative in two parts. On the one hand there were Dawkins and his followers attempting to give theologians a jolly good drubbing by pointing out to them the futility of endorsing any belief system which disregarded the exclusively material reality undergirding human life. Against that line of argument came a strong counterblast resulting in what seemed a veritable renaissance of Christian apologetics where one theological writer would follow another to point out the callowness of Dawkins’s understanding of religion,1 widely recognized as consisting in little but a rerun of the old conflict model of science and religion which first arose in formal terms in the later Victorian period in America.2 However, to nobody’s surprise the theological volumes which the dispute produced cut little ice with the persons to whom their critiques were directed (even assuming they were read by those persons at all). It is for that reason that I wish in what follows to turn to a less well reported aspect of the controversy but one which exerted a far greater public impact.
The New Atheists had indeed, just as they intended, stirred up a hornets’ nest, but it was their misfortune that so many of the more aggressive hornets have since turned round to sting them. This trend stems in good part from the fact that those expounding the Dawkinsite gospel had vastly underestimated those large ambivalences in many persons’ minds which for many decades had been concealed under a forbearing mask of civilized tolerance. The New Atheists’ failure to understand the nuanced way that “ordinary people” think was a strategic error so profound in its repercussions that, for reasons to be considered below, those after-effects could yet consign Darwin and his works to the dustbin of history.
Darwin Fatigue
In order to understand how and why Dawkins and his followers came to commit such a grave error it would be as well to reprise something of the reception of Darwin’s Origin in the more than a hundred years following 1860. The theories Darwin originally expounded were resoundingly rejected by the first cohort of scientific critics.3 Over the English Channel, too, skepticism about the ways and methods of pure speculation appears to have lain behind the decision of the French Academy of Sciences when it declined to elect Darwin to its zoological section on the grounds that both Origin and its pendant volume, The Descent of Man (1871), were “not science, but a mass of assertions and absolutely gratuitous hypotheses, often evidently fallacious.”4
Despite this clear scientific disapprobation, however, there emerged as the 19th century wore on an increasing acceptance of or at least acquiescence in Darwinian ideas on the part of increasing numbers among the educated classes (although many, like Thomas Huxley, whilst assenting to evolution, dissented from Darwin’s distinctive notion/misnomer of “natural selection,” recte natural preservation). By the century’s end a form of “Darwin fatigue” appears to have settled upon many people’s thinking, and with it a drift towards letting the case go by default. Where for instance writers and opinion-formers of the high Victorian era were once vitally engaged with Darwinism and its implications, many of their literary successors at the approach of the 20th century (excepting Thomas Hardy) reacted with some indifference, often quietly relegating Darwinism to the status of a superannuated controversy. As Professor John Holmes noted with regard to these later writers, “It was their parents’ and grandparents’ controversy, not their own.”5 And although pockets of questioning continued to exist to the extent that there could even be talk of an eclipse of Darwinism in the early decades of the 20th century6, the so-called New Synthesis of the early 1940s (which claimed to harmonize Darwinism with more up-to-date findings in genetics) ostensibly succeeded in steadying the ship, persuading large numbers to accept the Darwinian legacy positively. But how steady was the passage of the ship really?
Settled Science or Polite Fiction?
By the middle of the 20th century Darwinism had seemed by default to have slipped into that niche commonly termed settled science, and Darwin’s legacy was far less often confronted critically, at least in the public arena. All that new students supposedly had to do now was “learn about” Darwin in the same way they learned about such irrefutable historical information as the dates of Magna Carta or the American Revolution. Most 20th-century attitudes to Darwinism before the advent of the later 1970s might then perhaps most politely be labelled “accommodationist.” That mindset involved a tolerant acceptance of Darwinism — even whilst some might have suspected they were assenting to a polite fiction — accepting Darwinism “under erasure,” so to speak.
For did not Darwinism possess the commendable virtue of providing at least a colorable explanation for the underlying reality of biological existence, an explanation which remained consistent with the zeitgeist of a secularizing age? By which I mean that, if you bring to evolution an anything-but-God mindset, then you will cling tenaciously to the one purely materialist theory you believe has any chance — however improbable it may appear to you — of explaining life’s diversity. At the very least, Darwinism had, with all its glaring empirical deficits, become a convenient place-holder position in the absence of any genuinely demonstrable explanations for that which the classical poet Lucretius had once termed the Nature of Things. This attitude of somewhat disengaged half-belief linked to a courteous disinclination to rock the boat remained the norm until the later 1970s. It was a diplomatic (but behind the scenes heavily caveated) acceptance of Darwinism, but the New Atheists displayed little sensitivity or perhaps even bare comprehension of the subtleties of such nuanced thinking.
Renaissance of Dissent
In the event it has turned out not to be so much wounded religious sensibilities as a dispassionate re-analysis of the evidence carried out by independent, non-aligned thinkers that is bidding fair to topple the speculative edifice of Darwinism. A more fatal counterattack than that mounted by theologians has come not only from dissenting scientists but from ordinary, educated persons goaded into reconsidering the questionable data on the basis of which they have heard unsubstantiated truth-claims being proclaimed. The salient point here is that many such persons might never have felt impelled to review the evidence had they not been rather roughly importuned to attend to what was, without evidence, purported to be The Truth. This was all the more the case because of a suspicion that the official Darwinian line might not represent the truth since, as W. Daniel Hillis commented in the context of a symposium on the dialogue between scientific culture and the intelligentsia in a broader sense:
There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden, because the religious right are always looking for any argument between evolutionists as support for their creationist theories. There’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.7
Be that as it may, it was primarily due to the “Thou shalt believe what I say regardless or else be scorned as a nitwit” tone that many in the 1980s and ’90s felt stung to review the evidence afresh or, in many cases, for the first time in their lives. Such was certainly the case for the present author who a bare half decade ago was driven to research the evidence put forward by Darwin — whereupon he found that such evidence as exists was not merely flimsy but almost entirely nugatory and even illusory. In legal terminology I came to see the case as being without merit.
