On Darwinism's 'simple beginning' problem.

Never mind what your eyes tell you:

New York Times: "We are Sarcopterygian Fish," If You Ignore Contrary Data

Casey Luskin 

Given its prior history of pushing Tiktaalik  as an icon of evolution (now thoroughly toppled), the New York Times has an obvious fascination with the idea that tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates like frogs, birds, cows, and humans) evolved from fish. Now the Times Science section is at it again with an article titled "Fish's DNA May Explain How Fins Turned to Feet"

The article highlights a recent paper in Nature, reporting on the sequencing of the genome of the coelacanth, a famous fish often called a "living fossil" which is descended from the line of fish that supposedly evolved into tetrapods. Reporter Nicholas Wades writes that "the coelacanth is more closely related to people than to other fish," and he quotes Axel Meyer, an evolutionary biologist who co-authored the study of the coelocanth genome, who says: "Evolutionarily speaking, we are sarcopterygian fish." Sarcopterygians include the lungfish, coelacanth, and "evolutionarily speaking," tetrapods like you and me.

Is Meyer right? According to the NYT, there are two main pieces of relevant evidence. First, the coelocanth has "one gene that is related to those that, in animal species, build the placenta," and "[t]his gene could have been developed by land animals into a way of constructing the placenta."

The real story isn't quite that interesting. According to the Nature paper, a particular region of DNA associated with a Hox gene cluster in the coelocanth genome showed sequence homology with a stretch of Hox gene-related DNA in tetrapods. Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was found between Hox-gene-associated DNA across these organisms isn't very surprising. The authors aren't sure exactly what this particular segment of DNA does, though it's probably a promoter region. In mice the corresponding homologous region is associated with Hox genes that are important for forming the placenta. Ergo, we've solved the mystery of how the placenta evolved. Right?

Not really. Again, all that was found was a little homologous promoter region in Hox-gene related DNA in these two types of organisms. Given that we don't even understand exactly what these genes do or how they work, obviously the study offered no discussion of what mutations might have provided an evolutionary advantage. No evolutionary pathway was proposed, or even discussed. So there's not much meat to this story, other than a nice little region of homology between two shared, functional pieces of Hox-gene-related DNA. But of course, such shared functional DNA could be the result of common design and need not indicate common descent or Darwinian evolution.

The NY Times goes on, offering the second piece of evidence: "Another helpful preadaptation is a snippet of DNA that enhances the activity of the genes that drive the formation of limbs in the embryo." When they inserted this enhancer into mice, according to Neil Shubin, "It lit up right away and made an almost normal limb."

What's that he said? "Preadaptation"? Darwinian evolution isn't supposed to have any goals, so whenever I see that term I get suspicious that there's something non-Darwinian going on. So long as we're discussing the coelacanth's supposed "preadaptation" for life on the land, consider what vertebrate paleontologist Barbara Stahl wrote about coelacanth anatomy:

[T]he modern coelocanth shows no evidence of having ... internal organs preadapted for use in a terrestrial environment. The outpocketing of the gut that serves as a lung in land animals is present but vestigial in Latimeria. The vein that drains its wall returns blood not to the left side of the heart as it does in all tetrapods but to the sinos venosus at the back of the heart as it does directly or indirectly in all osteicthyans except lungfishes. The heart is characteristically fish-like in showing no sign of division into left and right sides, and the gut, with its spiral-valved intestine, is of a type common to all fishes except the most advanced ray-fins.

At one time, paleontologists thought that coelocanths, like air-breathing tetrapods, had nasal passages that opened into the mouth cavity, but dissection of Latimeria disroved that idea. Despite their fleshy fins, the coelocanths were no nearer the ancestral stock of land vertebrates than the dipnoans, fishes in which internal nares, or choanae, were also shown to be nonexistent.

(Barbara J. Stahl, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, p. 146 (Dover Publications, 1985).)

The coelocanth's anatomy doesn't make a very compelling case for "preadaptation" for land-based life, but the NY Times story about genetic "preadaptation" isn't very compelling either. Here's what they really found.

An enhancer is a short stretch of DNA that helps to enhance transcription of a gene by serving as an attachment point for proteins that are involved in recruiting RNA polymerase II, and various transcription factors necessary to transcribe the gene into RNA. The study found that an enhancer for a Hox gene involved in fin-development in coelocanths has sequence homology with an enhancer associated with a Hox gene involved in limb-development in mice. When the investigators inserted the coelocanth enhancer into the mouse, the mouse apparently grew what Neil Shubin called an "almost normal limb."

