Speciation vs. Darwinism.

Top Scientific Problems with Evolution: Speciation

Jonathan Wells

 

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by biologist Jonathan Wells on the top scientific problems with evolution. This is the seventh entry in the series, excerpted from the new book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here.

We know that speciation has occurred because many new species have appeared in the history of life. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote, “Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution.”¹ According to evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma, speciation “is the sine qua non of diversity” required for evolution. Speciation “stands at the border between microevolution — the genetic changes within and among populations — and macroevolution.”²

But How Does Speciation Occur? 

Part of the problem is that the term species is notoriously difficult to define. A definition applicable to plants and animals won’t necessarily work for bacteria, and definitions applicable to living things won’t necessarily work for fossils. As of 2004, several dozen definitions were in use among biologists and paleontologists.³ The definition most often used by evolutionary biologists is the “biological species concept,” according to which species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.⁴

If species are defined this way, then in one sense speciation has been observed in the laboratory. Normally when two different species hybridize, either naturally or artificially, the hybrids are sterile because the maternal and paternal chromosomes are too dissimilar and cannot pair up in cell division. Occasionally, however, the hybrid undergoes chromosome doubling, or polyploidy. With matching sets of chromosomes that can undergo cell division, the hybrid may then be fertile and constitute a new species under the biological species concept. In the first decades of the 20th century, Swedish scientist Arne Müntzing used two plant species to make a hybrid that underwent chromosome doubling to produce hempnettle, a member of the mint family that had already been found in nature.⁵

Speciation by polyploidy is called secondary speciation to distinguish it from primary speciation — the splitting of one species into two. According to Douglas Futuyma, polyploidy “does not confer major new morphological characteristics…[and] does not cause the evolution of new genera” or higher levels in the biological hierarchy.⁶ So although secondary speciation by polyploidy has been observed in flowering plants, it is not the solution to Darwin’s problem. The solution would be primary speciation by variation and selection, which has not been observed.

Darwin and Incipient Species

In 1940, geneticist Richard Goldschmidt argued that “the facts of microevolution do not suffice for an understanding of macroevolution.” He concluded, “Microevolution does not lead beyond the confines of the species, and the typical products of microevolution, the geographic races, are not incipient species.”⁷

Darwin used the term incipient species to refer to a variety of one species he thought was in the process of becoming a new species: “I believe a well-marked variety may be justly called an incipient species.”⁸ But how can we possibly know whether two varieties (or races) are in the process of becoming separate species? Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas are two varieties of the dog species (Canis lupis familiaris) that, for anatomical reasons, do not interbreed naturally. Are they on their way to becoming separate species? The Ainu people of northern Japan and the !Kung of southern Africa are members of the human species (Homo sapiens sapiens). Although people from both groups could undoubtedly interbreed, without modern technology, which affords mass movement of people around the globe, they would be (for all practical purposes) reproductively isolated geographically, linguistically, and culturally. Are they therefore incipient species? Clearly, Darwin’s term incipient species is a theoretical prediction, not evidence.

Origin of a New Species?

We sometime read in the news media that scientists have finally observed the origin of a new species. Such cases, however, are invariably either examples of incipient speciation, or cases in which scientists have inferred from already-existing species how they might have split in the past.⁹ Observational evidence for primary speciation is still missing.

In 1992, evolutionary biologist Keith Stewart Thomson wrote, “A matter of unfinished business for biologists is the identification of evolution’s smoking gun,” and “the smoking gun of evolution is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations.” Before Darwin, Thomson explained, the consensus was that species can vary only within certain limits; indeed, centuries of artificial selection had seemingly demonstrated such limits experimentally. “Darwin had to show that the limits could be broken,” wrote Thomson, and “so do we.”¹⁰

In 1996, biologists Scott Gilbert, John Opitz, and Rudolf Raff wrote: 

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. 

They concluded, “The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved.”¹¹

Evidence of Primary Speciation

English bacteriologist Alan Linton went looking for evidence of primary speciation and concluded in 2001:

None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another…Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [e.g., bacterial] to eukaryotic [e.g., plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.¹²

In 2002, evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote, “Speciation, whether in the remote Galápagos, in the laboratory cages of the drosophilosophers [those who study fruit flies], or in the crowded sediments of the paleontologists, still has never been directly traced.”¹³ So evolution’s smoking gun is still missing.