Intellectual Revolt
My negative conclusion concerning the life’s work of an icon of British science at first alarmed me since it seemed so presumptuous, but I soon found that others of my own age cohort and comparable educational background shared similar misgivings. In fact, the irreverent views of novelist A. N. Wilson and of veteran journalist Melanie Phillips reached a pitch of mocking satire which even I would hesitate to emulate. Wilson for instance discusses Swedish biologists’ computing of the time-scale on which “natural selection” would have to operate to produce a properly functioning eye in a number of fish-types, suggesting the figure of half a million years — a timeframe which Dawkins pronounced to be well-nigh instantaneous by the standards of geological time. Wilson’s sardonic response: “Having been fair to the Swedish biologists, it is also necessary to be fair to the haddock or the bream who might, if capable of speech, have wanted to say to Professor Dawkins, ‘Half a million years might seem ‘instantaneous’ in Oxford, but down here on the ocean bed, when we needed an eye to protect us from predators such as sharks, it seems rather a long time.’”8 Phillips is no less withering. To Dawkins’s contention that a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying (a “replicator”) she adds, “As the late, great comedian/magician Tommy Cooper would have said, ‘Just like that!’ There is no evidence whatever for this just-so story. It belongs not to science but to Dawkins’s imagination.”9 The fact that distinguished members of an educated intelligentsia have come forward to oppose Darwinism should surely be an indication that the whole Darwinian belief system requires to be analyzed afresh since the present theories of biological science clearly do not command the support of educated opinion.
Unknowable Unknowns
It seems inherently unlikely that just one of the many sempiternal imponderables of human existence would have revealed its secrets to what has been so much conjecture and hope-driven guesswork. Many informed minds clearly still view evolution in the same way that they do those other imponderables with which the question of the origin of species may most appropriately be compared, such as, What is the ultimate origin of the genetic code and who/what directed it to produce plant and animal species? Why are we safely cocooned in a cosmic Goldilocks zone in contrast to the truly Hadean state of the rest of the universe? Where do the laws of physics come from? What was before the Big Bang? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are the well-known existential imponderables with which the question of the origin of species is best compared. In fact, the “origin” of species (by which Darwin meant the “origination” or diversification of species) has traditionally been seen as a matter beyond all sensible conjecture, on a par with those other sources of human puzzlement referenced.
Evolution’s closest comparator is arguably that of the absolute origin of life on earth. That is, how did a once barren terrestrial environment give rise to life forms in the first place and how did the resources deemed necessary to this process — self-replicating molecules bearing well-nigh incalculable amounts of genetic information — come about? Darwin and Dawkins, in company with sundry media scientists, have made various guesses by invoking concepts like fluke chemical reactions in warm ponds or oceans and “spontaneous generation” (for which read “chance development”). However, the “abiogenetic” nostrum of water + chemicals = organic life has so far turned out to be a false hope, on earth as in outer space. There is no proof that life is just an “emergent” property of chemistry, and so the answer as to how life first arrived to reap the benefits of Earth’s bio-friendly conditions must necessarily remain a mystery.
The same skepticism could, mutatis mutandis and with equal justice, be applied to the subject of natural selection. Erasmus Darwin’s postulation of a transmutation of species was hardly a new hypothesis: it goes back to Greek antiquity and the thought experiments of Anaximander and Anaximenes in the 6th century before Christ,10 an era in which the idea of scientific proof as we understand it did not exist. Even Charles thought his grandfather’s hypotheses speculative; and in the 18th century such ideas as those of Erasmus and his French transmutationist colleagues were commonly regarded as the eccentric musings of a small, self-referential coterie.
Hence the prime desideratum in the 19th century was seen as the identification of a causal mechanism that might render plausible the counterintuitive claim of boundless metamorphic evolution alleged by Erasmus and his French confrères. Hoping to justify his grandfather’s intuitions on this point, Charles applied himself to finding a wholly material mechanism underlying the evolution of all things and so cut out the cosmic middleman, so to speak, which he found (via Thomas Malthus) in his conception of natural selection. Charles had essentially been hunting around for any idea that would make the incredible appear credible.
Randomness vs. Teleology
Although Charles had some qualified success with his Malthusian turn, many scientists, while readily conceding the possibility of incidental modifications on a minor scale as ad hoc adaptations to changing environments, have objected that the spawning of new species (speciation) is by definition a teleological project in pursuit of a new physiological goaland therefore dependent on a prior plan or conception. Purpose can after all hardly be achieved purposelessly. When Darwin bowed to peer pressure to change the term natural selection to natural preservation (on the entirely reasonable grounds that there was no goal-driven selection involved), this rather annulled the idea of innovation (i.e., development of new body plans and new species). The retitled “natural preservation” was by definition only a conservative force, not a productive one. This limitation, so fatal to Darwin’s original conception, should surely be revisited as a matter of prime importance. For to suggest that natural preservation could advance species or produce new ones seems to be an outrageous cooking of the books in order to produce a conclusion contradicted by evidence.
