Monday, 9 May 2022

(As always the question is) Who will watch the watchers?

The Caesars of 1st century.

1st century ce

Augustus (31 bce–14 ce)
Tiberius (14–37 ce)
Caligula (37–41 ce)
Claudius (41–54 ce)
Nero (54–68 ce)
Galba (68–69 ce)
Otho (January–April 69 ce)
Aulus Vitellius (July–December 69 ce)
Vespasian (69–79 ce)
Titus (79–81 ce)
Domitian (81–96 ce)
Nerva (96–98 ce)

But who will save us from our friends?

Actual design: A science stopper?

Science Stopper? Intelligent Design as a Fruitful Scientific Paradigm

Casey Luskin

Editor’s note: We have been delighted to present a series by geologist Casey Luskin on “The Positive Case for Intelligent Design.” This is the 12^th and final entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the new book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series here.

There’s a final common objection to intelligent design that the positive case for ID, outlined in this series, helps us to answer. In his Kitzmiller v. Dover testimony, biologist Kenneth Miller referred to intelligent design as a “science stopper.”¹ Similarly, in his book Only a Theory, Miller stated, “The hypothesis of design is compatible with any conceivable data, makes no testable predictions, and suggests no new avenues for research. As such, it’s a literal dead end…”²

Yet as we’ve already seen, ID makes a variety of testable and successful predictions. This allows ID to serve as a paradigm guiding scientific research to make new discoveries. The list below shows various fields where ID is helping science to generate knowledge. For each field, multiple ID-friendly scientific publications are cited as examples.

How ID Inspires the Progress of Science

Protein science: ID encourages scientists to do research to test for high levels of complex and specified information in biology in the form of the fine-tuning of protein sequences.³ This has practical implications not just for explaining biological origins, but also for engineering enzymes and anticipating and fighting the future evolution of diseases.
Physics and cosmology: ID has inspired scientists to seek and find instances of fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics to allow for life, leading to new fine-tuning arguments such as the Galactic Habitable Zone. This has implications for proper cosmological models of the universe, hinting at proper avenues for successful “theories of everything” that must accommodate fine-tuning, and other implications for theoretical physics.⁴
Information theory: ID leads scientists to understand intelligence as a cause of biological complexity, capable of being scientifically studied, and to understand the types of information it generates.⁵
Pharmacology: ID directs both experimental and theoretical research to investigate the limitations of Darwinian evolution to produce traits that require multiple mutations in order to function. This has practical implications for fighting problems like antibiotic resistance or engineering bacteria.⁶
Evolutionary computation: ID produces theoretical research into the information-generative powers of Darwinian searches, leading to the discovery that the search abilities of Darwinian processes are limited, which has practical implications for the viability of using genetic algorithms to solve problems.⁷
Anatomy and physiology: ID predicts function for allegedly “vestigial” organs, structures, or systems whereas evolution has made many faulty predictions of nonfunction.⁸
Bioinformatics: ID has helped scientists develop proper measures of biological information, leading to concepts like complex and specified information or functional sequence complexity. This allows us to better quantify complexity and understand what features are, or are not, within the reach of Darwinian evolution.⁹
Molecular machines: ID encourages scientists to reverse-engineer molecular machines — like the bacterial flagellum — to understand their function like machines, and to understand how the machine-like properties of life allow biological systems to function.¹⁰
Cell biology: ID causes scientists to view cellular components as “designed structures rather than accidental by-products of neo-Darwinian evolution,” allowing scientists to propose testable hypotheses about cellular function and causes of cancer.¹¹
Systematics: ID helps scientists explain the cause of the widespread features of conflicting phylogenetic trees and “convergent evolution” by producing models where parts can be reused in non-treelike patterns.¹² ID has spawned ideas about life being front-loaded with information such that it is designed to evolve, and has led scientists to expect (and now find!) previously unanticipated “out-of-place” genes in various taxa.¹³
Paleontology: ID allows scientists to understand and predict patterns in the fossil record, showing explosions of biodiversity (as well as mass extinction) in the history of life.¹⁴
Genetics: ID has inspired scientists to investigate the computer-like properties of DNA and the genome in the hopes of better understanding genetics and the origin of biological systems.¹⁵ ID has also inspired scientists to seek function for noncoding junk-DNA, allowing us to understand development and cellular biology.¹⁶

Avenues of Discovery

Critics wrongly charge that ID is just a negative argument against evolution, that ID makes no predictions, that it is a “god of the gaps” argument from ignorance, or that appealing to an intelligent cause means “giving up” or “stopping science.” As this series has shown, these charges are misguided.

Ironically, when critics claim that research is not permitted to detect design because that would stop science, it is they who hold science back by preventing scientists from investigating the scientific theory of intelligent design. When researchers are allowed to infer intelligent agency as the best explanation for information-rich structures in nature, this opens up many avenues of discovery that are bearing good fruit in the scientific community.

Notes

Kenneth R. Miller, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Day 2 AM Testimony (September 27, 2005).
Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008), 87.
Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors”; Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds”; Behe and Snoke, “Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Features That Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues”; Axe, “The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds”; Gauger and Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway”; Reeves et al., “Enzyme Families-Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family”; Thorvaldsen and Hössjer, “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems.”
Guillermo Gonzalez and Donald Brownlee, “The Galactic Habitable Zone: Galactic Chemical Evolution,” Icarus 152 (2001), 185-200; Guillermo Gonzalez, Donald Brownlee, and Peter D. Ward, “Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe,” Scientific American (2001), 62-67; Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC, Regnery, 2004); Guillermo Gonzalez, “Setting the Stage for Habitable Planets,” Life 4 (2014), 34-65; D. Halsmer, J. Asper, N. Roman, and T. Todd, “The Coherence of an Engineered World,” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics 4 (2009), 47-65.
William A. Dembski, The Design Inference; William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics(October 2009), 2647-2652; William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics 14 (2010), 475-486; Øyvind Albert Voie, “Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent,” Chaos, Solitons and Fractals 28 (2006), 1000-1004; McIntosh, “Information and Entropy —Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?”
Behe and Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues”; Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,” BIO-Complexity 2010 (2).
William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans 39 (September 2009), 1051-1061; Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (October 2009); Dembski and Marks, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search”; Winston Ewert, George Montanez, William Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” 42nd South Eastern Symposium on System Theory (March 2010), 290-297; Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, and Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints,” Plos One 3 (June 2008), e2246.
Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research”; William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Living Systems (Dallas, TX: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008).
Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories”; Kirk K. Durston, David K.Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 4 (2007), 47; David K.Y. Chiu and Thomas W.H. Lui, “Integrated Use of Multiple Interdependent Patterns for Biomolecular Sequence Analysis,” International Journal of Fuzzy Systems4 (September 2002), 766-775.
Minnich and Meyer. “Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in Pathogenic Bacteria”; McIntosh, “Information and Entropy—Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?”
Jonathan Wells, “Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?,” Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum, 98 (2005), 71-96; Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in pathogenic bacteria,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature Rhodes Greece (2004); Behe, Darwin’s Black Box; Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity.”
Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity”; Nelson and Jonathan Wells, “Homology in Biology”; Ewert, “The Dependency Graph of Life”; John A. Davison, “A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis,” Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum 98 (2005), 155-166; Ewert, “The Dependency Graph of Life.”
Sherman, “Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa: Thoughts About Evolution”; Albert D.G. de Roos, “Origins of introns based on the definition of exon modules and their conserved interfaces,” Bioinformatics 21 (2005), 2-9; Albert D.G. de Roos, “Conserved intron positions in ancient protein modules,” Biology Direct 2 (2007), 7; Albert D.G. de Roos, “The Origin of the Eukaryotic Cell Based on Conservation of Existing Interfaces,” Artificial Life 12 (2006), 513-523.
Meyer et al., “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang”; Meyer, “The Cambrian Information Explosion”; Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories”; Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity.”
Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica 56 (September 2008), 205-232; Voie, “Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent”; David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models,” Physics of Life Reviews 3 (2006), 211-228.
Richard v. Sternberg, “On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic– Epigenetic System”; Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research”; Josiah D. Seaman and John C. Sanford, “Skittle: A 2-Dimensional Genome Visualization Tool,” BMC Informatics 10 (2009), 451.