Next, the concluding entry in the series, “Darwin’s One Wrong Argument.”

Notes

1. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 403.
2. Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005), 401.
3. Jerry A. Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2004), 25.
4. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 273; Coyne and Orr, Speciation, 26-35.
5. Arne Müntzing, “Cytogenetic Investigations on Synthetic Galeopsis tetrahit,” Hereditas 16 (1932), 105-154.
6. Futuyma, Evolution, 398.
7. Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 8, 396.
8. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 1st ed., 52, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=67&itemID=F373&viewtype=side (accessed August 23, 2020).
9. Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006), 52-55.
10. Keith Stewart Thomson, “Natural Selection and Evolution’s Smoking Gun,” American Scientist 85 (1997), 516-518.
11. Scott F. Gilbert, John M. Opitz, and Rudolf A. Raff, “Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology,” Developmental Biology 173 (1996), 357-372.
12. Alan H. Linton, “Scant Search for the Maker,” The Times Higher Education Supplement (April 20, 2001), Book Section, 29.
13. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 32.

Jonathan Wells

Esperanto: A brief history.

Esperanto (/ˌɛspəˈrɑːntoʊ/ or /ˌɛspəˈræntoʊ/)^[5][6] is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" (la lingvo internacia). Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Unua Libro), which he published in five languages^[a] under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto"; the word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes."^[7] Zamenhof claimed that the grammar of the language could be learned in one hour, though this estimate assumed a learner with a background in European languages.

Within the range of constructed languages, Esperanto occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" (imitating existing natural languages) and a priori (where features are not based on existing languages). Although Esperanto's vocabulary, syntax, and semantics derive predominantly from Standard Average European languages of the Indo-European group, its grammar is highly regular when compared to these languages, and as such it is considered an easy language to learn. The vocabulary derives primarily from Romance languages, with substantial contributions from Germanic languages. One of the language's most notable features is its extensive system of derivation, where prefixes and suffixes may be freely combined with roots to generate words, making it possible to communicate effectively with a smaller set of words.

Esperanto is the most successful international auxiliary language and the only such language with a population of native speakers, of which there are perhaps several thousand.^[1] Usage estimates are difficult, but two recent estimates put the number of active speakers at around 100,000.^[2] Concentration of speakers is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is used as a name for the collection of places where it is spoken. The language has also gained a noticeable presence on the internet in recent years, as it became increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo, Wikipedia and Google Translate.^[8][9] Esperanto speakers are often called "Esperantists" (Esperantistoj).

 

Designed Intelligence vs. Darwinism.

New Book, Animal Algorithms, Spells Fresh Trouble for Darwinism

Jonathan Witt@JonathanRWitt

 

In Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts author Eric Cassell explores the buzzing, migrating, web-spinning, and colony-building world of ingenious animals blessed with gobsmackingly impressive skills — in many cases, from birth. 

How do blind mound-building termites know passive heating and cooling strategies that dazzle skilled human architects? What taught the honeybee its dance, or its hive mates how to read the complex message of the dance? How do monarch butterflies known to fly thousands of miles to a single mountainside in Mexico, to a place they’ve never been before? 

The secret, according to author Eric Cassell: behavioral algorithms embedded in their tiny brains.

The Problem for Darwinists

But how did these embedded programs arise in the history of life? There’s the problem for evolutionists. “Specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and the Cambrian explosion are inexplicable from a Darwinian viewpoint,” comments Baylor University computer engineer and intelligent design theorist Robert J. Marks. “In this book, Cassell masterfully adds animal algorithms to the list.”

Several other specialists have praised the book, including an entomologist, a paleoentomologist, and a neurobiologist.

The entomologist, Malcolm Chisolm, describes it as an enjoyable read that is also very well-researched. Melissa Cain Travis, author of Science and the Mind of the Maker, calls it “a fascinating exploration,” and says, “Readers will come away with a clear understanding of why the algorithmic dances of organisms such as bees, ants, and butterflies pose an enormous challenge to the materialist evolutionary paradigm.” 

Cassell has degrees in biology and electrical engineering. Much of his professional work has focused on flight navigation systems, including GPS. He has done extensive consulting work for the FAA and NASA.

