"Professor" Dave gets caught in the crossfire.

Professor Dave vs. James Tour re:the Origin of Life; ringside seat here. 

Our brains are smarter than we are?

 Mice Can’t Do Calculus but Their Brains Can. 

Evolution News 

Science writer Kevin Hartnett tells us that, based on experiments with mice, the brain sharpens control of precise maneuvers by using comparisons between control signals rather than the signals themselves:

[The research] explores a simple question: How does the brain — in mice, humans and other mammals — work quickly enough to stop us on a dime? The new work reveals that the brain is not wired to transmit a sharp “stop” command in the most direct or intuitive way. Instead, it employs a more complicated signaling system based on principles of calculus. This arrangement may sound overly complicated, but it’s a surprisingly clever way to control behaviors that need to be more precise than the commands from the brain can be. 

KEVIN HARTNETT, “THE BRAIN USES CALCULUS TO CONTROL FAST MOVEMENTS” AT QUANTA MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 28, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS.

The researchers observed, via neuroimaging and mathematics, that a simple Stop! signal in the brain would not allow the mouse to stop as quickly as it in fact did. There had to be another signalling system in the brain as well. So they decided to have a closer look at it. 

Between the cortex where goals originate and the [mesencephalic locomotor region] MLR that controls locomotion sits another region, the subthalamic nucleus (STN). It was already known that the STN connects to the MLR by two pathways: One sends excitatory signals and the other sends inhibitory signals. The researchers realized that the MLR responds to the interplay between the two signals rather than relying on the strength of either one. 

KEVIN HARTNETT, “THE BRAIN USES CALCULUS TO CONTROL FAST MOVEMENTS” AT QUANTA MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 28, 2022).

The MLR pays attention the difference between the two signals more than the signals themselves. A bigger difference means a faster change and a quicker command to Stop! 

The researchers cast the stopping mechanism in terms of two basic functions of calculus: integration, which measures the area under a curve, and derivation, which calculates the slope at a point on a curve.

If stopping depended only on how much of a stop signal the MLR received, then it could be thought of as a form of integration; the quantity of the signal would be what mattered. But it doesn’t because integration by itself isn’t enough for rapid control. Instead, the MLR accumulates the difference between the two well-timed signals, which mirrors the way a derivative is calculated: by taking the difference between two infinitesimally close values to calculate the slope of a curve at a point. The fast dynamics of the derivative cancel out the slow dynamics of the integration and allow for a fast stop. 

KEVIN HARTNETT, “THE BRAIN USES CALCULUS TO CONTROL FAST MOVEMENTS” AT QUANTA MAGAZINE (NOVEMBER 28, 2022).

So mice can’t do calculus but their brains can. Assuming that the human brain works similarly to the mouse brain when it comes to sudden stops, then — if the researchers are correct — our brains do calculus too, even if, despite applying ourselves personally, our minds are not very successful at it.

Neuroscientist Sridevi Sarma, who was not involved with the paper, notes that “it allows you to anticipate and predict.” If we must stop suddenly, it may be more useful to know how fast we are speeding up or slowing down than to know how fast we are going. The obliging brain’s calculus gives us that tool.

Fun fact: Mice actually like to run. Even wild mice will run in wheels, given a chance:

You may also wish to read: Researchers say the human brain’s claustrum acts as a router for thoughts. Francis Crick thought the claustrum might be the “seat of consciousness,” an inherently materialist concept. The researchers think he was wrong. Of course, seeing the claustrum as a router is more consistent with the immaterial nature of consciousness than seeing it as a seat. (Denyse O’Leary)  

2022:the year Darwinists asked the unaskable?

Do we need a new theory of evolution

Stephen Buranyi 

some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading. 

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.” 

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.” 

In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently.” Each of the authors came from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection – think of beavers building dams – to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland – the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) – but their proposals were, to many fellow scientists, incendiary. 

In 2015, the Royal Society in London agreed to host New Trends in Evolution, a conference at which some of the article’s authors would speak alongside a distinguished lineup of scientists. The aim was to discuss “new interpretations, new questions, a whole new causal structure for biology”, one of the organisers told me. But when the conference was announced, 23 fellows of the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation, wrote a letter of protest to its then president, the Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse. “The fact that the society would hold a meeting that gave the public the idea that this stuff is mainstream is disgraceful,” one of the signatories told me. Nurse was surprised by the reaction. “They thought I was giving it too much credibility,” he told me. But, he said: “There’s no harm in discussing things.” 

Traditional evolutionary theorists were invited, but few showed up. Nick Barton, recipient of the 2008 Darwin-Wallace medal, evolutionary biology’s highest honour, told me he “decided not to go because it would add more fuel to the strange enterprise”. The influential biologists Brian and Deborah Charlesworth of the University of Edinburgh told me they didn’t attend because they found the premise “irritating”. The evolutionary theorist Jerry Coyne later wrote that the scientists behind the EES were playing “revolutionaries” to advance their own careers. One 2017 paper even suggested some of the theorists behind the EES were part of an “increasing post-truth tendency” within science. The personal attacks and insinuations against the scientists involved were “shocking” and “ugly”, said one scientist, who is nonetheless sceptical of the EES. 

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up. 

Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would enable their field to join physics and chemistry in the club of austere, mechanistic sciences that stripped the universe down to a set of elemental rules. 

Without such a theory, they feared that biology would remain a bundle of fractious sub-fields, from zoology to biochemistry, in which answering any question might require input and argument from scores of warring specialists.

From today’s vantage point, it seems obvious that Darwin’s theory of evolution – a simple, elegant theory that explains how one force, natural selection, came to shape the entire development of life on Earth – would play the role of the great unifier. But at the turn of the 20th century, four decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species and two after his death, Darwin’s ideas were in decline. Scientific collections at the time carried titles such as The Death-bed of Darwinism. Scientists had not lost interest in evolution, but many found Darwin’s account of it unsatisfying. One major problem was that it lacked an explanation of heredity. Darwin had observed that, over time, living things seemed to change to better fit their environment. But he did not understand how these minute changes were passed from one generation to the next.

At the start of the 20th century, the rediscovery of the work of the 19th-century friar and father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, started to provide the answers. Scientists working in the new field of genetics discovered rules that governed the quirks of heredity. But rather than confirm Darwin’s theory, they complicated it. Reproduction appeared to remix genes – the mysterious units that programme the physical traits we end up seeing – in surprising ways. Think of the way a grandfather’s red hair, absent in his son, might reappear in his granddaughter. How was natural selection meant to function when its tiny variations might not even reliably pass from parent to offspring every time? 

Even more ominous for Darwinists was the emergence of the “mutationists” in the 1910s, a school of geneticists whose star exponent, Thomas Hunt Morgan, showed that by breeding millions of fruit flies – and sometimes spiking their food with the radioactive element radium – he could produce mutated traits, such as new eye colours or additional limbs. These were not the tiny random variations on which Darwin’s theory was built, but sudden, dramatic changes. And these mutations, it turned out, were heritable. The mutationists believed that they had identified life’s true creative force. Sure, natural selection helped to remove unsuitable changes, but it was simply a humdrum editor for the flamboyant poetry of mutation. “Natura non facit saltum,” Darwin had once written: “Nature does not make jumps.” The mutationists begged to differ. 

These disputes over evolution had the weight of a theological schism. At stake were the forces governing all creation. For Darwinists especially, their theory was all-or-nothing. If another force, apart from natural selection, could also explain the differences we see between living things, Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species, his whole theory of life would “utterly break down”. If the mutationists were right, instead of a single force governing all biological change, scientists would have to dig deep into the logic of mutation. Did it work differently on legs and lungs? Did mutations in frogs work differently to mutations in owls or elephants? 

In 1920, the philosopher Joseph Henry Woodger wrote that biology suffered from “fragmentation” and “cleavages” that would be “unknown in such a well-unified science as, for example, chemistry”. The divergent groups often feuded, he noted, and it seemed to be getting worse. It began to seem inevitable that the life sciences would grow more and more fractured, and the possibility of a common language would slip away. 

