Yet more secular mysticism?

 Fossil Friday: An Ediacaran Animal with a Question Mark

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday discusses Quaestio simpsonorum from the Late Precambrian of the Ediacaran biota in Australia, which is, well, actually I have no idea what it really is, and neither does anyone else, which makes its genus name very fitting indeed. Here is the backstory of these fossils that were discovered in the 555-million-year-old sandstones of Nilpena Ediacara National Park in the South Australian outback, and were reconstructed as inflated disc-shaped organisms that were floating over microbial mats on the ancient seafloor like a Roomba.

Just a few days ago the study by Evans et al. (2024) with the description of this fossil organism hit the news with sensationalist headlines like “Ancient ‘sea Roomba’ tells a 555-million-year-old story of our evolution” (Thompson 2024), or “Flinders fossil unlocks secrets of first animals on Earth” (Government of South Australia 2024), or “Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback” (Harris 2024), or “Enigmatic Fossil Shows Signs Of Being Earth’s First Animal” (Bressan 2024). It was boldly celebrated as “oldest evidence for complex, macroscopic animals” (de Lazaro 2024) and “the earliest moving animals” (Luntz 2024). Wow, that surely sounds like something important

Is It Really Based on Solid Evidence? 

A first look at the images of the fossil is not very encouraging: The fossils look like structureless blobs, and many fossil collectors might not even have bothered to pick them up. Certainly the actual study showed much more significant details? No, not at all which is a real bummer. Even co-author García-Bellido explicitly admitted to IFLScience “that all we really know about Quaestio is the shape of its outsides” (Luntz 2024). Yes, you heard that right. All we know about this fossil is the shape, which is nothing more than a few-inch-large round impression with a question-mark-like fold in the middle that originates from a kind of notch. Are any organs visible that suggest that it was a multicellular animal? No. Any bilateral symmetry? No, but this does not prevent the scientists from speculating that in spite of the external asymmetry, it might have been a pioneer bilaterian ancestor, because humans are bilaterian animals and internally asymmetrical (authors quoted in de Lazaro 2024). You can’t make this stuff up: They seriously compare a Precambrian blob of jello with a highly derived modern human and claim that external asymmetry in the former and internal asymmetry in the latter could somehow correspond, even though the internal asymmetry of humans does not belong to the ground plan of vertebrate animals even according to mainstream evolutionary biology. This is ridiculous junk science, based on almost useless fossil evidence. Actually, there are even inorganic pseudofossils like salt pseudomorphs that look quite similar to this stuff. All the elaborate hypotheses in the new study are based on the simple circumstance that the structures in the stone seem to show some polarity. Here is news: almost every organism does show some polarity including most protists and plants. This is much ado about nothing.

What about the alleged evidence for motility? Are there any trace fossils that really document active motility? No, but again the scientists claim otherwise. Why? Because a few of the fossils have a similar shaped and similar sized impression close to them, which they interpret as evidence for active movement. However, such structures had been already described under the name Epibaion for the Ediacaran dickinsoniids and are highly controversial in their interpretation as I discussed in a previous article (Bechly 2018). I highly recommend to read the paragraph on these alleged trace fossils in this latter article of mine. While some experts indeed interpreted those structures as grazing traces, others considered the serial impressions as made by dead organisms displaced by slow currents before finally being buried. I personally observed the latter phenomenon in fossil dragonflies from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen limestone (see Tischlinger 2001). The alleged traces show no continuity and thus no evidence for motility. But who am I, or world leading experts like A. Yu Ivantsov (also see Brasier & Antcliffe 2008 and McIlroy et al. 2009), to disagree with some evolutionary biology graduate student’s views, who thinks that this is “a clear sign that the organism was motile” (Bressan 2024, Harris 2024)? What makes things worse is the whole house of cards of far-reaching hypotheses that are built on this dubious foundation. The authors for example speculate that “the presence of muscles and/or a nervous system based on inferred behaviors would, if verified, constitute further evidence of more advanced differentiation” (Evans et al. 2024). Problem is: they are not verified. There is not a shred of evidence for muscles or nervous systems in any of the fossils! There is not even valid evidence for the inferred behaviors from which the presence of muscles and nervous system was inferred. It is quite revealing for the poor state of evolutionary biology that such imaginative story-telling is not only allowed but apparently welcome in a peer-reviewed science journal titled Evolution & Development.

An “Animal” with a Question Mark

In short: There is neither any convincing evidence for a metazoan affinity of Quaestio, nor for its motility. It is truly an Ediacaran “animal” with a question mark! The much more obvious conclusion is that Quaestio is just another problematic organism of the Ediacaran biota that cannot be connected to any living group. Actually, the scientists themselves did not suggest a direct relationship with any living animals but rather compared Queastio with dickinsoniids, which are of highly questionable animal relationship themselves (Bechly 2018). Sure, Quaestio and dickinsoniids still could be placozoan or coelenterate grade animals, or xenacoelomorph flatworms, even though none of them agrees in size, shape, symmetry or anatomy, or any relevant diagnostic similarities. Thus, they could as well be giant protists (Vendobionta sensu Seilacher), or rather an independent extinct group of multicellular organisms, or almost anything else such as fungi or lichens. There are also similarities between Quaestio and the trilobozoan Ediacaran fossils like Tribrachidium that were initially misidentified as echinoderms, or to other circular Ediacaran fossils like Cyclomedusa (featured above) that were initially misidentified as jellyfish, but later reinterpreted as holdfasts or microbial colonies. We have no clue what all these Ediacaran biota organisms really were. To claim that such undefinable blobs in sandstone represent fossils of the oldest motile animals is massively overselling the evidence to say the least.

References

Bechly G 2018. Why Dickinsonia Was Most Probably Not an Ediacaran Animal. Evolution News September 27, 2018. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/why-dickinsonia-was-most-probably-not-an-ediacaran-animal/

Brasier M & Antcliffe J 2008. Dickinsonia from Ediacara: a new look at morphology and body construction. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 270, 311–323 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2008.07.018

Bressan D 2024. Enigmatic Fossil Shows Signs Of Being Earth’s First Animal. Forbes October 19, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2024/10/18/enigmatic-fossil-shows-first-signs-of-being-earths-first-animal/

de Lazaro E 2024. New Species of Complex Ediacaran Animal Discovered in Australia. SciNews October 17, 2024. https://www.sci.news/paleontology/quaestio-simpsonorum-13355.html

Evans SD, Hughes IV, Hughes EB, Dzaugis PW, Dzaugis MP, Gehling JG, García-Bellido DC & Droser ML 2024. A new motile animal with implications for the evolution of axial polarity from the Ediacaran of South Australia. Evolution & Development e12491, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ede.12491

Government of South Australia 2024. Flinders fossil unlocks secrets of first animals on Earth. Environment SA News October 14, 2024. https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/news-hub/news/articles/2024/10/flinders-fossil-unlocks-secrets-of-first-animals-on-earth

Harris M 2024. Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback. Florida State University October 14, 2024. https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2024/10/14/florida-state-university-scientist-discovers-one-of-the-earths-earliest-animals-in-australian-outback/

Luntz S 2024. One Of The Earliest Moving Animals Had A Very Quizzical Shape. IFLScience October 22, 2024. https://www.iflscience.com/one-of-the-earliest-moving-animals-had-a-very-quizzical-shape-76460

McIlroy D, Brasier MD & Lang AS 2009. Smothering of microbial mats by macrobiota: implications for the Ediacara biota. Journal of the Geological Society 166, 1117–1121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/0016-76492009-073

Thompson B 2024. Ancient ‘sea Roomba’ tells a 555-million-year-old story of our evolution. New Atlas October 14, 2024. https://newatlas.com/biology/fossil-quaestio-evolution/

Tischlinger H 2001. Bemerkungen zur Insekten-Taphonomie der Solnhofener Plattenkalke. Archaeopteryx 19, 29–44.