Learning from the Birds and the Bees

“I happened to read some articles about bird migration and was surprised about how they could navigate so accurately,” Cassel said in explaining what drew him into the study of animal navigation. “Having worked on aircraft navigation systems, I was intrigued to know what method the birds use.”

There was also a bee experiment from his undergraduate days. “We followed bees as they foraged in a field of flowers,” he says. “One conclusion from the experiment indicated that the bees, rather than searching for food in a random manner, were following a specific efficient strategy. That urged the question as to how an animal with such a small brain is able to do that.”

Animal Algorithms promises to delight many of Discovery Institute Press’s loyal fans as well as attract new readers — the sort who might have little interest in molecular biology and fossils but who are fascinated by the macro world of animal behavior. Cassell points to another group the book is well suited for: biologists and engineers eager to learn more about applying systems engineering principles to complex programmed animal behaviors.

Get your copy now.

Darwinism vs. The science.

 

Top Scientific Problems with Evolution: Natural Selection

Jonathan Wells

 

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by biologist Jonathan Wells on the top scientific problems with evolution. This is the fifth entry in the series, excerpted from the new book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here.

In the Introduction to On the Origin of Species Darwin wrote, “I am fully convinced that species are not immutable.” He continued, “Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.”¹

But Darwin had no evidence for natural selection. In On the Origin of Species, the best he could offer was “one or two imaginary illustrations.”² So instead of direct evidence for natural selection, Darwin (who himself bred pigeons) based his argument on domestic breeding, or what is often called artificial selection. He noted that “the breeding of domestic animals was carefully attended to in ancient times,” and that “its importance consists in the great effect produced by the accumulation in one direction, during successive generations, of differences absolutely inappreciable by an uneducated eye.”³

The Origin of Species

Yet in all the years of domestic breeding, no one ever reported the origin of a new species, much less a new organ or body plan. In the 1930s, neo-Darwinian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky used the word microevolution to refer to changes within existing species (such as those observed by domestic breeders), and the word macroevolution to refer to the origin of new species, organs, and body plans. He wrote,

There is no way toward an understanding of the mechanisms of macroevolutionary changes, which require time on a geological scale, other than through a full comprehension of the microevolutionary processes observable within the span of a human lifetime and often controlled by man’s will. For this reason we are compelled at the present level of knowledge reluctantly to put a sign of equality between the mechanisms of macro- and microevolution, and proceeding on this assumption, to push our investigations as far ahead as this working hypothesis will permit.⁴

Evidence for Natural Selection?

But a “working hypothesis” is not evidence. It wasn’t until the 1950s that British naturalist Bernard Kettlewell discovered what appeared to be the first evidence for natural selection. Peppered moths in the UK exist predominantly in two varieties: dark (“melanic”) and light. Before the 19th-century industrial revolution, melanic forms were rare or absent, but when smoke from industrial cities darkened nearby tree trunks, the melanic form became much more common. This phenomenon, called industrial melanism, was attributed to melanic moths being better camouflaged than light moths and thus less visible to predatory birds: in other words, to natural selection. 

Kettlewell captured some of each variety and marked them with a tiny spot of paint. Then he released them onto dark- or light-colored tree trunks. When he recaptured some the next day, he found that a significantly greater proportion of better-camouflaged moths survived. Kettlewell termed this this “Darwin’s missing evidence.”⁵ The story, usually illustrated with photos of light- and dark-colored peppered moths on light- and dark-colored tree trunks, was featured for decades in many biology textbooks as compelling evidence for evolution.⁶

The Habits of Peppered Moths

By the 1980s, however, it had become clear that peppered moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks in the wild. They fly by night and rest during the day in upper branches where they can’t be seen. By releasing moths onto tree trunks in the daytime, Kettlewell’s experiment failed to simulate natural conditions. It turned out that most textbook photographs had been staged by pinning dead moths on tree trunks or by placing live moths in unnatural positions and photographing them before they moved away.⁷