A similar stricture might be applied to the large role accorded to chance in the evolutionary process, which stands in logical contradiction to the idea of a predictable mechanism or vera causa. By normally accepted standards, any observation making a claim to the status of a regularity or scientific law which depended on the postulation of chance would condemn itself as being a contradiction in terms. For chance is by definition not a (causative) agency nor does it evidence the predictability and regularity of a natural law. Darwin, to give him due credit, at least had the grace to harbor doubts about the role of chance in evolution, which is more than can be said of many of his 20th- and 21st-century legatees, some of whom show themselves blithely free of such reservations. Here for instance is Daniel Dennett expounding with unruffled finality (and circularity) what he terms his “algorithmic” ideas about natural selection: “Can the biosphere really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind algorithmic process.”11 That proposition seems to be not only culpably unfalsifiable (in Karl Popper’s sense) but also, frankly, indiscussable (to use the term used by the logical positivist philosophers of the earlier 20th century to designate what they called non-sense).
The Mystery of Mysteries
In the quest to get to the bottom of perennial mysteries, it has been justly observed, “absolute materialism does not triumph because it cannot fully explain the nature of reality.”12 Darwinism provides no convincing answers to the problems it claims to solve because the questions it attempts to confront lie beyond the domain of empirical science and its strictly delimited methodological parameters. Humankind’s steps towards solving these mysteries have hitherto been Lilliputian at best and all too frequently wrong-headed. As astrophysicist Paul Davies once observed, we can pursue rational enquiry till the cows come home but “my instinctive belief [is] that it is probably impossible for poor old Homo sapiens to get to the bottom of it all.”13 Furthermore, he adds, when we finally come to review an extended explanatory chain, “sooner or later we will have to accept something as given, whether it is God, or logic or a set of laws or some other foundation for existence… whether we call this deeper level of explanation God or something else is essentially a semantic matter.”
The irony is that Darwin himself in private correspondence showed himself only too aware of the limitations of the scientific method:
I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.14
Quite so. Rather surprisingly, Darwin’s conclusion makes him something of a poster boy for our postmodern mentality, whereas his more doctrinaire modern disciples seem more like Victorian forebears trapped in an anachronistic, pre-quantum universe. For almost a century now the Newtonian/Enlightenment paradigm has had to cede scientific authority and status to that of quantum physics where, in the subatomic world, the predictable regularities of the Newtonian universe simply do not apply. No self-respecting scientist can now claim to deliver certainty and predictability in the wake of bewildering advances in quantum mechanics with its (only) probabilistic laws.15 It may even be necessary to revisit causality and even reality itself. Early 20th-century British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington could see that clearly when he claimed that religion became eminently possible for a reasonable scientific person in the year 1927. The significance of that very precise date was that it was the year of the promulgation of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which essentially announced that “all bets are off” with regard to mankind’s aspirations to be able to truly understand nature. We were, Eddington strongly hinted, dependent on powers far beyond our comprehension.
Although he could have known nothing of the quantum world, the Darwin who latterly termed himself a theist seemed to show an instinctive understanding of albeit dimly apprehended hidden dimensions of reality when he courteously but firmly refused to endorse the views of the first atheist Member of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh. It therefore seems probable that he would have felt considerably affronted had he been able to foresee the tendentious uses to which his essentially questioning legacy has been put by certain of his modern disciples. It would be reasonable to suppose in an imaginary counterfactual scenario that Darwin would show the door to Dawkins and the New Atheists as politely but as firmly as he once did to Charles Bradlaugh.
Darwin decanonized?
Deconstructing Darwin: The Myth and the Man
Our observance of Darwin Day 2024 — the birthday of the iconic scientist — continues. Why didn’t Charles Darwin finish and publish his promised sequel to On the Origin of Species? Is it possible to separate Darwin the Myth from Darwin the Man to find the answer? On a new episode of ID the Future, I begin a conversation with author and professor Dr. Robert Shedinger about his new book, Darwin's Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished.
Most Darwin scholars take for granted that he satisfied the question of the origin of species. They promote a mythological view of Darwin as a scientific and cultural icon who forever changed the world with his theory of evolution by natural selection. But what if we study his life and work without making that assumption? Quite by accident, Dr. Shedinger began reading the voluminous private correspondence of the enigmatic naturalist. The letters to family, friends, and other scientists of his day revealed to him a very different Darwin from the myth — a Darwin prone to insecurity, false modesty, and rhetorical craftiness.
In Part 1, Dr. Shedinger explains the importance of comprehensively engaging with Darwin’s correspondence. He also reveals the frailties of Darwin that help us see him in a very different light. Harboring a secret fear that he’d become what his father said he would — a disgrace to himself and his family — Darwin desperately sought status and recognition in the scientific community of his day. After formulating his theory of natural selection, no contradicting argument or evidence could dissuade him from it. But what if he was wrong? In his study of Darwin, Shedinger dares to ask this question, perhaps the most important Darwin question of all.
Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Monday 12 February 2024
Time for Darwin to throw down?
For Darwin Day, Robert Shedinger Calls Darwin’s Bluff
It’s Darwin Day 2024, the birthday of Charles Darwin, and Discovery Institute Press has a new truth bomb for the occasion — Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished. The book, by Robert Shedinger, Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, drags from Charles Darwin’s closet a long overlooked skeleton devastating to the Darwinian mythology.