Just as it seemed that Darwinism might be buried, a curious collection of statisticians and animal breeders came along to revitalise it. In the 1920s and 30s, working separately but in loose correspondence, thinkers such as the British father of scientific statistics, Ronald Fisher, and the American geneticist Sewall Wright, proposed a revised theory of evolution that accounted for scientific advances since Darwin’s death but still promised to explain all of life’s mysteries with a few simple rules. In 1942, the English biologist Julian Huxley coined the name for this theory: the modern synthesis. Eighty years on, it still provides the basic framework for evolutionary biology as it is taught to millions of schoolchildren and undergraduates every year. Insofar as a biologist works in the tradition of the modern synthesis, they are considered “mainstream”; insofar as they reject it, they are considered marginal. 

Despite the name, it was not actually a synthesis of two fields, but a vindication of one in light of the other. By building statistical models of animal populations that accounted for the laws of genetics and mutation, the modern synthesists showed that, over long periods of time, natural selection still functioned much as Darwin had predicted. It was still the boss. In the fullness of time, mutations were too rare to matter, and the rules of heredity didn’t affect the overall power of natural selection. Through a gradual process, genes with advantages were preserved over time, while others that didn’t confer advantages disappeared. 

Rather than getting stuck into the messy world of individual organisms and their specific environments, proponents of the modern synthesis observed from the lofty perspective of population genetics. To them, the story of life was ultimately just the story of clusters of genes surviving or dying out over the grand sweep of evolutionary time. 

The modern synthesis arrived at just the right time. Beyond its explanatory power, there were two further reasons – more historical, or even sociological, than scientific – why it took off. First, the mathematical rigour of the synthesis was impressive, and not seen before in biology. As the historian Betty Smocovitis points out, it brought the field closer to “examplar sciences” such as physics. At the same time, writes Smocovitis, it promised to unify the life sciences at a moment when the “enlightenment project” of scientific unification was all the rage. In 1946, the biologists Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson started the Society for the Study of Evolution, a professional organisation with its own journal, which Simpson said would bring together the sub-fields of biology on “the common ground of evolutionary studies”. This was all possible, he later reflected, because “we seem at last to have a unified theory […] capable of facing all the classic problems of the history of life and of providing a causalistic solution of each.” 

This was a time when biology was ascending to its status as a major science. University departments were forming, funding was flowing in, and thousands of newly accredited scientists were making thrilling discoveries. In 1944, the Canadian-American biologist Oswald Avery and his colleagues had proved that DNA was the physical substance of genes and heredity, and in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick – leaning heavily on work from Rosalind Franklin and the American chemist Linus Pauling – mapped its double-helical structure. 

While information piled up at a rate that no scientist could fully digest, the steady thrum of the modern synthesis ran through it all. The theory dictated that, ultimately, genes built everything, and natural selection scrutinised every bit of life for advantage. Whether you were looking at algae blooming in a pond or peacock mating rituals, it could all be understood as natural selection doing its work on genes. The world of life could seem suddenly simple again. 

By 1959, when the University of Chicago held a conference celebrating the centennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the modern synthesists were triumphant. The venues were packed and national newspaper reporters followed the proceedings. (Queen Elizabeth was invited, but sent her apologies.) Huxley crowed that “this is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution”.

Yet soon enough, the modern synthesis would come under assault from scientists within the very departments that the theory had helped build.

From the start, there had always been dissenters. In 1959, the developmental biologist CH Waddington lamented that the modern synthesis had sidelined valuable theories in favour of “drastic simplifications which are liable to lead us to a false picture of how the evolutionary process works”. Privately, he complained that anyone working outside the new evolutionary “party line” – that is, anyone who didn’t embrace the modern synthesis – was ostracised. 

Then came a devastating series of new findings that called into question the theory’s foundations. These discoveries, which began in the late 60s, came from molecular biologists. While the modern synthesists looked at life as if through a telescope, studying the development of huge populations over immense chunks of time, the molecular biologists looked through a microscope, focusing on individual molecules. And when they looked, they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be. 

They found that the molecules in our cells – and thus the sequences of the genes behind them – were mutating at a very high rate. This was unexpected, but not necessarily a threat to mainstream evolutionary theory. According to the modern synthesis, even if mutations turned out to be common, natural selection would, over time, still be the primary cause of change, preserving the useful mutations and junking the useless ones. But that isn’t what was happening. The genes were changing – that is, evolving – but natural selection wasn’t playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel. 

Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. “If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular,” he said. “This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense.” Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin. 

Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed. The influential palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge argued that the fossil record showed evolution often happened in short, concentrated bursts; it didn’t have to be slow and gradual. Other biologists simply found that the modern synthesis had little relevance to their work. As the study of life increased in complexity, a theory based on which genes were selected in various environments started to seem beside the point. It didn’t help answer questions such as how life emerged from the seas, or how complex organs, such as the placenta, developed. Using the lens of the modern synthesis to explain the latter, says the Yale developmental biologist Günter Wagner, would be “like using thermodynamics to explain how the brain works”. (The laws of thermodynamics, which explain how energy is transferred, do apply to the brain, but they aren’t much help if you want to know how memories are formed or why we experience emotion.) 

Just as feared, the field split. In the 70s, molecular biologists in many universities peeled off from biology departments to form their own separate departments and journals. Some in other sub-fields, such as palaeontology and developmental biology, drifted away as well. Yet the biggest field of all, mainstream evolutionary biology, continued much as before. The way the champions of the modern synthesis – who by this point dominated university biology departments – dealt with potentially destabilising new findings was by acknowledging that such processes happen sometimes (subtext: rarely), are useful to some specialists (subtext: obscure ones), but do not fundamentally alter the basic understanding of biology that descends from the modern synthesis (subtext: don’t worry about it, we can continue as before). In short, new discoveries were often dismissed as little more than mildly diverting curiosities. 

Today, the modern synthesis “remains, mutatis mutandis, the core of modern evolutionary biology” wrote the evolutionary theorist Douglas Futuyma in a 2017 paper defending the mainstream view. The current version of the theory allows some room for mutation and random chance, but still views evolution as the story of genes surviving in vast populations. Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims – that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth – have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare. The theory’s ideas are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred. To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a position akin to a president reneging on a campaign promise – it failed to satisfy its entire coalition, but remains in office, hands on the levers of power, despite its diminished offer. 

Brian and Deborah Charlesworth are considered by many to be high priests of the tradition that descends from the modern synthesis. They are eminent thinkers, who have written extensively on the place of new theories in evolutionary biology, and they don’t believe any radical revision is needed. Some argue that they are too conservative, but they insist they are simply careful – cautious about dismantling a tried-and-tested framework in favour of theories that lack evidence. They are interested in fundamental truths about evolution, not explaining every diverse result of the process. 

“We’re not here to explain the elephant’s trunk, or the camel’s hump. If such explanations could even be possible,” Brian Charlesworth told me. Instead, he said, evolutionary theory should be universal, focusing on the small number of factors that apply to how every living thing develops. “It’s easy to get hung up on ‘you haven’t explained why a particular system works the way it does’. But we don’t need to know,” Deborah told me. It’s not that the exceptions are uninteresting; it’s just that they aren’t all that important. 

Kevin Laland, the scientist who organised the contentious Royal Society conference, believes it is time for proponents of neglected evolutionary sub-fields to band together. Laland and his fellow proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the EES, call for a new way of thinking about evolution – one that starts not by seeking the simplest explanation, or the universal one, but what combination of approaches offers the best explanation to biology’s major questions. Ultimately, they want their sub-fields – plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, cultural evolution – not just recognised, but formalised in the canon of biology 

There are some firebrands among this group. The geneticist Eva Jablonka has proclaimed herself a neo-Lamarckist, after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 19th-century populariser of pre-Darwinian ideas of inheritance, who has often been seen as a punchline in the history of science. Meanwhile, the physiologist Denis Noble has called for a “revolution” against traditional evolutionary theory. But Laland, a lead author on many of the movement’s papers, insists that they simply want to expand the current definition of evolution. They are reformers, not revolutionaries. 

