An air strike against Darwinian gradualism?

 Fossil Friday: The Carboniferous Explosion of Winged Insects

Gunter Bechly

Among the numerous abrupt appearances of new animal body plans in the history of life (Bechly 2024) there are also striking examples from my own field of research, which is the fossil history of winged insects (Pterygota), the most diverse group of organisms which includes more described species than all other multicellular life combined (Grimaldi & Engel 2005). Therefore, this Fossil Friday features the holotype of Fouquea superba, a winged insect of the order Palaeodictyoptera from the Upper Carboniferous of Commentry in France.

There have been three key innovations in the history of insects that contributed to the great success of this group. Those include the origin of wings and flight, the origin of foldable wings (Neoptera), and the origin of complete metamorphosis (Holometabola) (Nicholson et al. 2014). It is truly astonishing that all these three innovations appeared abruptly and very early among the oldest winged insects from the Carboniferous, which also exhibited a great diversity and disparity from the very beginning. I call this the Carboniferous Insect Explosion.

In the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous) subperiod between 323-299 million years ago, when the world was forming a single supercontinent Pangaea dominated by vast tropical swamp forests, this large diversity of different winged insect groups appeared suddenly without any known transitional forms in the older Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) or Devonian strata (Strahler 1999, Labandeira 2005, Grimaldi & Engel 2005, Knecht et al. 2011, Nicholson et al. 2015, Wang et al. 2016, Bechly 2023a). According to leading experts, “an insect equivalent of an Archaeopteryx remains elusive” (Grimaldi & Engel 2005: 160).

The early fossil record of Carboniferous winged insects does not only include giant palaeopteran insects like the extinct palaeodictyopterids, mayflies, and dragonflies, or “primitive” neopteran insect orders like stoneflies, roaches, and orthopterans, but also thrips, bugs, and even advanced holometabolans like wasps, beetles, and scorpionflies, often with “a high degree of specialization early in the evolution of insects” (Garwood & Sutton 2010). Here is a brief and incomplete list of the large diversity of early winged insect groups in the Carboniferous with their oldest known representatives (also see Nel et al. 2013: fig. 3:

Palaeodictyopterids: Delitzschala (Germany, 323 mya)

Mayflies (Ephemeroptera): Triplosoba (France, 303-299 mya)

Dragonflies / Griffenflies (Odonatoptera): Eugeropteron and Geropteron (Argentina, 325-324 mya?)

Stoneflies (Plecoptera): Gulou (China, 318-314 mya)

Roaches (Dictyoptera): Kemperala (Germany, 318 mya) and Qilianiblatta (China, 318-314 mya)

Orthopterans: Archaeorthoptera (Czech Rep., 324 mya)

Thrips (Thysanoptera): Westphalothripides (France, 314-307 mya)

Plant lice (Psocodea): Westphalopsocus (France, 314-307 mya)

Bugs (Hemiptera): Protoprosbole (Belgium, 316 mya) and Aviorrhyncha (France, 314-307 mya)

Holometabolan larvae: Metabolarva (Germany, 314-307 or 306 mya) and Srokalarva (USA, 311-307 mya)

Wasps (Hymenoptera): Avioxyela (France, 314-307 mya)

Beetles (Coleoptera): Stephanastus (France, 303-299 mya)

Neuropteroids: Srokalarva (USA, 311-307 mya) seems to be a larval neuropteroid according to Haug et al. (2015)

Scorpionflies (Mecoptera): Westphalomerope (France, 318-314 mya)

Of course, there is always considerable uncertainty concerning the identification of such fossil insects. A good example is Adiphlebia lacoana from the Pennsylvanian Mazon Creek locality in Illinois. This taxon was identified as oldest beetle by Béthoux (2009), which was accepted by Wolfe et al. (2016) and even used as fossil calibration point for the dating of beetle origins. However, the attribution of Adiphlebia to beetles was disputed by Kukalova-Peck & Beutel (2012), who instead considered it as a stem neuropterid, while it was later identified as paoliid stem dictyopteran by Kirejtshuk et al. (2014). Rasnitysn & Aristov (2013) transferred Adiphlebia to the extinct family Anthracoptilidae, which was concurred by Guan et al. (2016), who thoroughly discussed the various hypotheses for the relationship of this family (i.e., Palaeodictyopteroida, Prothorthoptera, Hypoperlida, Eoblattida (= Cnemidolestodea), stem-Mantodea, Paraneoptera, Holometabola), but ultimately supported the newer alternative of a position in Paoliida as sister group of Dictyoptera. Even though the holotype specimen of Adiphlebia is a very complete and well-preserved fossil insect, it has been attributed in the past fifteen years by different experts to almost all of the major subgroups of winged insects. Keep this in mind when you read about the next discovery of a sensational transitional fossil in the news.

Where are the Stem Pterygotes?

Given that we find so many different subgroups of modern winged insects in the Carboniferous, shouldn’t we expect to find at least some stem-pterygotes among the earliest winged insects? What and where are they? Only two candidates were suggested, namely Palaeodictyopterida and Paoliida.

Palaeodictyopteroids are an extinct group of large insects with densely veined wings and sucking-piercing mouth parts. They rank among the oldest known winged insects and were considered to be stem-pterygotes by the godfather of paleoentomology Anton Handlirsch (1906-1908), but this is no longer believed among modern experts. Their phylogenetic position is still a matter of debate, but they are generally considered to be crown group pterygotes, either more closely related to living Palaeoptera (mayflies and dragonflies) or to living Neoptera (all other winged insects, with foldable wings) (Rasnitsyn & Quicke 2002, Grimaldi & Engel 2005, Prokop & Engel 2019, Prokop et al. 2019). Prokop et al. (2019) explicitly stated that “interestingly, Palaeodictyopterida have not been recovered as sister group to all other Pterygota.” In my view, their palaeopteran wing articulation, their wing venation, their genital organs with paired penes, and larval characters with abdominal winglet-like structures (Haug et al. 2014, Prokop et al. 2022, Ross 2022), all suggest a position of palaeodictyopteroids in Palaeoptera, most likely as sister group of modern mayflies.

Paoliida are another group of early pterygote insects from the Upper Carboniferous and Permian. Based on some obsolete earlier hypotheses (Sharov 1966, Rasnitysn 1976, also see Rasnitysn & Quicke 2002), Prokop et al. (2012) considered Paoliida as “putative stem-group of winged insects”, even though Prokop & Nel (2007) had already cautioned that such a view is not supported by any synapomorphies. Consequently, no other experts accepted this hypothesis. More recent studies (Prokop et al. 2014, 2023, Legendre et al. 2015) identified Paoliida as the sister-group of roachoids (Dictyoptera) within modern Neoptera, which was also accepted and endorsed by the previous supporters of the alternative stem-pterygote hypothesis.

The only remaining potential stem-pterygote could be Carbotriplurida, which was actually suggested in a study co-authored by myself (Staniczek et al. 2014) and accepted by some later studies (e.g., Prokop et al. 2023). However, Carbotriplura from the Upper Carboniferous of the Czech Republic is just a wingless insect similar to a giant silverfish, and its position in the basal stem group of winged insects is only based on speculative scenarios and slightly broadened paranota. It basically is a fossil that roughly fits a hypothetical model (also see Haug et al. 2014, Ross 2017, 2022, Prokop et al. 2022), but not a transitional fossil in any meaningful way. It did not have anything like real mobile wings and not even anything that would be clearly identifiable as gliding or parachuting airfoils. There is no evidence or proof that it was an arboreal animal capable of gliding, and its large size rather points against this hypothesis. But including a fancy evolutionary story increased the unique selling point and impact of our paper, which I can freely admit now that I am no longer part of the Darwinian establishment and no longer under pressure from any museum PR departments to oversell results in the international competition for grants and reputation.

Devonian Proto-Wing Insects Debunked

What about alleged Devonian proto-winged insects you might have read about in text books. Don’t they prove a gradual development of wings from wingless insects prior to the Carboniferous period? No they definitely don’t do anything like that, as all known examples (Eopterum, Rhyniognatha, and Strudiella) for such alleged transitional fossils have been debunked:

Eopterum devonicum and Eopteridium striatum were described by the famous Russian paleoentomologist Rohdendorf (1961, 1970) as the oldest fossil evidence of winged insects from the Devonian of Russia. The fossils indeed resembled isolated insect wings with the characteristic wing venation. This finding made it into textbooks for decades, and was even featured in Willi Hennig’s (1969, 1981) groundbreaking work on Insect Phylogeny with detailed interpretation and naming of the wing venation. However, shortly later Rohdendorf (1972) himself already suspected that the two fossil may rather represent nothing but the isolated tail fans (uropods) of a fossil shrimp, which was strongly confirmed by the American crustaceologist Frederick Schram (1980). Bummer!

Rhyniognatha hirsti is a fragment of an arthropod head capsule from the Lower Devonian Rhynie chert in Scotland, which is about 412 million years old. The common claim that it represents the oldest insect fossil and possibly a winged insect is based on a study by Engel & Grimaldi (2004). Some experts tentatively followed their interpretation, such as Edgecombe & Legg (2013), who said that “Rhyniognatha is known from a mandible that is certainly a member of the insect clade Dicondylia (i.e. having an anterior mandibular articulation) and may even be a pterygote (Engel and Grimaldi 2004). Rhyniognatha (Fig. 15.6) extends the range of winged insects downwards from the Carboniferous.” Based on its characteristic morphology, I had always thought that Rhyniognatha rather looks like the head of a myriapod. Some colleagues from the University of Tübingen and the Natural History Museum in Stuttgart, with whom I had discussed the issue over the years fully agreed. Lo and behold, a more recent and much more thorough study by Haug & Haug (2017) suggested that Rhyniognatha was misinterpreted and indeed represents an early centipede, which was also accepted by Ross (2022).

Finally, Garrouste et al. (2012) described yet another supposed fossil evidence for a winged insect from the Late Devonian of Belgium, which they called Strudiella devonica. An accompanying comment to the original description celebrated the discovery because “a complete insect fossil from the Devonian period has long been sought” and “the finding of a candidate may improve our patchy understanding of when winged insects evolved” (Shear 2012). Otherwise, the identification of this fossil was immediately met with scepticism, because it lacked any trace of wings or even nymphal wing buds (Taylor 2012). Indeed, the fame of this fossil did not last long, because a year later a team of other distinguished scientists found that Strudiella is just a decomposing crustacean (Hörnschemeyer et al. 2013). They could hardly have been clearer when they said that “we consider it to be crucial to prevent this fossil from entering entomology textbooks as an early insect.” The original authors of course still disagreed (Garrouste et al. 2013), but most paleoentomologists no longer believe in this oldest winged insect and consider the identity of this fossil as problematic due to its poor preservation (Haug & Haug 2017).

After the debunking of Strudiella, evolutionary biologists were left empty handed with no fossil record at all of any Devonian precursors for winged insects that were postulated to exist by molecular clock studies and of course were expected by Darwinian reasoning based on the fully developed winged insects in the Lower Carboniferous (see below). Nevertheless, Darwinian scientists made grandiose claims like the following by Engel et al. (2013), which are not supported by any valid fossil evidence:

Palaeological studies have advanced significantly in the last twenty five years,particularly with a large number of reevaluations of taxa in a cladistic framework and by pushing back the timing of wing origins from the early Carboniferous into the earliest Devonian perhaps latest Silesian.