A review of primordial tech vs. Darwin.

 

Darwinism vs. Darwinism?

 

Wolves are the good guys II

 

Reason to doubt Darwin at the tips off our fingers

 

Physics: just another failed God?

 

Wolves are the good guys?

 

Wizard vs. Titan

 

More iconoclasm from the fossil record.

Fossil Friday: New Fossil Evidence Challenges Another Icon of Evolution

Günter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features the skull of Cynognathus crateronotus, a mammal-like reptile from the Middle Triassic of the southern hemisphere landmasses that had formed the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. It belongs to a group called cynodontians. The recent analysis of the jaw anatomy of fossil cynodonts from South America challenged some longstanding evolutionary ideas.

When evolutionists are asked what in their view represents the best evidence for the Darwinian story of common descent with modification, they will generally refer to the fossil record and especially to supposed transitional series like those of horses, elephants, whales, hominins, fishapods to tetrapods, dinos to birds, and most of all the transition from reptiles to mammals. The latter allegedly shows an unambiguous transformation of the jaw articulation from a primitive reptilian state to the derived mammalian condition, correlated with a reduction of bones and an incorporation of the original jaw articulation into the mammalian ear as auditory ossicles (Reichert-Gaupp theory).

A More Complicated Picture

However, a closer look at the actual fossil evidence shows a much more complicated picture that involves multiple independent origins of anatomical similarities. In a seminal study on the evolution of the mammalian middle ear, the authors admitted that “current hypotheses on the convergent evolution of middle ear bones are complex and controversial, partly because of a lack of phylogenetic resolution and partly because the interpretation of the fossil evidence is difficult” (Ramírez-Chaves et al. 2016). They concluded that “the departure of postdentary bones from the dentary to form a partial mammalian middle ear (PMME); … occurred convergently in the northern hemisphere ancestors of therians and the southern hemisphere ancestors of monotremes … the transition from a PMME to a definite mammalian middle ear (DMME) ocurred [sic] multiple times, including at least three cases of independent evolution within extant mammals (in monotremes, metatherians and eutherians).”

Now, a new study complicated this scenario even more: The scientists studied the well-preserved fossil remains of three key species of probainognathian cynodonts, viz. Brasilodon quadrangularis and Riograndia guaibensis from the Late Triassic of Brazil, as well as Oligokyphus major from the Early Jurassic of Great Britain. They used CT scanning to digitally reconstruct the jaw joint of these animals and found something very unexpected and surprising (Luo 2024). The jaw joint anatomy of the two Brazilian species was very different, with the joint of Riograndia being more mammal-like than that of Brasilodon, even though the later genus is considered as closer related to modern mammals. Furthermore, Riograndia was dated to be about 17 million years older than any other previously known mammal-like reptile with such an advanced jaw articulation. The authors concluded that “the dentary-squamosal contact, which is traditionally considered to be a typical mammalian feature, therefore evolved more than once and is more evolutionary labile than previously considered.”

Interesting News for a Departed Colleague

The press release unashamedly speaks about “rewriting our understanding of mammal evolution” (News Staff 2024), and elaborates that:

This indicates that the defining mammalian jaw feature evolved multiple times in different groups of cynodonts, earlier than expected. The findings suggest that mammalian ancestors experimented with different jaw functions, leading to the evolution of mammalian traits independently in various lineages. The early evolution of mammals, it turns out, was far more complex and varied than previously understood.

The lead author of the new study, Dr. James Rawson from the University of Bristol, said (quoted in News Staff 2024):

This indicates that the defining mammalian jaw feature evolved multiple times in different groups of cynodonts, earlier than expected. The findings suggest that mammalian ancestors experimented with different jaw functions, leading to the evolution of mammalian traits independently in various lineages. The early evolution of mammals, it turns out, was far more complex and varied than previously understood.

The lead author of the new study, Dr. James Rawson from the University of Bristol, said (quoted in News Staff 2024):

What these new Brazilian fossils have shown is that different cynodont groups were experimenting with various jaw joint types, and that some features once considered uniquely mammalian evolved numerous times in other lineages as well.

Dr. Zhe-Xi Luo, one of the world’s leading experts on mammalian origins and not involved in the new study, commented that this is “a jaw-dropping discovery about early mammals” (Luo 2024). It certainly is, and it definitely looks like we are witnessing the beginning of the dismantling of yet another icon of evolution, which would have been very interesting news to my recently deceased friend and colleague Jonathan Wells, who had described many such cases in his ground-breaking books.

References

News Staff 2024. New Cynodont Fossil Discoveries are Rewriting Our Understanding of Mammal Evolution. SciNews September 25, 2024. https://www.sci.news/paleontology/brazil-cynodonts-13286.html

Luo Z-X 2024. A jaw-dropping discovery about early mammals. Nature 634, 305–306. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03038-5

Ramírez-Chaves HE, Weisbecker V, Wroe S et al. 2016. Resolving the evolution of the mammalian middle ear using Bayesian inference. Frontiers in Zoology 13: 39, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-016-0171-z

Rawson JRG, Martinelli AG, Gill PG, Soares MB, Schultz CL & Rayfield EJ 2024. Brazilian fossils reveal homoplasy in the oldest mammalian jaw joint. Nature 634, 381–388. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07971-3

Yet more on abiogenesis' energy issues

 

On scrutinizing JEHOVAH'S Signature.

 

The science bots are coming?!

 

OoL science's top guns did not show up for the showdown ?

 

On reverse engineering JEHOVAH'S tech

 Studying Biology with System Engineering Principles

Emily Reeves

In the IEEE Open Journal of Systems Engineering, I recently co-authored a paper with Dr. Gerald Fudge at Texas A&M on the intersection of biology and engineering. Our paper does two things: 1) It lays out a methodology based on systems engineering for biologists. 2) It illustrates the usefulness of the methodology with a case study of glycolysis. 

The project was inspired a couple of years back when I read Uri Alon’s An Introduction to Systems Biology, which made me realize that biologists could benefit from the same engineering approaches used to build iPhones. These approaches could lead to uncovering the intricate designs in life. 

As a biologist, I’ve often wondered what the best way is to integrate engineering ideas in biology research. While there are many methods, one way engineering can assist the everyday biologist is in providing a robust methodology for approaching the study of living systems. A great illustration is the paper, “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?” The punchline is that a handyman can fix a radio, but a biologist probably can’t — and this has nothing to do with IQ but everything to do with methodology. (Lazebnik 2002)

Current practice in biology does not involve a formal methodology for reverse engineering a system. Instead, biologists are taught the scientific method, which is very useful for rigorously testing hypotheses, along with a reductionistic bottom-up processes of interrogation. Different from these is a methodology that helps one understand and interrogate a complex system. Having identified this problem, Dr. Fudge, a long-time engineer, and I teamed up to work on integrating the proven systems engineering methodology to enhance discovery in living organisms.

Proven in What Way?

I used the word “proven” because systems engineering has built amazing technology, from rockets to iPhones. It has a track record of being able to develop complex systems. The standard systems engineering process goes something like this. Engineers meet with stakeholders and are given a rough outline of requirements (verbal or written details about what the product should do). This is eventually formalized into a set of specific requirements and then often modeled using a systems engineering tool. More specific models are then developed, from which a variety of refinements result. Then construction begins. Construction of the smaller parts happens first, followed by the assembly of subsystems. Throughout this build phase, testing is ongoing, and all is compared with the list of requirements and the initial systems model. Eventually a completed product is produced, meeting the stakeholders’ expectations. Or that is the goal, anyway.