Actually, the technical paper didn't report the growth of any limbs -- whether "almost normal" or totally normal -- but rather only a "limb bud." But that's just a detail -- because even if a limb had grown, this wouldn't mean much for Darwinian evolution.

Again, it's well known that Hox genes are conserved throughout most vertebrates, including fish (like the coelacanth) and tetrapods (like mice). In this case, the genetically homologous enhancer in the two organisms seems to have had a similar, homologous function as well: in coelacanth it enhanced a Hox gene for building fins, and in mice it enhanced a Hox gene for building limbs. This similarity of function and genetic role makes it unsurprising that that these enhancers had a similar DNA sequence. The similarity of function, genetic role, and DNA sequence is thus interesting, but it's not overly surprising to find that it sort of worked when inserted in a mouse.

But what's evolution got to do with any of this? The experiment worked because of functional and genetic similarities between the coelacanth enchancer and the mouse enchancer. Once again, such similarities of sequence and function could be explained by common design and don't necessarily tell us much about common descent.

Inconvenient Immunoglobulin Data

So what are we to make of the NY Times's statement that "the coelacanth is more closely related to people than to other fish" or that "we are sarcopterygian fish"? Well, the article didn't mention one important piece of evidence from the coelocanth genome that contradicts those claims.

According to the  study in Nature, "The fish [coelocanth] is the first vertebrate found to lack genes for immunoglobulin-M [IgM], an almost universal immune-system protein." That's a bit weird, but it gets much weirder. According to the technical paper:

IgM genes cannot be found in coelacanth, despite an exhaustive search of the coelacanth sequence data, and even though all other major components of the immune system are present. Instead, we found two IgW genes; immunoglobulin genes that are found only in lungfish and cartilaginous fish and are believed to have originated in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates but subsequently lost in teleosts and tetrapods.

(Amemiya et al., "The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution," Nature, Vol. 496:311-316 (April 18, 2013) (internal citations omitted).)

This means that if we were to construct a phylogenetic tree of vertebrates based upon the IgW gene, we would get a bizarre tree that dramatically conflicts with the standard vertebrate tree. To understand why, let's first look at the standard vertebrate phylogeny, shown in the Nature paper:

Figure A: Reprinted from Figure 1, Amemiya et al., "The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution," Nature, Vol. 496:311-316 (April 18, 2013). Image used under a Creative Commons license, Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5. Usage not intended to imply endorsement by the authors/creators of the image.

This standard phylogeny could be simplified to look something like this:

Figure B: A simplified version of the standard vertebrate phylogeny.

But according to the IgW data, very roughly speaking, the vertebrate phylogeny should look something like this:



Figure C: A very rough sketch of what the vertebrate phylogeny might look like based upon the IgW gene.

Compare Figures B and C. Do you see the difference? In the standard phylogeny (Figure B), tetrapods (like you and me) are much more closely related to the coelocanth or lungfish than we are to ray-finned fish (like the goldfish). But in an IgW-based tree (Figure C), tetrapods should be much more closely related to goldfish than to the coelocanth or the lungfish. That's startling and unexpected -- if you're a proponent of common descent.

How does the Nature paper explain this phylogenetically incongruent data? In the passage I cited above, their explanation is that "immunoglobulin genes that are found only in lungfish and cartilaginous fish and are believed to have originated in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates but subsequently lost in teleosts and tetrapods."

Of course this requires some extremely unparsimonious and unlikely events. Since IgW is found in vertebrates as diverse as lungfish and cartilaginous fish (e.g., sharks), a Darwinian evolutionary view would infer that the gene for IgW was present in the ancestor of all jawed vertebrates. If so, then IgW must have stuck around in vertebrates long enough to end up in the sarcopterygian line. But somehow evolutionary theory must explain why tetrapods and all teleosts lack this gene.

Perhaps the loss of IgW in tetrapods isn't very hard to explain -- maybe IgW was lost in the early stages of the line that branched off other sarcopterygians and led to tetrapods.

But with teleosts, this story is much harder to believe. According to the standard evolutionary account, this ancient group of vertebrates diverged and began to diversify before the sarcopterygians (lungfish, coelocanths, and ultimately tetrapods) branched off. Since lungfish and coelocanths have IgW, somehow IgW was lost in all known teleosts, independently, and after the line that led to sarcopterygians branched off, so that today all teleosts lack this gene.