The case for EES rests on a simple claim: in the past few decades, we have learned many remarkable things about the natural world – and these things should be given space in biology’s core theory. One of the most fascinating recent areas of research is known as plasticity, which has shown that some organisms have the potential to adapt more rapidly and more radically than was once thought. Descriptions of plasticity are startling, bringing to mind the kinds of wild transformations you might expect to find in comic books and science fiction movies. 

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”. He sounded almost proud of the fish. 

Moczek’s own area of expertise is dung beetles, another remarkably plastic species. With future climate change in mind, he and his colleagues tested the beetles’ response to different temperatures. Colder weather makes it harder for the beetles to take off. But the researchers found that they responded to these conditions by growing larger wings. The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes. The species’s genes aren’t being slowly honed, generation by generation. Rather, during its early development it has the potential to grow in a variety of ways, allowing it to survive in different situations. 

“We believe this is ubiquitous across species,” says David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works on spadefoot toads, amphibians the size of a Matchbox car. Spadefoots are normally omnivorous, but spadefoot tadpoles raised solely on meat grow larger teeth, more powerful jaws, and a hardy, more complex gut. Suddenly, they resemble a powerful carnivore, feeding on hardy crustaceans, and even other tadpoles. 

Plasticity doesn’t invalidate the idea of gradual change through selection of small changes, but it offers another evolutionary system with its own logic working in concert. To some researchers, it may even hold the answers to the vexed question of biological novelties: the first eye, the first wing. “Plasticity is perhaps what sparks the rudimentary form of a novel trait,” says Pfennig. 

Plasticity is well accepted in developmental biology, and the pioneering theorist Mary Jane West-Eberhard began making the case that it was a core evolutionary force in the early 00s. And yet, to biologists in many other fields, it is virtually unknown. Undergraduates beginning their education are unlikely to hear anything about it, and it has still to make much mark in popular science writing. 

Biology is full of theories like this. Other interests of the EES include extra-genetic inheritance, known as epigenetics. This is the idea that something – say a psychological injury, or a disease – experienced by a parent attaches small chemical molecules to their DNA that are repeated in their children. This has been shown to happen in some animals across multiple generations, and caused controversy when it was suggested as an explanation for intergenerational trauma in humans. Other EES proponents track the inheritance of things like culture – as when groups of dolphins develop and then teach each other new hunting techniques – or the communities of helpful microbes in animal guts or plant roots, which are tended to and passed on through generations like a tool. In both cases, researchers contend that these factors might impact evolution enough to warrant a more central role. Some of these ideas have become briefly fashionable, but remain disputed. Others have sat around for decades, offering their insights to a small audience of specialists and no one else. Just like at the turn of the 20th century, the field is split into hundreds of sub-fields, each barely aware of the rest. 

To the EES group, this is a problem that urgently needs to be solved – and the only solution is a more capacious unifying theory. These scientists are keen to expand their research and gather the data to disprove their doubters. But they are also aware that logging results in the literature may not be enough. “Parts of the modern synthesis are deeply ingrained in the whole scientific community, in funding networks, positions, professorships,” says Gerd B Müller, head of the Department of Theoretical Biology at the university of Vienna and a major backer of the EES. “It’s a whole industry.”

The modern synthesis was such a seismic event that even its flatly wrong ideas took up to half a century to correct. The mutationists were so thoroughly buried that even after decades of proof that mutation was, in fact, a key part of evolution, their ideas were still regarded with suspicion. As recently as 1990, one of the most influential university evolution textbooks could claim that “the role of new mutations is not of immediate significance” – something that very few scientists then, or now, actually believe. Wars of ideas are not won with ideas alone.

To release biology from the legacy of the modern synthesis, explains Massimo Pigliucci, a former professor of evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, you need a range of tactics to spark a reckoning: “Persuasion, students taking up these ideas, funding, professorial positions.” You need hearts as well as minds. During a Q&A with Pigliucci at a conference in 2017, one audience member commented that the disagreement between EES proponents and more conservative biologists sometimes looked more like a culture war than a scientific disagreement. According to one attender, “Pigliucci basically said: ‘Sure, it’s a culture war, and we’re going to win it,’ and half the room burst out cheering.” 

To some scientists, though, the battle between traditionalists and extended synthesists is futile. Not only is it impossible to make sense of modern biology, they say, it is unnecessary. Over the past decade the influential biochemist Ford Doolittle has published essays rubbishing the idea that the life sciences need codification. “We don’t need no friggin’ new synthesis. We didn’t even really need the old synthesis,” he told me. 

What Doolittle and like-minded scientists want is more radical: the death of grand theories entirely. They see such unifying projects as a mid-century – even modernist – conceit, that have no place in the postmodern era of science. The idea that there could be a coherent theory of evolution is “an artefact of how biology developed in the 20th century, probably useful at the time,” says Doolittle. “But not now.” Doing right by Darwin isn’t about venerating all his ideas, he says, but building on his insight that we can explain how present life forms came from past ones in radical new ways. 

Doolittle and his allies, such as the computational biologist Arlin Stoltzfus, are descendants of the scientists who challenged the modern synthesis from the late 60s onwards by emphasising the importance of randomness and mutation. The current superstar of this view, known as neutral evolution, is Michael Lynch, a geneticist at the University of Arizona. Lynch is soft-spoken in conversation, but unusually pugnacious in what scientists call “the literature”. His books rail against scientists who accept the status quo and fail to appreciate the rigorous mathematics that undergirds his work. “For the vast majority of biologists, evolution is nothing more than natural selection,” he wrote in 2007. “This blind acceptance […] has led to a lot of sloppy thinking, and is probably the primary reason why evolution is viewed as a soft science by much of society.” (Lynch is also not a fan of the EES. If it were up to him, biology would be even more reductive than the modern synthesists imagined.) 

What Lynch has shown, over the past two decades, is that many of the complex ways DNA is organised in our cells probably happened at random. Natural selection has shaped the living world, he argues, but so too has a sort of formless cosmic drifting that can, from time to time, assemble order from chaos. When I spoke to Lynch, he said he would continue to extend his work to as many fields of biology as possible – looking at cells, organs, even whole organisms – to prove that these random processes were universal. 

As with so many of the arguments that divide evolutionary biologists today, this comes down to a matter of emphasis. More conservative biologists do not deny that random processes occur, but believe they’re much less important than Doolittle or Lynch think. 

The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. “In my view there is no – can be no – single theory of evolution,” he told me. “There cannot be a single theory of everything. Even physicists do not have a theory of everything.” 

This is true. Physicists agree that the theory of quantum mechanics applies to very tiny particles, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity applies to larger ones. Yet the two theories appear incompatible. Late in life, Einstein hoped to find a way to unify them. He died unsuccessful. In the next few decades, other physicists took up the same task, but progress stalled, and many came to believe it might be impossible. If you ask a physicist today about whether we need a unifying theory, they would probably look at you with puzzlement. What’s the point, they might ask. The field works, the work continues. 

 

Yet more on the fossil record's on going hostility toward the Darwinian narrative.

Fossil Friday: Fossil Elephant Shrews and the Abrupt Origin of Macroscelidea 

Günter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday we look into the origins of the placental mammal order Macroscelidea, which comprises the very strange but uber-cute elephant shrews or sengis. These small insectivorous mammals are speedy runners endemic to Africa, where they occur in 20 living species (Heritage et al. 2020). With their long mobile snouts they look a bit like the fictitious snouter animals described by the German zoologist Gerolf Steiner in his satirical book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia (Stümpke 1967), which has a kind of cult status among German-speaking animal lovers. Elephant shrews are sometimes considered to be living fossils (Novacek 1984) and their origin is believed to go back 57.5 million years in the Paleocene with a subsequent divergence of the crown group in the early Oligocene about 33 million years ago (Heritage et al. 2020: fig. 7) and its main diversification in the Miocene correlated with aridification events in Africa (Douady et al. 2003). 

