Monday, 12 June 2023
Fall of the three brains theory?
Reptilian Brain Myth Is Still Alive and Kicking
Do we have a three-part brain — reptilian, mammalian, and human? Curiously, psychology textbooks teach us that we do and neuroscience studies teach us that we don’t. Who to believe? And how did that happen anyway?
In the 1960s, Yale University physiologist and psychiatrist Paul D. MacLean (1913–2007) offered the triune brain theory. On that view, the reptilian brain (brain stem) controls things like movement and breathing; the mammalian brain controls emotion (limbic system); and the human cerebral cortex controls language and reasoning (neocortex). That might have been just another theory except that it was widely promoted by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996) in his book The Dragons of Eden (Random House, 1977). Praised in The Atlantic as “a rational, elegant, and witty book,” Dragons won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978, for “a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category.”
Chiming Beautifully
The theory chimed beautifully with materialist thought of the day. The cool people already assumed a long slow process of evolution from mud to mind, with stops along the way for reptile, mammal, and ape. And, as we were constantly reminded, many of us may have got stuck along the way.
But, as neuroscience advanced over the years, unwelcome facts began to surface. The human brain is just not organized as if the story happened in that way. As University of Oslo psychology professor Christian Krog Tamnes puts the matter in an interview at Science Norway, “Those of us who research brain development and brain evolution have known for quite some time that this isn’t true”:
Instead, the cells that are similar to each other were found scattered throughout the brains of both species.
Emotions, such as fear and sadness, are not made in one specific place in the brain. In fact, several parts of the brain are always involved.
Which parts of the brain are active vary from time to time, and from person to person.
For example, Tamnes points to a paper on the topic last year: Despite 320 million years of separate evolution, lizards and mice share a core set of neuron types that are found all over the brain, “including in the cerebral cortex, challenging the notion that certain brain regions are more ancient than others.”
Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers, “So if we absolutely need to have a metaphor, it’s much better to think of the brain as an orchestra. Even playing a simple song requires a lot of pieces to talk together effectively and in a coordinated way.”
So we can still have lots of problems but our Inner Lizard is not one of them.
What Psychology Students Are Learning
Psychology lecture rooms and textbooks have been curiously slow to let go of the reptilian brain myth, however. Is that perhaps because it is socially reassuring to think that everyone who questions our sincerely held beliefs is, neurologically maybe, a rat or reptile throwback? In 2020, Joseph Cesario and colleagues reported on a study of what psychology students are told about such matters:
This belief, although widely shared and stated as fact in psychology textbooks, lacks any foundation in evolutionary biology.
“Our experience suggests that it may surprise many readers to learn that these ideas have long been discredited among people studying nervous-system evolution. Indeed, some variant of the above story is seen throughout introductory discussions of psychology and some subareas within the discipline…
“To investigate the scope of the problem, we sampled 20 introductory psychology textbooks published between 2009 and 2017. Of the 14 that mention brain evolution, 86% contained at least one inaccuracy along the lines described above. Said differently, only 2 of the field’s current introductory textbooks describe brain evolution in a way that represents the consensus shared among comparative neurobiologists.”
CESARIO, J., JOHNSON, D. J., & EISTHEN, H. L. (2020). YOUR BRAIN IS NOT AN ONION WITH A TINY REPTILE INSIDE. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, 29(3), 255–260.
More information on the textbooks is offered here.
Puzzled by Sagan’s Role
Science writer and editor Ross Pomeroy seems genuinely puzzled by the role Sagan played in helping to popularize triune brain theory: “Carl Sagan was, and to this day is, generally regarded as an honest and skeptical broker of scientific information. That he presented such a disputed theory essentially as fact to the lay public is a bit surprising. What’s more, Carl Sagan continued to push the theory three years later in his far more widely read book, Cosmos.”
It’s not really so surprising if we look at the big picture. First, Sagan was a one-way skeptic. There were many things he was not skeptical about at all because they suited the popular worldview he shared and helped shape.
For example, as Justin Gregg recounted in 2013, in 1961, he joined a semi-secret society called the Order of the Dolphin, which sought a way to communicate with intelligent extraterrestrials. He bought into the idea that dolphins had a sort of super-intelligence and a language like ours. The theory was that if we could decipher that language, we could decipher any extraterrestrial one. The Order was certainly dedicated. Gregg recounts, “As the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett has noted, members wore insignia shaped like bottlenose dolphins and sent each other coded messages to hone their dolphinese and alien-language-decoding skills.”
Were They Nuts?
It might seem so at this distance. But club members back then included evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) and chemistry Nobelist Melvin Calvin — alongside SETI founder Frank Drake (1930–2022).
The lesson here is that science functions better when we follow the evidence, as the neuroscientists are doing, than when we form fan clubs for cozy ideas championed by science celebs, as the psychologists appear to be doing — at least in this area.
Accurate timekeeping is always by design?
Compasses, Clocks — Intelligent Design in Time
One can look at a piece of art or engineering and use the design filter to rule out chance or natural law. How much more is the design inference valid when seeing a sequence of events that work together for a purpose? If a sculpture appears designed, how much more a pendulum clock, or a symphony? Life is filled with dynamically changing, yet carefully regulated processes.
Hippos and Hedgehogs
Take the protein Sonic Hedgehog (SHH), whimsically named after a Japanese videogame character able to run at supersonic speeds, curl into a ball and attack enemies. Well known for its role in regulating embryonic development, SHH doesn’t just sit in the cell; it signals other proteins with the precision of a conductor. Patterns in the embryo, such as left-right symmetry and dorsal-ventral axis, are regulated by this important protein, coded for by the sonic hedgehog gene. Kim and Blackshaw, writing in Science, tell about a new function for this dynamic regulator that carries on throughout life.
Virtually all mammalian physiological functions fall under the control of an internal circadian rhythm, or body clock. This circadian rhythm is governed by master neural networks in the hypothalamus that synchronize the activity of peripheral clocks in cells throughout the body. Environmental perturbations that are a regular part of modern life, such as artificial light and international travel, can disrupt circadian rhythms, leading to adverse consequences for mental and physical health. On page 972 of this issue, Tu et al. report that primary cilia–mediated Sonic Hedgehog (SHH) signaling allows cells in the master circadian clock to maintain synchronization and control circadian rhythmicity in mice, identifying an unexpected functional role for this developmental regulator.
How can a tiny protein within a cell have dramatic effects on the hypothalamus, and by extension on the entire body?