Better evidence for natural selection came from finches in the Galápagos Islands in the 1970s. The islands were home to what biologists listed as 13 different species of finches, and biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant and their colleagues studied one of these on a single island. The Grants and their colleagues kept detailed records of each finch species’ anatomy, including the length and depth of their beaks. When a severe drought in 1977 killed many of the islands’ plants, about 85 percent of the birds died. The Grants and their colleagues noted that the survivors had beaks that were, on average, 5 percent larger than the population average before the drought, presumably because the surviving birds were better able to crack the tough seeds left by the drought. In other words, the shift was due to natural selection. The Grants estimated that if a similar drought occurred every ten years, the birds’ beaks would continue to get larger until they would qualify as a new species in 200 years.⁸

The Arrival of the Fittest

When the drought ended and the rains returned, however, food was plentiful, and the average beak size returned to normal. No net evolution had occurred.⁹ Nevertheless, “Darwin’s finches” found their way into most biology textbooks as evidence for evolution by natural selection.¹⁰

So there is evidence for natural selection, but like domestic breeding, it has never been observed to produce anything more than microevolution. As Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1904, “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”¹¹

For the arrival of the fittest, most modern evolutionary biologists rely on mutations.

 

 

Notes

1. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 1st ed., 6, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=21&itemID=F373&viewtype=side (accessed August 23, 2020).
2. Darwin, Origin of Species, 1st ed., 90, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=105&itemID=F373&viewtype=side (accessed August 23, 2020).
3. Darwin, Origin of Species, 1st ed., 32-34, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=47&itemID=F373&viewtype=side (accessed August 23, 2020).
4. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 12.
5. H.B.D. Kettlewell, “Darwin’s missing evidence,” Scientific American 200 (1959), 48–53.
6. Jonathan Wells, “Second Thoughts About Peppered Moths: This classical story of evolution by natural selection needs revising,” The Scientist 13 (May 24, 1999), https://www.discovery.org/a/590/ (accessed August 23, 2020); Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 137-157.
7. Judith Hooper, Of Moths and Men: Intrigue, Tragedy and the Peppered Moth (London, UK: Fourth Estate, 2002); Wells, Zombie Science, 63-66.
8. Peter T. Boag and Peter R. Grant, “Intense natural selection in a population of Darwin’s finches (Geospizinae) in the Galápagos,” Science 214 (1981), 82-85.
9. H. Lisle Gibbs and Peter R. Grant, “Oscillating selection on Darwin’s finches,” Nature 327 (1987), 511-513.
10. Wells, Icons of Evolution, 159-175.
11. Hugo de Vries, Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation, 2d ed. (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press, 1906), 825-826, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7234/7234-h/7234-h.htm (accessed August 23, 2020).

 

The fossil record refuses to play nice with Darwinian apologists.

 

Fossil Follies from Around the Science Literature

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Darwin knew that the fossil record did not support his theory of gradual increase in complexity through time but hoped that new fossil discoveries would fill in the narrative. 170 years of collecting has not helped. The Cambrian explosion is perhaps the best-known mismatch, but there are others. Adding to the difficulty, different dating methods often conflict with each other.

Monkeying with the Data

It would have been convenient for evolutionists if Africa and South America had split after monkeys had evolved, but they didn’t. This left them with klutzy explanations of how Old World monkeys evolved in Africa after the split, and then got to South America to become New World monkeys. The common story now is that they rafted over on vegetation across the Atlantic — a curious speculation, considering that sea captains these days never witness monkey families rafting out in the mid-Atlantic without fresh water or food. 

In PNAS, Campbell et al. manage to pull widely different dates for two sites in eastern Peru closer together. They had to struggle, though, with disagreements between different dating methods for nearby sites. In any case, their work did not help get the monkeys across the ocean. Peru is very far inland from Brazil where a raft might have washed ashore, so time for migration must be factored in. Watching the evolutionists monkeying with the data and hiding their difficulties with euphemisms (“trans-Atlantic dispersal”) is entertaining if not pitiful.

Though anthropoids are rare in the Santa Rosa paleofauna, they are of outsized importance, as they potentially represent the oldest records of that clade in South America, and their inferred age would constrain scenariosfor the timing of the trans-Atlantic dispersal of stem platyrrhines from Africa. [Emphasis added.]