This highly unparsimonous evolutionary story is the only way (and the way the Nature paper chooses) to explain why teleosts and tetrapods lack IgW, but lungfish and coelacanths don't. A more straightforward and plausible account of vertebrate relationships would suggest a phylogeny (Figure C) that's quite incompatible with the standard vertebrate phylogeny.

No wonder the New York Times decided not to mention this inconvenient data point that has emerged from the coeolocanth genome: it suggests the coelacanth is NOT "more closely related to people than to other fish," and that "we are" -- yes, big surprise -- NOT "sarcopterygian fish."

One Darwinian gatekeeper's journey to the 'dark side'

irreducibly complex and undeniably designed.

To Make a Baby Requires Intelligent Design
Geoffrey Simmons

Like a well-written, trillion-page novel, every micro-step, every macro-step, every twist and turn of our development follows a master plan. Any deviation, at least early on, from the blueprint would be like building a skyscraper and leaving out important parts of a first floor. Trillions of coordinated actions are linked together in time and space to create a human being. Quadrillions of very specific chemical reactions happen in sequence and/or in tandem.

Everything is perfectly timed. Virtually nothing is left to chance. Intelligent design requires intelligent planning.

From a Single Cell

The single cell (a zygote), formed by the union of the egg and sperm, becomes a 15 trillion-cell individual in a matter of nine months with amazing precision and speed. That includes over tens of thousands divisions per second with a greater than 99.99 percent rate of accuracy. By the 16th day the heart starts beating. By 30 days, the embryo will have grown to 10,000 times the size of the fertilized egg. At seven weeks the unborn child is an inch long and has developed all organs (e.g., liver, sex organs, spleen, intestine). At eight weeks, fingerprints and toe-prints can be found and the brain and spinal cord are clearly present. At a specific time, 250,000 neurons (nerve cells) migrate (climb, crawl, swim, slide, squeeze by) every minute to designated places with distinct purpose(s) within the brain. Compared to their size, the distances traveled by some can be compared to humans walking many miles. Noted the 15 trillion will become 75 trillion by adulthood.

At twelve weeks vocal cords show up, but because the lung are still filled with amniotic fluid and not air, a voice and breathing are absent. At four months ultrasound can show the baby sucking its thumbs and playing with its umbilical cord. Between 18 and 20 weeks the senses for pain are mature, virtually the same as they will be at birth. Studies show babies withdrawing their feet in response to irritating stimuli.

A few premature babies at around 23-24 weeks can survive in a neonatal intensive care unit. At 24 weeks, ultrasound can show the baby smiling. At twenty-eight weeks, a baby will track a moving light, such as a flashlight, held against the mom’s belly. Somewhere in this period, the baby learns to recognize her mother’s voice.

Time to Greet the World

When the baby decides it’s time to greet the world, she sends millions of messenger chemicals to the mother’s brain saying, “I’m ready. How about hitting the START button?” Mom’s brain then floods the womb with a different set of chemical messages telling all cells there to start the warm-up process. That mostly means contractions. There’s a shifting and aiming of the baby’s head downward and the placenta is notified to start loosening its grip. Of note, by this time, the uterus is 5 times its usual size, has a capacity of 500 times normal, and weighs in at 15 times heavier. It will return to normal size within a week, but it takes another month or so for complete healing.

The start-up contractions are called false or Braxton Hicks contractions; about this time a small amount of amniotic fluid leaks occurs (“my water broke”). The first contractions are variable in timing and usually mild, but that soon changes to closer timing and increasing intensity (pain). Pressure also comes from the sides of the uterus to line up the baby. An extremely thinned uterus does the pushing.

The baby has to exit to the outside world through the cervix which normally looks a little like a soft, pink bottle cap with a tiny hole in the middle (where the Pap test is done). This opening will slowly dilate to ten centimeters (4.5 inches) before the baby can begin its outward journey.  As it moves, its head fits inside (“engages”) the canal, facing sideways. Sideways is critical. The passageway through the bony pelvis is not wide enough to accommodate our large head (and large brain). FYI: The great apes don’t have this problem. Despite their size, their brains are considerably smaller.

No Room for Experimenting

Four percent of the time, the baby presents feet first or breech. The reason for this is unknown.