Clueless about wing origins.

The identification of putative proto-winged insects is also hampered by the more general problem that we do not even know how proto-wings should have looked like, because the question of insect wing origins is far from settled in the scientific community (see Grimaldi & Engel 2005, Engel et al. 2013, Ross 2017, 2022, Smith & Jockusch 2020, Akst 2022, Prokop et al. 2022). There exist very different theories for their origin without any consensus: Fossil evidence rather supports the older paranotal theory of an origin of insect wings from stiff outgrowths of the dorsal breastplates (paranota) of the exoskeleton, while evo-devo data rather support the newer exite theory (Kukalová-Peck 1997) of an origin from mobile leg appendages (exites). Actually, different lines of data equally support both theories, which are seemingly incompatible and mutually exclusive. This conundrum led to the suggestion that both theories might be true and insect wings originated as composite structures from a fusion of stiff thoracic outgrowths with mobile leg appendages. This dual origin hypothesis was also suggested in a paper co-authored by myself (Staniczek et al. 2011), but in this mainstream paper I could of course not mention the elephant in the room: such a view would make viable intermediate forms hardly conceivable, so that a saltational adaptive macro-mutation (hopeful monster) would be required, which would arguably imply intelligent design. Even though several recent studies (mainly by the research team of Tomoyasu and Clark-Hachtel at Miami University; e.g., Clark-Hachtel & Tomoyasu 2020) increasingly supported the dual origin hypothesis, there are also new studies that still support one of the single-origin scenarios, such as the recent Nature papers by Bruce & Patel (2020), who suggested “that insect wings and body walls evolved from ancient leg segments,” or by Ohde et al. (2022), who suggested “the wing origin from lateral tergum of a wingless ancestor.” Another recent study by Fisher et al. (2021) suggests that the evo-devo data “doesn’t favor either of those hypotheses about wings,” but rather, “what it says is we need other kinds of evidence” (Jockusch in Akst 2022). In other words, we are pretty much as clueless about the origin of insect wings as a century ago

The Oldest Fossil Record of Winged Insects

So, since all the alleged Devonian proto-winged insects have been debunked, what are the oldest unambiguous winged insects found in the fossil record? They were all found in Namurian sediments near the border between the Lower Carboniferous (Mississippian) and the Upper Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian), such as the rich fossil insect fauna from the Hagen-Vorhalle quarry in Germany, but many cannot be precisely dated enough to count them as oldest record (Brauckmann & Brauckmann 1992, Brauckmann et al. 1994, Prokop & Hörnschemeyer 2016). But there exist two exceptions, which happen to represent both major subgroups of winged insects (viz Palaeoptera and Neoptera).

One prominent contender is Delitzschala bitterfeldensis, which belongs to the palaeodictopterid family Spilapteridae and has even preserved the characteristic banded color pattern of the wings. It was discovered in the drilling core of a well borehole from the Bitterfeld region in eastern Germany (Brauckmann & Schneider 1996), which has been dated to a uppermost Lower Carboniferous age (Lower Namurian A/E2, Arnsbergian) of about 323 million years. Until recently this represented the oldest well-dated fossil of a winged insect (see Ross 2017) and has therefore been used as calibration point for phylogenetic trees (Wolfe et al. 2016).

More recently, an unnamed insect has been discovered in the slightly older (lowermost Namurian A/E1, Pendleian) sediments from the Upper Silesian Basin in the Czech Republic (Prokop et al. 2005), which are about 324 million years old. Based on its wing venation it could be attributed to the polyneopteran order Archaeorthoptera

The Oldest Fossil Record of Metamorphosis

Actually, the first holometabolous insects with complete metamorphosis are recorded from the same Pennsylvanian subperiod (about 314-307 million years ago) as many of the other very early winged insects (Nel et al. 2013). Molecular clock data even suggest that Holometabola are at least as ancient (about 328-318 mya) as the earliest fossil record of winged insects at all (Labandeira 2011), or place “the origin of Holometabola in the Carboniferous (355 Ma), a date significantly older than previous paleontological and morphological phylogenetic reconstructions” (Wiegmann et al. 2009a, 2009b, Misof et al. 2014). My dear colleague and frequent co-author André Nel (2019) recently commented that “the late Carboniferous was also the time of the oldest known holometabolous insects, with complete metamorphosis (wasps, beetles, scorpionflies).” Indeed, as already listed above, fossils from larval and adult holometabolous insects of different orders have been found in late Carboniferous layers (see Kukalová-Peck 1997, Nel et al. 2007, 2013, Béthoux 2009, Kirejtshuk & Nel 2013, Kirejtshuk et al. 2014, Haug et al. 2015). The mentioned holometabolan groups all have a complete metamorphosis with a pupal stage, where the caterpillar-like body plan of the larval stage is dissolved into a kind of cell tissue soup and rearranged into the very different adult body plan of the winged imago. It is hardly possible to explain an evolutionary origin of this marvellous metamorphosis at all, as the only suggested hypothesis, the so-called pronymph-hypothesis by Truman & Riddiford (1999), has to make the extremely implausible assumption that the main feeding stage (caterpillar) originated from a non-feeding late embryonal stage (pronymph) (see Bechly 2023b). Apart from that, it is certainly unexpected to find this sophisticated ontogenetic process already with early flying insects rather than after hundreds of millions of years of gradual evolution

Clocks versus Rocks

Just like in most other groups of organisms we find a great mismatch between the estimated ages by molecular clock studies and the earliest fossil record, even though Darwinism would predict that these two different lines of evidence should converge to the same true history of life. Molecular clock studies dated the origin of winged insects at about 440-370 million years ago, but the oldest fossil record is just about 324 million years ago, which implies a ghost lineage of a whopping 116-46 million years. (Gaunt & Miles 2002, Regier et al. 2004, Rehm et al. 2011, Rota-Stabelli et al. 2013, Thomas et al. 2013, Wheat & Wahlberg 2013, Misof et al. 2014, Rainford et al. 2014, Tong et al. 2015, Wang et al. 2016, Johnson et al. 2018, Montagna et al. 2019, Schachat et al. 2023).

New Study Vindicates the Carboniferous Insect Explosion

Last year a new study (Schachat et al. 2023), which reviewed the fossil and molecular evidence for the age of winged insects, fully vindicated the explosive origin of winged insects in the Carboniferous. In their abstract the authors confirmed the stark conflict between molecular clock datings and the fossil record, which requires extensive ghost lineages of unrecorded history. They were not at all convinced by any previous explanations for this conundrum and concluded:

Here, we examine the plausibility of such a gap in the fossil record, and possible explanations for it, … We do not find support for the mechanisms previously suggested to account for such an extended gap in the pterygote fossil record, including sampling bias, preservation bias, and body size.

Instead the authors suggested that the conflict between molecular clock and fossil record “is probably an analytical artifact of taxon sampling and choice of fossil calibration points, possibly compounded by heterogeneity in rates of sequence evolution or speciation, including radiations or ‘bursts’ during their early history [my emphasis].” Bursts in their early history is exactly what is described by me with the term Carboniferous Insect Explosion. I also agree that molecular clock datings are mostly rubbish, but this of course resonates better with intelligent design theory than Darwinian evolution, which would predict molecular clock studies to provide more accurate estimates on a regular basis.

The study also emphasized that different groups of insects appear in the fossil record roughly in the correct order as predicted by the sequence of branchings in phylogenetic reconstructions. Such cases of good stratigraphic fit indeed require an adequate explanation, which is arguably provided by common descent with modification. But the authors immediately qualified this result:

Obviously the fossil record is not sufficiently complete to expect that it recapitulates phylogeny with fine-tuned precision or accuracy, beyond the very broad-brush sequence of major taxa that are well represented as fossils; younger taxonomic units are expected to be less well represented as fossils, much less captured sequentially in the fossil record.

This suggests that the evidence for common descent from good stratigraphic fit may not be as strong as it is sometimes claimed.

Anyway, the abrupt appearance of winged insects with great diversity and disparity in the Carboniferous period, which we have called the Carboniferous Insect Explosion, is a phenomenon that is highly unexpected under Darwinian assumptions, but well be accommodated within an intelligent design paradigm. It represents just one of the many discontinuities in the history of life that strongly contradict the predictions from a neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. The same pattern is found in almost all groups of organisms, in all geographical regions, and in all periods of Earth’s history. This is clearly a signal in the data and not just noise. It is a signal that tells about a saltational history of life, with a series of bursts of biological creativity that can only be explained with the goal-directed infusion of new information from outside the system.

References

Akst J 2022. Unearthing the Evolutionary Origins of Insect Wings. The Scientist April 4, 2022. https://www.the-scientist.com/notebook/unearthing-the-evolutionary-origins-of-insect-wings-69845

Bechly G 2023a. Fossil Friday: The Abrupt Origin of Winged Insects. Evolution News March 24, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/03/fossil-friday-the-abrupt-origin-of-winged-insects/

Bechly G 2023b. Fossil Friday: How the Caterpillar Got Its Legs, or Not. Evolution News November 10, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/11/fossil-friday-how-the-caterpillar-got-its-legs-or-not/

Bechly G 2024. Fossil Friday: Discontinuities in the Fossil Record — A Problem for Neo-Darwinism. Evolution News May 10, 2024. https://evolutionnews.org/2024/05/fossil-friday-discontinuities-in-the-fossil-record-a-problem-for-neo-darwinism/

Béthoux O 2009. The earliest beetle identified. Journal of Paleontology 83(6), 931–937. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1666/08-158.1

Brauckmann C & Brauckmann B 1992. Zur stratigraphischen Datierung der ältesten Fluginsekten (Pterygota; Namurium, Ober-Karbon). Dortmunder Beiträge zur Landeskunde – Naturwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen 26, 59–68. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Dortmunder-Beitr-Landeskde_26_0059-0068.pdf

Brauckmann C & Schneider J 1996. Ein unter-karbonisches Insekt aus dem Raum Bitterfeld/Delitzsch (Pterygota, Arnsbergium, Deutschland) [A Lower Carboniferous insect from the Bitterfeld/Delitzsch area (Pterygota, Arnsbegian, Germany]. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie – Monatshefte 1996(1), 17–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1127/njgpm/1996/1996/17

Brauckmann C, Brauckmann B & Gröning E 1994. The Stratigraphical Position of the Oldest Known Pterygota (Insecta, Carboniferous, Namurian). Annales de la Société géologique de Belgique 117(1), 47–56. https://popups.uliege.be/0037-9395/index.php?id=1961

Bruce HS & Patel NH 2020. Knockout of crustacean leg patterning genes suggests that insect wings and body walls evolved from ancient leg segments. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 1703–1712. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01349-0

Clark-Hachtel CM & Tomoyasu Y 2020. Two sets of candidate crustacean wing homologues and their implication for the origin of insect wings. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 1694–1702. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1257-8

Edgecombe GD & Legg D 2013. The Arthropod Fossil Record. pp. 393–415 in: Minelli A, Boxshall G & Fusco G (eds). Arthropod Biology and Evolution – Molecules, Development, Morphology. Springer, Berlin (DE), ix+532 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36160-9_15