Dr. Fudge and I adapted this methodology for biology. We call it model-based reverse systems engineering (MBRSE). “Model-based,” because it utilizes a system model as a map to keep track of relationships between objects and processes. “Reverse,” because the goal of biology is to understand and predict how organisms function. “Systems,” because this approach utilizes requirements and modeling to tie components into a system-level design, illustrating how the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

To Start with Literature Mining

Our approach, as in biology, begins with observations via literature mining. However, these observations are guided by classic systems engineering questions. Those include: (1) What requirements is this system meeting? (2) What are its interfaces? (3) What are the associated derived requirements? (4) What predictions can we make, whether at the system, sub-system, or component level, based on these derived requirements? From observations, our methodology shifts quickly into a more traditional systems engineering approach, where we infer requirements from observations and build a system model (in our case we used OPCloud). Building a system model starts with qualitative conceptual modeling and can be followed by more specific computational modeling. Conceptual modeling, to my surprise, is highly accessible to biologists. It is more like creating a map than it is like quantitative modeling. Yet it serves as a critical foundation for quantitative modeling since it sets relationships between objects and processes through a formal language. This also allows for errors to be identified early. Once the system model and requirements are developed, which often identifies key knowledge gaps since it is a methodical process, one can make predictions, test, and then validate experimentally and update the model and requirements based on observed results. This is an iterative process where the goal is to develop a list of requirements and a systems model that accurately reflect the biological system or organism.

A Case Study of Glycolysis

In our paper, to illustrate the utility of our approach, we use glycolysis as a case study. Glycolysis is reasonably well understood and is familiar to many non-biologists since most high school biology courses teach the basics of this crucial metabolic pathway.

Similarities and Differences in Glycolysis by Systems Engineering 

Before we talk about similarities and differences in glycolysis across different types of organisms, it’s important to define a term: topology. Topology refers to the overall metabolic sequence — i.e., the ordering of the pathway steps that lead from, say, glucose to ATP and the intermediates that are produced along this pathway. It has been noted for glycolysis that among different types of organisms there are both remarkable similarities (for example, most organisms use one of two topological patterns for catabolism of glucose, commonly the EMP or ED topology) and remarkable differences (while the topology is conserved, the DNA sequences of the enzymes used in the pathway are not). (Rivas, Becerra, and Lazcano 2018) The high degree of similarity for the topology of the pathway across different organisms led many to assume that the uniformity resulted from common ancestry, and also to expect a common ancestry pattern for the genetic sequences of the enzymes. But this hypothesis overlooked system requirement-based reasons for topological similarity. As we write in our paper:

Traditionally, uniformity has been attributed as an artifact of common descent, meaning uniformity resulted from a historical relationship between all living organisms and does not have functional importance. However, in systems engineering, uniformity at a low level in a system design is often an optimized solution to upper-level requirements. We therefore propose that the striking similarity in the topology and metabolites of glycolysis across organisms is driven by a requirement for compatibility between organism energy interfaces, aiming to maximize efficiency at the ecosystem level.

Fudge and Reeves 2024

Ecosystem requirements shape the design of organisms, which in turn influence the requirements of metabolic design, ultimately constraining the structure of lower subsystems like glycolysis. This is because higher-level system needs determine the architecture of the subsystems below them. For glycolysis, a need for ecosystem efficiency and optimization of energy catabolism is a hypothesis with increasing evidentiary support that best explains the uniformity of the glycolytic topology. First, ecosystem efficiency requires some level of biomass commonality to maximize thermodynamic efficiency in reusing complex molecules by minimizing the amount of required biomolecule break-down and rebuild. This also helps minimize waste buildup, as shared waste products simplify the maintenance of ecosystem homeostasis. Second, the glycolytic pathway is recognized as optimized for a number of key metabolic constraints, further supporting its uniformity across species.

Ebenhöh and Heinrich [40] showed that the glycolysis architecture with a preparatory phase followed by a payoff phase is highly efficient based on kinetic and thermodynamic analysis. Similarly, Court et al. [41] discovered that the payoff phase has a maximally efficient throughput rate. In 2010, Noor et al. [42] demonstrated that the 10 step glycolytic pathway is minimally complex, with all glycolytic intermediates essential either for building biomass or for ATP production. In fact, it turns out that glycolysis is Pareto-optimized to maximize efficiency while serving multiple, often competing, purposes. Ng et al. [43] published their analysis in 2019 by analyzing over 10000 possible routes between glucose and pyruvate to show that the two primary glycolysis variant pathways are Pareto-optimized to balance ATP production against biomass production while simultaneously minimizing protein synthesis cost.

Fudge and Reeves 2024

In contrast, the differences in glycolytic enzyme or transporter sequences amongst organisms seem to be due to lower subsystem design requirements and constraints, which are expected to reflect more organism-specific differences. In our paper, we discuss the example of mammalian glucose transporters, which have 14 subtypes, only four of which are well characterized. (Thorens and Mueckler 2010) Of the four, each plays a unique role in system level glucose control within the mammalian system. Thus, differences in glucose transporters are explainable by their tissue-adapted roles. Similarly, differences between the glycolytic enzymes themselves are poorly correlated with ancestry and have led to complete dismissal of the previous assumption that the pathway had a single evolutionary origin. (Rivas, Becerra, and Lazcano 2018) Instead, evidence continues to accumulate that glycolytic enzyme differences between organisms play functional roles due to the unique subsystem environments in which they are placed.

The Warburg Effect and Cancer Research

Using our system engineering approach, we also generated a hypothesis for the Warburg effect, which is a well understood phenomenon in many cancer types. Briefly, the Warburg effect is preferential use of glucose in cancer via upregulation (i.e., increased usage) of glycolysis even in the presence of oxygen. This is often thought to be a deleterious byproduct of cancer, but our paper proposes a new perspective. Our hypothesis is that the Warburg effect is a normal system response to local organism injury or other temporary situations that require rapid tissue growth, such as during certain early developmental stages. Cancer occurs when the signal to turn off rapid tissue growth fails. The downstream effect is the continued signal for upregulated glycolysis, hence the Warburg effect. From our paper: 

Under certain (currently unknown) conditions, the feedback control loop for injury response can be broken, resulting in an under-controlled or completely uncontrolled response. In other words, we hypothesize a cellular level failure in the control system that upregulates cellular processes for division including glycolysis such that the rate of glycolysis is unconstrained at the cellular level. Note that all four proposed functions of the Warburg effect, plus its ability to support cellular metabolism if the oxygen supply is interrupted due to local loss of normal blood flow, are beneficial for tissue repair after an injury where 1) there might be reduced oxygen, 2) faster cell division and local ATP energy supply is needed, and 3) more biomass is required. A similar situation can occur during early organism development when tissue growth is more rapid than in the adult stage, and in which the blood supply is developing simultaneously.

Fudge and Reeves 2024

To our surprise, in our literature search, we found little about the Warburg effect as a critical part of injury repair. An exception was Heiden et al., who suggested that the increased cellular division rate associated with the Warburg effect can be beneficial in tissue repair as well as in immune responses. (Vander Heiden, Cantley, and Thompson 2009) We propose that this could be a very important area for investigation. Research that focuses on feedback mechanisms in the control system responsible for the rate of glycolysis upregulation should be able to verify or falsify our hypothesis.

