Saturday, 12 August 2023
Friday, 11 August 2023
In search of mindless information?
Is Life Just Chemistry, or Chemistry Plus Information?
In 2016, University of Ferrara theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri wrote a rather interesting open access paper on a key philosophical conflict in biology: Is life only chemistry or is it chemistry plus information? In it, he says that many biologists see information in life forms — biological information — as something that “does not really belong to science.”
How did they get there from here?
Author of Code Biology: A New Science of Life (Springer, 2015), Barbieri offers a history, a critique, and a proposed solution. In this and two upcoming articles, I will look at all three elements.
First, the History
Molecular biology understands genes as transferring linear sequences of information to proteins that carry out instructions. That’s information as it is generally understood. But some biologists, surveying the vast, complex, specified structures it builds, appear spooked by the thought:
This implies that there is an ontological difference between information and chemistry, a difference which is often expressed by saying that information-based processes like heredity and natural selection simply do not exist in the world of chemistry. Against this conclusion, the supporters of the chemical paradigm have argued that the concept of information is only a linguistic metaphor, a word that summarizes the result of countless underlying chemical reactions. The supporters of the information paradigm insist that information is a real and fundamental component of the living world, but have not been able to prove this point. As a result, the chemical view has not been abandoned and the two paradigms both coexist today.
BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060 HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016
Barbieri offers a solution, which we will look at later. But for now, note the nature of the conflict: “Information can’t be real if chemistry doesn’t completely subsume it” versus “information is real, apart from chemistry.”
He points to origin of life researcher Günter Wächtershäuser as a leading exponent of the first view: “If we could ever trace the historic process backwards far enough in time, we would wind up with an origin of life in purely chemical processes.” The physicalism that Wächtershäuser espouses here may cause us to overlook the fact that we really have no idea how to trace the “historic process” that far back in time. His claim is simple but not easily researchable. And in these times, that fact alone gives his chemical paradigm a certain weight. A dominant idea that cannot be proved can also not be disproved.
Of course, as Barbieri notes, Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix suggested the image of life forms as “information-processing machines.” That image was not welcomed in many places:
This is one of the most deeply dividing issues of modern science. Many biologists are convinced that biological information and the genetic code are real and fundamental components of life, but physicalists insist that they are real only in a very superficial sense and that there is nothing fundamental about them because they must be reducible, in principle, to physical quantities.
BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060
HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016
He realizes that conventional biologists’ most serious intellectual commitment is to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection acting on random mutation — a commitment he appears to support. So he reassures readers that Wächtershäuser’s “life is just chemistry” approach doesn’t really accord with Darwinism after all because “natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter.” He does not seem to grasp that the two theories get on very well precisely because both purport to explain how bewilderingly complex and highly specific life forms can come to exist in a universe that is devoid of intelligence.
So What Type of Material Substance Is Information?
The problem he does not address is that information, unlike chemistry, is fundamentally immaterial. A USB stick that contains vital information weighs the same as one that contains nothing or strings of random numbers. And the content, meaningful or not, is measured using concepts like bits and bytes, not physical attributes like kilograms and joules. And, unlike other quantities, information can convey meaning.
Meaning is a term Barbieri uses a good deal:
The existence of meaning in the organic world may seem strange, at first, but in reality it is no more strange than the existence of a code, because they are the two sides of the same coin. To say that a code establishes a correspondence between two entities is equivalent to saying that one entity is the meaning of the other, so we cannot have codes without meaning or meaning without codes. All we need to keep in mind is that meaning is a mental entity when the code is between mental objects, but it is an organic entity when the code is between organic molecules.
BARBIERI MARCELLO 2016 WHAT IS INFORMATION? PHIL. TRANS. R. SOC. A.3742015006020150060
HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.1098/RSTA.2015.0060, 13 MARCH 2016
No, actually. Meaning is an aspect of conveying information to an intelligent being, as in “The meaning of James’s earlier actions became clear to us when he suddenly switched sides.” If anything in life forms has a meaning, an intelligent agent will be needed to recognize it.
And if the chemistry-only faction is at all consistent, it should have no truck whatever with the idea that “meaning is a mental entity when the code is between mental objects.” True physicalism denies that there are any mental objects. The mind is an illusion generated in the brain via natural selection, one that happens to further human survival. Meaning is merely a part of that illusion.
Barbieri seems to want biology to combine physicalism with an acceptance of information — information that is stripped of its relationship to intelligence and thus somehow belongs to science after all. But, as we shall see, it can’t be done.
Next: Can information be separated from intelligence? Barbieri tries for an origin of life theory that allows for information but tries to separate it from intelligence. Does he succeed? I will consider that question in a subsequent post.
On Darwinian apologists' "what Cambrian explosion" defence
Fossil Friday: Did the Cambrian Explosion Really Happen?
When confronted with the argument from the sudden appearance of animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion about 540-515 million years ago (e.g., early arthropods like the featured trilobite Redlichia), the newest fad among anti-ID activists and hardcore Darwinists is to boldly deny that this event ever happened. A good example is the silly rant by YouTuber Dave Farina against Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. These deniers of the well-established scientific consensus rest their argument on the recent publications of a few maverick paleontologists, who indeed made similar claims about the Cambrian Explosion and the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event being nothing but a mirage, i.e., an artifact of incomplete preservation, undersampling, and sampling bias. I have already responded to several such claims in previous articles (e.g., Bechly 2022a, 2022b) and have shown why they are unconvincing and based on obfuscating language and ambiguous redefinition of common terms.
No Reasonable Doubt
I also established in my articles with numerous quotes from up-to-date peer-reviewed scientific literature that there is no reasonable doubt about the reality of the Cambrian Explosion and its status as a fatal problem for Darwinism (also see these articles by Luskin 2013, Luskin 2023 and Coppedge 2023).
Now, a new study by the above-mentioned team of maverick authors (Servais et al. 2023) has regurgitated the revisionist views, and this was of course accompanied by sensational press releases with catchy headlines like “Did the Cambrian explosion really happen?” (Heidt 2023). The main claims of this paper are:
The early Palaeozoic accommodated a single long-term radiation.
Continental fragmentation exerted a first-order control on this long-term radiation.
The Cambrian biodiversification was not a sudden burst (“explosion”) of diversity.