Footprints in the White Sands of Time

Speaking of America, evolutionary anthropologists will have to drastically revise the timeline of the first human arrivals in North America with the discovery of tens of thousands of human footprints, mostly of teenagers, at White Sands National Park, New Mexico. The problem is that they are being dated at 23,000 years old — about 40 percent earlier than the previous maximum date of 16,500 years for the time in which modern humans from Asia are thought to have crossed a land bridge at the Bering Strait into Alaska. (Note, too, that New Mexico is an additional 4,000 miles from the Bering Strait.) Bennett and Reynolds from Bournemouth University in the UK describe this upset in The Conversation — an upset in time as well as in expected behavior for products of evolution.

We tend to picture our ancestors engaged in life-or-death struggles — forced to battle the elements simply to survive. Yet the White Sands evidence is suggestive of a playful, relatively relaxed setting, with teenagers and children spending time together in a group.

Philosophically speaking, until now it was textbook truth that our species arrived in America not more than 16,500 years ago. If the radiocarbon dates of seeds found around the footprints are correct, the truth has evolved. When truth evolves, many connected concepts must also evolve.

The White Sands footprints provide unequivocal evidence that people were in the Americas at the height of the last glacial maximum, rather than some time after, as was previously thought. That’s a big deal for our understanding of the peopling of the Americas and the genetic composition of indigenous Americans.

The research has been published in Science by Bennett et al., “Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum.” The BBC News quotes other researchers who are flummoxed by the findings. Gary Haynes at the University of Nevada calls the tracks “provocative” since they are so far south of the Bering land bridge. Does it imply that other people crossed even earlier? Did they move across the continent quickly? Where are their descendants? Dr. Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge is even more confused.

“I can’t comment on how reliable the dating is (it is outside my expertise), but firm evidence of humans in North America 23,000 years ago is at odds with the genetics, which clearly shows a split of Native Americans from Asians approximately 15-16,000 years ago,” he told BBC News.

“This would suggest that the initial colonists of the Americas were replaced when the ice corridor formed and another wave of colonists came in. We have no idea how that happened.“

Another Instant Cambrian Predator

As noted here already, a large radiodont (related to the Cambrian predator Anomalocaris) was reported by Caron and Moysiuk in Royal Society Open Science. Named Titanokorys gainesi, it was found in the Marble Canyon area which is older than the Burgess Shale by 100,000 years. It dates at 508 million years. Titanokorys had a large head shield or carapace, raptorial appendages for digging or grasping prey, and teeth surrounding a circular mouth. Larger than some other similar species, this one could have reached 50 cm in length. Live Science shows a rotating artist conception of the impressive “helmet-headed sea monster” which was apparently a well-equipped swimming predator. The ease with which reporters ascribe magical powers to evolution needs serious correction. 

Life existed on Earth long before the Cambrian, but during the early part of that period — about 541 million to 530 million years ago — animal bodies got weird. During this boom time for evolution, known as the Cambrian explosion, species evolved and diversified at an unparalleled pace, producing creatures with daggerlike tails; spiny arms; Swiss-army-knife heads; mouths full of needles; and bodies that were so densely covered with bristles they resembled kitchen brushes.

Comb jellies (ctenophores) are also aggravating Darwin’s dilemma. Three scientists writing in The Conversation describe new specimens from Utah that are more complex than ones living today! Then they raise the hypothesis that these complex animals, with nerves, rows of bioluminescent cilia and muscles, are the first animals before sponges. After acknowledging the Cambrian explosion, they say of the Precambrian,

Before then, animals were very simple and largely microscopic, but in the geological blink of an eye, most of the modern phyla of animals (metazoans) appeared, including arthropods, molluscs and vertebrates.Ctenophores have long been thought to be near the base of the animal tree of life, resembling other primitive forms such as cnidarians (corals and jellyfish). Sponges look primitive because they lack a nervous system and organized tissues, and they only have a few cell types.

Ctenophores and cnidarians, despite their relative simplicity, are much more complex than sponges, so it was traditionally assumed that sponges were at the absolute base of the animal family tree — the “sponges-first hypothesis.”

However, some recent genomic studies have proposed that comb jellies are actually even lower on the family tree than sponges, a “ctenophores-first” hypothesis. This radical idea remains highly controversial because sponges have been assumed to be more primitive than ctenophores for more than 150 years.

