Friday, 20 October 2023
Lee Cronin is the Sphinx?
I’m Baffled by Lee Cronin, and I’m Not Alone
As Dr. James Tour’s sixty-day challenge to ten top origin-of-life scientists draws to a close this coming Monday, I wonder what brilliant comments will appear in response to the question, “How did life evolve from non-life?” The challenge, as David Klinghoffer summarized: “The deal is, if any of them can answer just one of five questions, relevant to solving the mystery of the origin of life, Professor Tour promises to shut up about the OOL and take down all his public material on the subject.” Professor Lee Cronin is one of the ten. He said this the other day on X:
If the origin of life is the origin of evolution & nothing comes before life then we are indeed stuck. I don’t think we need to be. Let’s shed the dogma, ego, & closed minds & ask the question clearly. How do we detect the onset of evolution BEFORE biology?
5:15 PM · Oct 16, 2023
Not a Mind Reader
I am curious what if anything Cronin and the other nine will offer in response to Dr. Tour. Perhaps they have already cracked the challenge behind the scenes and Tour will be obliged on Monday to admit defeat. But when I tried to interpret Cronin’s comment, I struggled. I’m no expert on OOL myself. Not a mind reader, either. Perhaps Dr. Cronin intended his remark in response to interlocutors other than Tour — like the scientists who are currently taking issue with his new paper with Sara Walker in Nature. As Philip Ball comments in Chemistry World:
The paper claims that an idea called assembly theory (AT) ‘explains selection and evolution’. This has drawn a clamour of responses from scientists on social media – many of them offended, some baffled — and prompted unusually vigorous debate in the online ‘comments’ section of the Nature site. Evolutionary biologists in particular have expressed outrage — denouncing the paper as nonsense, and even a Trojan horse for creationism.
It’s not hard to see why. From the first sentence of the abstract, the paper seems to imply that the authors have cracked a foundational problem for biology: ‘Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics.’ No we haven’t, biologists respond – we have never found the slightest contradiction between them, and to suggest otherwise opens the door to intelligent design
Apparently, being “baffled” puts me in good company. Which brings us back to Cronin’s recent tweet.
Taking the Bait
Do you know those prank mirror illusions where some object seems to just be sitting in a dish ready to be picked up, but you reach for it and there’s nothing there? Trying to find the promised clarity in his tweet was like reaching for the bait and finding nothing.
Our physicist colleague Brian Miller helped rephrase Cronin’s argument: “Imagining life originating spontaneously and then evolving seems implausible. Instead, long before a cell formed that could reproduce, much simpler chemical mixtures copied themselves, which allowed them to evolve into a cell.” Reducing that to a syllogism (a logical structure), Cronin is saying, “All life undergoes change, and some change is nonbiological, so life and its origin can be nonbiological too.” Apparently, finding evidence of nonbiological chemical change can help explain the OOL.
But his logic seems faulty, particularly considering Tour’s challenge.
Let’s say I were to ask you, “I wonder, how did the first music soundtrack originate?” Please don’t respond, “Your ego and your lack of clarity are a little too much. It’s key to remember that musical notes predate movies. Simple sets of notes formed spontaneously and then randomly changed the notes into a music soundtrack. Let me tell you about early musical notes.” Cronin’s reasoning follows the same logical structure and is just as confusing.
Shall We Play Chess?
Another oddity about his tweet strikes me: it doesn’t seem very sporting to respond to a challenge (whether from Tour or other scientists) by altering it. If your friend says, “Care for a game of chess?” you can’t very well respond, “Chess is my favorite, and I always win. If you wouldn’t mind, though, I think we should switch out the pieces for a deck of cards and use a cribbage board.” Tour detailed five challenge questions, and Cronin’s reformulation looks as similar to Tour’s questions as cribbage is to chess. Cronin assumes that simple chemical mixtures capable of reproduction formed spontaneously, and they then evolved into modern cells. The problem is that the formation of amino acids into protein chains or nucleotides into RNA or DNA are the very problems that Tour challenged experts to explain.
The unsound logic, ad hominem, and goalpost swapping in Cronin’s tweet are hardly what one should expect from a professor. But there are a few days left, and he can always follow up with a relevant chemical equation in another tweet.
Oh, by the way, Cronin has also tweeted this, back in 2021:
Origin of life research is a scam.
5:09 PM · Oct 28, 2021
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That, from an OOL researcher? Baffling indeed. Well, Dr. Tour is waiting for illumination. Evidently so are a lot of other people.
Thursday, 19 October 2023
On what ID is and is not.
Words for Wednesday! Disentangling ID from Creationism
There are so many words out there in need of definitions! Yesterday on Stephen Meyer’s Facebook page we launched the new “Terminology Tuesday” feature, with a quick read about just what we mean by intelligent design, and what we DON’T mean. We don’t mean creationism.
Yes, we’ve noticed that many folks are unsure how “intelligent design” and “creationism” differ. Indeed, misunderstanding (willful or otherwise) of what we mean is rampant in the comments section. So on this extra-wordy Wednesday we’ll tackle both terms together.
Intelligent design (“ID”) is the theory, based on the scientific method and empirical evidence, that the best explanation for the “apparent design” in the universe, which is acknowledged by most scientists, is actual design by an intelligent agent.
Creationism is the belief, typically based on religious scripture and tradition, that the universe has been designed and created by a divine agent.
Many Flavors to Choose From
Intelligent design proponents and creationists come in many flavors. Creationists certainly believe that the creator is intelligent. They might also believe that the creation account in the book of Genesis should be interpreted as six 24-hour days, and that the earth is just several thousand years old. But some creationists interpret the Genesis account differently, and believe that the earth and universe are very old. Others start with different religious traditions altogether. Many creationists look for scientific data that supports their religious tradition.
Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, do not necessarily subscribe to any particular view of who or what the designing intelligence is. In other words, creationism starts with the identity of the designer and works downward to the creation, while intelligent design theory starts with empirical evidence and does not, from this scientific evidence, ascribe an identity to the designing mind.
Do creationists believe that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent? Yes!
Do intelligent design theorists believe that the intelligent agent was the creator described in the Hebrew Bible? Some do. Others don’t.