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification “Event” was not a single “event.”
Terms such as “radiation” or “biodiversification” are more suitable terms.
The general fallacy of this paper is the conflation of the traditional understanding of the Cambrian Explosion as the sudden appearance of animal body plan disparity with the mere rate of biodiversification in terms of species diversity more or less continuously increasing from the Cambrian to the Ordovician. In other words: They are knocking down straw men.
But It Get’s Worse
In fact, the real data do not support their main point at all. What the scientists did in this study is simply screen two large paleontological databases, which collectively contain about 2 million entries about fossil biodiversity. Based on these data, which actually contradict their thesis, “the authors assert that these resources aren’t truly global …” and claim that “Were they to put the same effort into studying this period, the existence of two individual events would likely melt away” (Servais quoted in Heidt 2023). This is of course nothing but ad hoc special pleading and mere speculation about potential biases to explain away the inconvenient actual data. It is fishy indeed and suggests that the whole point of this endeavor is the protection of Darwinian evolution against empirical evidence. It certainly isn’t solid science!
So, it is hardly suprising that other experts remain utterly unconvinced and object that “there is actually quite good evidence that there was a Cambrian explosion, as we would typically call it” (Nanglu quoted in Heidt 2023). This will of course not prevent our dear opponents from misrepresenting the new paper as alleged proof that science has shown that the Cambrian Explosion never happened. Cherry picking and confirmation bias anyone?
References
Bechly G 2022a. Untangling “Professor Dave’s” Confusion about the Cambrian Explosion. Evolution News November 29, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/untangling-professor-daves-confusion-about-the-cambrian-explosion/
Bechly G 2022b. Dave Farina Criticizes Intelligent Design but Doesn’t Understand It. Evolution News December 5, 2022. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/dave-farina-criticizes-intelligent-design-but-doesnt-understand-it/
Coppedge D 2023. Evolutionists Spin the Cambrian Explosion — But Alas, All in Vain. Evolution News July 26, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/evolutionists-spin-the-cambrian-explosion-but-alas-all-in-vain/ (originally published 2015)
Heidt A 2023. Did the Cambrian explosion really happen? LiveScience July 8, 2023. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/evolution/did-the-cambrian-explosion-really-happen
Luskin C 2013. How “Sudden” Was the Cambrian Explosion? Evolution News July 16, 2013. https://evolutionnews.org/2013/07/how_sudden_was_/
Luskin C 2023. FAQ: The Cambrian Explosion Is Real, and It Is a Problem for Evolution. Evolution News May 19, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/05/faq-the-cambrian-explosion-is-real-and-it-is-a-problem-for-evolution/
Servais T, Cascales-Miñana B, Harper DAT, Lefebvre B, Munnecke A, Wang W & Zhang Y 2023. No (Cambrian) explosion and no (Ordovician) event: A single long-term radiation in the early Palaeozoic. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 623(9):111592
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.J.Palaeo.2023.111592
Thursday, 10 August 2023
The spectre of homochirality continues to loom over OOL science.
Origin of Life: The Challenge of Achieving Homochirality in a Prebiotic World
It's a challenge crucial for research on the origin of life. Among the many obstacles to generating biologically relevant polymers abiotically, achieving homochirality is perhaps the most difficult impediment to overcome. What is homochirality? Well, all macromolecules in life are composed of building blocks that exist as mirror images. The analogy of left and right hands is most commonly used to convey this chemical concept. With very few exceptions, life only uses one of these forms.
The chemical properties of mirror imaged compounds are equivalent for all practical purposes. The production of these building blocks in a prebiotic world, using very simple compounds as starting material, would therefore be expected to result in a racemic mixture, or 50/50 distribution, of these building blocks. This has already been confirmed from analysis of organic compounds retrieved from an asteroid, as I wrote here back in May.
Producing polymers consisting of only one configuration from this mixture is obligatory if a prebiotic origin of life on Earth is be convincingly explained to the scientific community. Proposing chemical schemes that produce polypeptides (proteins) or RNA using homochiral building blocks is the task at hand. Performing such a feat in solution appears unfeasible, so the prebiotic soup approach has been abandoned by many origin of life (OOL) scientists. A better alternative, widely investigated, is the use of mineral surfaces where adsorption of organic chemicals could theoretically select preferentially one configuration of a pair of chiral molecules.
Here I will briefly discuss this experimental approach, noting where the relevant studies have led. I’ll first consider polymerization of amino acids to form proteins, followed by attempts to achieve this feat using RNA precursors.
From Racemic Amino Acids to Homochiral Proteins
Among studies showing efficacy in obtaining short lengths of amino acids to form oligopeptides, one of earliest was reported in 1978 (Lahav N., White D., and Chang S. (1978) Science 201: 67-69). The system employed, to facilitate the condensation reaction to form peptide bonds between amino acids, was the use of clay minerals (kaolinite and bentonite). Repeated cycles of heating, evaporation, and rehydration were invoked, which are conditions likely present on a prebiotic Earth. Using the simplest amino acid, glycine (having no chiral center), diglycine was found to be produced at low levels with progressively lower amounts up to pentapeptide lengths. Notably the heating-drying phase of this cycle apparently facilitates the condensation reaction, enabling peptide bond formation.
A Long Way from the Goal
was a start, but still a long way from producing polypeptide lengths of any biological relevance. Small proteins should reach at a minimum 100-200 amino acids to effectively contribute to biological function. After this initial glimmer of hope, many other laboratories undertook similar approaches, testing out different mineral surfaces and a variety of reaction conditions. The highest achievers managed to produce polypeptides up to decamers. It became clear from these studies that the longer the polypeptide produced, the harder it was to retrieve it from the mineral surface, as it was tightly bound via a multitude of chemical bonding forces spread over a long chain of amino acids. Success at making long polypeptides seemingly dooms the polymer to remain fixed to the surface instead of being released into solution as needed by life.
A major flaw with the studies described above is that they did not attempt to account for how homochiral selectivity could be enforced by this route. Synthesizing polypeptides with a racemic mixture of amino acids offers prebiotic life nothing in terms of functionality. For proteins to assume specific and reproducible structures, a homochiral set of amino acids must be used. With this goal in mind, one laboratory reported that enantiomeric pairs of aspartic acid preferentially adsorb to opposing faces with mirror symmetry of calcite (calcium carbonate). It was proposed that aspartic acid, having three functional groups (two carboxylic acids and one amine group), orients itself with homochiral selectivity to the exposed chemical groups of calcite. This follows logically to account for the ~90 percent chiral enrichment observed.