Such a deep division of the main groups of extant Macroscelidea is also indicated by another recent molecular study (Krásová et al. 2021). So much for the theory, but let’s check what the actual fossil record, mostly consisting of jaw fragments and isolated teeth, really says. As noted by Stevens et al. (2021), “unravelling the origin and affinities of macroscelideans (also termed sengis, or elephant shrews) has long presented a palaeontological puzzle.” According to the technical literature the fossil record of the order Macroscelidea and its assumed fossil relatives spans from the Early Eocene to the Pleistocene (Patterson 1965, Butler 1995, Holroyd 2009, Asher & Seifert 2010, Naish 2013), and was always restricted to the African continent (for a possible exception see below). The earliest fossils of Macroscelidea are said to be 45.6 million years old (Hartenberger 1986, Holroyd 2010, Seiffert 2010a). 

Considerable Scientific Debate 

Of course, the question of the earliest fossil record of Macroscelidea hinges crucially on the question of which fossil taxa qualify as Macroscelidea in the first place. Unfortunately, this latter point is a matter of considerable scientific debate with very different suggestions for the composition, subdivision, and classification of Macroscelidea. We here follow the most recent work by Senut & Pickford (2021), but include in our discussion some more questionable fossil taxa considered by Holroyd (2010) and Hooker & Russell (2012) (see the Appendix for a classification of all genera with age ranges of their fossil record). 

The oldest unequivocal Macroscelidea are the fossil taxa Eorhynchocyon rupestris (Rhynchocyonidae), Namasengi mockeae (Macroscelididae: Namasenginae), Promyohyrax namibiensis (Myohyracidae), Afrohypselodontus minus and A. grandis (Afrohypselodontidae), all described by Senut & Pickford (2021) from the tufas of the Eocliff locality in Namibia. They demonstrate the simultaneous abrupt appearance of all four families of elephant shrews in the Middle Eocene (Bartonian/Priabonian, 40.4-37.2 mya), which is not exactly what Darwinism would predict. A somewhat older Middle Eocene record could be a single tooth (specimen SN 10’08 ) of an unnamed species from the Sperrgebiet in Namibia described by Pickford et al. (2008: 470), which is of probable Lutetian age (47.8-41.2 mya) and may belong to an early ancestor of Myohyracidae. 

Previously, the oldest crown group macroscelideans were the rhychocyonids Oligorhynchocyon songwensis from the Late Oligocene (25.2 mya) Nsungwe Formation in Tanzania (Stevens et al. 2021) and Miorhynchocyon meswae from the Early Miocene (22-21 mya) of Kenya (Butler 1984, Holroyd 2010, Heritage et al. 2020). 

The Pliocene 

genus Mylomygale was a rodent-like herbivore (Naish 2013) and is classified in a separate subfamily Mylomygalinae (Camp et al. 1953, Patterson 1965, Holroyd 2010). However, “Corbet & Hanks (1968) pointed out that it shows a considerable resemblance to Macroscelides, and it may be a specialized member of the Macroscelidinae” (Butler 1995). Until recently, Mylomygale was only known from Early Pleistocene cave sediments in South Africa, contemporaneous with the close-by locality of the famous Taung Child. Now, this genus has also been found in Middle Pliocene paleokarst of South Africa (Senut et al. 2022). 

Another group that is very close to modern macroscelideans but rather resembled hyraxes is the extinct family Myohyracidae (Patterson 1965, Van Valen 1967, Butler 1984, 1995, McKenna & Bell 1997, Naish 2013), which initially indeed was misidentified as fossil hyraxes. It is mainly known from the Miocene, but the earliest representatives are Myohyrax and Promyohyrax from the Late Eocene of Namibia (Senut & Pickford 2021). The above mentioned unnamed specimen from the Lutetian of Namibia might be a basal Myohyracidae, since Pickford et al. (2008) found that it has “a morphology that could represent the ancestral morphotype for Myohyrax and Protypotheroides.”

Finally, there is the new macroscelidean family Afrohypselodontidae erected by Senut & Pickford (2021) from the Late Eocene of Namibia, which is unique with its ever-growing rootless cheek teeth. 

Two other extinct taxa that were excluded from unequivocal Macroscelidea by Senut & Pickford (2021) but are quite likely indeed stem macroscelideans are the Metoldobotidae and Herodotiidae. The later could extend the fossil record to 55.8 million years ago, which would perfectly align with the brief Paleogene window of time, when most of the placental orders abruptly appear in the fossil record.

The genus Metoldobotes from the early Oligocene of Fayum in Egypt was often considered the oldest and largest unequivocal Macroscelidae (Patterson 1965, Simons et al. 1991, Asher & Seiffert 2010, Stevens et al. 2021). Strangely, it would also be “one of the most derived macroscelideans” (Simons et al. 1991). Tabuce et al. (2001) suggested that Metoldobotes is the sister group to Myrohyracidae and living elephant shrews, while Seiffert (2007) found strong bootstrap support for a sister group relationship with crown group Macroscelidea. However, in the most recent study this position has been questioned by Senut & Pickford (2021), who considered Metoldobotidae to be only doubtfully related to Macroscelidea, mainly because of its poorly preserved and scanty fossil record. As an interesting side note, Naish (2013) speculated that Metoldobotes may have been the only venomous sengi because of a conspicuous groove in the lower third incisor, but also cautioned that many mammals have such grooves without being venomous. 

The extinct family Herodotiidae is more primitive and older, with some similarities to the Paleogene “condylarthrans” (Butler 1995; see below), but still has often been included as subfamily Herodotiinae in a more widely understood family Macroscelidae (Simons et al. 1991, Butler 1995, Tabuce et al. 2001, 2012, Benoit et al. 2013, Tabuce 2018). The studies by Seiffert (2007) and Asher & Seiffert (2010) “reviewed arguments for and against including herodotiines (Nementchatherium, Chambius and Herodotius) in the Macroscelidea.” According to Seiffert (2007) “the Eocene herodotiines Chambius and Herodotius are generally considered to be primitive macroscelideans” (e.g., Hartenberger 1986, Tabuce et al. 2007, Seiffert 2010b), with a fossil record that extends to the Early or early Middle Eocene Chambi Massif in Tunisia, where Chambius was first discovered.  

However, in Seiffert’s own analysis (Seiffert 2003, 2007) the genera Herodotius and Chambius never clustered with Macroscelidea but with aardvarks in some of the trees, and in others with pseudoungulates, paenungulates, or hyraxes. Senut (2008) concluded that “the Palaeogene Macroscelididae from Northern Africa classified in the Herodotiinae (Simons et al., 1991), might not be ancestral to any of the Miocene to Recent Macroscelididae.” However, this result could be based on undersampling of data as a larger updated data set (Seiffert 2010b: fig. 14) again placed herodotiines with Macroscelidea. Benoit et al. (2013) studied the evolution of the middle and inner ear of elephant shrews and in their cladistic study resolved Chambius as basal-most representative, but they ignored the study of Seiffert (2007). I think the case for a macroscelidean relationship is reasonably well supported, which would extend the fossil record of Macroscelidea to about 55.8 million years ago. 

Uncertain and Doubtful 

All remaining candidates as earlier stem macroscelideans are much more uncertain and doubtful. They mostly belong to a group of enigmatic fossil mammals from the Paleocene and Eocene that was previously classified within the highly polyphyletic ungulate-like order “Condylarthra” in the family Hyopsodontidae, which seems to be a likewise polyphyletic waste basket taxon (Tabuce et al. 2001, 2006, Zack et al. 2005a, Halliday et al. 2015). The study by Halliday et al. (2015: fig. 1) mentioned a close affinity of Hyopsodontidae and Macroscelides as “current consensus,” but found that the “case of the macroscelidean relationships … depends on the assumption that apheliscid ‘condylarths’ fall within Hyopsodontidae,” which they failed to establish in their own analysis. 

