Monday, 22 April 2024
The lowly butterfly vs. Darwinism
Battle Butterflies
You can probably think of a lot of creatures that a military might decide to copy for its submarine designs. Sharks or giant squids. Whales, perhaps. Or what about… butterflies?
MIT reports that one of their engineers, Dr. Philip Daniel, is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Defense to a create a magnetic navigation system inspired by monarch butterflies. Daniel explains:
They’re able to migrate long distances and find the exact forest that their ancestors were born into. How? One theory is that they’re able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. They have a compass in their head, and they can use it to get where they want to go. The question is: Can humanity take advantage of the Earth’s magnetic field to accurately navigate without GPS?
Every year, around a billion monarchs travel from across North America to gather overwinter in a few specific locations in Mexico. Because adult monarchs live less than a year, none of these butterflies have made the journey before, yet they all somehow know how to travel hundreds upon hundreds of miles to arrive in the same place. (The sheer awesomeness of this journey is well-presented in the excellent Illustra Media documentary Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies (2011). If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.)
Magnetic Fingerprints
Daniel calls the navigational mechanism a compass, but this is just a shorthand. The word “compass” doesn’t do justice to the equipment monarchs have, as Daniel himself would no doubt be the first to acknowledge — after all, the U.S. miliary already has compasses. But monarchs have much more. What they need to navigate from different locations across the U.S. and Canada to a specific destination in Mexico is more like a complete GPS system.
So how do they do it? Daniel explains that deposits of metal in the earth’s crust can create ripples in the magnetic field, giving certain sites specific “fingerprints” to a highly sensitive detector. It has been hypothesized that monarchs use such a system, and that’s what he is hoping to create for the U.S. military.
Monarch navigation is still poorly understood, although we have figured out some pieces of it. The hypothesis of a magnetic map is necessary because what they are already known to use wouldn’t be enough to do what they do. So far, it’s known that they have an internal solar compass calibrated with an internal clock, and an internal magnetic compass as a backup for night and cloudy weather, but both of those systems would only tell them latitudinal direction, not longitude.
A reason to suspect that a magnetic map might be the solution is that it has been shown to exist in other animals. Experiments have demonstrated that turtle hatchlings can use magnetic fields to determine both latitude and longitude, implying they possess a sort of internal geographic coordinate system based on the earth’s magnetic field.
Nobody knows how this magnetic mapping system actually works. Whether it’s turtles, monarchs, or one of the other animals with seemingly magical navigational capabilities, we can still only wonder at what they can do. But if Dr. Daniel and his lab can crack the problem and engineer even a large and clumsy human equivalent of a magnetic mapping system, it might yield clues towards the design of the natural systems. A manmade functioning version would show how the system theoretically can work, and those details might enable scientists to make hypotheses that can be experimentally tested on butterflies and other migratory animals.
As always, biologists and engineers working together yields both better manmade designs and better understanding of the designs of living creatures.
Next on the Agenda…Self-Assembling Helicopters?
Incidentally, this navigation system is not even the most impressive thing about butterfly design. Another engineering marvel, also discussed in Metamorphosis, is the metamorphosis itself. It turns out, during the transformation the caterpillar completely dissolves within the chrysalis into a gooey soup, before self-assembling into a butterfly. Needless to say, this requires an incomprehensible level of coordination and planning to succeed.
Who knows? Eventually, the U.S. miliary might invent a tank than can dissolve and reassemble itself as a helicopter.
But I guess we’d better just start where we are. For the time being, the sophistication of butterfly design is far, far beyond us.
Sunday, 21 April 2024
Suboptimal design or suboptimal science?
The Panda’s Thumb: An Extraordinary Instance of Design?
Does the panda’s thumb refute intelligent design? Or is it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in the mammalian world, as one respected study has found? On this episode of ID the Future, host Casey Luskin speaks with philosopher Dr. Stephen Dilley about his recent paper evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the iconic panda’s thumb argument for evolution.
Harvard scientist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould is well-known for his theory that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria and best kept separate from one another. Yet one of his favorite arguments for evolutionary processes was the panda’s thumb, which is underpinned by a theology-laden premise: namely, God wouldn’t design the panda’s thumb like this, therefore a clumsy step-wise natural process is responsible. But does this argument hold up to philosophical and scientific scrutiny?
In this conversation, Dr. Dilley challenges the assumptions implicit in the panda’s thumb argument. He also explains that what might be deemed by some as sub-optimal design may actually be an engineering trade-off. Optimizing a structure can sometimes come at the cost of certain design constraints. Ultimately, Dilley holds that the panda’s thumb may be more of a problem for an evolutionary view than a design perspective: “If in fact the very best studies commend the thumb for its efficiency, its dexterity, its precision…then by Gould’s own framing the panda’s thumb would pose a problem” for evolutionists. Download the podcast or listen to it here
On the founding of "the eternal metropolis"
According to legend, Ancient Rome was founded by the two brothers, and demigods, Romulus and Remus, on 21 April 753 BCE. The legend claims that in an argument over who would rule the city (or, in another version, where the city would be located) Romulus killed Remus and named the city after himself. This story of the founding of Rome is the best known but it is not the only one.
Other legends claim the city was named after a woman, Roma, who traveled with Aeneas and the other survivors from Troy after that city fell. Upon landing on the banks of the Tiber River, Roma and the other women objected when the men wanted to move on. She led the women in the burning of the Trojan ships and so effectively stranded the Trojan survivors at the site which would eventually become Rome. Aeneas of Troy is featured in this legend and also, famously, in Virgil's Aeneid, as a founder of Rome and the ancestor of Romulus and Remus, thus linking Rome with the grandeur and might which was once Troy.Still other theories concerning the name of the famous city suggest it came from Rumon, the ancient name for the Tiber River, and was simply a place name given to the small trading center established on its banks or that the name derived from an Etruscan word which could have designated one of their settlements.
Saturday, 20 April 2024
Neanderthal man:just as sapien as we are?
Fossil Friday: Suppressed Dissent About Neanderthal DNA in Modern Humans
Since the seminal study by Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo almost 15 years ago (Green et al. 2010), there have been numerous publications supporting the idea that non-African modern humans have a few percent of their DNA inherited from Neanderthals through introgression. This has basically become a widely accepted fact and the textbook orthodoxy. However, there is one dissenter. It is not some crank amateur but a professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Cambridge, William Amos, who has published over 160 peer-reviewed publications including many in the highest-ranked journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Genetics, PLOS, Current Biology, and PNAS. Amos claims that the supposed evidence for introgression has been misinterpreted and is better explained by the hypothesis “that heterozygous sites attract additional mutations at and around them, creating a link between evolutionary rate and population size.“ Testing this hypothesis led him “to the prediction that mutation rate in humans would have dropped as a result of the large loss of variability that occurred during the out of Africa event, and thence to an alternative model to inter-breeding that could explain why non-Africans are closer to Neanderthals than Africans.”