The master circadian pacemaker responsible for regulating our daily rhythms is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the anterior hypothalamus. The cells that make up this pacemaker maintain intercellular coupling of molecular circadian rhythms, ensuring synchrony of SCN neurons. Robust clocks keep time using redundant mechanisms, and the SCN is no exception. Signals that promote cellular synchrony include paracrine signaling by fast neurotransmitters and multiple neuropeptides as well as gap junction–dependent electrical coupling. This cellular synchrony ensures the robust output of the central clock and renders it resistant to signals that reset peripheral clocks.
At this point in the story, one of the superheroes of irreducible complexity enters: the cilium, described by Michael Behe in his books. Neurons in the SCN synchronize their clocks via SHH signals sent and received through their primary cilia. Those non-motile cilia then transmit the timing signals inside via the molecular trucks inside the cilia: the intraflagellar transport (IFT) trains.
The master circadian pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) contains neuromedin S–expressing (NMS+) neurons that have primary cilia. The number and length of these cilia change throughout the day, which alters Sonic Hedgehog (SHH) signaling through Smoothened (SMO) co-receptors expressed on the cilia. When this signaling is disrupted, the cellular oscillators in the SCN become uncoupled, which affects circadian rhythmicity in mice.
Kim and Blackshaw call the discovery “surprising” for a protein that had been almost exclusively studied for its role in development. The new study by Tu et al. shows that adult organisms rely on SHH every day to keep the body clock running on time. That’s why they call it a “Super sonic circadian synchronizer.”
SHH is essential for the development and specification of many brain structures during embryogenesis, including the SCN, and it also regulates axonal targeting, dendrite formation, and synaptogenesis. An ongoing role for SHH signaling in the adult SCN raises several important questions. It is unclear what cells are the relevant source of SHH or how its synthesis and release are regulated. Primary cilia regulate many other classes of extracellular signaling—such as Notch, Wnt, Hippo, and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathways—often through receptor-independent mechanisms. Thus, it is unclear whether other extrinsic factors might contribute to controlling SCN function.
The Hippo pathway, which regulates body size, also transmits its signals about body size through the cilium. Look at this diagram to get a taste of the dynamic signals going on in the cell for that symphony of signals. The cilium looks more irreducibly complex than ever!
Encompassing a Body Compass
Understanding how SHH interacts with day-night cycles can help solve the problem of jet lag. It takes a while to resynchronize our body clock to the time of day in another location when we zoom off to another time zone and find the sun angle at odds with expectations. Time for a reset!
Just as the body clock can be reset by external cues, our internal compass can be reset by an external cue: namely, head direction. Results of experiments at McGill University, also done on mice, shows how whole-body actions interact with signals inside of cells.
This ability to accurately decode the animal’s internal head direction allowed the researchers to explore how the Head-Direction cells, which make up the brain’s internal compass, support the brain’s ability to re-orient itself in changing surroundings. Specifically, the research team identified a phenomenon they term ‘network gain’ that allowed the brain’s internal compass to reorient after the mice were disoriented. “It’s as if the brain has a mechanism to implement a ‘reset button’ allowing for rapid reorientation of its internal compass in confusing situations,” says Ajabi.
Fast Clocks, Slow Clocks
Speaking of development, we know that different animals have different gestation times: humans take nine months, mice around 20 days. Yet all of us live under the same day-night cycle. How do these “heterochronies” regulate themselves? It comes down to the dynamic activities going on inside cells as well, says a Focus article in Science Advances. The author’s one mention of evolution contributes nothing to the science:
In evolutionary developmental biology, differences in genetically controlled temporal programs are well recognized and referred to as heterochronies. These include differences in the time of initiation, duration, or rate of a process in comparison with an organisms’ ancestors or other species. Whereas shifts in the time of initiation or duration have been linked to genetic variation of regulatory sequences or differential expression dynamics, other heterochronies that emerge from changes in the rate of a process are distinct and usually involve the same genetic program operating at different speeds. This has been termed allochrony and does not seem to be explained by variations in regulatory sequences (Fig. 1, A to C). However, less is known about the mechanisms driving allochronies.
Nothing in Figure 1 owes anything to Darwinian evolution. Audiences know intuitively that any delicate dance is the work of a choreographer.
Developmental processes need to operate in harmony to synchronize cells, tissues, organs, and the whole organism. It is increasingly clear that a central element of this delicate dance is achieved by each cell using its own clock…. Cells offer the most basic model to expose timing control processes and to investigate the intrinsic genetic mechanisms that control timing.
Teresa Rayon’s article goes on to discuss the harmony between biochemical reactions, motor neurons, mitochondrial activity, metabolic rate and epigenetic mechanisms. The differences in scale between these players working toward a common goal—homeostasis—is astonishing.
Clocks that Must Not Reset
The body adjusts for day and night cycles, but some body clocks dare not change outside of tight limits: heart rate and breathing. We have a “resting heart rate” during sleep that was thought to be under the sole control of the parasympathetic nervous system, the nerve network that relaxes us. Scientists at Manchester University found, however, that the “fight-or-flight” sympathetic nervous system (SNS) works in concert with it to keep the heart ticking within its acceptable range. Listen to this orchestra play:
Importantly, transcription factors in the sinus node lost rhythmicity following the sustained β-adrenergic blockade. Thus, the team proposed that day-night rhythms in the sinus node are orchestrated by rhythmic β-adrenergic input from the SNS to regulate ion channel gene expression. “It’s a way of thinking about the involvement of the autonomic nervous system, not as commonly accepted, which is these very short range, immediate acute modulations of ion channel function, but through long range modulation by affecting gene expression in the heart or in the sinus node,” said D’Souza.
Here again is a case of tight coordination between cell signals and a body composed of trillions of cells. Talk about the tail wagging the dog: the goings on in specific ion channels in a cell membrane can influence the brain and the heart that are orders of magnitude larger. Sleep tight; your body knows what parts have to slow down and what parts must keep going.
No Real Hope for Evolution
One study on biological clocks attempted to “Darwinize” them, but only for the very simplest case: the KaiA/B/C oscillator in cyanobacteria (see this video for a quick presentation of this clock). “The central role of circadian rhythms in many biological processes, controlled by the day and night cycle on Earth, makes their evolution a fascinating topic,” say eight evolutionists in an open-access paper in Nature. They attempt to show a stepwise evolution “From primordial clocks to circadian oscillators.” Good luck.