Whoops, Wrong Date

For the last instance of fossil follies, an embarrassing retraction was made in the Darwinist literature that is quite comical in the scope of its correction. Not long ago, science news outlets were announcing a phenomenal find of animal burrows 1.2 billion years old — 400 million years older than the previous multicellular animal known, and nearly twice as old as the Ediacaran organisms that preceded the Cambrian explosion. Writing in New Scientist, reporter Jason Arunn Murugesu announces that the “Mystery of ancient burrows older than earliest animals has been solved.” 

By comparing the samples to other rocks and fossils in the area, and uranium-lead dating the minerals found in the burrows, the team estimated the holes were made 40 to 50 million years ago. The team found that the sandstone had subsequently hardened due to the arid conditions of the region, giving the impression that the burrows had been made much earlier than they actually were.

From 1.2 billion to 50 million years: that is some error! A correction this large, swinging from the Paleocene to the Eocene at the other end of the geological column, raises questions about scientists’ ability to interpret trace fossils. 

What should astound observers even more is the credulity of many scientists and reporters who had accepted the earlier date. Anthony Shillito at the University of Oxford called this a Darwin victory after the fact by remarking that the correction “fits much better with our current understanding of early animal evolution.” Given the ability of evolutionists to fit any data to the prevailing Darwinian narrative, one can only wonder about the degree of that “current understanding” in the first place. 

Islam: a brief history.

Islam is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion teaching that Muhammad is a messenger of God. It is the world's second-largest religion with 1.9 billion followers, or 24.9% of the world's population, known as Muslims. Muslims make up a majority of the population in 47 countries. Islam teaches that God is merciful, all-powerful, and unique, and has guided humanity through prophets, revealed scriptures, and natural signs. The primary scriptures of Islam are the Quran, believed to be the verbatim word of God, as well as the teachings and normative examples (called the sunnah, composed of accounts called hadith) of Muhammad (c. 570 – 632 CE).

Muslims believe that Islam is the complete and universal version of a primordial faith that was revealed many times before through prophets such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims consider the Quran, in Arabic, to be the unaltered and final revelation of God. Like other Abrahamic religions, Islam also teaches a final judgment with the righteous rewarded in paradise and the unrighteous punished in hell. Religious concepts and practices include the Five Pillars of Islam, which are obligatory acts of worship, as well as following Islamic law (sharia), which touches on virtually every aspect of life and society, from banking and welfare to women and the environment. The cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem are home to the three holiest sites in Islam.

From a historical point of view, Islam originated in early 7th century CE in the Arabian Peninsula, in Mecca, and by the 8th century, the Umayyad Caliphate extended from Iberia in the west to the Indus River in the east. The Islamic Golden Age refers to the period traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century, during the Abbasid Caliphate, when much of the historically Muslim world was experiencing a scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing. The expansion of the Muslim world involved various caliphates and states such as the Ottoman Empire, trade, and conversion to Islam by missionary activities (dawah).

Most Muslims are of one of two denominations: Sunni (85–90%) or Shia (10–15%). Sunni and Shia differences arose from disagreement over the succession to Muhammad and acquired broader political significance, as well as theological and juridical dimensions. About 12% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country; 31% live in South Asia, the largest percentage of Muslims in the world; 20% in the Middle East–North Africa, where it is the dominant religion; and 15% in sub-Saharan Africa. Sizable Muslim communities can also be found in the Americas, China, and Europe. Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world.

On Darwinists' attempts to disinherit a lost tribe.

 

De-Humanizing Neanderthals: A Darwinist Dog that Won’t Hunt

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

The latest Science Uprising video covers human evolution, and features geologist Casey Luskin and biologist Jonathan Wells:

For more on a specific issue touched on in the episode, check out a classic ID the Future podcast with Dr. Luskin. He tackles a neo-Darwinian assertion that theistic evolutionists Francis Collins and Karl Giberson make in The Language of Science and Faith. Giberson and Collins capitalize on the popular notion of Neanderthals as pre-human, cavemen-like beasts in order to bolster their claims for common ancestry. But what sort of common ancestry? And do experts even agree that Neanderthals were drastically different from Homo sapiens? Luskin explores the connection between Neanderthals and humans and points to the growing evidence that Neanderthals interbred with our species, buried their dead, employed technology, had a brain size equal to or even slightly larger than that of Homo sapiens, and were essentially just another race of humans. Some have attempted to use Neanderthals to help bridge the enormous gulf between humans and ape-like predecessors, but it’s increasingly clear that that dog won’t hunt. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

On the designed intelligence of the insect world's apex predator.