One reason the distinction is important is that many materialists (those who believe that everything about the universe is explicable in purely material terms, apart from a mind) ridicule creationism and lump ID in with it as if the two are equivalent. Whatever you believe, it’s important to recognize that creationism and ID are not the same thing. Creationism starts with the belief in a designer and interprets data accordingly, while ID starts with scientific evidence and infers the best possible explanation for that evidence.
Tuesday, 17 October 2023
Man is not Just another ape?
When a Child and a Chimp Were Raised Together
A recent item on X pointed to a story many of us hadn’t heard before about a couple’s effort to raise their infant son with a baby chimpanzee. Before you interrupt to offer condemnation, let me start by saying that the (true) story took place in the early 1930s when materialism seemed new and exciting to many. If anyone tried that in 2023, Child Protective Services and the SPCA would promptly be called.
Into the Time Capsule
But let’s climb into the time capsule (in our imaginations) and go back to 1931, when this kind of thing was still New and Cool.
When their son Donald Kellogg was ten months old, psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg decided to raise him alongside a baby female chimpanzee (7 months), Gua, in their temporary home in Florida, near a primate research center. Winthrop Kellogg had written about the possibilities of humanizing the ape and the birth of a son was his chance. He would treat the two infants in the exact same way.
was a confident time for projects like humanizing a baby chimp. But after nine months, the Kelloggs had to cancel the experiment. What happened? Different stories are told: Here’s one from Reuters in 1951:
The experiment was described by Sir Cyril Burt, former professor of psychology at London University in an article for The Family Doctor, the British Medical Association magazine. Raised by the professor and his wife, “Gua was treated, not as an animal pet, but as a member of the family, dressed exactly like the child, nursed and trained in the same way, rewarded, scolded or punished in the same way,” the article said. But early in the second year the child began to use words and phrases quite spontaneously, and to imitate the actions of its elders, in a way the animal never could manage.
“LITTLE ‘CHIMP’ PROVES SMARTER THAN HUMAN BABY AFTER 1 YEAR”. THE MONTREAL GAZETTE. REUTERS. JULY 27, 1954
A More Nuanced Story
So there was a natural divergence of abilities. But a more nuanced story emerged later:
Rachel Nuwer writes at Smithsonian Magazine:
It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua’s chimp noises. “In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study,” the authors write.
RACHEL NUWER, “THIS GUY SIMULTANEOUSLY RAISED A CHIMP AND A BABY IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN,SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, JULY 28, 2014
Well, now that the journal authors mention it, if a child is raised with a chimpanzee who is treated as if she were another child, that would interrupt his development. Donald was supposed to be learning to speak from parents, sibs, and playmates during critical formative years, not from an ape. Ultimately, the chimpanzee would never go on to talk but the boy could end up with delayed speech.
The parents did get a study and a book out of it though, published in 1933:
The overall study, called The Ape and the Child, is of more historical than scientific interest. Gua developed, physically, a great deal faster than Donald did. Gua imitated adult behaviors, wearing shoes, opening doors using the door handle, and feeding herself with a glass and a spoon. The chimp also outperformed the human when it came to physical tests.
ESTHER INGLIS-ARKELL, “THE 1931 EXPERIMENT THAT PAIRED A NEWBORN CHIMP WITH A NEWBORN BABY,” GIZMODO, DECEMBER 5, 2013
In the end, the Kelloggs returned to Indiana. Gua was returned to the primate center where she died a year later of pneumonia. And several authors have felt it worth mentioning that Donald Kellogg killed himself in 1973, aged just 43.
Not a Material Thing
Looking at the story from nearly a century’s distance, it’s hard to see what the experiment really demonstrated that could not have been observed by studying baby humans and baby chimps separately: Chimpanzees develop faster physically but then reach an intellectual plateau, relative to children, from which they never advance. Though there have been various attempts, no one has ever been able to give chimpanzees human minds — the real goal all along, surely — because the human mind is not a material thing. We cannot go around dispensing what we simply do not control.
And we can all be grateful for experimentation ethics committees today. At least it’s an effort.
Ps. The chimp's mind is not material either but like the human mind a physical substrate is absolutely necessary to its existence.
The craftsman is known by his craftsmanship.
Roman's Ch.1:20NIV"since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
If any wrong that originated within JEHOVAH'S the creation could not be addressed by what is right with JEHOVAH'S Creation would that not constitute a fail for JEHOVAH as creator?
The Logos must be a member of the creation to serve as a rebuttal to the enemy's slander.
1Corinthians ch.15:21NIV"For since death came through a MAN(not Godman), the resurrection of the dead comes also through a MAN(not Godman)"
Man's failure was not the fault of man's maker. As demonstrated by the righteousness of the second Adam.
An interlude VIII
The false gods can bring nothing but war. It's past time to to turn to the Lord JEHOVAH For the peace we all seek.
Monday, 16 October 2023
Sunday, 15 October 2023
JEHOVAH God offers the oppressed their only real hope.
"Like Saturn, the revolution eats its children. " Jacques Mallet Du Pan
How many times have we seen it? After years of struggle the oppressed find that they have merely exchanged one tyrant for another. Or worse still one tyrant for several tyrants.
Daniel ch.11:14 NLT"At that time there will be a general uprising against the king of the south. Violent men among your own people will join them in fulfillment of this vision, but they will not succeed."
Satan has successfully used false teachers to deceive many into thinking that the God of Abraham is backing some of the religiopolitical factions of the present age in their struggle for power.
The only reason anyone could possibly fall for such deception is that they have not come to an accurate understanding of character and purpose of the Lord JEHOVAH.
Daniel Ch.11:32NLT"He will flatter and win over those who have violated the covenant. But the people who know their God will be strong and will resist him."
JEHOVAH'S Purpose does not include ANY of the competing religiopolitical Faction of the present global civilisation.
Daniel ch.2:44NIV"“In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush ALL those kingdoms (Whether they claim the patronage of the God of Abraham or not) and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. "
At that time those who have not allowed themselves to be manipulated by clever rhetoric or lying propaganda. But instead have come to be numbered among that peaceful global brotherhood of those in covenant with the Lord JEHOVAH. Will finally find relief from this failed experiment in human Government.
Saturday, 14 October 2023
Courageously speak the undeniable truth.