The instant the baby passes out of the womb, chemical messages tell the baby’s brain to start the lungs breathing.  There’s no obvious ON switch, START button  or pull cord, but some critical mechanism(s) has to exist. Perhaps, it’s temperature change, air pressure change, and/or the hint of oxygen tickling the baby’s nose. We don’t know, but this messaging is obviously critical. A swat on the butt is more for the movies. If breathing starts too soon, the baby dies of asphyxiation; if too late, the baby incurs brain damage or dies of hypoxia (low oxygen). The decision to start breathing happens in a matter of seconds. It has to be exactly timed. Childbirth has always been this way.

There’s no room here for nature to have experimented.

On occasion, an unborn child will linger part way through the birth canal for hours, even days, especially with the mom’s first pregnancy, yet the baby remains quite stable, without a need to breathe.

By Survival of the Fittest?

At the time of birth, the newborn’s blood, which had been circumventing the lungs for nine months (there was no reason to breathe), must immediately go through lungs to absorb oxygen. There’s a very interesting trick (or change) that happens promptly after birth. A valve-like artery (ductus arteriosus) that was used to bypass the previously dormant lungs (since oxygen came from the mom via the placenta) closes off while the arteries to the lungs become functional.  The lungs’ tissues are ready to roll. The timing has to be exact. The rare baby who survives the non-complete closure of the ductus will need urgent surgery to close off this artery.

The birth of a baby could not have come about by survival of fittest, which is to say, by nature’s experimentation or trial and error. Mutation would have made things more dangerous. Intelligent planning is seen throughout.

Yet more on the Darwinism of the gaps fallacy.

Denis Lamoureux on the God-of-the-Gaps Fallacy
Brian Miller

I previously pointed out the dangers of Denis Lamoureux’s proposed synthesis between Darwinian evolution and religious belief. Today, I will correct his error that arguments for design in life fall into what is referred to as the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. The basic claim is that people of faith, particularly Christians, have often argued that some phenomenon which was not currently understood in nature (e.g., the complex motion of the planets) could only be explained by God’s direct intervention. They were in effect inserting God into the gaps of the current scientific understanding. However, future discoveries eventually demonstrated how natural processes explained the phenomenon, thus obviating the need for God. Therefore, scientists should not make the same mistake today by arguing that many features of life appear designed. For, in the future evolutionary explanations will inevitably explain what was once attributed to a designer. 

This argument appears compelling at first, but it actually demonstrates a misunderstanding of trends in scientific discovery over the past several decades. 

The God-of-the-gaps fallacy has only applied to natural processes related to common matter and energy. It has never applied to life. Living systems and their components represent arrangements of molecules that cannot be comprehended primarily in terms of their physical and chemical properties any more than the arrangement of parts in a car can be understood in terms of the material properties of metal, rubber, and glass. Instead, they can only be fully understood in relation to the purposeful functions they were designed to perform. As a consequence, attempts to explain the origin and development of life purely in terms of natural processes have constantly fallen into the materialism-of-the-gaps fallacy — evolutionary and other materialist narratives that seem plausible at first consistently topple as science advances.  

Origin of Life

The trend is perhaps most pronounced in origin of life research. Advances in organic synthetic chemistry have increasingly demonstrated the implausibility of any undirected process on the early earth producing life’s complex building blocks. And, nearly every step in the development of the first cell appears increasingly intractable as the underlying physics and chemistry are better understood. For instance, the forming of a functional cell membrane had long been assumed to be one of the easiest steps, but it now represents yet another insurmountable hurdle. At an even more foundational level, the thermodynamic challenges have grown increasingly problematic with advances in our understanding of non-equilibrium systems. The obstacles now appear so severe that arguing for a purely materialist account for life’s origin represents a modern day version of the quest for a perpetual motion machine

Evolutionary Narratives

Similarly, attempts to envision evolutionary narratives for the appearance of complex adaptations consistently collapse with advances in our understanding of the underlying biology. For instance, biologists once claimed that they had constructed for the evolution of the vertebrate eye a “detailed step-by-step” description. However, each stage in this cartoonish story proved increasingly implausible with new discoveries in the developmental biology of eye formation. For instance, the undirected origin of the lens requires a series of initial mutations to allocate undifferentiated tissue in front of the photoreceptors. This tissue must have then accumulated more mutations to eventually evolve into a fully functional lens. However, the tissue’s first appearance would have severely degraded the animal’s vision, so the  early mutations would have been strongly selected against and quickly removed from the population. 

