Viewing Chinese Lanterns in Pittsburgh
Paul Nelson
On the day after Thanksgiving, I was viewing Abutilon pictum — commonly known as the Chinese lantern plant — at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Pittsburgh, PA. While being charmed by its whimsical beauty, I also mused about the genetic coding requirements for the changes in protein expression and timing (during development) to give its precise floral morphology. Psalm 111:2.
America’s Unchristian Beginnings : Founding Fathers: Most, despite preachings of our pious right, were deists who rejected the divinity of Jesus.
BY STEVEN MORRIS
The Christian right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States as part of its campaign to force its view of religion on others who ask merely to be left alone. According to this Orwellian revision, the Founding Fathers were devout Christians who envisioned a Christian nation.
Not true. The early presidents and patriots were generally deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the relevance of the Bible.
* Thomas Paine, pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the War of Independence: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
* George Washington, first President: He seems to have had the characteristic unconcern of the 18th-Century deist for the forms and creeds of institutional religions. Although he often referred to Providence as an impersonal force, remote and abstract, he never declared himself to be a Christian, either in contemporary reports or his voluminous correspondence.
Washington championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray, a Universalist who denied the existence of hell, was invited to become an Army chaplain, other chaplains petitioned Washington to reject him. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washington uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
* John Adams, second President: Drawn to the study of law but facing pressure from his father to become a clergyman, he wrote that he found among lawyers “a noble air and gallant achievements” but among the clergy, the “pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces.” Late in life he wrote, “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it!!!’ ” It was during Adams’ presidency that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” This treaty with the Islamic state of Tripoli had been written and concluded by Joel Barlow during Washington’s Administration.
* Thomas Jefferson , third President and author of the Declaration of Independence: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” He referred to the Book of Revelations as “the ravings of a maniac” and in further criticism of the Bible he wrote: “The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.”
* James Madison, fourth President and father of the Constitution: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise,” he wrote. “During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
* Ethan Allen , whose capture of Ft. Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire the country to pursue the War of Independence: “That Jesus Christ was not God is evident from his own words.” Allen also wrote that he was generally “Denominated a deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian.” Allen stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked if he promised “to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God.” Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the god of nature, and the laws those “written in the great book of Nature.”
* Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion . . . has received various corruption changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.” He died a month later, a deist, not a Christian.
Ps. America's founders and doubtless many others were pushed away from the JEHOVAH of the bible because Christendom's version of him is the author of a hyper politicized gospel that is OK with attempting to force an outward piety upon society by force of arms. And both traditionalists and modernists are guilty of this vice lest anyone conclude that I am picking sides.
Failed Darwinian predictions
Cornelius G Hunter
addition to the DNA code, there are other fundamental molecular processes that appear to be common to all life. One intriguing example is DNA replication which copies both strands of the DNA molecule, but in different directions. Evolution predicts these fundamental processes to be common to all life. Indeed this was commonly said to be an important successful prediction for the theory. As Niles Eldredge explained, the “underlying chemical uniformity of life” was a severe test that evolution passed with flying colors. (Eldredge, 41) Likewise Christian de Duve declared that evolution is in part confirmed by the fact that all extant living organisms function according to the same principles. (de Duve, 1) And Michael Ruse concluded that the essential macromolecules of life help to make evolution beyond reasonable doubt. (Ruse, 4)
But this conclusion that the fundamental molecular processes within the cell are common to all species was superficial. In later years, as the details were investigated, important differences between species emerged. For example, key DNA replication proteins surprisingly “show very little or no sequence similarity between bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes.” (Leipe) Also different DNA replication processes have been discovered. These results were not what were expected:
In particular, and counter-intuitively, given the central role of DNA in all cells and the mechanistic uniformity of replication, the core enzymes of the replication systems of bacteria and archaea (as well as eukaryotes) are unrelated or extremely distantly related. Viruses and plasmids, in addition, possess at least two unique DNA replication systems, namely, the protein-primed and rolling circle modalities of replication. This unexpected diversity makes the origin and evolution of DNA replication systems a particularly challenging and intriguing problem in evolutionary biology. (Koonin)
Some evolutionists are reconsidering the assumption that all life on Earth shares the same basic molecular architecture and biochemistry, and instead examining the possibility of independent evolution, and multiple origins of fundamentally different life forms. (Cleland, Leipe)
References
Cleland, Carol. 2007. “Epistemological issues in the study of microbial life: alternative terran biospheres?.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38:847-861.
de Duve, Christian. 1995. Vital Dust. New York: BasicBooks.
Eldredge, Niles. 1982. The Monkey Business. New York: Washington Square Press.
Koonin, E. 2006. “Temporal order of evolution of DNA replication systems inferred by comparison of cellular and viral DNA polymerases.” Biology Direct 18:1-39.
Leipe, D., L. Aravind, E. Koonin. 1999. “Did DNA replication evolve twice independently?.” Nucleic Acids Research 27:3389-3401.
Ruse, Michael. 1986. Taking Darwin Seriously. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Religious Intuition Can Lead to Scientific Discovery: The Cases of Copernicus and Ferguson
Robert Shedinger
A common criticism of intelligent design holds that ID is more religion than science. This criticism is problematic as ID possesses a strong and growing empirical foundation. The purpose of this criticism, however, is to undermine any claims to truth associated with ID. As the argument goes, religion is subjective and faith-based while science is objective and empirically based. Religion therefore almost by definition can never provide reliable insights about the nature and structure of the physical universe. Thus, if ID is religion, it cannot be true. This would all be well and good except for the fact that there are at least two noteworthy examples of religious reasoning leading directly to scientific hypotheses later empirically confirmed to be true.
When I first began teaching at Luther College over twenty years ago, I had a senior colleague who held a PhD in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Bruce Wrightsman (who has since passed away) shared with me an article he had published back in 1980 in an obscure anthology titled “The Legitimation of Scientific Belief: Theory Justification by Copernicus.” My colleague argued persuasively that Nicholas Copernicus possessed no empirical evidence to place the sun at the center of the solar system but that he rather had relied on a religious justification. It is a shame this article has not garnered more attention.
Epicycles and Equants
By the 16th century, the old Ptolemaic system had become rather messy with its bevy of ad hoc features like epicycles and equants designed to keep the geocentric system consistent with observations. Messy as it was, the Ptolemaic system did remain consistent with observations and retained its practical use as a calendrical tool. There was no compelling empirical evidence suggesting a heliocentric solar system (a point supported by Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich in God’s Planet).
Copernicus, however, viewed the Ptolemaic system as a monstrosity. The God he believed in was the great artisan of the universe, and such a God would never create something as messy and clumsy as the Ptolemaic system. Placing the sun at the center of the solar system led to a simpler and more elegant model, one more pleasing to Copernicus’ religiously inspired aesthetic sensibilities. And it was on this basis that his theory rested. In Bruce Wrightsman’s words:
One may not like Copernicus’s reasons for coming to believe in and justifying his system but that is not a rational ground for refusing to accept them as reasons. We must therefore remind ourselves that scientific investigation had much broader implications for Copernicus than it has for many today and included those purposes which we classify as religious and extra-scientific.1
To be sure, Copernicus’ theory flew in the face of church doctrine, forcing Copernicus to delay publication out of fear of ecclesiastical reprisal. Yet despite the fact that Copernicus’ religiously inspired ideas about the structure of the cosmos may have been deemed heretical according to the orthodoxies of his day, they were religious nonetheless. And when Galileo later began peering at the night sky through his telescope, Copernicus’ religiously inspired aesthetics were found to have led him to truth about the structure of the solar system! Empirical evidence came after Copernicus had already proposed his theory on religious grounds, not before.
“A Mean Opinion of the Divine Wisdom”
A second example comes from the work of a lesser-known figure, 18th-century Scottish astronomer James Ferguson. Ferguson, like Copernicus, contradicted the religious orthodoxies of his day by suggesting that the stars that light up the night sky represented bodies like our sun accompanied by their own planetary systems and perhaps even extraterrestrial life. Orthodox beliefs of the time viewed the heavens as existing entirely for the aesthetic pleasure of humans on Earth. But according to Ferguson:
It is no ways probable that the Almighty, who always acts with infinite wisdom and does nothing in vain, should create so many glorious Suns, fit for so many important purposes, and place them at such distances from one another, without proper objects near enough to be benefitted by their influences. Whoever imagines they were created only to give a faint glimmering light to the inhabitants of this Globe, must have a very superficial knowledge of Astronomy, and a mean opinion of the Divine Wisdom.2
Clearly Ferguson possessed no empirical evidence suggesting the existence of planetary systems revolving around extra-solar suns. But his religious reasoning led him to propose that such things should exist. And here we are today with 21st-century technology continuing to empirically confirm the existence of extra-solar planets on a nearly daily basis!
