Friday, 27 January 2023

Where success is an orphan.

The fossil record continues to troll Darwinism.

Fossil Friday: Elephants and the Abrupt Origin of Proboscidea

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the iconic Deinotherium (16.9-0.78 mya) since today we look into the last order of afrotherian mammals, the Proboscidea and their putative fossil relatives. Proboscideans include the living and fossil elephants such as mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, stegodonts, and deinotheres. The fossil record of proboscideans is very extensive with about 50 genera with 185 species. It includes isolated teeth as well as complete skeletons with numerous early representatives from the Paleogene (Tassy 1990, McKenna & Bell 1997, Shoshani & Tassy 2005, Sanders et al. 2010). These fossils certainly provide significant information about the history and development of proboscideans (Tassy & Shoshani 1988, Tassy 1990, Shoshani & Tassy 1996, 2005, Shoshani 1998, 2001, Gheerbrant 2009, Gheerbrant & Tassy 2009, Begum 2021, Cantalapiedra et al. 2021). For our purpose we will ignore all of the later radiations of elephant-like mammals and will focus on the earliest representatives of the first radiation. So, when do proboscideans first appearance in the fossil record?

Oldest and Most Primitive

The oldest and most primitive assumed proboscidean is Eritherium azzouzorum from Sidi Chennane in the Ouled Abdoun Basin of Morocco (Gheerbrant 2009, Gheerbrant et al. 2012, Schmitt & Gheerbrant 2016). This outcrop is of Middle Paleocene (Selandian, 61.7-58.7 mya) age of almost 60 million years, which makes it the oldest known placental mammal locality in Africa. Eritherium was a relatively small animal, only about the size of a fox, and without a trunk or tusks. It did not really look like an elephant at all, and indeed there is a problem with its alleged proboscidean affinity: in some more recent phylogenetic studies, Eritherium is resolved outside of Proboscidea as a more basal paenungulate (Cooper et al. 2014, Rose et al. 2019), but it was confirmed as basal proboscidean by Gheerbrant et al. (2014, 2016) and Schmitt & Gheerbrant (2016)

Pretty much undisputed is Phosphatotherium escuilliei from the Early Eocene (earliest Ypresian, 55.8-48.6 mya) of the Ouled Abdoun Basin in Morocco (Gheerbrant et al. 1996, 2005a, Shoshany & Tassy 2005, Sanders et al. 2010), which represents the next oldest and second most primitive proboscidean (Gheerbrant et al. 2005a, Schmitt & Gheerbrant 2016). There was one little problem, though, which is the fact that the precise location of its discovery is unknown, because the holotype fossil was acquired from a commercial fossil dealer. The original description by Gheerbrant et al. (1996) admits this but says that an “unambiguous Thanetian age” is documented by the attached phosphatic matrix and the associated shark teeth, which are index fossils for an Upper Paleocene (Thanetian) layer that lacks Ypresian taxa. This “unambiguous” evidence apparently was not so unambiguous after all, because these very phosphatite layers were later recognized as earliest Ypresian by Gheerbrant et al. (2001, 2003), and the Ypresian age was also confirmed by later discovered new material of Phosphatotherium (Gheerbrant et al. 2005a).

Daouitherium rebouli is another primitive proboscidean from the Early Eocene (earliest Ypresian, 55.8-48.6 mya) of the Ouled Abdoun Basin in Morocco (Gheerbrant et al. 2002, Shoshany & Tassy 2005, Sanders et al. 2010). The original describers mentioned that the discovery of Daouitherium documents “an unexpected early diversity of proboscideans and of the old origin of the order” (Gheerbrant et al. 2002).

Numidotherium koholense was described from the Early Eocene (Ypresian) from El Kohol in Algeria (Mahboubi et al. 1984, Court 1995, Shoshani & Tassy 1996, Sanders eat al. 2010). A second species N. savagei was described by Court (1995) from the Upper Eocene (Bartonian, 40.4-33.9 mya) of southern Libya.

Last but not least, there is Khamsaconus bulbous, which was described from a single molar tooth from the Ypresian (55.8-48.6 Mya) of south Morocco. It was initially attributed to the louisinine “condylarths” thus in the possible relationship of the elephant shrew order Macroscelidea (Sudre et al. 1993; also see Bechly 2022c). Most later works rather considered this taxon as a very primitive and small early proboscidean (Gheerbrant et al. 1998, 2002, 2005a, 2012, Gheerbrant 2009, Sanders et al. 2010), but sometimes only with a question mark because the taxon is very poorly known.

One of the best-known early proboscideans is the somewhat younger genus Moeritherium, of which six species have been described. The earliest species is M. chehbeurameuri from the Bartonian of Algeria, which is 40.4-33.9 million years old (Delmer et al. 2006). Moeritheriumis quite remarkable for its very elongate body shape, which is certainly a derived trait that excludes Moeritherium from the direct ancestry of later proboscideans. The similarities between Moeritherium and the “walking sea cow” Protosiren led Andrews (1906) to first suggest a close relationship of elephants and sea cows, which later became generally recognized as the Tethytheria clade (McKenna 1975, Asher et al. 2003, Nishihara et al. 2005, Seiffert 2007, Tabuce et al. 2007, 2008, Asher & Seiffert 2010, O’Leary et al. 2013). Similar adaptations were considered by some experts as indicating a common semi-aquatic ancestor for these two mammal orders (Gaeth et al. 1999, Thewissen et al. 2000, Shoshani & Tassy 2005, Asher & Seiffert 2010).

Barytherium grave is the youngest of the primitive proboscideans and was discovered at the Eocene/Oligocene Fayum Depression in Egypt (33.9-28.4 mya) (Andrews 1906, Shoshani & Tassy 1996, Sanders et al. 2010), which also yielded other early proboscideans like Moeritherium, Phiomia, and Palaeomastodon.

None of these early proboscideans shows the strange phenomenon of horizontal tooth displacement that is found in more modern elephants and independently originated three times within Tethytheria (Shoshani 2001; also see Bechly 2022a). It is also worth noting that the phylogenetic relationships and classification within Proboscidea proved to be a quite controversial issue (Tassy 1988, Tassy & Shoshani 1988, Court 1995), which is hardly a big surprise as it seems to apply to most issues of higher phylogeny in all groups of organisms.

Embrithopoda

Embrithopoda is an enigmatic extinct group of large mammals from the Paleogene of the Old World, of which the best-known member is the iconic Arsinoitherium from the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene of Northern Africa. Even though Arsinoitherium resembled a rhino, most experts considered Embrithopoda as tethytherians within Afrotheria (see Erdal et al. 2016: tab. 2), and maybe even close relatives of proboscideans (Benoit et al. 2013, Avilla & Mothé 2021). However, the most recent studies rather suggest that embrithopods occupy a more basal position as sister group to all other Tethytheria (Erdal et al. 2016, Gheerbrant et al. 2018, 2021), so that the derived similarities with proboscideans have to be considered as convergences (also see Gheerbrant et al. 2005a and Benoit et al. 2013). The allegedly oldest fossil record for this group is Stylophus minor from the Early Eocene (Ypresian, 55.8-48.6 mya) Grand Daoui area in Morocco (Gheerbrant et al. 2018).

Anthracobunia

The Anthracobunia is a group of primitive perissodactyl-like mammals and includes the extinct families Cambaytheriidae and Anthracobunidae from the Early Eocene (55.8-48.6 Mya) of India and Pakistan (Wells & Gingerich 1983, Rose et al. 2006, 2014, 2019; also see Dunn 2020), and according to some workers may\ even include the extinct Desmostylia we discussed last week (Cooper et al. 2014, Rose et al. 2019, Gheerbrant et al. 2021; also see Bechly 2023b). Some scientists considered anthracobunids as tethytherians (Wells & Gingerich 1983, Ginsburg et al. 1999, Ducrocq et al. 2000, Rose et al. 2006, Tabuce et al. 2007, and Gheerbrant et al. 2014) and some other authors even considered them as basal proboscideans (Gingerich et al. 1990, Shoshani et al. 1996, Thewissen et al. 2000, Gheerbrant et al. 2005b, Asher & Seiffert 2010, Erdal et al. 2016), which would make them contemporaneous with some of the earliest proboscideans in Africa (Asher et al. 2003). Shoshany & Tassy (2005) preferred to exclude anthracobunids from Proboscidea until additional evidence becomes available, and Tabuce et al. (2008) mentioned that “the hypothesis that some extinct taxa (desmostylians, embrithopods and anthracobunids) are included in tethytheres is less supported, because the characters used to include them within tethytheres are homoplastic and/or of ambiguous distribution.” Indeed, more recent studies by Cooper et al. (2014), Gheerbrant et al. (2016), and Rose et al. (2014, 2019) unambiguously placed them outside Afrotheria in the stem group of odd-toed ungulates (Perissodactyla). This also makes much more sense from a paleobiogeographic point of view, as all anthracobunids were found in East Asia.