A Useful Design-Based Tool

Engineering is a design-driven field, born from the creativity of intelligent human agents. Many tools developed in the field have applications in biology. For example, the MBRSE approach overcomes a key challenge facing biology: many biological objects and processes are not linked to system-level requirements. Without these connections, a divide occurs between the structure of components and how they fit into the system’s function. On a personal note, one aspect of system modeling that I find particularly appealing is its use of formal relationships and structured language. Once you’re familiar with the tool, it becomes much easier to identify connections between subsystems or constraints, even when looking at a different system model. This offers a major advantage over the inconsistent, often free-form diagrams found in biology research papers, where each tends to differ from the next. Another benefit of systems modeling is that it organizes information from research papers in a structured, graphical manner. No matter how brilliant a researcher is, it’s impossible to keep track of information from thousands of papers. However, a systems model can do that. It’s remarkable that while these modeling tools are standard in engineering, they are largely absent from biological training, despite the clear benefit they offer in overcoming the inconsistencies of biological diagrams. 

Our reverse systems engineering approach is motivated by some key observations: 

Biological systems look as if they are designed; for example, Francis Crick cautions biologists about using evolutionary ideas to guide research because biological systems look designed though he thinks they evolved (Campana 2000). Even Richard Dawkins admitted in The God Delusion, “The illusion of design is so powerful that one has to keep reminding oneself that it is indeed an illusion.”

Biological systems have much in common with human engineered systems (Csete and Doyle 2002); and

Biological systems exhibit features such as modularity, robustness, and design re-use (Alon 2003) that are traditionally associated with good top-down engineering practices.

These observations suggest that from a pragmatic perspective, the best approach to reverse engineer biological systems will be to treat them as if they are the result of a top-down requirements-driven systems engineering process.

It is good news, then, that design-based tools and hypotheses play an increasingly prominent role in biology, offering a clear, coherent path to understanding biological complexity. From this understanding, more than a few deeper philosophical questions arise.

References

Alon, U. 2003. “Biological Networks: The Tinkerer as an Engineer.” Science (New York, NY) 301 (5641): 1866-67.

Campana, Joey. 2000. “The Design Isomorph and Isomorphic Complexity.” Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 149-53.

Csete, Marie E., and John C. Doyle. 2002. “Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity.” Science (New York, NY) 295 (5560): 1664-69.

Fudge, Gerald L., and Emily Brown Reeves. 2024. “A Model-Based Reverse System Engineering Methodology for Analyzing Complex Biological Systems with a Case Study in Glycolysis.” IEEE Open Journal of Systems Engineering 2:119–34.

Lazebnik, Yuri. 2002. “Can a Biologist Fix a radio? — Or, What I Learned While Studying Apoptosis.” Cancer Cell2 (3): 179–82.

Rivas, Mario, Arturo Becerra, and Antonio Lazcano. 2018. “On the Early Evolution of Catabolic Pathways: A Comparative Genomics Approach. I. the Cases of Glucose, Ribose, and the Nucleobases Catabolic Routes.” Journal of Molecular Evolution 86 (1): 27–46.

Thorens, Bernard, and Mike Mueckler. 2010. “Glucose Transporters in the 21st Century.” American Journal of Physiology. Endocrinology and Metabolism 298 (2): E141-45.

Vander Heiden, Matthew G., Lewis C. Cantley, and Craig B. Thompson. 2009. “Understanding the Warburg Effect: The Metabolic Requirements of Cell Proliferation.” Science 324 (5930): 1029-33.

An interlude XXI

 

On the nexus of art and information.

 

Human civilization is a Greek tragedy?

 

I.D has always been mainstream

 Using AI to Discover Intelligent Design

David Coppedge

Human senses are excellent design detectors, but sometimes they need a little help. In a recent case, AI tools were applied to aerial photographs of the Nazca plain in Peru. The algorithms, trained on known geoglyphs, were able to select hundreds of candidate sites with figures too faint for the human eye. Many of them, on closer inspection, turned out to indeed contain patterns on the ground indicative of purposeful manipulation by indigenous tribes that lived in the area long ago. 

Here is a case where humans used their intelligent design to create intelligently designed “machine intelligences” capable of detecting intelligent design. Even so, the scientists needed to use their innate design detection abilities to follow up on the AI results to validate the potential design detections. AI is a tool, not a thinker. As a tool, it offers new powers to archaeology: one of the examples of intelligent design in action in science.

The Nazca Pampa is designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO because of its immense geoglyphs, averaging 90m in length. The well-known ones, consisting of lines, geometric figures and images of animals, were rediscovered in the early 20th century and have fascinated scientists and laypeople alike. UNESCO describes what makes them unique:

They are located in the desert plains of the basin river of Rio Grande de Nasca, the archaeological site covers an area of approximately 75,358.47 Ha where for nearly 2,000 uninterrupted years, the region’s ancient inhabitants drew on the arid ground a great variety of thousands of large scale zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures and lines or sweeps with outstanding geometric precision, transforming the vast land into a highly symbolic, ritual and social cultural landscape that remains until today. They represent a remarkable manifestation of a common religion and social homogeneity that lasted a considerable period of time.

They are the most outstanding group of geoglyphs anywhere in the world and are unmatched in its extent, magnitude, quantity, size, diversity and ancient tradition to any similar work in the world. The concentration and juxtaposition of the lines, as well as their cultural continuity, demonstrate that this was an important and long-lasting activity, lasting approximately one thousand years.

Based on pottery fragments, the geoglyphs are dated to between at least 100 BC and possibly up to the 15th century. The spellings (Nasca vs Nazca) appear to be interchangeable. Mysteries remain about the purpose of geoglyphs, and various theories are debated. One thing is indisputable: they were designed by intelligent minds. The people made considerable effort to modify the landscape for whatever purposes that drove them. But that’s OK; ID theory can detect design without knowing the identity of the designer(s) or why they did their work. ID’s job is done when the Design Filter has ruled out chance and natural law to conclude something is the product of a designing intelligence. Discerning the purposes of designs like these are left in the capable hands of anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists, who may find themselves puzzled by some of the discoveries like the “knife-wielding killer whale” figure.

The New AI-Directed Discoveries

New detections of Nazca geoglyphs have continued slowly through the years. A team of Japanese, European, and American researchers, Sakai et al., publishing in PNAS, boasts that AI has accelerated the pace of new discoveries:

The rate of discovery of new figurative Nazca geoglyphs has been historically on the order of 1.5 a y (from 1940s to 2000s). It has accelerated due to the availability of remotely sensed high-resolution imagery to 18.7/y from 2004 to 2020. Our current work represents another 16-fold acceleration (303 new figurative geoglyphs during the 2022/23 season of field work) using big geospatial data technologies and data mining with the aid of AI. Thus, AI may be at the brink of ushering in a revolution in archaeological discoveries like the revolution aerial imaging has had on the field.

The Nazca geoglyphs can be classified as line-type (carved into the ground) or relief-type (made by aligning stones above ground). They can also be distinguished by subject matter and size. Sakai et al. surveyed the entire Nazca Pampa (629 km2), then subdivided aerial photographs with 10-cm resolution into grids. They trained their AI model on 406 relief-type glyphs and gave the AI some puzzles to solve:

To leverage the limited number of known relief-type geoglyphs, and to render the training robust, data augmentation is paramount. Hand-labeled outlines of known geoglyphs serve to pick 10 random crops from within each of the known geoglyphs. These are also randomly rotated, horizontally flipped, and color jittered. Similarly, 25 negative training images are randomly cropped from the area surrounding each known geoglyph. We set the ratio of positive to negative training images to 10:25 for a reasonable balance between precision and recall.

This method yielded 1,309 hotspots of likely geoglyphs, which the scientists classed as Rank I, II, or III from most to least likely. “Of the 303 newly discovered figurative geoglyphs,” the paper says, “178 were individually suggested by the AI and 125 were not individually AI-suggested.” It still required 2,640 labor hours of follow-up on foot and with drones to validate the AI selections. Nevertheless, this effort represented a quantum leap in design detection of glyphs with such low contrast they were barely visible to the unaided human eye.