Engel MS & Grimaldi DA 2004. New light shed on the oldest insect. Nature 427(6975), 627–630. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02291

Engel MS, Davis SR & Prokop J 2013. Insect Wings: The Evolutionary Development of Nature’s First Flyers. Chapter 12, pp. 269–298 in: Minelli A, Boxshall G & Fusco G (eds). Arthropod Biology and Evolution. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg (DE), ix+532 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36160-9_12

Fisher CR, Kratovil JD, Angelini DR & Jockusch EL 2021. Out from under the wing: reconceptualizing the insect wing gene regulatory network as a versatile, general module for body-wall lobes in arthropods. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288(1965): 20211808, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.1808

Garrouste R, Clément G, Nel P, Engel MS, Grandcolas P, D’Haese CA, Lagebro L, Denayer J, Gueriau P, Lafaite P, Olive S, Prestianni C & Nel A 2012. A complete insect from the Late Devonian period. Nature 488(7409), 82–85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11281Garrouste R, Clément G, Nel P, Engel MS, Grandcolas P, D’Haese CA, Lagebro L, Denayer J, Gueriau P, Lafaite P, Olive S, Prestianni C & Nel A 2013. Garrouste et al. reply. Nature 494, E4–E5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11888

Garwood R & Sutton M 2010. X-ray micro-tomography of Carboniferous stem-Dictyoptera: new insights into early insects. Biology Letters 6(5), 699–702. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0199

Gaunt MW & Miles MA 2002. An Insect Molecular Clock Dates the Origin of the Insects and Accords with Palaeontological and Biogeographic Landmarks. Molecular Biology and Evolution 19(5), 748–761. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a004133

Grimaldi D & Engel MS 2005. Evolution of the Insects. Cambridge University Press, New York (NY), xv+755 pp.

Guan Z, Prokop J, Roques P, Lapeyrie J & Nel A 2016. Revision of the enigmatic insect family Anthracoptilidae enlightens the evolution of Palaeozoic stem-dictyopterans. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 61(1), 71–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4202/app.00051.2014

Handlirsch A 1906-1908. Die fossilen Insekten und die Phylogenie der rezenten Formen. Ein Handbuch für Paläontologen und Zoologen. Engelmann, Leipzig (DE), ix+1430 pp.

Haug C & Haug JT 2017. The presumed oldest flying insect: more likely a myriapod? PeerJ 5:e3402, 1–16; DOI: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3402

Haug JT, Haug C & Garwood RJ 2014. Evolution of insect wings and development – new details from Palaeozoic nymphs. Biological Reviews 91(1), 53–69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12159

Haug JT, Labandeira CC, Santiago-Blay JA, Haug C & Brown S 2015. Life habits, hox genes, and affinities of a 311 million-year-old holometabolan larva. BMC Evolutionary Biology 15: 208, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-015-0428-8

Hennig W 1969. Die Stammesgeschichte der Insekten. Kramer, Frankfurt a.M. (Germany), 459 pp. English translation: Hennig W 1981. Insect Phylogeny. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (UK), 514 pp.

Hörnschemeyer T, Haug JT, Bethoux O, Beutel RG, Charbonnier S, Hegna TA, Koch M, Rust J, Wedmann S, Bradler S & Willmann R 2013. Is Strudiella a Devonian insect? Nature 494, E3–E4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11887

Johnson KP, Dietrich CH, Friedrich F et al. 2018. Phylogenomics and the evolution of hemipteroid insects. PNAS 115(50), 12775–12780. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1815820115

Kirejtshuk AG & Nel A 2013. Skleroptera, a new order of holometabolous insects (Insecta) from the Carboniferous. Zoosystematica Rossica 22(2), 247–257. https://www.zin.ru/journals/zsr/content/2013/zr_2013_22_2_Kirejtshuk.pdf

Kirejtshuk AG, Poschmann M, Prokop J, Garrouste R & Nel A 2014. Evolution of the elytral venation and structural adaptations in the oldest Palaeozoic beetles (Insecta: Coleoptera: Tshekardocoleidae). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 12(5), 575–600. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2013.821530

Knecht RJ, Engel MS & Benner JS 2011. Late Carboniferous paleoichnology reveals the oldest full-body impression of a flying insect. PNAS 108(16), 6515–6519. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1015948108

Kukalová-Peck J 1997. Mazon Creek insect fossils: the origin of insect wings and clues about the origin of insect metamorphosis. pp. 194–207 in: Shabica CW & Hay AA (eds). Richardson’s Guide to the Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek. Northeastern Illinois University Press, Chicago (IL), 308 pp.

Kukalová-Peck J & Beutel RG 2012. Is the Carboniferous †Adiphlebia lacoana really the “oldest beetle”? Critical reassessment and description of a new Permian beetle family. European Journal of Entomology 109(4), 633–645. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14411/eje.2012.075

Labandeira CC 2005. The Fossil Record of Insect Extinction: New Approaches and Future Directions. American Entomologist 51(1), 14–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ae/51.1.14Labandeira CC 2011. Evidence for an Earliest Late Carboniferous Divergence Time and the Early Larval Ecology and Diversification of Major Holometabola Lineages. Entomologica Americana 117 (1), 9–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1664/10-RA-011.1

Laurentiaux D 1952. Découverte d’un Homoptère Prosboloïde dans le Namurien Belge. Association pour l’Étude de la Paléontologie et de la Stratigraphie Houillères Publication 14, 3–16. https://biblio.naturalsciences.be/rbins-publications/association-pour-letude-de-la-paleontologie-et-de-la-stratigraphie-houilleres/14-1952

Legendre F, Nel A, Svenson GJ, Robillard T, Pellens R & Grandcolas P 2015. Phylogeny of Dictyoptera: Dating the Origin of Cockroaches, Praying Mantises and Termites with Molecular Data and Controlled Fossil Evidence. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0130127, 1–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0130127

Misof B et al. 2014. Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Science 346(6210), 763–767. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1257570

Montagna M, Tong KJ, Magoga G, Strada L, Tintori A, Ho SYW & Lo N 2019. Recalibration of the insect evolutionary time scale using Monte San Giorgio fossils suggests survival of key lineages through the End-Permian Extinction. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286(1912): 20191854, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.1854

Nel A 2019. A glance at the deep past history of insects. Comptes Rendus Biologies 342(7-8), 253–254. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crvi.2019.09.008

Nel A, Roques P, Nel P, Prokop J & Steyer JS 2007. The earliest holometabolous insect from the Carboniferous: a “crucial” innovation with delayed success (Insecta Protomeropina Protomeropidae). Annales de la Société Entomologique de France (NS) 43(3), 349–355. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00379271.2007.10697531

Nel A, Roques P, Nel P et al. 2013. The earliest known holometabolous insects. Nature 503(7475), 257–261. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12629

Nicholson DB, Ross AJ & Mayhew PJ 2014. Fossil evidence for key innovations in the evolution of insect diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281: 20141823, 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1823

Nicholson DB, Mayhew PJ & Ross AJ 2015. Changes to the Fossil Record of Insects through Fifteen Years of Discovery. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0128554, 1–61. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0128554Ohde T, Mito T & Niimi T 2022. A hemimetabolous wing development suggests the wing origin from lateral tergum of a wingless ancestor. Nature Communications 13:979, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28624-x

Prokop J & Engel MS 2019. Palaeodictyopterida. Current Biology 29(9), R306–R316. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.056

Prokop J & Hörnschemeyer T 2016. The oldest winged insects (Insecta: Pterygota). XXV International Congress of Entomology, Orlando, Florida, USA, September 25-30 2016. Conference Paper. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1603/ICE.2016.89884 (ResearchGate)

Prokop J & Nel A 2007. An enigmatic Palaeozoic stem-group: Paoliida, designation of new taxa from the Upper Carboniferous of the Czech Republic (Insecta: Paoliidae, Katerinkidae fam. n.). African Invertebrates 48(1), 77–86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7667687

Prokop J, Nel A & Hoch I 2005. Discovery of the oldest known Pterygota in the Lower Carboniferous of the Upper Silesian Basin in the Czech Republic (Insecta: Archaeorthoptera). Geobios 38(3), 383–387. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geobios.2003.11.006

Prokop J, Krzemiński W, Krzemińska E & Wojciechowski D 2012. Paoliida, a putative stem-group of winged insects: Morphology of new taxa from the Upper Carboniferous of Poland. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 57(1), 161–173. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4202/app.2010.0064

Prokop J, Krzemiński W, Krzemińska E, Hörnschemeyer T & Ilger J-M, Brauckmann C, Grandcolas P & Nel A 2014. Late Palaeozoic Paoliida is the sister group of Dictyoptera (Insecta: Neoptera). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 12(5), 601–622. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2013.823468

Prokop J, Krzemińska E, Krzemiński W, Rosová K, Pecharová M, Nel A & Engel MS 2019 Ecomorphological diversification of the Late Palaeozoic Palaeodictyopterida reveals different larval strategies and amphibious lifestyle in adults. Royal Society Open Science 6: 190460, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190460

Prokop J, Rosová K, Krzemińska E, Krzemiński W, Nel A & Engel MS 2022. Abdominal serial homologues of wings in Paleozoic insects. Current Biology 32(15), 3414–3422. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.024

Prokop J, Nel A & Engel MS 2023. Diversity, Form, and Postembryonic Development of Paleozoic Insects. Annual Review of Entomology 68(1), 401–429. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-120220-022637Rainford JL, Hofreiter M, Nicholson DB & Mayhew PJ 2014. Phylogenetic distribution of extant richness suggests metamorphosis is a key innovation driving diversification in insects. PLoS One 9(10): e109085, 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109085

Rasnitysn AP 1976. On the early evolution of insects and the origin of Pterygota. Zhurnal obshchey biologii [Journal of General Biology] 37, 543–555. [In Russian, with English summary]

Rasnitsyn AP & Aristov DS 2013. New fossil insects (Insecta: Caloneurida, Hypoperlida, Palaeomanteida, Jurinida) from the Middle and Upper Permian of European Russia. In: Aristov DS, Bahkuev AS, Golubev VK et al. (eds). Fossil Insects of the Middle and Upper Permian of European Russia. Paleontological Journal 47(7), 678–703. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0031030113070010

Rasnitsyn AP & Quicke DLJ (eds) 2002. History of Insects. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (NL), xii+517 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47577-4

Regier JC, Shultz JW & Kambic RE 2004. Phylogeny of Basal Hexapod Lineages and Estimates of Divergence Times. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 97(3), 411–419. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1603/0013-8746(2004)097[0411:POBHLA]2.0.CO;2

Rehm P, Borner J, Meusemann K, von Reumont BM, Simon S, Hadrys H, Misof B & Burmester T 2011. Dating the arthropod tree based on large-scale transcriptome data. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 61(3), 880–887. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2011.09.003

Rohdendorf BB 1961. Opisanie pervogo krilatogo nasekomogo iz devonskikh otlezheniy Timana (Insecta, Pterygota) [The description of the first winged insect from the Devonian beds of the Timan]. Èntomologičeskoe Obozrenie 40(3), 484–489. 

Rohdendorf BB 1970. Vtoraya nakhodka ostatkov krylatykh devonskikh nasekomykh. Èntomologičeskoe Obozrenie 49, 835–837.