As I discussed in my article on fossil sea cows (Bechly 2023b), Ishatherium subathuensiswas described by Sahni & Kumar (1980) and Sahni et al. (1980) from the early Eocene (Ypresian, 55.8-48.6 mya) Subhatu Formation in the Himalayas. It was described as the oldest known sirenian but only a few authors concurred with this interpretation (Sereno 1982). Domning et al. (1982) questioned the sirenian affinity as well as the dating. Indeed, most other experts think that it could as well be an anthracobunid perissodactyl or a moeritheriid proboscidean (Wells & Gingerich 1983, Domning et al. 1986, Zalmout et al. 2003, Rose et al. 2019), but Cooper et al. (2014) excluded Ishatherium from Anthracobunidae.

Radinskya and Phenacolophus

Both genera have been considered as putative Paenungulata and Tethytheria related to Embrithopoda (McKenna & Manning 1977, McKenna & Bell 1997). Asher et al. (2003)mentioned that “if the hypothesized relation between Arsinoitherium and phenacolophids in the Embrithopoda is correct (McKenna and Manning, 1977), then crown afrotheres are also represented by Paleocene taxa from Central Asia,” which of course would be problematic. The cladistic studies by Gheerbrant et al. (2005a, 2014) confirmed Phenacolophus as a sister group to Embrithopoda in Paenungulata, but resolved Radinskya as sister group to Perissodactyla. More recent studies (Gheerbrant et al. 2016, 2021) even excluded both genera from Afrotheria and instead placed them in the stem group of odd-toed ungulates (Perissodactyla), just like anthracobunids and possibly desmostylians, which makes much more sense biogeographically. But here is the more general question: Isn’t it strange that two totally unrelated groups like elephants and odd-toed ungulates, which belong to different supergroups like Afrotheria and Laurasiatheria, seem to have so many similarities, that it is difficult to place some extinct groups and even some recent groups like hyraxes (Bechly 2023a) closer to one or the other? Is that what Darwinism would predict? Of course not! Is it instead what intelligent design theory would predict? Indeed it is. Just add two and two together yourself.

Ocepeia and Abdounodus

There are two more taxa that are often discussed in the context of proboscidean phylogeny and evolution, which are the two species Abdounodus hamdii and Ocepeia daouinensisdescribed by Gheerbrant et al. (2001) from the Middle Paleocene (Selandian, 61.7-58.7 mya) phosphatic beds of Ouled Abdoun in Morocco, a fossil locality that also produced some of the earliest fossil proboscideans (see above). They were considered to be the first condylarth-like mammals from Africa and related to Perissodactyla and Paenungulata, which now are attributed to different supergroups of placental mammals. Later studies by the same authors suggested a possibly affinity with aardvarks or basal paenungulates (Gheerbrant et al. 2014, 2016). Abdounodus and Ocepeia have meanwhile been confirmed as basal Paenungulata by several phylogenetic studies (Gheerbrant et al. 2018, Avilla & Mothé 2021).

We can conclude that, apart from the usual mess of incongruent phylogenies, it is an undeniable fact that Proboscidea appeared abruptly in the Late Paleocene / Early Eocene with a surprising early diversity (Gheerbrant et al. 2002). Moreover, there are anatomical discontinuities between the distinct radiations of early lophodont proboscideans and later elephant-like forms (Tassy 1988, 1990, Begum 2021, Cantalapiedra et al. 2021). Herewith we have completed our review of the afrotherian mammal orders and can move on to the next mammalian supergroup, called Euarchontoglires, which includes primates, tree shrews, colugos, hares, rabbits, and pikas. Since we have already dealt with the origins of primates (Bechly 2022b), we will look into the fossil history of tree shrews next Fossil Friday.

The God hypothesis redux?

File under "well said," LXXXIX

"“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”"

Plato

One old NY home's brief architectural history.

The Houdini of the animal kingdom?

More on the origin of life re:the design debate

Thursday, 26 January 2023

Science vs. Chance and necessity of the gaps.

Another Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist for Intelligent Design

David Klinghoffer

Earlier this week, John West Reported on a major new exhibition on faith and science in Washington, DC, tackling the question of whether the Bible impeded or inspired the rise of modern science. (Judging from the historical record, “inspired” is clearly the correct answer.) In the article, he mentioned another Nobel Prize-winning scientist who endorsed the idea of an intelligent design behind the universe, using that phrase explicitly. This was news to me. He is physicist Arthur Holly Compton

Compton’s remark was, “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.” Interesting. He said that in 1940.

From the Wikipedia article

Arthur Holly Compton (September 10, 1892 – March 15, 1962) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his 1923 discovery of the Compton effect, which demonstrated the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. It was a sensational discovery at the time: the wave nature of light had been well-demonstrated, but the idea that light had both wave and particle properties was not easily accepted.

Compton joins fellow Nobel Prize-winning physicists Charles Townes (UC Berkeley) and Brian Josephson (Cambridge University) who have likewise come out for ID as a legitimate interpretation of the scientific evidence. (Townes passed away in 2015.) To those names you could add two more, Sir John B. Gurdon (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) and Gerhard Ertl (Nobel Prize in Chemistry) who, along with Dr. Josephson, endorsed the Discovery Institute Press book by chemist and ID proponent Marcos Eberlin, Foresight ,how the chemistry of life reveals planning and purpose

"Species" as a social construct?

Biologist Advocates Biology Without Species; What Could Go Wrong?

Evolution News

Like defining the term “life,” defining the biological category “species” has been the subject of interminable debate. Literally dozens of definitions of “species” exist, which is probably best explained by the ineliminable role of philosophy in the debate. When differing philosophies are competing, any definition represents an act of war (so to speak) — laying a claim to the whole conceptual territory by trying to drive out the competitors using semantic fiat.

So what is the definitional equivalent of the ultimate act of war? Blow the concept “species” to smithereens. Just say that species don’t exist — at all. One cannot define what does not exist. To complete the act of destruction, coin a term such as “speciesism” to attach as a pejorative to one’s opponents. They are the baddies who insist that the unreal (i.e., the standard taxonomic category of species) actually exists out there in the world.

From the Latin

The sober name for this “blow it to bits” approach is radical nominalism. “Nominal” comes from the Latin root for name (nomen). On this view, species are artificial categories, on which, for our own purposes, we hang names. Darwin promoted radical nominalism in the Origin of Species (1859, p. 52):

I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.

Radical nominalism didn’t fare very well in the 20th century, however, mainly because evolutionary biologists found they needed a category with some correspondence to real groups, out there in the nature, simply to have a coherent science of living things. But the blow-it-to-bits approach never went away.

A Program of Radical Nominalism

Recently, biologist Brent Mishler at UC Berkeley and his colleagues have laid out a full program of radical nominalism, presented in two open access volumes:

Speciesism in Biology and Culture: How Human Exceptionalism is Pushing Planetary Boundaries

What, if anything are species.

So what is real, according to Mishler? Only phylogeny — the tree of evolutionary descent. We slice the tree into arbitrary units of description, but ALL the units, including the species, are unreal.

Sigh. A long sigh. Biology without species? Like chemistry without the periodic table.

Anyway, thanks to Mishler and his publishers for making the texts open access.

Looks like the revolution will be televised after all?

Serendipity, thy name is Darwinism?