Our home world: The best seat in the house?

Guillermo Gonzalez on What’s Changed Since The Privileged Planet

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Jay Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery, discuss what’s changed in the years since the book first appeared. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

One big change they note: the number of exo-planets discovered has exploded, from 200 or so to several thousand. Gonzalez walks through this and other exciting recent advances in astronomy, and the two reflect on how these new discoveries bear upon the predictions and arguments they advanced in their book. Also in the conversation, Gonzalez speculates about what the James Webb Space Telescope may uncover after it comes online.

Primeval tech v. Darwinism:The big picture.

Devo vs. evo?

Cell Fate: Another Hurdle for Evolution

David Coppedge

When a stem cell divides, one daughter cell must maintain its stemness (i.e., ability to differentiate into any cell type) while the other specializes. Therein lies another truckload of requirements for coordinated action that, if it goes awry, can spell disaster for an animal or human. Watch this subject grow into a huge problem for evolutionary theory.

Researchers at University of California at Riverside investigated what happens when stem cells divide and specialize. UCR’s reporter Iqbal Pittawala describes how “genome organization influences cell fate.”

Understanding the molecular mechanisms that specify and maintain the identities of more than 200 cell types of the human body is arguably one of the most fundamental problems in molecular and cellular biology, with critical implications for the treatment of human diseases. Central to the cell fate decision process are stem cells residing within each tissue of the body. [Emphasis added.]

The two daughter cells face a massive organization problem. Even though they contain the same DNA code, they will take on separate roles in the cell. This means that the accessibility of genes between the two cells must radically differ.

Chromatin — a package of DNA wrapped around histone proteins — makes some genes accessible for transcription but hides others from the transcription factors (additional proteins) that switch on transcription. Begin to get a sense of how difficult this will be. There are tens of thousands of genes, and 200 cell types that utilize specific genes but not others. What process determines how chromatin will package the specialist daughter cell to make genes available if it will be a nerve cell as opposed to a muscle cell or heart cell? And how does the system keep the other daughter cell unaltered from the original stem cell?

A Challenge for a Librarian

Biochemist Sihem Cheloufi at UCR, together with colleague Jernej Murn, researched a protein complex involved in the process named “chromatin assembly factor 1” or CAF-1. As you read their description, think of the challenge a librarian faces with the card catalog for a large library.

“To help CAF-1 secure correct chromatin organization during cell division, a host of transcription factors are attracted to open regions in a DNA sequence-specific manner to serve as bookmarks and recruit transcription machinery to correct lineage-specific genes, ensuring their expression,” she said. “We wondered about the extent to which CAF-1 is required to maintain cell-specific chromatin organization during cell division.”

CAF-1 normally keeps genes tightly bound in chromatin so that they are inaccessible to transcription factors.

For a specific case, the biochemists looked at how blood stem cells divide and specialize into neutrophils — a type of white blood cell that acts as a first responder against an invasion by pathogens. They noticed that the levels of CAF-1 are finely balanced to prevent access by a particular transcription factor for that lineage named ELF1. (Note in passing that each cell type has its own suite of lineage-specific transcription factors.) Neutrophils artificially deprived of CAF-1 went awry and forgot their identity.

“By looking at chromatin organization, we found a whole slew of genomic sites that are aberrantly open and attract ELF1 as a result of CAF-1 loss,” Murn said. “Our study further points to a key role of ELF1 in defining the fate of several blood cell lineages.”

Peeking into a Keyhole

Recalling the 200 cell types in the human body, how does CAF-1 organize chromatin for each type? How does it know what genes to make accessible for a kidney cell, an astrocyte in the brain, or a liver cell? The UCR work is peeking into a keyhole of a library with a big operation inside. They don’t yet know how CAF-1 “preserves the chromatin state at specific sites and whether this process works differently across different cell types.” Think of our librarian just starting to get a handle on the job of arranging books in one wing and then finding 200 more wings to manage. Maybe a different analogy will expose the magnitude of this challenge.

“Like a city, the genome has its landscape with specific landmarks,” Cheloufi said. “It would be interesting to know how precisely CAF-1 and other molecules sustain the genome’s ‘skyline.’ Solving this problem could also help us understand how the fate of cells could be manipulated in a predictive manner. Given the fundamental role of CAF-1 in packaging the genome during DNA replication, we expect it to act as a general gatekeeper of cellular identity. This would in principle apply to all dividing cells across numerous tissues, such as cells of the intestine, skin, bone marrow, and even the brain.”

Surely there is much, much more involved than one protein complex named CAF-1. Something needs to “know” how to keep one daughter cell’s chromatin unchanged to maintain the stem cell pool, while reorganizing the chromatin for the differentiating cell — assuming the system also “knows” what cell type that daughter cell must become out of 200 possibilities. This implies a complex signaling system for triggering the production of specific cell types, which must trigger the appropriate suite of protein complexes to package the chromatin for access by that cell type’s lineage-specific transcription factors. Differentiation proceeds down a stepwise transition through progenitor cell states until the specialized cell, such as a neutrophil, results. How many evolutionists have thought about this challenge?

Quality-Control Terms from Engineering

The research paper is published open access. It is Franklin et al., “Regulation of chromatin accessibility by the histone chaperone CAF-1 sustains lineage fidelity,” in Nature Communications. Perhaps the magnitude of the challenge caused the 21 authors to shy away from referring to evolution in the paper. Instead, they refer to “lineage integrity” or “lineage fidelity” a dozen times. Those are quality-control terms from engineering and systems design.

Cell fate commitment is driven by dynamic changes in chromatin architecture and activity of lineage-specific transcription factors (TFs). The chromatin assembly factor-1 (CAF-1) is a histone chaperone that regulates chromatin architecture by facilitating nucleosome assembly during DNA replication. Accumulating evidence supports a substantial role of CAF-1 in cell fate maintenance, but the mechanisms by which CAF-1 restricts lineage choice remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate how CAF-1 influences chromatin dynamics and TF activity during lineage differentiation. We show that CAF-1 suppression triggers rapid differentiation of myeloid stem and progenitor cells into a mixed lineage state. We find that CAF-1 sustains lineage fidelity by controlling chromatin accessibility at specific loci, and limiting the binding of ELF1 TF at newly-accessible diverging regulatory elements. Together, our findings decipher key traits of chromatin accessibility that sustain lineage integrity and point to a powerful strategy for dissecting transcriptional circuits central to cell fate commitment.

Expecting random mutations to somehow emerge then be “selected” by some blind, aimless, uncaring “agentless act” (as Neil Thomas has put it) to construct this complex system seems beyond rational consideration. Intelligent design scientists, though, could make testable predictions to guide further research. Knowing how comparable systems are made by intelligent engineers — that is, systems involving coordinated reorganization of information for multiple applications — they could expect to find new types of sensors, feedback circuits, quality-control checkpoints, or other functional modules at work. These might consist of proteins, protein complexes, small RNAs, sugars, ions, or combinations of them capable of storing or conveying information. (Note: even if automated, these are not “agentless acts.” The agency is one step removed from mind to program, but a mind with foresight was necessary for its origin.)

