Nature's navigators v. Darwin.

Getting Around: Animal Migrations Exceed Evolutionary Expectations
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Why not stay put? In evolutionary terms, that seems an easier option for migrating animals. The evolutionist might argue that animals need to follow the food supply, but since natural selection is supposed to be so clever, why not evolve hibernation or a smaller stomach? Sure, animals need to follow the temperature, but why not just evolve thicker fur or feathers like snowy owls?

For every spectacular case of animal migration, biologists can find other animals that stay put in the cold, like the snowshoe hare, or go into hibernation, like bears or insect pupae, surviving the cold months of winter. Plants stay put whether in the Arctic or the desert. Why should animals travel thousands of miles through precarious weather or trackless seas? It doesn’t make evolutionary sense. Let’s look at some recent findings about animal migration.

Fish: European Eels

   

In Evolution: Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton describes the amazing life cycle of European eels. It’s an example of “baroque” design in the animal world, he argues, totally inexplicable by any kind of “selective pressure” that might be alleged to explain it. Since we last wrote about eels in October, more has been learned about the spectacular migration of these freshwater fish out to the salty ocean. We had asked, “Are eels equipped with magnetosensing, like salmon, sea turtles, and Monarch butterflies?”

The answer is, “yes” — researchers at the University of Miami  have found.

Scientists are closer to unraveling the long-standing mystery of how tiny glass eel larvae, which begin their lives as hatchlings in the Sargasso Sea, know when and where to “hop off” the Gulf Stream toward European coastlines to live out their adult lives in coastal estuaries.

In a new study by the University of Miami (UM)’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research’s Austevoll Research Station found that these glass eels (Anguilla anguilla) can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it like a compass controlled by an internal “biological” clock to orient themselves towards the coast. 

Notice that two senses cooperate in this skill: the ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field, and a biological clock to know when to change direction in relation to that field. The discoveries were made by monitoring eel orientations in a test facility where the ambient magnetism could be controlled.

“It is incredible that these small transparent glass eels can detect the earth’s magnetic field. The use of a magnetic compass could be a key component underlying the amazing migration of these animals,” said Cresci, the study’s lead author. “It is also the first observation of glass eels keeping a compass as they swim in shelf waters, and that alone is an exciting discovery.”

Not surprisingly, the paper in Science Advances  doesn’t speculate about how this ability might have evolved. They simply state the design-friendly facts:

Glass eels have a magnetic compass, and their orientation abilities appear to be linked to the tidal phase. This is preliminary evidence that magnetic compass–guided movement behavior could be tuned by an endogenous rhythm in the early life stages of a fish. This compass-guided movement, regulated by an endogenous rhythm, may be present in many migratory species.

Speaking of timing, it appears that salmon like to migrate in groups. Phys.org says that even when conditions are stable, observers don’t see sockeye salmon cueing off environmental conditions individually. Instead, pulses of fish are seen migrating together, perhaps for the added protection of a group.

Birds: Golden Eagles and Shearwaters

Humans aren’t the only beings familiar with a generation gap. Golden eagles have it, too. Bird watchers with the American Ornithological Society found that young and old eagles have “counterintuitive” migration habits. Science Daily  explains the findings:

Migration is tough, and birds do everything they can to optimize it. How do factors like weather and experience affect the strategies they choose? A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows that older, more experienced Golden Eagles actually migrate in poorer weather conditions and cover less ground than their younger counterparts, but for a good reason — they’re timing their efforts around raising the next generation of eagles.

The authors give a tip of the hat to evolution, saying, “Because of the costs of migration, there is selective pressure to capitalize on variation in weather to optimize migratory performance.” But as we said earlier, selection pressure should work to make the eagles stay put, not make them go through such hardships to reproduce.

The shearwater is a migratory bird that carries with it a travel journal of sorts. Richard Banati, a nuclear physicist in Australia, decided to take a look at the feathers with X-ray fluorescence microscopy, and found something unexpected: bands of zinc, calcium, bromine, copper and iron. He believes these provide clues to this species’ migratory habits as they fly a figure-8 path between the coasts of Siberia, Japan, and Tasmania on a 60,000-km route over open ocean. Writing in  The Conversation, he says:

Like the annual growth rings of trees, birds’ feathers lay down growth bars during their moult. (Moulting is the process of shedding old feathers, making way for new ones to grow.)

While bars simply show growth, the patterns of chemical elements tell us about the bird’s life during the growth period of the feather. They can indicate environmental exposures in a bird population, perhaps before impacts such as illness and death are clear….

The chemistry of feathers might become a tool for watching our environment.

Mammals: Whales

Imagine the surprise of boaters when a blue whale overturned their sightseeing boat off the coast of San Diego (see the video at BBC News). Is this sport to the giant beasts, the largest animals that have ever lived, something like tipping cows to farm boys? Nobody knows what was going through this whale’s mind, but we do know that whales are also master migrators, covering thousands of miles through clear and murky ocean routes. Remember Isabela, the blue whale that clocked a record 5,200 kilometers?

The World Wildlife Fund has been having fun with “whale cams” attached to humpback whales and minke whales,  Live Science reports. This is giving scientists unprecedented views of the social lives and feeding habits of these animals. The whale cams show that migration can be vertical as well as horizontal: “whales will range from rolling lunges near the surface to dives up to 1,148 feet (250 meters) deep to eat krill (small crustaceans), their main food source.”