Science and Aesthetics
These examples challenge any notion that religious thinking can never lead to true understandings about the nature and structure of the physical universe. Interestingly, aesthetic sensibilities continue to drive science in the case of theoretical physicists’ fascination with elegance, simplicity, and grand unification as a criterion of fundamental truth (even if this aesthetic sensibility has been divorced from its religious roots).
ID is not religion. But even if we were to concede falsely that it is, such a characterization is irrelevant to the question of whether it is true. Religion may not always lead to truth about the physical world, but it is patently false to say that it never has or never can.
Notes
1)Bruce Wrightsman, “The Legitimation of Scientific Belief: Theory Justification by Copernicus” in T. Nickles, ed., Scientific Discovery: Case Studies (D. Reidel, 1980), 62.
2)Quoted in Michael J. Crowe, “Astronomy and Religion (1780-1915): Four Case Studies Involving Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life” in John Hedley Brooke, et al., eds., Science in Theistic Contexts, Osiris 16 (2001): 212
Your Intelligently Designed Body Is a System of Systems
Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from Your Designed Body, the new book by engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman.
To be alive, every cell in your body needs solutions to a complicated set of problems — containment, gates, controls, framing, transport, energy, information, and reproduction. Zooming out from a single cell, the human body as a whole is made up of around thirty trillion cells (a figure that varies widely with an individual’s size). It needs to solve all the same kinds of problems that a cell does, plus quite a few more. And it needs new ways to solve old problems, ways completely different from how the same problems were solved at the cellular level.
For example, a single-celled organism is like a microscopic island of life. The cell gets what it needs and gets rid of what it doesn’t need from its surrounding environment. In contrast, a large multi-cellular organism (like you) is more like a continent with a deep and dark interior. Most of the cells reside deep in the interior with no direct access to the body’s surrounding environment. For a multicellular organism, then, harvesting the raw materials its cells need and getting rid of toxic by-products becomes a major logistical problem.
Several hundred such problems must be solved for a complex body to be alive. And many of the solutions to these basic problems generate new problems that must also be solved, or that constrain other solutions in critical ways. The result is that for a complex body to be alive, thousands of deeply interconnected problems must be solved, and many of them solved at all times, or life will fail.
Additionally, many of the problems the body faces are much more complex than those solved in any individual cell. For example, while it takes impressive engineering for cells to sense their environment (a process not well understood), sensing poses a considerably greater engineering challenge for a human body, since it involves much more sophisticated forms of sensing — like vision, hearing, taste, smell, and the fine-touch sensing in your hands.
The bottom line is that, as hard as it is for a cell to maintain life, it’s much harder for an organism with a complex body plan like yours.
Hard Problems Take Clever Solutions
Together, the many thousands of problems the body must solve for survival and reproduction require many thousands of ingenious solutions. Most of these solutions need special-purpose equipment across all levels of the body plan, from specifically adapted molecular machinery (like hemoglobin molecules) to specialized cells (like red blood cells) to tissues (like bone marrow) to whole body systems (like the cardiovascular system). This may involve hundreds of thousands of parts, replicated in millions of places.
Solutions to this class of problems always exhibit four interesting characteristics:
1. Specialization
It takes the right parts to make a working whole. Each part must perform a function with respect to the larger system. Each part must be made of the right materials, fine-tuned to precise tolerances, and equipped with suitable interfaces with the other parts. This is a design principle known as separation of concerns. Virtually every designed object in human experience is based on this design strategy. And this appears to be equally true in biological systems, including virtually every capability in the human body.
2. Organization
The parts must be in the right places, arranged and interconnected to enable the function of the whole. Each part must work with the other parts in an integrated way. The parts are often made of different materials, where a material is chosen for how its particular properties support the specific needs of that particular part and how it must function in light of the whole. This is a design principle known as the rule of composition. It counterbalances the separation of concerns principle. Separation of concerns breaks large problems into subproblems that are (slightly) easier to solve, while the rule of composition puts the solutions to the subproblems (the parts) together such that the function of the whole is achieved.
3. Integration
The parts must have exactly those interfaces that enable the parts to work together. With bones, this obviously involves their shapes, especially at their connection and articulation points (the joints). For other body systems this can involve structural support, alignment, shock absorption, gating and transport systems, electrical signaling, chemical signaling, exchange of complex information, and integrated logic.
4. Coordination
The parts must be coordinated such that each performs its respective function or functions at the right time. This usually requires one or more control systems, either active or passive, and usually some form of sensing and communication between the parts and the controls. This property is achieved by orchestration or choreography, which differ in the ways the controls are achieved, the former by a more centralized approach and the latter by a more distributed approach. In an old Chevy pickup, this function for the engine is achieved by a camshaft. In ATP Synthase, this is also achieved by a camshaft.
In designing a complex system, all four of the above factors must be considered across the whole when designing each of the parts.
When a system has all the right parts, in all the right places, made of the right materials, with the right specifications, doing their respective functions, at all the right times, to achieve an overall, system-level function that none of the parts can do on its own, you have what is known as a coherent system. Coherence, in this sense, is a functional requirement for all non-trivial systems. Moreover, in life the systems are never standalone — there are always interdependencies between and among the various component systems and parts. The human body is composed of coherent, interdependent systems.
Of course, each part in a larger system may be a system itself, composed of specialized parts, which may also be systems composed of specialized parts, and so on, forming a hierarchy of design. As with most human-designed artifacts, living systems consist of layers of systems and subsystems — a system of systems. This is exemplified in the human body.
The Scope of the Body’s Solutions
It takes a lot of work to keep a sawmill running. Logs need to be obtained, sorted, and brought in. Cut lumber needs to be taken away for further processing. The motors need electricity. The saw blades need to be changed out and sharpened. The workers need coffee. Lots of coffee. All these require various systems within the larger system.
Similarly, to keep your cells alive and working properly, your body requires eleven major organ systems1 to distribute, dispose, defend, generate energy, and perform other crucial tasks. The systems and their roles:
The respiratory system takes in the oxygen (O2) your cells need and gets rid of excess carbon dioxide (CO2).
The gastrointestinal (digestive) system takes in the water, sugar, fat, protein, salt, vitamins, and minerals your cells need.
The renal/urinary system rids your body of excess nitrogen (ammonia, urea) and helps maintain your blood pressure and control your body’s water and salt content.
The cardiovascular system pumps blood throughout your body to provide “just in time” delivery of supplies to every organ no matter what you’re doing. It’s also critical for managing temperature, dissipating excess heat, and distributing chemical signals throughout the body.
The integumentary system (skin) protects your body from the outside world while helping control your temperature through sweating. It continually replenishes itself from the inside out and is remarkably good at repairing itself when it gets cut or scraped.
The skeletal system (bones) provides support and protection for many of your vital organs (like your brain, spinal cord, lungs, and heart) and is the framework for the muscles. Its structures, organization, and proportions enable an amazing range of movement and activity.
The motor system (muscles) allows the body to move around, stay balanced, and handle things. It’s capable of a wide range of strength demands yet possesses extraordinarily fine controls.
The nervous system (nerves and brain) allows the body to sense your surroundings, maintain your body’s vital functions, and control your activities. It also allows you to be awake and aware — to think, communicate, imagine, and create.
The immune/lymphatic system protects you from invading pathogens.
The endocrine system sends out hormones to regulate things like your metabolism and growth.
The reproductive system, male and female, enables new human life.
Each of these is a specialized subsystem in the body. The body needs all of them, organized properly, and coordinated to remarkably fine tolerances. In turn, each of these subsystems is a complete system, itself composed of many specialized subsystems and parts, organized in specific ways, and precisely coordinated.
Untangling “Professor Dave’s” Confusion about the Cambrian Explosion
Günter Bechly
In a series at Evolution News, I am currently reviewing the attack (Farina 2022) on Stephen Meyer and Darwin’s Doubt by popular science YouTuber Dave Farina (aka Professor Dave). You will find my first post in the series here. We have seen the absurdly low quality of this individual’s video. But there is much more. I have added timecodes in square brackets for easier reference.