Tucked away in Darwin’s surviving papers is a lengthy manuscript he never finished, The Origin of Species’ oft-promised sequel on speciation he said would finally supply solid empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection. He admitted such evidence was largely absent from the Origin, a work he repeatedly described as a “mere abstract.” And yet Darwin soon abandoned his sequel, and without ever revealing this decision to his reading public.
A Long-Unsolved Mystery
The question of why Darwin set the work aside has never been satisfactorily resolved. In this fresh and engrossing piece of historical detective work, Shedinger probes Darwin’s letters, notebooks, and the unfinished manuscript itself to piece together the solution to the mystery — namely, that Darwin never finished his big sequel because in the end he couldn’t deliver the promised goods. His book, begun in earnest, devolved into a bluff.
Shedinger previously authored The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion. That earlier book received praise from scientists inside and outside the intelligent design community.
Scientists and scholars are also singing the new book’s praises. Historian Richard Weikart, author of Darwinian Racism, calls Darwin’s Bluff “fascinating.” Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK, describes it as “nothing short of a demythologization of modern biology’s origin story.”
“History of Science at Its Best”
The book resonated at a personal level for Günter Bechly, an internationally distinguished paleontologist. As he explains, “In 2009, as a card-carrying Darwinist serving as a fossil curator in one of Germany’s natural history museums,” he came to the startling realization that modern Darwinism rests “on a carefully constructed bluff.” Shedinger’s new book helped him see that, as Bechly puts it, such evolutionary “bluffing has a long pedigree, stretching back to the master of Down House himself. What emerges from Shedinger’s deep dive into Darwin’s private writings is a picture of a man wracked by doubts and insecurities about his evolutionary theory, but also a man not above a good bluff, one he sold so artfully that he may even have persuaded himself.”
Jeffrey Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University, says the new book also exposes modern Darwinism. Kripal lauds Darwin’s Bluff as “a minutely researched piece of new scholarship,” which shows that “the confident scientific naturalism for which Darwin is mythologized today is largely a set of rhetorical devices and dogmatic beliefs that add up to a massive bluff.” Shedinger’s book, Kripal concludes, “is the history of science and the study of religion at their best.”
On JEHOVAH'S Woman: the watchtower society's Commentary.
The “woman” of Genesis 3:15. At the time that he sentenced humankind’s parents, Adam and Eve, God gave the promise of a seed that would be brought forth by the “woman,” and who would crush the serpent’s head. (Ge 3:15) Here was a “sacred secret” that God purposed to reveal in his due time. (Col 1:26) Some factors in the circumstances existing at the time of the prophetic promise provide clues as to the ‘woman’s’ identity. Since her seed was to crush the serpent’s head, he would have to be more than a human seed, for the Scriptures show that it was not to a literal snake on the ground that God’s words were aimed. The “serpent” is shown at Revelation 12:9 to be Satan the Devil, a spirit person. Consequently, the “woman” of the prophecy could not be a human woman, such as Mary the mother of Jesus. The apostle sheds light on the matter at Galatians 4:21-31.—See SEED.
In this passage the apostle speaks of Abraham’s free wife and of his concubine Hagar and says that Hagar corresponds to the literal city of Jerusalem under the Law covenant, her “children” being the citizens of the Jewish nation. Abraham’s wife Sarah, Paul says, corresponds to “the Jerusalem above,” who is the spiritual mother of Paul and his spirit-begotten associates. This heavenly “mother” would be also the “mother” of Christ, who is the oldest among his spiritual brothers, all of whom spring from God as their Father.—Heb 2:11, 12; see FREE WOMAN.
It would follow logically and in harmony with the Scriptures that the “woman” of Genesis 3:15 would be a spiritual “woman.” And corresponding to the fact that the “bride,” or “wife,” of Christ is not an individual woman, but a composite one, made of many spiritual members (Re 21:9), the “woman” who brings forth God’s spirit-begotten sons, God’s ‘wife’ (prophetically foretold in the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah as cited in the foregoing), would be made up of many spiritual persons. It would be a composite body of persons, an organization, a heavenly one.
This “woman” is described in John’s vision, in Revelation chapter 12. She is shown as bringing forth a son, a ruler who is to “shepherd all the nations with an iron rod.” (Compare Ps 2:6-9; 110:1, 2.) This vision was given to John long after Jesus’ human birth and also after his anointing as God’s Messiah. Since it obviously has to do with the same person, it must have reference, not to Jesus’ human birth, but to some other event, namely, his being installed in Kingdom power. So the birth of God’s Messianic Kingdom was here pictured.
Satan is shown later as persecuting the “woman” and making war with “the remaining ones of her seed.” (Re 12:13, 17) The “woman” being heavenly, and Satan by this time being hurled down to the earth (Re 12:7-9), he could not reach those heavenly persons of whom the “woman” was made up, but he could reach the remaining ones of her “seed,” her children, the brothers of Jesus Christ still on earth. In that way he persecuted the “woman.”
Sunday 11 February 2024
But who will save them from their friends?
Dead Pets: PETA’s Astonishing Kill Rate
PETA (or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) believes that animals and humans have equal moral value, yet it has long killed animals at a rate far higher in its Norfolk, Virginia, animal shelter than have other similar facilities. (This apparently includes adoptable animals, as I discussed here in 2009.)