For example, an ID research team might look for a comparable system in industry that faces the same kind of challenge. They could identify the minimum number of job descriptions required to make the system work, then look for molecules performing those roles in the cellular analogue. Even if the match is imperfect, the ID approach can advance science, because what the researchers learn can feed back into biomimetic design, leading to improved applications in industry.

Poor Darwin. With his crude awareness of cells dividing that looked like bubbles separating, he had no idea what he would be in for in the 21st century.

Wednesday, 4 May 2022

The second horseman continues his ride through the slavic world.

A new path for the second horseman?

And still yet even more primeval tech vs. Darwinism.

The war to recapture the agrora has begun?

When a slave rules as king.

John West: C. S. Lewis and the “Human Fallibility of Science”

David Klinghoffer

John West had a great conversation on the Pints with Jack podcast about his book The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. Dr. West reminds listeners of an insight of Lewis’s that doesn’t get the attention it deserves, perhaps because it comes in the Epilogue of the last book Lewis completed, the fascinating The Discarded Image. It’s not his Lewis’s most widely read work. The subject matter is not what everyone associates with him — not fantasy, or science fiction, or apologetics, but an account of the Medieval mental picture of the world.

Neither Fiction Nor Fact

In the Epilogue, he turns his focus on the “Models” that we all bring to bear in understanding our world. Medieval Europeans had one. We have another. These Models, which are neither fictional nor fully objective or factual either, dictate a certain understanding of nature, among other things. In Lewis’s view, “nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her.” Ask different questions and you will get different answers.

From The Magician’s Twin:

Lewis recalled that when he was young he “believed that ‘Darwin discovered evolution’ and that the far more general, radical, and even cosmic developmentalism… was a superstructure raised on the biological theorem. This view has been sufficiently disproved.” What really happened according to Lewis was that the “[t]he demand for a developing world — a demand obviously in harmony both with the revolutionary and the romantic temper” had developed first, and when it was “full grown” the scientists went “to work and discover[ed] the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest.”
Lewis’s view has momentous implications for how we view the reigning paradigms in science at any given time — including Darwinian evolution. “We can no longer dismiss the change of Models [in science] as a simple progress from error to truth,” argued Lewis. “No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy… But… each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge” Lewis added that he did “not at all mean that these news phenomena are illusory… But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her.”

Recognizing what West calls the “human fallibility of science” is even more important today than it was in 2012 when he edited his book, or in 1964 when Lewis wrote his. The spirt or psychology of the day gives us the science we wished for. This makes it highly fallible, and potentially dangerous. The notion that science is our guide to morality, policy, and beyond is called scientism. The idea is ripe with possibilities of totalitarianism. But it’s what Americans and other Westerners seem to want.

The original "Cosa Nostra"

No, you don't know me.

I hate to burst your bubble who ever you might be, but just because you went to some antiJW propaganda mill and got your skull pumped full of lying propaganda it does not mean that you know me. I am the world's number one expert on what I believe and why I believe it. If you want to know what I actually believe and why just ask me. I have no problem with people disagreeing with my beliefs.

John15:20KJV"Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also."

I am not vain enough to compare myself to Jesus, so I fully expect that the reasoning and logic that impresses me will not impress everyone. But it really gets my goat when people pretend to know what I believe better than I do.

OOL science's unicorn?

Mitochondria: Evolution’s Ever-Receding Ancestor

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic episode of ID the Future, biophysicist Cornelius Hunter explains how mitochondria, the powerhouses of eukaryotic cells, pose a powerful and growing problem for evolution. For years evolutionists thought some early cells must somehow have brought other cells inside of them, and those other cells then mysteriously evolved into mitochondria. But recent research undermines that notion. Why do many evolutionists then still cling to the idea? Dr. Hunter’s answer explains how a lot of evolutionary thinking persists in the face of mounting contrary evidence. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Darwinism in time trouble? II

Fact Check: Hawaiian Silverswords Fail the Species Pair Challenge

Günter Bechly

In a recent article at Evolution News (Bechly 2022) I introduced a new argument against Darwinian evolution and a challenge to Darwinists. Here is the argument in a nutshell: Among the 350,000 described fossil species, we can identify numerous abrupt origins of new body plans within a 5–10 million years window of time. Among an estimated 8.7 million recent species we find no such body plan disparity in any pairs of species that diverged in a similar time frame according to molecular clock studies. This contradicts expectations from a Darwinian perspective.

The simple challenge to Darwinists is to find a single pair of recent species that have diverged within about 5 million years ago and that exhibit a disparity in body plan similar to major transitions in the history of life (e.g., compared to Pakicetus and Basilosaurus). Apparently, I rattled the Darwinist cage, because it took only a few days for a fevered response at the Peaceful Science forum. They claimed to have met the challenge and also invited me to join the discussion at the forum.

Therefore, let me first briefly explain why I declined this invitation and will never participate at Peaceful Science, which in my view deserves to be rebranded as Unpeaceful Science (Clemmons & Luskin 2021). This forum is dominated mainly by the very same group of hardcore anti-ID activists (such as Joe Felsenstein, John Harshman, Arthur Hunt, Puck Mendelssohn, and “Rumraket”) who are notorious for their vitriolic attacks against intelligent design proponents at other Darwinist forums like Panda’s Thumb. You just have to skim through the comments in some of the threads to realize that there is not the slightest interest in a mutually respectful, fair, and unbiased discussion of arguments and evidence. Sorry not to be sorry that I have zero tolerance for such behavior and will never waste my time in a forum that exhibits such a low level of intellectual integrity.

Two Blatant Examples

Also, the recent two threads at Peaceful Science about my article abound with uncharitable comments and misrepresentations of the arguments. Here are just two blatant examples:

At the very beginning of the initial posting of the thread at Peaceful Science there is a gross misrepresentation of my argument by commenter Art Hunt. Contrary to his statement, my argument was emphatically not that “should a pair of species diverge and go off on their evolving ways, one would expect to see (inevitably, invariably?) dramatic differences in such species pairs as time passes.” How anybody could read my article and come to this conclusion is beyond me. By the way: In my argument I also do not claim that all recent species pairs that diverged only a few million years ago necessarily must look so similar that they appear indistinguishable to laypeople, even though this is often the case. The crucial point is rather to find different body plans in species that diverged only a few million years ago, which is common in the fossil record but virtually absent among recent species.

Another commenter, named Roy, claimed in the second thread at Peaceful Science that I exaggerated the sudden origin of trilobites within 13 million years and misrepresented the paper by Daley et al. (2018). He triumphantly says:

I’ve checked the reference given for his claim of “the origin of trilobites from worm-like ancestors in less than 13 million years”. Not only does it not mention worm-like anything, but it actually says
“The first arthropod traces (Rusophycus ) appear at approximately 537 Ma, shortly after the start of the Cambrian at approximately 540 Ma. Crown group euarthropods (trilobites) appear at 521 Ma…”
That’s 16my between trilobites and Rusophycus, trace fossils which are definitely not worm-like because they show signs of being made by legs.
Bechly, like most ID and YEC advocates, must be counting on no-one checking his references.