Another team publishing in  Science Advances found a novel technique to monitor humpback feeding habits: radiocarbon. “While the whales mostly relied on Antarctic-derived energy stores during their annual migration, there was some evidence of feeding within temperate zone waters in some individuals.” Differences in radiocarbon, measured in the whales’ baleen plates and skin, apparently come from different abundances of radiocarbon between polar and temperate waters. The study provided the first evidence that some individuals were supplementing their diet with trips into geographically distant food webs.

Amazing Daily Commuters

Daily migrations can be as interesting as annual migrations. The average human commuter drives about 5 to 13 miles per day, according to National Geographic. Compare that with blue herons, which fly up to 20 miles per day in search of food. A tropical Atlantic fish called the French grunt swims about a kilometer per day. Then there are the golden jellyfish of Palau, which follow the sun each day across a lake to support their photosynthetic algae partners.

One of the most amazing daily commuters, though, is also the smallest: plankton. Reporter Liz Langley calls it the largest vertical migration of its kind, in terms of biomass. An embedded video clip teases, “The world’s largest migration isn’t what you think.” In the video, Dr. Erika Montague says that all the plankton in the world outweigh all other sea animals combined. Tiny jellyfish, shrimp, comb jellies, and other organisms lumped into the collective we call plankton are not just passive drifters; they have the ability to move vertically through the water column. You can see them flapping their fins or pumping their water bells like hard-working swimmers.

Oceanographers estimate that these tiny sea creatures might move as much water as the wind and the tides. “This happens all around the planet, in every ocean,” Montague says. “It’s amazing.” It is.

  

Darwinism's greatest adversary may be Darwinism?

Biologist Laments, “I Want Deeply for [Darwinism] to Make Sense”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

In his important new book, coming out on September 12 from HarperOne, State University of New York biologist J. Scott Turner tells the story about the Christmas pony. As a gift for a child who wants a pony, a poor family could afford only a pile of horse manure. Traipsing downstairs on Christmas morning to behold this well-intentioned mess, the child delightedly squealed and clapped.Her parents asked her why. She answered, “Because I know there’s a pony in there somewhere.”

In evaluating the coherence of Darwinian theory, Dr. Turner finds many of his fellow biologists in much the same mood. Squealing and clapping, they know there’s a coherent theory in there somewhere.

His book,  Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,  underlines that Turner is not an “anti-Darwinist.” On the contrary, he explains that “I want deeply for it” – meaning the modern theory of Darwinian evolution – “to make sense.” The reasons for his disillusion, which he outlines in this fascinating contribution to the evolution debate, turn upon long-ignored problems with the theory, and counterevidence from the mysterious nature of life itself.It is still a couple of months too early for reviews of Purpose and Desire, but Kirkus welcomes it with a pre-publication starred review as an “ingenious mixture of science and philosophy that points out major defects in Darwinism and then delivers heterodox but provocative solutions…a highly thought-provoking book.”

Turner writes:

For the longest time, we’ve been able to fudge these problems, carried along on the faith that, to paraphrase the punch line of an old joke, there had to be a pony in there somewhere. But the dread possibility is beginning to rear its head; what if the pony isn’t there?

The problem for modern Darwinism is, I argue, that we lack a coherent theory of the core Darwinian concept of adaptation.

It all unravels from there, thanks to unexpected insights from Biology’s Second Law – homeostasis – and the great 19th-century French physiologist Claude Bernard, writing just six years after Darwin’s Origin of Species. After some delay, the crisis for the evolutionary biologist is at hand.

Without giving away any more punch lines, I recommend this: Pre-order Purpose and Desire now, because if you do so, for a limited time only, you’ll also get two free e-books to go along with it. The free e-books are Fire-Maker: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet, by biologist Michael Denton, and Metamorphosis, which I edited as a companion to the Illustra Media documentary. Find the details here. (Note: When we first pointed out this offer, the web page wasn’t working correctly. It’s now fixed.)

Well. Turner’s book is a great read, and while he’s not a proponent of ID, he turns a fresh new page for the case for design in nature. Promise: We’ll have more to say about his argument in due time.

Interview with a titan.

The political center is dead and gerrymandering killed it?:Pros and cons.

More fossils mean more doubt?

In Resolving Darwin's Doubt, New Cambrian Animal Fossils Are No Help at All

Evolution News & Views July 2, 2015 11:53 AM 

 

More complexity in the earliest multicellular animals intensifies what Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer calls "Darwin's Doubt."

Euarthropods
A paper in Current Biology comes closest to demonstrating "the deep homology between exoskeletal features in an evolutionary continuum of taxa with distinct types of body organization." Author Javier Ortega-Hernández takes on "the euarthropod head problem" by finding similarities between two specimens from the Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian). His analysis, though, only compares positions of complex tissues, not how they originated. Amid various controversies, he focuses on a relatively simple structure, the anterior sclerite (a front plate of cuticle) within one phylum, the true arthropods.

Despite its ubiquitous nature, the significance of the anterior sclerite remains controversial, as there is little agreement on the correspondence of this structure among stem- and crown-group euarthropods. [Emphasis added.]