Zack et al. (2005b) removed the apheliscine and louisinine genera from Hyopsodontidae and placed them in a separate family, Apheliscidae. This family Apheliscidae comprises several genera and species including Haplaletes andakupensis and Litomylus orthronepius, which could be the oldest stem macroscelideans by far with an estimated stratigraphic range of 66.043-63.3 mya. A relationship of Apheliscidae with Macroscelidea was supported by several studies (Simons et al. 1991, Zack et al. 2005a, Penkrot et al. 2008), which also postulated a possible Holarctic origin of this subgroup of Afrotherian mammals. This would be strange indeed, but also on anatomical grounds such a relationship with Macroscelidea still has to be considered as highly controversial, since Halliday et al. (2015) instead recovered Apheliscidae as a basal member of the Laurasiatheria, thus not even as afrotherian mammals. 

A Big Question Mark 

As just mentioned, Zack et al. (2005b) had transferred Louisininae from Hyoposodontidae to the reinstated family Apheliscidae. Louisinines also include the species Cingulodon magioncaldai and Monshyus praevius from the Hainin Formation in Belgium, which yielded the oldest Cenozoic mammalian fauna of Europe with its estimated age range of 66.043-61.7 mya (Sudre & Russell 1982, De Bast & Smith 2017). Several authors considered a possible relationship of louisinines with Macroscelidea (e.g., Hartenberger 1986, Simons et al. 1991, Tabuce et al. 2001, 2007, Holroyd & Mussell 2005, Zack et al. 2005a; see Benoit et al. 2013). This was indeed strongly suggested by Hooker & Russell (2012), who elevated them to a separate family, Louisinidae, in the stem group of Macroscelidea.  

Tabuce (2018) tentatively and with a big question mark concurred with this result, even though the study had significant flaws that were highlighted by De Bast & Smith (2017) who commented:

Hooker & Russell (2012) followed this hypothesis in the last revision of the family; however, they relied on a cladogram that lacked any extant member of Macroscelidea and in which most basal dichotomies are found only in the majority-rule consensus but not in the strict consensus tree. Here we place the family in Eutheria without further precision because we believe that the characters shared by Louisinidae and Hyopsodontidae with Macroscelidea are convergences due to the development of saltatorial capacities. 

Two other hyopsodontid “condylarths,” i.e. Teilhardimys (= Microhyus) and Paschatherium,were recovered as very basal stem group representatives of Macroscelidea by Zach et al. (2005a) and Tabuce et al. (2006). Zach et al. (2005b) classified these two genera in Louisininae within Apheliscidae. In the cladogram of Tabuce et al. (2007) the North American apheliscines are closer to Macroscelidea, but the European louisinines “Microhyus” and Paschatherium closer to Paenungulata. On the other hand, Cooper et al. (2014) found that “the consistent recovery of the European louisinids Paschatherium and Teilhardimys as stem perissodactyls challenges the view that they are afrotherian macroscelideans.” The seminal work by Halliday et al. (2015) on Paleocene mammal affinities found neither Teilhardimys nor Apheliscidae to be closely related with Macroscelidea and indeed did not even support any of the mammalian supergroups (Xenarthra, Afrotheria, Euarchontoglires, and Laurasiatheria) as monophyletic unless constrained with molecular data. It must be really emphasized again: the very same fossils were in some studies resolved as close relatives of the order Macroscelidea and Paenungulata within the supergroup of Afrotheria, and in other studies recovered as close relatives of the unrelated order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates) in the different supergroup Laurasiatheria.  

Have you ever heard any physicists hotly debating if a certain particle is a fermion or a boson? All such substantial problems were likely the reason that Senut & Pickford (2021) in the most recent work on macroscelidean evolution considered Louisinidae to be doubtfully related to Macroscelidea.

In their mentioned revision of Louisinidae, Hooker & Russell (2012) suggested in their maximum parsimony cladogram (see above for flaws in this analysis) that the genus Adunator and the families Adapisoricidae and Amphilemuridae successively represent the most basal branches of the macroscelidean lineage. Apparently, this was not accepted by any other authors (compare Tabuce et al. 2018), but still made it into the Paleobiology Database and the German Wikipedia. 

In spite of some similarities with hyopsodontid condylarths, these taxa are generally considered to be related to erinaceomorph insectivorans (hedgehogs) of the order Eulipotyphla (Russel 1964, Van Valen 1967, Novacek et al. 1985, Halliday et al. 2015). Senut & Pickford (2021) did not even bother to list them among their “families of doubtful or uncertain macroscelidean affinities.”

Last but not least, we must briefly discuss the leptictidians, an enigmatic group of bipedal mammals from the Paleogene. Asher & Seiffert (2010) placed the genus Leptictis from the Late Eocene and Oligocene of North America as sister group to Macroscelidea in their tree of Afrotherian phylogeny and biostratigraphic distribution. This phylogenetic position of leptictids was also supported in the cladograms of Zack et al. (2005a: fig. 3c), Hooker & Russell (2012), and O’Leary et al. (2013). The genus Leptictis and its relatives are generally recognized as a distinct order Leptictida, which even includes the Late Cretaceous genus Gypsnonictops. 

This would of course be an extremely interesting and very unusual dating for a subgroup of Afrotheria and alleged close relative of living elephant shrews. However, according to other experts (e.g. Wible et al. 2009), including the most recent study (Halliday et al. 2015), the Leptictida instead belong into the paraphyletic stem group of placental mammals, and therefore do not even represent real eutherians. Similarities of leptictids and macroscelideans therefore have to be considered as convergences, as already suggested by Butler (1995). Likewise, Meehan & Martin (2010) noted that “the morphology of leptictidans was highly convergent to that of extant macroscelideans, due to similar ecological specialisations to insectivory, digging, and saltatory locomotion” (Halliday et al. 2015). 

An Apparently Simple Question 

As you likely have realized by now, it can get pretty complicated to answer the apparently simple question of what the earliest fossil record of a certain group is, or even to find a consensus about what the group is. Anyway, from the above we can at least conclude that the oldest fossil record of unequivocal Macroscelidea is about 55.8-40 mya and that of the more doubtful alleged stem group about 66-56 mya. While there are some aberrant rodent-like and hyrax-like fossil elephant shrews, we do not find any fossil evidence for a gradual building of the distinct macroscelidean body plan during the Paleogene and Neogene periods (formerly called Tertiary). Likewise their theoretically predicted stem group in the Upper Cretaceous is totally missing in the fossil record, since Leptictida turned out to be stem eutherians. Just as all the other placental mammal orders, elephant shrews appeared abruptly on the scene, unless “hyopsodontids” like Louisinidae should indeed turn out to be stem group macroscelideans, which is still far from certain (see above). But even then, there would remain a large morphological gap between the condylarth-like stem taxa and unequivocal macroscelideans. 

Just like its internal classification, the systematic affinities of the order Macroscelidea used to be a big mess, with very different candidates discussed as putative closest relatives, such as Archonta (treeshrews, colugos, and primates), Glires (rabbits, hares, and rodents), Eulipotyphla (insectivores), Tubulidentata (aardvarks), and Afrosoricida, as well as extinct Condylarthra (Patterson 1965, Simons et al. 1991, Butler 1995, Tabuce et al. 2001, Asher & Seiffert 2010, Naish 2013, Stevens et al. 2021). Rathbun (2005) therefore noted that “few mammals have had a more colourful history of misunderstood ancestry than the elephant-shrews.” Only after the advent of phylogenomics have they been recognized as members of the Afrotheria clade (Nishihara et al. 2005, Seiffert 2003, 2007, Asher & Seiffert 2010). Next Fossil Friday we will look into another member of the Afrotheria, i.e., the order Afrosoricida that includes golden moles, otter shrews, and the iconic tenrecs of Madagascar. Stay tuned for more evidence on abrupt appearances in the mammalian fossil record. 