Live Not by Lies: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Intelligent Design
When one person stands up to lies or oppression, others can become emboldened to do the same. On a classic ID the Future episode, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses his article about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Solzhenitsyn penned the short essay “Live Not by Lies” in 1974, just before he was arrested and exiled from Russia. It was his advice, or strategy, for living under totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn’s basic advice is simply not to participate with lies, and to refuse to speak what one does not believe. It’s unnervingly relevant counsel to us in America today, where “cancel culture” and other silencing tactics, long foreshadowed in the intelligent design debate, are spreading to the broader culture. As Egnor relates, sometimes it takes a single person to stand firm before others will do the same. “There are orders of magnitude more of us than of them,” Egnor says. “That is people who feel as we do: who support academic freedom, who support human dignity, who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion…the only way they control us, the only way they oppress us, is with our cooperation.” Download the podcast or listen to it Here.
The neck of plesiosaur vs. Darwinism.
Fossil Friday: Rapid Elongation of Plesiosaur Necks Points to Intelligent Design
Apart from ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs likely represent the best-known group of Mesozoic marine reptiles. This may partly be related to the fact that they were discussed as potential identification for the Loch Ness monster by cryptozoologists, which of course is total nonsense. The distinctive body plan of plesiosaurs has been compared to a hybrid of a sea snake with a sea turtle. Studies suggest that they had a unique mode of swimming, with two pairs of flippers (Muscutt et al. 2017), but it has been a matter of considerable debate and speculation “whether both flipper pairs were moved up and down in synchrony or in some sort of alternating or asymmetrical gait” (Naish 2017). The most striking trait of plesiosaurs is their extremely elongated neck, which may have been very useful for catching fish. This elongated neck is already present in the older pachypleurosaurs, nothosaurs, and pistosaurs, which represent the assumed stem group from which plesiosaurs are thought to have evolved. They all belong to the 15 groups of marine reptiles that abruptly appeared in the Early Triassic after the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period (Bechly 2023).
Just Allometric Growth?
A new study by Liu et al. (2023), recently published in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution, found that the neck length of plesiosaur-related pachypleurosaurs increased dramatically and doubled in length within only 5 million years in the Early Triassic (Freedman 2023). At first glance, it may seem that such an elongation of the neck is just allometric growth and therefore not out of the reach of unguided Darwinian mechanisms, but not so fast: indeed the neck of these marine reptiles was not just growing in length, as in giraffes which retain the normal number of vertebrae, but by an extreme multiplication of neck (cervical) vertebrae to as many as 72. This is a very unusual phenomenon and not easy to achieve for mutations without fatal consequences for the organism.
A study on abnormal numbers of cervical vertebrae in humans by Varela-Lasheras et al. (2011) showed that such deviations are generally deleterious. It might be objected that this is only true in mammals, where the number of cervical vertebrae is strictly constrained to seven (the only exceptions are sloths, lorises, and pottos, where homeotic mutations were responsible; Galis 1999, Böhmer et al. 2018, Galis et al. 2021), but maybe less so in reptiles, where the number of cervical vertebrae is less conserved. However, even in lizards deviations from the usual number of eight cervical vertebrae are extremely rare compared to the considerable individual variability for many other osteological traits (Barbadillo & Barahona 1994). Likewise, the usual number of nine cervical vertebrae in crocodilians was not broken even in the extinct, highly aberrant giant caiman Purussaurus (Scheyer et al. 2019). Obviously, the number of cervical vertebrae is highly conserved in reptiles as well and usually numbers around seven to nine.
Hard to Reconcile with Darwinian Evolution
Consequently, the breaking of the conserved number of cervical vertebrae is hard to reconcile with an unguided evolutionary mechanism, and better explained by intelligent design, which could coordinate changes and avoid deleterious consequences. Also, the very fast growth rate of the neck length exceeds the limitations of population genetics for the accumulation of mutations in a population of marine reptiles within the available window of time of less than 5 million years, which is about the average longevity of a single vertebrate species. This rather suggests coordinated non-random adaptive macromutations as a better explanation, which is my preferred model of the ID mechanism.
What is the evolutionary explanation suggested by the authors of the new study? They simply postulate an extremely rapid rate of change in the time of crisis after the end-Permian mass extinction (Freedman 2023), as if the opening of new niches by itself could create the genetic information required for biological novelty to emerge.
References
Barbadillo LJ & Barahona F 1994. The number of cervical vertebrae in lacertid lizards: some unusual cases. Herpetological Journal 4, 1666. https://www.thebhs.org/publications/the-herpetological-journal/volume-4-number-4-october-1994/1382-08-the-number-of-cervical-vertebrae-in-lacertid-lizards-some-unusual-cases
Bechly G 2023. Fossil Friday: The Triassic Explosion of Marine Reptiles. Evolution News March 31, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/03/fossil-friday-the-triassic-explosion-of-marine-reptiles/
Böhmer C; Amson E; Arnold P; van Heteren AH; Nyakatura JA 2018. Homeotic transformations reflect departure from the mammalian ‘rule of seven’ cervical vertebrae in sloths: inferences on the Hox code and morphological modularity of the mammalian neck. BMC Evolutionary Biology 18(1): 84, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1202-5
Freedman E 2023. Ancient sea monsters grew their long necks super fast after Great Dying by adding more vertebrae. LiveScience September 11, 2023. https://www.livescience.com/animals/reptiles/ancient-sea-monsters-grew-their-long-necks-super-fast-after-great-dying-by-adding-more-vertebrae
Galis F 1999. Why do almost all mammals have seven cervical vertebrae? Developmental constraints, Hox genes, and cancer. Journal of Experimental Zoology 285(1), 19–26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1097-010x(19990415)285:1<19::aid-jez3>3.0.co;2-z
Galis F, Van Dooren TJM & van der Geer AAE 2022. Breaking the constraint on the number of cervical vertebrae in mammals: On homeotic transformations in lorises and pottos. Evolution & Development 24(6), 196–210. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ede.12424
Liu Q-L, Cheng L, Stubbs TL, Moon BC, Benton MJ, Yan C-B & Tian L 2023. Rapid neck elongation in Sauropterygia (Reptilia: Diapsida) revealed by a new basal pachypleurosaur from the Lower Triassic of China. BMC Ecology and Evolution 23: 44, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-023-02150-w
Muscutt LE, Dyke G, Weymouth GD, Naish D, Palmer C & Ganapathisubramani B 2017. The four-flipper swimming method of plesiosaurs enabled efficient and effective locomotion. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284(1861): 20170951, 1–8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0951
Naish D 2017. The Unique and Efficient 4-Flipper Locomotion of Plesiosaurs. Scientific American August 30, 2017. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/the-unique-and-efficient-4-flipper-locomotion-of-plesiosaurs/
Scheyer TM, Hutchinson JR, Strauss O, Delfino M, Carrillo-Briceño JD, Sánchez R & Sánchez-Villagra MR 2019. Giant extinct caiman breaks constraint on the axial skeleton of extant crocodylians. eLife 8: e49972, 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.49972
University of Bristol 2023. Plesiosaurs doubled their neck-length by gaining new vertebrae. Press release by the University of Bristol September 4, 2023. https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2023/september/plesiosaur-necks.html
Varela-Lasheras I, Bakker AJ, van der Mije SD, Metz JAJ, van Alphen J & Galis F 2011. Breaking evolutionary and pleiotropic constraints in mammals: On sloths, manatees and homeotic mutations. EvoDevo 2:11, 1–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/2041-9139-2-11
Friday, 13 October 2023
But by JEHOVAH'S Spirit!