Obscure Forums
So, how did the scientific establishment react to this maverick view? Actually, in spite of his credentials and in spite of his thorough argumentation and analyses, Amos tried in vain to get his dissenting hypothesis published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Since 2017 his manuscript is still only available as a preprint from bioRxiv (Amos 2017). On his personal webpage Amos writes that “challenging the idea that many humans carry Neanderthal legacies has proved near-impossible!” Therefore, he decided to make a 20-page document freely available as a download on his website. It is titled “Is the idea that many humans carry some Neanderthal DNA correct?” and it summarizes his ideas, analyses, and reasons. The only brief discussions of his alternative hypothesis are found in the obscure forums of BioLogos and Peaceful Science, which is quite telling because these are sites mostly known for bashing intelligent design advocates.
A Parallel with Intelligent Design
Indeed, the case of Professor William Amos represents an interesting parallel with dissenters in the intelligent design community, who challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy and try to get their scientific studies published in peer-reviewed mainstream academic journals. In relatively rare cases it works (see here for a list), but most often the Darwinian thought police make sure that such manuscripts get rejected by the editors without even having been sent to reviewers. You heard right: such dissenting studies are mostly not rejected by peer reviewers because they are considered bad science. They are never seen by peer reviewers but are suppressed by overzealous watchmen of the scientific orthodoxy without further consideration. This is not just hearsay, because I experienced it twice in the past three months myself. So I can very much sympathize with the frustration of William Amos with the scientific community.
The latter community is clearly not driven by an unbiased quest for truth. Indeed, the peer review system has become deeply corrupted. Biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner said in an interview: “I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists.” Historian Philip Magness agreed and noted in a blog post that “Academic peer review is a highly dysfunctional process, replete with perverse incentives and maddeningly Kafkaesque outcomes.”
References
- Amos W 2017. Testing an alternative explanation for relatively greater base-sharing between Neanderthals and non-African humans. bioRxiv, 25 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/133306
- Green RE, Krause J, Briggs AW, … Pääbo, S. 2010. A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science 328(5979), 710–722. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1188021
On the two Adams and the Socinian/biblical unitarian paradigm
1Corinthians ch.15:47NASB" The first man is from the earth, [s]earthy; the second man is from heaven."
Luke ch.3:38NASB"the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God."
If we take the Socinian/biblical unitarian position it seems odd that either Adam should be spoken of as originating from heaven.
And if this originating from heaven is figurative language for the extraordinary origin of the second Adam. How can anyone argue that the origin of the first Adam was less distinctive?
Unlike the second Son of (the)God the first was not also son of (the)Man.
JEHOVAH's Archangel breathe the first breath into the lungs of the first Adam see Genesis 2:7. What could be more distinctive than that?
From a Socinian perspective it seems that the first Adam is much more worthy of the titles
son of God and Lord from heaven in terms of his origin.
Romans ch.5:14NIV"Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come."
The first Adam is the prototype . How can any man born of a fallen woman possibly have more of a claim to the title Son from heaven than him if the Socinian/biblical unitarian paradigm be true?
Friday, 19 April 2024
AI as Darwinism's loyal opposition?
Science Paper: Use Artificial Intelligence to Challenge Evolution
A new bold paper in the Elsevier journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology states, “Darwinian evolution has become dogma; AI can rescue what is salvageable.” Authors Olen Brown and David Hullender note, “The publication of scientific disagreements with elements of Darwinian evolution including its modern variants is increasing” and they cite various examples from the literature:
The publication of scientific disagreements with elements of Darwinian evolution including its modern variants are increasing. The view that “Evolution is both a fact and … the most important theory in biology. Evolution explains every situation” (Russo and André, 2019) is being challenged. Wray and Hoekstra in the Comment Does evolutionary theory need a rethink” published in Nature (Wray and Hoekstra, 2014) reported that Kevin Leland and seven colleagues responded “Yes, urgently”, while Gregory Wray and five colleagues responded: “No, all is well”. Typical of balanced questioning is Dennis Noble who wrote “Something has gone deeply wrong in biology” (Noble, 2021).
The paper thus argues that “that the theory of biological evolution, including its modern variants, suffers from several logical deficits, is absurdly improbable mathematically, and also biologically mechanism-deficient.” However, as the title suggests, the authors believe that “Darwinian evolution has become dogma” and some new method is needed to move past non-objective adherence to evolutionary models. They believe this method is artificial intelligence (AI).
Use AI to Challenge Evolution?
The authors propose that “the new approach of AI … is required to move forward scientifically.” They note that AI provides “powerful analytical tools” that can be used for evaluating the merits of scientific theories and ask, “[C]ould a complex computer be programmed to evaluate the theory (many say the fact) of biological evolution? Or perhaps test particular postulates essential to the theory?” They believe AI is well-suited for this task, since it has already been used to “rediscover fundamental equations” in fields such as physics and chemistry, and has been highly successful at playing games and solving puzzles. They believe this makes AI applicable to studying evolution:
Use AI to Challenge Evolution?
The authors propose that “the new approach of AI … is required to move forward scientifically.” They note that AI provides “powerful analytical tools” that can be used for evaluating the merits of scientific theories and ask, “[C]ould a complex computer be programmed to evaluate the theory (many say the fact) of biological evolution? Or perhaps test particular postulates essential to the theory?” They believe AI is well-suited for this task, since it has already been used to “rediscover fundamental equations” in fields such as physics and chemistry, and has been highly successful at playing games and solving puzzles. They believe this makes AI applicable to studying evolution:
Evolution, also, is a puzzle. It necessarily involves the absurdly improbable self-assembly of many complex biological machines using simpler parts (Brown and Hullender, 2023). Gartner et al. (2020) stated, “self-assembly of a large biological molecule from small building blocks is like finishing a puzzle of magnetic pieces by shaking the box.” AI works well for chess; we propose that it would work well for assessing ideas about biological evolution, especially the problem of self-assembly. Initially, it should be applied to testing the limits of the usefulness of ‘survival of the fittest’ for microevolution and the highly-improbable self-assembly required for macroevolution.
If AI were used to test and evaluate evolution, would people trust its results?
Some May Not Like This Approach
They believe that using AI to test evolution will lead to a problem: evolution will be challenged, and some may not want AI applied in this manner. They write that this should not matter because dogmas should never prevent scientific questions from being asked:
A perceived potential difficulty, which might, however, produce the first positive result of applying AI, is that focused discussion of the tenets, assumptions, and established facts of biological evolution would result. Consensus without criticism is not healthy for science. Biologists can learn from the field of Physics which is open to recognizing new ideas. It has shown itself receptive to change with concepts about gravity evolving from Newton to Einstein and the current interpretations, an example. The consequences of challenging the overall theory and subcomponents of biological evolution are monumentally significant for progress in this field and has ramifications for all of science including the freedom to challenge dogmas. “The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors” —J. Robert Oppenheimer.