Apparently, things have not improved in the intervening years. PETA’s kill rate in 2023 was an astonishing 76 percent for dogs, 81 percent for cats, and 78 percent for all animals in its care. In comparison, all Virginia public agencies euthanized 9 percent of dogs, 11 percent of cats, and 10 percent of all animals.
Why might that be? PETA says its animals are mostly not adoptable. But I suspect it has more to do with its absolutist animal-rights ideology that perceives human ownership of domesticated animals as akin to slavery and, hence, a cause of suffering. As a consequence, PETA’s leadership may believe that some animals are better off dead than adopted by households that are non-vegan or don’t espouse the group’s animal-rights beliefs.
The state of play re: academics' knowledge(or ignorance) of the origin of language.
Top Five Questions on the Origin of Language — Answered!
Here are answers to the top five questions asked about human languages, of which there are estimated to be over 7,100 spoken today, omitting blended languages (pidgins and creoles).
1. When Did Humans Evolve Language?
The assured results of modern science are that… no one really knows. There are, of course, many theories, including one offered by University of California Irvine prof Richard Futrell, covered at Discover Magazine:
As we got smarter and found more things we wanted to communicate, we ran into what Futrell calls a “simplicity bottleneck.” We couldn’t just keep adding more words. We didn’t need a lot of linguistic structure when all we needed to communicate was a few distinct calls to warn of predators or to attract a mate or threaten a rival,
“Our brains aren’t big enough; our lives aren’t long enough to learn them all,” he says.
At that point, if the computer models are correct, linguistic structure was inevitable. This may also, Futrell says, have led to a runaway evolutionary dynamic where an increase in the complexity of culture meant that people who had better communication had more evolutionary success; meanwhile, better communication led to even greater cultural complexity. Before you know it, you have 7,000 languages and mind-twisting conversations about quantum physics.
AVERY HURT, “WHEN DID HUMANS EVOLVE LANGUAGE?” DISCOVER MAGAZINE, OCT 27, 2023
But just because we need something is no guarantee that we will have it. There is something missing from this computer-based theory, as there is from all materialist theories about the origin of anything.
2. What Is the World’s Oldest Language?
At Scientific American, Lucy Tu offers some information:
As for the oldest language that is still spoken, several contenders emerge. Hebrew and Arabic stand out among such languages for having timelines that linguists can reasonably trace, according to [linguist Danny] Hieber. Although the earliest written evidence of these languages dates back only around 3,000 years, Hieber says that both belong to the Afroasiatic language family, whose roots trace back to 18,000 to 8,000 B.C.E., or about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. Even with this broad time frame, contemporary linguists widely accept Afroasiatic as the oldest language family. But the exact point at which Hebrew and Arabic diverged from other Afroasiatic languages is heavily disputed.
LUCY TU, “WHAT’S THE WORLD’S OLDEST LANGUAGE?”SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, AUGUST 24, 2023
Some, she says, would add Chinese, which probably arose from Proto-Sino-Tibetan about 4,500 years ago or Tamil, to which some ascribe an origin 7,000 years ago. As she says, “bragging rights” and political considerations complicate the disputes.
3. Does Learning a Third Language Interfere with the Other Two Languages You Know?
It can interfere with the second foreign language (FL) to some extent. A recent open access study found that “ … learning a new language indeed comes at the cost of subsequent retrieval ability in other FLs. Such interference effects set in immediately after learning and do not need time to emerge, even when the other FL has been known for a long time.”
4. Are New Languages Still Getting Started?
New or greatly changed languages can get started when groups of people who speak different languages must learn to interact. That’s how the world’s many pidgins originated. Sociolinguist Phillip M. Carter thinks that the beginnings of something like that may be happening in Miami as English and Spanish speakers interact:
According to FIU research published in English World Wide, some expressions unique to the 305 are evidence a distinct dialect is emerging in South Florida. It’s the result of a common phenomenon that happens in other regions of the world when two languages come into close contact. In this case, Spanish sayings are being “borrowed” and directly translated into English — then passed down and used by generations who are bilingual.
ANGELA NICOLETTI, “‘GET DOWN FROM THE CAR’ IS AN EXPRESSION YOU’LL PROBABLY ONLY HEAR IN MIAMI. NEW RESEARCH EXPLAINS WHY” FIU NEWS, MAY 11, 2023
However, the advent of worldwide communication has tended to favor the 25 dominant world languages at the expense of those spoken by only as few thousand people in one area.
5. Will AI Take Over and Introduce Some Sort of Uniquack?
Not so fast, says Optilingua Europe, a translation firm offering 100 languages:
Despite its many advantages, AI is far from infallible and still has many limitations in the field of translation. Indeed, this technology is not able to adapt the translation to the target readership. Nor can it consider local cultural norms and customs, the clients’ expectations, the style, the translation’s intention… These are essential elements in translation, to obtain texts that are respectful of the local culture, adapted to the target audience and faithful to the source text. Furthermore, while AI translation can be effective for the most common languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Arabic, etc.), it is much less effective for rare languages or dialects for which little data exists. In such cases, the AI will very often have to use English translation as an intermediate step, which may generate significant errors and misunderstandings.
FRÉDÉRIC IBANEZ, “THE IMPACT OF AI ON THE FUTURE OF TRANSLATION,” OPTILINGUA EUROPE, 21.03.2023
As writer and editor Anthony Esolen observes, “Human language is by far the most sophisticated invention in the universe, and a book the most sophisticated “software”… beaming the thoughts of men long gone into your own mind, but not in a dead way, not in a deterministic way, but alive, suggestive, unpredictable.” It’s not realistic to hope either that we can easily explain its origin or simply reduce it to software.