Circadian rhythms play an essential part in many biological processes, and only three prokaryotic proteins are required to constitute a true post-translational circadian oscillator. The evolutionary history of the three Kai proteins indicates that KaiC is the oldest member and a central component of the clock. Subsequent additionsof KaiB and KaiA regulate the phosphorylation state of KaiC for time synchronization. The canonical KaiABC system in cyanobacteria is well understood, but little is known about more ancient systems that only possess KaiBC…. Here we investigate the primordial circadian clock in Rhodobacter sphaeroides, which contains only KaiBC, to elucidate its inner workings despite missing KaiA. Using a combination of X-ray crystallography and cryogenic electron microscopy, we find a new dodecameric fold for KaiC, in which two hexamers are held together by a coiled-coil bundle of 12 helices. This interaction is formed by the carboxy-terminal extension of KaiC and serves as an ancient regulatory moiety that is later superseded by KaiA. A coiled-coil register shift between daytime and night-time conformations is connected to phosphorylation sites through a long-range allosteric network that spans over 140 Å. Our kinetic data identify the difference in the ATP-to-ADP ratio between day and night as the environmental cue that drives the clock. They also unravel mechanistic details that shed light on the evolution of self-sustained oscillators.
The authors build phylogenetic trees to argue that KaiC is more ancient than KaiA and KaiB. While admittedly rigorous, their work does not explain the origin of KaiBC itself, the gene that codes it, or its functional connection to diurnal cycle. KaiC, as shown in the video, is the largest and most complex protein in the clock with 518 amino acids arranged in a geometrically-elegant pair of hexamers that can undergo conformational changes essential for its operation. Its function is intimately tied to specific serine and threonine residues at precise locations.
At best, their evolutionary hypothesis shows a division of labor when KaiA is present. Oddly, the authors say that the KaiBC clock in R. sphaeroides “can perform both autophosphorylation and nucleotide exchange on its own and does so faster than its more recently evolved counterparts.” The paper leaves many unasked and unanswered questions. They offer no stepwise evolution from the simple prokaryotic clock to the “complex and highly sophisticated” circadian clocks in eukaryotes. There is no mention of mutations or natural selection. And a chicken-and-egg conundrum arises when asking which came first: the gene or the protein. Why would a gene sequence 518 aa long emerge by mistake without a function being known for it? That’s too improbable. If the protein came first and ticked like a clock, how did the code for it become embedded in the genome, which has a different alphabet? In the concluding discussion, the authors give an essentially magical explanation, calling the simplest of clocks “an example of convergent evolution.” If one did not already believe in the creative power of natural selection, this paper would prove little and make less sense.
In the arts, design is evident in both static and dynamic works. If paintings and sculptures evince design, much more do finely crafted instruments performing in harmony in real time. That’s ID in the 4th dimension.
The fall of the selfish gene?
Cognitive Cells? A Newer Challenge to Neo-Darwinism
In September 1957, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Francis Crick (1916–2004) announced the “Central Dogma” in biology, at a symposium at Oxford University. The dogma is currently given in the Biology Dictionary thus: “genetic information flows primarily from nucleic acids in the form of DNA and RNA to functional proteins during the process of gene expression.” This view that genes rule underpins mainstream assumptions about how traits are inherited; from there, it governs accepted assumptions about evolution. So the ground on which Darwin’s modern defenders stand, propounding the only true history of life, is narrow but it is firm.
Sir Francis Crick is perhaps better known to laypeople for his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul, which he opened by announcing
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”
And the pack of mindless neurons that you think is you was created by those genes.
An Interesting New Paper
But what about the evidence that neurons self-organize? An interesting new paper in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology calls for a different Central Dogma, recognizing forces other than genes:
Accumulating scientific discoveries support the need for a revised Central Dogma to buttress evolutionary biology’s still-fledgling migration from a Neodarwinian canon. A reformulated Central Dogma to meet contemporary biology is proposed: all biology is cognitive information processing.
The word “cognitive” is worth examining. According to Merriam–Webster, it means
of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)
or
based on or capable of being reduced to empirical factual knowledge.
Which definition do the authors, William B. Miller Jr. (UCLA), František Baluška (University of Bonn), and Arthur S. Reber (University of British Columbia), mean when they tell us that “As the internal measurement by cells of information is self-referential by definition, self-reference is biological self-organization, underpinning 21st century Cognition-Based Biology.” Do they mean that cells, in some sense, think?
Thoughtful Cells
They don’t quite say but the hints are intriguing. Darwin-shaped biology lags behind the times, they say, despite the accumulating contrary evidence that “non-random genetic mutations are common, linked to structural factors, epigenetic impacts, and biased DNA repair mechanisms,” among other things.
More directly, they write: “The crux of that difference separating Crick’s Central Dogma from a modern idiom is the contemporary recognition that cellular cognition governs the flow of biological information.”
So cells are smarter than we thought… ? They offer a brief look at the many bewilderingly complex feedback loops in typical cells. In their view, how should biology change? Here are some snippets from their Conclusion:
When biology is framed as an informational interactome, all forms of biological expression interact productively in a continuous, seamless feedback loop. In that reciprocating living cycle, there is no privileged level of causation since all aspects of the cell as an organized whole participate in cellular problem-solving
So the cell acts on itself (self-organization) instead of merely being acted upon by the neo-Darwinian genes. But also, they write,
The origin of self-referential cognition is unknown. Indeed, it can now be declared biology’s most profound enigma. Yet, that instantiation can be properly accredited as equating with the origin of life.
“Self-Referential Cognition”
In short, we have no idea how cells, which have been around for billions of years, could become so complex that they can be compared to intelligent beings (“self-referential cognition”) without any design in nature at all. Well, maybe they couldn’t have. Maybe the main thing to take away here, whether the authors intend it or not, is this: If biologists don’t want intelligent design, they will surely need to come up with something more convincing than Crick’s materialism.
Two other things are worth noting: Dogmas in science often do not age well because challenges are mounted by brilliant investigators but the dogma is defended by tenured mediocrities and — in the case of any type of Darwinism — pop science writers and education pressure groups. Even when the dogma is mouldy and rotten, it can be hard to overturn once it is embedded in the institutional culture on which their careers all depend.
Second, conundrums like this help us understand why panpsychism (all life forms/cells are conscious) is beginning to replace materialism in science.
Here’s the Problem
In a nutshell: The only really satisfactory form of materialism is eliminative materialism, meaning that minds are merely what brains do and human consciousness is simply an evolved illusion. You are indeed nothing but a pack of neurons. But if so, that very theory is an illusion like all the others.
In a world of awe-inspiringly complex life forms, it probably makes more sense for the materialist to adopt panpsychism. Thus words like “cognitive” and “self-referential” can be attached to cells without risk. I am not claiming that the authors are panpsychists, of course. My point is that their approach should be welcome to panpsychists.