[…]
Problems with the Darwinian theory of evolution, including its modern variants, and origin of life theories are significant and require new approaches and a willingness of scientists to look for bold solutions. The application of AI has great promise both for assessing the problems and weaknesses and for providing innovative and significant solutions of great significance for science and humankind. AI can be the pathway to correcting the problems in evolutionary theory, but the human brain must create that pathway. There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science.
Not Turtles All the Way Down?
These are nice statements of the importance of freedom of scientific inquiry. But what would AI find if it were let loose to critically investigate biological evolution? Their main argument is that we need to apply it to such a task. But they predict that if AI were applied to questions of biological origins, it would find serious flaws in evolutionary models: “We conclude that AI has this potential and encourage its application immediately for evaluating theories of biological evolution. It seems remote that AI would conclude that it is ‘turtles all the way down’.”
Surely any conclusion from AI about theories of biological evolution would be highly controversial — people would either accept and tout them or criticize the AI model that was used as flawed and inadequate. But it would be an interesting project to undertake nonetheless.
Thursday, 18 April 2024
Coded communication and design.
New Study Reveals Secrets of Honey Bee Waggle Dance
The honey bee “waggle dance” is the method used to communicate to members of a hive information about the location of food sources as well as potential nest locations. The information includes direction and distance. One of the mysteries about the method is how other bees are able to detect the direction that the dancer bee is attempting to communicate. There are several factors that make detecting direction challenging for the observing bees. One is that the dances take place inside a dark hive. Therefore, other bees can’t visually observe the dancing bees. Second is that the surface in the hive where it occurs is vertical, whereas the direction that is being communicated is lateral. Third is that it takes place in a crowded hive with hundreds of tightly packed bees.
Do the Hustle
Previously it had been assumed that the following bees aligned their bodies with the dancing bees to determine direction. However, a new study published in Current Biology has provided evidence that the non-dancing bees (followers) utilize a more sophisticated method where they use their antennae to track the movement of a dancing bee and therefore its relative orientation.1 The followers do this by maintaining a constant angle between their antennae and the direction of the waggle dance line. As explained by the authors, “Knowing its own orientation relative to gravity, this allows the follower to deduce the dancer’s orientation relative to gravity.” The gravitational direction is a proxy for the direction of the sun, and the dance angle represents the communicated direction relative to the sun.
Another important aspect of the method is that “the dancer’s orientation remains consistent (relative to gravity) over continuously varying angles of the follower to the dancer, so that by continuous integration of this estimate” the follower can determine the direction. The paper points out that their hypothesis requires two other assumptions. The first is that bees can track their head direction relative to gravity. It is not known how gravity is represented in the bee brain, specifically within what is known as the “central complex.” The second assumption is that the bee antenna position influences information processing in the central complex. The paper points out that, “There is evidence from bees, locusts, cockroaches, and flies that mechanical signals from antennae reach the central complex.” This is a region that is common in all insects.
As described by noted bee expert Lars Chittka, the central complex, “contains the computational centers for integration of the polarized light-based sky compass, information about the animal’s own position and movement, and landmark information.”2 In other words, the central complex is the region of the brain where it appears that much of this information processing and algorithmic computation takes place.
Animal Algorithms
Recent research has also revealed that learning is integral to bee’s interpretation of the distance associated with the dance and translating that to travel distance.3 That study concluded that the distance calibration, as well as the directional component, requires fine-tuning through learning.4
As I describe in my book Animal Algorithms,5 there are several programmed algorithms designed to detect and apply the information that is used to guide the bees to specific locations. Detecting the waggle dance direction and computing the navigation guidance involves algorithms that apply several forms of mathematics, including geometry and coordinate transformation. The Current Biology paper is further confirmation of that, and an indication of a larger number and complexity of the algorithms. Even though much has been learned about these sophisticated behaviors, there are still several elements that are poorly understood, among them being how the brain’s neural networks are designed to implement the algorithms.
Notes
Anna Hadjitofi and Barbara Webb, “Dynamic antennal positioning allows honeybee followers to decode the dance,” Current Biology, 34, April 22, 2024, 1-8.
Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 144.
“Social signal learning of the waggle dance in honey bees,” Dong et al., Science 379, March 10, 2023, 1015-1018.
Eric Cassell, “The Role of Learning in the Honey Bee Waggle Dance,” Evolution News, March 20, 2023.
Eric Cassell, Animal Algorithms (Discovery Institute Press, 2021), 60-62.
Wednesday, 17 April 2024
File under "Well said" CVI
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."
Albert Einstein
The ministry of truth is on the march?
Slouching Toward Totalitarianism — How to Fight Science Censorship
Scientific censorship is on the rise. Governments are colluding with Big Tech to suppress unfavorable ideas. De-platforming and dismissal campaigns are all the rage. How do we prevent our society from slouching towards totalitarianism? On a new episode of ID the Future, host Casey Luskin welcomes science journalist Denyse O’Leary to discuss today’s forms of censorship, how they affect the intelligent design community, and most importantly, what we can do about it.
The Internet was supposed to represent a great democratization of ideas where everyone could have a voice and access the world’s information, says Dr. Luskin. Today it is becoming a battleground of open and hidden censorship. O’Leary explains why. She also analyzes the latest form of censorship — the idea of “disinformation.” In simplest terms, disinformation is any information the government doesn’t want you to have. Luskin and O’Leary give examples of how this is playing out in science. The intelligent design community is no stranger to the impact of censorship, of course. But this refresher on the latest forms of censorship should inspire all supporters of free science to continue defending and advocating for a diversity of opinions to exist on the Internet and in our society. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Tuesday, 16 April 2024
JEHOVAH is King!
1.Oh sing unto JEHOVAH a new song: Sing unto JEHOVAH, all the earth.
2Sing unto JEHOVAH, bless his name; Show forth his salvation from day to day.
3Declare his glory among the nations, His marvellous works among all the peoples.
4For great is JEHOVAH, and greatly to be praised: He is to be feared above all gods.
5For all the gods of the peoples are idols; But JEHOVAH made the heavens.
6Honor and majesty are before him: Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
7Ascribe unto JEHOVAH, ye kindreds of the peoples, Ascribe unto Jehovah glory and strength.
8Ascribe unto JEHOVAH the glory due unto his name: Bring an offering, and come into his courts.
9Oh worship JEHOVAH in holy array: Tremble before him, all the earth.
10Say among the nations, JEHOVAH reigneth: The world also is established that it cannot be moved: He will judge the peoples with equity.
11Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;
12Let the field exult, and all that is therein; Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy
13Before JEHOVAH; for he cometh, For he cometh to judge the earth: He will judge the world with righteousness, And the peoples with his truth.
Monday, 15 April 2024
Ignorance is indeed bliss?
Ignorance of Evolutionary Theory as a “Superpower”
Princeton University recently offered a glowing profile of their maverick developmental biologist Celeste Nelson. The piece talks about how her lab is, atypically, not simply composed of biologists but contains researchers from wildly different fields — engineering, physics — working together to study lung development. It turns out they are getting results by not knowing what “everyone knows” in biology.
Nelson says:
What I like about putting them all together in one lab is that they start to question each other’s assumptions. Everyone comes in with a certain level of ignorance, and that ignorance is a massive superpower, because they don’t know what the dogmas are. Just about all our major findings have come from being completely ignorant about how biology is supposed to work, and actually seeing the system with fresh eyes.
So what are these burdensome assumptions? The example the piece gives as an illustration is, interestingly, an evolutionary assumption:
Within the biology community, for instance, it’s traditionally been assumed that conserved traits — those shared by different species and selected by evolution on multiple occasions — are inherently important, while nature’s outliers are less worthy of study. Because many in Nelson’s group were trained outside the world of biology, they’re not beholden to its assumptions and have no issue prioritizing the study of unconserved traits, like mechanisms of lung development.
Of course, if you believed that all biological systems were built with care by a designer, you wouldn’t assume that less-common designs were most likely inferior or worthless evolutionary dead-ends. I have no reason to think that Nelson supports intelligent design or that she is in any way a critic of contemporary evolutionary theory. But as you read her profile, you begin to get the uneasy feeling that it’s not just ignorance in general that is a superpower in her lab, but more particularly ignorance of evolutionary theory.
The example above is only the beginning. In one short article (which seems in no way intended as a critique of evolutionary theory) I can see about five other examples of the superpower of evolutionary ignorance at play.
1.Homology vs. Unique Design
Early in her career, Nelson tried to publish a paper on chicken lung development. The reviewers were not very interested in her findings, because scientists had found similar results about mouse lungs, and “the conventional wisdom at the time said that chicken lungs form and behave like mouse and human lungs.”
This response made her question if the lungs of different species really were so similar, or if that was merely an assumption.
She started looking into it, and found that lungs actually develop by significantly different processes in different related species. Homology was only assumed — it wasn’t the reality. How often might that be the case?
2.Reductionism vs. Holism
Nelson was able to uncover these differences in the lungs of different species by setting aside the genes and proteins — which are so often the focus — and actually studying the developing lungs themselves.
There has long been a tendency to reduce an entire living organism to its genes. And no wonder; this approach is very comfortable for a Darwinian perspective, because random variation in genes seems relatively manageable for evolution — switch out a few letters, and voilà! you’ve got a new gene, perhaps a functional one.
But this view of things doesn’t grasp the full of scale of organization and complexity of life. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the genetic code is only one factor that guides the development of organisms. Which was to be expected, in retrospect — living systems are obviously intricate in the extreme, and we never should have imagined that translating this intricacy into code would somehow make it less complex.
3.Going Solo vs Coordinated Action
One of the new discoveries Nelson’s lab has made is that smooth muscles guide lung development:
Nelson found that a type of stiff tissue called smooth muscle, which was previously assumed to lack a role in lung development, is critical for the formation of branches in mouse lungs…Using mouse cells that express fluorescent proteins, Nelson’s team created a time-lapse video that showed smooth muscle wrapping around the elongating bronchiole like a telephone cord, forcing the softer bronchiole to fork into two daughter branches that, fittingly, together resemble Mickey Mouse ears. This process occurs at the terminus of each growing branch, resulting in millions of such branching events over the course of lung development.
One part actively directing another part, with precision, is par for the course in engineering. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is also ubiquitous in biology. However, is it not what an evolutionary framework leads one to expect, because random beneficial mutations are not coordinated. Even if there is a viable evolutionary pathway to a complex system of interworking parts — with no step in the process lacking functionality for either the new structures or the organism as a whole, through some sort of “co-option” or “scaffolding” process — Darwinian mechanisms do not increase the likelihood of evolutionary development occurring according to this pathway, because the huge adaptive pay-off at the end of the process would not be foreknown and would therefore not itself be selected for.
A large pile-up of individual useful traits is much more likely through Darwinian mechanisms than it would be by sheer luck, but a single useful trait that emerges only out of many traits working together is not.
4.Incremental Change vs. Synchronicity
In fact, this is the very problem Nelson is currently working on — but from a developmental biology perspective, not an evolutionary biology perspective. (The change of subdisciplines apparently makes the problem suddenly relevant and worth discussing.) Nelson calls it the “Thanksgiving dinner problem.” The perennial difficulty of Thanksgiving dinners is that it’s hard to time everything just right so every dish finishes at the same time, and nothing gets cold. It’s the same problem in embryo development — if something gets “done” before everything else is done, the organism dies or is permanently impaired. That’s because all the parts are working together, and their coordination is what makes an organism function.
When you think about it, it’s clear that problem applies to both development and evolution: a developing embryo can’t gain one organ without gaining another at the same time, or it doesn’t work — and the same goes for an evolving species. If five days of miscoordination in developmental history kills or impairs an individual organism, then of course 5 million years of miscoordination in evolutionary history wouldn’t work — since even one generation in this state would be an evolutionary dead end.
In developmental biology, the solution is assumed to be some sort of underlying plan — biologists look for the signals, the code, written in the DNA or somewhere else, that must be directing the development. So the obvious question is, what’s guiding the timing of evolution?
5.Randomness vs. Engineering
Richard Dawkins has said that biology is the study of natural systems that have the appearance of design. But many scientists seem to be overburdened by the length of this definition. It must be hard to always remember to add “the appearance of.” They perpetually revert to just saying “design.”
So, not unexpectedly, the subtitle of the article lauds the “efficient designs” of various organisms that Nelson’s lab has uncovered. But this goes deeper than just semantics. If you think about Nelson’s research, most of her success comes from looking at life from an engineering perspective — even to the point of involving engineers in her lab. Whether she admits it or not, life is best understood through the framework of design. Might that be a hint about whether it might actually be designed?
All things considered, it looks like ignorance really is a superpower. No doubt that’s true in any area of expertise, since beginners can see things with fresh eyes. But I suspect it is especially true in the current field of evolutionary biology.
Sunday, 14 April 2024
Saturday, 13 April 2024
JEHOVAH'S glory demystified.
Heb. 1:3 / Isa. 42:8 Does Jesus really share JEHOVAH'S Glory?
Is. 42:8 - "I am the LORD [JEHOVAH - ASV]: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images" - KJV.
Heb. 1:3 - "[Jesus] being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person...sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" - KJV.