[TC 7:44] If all is well with the fossil record as evidence for Darwinian gradualism, as Mr. Farina claims, then why does he have to raise his next point, invoking the “obvious limitations to the fossil record” due to rare fossilization and sampling bias? He says that Dr. Meyer’s rejection of the “artifact hypothesis” fails to acknowledge the validity of these limitations. Instead, he says, Meyer lied about the Doushantuo Formation (more about that later). However, it is Farina, who is distorting the truth, as Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt discusses at length the limitations of the fossil record and explores in detail why these limitations cannot explain away the absence of the assumed ancestors of the Cambrian phyla in the Ediacaran strata (Meyer 2013a: 56–62). My article on the demise of the artifact hypothesis should settle this issue beyond reasonable doubt (Bechly 2020d), because numerous Ediacaran localities of the Burgess-Shale-type could and would have preserved even small and soft-bodied assumed ancestors of the Cambrian phyla but there are none. The same was acknowledged by Scheffer (2009), who said “it could be that earlier rocks were not as good for preserving fossils. However, very well-preserved fossils do exist from earlier periods, and it is now generally accepted that the Cambrian explosion was real.” The artifact hypothesis was also rejected by the leading experts Erwin & Valentine (2013) in their book on the Cambrian Explosion (see Luskin 2013a for quotes).
By the way: if Farina or anybody else should respond that such Evolution News articles don’t count because they are not peer-reviewed scientific papers, you just have to mention that all those articles are heavily based on such peer-reviewed mainstream studies and only report and comment on them. You will find all the references there.
[TC 8:50] Farina disputes the claim that “Animals appear for the first time in the Cambrian explosion,” which Meyer made in a popular video. Farina pedantically says this is objectively wrong because Meyer himself mentioned sponges and Kimberella as a probable simple animal from the Ediacaran. Therefore, Farina considers the Cambrian only as a diversification of animal life not its origin. This is either false or misleading. It is false if it refers to the core problem of the Cambrian Explosion, which is the abrupt origin of most bilaterian animal phyla or body plans. It is misleading if it refers to the origin of animals in the sense of Metazoa because (as Farina correctly noted) Meyer never disputes the existence of Precambrian metazoans such as sponges and cnidarians, and even acknowledges Kimberella as a possible bilaterian (though there are good reasons to doubt that Kimberella was a mollusk or a bilaterian (see further on for a critical discussion of Kimberella).
Dating the Cambrian Explosion
[TC 9:22] Farina claims that the dating of the Cambrian Explosion as 530-520 mya is wrong too. He cites Erwin et al. (2011) as establishing:
Earliest skeletal fossils in the latest Ediacaran
Plates, spines, shells in the Fortunian 541-530 mya
First occurrences of metazoan phyla in the latest Ediacaran 555 mya with a dramatic rise of 25 mya in the first stages of the Cambrian.
[TC 10:48] Farina therefore thinks that the Cambrian Explosion was at least 25 my (not 10 my) long and Meyer should have known this because Erwin’s paper appeared before Meyer’s book. Well, I actually agree that the total length of the Cambrian Explosion, as documented by the fossil record, may have been about 25 million years. But this point is immaterial because many experts also agree that the main pulse was much shorter and precisely in the range given by Meyer (see the numerous studies quoted in review articles by Luskin 2013 and CSC 2019). Here are just two prominent examples:
Bowring et al. (1993) concluded that the “period of exponential increase of diversification lasted only 5 to 6 m.y. … it is unlikely to have exceeded 10 m.y.”
In the standard textbook on the Cambrian Explosion, the renowned experts Erwin & Valentine (2013: p. 5) (yes, that’s the same Douglas Erwin who was lead author of the study quoted by Farina) dated the main diversification to a “geologically brief interval between about 530 to 520 Ma.” That’s 10 million years, exactly as stated by Meyer. Even the older Erwin et al. (2011) paper quoted by Farina found 13 bilaterian animal phyla originating in the Lower Cambrian Stage 3 (see his Supplementary Information), which lasted about 7 million years and includes the famous Sirius Passet and Chengjiang biota.
Furthermore, the fact that the first fossils found of different Cambrian animal phyla are somewhat spread out in time does not at all contradict a much narrower event for their origin, because the so-called Signor-Lipps effecthas to be taken into account. This effect refers to the fact that the oldest and youngest discovered fossils often fail to represent the actual first and last occurrences of these taxa in the history of life. Finally, it does not make a significant difference for the problem of the Cambrian Explosion whether it lasted 5 million years or 25 million years, because even the latter range would be orders of magnitude too short to accommodate the origin and spreading of the required genetic changes, based on standard population genetics (see further on for this waiting time problem).
Two Phases of the Cambrian Explosion
[TC 11.07] Farina cites more recent research by Zhuralev & Wood (2018), who suggested two phases of the Cambrian Explosion with two separate radiations, one of stem lineages 542-513 mya, and one of crown lineages from 513-485 my (connecting with the onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, aka GOBE). This is totally irrelevant, though, as the problem of Cambrian Explosion is the origin of the body plans in the first radiation and not their diversification in the second one. That there were many other later radiations is not under dispute, but the narrow windows of time for most of these radiations show that the Cambrian Explosion is just one of many examples of abrupt origins that contradict gradualist Darwinian expectations (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021e). It makes the problem worse not better.
[TC 11:41] Farina misrepresents the claim for the suddenness of the Cambrian Explosion. He says the claim is that “an enormous number of species showed up in an unimaginable short period of time.” Nope, that is not the problem at all. The problem is the abrupt origin of complex body plans of bilaterian animal phyla, without any fossil evidence for their gradual evolution in the preceding layers. He calls it dishonesty to exploit the apparent suddenness suggested by the word “Explosion” but fails to mention that this suddenness is emphasized in tons of technical papers on the Cambrian Explosion, which was named “Explosion” and “Evolution’s Big Bang” for a reason. Again, see Luskin (2013b) for an extensive review of all the mainstream technical papers that use words like “sudden” or “abrupt” to describe the Cambrian Explosion and the origin of the phyla and their respective body plans. [TC 12:00] Farina says that in actuality the two phases of the Cambrian Explosion took 70 million years. Well, except for the authors of the mentioned study and their research group, hardly any respected expert on the Cambrian Explosion ever claimed that it spanned 70 million years, mainly because the term “Cambrian Explosion” only refers to the first radiation. Another recent study seeks to identify three phases of the Cambrian Explosion but estimates its maximal duration to be about 40 million years (Zhang & Shu 2021). However, these authors qualify this maximum estimate with the following admission: “Most body plans emerged within [my emphasis] this time window. The birth of each body plan might be even in a much shorter[my emphasis] time interval.” They also ask if the Cambrian Explosion poses a challenge to evolution, but with hand-waving dismiss this dangerous possibility, simply maintaining that millions of years is plenty of time for evolutionary change.
A Long Time, Biologically Speaking?
[TC 12:10] Like the latter authors, Farina also claims that the Cambrian Explosion was a long time biologically for the diversification to take place. Really? Such bold claims, whether made by scientists or by YouTubers, are not science but just an unsubstantiated opinion. If real hard science like the math of population genetics is used to address this question, the Darwinian house of cards collapses (see further on for this waiting time problem). Also, the available time was certainly not as long as claimed. How did Zhang & Shu (2021) arrive at their maximum estimate of 40 million years? Similar to Daley et al. (2018), they simply took the documented absence of metazoan communities at 560 mya as their starting point in the Ediacaran and the full development of the metazoan communities at 521 mya in the Lower Cambrian as their end point. However, the Cambrian Stage 1 begins at 541 million years and there is no fossil record of uncontroversial metazoan communities prior to this, as explicitly granted by Daley et al. and others. Zhang & Shu simply added 20 million years of the terminal Ediacaran to the Cambrian Explosion. They did so without any evidence whatsoever. Casey Luskin (2013b) wrote an excellent article about how mainstream experts support Meyer’s dating and description of the suddenness of the Cambrian Explosion, which totally debunks Farina’s claims (also see CSC 2019).