It works for aspartic acid in this case, but what about glutamic acid? It has the same functional groups but they are spaced apart a little differently. There is no guarantee that the corresponding chiral glutamic acid also binds selectively to the same surface. Sadly, this was not reported. Among the 20 amino acids, only 11 possess at least three functional groups required for appropriate spatial positioning to the mineral interface. The remaining nine have only two, one carboxyl and one amine group. This leaves little room for attaining homochirality for all amino acids as needed to construct proteins.
To give this laboratory credit, they did mention that alanine, valine, and lysine do not exhibit chiral selection on calcite. The lack of data for most remaining amino acids leads one to believe minerals in general are another dead end for the homochirality problem that OOL protein researchers are trying to solve. In contrast to the conclusions I draw from these observations, the authors were not dissuaded from making bold claims about how this model might help account for homochiral polymerization of amino acids on mineral surfaces in general.
Mineral Models to Select Ribose for RNA
The carbohydrate ribose, required to make RNA, presents a highly problematic situation. Ribose has four chiral centers, unlike amino acids with just one. Therefore, D-ribose found in RNA has seven other chemical partners differing in their spatial arrangement of atoms. Ribose has one advantage to assist the OOL researchers. It most often exists as six- or five-membered ring structures where the functional hydroxyl groups are positioned geometrically to one side of this chemical framework. Minerals such as rutile can accommodate hydrogen bonding, presenting an opportunity to preferentially bind ribose over its other carbohydrate competitors. Such a model has been proposed with the caveat that a third dimensional force must be applied to effect separation of ribose from the other sugars.
The first two dimensions are accounted for by quasi-planar interactions of sugar rings to the mineral interface. In simpler terms, this mineral needs to be applied to a separation technique called chromatography. The tighter binding of ribose, by virtue of its hydroxyl groups all pointing to the mineral surface, would permit tighter retention where the other sugars would proceed more rapidly through this chromatographic separation.
There are several problems with this innovative proposal. Setting up a chromatographic separation does not happen naturally. It requires a specific design where all molecules must enter the chromatographic medium simultaneously. In other words, an external agent is required to carry out this exercise. Assuming that chromatography proceeds as hoped, the last 5-carbon sugar eluting from the chromatographic medium will be D- and L-ribose. There is still a racemic mixture of ribose that must be contended with. Finally, as discussed in my earlier article, appropriately linking a nucleobase and finally phosphate to D-ribose is an extremely difficult task without the use of specifically engineered catalysts, e.g., enzymes. This is highly unlikely to happen in a prebiotic scenario.
The Task at Hand
I have addressed here the potential minerals proposed by OOL researchers to abiotically synthesize the first functional biopolymers. Simple principles discounting these proposals can be applied to other comparable scenarios in this area, but that would require a much longer and more technical article. Suffice it to say there are sound counterarguments to the plethora of schemes that OOL researchers devise in trying to account for how life could have emerged abiotically. Critically examining these schemes is the job with which scientists on the other side of the field are tasked.
Wednesday, 9 August 2023
Science as one party state?
Andrew Klavan, Casey Luskin: Displaced Authority and Progressive Censorship
On a new episode of ID the Future, we’re pleased to share Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan’s recent interview with Dr. Casey Luskin. Klavan loves science, but he smells a rat when famous scientists like Richard Dawkins use displaced authority to make proclamations about science’s relationship with religion. So after reading Luskin’s recent Daily Wire article about progressives and their long history of banning intelligent design from the classroom, Klavan invited Luskin on his show to help his viewers better understand the theory of intelligent design and the reality of the evolutionary paradigm.
Luskin starts with the meanings of evolution and the questions that guide intelligent design researchers. He cites plenty of examples of design from biology and cosmology. Klavan asks how badly people get censored for considering design perspectives in their work. Luskin explains, using the case of physicist Eric Hedin and his treatment at Ball State University as an example. Luskin rounds out the conversation by explaining how intelligent design uses the scientific method to detect the hallmarks of design in both living systems and the universe at large. “Science never gives us, under any conditions, absolute certainty,” Luskin notes. “What it can allow us to do, though, is use the methods of historical sciences to infer the best explanation for a given situation given what we know about how the world works.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
On Darwin's unresolved doubt?
In Resolving Darwin’s Doubt, These Cambrian Fossils Are No Help
More complexity in the earliest multicellular animals has only intensified what Stephen Meyer calls “Darwin’s Doubt.” Some examples follow.
Euarthropods
A paper in Current Biology comes closest to demonstrating “the deep homology between exoskeletal features in an evolutionary continuum of taxa with distinct types of body organization.” Author Javier Ortega-Hernández takes on “the euarthropod head problem” by finding similarities between two specimens from the Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian). His analysis, though, only compares positions of complex tissues, not how they originated. Amid various controversies, he focuses on a relatively simple structure, the anterior sclerite (a front plate of cuticle) within one phylum, the true arthropods.
Despite its ubiquitous nature, the significance of the anterior sclerite remains controversial, as there is little agreement on the correspondence of this structure among stem- and crown-group euarthropods.
His attempt at finding phylogenetic relationships, given such a trifling structure in a narrow range of animals, is less than convincing. Worse, he ignores the weightier matters of the explosive origin of the complex body plans of these animals.
Collinsium
Science media were excited to report on a “spiky monster worm” from China, named Collinsium ciliosum (original paper is in PNAS). If this is supposedly an ancestor of modern velvet worms, as researchers at the University of Cambridge claim, it was already complex, with spikes, a mouth with teeth, antennae, and filter feeding appendages. Its 72 spikes in rows down its back are particularly noteworthy. If anything, it looks more complex than “Today’s 180 or so species of velvet worms [that] all look and act pretty much the same” (Science Magazine). “This isn’t the first time that an ancestral group has displayed more diversity than its modern-day relatives,” Live Science comments. If this is evolution, it’s going backwards.