Rohdendorf BB 1972. 1972. Devonskie eopteridy-ne nasekomye a rakoobraznye Eumalacostraca. Èntomologičeskoe Obozrenie 51, 96–97.

Ross A 2017. Insect Evolution: The Origin of Wings. Current Biology 27(3), R113–R115. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.014

Ross A 2022. Evolution: The origin of insect wings revisited. Current Biology 32(15), R851–R853. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.087

Rota-Stabelli O, Daley AC & Pisani D 2013. Molecular timetrees reveal a Cambrian colonization of land and a new scenario for ecdysozoan evolution. Current Biology 23(5), 392–398. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.01.026Schachat SR, Goldstein PZ, Desalle R, Bobo DM, Boyce CK, Payne JL & Labandeira CC 2023. Illusion of flight? Absence, evidence and the age of winged insects. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 138(2), 143–168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blac137

Schram FR 1980. Miscellaneous Late Paleozoic Malacostraca of the Soviet Union. Journal of Paleontology 54(3), 542–547. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1304195

Sharov AG 1966. Basic Arthropodan Stock with Special Reference to Insects. Pergamon Press, Oxford (UK), 271 pp.

Shear WA 2012. An insect to fill the gap. Nature 488(7409), 34–35. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/488034a

Smith FW & Jockusch EL 2020. Into the body wall and back out again. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 1580–1581. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01350-7

Staniczek AH, Bechly G & Godunko RJ 2011. Coxoplectoptera, a new fossil order of Palaeoptera (Arthropoda: Insecta), with comments on the phylogeny of the stem group of mayflies (Ephemeroptera). Insect Systematics & Evolution 42, 101–138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/187631211X578406

Staniczek AH, Sroka P & Bechly G 2014. Neither silverfish nor fowl: The enigmatic Carboniferous Carbotriplura kukalovae Kluge, 1996 (Insecta: Carbotriplurida) is the putative fossil sister group to winged insects (Insecta: Pterygota). Systematic Entomology 39(4), 619–632. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/syen.12076

Strahler AN 1999. Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy. Prometheus Books: Buffalo (NY), 575 pp.

Taylor C 2012. A Devonian Pterygote? Catalogue of Organisms August 2, 2012. http://coo.fieldofscience.com/2012/08/a-devonian-pterygote.htm

Thomas JA, Trueman JWH, Rambaut A & Welch JJ 2013. Relaxed Phylogenetics and the Palaeoptera Problem: Resolving Deep Ancestral Splits in the Insect Phylogeny. Systematic Biology 62(2), 285–297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/sys093

Tong KJ, Duchêne S, Ho SYW & Lo N. 2015. Comment on ‘Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution’. Science 349(6247), 487–487. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa5460

Truman JW & Riddiford LM 1999. The origins of insect metamorphosis. Nature 401(6752), 447–452. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/46737

Wang Y-h, Engel MS, Rafael JA, Wu H-y, Rédei D, Xie Q, Wang G, Liu X-g & Bu W-j 2016. Fossil record of stem groups employed in evaluating the chronogram of insects (Arthropoda: Hexapoda). Scientific Reports 6(1): 38939, 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep38939

Wiegmann BM, Kim J-w & Trautwein MD 2009a. Holometabolous insects (Holometabola). Chapter 31, pp. 260–263 in: Hedges SB & Kumar S (eds). The Timetree of Life. Oxford University Press: New York (NY), xxi+551 pp. http://www.timetree.org/public/data/pdf/Wiegmann2009Chap31.pdf

Wheat CW & Wahlberg N 2013. Critiquing blind dating: the dangers of over-confident date estimates in comparative genomics. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28(11), 636–642. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2013.07.007

Wiegmann BM, Trautwein MD, Kim J-W, Cassel BK, Bertone MA, Winterton SL & Yeates DK 2009b. Single-copy nuclear genes resolve the phylogeny of the holometabolous insects. BMC Biology 7: 34, 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7007-7-34Wolfe JM, Daley AC, Legg DA & Edgecombe GD. 2016. Fossil calibrations for the arthropod Tree of Life. Earth-Science Reviews 160, 43–110. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2016.06.008

Of mice ,men and the power of positive thinking.

 Research with Mice May Explain How the Placebo Effect Works

Evolution News

The placebo effect is the best-known effect in medicine: We get better from an illness in part because we think we will. That’s not “just imagination”; it is proven by the best double-blind randomized clinical trials. When testing a new medication, researchers must subtract the placebo effect from their overall results in order to assess the medication’s true efficacy.

But how the placebo effect works in humans is something of a mystery. For example, it works even when patients know it’s a fake. And it may be getting stronger as researchers learn to manipulate it more effectively

Unexpected Results

A recent development from an experiment on mice sheds a bit of light. A group of researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found circuits in the brain that unexpectedly play an role:

… researchers at the UNC School of Medicine — with colleagues from Stanford, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Allen Institute for Brain Science — found a pain control pathway in the brain.

The researchers then showed that certain neurons and synapses along this pathway are highly activated when mice expect pain relief, with the mice experiencing pain relief even when no medication is involved.

MARK DEREWICZ, “BRAIN CIRCUITS OFFER PLACEBO EFFECT PAIN RELIEF,” UCCCH RESEARCH, JULY 31, 2024

How did the researchers know what the mice were expecting? As Adam Kovac explains at Gizmodo,

In their study, published this week in the journal Nature, the scientists trained mice by placing them in two connected chambers for a week. For the first few days, the floors of both chambers were pleasantly warm. Then, the floor of one chamber was made painfully hot, but the mice were able to seek shelter from the pain by scampering to the second chamber. Finally, on the last day, the floors of both chambers were made painfully hot. The mice, having been conditioned to expect relief upon reaching the second chamber, experienced some pain relief by virtue of the placebo effect. Upon reaching the second chamber, and despite it being just as hot as the first chamber, the mice displayed fewer behaviors associated with being hurt, such as jumping and paw licking.

ADAM KOVAC, “HOW PLACEBOS TRICK THE BRAIN INTO REDUCING PAIN,” GIZMODO, JULY 23, 2024

Not Nice to Mice

This sounds like cruelty to animals, yet something of value was learned. The mice had been injected with a virus that caused brain areas that experienced a change to light up. These were areas the researchers had not expected to be involved in pain control.

As they put it in their Abstract,

Here, we show that analgesia from the expectation of pain relief is mediated by rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) neurons that project to the pontine nucleus (rACC→Pn), a pre-cerebellar nucleus with no established function in pain. We created a behavioral assay that generates placebo-like anticipatory pain relief in mice. In vivo calcium imaging of neural activity and electrophysiological recordings in brain slices showed that expectations of pain relief boost the activity of rACC→Pn neurons and potentiate neurotransmission in this pathway.

CHEN, C., NIEHAUS, J.K., DINC, F. ET AL. NEURAL CIRCUIT BASIS OF PLACEBO PAIN RELIEF.NATURE (2024). AN ACCELERATED PREVIEW OF THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS

Of course, with humans, things are likely to be more complex than with mice. The mice had to be placed in a very simple painful situation in order to trigger a placebo effect. With humans, it is often just a matter of communicating orally that “This [sugar pill] works!” But identifying new brain circuits that are changed by the expectation alone — the neural correlates of expectation — may help produce more effective pain control for both human and animals.

File under "well said" CX

 "Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another."

Paul Johnson

Darwinism is devolving?

 Is This a Paradigm Shift? 

Daniel Witt

My latest previous post, with David Klinghoffer, was about the “tipping point” in dissent from neo-Darwinism observed by Oxford physiologist Denis Noble, which he pin-pointed as occurring when the Royal Society convened in 2016 for the purpose of rethinking evolutionary theory. From Noble’s viewpoint, since 2016 defenders of neo-Darwinism have gotten very quiet, and young researchers in the emerging generation of scientists are happily working outside the framework of neo-Darwinism. 

Not long ago at all, that sort of change seemed like a distant dream. As Douglas Axe put it in 2016, the academe had become a “self-righteous monoculture,” and I think Axe’s comment expressed how many people felt: “Maybe this regrettable situation will change, someday.”

“Maybe…someday.” Implied was: But don’t hold your breath.

The Zeitgeist is dead.

But that’s always how it feels when a certain climate of opinion is dominant and in line with the current zeitgeist. The dogma seems utterly unshakeable. 

Until, one day, it doesn’t. C. S. Lewis (one of the most vehement critics of the zeitgeist qua zeitgeist) wrote

Nor can a man of my age ever forget how suddenly and completely the idealist philosophy of his youth fell. McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley seemed enthroned forever; they went down as suddenly as the Bastille. And the interesting thing is that while I lived under that dynasty I felt various difficulties and objections which I never dared to express. They were so frightfully obvious that I felt sure they must be mere misunderstandings: the great men could not have made such very elementary mistakes as those which my objections implied. But very similar objections — though put, no doubt, far more cogently than I could have put them — were among the criticisms which finally prevailed. 

An idea sits on its glorious throne. None dare question it. All its critics are doomed to perpetual quackdom. And then — just like that! — the zeitgeist changes. Suddenly, that “indisputable” idea is old-fashioned, out-of-date. People forget that they ever believed in it. Another philosophy takes its place, and it seems indisputable.

If Noble is right, that’s happening with neo-Darwinism. And it may be too much to hope, but there is some evidence the shift goes even beyond neo-Darwinism. Even Darwinism itself (without the “neo-”), maybe even the overarching philosophy of methodological naturalism, could be approaching a fall from power. 

For example, Stephen Meyer perceives a shift in the public reception of intelligent design. In 2019, there was already a lot of interest in pro-ID content, but the responses tended to be very vicious. By 2023, the interest was still there, but the reactions seemed overwhelmingly positive. Meyer thinks this is a ripple effect from the deeper change that is underway, as arguments that have been percolating for decades begin to shift opinions in higher intellectual circles.

John West, meanwhile, has noted that opponents of intelligent design seem to be devolving in quality. Follow the downward trajectory from Darwin himself, to Stephen Jay Gould, to Richard Dawkins, to “loudmouth atheist” Jerry Coyne and P. Z. “hammer on the lunatics and idiots” Myers, to the likes of the YouTuber “Professor Dave” … The best of the best in the biology world just don’t seem that invested in attacking intelligent design or defending Darwinism anymore. 

Meanwhile, in the broader philosophical scene, two of the New Atheist “four horsemen of the apocalypse” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris) have passed away, and no one seems queued to replace them. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a contender for fifth horseman (or first horsewoman?), has converted to Christianity. Dawkins himself recently commented that he doesn’t want to be remembered for being “vehement and an atheist.” 

Something is changing. 

...Long live the Zeitgeist!

But let’s not get too excited. Just because the paradigms are shifting does not mean that intelligent design is going to suddenly take the throne. There are other options. Panpsychism is on the rise. Vitalist theories are coming out of the shadows. Denis Noble’s methodologically naturalist Third Way group are trying hard to carve out a theory of biology that is independent of both neo-Darwinism and intelligent design, placing their hopes in various versions of teleonomy (internal teleology) and autopoiesis (self-construction) as explanations for biological complexity. Whatever emerges victorious from the milieu is likely to be neither intelligent design nor old-fashioned neo-Darwinism — just as whatever emerges from the larger philosophical debates will probably be neither crude materialism nor old-fashioned religious theism. There are other options there, too.