Well, what I do count on is an average reading comprehension. Of course, Rusophycus traces show evidence of legs! That’s the whole point. Contrary to most trace fossils, which are paleontological problematica and cannot be attributed to a specific organism as trace maker, every undergraduate paleontology student learns that Rusophycus traces are the resting traces of trilobites and trilobite-like arthropods. So, by these traces we have evidence for crown group arthropods like trilobites for 537 million years ago. The same paper by Daley et al. (2018) also explicitly acknowledged that 560–550 million years ago there as yet existed no bilaterian animals (and certainly no arthropods). That is because of the clear evidence from so-called BST-localities, which are Ediacaran localities of the Burgess Shale Type that could have preserved even small and soft-bodied animal ancestors. The current mainstream view is that at best, coelenterates (jellies) and enigmatic worm-like animals existed at this Ediacaran time. Even if this were true (I challenged such claims for Ediacaran animals in several article series at Evolution News), it would mean that the arthropod body plan with exoskeleton, articulated legs, mouth parts, compound eyes, central nervous system, and gut system evolved within 13 million years from such assumed jelly- or worm-like ancestors. The 13 million years represent the time span from the Ediacaran BST-localities 550 million years ago to the oldest Rusophycus traces 537 million years ago. Commenter Roy did not understand either my argument or the Daley article (also see Bechly 2018). Unfortunately, such an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect is all too commonly found among the most vocal critics of intelligent design on the Internet.

Meanwhile, a very active atheist commenter and anti-ID activist, writing under the pseudonym Rumraket, suggested that dog breeds qualify because they look so different (just think of a Pug and an Irish Setter) and originated within a few thousand years. However, there are of course two major problems with this preposterous claim:

The differences in size, shape, and fur of dog breeds are not at all differences in body plan but just simple variations within the same species based on phenotypic plasticity. No organisms with a different body plan would be able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
The rapid changes in appearance are based on human breeding, which is a teleologically guided process and thus an example of intelligent design. No comparable variations exist in any wild canine species.

***Different dog breeds (Free*SVG, Public Domain)***

Commenter Roy suggested that otters and ferrets should meet the challenge because they diverged “just over 10mya.” According to TimeTree.org, otters (genus Lutra) and ferrets (genus Mustela) diverged an estimated 17.5 million years ago. And of course, they do not even remotely exhibit anything like different body plans. Commenter Matthew Dickau in the same thread predicts that I will likely reject the examples as not different enough. Yup, that is exactly what I do, because they aren’t. Actually, they are still very similar even though they had more than triple the time available that separates pakicetids and earliest pelagicetid whales. The fact that none of the biologists at Peaceful Science, who definitely should know better than “30-year veteran Roy,” objected to this ludicrous example is very telling indeed.

*Mustela putorius* (Mrs. Polecat / Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0).

A More Serious Response

But enough of this. Let’s move on to a more interesting claim that the challenge has been met. Has it? Spoiler alert: no, it hasn’t!

This more serious contender was suggested by botanist Arthur G. Hunt, a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Kentucky and one of the most active commenters at Peaceful Science. He mentions the fascinating case of a group of plants called the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance. They comprise 33 species in the three genera Argyroxiphium, Dubautia, and Wilkesia, which are endemic to the Hawaiian Islands (Carr 1985). They form a monophyletic group (clade) within the sunflower family Asteraceae, and are believed to have colonized Hawaii about 5 million years ago with a single pioneer species of tarweed from California that then quickly radiated into differently adapted species (Baldwin et al. 1990; Baldwin & Sanderson 1998; Barrier et al. 2001; Landis 2018). These species exhibit a surprising diversity of phenotypes and, especially in the genus Dubautia, we even find very different growth forms such as cushion plants, mat plants, rosette plants, subshrubs, shrubs, trees, and lianas or vines (Baldwin & Robichaux 1995; Baldwin 1997; Baldwin & Sanderson 1998). Therefore, they are considered one of the most important examples of adaptive radiation in the plant kingdom (Purugganan & Robichaux 2005; Blonder et al. 2016). Professor Hunt’s claim is simple and seductive: the Hawaiian Sword Alliance allegedly developed very different body plans within 5 million years and thus perfectly meets my challenge. Does it? Not really, and here is why.

A minor quibble concerns the dating of the radiation, which proved to be tricky in the absence of a fossil record. The current estimates rest on multiple assumptions concerning the phylogenetic relationship, paleoclimate, and paleogeography (Landis et al. 2018), which introduces considerable uncertainty. The fact that other radiations on Hawaii are much older than the estimate for Silverswords (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998), should at least raise some doubts concerning the reliability of this estimate. After all, the Kure Atoll, the oldest island of the archipelago was already formed 29 million years ago. Nevertheless, this issue is of minor importance, and we can grant the current consensus dating of 5.1-5.2 million years (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998; Landis et al. 2018) for the sake of the argument.

A more important point is the fact that the differences among the species of Hawaiian Silverswords are all related to different growth forms and allometric shifts of already existing structures. Even though the differences appear superficially striking, they do not involve any novel body plans (i.e., no new proteins, new tissues, or new organs). Therefore, the radiation of Hawaiian Silverswords is not comparable to major body plan transitions such as from “worm” to trilobite, from terrestrial quadruped to marine whale, or from hair-like dino-fuzz to pennaceous feathers, etc. If the different growth forms of Hawaiian Silverswords really represented different body plans, they would not have been classified in the same family and subfamily as their continental tarweed relatives, and, in the case of Dubautia, even within the same genus, at least not prior to the cladistic revolution in the 1970s when typological thinking still prevailed in biological systematics.

*Hawaiian Silverswords:* Dubautia linearis (KarlM / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.5).

A Second Crucial Issue

The second crucial issue is phenotypic plasticity: On the University of Hawaii Botany website about the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance you will find photos of very different pincussion-like and shrub/tree-like growth forms within the same species, Dubautia waialealae. A very similar variability is found in Dubautia laxa, for which “it is unclear if the recognized subspecies represent unique evolutionary entities or if the ecological and morphological diversity within this group is a product of recurrent local adaptation or phenotypic plasticity” (McGlaughlin & Friar 2011). This fact alone totally debunks the claim. If such different growth forms were really comparable to body plan differences bigger than in any mammals, as Art Hunt claims, this would be as if we were to find a quadruped with a normal tail and a marine animal with flippers and fluke as variations within the same species. Of course, such different growth forms are not comparable to different body plans but just represent phenotypic plasticity that is a common phenomenon in the plant kingdom.

It is of course also true that many of the different phenotypes of Hawaiian Silverswords do correlate with taxonomic differences in genus and species (Carr 1985; Blonder et al. 2016: 221). However, the very fact that there are species like Dubautia waialealae with very different growth forms shows that the same can be reasonably assumed for the ancestral species prior to the radiation. Such an ancestral species could have colonized the Hawaiian Islands as early as 29 million years ago when the oldest island (Kure) originated but certainly much earlier than 5.2 million years (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998). During the later radiation such ancestral phenotypic plasticity could become partly stabilized and fixed in different species. This scenario is strongly supported by the finding that the Hawaiian Silverswords seem to have originated from a polyploid hybrid (Baldwin & Sanderson 1998; Barrier et al. 1999, 2001; Purugganan & Robichaux 2005), which is known to increase phenotypic plasticity in plants (Weber & D’Antonio 2000; Ainouche & Jenczewski 2010; Te Beest et al. 2012; Cara et al. 2013).

My judgment that these plants do not have very different body plans, in spite of their often strikingly different growth forms, is also supported by the fact that they still frequently hybridize without sterility (Carr & Kyhos 1981, 1986; Carr 1985, 1995; Baldwin et al. 1990; Baldwin 2006). I can only repeat myself: organisms with different body plans cannot successfully interbreed. It is a common Darwinian dogma that new body plans correlate with significant genetic changes in early development (John & Miklos 1988: 309; Van Valen 1988; Thomson 1992: 111; Arthur 1997: 14+21; Kalinka & Tomancak 2012; Willmore 2012; Meyer 2013), which arguably would prevent any hybridization.