Zechariah Ch.4:6ASV"Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of JEHOVAH unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith JEHOVAH of hosts. "
None of the struggles among the contending religiopolitical factions of this present age have anything to do with anybody's freedom.
Words like liberty and Justice are being cleverly weaponised to exploit collective insecurities in service of the acquisition of power.
It's a dangerous game. And those who play this game keep forgetting history's lessons re:the idolising of hard power.
Politics can only bring death and destruction. The last thing humanity needs is more politics. Only JEHOVAH'S Spirit can (as his loyalists can testify) bring peace and life ( even resurrecting the dead).
Interrogating yet another Darwinian Just so story.
Chinks in the Chicxulub Story
Evolutionists have a strange theory of causation. Disasters drive living things to emerge and arise, like Phoenix out of the flames, into greater levels of complexity and beauty. What in the blazes of a conflagration awards regenerative power to survivors?
We have roses, petunias, and orchids, we are told, because a big rock slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago. We also have delicate butterflies and shrews, but none of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, or ichthyosaurs. Dinosaurs, the fossil record shows, ranged in size from the mighty T. rex and long-necked sauropods down to species the size of chickens. They lived in all parts of the world, even in the Arctic. Some may have been warm blooded. Though they had survived on a dynamic planet for 135 million years, they all perished because of one space rock that landed in the Yucatan, leaving the Chicxulub Crater as a scar.
The event brought the Cretaceous Period to a close and launched the Paleogene, a boundary designated K-Pg. Not a single dinosaur survived, but strangely, the asteroid didn’t discriminate against all the reptiles, because lizards, snakes, and crocodiles are still with us. Delicate butterflies, worms, frogs, flowering plants, tweety birds, and small mammals made it through. All these groups didn’t just survive, we are told, but they catapulted upward into evolutionary glory. Does something sound strange about this scenario? It gets stranger still. Consider flowering plants. From Jamie Thompson at The Conversation:
However, it’s not clear how they did it. Angiosperms, so fragile compared with dinosaurs, cannot fly or run to escape harsh conditions. They rely on sunlight for their existence, which was blotted out.
Fossils in different regions tell different versions of events. It is clear there was high angiosperm turnover (species loss and resurgence) in the Amazon when the asteroid hit, and a decline in plant-eating insects in North America which suggests a loss of food plants. But other regions, such as Patagonia, show no pattern.
Mammals, too, were “not as boring” as thought before the asteroid hit, according to the Field Museum in Chicago. They were already specialized in various groups with distinct lifestyles. This overturns a long-assumed idea that only generic, unspecialized types would be able to diversify after an extinction event.
“The idea of the ‘survival of the unspecialized’ goes back to the 1800s, and the conventional wisdom is that generalized animals are the least likely to go extinct. But we found that the ones that survived more often only seemed generalized in hindsight, when compared with their later descendents. They were actually pretty advanced animals for their time, with new traits that might have helped them survive and provided evolutionary flexibility,” says Ken Angielczyk, the MacArthur Curator of Paleomammalogy at the Field Museum and senior author of the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Evolutionary flexibility: yes, Darwin storytellers are quite the contortionists. The curators of the museum call this finding “Survival of the Newest” — “having new and different traits can be the key to succeeding in the aftermath of a catastrophe.” Did this strategy give rise to giraffes, elephants, lions, monkeys, and people? Prior specialization was also true of birds, now that we know that birds resembling modern ducks and shorebirds were living before the K-Pg disaster.
Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
A common theme in the evolutionary accounts of mass extinctions is that geological disasters create opportunities for evolutionary progress. Disasters are healthy for evolution. They clear the land for new ecosystems. Dr. Thompson put it this way in news from the University of Bath:
After most of Earth’s species became extinct at K-Pg, angiosperms took the advantage, similar to the way in which mammals took over after the dinosaurs, and now pretty much all life on Earth depends on flowering plants ecologically.
Looking at the bright side, Peter Wilf at Penn State treats the asteroid like a welcoming maître d’:
The K-Pg extinction ushered in the rise and true dominance of flowering plants and helped establish the planet’s tropical rainforests that hold most of its biodiversity, Wilf said.
We might call this the Homesteader Theory. With the landscape cleared, survivors glanced into the Wild West, dreaming of a better life in the new frontier. Evolution became the world’s homesteading agency, subsidizing the pioneers with land grants, motivating survivors to start over with new resources, like governments distribute after a hurricane or pandemic. But can Evolution (capitalized as if a benevolent Blind Tinkerer) distribute relief checks in the form of beneficial mutations, hoping that organisms will naturally select them to rise out of poverty and enrich the environment? Is Evolution a wealthy benefactor handing a homeless man on the street some hefty cash, hoping he will improve himself and become an entrepreneur, hiring other homeless people, turning a blighted community into a prosperous town?
Whether or not the disaster happened as believed and held the Earth hostage in dark, wintery conditions for a hundred thousand years, we should question the power of natural selection to “take advantage” of a catastrophe and “usher in” a new paradise of diversification. If organisms were engineered to do that, one might believe it to be possible. But can this happen to blind products of blind processes?