In addition, the lens would not have become even marginally functional until a complex network of developmental genes emerged to complete its formation. Such a feat would have required hundreds of coordinated mutations, not to mention numerous changes beyond the developmental network, yet the allowable time would have been sufficient for only two or three,even if negative selection were ignored. Therefore, accumulating even a tiny fraction of the needed changes in a feasible timeframe would have been next to impossible. Other evolutionary scenarios for major transformations also fail upon similar analyses. Those which seem plausible only do so because the underlying biology is not well understood, or simply ignored, and rigorous mathematical calculations of required time scales have been avoided.  

Fossil Record

Evolutionary theory has also faced increasing challenges from the fossil record. Even if one assumed that common ancestry were true, the timescale allowed by the record for the appearance of new complex innovations has typically decreased to within geological instances. In addition, once a species appears, it remains essentially the same throughout its tenure on earth. This pattern is most clearly seen where the fossil record is most complete. Copious documentation of these trends was collected by Walter ReMine in his book The Biotic Message. One particularly illustrative example is from Derek Ager’s The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (Ager, pp. 16-17, as cited in ReMine, p. 314):  

Peregrinella … is one of the most distinctive brachiopods in the whole record and it has internal structures which make it clear that none of the abundant brachiopods in the strata above or below could possibly be classified as even distant relations. …. In other words, we have fossils that just suddenly appear around the world at one moment in geological history and ‘whence, and whither flown again, who knows’? … the Mesozoic brachiopods are now very thoroughly documented in every stage and the relations of these large and distinctive forms can hardly have been missed.

The most dramatic conflict between evolutionary theory and reality is the sudden appearance of new animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion. The only cogent attempt to explain this event was presented by paleontologist Charles Marshall and his colleagues. They recognized that the transformation of body plans required the rewiring of the genetic networks which controlled the animals’ embryological development. They also understood that such changes were impossible in modern organisms. In response to these facts, they proposed that animals ancestral to each phyla had genetic networks of a completely different nature from today in that they were far more malleable. As a result, animals could transform dramatically though alterations in these networks without harm. After sudden changes occurred in each branch of the tree, the genetic networks in every phylum uniformly transformed into the unchangeable forms we see today. 

The charm of this model is that it is almost completely untestable since it revolves around groups of organisms which left no trace in the fossil record. It also has to make several rather dubious ad hoc conjectures which could never be verified. However, it does rely on one key assumption which can be studied. Namely, the model presupposes that the development of a new phylum of animal does not require large numbers of new genes, and that that claim has been disproven. Consequently, the fact that enormous amounts of information appeared suddenly in the origin of most animal phylapoints clearly to intelligent design since its production is only possible through a mind. 

Most design critics ignore the data mentioned above and instead attempt to defend evolutionary theory by using groups of organisms where the evidence is considerably less complete and atypical (e.g., whale series). In these cases, the gaps in evolutionists’ knowledge provide room for their imaginations to project their assumptions unto the data. Namely, they infer that groups of species/genera are connected through the gradual branching of an evolutionary tree. The challenge is that the presumed tree has no basis in reality. Even common icons such as the whale series do not represent clear ancestor-descendant relationships, but each “transitional link” is simply assumed to reside on a branch of a hypothetical tree near other links on neighboring branches. The animals are believed to be closely related due to similarities in their traits. The problem is that mounting evidence has demonstrated that similarities of every type between different groups of organisms are not reliable indicators of common ancestry. For, the similarities do not imply a consistent evolutionary tree engineer or computer programmer implementing common design modules to meet similar goals. 

Imperfection-of-the-Gaps Fallacy

Another error perpetrated by many evolutionists comes when they encounter some feature of life where the design logic is not immediately obvious. They often claim that such features represent examples of poor design which no competent engineer would have created. Such claims have constantly fallen into the imperfection-of-the-gaps fallacy. The perception of poor design simply reflected a lack in understanding of the underlying biology or ignorance of engineering principles. As biologists or engineers more carefully studied the features, they consistently came to recognize that they represented exceptional design.For instance, biologists in the 19th century identified dozens of what were then believed to be useless organs in the human body. Nearly all have since been shown to be fully functional. Recent examples include the appendix, tonsils, and the tail bone (coccyx). Other refuted examples of poor design include many examples of junk DNA, the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye, the laryngeal nerve, the panda’s thumb, and pelvic bones in whales. Some examples of currently suboptimal design might exist due to their having degraded over time from deleterious mutations, but such examples no more refute the argument for design in life than rust on a car argues for it being the product of a tornado moving through a junk yard. In reality, the more biology and engineering advance, the more the evidence for design in life increases.     