Andreas Wagner: Genetic Regulation Drives Evolutionary Change

Cornelius G Hunter

A Hall of Mirrors

A new paper from Andreas Wagner and co-workers argues that a key and crucial driver of evolution is changes to the interaction between transcription factor proteins and the short DNA sequences to which they bind. In other words, evolution is driven by varying the regulation of protein expression (and a particular type of regulation—the transcription factor-DNA binding) rather than varying the structural proteins themselves. Nowhere does the paper address or even mention the scientific problems with this speculative idea. For example, if evolution primarily proceeds by random changes to transcription factor-DNA binding, creating all manner of biological designs and species, then from where did those transcription factors and DNA sequences come? The answer—that they evolved for some different, independent, function; itself an evolutionary impossibility—necessitates astronomical levels of serendipity. Evolution could not have had foreknowledge. It could not have known that the emerging transcription factors and DNA sequence would, just luckily, be only a mutation away from some new function. This serendipity problem has been escalating for years as evolutionary theory has repeatedly failed, and evolutionists have applied ever more complex hypotheses to try to explain the empirical evidence. Evolutionists have had to impute to evolution increasingly sophisticated, complex, higher-order, mechanisms. And with each one the theory has become ever more serendipitous. So it is not too surprising that evolutionists steer clear of the serendipity problem. Instead, they cite previous literature as a way of legitimizing evolutionary theory. Here I will show examples of how this works in the new Wagner paper.

The paper starts right off with the bold claim that “Changes in the regulation of gene expression need not be deleterious. They can also be adaptive and drive evolutionary change.” That is quite a statement. To support it the paper cites a classic 1975 paper by Mary-Claire King and A. C. Wilson entitled “Evolution at two levels in humans and chimpanzees.” The 1975 paper admits that the popular idea and expectation that evolution occurs by mutations in protein-coding genes had largely failed. The problem was that, at the genetic level, the two species were too similar:

The intriguing result, documented in this article, is that all the biochemical methods agree in showing that the genetic distance between humans and the chimpanzee is probably too small to account for their substantial organismal differences.

Their solution was to resort to a monumental shift in evolutionary theory: evolution would occur via the tweaking of gene regulation.

We suggest that evolutionary changes in anatomy and way of life are more often based on changes in the mechanisms controlling the expression of genes than on sequence changes in proteins. We therefore propose that regulatory mutations account for the major biological differences between humans and chimpanzees.

In other words, evolution would have to occur not by changing proteins, but by changing protein regulation. What was left unsaid was that highly complex, genetic regulation mechanisms would now have to be in place, a priori, in order for evolution to proceed.

Where did those come from?

Evolution would have to create highly complex, genetic regulation mechanisms so that evolution could occur.

Not only would this ushering in of serendipity to evolutionary theory go unnoticed, it would, incredibly, be cited thereafter as a sort of evidence, in its own right, showing that evolution occurs by changes to protein regulation.

But of course the 1975 King-Wilson paper showed no such thing. The paper presupposed the truth of evolution, and from there reasoned that evolution must have primarily occurred via changes to protein regulation. Not because anyone could see how that could occur, but because the old thinking—changes to proteins themselves—wasn’t working.

This was not, and is not, evidence that changes in the regulation of gene expression can be “adaptive and drive evolutionary change,” as the Wagner paper claimed.

But this is how the genre works. The evolution literature makes unfounded claims that contradict the science, and justifies those claims with references to other evolution papers which do the same thing. It is a web of deceit.

Ultimately it all traces back to the belief that evolution is true.

The Wagner paper next cites a 2007 paper that begins its very first sentence with this unfounded claim:

It has long been understood that morphological evolution occurs through alterations of embryonic development.

I didn’t know that. And again, references are provided. This time to a Stephen Jay Gould book and a textbook, neither of which demonstrate that “morphological evolution occurs through alterations of embryonic development.”

These sorts of high claims by evolutionists are ubiquitous in the literature, but they never turn out to be true. Citations are given, and those in turn provide yet more citations. And so on, in a seemingly infinite hall of mirrors, where monumental assertions are casually made and immediately followed by citations that simply do the same thing.

Wednesday, 25 January 2023

The end of science?

Paul Nelson Diagnoses the Decline of “Groundbreaking Science”

Paul Nelson

On a new episode of ID the Future, philosopher of science Paul Nelson talks with host Rob Crowther about a new paper in Nature making waves in the scientific community, “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time.” According to Michael Park and his fellow researchers, the rate of groundbreaking scientific discoveries is declining while the percentage of consolidating (or incremental) science is coming to dominate. Is the spirit of groundbreaking scientific discovery withering, and if so, why? Nelson notes a 1997 book by John Horgan, The End of Science. Nelson credits Horgan for seeing the trend a generation ahead of the Park paper, but Nelson breaks with Horgan on the diagnosis. Horgan posits that groundbreaking science is declining because we have already made most of the big breakthroughs there are to make. Nelson begs to differ. He suggests the problem lies elsewhere and likely is multifaceted. He offers analysis and a prescription for reinvigorating the scientific enterprise in the 21st century.

Download the podcast or listen to it here

Us who?

Genesis1:26NIV"Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, a and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”"

Who is the us(1st person plural) mentioned in this verse. Well the speaker is the Lord JEHOVAH so he is the principal referent but the pronoun necessarily refers to at least one other said to be in the image (Grk eikon) of JEHOVAH according to strong's eikon is a figure/copy of an original. What does that entail in the case of JEHOVAH well we note that mankind's being in the likeness of God put them above the remainder of the physical creation. So man with his mental, moral and spiritual attributes that facilitate a filial relationship with his creator is a baseline as to what it would mean for a creature to be in the image and likeness of JEHOVAH.

For further confirmation consider

Genesis9:3,4NIV"everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

4“But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it."

Note the hierarchy the senseless non- living ground is not even mentioned. The plants can be used as food by man and his livestock in a sustainable way.

Although permitted to supplement their diet with meat. There was to be no wanton slaughter of these subhuman souls . The blood of whatever animals were used as food was to be drained as a gesture of respect to the giver of all life.

Man though was on another level entirely:

Genesis9:6NIV"“Whoever sheds human blood,

by humans shall their blood be shed;

For in the image of God

has God made mankind."

Thus no creature below the level of Mankind could be spoken of as being in the image and likeness of God. Thus we are compelled to look to the superhuman realm for a creature that can be spoken of as being like God, one who would be considered a God by humans who might encounter him. One who could consciously give a positive response to the command to make man in his image. With man as a baseline we cannot give consideration to any impersonal abstraction or force. Only a Son like man is would fit the role.

Genesis3:22NIV"And the Lord God said, “The man has now become LIKE one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”"

Again suggesting a privileged Son with delegated authority to make law/regulation.

After acting as JEHOVAH'S representative and executing JEHOVAH'S judgment on mankind note the appearance of superhuman representatives of mankind's creator.

Genesis3:24NIV"After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side e of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life."

Note also:

Genesis3:8NIV"Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was WALKING in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. "

And:

Genesis11:5-7NIV"But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”"

Obviously JEHOVAH'S descent from the heavenly realm was by proxy with Superhuman messengers serving as representatives authorized to speak and act on their Lord's behalf.

Doubtless any from among these who would be invited to serve as JEHOVAH'S instrument in forming a home for man and then man himself. Would he of an exceptionally privileged station it would not be surprising at all if he were found to be the chief of these superhuman sons of JEHOVAH.

Yet another Darwinian just so story bites the dust?

Darwin, We Have a Problem: Horse Teeth Are Not Less Evolved

David Coppedge

It was a perfect Darwinian tale. The evidence was right there in the fossils. Teeth evolved to have higher crowns in ruminants (e.g., cattle, sheep, antelopes, deer, giraffes) over time, because the rise of grasslands caused more tooth abrasion and required more durability. Evolution met the need and provided the dental and digestive toolkits for the evolving diet. Here’s how it was told, according to Gordon D. Sanson in a PNAS commentary:

The rise and spread of grasslands on different continents during the Tertiary coincided with the appearance of dental characters assumed to be adaptations for eating grass. The dogma was, and largely still is, that grasses are particularly tough and abrasive compared to the ancestral diet of woodland plants. Grasses have long been thought to be particularly abrasive because of their high levels of endogenous silica bodies (phytoliths) although exogenous dust or grit on the surface of grass leaves can also cause tooth wear. Grass-eaters evolved very durable teeth with sacrificial high crowns that could endure high levels of wear (Fig. 1). The teeth also developed highly folded and more complex enamel ridge patterns, assumed to be necessary for chewing a tough fibrous diet. There were other adaptations associated with moving onto grasslands, including changes in locomotory morphology, herd behavior, and body size, but the linkage between tooth form and function and the changing biomechanical properties of the diet are of interest here. It is a particularly rich story because teeth, being so hard and durable, are well preserved in the fossil record.