A Word from the Experts
I don’t have much to add to Luskin’s (2013b) article, apart from a few more references from some true experts:
Scheffer (2009: 169-170): “The collapse of the Ediacaran fauna is followed by the spectacular radiation of novel life-forms known as the Cambrian explosion. All of the main body plans that we know now evolved in as little as about 10 million years. It might have been thought that this apparent explosion of diversity might be an artifact. For instance, it could be that earlier rocks were not as good for preserving fossils. However, very well preserved fossils do exist from earlier periods, and it is now generally accepted that the Cambrian explosion was real.”
Erwin & Valentine (2013: 5-6): “[A] great variety and abundance of animal fossils appear in deposits dating from a geologically brief interval between about 530 to 520 Ma, early in the Cambrian period. During this time, nearly all the major living animal groups (phyla) that have skeletons first appeared as fossils (at least one appeared earlier). Surprisingly, a number of those localities have yielded fossils that preserve details of complex organs at the tissue level, such as eyes, guts, and appendages. In addition, several groups that were entirely soft-bodied and thus could be preserved only under unusual circumstances also first appear in those faunas. Because many of those fossils represent complex groups such as vertebrates (the subgroup of the phylum Chordata to which humans belong) and arthropods, it seems likely that all or nearly all the major phylum-level groups of living animals, including many small softbodied groups that we do not actually find as fossils, had appeared by the end of the early Cambrian. This geologically abrupt and spectacular record of early animal life is called the Cambrian explosion. …Taken at face value, the geologically abrupt appearance of Cambrian faunas with exceptional preservation suggested the possibility that they represented a singular burst of evolution, but the processes and mechanisms were elusive. Although there is truth to some of the objections, they have not diminished the magnitude or importance of the explosion. … Several lines of evidence are consistent with the reality of the Cambrian explosion.”
Lee et al. (2013): “The near-simultaneous appearance of most modern animal body plans (phyla) ∼530 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion is strong evidence for a brief interval of rapid phenotypic and genetic innovation … The abrupt appearance of most modern animal body plans (often ranked as phyla and classes) over half a billion years ago is one of the most important evolutionary events after the origin of life.”Briggs (2015): “We now know that the sudden appearance of fossils in the Cambrian (541–485 million years ago) is real and not an artefact of an imperfect fossil record … all the major animal groups evolved in a relatively short time during the Cambrian explosion.”
Buatois et al. (2016): “The majority of body plans were established during the Cambrian Explosion (CE), whereas the significant taxonomic increases during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE) were manifest at lower taxonomic levels.”
Davis (2019): “The Cambrian explosion was far shorter than we thought.”
Cabey (2020): “Nevertheless, now, 150 years after The Origin, when an incomparably larger stock of animal fossils has been collected, Darwin’s gap remains, the abrupt appearance of Cambrian fossils is a reality, and we are still wondering about the forces and mechanisms that drove it. Despite the fact that, from time to time, a small number of students have questioned the reality of the Cambrian explosion on the same ground as Darwin, today’s consensus is that the Cambrian explosion is a scientific fact (Linnemann et al., 2019) and ‘The Cambrian explosion is real and its consequences set in motion a sea-change in evolutionary history’ (Conway Morris, 2000; Nichols et al., 2006).”
Heger et al. (2020): “The Cambrian explosion was a unique animal radiation ~540 million years ago that produced the full range of body plans across bilaterians. The genetic mechanisms underlying these events are unknown.”
How short was the Cambrian Explosion? Recent evidence suggests that it may have been extremely short (Bechly 2021d). A study by Linnemann et al. (2018) demonstrated that the window of time between the latest appearance date (LAD) of the alien Ediacaran biota and the first appearance date (FAD) of the complex Cambrian biota was only 410,000 years. Again, we must take the Signor-Lipps effect into account, but you get an idea about the biological and geological abruptness of this event.
Furthermore, Farina’s claim that the Cambrian Explosion was a long time, biologically speaking, is nonsense. See the recent study by Daley et al. (2018) that I have discussed in two previous articles (Bechly 2018a, Bechly 2021d). The bottom line is that this study showed that only 13 million years were available for the transition from simple stem-metazoans to the fully developed and highly complex body plan of crown group arthropods, with exoskeleton, articulated legs, gut system, nervous system, and highly efficient compound eyes. This time span equals about the average longevity (5-10 my) of just two successive marine invertebrate species (Levinton 2001: 384, table 7.2). Of course, this does not mean that more overlapping speciation events could have happened during this time, but the comparison gives a good feeling for how short this time is in biological terms. This feeling can be corroborated with hard science and math: as correctly emphasized by Meyer in his book (Meyer 2013a), the standard mathematical tools of population genetics show that such a window of time is orders of magnitude too short to accommodate the waiting times for the origin and fixation of the required genetic changes (see further).
TC 12:26] Farina claims that Meyer is dishonest for saying that “many animal phyla show up for the first time in the Cambrian.” This is beyond ridiculous as exactly this statement can be found all over the technical literature about the Cambrian Explosion. It is the single most uncontroversial fact about the Cambrian Explosion that is affirmed by virtually all experts. Even Dawkins himself says, “It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.” (The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, pg. 229-230.) An invertebrate biology textbook states (Barnes et al. 2001: 9–10): “Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, ‘fully formed,’ in the Cambrian some 550 million years ago…The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla.”
Apparently based on then-grad student Nick Matzke’s review of Darwin’s Doubt (Matzke 2013), Farina parrots the silly quibble about the arbitrary definition of the Linnean rank of a phylum. Yes, cladists are right about this critique but it completely misses the point.
[TC 12:55] In support of this irrelevant claim, Farina quotes Budd & Jensen (2000), who said that characterizing phyla by particular types of “body plan” seems to be based on an artifact of classification. That’s fine, but the issue of the body plans remains no matter what you call them. The issue is not the artifactual arbitrariness of Linnean categorical ranks, which may be happily granted. The abrupt origin of the very different body plans of Cambrian animal phyla does not disappear only because you dispense with the phylum category in a modern phylogenetic classification. The fundamental differences among the distinct body plans was the reason these groups of animals were categorized as different phyla in the first place. You can change the names however you want, but the biological facts persist.
The mentioned paper by Budd & Jensen (2000) also redefined “a body plan [a]s that set of features plesiomorphically shared by extant taxa in a monophyletic clade.” Well, I’m sorry to say so, but the authors seem to be quite confused about cladistics, which Mr. Farina is of course not competent to recognize. Their definition is not only nonsensical but objectively erroneous, as it would imply that, for example, the body plan of vertebrates does not include vertebrae because those are synapomorphically shared and not symplesiomorphically shared by all vertebrates.
[TC 14:15] Therefore, it does not come as a big surprise that Farina incorrectly defines the term “plesiomorphic” as “traits that are shared by all the members of a group but are not unique to that group.” Nope, that is not what the term means. Plesiomorphic is just the technical cladistic term for a “primitive” or unmodified character state compared to the changed or derived state that is called apomorphic. Plesiomorphic and apomorphic only denote the polarity of a character and do not imply any statements of similarity between organisms. Only the terms “symplesiomorphy” and “synapomorphy” imply a shared character state and a homology hypothesis. Symplesiomorphic simply means a shared primitive homologous character state, such as multicellularity shared by ants and lions. But Farina’s definition would not even correctly define symplesiomorphy, because his definition would likewise apply for homoplasies (non-homologies) that are not uniquely shared, such as the wings of birds and insects. Farina doesn’t have a grasp of the basics of cladistic terminology. Maybe he should study my online “Glossary of Phylogenetic Systematics” to learn something before he tries to teach others.
John West in Turin, Italy: Intelligent Design’s Roots and Fruit
Evolution News
A new episode of ID the Future takes us to a conference in Turin, Italy, where scholar John West speaks about the roots of intelligent design, roots that stretch back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. In his talk, Dr. West also makes the case that design thinking was crucial to the rise of modern science, and he traces how Darwinism has eroded design thinking, fueled scientific racism, and undermined belief in human exceptionalism. West celebrates some of Italy’s contributions to Western civilization but also calls attention to Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who championed various racist ideas undergirded by Darwinian thinking, disturbing work that West learned more about when he visited the Cesare Lombroso Museum in Turin. On the bright side, there has been a surge in skepticism about Darwinian thinking, West says, along with a powerful resurgence in design thinking. Listen to the podcast or download it here.