Anyway, there is a definite nudge in that direction. University of Chicago biochemist James Shapiro titled a 2021 journal paper “All living cells are cognitive.” The same year, prominent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, said in a book excerpt at The Scientist, that we cannot deny viruses “some fraction” of intelligence, based on the way their strategies resemble those of insects. Scientific American has run a number of pieces sympathetic to panpsychism over the years. New Scientist also offered a sympathetic long form discussion last year.
From a panpsychist perspective, human consciousness is not a mere illusion generated by a pack of neurons. It is the most highly developed known form of consciousness among life forms, all of which are conscious to some extent. That is, it is real in the same way that cell cognition and self-organization are real. So humans can learn about cells and propound theories about them that are not necessarily illusions but rather a meta level of consciousness.
Of course, panpsychism doesn’t do much to resolve the “profound enigma” of how such a world of life could come to exist without any intelligent intention or design. But that’s not what the materialist most needs right now anyway. He most needs to believe that his own findings are not just a user illusion. He can admit the profound enigma and leave the matter there.
Sunday, 11 June 2023
More Rudyard Kipling style Just so stories from Darwinist.
How Did Birds Get Their Wings? Bacteria May Provide a Clue to the Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovation, Say Evolutionists
That evolution occurred is known to be a fact but how evolution occurred is not known. In particular we are ignorant of how evolutionary innovations arose. Of course biological novelties and innovations arose from a series of random chance events, but it is less than reassuring that we cannot provide more detail. How exactly did the most complex designs spontaneously arise? What mechanisms overcame, over and over, the astronomical entropy barriers, by sheer luck of the draw? As Craig MacLean’s and Andreas Wagner’s, and coworker’s, new PLOS Genetics paper begins, “Novel traits play a key role in evolution, but their origins remain poorly understood.” Could it be that evolution is not actually a fact? No, not according to evolutionists. And this new paper claims to provide the basis for how the seemingly impossible became the mundane.
The paper begins by summarizing the many proposed genetic mechanisms for the evolution of biological innovations:
An evolutionary innovation is a new trait that allows organisms to exploit new ecological opportunities. Some popular examples of innovations include flight, flowers or tetrapod limbs [1,2]. Innovation has been proposed to arise through a wide variety of genetic mechanisms, including: domain shuffling [3], changes in regulation of gene expression [4], gene duplication and subsequent neofunctionalization [5,6], horizontal gene transfer [7,8] or gene fusion [9]. Although innovation is usually phenotypically conspicuous, the underlying genetic basis of innovation is often difficult to discern, because the genetic signature of evolutionary innovation erodes as populations and species diverge through time.
1. Mayr E. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press; 1963.
2. Pigliucci M. What, if anything, is an evolutionary novelty? Philos Sci. 2008;75: 887–898. Available:http://philpapers.org/rec/PIGWIA
3. Patthy L. Genome evolution and the evolution of exon-shuffling—a review. Gene. 1999;238: 103–14. Available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10570989 pmid:10570989
4. True JR, Carroll SB. Gene co-option in physiological and morphological evolution. Annu Rev Cell Dev Biol. 2002;18: 53–80. doi: 10.1146/annurev.cellbio.18.020402.140619. pmid:12142278
5. Zhang J. Evolution by gene duplication: An update. Trends Ecol Evol. 2003;18: 292–298. doi: 10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00033-8.
6. Bergthorsson U, Andersson DI, Roth JR. Ohno’s dilemma: evolution of new genes under continuous selection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007;104: 17004–9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0707158104. pmid:17942681
7. Boucher Y, Douady CJ, Papke RT, Walsh DA, Boudreau MER, Nesbø CL, et al. Lateral gene transfer and the origins of prokaryotic groups. Annu Rev Genet. 2003;37: 283–328. doi: 10.1146/annurev.genet.37.050503.084247. pmid:14616063
8. Wiedenbeck J, Cohan FM. Origins of bacterial diversity through horizontal genetic transfer and adaptation to new ecological niches. FEMS Microbiol Rev. 2011;35: 957–976. doi: 10.1111/j.1574-6976.2011.00292.x. pmid:21711367
9. Thomson TM, Lozano JJ, Loukili N, Carrió R, Serras F, Cormand B, et al. Fusion of the human gene for the polyubiquitination coeffector UEV1 with Kua, a newly identified gene. Genome Res. 2000;10: 1743–56. pmid:11076860 doi: 10.1101/gr.gr-1405r
The unspoken problem here is, as usual, serendipity. The various proposed genetic mechanisms for the evolution of biological innovations all suggest an amazing bit of fortuitous luck. For random chance events just happened to create these various complicated structures and mechanisms (such as horizontal gene transfer and protein domains their shuffling) which then produced new evolutionary breakthroughs.
Evolution didn’t know what was coming. Evolution did not plan this out, it did not realize that horizontal gene transfer would lead the way to new biological worlds. The evolution of horizontal gene transfer would require a long sequence of random mutations, many of which would not provide any fitness advantage. And when the construction project was completed, and the first horizontal gene transfer capability was possible, there would be no immediate advantage.
This is because there would have been no genes to transfer. The mechanism works only when it is present in more than one, neighboring, cells. One cell gives, and another cells receives. By definition the mechanism involves multiple cells.
But it doesn’t stop there. Even if the first horizontal gene transfer capability was able to spread across a population, and even if it did provide a fitness advantage to the fortunate citizens, there would not be even a hint of the enormous world of biological innovations that had just been opened.
In other words, what this evolutionary narrative entails is monumental serendipity. Biological structures and mechanisms (horizontal gene transfer in this case, but it is the same story with the other hypotheses listed above) are supposed to have evolved as a consequence of a local, proximate, fitness advantage: a bacteria could now have a gene it didn’t have before.
But it just so happened that the new structures and mechanisms would also, as a free bonus, be just what was needed to produce all manner of biological innovations, far beyond assisting a lowly bacteria increase its fecundity.
This is monumental serendipity.
Undaunted, the new paper finds that one of the other mechanisms, gene duplication and subsequent neofunctionalization, is a key enabler and pathway to biological innovations.
That conclusion resulted from what otherwise was a fine piece of research work. The experimenters exposed different populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a dangerous infectious bacteria, to 95 new sources of its favorite food: carbon.
The bacteria had to adjust to the new flavors of carbon and they did so with various genetic modifications, including various genetic mutations. In the most challenging cases (where the new carbon sources were most difficult for the bacteria to adjust to), the bacteria often produced mutations in genes involved in transcription and metabolism. And these mutations often occurred in genes where there were multiple copies, so the mutations occurred in one copy while the other copy could continue in its normal duties.