If one stops personifying Evolution and organisms, such a vision sounds highly problematic. Disasters witnessed in recent history have had no such effect. The Tunguska explosion of 1908 flattened trees for 830 square miles in Siberia, but no new species evolved to enter the blast zone. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 blasted mutation-inducing radiation all through the surrounding countryside, but the same species are slowly returning, none of them with new evolutionary traits. Should we accept an excuse that Evolution has just not had enough time in these cases to show her power? (It’s a she, remember.)
Curiuoser and Curiouser
Another odd scenario in Darwinian storytelling appeared recently: an asteroid created agriculture! According to James Kennett at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant.” Modern humans had been laboriously hunting and gathering from their caves for over a hundred thousand years, but then, 12,800 years ago, boom! A Tunguska-like airburst committed climate change and made them consider planting seeds for the first time to plan for a sustainable future.
To be clear, Kennett said, agriculture eventually arose in several places on Earth in the Neolithic Era, but it arose first in the Levant (present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and parts of Turkey) initiated by the severe climate conditions that followed the impact.
Something clearly happened in the Middle East and perhaps other places around the world, but do disasters cause new bursts of evolution?
Taken together, the evidence presented by these papers, according to the scientists, “implies a novel causative link among extraterrestrial impacts, hemispheric environmental and climatic change, and transformative shifts in human societies and culture, including agricultural development.”
Were intelligent humans incapable of thinking about planting seeds long before an asteroid caused them to do so? Just asking.
Intelligent design theory, with its engineering model, incorporates foresight that can equip organisms for risk management. Evolution has no such ability. In Darwinism, organisms live for the moment. They have neither desire nor power to survive or improve. If they do survive, it is due to sheer dumb luck. Design advocates might agree that those left behind were lucky. But what happened next? Neo-Darwinism would require creatures to wait for a rare beneficial mutation, or an even rarer set of coordinated mutation. Only then could its blind, mindless, impersonal “selector” (by chance) use them to confer some advantage upon the survivors. No government subsidies will follow an asteroid. Only what already exists within the animal or plant, or reshapes their coded instructions, will equip them to thrive.
The neo-Darwinian might respond that previous naturally selected traits had endowed them with tools to survive and diversify. But again, to think consistently as a Darwinian, one must disavow all forms of personification. On Darwin’s view of the world, nobody was around to care. There was no providence, no intervention, no disaster relief program. Whether at K-Pg or long before, organisms could not foresee any need to keep evolving and progressing, nor could they care to. Natural selection could not plan ahead to give an organism a general-purpose survival toolkit with instructions, “In case of asteroid, pull handle.” At best, it could only tinker around with what works in the immediate moment.
The famous line from Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way,” presupposes an inner urge to keep on keeping on. What could be the source of this desire, this unction, this anointing that drives organismal perseverance in the wake of disaster? The interlocutor might retort, “If our shrew-like ancestors at K-Pg didn’t have it, we wouldn’t be here!” So it was caused by chance, then? Wasn’t science supposed to disavow chance explanations and seek necessary and sufficient causes for things? Applying my Mars Rover analogy once more, if Mars were populated with rovers, and some survived after an impact, would it be due to foresight by the designers, or because a few lucky ones had been previously hit with cosmic rays that improved their electronics? Could the proponent of that view say, “Electricity finds a way”?
In the University of Bath news, one of the co-authors ranks groups by adaptability.
Dr Ramírez-Barahona said: “Flowering plants have a remarkable ability to adapt: they use a variety of seed-dispersal and pollination mechanisms, some have duplicated their entire genomes and others have evolved new ways to photosynthesise.
“This ‘flower power’ is what makes them nature’s true survivors.”
A quirky tribute to hippies, perhaps, but it begs the question of why plants survived but dinosaurs did not. One scientific way to evaluate this claim would be to catalog the common traits among all the survivors that provided them with “a remarkable ability to adapt” compared to the losers. It’s hard to imagine all the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and ichthyosaurs from multiple habitats around the globe were so deprived of the special unction to function after one asteroid impact when they had presumably survived numerous other disasters over millions of years. Not even one breeding pair in Russia made it through alive?
Why One Disaster When You Can Have Two?
Not every scientist thinks Chicxulub alone was responsible. A diehard group points to another disaster — the Deccan Traps — as the cause of the dinosaurs’ demise. A team writing in Science Advances gives evidence that repeated “volcanic winters” prior to Chicxulub may have weakened the biosphere:
Independent evidence suggests the Deccan flood basalts erupted in high-flux pulses. Our data suggest that volcanic sulfur degassing from such activity could have caused repeated short-lived global drops in temperature, stressing the ecosystems long before the bolide impact delivered its final blow at the end of the Cretaceous.
Once again, though, whether disasters around K-Pg occurred alone or in combination, we must ask why so many delicate organisms made it through — butterflies, worms, frogs, and birds, as well as other reptile groups. The fact that birds could fly is not an answer. Pterosaurs flew; some were as small as birds. They existed on every continent. All the groups of flying insects survived. Not one dinosaur made it. No extinct reptile on sea, air, or land survived. Why?
Evolutionists have one standard retort: “Birds are dinosaurs!” Well, OK. But true birds were flying around long before Chicxulub. Given the variety of survivors, it seems that a breeding pair of ichthyosaurs in the deep sea could have made it through, or a small pterosaur colony somewhere, or an ankylosaur family in Africa. Given that all the primates derived from the small mammals at K-Pg, it seems a surviving dinosaur colony could have evolved to walk upright by now, like the humanoid reptiles in the cartoons.
Chicxulub was remarkably selective. It brought the Earth a gift of unprecedented evolutionary powers — storytelling powers, I mean.
Thursday, 12 October 2023
Wednesday, 11 October 2023
The Lord JEHOVAH is our Only Hope
Psalm ch.146:3KJV"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help."
Quit looking to politicians for hope (including those claiming the backing of God)
Let the Lord JEHOVAH Alone be your confidence.
File under "well said" C
"Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed— and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors— and they have no comforter."
Ecclesiastes ch.4:1 New International Version
The craftsmanship of a blind watchmaker?