The 5th dynasty (c. 2465–c. 2325 BCE)
The first two kings of the 5th dynasty, Userkaf and Sahure, were sons of Khentkaues, who was a member of the 4th-dynasty royal family. The third king, Neferirkare, may also have been her son. A story from the Middle Kingdom that makes them all sons of a priest of Re may derive from a tradition that they were true worshipers of the sun god and implies, probably falsely, that the 4th-dynasty kings were not. Six kings of the 5th dynasty displayed their devotion to the sun god by building personal temples to his cult. These temples, of which the two so far identified are sited similarly to pyramids, probably had a mortuary significance for the king as well as honouring the god. The kings’ pyramids should therefore be seen in conjunction with the sun temples, some of which received lavish endowments and were served by many high-ranking officials.
Pyramids have been identified for seven of the nine kings of the dynasty, at Ṣaqqārah (Userkaf and Unas, the last king), Abū Ṣīr (Sahure, Neferirkare, Reneferef, and Neuserre), and south Ṣaqqārah (Djedkare Izezi, the eighth king). The pyramids are smaller and less solidly constructed than those of the 4th dynasty, but the reliefs from their mortuary temples are better preserved and of very fine quality; that of Sahure gives a fair impression of their decorative program. The interiors contained religious scenes relating to provision for Sahure in the next life, while the exteriors presented his “historical” role and relations with the gods. Sea expeditions to Lebanon to acquire timber are depicted, as are aggression against and capture of Libyans. Despite the apparent precision with which captives are named and total figures given, these scenes may not refer to specific events, for the same motifs with the same details were frequently shown over the next 250 years; Sahure’s use of them might not have been the earliest.
Foreign connections were far-flung. Goldwork of the period has been found in Anatolia, while stone vases named for Khafre and Pepi I (6th dynasty) have been found at Tall Mardīkh in Syria (Ebla), which was destroyed around 2250 BCE. The absence of 5th-dynasty evidence from the site is probably a matter of chance. Expeditions to the turquoise mines of Sinai continued as before. In Nubia, graffiti and inscribed seals from Buhen document Egyptian presence until late in the dynasty, when control was probably abandoned in the face of immigration from the south and the deserts; later generations of the immigrants are known as the Nubian C Group. From the reign of Sahure on, there are records of trade with Punt, a partly legendary land probably in the region of present-day Eritrea, from which the Egyptians obtained incense and myrrh, as well as exotic African products that had been traded from still farther afield. Thus, the reduced level of royal display in Egypt does not imply a less prominent general role for the country.
High officials of the 5th dynasty were no longer members of the royal family, although a few married princesses. Their offices still depended on the king, and in their biographical inscriptions they presented their exploits as relating to him, but they justified other aspects of their social role in terms of a more general morality. They progressed through their careers by acquiring titles in complex ranked sequences that were manipulated by kings throughout the 5th and 6th dynasties. This institutionalization of officialdom has an archaeological parallel in the distribution of elite tombs, which no longer clustered so closely around pyramids. Many are at Giza, but the largest and finest are at Ṣaqqārah and Abū Ṣīr. The repertory of decorated scenes in them continually expanded, but there was no fundamental change in their subject matter. Toward the end of the 5th dynasty, some officials with strong local ties began to build their tombs in the Nile valley and the delta, in a development that symbolized the elite’s slowly growing independence from royal control.
Something of the working of the central administration is visible in papyri from the mortuary temples of Neferirkare and Reneferef at Abū Ṣīr. These show well-developed methods of accounting and meticulous recordkeeping and document the complicated redistribution of goods and materials between the royal residence, the temples, and officials who held priesthoods. Despite this evidence for detailed organization, the consumption of papyrus was modest and cannot be compared, for example, with that of Greco-Roman times.The last three kings of the dynasty, Menkauhor, Djedkare Izezi, and Unas, did not have personal names compounded with “-Re,” the name of the sun god (Djedkare is a name assumed on accession); and Izezi and Unas did not build solar temples. Thus, there was a slight shift away from the solar cult. The shift could be linked with the rise of Osiris, the god of the dead, who is first attested from the reign of Neuserre. His origin was, however, probably some centuries earlier. The pyramid of Unas, whose approach causeway was richly decorated with historical and religious scenes, is inscribed inside with spells intended to aid the deceased in the hereafter; varying selections of the spells occur in all later Old Kingdom pyramids. (As a collection, they are known as the Pyramid Texts.) Many of the spells were old when they were inscribed; their presence documents the increasing use of writing rather than a change in beliefs. The Pyramid Texts show the importance of Osiris, at least for the king’s passage into the next world: it was an undertaking that aroused anxiety and had to be assisted by elaborate rituals and spells
For Darwinism, Pregnancy Is the “Mother of all Chicken-and-Egg Problems”
David Klinghoffer
Here’s a really devilish problem to pose to your favorite friend, teacher, or relative who’s a Darwinist true believer. As Your Designed Body co-author Steve Laufmann observes, the relationship between an embryo and its mother is a relationship between unequals. The embryo’s systems are not yet complete so it depends on its mother for its life. This entails communication between the entities.
But as Laufmann asks, how could such a thing as pregnancy evolve gradually, without guidance or foresight, “when you have to have it in order to have a next generation. Nobody has ever addressed a problem like that.” No, they haven’t, at least not persuasively, which is why Laufmann calls it the “mother of all chicken-and-egg problems.” Darwinian evolution has many of those, as it takes an engineer like Steve Laufmann, or a physician like his co-author Howard Glicksman, to fully recognize. Evolutionary biologists tend to silently glide over such issues, which clearly point to intelligent design. Either that, or they are satisfied by vague speculations.
Same-Handed Molecules Are an “Overarching Design Principle” in Life, Say Researchers
David Coppedge
Homochirality, the same-handedness of building blocks of DNA and proteins, poses a severe challenge for those who deny the intelligent design of life. Design advocates have explained the problem: James Tour, Casey Luskin, Rob Stadler, and many others (see a description of the problem here). The odds of random, blind forces selecting every amino acid in a protein to be left-handed, and every sugar in a DNA chain to be right-handed, are vanishingly small.
Materialists also recognize this hurdle in their origin-of-life theories, because homochirality would have had to become established before natural selection could be called upon for assistance. But what happens when heterochiral molecules do make it into our cells? Bad things happen.
Heterochirality Syndrome
Normally, cells do a good job of keeping our molecules 100 percent homochiral. Stray wrong-handed molecules are either destroyed or turned into the correct hand before a protein or nucleic acid goes into service. A research team in France wondered what would happen if they forced certain genes to go rogue, or heterochiral. (Good thing they tried this on fruit flies and not humans.) They published the dire results in Nature Communications (open access). The Abstract of the paper by Banreti et al., “Biological effects of the loss of homochirality in a multicellular organism,” hints at troubles to come:
Homochirality is a fundamental feature of all known forms of life, maintaining biomolecules (amino-acids, proteins, sugars, nucleic acids) in one specific chiral form. While this condition is central to biology, the mechanisms by which the adverse accumulation of non-l-α-amino-acids in proteins lead to pathophysiological consequences remain poorly understood. To address how heterochirality build-up impacts organism’s health, we use chiral-selective in vivo assays to detect protein-bound non-l-α-amino acids (focusing on aspartate) and assess their functional significance in Drosophila. We find that altering the in vivo chiral balance creates a ‘heterochirality syndrome’ with impaired caspase activity, increased tumour formation, and premature death. Our work shows that preservation of homochirality is a key component of protein function that is essential to maintain homeostasis across the cell, tissue and organ level.
The authors call homochirality “an overarching design principle in all living organisms.” They do not delve into the origin of homochirality, and say essentially nothing about evolution (except for noting that a certain amino acid in a specific position of a gene is “evolutionarily conserved,” meaning it has not evolved).
Surprisingly, the health effects of heterochirality have not been studied in detail before, they say.
Furthermore, a direct link between the partial loss of homochirality and protein dysfunction has not been shown, and hence the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms connecting heterochirality to pathophysiological sequelae remains unknown.