The ancient wisdom of the ents.

 At nautilus: the ancient wisdom stored in trees 

Uncommon descent 

What’s the oldest known living thing, and how do we know? Why should we even want to know? The explanation is a history of curiosity and care. It’s about our long-term relationships—spiritual and scientific—with long-lived plants, as long as long can be. It’s all about trees.

A tree is a plant that people call a tree—a term of dignity, not botany.

Although people construct the meaning of “trees” and assign age value to the vascular plants they call “ancient trees,” people cannot themselves create life that grows in place for centuries. Exclusively, solar-powered organisms enact that miracle. Among plants, there are ephemerals, annuals, biennials, perennials—and, beyond them all, perdurables, thousand-year woody life-forms. 

INTO ETERNITY: Individual bristlecone pines, such as this one photographed in Utah, can live for close to 5,000 years. By sectioning off dying parts of themselves, they’re able to outlast the rise and fall of human empires. Photo by Anthony Heflin / Shutterstock.

As a rule, gymnosperms (flowerless plants with naked seeds) grow slower and live longer than angiosperms (flowering plants with fruits). Gymnosperms include ginkgo (a genus of one), cycads, and every kind of conifer—including yews, pines, firs, spruces, cedars, redwoods, cypresses, podocarps, and araucarias. All these lineages began hundreds of millions of years before the divergence of angiosperms. In effect, the newer, faster competition forced slow growers to retreat to exposed sites and poor soils, adverse niches conducive to oldness. Five thousand years is the approximate limit for nonclonal living under adversity. In plants, the potential for extreme longevity seems to be an evolutionary holdover from the deep past. Only about 25 plant species can, without human assistance, produce organisms that live beyond one millennium, and they are mainly conifers of primeval lineage. The cypress family contains the most perdurables, followed by the pine family. Many relict conifers hang on in limited, vulnerable habitats. The ice ages didn’t help their cause. In general, neither did humans, with their technologies of fire, domestication, and metalworking. Of some 600 conifer species, roughly one-third are endangered, with many genera reduced to a single species. 

A gymnosperm doesn’t so much live long as die longer—or, live longer through dying. The interior dead wood—the heartwood—performs vital functions, mechanically and structurally. In comparison, the thin living outer layer is open to the elements. If damaged by an extrinsic event such as fire or lightning, this periderm doesn’t heal or scar like animal skin. Instead, new cambium covers the injury, absorbing it as one more historical record alongside its growth rings. Thus, an ancient conifer is neither timeless nor deathless, but timeful and deathful. A few special conifers such as bristlecone pine can live through sequential, sectorial deaths—compartmentalizing their external afflictions, shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark. The final cambium has vitality like the first. Longevity doesn’t suppress fecundity. Unlike animals, plants don’t accumulate proteins that lead to degenerative diseases. 

The strongest correlation with long life (elongated death) is chemical. Longevous conifers produce copious resins—volatile, aromatic hydrocarbons like terpenes—that inhibit fungal rot and insect predation. Chemically, bristlecone is off the charts. Its high-elevation habitat offers additional protection from enemies, competitors, and fire, given that they tolerate dryness and cold. In habitats with chronic stress, conifers grow slower and stockier. Slow woody growth generates more lignin, another organic polymer with defensive properties. Stress-tolerant plants prioritize stability over size. Their stuntedness is equal parts adaptation and tribulation. 

Regrowth is another pathway to oldness, an adaptation that appears in both gymnosperms and angiosperms. Certain single-boughed woody species—notably ginkgo, redwood, yew, olive—can recover from catastrophic damage, even the death of the bole. These trees never lose their ability to resprout and regenerate. At the organismal level, they do not senesce, meaning they don’t lose vitality with age. In theory, such a plant is internally capable of immortality, though some external force inevitably ends its life. With particular species and cultivars, humans can force rejuvenation through grafting, pollarding, or coppicing. Plants that normally die young may live long under horticultural care. 

The price of longevity is immobility. At the organismal level, a plant cannot migrate like an animal. Its localism is total. Trees take what comes until something indomitable comes along. Extrinsic mortality may result from a distinct catastrophe, such as fire or gale, or multiple, cumulative stressors. There are limits beyond which even the most deeply rooted organisms can no longer function. Thresholds of water, salinity, and temperature are absolute thresholds. 

Does a naturally occurring tree of great age have value in itself? Foresters and forest ecologists have long debated this question. A century ago, technicians used words like “overage,” “overmature,” and “decadent” to describe standing timber past its prime. Commercial managers saw tree life as individual and rotational, and considered postmerchantable growth to be a biological waste of time. Their business—international markets for wood products—encouraged uniformity in age and size. By contrast, forest ecologists studied the communities in, on, and under each tree—each a world in itself—and saw forest life as processual. The cycle of life required dead and dying trees. Today, foresters meet ecologists halfway: Old trees provide nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and other “ecosystem services.” 

Perdurables are so much more than service providers. They are gift givers. They invite us to be fully human—truly sapient—by engaging our deepest faculties: to venerate, to analyze, to meditate. They expand our moral and temporal imaginations. 

In mythical form, trees appear in creation stories, present at time’s beginning. In graphical form, they represent seasons, cycles, genealogies, algorithms, and systems of knowledge. An olden bough is a bridge between temporalities we feel and those we can only think. This is why Darwin imagined millions of years of evolutionary history as a wide-spreading Tree of Life. Most profoundly, select living conifers—ancient organisms of ancient ancestry—are incarnations of geohistory. Volcanic eruptions, magnetic field reversals, and solar proton events leave signatures in their wood. Through tree-ring science, we see how woody plants register cyclical time and linear time, Chronos (durations) and Kairos (moments), climate and weather, the cosmogenic and the planetary. As multitemporal beings—short, long, and deep time together, in living form—perdurables allow us to think about the Anthropocene without anthropocentrism. They grant emotional access to timefulness.  

The “adaptations” that contribute to trees’ longevity have the hallmarks of design, to enable the organism to weather various threats to its existence. The persistence of these living things is remarkable. The author’s description of some trees reminds me of Tolkien’s description of elves: immortal, but still subject to death by violence. Stewarding Earth’s resources by appreciating the value of these longest-lived keepers of history is commended to us by wisdom. 

Bowing down to the beast?

 Robert Schenk on the religious right's Faustian bargain.

Faith on view 

Brad Reed of Salon writes that Evangelical preacher Robert Schenck criticized Christian conservative support of Republicans in testimony to the House Judicial Committee. He argued that the alliance between the religious right and Republicans came at “a great spiritual cost.”

Reverend Schenck was a prominent activist in the pro-life movement before 2019 and cited the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as part of an unequal exchange between Christians and politicians. Schenck later repudiated his anti-abortion position and has preached in more than 40 countries since 1982, including every state in the US.

Reed continues:

The Rev. Robert Schenck, who was once a prominent anti-abortion activist, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday that he and his fellow conservative Christians made a Faustian bargain with the Republican Party as part of their quest to overturn Roe v. Wade.

During his testimony, Schenck described a meeting he and his fellow evangelicals had with Republican operatives in which they were told that, in order to get what they wanted with Roe, they would have to accept and promote an entire package of right-wing policies that they otherwise might have found objectionable.

In that meeting that I participated in, the conversation went something like this: ‘You guys want Roe v. Wade overturned, we can do that for you, but you take the whole enchilada, you take the whole thing,”‘ he said. “You take everything else that comes with it. Because if you want Roe gone, you have to work with us.”

“From that point on that community that I had served, and still do, made a deal with them devil,” he said. “That deal was, we would support everything on the conservative agenda, whether or not we had conscientious conflict with them. The means were justified by the ends of that.” 