In addition, ruminants evolved forestomachs that wash and sort some of the grit from the grass, allowing the animals to regurgitate the food, chew the cud, and break down the bolus into finer particles. This provided an “inadvertent advantage” over mammals that didn’t evolve a forestomach, like horses.

A Difficulty with Tooth Evolution

Alas, an earlier paper in PNAS by Valerio et al. raised a difficulty with the tooth evolution story. As evolutionists, these agricultural scientists agreed with part of the tale. It appears true that cattle and other ruminants sort out the dirt and grit in the forestomach. The team proved this in a series of experiments. The sorting mechanism does appear to reduce wear on a cow’s teeth.

Many reasons have been suggested for the evolutionary success of the highly diverse clade of ruminants. Ruminants have evolved a forestomach physiology that leads to unparalleled chewing efficacy for mammals of their size, with an extreme particle size reduction. This is due to a well-documented particle sorting mechanism in their forestomach that is based on the density of the forestomach content, which floats/sediments in a liquid medium. This mechanism should, inadvertently, also wash off a large proportion of grit and dust before the material is regurgitated for rumination. Here, we show in live animals that this suspected washing actually takes place.

Sanson thought about this finding. He put the new evidence alongside the old evolutionary story and started asking questions. Recalling Kuhn’s philosophy of science, he wondered if biologists had been defending a paradigm without questioning its assumptions. If so, they’ve been doing it for a century and a half!

It is inevitable that we conduct research within the lens of existing paradigms, but Thomas Kuhn argued that reevaluation of assumptions encourages paradigm shifts. For over 150 y, the coevolution of grasses and large mammalian herbivores has interested biologists and has become a classic textbook paradigm of adaptation. Valerio et al.’s contribution prompts a fresh look at the assumptions underlying this paradigm. … Valerio et al.’s paper raises questions that are worth unpacking.

A simple observation should have perturbed the story long ago: horses are not ruminants. They eat grass but do not chew the cud. Why do equids appear so well adapted to grazing? Like ruminants, they can eat grass for eight hours a day and live long, healthy lives.

Is rumination a greater advantage than tooth complexity in avoiding wear?

Is crown height (hypsodonty) more advantageous than reduction of particle size in food?

Are grasses more abrasive than other plant diets? There is “little evidence” for this, Sanson asserts.

Did hypsodonty precede the emergence of grasslands? Apparently not in South America.

Are geological particles (e.g., volcanic ash) more abrasive than grass phytoliths?

To what extent do grasses accumulate more exogenous sources of grit (e.g., wind-borne sediments) than the endogenous grit in grass phytoliths? Where is the true grit?

Are high crowns more adaptive than enamel ridge complexity?

Do all ruminants benefit the same from the forestomach sorting mechanism if they ingest different quantities of grit?

Most importantly, “What is the driver for the evolution of tooth enamel complexity, durability, or cutting efficiency or effectiveness, or both?”

A Simplistic Scenario

Here’s a sample of Sanson ruminating on the complexities of these issues. They weaken, if not undermine, the simplistic evolutionary scenario.

The cause of abrasion has become more contentious since several studies have questioned the hardness of plant phytoliths and consequently their capacity to wear tooth enamel. However, even if plant phytoliths do contribute to enamel wear, it has been estimated that African buffalo may consume between 10 and 28 kg of grit and 300 and 400 kg of endogenous silica per year depending on the soil type. A fifteen-year-old buffalo on granite soils might have chewed over 200 million times on a diet containing about 6,000 kg of silica, 14 times the amount of grit on the food. These are formidable quantities and attest to the durability of teeth and the necessity for high crowns. With the potential for such quantities of abrasives in the diet, does any inadvertent advantage become less important in grazers if the wear from endogenous silica swamps the wear from exogenous grit? On the other hand, if browsing ruminants consume lower grit levels but virtually no silica, they may have a relatively higher inadvertent advantage. The relative contribution of endogenous to exogenous abrasives needs to be systematically measured over diets, seasons, and soil types and integrated with studies on chewing behavior.

Sanson remarks, “Arguably, Valerio et al. inadvertently highlight just how much we do not know about chewing, which is such a vital part of food mechanical preparation that a large herbivore might invest 8 h a day in the activity.” Then he proceeds to ask more questions:

Ruminant teeth must deal with fresh abrasive food on ingestion and softened, washed, and sorted food on rumination, possibly engaging with a wider range of biomechanical properties than a nonruminant. A horse must accommodate unwashed and unsorted food particles. Why then are the teeth so similar in many ways and why does the fundamental paradigm still make sense when the assumptions may not be so robust after all?Are the biomechanical properties relevant? Diet toughness is often considered in terms of the energy required to chew the food, but that may not be a limiting factor. Rather toughness might affect how the food locally resists fracture and flows along the basins between the complex enamel ridges when chewed.

On he goes, questioning assumptions that have supported a paradigm for a century and a half. Darn Valeria et al.! They just made it tougher to chew the Darwinian story.

Valerio et al. suggest an added level of complexity. Their perspective, as agricultural and veterinary scientists familiar with the intricate workings of the ruminant’s digestive system, bears on the assumptions made by paleontologists about the coevolution of grasses and grazers. Unraveling the selective forces that have led to the patterns of dental evolution has just become more difficult.

Unnecessary Difficulty

The difficulty lies in the narrative, not the evidence. Each mammal — ruminant or not — is living well in its habitat, because it has the right tools for the job. We don’t see horses or cows keeling over in the grass from starvation, suffering from worn-out teeth in aging gums. Ranchers have more horse sense than this; they can tell a horse’s age by looking at its teeth, even if they are courteous enough to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth. Retired horses put out to pasture continue to graze and usually die of other causes than tooth loss. The cows are not laughing at them, mooing that they should have evolved forestomachs.

Isn’t that the motivation that causes so many evolutionary tales to fall? In their myth of progress, they envision animals emerging with more complexity over millions of years. Their “universal tree of life” icon starts at a single root and branches out in all directions, each branch “innovating” the tools necessary for whatever creature happens along. Innovations emerge because of “selective forces” that impel them toward solutions for the challenges that the environment throws at them. It’s such a blissful scenario. How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

Evolutionists have been chewing this cud for too long, assuming that Darwin’s magical “selective forces” have the true grit to deal with gritty grass. Time to change the channel and watch The Way Things Work.

Greetings to our new robot overlords?

On the fallacious reasonings of reductive spiritualists.

Our souls must be concretely distinct from our bodies because we are capable of abstract thinking on morals and math and the like? Really? Or our souls are concretely distinct from our bodies because though the material making up our bodies constantly changes our inner identity does not?

Are we capable of abstract thinking from the womb? Why not? Why would our concretely distinct souls be limited in any way by the size or state of development of our brains? In as much as those making these arguments claim that we don't need a brain at all to do abstract thinking and moral reasoning. But some of us beg to differ.

Is there a dog heaven? Because the notion of a continuous self despite a changing body can also be employed to argue for a concretely distinct dog self that would exist after the death of the the dog body. But most of those making these kinds of "arguments" would likely balk at such a thought.

Here is the thing about the so called near death experiences that many are left to depend on for virtually the entirety of their reasoning for the reductive spiritualism paradigm. These are not post death experiences. If I want to know what the experience of living in Venezuela is like I'm not going to rely on a source who has live his whole life in Guyana because the two countries share a border. A near Venezuela experience is not the same as a actual Venezuela experience. Ninety five plus percent of those who experience near death trauma recall no such NDEs. Why not? Are some souls more reductive than most?

Most of those so called NDEs yield unverifiable/unreliable information. That's right reductive spiritualists are left relying on an anomalous finding within an anomaly for virtually the entirety of their argument. The sacred text provides an alternative explanation for this anomalous anomaly. We note that necromancy was forbidden on pain of death by our loving heavenly Father the Lord JEHOVAH. Why? There are malignant superhuman intelligences who have a stake in turning men away from the one true hope for the dead i.e the resurrection.