 

Dragonflies Make the Most of a Tiny Brain

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Picture the size of a dragonfly’s head, including its eyes and brain. For such tiny assets, one would think its capabilities would be severely limited. But powered flight? Targeting and chasing and intercepting a fast-darting prey? Never underestimate the ability of biological design to pack these feats — and more — into a tiny space. The secret lies in the engineering. Engineers routinely work with optimizing performance within constraints.

In PNAS, Sara Nicholson (Flinders University, Australia) and Karin Nordström (Uppsala University, Sweden) took a look at how dragonflies and other targeting insects achieve “Facilitation of neural responses to targets moving against optic flow.” Optic flow is just what it sounds like: optical information that flows past you when you are moving. Gamers know all about simulated optic flow. They try to stay focused on their objective when information and noise is moving around them. Think “jump to light speed” in Star Wars movies, or dodging rocks as Han Solo tries to negotiate an asteroid belt to get to a planet without getting hit. Optic flow is a major issue for flying insects, and dragonflies come well equipped to deal with it — and use it.

Nicholson and Nordström consider how insects succeed at targeting prey. Consider the noisy environment involved. Get into a dragonfly’s head, like an X-wing gunner, and visualize all the clutter in the heat of battle: enemy craft on the left and right, coming in from a distance, and pieces of debris passing above and below you. Rapid correction of pitch, yaw, and roll is required for your seat and for the craft, but this only adds to the visual confusion. Insects face an even greater challenge, because their fields of view are highly textured, and their prey is small compared to the background. The prey, moreover, is constantly darting in unpredictable directions. “Efficient target detection is a computationally challenging task,” they say, “which becomes even more difficult when done against visual clutter.”

Dragonflies (order Odonata) and hoverflies (order Diptera) are among insect flyers equipped with special neurons for targeting with optic flow.

The ability of insects to successfully pursue targets in clutter is thus remarkable and suggests a high level of optimization, making the underlying neural mechanisms interesting to study. Indeed, insects that pursue targets, including predatory dragonflies and robberflies, as well as territorial hoverflies, have higher-order neurons in the optic lobes and the descending nerve cord that are sharply tuned to the motion of small, dark targets. Target-tuned neurons often have receptive fields in the part of the compound eye that has the best optics. Target selective descending neurons (TSDNs) project to the thoracic ganglia where wing and head movements are controlled, and electrically stimulating dragonfly TSDNs leads to wing movements. Taken together, this suggests that TSDNs subserve target pursuit. However, how TSDNs respond to targets moving against translational and rotational optic flow is unknown.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

One strategy for staying on course is to keep one’s forward vision on the prey, to “lock on” to the target like fighter pilots do. (This is called “gaze stabilization.”) Another strategy is to watch for anything that moves against background. Those are helpful for initial targeting from a stationary position, but things quickly get complicated when taking flight.

However, as soon as the pursuer moves, its own movement creates self-generated widefield motion across the retina, often referred to as optic flow or background motion. In addition to self-generated optic flow, when a pursuer is subjected to involuntary deviations away from their intended flight path, for example by a gust of wind, this also generates optic flow. Quickly correcting such unplanned course deviations is essential for successfully navigating through the world.

When everything is moving — hunter, target, and background — what then? If the hunter rotates, everything in the field of vision rotates with the same angular velocity (rotational movement). If the hunter turns, by contrast, more distant objects move more slowly (translational movement). Surprisingly, many flying insects show “behavioral segregation between rotational and translational movements,” they say. “How this may influence target detection is currently not known.” Into the lab they went.

Flight Simulator

The authors put a hoverfly into a flight simulator, where they could control what kind of motion it perceived with programmed moving dots. Using electrodes, they watched the response of its TSDNs.

We found that orthogonal optic flow attenuated the TSDN target response but to a lesser degree than syn-directional optic flow. This suggests that the vector divergence between the target and the optic flow is important. Most strikingly, we found that counterdirectional optic flow increased the TSDN response to target motion, if the target moved horizontally. We found that projecting optic flow to only a small frontal portion of the eye was sufficient to elicit both TSDN attenuation and facilitation. As descending neurons control behavioral output, the response attenuation and facilitation could play a role in modulating optomotor, or gaze stabilizing corrective turns, as needed during target pursuit.