 Ps. Of course the religious left has long had its own Faustian bargain going with the political left and is (if anything) even less self aware re:the spiritual injury they have been doing themselves thereby.

Pi : a brief history.

pi 

mathematics

Alternate titles: π

By the editors of the encyclopedia brittanica 

pi, in mathematics, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The symbol π was devised by British mathematician William Jones in 1706 to represent the ratio and was later popularized by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Because pi is irrational (not equal to the ratio of any two whole numbers), its digits do not repeat, and an approximation such as 3.14 or 22/7 is often used for everyday calculations. To 39 decimal places, pi is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197 

The Babylonians (c. 2000 BCE) used 3.125 to approximate pi, a value they obtained by calculating the perimeter of a hexagon inscribed within a circle and assuming that the ratio of the hexagon’s perimeter to the circle’s circumference was 24/25. The Rhind papyrus (c. 1650 BCE) indicates that ancient Egyptians used a value of 256/81 or about 3.16045. Archimedes (c. 250 BCE) took a major step forward by devising a method to obtain pi to any desired accuracy, given enough patience. By inscribing and circumscribing regular polygons about a circle to obtain upper and lower bounds, he obtained 223/71 < π < 22/7, or an average value of about 3.1418. Archimedes also proved that the ratio of the area of a circle to the square of its radius is the same constant.

Over the ensuing centuries, Chinese, Indian, and Arab mathematicians extended the number of decimal places known through tedious calculations, rather than improvements on Archimedes’ method. By the end of the 17th century, however, new methods of mathematical analysis in Europe provided improved ways of calculating pi involving infinite series. For example, Isaac Newton used his binomial theorem to calculate 16 decimal places quickly. Early in the 20th century the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan developed exceptionally efficient ways of calculating pi that were later incorporated into computer algorithms. In the early 21st century computers calculated pi to 62,831,853,071,796 decimal places, as well as its two-quadrillionth digit when expressed in binary (0).

Pi occurs in various mathematical problems involving the lengths of arcs or other curves, the areas of ellipses, sectors, and other curved surfaces, and the volumes of many solids. It is also used in various formulas of physics and engineering to describe such periodic phenomena as the motion of pendulums, the vibration of strings, and alternating electric currents. 

 

Our designed solar system v.chance and necessity

 The fine-tuning of the solar system 

Uncommon descent 

The universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and the Earth–Moon double planet system demonstrate clearly some remarkable evidence of highly intelligent design. If we consider them separately, each characteristic appears to be highly improbable due to random chance. When taken all of them together, the probability of random chance becomes as small as to be impossible. An alternative thought, designed by an intelligent creator is a more realistic explanation to many of the civilized people. In either way, we must admit that we are nothing but a product of a miracle—either a miracle of chance or a miracle of design. 3 

Argument from the formation of the sun in a cluster 

1. Scientists determined that the Sun formed in a cluster of stars containing at least one massive star that died in a supernova explosion.

2. The distance to that supernova must have been close enough to enrich the solar nebula adequately, but not so close that it would have destroyed the disk from which the planets formed.

3. Such fine-tuning indicates design of the solar system that could have been done only by The Supreme Engineer, God.

4. God necessarily exists.

http://kgov.com/fine-tuning-of-the-universe

The Finely Tuned Parameters of the Solar System include:

- Our Sun is positioned far from the Milky Way's center in a galactic goldilocks zone of low radiation

- Our Sun placed in an arm of the Milky Way puts it where we can discover a vast swath of the entire universe

- Earth's orbit is nearly circular (eccentricity ~ 0.02) around the Sun providing a stability in a range of vital factors

- Earth's orbit has a low inclination keeping it's temperatures within a range permitting diverse ecosystems

- Earth's axial tilt is within a range that helps to stabilize our planet's climate

- the Moon's mass helps stabilize the Earth's tilt on its axis, which provides for the diversity of alternating seasons

- the Moon's distance from the Earth provides tides to keep life thriving in our oceans, and thus, worldwide

- the Moon's nearly circular orbit (eccentricity ~ 0.05) makes it's influence extraordinarily reliable

- the Moon is 1/400th the size of the Sun, and at 1/400th its distance, enables educational perfect eclipses

- the Earth's distance from the Sun provides for great quantities of life and climate-sustaining liquid water

- the Sun's extraordinary stable output of the energy

- the Sun's mass and size are just right for Earth's biosystem

- the Sun's luminosity and temperature are just right to provide for Earth's extraordinary range of ecosystems

- the color of the Sun's light from is tuned for maximum benefit for our plant life (photosynthesis)

- the Sun's low "metallicity" prevents the destruction of life on Earth

- etc., etc., etc. 

cloud that forms star and planetary system

Correct number and sizes of planets and planetesimals consumed by star

Correct variations in star’s diameter

Correct level of spot production on star’s surface

Correct variability of spot production on star’s surface

Correct mass of outer gas giant planet relative to inner gas giant planet

Correct Kozai oscillation level in planetary system

Correct reduction of Kuiper Belt mass during planetary system’s early history

Correct efficiency of stellar mass loss during final stages of stellar burning

Correct number, mass, and distance from star of gas giant planets in addition to planets of the mass and distance of Jupiter and Saturn

Our solar powered biosphere v. Darwinism

 At Phys.Org: Alpine Lake Bacteria Deploy Two Light-Harvesting Systems 

Uncommon descent  

Christopher Packham writes:

Though humans, along with other vertebrate and invertebrate organisms, don’t photosynthesize, we’re definitely the downstream beneficiaries of the life forms that do. Phototrophic organisms at the bottom of the food chain convert abundant sunlight into the energy that ultimately powers all other life.

The two metabolic systems for harvesting light energy are fundamentally different. The most familiar is the chlorophyll-based photosynthesis by which plant life uses light to power the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into sugars and starches; the other system consists of proton-pumping rhodopsins.

Microbial rhodopsins, retinal-binding proteins, provide ion transport driven by light (and incidentally, sensory functions). It’s a family that includes light-driven proton pumps, ion pumps, ion channels and light sensors. Microbial rhodopsins are found in archaea, bacteria and eukaryota and are widespread in oceans and freshwater lakes. Generally speaking, species tend to pick one or the other metabolic system, the PC/Mac dichotomy of phototrophic organisms. However, a multi-institutional team of molecular biologists now reports finding an alpine lake bacterium that uses both bacteriochlorophyll-based photosynthetic complexes and proton-pumping rhodopsins. Their study is published in PNAS.

Based on flash photolysis measurements, the authors report that both systems are photochemically active in Sphingomonas glacialis AAP5, found in the alpine lake Gossenköllesee, located in the Tyrolean Alps. Specifically, in low-light conditions between 4 and 22 degrees Celsius, the bacterium expresses bacteriochlorophyll, and in light conditions at temperatures below 16 degrees Celsius, expresses xanthorhodopsin, a proton pump.

S. glacialis uses harvested light to synthesize ATP and to stimulate growth. The authors write, “This indicates that the use of two systems for light harvesting may represent an evolutionary adaptation to the specific environmental conditions found in alpine lakes and other analogous ecosystems,” namely a response to large seasonal changes of temperature and light.

As the authors note, bacteriochlorophyll-based systems are large, complex and pigment-driven, requiring complex molecular machinery for synthesis, assembly and regulation. But once assembled, they comprise a “set-it-and-forget-it” system that functions even under low-light conditions. Rhodopsins, on the other hand, are far simpler and less expensive to express; their disadvantage is that they are only assembled and function in the presence of higher irradiance levels.

Loaded with all the genetic hardware for both chlorophototrophy and retinalphototrophy, these photoheterotrophic little guys have a reduced need for aerobic respiration and can therefore use available carbon for growth, a scarce commodity in the alpine lake environment they call home. 

“As the authors note, bacteriochlorophyll-based systems are large, complex and pigment-driven, requiring complex molecular machinery for synthesis, assembly and regulation.” A statement such as this, acknowledging complex, functional systems of molecular machines necessary for photosynthesis, is scientifically incompatible with the suggestion that “light harvesting may represent an evolutionary adaptation.”