New Scientist included photos of some of the new geoglyphs outlined for clarity. The new ones tend to be smaller and located near trails rather than larger roads, leading the scientists to surmise that they were intended for viewing by local groups instead of for community-wide religious rituals. Reporter Jeremy Hsu wrote about the need for human intelligence to corroborate the selections made by AI:

The researchers followed up on the AI suggestions and discovered a total of 303 figurative geoglyphs during field surveys in 2022 and 2023. Of these figures, 178 geoglyphs were individually identified by the AI. Another 66 were not directly pinpointed, but the researchers found them within a group of geoglyphs the AI had highlighted.

“The AI-based analysis of remote sensing data is a major step forward, since a complete map of the geoglyphs of the Nazca region is still not available,” says Karsten Lambers at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But he also cautioned that “even this new, powerful technology is more likely to find the better visible geoglyphs — the low hanging fruits — than the more difficult ones that are likely still out there”.

The authors believe that many more geoglyphs remain to be discovered in the area. Now that design has been concluded, we may understandably wonder what the people had in mind when they made these figures:

Line-type geoglyphs predominantly depict wildlife-related motifs (e.g., wild animals and plants). Most relief-type geoglyphs (81.6%) depict human motifs or motifs of things modified by humans (33.8% humanoids, 32.9% decapitated heads, and 14.9% domesticated camelids). These do not appear in the line-type figurative geoglyphs at all. Decapitated heads are sometimes depicted alone, while humanoids are repeatedly depicted with decapitated heads and together with domesticated camelids. Examples of both are shown as Insets to Fig. 5. Wild animals, which dominate the line-type geoglyphs, represent only 6.9% (47 geoglyphs) of the relief-type geoglyphs. These include bird, cat, snake, monkey, fox, killer whale, and fish.

Again, though, figuring out the meaning of the designs is not ID’s job. ID is equally valid at detecting evil designs and good designs. Undoubtedly future archaeologists might have trouble understanding 21st century graffiti if they happened upon a destroyed U.S. city without written records or history. But thanks to the Design Filter, determining whether contemporary “art” was designed or not would be a straightforward project

Rise ,fall,repeat?

 

Basic training?

 

The septuagint and the divine name

 

Yet further echoes of the Cambrian explosion.

 Fossil Friday: An Extinct Animal Body Plan from the Cambrian Explosion

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features Herpetogaster collinsi from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale in Canada. It is as an example of an extinct group of animals called Cambroernida, that originated in the Early Cambrian and disappeared in the Late Devonian.

Eldonia — The Medusa That Wasn’t

The Cambrian fauna of the famous Burgess Shale includes numerous enigmatic fossils that for a long time eluded any attempts by evolutionary scientists to place them in the tree of life. One of these fossils is Eldonia ludwigi, which was a soft-bodied animal with disc-shaped body, a coiled gut, and a ring of feeding tentacles around the oral opening. More than hundred years ago, Charles Walcott (1911) collected 550 specimens from the Burgess Shale and many more have meanwhile been found, including specimens from the Early Cambrian of Chengjiang in southwest China (Sun & Hou 1987, Chen et al. 1995, Zhu et al. 2002), the Middle Cambrian of Utah (Conway Morris & Robinson 1988) and Siberia (Friend 1995, Ivantsov 1998, Friend et al. 2002), and the Late Ordovician Erfoud sandstones of Morocco (Alessandrello & Bracchi 2003). Furthermore, seven other genera of eldoniids were described from different localities and strata. The latest fossil record is the putative eldoniid Paropsonema from the Upper Devonian of New York (Hagadorn & Allmon 2019), which was first described by Clarke (1900) as an echinoderm, which is an attribution that was still supported by Conway Morris (1993). However, the systematic affinities and lifestyle of eldoniids remained enigmatic. Because of the medusoid appearance some experts suggested an identification as cnidarian siphonophore or jellyfish (Madsen 1956, 1957, 1962, Lemche 1960, Seilacher 1961, Sun & Hou 1987), but the most favored alternative interpretations included an attribution to lophophorates (Dzik 1991, Chen et al. 1995, Dzik et al. 1997, Zhu et al. 2002) or to holothurian echinoderms (sea cucumbers) (Walcott 1911, Clark 1913, Durham 1974). Zhu et al. (2002) said that “the new anatomical information emphasize close phylogenetic relations with lophophorates (U-shaped intestine, circumoral tentacles and ectodermal, marginal accreted disc), though some features (e.g. dendritic tentacles, ventral pustules that may relate to reduced podia) do not exclude affinities with echinoderms.” Because of this strange and ambiguous combination of characters, Conway Morris & Robinson (1988) had concluded that “the higher taxonomic affinities of this genus are best regarded as uncertain”, but only a few years later Conway Morris (1993) considered eldoniids as pre-echinoderm deuterostomes (also see Friend 1995, Caron et al. 2010, and MacGabhann 2012), which happens to represent the currently preferred view (see below). Even the lifestyle of eldoniids was reconstructed very differently (see discussion in Caron et al. 2010): some scientists considered them as pelagic filter feeders (e.g., Clark 1913, Durham 1974, Chen et al. 1995, Zhu et al. 2002), while others re-interpreted them as sedentary benthic deposit feeders (Luo et al. 1999). Looks like there is not much we really know for sure about ancient life on Earth.

Herpetogaster — An “Alien” Life Form from Deep Time

Herpetogaster is another very strange fossil organism known from more than hundred specimens from the Middle Cambrian of British Columbia and Nevada as well as the Early Cambrian Chengjiang biota of China (Caron et al. 2010, Kimmig et al. 2019, Yang et al. 2020, 2023). It had a long and narrow stalk, a curved and segmented sac-like body, and pair of branched feeding tentacles around the apical mouth. Herpetogaster was about 3-4 cm long and was often found attached to fossil sponges. The quite similar genus Phlogites (= Cheungkongella) was originally described as urochordate (tunicate) by Shu et al. (2001), but re-interpreted as a tentaculate similar to entoprocts (Kamptozoa) by Chen et al. (2003) and Hou et al. (2006), and finally identified as a stem ambulacrarian by Caron et al. (2010) and Li et al. (2023). Shu et al. (2010) disagreed and still considered a tunicate affinity. These determinations seemingly jump between major groups of animals like in a wild guessing game.

Cambroernida — A Novel Animal Body Plan from the Paleozoic

Caron et al. (2010), who first described Herpetogaster collinsi from the Burgess Shale biota, already recognized that this organism likely represents a deuterostome animal, which they tentatively attributed to the stem group of hemichordates and echinoderms that are united in a clade called Ambulacraria. They also recognized that the enigmatic eldoniids, in spite of their discoidal shape, seem to be closely related to Herpetogaster and share a similar body plan. These animals are so distinct and so different from all other known animal phyla, that Caron et al. erected a new clade named Cambroernida to accommodate them. They did not formerly rank it as a new phylum, but it is very clear that this clade would deserve such a high rank in the taxonomic hierarchy as one of the numerous distinct body plans of bilaterian animals that originated in the Cambrian Explosion (see Bechly 2024).