On that note: the lack of will among Dawkins and his sort to fight against ID may be mostly due to the fact that the shifting winds of culture have tossed many of the ID people and Darwinists (including Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne) onto the same side of some of the most heated debates. It’s not 2005 anymore, and the center of the “culture war” is no longer between the Religious Right and the New Atheists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for her part, has said that one reason she became a Christian was because “secular tools alone can’t equip us for civilizational war.” 

Of course, not all proponents of intelligent design are religious, or politically on any particular side, or interested in civilizational wars. But atheist opponents of ID typically associate ID with religion, so if they find themselves on the same side as religious people in other ideological battles, they are naturally going to have less enthusiasm for attacking ID. 

Get ready for...something.

It isn’t necessarily a positive development. While it’s encouraging that unquestionable tenets of Darwinism are now becoming questionable, and while there are some genuinely encouraging signs of a new openness to the theory intelligent design in many circles, it’s important to realize that the new zeitgeist will not necessarily be any better than the old one. If old enemies are forced to be friends, that could be because they’re having to deal with something worse than either of them.

For example, a power-driven post-truth paradigm could be worse than the old materialist paradigm. Stephen Meyer recently commented that he feels in a sense like a kindred spirit with Richard Dawkins, because both men care intensely about the big questions of life. I saw what Meyer meant when I watched Dawkins’s recent debate with the ex-atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dawkins brushed aside the critique that the ideas he promoted might have undermined Western civilization with the response that, essentially, that was none of his business: as a scientist, he cared about what was true, consequences be damned. 

It sounded … old-fashioned. And that’s worrisome, because a post-truth paradigm is not likely to yield either truth or good pragmatic outcomes. If a post-truth attitude becomes entrenched in the new paradigm, we might look back nostalgically to the days when materialism was the main intellectual competitor. 

At any rate we don't get a choice.

Whatever the new paradigm looks like, ID theorists are going to want to be at the cutting-edge of engaging with it. Right now, it may be tempting to treat panpsychism, self-construction, teleonomy, and whatever else comes up as frivolous distractions from the real intellectual opponent of Darwinism. But I think that would be a mistake. 

As Denis Noble says, “neo-Darwinism is dead,” or at least dying. In the coming decades, the debate may be between, say, intelligent design and some sort of quantum physics-inflected marriage of scientism and spiritualism, not genuinely materialist, though haunted by the ghost of materialism. Because the coming victor is hard to see before it arrives, ID theorists need to be assessing new theories carefully as they emerge, not relegating them to mockery and dismissal. It would be a mistake to keep beating a dead horseman, and miss what’s coming up from behind. 

Darwinism's supposed simple beginning is truly dead and buried?

 “That Is a Lot of Evolution”: Study Finds LUCA Required 2,600 Genes

Casey Luskin

Recently I wrote about a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution which found that the origin of life on Earth “required a surprisingly short interval of geologic time.” But I didn’t mention that the study reported the astounding complexity they inferred must have been present in that life — namely the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living organisms. In short, they believe that LUCA must have had some 2,600 protein-coding genes — not that much different from many free-living bacteria or archaea that are around today. From the technical paper:

Phylogenetic reconciliation suggests that LUCA had a genome of at least 2.5 Mb (2.49–2.99 Mb), encoding around 2,600 proteins, comparable to modern prokaryotes. … Altogether, our metabolic reconstructions suggest that LUCA was a relatively complex organism, similar to extant Archaea and Bacteria.

“A Fairly Large Genome”

Similarly, a write-up in Science expands on the meaning of the complexity:

The last ancestor shared by all living organisms was a microbe that lived 4.2 billion years ago, had a fairly large genome encoding some 2600 proteins, enjoyed a diet of hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, and harbored a rudimentary immune system for fighting off viral invaders. 

Likewise a commentary in Nature Ecology & Evolution states

Our results indicate that the LUCA existed between 4.09 and 4.33 billion years ago, a few hundred million years after the moon-forming impact. Our reconstruction of the genome of the LUCA is over 2.5 megabases, comparable to living bacteria, and encompasses at least 2,500 protein-coding genes. The LUCA was capable of nucleotide and protein synthesis, possessed a cellular envelope, and used ATP as an energy currency. … We also found that the LUCA possessed an RNA-based immune system … LUCA must have been part of a broader ecosystem, of which it represents the only living descendant.

Although some aspects of our study are in good agreement with previous work on the LUCA, we infer a larger genome size and genetic repertoire than most previous studies.

This means that not only did life emerge rapidly, but life with a genome composed of thousands of genes and with millions of base pairs emerged rapidly. This is astounding.

Evolutionary Reasoning at Work

Now we must understand that their inferences about LUCA are all based upon evolutionary reasoning. LUCA of course is a hypothetical evolutionary postulate. As such, it depends on universal common ancestry being true. I’m a skeptic of universal common ancestry for various scientific reasons. However, once you understand the reasoning they use to infer the complexity of LUCA, you appreciate the conundrum that this kind of a study poses for naturalistic accounts of the origin of life. An article in the Washington Post invites readers to “Meet the surprisingly complex ancestor of all life on Earth.” It explains the methods that were used:

The new timeline and details can be chalked up to more advanced analysis methods available today. In the new study, the team of 19 scientists used a combination of genetic analysis and fossil records to determine the age of LUCA and its characteristics. They first compared genes in modern genomes of bacteria and archaea to determine which gene families were present in LUCA. They estimated LUCA’s genome size, the number of proteins it encoded and its metabolism.

In other words, by comparing the genomes of modern organisms, they were able to infer the minimal sets of genes that must have been present if in fact they are all descended from a common ancestor. The bottom line? It’s a lot of genes — making LUCA more complex than many evolutionary theorists probably expected to find. As the Washington Post noted:

In the most extensive analysis of the organism to date, scientists propose in a new study that this hypothesized ancestor was more sophisticated than previously known — thought to possess an immune system to fight off viruses, for instance.

The team said LUCA appeared around 4.2 billion years ago, shortly after Earth was thought to be habitable, suggesting it evolved even quicker than previous estimates and survived through tumultuous times on the planet.

[…]But LUCA may have been more complex than they previously thought, the authors found. They inferred it had an immune system that fought viruses and found evidence suggesting it contained genes to protect against ultraviolet damage and lived at the ocean surface.

The lead author of the study was quoted as saying, “[T]his was a fairly complex organism, already possibly by the time of like 4.2 billion years ago.” Another scientist commented, “LUCA was a very complex cell, with a genome similar to modern bacteria (which we think of as simple, but from a molecular biology perspective are very complex).”

That latter scientist was further quoted saying: “That is a lot of evolution to happen within 100 million years or less.” A lot of evolution, indeed.

An Unanswered Question

This leaves unaddressed the question of whether organismal life, a “very complex cell,” could exist at all below the threshold of complexity that the study attributes to LUCA — without, for example, sophisticated defenses such as an “immune system that fought viruses” or “genes to protect against ultraviolet damage.” 

Would a much simpler cell be viable? To think so pushes the envelope of plausibility. If it would be viable, someone needs to explain how such a defenseless life could survive to reproduce. If it wouldn’t, the strong suggestion is of life springing from non-life without a far simpler yet viable transitional state. 

Transitions like that, including very rapid ones, are a hallmark of human-devised technology. In the context of the early Earth, it sounds like the act of a creative agent, existing before the first cell came to be. In other words, it sounds like intelligent design.

For the defence

     An unabridged excerpt of Bill davidson's article in the Nov.2nd 1946 edition of Collier's Entitled:Jehovah's travelling salesmen:P.75  

"because of the obviously huge income from the millions of publications every year the board of directors have often been accused of using Jehovah's Witnesses as a personal racket. 

There is no evidence to support these charges.The leaders actually live in lower middle class simplicity,and the first president of the Society,Charles Taze Russel,left exactly $200 in his will when he died in 1916.He had been the owner of a chain of haberdashery stores and a very wealthy man at one time.The same thing is true of Judge Joseph F.Rutherford,the second president.A few years ago,Roger baldwin of the American civil liberties union became one of the few men outside of the board of directors to get some official notion of the organisations finances.Baldwin is convinced that the million dollar profit of that particular year was almost completely eaten up by foreign publication losses,administration expenses and the tremendous legal expenses necessary to defend the witnesses in courtrooms."

Page 4 paragraph 1 Watchtower society's charter."It does not contemplate pecuniary gain or profit,incidentally or otherwise,to its members,directors or officers.Its members shall be only men who are mature,active and faithful witnesses of Jehovah devoting full time to performance of one or more of its chartered purposes under its direction and by its authority,or such men who are devoting part time as active presiding ministers or servants of congregations of Jehovah's witnesses."

Master race delusions are a necessary implication of Darwinism?

 West, Metaxas: Face It, Darwinian Theory Is Itself Racist

David Klinghoffer

Let’s be candid. It’s not just that Darwinian theory has had racists among its proponents. The theory itself is racist, with many evil stains on its conscience that follow straight from that fact, as any honest evolutionist would have to admit. You could cite the writing of Darwin himself, the disturbing illustrations of human evolution offered by his German disciple Ernst Haeckel, the “human zoos” of the early-20th-century United States, leading right up to the theory’s complicity in justifying the Final Solution.

But it’s more than that. As John West and Eric Metaxas emphasize in a new Socrates in the Studio episode, this malign record is no mere inexplicable aberration from an otherwise innocent scientific theory. The legacy is not a mistake, or a byproduct of the unenlightened past. It is quite explicable. It follows logically from Darwinian thinking itself, especially as reflected in The Descent of Man. 

A Straightforward Reading

As Dr. West notes, a straightforward reading of that book indicates “you should expect dramatic differences” among races. After all, natural selection operates differently in different environments — say, in Africa as opposed to Scandinavia. It’s an inevitable prediction of evolution (very different from Judeo-Christian tradition, or from intelligent design) that the human races would be unequal. And given that, why wouldn’t you also expect that one race is closest of all to our ape cousins? What would be surprising is if there weren’t such a race. Darwin and the Darwinists saw that clearly, and the notorious human zoos at the St. Louis World’s Fair (see the photo at the top) and the Bronx Zoo, in 1904 and 1906 respectively, were simply seeking to educate the public about the implications of evolutionary biology.

Watch the episode here, though you will need to subscribe to Socrates + to continue beyond the first half hour or so. At about that mark, Metaxas asks a very good question: Today’s evolutionists (or most of them, beyond those on the demented far right) dismiss racist views. But in keeping with their Darwinism, how can they do this? What is their rationale? Do they have one that makes any sense?

Metaxas mentions that he’s familiar with how Hitler’s Nazis applied an evolutionary lens in their ideology. He covers that in his book Bonhoeffer, which I’m reading now — and it is excellent. For still more background, watch John West’s awarding-winning Documentary Human Zoos. It’s an in-depth look at this disturbing and typically covered-up thread from the history of “consensus science”:

Higher ed has fallen?

Google's stranglehold on the agrora loosened?

 

Yet another house divided?

 

Primeval tech continues to corrode the Darwinian narrative?