Unguided natural processes degrade complex, functional systems over time. The spacetime history of the universe is woefully insufficient to randomly produce such complex, functional molecules. Yet again, researchers have claimed godlike powers for nature. Deifying nature has no place in modern science, since we know that nature itself is subject to laws that regulate its workings. The light-harvesting capabilities of bacteria represent the work of intelligent design, consistent with the role of God as Creator. 

Design deniers:stumped by the book of life again?

Yet Another Example Of How Materialism Blinds Its Proponents

Uncommondescent 

Over at the Reasons.org post (see here), UB and JVL are having an exchange that illustrates perfectly how materialism blinds its proponents.

UB summarizes:

In 1948 did John Von Neumann take a page from Alan Turing’s 1933 Machine and give a series of lectures predicting that a quiescent symbol system and a set of independent constraints would be required for autonomous open-ended self replication? Yes. In 1953 did Francis Crick, along with Watson, discover the sequence structure of that symbol system, calling it a code? Yes. And in 1955 did he further predict that an unknown set of protein constraints would be found working in the system, establishing the necessary code relationships? Yes. In 1956-1958 did Mahlon Hoagland and Paul Zamecnik experimentally confirm Crick’s (and Von Neumann’s) predictions. Yes. In 1961, did Marshal Nirenberg have to demonstrate the first symbolic relationship in the gene system in order to know it? Yes. In 1969 did Howard Pattee set off on a five decade analysis of the gene system, confirming it as symbolic control of a dynamic process? Yes. Do the encoded descriptions of the constraints have to be physically coherent with all the other descriptions (i.e. self-referent) in order to successfully function? Yes. Is the gene system and written human language the only two systems known to science that operate in this way? Yes. Is the appearance of an encoded symbol system considered in science to be a universal correlate of intelligence? Yes.

All of UB’s claims are true beyond the slightest doubt. Is JVL convinced? Of course not. He writes: 

I’d say you made an error in how you choose to interpret the works of semiotic researchers as supporting ID when they, themselves, do not see their work in that way. 

JVL’s point is that if UB is correct about the logical inferences of the researchers’ work, how could that conclusion have escaped the researchers themselves? It does not seem to have occurred to JVL that both things could be true at the same time. In other words, UB could very well be correct about the logical conclusion compelled by the researchers’ observations, even though the researchers themselves did not come to that conclusion. How is that possible? Simple. The researchers, like JVL, were blinded by their a priori metaphysical commitments. They literally could not see where their own work was leading.

Examples of researchers who could not see where their own work was heading abound in history. Does anyone think that Copernicus reached his heliocentric conclusions based on original research alone? Of course he didn’t. Men had been observing the planets and the stars for hundreds of years before Copernicus, and he had a library full of their work. All of these prior researchers concluded that their observations supported a geocentric cosmology. Copernicus’ genius was not in making new observations. His genius was in interpreting observations that had been made over the course of hundreds of years through a new paradigm (a paradigm inspired, by the way, by Copernicus’ conviction that God’s design had to be more elegant than the existing system described). 

Now, let’s imagine if JVL were responding to Copernicus in 1543:Copernicus: Ptolemy established the geocentric paradigm when he published the Almagest in 150 AD.  I do not dispute Ptolemy’s observations. I agree with them. Nor do I dispute the observations of all subsequent astronomers who have taken the geocentric view for granted for nearly 1,400 years. Again, I agree with those observations. But I have concluded that even though those observations were correct, the researchers did not reach the correct conclusion from those observations. The earth orbits the sun.

JVL: The researchers on whose observations you are relying did not reach the same conclusion that you do. Therefore, you must be wrong.

Sound farfetched? Not so fast. There were lots of JVLs back in the 16th century who said that very thing. Copernicus was correct. But that didn’t stop people like JVL from pushing back at him on the basis of authority. Indeed, the people who pushed back at Copernicus had an even better argument than JVL does today. After all, Copernicus was trying to upset a paradigm that had been taken for granted for well over a millennium. The authority weighing against him was overwhelming. But he was right and the prior authorities were wrong.That is why science proceeds by challenging authority, not, as JVL would have it, by meekly submitting to it.

So yes, it is true as JVL says. The researchers UB cites did not understand the significance of their own observations, just as the researchers who preceded Copernicus (many of whom were brilliant men) did not understand the significance of their own observations.

JVL thinks he has a knockdown counter to UB: “The researchers you cite did not reach the same conclusion that you do.” He is wrong about that.

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: a brief history.

 Marcel-Paul Schützenberger 

Wikipedia 

 Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger (24 October 1920 – 29 July 1996) was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. He worked in the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory.[1] In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of [neo-]Darwinism",[2] a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution. Several notable theorems and objects in mathematics as well as computer science bear his name (for example Schutzenberger group or the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy). Paul Schützenberger was his great-grandfather. 

Contributions medicine and biology 

Schützenberger's first doctorate, in medicine, was awarded in 1948 from the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.[4] His doctoral thesis, on the statistical study of biological sex at birth, was distinguished by the Baron Larrey Prize from the French Academy of Medicine.[5]

Biologist Jaques Besson, a co-author with Schützenberger on a biological topic,[6] while noting that Schützenberger is perhaps most remembered for work in pure mathematical fields, credits him[5] for likely being responsible for the introduction of statistical sequential analysis in French hospital practice.[7] 

Contributions to computer science and linguistics 

Schützenberger's second doctorate was awarded in 1953 from Université Paris III[dubious – discuss].[8] This work, developed from earlier results[9][10] is counted amongst the early influential French academic work in information theory.[11] His later impact in both linguistics and combinatorics is reflected by two theorems in formal linguistics (the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem[12] and the Chomsky–Schützenberger representation theorem), and one in combinatorics (the Schützenberger theorem). With Alain Lascoux, Schützenberger is credited with the foundation of the notion of the plactic monoid,[13][14] reflected in the name of the combinatorial structure called by some the Lascoux–Schützenberger tree.[15][16]

In automata theory, Schützenberger is credited with first defining (what later became known as) weighted automata, the first studied model of automata which compute a quantitative output.[17]

The mathematician Dominique Perrin credited Schützenberger with "deeply [influencing] the theory of semigroups" and "deep results on rational functions and transducers", amongst other contributions to mathematics.[1]

Office honors and recognition 

Professorships and other teaching[1]

Professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Poitiers (1957–1963)

Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University (1961–1962)

Director of Research at the CNRS (1963–1964)

Professor at the University of Paris (1964–1970)

Professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris VII (1970-until his death in 1996)

National honors

In 1988, after having been a Correspondant since 1979, Schützenberger was made a full Membre of French Academy of Sciences.

Posthumous recognitions

After his death, two journals in theoretical mathematics dedicated issues to Schützenberger's memory. He was commemorated in this manner by Theoretical Computer Science in 1998[18] and again by the International Journal of Algebra and Computation in 1999.[19]

The mathematician David Berlinski provided this dedication in his 2000 book The Advent of The Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World: À la mémoire de mon ami . . M. P. Schützenberger, 1921-1996. 

Works 

For the complete list of his papers, see: Papers

De la diversité de certains cancers. Pierre Florent Denoix, Paris (1954)/About the diversity of some cancers

Théorie géométrique des polynômes eulériens, with Dominique Foata, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Springer (1970)/Geometric theory of Euler polynomials

Triangle de pensées, with Alain Connes and André Lichnerowicz, Paris, O. Jacob ; Saint-Gély du Fesc : Espace 34 (2000)/Triangle of thoughts

Les failles du darwinisme, La Recherche, n°283 (January 1996)/The miracles of darwinism

Œuvres complètes, edited by Jean Berstel, Alain Lascoux and Dominique Perrin, Institut Gaspard-Monge, Université Paris-Est (2009)/Complete Works

The Complete Works of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: Complete Works