To understand how weakly supported the phylogenetic and evolutionary hypotheses really are, it is worthwhile to quote from the discussion in Caron et al. (2010):

Arriving at a precise phylogenetic position for the cambroernids, therefore, has proved difficult. On balance a place amongst the tentaculate lophotrochozoans seems to be less persuasive. Given a place within the ecdysozoans is even less plausible, then the final possibility must be to look to the deuterostomes. Here, as noted the options revolve around a series of possibilities, including a stem- group echinoderm, a hemichordate or an ambulacrarian. Whilst this list of possibilities might seem to leave the matter largely unconstrained, it is important to stress that from a Cambrian perspective the morphological differences between these various alternatives were probably insignificant. If, for the sake of the argument, the position of the cambroernids does indeed lie near the branching point of the two main ambulacrarian clades that led ultimately to the echinoderms and hemichordates, then we should not be surprised that it seems reminiscent of both pterobranchs and pre-radial echinoderms. … Finally, if accepted as some sort of deuterostome then these fossils have some further interesting implications. … Whilst many of the evolutionary steps involved in this process are still hypothetical, we suggest that animals similar to Herpetogaster may, in terms of the fossil record, be our best current glimpse of a very primitive ambulacrarian.

This is a lot of uncertainty as shaky foundation for a house of cards of evolutionary speculations. It is likely the reason why, despite Caron et al.’s work, some other experts still think that “the taxonomic affinities of these groups remain uncertain” (Hagadorn & Allmon 2019), even though some others had readily excepted the cambroernid-hypothesis (MacGabhann 2012). The most recent work by Li et al. (2023) is a perfect example for the dubious evolutionary hypotheses built on such shaky assumptions. The latter author concluded that:

As Herpetogaster has been recovered at the base of the Ambulacrarian tree in recent phylogenies, a planktonic larval stage is suggested, which implies, that the last common ancestor of the Ambulacraria might have already had planktonic larvae or that such larvae developed multiple times within the Ambulacraria

Note the typical Darwinian gobbledygook with key words like “suggested” and “might,” combined with the anything goes approach of either the character is homologous or it developed multiple times. The real information content of such statements is basically zero.

Anyway, the cambroernid-hypothesis by Caron et al. has more recently been corroborated by Li et al. (2023), who analyzed the discoidal metazoan Rotadiscus grandis from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang biota, a putative eldoniid. According to these scientists, the results of their research implied that “key traits of extant forms, such as a post-anal region, gill bars, and a U-shaped gut, evolved through convergence.” Wait a moment and read this carefully again. It means nothing less than the following: characteristic similarities of one of the two major branches of metazoan animals (i.e., Protostomia and Deuterostomia) are not based on common descent but independently acquired. Furthermore, the scientists found “Rotadiscus exhibits a chimeric combination of ambulacrarian and chordate characters.” However, these chordate-like features (e.g., a serialized body) are not known from living hemichordates and echinoderms, implying secondary loss or another convergence. The more we know about the distribution of certain anatomical features in fossil organisms, the more the initially apparent congruent distribution of similarities among recent organisms evaporates as a mirage, an artifact of incomplete knowledge. In reality, many traits exhibit a highly incongruent pattern of similarities that do not easily align with a nested hierarchy that could be translated into a tree of life. One of the strongest arguments in favor of Darwinian evolution gets more and more dismantled, which totally vindicates the critique by Michael Denton that evolution is a theory in crisis, in spite of the desperate attempts of denialism by mainstream academia.

References

Alessandrello A & Bracchi G 2003. Eldonia berbera n. sp., a new species of the enigmatic genus Eldonia Walcott, 1911 from the Rawtheyan (Upper Ordovician) of little Atlas (Erfoud, Tafilalt, Morocco). Atti della Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Milano 144(2), 337–358. https://biostor.org/reference/266993

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/

Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Shu D 2010. Tentaculate Fossils from the Cambrian of Canada (British Columbia) and China (Yunnan) Interpreted as Primitive Deuterostomes. PLoS ONE 5(3): e9586, 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0009586

Chen J-Y, Zhu M-Y & Zhou GQ 1995. The early Cambrian medusiform metazoan Eldonia from the Chengjiang Lagerstätte. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 40(3), 213–244. https://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app40/app40-213.pdf

Chen J-Y, Huang D-Y, Peng Q-Q, Chi H-M, Wang X-Q & Feng M 2003. The first tunicate from the Early Cambrian of South China. PNAS 100(14), 8314–8318. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1431177100

Clark AH 1913. Cambrian Holothurians. The American Naturalist 47(560), 488–507. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2455578

Clarke JM 1900. Paropsonema cryptophya, a peculiar echinoderm from the intumescens zone (Portage beds) of western New York. Bulletin of the New York State Museum 39(8), 172–178.

Conway Morris S 1993. The fossil record and the early evolution of the Metazoa. Nature 361(6409), 219–225. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/361219a0

Conway Morris S & Robinson RA 1988. More Soft-Bodied Animals and Algae from the Middle Cambrian of Utah and British Columbia. The University of Kansas Paleontological Contributions 122, 1–48. https://hdl.handle.net/1808/3691

Durham JW 1974. Systematic position of Eldonia ludwigi Walcott. Journal of Paleontology 48(4), 750–755. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1303225

Dzik J 1991. Is fossil evidence consistent with traditional views of the early metazoan phylogeny? pp. 47–56 in: Simonetta AM & Conway Morris S (eds). The Early Evolution of Metazoa and the Significance of Problematic Taxa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), 296 pp.Dzik J, Zhao Y & Zhu M 1997. Mode of life of the Middle Cambrian eldonioid lophophorate Rotadiscus. Palaeontology 40(2), 385–396. https://www.palass.org/publications/palaeontology-journal/archive/40/2/article_pp385-396

Friend D. Paleobiology of Paleozoic medusiform stem group Echinoderms. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, Cambridge (UK), 178 pp.

Friend D, Zhuravlev AY & Solov’ev IA 2002. Middle Cambrian Eldonia from the Siberian Platform. Paleontological Journal 36(1), 20–24. https://repository.geologyscience.ru/handle/123456789/28936

Hagadorn JW & Allmon WD 2019. Paleobiology of a three-dimensionally preserved paropsonemid from the Devonian of New York. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 513, 208–214. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2018.08.007

Hou X-G, Bergström J, Ma X-Y & Zhao J 2006. The Lower Cambrian Phlogites Luo & Hu Re-Considered. GFF 128(1), 47–51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/11035890601281047

Ivantsov AA 1998. The Richest of Sinsk Lagerstätten (Lower Cambrian, Siberian Platform). p. 10 in: Ahlberg P, Eriksson M & Olson I (eds). Abstracts of IV Field Conference of the Cambrian Stage Subdivision Working Group (Lund, Sweden, 24-31 August 1998).

Kimmig J, Meyer RC & Lieberman BS 2019. Herpetogaster from the early Cambrian of Nevada (Series 2, Stage 4) and its implications for the evolution of deuterostomes. Geological Magazine 156(1), 172–178. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0016756818000389

Lemche H 1960. A possible central place for Stenothecoides Resser, 1939 and Cambridium Horny, 1957 (Molluscs Monoplacophora) in invertebrate phylogeny. Reports of the International Geological Congress, XXl Session, Norden 22, 92–101.

Li Y, Dunn FS, Murdock DJE, Guo J, Rahman IA & Cong P 2023. Cambrian stem-group ambulacrarians and the nature of the ancestral deuterostome. Current Biology 33(12), 2359–2366. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.04.048

Luo H, Hu S, Chen L, Zhang S & Tao Y 1999. Early Cambrian Chengjiang fauna from Kunming region, China. Yunnan Science and Technology Press, Kunming, 162 pp.