Job14:14,15NIV"If someone dies, will they live again?

All the days of my hard service

I will wait for my renewal b to come.

1 5You will call and I will answer you;

you will long for the creature your hands have made.

Would a re-imprisonment of ones freed spirit soul in a body of flesh that hampers rather than enhances its powers be something to look forward to?

Job was rather hoping in JEHOVAH to live AGAIN. A very different hope to some mysterious afterlife.

But of course to actually be resurrected one must first actually die.

1Corinthians15:35,36NIV"But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. "

So either there is an afterlife or there is a resurrection,one can't have it both ways.

On post modernism.

Tuesday, 24 January 2023

Darwinists are probably being disingenuous?

The “All Outcomes Are Equiprobable” Argument

Cornelius G Hunter

I’ve been busy lately with a big landscaping job for the neighborhood evolutionist. He wanted a massive set of stones to be carefully arranged in his backyard. He wanted stones of different colors, and the careful arrangement would spell out “Evolution Is True.”

Unfortunately, the day I finished this big job there was an earthquake in the neighborhood which jumbled the stones I had carefully arranged. I had to go back to the evolutionist’s property and put the stones back in order.

To makes matters worse, the evolutionist wouldn’t pay me for the job. When I sued him he told the judge that I was lying. He said I didn’t do the job, but instead the arrangement of the stones was due to the recent earthquake.

I explained to the judge that such an event would be unlikely, but the evolutionist retorted that landscapers don’t understand probability. The evolutionist explained to the judge that all outcomes are equally probable. Every outcome, whether it spells out “Evolution Is True” or nothing at all, have a probability of one divided by the total number of possible arrangements. He said that I was committing a mistake that is common with nonscientific and uneducated people. He explained that if you toss a coin 500 times the sequence of heads and tails will be astronomically unlikely. But it happened. All such sequences, even if they spell out a message in Morse code, are equiprobable.

The judge agreed. He fined me for bringing a frivolous lawsuit against the evolutionist and made me write “Evolution Is True” 500 times.

What is the biblical orthodoxy re: the only true God?

The science is settled?: the end is near?

Time to address the elephant in the lab?

The Elephant in the Science Lab

Stephen Iacobini

In previous posts I have been seeking to describe the science of purpose. Now it is worth getting down to the basics of what science actually is and how it works. The goal is to tease out what has heretofore been elusive for conventional science. I am referring to the elephant in the room, or rather in the laboratory: purpose.

In this context it is necessary to distinguish between measuring grossly objective phenomena versus observing the effects of invisible forces and creating a theory as to what might account for them. Newton came up with a model for that ubiquitous invisible force called gravity. Einstein proved that Newton was not entirely correct and offered a more sophisticated model of why we are snuggled tightly to the ground.

The point is that for much of science, where we cannot actually touch or see what we are describing, we create a model that allows us to think in macroscopic, concrete terms about what might be going on below the level of our senses.

Invisible Entities

Consider the models we create to describe the action of the invisible entities we refer to as molecules. The study of molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. And chemistry began with simple compounds such as water, hydrogen, oxygen, ammonia, etc. This was inorganic chemistry, arising in the 19th century. And for over a century it seemed that the models we created to describe the reactions between these entities was indeed verifiable in test tubes.

But something very strange has happened in the world of chemistry for the past 20 to 40 years. We now have the discipline of molecular biology, aka biochemistry, where we study the behavior of the molecules of life.These are well-known entities: DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids, etc. When these new disciplines arose in the second half of the 20th century, the models of the 19th century were still employed. After all, these were still just molecules. They must obey the basic laws of chemistry and physics. They must behave like Tinkertoy objects, mindlessly responsive to all the impinging forces of the organic milieu.

But Is This Really True?

When we apply an electrical charge to H2O, we know what will happen. But when we read a sequence of DNA, the human mind and all of its computers are powerless to determine exactly what protein will be translated through the spliceosome and the ribosome. The answer is not deterministic at all, at least in ways that we understand. And that failure to understand is what brings us all the way back to the beginning of our analysis. By definition, when our observations do not comport with our predictions, it is not nature that is at fault. The fault lies with our predictions, and the fundamental source of the prediction is the model.

The greatest molecular biologist of all time was Carl Woese. He ended his career, after having discovered archaea, by proclaiming that the models of molecular biology must be completely reconsidered. He understood, unlike the naturalists, that molecules behave in a purposeful fashion in ways that the model of mindless Tinkertoys can never predict.

Surprising Terminology

Open any textbook on molecular biology and you will find terminology such as “chaperoning,” “translating,” “interpreting,” “fashioning,” “alternating,” “optimizing,” “stimulating,” “selecting,” “repressing,” etc. These words are applied to the action of biomolecules in the same way that you would apply them to any conscious creature.

As Woese said, we must embrace the revolution in biology, a revolution quite similar to the one that Einstein and Schrodinger wrought in physics over a hundred years ago. A lot of what chemists figured out in past centuries was true, up to a point, but those days are in the past, and the complexity of life requires an entirely new analysis. The function of macromolecules within the cell is decisive, selective, and quite frankly, purposefully conscious.

Those who deny seeing the elephant in the laboratory should wonder what else there is in the room with them.

And still even more on the business of war: blood money?

Yet more cross talk from the fossil record re: Darwinism.

Fossil Friday: Sea Cows and the Abrupt Origin of Sirenia and Desmostylia

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the reconstructed skeleton of the “walking sea cow” Pezosiren from the Eocene of Jamaica, because today we look into the origins of the placental mammal order Sirenia, commonly known as sea cows. This order of herbivorous aquatic mammals includes only four living species of manatees and dugongs as well as the giant Steller’s sea cow, which was unfortunately exterminated by overhunting just a few decades after its discovery in the mid 18th century. Together with Proboscidea (elephants) and the extinct Desmostylia and Embrithopoda, the order Sirenia belongs to a subgroup of afrotherian mammals that is called Tethytheria (McKenna 1975, Gheerbrant et al. 2005, Nishihara et al. 2005, Berta et al. 2006, Seiffert 2003, 2007, Tabuce et al. 2008, Domning et al. 2010, O’Leary et al. 2013, Self-Sullivan et al. 2014, Domning 2018b), because they are thought to have evolved on the coast of the ancient Tethys Ocean (Heritage & Seiffert 2022).

The fossil record of sirenians is comparatively rich and even includes a lot of more or less complete skeletons. Domning et al. (1982: table 1), Domning (1994), and Self-Sullivan (2014)provided lists of all the ancient fossil sirenians known at that time. Diedrich (2013: fig. 1) and Springer et al. (2015: fig. 5) featured very good charts of the stratigraphic distribution of fossil sirenians, while Heritage & Seiffert (2022) provided the most comprehensive and up-to-date study or their phylogenetic relationships, ages or divergence, and paleobiogegraphic history. Based on molecular data, Sirenia are believed to have originated in the Earliest Paleocene about 65 million years ago (Springer et al. 2015: fig. 4), but when do sirenians first appear in the actual fossil record?

First Fossil Appearance

A putative fossil sirenian, Ishatherium subathuensis, was described by Sahni & Kumar (1980)and Sahni et al. (1980) from the early Eocene (Ypresian, 55.8-48.6 mya) Subhatu Formation in the Himalayas. It might represent the oldest known sirenian (Sereno 1982) but it could as well be an anthracobunid perissodactyl or a moeritheriid proboscidean (Wells & Gingerich 1983, Domning et al. 1986, Zalmout et al. 2003, Cooper et al. 2014, Rose et al. 2019). Domning et al. (1982) questioned the sirenian affinity as well as the dating. Two poorly preserved maxillary fragments from the Early Eocene (48.6-48.0 mya) Casamayoran Formation of Patagonia, which were named Florentinoameghinia mystica, were later attributed to Sirenia by Sereno (1982), but Domning (2001b) considered them as mammal of uncertain affinity.