False Understanding of Nature

Denis Lamoureux’s invoking the god-of-the-gaps argument reflects a false understanding of nature. He conceives of the universe as a well-designed clock that should not need continuous rewinding. A more accurate metaphor is that the universe is like a musical instrument that was designed to interact with its designer. Specifically, our universe was wonderfully engineered to sustain life, but it was also designed to later manifest infusions of information in the origin of the first cell and in the later appearance of complex innovations. This choice for the structure of the cosmos has one particularly important advantage. If the universe were designed to generate and radically transform life, the information required for the first cell and later innovations would have needed to have been built into the laws of physics. The laws would have then been so complicated and intractable that the development of science would have been impossible. 

Lamoureux laments that people of faith would desire to construct sophisticated arguments from science to demonstrate the existence of God. In one sense he has a point. The evidence from life for an intelligent cause is so clear that anyone should recognize it with little effort. Unfortunately, typical science education often conditions the mind to suppress that reality. Attempting to see design then becomes like an art patron who lost nearly all of his or her vision attempting to appreciate an impressionist painting from a distance. The rigorous design arguments function analogously to high-powered glasses that help restore normal vision. Naturally, people who have completely lost their sight or the desire to see altogether will not appreciate such assistance. However, they should not attempt to rob others of the opportunity

Design denial crashes into a brick wall or former atheist confronts his selective scepticism.

The brick wall
January 1, 2016 Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design

I’ve had a very interesting night. After watching Dr. David Wood (a Christian apologist and former atheist) and skeptic John Loftus (an atheist and former Christian preacher) debate whether Jesus rose from the dead in a very lively exchange, I decided to have a look at David Wood’s fascinating but very disturbing conversion story (WARNING: Do NOT watch this with children in the room!) At one point in the video (20:38), David Wood describes how several things combined to destabilize his entire atheistic belief system. The first was the argument from design:

First, what’s called the design argument finally hit me. I was looking at a wall, and how the bricks were arranged, and I thought to myself: “You know, if someone told me that these bricks went into this order by some process that didn’t involve intelligence, I’d smack him in the mouth. And yet I believe that life formed without intelligence, when the most basic living cell is unimaginably more complicated than some bricks stacked on a wall.” Why did I blindly accept the extraordinary claim that life arose spontaneously from non-life without demanding some very good evidence?

David Wood’s argument is not directed at unguided evolution, but at abiogenesis, so the standard reply that an organism is not like a wall (or a watch, for that matter) because it can reproduce, is beside the point. What we are talking about here is the origin of the first living thing that could reproduce.

Now, if I were an atheist, I might respond to David Wood’s argument as follows: “Maybe even the most basic living cells today are far, far more complicated than the first self-replicating molecule was. And maybe the first self-replicator was simple enough to have originated spontaneously on the primordial Earth, by an unguided process, over a period of hundreds of millions of years. And once it originated, it could have evolved into bacteria and other living organisms.”

I might say that, but the problem is that:

(a) there’s not a smidgen of evidence for the existence of these primitive self-replicators;

(b) there’s also no evidence that even a primitive self-replicator could have evolved within the time available;

(c) peer-reviewed calculations by a senior evolutionary biologist suggest that the origin of the simplest possible life-form – a “a coupled replication-translation system” – on the primordial Earth would have been a fantastically improbable event, even over a period of billions of years;

(d) we have no evidence that such a primitive life-form could have evolved into the kinds of cells that we find on Earth today;

(e) while someone might invoke the multiverse to beat the overwhelming odds against abiogenesis, there are also universes out there in which brick walls form spontaneously, too – yet we don’t go around saying that design inferences for brick walls; and

(f) in any case, there are good scientific arguments against the existence of an infinite multiverse.

Finally, Dr. David Wood does not present his design argument as a knock-down demonstration. The question he posed was: “Why did I blindly accept the extraordinary claim that life arose spontaneously from non-life without demanding some very good evidence?” Right now, we have no evidence for abiogenesis, let alone very good evidence.

So my question for readers today is: what do you think of David Wood’s “brick wall” design argument?

The new wild west?

Mass Human Cloning May Soon Be Upon Us
Wesley J. Smith

Human cloning has been accomplished, but the field remains generally stalled because of a shortage of human eggs — one needed per cloning attempt — and eggs for use in research are hard to come by.