The bulk of the paper documents what happened to hapless flies forced to endure “heterochirality syndrome.” For example, one intervention involved knocking out the Pimt gene. This gene is an enzyme essential for repair of heterochiral proteins. It recognizes wrong-handed aspartame residues after translation and converts them into the correct left-handed form. Here’s what happened to the poor fly:
Importantly, Pimt knock-out flies showed premature death, dying 14 days earlier than control flies (Fig. 5a). Premature death was due solely to the lack of Pimt activity, as the phenotype could be fully rescued by a Pimt wild type (Pimtwt), but not a Pimt catalytic dead (PimtS60Q) knock-in construct (Fig. 5a), in which the evolutionarily conserved serine60 residue (Supplementary Fig. 5) was replaced by glutamine. Furthermore, we found that loss of Pimt activity led to the formation of protein aggregates and large melanotic tumours inside the body (Fig. 5b, c).
The loss of the heterochirality repair enzyme also gives mice a miserable, short life. And when the enzyme fails in humans, brain damage and lung cancer can result.
Importantly, Pimt knock-out mice showed significant growth retardation succumbing to fatal seizures at an average of 42 days after birth, and increased proliferation and granule cell number in the dentate gyrus. Pimtexpression and enzyme activity were significantly decreased in human astrocytic tumours and promoted epithelial mesenchymal transition in lung adenocarcinoma cell lines, indicating that impaired Pimt activity has several pathophysiological consequences.
The team excised the working part of Pimt using CRISPR-Cas9. Their observations of the aftereffects demonstrated that Pimt is “ubiquitously expressed in tissues throughout the fly life cycle” and in probably most other life forms. This fact adds to the materialist’s challenge, because even if simple cells found a way to start homochiral, they would quickly succumb to what we could dub the “right hook punch” from a wrong-handed amino acid.
What Causes the Trouble?
The team found that wrong-handed amino acids change the 3-D conformation of proteins. One right-handed aspartate (D-aspartic acid, as opposed to the correct L- form), induces structural changes to the caspase cleavage site where the correction must occur. So altered, the enzyme cannot “fit” the repair site. Caspases are involved in cutting out defective parts of proteins. They also participate in programmed cell death, or apoptosis.
Our results show that caspases malfunction when the consensus cleavage site of target proteins suffer a stereoinversion, which could potentially affect many important cellular processes.
In summary, heterochirality syndrome reduces lifespan, increases susceptibility to tumors, inhibits apoptosis, and more. People suffering from even one enzyme with a wrong-handed amino acid “are expected to have massive physiological consequences on cell and tissue homoeostasis,” and the defect “might be implicated in many human diseases.” Due to cascading effects from a heterochiral building block, it’s all downhill when random chance lands a right hook.
Overall, our results show that accumulation of non-l-α-AAs in proteins, promotes a progressive heterochirality syndrome, through a cascading effect across biological scales spanning from loss of molecular homochirality to increased resistance to caspase activity in cells, increased tumour susceptibility in organs and, consequently, premature death of the chiral-deficient animal (Fig. 6h). We further suggest that heterochirality spreading in living organisms represents a novel causal factor that may be associated with a broad range of defective cellular processes, diseases and ageing.
What Are the Implications?
Without foresight to solve heterochiral incidents, a primordial cell would quickly perish even if, against all odds, it began homochiral. These authors have shown one of the enzymes that prevents heterochirality syndrome by recognizing and fixing a single D-amino acid to its L- form. This is fascinating to ponder, since even intelligent chemists have difficulty separating the isoforms of chiral molecules (example 1, example 2).
Biochemists realize that homochirality is functionally beneficial and would tend to be preserved by natural selection. A paper in the journal Chem explained why but failed to address the origin of homochirality. Occasionally a materialist will attempt to speculate about how a protocell “emerged” from a pool of heterochiral building blocks and evolved toward homochirality via “chance aided by luck,” but those attempts usually end like this example from 2010:
Whether or not we will ever know how this property developed in the living systems represented on Earth today, studies of how single chirality might have emerged will aid us in understanding the much larger question of how life might have, and might again, emerge as a complex system.
Statements like this beg the question of emergence. Must it be materialistic? If understanding is the goal, Ockham’s razor would favor the simplest cause that is capable of separating thermodynamically equivalent objects that differ only in geometry. That cause is intelligence. Even a child could easily separate left- and right-handed toy soldiers of equal mass.
It’s been over 170 years since Louis Pasteur recognized chirality as a fundamental feature of biology (see here). Were it not for the philosophical preferences of some, the strength of intelligence over randomness in achieving perfect homochirality and maintaining it with molecular machines would universally be recognized as the most obvious choice to account for this “overarching design principle in all living organisms.”
Not a family matter: The effects of religiosity on academic outcomes based on evidence from siblings
Ilana M.HorwitzaBenjamin W.DomingueaKathleen MullanHarrisb
Abstract
Religiosity has been positively linked with multiple measures of academic success, but it is unclear whether the “effect” of religiosity on academic outcomes is causal or spurious. One source of heterogeneity that may contribute to a child's level of religiosity and his/her academic success is family background. This paper is the first to use sibling differences to estimate the associations between religiosity on short and long-term academic success. Our analysis yields two main results. First, more religious adolescents earned higher GPAs in high school, even after including family fixed effects. Second, because they earned higher GPAs in high school, more religious adolescents completed more years of education 14 years after their religiosity was measured. Our findings suggest that adolescents' religious commitments influence their schooling in both the short and long term and should be more actively included and theorized as important drivers of educational and economic stratification.
Introduction
Religion permeates every aspect of American society. Religious commitments shape where Americans live, how they vote, who their friends are, and even how happy they are. Religion is a particularly salient feature for millions of American teenagers: one in two see faith as central to their daily life, and one in three say they pray daily (Smith and Denton, 2005).1 When it comes to academic performance, religiously engaged adolescents appear to have better academic outcomes than those who are not religiously active. They earn higher GPAs (Glanville et al., 2008; Good and Willoughby, 2011; McKune and Hoffmann, 2009; Milot and Ludden, 2009; Regnerus and Elder, 2003; Tirre, 2017; Toldson and Anderson, 2010), aspire to go farther in school2 (Al-fadhli and Kersen, 2010; Muller and Ellison, 2001; Regnerus, 2000), and actually stay in school longer (Brown and Gary, 1991; Kim, 2015; Lee et al., 2007; Lee and Pearce, 2019; Lehrer, 2010, 2004; Loury, 2004; Mohanty, 2016). The theoretical reason for this positive association is that increased religiosity tends to deter young people from risky behaviors, promotes social capital and network closure, and motivates youth to act in ways that adhere to the moral grounding of their religious teachings (Smith, 2003).
While the evidence suggests that more religiously engaged students have better academic outcomes, questions remain as to how to interpret this evidence. The existing evidence has been derived from observational approaches that inherently limit the scope of inference; as a consequence, there is uncertainty about whether the “effect” of religiosity on academic outcomes is causal or spurious (Bagiella et al., 2005; Cochran et al., 1994; Freeman, 1986; Regnerus and Smith, 2005). We are particularly concerned about the role of family background—a key source of heterogeneity that influences children's level of religiosity as well as their academic success (Eirich, 2012; Ludwig and Mayer, 2006). While previous studies have attempted to eliminate family-level confounders by including a set of observed family-level controls (e.g., parental education, family income, and family structure), these controls do not effectively address family-level heterogeneity, especially when these factors are unobserved (Kim, 2018). Thus, previous studies may be overstating the actual effect of religiosity, which could be null or even negative. Approaches that allow for more stringent analyses of such observed associations are useful in such settings. Here, conduct within-family analysis by analyzing sibling pairs to better understand the association of religiosity, high school GPA, college aspirations, and educational attainment. Data on sibling pairs allow us to separate the contribution of religiosity from families by examining whether sibling differences in religiosity translate into sibling differences in academic achievement (since family differences are muted between siblings).
Coast to Coast — Stephen Meyer Takes the God Hypothesis to a Huge and Unusual Audience
David Klinghoffer
I suppose Stephen Meyer could do the safe thing and talk only to audiences that largely already accept his picture of reality. That would be safe. But would it be fun? Find out the meaning of “fun” when Dr. Meyer talks with host George Noory tonight on the phenomenally popular overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM, with 2.75 million weekly listeners. You can locate a station near you by consulting this link.