After quoting the above two verses, some trinitarians will claim that they prove that Jesus is JEHOVAH. They claim that if JEHOVAH will not share his glory with anyone else, then Jesus must be JEHOVAH because he shares JEHOVAH'S glory.
Well, first we should note that others have "shared" or reflected JEHOVAH'S glory. For example, the angel at Luke 2:9 appeared with "the glory of the LORD." God was not physically present, but the angel He personally sent to represent him was there with God's reflected glory to identify him as being from God and representing God. This particular angel was not even Jesus since Jesus had already been born on earth (verse 11). We see a similar thing at Rev. 21:10, 11 where the city of holy Jerusalem has descended from God and has the glory of God! That is how it can be identified as being from God: It has the glory of God!
Why, even some Christians will reflect God's glory: 2 Cor. 3:7-18. And Jesus himself said that the glory which the Father had given him he had also given to his followers! - John 17:22.
So it certainly appears that God allows his glory to be with others who represent him as a sign of the authority He has given them and who do not represent that glory as being their very own.
But there is something else that makes the trinitarian argument incredibly poor (if not downright dishonest). That is the actual meaning of "glory." You see, "glory" meant, even as it does today, two different things. Often it meant "honor" or "praise" which a person has earned. On occasion, however, the same word meant the visible, brilliant light radiating from something or someone.
So we can see that Isaiah also uses this meaning at Is. 60:1-3 where "shine," "light," "brightness" are used in conjunction with God's "glory" and that glory (`kaw-bode' in the Hebrew) will be seen. We find this same meaning at Acts 7:55 (where the glory was seen), Luke 2:9 (where the glory 'shone' all around them). Obviously, a visible light-radiating type of glory is intended at these places.
But at Is. 42:12 and 43:7 we can see that the same Hebrew word "kaw-bode" clearly means "honor" or "praise." In fact, that same Hebrew word ("kaw-bode") is even translated as "honour" at Ps. 66:2 (and 30 other places in the KJV).
Even today in modern English we have those same two meanings for "glory."
(1) "Praise, honor, or distinction accorded by common consent; renown," and (2) "Brilliancy; splendor." - Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, ("Glory").
For example, we might say that the Nobel Prize winner did not want to share the glory with another scientist who had merely copied some of his scientific work. "Glory" in this sense is not a visible brightness or radiance he gives off but the recognition, honor, and praise he will receive. The glory of a beautiful sunset, however, is a visual brightness or beauty which others receive or observe.
So which meaning was intended at Is. 42:8? (1) A shining visible "glory" given off by someone or (2) "praise" and "honor" owed to someone?
Well we can see from how it's used at Is. 42:8 that it clearly means "praise" or "honor" - "I am [JEHOVAH]: that is my name [see Ps. 83:18] and my glory [`kaw-bode'] will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images." This style of writing is very common in the Holy Scriptures. It is called parallelism because similar (or parallel) meanings are written (in different words) beside each other.
For example: the familiar verse at Is. 9:6 begins "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." You can easily see that the second clause ("unto us a son is given") is parallel (similar in meaning) to the first clause ("unto us a child is born").
We can see, then, that the entire verse at Is. 42:8 is about the honor that is due God alone. Jehovah starts the verse by declaring his name (to which he has said honor is due forever - Ps. 83:18; Ps. 86:9; Ps. 113:1-3; Ps. 145:21; Ezek. 39:6, 7). He then follows that with the parallelism: (1) "my glory [`kaw-bode'] I will not give to another" and (2) "neither my praise to graven images." Clearly the word "glory" (paralleled by "praise" in the next statement of this verse) here means "praise" or "honor." - see Is. 42:12, 17.
And just as clearly, we can see that the word "glory" at Heb. 1:3 means the visible radiance given off by him (as with the angel of Luke 2:9 who reflected God's glory). - see Heb. 1:3 in TEV, NIV. In fact, some modern trinitarian Bibles even translate Heb. 1:3 as "He reflects the glory of God" - RSV (compare NAB; MLB; GNB; and Moffatt's translation).
Therefore, if God said "I shall not share the praise or honor due me" at Is. 42:8, what kind of "evidence" is it to point out that Jesus reflects God's visible radiance at Heb. 1:3?
Heb. 1:3 - "[Jesus] being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person...sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" - KJV.
After quoting the above two verses, some trinitarians will claim that they prove that Jesus is JEHOVAH. They claim that if JEHOVAH will not share his glory with anyone else, then Jesus must be JEHOVAH because he shares JEHOVAH'S glory.
Well, first we should note that others have "shared" or reflected JEHOVAH'S glory. For example, the angel at Luke 2:9 appeared with "the glory of the LORD." God was not physically present, but the angel He personally sent to represent him was there with God's reflected glory to identify him as being from God and representing God. This particular angel was not even Jesus since Jesus had already been born on earth (verse 11). We see a similar thing at Rev. 21:10, 11 where the city of holy Jerusalem has descended from God and has the glory of God! That is how it can be identified as being from God: It has the glory of God!
Why, even some Christians will reflect God's glory: 2 Cor. 3:7-18. And Jesus himself said that the glory which the Father had given him he had also given to his followers! - John 17:22.
So it certainly appears that God allows his glory to be with others who represent him as a sign of the authority He has given them and who do not represent that glory as being their very own.
But there is something else that makes the trinitarian argument incredibly poor (if not downright dishonest). That is the actual meaning of "glory." You see, "glory" meant, even as it does today, two different things. Often it meant "honor" or "praise" which a person has earned. On occasion, however, the same word meant the visible, brilliant light radiating from something or someone.
So we can see that Isaiah also uses this meaning at Is. 60:1-3 where "shine," "light," "brightness" are used in conjunction with God's "glory" and that glory (`kaw-bode' in the Hebrew) will be seen. We find this same meaning at Acts 7:55 (where the glory was seen), Luke 2:9 (where the glory 'shone' all around them). Obviously, a visible light-radiating type of glory is intended at these places.
But at Is. 42:12 and 43:7 we can see that the same Hebrew word "kaw-bode" clearly means "honor" or "praise." In fact, that same Hebrew word ("kaw-bode") is even translated as "honour" at Ps. 66:2 (and 30 other places in the KJV).
Even today in modern English we have those same two meanings for "glory."
(1) "Praise, honor, or distinction accorded by common consent; renown," and (2) "Brilliancy; splendor." - Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, ("Glory").
For example, we might say that the Nobel Prize winner did not want to share the glory with another scientist who had merely copied some of his scientific work. "Glory" in this sense is not a visible brightness or radiance he gives off but the recognition, honor, and praise he will receive. The glory of a beautiful sunset, however, is a visual brightness or beauty which others receive or observe.