His attempt at finding phylogenetic relationships, given such a trifling structure in a narrow range of animals, is less than convincing. Worse, he ignores the weightier matters of the explosive origin of the complex body plans of these animals.
Collinsium
Science media are excited about a new "spiky monster worm" from China, named Collinsium ciliosum (pictured above; original paper is in PNAS). If this is supposedly an ancestor of modern velvet worms, as researchers at the University of Cambridge claim, it was already complex, with spikes, a mouth with teeth, antennae, and filter feeding appendages. Its 72 spikes in rows down its back are particularly noteworthy. If anything, it looks more complex than "Today's 180 or so species of velvet worms [that] all look and act pretty much the same" (Science Magazine). "This isn't the first time that an ancestral group has displayed more diversity than its modern-day relatives," Live Science comments. If this is evolution, it's going backwards.

The critter is one of the first known animals on Earth to develop protective armor and to sport specialized limbs that likely helped it catch food, the researchers said. This newfound species lived during the Cambrian explosion, a time of rapid evolutionary development, they said.

Abrupt appearance? Rapid development? How this helps the evolutionary story is not clear. The Cambridge news item offers word salad as a distraction from the issues raised in Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt, which they simply ignore.

"Animals during the Cambrian were incredibly diverse, with lots of interesting behaviours and modes of living," said Ortega-Hernández. "The Chinese Collins' Monster was one of these evolutionary 'experiments' -- one which ultimately failed as they have no living direct ancestors -- but it's amazing to see how specialised many animals were hundreds of millions of years ago. At its core, the study of the fossil record seeks answers about the evolution of life on Earth that can only be found in deep time. All the major biological events responsible for shaping the world we inhabit, such as the origin of life, the early diversification of animals, or the establishment of the modern biosphere, are intimately linked to the complex geological history of our planet."

Anomalocaris
Star of the Illustra documentary Darwin's Dilemma, the apex predator Anomalocaris was mentioned recently in connection with a new member of its family. This one, a giant named Aegirocassis benmoulae, was found in Morocco, indicating the global extent of the anomalocaridids. Unlike its more famous relative, "this anomalocaridid from the Ordovician exposes a second set of body flaps and reopens the question of how the two branches of arthropod legs evolved," Gregory Edgecombe notes in Current Biology. The authors of the paper in Nature are not much help to Darwin, having to invoke "convergent evolution" again:

Among arthropods, the size of A. benmoulae (over 2 m in length) is paralleled only by some pterygotid eurypterids and terrestrial arthropleurids. The evolution of gigantic filter-feeders within clades of nektic macrophagous predators is well documented in Mesozoic pachycormid fish and Cenozoic sharks and whales. The huge size of A. benmoulae represents a much earlier example of a filter-feeding lifestyle correlating to gigantism. The abundance of gigantic anomalocaridid filter-feeders in the high palaeolatitude Fezouata Biota points to a complex planktic ecosystem. Early Cambrian anomalocaridid filter-feeders also fed on zooplankton, but they remained relatively small. Although the Cambrian Explosion saw the establishment of the first complex planktic ecosystems, the convergent (Supplementary Text) rise of giant filter-feeding anomalocaridids during the Ordovician followed an increase in the abundance and diversity of phytoplankton and a consequent zooplankton radiation as part of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.

Once again: abrupt appearance of complex body plans, complex ecosystems, and convergent evolution. None of this helps the evolutionary story or answers the key issue: where did the genetic information come from to build complex body plans with hierarchical structures and functional organs composed of new tissues and cell types?
Hallucigenia
When Hallucigenia was first found in the Burgess Shale a century ago, paleontologists couldn't tell top from bottom or front from back. The bizarre creature with paired spines pointing away from its paired legs was missing an important part: its head. Now, the head has been found. It's complex, with a pair of eyes and rows of teeth. This requires explaining more cell types and tissue types than before, exacerbating the problem Stephen Meyer identified in his book.
Martin R. Smith from Cambridge, with Jean-Bernard Caron from the Toronto Museum of Natural History, announced the discovery in Nature. Other sites, like PhysOrg and New Scientist, picked up the story and showcased the new artwork. For BBC News, Smith described his initial reaction:

By delicately chipping away at the rock, scientists found a spoon-shaped head with some surprising features.
"When we put it into the electron microscope, we were delighted to see not just a tiny pair of eyes looking back at us, but also beneath them a really cheeky semi-circular smile.
"It was as if the fossil was grinning at us at the secrets it had been hiding," explained Dr Smith.
Inside the creature's mouth, the researchers found a ring of teeth and then another set of teeth running from its throat down towards its stomach.