The oldest unequivocal fossil sea cow is the quadrupedal prorastomid Prorastomus sirenoides from the Chapelton Formation (Yellow Limestone Group) in west-central Jamaica. It was first described by Richard Owen (1855), the famous enemy of Charles Darwin. Savage et al. (1994) re-described the holotype and described a second specimen. Even though Prorastomus is considered to be the most primitive known sirenian, it has some derived traits “that exclude it from the direct ancestry of other sirenians” (Savage et al. 1994). It is often stated to be of early Middle Eocene (48.6-40.4 mya) age, but according to Savage et al. (1994) the layers of the Stettin Member, where both known specimens were found, rather dates to the late Early Eocene (Ypresian) (Robinson 1988, Gold et al. 2018), thus about 49-50 million years ago.

About the same age of 48 million years (Late Ypresian / Early Lutetian), if not even slightly more ancient (Black 2013), is a petrosal bone from Chambi in Tunisia described by Benoit et al. (2013), which seems to be even more primitive than the Eocene prorastomids from Jamaica.

Only slightly younger are the prorastomid Pezosiren portelli from Chapelton Formation in Jamaica (Domning 2001a), which is of early Middle Eocene (Lutetian 48.6-40.4 mya, but rather 47 mya) age (Donovan 2002), and an unnamed prorastomid from the Lutetian of Senegal (Hautier et al. 2012). The skeletal reconstruction of Pezosiren, which is featured in this Fossil Friday article and became quite popular as the “walking sea cow” (Berta 2012, Prothero 2015), actually represents a composite of some hundred isolated bones collected from the same layers and believed to belong to the same species by Domning (2001a). The distal part of the tail and most of the feet bones were not found and added as “educated guesses.” This does not mean that the reconstruction is wrong, but at least some caution may be warranted.

From layers of the same Middle Eocene (Lutetian, 48.6-40.4 mya) age, several protosirenids have been found: Ashokia antiqua from the Harudi Formation in India (Bajpai et al. 2009), Libysiren sickenbergi from the Wadi Thamit Formation in Lybria (Domning et al. 2017), and Protosiren eothene from the early Lutetian Habib Rahi Formation in Pakistan, which is “virtually the same age as the prorastomids” according to Zalmout et al. 2003, early Lutetian). Furthermore, there are Sobrarsiren cardieli from the late middle Lutetian (SBZ15/C19r, 42 mya) Sobrarbe Formation in Spain (Díaz-Berenguer et al. 2018, 2020), and a possible sirenian vertebra from the early Lutetian of Israel (Goodwin et al. 1998). All these protosirenid stem sea cows still had four legs and had an amphibic way of life (actually Sobrarsiren is not a genuine protosirenid but more closely related to the fully aquatic sirenians).

The oldest fully aquatic sea cows, with reduced hind legs and (likely) a fluke, are the Middle Eocene (Lutetian, 48.6-40.4 mya) “dugongids” Anisosiren pannonica from Hungary (Kordos 1979, 2002), Eosiren abeli from Egypt (Sickenberg 1934), Eotheroides sp. (Samonds et al. 2009), and Sirenavus hungaricus from Felsogalla in Hungary (Kretzoi 1941, Kordos 1981, 2002). These advanced stem sirenians resembled modern dugongs, but crown group Sirenia first appear with genuine Dugongidae at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary about 33.9 million years ago (Heritage & Seiffert 2022).

Nevertheless, based on dental synapomorphies, Domning et al. (2010) had considered Eotheroides as a crown-group sirenian closer related to Dugongidae than to Trichechidae, which led to the use of this taxon as calibration data point for the age of crown group Sirenia by Benton et al. (2015, also see Fossil Calibration Database), who erratically also cited “Gheerbrant et al. (2005)” in support of this hypothesis even though these authors did not even mention Eotheroides. Such a crown group position was also suggested for Eotheroidesand Eosiren by the cladistic studies of Savage (1976), Springer et al. (2015), Vélez-Juarbe & Domning (2015), and Balaguer & Alba (2016). Domning et al. (2017) not only recovered Eotheroides as a crown group sirenian in Dugongidae, but even resolved the quadrupedal protosirenids Ashokia, Libysiren, and Protosiren as crown group sirenians closer related to Trichechidae than to Dugongidae (compare Savage 1976). This would make fully aquatic sirenians diphyletic, as already indicated by Diedrich (2013). On the other hand, the studies by Domning (1994), de Buffrénil et al. 2010, Díaz-Berenguer et al. (2018), and especially Heritage & Seiffert (2022) had the protosirenid genera as well as Eotheroides and Eosirenresolved well outside the crown group. I am sorry to say that phylogenetics turns out to be nothing but junk science when you look at the actual studies and their highly incongruent results and not just at the fancy polished text book figures. Darwin’s modern bulldogs like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne are either totally ignorant or deliberately spreading falsehoods when they make their readers believe that there is one well-established tree of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Phylogenetics is a mess!

Anyway, the sirenian fossil record, just like that of whales, is remarkable in featuring early representatives that still were quadrupedal and amphibic, which arguably supports common descent of sea cows from terrestrial ancestors and thus a secondary adaptation to a fully aquatic way of life (Sickenberg 1931, Heal 1973, Savage 1976, Domning & Gingerich 1994, Domning 1982, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2018b, Berta et al. 2006, Uhen 2007, de Buffrénil et al. 2010, Berta 2012, 2017, Self-Sullivan et al. 2014, Prothero 2015, Díaz-Berenguer et al. 2020, Heritage & Seiffert 2022, and Wikipedia).

Everything OK So Far?

So, is every thing OK with Darwinism after all? No so fast. Actually, there are some problems that do not square well with a Darwinian scenario:

1.Sirenians appear abruptly in the fossil record at the onset of the Middle Eocene, together with other placental mammal orders, without a long transitional series establishing any kind or gradual development.

2.There is a distinct morphological gap between the quadrupedal forms (Prorastomidae and Protosirenidae) and fully aquatic sea cows (Dugongidae and Trichechidae).

3.Fully aquatic sirenians that looked like modern dugongs appear more or less around the same time as the primitive quadrupedal stem sirenians. Thus, sirenians immediately appear with a large diversity in the Middle Eocene.

4.The origin of Trichechidae is totally in the dark, without any clear connection to the Dugongidae and their stem line.

Even though the fossil evidence in my view indeed supports common descent, it contradicts Darwinian expectations and does not at all support an unguided mechanism of evolution, which would imply slow and gradual transformations with small changes accumulating over long periods of time via numerous transitional species that only slightly differ from each other. The saltational pattern in the fossil record rather suggests very quick and dramatic changes within only a few transitional species, which arguably requires an infusion of new information from outside the system (also known as intelligent design).

Before we move on, I would like to share a little trivia that shows under what strange circumstances some important fossil finds were made: Voss et al. (2019) published one of the oldest fossil sea cows (Prototherium spec.) from Europe, which was found in Middle Eocene limestone from Spain that is dated to an Early Bartonian age of about 40 million years (also see Astibia et al. 2010). More precisely, the fossil was discovered in the paving stones of a shopping mall in the city of Girona in Catalonia, where thousands of people walked over this treasure for several years before its importance was recognized.

The Enigmatic Desmostylia

In the context of the fossil history of sirenians it is also necessary to discuss the extinct mammal order Desmostylia, because these semiaquatic herbivorous marine mammals were somewhat similar to early quadrupedal sirens and possibly closely related. Initially they were even erroneously considered to be sirenians (e.g., Hannibal 1922, Simpson 1945). The degree of their aquatic adaptation is still a matter of scientific debate (Inuzuka et al. 1994, Domning 2002, Clementz et al. 2003, Gingerich 2005, Uhen 2007, Hayashi et al. 2013). Desmostylia are only known from the Early Oligocene to Late Miocene of the North Pacific rim in 2-4 families and 10-12 genera with 13-14 species (Beatty 2009, Domning 2018a, Matsui & Tsuihiji 2019). Some relic species may have survived until the Pliocene (Kimura 1966). The most primitive and among the oldest representatives are the Behemotopsidae (Ray et al. 1994, Beatty & Cockburn 2015, Domning 2018a), while the families Paleoparadoxiidae and Desmostylidae (= Cornwalliiidae) are more derived and usually younger. But if we look more closely into the data, the fossil record tells a somewhat different story:

According to PaleoDB all the earliest desmostylian fossils are of Chattian age (28.4-23.03 mya) and include:

Behemotopsidae:

Behemotops proteus from the Pysht Formation in Washington and the Sooke Formation on Vancouver Island 24.8-24.1 mya.