An Avian Example

Since we are talking about Hawaiian island radiations, it may also be worth mentioning the avian example of the honeycreepers, which is yet another example for such radiations of “closely related species [that] are characterized by levels of phenotypic diversity otherwise associated with higher taxa” (Baldwin et al. 1990). The Hawaiian honeycreepers are a group of passerine birds endemic to the Hawaii, of which many are already extinct or critically endangered. They are believed to be most closely related to the Asian rosefinches of the genus Carpodacus and to have colonized the Hawaiian Islands 5.7–7.2 million years ago (Lerner et al. 2011). These beautiful birds have very different plumage and very different beak shapes, from short and thick finch-like beaks to long, thin, and curved beaks. Might these birds meet the challenge? Again, the answers must be no, because changes in color pattern and beak shape are not at all body plan differences. It has been experimentally demonstrated in the famous Galápagos finches (Abzhanov et al. 2004, 2006; Lawson & Petren 2017) that very simple genetic switches are responsible for modification of beak shape. Mainly two simple genes, BMP4 and Calmodulin, control all three dimensions of the bird’s beak. The same certainly also applies to the very different beaks of the Hawaiian honeycreepers, as well as to their different colors.

Similar arguments could be made about the radiation of cichlid fish in the East African Lake Malawi, which “constitute the most extensive recent vertebrate adaptive radiation” (Malinsky et al. 2018). Within about 4 million years, this radiation produced quite different-looking animals in terms of size, shape, color, and behavior (Schedel et al. 2019), but again no new body plans. These popular ornamental fish are still very similar genetically and often hybridize (Kuraku & Meyer 2008). Even Young Earth Creationists do not deny that neo-Darwinian mechanisms may quickly change such simple traits and explain fast speciation, and neither do I.

To be clear: The rejection of these examples is neither moving the goalposts nor committing the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. They simply do not meet the condition of different body plans. It should not be too difficult to realize that quantitative modifications and variations in size, shape, color, behavior, or growth form are not the same thing as the de novo origin of totally new organ systems such as the counter-current heat exchange system in whales or the origin of all the organs necessary to make an arthropod from a worm-like ancestor. If Darwinists should find something significantly better than Silverswords or dog breeds, I will happily be the first to recognize a successful response. But of course, even if such a single example were to be found, it would not be sufficient to remove the general problem of a clear pattern of big changes in short time being ubiquitous in the fossil record but not in the present fauna. This pattern is undeniable and requires an explanation. Anyway, my challenge still stands and has not yet been met. Try again and try harder, and next time also try not to misrepresent the argument!

References

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Abzhanov A, Kuo WP, Hartmann C, Grant BR, Grant PR, Tabin CJ 2006. The calmodulin pathway and evolution of elongated beak morphology in Darwin’s finches. Nature 442, 563–567. DOI: 10.1038/nature04843.
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Barrier M, Baldwin BG, Robichaux RH, Purugganan MD 1999. Interspecific hybrid ancestry of a plant adaptive radiation: Allopolyploidy of the Hawaiian silver- sword alliance (Asteraceae) inferred from floral homeotic gene duplications. Molecular Biology and Evolution 16(8), 1105–1113. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a026200.
Barrier M, Robichaux RH, Purugganan MD 2001. Accelerated regulatory gene evolution in an adaptive radiation. PNAS 98(18), 10208–10213. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.181257698.
Bechly G 2018. Alleged Refutation of the Cambrian Explosion Confirms Abruptness, Vindicates Meyer. Evolution News May 29, 2018.
Bechly G 2022. Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists. Evolution News April 25, 2022.
Blonder B, Baldwin BG, Enquist BJ, Robichaux RH 2016. Variation and macroevolution in leaf functional traits in the Hawaiian silversword alliance (Asteraceae). Journal of Ecology 104(1), 219–228. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.12497.
Cara N, Marfil CF, Masuelli RW. 2013. Epigenetic patterns newly established after interspecific hybridization in natural populations of Solanum. Ecology and Evolution 3(11), 3764–3779. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.758.
Carr GD 1985. Monograph of the Hawaiian Madiinae (Asteraceae): Argyroxiphium, Dubautia, and Wilkesia. Allertonia 4(1), 1–123. JSTOR: 23186117.
Carr GD 1995. A fully fertile intergeneric hybrid derivative from Argyroxiphium sandwicense ssp. macrocephalum X Dubautia menziesii (Asteraceae) and its relevance to plant evolution in the Hawaiian Islands. American Journal of Botany 82(12), 1574–1581. DOI: 10.1002/j.1537-2197.1995.tb13860.x.
Carr GD, Kyhos DW 1981. Adaptive Radiation in the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance (Compositae-Madiinae). I. Cytogenetics of Spontaneous Hybrids. Evolution 35(3), 543–556. DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.1981.tb04916.x.
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Clemmons T, Luskin C 2021. An Unpeaceful Peace. Salvo 57.
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Kalinka AT, Tomancak P 2012. The evolution of early animal embryos: conservation or divergence?Trends in Ecology & Evolution 27(7), 385–393. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2012.03.007.
Kuraku S, Meyer A 2008. Genomic analysis of cichlid fish ‘natural mutants’. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development 18(6), 551–558. DOI: 10.1016/j.gde.2008.11.002.
Landis MJ, Freyman WA, Baldwin BG 2018. Retracing the Hawaiian silversword radiation despite phylogenetic, biogeographic, and paleogeographic uncertainty. Evolution 72(11), 2343–2359. DOI: 10.1111/evo.13594.
Lawson LP, Petren K 2017. The adaptive genomic landscape of beak morphology in Darwin’s finches. Molecular Ecology 26(19), 4978-4989. DOI: 10.1111/mec.14166.
Lerner HRL, Meyer M, James HF, Hofreiter M, Fleischer RC 2011. Multilocus Resolution of Phylogeny and Timescale in the Extant Adaptive Radiation of Hawaiian Honeycreepers. Current Biology 21, 1838–1844. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.039.
Malinsky M, Svardal H, Tyers AM, Miska EA, Genner MJ, Turner GF, Durbin R 2018. Whole-genome sequences of Malawi cichlids reveal multiple radiations interconnected by gene flow. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, 1940–1955. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0717-x.
McGlaughlin ME, Friar EA 2011. Evolutionary diversification and geographical isolation in Dubautia laxa(Asteraceae), a widespread member of the Hawaiian silversword alliance. Annals of Botany 107(3), 357–370. DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcq252.
Meyer SC 2013. The Origin of Body Plans. Chapter 13, pp. 255–270 in: Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. HarperOne: New York (NY), 512 pp.
Purugganan MD, Robichaux RH 2005. Adaptive Radiation and Regulatory Gene Evolution in the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance (Asteraceae). Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 92(1), 28–35. JSTOR: 3298646.
Schedel FDB, Musilova Z, Schliewen UK 2019. East African cichlid lineages (Teleostei: Cichlidae) might be older than their ancient host lakes: new divergence estimates for the east African cichlid radiation. BMC Evolutionary Biology 19:94, 1–25. DOI: 10.1186/s12862-019-1417-0.
Te Beest M, Le Roux JJ, Richardson DM, Brysting AK, Suda J, Kubesová M, Pysek P. 2012. The more the better? The role of polyploidy in facilitating plant invasions. Annals of Botany 109(1), 19–45. DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcr277.
Thomson KS 1992. Macroevolution: The Morphological Problem. American Zoologist 32, 106–112. DOI: 10.1093/icb/32.1.106.
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Weber E, D’Antonio CM 2000. Phenotypic plasticity in hybridizing Carpobrotus spp. (Aizoaceae) from coastal California and its role in plant invasion. Canadian Journal of Botany 77(10), 1411–1418. DOI: 10.1139/b99-091.
Willmore KE 2012. The Body Plan Concept and Its Centrality in Evo-Devo. Evolution: Education and Outreach 5(S2), 219–230. DOI: 10.1007/s12052-012-0424-z.