Most of the chatter is preoccupied with where to put this creature in a Darwinian phylogenetic tree. For a long time, animals were lumped together by their type of body cavity (coelom). That's changed; in 1997, Aguinaldo invented the category "ecdysozoa" ("molting animals") based on ribosomal RNA comparisons. This lumped together everything from butterflies to roundworms, from tardigrades ("water bears") to centipedes, from velvet worms to spiders. But is such a clade meaningful? "These disparate phyla are united by their means of molting, but otherwise share few morphological characters -- none of which has a meaningful fossilization potential." Smith and Caron note. "As such, the early evolutionary history of the group as a whole is largely uncharted."
The purpose of the grouping was to try to unite all the creatures that supposedly had a common ancestor. A more meaningful designation would account for the complexity and unique features of each animal, without forcing it into preconceived notions of common ancestry. Hallucigenia is a prime example. This creature had eyes, a mouth, teeth, a throat, a foregut, a stomach, and an anus. It had appendages that could reach its mouth. It had seven pairs of spines, each emerging from "a buttress of soft tissue," arranged with curvatures from front to back, protecting the entire animal. It had claws on the ends of the legs.
It's not just the cell types that need to be explained, but their arrangement into functional structures. These structures, moreover, need to be integrated into a functional animal in its ecosystem. And, they need software in some central nervous system that allowed the animal to use all of it. This is hierarchical organization, none of which is seen in the Precambrian layers beneath.
Just-So Storytelling
Live Science has a nice gallery of these and other Cambrian critters. Interesting  animals, but nothing new here. More of the same complexity. More of the same just-so storytelling that assumes undirected evolution. More distraction from the main question: what is the source of complex specified information to build a complex animal? How could it emerge from a blind, unguided process?

 

Tactility v. Darwin.

Design at Your Fingertips: Researchers Struggle to Model Sense of Touch
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

The late pianist Victor Borge (1909-2000) was beloved not only for his comedy shtick but also for the sensitivity of his keyboard touch. He maintained the ability to interpret the most subtle pieces such as Claire de Lune (click on the image above to go there) with extreme delicacy all the way to age 90, when he was still giving 60 performances a year. It would be hard to design a robot with that level of durability, reliability, or sensitivity. Scientists know, because they’re having a hard time understanding it, let alone imitating it.

Four researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Sheffield (UK) have made major progress over previous attempts to model the sense of touch. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Simulating tactile signals from the whole hand with millisecond precision,” they announce their new mathematical model of a single hand’s neural responses under a variety of fingertip-touch experiments, hoping to assist robotics engineers wishing to imitate human touch response. Note the words code and information:

When we grasp an object, thousands of tactile nerve fibers become activated and inform us about its physical properties (e.g., shape, size, and texture). Although the properties of individual fibers have been described, our understanding of how object information is encoded in populations of fibers remains primitive. To fill this gap, we have developed a simulation of tactile fibers that incorporates much of what is known about skin mechanics and tactile nerve fibers. We show that simulated fibers match biological ones across a wide range of conditions sampled from the literature. We then show how this simulation can reveal previously unknown ways in which populations of nerve fibers cooperate to convey sensory information and discuss the implications for bionic hands. [Emphasis added.]

Unlike previous experiments that attempted to measure neural spikes from individual sensors in the skin of monkeys or humans, this new model simulates the responses of thousands of sensors based on knowledge of their classifications and distributions in the skin of the human hand. The team incorporated three classes of nerve fibers into the model:

Slowly adapting (SA) sensors: these respond primarily to spatial information from the stimulus.

• Rapidly adapting (RA) sensors: twice as densely packed as SA sensors, these provide a mix of spatial and vibration responses.
• Pacinian sensors: less densely packed than the other types, these neurons are sensitive to vibrations and waves generated by movement across the skin.

Each of these fibers produces spike trains that encode different aspects of the stimulus, such as edges, compression, and vibration. One type alone might not convey much about the source, but together, they give the brain a rich array of data. Interpreted correctly, this information allows the brain to draw conclusions about size, shape, and texture of an object by touch alone. A blind person can thus “see” Braille letters with the fingertips where these neurons are most densely packed: “each fingertip contains just under 1,000 fibers,” the paper states, providing fine resolution, especially from the high-resolution SA1 fibers.

The spike trains become more complex as the fingertip is moved into or across the source, activating more of the RA and PC fibers. Simply pressing a key on a computer keyboard is a complex act, with surrounding neurons becoming involved as pressure is applied or released. Moving a finger across a surface sets up waves that propagate throughout the hand, activating more sensors along the length of the finger and into the palm. This all happens within milliseconds (thousandths of a second), as it must when you consider the fast action of typing or playing a rapid piano piece. Even though PC fibers are less densely populated, their activity “dwarfs that of active SA1 or RA fibers,” the authors say, since they almost all become activated during a grasping operation or when feeling vibrations.

The authors describe their efforts to “tune” or “fit” their model to known facts about neurons in the hand. Eventually, they achieved a good match for things like edge detection, edge orientation, and direction of motion for simple actions. Nevertheless, they omitted important capabilities such as temperature or pain — two important inputs that can generate reflex actions that activate arm muscles to jerk the hand away before the brain is aware of danger. Needless to say, their model completely overlooks things like sweat glands, blood vessels, immune cells, and all the other equipment packed into a fingertip.

While the new model reflects admirable progress in understanding the sense of touch, and while it will undoubtedly help engineers seeking to improve prosthetic devices and robotic capabilities, the authors admit in the last section a number of limitations to their model. For instance, they tuned their model to information from rhesus macaques, knowing that humans have an additional type of tactile sensor called the SA2 fiber. They also fit their model to compression actions but not to sliding actions. In addition, they didn’t take fingerprints into account. Here’s why that could be a serious shortcoming of the model:

Third, the skin mechanics model treats the skin as a flat surface, when in reality, it is not. The 3D shape of the skin matters during large deformations of the fingertip. For example, pressing the fingerpad on a flat surface causes the skin on the side of the fingertip to bulge out, which in turn, causes receptors located there to respond. Such complicated mechanical effects can be replicated using finite element mechanical models but not using the continuum mechanics (CM) model adopted here. To the extent that friction is a critical feature of a stimulus — for example, when sliding a finger across a smooth, sticky surface — or that the finger geometry plays a critical role in the interaction between skin and stimulus — as in the example of high-force loading described above — the accuracy is compromised. Under most circumstances, the model will capture the essential elements of the nerves’ response.