As a rule, the show covers a fascinating a mix of topics, with an emphasis on the strange and supernatural, and is never dull. For example, after the Return of the God Hypothesis author is on for two hours, from 10-12 pm Pacific / 1-3 am Eastern, the next guest is a gentleman who says he communicates with the dead. That’s right, first it’s Steve Meyer, talking about the Webb Space Telescope and the Big Bang, then a necromancer. It’s quite the pairing. Well, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any materialist’s philosophy! I intend to stay up and listen.
Also, look here for Meyer’s recent article for the Daily Wire, “Here’s Why James Webb Telescope Discoveries Are Causing Scientists To Rethink Galaxy Formation (But Not The Big Bang).”
By Cornelius Hunter.
In addition to the DNA code, there are other fundamental molecular processes that appear to be common to all life. One intriguing example is DNA replication which copies both strands of the DNA molecule, but in different directions. Evolution predicts these fundamental processes to be common to all life. Indeed this was commonly said to be an important successful prediction for the theory. As Niles Eldredge explained, the “underlying chemical uniformity of life” was a severe test that evolution passed with flying colors. (Eldredge, 41) Likewise Christian de Duve declared that evolution is in part confirmed by the fact that all extant living organisms function according to the same principles. (de Duve, 1) And Michael Ruse concluded that the essential macromolecules of life help to make evolution beyond reasonable doubt. (Ruse, 4)
But this conclusion that the fundamental molecular processes within the cell are common to all species was superficial. In later years, as the details were investigated, important differences between species emerged. For example, key DNA replication proteins surprisingly “show very little or no sequence similarity between bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes.” (Leipe) Also different DNA replication processes have been discovered. These results were not what were expecte
In particular, and counter-intuitively, given the central role of DNA in all cells and the mechanistic uniformity of replication, the core enzymes of the replication systems of bacteria and archaea (as well as eukaryotes) are unrelated or extremely distantly related. Viruses and plasmids, in addition, possess at least two unique DNA replication systems, namely, the protein-primed and rolling circle modalities of replication. This unexpected diversity makes the origin and evolution of DNA replication systems a particularly challenging and intriguing problem in evolutionary biology. (Kooni
Some evolutionists are reconsidering the assumption that all life on Earth shares the same basic molecular architecture and biochemistry, and instead examining the possibility of independent evolution, and multiple origins of fundamentally different life forms. (Cleland, Leipe).
References
Cleland, Carol. 2007. “Epistemological issues in the study of microbial life: alternative terran biospheres?.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38:847-861.
de Duve, Christian. 1995. Vital Dust. New York: BasicBooks.
Eldredge, Niles. 1982. The Monkey Business. New York: Washington Square Press.
Koonin, E. 2006. “Temporal order of evolution of DNA replication systems inferred by comparison of cellular and viral DNA polymerases.” Biology Direct 18:1-39.
Leipe, D., L. Aravind, E. Koonin. 1999. “Did DNA replication evolve twice independently?.” Nucleic Acids Research 27:3389-3401.
Ruse, Michael. 1986. Taking Darwin Seriously. New York: Basil Blackwell.
When Popular Mechanics is Dissing Your Evolution Theory You Know You Have Problems
Cornelius Hunter
Don’t Two Wrongs Make a Right?
We’ve long since lost track of how many times the RNA World hypotheses—which states that life originated from an RNA enzyme-genome combination rather than from DNA—failed only to be once again resurrected, but we do know this crazy idea will, for a long time to come, continue to be cited as “good solid” evidence for evolution. This despite new research which gives yet another reason for its failure.
There are big problems with the idea that life arose from a random assembly of DNA. Aside from the little problem of generating astronomical amounts of crucial information from, err, random mutations, the resulting DNA doesn’t do anything by itself. That is because proteins are needed to extract said information and do something with it.
So, evolutionists came up with the clever idea of using RNA instead of DNA, since RNA can both store genetic information and also do something with it. Of course, this idea still has that little problem of generating the information in the first place. Oh, also, there is precisely zero evidence of any “RNA World” organisms.
Now or ever.
There is no organism that does this. There is no organism that does anything like this. There is no controlled, laboratory, version of such a thing. There isn’t even a computer simulation of it, at least in any kind of detail.
Not only does this call the entire idea into question, it also raises another little problem that if there was this so-called RNA World, then it must have gone away at some point, and neatly transitioned into a DNA world, without leaving a trace. But aside from vague speculation, there is no compelling notion of how this would occur.
This is but a brief introduction to the problems one finds with the RNA World, that have led to its repeated downfall, before its repeated resurrections.
Now, this new research points out the rather inconvenient fact that RNA is too sticky:
But while RNA strands may be good at templating complementary strands, they are not so good at separating from these strands. Modern organisms make enzymes that can force twinned strands of RNA—or DNA—to go their separate ways, thus enabling replication, but it is unclear how this could have been done in a world where enzymes didn’t yet exist.
Amazingly enough, this story was picked up by, of all mags, Popular Mechanics.
Yup. You know you have problems with Popular Mechanics is dissing your evolutionary theory.
And while one might have thought that this rather fundamental problem would have disqualified the RNA World hypothesis a long time ago—RNA’s “stickiness” was not just discovered yesterday—it turns out that fundamental problems such as this tend to be openly discussed only when a replacement theory is at the ready.
And sure enough, since DNA didn’t work, and perhaps now we can finally say that RNA also didn’t work, perhaps the trick is to combine them. Don’t two wrongs make a right? And so, it is, the new research indeed proposes that life got going by using fancy chimeric molecular strands that are part DNA and part RNA.
Well, evolution dodged another bullet. But we think we can at least say that Alexander Oparin’s 1924 prediction that origin of life research would be solved “very, very soon” hasn’t quite turned out right.Religion drives science, and it matters.
Debunking “Professor Dave’s” Hit Piece Against Stephen Meyer
Günter Bechly
In a previous series at Evolution News (Bechly 2022a, 2022b, 2022c), I answered the diatribe by YouTuber “Professor Dave” directed against our Discovery Institute colleague, geologist Dr. Casey Luskin. The popular YouTuber, whose real name is Dave Farina, is neither a professor nor a PhD but just a failed ex-teacher who unsuccessfully tried twice to get a master’s degree in chemistry. These are simply facts about him. But his more than two million subscribers and others, who may come across his misleading content, deserve some fact-checking. Therefore, I exposed the non-professor’s propaganda and incompetence. In a second episode (Farina 2022) aimed at intelligent design proponents, Mr. Farina did it again, focusing on philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer and in particular Meyer’s New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013a). This YouTube video runs to about an hour and a quarter, so I will be answering him once again in a series, minute by minute. I have added timecodes in square brackets for easier reference.
So Let’s Begin
I have no problem at all with people who disagree strongly with intelligent design theory, nor with other worldviews including atheism, but one should at least assume that the other side is as honestly committed to a quest for truth as you yourself are. However, civilized discourse is not Farina’s cup of tea. In the first five minutes of his new video, he calls ID proponents “clowns,” “charlatans,” “frauds,” and “liars,” and calls ID arguments “pseudo-science,” “rubbish,” “horse manure,” and “dishonest tripe.” His personal agenda is revealed by the ridiculous statement [TC 3:00] that genocide, infanticide, eugenics, and other evils are “all the heinous acts that historically have been the exclusive domain of religion.” Has he never heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot?
Apparently, Farina thinks the best way to deal with anybody he disagrees with is to bully and berate them with hate speech and gutter language. Here is an example of what I mean from one of his comments on YouTube (I’ve replaced certain letters with asterisks to make the profanity more tolerable to read):
Um, I’m pretty sure I would make Meyer cry. He’s a f****ing moron, as I demonstrated in this video you didn’t watch. Why are all you creationist tools such cowardly sh**bags?
When a commenter on his video against Stephen Meyer criticized his harsh language, Farina responded with even more over-the-top vituperation:
They are liars. I show how they are liars. That’s all it is. And for f****’s sake, I’m exposing the agenda of what is essentially a terrorist organization that wants to drag America back to an authoritarian theocracy and ruin millions of lives, and you have the balls to call me nasty and mean-spirited for speaking out against them? You’re f****ing stupid. I suggest you work on that. [“They” refers to Discovery Institute and ID proponents.]
What Is Wrong with This Guy?
This is not how a sane and reasonable adult writes. Since when are academic questions and intellectual debates settled by lobbing f-words? I can only pity the school kids who suffered under such an intolerant and rude person as a science teacher. Farina seems to have some significant anger management issues. He certainly is not the type of person any reasonable parents would like to have around their kids! This has nothing to do with intelligent design vs. materialism or religion vs. science. Farina’s immature pottymouth should disqualify him from any serious discourse about anything with anyone. He really needs a “time out.”