 Review Article Explores Design Patterns in Biological Cells

Emily Reeves

An excellent review article, “Design Patterns of Biological Cells,” published earlier this year in BioEssays, shows that design patterns are “generalized solutions to recurring problems.” (Andrews, Wiley, and Sauro 2024) The theory of intelligent design (ID), which suggests that certain aspects of nature are better explained by intelligent agency than by law-like regularities and chance events, predicts design patterns in nature. This is because design patterns are technically derived solutions — derived by designers — to challenges encountered within the design space.

The authors review three types of design patterns. For each, I’ll pick one subcategory and flesh it out in a bit more detail. I will then turn to discussing how each design pattern requires direct actions of an intelligent agent. Here are the three categories:

“Creational” describes recurring patterns for building components of the cell.

“Structural” describes interconnections or relationships between objects in the cell.

“Behavioral” describes the behavior of cellular objects through time.

Creational Design Patterns

Andrews et al. identify five subcategories for creational design patterns. The first of these subcategories is templating. Cells need to maintain the information in DNA and prevent it from being corrupted by time and chance. The solution to this problem is templating where the original information is faithfully templated or copied. Templating in the cell includes DNA replication, transcription, and translation. Templating points to an intelligent agent behind its design because it requires comprehension of the forces imposed by the laws of physics and chemistry that would need to be overcome to preserve information. Templating also requires foresight to imagine a solution, inventing irreducibly complex molecular machines like DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase, and the ribosome. Finally, templating requires creation of the information itself, the physical DNA code for the polymerases and ribosome. 

Structural Design Patterns

Structural patterns are design patterns based on object-to-object relationships. For structural patterns, Andrews et al. identify six subcategories. Of these, the third is common currency.

Across cells, there are many common metabolites, including common storage forms of energy, such as ATP. Traditionally, this has been attributed to common ancestry, but there is a critical design-based reason for it. Using a common currency simplifies interactions between objects. For example, it’s easier to fill up your car with gasoline when gasoline is a common currency because no matter where you travel, other people need gasoline for their cars, and so chances are you will find it for sale. Here’s another example: It is easier to buy groceries with a common currency, such as the U.S. dollar, because you don’t have to stop and exchange your money before making a purchase, likely paying a fee for doing so. 

Cells face similar constraints. They rely on certain producers of energy at certain times and incur a cost for energy interconversions. Thus, ATP is likely a designed solution to the aforementioned requirements. Andrews et al. point out that the topological pattern of common currency has a “bow tie” architecture. In this type of architecture, many nutrients are turned into a common currency (the knot) which can then expand to accomplish many different things. This design motif requires an intelligent agent because the goals of the ecosystem and organisms must be evaluated before coming up with a currency that can work between lower-level objects. This entails an understanding of how everything will interrelate and what is possible in the design space of physics and chemistry, followed by planning and implementation. Only an intelligent agent has these capabilities, which are not accessible to random processes.

Behavioral Design Patterns

Behavioral design patterns focus on the dynamics of reaction networks. Andrews et al. identify eight such patterns. For example, there is switching, which occurs when a continuum of input needs to be converted into a discrete output. The most common ways of accomplishing this are by using ultrasensitivity or bistability. Ultrasensitive switches facilitate a sharp threshold response, ensuring that the system is fully in one state or the other, rather than in an intermediate state. This can be accomplished in different ways. A classic example of ultrasensitivity in biology is the necessary switch of hemoglobin from binding oxygen in the lungs to releasing it in the muscles. This is performed through the allosteric design of hemoglobin. When the partial pressure of oxygen is high (in the lungs), binding of one molecule of oxygen makes binding of the next oxygen molecule easier. Importantly, when one plots the percentage of hemoglobin bound to oxygen versus the partial pressure of oxygen, the curve is sigmoidal, not hyperbolic. The sigmoidal shape tells us that in the lungs, binding of oxygen is easier after the first molecule binds and release of oxygen becomes easier in the muscle after the first molecule is let go.

Ultrasensitivity, represented by that sigmoidal curve, can be accomplished in another way. Suppose there is a phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycle where the kinase and phosphatase are working at saturation levels and have rate constants that are independent of the concentration of their substrates. Although it isn’t abundantly clear until this is plotted graphically, the response is also ultrasensitive, i.e., sigmoidal. Given those conditions, the cycle can switch sharply between being almost entirely in one state to being almost entirely in the other state. (Ferrell and Ha 2014b)

Another way ultrasensitivity works is by having multiple phosphorylation sites on a kinase where the kinase isn’t active until the final phosphorylation, and each successive phosphorylation is a little bit easier than the prior one. (Ferrell and Ha 2014a)

Yet another example is concentration-based inhibition. Here, a tightly bound inhibitor might prevent enzyme activity, up until the enzyme concentration surpasses that of the inhibitor. At that point the enzyme is no longer inhibited, leading to a sudden switch.

A final and somewhat different example is positive feedback. This occurs more frequently in developmental networks than in sensory networks. Why is that the case? Positive feedback slows response time, which is advantageous for multistage processes that are time-consuming or include delays. Slower response times can also help reduce noise, which is critical when making irreversible decisions. However, positive regulation can accomplish more than just that. Positive regulation can make sharp decisions between two states and remembering those decisions for a long time, a phenomenon known as bistability. Consider positive feedback in gene regulation: once a gene is activated by positive autoregulation, it is locked ON. The gene will remain elevated even after the input has disappeared, providing long-term memory that the input existed. This type of switching is employed during development to make irreversible decisions that commit a cell to a specific fate. (Alon 2019)

Why does the switching design motif point to intelligence? Designing an effective switch requires understanding the system and what needs to be controlled “— what needs to be turned on or off at what time?” Considering whether control should be manual or automated is needed. Additionally, building appropriate switches requires knowledge about safety. Switching is also often necessary in sequential operations. The type of switch, the sensitivity of the switch, the construction of the switch, and the switch’s compatibility must all be thought through ahead of time. Each switch functions a certain way in the system such that it appears to “know” or “anticipate” other switch behavior so that more complex behavior can be produced.

Why Study These Design Patterns? 

It is useful to compile a list of solutions that cells utilize to solve specific problems. Design patterns abstract a broad range of cell functions into a manageable set of distinct patterns connected to the functions they serve by showing how they solve certain problems. Looking at these, as we did with the example of the different ways ultrasensitivity is currently known to be accomplished, provides a deeper understanding of why cellular mechanisms operate the way that they do. Accordingly, design patterns in cells also provide an outstanding illustration of how design-based thinking can further our understanding of biology.

References

Alon, Uri. 2019. An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits. Second edition. | Boca Raton, Fla. : CRC Press, [2019]: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

Andrews, Steven S., H. Steven Wiley, and Herbert M. Sauro. 2024. “Design Patterns of Biological Cells.” BioEssays: News and Reviews in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology 46 (3): e2300188.

Ferrell, James E., Jr, and Sang Hoon Ha. 2014a. “Ultrasensitivity Part II: Multisite Phosphorylation, Stoichiometric Inhibitors, and Positive Feedback.” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 39 (11): 556–69.

Ferrell, J. E., Jr, & Ha, S. H. (2014b). “Ultrasensitivity Part I: Michaelian Responses and Zero-Order Ultrasensitivity.” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 39 (10): 496–503.

Against nincsnevem ad pluribus XXI

 Mr. Nevem claims that there is some setting preventing him from commenting on my channel,I find it quite odd that he seems to be the only person who has been affected by this supposed setting. My channel setting simply says that anyone with a Google ID can comment. Google of course is the parent company of the blogspot platform,anyone can obtain a Google ID for free in literally a matter of minutes. So I'm sorry nincs but this leaves you looking quite weak.

Timing is everything?

 

On the origin of the Lizard King.

 Fossil Friday: Controversial Gradualism in Tyrannosaurids

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the tyrannosaurid Daspletosaurus torosus from the Late Cretaceous of Canada. This dinosaur genus was recently in the news (News Release 2024) and caused a flurry of tweets (see Fowler 2024 on X) because of a scientific controversy about the origin of the famous T. rex — either by gradual transformation of Daspletosaurus into Tyrannosaurus, or by more discontinuous splitting from the daspletosaurine lineage. The former process of speciation is called anagenesis and the latter cladogenesis. Anagenesis is a special case of Darwinian gradualism, which is largely contradicted by the evidence from the fossil record, as I have discussed in several previous articles (Bechly 2019, 2024a, 2024b). Dinosaur paleontologists Elías Warshaw and Denver Fowler nicknamed their preferred view of an anagenetic origin of the genus Tyrannosaurus from Daspletosaurus the “Tyrannagenesis hypothesis” (Fowler 2024 on X).

Anagenesis as a mechanism of speciation in Daspletosaurus was already proposed by Carr et al. (2017) for the transition between Daspletosaurus torosus and the younger new species Daspletosaurus horneri from the Late Cretaceous of Montana. This latter species was named after famous dinosaur paleontologist Jack Horner, who had first suggested phyletic evolution in four lineages of dinosaurs including tyrannosaurids (Horner et al. 1992). A few years later, Warshaw & Fowler (2022) described another species of Daspletosaurus, and suggested that the three known species of this genus formed an evolutionary transition towards Tyrannosaurus (and the closely related genera Tarbosaurus and Zhuchengtyrannus), which would imply that the genus Daspletosaurus is not a distinct clade but a paraphyletic grade. This was communicated by the popular science media with headlines like “Newly-Discovered Tyrannosaur Species Fills Gap in Lineage Leading to Tyrannosaurus rex” (Anderson 2022). Darwin was proven right again, right? Right?

Well, Not So Fast

This year a new study by Scherer & Voiculescu-Holvad (2024) challenged the whole story. Their reanalysis of the dataset of their colleagues Warshaw & Fowler (2022) decisively refuted those claims of anagenesis in the tyrannosaur lineage. They concluded that “the dataset reveals that anagenesis is not found to be a driver of speciation within Daspletosaurus.” Instead they found strong evidence for “cladogenetic Tyrannosauridae composed of four morphologically and biogeographically distinct clades.” In their reconstructed phylogenetic tree, the three distinct species of Daspletosaurus formed a clade with the genus Thanatotheristes as sister group to a clade that includes Zhuchengtyrannus, Tarbosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus. The scientists explicitly cautioned that “all known species of Daspletosaurus do not meet previously established prerequisites for anagenesis and advise against prematurity when making conclusions concerning significant processes surrounding the mode of evolution of extinct genera with sparse and often incomplete fossil records.”

This unsurprisingly provoked a quick response by Warshaw et al. (2024), which is still in pre-proof stage, in which they present an updated analysis, incorporating further data and corrected “erroneous” interpretations, which allegedly overturns this challenge and again supports anagenesis in the tyrannosaur lineage.

A Striking Admission

History will tell who is right in this scientific controversy, but personally I am more convinced by the evidence against anagenesis. Therefore, I can only reiterate what I had already emphasized in my earlier article (Bechly 2019):

On the occasion of the Darwin Year in 2009, Hunt (2010) had reviewed all the fossil evidence for species transitions assembled by paleontologists in 150 years of research since the time of Charles Darwin. Hunt’s conclusion was mind blowing, even if framed in somewhat obfuscating language:

The meandering and fluctuating trajectories captured in the fossil record are not inconsistent with the centrality of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism, but they probably would not have been predicted without the benefit of an empirical fossil record.