Saturday, 30 April 2022

It's complicated. III

China vs. China?

MAGA: Africa edition?

Urban nomad.

Dembski on being an I.D. pioneer.

ID Pioneer William Dembski on His Rocky and Rewarding Journey

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, intelligent design pioneer William Dembski tells the story of his rocky journey into and out of higher education, the reasons for his sabbatical from the ID movement, his recent success as an entrepreneur, and his return to ID work. Along the way Dembski bats down a mistaken rumor about his sabbatical. The occasion for his conversation with host Casey Luskin is the recent anthology Dembski and Luskin contributed to and helped edit, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

It's complicated. II

And still yet more primeval tech vs. Darwin.

David Berlinski is skeptical about the skeptics?

Medved, Berlinski Take on Steven Pinker and Whig History

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, Human Nature author and polymath David Berlinski and radio host Michael Medved discuss everything from human depravity, the burning of Notre Dame, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Big Bang and a quixotic century-old pact to ban war. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Berlinski argues that the case for the death of God and the case for the impending demise of human depravity have been greatly exaggerated. Taking issue with Steven Pinker, Berlinski insists that there is little if any evidence that human evil is being steadily rolled back by the spread of secular values. Further, the idea that science has disproven God flies in the face of trends running in the opposite direction, perhaps most dramatically in the triumph of the Big Bang theory over an eternal universe model. Berlinski, who himself is not religious, insists that optimistic Whig history is bankrupt and that anyone imagining that human depravity and the God hypothesis are things of the past are themselves living in the past.

Wednesday, 27 April 2022

On the myth of engineerless engineering.

Unraveling the Myth that Undesigned Processes Generate Novel Functions

Brian Miller

I was recently informed of a video posted on the YouTube channel Creation Myths titled “Creation Myth: ‘Information’ Requires ‘Intelligence’.” The video specifically references a clip of Stephen Meyer detailing the design implications of the Cambrian Explosion. Meyer states that the information required for the sudden appearance of radically new animals could only have originated from a mind. The critic responds to this claim by arguing that experiments have demonstrated that information can be created by natural processes, and he cites two research studies to support this assertion. His argument ultimately fails since it is founded on a misunderstanding of the evidence for design associated with biological information. This error is so common that it deserves special attention.

The Research Studies

The first cited article is a 2017 study by Neme et al. that purportedly demonstrated the creation of new information with ease. The researchers inserted randomly generated sequences of 150 base pairs into the DNA of E. coli. They reported that 25 percent of random sequences enhance cells’ growth rate. The experiment purportedly yielded new information without intelligent direction.

The second cited article is a 2018 study by Yona et al. that explored the difficulty of randomly generating a 100-base-pair DNA sequence in E. coli that would bind to an RNA polymerase. The study demonstrated that 10 percent of random sequences adjacent to the genes in a lac operon would bind to the polymerase in such a way as to initiate transcription. This study also purportedly demonstrates that information can be created by a random process.

The Misunderstanding

Upon close inspection, both studies fail to challenge the design argument that is based on biological information. Neme et al. misinterpreted their results, as Weisman and Eddy explain in their critical review of the study. Douglas Axe summarizes the experimenters’ error as follows:

They merely showed that if you burden bacteria by forcing them to churn out RNA and protein from random inserts, it’s fairly easy to find sequence-dependent effects on growth — not because anything clever has been invented, but because the burden of making so much junk varies slightly with the kind of junk. That means any junk that slows the process of making more junk by gumming up the works a bit would provide a selective benefit. Such sequences are “good” only in this highly artificial context, much as shoving a stick into an electric fan is “good” if you need to stop the blades in a hurry.

In short, the sequences performed no new function, so no new information was created.

The Yona et al. experiment did show that a DNA sequence can be randomly generated that can perform simple functions, such as binding to a polymerase. Yet this achievement is not relevant to Stephen Meyer’s full argument. Meyer is not claiming that random processes cannot generate small quantities of information. He is arguing that random processes cannot generate the quantity of information required for anything comparable to creating a new protein with a novel structure. Axe and others have decisively demonstrated that the information associated with even modest proteins is typically greater than what could be produced by any undirected process (here, here, here).

The Challenge for Evolution

The central challenge for evolutionary theory is creating sufficient information to produce something truly novel that functions at a level that would benefit an organism. In the case of the lac operon, the specificity required for it to function is not the difficulty of an RNA polymerase binding to the promoter region. The specificity and thus the information reside in the sequences that encode the repressor that acts as an on/off switch and the genes that encode the proteins that break down lactose. The minimal required information for the operon to function is vastly greater than that associated with the region that binds to a polymerase. The amount is almost certainly beyond what any undirected process could produce.

On the History of life's Barrage against Darwinism

Bechly: “Life’s Second ‘Big Bang'”

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

German paleontologist Günter Bechly is co-author (with Stephen Meyer) of the chapter titled “The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry” in the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. On a classic episode of ID the Future with host Sarah Chaffee, he moves on from the Cambrian explosion (see here) to discuss “life’s second ‘big bang.’” He then touches on other biological explosions, including the Avalon explosion, the Triassic explosion, the origin of flowering plants, and the origin of placental mammals. “There’s no reasonable way,” Bechly concludes, “to get from bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Darwinism in time trouble?

Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists

Günter Bechly

In the many years of vehement debate between proponents of unguided evolution and intelligent design, it sometimes may look like all has already been said and there are no new arguments on either side. However, this is not the case at all. Intelligent design theory has greatly developed since its early beginnings and many new arguments have been added in support of the design inference. Here, I want to introduce another new argument and formulate a challenge to my Darwinist colleagues. This challenge is by no means rhetorical and could be easily met with simple research in publicly available data bases. Here it is.

As I have laid out in various publications (e.g., Bechly & Meyer 2017) and lectures, the fossil record demonstrates that the history of life was not a series of gradual transformations by an accumulation of small changes over long periods of time. Instead of conforming to this gradualist prediction of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the fossil record consistently documents a series of saltational transitions with abrupt appearances of new body plans within very short windows of time. This implies a fatal problem for Darwinism called the waiting time problem, because population genetic calculations and simulations show that the windows of time established by the fossil record are orders of magnitude too short to accommodate the required genetic changes for these body plan transformations.

Some examples of abrupt body plan transitions are the origin of photosynthesis; the origin of eukaryotes; the origin of the Ediacaran biota (Avalon Explosion) and Cambrian animal phyla (Cambrian Explosion) such as the origin of trilobites from worm-like ancestors in less than 13 million years (Daley et al. 2018, Bechly 2018); the origin of efficient eyes in arthropods, cephalopods, and vertebrates; the terrestrialization of plants (embryophytes), arthropods (tracheae), and vertebrates (tetrapod limbs); the origin of wings in insects, pterosaurs, bats, and birds (including the origin of pennaceous feathers from filamentous precursors); the origin of secondarily marine vertebrates such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, manatees, and whales; the origin of echolocation in bats and whales; the origin of complex new reproductive systems (angiosperm flowers, dragonfly secondary copulatory apparatus, holometabolic insect metamorphosis, amniote egg, and eutherian placenta); the origin of distinct new body plans in vertebrates (e.g., snakes, turtles, bats, and whales); and even the origin of our own genus Homo and of a globular braincase correlated with the “Creative Explosion” of symbolic thinking within Homo sapiens.