Another limitation may be even more significant. They didn’t take into account the networking of responses in adjacent nerves. Their model treats an affected area as an isotropic “hotspot” wherein all the fibers react the same way, but nerve fibers are known to branch out and affect neighboring fibers. This can produce complex interactions between neurons, adding to the encoded tactile information the brain receives.

Let’s dive one level deeper into the details to consider what goes on at the cellular level. A neuron embedded in the skin does not see anything. It “feels” the outer skin deforming slightly because it contains mechanosensitive portals in its membranes. These portals let some ions in, and others out, creating a wave train of signals down the cell’s length. That’s the electrical “spike” the authors talk about, but it doesn’t just happen without each neural cell first being equipped with molecular machines able to respond to pressure, and able to quickly reset and re-fire as the source changes. As the signals propagate toward the brain, the neurons must cross synapses that convert the electrical signals to chemical signals and back again, preserving the information and the timing of the signals as we saw in the case of 3-D hearing.

Once again, the simplest, ordinary action of touching a fingertip on a surface is vastly more complex than we could conceive, challenging scientists to come up with simplified models to understand it. With this in mind, try an experiment: with your eyes closed, touch your index finger to a variety of surfaces around you: a table top, clothing, bread, liquid, the skin of your arm, a puff of air from your lips. Try to discern by touch alone information about each object’s friction, temperature, smoothness, shape, and hardness. Think of all those thousands of sensors providing that information to the brain with millisecond precision! Imagine what the brain has to deal with you when you plunge your whole body into a cold pool on a hot summer day.

The authors say nothing about evolution in their paper. Design is so abundantly obvious in the human body, as Steve Laufmann discussed in his recent ID the Future podcasts about Howard Glicksman’s series on physiology, our best engineers cannot even conceive of approximating that level of functional coherence, performance and integration. Not even close.

The undead in review.

Jonathan Wells and Zombie Science — Reviewing the Reviewers

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, Ray Bohlin gets biologist Jonathan Wells’s reaction to early responses to Wells’s new book, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution.

Dr. Wells shares his favorite endorsement, discusses evolutionist Jerry Coyne’s “review” (Coyne admittedly didn’t read the book), and describes a spoof review that … well, listen and decide for yourself what you think the reviewer’s real message was.  Listen to it here, or download it here.

Two billion year old tech Vs. Darwinism

How Evolutionists Stole the Histones;
Cornelius Hunter

The recent finding that the DNA packaging technology and structure, known as chromatin, is not limited to eukaryotes but is also present in archaea, and so from an evolutionary perspective must have “evolved before archaea and eukaryotes split apart—more than 2 billion years ago,” is merely the latest in a string of misadventures evolutionists have incurred ever since they stole the histones.

Histones are the hub-like proteins which (usually) serve as the hubs about which DNA is wrapped in the chromatin structure. Like a thread wrapped around a spool this design packs DNA away for storage with an incredible packing factor. Interestingly, the histone proteins are highly similar across vastly different species. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, this means they must have evolved early in evolutionary history to a very specific design. As one textbook explains:

The amino acid sequences of four histones (H2A, H2B, H3, and H4) are remarkably similar among distantly related species. For example, the sequences of histone H3 from sea urchin tissue and of H3 from calf thymus are identical except for a single amino acid, and only four amino acids are different in H3 from the garden pea and that from calf thymus. … The similarity in sequence among histones from all eukaryotes indicates that they fold into very similar three-dimensional conformations, which were optimized for histone function early in evolution in a common ancestor of all modern eukaryotes. [1]

But the new finding pushes back this evolutionary “optimization” far earlier in time. Once again, evolution’s heroics are moved to the distant past where no one can see. Early life was not simple.

And of course DNA needs to be accessed so this histone packaging is quite dynamic. It can roll or it can be removed and moved. The histones themselves have tails that stick out and are tagged with small chemical groups that influence whether the packaging is tight or unrolled. Again, early life was not simple.

But the fact that histones are so similar across a wide range of species leads to an entirely different dilemma for evolution. For from an evolutionary perspective, it means that the histones must not tolerate change very well. Here is how a leading 1994 textbook described it:

When the number of amino acid differences in a particular protein is plotted for several pairs of species against the time since the species diverged, the result is a reasonably straight line. That is, the longer the period since divergence, the larger the number of differences. … When various proteins are compared, each shows a different but characteristic rate of evolution. Since all DNA base pairs are thought to be subject to roughly the same rate of random mutation, these different rates must reflect differences in the probability that an organism with a random mutation over the given protein will survive and propagate. Changes in amino acid sequence are evidently much more harmful for some proteins than for others. From Table 6-2 we can estimate that about 6 of every 7 random amino acid changes are harmful over the long term in hemoglobin, about 29 of every 30 amino acid changes are harmful in cytochrome c, and virtually all amino acid changes are harmful in histone H4. We assume that individuals who carried such harmful mutations have been eliminated from the population by natural selection. [2]