So which meaning was intended at Is. 42:8? (1) A shining visible "glory" given off by someone or (2) "praise" and "honor" owed to someone?
Well we can see from how it's used at Is. 42:8 that it clearly means "praise" or "honor" - "I am [JEHOVAH]: that is my name [see Ps. 83:18] and my glory [`kaw-bode'] will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images." This style of writing is very common in the Holy Scriptures. It is called parallelism because similar (or parallel) meanings are written (in different words) beside each other.
For example: the familiar verse at Is. 9:6 begins "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." You can easily see that the second clause ("unto us a son is given") is parallel (similar in meaning) to the first clause ("unto us a child is born").
We can see, then, that the entire verse at Is. 42:8 is about the honor that is due God alone. Jehovah starts the verse by declaring his name (to which he has said honor is due forever - Ps. 83:18; Ps. 86:9; Ps. 113:1-3; Ps. 145:21; Ezek. 39:6, 7). He then follows that with the parallelism: (1) "my glory [`kaw-bode'] I will not give to another" and (2) "neither my praise to graven images." Clearly the word "glory" (paralleled by "praise" in the next statement of this verse) here means "praise" or "honor." - see Is. 42:12, 17.
And just as clearly, we can see that the word "glory" at Heb. 1:3 means the visible radiance given off by him (as with the angel of Luke 2:9 who reflected God's glory). - see Heb. 1:3 in TEV, NIV. In fact, some modern trinitarian Bibles even translate Heb. 1:3 as "He reflects the glory of God" - RSV (compare NAB; MLB; GNB; and Moffatt's translation).
Therefore, if God said "I shall not share the praise or honor due me" at Is. 42:8, what kind of "evidence" is it to point out that Jesus reflects God's visible radiance at Heb. 1:3?
The spectre of the cambrian explosion continues to loom over Darwinism
Fossil Friday: Hemichordate Body Plan and Lifecycle Goes Back to the Cambrian Explosion
This Fossil Friday we will discuss the abrupt origin of yet another animal phylum during the famous Cambrian Explosion. It is the marine invertebrate phylum Hemichordata, which is represented by the pterobranchs (including the extinct graptolites) and the acorn worms (enteropneusts) as well as the enigmatic Planctosphaeroidea, which might just be planktic larva of some unknown deep sea acorn worms. Like chordates, hemichordates are deuterostome animals and considered to be the closest relatives (sister group) of echinoderms such as sea urchins and starfish. They have a tripartite body with three body cavities. While pterobranchs are sessile filter feeders, acorn worms are detritivores living in U-shaped burrows in the sea floor. The fossil record of Hemichordata goes back to the Early/Middle Cambrian (Maletz 2014, Nanglu et al. 2020).
The oldest known hemichordate and oldest pterobranch is the zooid fossil Galeaplumosus abilus from the 525-518 million year old Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Konservat-Lagerstätte of southern China (Hou et al. 2011, also see Hou et al. 2017).
Only very few fossil enteropneusts have been described yet in just eight fossil species (Cameron 2018, Yang et al. 2024) from the Cambrian (Walcott 1911, Caron et al. 2013, Nanglu et al. 2016, Yang et al. 2024), the Carboniferous (Bardack 1997, Maletz 2014, Cameron 2016), and the Jurassic periods (Arduini et al. 1984, Alessandrello et al. 2004, Bechly & Frickhinger 1999). Possible trace fossils of acorn worms have been reported from the Lower Triassic of Italy by Twitchett (1996). This rarity is quite remarkable because some other soft-bodied worm-like organisms that burrow in the sea floor are much better represented in the fossil record. Actually, the only enteropneust specimen from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria in Germany was described by myself as Mesobalanoglossus buergeri (also see Bechly 2015). The featured image shows the holotype specimen (no. SNSB-BSPG 1998-I-15), which is 68.8 cm long and 2.6 cm wide, and deposited at the Natural History Museum in Munich.
Abrupt Appearance, Yet Again
Recently, 39 specimens of the previously unknown acorn worm Cambrobranchus pelagobenthos were described from the Hayiyan Lagerstätte in China (Yang et al. 2024), which belongs to the famous Lower Cambrian Chengjiang biota. The scientists could also describe larvae and juveniles and thereby document the characteristic indirect development with a pelago-benthic lifestyle already for these earliest known representatives of acorn worms.
Thus, both major subgroups of the phylum Hemichordata are known from Lower Cambrian fossils with completely modern morphology and life cycle, which confirms the overall pattern of the abrupt appearance of animal phyla in the Cambrian Explosion. Furthermore, the putative stem-hemichordate Gyaltsenglossus senis was described by Nanglu et al. (2020) from the Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada. However, with an estimated age of 506 million years, it is 10-20 million years younger than the oldest crown group representatives discussed above and thus requires an ad hoc explanation in terms of ghost lineages to be accommodated within a Darwinian paradigm
References
Alessandrello A, Bracchi G & Riou B 2004. Polychaete, sipunculan and enteropneust worms from the Lower Callovian (Middle Jurassic) of La Voulte-sur-Rhône (Ardèche, France). Memoire della Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano (Fascicolo I) 32, 1–16.
Arduini P, Pinna G & Terruzzi G 1981. Megaderaion sinemuriense n.g. n.sp., a new fossil enteropneust of the Sinemurian of Osteno in Lombardy. Atti della Societa Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano 122(1-2), 104–108. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/325194
Bardack D 1997. Wormlike animals: Enteropeusta. pp. 89–92 in: Shabica CW & Hay AA (eds). Richardson’s Guide to the fossil fauna of Mazon Creek. Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago (IL), 308 pp.