The critter is one of the first known animals on Earth to develop protective armor and to sport specialized limbs that likely helped it catch food, the researchers said. This newfound species lived during the Cambrian explosion, a time of rapid evolutionary development, they said.
Abrupt appearance? Rapid development? How this helps the evolutionary story is not clear. The Cambridge news item offers word salad as a distraction from the issues raised by Dr. Meyer, which they simply ignore.
Animals during the Cambrian were incredibly diverse, with lots of interesting behaviours and modes of living,” said Ortega-Hernández. “The Chinese Collins’ Monster was one of these evolutionary ‘experiments’ — one which ultimately failed as they have no living direct ancestors — but it’s amazing to see how specialised many animals were hundreds of millions of years ago. At its core, the study of the fossil record seeks answers about the evolution of life on Earth that can only be found in deep time. All the major biological events responsible for shaping the world we inhabit, such as the origin of life, the early diversification of animals, or the establishment of the modern biosphere, are intimately linked to the complex geological history of our planet.”
Anomalocaris
The apex predator Anomalocaris was mentioned in connection with a more recently discovered member of its family. This one, a giant named Aegirocassis benmoulae, was found in Morocco, indicating the global extent of the anomalocaridids. Unlike its more famous relative, “this anomalocaridid from the Ordovician exposes a second set of body flaps and reopens the question of how the two branches of arthropod legs evolved,” Gregory Edgecombe notes in Current Biology. The authors of the paper in Nature are not much help to Darwin, having to invoke “convergent evolution” again:
Among arthropods, the size of A. benmoulae (over 2 m in length) is paralleled only by some pterygotid eurypterids and terrestrial arthropleurids. The evolution of gigantic filter-feeders within clades of nektic macrophagous predators is well documented in Mesozoic pachycormid fish and Cenozoic sharks and whales. The huge size of A. benmoulaerepresents a much earlier example of a filter-feeding lifestyle correlating to gigantism. The abundance of gigantic anomalocaridid filter-feeders in the high palaeolatitude Fezouata Biota points to a complex planktic ecosystem. Early Cambrian anomalocaridid filter-feeders also fed on zooplankton, but they remained relatively small. Although the Cambrian Explosion saw the establishment of the first complex planktic ecosystems, the convergent (Supplementary Text) rise of giant filter-feeding anomalocaridids during the Ordovician followed an increase in the abundance and diversity of phytoplankton and a consequent zooplankton radiation as part of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.
Once again: abrupt appearance of complex body plans, complex ecosystems, and convergent evolution. None of this helps the evolutionary story or answers the key issue: where did the genetic information come from to build complex body plans with hierarchical structures and functional organs composed of new tissues and cell types?
Hallucigenia
When Hallucigenia (pictured above) was first found in the Burgess Shale a century ago, paleontologists couldn’t tell top from bottom or front from back. The bizarre creature with paired spines pointing away from its paired legs was missing an important part: its head. Since then, the head has been found. It’s complex, with a pair of eyes and rows of teeth. This requires explaining more cell types and tissue types than before, exacerbating the problem Stephen Meyer identifies.
Martin R. Smith from Cambridge, with Jean-Bernard Caron from the Toronto Museum of Natural History, announced the discovery in Nature. Other sites, like Phys.prg and New Scientist, picked up the story and showcased the new artwork. For BBC News, Smith described his initial reaction:
By delicately chipping away at the rock, scientists found a spoon-shaped head with some surprising features.
“When we put it into the electron microscope, we were delighted to see not just a tiny pair of eyes looking back at us, but also beneath them a really cheeky semi-circular smile.
“It was as if the fossil was grinning at us at the secrets it had been hiding,” explained Dr Smith.
Inside the creature’s mouth, the researchers found a ring of teeth and then another set of teeth running from its throat down towards its stomach.
Most of the chatter is preoccupied with where to put this creature in a Darwinian phylogenetic tree. For a long time, animals were lumped together by their type of body cavity (coelom). That’s changed; in 1997, Aguinaldo invented the category “ecdysozoa” (“molting animals”) based on ribosomal RNA comparisons. This lumped together everything from butterflies to roundworms, from tardigrades (“water bears”) to centipedes, from velvet worms to spiders. But is such a clade meaningful? “These disparate phyla are united by their means of molting, but otherwise share few morphological characters — none of which has a meaningful fossilization potential.” Smith and Caron note. “As such, the early evolutionary history of the group as a whole is largely uncharted.”
The purpose of the grouping was to try to unite all the creatures that supposedly had a common ancestor. A more meaningful designation would account for the complexity and unique features of each animal, without forcing it into preconceived notions of common ancestry. Hallucigenia is a prime example. This creature had eyes, a mouth, teeth, a throat, a foregut, a stomach, and an anus. It had appendages that could reach its mouth. It had seven pairs of spines, each emerging from “a buttress of soft tissue,” arranged with curvatures from front to back, protecting the entire animal. It had claws on the ends of the legs.
It’s not just the cell types that need to be explained, but their arrangement into functional structures. These structures, moreover, need to be integrated into a functional animal in its ecosystem. And, they need software in some central nervous system that allowed the animal to use all of it. This is hierarchical organization, none of which is seen in the Precambrian layers beneath.
Just-So Storytelling
Live Science has a nice gallery of these and other Cambrian critters. Interesting animals, but nothing new here. More of the same complexity. More of the same just-so storytelling that assumes undirected evolution. More distraction from the main question: what is the source of complex specified information to build a complex animal? How could it emerge from a blind, unguided process?
Tuesday, 8 August 2023
The technology of life.
Listen: The Innovative Cellular Engineering That Keeps Us Alive
When left to their own devices, the laws of nature tend toward death, not life. So what does it take for life to exist? On a new episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson talks with physician Howard Glicksman about some of the remarkable engineering challenges that have to be solved to produce and maintain living organisms such as ourselves. Glicksman is co-author with systems engineer Steve Laufmann of the recent book Your Designed Body, an exploration of the extraordinary system of systems that encompasses thousands of ingenious and interdependent engineering solutions to keep us alive and ticking. In the “just so” stories of the Darwinian narrative, these engineering solutions simply evolved. They emerged and got conserved. Voila! But in this chat, Anderson and Glicksman explain that it takes more than the laws of nature to keep us from dying. “Chemicals on their own don’t have any desire or tendency to turn into living organisms,” says Anderson. “They tend to degrade, they tend to break down, they tend to go back to their basic constituents.” Glicksman and Anderson discuss examples, including how the human body handles friction, heat transfer, and the crucial task of maintaining chemical balance at the cellular level. And where does all this essential innovation come from? Glicksman points to an intelligent cause that transcends matter and energy. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Luke's gospel on Rich and Poor.