The Lifespan of a Single Species

An additional fact that underscores the waiting time problem in cases like whale origins (see this Long Story Short 2020 video) is the average longevity of larger mammal species and especially artiodactyls at only 4.1-4.39 million years (Prothero 2014). Whales are thought to be nested in and derived from artiodactyl ungulates. The fossil record shows that the transition from quadrupedal whale ancestors similar to Raoellidae (such as Indohyus) and Pakicetidae to fully marine pelagicete whales like Basilosauridae happened in just 4.5 million years. This implies that the body plan transition from a pig-like animal to a dolphin-like animal happened within the lifespan of a single species. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility of several successive speciation events within this time period, but it is still a fact that illustrates the biological abruptness of this major anatomical re-engineering.

Finally, there is also another related problem that has been hitherto largely overlooked: The morphological similarity of modern species pairs, which have diverged in a similar time frame, poses a severe problem. That is because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that allegedly were at work and common during all periods of Earth history and in all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species. To explore this issue, I surveyed TimeTree.org (Hedges & Kumar 2009, Hedges et al. 2006, 2015, Kumar et al. 2017), which is a databank of 97,085 living species of different groups of organisms, with molecular clock estimates of their time of divergence based on 3,998 studies. When probing any pairs of species, even those with longer divergence times than available for the development of the body plan differences between pakicetids and basilosaurids, we find without exception that their morphologies are hardly distinguishable for laymen and they often still can hybridize.

So Much for the Theoretical Prelude

Now let’s look at some more-or-less random examples from TimeTree to see what I mean.

Firs (Abies spec.) and cedars (Cedrus spec.) belong to the same subfamily of conifer trees but separated already 141 million years ago. That is more than 30 times the time available for the origin of marine whales, but there is hardly any difference in body plan. Of course, this might just be a case of evolutionary stasis as in living fossils, but the next examples will make you think again.

The common house fly (Musca domestica) and the small house fly (Fannia scalaris) diverged about 48 million years ago. For laymen they look basically indistinguishable. Hmmm, that’s strange, but could still be a fluke.

***Common house fly (Alvesgaspar, Wikimedia / GFDL).***

My favorite animals are dragonflies and damselflies. The northern damselfly (Coenagrion hastulatum) and the azure damselfly (Coenagrion puella) diverged 11.8 million years ago. Even as an expert on these insects, I have to resort to a determination key to distinguish them. Can you?

***Northern damselfly, Gilles San Martin, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0).***

What about amphibians? The European common frog (Rana temporaria) and moor frog (Rana arvalis) diverged 21.4 million years ago. They look almost identical. Do we start to see a pattern?

***European common frog (Richard Bartz, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.5).***

“Reptiles” show the same pattern. The Galapagos land iguanas (Conolophus spec.) and marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus spec.) diverged 18.2 million years ago. The marine iguanas can excrete salt from a gland at their nostrils and have a more flattened tail, but otherwise still look very much like their cousins.

***Galapagos land iguana (Bermard Gagnon, Wikimedia / GFDL).***

Avian Examples

Birds rank among the best studied groups in terms of speciation. The green warbler (Phylloscopus nitidus) and Bonelli’s warbler (P. bonelli) diverged 15.2 million years ago (but at least 4-7 million years according to Helbig et al. 1995). They look identical and may still be able to hybridize.

***Green warbler (Wouter van der Ham, Wikimedia / CC BY 3.0).***

Here is another avian example to show this is a common pattern among recent bird species. The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and tree sparrow (Passer montanus) diverged 10.2 million years ago. They have some minor differences in color pattern but indeed hybridize even in the wild. Still thinking evolution can achieve miracles in a few million years? Where the heck is the evidence?

***House sparrow (Mathias Appel, Wikimedia / PD).***

Well, let’s move on to mammals. The common house mouse (Mus musculus) and house rat (Rattus rattus) diverged 20.9 million years ago (at least 12 million years according to Kimura et al. 2015). Apart from the size difference they look very much alike.

***House mouse (Amirekul, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0).***

Did you ever taste beefalo steak? Beefalos are hybrids between European bison (Bison bonasus) and cattle (Bos taurus) that diverged 4.88 million years ago, which is about the same time frame as in the whale example. Some archaic breeds of cattle like the Scots highland cattle look even more similar to the bison and the aurochs.

***European bison (Michael Gäbler, Wikimedia / CC BY 3.0).***

Horse (Equus caballus) and ass (Equus asinus) diverged 7.7 million years ago and can still hybridize as mules. Their wild ancestors looked even more similar than most of their modern domesticated breeds.

***Przewalski’s horse (Charles Miller, Wikimedia / CC BY 2.0).***

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and African elephants (Loxodonta africana) diverged 25.9 million years ago (at least 7.6 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007), and they mainly differ in the tip of the trunk, ear size, and shape of their withers. Even the two almost identical African species of the savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) diverged 7.6 million years ago (at least 4 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007). Not really a new body plan.

***Asian elephant (Yathin S Krishnappa, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0).***

The South American spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and Asian black bear (Ursus / Selenarctos thibetanus) diverged 16.5 million years ago. They look very similar and can hybridize in captivity (Mondolfi & Boede 1981).

***Spectacled bear (Ltshears, Wikimedia / GFDL).***

River otter (Lutra lutra) and brown fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) diverged about 40 million years ago. They indeed look quite different, but still a far cry from the difference between pakicetids and basilosaurids in a tenth of the time. This example is interesting because some experts thought that otters represent the closest related group to pinnipeds, or at least assumed stem pinnipeds like the Miocene Puijila darwini were very similar to otters. Therefore, this case seems to be a pretty good analogue to the early amphibious stem whales, which made a much bigger transition in terms of body plan in just a few million years.

***River otter (Factumquintus, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0) .***

The Sister Group of Whales

In modern phylogenetic reconstructions hippos are consistently recovered as the sister group of whales. So, we might expect to find a comparable evolutionary disparity within this group. However, even though the river hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and pygmy hippo (Choeropsis liberiensis) diverged 9.6. million years ago, they share the same body plan and only differ somewhat in size and proportions. Still not convinced?

***River hippo (Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia / GFDL).***

Now, let’s have a look at modern cetaceans. Maybe they are different? The common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) diverged 3.99 million years ago. This represents about the timeframe available between pakicetids and basilosaurids and shows what blind evolution at best can achieve with whales in this time: only very minor differences!

***Common dolphin (Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0).***

Finally, what about great apes and humans. Chimp (Pan paniscus) and gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) diverged according to TimeTree 9.06 million years ago and humans (Homo sapiens) from chimps 6.7 million years, which agrees with the hominin fossil record. There are two possibilities: Either you follow those scientists who consider the biological difference between humans and chimps as marginal. Then this example would just confirm the pattern described above. Or, you consider humans as very different from chimps, based on their different bipedal locomotion and especially their mental capacity and cultural achievements. In the latter case humans would represent the only exception to the pattern that I could find, which would be a remarkable confirmation of Judeo-Christian human exceptionalism.

***Chimp (Magnus Johansson, Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 2.0),***

Two Indisputable Facts

These examples could be expanded endlessly but should be sufficient to establish the point. There are clearly limits to what unguided evolution can do within a few million years, and these limits are far below the level of any major body plan transitions. Thus, we can safely conclude that there are two indisputable facts that require an adequate explanation:

1.) There are many examples of fossil species pairs with very different body plans that diverged within a window of time of 5 (±5) million years. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are only about 350,000 described fossil species (extrapolated based on data in Teichert 1956, Valentine 1970, Raup 1976, and Alroy 2002), which represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 5-50 billion species that have ever lived on Earth (Raup 1991).