“Astonishing” Clocks Found in Bacteria
Science news from England speaks of the “Astonishing complexity of bacterial circadian clocks.” The astonished scientists hale from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, an “independent, international centre of excellence in plant science, genetics and microbiology.” Why would researchers in the UK and in mainland Europe, predominantly Darwinians, react with astonishment? It was from pondering how evolution could give accurate timepieces to the simplest, most primitive forms of life.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the first to view bacteria with a simple microscope in 1683, was astonished to see life forms this small that were capable of motion and reproduction. William Paley in 1805 would have been astonished to be told that a watch on the heath simply emerged out of the ground. But today’s evolutionists take complexity for granted. Every tissue, organ, and system in biology can be accounted for by the omnipotent hand of natural selection. “Ho-hum” should be the reaction.
Bacteria make up more than 10% of all living things but until recently we had little realization that, as in humans, soil bacteria have internal clocks that synchronize their activities with the 24-hour cycles of day and night on Earth.
New research shows just how complex and sophisticated these bacterial circadian clocks are, clearing the way for an exciting new phase of study….
An international collaboration from Ludwig Maximillian University Munich (LMU Munich), The John Innes Centre, The Technical University of Denmark, and Leiden University, made the discovery by probing gene expression as evidence of clock activity in the widespread soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis.
“Pervasive” Clock Activity
The authors published a paper about this in Science Advances, announcing that the bacterial clock “evokes properties of complex, multicellular circadian systems.” The lead author, Francesca Sartor, noted that the clock activity is “pervasive” in this tiny microbe. It regulates multiple genes and behaviors.
Professor Antony Dodd from the John Innes Centre added, “It is astonishing that a unicellular organism with such a small genome has a circadian clock with some properties that evoke clocks in more complex organisms.”
Moreover, the researchers believe that clocks are widespread in bacteria. What happened to the notion of simple to complex evolution by gradual steps? Would a “blind watchmaker” start with a Rolex?
Professor Ákos T. Kovács, from Leiden University and Technical University of Denmark said… “it is amazing that the circadian clock in Bacillus subtilis — a bacterium with just four thousand genes — has a complex circadian system that is reminiscent of circadian clocks in complex organisms such as flies, mammals, and plants”.
“Just four thousand genes” sounds flippant. Try counting to four thousand out loud; it will take over two hours at two seconds per integer. As you count, think of a molecular machine, regulatory element, or purposeful role represented by every one of those digits. Each bacterial gene, moreover, is composed of 900 base pairs on average. That’s a lot of functional information packed into an organism a micron in diameter. Even so, evolutionary biologists did not expect to find circadian clocks in bacteria that match the functional sophistication of those in flies, mammals, and plants.
Are Genes Blind Watchmakers?
Audrey Mat, a marine biologist at the University of Vienna, says that genes are “The Great Clockmakers.” Writing in The Conversation, she gives the ho-hum response to the existence of timekeepers in living organisms. “The rotations of the Earth, Moon and Sun generate environmental cycles that have favoured the selection of biological clocks.” Under this reasoning, pressure waves favor the selection of ears. Photons favor the selection of eyes. Planet rotations and orbits favor the selection of clocks. Environments can favor things all they can, but complex sensors to detect and use them do not logically follow.
The circadian clock mechanism was first discovered in the fruit fly, also known as Drosophila, in the 1970s. It is based on feedback loops in the transcription and translation of several genes — gene A promotes the expression of gene B, which in turn inhibits the expression of gene A — creating an oscillation. During the day, light induces the diminution of specific factors of the loop via a photoreceptor called cryptochrome. Interestingly, the key factors in the mechanism essentially only comprise a few genes named period, timeless, clock and cycle. However, the fine-tuning and regulation of the clock is based on a complex molecular and neuronal network that ensures its timing and precision.
According to Mat, physical forces not only drive the emergence of devices to sense them; they also tune them and maintain them. They even adjust their responses to the changing seasons. How does Darwinism explain this? It doesn’t:
The circadian clock is not the only clock mechanism that exists in nature. Many biological processes are seasonal, such as the migration of a host of birds and insects, the reproduction and hibernation of many animal species and the flowering of plants. This seasonality is generally dictated by several factors, including by what is known as a circannual clock in the case of many species. The mechanism of this clock has not yet been determined.
Can Clocks Be Darwinized?
The paper in Science Advances makes no claim for Darwinism, either. The authors put evolutionary explanations in future tense:
Discovering mechanisms by which this memory of entrainment conditions during development of a circadian system occurs, in diverse systems, will inform on convergent and divergent evolutionary processes.
That’s all they say about evolution. Don’t hold your breath, though, for answers. Faced with complex functional timekeeping in the most primitive organisms, evolutionary biologists have their storytelling work cut out for them.
Circadian clocks are pervasive throughout nature, yet only recently has this adaptive regulatory program been described in nonphotosynthetic bacteria. Here, we describe an inherent complexity in the Bacillus subtilis circadian clock…. We report that circadian rhythms occur in wild isolates of this prokaryote, thus establishing them as a general property of this species, and that its circadian system responds to the environment in a complex fashion that is consistent with multicellular eukaryotic circadian systems.
The complex abilities of the bacterial species included entrainment, or the following of cues. Like catching a train, entrainment requires sensing environmental cues, called zeitgebers, and getting on board to go somewhere on purpose. This also presupposes a memory of the cues.
Starting Expectations and Startling Conclusions
One doesn’t always see “surprised” in a stodgy scientific paper, but the word stood out in this one:
Entrainment leads to the establishment of a stable phase relationship between the external (environmental) and the internal (circadian) time. Circadian systems use zeitgebers for entrainment, leading to a set of remarkable phenomena. We were surprised to observe that a prokaryote challenged with chronobiological protocols exhibits a variety of highly complex entrainment properties…. The presence of aftereffects (see table S1) suggests that information regarding zeitgeber exposure is stored, much like a memory.
They didn’t expect this. “It would be naïve to assume that a prokaryotic circadian clock shares these properties with multicellular organisms,” they initially thought, but the observations proved otherwise. Using red and blue light as zeitgebers, and watching responses with fluorescent cues, they were able to entrain the microbes and alter their behaviors by modifying the free-running period (FRP) of the light. The results demonstrated that “this organism shares many circadian characteristics occurring in eukaryotic organisms, some of which have yet to be documented in established clock models in cyanobacteria or fungi.”