Luke ch.6:20-26KJV"20And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. 21Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. 22Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. 23Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.
24But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. 25Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. 26Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets."
Here is strong's on the word rendered "poor":
4434. ptóchos ►
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance
beggar, poor.
From ptosso (to crouch); akin to ptoeo and the alternate of pipto); a beggar (as cringing), i.e. Pauper (strictly denoting absolute or public mendicancy, although also used in a qualified or relative sense; whereas penes properly means only straitened circumstances in private), literally (often as noun) or figuratively (distressed) -- beggar(-ly), poor.:
Taken literally Jesus said happy/ blessed are you beggars. There were certainly no literal beggars among the twelve apostles that He had just chosen. So what kind of beggar does JEHOVAH bless ,the parallel account of Matthew is helpful.
Matthew ch.5:3NIV"“Blessed are the poor in(Beggars for the) spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
The simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to the spiritual we are all poor. Some are aware of that critical poverty in their own particular case and are eagerly pursuing the one source that can alleviate it, our Lord promises that all such are due for a blessing.
Others imagine themselves to be "rich" but Paul warns that our evaluation of ourselves is of no consequence
1Corinthians ch.4:4NIV"My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me."
So the "rich" are "poor" in JEHOVAH'S eyes and the "poor" are "rich" in JEHOVAH'S eyes.
Actual design not merely apparent design.
No, Intelligent Design Doesn’t Reason by Analogy; Here’s Why
It's time again to address some misunderstandings of intelligent design. First, is the inference to design in biology based on a mere analogy to other forms of design, by humans?
Let’s consider the question. To start, let’s ask: Why can we make this inference in the first place? It’s because natural systems contain the type of information and complexity that in our experience come only from intelligence. This is not merely an “analogy” but derives instead from the sequence-based specified complexity that we see in living systems (e.g., DNA), which is precisely the same, at the mathematical level, as we see in written language. Hubert Yockey makes this clear:
It is important to understand that we are not reasoning by analogy. The sequence hypothesis [that the exact order of symbols records the information] applies directly to the protein and the genetic text as well as to written language and therefore the treatment is mathematically identical.
HUBERT P. YOCKEY, “SELF ORGANIZATION ORIGIN OF LIFE SCENARIOS AND INFORMATION THEORY,” JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY, VOL. 91:13-31 (1981).
So what we see in living systems has mathematical and informational properties that are identical to written language.
Aligned with Mainstream Science
We also see machines in living systems. That’s not to say that cells or living systems on the whole are “machines,” but they do contain machines. It’s not a stretch to say that calling these things a machine is more than an analogy — it’s an identity. This is because you see the same design logic in molecular machines within cells that you see in human-designed machines.
The classic example would be ATP synthase where you find a stator, a rotor, an energy source, and you are converting one form of energy into another (with ATP synthase you are converting the electrical potential of proton flow into mechanical energy and that mechanical energy is then converted into the chemical energy of ATP). You’d be hard pressed not to call these things machines, and the idea is not unaligned with mainstream science. As former President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Bruce Alberts stated:
The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines…. Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.
BRUCE ALBERTS, “THE CELL AS A COLLECTION OF PROTEIN MACHINES: PREPARING THE NEXT GENERATION OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGISTS,” CELL, VOL. 92:291 (FEBRUARY 6, 1998).
Likewise, in 2000, Marco Piccolini wrote in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology that “extraordinary biological machines realize the dream of the seventeenth-century scientists … that ‘machines will be eventually found not only unknown to us but also unimaginable by our mind.’” He notes that modern biological machines “surpass the expectations of the early life scientists.” (Marco Piccolino, “Biological machines: from mills to molecules,” Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Vol. 1:149-153 (November, 2000).)
So, is it just an analogy or is it an identity? Or perhaps both? When we look at the mathematics and physics behind what is going on, the similarities between biological machines and biological information and written language and human-designed machines go beyond mere analogy and become an identity. If it’s an identity then it’s more than just an analogy.
How Things Become Themselves
Other people (or sometimes the same people) label arguments for intelligent design as “theology” or “metaphysics.” Are they right?
Now science is in the business of explaining how things originate and form. This is done through the historical sciences. A historical science starts by observing causes at work in the world around us. Some of those causes include:
Random mutation
Natural selection
Intelligent agency
We can observe each of these causes and understand the kind of information and complexity they are capable of generating. Because we have observation-based experience with these causes we know what they can and cannot do. Because we can observe, study, and understand the causal powers of these causes in real time, they are therefore proper subjects of scientific study and are causes that we can potentially invoke to explain things in nature. Full stop.
And here is what some of those observations reveal, in simple terms:
Random mutation and/or natural selection does NOT generate high levels of complex and specified information.
Intelligent agency DOES generate high levels of complex and specified information.
Random mutation and/or natural selection does NOT generate machines.
Intelligent agency DOES generate machines.
In all of our experience, high levels of complex and specified information and machines have only one known source: intelligence. We know that intelligence can produce these things due to our experience-based observations of intelligent agents in the world around us. Thus, we have empirical grounds for inferring that an intelligent cause was at work.
So, it’s true that some label these arguments metaphysics or theology, or call it a “distortion” to say this type of reasoning is science. But no, everything above is based the methods of science. That’s all there is to it
Only by confusion can Trinitarians prevail.
The ONLY Way that Trinitarians can appear to prevail in debate is by confusion. That is why it is so important to clarify definitions from the begining. Who/what is the most high God? Is this most high God triune? Is this trinity composed of three distinct Gods.
Is any of these three distinct persons/Gods the most high God?
This is especially the case when they attempt to use/misuse disputed scriptures like
Romans ch.9:5NCB"to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah,[b] who is over all, God blessed for ever.[c] Amen."