The problem is, these genetic duplicates were preexisting in the P. aeruginosa genome. This is yet another instance of serendipity.
Why? Because preexisting duplicates are not common. Only about 10% of the genes have duplicates lying around, and fortunately, the genes needed for adaptation (involving transcription and metabolism) just happened to have such duplicates.
Now there were a few instances of de novo gene duplication. That is, once the experiment began, and after the P. aeruginosa populations were exposed to the challenging diets, a total of six genes underwent duplication events. But in each and every case, the duplication events occurred repeatedly and independently, in different populations (for each of the 95 different carbon sources, the experimenters ran four parallel trials with independent populations).
This result indicates directed gene duplication. This is because it is highly unlikely that random, chance, gene duplication events just happened hit on the same gene in different populations. Here is an example calculation.
Let’s assume that in the course of the experiment, which ran for 30 days and about 140 generations of P. aeruginosa, some genes may undergo duplication events by chance. Next assume there is a particular gene that needs to be duplicated and modified in order to for P. aeruginosa to adapt to the new food source. (Note that there may be several such genes, but as we shall see that will not affect the conclusion). Given that there are four separate, independent trials, what is the probability that the gene will be duplicated in two or more of those trials?
Let P_dup be the probability that any gene is duplicated in the course of the experiment. For our gene of interest, it may be duplicated in 0, 1, 2, 3, or all 4 of the trials. The binomial distribution describes the probability, P, of each of these outcomes. To answer our question (i.e., What is the probability that the gene will be duplicated in two or more of those trials?) we sum the binomial distribution’s value for N = 2, 3 and 4. In other words, we calculate P(2) + P(3) + P(4).
This will give us the probability of observing what was observed in the experiment (i.e., the duplication events occurred repeatedly and independently, in different populations, in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed).
Well for a reasonable value of P_dup, the probability that any gene is duplicated in the course of the experiment, such as 0.0001, the probability of observing multiple duplications events for any given food source (i.e., P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is about 60 in one billion, or 6 times 10^-8. Even worse, the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about 5 times 10^-44.
It isn’t going to happen.
Exceptionally high rates of gene duplication, in particular genomic regions of Salmonella typhimurium, in a high growth rate medium, were observed to be about 0.001 and even slightly above 0.01 in rare cases.
If we go all out and set P_dup to an unrealistically high 0.1, our results are still unlikely. The P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is .05, and the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about 2 times 10^-8.
In order to raise these probabilities to reasonable levels, such that what was observed in the experiment is actually likely to have occurred, we need to raise P_dup to much higher values. For example, for a P_dup of .67 (two-thirds probability), P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is .89, and the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about .5.
But even this doesn’t work. For if we were to imagine unrealistically high P_dup values of 0.1 or higher, then massive numbers of duplication events would have been observed in the experiments.
But they weren’t.
Once again, the science contradicts the theory. Our a priori assumption that evolution is a fact, and that the P. aeruginosa adaptations to the new food sources were driven by random mutations, did not work. The theory led to astronomically low probabilities of the observed results.
What the observed gene duplications are consistent with is directed gene duplications. Just as mutations have been found to be directed in cases of environmental challenges, it appears that gene duplications may also be directed.
The paper’s premise, that biological innovations such as flowers and wings are analogous to bacteria adapting to new nutrient sources, is fallacious. But setting that aside, the experimental results do not make sense on evolution’s mechanism of random mutations and natural selection. Instead, the results indicate directed adaptation.
Isaiah chapter 44 Legacy Standard Bible
Isaiah 44
“But now hear, O Jacob, My servant,
And Israel, whom I have chosen:
2
Thus says Yahweh who made you
And formed you from the womb, who will help you,
‘Do not fear, O Jacob My servant,
And you Jeshurun whom I have chosen.
3
For I will pour out water on the thirsty ground
And streams on the dry land;
I will pour out My Spirit on your seed
And My blessing on your offspring;
4
And they will spring up among the grass
Like poplars by streams of water.’
5
This one will say, ‘I am Yahweh’s’;
And this one will call on the name of Jacob;
And this one will write on his hand, ‘Belonging to Yahweh,’
And will name Israel’s name with honor.
6
“Thus says Yahweh, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, Yahweh of hosts:
‘I am the first, and I am the last,
And there is no God besides Me.
7
Who is like Me? Let him call out and declare it;
And let him tell it to Me in order,
From the time that I established the ancient people.
And let them declare to them the things that are to come
And the events that are going to take place.
8
Do not be in dread and do not be afraid;
Have I not long since caused it to be heard to you and declared it?
And you are My witnesses.
Is there any God besides Me,
Or is there any other Rock?
I know of none.’”
9
Those who form a graven image are all of them futile, and their desirable things are of no profit; even their own witnesses fail to see or know, so that they will be put to shame.
10
Who has formed a god or cast a graven image to no profit?
11
Behold, all his companions will be put to shame. The craftsmen themselves are mere men. Let them all assemble themselves, let them stand up, let them be in dread, let them together be put to shame.
12
The man crafts iron into a cutting tool and does his work over the coals, forming it with hammers and working it with his powerful arm. He also gets hungry and has no power; he drinks no water and becomes weary.
13
Another crafts wood, he extends a measuring line; he outlines it with a stylus. He makes it with planes and outlines it with a compass and makes it like the form of a man, like the glory of man, so that it may sit in a house.
14
In order to cut cedars for himself, he takes a cypress or an oak and raises it for himself among the trees of the forest. He plants a fir, and the rain makes it grow.
15
Then it becomes something for a man to burn, so he takes one of them and warms himself; he also kindles a fire to bake bread. He also works to produce a god and worships it; he makes it a graven image and falls down before it.
16
Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he eats meat as he roasts a roast and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Aha! I am warm; I have seen the fire.”
17
But the rest of it he makes into a god, his graven image. He falls down before it and worships; he also prays to it and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god.”
18
They do not know, nor do they understand, for He has smeared over their eyes so that they cannot see and their hearts so that they will have no insight.
19
No one causes this to return to his heart, nor is there knowledge or understanding to say, “I have burned half of it in the fire and also have baked bread over its coals. I roast meat and eat it. Then I make the rest of it into an abomination; I fall down before a block of wood!”
20
He feeds on ashes; a deceived heart has turned him aside. And he cannot deliver his soul, and he cannot say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”
YAHWEH FORGIVES AND REDEEMS
21
“Remember these things, O Jacob,
And Israel, for you are My servant;
I have formed you, you are My servant;
O Israel, you will not be forgotten by Me.