Apart from the obligatory verbal kowtow to Darwinian orthodoxy, this striking admission simply means that the empirical data from the fossil record strongly contradict the gradualist predictions of Darwin’s theory. There hardly exists any fossil evidence for directional and gradual species-to-species transitions, and especially not for anagenesis.

References

Anderson N 2022. Newly-Discovered Tyrannosaur Species Fills Gap in Lineage Leading to Tyrannosaurus rex. SciNews November 25, 2022. https://www.sci.news/paleontology/daspletosaurus-wilsoni-11424.html

Bechly G 2019. Apeman Waves Goodbye to Darwinian Gradualism. Evolution News September 6, 2019. https://evolutionnews.org/2019/09/apeman-waves-goodbye-to-darwinian-gradualism/

Bechly G 2024a. Fossil Friday: Chronospecies, a Sinking Ship. Evolution News February 9, 2024. https://evolutionnews.org/2024/02/fossil-friday-chronospecies-a-sinking-ship/

Bechly G 2024b. Fossil Friday: Direct Fossil Ancestors of Living Species? Evolution News March 8, 2024. https://evolutionnews.org/2024/03/fossil-friday-direct-fossil-ancestors-of-living-species/

Carr TD, Varricchio DJ, Sedlmayr JC, Roberts EM & Moore JR 2017. A new tyrannosaur with evidence for anagenesis and crocodile-like facial sensory system. Scientific Reports 7:44942, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44942

Horner JR, Varricchio DJ & Goodwin MB 1992. Marine transgressions and the evolution of Cretaceous dinosaurs. Nature 358, 59–61. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/358059a0

Hunt G 2010. Evolution in Fossil Lineages: Paleontology and The Origin of Species. The American Naturalist 176(S1), S61–S76; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/657057

News Release 2024. New research by Badlands Dinosaur Museum Paleontologists sheds light on the ancestry of Tyrannosaurus rex. Dickinson Museum Center June 29, 2024. https://www.dickinsongov.com/museum-center/page/anagenesis-and-tyrant-pedigree

Scherer CR & Voiculescu-Holvad C 2024. Re-analysis of a dataset refutes claims of anagenesis within Tyrannosaurus-line tyrannosaurines (Theropoda, Tyrannosauridae). Cretaceous Research 155: 105780, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2023.105780

Warshaw EA & Fowler DW 2022. A transitional species of Daspletosaurus Russell, 1970 from the Judith River Formation of eastern Montana. PeerJ 10:e14461, 1–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14461

Warshaw EA, Barrera Guevara D & Fowler DW 2024. Anagenesis and the tyrant pedigree: a response to “Re-analysis of a dataset refutes claims of anagenesis within Tyrannosaurus-line tyrannosaurines (Theropoda, Tyrannosauridae)”. Cretaceous Research 105957 pre-proof. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2024.105957

Continuing to distinguish between science and science.

 

Fish hearing vs. Darwin.

 Study Unravels the Mystery of Fish Hearing

Eric Cassell

A newly published study in the journal Nature concerning fish hearing has apparently unraveled the mechanism for how they determine the direction of sound.1 For a long time it was believed that fish did not possess any sense of hearing. One reason was because they do not have external ears. That ignored the fact that hearing is accomplished by the inner ear in most animals. It was Nobel Prize-winner Karl von Frisch who conducted experiments in the 1930s that proved fish can hear sounds. Since then, it has been known that fish can determine the direction of sounds. Yet an explanation of how this is accomplished has been elusive. 

Human Hearing

It is instructive first to understand how humans and other vertebrate animals determine the direction of sound. Humans use the time difference between the arrival of sound waves at the two ears. This is called the interaural time difference (ITD). Humans can discern the horizontal direction to within 2 degrees, which translates to a time difference of 11 microseconds.2 That means human brains have an extremely well-designed neural network to achieve that level of performance. One theory is that there is a network of neurons that “use axons as delay lines and to measure small time differences precisely.”3 In addition, vertebrates detect the differences in sound wave pressure between the ears, which is also an aid in determining direction.

Challenge of Sound Detection Underwater

Detecting and processing sound underwater presents more problems than in the air. One is that the speed of sound is approximately five times faster in water than in air. That means that the ITD is significantly shorter, which makes it more challenging to measure the difference in the arrival time between two receptors in an animal. The detected pressure differences are also smaller underwater. In addition, sound pressure in water has no directional component. Due to these and other technical problems the prevailing models indicated that it should not be possible for fish to determine the direction of a source of sound. 

Evidence of Fish Detection of Sound Direction

There is a large body of experimental evidence showing that fish can determine the direction of sound. Directional hearing is essential to a number of fish behaviors, including finding prey, avoiding predators, and locating mates. The ability to move in the direction of the source of sound is called phonotaxis. One example in fish is that the females of some species will seek the mating call of males. That includes the ability to distinguish different species, as fish bioacoustics scientists Anthony Hawkins and Arthur Popper explain, “Behavioral studies of sound communication have indicated that fish discriminate between calls on the basis of differences in repetition rate and duration, rather than frequency or bandwidth.”4 It should not be surprising that fish have very good hearing capabilities because as Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows, writes, “Despite the common assumption that fishes are silent, they actually have more ways of producing sounds than any other group of vertebrate animals…Fishes produce a veritable symphony of sounds…So notable are the sounds of some fishes that we have named the fishes accordingly: grunts, drums, trumpeters, croakers, sea robins, and grunters.”5

Experiments were conducted in which Atlantic cod and haddock were conditioned to respond to a pulsed tone from loudspeakers at different horizontal angles. The results showed that the fish readily detected the difference when the loudspeakers were separated by 20 degrees or more.6 Hawkins and Popper also state that the experiments “demonstrated that the cod is well able to discriminate between separate sound sources in 3D space.”7 There is evidence in mammals for a correlation between the field of vision and the ability to determine the direction of sound.8 In other words, the narrower the field of vision the more accurate the sound localization that appears to be required. In the case of fish, since they typically have a very wide field of vision, their localization of sound probably does not need to be that accurate. Hence, as was found in the described experiment, localization within about 20 degrees is likely sufficient. The fact that fish have the ability to determine the direction of sound and employ it in numerous behaviors made it all the more confounding why scientists had been unable to determine the mechanism.

One important characteristic of fish that does help sound detection is that they are acoustically transparent. This characteristic is useful because, in addition to pressure, the transmission of sound in any medium occurs through the oscillation of pressure and motion. In addition to the oscillatory change of the pressure wave, underwater sound also consists of a to-and-fro motion of particles in the direction of transmission. This phenomenon is called particle motion which “can be measured in terms of displacement, velocity, or acceleration, (and) differs from the sound pressure in that it is inherently directional, and all the motion parameters are vector quantities.”9 It turns out that this phenomenon of sound transmission in water is crucial as, “This mechanism for the direct detection of particle motion by the otolith organs is found in all fishes.”10Detection of this motion isn’t trivial since, “The to-and-fro displacements of the very small body of water are of the order of nanometers.”11 At first it might seem simple to determine direction based on particle motion since the motion is directly in line with the propagation of the sound wave. The problem, however, is that because the motion is back-and-forth, there is an ambiguity of 180 degrees in the direction.

The Experiment

For the experiment documented in the Nature paper the researchers tested hearing capability in Danionella cerebrum, one of the smallest teleost (bony) fish. An additional problem for hearing in small fish is that the distance between the inner ears is relatively short. In the case of D. cerebrum it is only about 0.6 millimeters, which is several orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of sound (approximately 150 millimeters). That makes it difficult to measure the phase of the detected pressure wave. The experiment was able to simulate and control a number of variables associated with sound (notably pressure and motion) and observed how the fish reacted. In addition, during the experiment a laser scanning microscope was used to examine the fish hearing auditory structures. This enabled the researchers to compare the reaction of the auditory structures with the various models.

Directional Hearing Mechanism

The study evaluated several different theories and models of potential mechanisms for determining direction. After the researchers compared the experimental results with the models, the evidence provided the most validation for one model, originally proposed by zoologist Arie Schuijf in 1975. The Schuijf model is based on the comparison of pressure and particle motion. Fish are able to detect the motion of pressure and particle motion separately, using individual detectors. The detection of pressure occurs in the swim bladder as, “All known sound pressure sensors in fish are based on compressible gas-filled organs.”12 The swim bladder is the organ used by bony fish to control their buoyancy. Particle motion can be detected because, being acoustically transparent, tissue in the fish is coupled to the motion of the water as it moves through the fish. The two measurements can then be compared and used to estimate the incoming direction of sound. The reason this is possible is because the pressure and particle motion are out of phase. When pressure is highest the particle motion is away from the source. When pressure is lowest the particle motion is toward the source.

As described by the authors of the paper, this physical characteristic of underwater acoustics provides the basis for the directional hearing algorithm. There is a neural mechanism that uses these two sensory inputs to estimate the direction that the sound is coming from. In addition to highly sensitive sensors it must also include an accurate internal clock to determine when the two inputs are to be compared. The fish directional hearing algorithm appears to be another example of a complex programmed behavior in animals.13 However, as indicated in a related Nature article, “We do not yet know what happens in the brain and how it interprets information from the inner ear about the phase and amplitude of sounds.”14

Some experiments also appear to indicate that fishes can estimate distance based on the information provided by pressure and particle motion sensors. The ability to estimate the distance of the source of sound is a hearing capability not possessed by humans. Some species of fish can detect ultrasound up to frequencies of 180,000 Hertz.15 Human hearing capability is typically up to 20,000 Hertz. Very impressive capabilities for animals that scientists once thought had no hearing ability at all!

Notes

Veith, et al., “The mechanism for directional hearing in fish,” Nature, Vol. 631, 4 July 2024, 118-23.

Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, Michael A. Paradiso, Neuroscience (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007), 369.

Bear, et al., Neuroscience, 370.

Anthony D. Hawkins, Arthur N. Popper, “Directional hearing and sound source localization by fishes,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 144, 3329-3350, December 14, 2018.

Jonathan Balcombe. What a Fish Knows (New York: Scientific American, 2016), 40-41.

Hawkins and Popper, “Directional hearing and sound source localization by fishes.”

Hawkins and Popper, “Directional hearing and sound source localization by fishes.”

Henry E. Heffner, Rickye S. Heffner, “The evolution of mammalian hearing,” AIP Conf. Proc. 1965, 130001, May 31, 2018.

Popper, et al., “Examining the Hearing Abilities of Fishes,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 146, 948–955 (2019).

Popper and Hawkins, “The importance of particle motion to fishes and invertebrates.”

Arthur N. Popper, Anthony D. Hawkins, “The importance of particle motion to fishes and invertebrates,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 143, 470-488, January 29, 2018.

Veith, et al., “The mechanism for directional hearing in fish,” 123.

Eric Cassell, Animal Algorithms (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021).

Catherine E. Carr, “How fish sense the direction of sound,” Nature, Vol. 631, 4 July 2024, 29.

Friedrich Ladich and Tanja Schulz-Mirbach, “Diversity in Fish Auditory Systems: One of the Riddles of Sensory Biology,” Front. Ecol. Evol. 4:28, 31 March 2016.