Behemotops katsuiei from the Moravan Formation in Japan

Seuku emlongi from Yaguina Formation in Oregon

Desmostylidae:

Ashoroa laticosta from the Moravan Formation in Japan (Inuzuka 2000)

Cornwallius sookensis from the Sooke Formation on Vancouver Island, Yaquina Formation in Oregon, Unaslaska Formation in Alaska, and Baja California in Mexico

Many sources (including Wikipedia) still cite an Early Oligocene (Rupelian) age for Behemotops, which would make it to the oldest desmostylian. However, this appears to be based on an obsolete dating of the Pysht Formation in Washington (Domning et al. 1986, Barnes & Goedert 2001), which has been re-dated as Late Oligocene / Chattian (Prothero et al. 2001, Beatty & Cockburn 2015). Actually, the layers where Behemotops proteus was found in the Pysht Formation (Chron C6Cr) have been more precisely dated to 24.8-24.1 million years ago (Prothero et al. 2008). A specimen of Behemotops from Hokkaido in Japan was initially believed to be older, but rather was more or less contemporaneous with the North American congeneric specimens (Saito et al. 1988).

In one of the more recent studies on Desmostylia the authors presented a diagram of the stratigraphic distribution (Matsui & Tsuihiji 2019: fig. 4), in which some of the more derived Desmostylidae not only appear together with the more primitive Behemotopsidae, but even predate them in the fossil record. The desmostylid Ashoroa laticosta is shown around the Rupelian/Chattian boundary about 29-27 mya and Cornwallius sookensis even from the middle Rupelian about 31 mya. The authors do not cite their sources for these more precise stratigraphic ranges, but they are congruent with the dating for all the localities of Cornwallius sookensis by Beatty (2002, 2006a, 2006b, 2009) to a Late Oligocene / Zemorrian (33.5-22 mya) age, which overlaps with the Rupelian and Chattian.

Finally, there is an isolated atlas vertebra from an undetermined putative desmostylian from the Lincoln Creek Formation in Washington, which dates to the Eocene/Oligocene boundary, about 37-36 million years ago (Prothero & Armentrout 1985), and arguably represents the oldest known fossil record of Desmostylia (Barnes & Goedert 2001).

Unlike Any Living Mammals

Desmostylians were quite unlike any living mammals, maybe resembling hippos, but their life reconstruction is still controversial even though complete skeletons are known (Inuzuka 1984, Halstead 1985, Domning 2002). The evolutionary origins of Desmostylia remain totally in the dark, and also their phylogenetic affinities are still hotly debated. Usually, they are considered as relatives of elephants and sea cows within Tethytheria (Reinhart 1953, McKenna 1975, Domning et al. 1986, Novacek & Wyss 1987, McKenna & Bell 1997, Domning 2018a), but is unclear if they are closer related to elephants (Domning et al. 1986, Clementz et al. 2003, Berta et al. 2006, Uhen 2007, Beatty 2009, Asher & Seiffert 2010) or to sea cows (Vélez-Juarbe & Domning 2015).

However, several new studies (Cooper et al. 2014, Rose et al. 2019; also see Beatty & Cockburn 2015 and Heritage & Seiffert 2022) suggested that desmostylians are no tethytheres at all but rather odd-toed ungulates (Perissodactyla), thus not even members of the afrotherian clade. This would align with the fact that demostylians have “no African record whatsoever” (Asher et al. 2003). Gheerbrant et al. (2016) recovered desmostylians either as sister group of Paenungulata or as stem perissodactyls, but also found evidence for long-branch attraction between Desmostylia and Paenungulata (Tethytheria), suggesting possible convergent similarity. Therefore, Matsui (2017) and Matsui & Tsuihiji (2019) considered desmostylian affinities as controversial. If a perissodactyl relationship should be corroborated, then all the morphological similarities with Tethytheria would have to be reinterpreted as independently acquired convergences and thus not based on common ancestry. If you followed my previous articles in this series, this will hardly come as a surprise. I recently wrote a Fossil Friday article about the strange phenomenon of horizontal tooth displacement that independently originated three times within Tethytheria and confused scientists (Bechly 2022). As I said: phylogenetics is a mess and calling it science is misplaced and overselling this kind of fancy storytelling and educated guessing based on highly incongruent data!

Next Fossil Friday we will look into the final member of the Afrotheria, the order Proboscidea, which includes elephants and their fossil relatives.

Monday, 23 January 2023

And still yet more on the business of war.

A wolf in sheep's clothing?

Sunday, 22 January 2023

Four decades later and it's (still) design all the way down.

Omega-3 Nutrition Pioneer Tells How He Saw Irreducible Complexity in Cells 40 Years Ago

Evolution News

On a classic episode of ID the Future, Jorn Dyerberg, the Danish biologist and co-discoverer of the role of omega-3 fatty acids in human health and nutrition, talks with host and physicist Brian Miller about finding irreducible complexity in cells, and how it takes many enzymes and co-enzymes working together for life-essential metabolism to work in every living cell. This poses a problem for neo-Darwinism, Dyerberg explains, since if these enzymes showed up one at a time, and evolved via one or two small mutations at a time, as Darwinian gradualism posits, then “over these eons, the other enzymes would just be sitting there waiting for the next one to come,” and waiting around without any function that might explain why natural selection working on random mutations bothered to engineer them, or keep them around. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Grand Central NY: a brief architectural history.

What is meant by "design" re:human biology?

Fleshing Out a Theory of Biological

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, author and engineer Steve Laufmann delves into the theory of biological design he develops in Your Designed Body, his new book co-authored with physician Howard Glicksman. Laufmann explains how his engineering background has helped him further develop design theory and, with help from Glicksman, apply it to the human body. In exploring the causal capacities of intelligent design, Laufmann spotlights four elements: (1) intentional actions, which in turn require mind, agency, and foresight; (2) adaptive capabilities, which involve, among other things, control systems that employ sensors, logic, and effectors; (3) design properties (e.g., modularity); and (4) degradation prevention.

The last of these features is implemented by engineers to get a system to last longer. In the case of living organisms, it works at the individual level, as with our immune system and other bodily repair systems; but as Laufmann notes, it also works across generations to slow genetic degradation. Laufmann and host Michael Egnor explore these and other insights at the intersection of biology and engineering. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Thursday, 19 January 2023

How we can know that the engineering is real II.

On the Miracles of Physiological Design

Neil Thomas

Shortly before coming to the recently published volume Your Designed body, by systems engineer Steve Laufmann and veteran physician Howard Glicksman, I had happened to be reading an old interview with eminent medical academic Sir Roger Bannister (the first under-four-minute mile runner) whose specialism had been the autonomic nervous system. Said Bannister to his interviewer:

You have probably not heard of that system but it regulates the heart and circulation. These are functions of the brain which it probably thought wise to exclude from voluntary control. Are you with me? We don’t want to know what our heart is doing, we don’t want to know whether we are breathing or not. This part of the brain does it all for us.1

Neither history nor the wider context of the interview records what agency Bannister might have had in mind to account for the formation of this finely discriminating design feature, but it is a question which advances to front and center of the new Laufmann/Glicksman volume. A good part of the book is devoted to explaining the finely engineered features of human anatomy, and after reading those some three hundred dense and clearly illustrated pages I defy any open-minded reader to accept the old canard of Lucretius, David Hume, Darwin, and their modern apologists to the effect that the sublimely detailed and integrated structures of our bodies represent only the appearance of design (see discussion in Laufmann/Glicksman, pp. 20-21).

Such features, the two authors point out, must ultimately be the work of a designer-engineer transcending all observable dimensions and conventional categories of understanding (see esp. pp. 439-41). By comparison, we are obliged to come to the humble conclusion that human efforts at artificial automation and prosthetics, whilst being entirely commendable, are puny by comparison. Some few readers may remember the 1960s BBC TV series called Tomorrow’s World in which it was predicted that we would have biddable mechanical servants by the 1980s. Such hubristic prognostications were of course silently dropped as the decades wore on and we were left to ponder how organic creation must have occurred at some level we cannot even begin to fathom.