Madsen FJ 1956. Eldonia, a Cambrian Siphonophore — formerly interpreted as a holoturian. Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk Naturhistorisk Forening i Københaven 118, 7–14MacGabhann BA 2012. A Solution to Darwin’s Dilemma: Differential Taphonomy of Palaeozoic and Ediacaran Non-Mineralised Discoidal Fossils. Earth and Ocean Sciences. PhD Thesis, National University of Ireland, Galway, xxix+338 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13025/16034

Madsen FJ 1957. On Walcott’s supposed Cambrian holothurians. Journal of Paleontology 31(1), 281–282. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1300523

Madsen FJ 1962. The systematic position of the Middle Cambrian fossil Eldonia. Meddeleser fra Dansk Geologisk Forening 15, 87–89. https://2dgf.dk/xpdf/bull-1962-15-1-87-89.pdf

Seilacher A 1961. Holothurien im Hunsrückschiefer (Unter-Devon). Notizblatt des hessischen Landes-Amtes für Bodenforschung 89, 66–72. [In German] https://www.hlnug.de/fileadmin/shop/publikationen/geologie/notizblatt/Notizblatt%20des%20Hessischen%20Landesamtes%20für%20Bodenforschung%20Band%2089.pdf

Shu DG, Chen L, Han J & Zhang X-L 2001. An Early Cambrian tunicate from China. Nature 411(6836), 472–473. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35078069

Shu D-G, Conway Morris S, Zhang Z-F & Han J 2010. The earliest history of the deuterostomes: the importance of the Chengjiang Fossil-Lagerstätte. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277(1679), 165–174. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.0646

Sun W-g & Hou X-g 1987. Early Cambrian medusae from Chengjiang, Yunnan, China. Acta Palaeontologica Sinica 26(3): 257–271. [In Chinese]

Walcott CD 1911. Middle Cambrian holothurians and medusae. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 57(3), 41–68. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/23427

Yang X, Kimmig J, Lieberman BS & Peng S 2020. A new species of the deuterostome Herpetogaster from the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota of South China. The Science of Nature 107(5): 37, 1–8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-020-01695-w

Yang X, Kimmig J, Schiffbauer JD & Peng S 2023. Herpetogaster collinsi from the Cambrian of China elucidates the dispersal and palaeogeographic distribution of early deuterostomes and the origin of the ambulacrarian larva”. PeerJ 11: e16385, 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16385

Zhu MY, Zhao YL & Chen JY 2002. Revision of the Cambrian discoidal animals Stellostomites eumorphus and Pararotadiscus guizhouensis from South China. Geobios 35(2), 165–185. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-6995(02)00025-6

OoL science's energy problem.

 

Nanotech and the future of recycling

 

The mother of rainstorms?

 

Caterpillars eat Darwinian apologists' lunch?

 “Notions” About Metamorphosis Fall Short of Scientific Explanations

David Coppedge

The authors of a new paper on insect metamorphosis admit that its evolution is “poorly understood,” adding that “why this extreme lifestyle evolved is unclear.” Stated succinctly, they don’t know how it evolved; they don’t know why it evolved; they just know that it did evolve. With non-Darwinian explanations ruled out from the starting gate by the philosophical rule of methodological naturalism, what’s a Darwinian to do? Some of them came up with a notion. 

Our work supports the notion that the holometabolous life history evolved to remove developmental constraints on fast growth, primarily under high mortality. 

Dictionary.com gives five definitions for “notion”—

a general understanding; vague or imperfect conception or idea of something: a notion of how something should be done.

an opinion, view, or belief: That’s his notion, not mine.

conception or idea: his notion of democracy.

a fanciful or foolish idea; whim: She had a notion to swim in the winter.

an ingenious article, device, or contrivance; knickknack.

Science aspired to rise high above notions. For instance, in Leeuwenhoek’s day, people believed in spontaneous generation. The citizen scientist debunked that notion using the tools of observation, testing, and causal explanation. He observed the complete life cycle of ants, fleas, mussels, eels, and various insects, proving that all organisms had parents. 

Notions have no place in scientific explanation. They may serve a pre-scientific purpose by suggesting a hypothesis to be tested but fall short of the demands of rigorous science. Notions (“small items displayed for sale”) belong in department stores, not universities.

Terms in Metamorphosis Science

Insect metamorphosis is best illustrated by the butterfly hatching from a chrysalis. This form of complete metamorphosis, in which the larval body plan is broken down and a new adult body plan is built, is called holometaboly. An adult butterfly hatches from its straitjacket with new wings, new limbs, a new proboscis, new sense organs, new reproductive organs, a new digestive system — a whole new organism built from the same genome. 

In its documentary Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies, Illustra Media compared the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly to a Model T driving into a garage and emerging as a helicopter, ready to fly, having been constructed out of all the disassembled parts of the car (see excerpt here). It’s no wonder that this kind of metamorphosis is “poorly understood” by Darwinians. Strictly speaking, holometaboly includes four stages in the life cycle of insects that undergo complete metamorphosis: egg, pupa, larva, and adult (also known as the imago). Over 50 percent of insects undergo holometaboly.

There’s a simpler form of metamorphosis known as hemimetaboly (incomplete metamorphosis) that might give a creative storyteller a steppingstone for support of his notion. This kind of life cycle, exemplified by grasshoppers, dragonflies, lice and many others, skips the pupa stage and goes from egg to nymph to imago. A few other insect orders are ametabolous(exhibiting slight or absent metamorphosis), growing in size from birth to adult. Only “primitive” wingless insects are ametabolous. Is there an evolutionary progression evident in these life cycles? That wasn’t clear to the authors of a new paper:

Holometaboly has fascinated students of natural history since Aristotle, yet the evolution of this extreme form of metamorphosis is puzzling: If decoupling different life stages is the key adaptation of metamorphosis, simpler forms of metamorphosis such as hemimetaboly should suffice. What is then the extra driver for the evolutionof complete metamorphosis?

The Notion Marketers

Four evolutionists from the Free University of Berlin and from Princeton published their notion in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the Significance statement of their paper titled, “Rapid growth and the evolution of complete metamorphosis in insects,” Manthey et al. boasted of the explanatory power of their notion.

More than half of all animal species are insects that undergo a dramatic rebuilding of their bodies, dubbed complete metamorphosis, as exemplified by the transition from a caterpillar through a pupa to a butterfly. Why this extreme lifestyle evolved is unclear. Here, by combining empirical data and mathematical modeling, we find that the holometabolous insects grow much faster than insects that do not show this extreme form of metamorphosis. This allows to first grow and then build the adult body, allowing for much faster growth.Fast growth is favorable under many ecological conditions such as competition and predation. This growth advantage reported here can almost certainly help to understand the huge diversification of the holometabolous insects.

The Abstract mentions the “notion” quoted earlier. But they didn’t leave it at the notion stage, a Darwinian might object. They tested the notion with empirical data and mathematical modeling, didn’t they? Well, let’s see.

The “Mother-May-I” Allow Notion

The essence of their notion is that complete metamorphosis allows the insect “to first grow and then build the adult body, allowing for much faster growth.” Stop right there! Are we to picture the magic hand of evolution, like a fairy godmother, granting permission to evolve? Does she tell the caterpillar entering a chrysalis, “You are now allowed, child, to build your adult butterfly body faster than you could before.” How does this make their explanation superior to a notion? Continuing this mini-fable, wouldn’t the caterpillar complain to the fairy godmother, “But how am I supposed to do that? I know how to die, dissolving all my existing parts, but where are the instructions for building wings and a proboscis and everything out of the debris? This chrysalis you gave me looks like a casket! How do I know I will get out the other side alive, let alone fly?”