Obviously Paul is glorifying the one and only most high God for favouring Israel spiritually. The greatest of these favours is that of having the saviour of mankind as a descendent of their patriarchs and prophets. Some Trinitarians in a desperate attempt to extract proof for their extra biblical claims of a triune most high God, claim that Paul is making the Messiah who sprang from Israel according to the flesh numerically identical to the most high God.
The problem of course is that if the very unipersonal Messiah is made to be the MOST HIGH GOD then the obvious result is a falsifying of the Nicene creed. Which plainly declares that the constituents of the trinity are merely distinct persons but not distinct Gods or Lords and certainly not that most distinct most high God and most high Lord who/which is tri-personal.
Romans ch.9:5CJB"the Patriarchs are theirs; and from them, as far as his physical descent is concerned, came the Messiah, who is over all. Praised be Adonai for ever! Amen."
Romans ch.9:5CEV"They have those famous ancestors, who were also the ancestors of the Christ.[a] I pray that God, who rules over all, will be praised forever![b] Amen."
Romans ch.9:5GNT"they are descended from the famous Hebrew ancestors; and Christ, as a human being, belongs to their race. May God, who rules over all, be praised forever![b] Amen."
Romans ch.9:5TLB"Great men of God were your fathers, and Christ himself was one of you, a Jew so far as his human nature is concerned, he who now rules over all things. Praise God forever!"
Romans ch.9:5NAB(RE)"They are Israelites; theirs the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; 5 theirs the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Messiah. God who is over all[c] be blessed forever. Amen."
Romans ch.9:5NLV"The early preachers came from this family. Christ Himself was born of flesh from this family and He is over all things. May God be honored and thanked forever. Let it be so."
Romans ch.9:5RSV"to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. God who is over all be blessed for ever.[a] Amen."
Romans ch.9:5Goodspeed"and the patriarchs, and from them physically Christ came—God who is over all be blessed forever! Amen. "
Monday, 7 August 2023
Sunday, 6 August 2023
Saturday, 5 August 2023
Irenaeus on the monarchy of the one God and Father.
Irenaeus "This is the rule of our faith, the foundation of the building, and what gives support to our behavior.
God the Father uncreated, who is uncontained, invisible, one God, creator of the universe; this is the first article of our faith.
And the second is: The Word of God, the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who appeared to the prophets according to their way of prophesying and according to the dispensation of the Father. Through(Dia) him all things were created. Furthermore, in the fullness of time, in order to gather all things to himself, he became a human being amongst human beings, capable of being seen and touched, to destroy death, bring life, and restore fellowship between God and humanity.
And the third article is: The Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and our forebears learned of God and the righteous were led in the paths of justice, and who, in the fullness of time, was poured out in a new way on our human nature in order to renew humanity throughout the entire world in the sight of God."
(The Christian Theology Reader, Blackwell, 1995, edited by Alister McGrath, p. 93)
I don't doubt for the briefest instance that there is much that Irenaeus and myself would disagree about. However I note with interest that for Irenaeus the God and Father of Jesus is not merely THE distinct person but THE distinct God (1Corinthians ch.8:6 NIV"yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came.." the God and Father of Jesus is the only God out of (ex)whom all of the information and energy in creation proceeds.
,and why mention His being uncreated if this is not an exceptional trait in the given context. I also note that as in scripture there is no God the Son or God the spirit only one God the Father. I further note that all things occur at the dispensation of that one God who is the one Father and none other ,clearly for Irenaeus The God and Father of Jesus is absolute monarch having no equals. Jesus is clearly subordinate to the one God who is the one Father of himself and all of the intelligent creation. The creation is (ex) out of JEHOVAH But (Dia) through his Son. JEHOVAH is the one God his Son Jesus Christ is his instrument.
A congenital design filter?
Douglas Axe: We Have an Eye For Detecting Design
On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Eric Metaxas continues his conversation with biologist and professor Dr. Douglas Axe. The subject is Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed and his account of how he lost his position at a Cambridge research lab because of the implications of his research findings. Axe discusses the polarized atmosphere in science today, driven by an unreasonable commitment to materialism. He describes the prevailing attitude: “Either you’re with us and on board on these issues or you are anti-science. That is a very unhelpful position for scientists to be taking.” Axe also talks about the reliability of our built-in design intuition and the implications of living in a designed universe. Metaxas notes that though many adopt a Darwinian narrative of life, few are prepared to follow the logic of an accidental cosmos all the way.
JEHOVAH is both a singular person and a singular God
Genesis ch.6:6ASV"Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am JEHOVAH, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with great judgments:
I (first person SINGULAR) He is both the supreme person and the supreme God.
Exodus ch.18:11ASV"Now I know that Jehovah is greater than all gods; yea, in the thing wherein they dealt proudly against them."
Deuteronomy ch.3:24ASV"O Lord JEHOVAH, THOU hast begun to show thy servant THY greatness, and THY strong hand: for what god is there in heaven or in earth, that can do according to THY works, and according to THY mighty acts?"
He is always address in singular personal pronouns for a reason
Deuteronomy ch.6:10ASV"And it shall be, when JEHOVAH thy God shall bring thee into the land which HE sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee, great and goodly cities, which thou buildest not,"
1Samuel ch.12:17ASV"Is it not wheat harvest to-day? I will call unto JEHOVAH, that HE may send thunder and rain; and ye shall know and see that your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of JEHOVAH, in asking you a king."
2Samuel ch.7:22ASV"Wherefore THOU art great, O JEHOVAH God: for there is none like THEE, neither is there any God besides THEE, according to all that we have heard with our ears."
JEHOVAH is both the greatest person and the greatest God.
1Chronicles ch.16:25ASV"For great is JEHOVAH, and greatly to be praised: He also is to be feared above all gods."
Psalms ch 83:18ASV"That they may know that [d]THOU ALONE, whose name is JEHOVAH,
Art the Most High over all the earth."
The name JEHOVAH is not Just another name as some disrespectfully claim it is the only name deservedly and exclusively borne by the greatest person in all of reality and is the only name ever described as Holy in all of scripture. It occurs more frequently in the bible than the the next five most common names/titles combined.
JEHOVAH Has the greatest zeal for his name.
Malachi ch.1:11ASV "For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name [j]shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place [k]incense [l]shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name [m]shall be great among the Gentiles, saith JEHOVAH of hosts."