Bechly G 2015. [Chapter] Eichelwürmer (Hemichordata: Enteropneusta). p. 324 in: Arratia G, Schultze HP, Tischlinger H & Viohl G (eds). Solnhofen – Ein Fenster in die Jurazeit. 2 vols. Pfeil Verlag, Munich (Germany), 620 pp. [In German] https://pfeil-verlag.de/publikationen/solnhofen-ein-fenster-in-die-jurazeit/
Bechly G & Frickhinger KA 1999. Acorn worms. pp. 76–79 in: Frickhinger KA (ed.). The Fossils of Solnhofen 2: New specimens, new details, new results. Goldschneck-Verlag, Korb (Germany), 190 pp. [German PDF]
Cameron CB 2016. Saccoglossus testa from the Mazon Creek fauna (Pennsylvanian of Illinois) and the evolution of acorn worms (Enteropneusta: Hemichordata). Palaeontology 59(3), 329–336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12235
Cameron CB 2018. Class Enteropneusta: Introduction, Morphology, Life Habits, Systematic Descriptions, and Future Research. Treatise Online 109, 1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17161/to.v0i0.7889 (dead link)
Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Cameron CB 2013. Tubicolous enteropneusts from the Cambrian period. Nature 495, 503–506. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12017
Hou X-g, Aldridge RJ, Siveter DJ, Siveter DJ, Williams M, Zalasiewicz J & Ma X-y 2011. An Early Cambrian Hemichordate Zooid. Current Biology 21(7), 612–616. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.005
Hou X-g, Siveter DJ, Siveter DJ, Aldridge RJ, Cong P-y, Gabbott SE, Ma X-y, Purnell MA & Williams M 2017. Hemichordata. Chapter 22, pp. 250–251 in: The Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China: The Flowering of Early Animal Life. 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (UK) / Hoboken (NJ), xii+316 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118896372.ch22
Maletz J 2014. Hemichordata (Pterobranchia, Enteropneusta) and the fossil record. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 398, 16–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2013.06.010
Nanglu K, Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Cameron CB 2016. Cambrian suspension-feeding tubicolous hemichordates. BMC Biology 14: 56, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-016-0271-4
Nanglu K, Caron J-B & Cameron CB 2020. Cambrian Tentaculate Worms and the Origin of the Hemichordate Body Plan. Current Biology 30(21), 4238–4244.e1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.078
Twitchett RJ 1996. The Resting Trace of an Acorn-Worm (Class: Enteropneusta) from the Lower Triassic. Journal of Paleontology 70(1), 128–131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1306375
Walcott CD 1911. Cambrian Geology and Paleontology II: No. 5 – Middle Cambrian annelids. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 57, 109–145. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/34820
Yang X, Kimmig J, Cameron CB, Nanglu K, Kimmig SR, de Carle D, Zhang C, Yu M & Peng S 2024. An early Cambrian pelago-benthic acorn worm and the origin of the hemichordate larva. Palaeontologia Electronica 27(1): a17, 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26879/1356
Perfect solar eclipses and the case for design.
To Understand the Meaning of a Solar Eclipse
The sun and the moon are not just the same shape, but the same apparent size in the sky. It’s this happy arrangement that produces total solar eclipses as seen from the earth’s surface.
Americans got a chance to view such an eclipse on Monday — an event we won’t see again from coast to coast until 2045. The moon’s 115-mile wide central shadow entered Texas from Mexico around 12:29 p.m. over Eagle Pass before grazing the edge of San Antonio, and then passing over Dallas-Ft. Worth. It continued on a northeasterly pass over 11 other states until it reached Maine. (You can find the precise path at NationalEclipse.com.)
In a total solar eclipse, just before “totality,” the last bright bit of the sun’s photosphere looks like a pink diamond in an engagement ring. When the moon covers the sun’s disk, the sky goes dark; the temperature drops; the stars appear. Bugs and animals get confused and go quiet or start squawking. And the dim outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona, reaches out from the black lunar disk like the gray iris of an eye with a black pupil in the middle. At that point you can take off your protective glasses and see it with your naked eyes.
Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez (my co-author on The Privileged Planet) and I provided live commentary for an eclipse viewing in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas — where totality lasted four minutes and 19 seconds. (You can find highlights at X on the @DiscoveryCSC feed.)
In order for a total solar eclipse to occur, the moon, sun, and Earth have to line up in a straight line. When the moon passes in front of the sun, you can see an eclipse if you’re in the path of the moon’s shadow.
Those fully in the shadow — the umbra — see the moon cover the sun. If you’re just outside that path, you see a partial eclipse — the penumbra. The difference between a partial and total eclipse is like the difference between day and night. It’s impossible to capture with mere words the experience of seeing a total eclipse. But words can help us ponder its meaning.
Finely Tuned
The sun is a giant ball of gas and plasma. The moon is a much smaller rock. And yet, during a total eclipse, they mark off the same space in our sky. They match. On Earth, we can see not just total eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses.
The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun. But the moon is also about 400 times closer to the earth than is the sun. As a result, the size of the moon matches the size of the sun from our perspective. And since they appear as round disks, they match in both size and shape.
Physics doesn’t require this arrangement. There are 65 major moons in our solar system and many smaller ones. But only we enjoy perfect solar eclipses when a moon just barely covers the sun’s bright photosphere. If there were life forms on Mars or Jupiter, they wouldn’t see such eclipses.
So the best place to view total solar eclipses in our solar system is just where there are observers to see them. Let that sink in a minute.
A Habitable Planet
Most astronomers chalk this up to coincidence. And yet, without this precise arrangement of the earth, the moon, and the sun, we probably wouldn’t exist.
Let me explain. For lots of reasons, a planet almost surely needs liquid water on its surface to host complex life. Almost all places in the solar system and in the universe are either way too hot or way too cold for this. To be “habitable,” a planet needs to be in the “Goldilocks Zone” around its star: not too hot and not too cold. Think of this zone as a narrow, nearly circular ring of space around a star. (Netflix’s Three-Body Problem is fun science fiction, but any planet in a three-star system would almost surely be lifeless.)
The earth is, of course, safely inside the Goldilocks Zone. And as a result, the sun appears to be a certain size in our sky.
Our large, well-placed moon also plays a key role in making Earth habitable by stabilizing the tilt of its axis. That gives our planet a more stable climate. The moon also contributes to Earth’s ocean tides, which mix nutrients from the land into the oceans. The two tiny moons around Mars are much too small to serve in this role. As a result, Mars wobbles on its axis far more than the earth does. That’s bad news for Martians.
Now put these two facts together.
When a planet, like Earth, is in the cozy, life-friendly zone around a star, that star will appear to be a certain size in its sky.
A habitable planet like Earth also needs to have a moon of a certain size in its sky to create the right amount of gravitational pull to stabilize the planet.
Not just “certain” sizes, but nearly the same apparent sizes. So, two of the key ingredients for building a habitable planet also produce perfect eclipses for observers on that planet.
Our Eclipses Are a Gold Mine for Science
That alone seems fishy. But there’s more: Our ability to see perfect solar eclipses has played a pivotal role in several major scientific discoveries. Those discoveries would have been hard to make on the planets that don’t enjoy such eclipses.
First, eclipses helped us unlock the mystery of stars.
Scientists since Isaac Newton (1666) have known that sunlight splits into all the colors of the rainbow when passed through a prism. But only in the 19th century did astronomers begin to observe solar eclipses with spectroscopes, which use prisms. This allowed them to discover how the sun produces its light.
The beginning and end of totality present the best chances to examine the thin middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, called the chromosphere. It shines in the ruby-red light of hydrogen gas heated to more than 20,000° Celsius (36,000° Fahrenheit). Just beyond the moon’s silhouette during an eclipse, observers may also see solar prominences: brilliant red arcs, loops, and jets of hot gas propelled by the explosive release of the sun’s magnetic energy.
All of this gave astronomers a way to figure out the structure of the sun itself. Since the sun looks larger from the earth than from any other planet with a moon, we can discern finer details in its chromosphere and corona than we could from any other planet.