In the Illustra film, this argument is stated more elegantly by Paul Nelson and Ann Gauger (see my earlier articles here and here). Unless there is a plan and a genetic program already in place to emerge from the chrysalis with wings and antennae and all the new body parts, the caterpillar, like the melted down Model T, is the end of the line. One cannot assume that “allowing” it to happen will make it happen. Yet Manthey et al. continue to use the Allow Notion:

Metamorphosis, the life-cycle discontinuity between larval and adult phenotypes, is found in the majority of animal taxa and is commonly explained as an adaptation that allows organisms to optimize their phenotypes to different habitats or diets.

A synonym for “allowing” is “enabling” good things to happen. Enable, like allow, personifies selection as a beneficent driver. They disguise this driver by embedding it in a mathematical model. This is evident in the following quote, where we notice they substitute “idea” for “notion” — the same fallacy.

We find that holometabolous insects have higher growth rates than hemimetabolous insects. This is consistent with the fastest reported growth rates in insects being reported for black soldier flies and burying beetles, both of which are holometabolous. Our mathematical model shows that in the presence of a trade-off between growth and differentiation, selection for fast growth results in the temporal decoupling of growth and differentiation and can result in the evolution of holometaboly. This effect is exacerbated under increasing risk of mortality. 

Risk of mortality — recall the poor caterpillar worried about dying in the casket. Here comes the “enable” word; evolution will enable the caterpillar to come out alive as a butterfly.

Taken together, our findings are highly consistent with the idea that holometaboly enables insects to escape the developmental constraints imposed by a trade-off between growth and differentiation.

Twice they say their notions are “consistent with” some evidence. Correlation is not causation. Despite the whiz-bang math in their model, a model built with a notion confers no empirical adequacy on it. This is especially true when the model personifies the cause, contrary to the authors’ naturalistic worldview.

The “It Could Be Beneficial” Notion

A common flaw in evolutionary explanations is the assumption that a new trait or innovation might be beneficial. That doesn’t work except in hindsight. Because Darwinism lacks foresight, pointing to benefits of a trait today begs the question that it evolved yesterday. Natural selection cannot select what isn’t there. From the ancestor’s view before the innovation emerges, benefits can only arise by sheer dumb luck. It cannot say, “If I get this mutation, I will enjoy a benefit.”

How complete metamorphosis is related to the evolutionary success of the holometabolous insects, measured in terms of both species richness and habitat dominance, is poorly understood. One explanation is that once complete metamorphosis had evolved, the resulting higher modularity would enable higher evolvability, as for example shown by the high diversity of mouthparts in holometabolous insects. If, as we propose here, the decoupling of growth and differentiation has been the main driver for the evolution of complete metamorphosis, then any ecological situation where fast growth is beneficial would give holometabolous insects a significant competitive advantage over other organisms that display alternative forms of metamorphosis or no metamorphosis at all. The breaking of constraints on growth almost certainly provides an added evolutionary benefit to the other potential advantages provided by biphasic metamorphic life cycles.

Natural selection knows nothing of “potential advantages” that might accrue. Nothing in nature “evolves to” reach a potentially advantageous goal. Postdicting causation by observing existing benefits begs the question of natural selection. Why not consider that the benefits were designed into the original coding?

The Promissory Notion

For a beneficial trait to persist, it must be coded in genes. The authors never link their notion to genetic mutations being naturally selected. That part of the explanation, they say, is a job for future research. All they speculate is that their notion “can” or might work.

Our results do not make a statement about the developmental pathways that result in a larval and pupal stage of holometabolous insects but rather identify how selection can result in decoupling growth and differentiation. Bringing together the developmental and the adaptive evolution perspective on complete metamorphosis will be an important future challenge. This should allow for understanding genetic changes and their order that were required to result in this key innovation of the pupa.

Other Darwinians, they just suggested, are now “allowed” to explain how the benefits got coded in the genes. Others — not them — will bring the coveted “understanding.” With this promissory note, they tossed the hot potato of turning their notion into an explanation to others! But readers of a scientific paper expect understanding now. If it’s just a notion that might be explained later by others, why publish it?

Summary

Notions are beneath the dignity of science. They can serve as heuristics that lead to science, but they fall short of scientific explanations. An untested notion dies in its chrysalis and won’t fly. Weak papers like this getting published in major journals is one result of censorship of critiques from outside the Darwin Party.

Ezekiel chapter one New World Translation Study Bible

 In the 30th year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, while I was among the exiled people+ by the river Cheʹbar,+ the heavens were opened and I began to see visions of God. 2 On the fifth day of the month—that is, in the fifth year of the exile of King Je·hoiʹa·chin+— 3 the word of JEHOVAH came to Ezekiel* son of Buʹzi the priest by the river Cheʹbar in the land of the Chal·deʹans.+ There the hand of JEHOVAH came upon him.+

4 As I was looking, I saw a tempestuous wind+ coming from the north, and there was a huge cloud and flashing fire*+ surrounded by a bright light, and from the midst of the fire was something that looked like electrum.*+ 5 Within it were what looked like four living creatures,+ and the appearance of each one was like that of a human. 6 Each one had four faces and four wings.+ 7 Their feet were straight, and the soles of their feet were like those of a calf, and they were shining like the glow of burnished copper.+ 8 They had human hands under their wings on all four sides, and the four of them had faces and wings. 9 Their wings were touching one another. They would not turn when they went; they would each go straight forward.+

10 Their faces had this appearance: Each of the four had a man’s face with a lion’s+ face on the right, a bull’s+ face on the left, and each of the four had an eagle’s+ face.+ 11 That is how their faces were. Their wings were spread out above them. Each had two wings that were touching one another and two wings covering their bodies.+

12 They would each go straight forward, going wherever the spirit would incline them to go.+ They would not turn as they went. 13 And the living creatures had the appearance of burning coals of fire, and something that looked like torches of bright fire was moving back and forth between the living creatures, and lightning was flashing out from the fire.+ 14 And when the living creatures would go forth and return, their movement had the appearance of flashes of lightning.

15 As I was watching the living creatures, I saw one wheel on the earth beside each of the living creatures with four faces.+ 16 The wheels and their structure appeared to glow like chrysʹo·lite, and the four of them looked alike. Their appearance and structure looked as though a wheel were within a wheel.* 17 When they moved, they could go in any of the four directions without turning as they went. 18 Their rims were so high that they inspired awe, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around.+ 19 Whenever the living creatures moved, the wheels would move along with them, and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels would also be lifted up.+ 20 They would go where the spirit inclined them to go, wherever the spirit went. The wheels would be lifted up together with them, for the spirit operating on the living creatures* was also in the wheels. 21 When they moved, these would move; and when they stood still, these would stand still; and when they were lifted up from the earth, the wheels would be lifted up together with them, for the spirit operating on the living creatures was also in the wheels.

22 Over the heads of the living creatures was the likeness of an expanse that sparkled like awesome ice, stretched out above their heads.+ 23 Under the expanse their wings were straight,* one to the other. Each one had two wings for covering one side of their bodies and two for covering the other side. 24 When I heard the sound of their wings, it was like a sound of rushing waters, like the sound of the Almighty.+ When they moved, it was like the sound of an army. When they stood still, they would let their wings down.

25 There was a voice above the expanse over their heads. (When they stood still, they would let their wings down.) 26 Above the expanse that was over their heads was what looked like a sapphire stone,+ and it resembled a throne.+ Sitting on the throne up above was someone whose appearance resembled that of a human.+ 27 I saw something glowing like electrum+ that was like a fire radiating from what appeared to be his waist and upward; and from his waist down, I saw something that resembled fire.+ There was a brilliance all around him 28 like that of a rainbow+ in a cloud on a rainy day. That was how the surrounding brilliant light appeared. It was like the appearance of the glory of JEHOVAH.+ When I saw it, I fell facedown and began to hear the voice of someone speaking

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