Not the Same as Generating

The authors are particularly good at unmasking the immoderate claims made for “natural selection” as a force with the power to shape the whole organic universe. Such claims, they point out, are “short on engineering details” and, most fundamentally, the authors point out that selecting is not the same as generating. This is a truly critical distinction and they point to the work of Gerd Műller of the University of Vienna whose research has led him to state categorically that neo-Darwinism simply has no theory of the generative and therefore no innovative capacity: nothing in Darwin’s theory can generate any nontrivial innovations (p. 370).

Darwin, furthermore, should have known this. The authors point to the letter he sent to Charles Lyell in September 1860 in which he concedes that “natural preservation” would have been the better term to have used because selection in the way that intelligent animal breeders operate could not possibly be part of an unintelligent process (contrary to what Darwin had once insisted against the well-meaning counsels of friends and colleagues). Whether Darwin permitted himself to realize it or not,2 his concession to Lyell invalidates his claim that natural selection could produce innovation (new body parts/plans/species), hence the grand biological pathway from microbes to man is thereby invalidated. By every logical criterion, his rowing back on that point was absolutely fatal to his macromutational claims and this should by rights have stopped the accelerating Darwinian bandwagon dead in its tracks in the Fall of 1860.

An Interesting Hypothetical

It would make an interesting historical hypothetical to consider how history might have developed had Darwin and his legatees had the logical acumen or even fundamental honesty to acknowledge that the letter to Lyell signaled the logical death-knell of the theory of natural selection. Alas, that is not how things panned out as Darwin and his successors colluded to throw verbal smoke screens round the issue. He and his supporters were clearly too committed to the hope of natural selection coming through as a deus ex machina to provide a (claimed) mechanism or vera causa to justify the idea of evolution developed by Erasmus Darwin (alongside sundry 18th-century French philosophes). For more than a century that theory of evolution had been greeted with considerable skepticism by the generality of people and so it was vital to talk up the supposed “scientific” credentials of natural selection as a (claimed) bona fide mechanism. Only in that way would it be possible to rescue the idea of evolution from the scorn and ultimately the oblivion to which it was heading before 1859. Only in that way would it be possible to secure acceptance for the new, secular myth many wished to promote.

The two authors chance their arm by advancing what they see as the probability that the sheer pressure of data will soon topple the Darwinian house of cards (p. 367, note 12). It should perhaps be added that this collapse would be more probable if we were dealing with dispassionate science — but we are not. If such were the case, then all those who read Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (UK 1985, USA 1986) and followed Denton’s “formal disproof” of Darwin’s work would have been forced by sheer weight of evidence to conclude that a major revaluation of evolutionary thinking was an urgent requirement. However, in Darwinism we are dealing not with science but with what anthropologists and folklorists term a “mythic universal” — in this case taking the form of an apparently ineradicable, millennia-old Lucretian thoughtway about the origin and evolution of the world. In its modern guise the narrative has of course reinvented itself by hitching a ride from the perceived prestige of science to strengthen its mythic force.

Nadir of the Irrational

The sequel is, of course, history. The Epicurean/Lucretian conjecture, which had chosen to see the world as a mindless collocation of atoms assembled by nothing more than chance, was regarded for literally thousands of years as the very nadir of irrational absurdity. Newly decked out in its now “scientific” livery, on the other hand, it has been able to deceive the beau monde for more than a century and a half under its portentous guise of “natural selection.” It is that wholly irrational belief system which would have to be overcome amongst a group of people who are not willing to leave the matter to the proper adjudication of hard evidence. That is the essential stumbling block we face. In the upper echelons of academic biology we are up against a protective screen of professional unity superintended by what has been memorably termed “the secular inquisition.”3 The result is that open dissent of the sort shown by such as Michael Denton and somewhat more recently by Michael Behe is rarely encountered (and even more rarely from the ranks of the untenured).

It is an old and dismal story which need not be pursued any further here. On the plus side, the optimism of the two authors may be justified by the frequent whispers we overhear about some evolutionary scientists harboring private reservations about the truth-value of dogmas which they are constrained to defend ex officio. Laufmann and Glicksman mention the Viennese scientist Gerd Müller, but he is by no means the only one. I encountered further exceptions to the strictly policed omertà rule in the shape of a volume published under the conventionally respectable aegis of the New Scientist publishing house. I refer to the volume of collected essays entitled Chance,4 organized in a largely viva voce seminar format which appears to have encouraged a refreshing degree of candor from its distinguished contributors. I shall give a brief notice of that volume and its relevance to the issue at hand.

Chance, Necessity — and Conjecture

Now as ever, the mystery of life having somehow appeared on earth in the midst of a dead outer cosmos remains a perennial enigma (cosmologists have the candor to admit that they can provide no empirically defensible pathway for our emergence). There has been exceedingly broad-brush speculation on the issue but nothing with any serious claim to empirically testable truth status. As noted in regard to the formation of life by one of the contributors, Paul Davies, it is not just the basic chemical ingredients of life which have proved unfathomable: even more challenging has been “the logical structure and organization of the molecules … which implies a certain sort of organized complexity.” He goes on to pose the still unanswerable question:

How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software, and where did the very peculiar form of information needed to get the first living cell up and running come from?

P. 16

Bracketing off the unknown means and modalities by which life may have originated, Professor Nick Lane proceeds to the next question:

THEN what happens? It is generally assumed that once simple life has emerged, it gradually evolves into more complex forms, given the right conditions. But that’s not what happens on Earth … If simple cells had evolved slowly into more complex ones over billions of years, all kinds of intermediate forms would have existed and some still should. But there are none.

P. 16

Between the simplest and the more complex forms of cell life there is a gulf of billions of years since “simple cells just don’t have the right cellular architecture to evolve into more complex forms” (p. 29). Hence, Lane concludes, the emergence of complex life must have hinged not on slow Darwinian progression but on a single, fluke event:

This means that there is no inevitable trajectory from simple to complex life. Never-ending natural selection, operating on infinite populations of bacteria over millions of years, may never give rise to complexity. Bacteria simply do not have the right architecture.

P. 32

Davies concurs with this verdict when discussing the perennial riddle of abiogenesis:

Darwinism kicks in only when life is already under way. How can we appeal to natural selection in the prebiotic stage?

P. 19

Dr. Bob Holmes then jumps in to continue the theme and support the opinions of other participants:

Surprisingly, natural selection may have little role to play in one of the key steps of evolution — the origin of new species. Instead it would appear that speciation is merely an accident of fate.

P. 33

Citing the work of Professor Mark Pagel, Holmes points out that Darwin, despite his chosen title of Origin of Species, offered no concrete suggestions as to how speciation actually occurred. What is more, even the discovery of Mendelian genetics has brought us little further enlightenment:

With the benefit of genetic hindsight, which Darwin lacked, you might think that they [modern biologists] would have cracked it. Not so. Speciation still remains one of the biggest mysteries in evolutionary biology.

P. 34

This conclusion, he points out with some understatement, “is a disquieting one for evolutionary biologists” since “the unexamined view of natural selection leading to large-scale innovations is not true.” (p. 35) Concurring with Lane and Davies, he sees speciation as little more than “some single, sharp kick of fate that is, in the evolutionary sense, unpredictable. Speciation has nothing to do with natural selection since it can only shape existing species, not spawn new ones.”

Not Minor Objections

The above views are not minor objections. Instead, cumulatively they point to the fact that humanity must go back to the drawing board to study the issue of its provenance and development on planet Earth. As of the present moment in time the contributors freely confess their ignorance. To ascribe something to mere chance, for instance, can only be accounted a major evasion. So how did animal and human life emerge? A decade ago Thomas Lessl wrote with some justice:

To declare that “Nature did it” without any information about HOW is hardly any more rigorous than than to assert that “God did it,” absent any scientific means for testing supernatural causation.5

The operative word in that sentence is “information,” for at the end of the day Darwinism gives us speculation rather than hard information. It is precisely the failure of any “scientific means” to provide convincing explanations of how Nature really functions that is increasingly preventing the full acceptance of Darwinian explanations by a modern populace educated to reject empirically ungrounded conjectures. This resistance to Darwinian theorizing typically proceeds not from any theistic bias or untutored “argument from incredulity” (as is often tendentiously implied) but rather from an extreme logical unease about Darwinian postulates and would-be explanations. The book under review is a splendid and uniquely well-informed contribution to the debate about what is by all available indices a theory in deep and quite possibly terminal crisis.

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