22
I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud
And your sins like a cloud.
Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.”
23
Shout for joy, O heavens, for Yahweh has done it!
Make a loud shout, you lower parts of the earth;
Break forth into a shout of joy, you mountains,
O forest, and every tree in it;
For Yahweh has redeemed Jacob
And in Israel He shows forth His beautiful glory.
24
Thus says Yahweh, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb,
“I, Yahweh, am the maker of all things,
Stretching out the heavens by Myself
And spreading out the earth all alone,
25
Causing the omens of boasters to be annulled,
And making fools out of diviners,
Causing wise men to turn back,
And making foolishness out of their knowledge,
26
Confirming the word of His servant—
And the counsel of His messengers He will complete—
And being the One who says of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be inhabited!’
And of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be built.’
And I will raise up her waste places again.
27
It is I who says to the depth of the sea, ‘Be dried up!’
And I will make your rivers dry.
28
It is I who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd!
And all My good pleasure he will complete.’
And saying of Jerusalem, ‘She will be built,’
And of the temple, ‘Your foundation will be laid.’”
The highest tech of all
Listen: Carbon Valley Trumps Silicon Valley
Got a smartphone? As complicated a machine as it is, it doesn’t compare to the incredible sophistication found in biology. On a classic episode of ID the Future, we hear from two contributors to the Crossway Anthology, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, molecular biologist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. They explain how Carbon Valley trumps Silicon Valley, and shouts intelligent design. They compare some of today’s technological marvels to living technology, and show how even “simple cells” far exceed the best that Silicon Valley has to offer. As Meyer says: “Nobody doubts that natural selection and random mutation is a genuine biological process. What we do doubt is that those mechanisms have the power to generate fundamentally new forms of life.” Download the podcast or listen to it Here
Friday, 9 June 2023
When the science is untrustworthy?
Fossil Friday: The Gupta Scandal
This Fossil Friday features conodont microfossils from the Triassic of the Himalaya region in India (Goel 1977) to illustrate a veritable crime story. You may have heard of cases of fraud in paleontology such as the famous hoaxes of Piltdown Man and Archaeoraptor, but the greatest scientific fraud of the century is not so well known outside of professional paleontologist circles. It was Indian scientist Vishwa Jit Gupta, professor of geology at Panjab University, who played the “star role” in this biggest case of fraud in paleontology and maybe all of science ever (Lewin 1989).
A Dubious Accident
Gupta was India’s most celebrated paleontologist, with 455 scientific publications (including two Nature papers and five books), when the scandal started to come to light in 1989 (Talent 1989, Lewin 1989, Anderson 1991, Nature 1993), but it took nine years for the total truth and magnitude of the scandal to be revealed (Ruffell et al. 2012, Webster 2016). It turned out that over 30 years of research with 126 gullible co-authors, Gupta had falsified data, stolen fossils from colleagues and collections around the world, and then claimed to have found them in the Himalayas, often in made-up localities and layers. Gupta’s “fraudulent practices have involved most invertebrate phyla as well as the vertebrates and include fossils of Cambrian to Cenozoic age” (Webster et al. 1993). Gupta did not only commit scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale, but he even issued death threats with head money to whistleblowers including Australian geologist John Talent, one of whom one was actually killed in a dubious accident (Carleton 2005, Ruffell et al. 2012). After a final report in 1994 found Gupta guilty of all charges, “an article in the Indian weekly The World called for Gupta to be stripped of his PhD and DSc degrees, both of which had been demonstrated to be based upon fraudulent work. Strangely, though, when the Academic Senate of the Panjab University met to decide Gupta’s fate, only five out of the 55 senators voted for his dismissal. Gupta was allowed to keep his position within the university, to supervise research students and to retain his degrees” (Fossil Industry 2022).
Good to Remember
Gupta retired normally in 2002, with super-annuation benefits (Patnaik 2015), and none of his fraudulent publications has been retracted. Nor was he ever held legally accountable for his unbelievable misconduct. In 2013 a book was finally published in India about the case (Shah 2013). Nowadays, such a scandal would likely never have been uncovered at all, because political correctness would hardly allow anyone to accuse a scientist from a non-Western country of such outrageous behavior or even find that “India is also a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research” (Patnaik 2015). An obvious question that is also not allowed to be asked concerns the desolate state of a whole scientific discipline, where such a massive fraud could happen in the first place and stay unnoticed for decades. Good to remember when somebody tells you to just trust in science and to stop asking inconvenient questions.
References
Anderson I 1991. Himalayan scandal rocks Indian science. NewScientist Febr. 9, 1991. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917551-600-himalayan-scandal-rocks-indian-science/
Carleton S 2005. What happens to the Whistleblowers? ABC The Science Show Sept. 3, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050911052826/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1451250.htm
Fossil Industry 2022. A famous case of Indian fossil fraud and theft. Fossil Hunters Dec. 21, 2022. https://www.fossilhunters.xyz/fossil-industry/a-famous-case-of-indian-fossil-fraud-and-theft.html
Goel RK 1977. Triassic Conodonts from Spiti (Himachal Pradesh), India. Journal of Paleontology 51(6), 1085–1101. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1303823
Lewin R 1989. The Case of “Misplaced” Fossils. Science 244(4902), 277–279. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.244.4902.277
Nature 1993. Palaeontology under a Himalayan shadow. Nature 366(6456), 616. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/366616a0
Patnaik PR 2015. Scientific Misconduct in India: Causes and Perpetuation. Science and Engineering Ethics 22(4), 1245–1249. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9677-6
Ruffell A, Majury N & Brooks WE 2012. Geological fakes and frauds. Earth-Science Reviews 111(1-2), 224–231. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.12.001
Shah SK 2013. Himalayan Fossil Fraud – A View from the Galleries. Palaeontological Society of India Special Publication 4, University of Lucknow, 141 pp.
Talent JA 1989. The case of peripatetic fossils. Nature 338(6217), 613–615. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/338613a0
Webster GD 2016. An evaluation of the V. J. Gupta echinoderm papers, 1971–1989. Journal of Paleontology 65(6), 1006–1008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S002233600003331X
Webster GD, Rexroad CB & Talent JA 1993. An Evaluation of the V. J. Gupta Conodont Papers. Journal of Paleontology 67(3), 486–493. https://www.jstor.org/stable
A pair of knights joust?