The first experiments showed that the neurons responded most strongly to counteracting optic flow: i.e., when the target was moving opposite the background optic flow. They narrowed it down further and found that frontal optic flow was “required and sufficient” to trigger TSDN response. “In summary, our results show that a small spatial window of optic flow in either the dorsal or ventral visual field is enough to strongly attenuate (Fig. 3B) or facilitate (Fig. 3C) the TSDN response to target motion.” That appears to be a clever strategy for making the most of a limited set of neurons.

This suggests that the level of vector divergence between the target and the optic flow influences the TSDN responses, so that maximum attenuation is generated at minimum vector divergence, whereas maximum facilitation is generated at maximum divergence.

Further experiments with pitch, yaw, and roll seemed to support this elegant, simple strategy. Since there are other neurons participating, though, the true picture is more complex. Further experiments altering the density of dots added some complications. Upstream small target motion detectors (STMDs) also inform the TSDNs, but in different amounts depending on the type of motion. Vector divergence from optic flow, therefore, was not enough to explain all the responses. Some neurons may inhibit other neurons in some motions but facilitate them in other motions. Further work will be required to disambiguate all the factors in play.

Nevertheless, our findings make behavioral sense. Prior to initiating target pursuit, male Eristalis hoverflies predict the flight course required to successfully intercept the target, based predominantly on the target’s angular velocity. To successfully execute an interception flight, the hoverfly turns in the direction that the target is moving. In doing so, the hoverfly creates self-generated optic flow counterdirectional to the target’s motion. In this case, the TSDNs would be facilitated, which could be beneficial. Importantly, the facilitation would take place across a range of dot densities, suggesting that even relatively sparse background textures would affect the TSDN response.

When the TSDNs are quiet, the insect can assume it is still on target with the prey. Only when contrary optic flow is perceived does the TSDN signal that a course correction is required. How head movements and wing movements factor into these rapid decisions remains to be discovered. The authors did not speculate about how these organs, neurons, and responses might have evolved.

Behold the Beast

A cover story of the IEEE Spectrum shows a magnified dragonfly head. That’s where all this processing goes on. The story, “Fast, Efficient Neural Networks Copy Dragonfly Brains,” tells how “An insect-inspired AI could make missile-defense systems more nimble.” The author, Frances Chance, works at Sandia Labs on dragonflies. Like Nicholson and Nordström., she does flight simulations but in simplified software models instead of making actual measurements on the insect’s neurons. Was a reference to evolution really necessary or helpful in her opening paragraph?

In each of our brains, 86 billion neurons work in parallel, processing inputs from senses and memories to produce the many feats of human cognition. The brains of other creatures are less broadly capable, but those animals often exhibit innate aptitudes for particular tasks, abilities honed by millions of years of evolution.

Her article contains some amazing facts: those ants in your pantry have 250,000 neurons, while dragonflies have close to a million. Dragonflies intercept and capture 95 percent of the prey they pursue. Their eyes are faster than ours, operating at “the equivalent of 200 frames per second.” Without access to GPS, a compass, or gyroscope (as far as we know), a dragonfly successfully intercepts hundreds of mosquitos per day.

What intrigues Chance is how these insects do so much with so little. The AI products that make news come at a huge processing cost. These small animals rival our best capabilities in some aptitudes, and they do it by balancing simplicity with sophistication. Her model results appear oversimplified. Maybe that is due to her assumption of evolution:

It is possible that biological dragonflies have evolved additional tools to help with the calculations needed for this prediction. For example, dragonflies have specialized sensors that measure body rotations during flight as well as head rotations relative to the body — if these sensors are fast enough, the dragonfly could calculate the effect of its movements on the prey’s image directly from the sensor outputs or use one method to cross-check the other. I did not consider this possibility in my simulation….

The simulated dragonfly does not quite achieve the success rate of the biological dragonfly, but it also does not have all the advantages (for example, impressive flying speed) for which dragonflies are known.

Frances Chance is mesmerized by the navigational achievements of insects, and glows with imagined possibilities for biomimicry. She knows she needs to check her simulation against real world dragonflies. ID advocates should encourage her to do so, because often the sophistication of biological engineering that implies designing intelligence is seen in the details.