So the reason the histone proteins are so similar, again from an evolutionary perspective, is because mutations changing those proteins could not be tolerated. This is the evolutionary prediction and here is how the next edition of that same textbook, eight years later in the year 2002, added to the discussion of the high similarity of the histone proteins:

As might be expected from their fundamental role in DNA packaging, the histones are among the most highly conserved eucaryotic proteins. For example, the amino acid sequence of histone H4 from a pea and a cow differ at only at 2 of the 102 positions. This strong evolutionary conservation suggests that the functions of histones involve nearly all of their amino acids, so that a change in any position is deleterious to the cell. This suggestion has been tested directly in yeast cells, in which it is possible to mutate a given histone gene in vitro and introduce it into the yeast genome in place of the normal gene. As might be expected, most changes in histone sequences are lethal; the few that are not lethal cause changes in the normal pattern of gene expression, as well as other abnormalities.

There was only one problem. That is false. In fact, even at the time studies had already shown that histone H4 could well tolerate many changes. It was not merely an example of evolution pointing in the wrong direction and producing yet another failed prediction. It was an all too frequent example of evolution abusing science, force-fitting results into its framework. And of course all of this became doctrine for wider consumption. As a 2001 PBS documentary stated:

Histones interact with DNA in the chromosomes, providing structural support and regulating DNA activities such as replication and RNA synthesis. Their ability to bind to DNA depends upon a particular structure and shape. Virtually all mutations impair histone's function, so almost none get through the filter of natural selection. The 103 amino acids in this protein are identical for nearly all plants and animals.

But it is not, and was not, true that “virtually all mutations impair histone’s function.” That was not science, it was dogma disguised as science. And since then the dogma has become even more obvious. As one recent paper summarized:

Furthermore, recent systematic mutagenesis studies demonstrate that, despite the extremely well conserved nature of histone residues throughout different organisms, only a few mutations on the individual residues (including nonmodifiable sites) bring about prominent phenotypic defects.

Similarly another paper bemoaned the confusing results:

It is remarkable how many residues in these highly conserved proteins can be mutated and retain basic nucleosomal function. … The high level of sequence conservation of histone proteins across phyla suggests a fitness advantage of these particular amino acid sequences during evolution. Yet comprehensive analysis indicates that many histone mutations have no recognized phenotype.

In fact, even more surprising for evolutionists, many mutations actually raised the fitness level:

Surprisingly, a subset of 27 histone mutants show a higher intensity after growth (log2 ratio >+1.5) suggesting they are collectively fitter and maintain a selective advantage under glucose limitation.

It was yet another falsified evolutionary prediction, and yet another example of evolution abusing science.

Now evolutionists propose a redundancy hypothesis. Those histone mutations are well tolerated because evolution constructed a backup mechanism. Both mechanisms would have to mutate and fail before any lethal effects could be felt.

As usual, contradictory results are accommodated by patching the theory with yet more epicycles. The epicycles make the theory far more complex, and far more unlikely, if that were so possible. In this case, evolution not only struck on incredible complexity, and did so early in history (before there were eukaryotes and nucleus’s in which to pack the DNA), but the whole design now must have incorporated layers of redundancy which we haven’t even been able to figure out yet.

And all of this, evolutionists insist, must be a fact. Anyone who would so much as doubt this truth must be blackballed.

It has been one misstep after another ever since the evolutionists stole the histones. Evolution is truly a profound theory, not for what it reveals about nature, but for what it reveals about people. Religion drives science, and it matters.

1. H Lodish, A Berk, SL Zipursky, et al., Molecular Cell Biology, 4th ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000).

2. B Alberts, D Bray, J Lewis, M Raff, K Roberts, J Watson, Molecular Biology of the Cell, 3rd ed. (New York: Garland Science, 1994), 243.

3. B Alberts, A Johnson, J Lewis, et. al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed. (New York: Garland Science, 1994), 243.

Galapagos finches Vs. Darwin.

Darwin’s Finches Are Evidence for Evolution? Think Again:
By MICHAEL DENTON Published on February 11, 2016:


Today is Darwin Day, marking the birthday of Charles Darwin. As the world looks back on the achievements of the great man, you are likely to see many “icons of evolution” triumphantly displayed. These famous, yet often flawed, success stories of Darwinian theory are held up as reasons to believe that the neo-Darwinian synthesis and everything it entails — scientifically and philosophically — has vanquished all legitimate challenges. But that is not so.

One of the most famous such icons is a small group of birds, an inspiration for Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, that populates a remote cluster of islands in the equatorial Pacific. The Galápagos finches, with their different beak sizes, are brandished as one of the clearest examples of evolution at work.

However, that is true up to only a very limited extent. These birds are, indeed, a clear example of micro-evolution. They are closely related to each other and their beaks have obviously been adapted through natural selection to the different food sources on the various islands. However, the finches also show what is required in order to expand the mechanism of natural selection to the larger or macro scale.

The Galápagos finches put on display the two strict requirements that must be present in order for natural selection to work its magic. If these two factors are not present, natural selection is impotent to change any creature at all, much less create a new species.