Friendly Sparring, Verbal and Otherwise, on a Recent Episode of The Bryan Callen Show
Michael Shermer is one of comedian and podcaster Bryan Callen’s go-to science skeptics. So when Callen invited Dr. Stephen Meyer on his show recently, he knew he’d have a colorful back-and-forth on his hands if he also asked Shermer to join in. The result is the type of interaction we’re secretly craving more of these days — energetic conversation between people with differing views but who demonstrate respect for one another, for themselves, and for those who may be watching.
“So afterwards, we’re going at it!” Shermer jokes with a chuckle early in the proceedings. And why not? In their younger years, Stephen trained as a boxer and Michael rode bikes professionally. After the verbal sparring, there may be a chance for these athletic scholars to settle things off-camera.
One reason a Shermer/Meyer match-up makes sense is that both men demonstrate a healthy level of intellectual humility, an essential ingredient in any debate over important scientific ideas. “I’ll talk to anybody,” Shermer acknowledges, “because I’m curious to know, is it possible I’m wrong in this new idea?” Indeed, Shermer recently spent over two hours wrestling with Meyer’s arguments on his own Podcast discussing Return of the God Hypothesis.
Higher, Unmeasurable Truths
As Callen probes Shermer on whether higher, unmeasurable truths exist in life, Meyer helps to focus the conversation on the science:
There are both observables and unobservables as we begin to think about the big questions. And the God question, I think, is a question of metaphysics, but it’s also a question of science. And even the most staunch atheists inadvertently reveal that they accept that as well. Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Dawkins’s way of framing the issue, says Meyer, implies that metaphysical hypotheses, whether materialism, theism, deism, or pantheism, can be tested, just as scientific hypotheses can be tested, by making observations about the properties of life in the universe.
A Conference in Wales
Not so fast, contests Shermer. “The idea that there’s one theory here, and then there’s the God hypothesis — no. There’s actually a dozen over here and we don’t know which one’s the right one.” Shermer reported on a conference he had recently attended in Wales where he watched Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, and others debate the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. “There is not agreement that there was a beginning called the Big Bang,” says Shermer. “There is no ‘A’ Beginning, it just keeps cycling through…”
“No, no, that’s not actually accurate,” interjects Meyer politely:
There is empirical evidence of a beginning. What Penrose does is postulate an infinite cycle of beginnings for which he has no evidence and has to posit something called a phantom field, which other physicists have rejected on the grounds that the phantom field has attributes that no other physical field ever postulated in physics has, namely mind-like characteristics. It can reduce entropy at just the right time in just the right way to allegedly produce another cycle of expansion, but there’s no evidence for an infinite cycle of beginnings. That’s a pure theoretical postulation.
“What’s More Magical?”
The sparring continues over fine-tuning, the origin of complexity, and why mind is a better candidate for a prime reality than matter alone. “Michael and I both agree that we both oppose magical thinking,” says Meyer. “But the question is what’s more magical?” Is it more magical to posit causal powers to brute inanimate matter that our observation shows isn’t capable of producing the effects in question, or to posit a mind, knowing that minds are real and knowing from our own observation what minds are capable of doing?
Throughout their conversation both Meyer and Shermer reveal a fair bit of common ground, from effective political systems to their adherence to Bayesian logic. That means they also both agree that it’s not possible to be 100 percent positive about a given hypothesis. Which is why Meyer follows the same methods of reasoning that Charles Darwin and his 19th-century contemporaries used in their own work. Examine multiple competing hypotheses, test and evaluate their explanatory power, and make an inference to the best explanation. As Shermer puts it as he defines what truth is, “something confirmed to such a degree it would be reasonable to offer your provisional assent.”
“I’m also a skeptic,” says Meyer, “but I’m a skeptic about the magical thinking that materialism now entails. I think Michael and I have a lot of commonality and epistemology but difference in judgment about where the rub is.”
Come for the sparring. Stay for the civility. Enjoy for yourself this friendly, thoughtful exchange on the God question!
Thursday, 8 June 2023
It's bomb thrower David Berlinski again.
Listen: In a New Book, David Berlinski Gives the Devil His Due
On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid rings up Science After Babel author David Berlinski in Paris to discuss the philosopher’s latest Book
. Berlinski is at his cultivated best as the two discuss everything from the biblical Tower of Babel as a metaphor for modern materialistic science, to his friendship with the brilliant and colorful French intellectual Marcel Schützenberger, a world-class mathematician who was self-taught and, as we learn here, came within a hair’s breadth of being swept up in the Chinese Revolution. Berlinski also reflects on the seminal 1966 Wistar Symposium , which laid out some mathematical challenges to Darwinism, challenges that Berlinski says remain unanswered to this day. At the same time, Berlinski gives the devil — here Darwinism — its due. Download the¹ podcast or listen to it Here.
Will it be the noble savage or savage noble who saves civilization?
The Barbarian Within: Darwinism and the Secular Script for Masculinity
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a preview adapted from Nancy Pearcey’s forthcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity. The book will be published on June 27, but you can pre-order now!
Civilization has degenerated into a “mawkish sentimentality,” complained a writer in 1888. “In Heaven’s name, leave us a saving touch of honest, old-fashioned barbarism!”
How did barbarism come to be seen as a positive trait for men — “a saving touch,” a remedy for Victorian sentimentality?…
A new concept of masculinity took hold after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). His evolutionary theory inspired the idea that, at the core, men are animals — and that to recover their authentic masculinity, men need to reconnect with their inner beast. For example, Zane Grey said that in his Westerns he was trying to recapture the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. “Nature developed man according to the biological facts of evolution,” he wrote. “Something of the wild and primitive should forever remain instinctive in the human race.”
Male writers began to claim that civilization was merely a thin veneer over our animal nature. A book titled Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” A book titled The Caveman Within Us (1922) argued that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.”
In fact, any man not primitive or barbarian enough risked being judged as a failure as a man. The most prominent psychologist of the age, G. Stanley Hall, remarked that “a teenage boy who is a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.”
In this chapter, we will investigate the application of Darwinism to human behavior, which is called Social Darwinism. How has it shaped the public discourse on masculinity right up to our own day? How has it contributed to the secular script for the “Real” Man.
The “Blessings” of War
In the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and urbanization, a new word entered the English language: overcivilized. People began to worry that city boys were becoming soft and emasculated. They were no longer the strapping young men produced by harsh pioneer days or rugged farm life. The three principal institutions that dominate early childhood socialization — family, religion, and education — were increasingly staffed and run by women. Men began to cast about for ways to retrieve a sense of robust manhood.
Social Darwinism came in handy in several ways. Take militarism: If life evolved through the struggle for survival, then applying that principle to nations suggests that the way to produce strong, vigorous manhood is through warfare.