Our observations also underscore that a combination of zeitgebers is used by B. subtilis, which is analogous to the situation for fungal, mammalian, and plant cells. The task of the circadian clock is to “read” the local environment and, for many systems, this means harvesting not just one but many cues. We suggest that by using both blue and red light and temperature as zeitgebers, B. subtilis can fine-tune clock-regulated processes to a greater range of situations.
For this to be true of tiny microbes that live in the soil is indeed surprising. How do they do it without eyes? The “light-sensing mechanisms used by B. subtilis for the purpose of entrainment remain unknown.” Perhaps the microbes respond to the energy levels of different wavelengths of light penetrating the soil. Whatever is involved in the bacterium’s clock led to a second use of the word “remarkable” in the conclusion:
In conclusion, we find it remarkable that a relatively simple prokaryote, which lacks the obvious hierarchy of organization of multicellular organisms, evokes properties of complex circadian systems.
Design advocates would certainly find it remarkable, too. But surprising? For those committed to explaining biology by unguided material causes, surprise is understandable. Those who recognize the hand behind the superb engineering all around us in life are delighted but not surprised.
File under "well said" XCIX
"“Put away your sword,” Jesus told him. “Those who use the sword will die by the sword."
Matthew ch.26:52 New Living Translation
Tuesday, 10 October 2023
An interlude VII
All praise an honor to JEHOVAH God for the blessed global brotherhood of JEHOVAH'S Dedicated servants.
The war on human exceptionalism continues apace.
Not Enough Evidence: Casey Luskin on Recent Homo naledi Claims
A recent ABC News article says the latest research about the hominid species Homo naledi “erases the idea of human exceptionalism.” A new Netflix documentary suggests that humans are not that special after all. Should we believe the media hype? Or is there more to the story? On a new episode of ID the Future, I talked with Dr. Casey Luskin to get an update on the Homo naledi controversy.
In June 2023, three new preprint papers were posted from the team that discovered Homo naledi in 2015. They claim that the small-brained species had high intelligence and engaged in activities like burying their dead, using fire, and engaging in cave wall art. At the time of publication the papers had not been peer reviewed. This didn’t stop the scientists from embarking on a massive media marketing campaign to promote their findings. A few months later, though, the critical reviews from other scientists in the field came in. Their colleagues didn’t buy it. “There just wasn’t any science in the paper ultimately,” said one paleoarchaeologist. Another reviewer called the preprints “incomplete and inadequate, and should not be viewed as finalized scholarship.”
In this episode, Dr. Luskin reviews each of the three main claims about Homo naledi made by Dr. Lee Berger and his team and gives us a summary of the strongest counterarguments. He also gives his thoughts on the recent Netflix film. “It’s very important to communicate scientific ideas to the public,” says Luskin. “And I think it’s great when scientists do that, when they do it carefully and responsibly and they’re making sure that the evidence has been thoroughly worked out…in this case, there was a sense that they had sort of put the cart before the horse.”
Luskin credits Berger and his team as respected professionals who did some amazing physical feats in their recent discoveries. But he also notes that in this case, the standards of evidence were just not met. “I think it’s important not to hype your claims. To make sure that you’re being careful with your science. And this is a lesson for everybody in science…for all of us who do science, let’s be careful with our arguments and careful with our claims.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Monday, 9 October 2023
File under "well said" XCVIII
"Accept the way God does things,
for who can straighten what he has made crooked?"
Ecclesiastes Ch.7:13 New Living Translation.
Psalm ch.72 American Standard Version.
Psalms Ch.72 American Standard version.
Give the king thy judgments, O God, And thy righteousness unto the king's son.
2He will judge thy people with righteousness, And thy poor with justice.
3The mountains shall bring peace to the people, And the hills, in righteousness.
4He will judge the poor of the people, He will save the children of the needy, And will break in pieces the oppressor.
5They shall fear thee while the sun endureth, And so long as the moon, throughout all generations.
6He will come down like rain upon the mown grass, As showers that water the earth.
7In his days shall the righteous flourish, And abundance of peace, till the moon be no more.
8He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, And from the River unto the ends of the earth.
9They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; And his enemies shall lick the dust.
10The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall render tribute: The kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.
11Yea, all kings shall fall down before him; All nations shall serve him.
12For he will deliver the needy when he crieth, And the poor, that hath no helper.
13He will have pity on the poor and needy, And the souls of the needy he will save.
14He will redeem their soul from oppression and violence; And precious will their blood be in his sight:
15And they shall live; and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba: And men shall pray for him continually; They shall bless him all the day long.
16There shall be abundance of grain in the earth upon the top of the mountains; The fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: And they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth.
17His name shall endure for ever; His name shall be continued as long as the sun: And men shall be blessed in him; All nations shall call him happy.
18Blessed be JEHOVAH God, the God of Israel, Who only doeth wondrous things:
19And blessed be his glorious name for ever; And let the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen, and Amen.
JEHOVAH'S Reminders keep us from the ranks of the insane.
John ch.4:20,21ESV"If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother."
Luke Ch.10:25-37KJV", behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? 26He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? 27And he answering said, Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. 28And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. 29But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
30And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 31And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. 33But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, 34And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. 36Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? 37And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise."
There are no good guys.
It is the third millennium and there is only war.
No good guys.
No just causes.
Only winners and losers.
And of course the victors write the narrative.
Sunday, 8 October 2023
On Darwinism of the gaps re:plant evolution.
Plant Evolution: All Gaps and Miracles
130,000 observations. 548 traits. 400 species of living and fossil plants. This is what a team of 10 evolutionary biologists investigated in a major project to look for patterns of evolution in the plant kingdom. Publishing in Nature Plants, they reproduced their morphospace map of the major groups of plants. If described in words, it would go:
Bang! Algae
Bang! Bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts)
Bang! Lycophytes (vascular plants including clubmosses)
Bang! Ferns (spore-bearing vascular plants)
Bang! Gymnosperms (seed-bearing cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers)
Bang! Angiosperms (flowering plants)
Subsequent to each bang, there were rapid variations, like the sparkly after-effects of complex fireworks. But the disparity between each bang is huge. Lead author Philip C. J. Donoghue, with colleagues James Clark and Sandy Hetherington, describe their work in The Conversation. They knew that animals showed explosive appearance and rapid radiation in the Cambrian explosion. “Is the same true of the plant kingdom?” they asked.