Man's global Dominion has not gone totally unchallenged.
The Most Deadly Man-Eating Lions In History
Man-eater, the very word strikes fear in the hearts of many. The term is used to refer to an animal that attacks or kills humans. Animals involved in these attacks range from sharks to wolves and crocodiles to big cats. Of human deaths by big cats, many have been caused by lions in particular. What drives a lion to kill humans? Lack of prey is the main factor behind this occurrence. When lions cannot find food, they are forced to search over many miles. Becoming desperate, they will often turn to livestock or humans for survival. Human activity is responsible for declining prey populations. With humans infringing on lion territory, lions are running out of places to go. Humans are also an easier prey to catch which is appealing to older or sick lions. Some scientists claim that once a predator tastes human blood, they will develop a preference for it and begin to seek out people as prey. This theory could explain why some animals are repeat offenders. Below are some of the most vicious man-eating lions in history.
Most Dreaded Man-Eating Lions
Man-Eaters Of Njombe
Between 1932 and 1947, the people of southern Tanzania lived under fear of being attacked by lions. One pride (a group of lions) of 15 lions was especially violent, earning them the name of “Man-eaters of Njombe”. These lions were triggered by the British colonial government’s efforts to control an outbreak of rinderpest virus. In order to stop the virus that was killing local livestock, the government began killing off wild animals like zebra, wildebeest, and antelope. Consequently, lions began to starve and search for alternative prey. The Njombe pride was clever, moving through the night and killing during the day which is opposite of typical lion behavior. Before they were exterminated by the British game warden, the Njombe pride claimed the lives of approximately 1,500 victims.
Tsavo Lions
The Tsavo man-eaters have been immortalized on the silver screen and have villainized their descendants, the Tsavo lion. This lion species travels in smaller pride, and the males are easily recognized by their lack of a mane. In 1898, 2 of them had their sights set on a railroad crew along the Tsavo River in Kenya. They have been blamed for the death of 140 workers. One of the possible explanations for this behavior is that the lions got a taste for human blood after scavenging on the corpses of workers. Many of these men were slaves and not given a proper burial thus leaving their bodies exposed to the lions. This opportunity motivated their preference for human prey, and the lions continued attacking the living. The men were so scared that the majority left the job. The chief engineer finally visited the project site and killed the two lions. Recent estimates suggest the two were responsible for a significantly lower victim count.
Chiengi Charlie
Chiengi Charlie, also known as the White Lion due to his light color, terrorized present-day Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in 1909. His strange appearance, white-like with only half a tail, led villagers to revere him as one might revere a legend. He moved among villages preying on the inhabitants and eventually joining forces with two other lions. Rumors have it that Chiengi Charlie even killed a servant who had been sent to hunt him down. He managed to elude villagers for a year and during that time devoured 90 people. He was eventually shot.
Osama
Osama, the Arabic word for lion, killed over 50 people from 2002 to 2004 in Rufiji, Tanzania. When he was shot in 2004, he was only 3 ½ years old. His young age has led some scientists to believe that Osama learned to hunt for people from his mother. Others claim he singled out humans because of a large abscess on one of his molars, human flesh being more tender than other animals.
Lion Of Mfuwe
In 1991, the Lion of Mfuwe killed an estimated six people in the Luangwa River Valley of Zambia. A man from California in the US was visiting on safari at the time and reportedly waited in a hunting blind for nearly three weeks before getting the opportunity to shoot the lion. Villagers claim that the lion was so fearless that he sauntered through the middle of the town carrying the laundry basket of one of his casualties. His size was enormous, nearly 10 feet in length, and today, his body can be found at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Ongoing Fear
These man-eating lions will live on as the subjects of oral stories passed on by inhabitants of the villages where these creatures once preyed. They will serve as lessons for small children, a reminder to pay close attention to their surroundings and watch out for lions. Their deaths are not in vain, and everybody can learn a lesson from their stories. Human interference is often the root cause of these killings. When ravaged by hunger and pushed to desperation, big cats can and will turn to humans for food.
On Christian physicalism
We are Christian physicalists. Why? Because as those who believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures we are convinced that the bible ,properly understood, holds to this view of earthly life including human life.
ecclesiastes ch.3:19,20KJV"19For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. 20All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.".
Now we do not hold to a reductive physicalism. We do not e.g believe that left alone matter and the laws of physics would eventually produce life,consciousness,intelligence or free moral agency or that there is no meaningful difference between living and nonliving matter. You can tell that the Lord JEHOVAH distinguishes between living and nonliving matter by his law regarding the way that we are to deal with even subhuman lifeforms.
Deuteronomy ch.5:14NIV"but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do."
Proverbs ch.12:10KJV"A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."
Matthew ch.10:29KJV,"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care."
It's important to understand that the beasts are souls(Greek psyche/Hebrew nephesh) like man
Genesis Ch.1:20KJV"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature(Nephesh/psyche) that hath life"
Indeed all life is to be regarded as sacred:
Leviticus ch.17:11KJV" the life(Nephesh/psyche) of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul."
Even the lifeblood of the brute beast is to be distinguished from any nonliving substance indeed regarded as sacred.
Christian physicalism is necessary for a proper understanding of the atonement.
Blood would not be necessary for the sustaining of a spirit self. And hence could not redeem such a nonphysical self.