But who is this Greatest person who worthily bears this hallowed and greatest of names.
Luke ch.1:32ASV"He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High: and the LORD God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: "
The God and Father of Jesus Christ is the most high GOD. Logically if there are two other people who are as great as the God and Father of Jesus he is simply not the most high. The God And Father of Jesus is the lone owner of the sacred name,the Lord JEHOVAH.
On logic and exegesis.
The thing about language ,or to be more specific the meaning intended by its use, is that it is context driven. Every single word has a semantic range, also words can be used literally or figuratively. If we want to extract the logos (the speaker/writer's intent) from speech or script we must carefully factor in the context of said writer/speaker's words. This would certainly be the case with the pursuit of an accurate understanding of the Holy Bible. The logos that we seek to apprehend from the sacred text is JEHOVAH'S ,The divine author. We believe the text to be a single work from a single mind meant to communicate a single intelligible Logos.
Acts ch.17:11NIV" Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true."
The Bereans approach to determining sacred truth is recommended to us by JEHOVAH Through the apostle Paul. The inspired scriptures are to be viewed as the sole touchstone for separating truth from error. There is no mention of any comparison with religious oral tradition although there were certainly voluminous amounts of same available. Another consideration is logic and commonsense. Wisdom is a cardinal attribute of JEHOVAH.
Romans ch.16:27GWT"God alone is wise. Glory belongs to him through Jesus Christ forever! Amen"
JEHOVAH'S Wisdom is flawless and so we rightly expect his communications to be characterized by transcendent Wisdom. Logic is a key component of wisdom. Any communication that invokes or requires the embrace of logical contradictions can be dismissed out of hand as originating from JEHOVAH. So in addition to paying careful attention to the immediate and the overall context of the scriptures, we also reject interpretations that require the embrace of logical fallacy/contradiction. Certainly one way that a conclusion would be shown to be illogical is if said conclusion failed on its own terms.
For instance: John ch.1:1NIV"1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was WITH (the) God, and the Word was God."
Some conclude that the word is as much God as the God he is with. On just what basis is difficult to know . The God he was with was a distinct God and not merely a distinct person so he would himself need to be a distinct God to have a chance of being as divine as the distinct God he was with if this God is the Father and the Son is a distinct God in the same sense that the Father is a distinct God, well then we have bi-theism. And yet those who invoke this conclusion claim to have an ironclad commitment to monotheism.
Strong's 2316 on Theos"the supreme Divinity, God, godly.
Of uncertain affinity; a deity, especially (with ho) the supreme Divinity; figuratively, a magistrate; by Hebraism, very -- X exceeding, God, god(-ly, -ward)".
Note the semantic range of Theos with the definite article it likely refers to the supreme divinity it is therefore interesting that only the The God and Father of Jesus is ever referred to by the unqualified ho Theos ( not a possessive) without the definite article it may refer to a divinely appointed ruler i.e those made to resemble the supreme God at his pleasure. Thus Father and Son are not merely distinct persons but distinct Gods the God that Logos was with is the supreme divinity thus by definition he has NO Equals
Supreme as defined by Merriam Webster :2)greatest in degree, quality, or intensity 1): highest in rank or authority
the supreme commander
especially : in a position of unquestioned authority, dominance, or influence"
So Logically no other person or God is equal in any positive sense to the God and Father of Jesus i.e the Lord JEHOVAH.
Acts ch.3:13KJV"The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob(i.e JEHOVAH), the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let him go. "
Friday, 4 August 2023
Materialism's lack of self awareness?
Self-Referential Absurdity in a Theory of Consciousness.
Would you have a rational discussion with a zombie? Materialists are forced into the position of discussing philosophy and science with the walking dead, since under their terms we are all that. Unless rationality is a mindful concept — unless we are more than atoms in motion — that’s the logical result of denying mind and intelligence.
To deny that we are mindful creatures, the materialist also has to deny the existence of any realm of abstract concepts that a mind can access. Yet materialism itself is an abstract concept.
This seems intuitively obvious, but it’s amazing how often materialists ignore the self-refuting nature of their assumptions. Nancy Pearcey wrote about this, noting ways in which materialist claims commit the self-referential absurdity: “Applied to itself, the theory commits suicide.”
An example is a theory of consciousness from Ezequiel Morsella, a psychology professor at San Francisco State University. Morsella relegates consciousness to a minor, passive role as an interpreter of sensory data rather than a free agent of choice and deliberate thought.
“The interpreter presents the information but is not the one making any arguments or acting upon the knowledge that is shared,” Morsella said. “Similarly, the information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious processes, nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man, and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.”
So Did Morsella Think About This?
Here’s how you uncover a self-referential fallacy: you apply the claim to itself to see if it short circuits. Morsella made an argument, but said consciousness doesn’t make arguments. He said consciousness can’t create information, but he attempted to create information from his own theory. He said we don’t really think, but told his readers “you think.”
Consciousness, per Morsella’s theory, is more reflexive and less purposeful than conventional wisdom would dictate. Because the human mind experiences its own consciousness as sifting through urges, thoughts, feelings and physical actions, people understand their consciousness to be in control of these myriad impulses. But in reality, Morsella argues, consciousness does the same simple task over and over, giving the impression that it is doing more than it actually is.
“We have long thought consciousness solved problems and had many moving parts, but it’s much more basic and static,” Morsella said. “This theory is very counterintuitive. It goes against our everyday way of thinking.”
Some ideas are counterintuitive because they are wrong. Self-referential fallacies permeate these comments like white on rice. If “conventional wisdom” is not mindful, it is not wise — nor is Morsella’s alternative. If the human mind experiences its own consciousness but has no control, did Morsella have control when he chose to write this statement? If consciousness can’t think, why does he keep referring to thinking? And what is “reality” if our minds are incapable of apprehending such a concept?
The theory, which took Morsella and his team more than 10 years to develop, can be difficult to accept at first, he said.
So did he think about his theory for all those years? Did he choose to “develop” it? Does he want our minds to “accept” it? We’re watching a poor professor’s theory implode. To take him seriously, we would have to treat him as a zombie going through motions and mouthing syllables. Nobody’s home.
Here Comes Evolution
We see next that he builds his ideas on the theory of evolution.
The study of consciousness is complicated, Morsella added, because of the inherent difficulty of applying the conscious mind to study itself.