What is more, nobody who knows his stuff and is confident about his position talks or writes like Farina does. The only reason I bother to address his erroneous arguments is to equip viewers of his video with some accurate information about the scientific evidence. Therefore, I will have to heavily quote from the technical literature and provide references to mainstream peer-reviewed scientific sources. You’ll see that Farina is parroting familiar claims by ID critics like Charles Marshall (2013), Nick Matzke (2013), and Donald Prothero (2013) that have been addressed and refuted many times (e.g., Klinghoffer 2015 and CSC 2019).
Farina’s Ridiculous Parodies
[TC 5:06] Farina initially suggests that the two following arguments characterize the position of Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt:
“1) Some lies about the Cambrian explosion mean intelligent design is true.”
“2) I don’t understand genetics even a little bit so intelligent design must be true.”
Every reader should recognize these two points as ridiculous parodies. To justify his silly claims, Farina would have to establish that Meyer is not just wrong about the Cambrian Explosion and genetics, but that he is deliberately lying. He also would have to establish that Meyer suggests intelligent design is true only because of explanatory gaps in the Cambrian Explosion or genetics. Of course, Farina does nothing like that. He shows no evidence whatsoever that Meyer is lying, because of course Meyer is not doing so. He fails to show that Meyer’s claims about the Cambrian Explosion and about genetics are incorrect or that they do not represent good science. And of course, Farina himself is grossly misrepresenting the design argument, which as Meyer shows in meticulous detail is not an argument from ignorance but an inference to the best explanation based on what we do know about the causal structure of the universe.
[TC 6.55] Farina says that denying that the fossil record documents gradual change is a “huge lie.” He claims there are countless examples and lists the transitions of reptiles to mammals, fish to tetrapods, amphibians to reptiles to birds, land mammals to sea mammals (e.g., walking whales), and early hominids to humans. We will come back to these examples shortly.
A Claim of Science Denial
[TC 7:30] Farina also maintains that disputing transitional fossils is science denial. This claim has two major problems.
First, it uses an ambiguous term, “transitional fossil.” Evolutionary paleontologists and Darwin skeptics mean different things by this term. As I have written (Bechly 2021e: 346-7):
Evolutionists often say that there are many transitional fossils, while creationists often say that there are none. It seems that one side must be wrong, but actually both are right because they talk past each other and use the same term for two different things. When evolutionists talk about transitional fossils, then they usually only mean transitional in the anatomical sense. This refers to fossils that possess a mosaic pattern of characters, with some primitive characters of the assumed ancestors still retained, while some (but not all) derived characters of the assumed descendants are already developed so that the fossil is anatomically intermediate. Evolutionists do not necessarily imply with the term transitional fossil that these forms are direct ancestors, as they could well be side branches from the ancestral lineage. Therefore, transitional fossils are not necessarily in the correct temporal sequence, because such side branches could persist and even outlive more advanced forms.
When creationists and critics of Darwinism say that there is a lack of transitional fossils, they usually mean transitional in the sense of a gradual sequence of direct ancestor-descendent relationships, which implies not only a fine-graded directional anatomical transition but also a correct temporal order. While transitional fossils in the first sense are indeed very common and exist for most groups of organisms, transitional fossils in the second sense are extremely rare and mostly missing indeed
Second, it is a total red herring because, as I and others have emphasized ad nauseam in the past, intelligent design theory is agnostic concerning the question of material common descent. Farina over and over confuses intelligent design with Biblical creationism. Many prominent design proponents explicitly affirm common descent (e.g., Michael Behe, Michael Denton, Richard Sternberg, and myself) and therefore have no problems with transitional fossils and transitional series at all.
Farina gives his viewers the misleading impression that the fossil sequences he mentions establish a gradual and continuous development as predicted by Darwin. This is false.
Let’s Look at Each of His Examples
Reptile-mammal transition: Even though the so-called mammal-like reptiles indeed form a nice roughly transitional series (according to the evolutionist’s definition, given above), which is elegantly explained by common descent, they do not form an unbroken gradual series, even though this has been claimed in a few older studies (e.g., Hopson 1994 and Sidor & Hopson 1998). Rather they exhibit four distinct radiations (i.e., pelycosaurs, therapsids, cynodonts, and mammaliaforms), where each new construction appears abruptly in the fossil record (Carroll 1988: fig. 17-1). The first synapsids, previously called “pelycosaurs,” appear without precursors in the Upper Carboniferous about 307-310 mya, so that the lack of a gradual series of ancestral forms cannot be attributed to the famous “Romer’s Gap” in the fossil record after the end of the Devonian. As Kemp (2012) has emphasized, “Pelycosaur-grade synapsids originated as one of the amniote lineages that constituted part of the explosive radiation of tetrapods in the Carboniferous.” The same authors talk about the “explosive Middle Permian radiation of therapsids.” Kemp (2005: 84) mentions in his textbook on the evolution of mammals “the sudden appearance of the diverse therapsid fauna 270 Ma,” which has also been called the “therapsid event” (Lucas & Shen 2018: 13) or “Kazanian revolution” (Bakker 1980). Spindler (2014) says that the successful clade of therapsids occurs rather suddenly in the fossil record.” He refuted the alleged earlier therapsid Tetraceratops, and described a possible older bone fragment, but admits that its identification as a therapsid is weak because of limited anatomical information and conflicting characters.
Cynodonts appear suddenly in the latest Late Permian (Botha et al. 2007). The first mammaliaforms (i.e., Haramiyida) appear likewise suddenly about 247-245 mya in the Lower Triassic with an “explosive origin followed by a rapid early diversification” (Abdala et al. 2007). This was followed by a “Jurassic Big Bang” of mammaliaform evolution (Brusatte & Luo 2016). It was not Stephen Meyer who came up with terms like “therapsid event,” “Kazanian revolution,” or “Jurassic Big Bang,” but rather the experts in the mammalian fossil record, who would not have used such terms for a slow and gradual pattern of appearance.
Fish-tetrapod transition: This transition is far from being resolved in a gradual way, which is why a recent study concluded that “the fish-to-tetrapod transition is one of the fundamental problems in evolutionary biology” (Wood & Nakamura 2018). Is there a series of transitional fossils morphologically connecting lobe-finned fish and tetrapods? Yes, they are often called fishapods, and include famous taxa like Tiktaalik and Ichthyostega. Do tetrapods appear gradually from these fishapods? No, not by any stretch of the imagination! Actually, the oldest evidence for tetrapods (the Zachelmie tracks from Poland) predates the oldest fishapods by 10 million years (Ahlberg 2019). It even predates fish-like forms such as Eusthenopteron that rather resembled a salmon. Of course, this inconvenient truth can be explained away with ad hoc hypotheses like ghost lineages and an incomplete fossil record. What cannot be explained away is the simple fact of an extremely sudden appearance of tetrapods. But there is not just this temporal paradox of assumed descendants being older than their assumed ancestors. There are also large gaps in the morphological transition. This holds true especially for the transition from typical pectoral and pelvic lobe-fins to the typical tetrapod hand and foot skeleton with phalanges, for which the first evidence was just recently discovered in a well-preserved specimen of Elpistostege (Cloutier et al. 2020)
genetic changes, was achieved within the lifespan of a single species. This raises a severe waiting time problem (Evolution News 2016, also see further on) because a neo-Darwinian slow and gradual accumulation and selection of small changes over long periods of time cannot explain such fast transitions. It is not a question of implausibility, but a question of mathematical impossibility.
Early hominids to humans: It is a common misconception that the human fossil record shows a nice gradual transition from the ape-like early hominins (i.e., australopithecines) to our own genus Homo and modern humans. The truth is that there is a distinct gap between australopithecines and early Homo. The latter appears so abruptly that it has inspired a “Big Bang Theory of Human Evolution” (Swanbrow 2000). The renowned paleoanthropologist John Hawks has written (Hawks et al. 2000) that “In sum, the earliest H. sapiens remains differ significantly from australopithecines in both size and anatomical details. Insofar as we can tell, the changes were sudden and not gradual.” The authors explain it with an assumed population bottleneck two million years ago that led to a series of sudden, interrelated changes.