“War is a blessing for humanity,” wrote a German anthropologist, “since it offers the only means to measure the strengths of one nation to another and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence.” A biologist agreed:
According to Darwin’s theory, war has constantly been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human race, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally inferior or morally degenerate peoples must clear out and make room for the stronger and better developed.
Theodore Roosevelt was a Social Darwinist and famously said in 1895, “The country needs a war.” He argued that the current generation of young men needed to test their mettle in battle:
No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the courage of the statesman who has to meet storms which can only be quelled by soldierly virtue — this stands higher than any qualities called out merely in times of peace.
G. Stanley Hall even cast militarism as a “manly protest” against the influence of women: “War is, in a sense, the acme of what some now call the manly protest. In peace, women have invaded nearly all the occupations of man, but in war, male virtues come to the fore, for woman cannot go ‘over the top.’” War was depicted not as a necessary evil but as a positive strategy for restoring virile manhood.
Your Inner Barbarian
Social Darwinism was also used to support a sports and fitness craze that swept over the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century. As middle-class Americans left behind the rigorous life on the farm to become a nation of sedentary office workers, they began to turn to sports and exercise to rebuild their physical health. The first tennis court in the United States was built in 1876, the first basketball court in 1891.
Sports were touted not only as a way to get physically fit but also as a way for boys to reconnect with their evolutionary origins. In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, a devotee of Darwin, proposed a theory called recapitulation, claiming that each human embryo replays the entire history of evolution (from one-celled organism, to fish, to amphibian, to mammal, to human). Social Darwinists concluded that boys continue the process of evolution by “recapitulating” the history of the human race as they pass from childhood to adulthood.
For example, William Forbush, a child development specialist, wrote a highly influential book titled The Boy Problem (1902) claiming that each boy repeats “the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Joseph Lee, a social reformer who founded a movement to build playgrounds in cities, said play arose from an earlier stage of human evolution — from the “barbaric and predatory society to which the boy naturally belongs.” A pioneer in the Boy Scout movement said athletics were reminiscent “of the struggle for survival, of the hunt, of the chase, of war.”
The idea was that even as boys grew up to become refined Victorian gentlemen, they should always retain a core of wildness and savagery. When Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Boy Scouts of America, he said that his goal was to rekindle in boys “the power of the savage.”
Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation was eventually discredited. (He had supported the theory with falsified sketches of embryos; already in his own day, he was accused of fraud.) Yet the idea that humans arose from animal origins and are barbarians at heart was becoming part of the socially constructed definition of manhood.
Darwinian Stories
Darwinism was used to bolster the philosophy of naturalism, the claim that nature is all that exists. Among writers, it inspired a new genre called literary naturalism. Novelists portrayed humans as evolved organisms, governed by the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Émile Zola, a leading theorist of literary naturalism, said he wanted to portray characters as “human animals, nothing more.”
For example, Frank Norris wrote a short story (1893) about a bookish student named Lauth living in medieval France who gets caught up in a riot and ends up killing a man with a crossbow:
In an instant, a mighty flame of blood-lust thrilled up through Lauth’s body and mind. At the sight of blood shed by his own hands all the animal savagery latent in every human being woke within him — no more merciful scruples now. He could kill. In the twinkling of an eye the pale, highly cultivated scholar . . . sank back to the level of his savage Celtic ancestors. His eyes glittered . . . and his whole frame quivered with the eagerness and craving of a panther in sight of his prey.
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), often assigned in high school classes, is set during the Civil War. Early in the novel, the main character, Henry, flees from the field of battle. But later he “felt the daring spirit of a savage.” He redeems himself by fighting like a “barbarian, a beast,” a “war devil.”
Jack London is best known for books like The Call of the Wild (1903). But what most people do not know is that, as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience” to radical naturalism by reading books about evolution. He even memorized passages from Darwin’s books and could quote them by heart, the way Christians memorize Scripture.
Though London wrote about dogs, he intended them as metaphors for humans. In The Call of the Wild, the main character is a dog named Buck, a house pet captured and sold to an Alaskan expedition where he is thrown into a Darwinian struggle for survival. In the Nordic cold, he quickly learns that men and dogs “were savages all of them, who knew no law but the law of the club and fang.”
Eventually, the last tie to civilization is broken and Buck returns to a pre-civilized existence. A literary critic writes, “Ideal manliness thrives in Buck only because he becomes less and less human, more and more wild.”
Theodore Dreiser, author of American classics such as Sister Carrie, likewise underwent a naturalistic rite of passage by reading books about evolution. He wrote that Darwinism blew him “intellectually to bits,” destroying the last vestiges of his Catholic upbringing. He intended his novels to show that all human “ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows, and joys” were nothing but products of chemical reactions in the brain. He called them “chemic compulsions.” The literary naturalists used fiction to promote a Darwinian worldview that reduced humans to products of evolutionary forces.
The Thin Veneer of Civilization
The literary naturalists treated the wilderness as an arena where men could reaffirm their masculinity. As one historian explains, the wilderness was seen “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery — qualities that defined fitness in Darwinian terms.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs set his immensely popular Tarzan series (1912) in the African jungle. Because of Tarzan’s wild upbringing, he avoids the debilitating forces of civilization, possessing the power and strength of primitive manhood. Even after mastering European customs and languages, he prefers to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization” (as Burroughs puts it) and dress in a loincloth of animal hide, eating raw meat that he has killed himself. In Tarzan of the Apes, he tells Jane, “I am still a wild beast at heart.”
The message of the Tarzan books, says sociologist Michael Kimmel, is that “descending the evolutionary ladder is the only mechanism to retrieve manhood.”
This is a severely stunted, shrunken, truncated view of human nature. From the time of the classical Greeks and Romans, virtue had been defined as the restraint of the “lower” passions by the “higher” faculties of reason, spirit, and moral will. But Darwinism was taken to mean that humans had triumphed over the other species not by reason and moral restraint but by the fierce, fighting urges. In a stunning reversal, the animal passions and instincts were held up as the authentic self.
The secular script for manhood was redefined as crude and combative, governed by the biological instincts for lust and power.
Many of the literary naturalists created rollicking adventure stories that are great fun to read. One of our sons devoured the Tarzan books. But Christians should always read with their worldview antennae poised to pick up the story’s underlying message. A Darwinian worldview furthered secular ideas of what it means to be a man.
The earlier ideal of the Christian gentleman had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature — to compete in the ruthless struggle for dominance and power. The “Real” Man was being defined in increasingly toxic term
s.
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