That impediment may soon be overcome. Scientists have changed human blood cells into immature egg cells. The next steps should go even farther, eventually allowing for the eventual mass lab-creation of eggs capable of being fertilized or used in cloning.. From the Motherboard story:

The eggs produced by [Mitinori] Saitou and his colleagues are far too immature to be fertilized, much less grow into a human child. Still, they open the door for babies made from the genetic material of relatives, dead or alive. They could also provide a way for infertile people or same-sex partners to produce a child made from their own DNA.


The next step, according to the researchers, is to apply a similar process to the production of human sperm and to create egg cells that are mature enough to be fertilized. This will not only require a lot more research, but creating viable human eggs in a lab is also sure to be incredibly controversial.

Ya think?

And Here’s the Thing

It isn’t just eggs and cloning. Biotechnology researchers are creating the most powerful technologies invented since the splitting of the atom. For example:

CRISPR allows any cell or life form to be genetically engineered, potentially used in life-saving genetic therapies or the unleashing of a genetically altered viral pandemic.
Three parent embryos are being created in labs to be brought to birth.
Artificial life forms are being created with no predicate in creation or evolution.
Researchers are putting human stem cells into mouse brains and making other forms of chimeric lab animals.
The list goes on and on.


Yet, there are few concerted national and international discussions outside the research community to find ways to govern these experiments or to draw firm boundary lines. Indeed, other than some government funding restrictions, scientists are generally ethically bound only by their own consciences. That is unacceptable.

Missing: A Systematic Ethical Conversation

George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics attempted to carry on a systematic ethical conversation about these crucial issues. But the Council was roundly attacked in the media and among mainstream bioethicists for daring to have a conservative perspective and, as a consequence, much of its intellectually sterling work is too often ignored.

Time and scientists wait for no one! Yet our leaders dither. There is no serious discussion that I can discern within the current Administration about gathering a bioethics/biotechnology advisory council together.

We need a robust societal debate, led, I believe, by a council with members holding various, even conflicting, ethical and political perspectives — I call it a populist bioethics council — to duke it out publicly. Nothing attracts media attention or public interest like a good policy donnybrook, out of which we can hope to achieve at least some policy and societal consensuses.


It’s time to focus! Anything goes, or leaving our biotechnological future “up to the experts,” is not a wise or sustainable approach.

A clash of Titans.LXXVI

Bad design or bad logic?

Critic of Intelligent Design Acknowledges: “Bad Design” Arguments Don’t Work
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

It’s good to be able to report progress. Nathan Lents, whose name you’re probably tired of hearing, wrote a Wall Street Journal article and a whole book

themed on the idea of “poor design” in the human body. In the book, he included one section about the sinuses and their supposedly “suboptimal design” (pp. 8-13). Lents is a biologist and college professor who, to judge from the language he used in fighting this out with us, apparently didn’t know some basic terminology about the anatomy of the sinuses.

Writing here, here, here, and here,neuroscientist Michael Egnor responded to Lents on a range of topics, which to me seemed like a proper job of “shellacking” Professor Lents, as I wrote in a tweet. Lents was still smarting about that when he agreed to participate in a forum at the Peaceful Science blog administered by computational biologist Josh Swamidass. To make a long story short, Lents accused Egnor of making an elementary error and refusing to acknowledge it. But But Evolution News demonstrated that it was Lents, not Egnor, who was wrong. It was not a matter of opinion or interpretation.

A Mere Quibble?

Now Swamidass, a prominent critic of intelligent design, acknowledges as much. See, “Who Is Right About Sinuses?” So does Lents, while nevertheless brushing off the whole matter as a quibble over terminology: “They did correctly [point] out one mistake I made in terminology, which they make a huge deal out of, and which I have corrected in the text below.” So when he thought he had caught an unacknowledged error on our end, it was a big deal. Now, it’s not. Hey, why fuss about a bit of mistaken terminology? Well, it wasn’t anyone around here who wrote a section of a book, asserting the poor design of the human sinuses, only to have it shown that we didn’t understand that “the maxillary sinus is in fact one of the paranasal sinuses.”

A small point? You decide. But this is interesting. As Swamidass notes, the argument from “bad design” is commonplace, however as he goes on to say, it’s also invalid.

    Though it is not the focus or precise argument of his book, Dr. Lents is often making a “bad design” argument for evolution. This is a common argument offered to support evolution, and Dr. Lents is certainly not the first to make it.