First, the finches’ beaks are clearly adaptive. Each distinct variation gives the lucky individual a definitive leg-up in its specific environment. There is an obvious, practical reason why the differentiation is helpful to the species in question. This is absolutely essential in order for natural selection to pick between variations in species. Natural selection can only “see” those variations that are adaptive — causing one individual to live, and carry on its genes, and another to die and not leave offspring. If a variation is neutral or does not somehow increase fitness in the specific environment the creature lives in, Darwin’s mechanism cannot select it.

Second, there is a functional continuum among the finches’ beaks. That is, between a finch with a tiny beak and a finch with a large beak, there are tiny, step-by-step changes, and each change makes the creature slightly more fit in its environment. This is also essential for natural selection to work.

The problem for Darwinian theory comes in explaining evolutionary change where, unlike the case of Darwin’s finches, these requirements are absent. First, there may not be a continuum. That is, natural selection cannot make large jumps or drastic changes. There must be small steps. Secondly, each single step must be beneficial to the individual. It is not enough for the first and last versions of the adaptation to be helpful — all the intervening steps must increase fitness as well.

There are examples of creatures throughout the biological world that break one or both of these rules. Many creatures just don’t fit the natural selection story like the Galápagos finches do.

For example, what is the adaptive significance of the many examples of geometric or abstract forms we see in the world, such as the shapes of leaves or the concentric whorls of flowers? Or consider the case of the enucleated red blood cell in mammals, which was the subject of my postdoctoral work. Not only have we found no obvious reason that such features increase fitness, there is no plausible continuum leading from a blood cell that keeps its nucleus to one that ejects it.

There are no such intermediate forms in nature, and it is impossible to plausibly imagine intermediates that are even stable, much less adaptive. I document many more examples in my new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis.

Without workable explanations for these many anomalies, Darwinian evolution may just go the way of Newtonian physics — applicable to a small area where specific rules apply, but unable to make universal statements about the world in general.

So when you see the media promoting the Galápagos finches as evidence for Darwinian evolution this Darwin Day, take it with a grain of salt. Not every species in the world is as obliging to the requirements of Darwinism as the famous finches. And this is just the beginning of life’s richness and complexity that cannot be reduced to Darwinian biology.

On Darwinian attempts at explaining(away) human mathematical ability

Explaining Human Mathematical Ability — Three Evolutionary Hypotheses

 William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells

Editor’s note: Last week we launched the new online college-level curriculum   to go with a beloved ID classic, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems, by mathematician William Dembski and biologist Jonathan Wells. The curriculum is free and available here.  The 300-page book is hardcover, featuring full-color illustrations and accompanied by a CD with additional materials. Get it on Amazon now. Listen to Jonathan Wells talk about this package of amazing resources on an ID the Future podcast. And enjoy the following excerpt by Dr. Dembski and Dr. Wells:

Humans have many unique cognitive abilities apart from language. Evolutionary theorists have proposed three main types of hypotheses for how these abilities might have evolved: the adaptationist hypothesis, the byproduct hypothesis, and the sexual selection hypothesis. Let’s consider these hypotheses in turn with respect to a specific cognitive ability, namely, mathematics.

The Adaptationist Hypothesis

How did humans acquire their talent for mathematics? According to the adaptationist hypothesis, mathematical ability conferred a selective advantage on our evolutionary ancestors. Those with better mathematical abilities were as a result better able to survive and reproduce. In other words, they were better able to “adapt” to their environments (hence the term “adaptationist hypothesis”). This hypothesis has a certain plausibility when it comes to the acquisition of rudimentary mathematical abilities like simple arithmetic.

For example, if one of our hunter-gatherer ancestors counted five lions earlier in the day but now sees four of them dead (killed by him and his fellow hunters), a knowledge of basic arithmetic will warn him that one lion is still on the loose. He will thus know to act cautiously, which will translate into a survival and reproductive advantage. But rudimentary mathematical abilities are one thing; developing four-dimensional Riemannian geometries that describe a curved spacetime manifold, as Albert Einstein did, is quite another. It is hardly plausible that abstract mathematics, such as the Einstein Field Equations, confers any immediate survival and reproductive advantage. Moreover, future survival and reproduction is ruled out because evolution does not “look ahead.” So the adaptationist hypothesis breaks down, and other hypotheses are required.

The Byproduct Hypothesis

According to the byproduct hypothesis, higher cognitive functions like mathematics are not evolutionary adaptations at all. Instead, they are unintended byproducts of traits that are adaptive. Spectacular mathematical abilities are thus said to piggyback on adaptive traits. Pascal Boyer offers such an argument. According to him, some rudimentary ability to count and add is adaptive, but the capacity to do higher-level mathematics is a byproduct of this rudimentary ability. The higher-level capacity is not adaptive by itself; rather, it emerges as a free rider on abilities that are adaptive. But how, exactly, does rudimentary quantitative ability turn into the ability to develop curved spacetime Riemannian geometries or mathematical theories of comparable sophistication? Boyer doesn’t say.1

This is always the weakness of byproduct hypotheses, namely, bridging the gap between what can be explained in standard evolutionary terms (adaptations) and the unexpected “freebies” (byproducts) that come along for the ride. Some free lunches are just too good to be true. And precisely when they are too good to be true, they require explanation. That’s especially true of mathematics: Here we have a human capacity that not only emerges, according to the byproduct hypothesis, from other capacities, but also provides fundamental insights into the structure of the physical universe (mathematics is, after all, the language of physics).2 How could a capacity like that arise as the byproduct of a blind evolutionary process, unguided by any intelligence? It is not a sufficient explanation here simply to say that it could have happened that way. Science does not trade in sheer possibilities. If our mathematical ability is the byproduct of other evolved traits, then the connection with those traits needs to be made explicit. To date, it has not been.