Hebrews ch.2:14-16NIV"14Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. 16For surely it is not angels(Spirits) he helps, but Abraham’s descendants(physical souls dependent on flesh and blood). "
This is the only way that a truly substitutionary atonement can be effected by means of blood.
Friday 9 February 2024
The concept of the chronospecies is becoming a palaeospecies?
Fossil Friday: Chronospecies, a Sinking Ship
In my public presentations and articles on the problems for neo-Darwinism raised by the ubiquitous discontinuities of the fossil record, I usually do not just present a series of abrupt appearances of new body plans in the history of life. Rather, I also describe how gradualism fails to be supported even on lower taxonomic levels. One example is my Evolution News article from September 2019, where I showed how all the three major textbook examples for alleged gradual species-to-species transitions have been debunked by more modern mainstream research (Bechly 2019).
The Concept of Chronospecies
A potential response by Darwinists could be to refer to the concept of chronospecies in paleontology (sometimes called paleospecies or morphospecies), which was introduced by George (1956) for the naming of successive species in a single evolving lineage. Putative examples are known from marine protozoans (e.g., foraminiferans, see Wei 1987), marine invertebrates (e.g., ammonites, see Dzik 1990), and a few cases in vertebrates, such as fossil water rats (see Escudé et al. 2008) and the extinct endemic bovid Myotragus from the Mediterranean Balearic islands of Mallorca and Menorca (Moya Sola & Moya 1982, Köhler & Moya-Sola 2004, Bover & Alcover 2005, Moya Sola et al 2007, Bover et al. 2010).
Of course, such chronospecies are not at all uncontroversial. Some experts deny that these represent macroevolutionary speciation, but instead simply represent microevolutionary changes within a single species (e.g., Willmann 1985, Allmon 2016), and thus are completely arbitrary delimitations (Cain 1954, Thomas 1956, Simpson 1961: 165, Mayr 1963: 24, Mayr & Ashlock 1991: 106) of chunks of a genealogical nexus (Kitts & Kitts 1979, Kitts 1983, Lyman & O’Brien 2002). But in all fairness, such fuzzy chunks arguably are what we should expect to find if there were indeed gradual species-to-species transitions, especially in cases of anagenetic change within a single evolving species lineage.
A Common Pattern
But, even in the few known cases, it has become a common pattern that new research tends to challenge and refute the status of chronospecies. One example are the marine sloths of the extinct genus Thalassocnus, which lived with five successive species in the Late Miocene and Pliocene along the Pacific coast in South America. “They were regarded by McDonald and Muizon (2002) as segments of a single lineage representing the initial and progressively more aquatic adaptations” (Muizon et al. 2003). Nevertheless, the study by Muizon et al. (2003) concluded that:
Parsimony analysis does not resolve the relative positions of T. antiquus and T. natans, and, therefore, does not fully confirm the possibility of a single Thalassocnus lineage, which spans over 4 Ma. However, Thalassocnus is an endemic genus and the stratigraphic distribution of its four species is well known. Furthermore, some characters indicate a continuous evolution from the oldest (T. antiquus) to the youngest species (T. carolomartini). Therefore, we prefer the hypothesis of a single Thalassocnus lineage, although a more complex evolutionary scenario is not discarded.
The authors elaborated that:
The new parsimony analysis presented here indicates that the four species of Thalassocnus may not represent a single evolving lineage. … Although parsimony analysis indicates that the absence and existence of a single time-successive lineage including all four species of Thalassocnus are equally parsimonious, we are reluctant to accept the first interpretation. … To conclude, a definitive decision is not easy to establish because reversals could explain the morphology … In spite of the result of the parsimony analysis, we believe that the exclusion of T. natans from a ‘‘Thalassocnus lineage’’ would be a surprising coincidence and that only a single Thalassocnus lineage is likely to have existed in the southeastern Pacific. … However, we do not discard the possibility of a more complex evolutionary scenario for Thalassocnus.
Slowly Sinking
In short: There is by no means unequivocal evidence for gradual anagenetic speciation in the case of the aquatic sloth Thalassocnus. Given the other refuted examples (see Bechly 2019), this raises further doubts about the validity of the few remaining cases of alleged gradual species-to-species transitions. Stanley (1978) found in his seminal analysis of chronospecies that “most net evolutionary change must have been associated with saltational speciation.” Also the metastudy of Hunt (2010), who looked at 150 years of research on the fossil evidence for speciation since the time of Darwin, found no evidence for the directional change predicted by anagenetic (or even cladogenetic) speciation (see Bechly 2019). The “ship” of chronospecies seems to be slowly sinking, which suggests that non-gradual processes dominated the history of life even on the lower taxonomic levels. That is consistent with intelligent design theory but inconsistent with neo-Darwinian evolution.
The Ovum vs. Darwin.
The Exquisite Design of Egg Cells
In two previous articles (here and here), I discussed the irreducible complexity of sperm cells and the seminal fluid for successful fertilization. Now, I will review the exquisite design features of a female egg cell (also called an ovum, plural ova). Here is an animation of the incredible process of reproduction, from ejaculation to birth.
Oogenesis
Oogenesis (the process of egg cell formation) begins during embryonic development when the primordial germ cells are specified. These cells migrate to the genital ridges, which later develop into the female ovaries. Prior to birth, the primordial germ cells undergo mitotic divisions to form oogonia, the precursor cells for eggs. These oogonia transform into primary oocytes, which are diploid cells arrested in prophase I of meiosis. This arrest typically occurs before or shortly following birth.