“For the vast majority of human history, we were hunting and gathering and had more pressing concerns that required rapidly executed voluntary actions,” Morsella said. “Consciousness seems to have evolved for these types of actions rather than to understand itself.”
In other words, Morsella’s theory is just a new way of hunting and gathering to pass on his genes. It has no more significance than that. It’s not about making rational arguments in abstract realms of logic and understanding. Pearcey showed the suicidal inevitability of so-called “evolutionary epistemology.”
By contrast, intelligent design is not self-refuting. If we truly are rational creatures with consciousness and free will, then we can talk about those concepts in a meaningful way. Our own awareness of our rationality and choice makes it reasonable to assume that our fellow humans experience consciousness like we do. When we bounce ideas off them, and analyze arguments, we can judge which are true or false by weighing their logical coherence or comparing their correspondence with reality.
Animals have ways of “making sense” of the world through their inputs and brains, as researchers at the University of Buffalo describe. But this does not mean that humans are just “more of the same” in terms of information processing. Four times the news item uses the word “understand” or “understanding” how animals do it. Understanding is superfluous to survival. For a bird, it is sufficient to know that a sound signifies a mate or a threat. Humans share that ability, but are exceptional in caring how or why sounds represent things.
Recalling Euler’s Identity
Consider this on Live Science about Euler’s Identity, named for Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (pictured above) and called “The most beautiful equation in mathematics.” The simplicity of this relationship, eiπ + 1 = 0, is indeed profound and beautiful. It brings together five mathematical entities in a purely abstract way, one of them being the “imaginary” number i. It is purely conceptual, the result of a long process of logical reasoning, using theorems of calculus. Yet its truth can be checked out against the real world by seeing how it works in applications as diverse as wave mechanics, half-lives, and compound interest.
One must also presuppose consciousness and free will to determine if a statement commits the self-referential fallacy. To prove this, I leave you with a choice to work the following logical exercise. You can quit now, or proceed. (Is that choice yours, or is your hunter-gatherer instinct controlling you?) If you choose to continue, look at any or all of the following statements and decide if they are self-refuting by posing a question referring back to the claim. We’ll do the first three as examples. Have fun!
Everything is relative. (Is that absolutely true?)
Question everything. (Should we question the advice to question everything?)
Only particles and forces exist. (Is that statement made of particles and forces?)
All is illusion.
Name-callers are idiots.
People are really zombies.
It’s impossible to know anything.
Only statements derived empirically are valid.
Everything evolves.
Morality is just an evolutionary strategy.
Tolerate everyone.
Co-exist.
“They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.” (Richard Dawkins)
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly… [including the idea that] human free will is nonexistent… Free will is a disastrous and mean social myth.” (William Provine).
Darwinism is like “a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.” (Daniel Dennett)
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” (Theodosius Dobzhansky)
“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Charles Darwin)
We must take control of our own evolution.
By the way, Leonhard Euler was known to work out complex derivations in his head while blind. Of what possible use was this ability for survival?
How life's big bang continues to complicate the Darwinian narrative.
Fossil Friday: Fossil Tunicate Confirms Cambrian Explosion
The so-called Cambrian Explosion is an iconic event in the history of life about 520 million years ago, marked the sudden appearance of more than 20 bilaterian animal phyla with all their different body plans. However, body plans are not restricted to the phylum level. For example within the phylum Chordata we find three different subphyla (i.e., lancelets, tunicates, and vertebrates) with very different body plans and different life cycles. All three subphyla appear abruptly and together in the Lower Cambrian Stage 3, about 518 milion years ago, including the oldest putative tunicates such as Shankouclava anningense from the famous Maotianshan shales in South China (Shu et al. 2001, Chen et al. 2003).
Even within tunicates we find quite different body plans such as free living salps and larvaceans as well as sessile sea grapes and sea squirts. Of course, this raises the interesting question of the origin and antiquity of these tunicate body plans, especially because tunicates are nowadays considered to be the closest relatives of vertebrates. Unfortunately, tunicates are generally very rare in the fossil record and previously only one early tunicate showed anatomical details with soft-tissue preservation.
Confirming Life’s Big Bang
Recently, a new study was published by Nanglu et al. (2023) about a fossil tunicate from the mid-Cambrian Marjum Formation of Utah, which is dated to an age of about 500 million years. The remarkably well-preserved animal was named Megasiphon thylakos and documents an early biphasic life cycle, with a planktonic larva and a sessile epibenthic adult. The authors consider that Megasiphon could even be a modern crown group tunicate, which would place the basal divergence into free living and sessile tunicates “50 million years earlier than currently estimated based on molecular clocks.” Of course, the phylogenetic analysis was, as all too often is the case, not conclusive and could not decide between two alternative scenarios. But even if Megasiphon were to fall only within the stem group of all tunicates, the authors emphasize that it clearly “demonstrates that fundamental components of the modern tunicate body plan were already established shortly after the Cambrian Explosion.” In commentary for the journal Science, Heidt (2023) even claims that the discovery could “push back origins of vertebrates, including humans,” which would agree with equally ancient fishlike animals such as Metaspriggina.
Almost on a monthly basis new fossil evidence corroborates the abruptness of the Cambrian Explosion as a genuine “Big Bang” of life and a fatal problem for Darwinian evolution. Far from solving the enigma of the Cambrian Explosion and other such abrupt events in the history of life, our exponentially growing knowledge of the fossil record instead makes the problems bigger and bigger, which clearly shows that they are not based on mere artifacts of preservation or sampling bias.
References
Heidt A 2023. Half-billion-year-old sea squirt could push back origins of vertebrates, including humans. Science 381(6653). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adj5955
Nanglu K, Lerosey-Aubril R, Weever JC & Ortega-Hernández J 2023. A mid-Cambrian tunicate and the deep origin of the ascidiacean body plan. Nature Communications 14:3832, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39012-4
Shu D-G, Chen L, Han J & Zhang X-L 2001. An early Cambrian tunicate from China. Nature 411(6836), 472–473. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35078069
Chen J-Y, Huang D-Y, Peng Q-Q, Chi H-M, Wang X-Q & Feng M 2003. The first tunicate from the early Cambrian of South China. PNAS 100(14), 8314–8318. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas
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