Having recognized that Dr. Lents holds to a very common view, I confess that I do not personally think the bad design argument is valid. In my view, it mistakes the quirks and “seams” in our body as errors, and makes a theological argument that extends beyond science. In contrast with the bad design argument, I prefer to insist science remain neutral and silent on theological arguments such as these, and see these quirks as biological mysteries that often reveal evidence of common descent, and non-intuitive details of how our bodies work. I know I may be in the minority among biologists in disputing the bad design argument, but I hope that could shift in the future. Nothing intrinsic to evolutionary science requires us to make those arguments. 

     Very good — I like the language about “seams.” I am looking right now at the sweater I’m wearing, and it too has “seams” while at the same time reflecting someone’s intelligent design. Thank you, Dr. Swamidass!

Swamidass adds, “Though the acrimony is not necessary, it is not surprising. These are the grand questions we are facing, and they are important.” Yes, they are both grand and important. Speaking only for myself, though, I think the reason for the “acrimony” is that ID scientists are routinely misrepresented, to malign, dismiss, and often to harm them professionally. This pressure to conform or be punished comes from both named opponents and unnamed ones (e.g., Wikipedia editors). Evolutionists face no parallel dynamic.

I do not like to see that happen to respected colleagues. Using the medium we have available to us to forcefully resist these efforts is not only “not surprising.” It’s the correct thing to do.

    

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The universe finetuned for furries?

Was Universe Designed for Hairy-Nosed Wombats?
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Professor David Barash of the University of Washington is an evolutionary biologist known for delivering a yearly talk to his students disabusing them of the idea that science can reasonably be reconciled with religious faith. He boasted about this in the New York Times. He calls it The Talk.

Writing today over at Aeon, he offers an essay on “Anthropic arrogance,” arguing that, “Claims that the Universe is designed for humans raise far more troubling questions than they can possibly answer.” He begins by cracking wise.

Welcome to the ‘anthropic principle’, a kind of Goldilocks phenomenon or ‘intelligent design’ for the whole Universe. It’s easy to describe, but difficult to categorise: it might be a scientific question, a philosophical concept, a religious argument — or some combination. The anthropic principle holds that if such phenomena as the gravitational constant, the exact electric charge on the proton, the mass of electrons and neutrons, and a number of other deep characteristics of the Universe differed at all, human life would be impossible. According to its proponents, the Universe is fine-tuned for human life.

This raises more than a few questions. For one, who was the presumed cosmic dial-twiddler? (Obvious answer, for those so inclined: God.) Second, what’s the basis for presuming that the key physical constants in such a Universe have been fine-tuned for us and not to ultimately give rise to the hairy-nosed wombats of Australia, or maybe the bacteria and viruses that outnumber us by many orders of magnitude? In Douglas Adams’s antic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), mice are ‘hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings’ who are responsible for the creation of the Earth. What if the Universe isn’t so much anthropic as mouse-thropic, and the appearance and proliferation of Homo sapiens was an unanticipated side effect, a ‘collateral benefit’?

Did I say he cracks “wise”? Wrong word.

A Puerile Challenge

This is well-timed because Ann Gauger’s beautiful essay this morning, “Beyond Adapation: The Human Brain Is Something New,” answers the puerile challenge very nicely. In a universe “designed” for mice or hairy-nosed wombats (which, by the way, are a lot cuter than they sound) it would be mice or wombats writing poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The human brain, whether you believe it channels the soul or not, is undoubtedly unique in the world of life.

With our brains we write music, dance the ballet, paint landscapes, play chess, and do theoretical physics. We send men to the moon and then bring them back. We contemplate our origin, what and who we are, and give thanks. Non-human primates [like wombats and mice] don’t do these things. Furthermore, these abilities far exceed what is needed for survival, and at least in the case of theoretical physics and traveling to the moon, are not useful for finding true love. The verdict on chess is still out.

The key point that Gauger makes is that of all the exceptional things that humans can do with our minds, the most exceptional are not explained by adaptation, and so can’t be explained by the evolutionary biology that Dr. Barash teaches. 

Yes, “bacteria and viruses…outnumber us by many orders of magnitude,” but I’m not able to see the sense or wisdom in privileging sheer numbers as a mark of cosmic significance over, for example, the utterly exceptional ability — unique in the universe, as far as we know — of a human being to say and mean, “Thank you.”