We then analysed all this data, grouping plants based on their overall similarities and differences, all plotted within what can be thought of as a “design space”. Since we know the evolutionary relationships between the species, we can also predict the traits of their extinct shared ancestors and include these hypothetical ancestorswithin the design space, too.
Interesting term: design space. Plants look designed, but the team “knows” they evolved. As Francis Crick taught, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” And so, this team dutifully sought to uncover how “plant life has navigated design space through evolutionary history and over geological time.” They would get the data to fit Darwin’s tree, even if they had to invent “hypothetical ancestors” to do it. Even so, the result resembles Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, gussied up with tinsel to help the Peanuts gang celebrate anyhow.
Miracle Talk
Forcing the uncooperative data into an “evolutionary pattern” of ancestors and descendants branching into a treelike pattern of universal common ancestry required some imagination. This was easily accomplished using miracle words. Plants emerged. They expanded. They occupied design space. And sometimes, they reversed direction and converged.
The evolutionary relationships conveyed by the branching genealogy in the above plot show that there is, generally, a structure to the occupation of design space — as new groups have emerged, they have expanded into new regions. However, there is some evidence for convergence, too, with some groups like the living gymnosperms (conifers and allies) and flowering plants plotting closer together than they do to their common ancestor.
The next question is, “How did plant body plan diversity evolve?” or, what triggered the emergence, expansion, occupation, and convergence seen in the morphospace diagram? Well now that miracles are allowed in the story, other miracles can be called on to generate them.
Overall, the broad pattern is one of progressive exploration of new designs as a result of innovations that are usually associated with reproduction, like the embryo, spore, seed and flower. These represent the evolutionary solutions to the environmental challenges faced by plants in their progressive occupation of increasingly dry and challenging niches on the land surface. For example, the innovation of seeds allowed the plants that bear them to reproduce even in the absence of water.
So how did a pine tree emerge? It innovated. On its exploration of design space, it found a solution to an environmental challenge. By design? Oh, no! It found an evolutionary solution. Once upon a time, a seed emerged. “Aha!” said the pine tree. “Now I can reproduce in the absence of water.” Nature selected it. (We know the sex of Nature; it’s a female)
Evolutionary Juice: A Magic Potion
Once an innovation emerges, it can expand. Just wait; evolution is not done with miracles yet!
So does that make plants different from animals, studies of which are the basis for the expectation of early evolutionary innovation and exhaustion? Not at all. Comparable studies that we have done on animals and fungi show that, when you study these multicellular kingdoms in their entirety, they all exhibit a pattern of episodically increasing anatomically variety. Individual lineages may soon exhaust themselves but, overall, the kingdoms keep on innovating.
This suggests a general pattern for evolutionary innovation in multicellular kingdoms and also that animals, fungi and plants still have plenty of evolutionary juice in their tanks. Let’s hope we’re still around to see what innovation arises next.
What Was the Innovation Mechanism?
The researchers offer only one mechanism for innovation: whole gene duplication, or polyploidy. The paper explains,
Whole-genome duplication has often been invoked as a causal factor in plant macroevolution and, indeed, palaeopolyploidy has been associated with some of the lineages that exhibit the greatest expansions in morphospace occupation, such as spermatophyte and angiosperm stems. Although comparable expansions are also associated with the embryophyte and tracheophyte stems, on which no ploidy events have been inferred, these branches are associated with pulses in gene family innovation that, arguably, have much the same effect in creating redundant genes available for neofunctionalization or the rewiring of gene regulatory networks.
Can redundancy be a cause of innovation? Will duplicating a chapter in a novel help the protagonist solve a new problem? That seems a stretch. Some branches in the plant kingdom can’t call on that mechanism anyway. Instead, they use “gene family innovation” to get their innovations to emerge and develop. All this makes perfect sense in Darwin fantasyland.
Filling Gaps with Imagination
The paper speaks often about disparity, which in general means the lack of similarity. In the paper, the authors take disparity to mean “phenotypic differentiation” — e.g., a Cambrian trilobite looks different from a worm, and a moss looks different from a fern. There’s disparity all over the morphospace diagram, both within major groups and between them. These are drawn as straight connecting lines. Do the authors supply any data to fill in those gaps?
In part, the clumpy nature of plant morphospace occupation is a result of the extinction of phylogenetic intermediates that once bridged clade-based clusters, as evidenced by our phylomorphospace analysis and the inclusion of fossil species. In effect, extant plant lineages have contracted from areas occupied by their forebears. However, the clustered occupation of morphospace also results from the divergence of these clades within morphospace, from their shared ancestors and from one another.
The intermediates were there, we are told. They just went extinct. But with imagination, you can visualize what they might have looked like. Remember those “hypothetical ancestors” spoken of earlier?
The authors included some fossil species to try to fill in the gaps. They populate some of the lines within groups, notably within lycophytes, but the longest gaps between groups are “depauperate” of fossil evidence for the intermediates Darwinism requires.
Fossil taxa populate many of the branches on the phylogeny within morphospace, but some branches remain conspicuously depauperate, including stem-angiosperms, stem-conifers and stem-embryophytes (fossil species are known that might occupy some of these branches, but there are few credible candidates for the embryophyte stem).
The new work, therefore, did not clear up “Darwin’s abominable mystery” on the origin of angiosperms — all those hugely varied flowering plants that comprise most of our gardens and urban trees. With imagination and a few miracles, though, everything can be tidied up.
Overall, the phylomorphospace demonstrates exploration of new regions of morphospace throughout the evolutionary history of plants. This is seen at the level of all characters but is mostly strongly associated with the evolution of reproductive novelties, such as those associated with the origin of embryophytes, seed plants and angiosperms, but also with realization of the ecological opportunities that those reproductive novelties afforded.
Those plants wanted to evolve. The environment was driving them to explore! Chance gave them raw material by duplicating chapters of their novel, so that they could write new plot lines by neofunctionalization. With so many emergent novelties at their disposal, plants could afford to realize their evolutionary potential. What could prevent them from going forth and conquering the planet?
It’s instructive that the more Darwinians boast of disavowing miracles as inimical to the spirit of science, the more they find them useful.
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