2.) There exist no living species pairs with even remotely similar differences in body plan that are dated to have diverged in a similar time frame. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are an estimated 8.7 million living species (Mora et al. 2011, Strain 2011, Sweetlove 2011), of which more than 2 million are described (IISE 2012). Previous estimates of the total number of living species varied from 3-100 million species (May 1988, Tangley 1997, Chapman 2009), but if microbes are included, it could even be up to a trillion living species (Locey & Lennon 2016, Latty & Lee 2019).

Considering the fact that windows of time of only 5-10 million years account for most of the abrupt appearances of new body plans in the fossil record (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021), the Bayesian likelihood of not finding a single example of similar morphological disparity having originated on a similar time frame among the millions of living species is basically close to zero. I consider this simple argument as a final nail in the coffin of Darwinian unguided evolution.

A Public Challenge

Having made my case, I here formally and publicly pose the challenge again to prove me wrong. My dear Darwinist friends and colleagues, please find in the vast database of 97,000 species at TimeTree.org just a single example of any pair of different species that have diverged about 5 million years ago (give or take a few million years) according to a consensus of multiple molecular clock studies, and that exhibit a morphological disparity in their body plans comparable to, say, Pakicetus and Basilosaurus. To be clear, of course no evolutionist ever claimed that Pakicetus was the actual ancestor of Basilosaurus. It rather represented a side branch of the cetacean stem group. But what evolutionists definitely do imply is that the stem species was roughly similar in body plan to Raoellidae and Pakicetidae. Therefore, this challenge is absolutely valid and reasonable.

An obvious possible objection by Darwinists might be that recent species pairs do not represent ancestor-descendent lineages but just cousin lineages that both diverged from a common ancestor. Yes, I get it. However, this also applies for most fossil examples, and there is a catch: While differences in ancestor-descendent lineages could only accumulate in a single evolving lineage, recent lineages could both evolve differences during the same time in each lineage and thus should rather present more and not less morphological disparity. Therefore, this point makes the problem even worse for Darwinists.

Maybe evolutionists will appeal to yet unknown non-Darwinian processes. However, the great advantage of this new argument is that it is totally independent of the nature of the transformation process. You could simply consider that process as a black box. Therefore, it is totally irrelevant if Darwinists invent some new possible mechanism. The crucial point is not the process, but the resulting pattern of new body plans consistently having come into being abruptly in the distant past, but not in the more recent past.

No Conceivable Reason

There is no conceivable reason why a disparity like that between Pakicetus and Basilosaurus should be limited to the fossil record, where it can be found in numerous examples among all groups of organisms, while being totally absent among the millions of recent species. So, let’s be generous and not restrict the challenge to the TimeTree database. Just find any pair of species among the millions of living species to meet the challenge. Only one! Come on, if unguided evolution really can do its magic, this should not be too difficult, should it? Well, I won’t hold my breath, but if the challenge cannot be met, Darwinists should be asked to explain why.

Here is my explanation. Darwinism is wrong, and this applies not only to the neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection but to any unguided evolutionary processes including those suggested by proponents of the so-called Extended Synthesis (e.g., Shapiro et al. 2014, Laland et al. 2014, 2015, Garte 2016, Müller 2016, 2017).

There is no evolutionary reason why the creative power of this process should have been active over all of Earth history but then ceased to function within the past 10 million years. Intelligent design proponents can easily explain this pattern: there was creative intelligent intervention in the history of life, but this creative activity deliberately ceased with the arrival of humans as the final telos. Any further explanation would have to transgress the methodological limits of the design inference, but Judeo-Christian theists will certainly recognize an eerie correspondence with the Biblical message, which says that God rested from his creative activity after the creation of humans (Genesis 2:2-3).

References

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Bechly G 2018. Alleged Refutation of the Cambrian Explosion Confirms Abruptness, Vindicates Meyer.Evolution News May 29, 2018.
Bechly G 2021. Chapter 31: Does the Fossil Record Demonstrate Darwinian Evolution? Pp 345–356 in: Dembski WA, Luskin C, Holden JM (eds). The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Eugene (OR): Harvest House.
Bechly G, Meyer SC 2017. Chapter 10. The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry. Pp 331–361 in: Moreland JP, Meyer SC, Shaw C, Gauger AK, Grudem W (eds). Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Wheaton (IL): Crossway.
Chapman AD 2009. Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World. 2^nd ed. Canberra (Australia): Australian Biological Resources Study. [PDF]
Daley AC, Antcliffe JB, Drage HB, Pates S 2018. Early fossil record of Euarthropoda and the Cambrian Explosion. PNAS 115(21), 5323–5331. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1719962115.
Garte S 2016. New Ideas in Evolutionary Biology: From NDMS to EES. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 68, 3–11. [PDF]
Hedges SB, Kumar S (eds.) 2009. The Timetree of Life. New York (NY): Oxford University Press.
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Hedges SB, Marin J, Suleski M, Paymer M, Kumar S 2015. Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification. Molecular Biology and Evolution 32, 835–845. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msv037.
Helbig AJ, Seibold I, Martens J, Wink M 1995. Genetic Differentiation and Phylogenetic Relationships of Bonelli’s Warbler Phylloscopus bonelli and Green Warbler P. nitidus. Journal of Avian Biology 26(2), 139–153. DOI: 10.2307/3677063.
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Laland KN, Uller T, Feldman MW, Sterelny K, Müller GM, Moczek A, Jablonka E, Odling-Smee J, Wray GA, Hoekstra HE, Futuyma DJ, Lenski RE, Mackay TFC, Schluter D, Strassmann JE 2014. Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Nature 514, 162–164. DOI: 10.1038/514161a.
Laland KN, Uller T, Feldman MW, Sterelny K, Müller GM, Moczek A, Jablonka E, Odling-Smee J 2015. The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282:20151019, 1–14. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1019.
Latty T, Lee T 2019. How many species on Earth? Why that’s a simple question but hard to answer. The Conversation April 28, 2019.
Locey KJ, Lennon JT 2016. Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity. PNAS 113(21), 5970–5975. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521291113.
Long Story Short 2020. Ep. 2 Whale Evolution: Good Evidence for Darwin? Discovery Science YouTube channel 24.04.2020.
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Mondolfi E, Boede EO 1981. A hybrid of a spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and an Asiatic black bear (Selenarctos thibetanus) born at the Maracay Zoological Park, Venezuela. Memoria de la Sociedad de Ciencias Naturales La Salle 41(115), 143–148. [ResearchGate]
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Monday, 9 May 2022

1st century ce

Science Stopper? Intelligent Design as a Fruitful Scientific Paradigm

How ID Inspires the Progress of Science

Avenues of Discovery

Notes

Guillermo Gonzalez on What’s Changed Since The Privileged Planet

Cell Fate: Another Hurdle for Evolution

A Challenge for a Librarian

Peeking into a Keyhole

Quality-Control Terms from Engineering

Wednesday, 4 May 2022

John West: C. S. Lewis and the “Human Fallibility of Science”

Neither Fiction Nor Fact

Mitochondria: Evolution’s Ever-Receding Ancestor

Fact Check: Hawaiian Silverswords Fail the Species Pair Challenge

Two Blatant Examples

A More Serious Response

A Second Crucial Issue

An Avian Example

References

Saturday, 30 April 2022

ID Pioneer William Dembski on His Rocky and Rewarding Journey

Medved, Berlinski Take on Steven Pinker and Whig History

Wednesday, 27 April 2022

Unraveling the Myth that Undesigned Processes Generate Novel Functions

The Research Studies

The Misunderstanding

The Challenge for Evolution

Bechly: “Life’s Second ‘Big Bang'”

Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists

The Lifespan of a Single Species

So Much for the Theoretical Prelude

Avian Examples

The Sister Group of Whales

Two Indisputable Facts

A Public Challenge

No Conceivable Reason

References

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