Primary oocytes are surrounded by somatic cells to form primordial follicles, which go through a process called folliculogenesis, where they develop into primary, secondary and eventually tertiary follicles. As a female reaches sexual maturity, some primary oocytes are activated each menstrual cycle. The activated primary oocyte completes meiotic division I, resulting in the formation of a secondary oocyte and a smaller cell called a polar body (the primary purpose of the polar body is to discard the extra genetic material that is produced during meiosis). However, the secondary oocyte is arrested in metaphase II.
The mature follicle ruptures during ovulation, releasing the secondary oocyte into the fallopian tube. If fertilized by a sperm cell, the secondary oocyte completes meiotic division II, resulting in a mature egg (ovum) and another polar body. If fertilization does not occur, meiosis II is not completed. After ovulation, the remaining follicle transforms into the corpus luteum, which secretes hormones like progesterone to prepare the uterus for a potential pregnancy. If fertilization doesn’t happen, the corpus luteum degenerates, resulting in a drop in hormone levels. This triggers menstruation, and the cycle resets.
Fertilization
As I discussed previously, sperm cells swim through the female reproductive tract, directed by the cilia, in addition to chemical signals. Chemicals called chemoattractants are released by the egg cell, and these serve as signaling molecules that generate a concentration gradient. The sperm cell is capable of chemotaxis, a process that results in the sperm cell moving up the concentration gradient, towards higher chemoattractant concentrations. Changes in chemoattractant concentration are detected by specialized receptors on the surface of sperm cells. When an increase in concentration is detected, a signaling cascade is triggered within the cell, which influences the flagellum’s beating pattern. Thus, the sperm moves progressively in the direction of the egg — that is, the source of the chemoattractants. As the sperm swims towards the egg, the concentration of chemoattractants is continuously being measured, which allows it to adjust its course in order to fine-tune its movements. Once the sperm gets within close proximity of the egg, it encounters other signaling molecules that further guide the sperm cells and direct it towards the egg’s plasma membrane, the site of fertilization.
Upon reaching the egg, the sperm cell encounters the zona pellucida, a glycoprotein rich matrix that surrounds the egg. Sperm-egg recognition begins with the interaction between glycoproteins on both the sperm surface and zona pellucida, thereby guiding the sperm cell towards the egg cell’s surface.
In a previous article, I wrote about the acrosome, a specialized structure possessed by sperm cells, that contains enzymes that aid in penetrating the egg’s protective barriers. Contact between the sperm and the zona pellucida results in the acrosome undergoing exocytosis, releasing these enzymes. These enzymes help to create a pathway for the sperm to arrive at the plasma membrane of the egg. Once through, fusion occurs between the egg and the sperm’s plasma membrane, thereby allowing the sperm’s genetic material to come into proximity with the egg’s cytoplasm.
Egg Activation
Upon fusion of the plasma membranes of the sperm and egg, various changes are triggered in the egg, collectively referred to as “egg activation.” First, the egg’s membrane becomes less permeable to other sperm, in order to prevent a single egg from being fertilized by more than one sperm cell. The fast block to polyspermy involves a change in the electrical properties of the egg’s plasma membrane. When the sperm’s outer layers are successfully penetrated by the sperm cell, it triggers the release of calcium ions (Ca2+) from intracellular stores in the egg.
The influx of calcium ions serves as a signal to initiate changes in the egg’s membrane potential. Ion channels on the egg’s membrane are opened, and facilitate the entry of sodium ions (Na+). The consequence is that the egg’s plasma membrane depolarizes. Normally, the egg’s membrane is maintained at a negative resting potential. However, the influx of positive sodium ions neutralizes this negative potential, making the membrane potential less negative. The altered membrane potential makes it more difficult for other sperm to initiate the fusion process, and thereby creates a temporary electrical barrier that inhibits additional sperm from fusing with the egg. The depolarization is a temporary phenomenon. After a brief period, the egg membrane potential is restored to its normal resting state (often referred to as “resetting” the egg).
A secondary defense against polyspermy is known as the slow block, or the “cortical reaction.” As calcium ions are released upon fertilization, this triggers the exocytosis of cortical granules, located just beneath the egg’s plasma membrane, containing enzymes. The glycoproteins in the zona pellucida are cross-linked by these enzymes, and this results in the hardening of the zona pellucida, reducing its permeability. The modified zona pellucida forms a structure called the “fertilization envelope,” which surrounds the egg, forming a barrier that physically blocks additional sperm from gaining access to the egg’s surface.
Changes also take place in the egg cell that promote the completion of meiosis and initiate early embryonic development. The genetic material of the sperm and egg, consisting of a single set of chromosomes each (23 chromosomes in humans), combine to form a diploid cell called the zygote, which contains the full set of chromosomes needed to develop a new individual. This instantly determines gender, eye and hair color, and many other traits.
After fertilization has occurred, the zygote begins to undergo a series of rapid cell divisions through a process called cleavage. This results in the development of a multicellular embryo, which travels through the fallopian tube towards the uterus. Eventually, it arrives at the uterus and attaches to the uterine lining in a process called implantation.
An Exquisite Design
As one can see from the foregoing discussion, the development of an egg cell and its activation in response to encountering a sperm cell exhibit exquisite design, being contingent upon multiple mutually dependent processes, all of which are needed for successful reproduction. When considered in conjunction with the incredible engineering features of the sperm cell and the seminal fluid (discussed in a previous articles), it would seem to put the thesis of design almost beyond question
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