This knowledge, in turn, has allowed astronomers to make sense of the light from the distant stars. Perfect eclipses, then, have been a key that allowed us to unlock the physics of stars.
Testing Einstein’s Theory
Eclipses have done far more than help astronomers decipher starlight, however.
In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein predicted in his General Theory of Relativity that light passing near a massive object like the sun would be visibly bent. To test his theory, astronomers needed to measure the changes in the positions of starlight passing near the sun’s edge compared to their positions months later when the sun was in another part of the sky.
Have you ever tried to look at starlight right next to the edge of the sun? It’s a bad idea and wouldn’t work anyway. The test could only be done during a total solar eclipse. That’s why, during the 1919 eclipse, two teams of astronomers set out to confirm Einstein’s theory.
They succeeded, as did other astronomers during later eclipses. This led scientists to embrace Einstein’s theory, which is the basis of our current knowledge of the universe.
Conspiracy, Not Coincidence
There’s far more to this story. Indeed, the perfect eclipses we enjoy are just one of many examples of an eerie pattern Gonzalez and I discuss in detail in The Privileged Planet. That pattern points to a startling conclusion: Life-friendly places like Earth are also the best places, overall, for doing science. That is, the rare places where observers can exist are also the best overall places for observing. The universe seems to be designed not just for life but also for discovery.
Genesis 1 says that God created lights in the sky for “signs.” One of those signs has been hiding in plain sight all along.
Darwinism's God?
Was God a Bacterium?
University of Bonn biologist František Baluška has an explanation for the apparent design in biology. He believes that there was design involved in evolution — yet not from an outside designer, but from the organisms themselves. He maintains that all living organisms are sentient, even down to simplest bacteria, and that they used their minds to evolve.
You read that right. And it’s not a mischaracterization of his views. For example, here’s how Baluška and his collaborators William B. Miller Jr. and Arthur S. Reber summarize the thesis in a recent paper1:
The first eukaryotic cells emerged some 2–1.5 billion years ago, which implies that it took nearly two billion years to get from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells. Our cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model states that all living cells utilize cellular sentience to survive and evolve. We argue that the prolonged timeline to evolve eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells was necessitated by the complex level of evolutionary novelty required to assemble unitary consciousness from several formerly independent prokaryotic versions of cellular consciousness, as successive orders of cognition…Once an initiating eukaryotic threshold of cognition was attained, eukaryotic evolution (based on its novel eukaryotic version of cellular sentience and cognition) proceeded relatively rapidly alongside an active unicellular sphere, including a huge diversity of protozoa and other protists that has thrived and evolved until our present day. Some 0.8 billion years ago, and on several occasions, colonial protists invented the multicellular forms that evolved into fungi, animals, and plants, emerging first in the sea and later also on land. Cellular cognition enabled multicellularity and permitted its successful continuous evolution toward the higher level of cohesive cellular complexities exhibited in multicellular organisms, with symbiotic fungal–plant/tree roots networks representing one of its most extensively integrated forms.
Notice the use of the word “invented.” For once, this is not a case of sloppy language or the tendency to anthropomorphize natural selection. They are really saying that protists invented complex multicellular life, using their minds. First life evolved the ability to think; then it used that ability to evolve everything else. As they put it later on: “Evolutionary development is creative not only through either mutations or natural selection but also — and mainly — through the linked cognitive activities and preferences of individual organisms.”
Poetic License?
Peter Corning, an editor of the volume in which the paper appears, seems a little wary of going all-in on the idea of conscious microorganisms. In his introductory essay to the volume, he says that biologists who say primordial organisms exhibit sensation, choosing, and mind are exercising “poetic license.”
Poetic license is well and good — in poetry. But poetry does not cut it as scientific explanation. If the idea of primordial consciousness is mere poetry, it does not explain. If, on the other hand, it is not mere poetry… well, that is something very astonishing. It speaks either to a non-physical intellect, or else to a level of ordered complexity much harder to account for than the complex systems it is invoked to explain away in the first place. Neither option is quite tolerable, apparently, so Corning seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. Primordial “consciousness” can be invoked to get past the nasty difficulties with neo-Darwinism, but if it’s called out as too ridiculous, or demanding explanation, that charge can be brushed away with “poetic license.”
At any rate, I see no evidence that Baluška and his colleagues are being the least bit poetical. They make it very clear that what they are talking about is literally mind, cognition, consciousness, sentience — terms they seem to use interchangeably. They attribute mind to primordial organisms, and attribute evolution to the decisions made by these minds.
Elsewhere, Baluška and Reber write, “let us be clear about what we mean by sentience or consciousess [sic] as it is manifested in unicellular species. We are referring to feelings, subjective states, a primitive awareness of events, including an awareness of internal states.”
But How Does It Work?
We should acknowledge that this theory is, unlike some similar attempts, at least an actual solution: if true, it would explain how complex life evolved. However, in solving that problem, Baluška and his colleagues create another, equally formidable problem: how does this primordial sentience work, and where did it come from?
While there does appear to be evidence that plants, fungi, protozoans, bacteria, and archaea respond to the world in a manner that is much more like “thinking” than we are typically taught to believe, there is a lot of mystery about how they do it. The following explanation, from the first paper, is typical:
The plasma membrane provides all cells with a sheltered space, allowing exotic biophysical phenomena based on charged ions, reactive oxygen species, and bioelectric as well as biomagnetic phenomena.
Throw in a random assortment of poorly understood phenomena, and boom! you have consciousness. Of course, the authors would admit that the exact mechanisms of cellular consciousness are still poorly understood. That’s fine. But do they really think that once they uncover the details of these primordial minds, those minds will be easier to explain naturalistically than, say, the bacterial flagellum?
A Cure Worse than the Disease
The thing is, if we ever came down to hard details about what Baluška et al. are proposing, all the old design arguments would still be waiting to be dealt with. There is no reason to hope that “cellular cognition,” “plant neurons,” or a “fungal mind” is less likely to be irreducibly complex or require foresight in its engineering than any other biological system. Actually, it would probably be much more complex than most.
Essentially, what these researchers are doing is taking the most advanced and perplexing system in biology, the brain, and putting it at the beginning of the evolutionary process instead of the end. That’s a fascinating theory, and they are to be commended for their courage and willingness to think outside the box. If true, it’s revolutionary. But it’s not going to make things easier on unguided evolution.
For now, it might make things easier on scientists who prefer to hide from design arguments rather than face them head on. But in the end, there is no escaping the fact that if this theory is true it speaks to a level of design in nature far more exquisite and improbable than anything hitherto dreamt of.
Notes
Baluška, František, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber. “Cellular Basis of Cognition and Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks.” In Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems, edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross. 33-58. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023.
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