Against nincsnevem ad pluribus XX.

 Nincs:Mary and the Second Eve

The argument that Mary would have recognized Jesus as the Second Adam if she were truly the Second Eve misunderstands both the role of typology and Mary’s faith journey. Mary’s understanding of her Son’s mission grew over time, just as the apostles’ understanding of Jesus' messianic role developed gradually. Her initial responses, including her participation in the purification rite and her concern for Jesus' well-being, reflect her humanity and deep maternal love, not a lack of understanding of Jesus' identity.

Moreover, being the Second Eve does not imply immediate and complete knowledge of all theological implications. It indicates Mary’s unique role in salvation history as the one who, through her obedience, reversed the disobedience of Eve. Mary’s sinlessness is rooted in her unique role in God’s plan of salvation, which is why the Church venerates her as the sinless Mother of God.

Failure to acknowledge JEHOVAH'S Prophet is a sin.

John ch.8:24NIV"I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.”

John ch 15:24NIV"If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father."

Mary obviously repented of her lapse into faithlessness but that is different from claiming that she was born like Eve free from inherited sin.

By way of a reminder 

Mark ch.3:21NIV"When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”

Verse 33 indicates that Jesus Mother was numbered among those not heeding the meaning of the many powerful signs JEHOVAH Was performing through Him for a time,this would have been something she would need to repent of and seek forgiveness for which she evidently did,

Against nincsnevem ad pluribus XIX

Nincs: Jesus’ Words About His Family (Matthew 12:49-50)

The passage where Jesus speaks about His disciples as His mother and brothers is often misunderstood. Jesus is not rejecting or diminishing Mary’s role; rather, He is expanding the concept of family to include all who do the will of God. This does not contradict the veneration of Mary but highlights that spiritual kinship is based on obedience to God. Mary, as the first and most perfect disciple of Jesus, who fully did the will of God, is the ultimate model of this spiritual family. Far from being an "odd" thing to say, Jesus’ words emphasize the importance of spiritual relationships in the Kingdom of 

Me:Again what I Said was that if Jesus wanted his mother to be venerated as the only other sinless woman who ever lived Besides Eve and coredemptrix and queen of heaven, this statement putting her on the the same level as any other sinful believer seems odd the Bible makes Jesus separation from sinners and his roles as the perfect priest and prophet quite clear .

Matthew ch 12:48-50NKJV"But He answered and said to the one who told Him, “Who is My mother and who are My brothers?” 49And He stretched out His hand toward His disciples and said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! 50For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother"

Not only that after his glorification he made no declarations through her at all preferring to use sinful men as teachers when he had a perfect sinless woman in their midst quite puzzling.

Against nincsnevem ad pluribus XVIII

 Nincs:The Law and Inherited Sin

The claim that the law only applies to those with inherited sin and thus would not apply to Mary if she were sinless misunderstands the nature of the Mosaic Law. The law was a comprehensive system that applied to all Israelites, regardless of individual sinfulness. Jesus Himself, who was without sin, was circumcised (Luke 2:21) and participated in other rites prescribed by the law. His submission to the law was not an indication of sin but a demonstration of obedience to God's commandments. Similarly, Mary's participation in the purification rite (Luke 2:22-24) was an act of obedience and humility, not an indication of sin.

Me:as tends to be the case I have to give my actual position in lieu of Mr.nevem's strawman,what I Said was that sin offerings would only apply to those conscious of sins, offerings made for the sins of the nation as a whole would be one thing but the law is clear a personal sin offering would only be made by one who has committed sins,this can be seen by the fact that confession of ones sins were involved in the ritual.

See leviticus 5

Moreover, the law’s purpose was not solely to address personal sin but to regulate the covenantal relationship between God and His people. Mary, being fully Jewish and living under the Mosaic Law, would naturally observe its requirements, even if she was preserved from original sin. This does not negate her sinlessness but shows her faithful adherence to the la

Me:The offering of whole burnt offerings would not be necessary for someone who is not conscious of sin under the law if a person kept the moral requirements of the law no sin offering would be necessary from such a person the constant offering whole burnt offerings demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the law that is why Christ could say something greater than the temple is here,

Hebrews ch.9:12NIV"He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption."

Against nincsnevem ad pluribus XVII.

 

Nincs:Your argument appears to misunderstand both the nature of God’s foreknowledge and the theological position held by many Christian traditions regarding free will and predestination.

Me:My argument is that if God has foreknown the infinite future exhaustively From the infinite past the only LOGICAL conclusion is that the infinite future has been foredetermined from the infinite past, and that if JEHOVAH is the true first and sole cause of this exhaustively foredetermined universal creation it is he who has either actively or passively exhaustively foredetermined the future, so before JEHOVAH Creates the unrepentant murderer he knows from the infinite past that he will murder unrepentantly, of course this event is foredetermined nothing else but this can happen. but the only way it can happen is if JEHOVAH CHOOSES to give the remorseless murderer a body and a mind and access to the weapons and knowledge the remorseless murderer would need to commit his crime . JEHOVAH Can choose to deny the remorseless murderer what he needs to commit his crime, he chose otherwise.

Either JEHOVAH is incapable of creating our hypothetical remorseless murderer in a way that gives him a genuine moral choice . Or he can create him with a genuine choice re: his moral development and chose not to. So this is about basic logic . As you will see Mr.nincsnevem responds in typical fashion not by demonstrating any inconsistency in my logic but by parotting the party line in his typically circular style of argumentation. 

Nincs:Firstly, it’s important to clarify that God’s foreknowledge and human foreknowledge are indeed different, but this does not negate the possibility of God knowing the future without determining it. Christian theology traditionally teaches that God, being outside of time, sees all events—past, present, and future—simultaneously. This does not mean that God determines every action that will occur; rather, it means that God knows the choices that free creatures will make. God’s knowledge is comprehensive and perfect, but it does not override or negate human free will.

Me : JEHOVAH is the first and most consequential cause of all events in the creation he is no mere passive observer of the future he creates the future actively or passively,any event JEHOVAH Foreknows he has the power to actively or passively alter,so he can foreknow several outcomes to the same chain of events, the example of the sun's rising in the east was made JEHOVAH Can easily arrange to have the sun rise in the west or any other direction or not at all habakkuk ch.3:11,

To argue then that JEHOVAH Does not have the might and wisdom to make certain aspects of the future undetermined or to alter his own previous determinations of said future is to misunderstand the scriptures true position re:JEHOVAH'S Sovereignty over his creation.

Amos ch.7:1-6NIV"This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: He was preparing swarms of locusts after the king’s share had been harvested and just as the late crops were coming up. 2When they had stripped the land clean, I cried out, “Sovereign LORD, forgive! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”

3So the LORD relented.

“This will not happen,” the LORD said.

4This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: The Sovereign LORD s calling for judgment by fire; it dried up the great deep and devoured the land. 5Then I cried out, “Sovereign LORD, I beg you, stop! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”

6So the LORD relented.

“This will not happen either,” the Sovereign LORD said..

4This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: The Sovereign LORD was calling for judgment by fire; it dried up the great deep and devoured the land. 5Then I cried out, “Sovereign LORD, I beg you, stop! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”

6So the LORD relented.

“This will not happen either,” the Sovereign LORD said."

JEHOVAH as the source of all the energy and information in the creation causes the future not an exhaustively predetermined future but he uses his Sovereign power to safeguard our freewill

Nincs:You mention that because the future is not fully foredetermined, it cannot be precisely foreknown. However, this claim assumes that for something to be known, it must be determined. This is not the case, especially when considering the nature of God. God's knowledge is not contingent on causality in the way human knowledge is. God’s knowledge is complete and eternal, meaning that He knows the outcomes of all free decisions without needing to cause them. This understanding preserves both the sovereignty of God and the genuine freedom of human beings.

Me:It's basic logic every contingent event/occurrence has a chain of causes that precedes it JEHOVAH Being the first cause and the source of all the information an energy in the creation. So if an outcome is inevitable the chain of causes leading up to it logically has already begun . If it was inevitable from prior to the creation then the creator himself must be included in that chain of causes he being the first cause, and bearing in mind he has the power to alter outcomes,

The only way to preserve human freedom is for morally consequential outcomes to not be inevitable from eternity,

Nincs:Regarding your assertion that Christendom posits an "apology for free will" that is "really no free will at all," this seems to be a misunderstanding of what Christian theologians, especially within Catholic and many Protestant traditions, actually teach. The doctrine of predestination, as understood in these traditions, does not imply absolute determinism. For example, the Catholic Church teaches that God predestines no one to damnation and that human beings are fully capable of making free choices that have real moral significance. The Council of Trent, for example, affirmed the reality of human free will while also upholding the necessity of divine grace.

A vain attempt to reconcile what is logically irreconcilable if an outcome is inevitable prior to my existence ,logically I have no choice, the chain of causes that rendered the outcome inevitable preceded my existence JEHOVAH would have chosen to not mitigate the chain of causes that made the outcome inevitable and thus would be culpable as the first cause in my failure.

Nincs:Your critique of "absolute predeterminism" as absurd is addressing a straw man rather than the actual beliefs of most Christian traditions. Absolute predeterminism, where all events are caused by God in a way that negates human freedom, is not a position held by mainstream Christianity. Instead, what is often taught is that God's foreknowledge includes a divine plan where human freedom plays a real and vital role. This is not absurdity but a sophisticated understanding of how divine omniscience and human freedom coexist.

Me: it is your lack of rationality that is the problem whatever outcomes that JEHOVAH foreknows are inevitable every outcome has a chain of causes preceding it if an outcome is inevitable the chain of causes leading up to it has already begun that is just the way causality and contingency works. JEHOVAH Has the power to mitigate secondary causes and alter outcomes if he chooses not to then he bears some responsibility for the outcome. So your claim that the totality of the future is foreknown is the same as saying every decision and outcome is inevitable,which is the same as saying that there is no freewill.

Nincs:Finally, your point about true moral excellence being impossible under the doctrine of predeterminism is based on a misunderstanding. In Christian thought, moral excellence is possible precisely because humans have the freedom to choose between good and evil, even within the scope of God’s omniscient knowledge. God's foreknowledge does not constrain human freedom; rather, it encompasses it, allowing for the genuine exercise of free will and moral responsibility.

Me: JEHOVAH'S Omniscience is not the issue He has the might and the right to create a universe that leaves morally consequential choices undetermined hence not inevitable if our decisions were inevitable from eternity there is no freewill and all of your circular arguments will not make it otherwise.

Nincs:In summary, the notion that God’s foreknowledge negates human free will is a misconception. Traditional Christian doctrine affirms that God’s omniscience and human freedom are compatible, and that God’s foreknowledge does not equate to predetermination. This balance between divine knowledge and human free will is what allows for true moral agency and the potential for moral excellence.

Me:it is simply logical that once an outcome is accurately foreknown it is inevitable from that point if this inevitability precedes the existence of the agent the agent cannot rightly be held responsible for the outcome. Basic logic. 

A scientific basis for hope?

 

NeoDarwinism is dead?

 

Back from the dead?

 

ID keeps on becoming ever more mainstream?

 

Dark oxygen?