The Sexual Selection Hypothesis

Finally, we turn to the sexual-selection hypothesis. Sexual selection is Darwin’s explanation for how animals acquire traits that have no direct adaptive value. Consider a stag whose antlers are so large that they are more deadweight than defense. Or a peacock whose large colored tail makes it easy prey. How do such structures evolve? According to Darwin, they evolve because they help to attract mates—they are a form of sexual display. Thus, even though these features constitute a disadvantage for survival in the greater environment, the reproductive advantage they provide in attracting mates more than adequately compensates for this disadvantage and provides an evolutionary explanation for the formation of these features.

Geoffrey Miller has applied Darwin’s idea of sexual selection to explain the formation of our higher cognitive functions.3 According to him, extravagant cognitive abilities like those exhibited by mathematical geniuses are essentially a form of sexual display. Once a capacity begins to attract mates, it acts like a positive feedback loop, continually reinforcing itself. In the case of cognitive functions, such a positive feedback loop can run unchecked because there are no environmental constraints to impose limits: unlike stag antlers or peacock tails, which can only get so large before their adaptive disadvantage outweighs their ability to attract mates, higher cognitive functions can essentially increase without limits. This, for Miller, is the origin of our higher cognitive functions, and our talent for mathematics in particular.

The Fundamental Weakness of These Evolutionary Hypotheses

Leaving aside whether mathematical ability really is a form of sexual display (most mathematicians would be surprised to learn as much), there is a fundamental problem with these hypotheses. To be sure, they presuppose that the traits in question evolved, which in itself is problematic. The main problem, however, is that none of them provides a detailed, testable model for assessing its validity. If spectacular mathematical ability is adaptive, as the adaptationist hypothesis claims, how do we determine that? What precise evolutionary steps would be needed to achieve that ability? If it is a byproduct of other abilities, as the byproduct hypothesis claims, of which abilities exactly is it a byproduct and how do these other abilities facilitate it? If it is a form of sexual display, as the sexual selection hypothesis claims, how exactly did the ability become a criterion for mate selection?

In short, the main difficulty with all three hypotheses is that they attempt to account for an existing state of affairs without hard evidence of the factors that brought it about, only speculation. In the case of mathematics in particular, that is an especially severe deficit because higher mathematics is not obviously useful when it first emerges. The fact that uses are sometimes found later is, on conventional evolutionary grounds, irrelevant to its emergence. It becomes relevant only if one is justified in thinking that there is purpose in nature.

Intelligent Design?

Certainly, if evolution is true, then one of these hypotheses or some combination of them is likely to account for our ability to do mathematics. But even if evolution is true, in the absence of a detailed, testable model of how various higher-level cognitive functions emerged, these hypotheses are scientifically sterile. On the other hand, from an intelligent design perspective, mathematics is readily viewed as an inherent feature of intelligence and rationality. Moreover, the fact that the mathematical theorems we prove mirror the deep structure of physical reality suggests that intelligence is fundamental to nature and not merely an accidental or historical byproduct of blind material forces. The intelligence underlying nature as reflected in mathematics is a theme explored by Eugene Wigner, who referred to the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in elucidating nature.4

Number Sense in Animals

Many animals have a  basic ability to know the difference between more and less, or many and few. Rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees appear to pay more attention to a quantity if it has changed than if it hasn’t. According to M. D. Hauser, captive rhesus monkeys have been taught to understand ordinal relations from 1 to 9, but only after hundreds of training trials in conditions that are not duplicated in the wild.5 Essentially, after six months of training, some rhesus monkeys were accurate 50 percent of the time in identifying an ascending or descending order from 1 to 9.6 A weakness of this research is the high level of human interference, a point often overlooked in evolutionary literature (though not by Hauser). The monkeys develop this skill under intensive training by humans. It is unlikely that they would do so otherwise, because almost any non-destructive use of the average wild monkey’s time would be better and more immediately rewarded in nature. This fact tells against an adaptationist hypothesis in explaining even the most basic arithmetic skills, never mind abstract mathematical skills that typically only find a use after they have emerged apart from any survival goal.

Notes:

(1) Boyer makes this argument in Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001). In attempting to account for higher cognitive functions, Boyer is concerned not just with mathematics but also with art, religion, and ethics. For another byproduct approach to higher cognitive functions, see Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996). Mithen sees higher-level functions like mathematics as the byproducts of a “cognitive fluidity” that is adaptive in the sense that it facilitates the coordination and communication of various lower-level cognitive modules.

(2) See especially Mark Steiner, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

(3) See his book The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

(4) See Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications in Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 1. For a deeper exploration of this theme, see Steiner, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem.

(5) M. D. Hauser, “What Do Animals Think about Numbers?” American Scientist 88 (2) (2000): 144–51.

(6) Beth Azar, “Monkeying Around with Numbers,” Monitor on Psychology: Science Watch 31(1) (January 2000): available online here (last accessed June 7, 2006).